Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett,
00:00:03 a professor of psychology at Northeastern University,
00:00:06 and one of the most brilliant and bold thinkers and scientists
00:00:10 I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking with.
00:00:12 She’s the author of a book that revolutionized
00:00:15 our understanding of emotion in the brain
00:00:17 called How Emotions Are Made.
00:00:19 And she’s coming out with a new book called
00:00:22 Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
00:00:24 that you can and should preorder now.
00:00:28 I got a chance to read it already,
00:00:30 and it’s one of the best short,
00:00:31 whirlwind introductions to the human brain I’ve ever read.
00:00:35 It comes out on November 17th,
00:00:37 but again, if there’s anybody worth supporting,
00:00:39 it’s Lisa, so please do preorder the book now.
00:00:43 Lisa and I agreed to speak once again
00:00:45 around the time of the book release,
00:00:47 especially because we felt that this first conversation
00:00:50 is good to release now,
00:00:52 since we talk about the divisive time
00:00:54 we’re living through in the United States,
00:00:56 leading up to the election.
00:00:58 And she gives me a whole new way to think about it
00:01:01 from a neuroscience perspective
00:01:03 that is ultimately inspiring of empathy,
00:01:06 compassion, and love.
00:01:08 Quick mention of each sponsor,
00:01:10 followed by some thoughts related to this episode.
00:01:13 First sponsor is Athletic Greens,
00:01:15 the all in one drink that I start every day with
00:01:18 to cover all my nutritional bases
00:01:20 that I don’t otherwise get through my diet naturally.
00:01:23 Second is Magic Spoon,
00:01:25 low carb, keto friendly, delicious cereal
00:01:27 that I reward myself with after a productive day.
00:01:31 The cocoa flavor is my favorite.
00:01:33 Third sponsor is Cash App,
00:01:35 the app I use to send money to friends for food, drinks,
00:01:39 and unfortunately, for the many bets I have lost to them.
00:01:43 Please check out these sponsors in the description
00:01:45 to get a discount and to support this podcast.
00:01:49 As a side note, let me say that the bold,
00:01:51 first principles way that Lisa approaches
00:01:53 our study of the brain is something that has inspired me
00:01:57 ever since I learned about her work.
00:01:59 And in fact, I invited her to speak at the AGI series
00:02:03 I organized at MIT several years ago.
00:02:06 But as a little twist, instead of a lecture,
00:02:09 we did a conversation in front of the class.
00:02:11 I think that was one of the early moments
00:02:13 that led me to start this very podcast.
00:02:16 It was scary and gratifying,
00:02:18 which is exactly what life is all about.
00:02:21 And it’s kind of funny how life turns on little moments
00:02:24 like these that at the time don’t seem to be anything
00:02:27 out of the ordinary.
00:02:28 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
00:02:31 review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
00:02:33 follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
00:02:35 or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
00:02:39 And now, here’s my conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett.
00:02:44 Since we’ll talk a lot about the brain today,
00:02:47 do you think, let’s ask the craziest question,
00:02:49 do you think there’s other intelligent life
00:02:51 out there in the universe?
00:02:53 Honestly, I’ve been asking myself lately
00:02:55 if there’s intelligent life on this planet.
00:02:58 You know, I have to think probabilities suggest yes.
00:03:05 And also, secretly, I think I just hope that’s true.
00:03:08 It would be really, I know scientists
00:03:11 aren’t supposed to have hopes and dreams,
00:03:13 but I think it would be really cool.
00:03:16 And I also think it would be really sad if it wasn’t the case.
00:03:20 If we really were alone, that would be,
00:03:24 that would seem profoundly sad, I think.
00:03:29 So it’s exciting to you, not scary?
00:03:32 Yeah, no, you know, I take a lot of comfort and curiosity.
00:03:36 It’s a great resource for dealing with stress.
00:03:44 So I’m learning all about mushrooms and octopuses
00:03:49 and, you know, all kinds of stuff.
00:03:51 And so for me, this counts, I think, in the realm of awe.
00:03:55 But also, I think I’m somebody who cultivates awe
00:03:59 deliberately on purpose to feel like a speck, you know?
00:04:02 I find it a relief occasionally.
00:04:06 To feel small.
00:04:07 To feel small in a profoundly large and interesting universe.
00:04:12 So, maybe to dig more technically on the question of intelligence,
00:04:17 do you think it’s difficult for intelligent life to arise
00:04:20 like it did on Earth?
00:04:22 From everything you’ve written and studied about the brain,
00:04:26 how magical of a thing is it in terms of the odds it takes to arise?
00:04:32 Yeah, so, you know, magic is just, don’t get me wrong.
00:04:38 I mean, I like a magic show as much as the next person.
00:04:43 My husband was a magician at one time.
00:04:45 But, you know, magic is just a bunch of stuff
00:04:48 that we don’t really understand how it works yet.
00:04:50 So I would say from what I understand,
00:04:53 there are some major steps in the course of evolution
00:04:59 that at the beginning of life,
00:05:00 the step from single cell to multicellular organisms,
00:05:04 things like that, which are really not known.
00:05:06 I think for me, the question is not so much what’s the likelihood
00:05:16 that it would happen again as much as what are the steps
00:05:22 and how long would it take?
00:05:24 And if it were to happen again on Earth,
00:05:28 would we end up with the same menu of life forms
00:05:33 that we currently have now?
00:05:34 And I think the answer is probably no, right?
00:05:36 There’s just so much about evolution
00:05:38 that is stochastic and driven by chance.
00:05:43 But the question is whether that menu
00:05:44 would be equally delicious,
00:05:46 meaning like there’d be rich complexity of the kind of,
00:05:49 like would we get dolphins and humans
00:05:52 or whoever else falls in that category
00:05:54 of weirdly intelligent, seemingly intelligent?
00:05:59 However we define that.
00:06:01 Well, I think that has to be true.
00:06:03 If you just look at the range of creatures
00:06:05 who’ve gone extinct.
00:06:06 I mean, if you look at the range of creatures
00:06:09 that are on the Earth now, it’s incredible.
00:06:13 And it’s sort of tried to say that,
00:06:14 but it actually is really incredible.
00:06:18 Particularly, I don’t know, I mean, animals,
00:06:22 there are animals that seem really ordinary
00:06:26 until you watch them closely
00:06:27 and then they become miraculous,
00:06:29 like certain types of birds,
00:06:30 which do very miraculous things,
00:06:32 build bowers and do dances
00:06:36 and all these really funky things
00:06:37 that are hard to explain
00:06:39 with a standard evolutionary story,
00:06:41 although people have them.
00:06:43 Yeah, the birds are weird.
00:06:44 They do a lot for mating purposes.
00:06:47 They have a concept of beauty
00:06:49 that I haven’t quite, maybe you know much better,
00:06:52 but it doesn’t seem to fit evolutionary arguments well.
00:06:55 It does fit.
00:06:56 Well, it depends, right?
00:06:57 So I think you’re talking about the evolution of beauty,
00:07:00 the book that was written recently by,
00:07:03 was it Frum, was that his name?
00:07:06 Richard Frum, I think, at Yale.
00:07:07 Oh, I’m sorry, no, I didn’t know.
00:07:09 Oh, it’s a great book.
00:07:09 It’s very controversial, though,
00:07:11 because he’s making the argument
00:07:14 that the question about birds and some other animals
00:07:17 is why would they engage
00:07:19 in such metabolically costly displays
00:07:24 when it doesn’t improve their fitness at all?
00:07:27 And the answer that he gives is the answer that Darwin gave,
00:07:31 which is sexual selection, not natural selection.
00:07:35 But selection can occur for all kinds of reasons.
00:07:37 There could be artificial selection,
00:07:39 which is when we breed animals, right?
00:07:41 Which is actually how Darwin,
00:07:43 that observation helped Darwin come to the idea
00:07:46 of natural selection.
00:07:47 Oh, I see.
00:07:49 And then there’s sexual selection,
00:07:50 meaning, and the argument that,
00:07:53 I think his name is Frum,
00:07:55 makes is that it’s the pleasure,
00:07:59 the selection pressure is the pleasure of female birds.
00:08:03 Which, as a woman, and as someone who studies affect,
00:08:07 that’s a great answer.
00:08:09 I actually think there probably is natural,
00:08:10 I think there is an aspect of natural selection to it,
00:08:13 which he maybe hasn’t considered.
00:08:15 But you were saying the reason we brought up birds
00:08:17 is the life we’ve got now seems to be quite incredible.
00:08:20 Yeah, so he brought up birds,
00:08:22 now seems to be quite incredible.
00:08:25 Yeah, so you peek into the ocean,
00:08:26 peek into the sky, there are miraculous creatures.
00:08:29 Look at creatures who’ve gone extinct.
00:08:31 And in science fiction stories,
00:08:35 you couldn’t dream up something as interesting.
00:08:37 So my guess is that intelligent life evolves
00:08:43 in many different ways, even on this planet.
00:08:47 There isn’t one form of intelligence.
00:08:48 There’s not one brain that gives you intelligence.
00:08:51 There are lots of different brain structures
00:08:52 that can give you intelligence.
00:08:54 So my guess is that the menagerie
00:08:59 might not look exactly the way that it looks now,
00:09:01 but it would certainly be as interesting.
00:09:04 But if we look at the human brain versus the brains,
00:09:09 or whatever you call them,
00:09:11 the mechanisms of intelligence in our ancestors,
00:09:14 even early ancestors,
00:09:15 that you write about, for example, in your new book,
00:09:18 what’s the difference between the fanciest brain we got,
00:09:25 which is the human brain,
00:09:27 and the ancestor brains that it came from?
00:09:31 Yeah, I think it depends on how far back you want to go.
00:09:34 You go all the way back, right, in your book.
00:09:38 So what’s the interesting comparison, would you say?
00:09:41 Well, first of all, I wouldn’t say that the human brain
00:09:43 is the fanciest brain we’ve got.
00:09:45 I mean, an octopus brain is pretty different
00:09:48 and pretty fancy,
00:09:48 and they can do some pretty amazing things
00:09:51 that we cannot do.
00:09:52 You know, we can’t grow back limbs,
00:09:54 we can’t change color and texture,
00:09:56 we can’t comport ourselves and squeeze ourselves
00:09:59 into a little crevice.
00:10:01 I mean, these are things that we invent,
00:10:03 these are like superhero abilities
00:10:04 that we invent in stories, right?
00:10:06 We can’t do any of those things.
00:10:08 And so the human brain is certainly,
00:10:11 we can certainly do some things
00:10:12 that other animals can’t do.
00:10:15 That seemed pretty impressive to us.
00:10:16 But I would say that there are a number of animal brains
00:10:21 which seem pretty impressive to me
00:10:23 that can do interesting things
00:10:25 and really impressive things that we can’t do.
00:10:28 I mean, with your work on how emotions are made and so on,
00:10:31 you kind of repaint the view of the brain
00:10:34 as less glamorous, I suppose,
00:10:38 than you would otherwise think.
00:10:41 Or like, I guess you draw a thread
00:10:43 that connects all brains together
00:10:47 in terms of homeostasis and all that kind of stuff.
00:10:50 Yeah, I wouldn’t say that the human brain
00:10:53 is any less miraculous than anybody else would say.
00:10:57 I just think that there are other brain structures
00:11:00 which are also miraculous.
00:11:02 And I also think that there are a number of things
00:11:04 about the human brain which we share
00:11:07 with other vertebrates, other animals with backbones.
00:11:11 But that we share these miraculous things.
00:11:16 But we can do some things in abundance.
00:11:19 And we can also do some things with our brains together,
00:11:23 working together that other animals can’t do.
00:11:27 Or at least we haven’t discovered their ability to do it.
00:11:31 Yeah, this social thing.
00:11:33 That’s one of the things you write about.
00:11:37 How do you make sense of the fact,
00:11:39 like the book Sapiens, and the fact that we’re able
00:11:43 to kind of connect, like network our brains together
00:11:47 like you write about?
00:11:48 I’ll try to stop saying that.
00:11:53 Is that like some kind of feature
00:11:56 that’s built into there?
00:11:58 Is that unique to our human brains?
00:12:00 Like how do you make sense of that?
00:12:02 What I would say is that our ability
00:12:04 to coordinate with each other is not unique to humans.
00:12:09 There are lots of animals who can do that.
00:12:14 But what we do with that coordination is unique
00:12:20 because of some of the structural features in our brains.
00:12:25 And it’s not that other animals
00:12:29 don’t have those structural features.
00:12:30 It’s we have them in abundance.
00:12:33 So the human brain is not larger
00:12:38 than you would expect it to be for a primate of our size.
00:12:42 If you took a chimpanzee and you grew it
00:12:47 to the size of a human, that chimpanzee would have a brain
00:12:51 that was the size of a human brain.
00:12:53 So there’s nothing special about our brain
00:12:56 in terms of its size.
00:12:57 There’s nothing special about our brain
00:12:59 in terms of the basic blueprint
00:13:04 that builds our brain from an embryo
00:13:06 is the basic blueprint that builds all mammalian brains
00:13:10 and maybe even all vertebrate brains.
00:13:14 It’s just that because of its size
00:13:17 and particularly because of the size
00:13:19 of the cerebral cortex, which is a part
00:13:23 that people mistakenly attribute to rationality.
00:13:27 Why mistakenly?
00:13:29 Is that where all the clever stuff happens?
00:13:31 Well, no, it really isn’t.
00:13:33 And I will also say that lots of clever stuff happens
00:13:36 in animals who don’t have a cerebral cortex.
00:13:38 But because of the size of the cerebral cortex
00:13:43 and because of some of the features
00:13:46 that are enhanced by that size,
00:13:49 that gives us the capacity to do things
00:13:52 like build civilizations and coordinate with each other,
00:13:57 not just to manipulate the physical world,
00:14:01 but to add to it in very profound ways.
00:14:05 Like, other animals can cooperate with each other
00:14:09 and use tools.
00:14:11 We draw a line in the sand and we make countries
00:14:14 and then we create citizens and immigrants.
00:14:20 But also ideas.
00:14:21 I mean, the countries are centered around the concept
00:14:24 of like ideas.
00:14:25 Well, what do you think a citizen is and an immigrant?
00:14:28 Those are ideas.
00:14:30 Those are ideas that we impose on reality
00:14:33 and make them real.
00:14:34 And then they have very, very serious and real effects,
00:14:38 physical effects on people.
00:14:40 What do you think about the idea
00:14:42 that a bunch of people have written about,
00:14:43 Dawkins with memes, which is like ideas are breeding.
00:14:48 Like, we’re just like the canvas for ideas to breed
00:14:53 in our brains.
00:14:54 So this kind of network that you talk about of brains
00:14:57 is just a little canvas for ideas
00:14:59 to then compete against each other and so on.
00:15:02 I think as a rhetorical tool, it’s cool to think that way.
00:15:08 So I think it was Michael Pollan.
00:15:10 I don’t remember if it was in the Botany of Desire,
00:15:12 but it was in one of his early books on botany
00:15:18 and gardening where he wrote about plants
00:15:23 and he wrote about plants utilizing humans
00:15:29 for their own evolutionary purposes.
00:15:32 Which is kind of interesting.
00:15:33 You can think about a human gut in a sense
00:15:36 as a propagation device for the seeds of tomatoes
00:15:42 and what have you.
00:15:43 So it’s kind of cool.
00:15:45 So I think rhetorically it’s an interesting device,
00:15:48 but ideas are, as far as I know, invented by humans,
00:15:55 propagated by humans.
00:15:58 So I don’t think they’re separate from human brains
00:16:01 in any way, although it is interesting
00:16:04 to think about it that way.
00:16:06 Well, of course, the ideas that are using your brain
00:16:09 to communicate and write excellent books.
00:16:13 And they basically picked you, Lisa,
00:16:17 as an effective communicator and thereby are winning.
00:16:21 So that’s an interesting worldview
00:16:24 to think that there’s particular aspects of your brain
00:16:28 that are conducive to certain sets of ideas
00:16:31 and maybe those ideas will win out.
00:16:33 Yeah, I think the way that I would say it really though
00:16:35 is that there are many species of animals
00:16:38 that influence each other’s nervous systems,
00:16:40 that regulate each other’s nervous systems,
00:16:42 and they mainly do it by physical means.
00:16:44 They do it by chemicals, scent.
00:16:47 They do it by, so termites and ants and bees,
00:16:51 for example, use chemical scents.
00:16:55 Mammals like rodents use scent
00:16:59 and they also use hearing, audition,
00:17:02 and that little bit of vision.
00:17:05 Primates, nonhuman primates add vision, right?
00:17:09 And I think everybody uses touch.
00:17:13 Humans, as far as I know, are the only species
00:17:16 that use ideas and words to regulate each other, right?
00:17:20 I can text something to someone halfway around the world.
00:17:24 They don’t have to hear my voice.
00:17:26 They don’t have to see my face
00:17:27 and I can have an effect on their nervous system.
00:17:30 And ideas, the ideas that we communicate with words,
00:17:35 I mean, words are in a sense a way
00:17:36 for us to do mental telepathy with each other, right?
00:17:39 I mean, I’m not the first person to say that obviously,
00:17:41 but how do I control your heart rate?
00:17:45 How do I control your breathing?
00:17:46 How do I control your actions with words?
00:17:49 It’s because those words are communicating ideas.
00:17:54 So you also write, I think, let’s go back to the brain.
00:17:57 You write that Plato gave us the idea
00:17:59 that the human brain has three brains in it, three forces,
00:18:05 which is kind of a compelling notion.
00:18:08 You disagree.
00:18:09 First of all, what are the three parts of the brain
00:18:12 and why do you disagree?
00:18:16 So Plato’s description of the psyche,
00:18:20 which for the moment we’ll just assume
00:18:22 is the same as a mind.
00:18:24 There are some scholars who would say a soul, a psyche,
00:18:27 a mind, those aren’t actually all the same thing
00:18:29 in ancient Greece, but we’ll just for now gloss over that.
00:18:34 So Plato’s idea was that,
00:18:36 and it was a description of really about moral behavior
00:18:41 and moral responsibility in humans.
00:18:44 So the idea was that the human psyche can be described
00:18:47 with a metaphor of two horses and a charioteer.
00:18:53 So one horse for instincts,
00:18:57 like feeding and fighting and fleeing and reproduction.
00:19:02 I’m trying to control my salty language,
00:19:09 which apparently they print in England.
00:19:11 Like I actually tossed off a fairly.
00:19:14 F, S?
00:19:15 Yeah, F, F, yeah.
00:19:17 I was like, you printed that?
00:19:19 I couldn’t believe you printed that.
00:19:20 Without like the stars or whatever?
00:19:22 No, no, no, it was full print.
00:19:23 They also printed a B word and it was really, yeah.
00:19:28 Well, we should learn something from England.
00:19:32 Indeed, anyways, but instincts.
00:19:34 And then the other horse represents emotions.
00:19:37 And then the charioteer represents rationality,
00:19:40 which controls the two beasts, right?
00:19:43 And fast forward a couple of centuries
00:19:49 and in the middle of the 20th century,
00:19:54 there was a very popular view of brain evolution,
00:19:57 which suggested that you have this reptilian core,
00:20:03 like an inner lizard brain for instincts.
00:20:08 And then wrapped around that evolved,
00:20:10 layer on top of that evolved a limbic system in mammals.
00:20:16 So the novelty was in a mammalian brain,
00:20:18 which bestowed mammals with, gave them emotions,
00:20:23 the capacity for emotions.
00:20:24 And then on top of that evolved a cerebral cortex,
00:20:32 which in largely in primates, but very large in humans.
00:20:41 And it’s not that I personally disagree.
00:20:46 It’s that as far back as the 1960s,
00:20:49 but really by the 1970s, it was shown pretty clearly
00:20:54 with evidence from molecular genetics.
00:20:55 So peering into cells in the brain
00:20:59 to look at the molecular makeup of genes
00:21:02 that the brain did not evolve that way.
00:21:05 And the irony is that the idea of the three layered brain
00:21:15 with an inner lizard that hijacks your behavior
00:21:20 and causes you to do and say things
00:21:22 that you would otherwise not,
00:21:24 or maybe that you will regret later.
00:21:27 That idea became very popular,
00:21:30 was popularized by Carl Sagan in The Dragons of Eden,
00:21:36 which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977,
00:21:40 when it was already known pretty much
00:21:42 in evolutionary neuroscience
00:21:44 that the whole narrative was a myth.
00:21:47 So what the narrative is on the way it evolved,
00:21:50 but do you, I mean, again, it’s that problem
00:21:54 of it being a useful tool of conversation
00:22:00 to say like there’s a lizard brain
00:22:02 and there’s a, like if I get overly emotional on Twitter,
00:22:05 that was the lizard brain and so on.
00:22:09 But do you?
00:22:10 No, I don’t think it’s useful.
00:22:11 I think it’s, I think that.
00:22:13 Is it useful, is it accurate?
00:22:16 I don’t think it’s accurate,
00:22:18 and therefore I don’t think it’s useful.
00:22:20 So here’s what I would say.
00:22:22 I think that the way I think about philosophy and science
00:22:30 is that they are useful tools for living.
00:22:34 And in order to be useful tools for living,
00:22:39 they have to help you make good decisions.
00:22:44 The triune brain, as it’s called, this three layer brain,
00:22:47 the idea that your brain is like an already baked cake
00:22:50 and the cortex, cerebral cortex,
00:22:53 just layered on top like icing.
00:22:54 The idea, that idea is the foundation of the law
00:23:01 in most Western countries.
00:23:03 It’s the foundation of economic theory
00:23:07 and it’s a great narrative.
00:23:11 It sort of fits in with what I’ve been saying
00:23:13 fits our intuitions about how we work.
00:23:17 But it also, in addition to being wrong,
00:23:22 it lets people off the hook for nasty behavior.
00:23:29 And it also suggests that emotions
00:23:32 can’t be a source of wisdom, which they often are.
00:23:36 In fact, you would not wanna be around someone
00:23:39 who didn’t have emotions.
00:23:40 That would be, that’s a psychopath.
00:23:43 I mean, that’s not someone you wanna really
00:23:49 have that person deciding your outcome.
00:23:50 So I guess my, and I could sort of go on and on and on,
00:23:54 but my point is that I don’t think,
00:23:59 I don’t think it’s a useful narrative in the end.
00:24:03 What’s the more accurate view of the brain
00:24:06 that we should use when we’re thinking about it?
00:24:08 I’ll answer that in a second,
00:24:09 but I’ll say that even our notion of what an instinct is
00:24:12 or what a reflex is, it’s not quite right, right?
00:24:16 So if you look at evidence from ecology, for example,
00:24:22 and you look at animals in their ecological context,
00:24:25 what you can see is that even things
00:24:27 which are reflexes are very context sensitive.
00:24:33 The brains of those animals are executing
00:24:37 so called instinctual actions
00:24:39 in a very, very context sensitive way.
00:24:42 And so even when a physician takes the,
00:24:46 it’s like the idea of your patellar reflex
00:24:49 where they hit your patellar tendon on your knee
00:24:52 and you kick, the force with which you kick and so on
00:24:57 is influenced by all kinds of things.
00:25:00 A reflex isn’t like a robotic response.
00:25:05 And so I think a better way is a way that,
00:25:10 to think about how brains work,
00:25:12 is the way that matches our best understanding,
00:25:16 our best scientific understanding,
00:25:17 which I think is really cool
00:25:21 because it’s really counterintuitive.
00:25:24 So how I came to this view,
00:25:26 and I’m certainly not the only one who holds this view.
00:25:28 I was reading work on neuroanatomy
00:25:31 and the view that I’m about to tell you
00:25:34 was strongly suggested by that.
00:25:36 And then I was reading work in signal processing,
00:25:39 like by electrical engineering.
00:25:41 And similarly, the work suggested that,
00:25:45 the research suggested that the brain worked this way.
00:25:48 And I’ll just say that I was reading
00:25:49 across multiple literatures
00:25:51 and they were who don’t speak to each other
00:25:53 and they were all pointing in this direction.
00:25:56 And so far, although some of the details
00:26:00 are still up for grabs,
00:26:02 the general gist I think is I’ve not come across anything yet
00:26:07 which really violates, and I’m looking.
00:26:11 And so the idea is something like this.
00:26:13 It’s very counterintuitive.
00:26:15 So the way to describe it is to say
00:26:18 that your brain doesn’t react to things in the world.
00:26:22 It’s not, to us it feels like our eyes
00:26:25 are windows on the world.
00:26:27 We see things, we hear things, we react to them.
00:26:32 In psychology, we call this stimulus response.
00:26:34 So your face, your voice is a stimulus to me.
00:26:39 I receive input and then I react to it.
00:26:44 And I might react very automatically, system one.
00:26:50 But I also might execute some control
00:26:53 where I maybe stop myself from saying something
00:26:57 or doing something and in a more reflective way
00:27:02 execute a different action, right?
00:27:04 That’s system two.
00:27:06 The way the brain works though,
00:27:08 is it’s predicting all the time.
00:27:10 It’s constantly talking to itself,
00:27:12 constantly talking to your body,
00:27:15 and it’s constantly predicting what’s going on in the body
00:27:20 and what’s going on in the world and making predictions
00:27:24 and the information from your body and from the world
00:27:29 really confirm or correct those predictions.
00:27:32 So fundamentally the thing that the brain does
00:27:35 most of the time is just like talking to itself
00:27:39 and predicting stuff about the world,
00:27:41 not like this dumb thing that just senses and responds,
00:27:45 senses and responds.
00:27:46 Yeah, so the way to think about it is like this.
00:27:48 You know, your brain is trapped in a dark silent box.
00:27:52 Yeah, that’s very romantic of you.
00:27:56 Which is your skull.
00:27:57 And the only information that it receives
00:28:01 from your body and from the world, right,
00:28:04 is through the senses, through the sense organs,
00:28:07 your eyes, your ears,
00:28:09 and you have sensory data that comes from your body
00:28:14 that you’re largely unaware of to your brain,
00:28:17 which we call interoceptive,
00:28:20 as opposed to exteroceptive, which is the world around you.
00:28:23 But your brain is receiving sense data continuously,
00:28:31 which are the effect of some set of causes.
00:28:37 Your brain doesn’t know the cause of these sense data.
00:28:41 It’s only receiving the effects of those causes,
00:28:44 which are the data themselves.
00:28:46 And so your brain has to solve what philosophers call
00:28:49 an inverse inference problem.
00:28:51 How do you know, when you only receive
00:28:53 the effects of something,
00:28:54 how do you know what caused those effects?
00:28:56 So when there’s a flash of light or a change in air pressure
00:29:00 or a tug somewhere in your body,
00:29:04 how does your brain know what caused those events
00:29:09 so that it knows what to do next to keep you alive and well?
00:29:15 And the answer is that your brain has one other source
00:29:18 of information available to it,
00:29:21 which is your past experience.
00:29:23 It can reconstitute in its wiring past experiences,
00:29:30 and it can combine those past experiences in novel ways.
00:29:34 And so we have lots of names for this in psychology.
00:29:39 We call it memory.
00:29:40 We call it perceptual inference.
00:29:42 We call it simulation.
00:29:45 It’s also, we call it concepts or conceptual knowledge.
00:29:49 We call it prediction.
00:29:50 Basically, if we were to stop the world right now,
00:29:54 stop time, your brain is in a state,
00:30:00 and it’s representing what it believes
00:30:05 is going on in your body and in the world.
00:30:08 And it’s predicting what will happen next
00:30:11 based on past experience, right?
00:30:13 Probabilistically, what’s most likely to happen.
00:30:15 And it begins to prepare your action,
00:30:24 and it begins to prepare your experience based,
00:30:31 so it’s anticipating the sense data it’s going to receive.
00:30:35 And then when those data come in,
00:30:38 they either confirm that prediction
00:30:40 and your action executes
00:30:42 because the plan’s already been made,
00:30:44 or there’s some sense data that your brain didn’t predict
00:30:51 that’s unexpected, and your brain takes it in.
00:30:54 We say encodes it.
00:30:55 We have a fancy name for that.
00:30:57 We call it learning.
00:30:58 Your brain learns,
00:31:00 and it updates its storehouse of knowledge,
00:31:03 which we call an internal model
00:31:07 so that you can predict better next time.
00:31:08 And it turns out that predicting and correcting,
00:31:11 predicting and correcting is a much more metabolically
00:31:14 efficient way to run a system
00:31:16 than constantly reacting all the time.
00:31:18 Because if you’re constantly reacting,
00:31:20 it means you can’t anticipate in any way
00:31:22 what’s going to happen.
00:31:24 And so the amount of uncertainty that you have to deal with
00:31:27 is overwhelming to a nervous system.
00:31:30 Metabolically costly.
00:31:32 I like it.
00:31:33 And so what is a reflex?
00:31:34 A reflex is when your brain doesn’t check
00:31:38 against the sense data.
00:31:40 That the potential cost to you is so great,
00:31:45 maybe because your life is threatened,
00:31:48 that your brain makes the prediction
00:31:50 and executes the action without checking.
00:31:55 Yeah, so but prediction is still at the core.
00:31:57 That’s a beautiful vision of the brain.
00:31:58 I wonder, from almost an AI perspective,
00:32:01 but just computationally,
00:32:03 is the brain just mostly a prediction machine then?
00:32:07 Like is the perception just the nice little feature
00:32:11 added on top?
00:32:12 Like the, both the integration
00:32:15 of new perceptual information.
00:32:17 I wonder how big of an impressive system is that
00:32:21 relative to just the big predictor, model constructor.
00:32:25 Well, I think that we can look to evolution for that,
00:32:28 for one answer, which is that when you go back,
00:32:32 you know, 550 million years, give or take,
00:32:35 we, you know, the world was populated by creatures,
00:32:38 really ruled by creatures without brains.
00:32:43 And, you know, that’s a biological statement,
00:32:46 not a political statement.
00:32:48 Really ruled with creatures with a.
00:32:49 You calling dinosaurs dumb?
00:32:50 You’re talking about like.
00:32:51 Oh no, I’m not talking about dinosaurs, honey.
00:32:53 I’m talking way back, further back than that.
00:32:56 Really these, there are these little,
00:32:58 little creatures called amphioxus,
00:33:01 which is the modern, it’s a, or a lancet.
00:33:04 That’s the modern animal,
00:33:06 but it’s an animal that scientists believe is very similar
00:33:10 to our common,
00:33:12 the common ancestor that we share with invertebrates
00:33:16 because, basically because of the tracing back,
00:33:21 the molecular genetics and cells.
00:33:23 And that animal had no brain.
00:33:27 It had some cells that would later turn into a brain,
00:33:30 but in that animal, there’s no brain,
00:33:32 but that animal also had no head,
00:33:34 and it had no eyes, and it had no ears,
00:33:36 and it had really, really no senses for the most part.
00:33:40 It had very, very limited sense of touch.
00:33:43 It had an eye spot for, not for seeing,
00:33:47 but just for entraining to circadian rhythm,
00:33:50 to light and dark.
00:33:52 And it had no hearing.
00:33:54 It had a vestibular cell
00:33:56 so that it could keep upright in the water.
00:33:58 So at the time, we’re talking evolutionary scale here,
00:34:02 so give or take some 100 million years or something,
00:34:07 but at the time, what are the vertebrate,
00:34:09 like when a backbone evolved and a brain evolved,
00:34:13 a full brain, that was when a head evolved with sense organs
00:34:19 and when that’s when your viscera,
00:34:22 like internal systems involved.
00:34:23 So the answer I would say is that senses,
00:34:30 motor neuroscientists,
00:34:31 people who study the control of motor behavior
00:34:34 believe that senses evolved in the service of motor action.
00:34:41 So the idea is that,
00:34:44 like what triggered, what was the big evolutionary change?
00:34:49 What was the big pressure that made it useful
00:34:53 to have eyes and ears and a visual system
00:34:56 and an auditory system and a brain basically?
00:34:59 And the answer that is commonly entertained right now
00:35:05 is that it was predation,
00:35:07 that when at some point an animal evolved
00:35:11 that deliberately ate another animal
00:35:14 and this launched an arms race between predators and prey
00:35:20 and it became very useful to have senses, right?
00:35:24 So these little amphioxies don’t really have,
00:35:32 they’re not aware of their environment very much, really.
00:35:36 And so being able to look up ahead and ask yourself,
00:35:46 should I eat that or will it eat me is a very useful thing.
00:35:53 So the idea is that sense data
00:35:59 is not there for consciousness.
00:36:01 It didn’t evolve for the purposes of consciousness.
00:36:03 It didn’t evolve for the purposes of experiencing anything.
00:36:08 It evolved to be in the service of motor control.
00:36:13 However, maybe it’s useful.
00:36:18 This is why scientists sometimes avoid questions
00:36:23 about why things evolved.
00:36:25 This is what philosophers call this teleology.
00:36:28 You might be able to say something about how things evolve,
00:36:33 but not necessarily why.
00:36:35 We don’t really know the why.
00:36:38 That’s all speculation.
00:36:40 But the why is kind of nice here.
00:36:42 The interesting thing is,
00:36:44 that was the first element of social interaction is,
00:36:47 am I gonna eat you or are you gonna eat me?
00:36:50 And for that, it’s useful to be able to see each other,
00:36:55 sense each other.
00:36:57 That’s kind of fascinating that there was a time
00:37:00 when life didn’t eat each other.
00:37:03 Or they did by accident.
00:37:04 So an amphioxus, for example,
00:37:08 it kind of like gyrates in the water,
00:37:11 and then it plants itself in the sand
00:37:14 like a living blade of grass,
00:37:17 and then it just filters whatever comes into its mouth.
00:37:21 So it is eating, but it’s not actively hunting.
00:37:25 And when the concentration of food decreases,
00:37:30 the amphioxus can sense this.
00:37:35 And so it basically wriggles itself randomly
00:37:40 to some other spot,
00:37:41 which probabilistically will have more food
00:37:44 than wherever it is.
00:37:46 So it’s not guiding its actions on the basis of,
00:37:52 we would say there’s no real intentional action
00:37:55 in the traditional sense.
00:37:58 Speaking of intentional action, and if the brain is,
00:38:02 if prediction is indeed a core component of the brain,
00:38:05 let me ask you a question that scientists also hate
00:38:09 is about free will.
00:38:11 So how does, do you think about free will much?
00:38:15 How does that fit into this, into your view of the brain?
00:38:19 Why does it feel like we make decisions in this world?
00:38:24 This is a hard, we scientists hate this,
00:38:26 this is a hard question we don’t have the answer to.
00:38:28 Have you taken a side?
00:38:30 I think I have. Do you have free will?
00:38:31 I think I have taken a side,
00:38:32 but I don’t put a lot of stock in my own intuitions
00:38:37 or anybody’s intuitions about the cause of things.
00:38:41 One thing we know about the brain for sure
00:38:42 is that the brain creates experiences for us.
00:38:46 My brain creates experiences for me,
00:38:47 your brain creates experiences for you
00:38:49 in a way that lures you to believe that those experiences
00:38:53 actually reveals the way that it works,
00:38:56 but it doesn’t.
00:38:59 So you don’t trust your own intuition about free will?
00:39:01 Not really, not really.
00:39:03 No, I mean, no, but I am also somewhat persuaded by,
00:39:07 I think Dan Dennett wrote at one point,
00:39:11 the philosopher Dan Dennett wrote at one point that it’s,
00:39:16 I can’t say it as eloquently as him,
00:39:18 but people obviously have free will,
00:39:20 they are obviously making choices.
00:39:22 So there is this observation that we’re not robots
00:39:27 and we can do some things
00:39:29 like a little more sophisticated than an amphioxus.
00:39:31 So here’s what I would say.
00:39:35 I would say that your predictions,
00:39:39 your internal model that’s running right now,
00:39:43 your ability to understand the sounds that I’m making
00:39:46 and attach them to ideas is based on the fact
00:39:50 that you have years of experience
00:39:54 knowing what these sounds mean
00:39:55 in a particular statistical pattern, right?
00:40:01 I mean, that’s how you can understand the words
00:40:03 that are coming out of my mouth.
00:40:06 Right, I think we did this once before too, didn’t we?
00:40:09 When we were.
00:40:10 I don’t know, I would have to access my memory module.
00:40:12 I think when I was in your, when I.
00:40:14 The class thing?
00:40:15 Yeah, I think we did it just like that actually, so bravo.
00:40:18 Wow, I have to go look back to the tape.
00:40:21 Yeah, anyways, the idea though
00:40:25 is that your brain is using past experience
00:40:28 and it can use past experience in,
00:40:33 so it’s remembering, but you’re not consciously remembering.
00:40:36 It’s basically re implementing prior experiences
00:40:40 as a way of predicting what’s gonna happen next.
00:40:42 And it can do something called conceptual combination,
00:40:44 which is it can take bits and pieces of the past
00:40:48 and combine it in new ways.
00:40:50 So you can experience and make sense of things
00:40:55 that you’ve never encountered before
00:40:57 because you’ve encountered something similar to them.
00:41:04 And so a brain in a sense is not just,
00:41:10 doesn’t just contain information.
00:41:13 It is information gaining,
00:41:14 meaning it can create new information
00:41:17 by this generative process.
00:41:19 So in a sense, you could say, well,
00:41:20 that maybe that’s a source of free will.
00:41:23 But I think really where free will comes from
00:41:25 or the kind of free will that I think
00:41:27 is worth having a conversation about
00:41:32 involves cultivating experiences for yourself
00:41:36 that change your internal model.
00:41:40 When you were born and you were raised
00:41:42 in a particular context, your brain wired itself
00:41:48 to your surroundings, to your physical surroundings
00:41:51 and also to your social surroundings.
00:41:53 So you were handed an internal model basically.
00:41:58 But when you grow up,
00:42:01 the more control you have over where you are
00:42:05 and what you do, you can cultivate new experiences
00:42:10 for yourself.
00:42:11 And those new experiences can change your internal model.
00:42:16 And you can actually practice those experiences
00:42:21 in a way that makes them automatic,
00:42:24 meaning it makes it easier for the brain,
00:42:26 your brain to make them again.
00:42:28 And I think that that is something like
00:42:33 what you would call free will.
00:42:35 You aren’t responsible for the model that you were handed,
00:42:40 that someone, your caregivers cultivated a model
00:42:46 in your brain.
00:42:47 You’re not responsible for that model,
00:42:49 but you are responsible for the one you have now.
00:42:52 You can choose, you choose what you expose yourself to.
00:42:56 You choose how you spend your time.
00:42:59 Not everybody has choice over everything,
00:43:02 but everybody has a little bit of choice.
00:43:04 And so I think that is something that I think
00:43:11 is arguably called free will.
00:43:13 Yeah, the ripple effects of the billions of decisions
00:43:18 you make early on in life are so great
00:43:23 that even if it’s not,
00:43:27 even if it’s like all deterministic,
00:43:30 just the amount of possibilities that are created
00:43:35 and then the focusing on those possibilities
00:43:38 into a single trajectory,
00:43:41 that somewhere within that, that’s free will.
00:43:45 Even if it’s all deterministic,
00:43:47 that might as well be just the number of choices
00:43:51 that are possible and the fact that you just make
00:43:53 one trajectory to those set of choices
00:43:56 seems to be like something like
00:43:58 they’ll be called free will.
00:43:59 But it’s still kind of sad to think like
00:44:02 there doesn’t seem to be a place
00:44:03 where there’s magic in there,
00:44:05 where it is all just the computer.
00:44:08 Well, there’s lots of magic, I would say, so far,
00:44:10 because we don’t really understand
00:44:13 how all of this is exactly played out at a,
00:44:20 I mean, scientists are working hard
00:44:23 and disagree about some of the details
00:44:26 under the hood of what I just described,
00:44:28 but I think there’s quite a bit of magic actually.
00:44:31 And also there’s also stochastic firing of,
00:44:38 neurons don’t, they’re not purely digital
00:44:42 in the sense that there is,
00:44:45 there’s also analog communication between neurons,
00:44:47 not just digital.
00:44:48 So it’s not just with firing of axons.
00:44:51 And some of that, there are other ways to communicate.
00:44:55 And also there’s noise in the system
00:45:01 and the noise is there for a really good reason.
00:45:04 And that is the more variability there is,
00:45:08 the more potential there is for your brain
00:45:12 to be able to be information bearing.
00:45:15 So basically, there are some animals
00:45:20 that have clusters of cells.
00:45:22 The only job is to inject noise.
00:45:25 You know, into their neural patterns.
00:45:27 So maybe noise is the source of free will.
00:45:30 So you can think about stochasticity or noise
00:45:34 as a source of free will,
00:45:36 or you can think of conceptual combination
00:45:40 as a source of free will.
00:45:42 You can certainly think about cultivating,
00:45:46 you know, you can’t reach back into your past
00:45:49 and change your past.
00:45:51 You know, people try by psychotherapy and so on,
00:45:54 but what you can do is change your present,
00:45:59 which becomes your past.
00:46:02 Right?
00:46:03 So one way to think about it is that you’re continuously,
00:46:08 this is a colleague of mine, a friend of mine said,
00:46:10 so what you’re saying is that people
00:46:12 are continually cultivating their past.
00:46:15 And I was like, that’s very poetic.
00:46:17 Yes, you are continually cultivating your past
00:46:21 as a means of controlling your future.
00:46:26 So you think, yeah, I guess the construction
00:46:29 of the mental model that you use for prediction
00:46:32 ultimately contains within it your perception of the past,
00:46:36 like the way you interpret the past,
00:46:38 or even just the entirety of your narrative about the past.
00:46:41 So you’re constantly rewriting the story of your past.
00:46:45 Oh boy.
00:46:46 Yeah.
00:46:48 That’s one poetic and also just awe inspiring.
00:46:51 What about the other thing you talk about?
00:46:55 You’ve mentioned about sensory perception
00:46:57 as a thing that like is just,
00:47:00 you have to infer about the sources of the thing
00:47:03 that you have perceived through your senses.
00:47:07 So let me ask another ridiculous question.
00:47:12 Is anything real at all?
00:47:14 Like, how do we know it’s real?
00:47:15 How do we make sense of the fact that just like you said,
00:47:19 there’s this brain sitting alone in the darkness
00:47:21 trying to perceive the world.
00:47:23 How do we know that the world is out there to be perceived?
00:47:27 Yeah, so I don’t think that you should be asking questions
00:47:30 like that without passing a joint.
00:47:32 Right, no, for sure.
00:47:33 I actually did before this, so I apologize.
00:47:36 Okay, no, well, that’s okay.
00:47:37 You apologize for not sharing.
00:47:38 That’s okay.
00:47:39 So, I mean, here’s what I would say.
00:47:41 What I would say is that the reason why
00:47:43 we can be pretty sure that there’s a there there
00:47:46 is that the structure of the information in the world,
00:47:51 what we call statistical regularities
00:47:53 in sights and sounds and so on,
00:47:56 and the structure of the information
00:47:57 that comes from your body, it’s not random stuff.
00:48:00 There’s a structure to it.
00:48:02 There’s a spatial structure and a temporal structure.
00:48:05 And that spatial and temporal structure wires your brain.
00:48:08 So an infant brain is not a miniature adult brain.
00:48:13 It’s a brain that is waiting for wiring instructions
00:48:16 from the world.
00:48:18 And it must receive those wiring instructions
00:48:21 to develop in a typical way.
00:48:23 So, for example, when a newborn is born,
00:48:27 when a newborn is born, when a baby is born,
00:48:32 the baby can’t see very well
00:48:36 because the visual system in that baby’s brain
00:48:39 is not complete.
00:48:42 The retina of your eye, which actually is part of your brain,
00:48:47 has to be stimulated with photons of light.
00:48:49 If it’s not, the baby won’t develop normally
00:48:53 to be able to see in a neurotypical way.
00:48:56 Same thing is true for hearing.
00:48:57 The same thing is true really for all your senses.
00:49:00 So the point is that the physical world
00:49:05 the physical world, the sense data from the physical world
00:49:09 wires your brain so that you have an internal model
00:49:12 of that world so that your brain can predict well
00:49:16 to keep you alive and well and allow you to thrive.
00:49:19 That’s fascinating that the brain is waiting
00:49:23 for a very specific kind of set of instructions
00:49:26 from the world.
00:49:27 Like not the specific,
00:49:29 but a very specific kind of instructions.
00:49:31 So scientists call it expectable input.
00:49:35 The brain needs some input in order to develop normally.
00:49:39 And we are genetically, as I say in the book,
00:49:44 we have the kind of nature that requires nurture.
00:49:48 We can’t develop normally without sensory input
00:49:53 from the world and from the body.
00:49:55 And what’s really interesting about humans
00:49:57 and some other animals too, but really seriously in humans,
00:50:02 is the input that we need is not just physical.
00:50:08 It’s also social.
00:50:10 We, in order for an infant, a human infant
00:50:14 to develop normally, that infant needs eye contact, touch.
00:50:19 It needs certain types of smells.
00:50:22 It needs to be cuddled.
00:50:24 It needs, right?
00:50:25 So without social input,
00:50:30 that infant’s brain will not wire itself
00:50:36 in a neurotypical way.
00:50:38 And again, I would say there are lots
00:50:41 of cultural patterns of caring for an infant.
00:50:46 It’s not like the infant has to be cared for in one way.
00:50:50 Whatever the social environment is for an infant,
00:50:54 that will be reflected in that infant’s internal model.
00:50:59 So we have lots of different cultures,
00:51:00 lots of different ways of rearing children.
00:51:02 And that’s an advantage for our species,
00:51:05 although we don’t always experience it that way.
00:51:07 That is an advantage for our species.
00:51:10 But if you just feed and water a baby
00:51:15 without all the extra social doodads,
00:51:20 what you get is a profoundly impaired human.
00:51:25 Yeah, but nevertheless, you’re kind of saying
00:51:28 that the physical reality has a consistent thing
00:51:34 throughout that keeps feeding these set
00:51:38 of sensory information that our brains are constructed for.
00:51:43 Yeah, the cool thing though,
00:51:44 is that if you change the consistency,
00:51:47 if you change the statistical regularities,
00:51:49 so prediction error, your brain can learn it.
00:51:52 It’s expensive for your brain to learn it.
00:51:53 And it takes a while for the brain
00:51:55 to get really automated with it.
00:51:57 But you had a wonderful conversation with David Edelman,
00:52:01 who just published a book about this
00:52:04 and gave lots and lots of really very, very cool examples.
00:52:07 Some of which I actually discussed
00:52:09 in How Emotions Were Made,
00:52:11 but not obviously to the extent that he did in his book.
00:52:14 It’s a fascinating book,
00:52:15 but it speaks to the point that your internal model
00:52:21 is always under construction.
00:52:23 And therefore, you always can modify your experience.
00:52:30 I wonder what the limits are.
00:52:31 Like if we put it on Mars or if we put it in virtual reality
00:52:36 or if we sit at home during a pandemic
00:52:39 and we spend most of our day on Twitter and TikTok,
00:52:42 like I wonder where the breaking point,
00:52:45 like the limitations of the brain’s capacity
00:52:48 to properly continue wiring itself.
00:52:54 Well, I think what I would say is that
00:52:56 there are different ways to specify your question, right?
00:53:00 Like one way to specify it
00:53:01 would be the way that David phrases it,
00:53:05 which is can we create a new sense?
00:53:09 Like can we create a new sensory modality?
00:53:14 How hard would that be?
00:53:15 What are the limits in doing that?
00:53:19 But another way to say it is what happens to a brain
00:53:23 when you remove some of those statistical regularities,
00:53:27 right?
00:53:28 Like what happens to an adult brain
00:53:30 when you remove some of the statistical patterns
00:53:36 that were there and they’re not there anymore?
00:53:37 Are you talking about in the environment
00:53:39 or in the actual like you remove eyesight, for example?
00:53:43 Well, either way.
00:53:44 I mean, basically one way to limit the inputs to your brain
00:53:49 are to stay home and protect yourself.
00:53:53 Another way is to put someone in solitary confinement.
00:53:57 Another way is to stick them in a nursing home.
00:54:02 Well, not all nursing homes, but there are some, right?
00:54:06 Which really are where people are somewhat impoverished
00:54:11 in the interactions and the variety
00:54:15 of sensory stimulation that they get.
00:54:17 Another way is that you lose a sense, right?
00:54:20 But the point is I think that the human brain
00:54:25 really likes variety, to say it in a sort of Cartesian way.
00:54:36 Variety is a good thing for a brain.
00:54:39 And there are risks that you take
00:54:48 when you restrict what you expose yourself to.
00:54:54 Yeah, you know, there’s all this talk of diversity.
00:54:56 The brain loves it to the fullest definition
00:55:00 and degree of diversity.
00:55:01 Yeah, I mean, I would say the only thing,
00:55:04 basically human brains thrive on diversity.
00:55:07 The only place where we seem to have difficulty
00:55:10 with diversity is with each other, right?
00:55:13 But who wants to eat the same food every day?
00:55:16 You never would.
00:55:17 Who wants to wear the same clothes every day?
00:55:19 I mean, my husband, if you ask him to close his eyes,
00:55:21 he won’t be able to tell you what he’s wearing, right?
00:55:24 He’ll buy seven shirts of exactly the same style
00:55:27 in different colors, but they are in different colors, right?
00:55:30 It’s not like he’s wearing.
00:55:31 How would you then explain my brain,
00:55:35 which is terrified of choice
00:55:36 and therefore wear the same thing every time?
00:55:39 Well, you must be getting your diversity.
00:55:41 Well, first of all, you are a fairly sharp dresser,
00:55:43 so there is that, but you’re getting some reinforcement
00:55:47 for dressing the way you do.
00:55:48 But no, your brain must get diversity in other places.
00:55:52 But I think we, you know,
00:55:56 so the two most expensive things your brain can do,
00:55:59 metabolically speaking, is move your body and learn.
00:56:04 And learn something new.
00:56:08 So novelty, that is diversity, right,
00:56:12 comes at a cost, a metabolic cost,
00:56:14 but it’s a cost, it’s an investment that gives returns.
00:56:19 And in general, people vary
00:56:21 in how much they like novelty, unexpected things.
00:56:24 Some people really like it.
00:56:26 Some people really don’t like it,
00:56:27 and there’s everybody in between.
00:56:29 But in general, we don’t eat the same thing every day.
00:56:32 We don’t usually do exactly the same thing
00:56:36 in exactly the same order,
00:56:37 in exactly the same place every day.
00:56:41 The only place we have difficulty
00:56:43 with diversity is in each other.
00:56:48 And then we have considerable problems there,
00:56:50 I would say, as a species.
00:56:52 Let me ask, I don’t know if you’re familiar
00:56:55 with Donald Hoffman’s work about questions of reality.
00:57:00 What are your thoughts of the possibility
00:57:03 that the very thing we’ve been talking about,
00:57:06 of the brain wiring itself from birth
00:57:10 to a particular set of inputs,
00:57:12 is just a little slice of reality,
00:57:15 that there is something much bigger out there
00:57:17 that we humans, with our cognition, cognitive capabilities,
00:57:21 is just not even perceiving.
00:57:23 The thing we’re perceiving is just a crappy,
00:57:26 like Windows 95 interface onto a much bigger,
00:57:32 richer set of complex physics
00:57:35 that we’re not even in touch with.
00:57:38 Well, without getting too metaphysical about it,
00:57:41 I think we know for sure.
00:57:42 It doesn’t have to be the crappy version of anything,
00:57:47 but we definitely have a limited,
00:57:50 we have a set of senses that are limited
00:57:53 in very physical ways,
00:57:55 and we’re clearly not perceiving everything
00:57:57 there is to perceive.
00:57:58 That’s clear.
00:57:59 I mean, it’s just, it’s not that hard.
00:58:01 We can’t, without special,
00:58:03 why do we invent scientific tools?
00:58:04 It’s so that we can overcome our senses
00:58:07 and experience things that we couldn’t otherwise,
00:58:10 whether they are different parts of the visual spectrum,
00:58:14 the light spectrum,
00:58:15 or things that are too microscopically small for us to see
00:58:19 or too far away for us to see.
00:58:22 So clearly, we’re only getting a slice,
00:58:27 and that slice,
00:58:32 the interesting or potentially sad thing about humans
00:58:38 is that we, whatever we experience,
00:58:40 we think there’s a natural reason for experiencing it,
00:58:44 and we think it’s obvious and natural
00:58:46 and it must be this way,
00:58:48 and that all the other stuff isn’t important.
00:58:50 And that’s clearly not true.
00:58:53 Many of the things that we think of as natural
00:58:55 are anything but,
00:58:57 they’re certainly real, but we’ve created them.
00:59:00 They certainly have very real impacts,
00:59:02 but we’ve created those impacts.
00:59:04 And we also know that there are many things
00:59:06 outside of our awareness that have tremendous influence
00:59:10 on what we experience and what we do.
00:59:13 So there’s no question that that’s true.
00:59:16 I mean, just, it’s,
00:59:18 but the extent is how, really the question is,
00:59:22 how fantastical is it?
00:59:23 Yeah, like what, you know, a lot of people ask me,
00:59:26 am I allowed to say this?
00:59:27 I think I’m allowed to say this.
00:59:28 I’ve eaten shrooms a couple of times,
00:59:31 but I haven’t gone the full,
00:59:33 I’m talking to a few researchers in psychedelics.
00:59:35 It’s an interesting scientifically place.
00:59:37 Like what is the portal you’re entering
00:59:40 when you take psychedelics?
00:59:41 Or another way to ask is like dreams.
00:59:45 So let me tell you what I think,
00:59:46 which is based on nothing.
00:59:48 Like this is based on my, right, so I don’t.
00:59:51 Your intuition.
00:59:52 It’s based on my, I’m guessing now,
00:59:56 based on what I do know, I would say.
00:59:59 But I think that, well, think about what happens.
01:00:02 So you’re running, your brain’s running this internal model
01:00:04 and it’s all outside of your awareness.
01:00:06 You see the, you feel the products,
01:00:08 but you don’t sense the,
01:00:10 you have no awareness of the mechanics of it, right?
01:00:13 It’s going on all the time.
01:00:17 And so one thing that’s going on all the time
01:00:19 that you’re completely unaware of
01:00:20 is that when your brain,
01:00:22 your brain is basically asking itself,
01:00:25 figuratively speaking, not literally, right?
01:00:27 Like how is, the last time I was in this sensory array
01:00:32 with this stuff going on in my body
01:00:33 and this chain of events which just occurred,
01:00:37 what did I do next?
01:00:39 What did I feel next?
01:00:40 What did I see next?
01:00:42 It doesn’t come up with one answer.
01:00:43 It comes up with a distribution of it, possible answers.
01:00:47 And then there has to be some selection process.
01:00:50 And so you have a network in your brain,
01:00:54 a sub network in your brain, a population of neurons
01:00:57 that helps to choose.
01:01:00 It’s not, I’m not talking about a homunculus in your brain
01:01:03 or anything silly like that.
01:01:07 This is not the soul.
01:01:08 It’s not the center of yourself or anything like that.
01:01:11 But there is a set of neurons
01:01:17 that weighs the probabilities
01:01:21 and helps to select or narrow the field, okay?
01:01:26 And that network is working all the time.
01:01:30 It’s actually called the control network,
01:01:32 the executive control network,
01:01:33 or you can call it a frontoparietal
01:01:35 because the regions of the brain that make it up
01:01:38 are in the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe.
01:01:41 There are also parts that belong
01:01:43 to the subcortical parts of your brain.
01:01:44 It doesn’t really matter.
01:01:45 The point is that there is this network
01:01:47 and it is working all the time.
01:01:49 Whether or not you feel in control,
01:01:50 whether or not you feel like you’re expending effort
01:01:52 doesn’t really matter.
01:01:53 It’s on all the time, except when you sleep.
01:01:57 When you sleep, it’s a little bit relaxed.
01:02:03 And so think about what’s happening when you sleep.
01:02:05 When you sleep, the external world recedes,
01:02:09 the sense data from,
01:02:11 so basically your model becomes a little bit,
01:02:16 the tethers from the world are loosened.
01:02:19 And this network, which is involved in,
01:02:24 you know, maybe weeding out unrealistic things
01:02:27 is a little bit quiet.
01:02:29 So use your dreams are really your internal model
01:02:34 that’s unconstrained by the immediate world.
01:02:40 Except, so you can do things that you can’t do
01:02:43 in real life, in your dreams, right?
01:02:45 You can fly.
01:02:46 Like I, for example, when I fly on my back in a dream,
01:02:49 I’m much faster than when I fly on my front.
01:02:51 Don’t ask me why, I don’t know.
01:02:53 Or when you’re laying on your back in your dream.
01:02:55 No, when I’m in my dream and flying in a dream,
01:02:58 I am much faster flyer in the air.
01:03:00 You fly often?
01:03:02 Not often, but I, You talk about it like you,
01:03:04 I don’t think I’ve flown for many years.
01:03:06 Well, you must try it.
01:03:08 I’ve flown, I’ve fallen.
01:03:11 That’s scary.
01:03:12 Yeah, but you’re talking about like airplane.
01:03:14 Yeah, I fly in my dreams.
01:03:16 And I’m way faster, right? On your back.
01:03:18 On my back, way faster.
01:03:21 Now you can say, well, you know,
01:03:22 you never flew in your life.
01:03:24 Right, it’s conceptual combination.
01:03:25 I mean, I’ve flown in an airplane
01:03:27 and I’ve seen birds fly
01:03:30 and I’ve watched movies of people flying
01:03:31 and I know Superman probably flies,
01:03:34 I don’t know if he flies faster on his back, but.
01:03:36 He’s, I’ve never seen Superman.
01:03:37 He’s always flying on his front, right, but yeah.
01:03:40 But anyways, my point is that, you know,
01:03:41 all of this stuff really, all of these experiences
01:03:46 really become part of your internal model.
01:03:48 The thing is that when you’re asleep,
01:03:52 your internal model is still being constrained
01:03:54 by your body.
01:03:56 Your brain’s always attached to your body.
01:03:58 It’s always receiving sense data from your body.
01:04:01 You’re mostly never aware of it
01:04:04 unless you run up the stairs
01:04:06 or, you know, maybe you are ill in some way.
01:04:11 But you’re mostly not aware of it,
01:04:12 which is a really good thing.
01:04:13 Because if you were, you know,
01:04:16 you’d never pay attention to anything
01:04:17 outside your own skin ever again.
01:04:19 Like right now, you seem like
01:04:20 you’re sitting there very calmly,
01:04:21 but you have a virtual drama, right?
01:04:25 It’s like an opera going on inside your body.
01:04:30 And so I think that one of the things
01:04:33 that happens when people take psilocybin
01:04:37 or take, you know, ketamine, for example,
01:04:41 is that the tethers are completely removed.
01:04:47 Yeah.
01:04:48 That’s fascinating.
01:04:50 And that’s why it’s helpful to have a guide, right?
01:04:53 Because the guide is giving you sense data
01:04:57 to steer that internal model
01:04:59 so that it doesn’t go completely off the rails.
01:05:02 Yeah.
01:05:03 Again, that wiring to the other brain,
01:05:06 that’s the guide, is at least a tiny little tether.
01:05:09 Exactly.
01:05:10 Yeah.
01:05:11 Let’s talk about emotion a little bit, if we could.
01:05:14 Emotion comes up often.
01:05:16 And I have never spoken with anybody
01:05:19 who has a clarity about emotion
01:05:24 from a biological and neuroscience perspective that you do.
01:05:29 And I’m not sure I fully know how to,
01:05:34 as a, I mentioned this way too much,
01:05:37 but as somebody who was born in the Soviet Union
01:05:40 and romanticizes basically everything,
01:05:42 talks about love nonstop,
01:05:44 you know, emotion is a, I don’t know what to make of it.
01:05:48 I don’t know what to,
01:05:51 so maybe let’s just try to talk about it.
01:05:53 I mean, from a neuroscience perspective,
01:05:56 we talked about it a little bit last time,
01:05:58 your book covers it, how emotions are made,
01:06:00 but what are some misconceptions we writers of poetry,
01:06:06 we romanticizing humans have about emotion
01:06:10 that we should move away from before
01:06:14 to think about emotion from both a scientific
01:06:18 and an engineering perspective?
01:06:20 Yeah, so there is a common view of emotion in the West.
01:06:25 The caricature of that view is that,
01:06:30 you know, we have an inner beast, right?
01:06:33 Your limbic system, your inner lizard,
01:06:38 we have an inner beast
01:06:39 and that comes baked in to the brain at birth.
01:06:41 So you’ve got circuits for anger, sadness, fear.
01:06:44 It’s interesting that they all have English names,
01:06:46 these circuits.
01:06:47 But, and they’re there
01:06:50 and they’re triggered by things in the world.
01:06:52 And then they cause you to do and say,
01:06:56 and so when your fear circuit is triggered,
01:06:59 you widen your eyes, you gasp,
01:07:03 your heart rate goes up,
01:07:06 you prepare to flee or to freeze.
01:07:12 And these are modal responses.
01:07:15 They’re not the only responses that you give,
01:07:16 but on average, they’re the prototypical responses.
01:07:20 That’s the view.
01:07:22 And that’s the view of emotion in the law.
01:07:25 That’s the view, you know,
01:07:27 that emotions are these profoundly unhelpful things
01:07:31 that are obligatory kind of like reflexes.
01:07:37 The problem with that view
01:07:39 is that it doesn’t comport to the evidence.
01:07:44 And it doesn’t really matter.
01:07:46 The evidence actually lines up beautifully with each other.
01:07:49 It just doesn’t line up with that view.
01:07:50 And it doesn’t matter whether you’re measuring people’s faces,
01:07:53 facial movements, or you’re measuring their body movements,
01:07:55 or you’re measuring their peripheral physiology,
01:07:57 or you’re measuring their brains
01:07:59 or their voices or whatever.
01:08:00 Pick any output that you wanna measure
01:08:03 and any system you wanna measure,
01:08:05 and you don’t really find strong evidence for this.
01:08:09 And I say this as somebody who not only has reviewed
01:08:13 really thousands of articles and run big meta analyses,
01:08:17 which are statistical summaries of published papers,
01:08:21 but also as someone who has sent teams of researchers
01:08:25 to small scale cultures,
01:08:30 you know, remote cultures,
01:08:32 which are very different from urban,
01:08:37 large scale cultures like ours.
01:08:40 And one culture that we visited,
01:08:42 and I say we euphemistically because I myself didn’t go
01:08:47 because I only had two research permits,
01:08:49 and I gave them to my students
01:08:52 because I felt like it was better for them
01:08:54 to have that experience
01:08:56 and more formative for them to have that experience.
01:08:59 But I was in contact with them every day by satellite phone.
01:09:03 And this was to visit the Hadza hunter gatherers in Tanzania
01:09:09 who are not an ancient people, they’re a modern culture,
01:09:14 but they live in circumstances, hunting and foraging,
01:09:19 circumstances that are very similar,
01:09:24 in similar conditions to our ancestors,
01:09:28 hunting gathering ancestors,
01:09:30 when expressions of emotion were supposed to have evolved,
01:09:34 at least by one view of, okay.
01:09:37 So, you know, for many years,
01:09:41 I was sort of struggling with this set of observations,
01:09:45 which is that I feel emotion,
01:09:48 and I perceive emotion in other people,
01:09:52 but scientists can’t find a single marker,
01:09:55 a single biomarker,
01:09:57 not a single individual measure or pattern of measures
01:10:01 that can predict what kind of emotional state they’re in.
01:10:06 How could that possibly be?
01:10:08 How can you possibly make sense of those two things?
01:10:12 And through a lot of reading
01:10:15 and a lot of an immersing myself in different literatures,
01:10:19 I came to the hypothesis that the brain
01:10:24 is constructing these instances
01:10:26 out of more basic ingredients.
01:10:29 So when I tell you that the brain,
01:10:32 when I suggest to you that what your brain is doing
01:10:34 is making a prediction,
01:10:37 and it’s asking itself, figuratively speaking,
01:10:41 the last time I was in this situation
01:10:43 and this, you know, physical state,
01:10:46 what did I do next?
01:10:47 What did I see next?
01:10:48 What did I hear next?
01:10:50 It’s basically asking what in my past
01:10:53 is similar to the present?
01:10:59 Things which are similar to one another
01:11:02 are called a category.
01:11:03 A group of things which are similar
01:11:05 to one another is a category.
01:11:07 And a mental representation of a category is a concept.
01:11:12 So your brain is constructing categories or concepts
01:11:15 on the fly continuously.
01:11:17 So you really want to understand what a brain is doing.
01:11:19 You don’t, using machine learning like classification models
01:11:23 is not going to help you
01:11:24 because the brain doesn’t classify.
01:11:25 It’s doing category construction.
01:11:29 And the categories change,
01:11:31 or you could say it’s doing concept construction.
01:11:34 It’s using past experience to conjure a concept,
01:11:37 which is a prediction.
01:11:41 And if it’s using past experiences of emotion,
01:11:45 then it’s constructing an emotion concept.
01:11:50 Your concept will be,
01:11:54 the content of it changes
01:12:01 depending on the situation that you’re in.
01:12:03 So for example, if your brain uses past experiences of anger
01:12:06 that you have learned,
01:12:10 either because somebody labeled them for you,
01:12:13 taught them to you, you observed them in movies and so on,
01:12:18 in one situation could be very different
01:12:20 from your concept of for anger than another situation.
01:12:24 And this is how anger, instances of anger are,
01:12:29 we call a population of variable instances.
01:12:32 Sometimes when you’re angry, you scowl.
01:12:34 Sometimes when you’re angry, you might smile.
01:12:38 Sometimes when you’re angry, you might cry.
01:12:42 Sometimes your heart rate will go up, it will go down,
01:12:44 it will stay the same.
01:12:46 It depends on what action you’re about to take
01:12:49 because the way prediction, and I should say,
01:12:51 the idea that physiology is yoked to action
01:12:56 is a very old idea in the study
01:13:00 of the peripheral nervous system
01:13:01 that’s been known for really decades.
01:13:04 And so if you look at what the brain is doing,
01:13:07 if you just look at the anatomy and you,
01:13:09 here’s the hypothesis that you would come up with.
01:13:12 And I can go into the details.
01:13:14 I’ve published these details in scientific papers
01:13:18 and they also appear somewhat in
01:13:20 How Emotions Were Made, my first book.
01:13:22 They are not in the seven and a half lessons
01:13:25 because that book is really not pitched
01:13:29 at that level of explanation.
01:13:31 It’s just giving, it’s really just a set of little essays.
01:13:36 But the evidence, but what I’m about to say
01:13:38 is actually based on scientific evidence.
01:13:41 When your brain begins to form a prediction,
01:13:46 the first thing it’s doing is it’s making a prediction
01:13:51 of how to change the internal systems of your body,
01:13:54 your heart, your cardiovascular system,
01:13:56 the control of your heart, control of your lungs,
01:13:59 a flush of cortisol, which is not a stress hormone.
01:14:03 It’s a hormone that gets glucose
01:14:05 into your bloodstream very fast
01:14:08 because your brain is predicting you need to do this.
01:14:10 Predicting you need to do something
01:14:13 metabolically expensive.
01:14:18 And so either that means either move or learn, okay?
01:14:24 And so your brain is preparing your body,
01:14:28 the internal systems of your body
01:14:30 to execute some actions, to move in some way.
01:14:34 And then it infers based on those motor predictions
01:14:42 and what we call viscera motor predictions,
01:14:45 meaning the changes in the viscera
01:14:48 that your brain is preparing to execute,
01:14:54 your brain makes an inference about what you will sense
01:14:59 based on those motor movements.
01:15:01 So your experience of the world
01:15:05 and your experience of your own body
01:15:09 are a consequence of those predictions, those concepts.
01:15:13 When your brain makes a concept for emotion,
01:15:16 it’s constructing an instance of that emotion.
01:15:21 And that is how emotions are made.
01:15:24 And those concepts load in,
01:15:27 the predictions that are made include contents
01:15:32 inside the body, contents outside the body.
01:15:36 I mean, it includes other humans.
01:15:38 So just this construction of a concept
01:15:42 includes the variables that are much richer
01:15:46 than just some sort of simple notion.
01:15:51 Yeah, so our colloquial notion of a concept
01:15:53 where I say, well, what’s a concept of a bird?
01:16:00 And then you list a set of features off to me.
01:16:02 That’s people’s understanding,
01:16:04 typically of what a concept is.
01:16:05 But if you go into the literature in cognitive science,
01:16:10 what you’ll see is that the way
01:16:13 that scientists have understood what a concept is
01:16:15 has really changed over the years.
01:16:17 So people used to think about a concept
01:16:19 as philosophers and scientists used to think about a concept
01:16:24 as a dictionary definition for a category.
01:16:27 So there’s a set of things which are similar
01:16:29 out in the world.
01:16:31 And your concept for that category
01:16:36 is a dictionary definition of the features,
01:16:39 the necessary insufficient features of those instances.
01:16:43 So for a bird, it would be.
01:16:47 Wings, feathers. Right, a beak.
01:16:50 It flies, whatever, okay.
01:16:53 That’s called the classical category.
01:16:55 And scientists discovered, observed
01:16:58 that actually not all instances of birds have feathers
01:17:02 and not all instances of birds fly.
01:17:05 And so the idea was that you don’t have
01:17:08 a single representation of necessary insufficient features
01:17:11 stored in your brain somewhere.
01:17:13 Instead, what you have is a prototype,
01:17:15 a prototype meaning you still have
01:17:18 a single representation for the category, one,
01:17:22 but the features are like of the most typical instance
01:17:27 of the category or maybe the most frequent instance,
01:17:29 but not all instances of the category
01:17:31 have all the features, right?
01:17:33 They have some graded similarity to the prototype.
01:17:38 And then, you know,
01:17:42 what I’m gonna like incredibly simplify now,
01:17:48 a lot of work to say that then a series of experiments
01:17:52 were done to show that in fact,
01:17:56 what your brain seems to be doing is coming up
01:17:58 with a single exemplar or instance of the category
01:18:03 and reading off the features
01:18:08 when I ask you for the concept.
01:18:11 So if we were in a pet store and I asked you
01:18:17 what are the features of a bird,
01:18:20 tell me the concept of bird,
01:18:21 you would be more likely to give me features of a good pet.
01:18:26 And if we were in a restaurant,
01:18:29 you would be more likely, you know, like a budgie, right?
01:18:31 Or a canary.
01:18:32 If we were in a restaurant,
01:18:34 you would be more likely to give me the features
01:18:36 of a bird that you would eat, like a chicken.
01:18:39 And if we were in a park,
01:18:40 you’d be more likely to give me in this country,
01:18:46 you know, the features of a sparrow or a robin.
01:18:49 Whereas if we were in South America,
01:18:50 you would probably give me the features of a peacock
01:18:54 because that’s more common
01:18:57 or it is more common there than here
01:18:59 that you would see a peacock in such circumstances.
01:19:01 So the idea was that really what your brain was doing
01:19:06 was conjuring a concept on the fly
01:19:12 that meets the function that the category is being put to.
01:19:18 Okay?
01:19:19 Okay.
01:19:21 Then people started studying ad hoc concepts,
01:19:27 meaning concepts where the instances don’t share
01:19:32 any physical features, but the function of the instances
01:19:39 are the same.
01:19:40 So for example, think about all the things
01:19:42 that can protect you from the rain.
01:19:46 What are all the things that can protect you from the rain?
01:19:49 Umbrella, like this apartment.
01:19:54 Right.
01:19:56 Your car.
01:19:57 Not giving a damn.
01:19:59 Like a mindset.
01:20:03 Yeah, right, right.
01:20:05 So the idea is that the function of the instances
01:20:08 is the same in a given situation.
01:20:11 Even if they look different, sound different,
01:20:13 smell different, this is called an abstract concept
01:20:17 or a conceptual concept.
01:20:22 Now the really cool thing about conceptual categories
01:20:27 or conceptual category is a category of things
01:20:31 that are held together by a function,
01:20:35 which is called an abstract concept
01:20:37 or a conceptual category,
01:20:39 because the things don’t share physical features,
01:20:41 they share functional features.
01:20:44 There are two really cool things about this.
01:20:46 One is that’s what Darwin said a species was.
01:20:50 So Darwin is known for discovering natural selection.
01:20:59 But the other thing he really did,
01:21:02 which was really profound, which he’s less celebrated for,
01:21:06 is understanding that all biological categories
01:21:10 have inherent variation, inherent variation.
01:21:15 Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species
01:21:19 about before Darwin’s book,
01:21:22 a species was thought to be a classical category
01:21:27 where all the instances of dogs were the same,
01:21:30 had the exactly same features,
01:21:32 and any variation from that perfect platonic instance
01:21:39 was considered to be error.
01:21:41 And Darwin said, no, it’s not error, it’s meaningful.
01:21:44 So nature selects on the basis of that variation.
01:21:52 The reason why natural selection is powerful and can exist
01:21:56 is because there is variation in a species.
01:22:01 And in dogs, we talk about that variation
01:22:03 in terms of the size of the dog
01:22:06 and the amount of fur the dog has and the color
01:22:09 and how long is the tail and how long is the snout.
01:22:12 In humans, we talk about that variation
01:22:16 in all kinds of ways, right, including in cultural ways.
01:22:23 So that’s one thing that’s really interesting
01:22:25 about conceptual categories is that Darwin
01:22:28 is basically saying a species is a conceptual category.
01:22:31 And in fact, if you look at modern debates
01:22:34 about what is a species, you can’t find anybody
01:22:38 agreeing on what the criteria are for a species,
01:22:43 because they don’t all share the same genome.
01:22:46 We don’t all share, we don’t,
01:22:47 there isn’t a single human genome.
01:22:49 There’s a population of genomes, but they’re variable.
01:22:56 It’s not unbounded variation, but they are variable, right?
01:23:00 And the other thing that’s really cool
01:23:03 about conceptual categories is that they are the categories
01:23:10 that we use to make civilization.
01:23:15 So think about money, for example.
01:23:19 What are all the physical things
01:23:21 that make something a currency?
01:23:25 Is there any physical feature that all the currencies
01:23:28 in all the worlds that’s ever been used by humans share?
01:23:33 Well, certainly, right, but what is it?
01:23:36 Is it definable?
01:23:38 So it’s getting to the point that you make this function.
01:23:43 It’s the function, right.
01:23:44 It’s that we trade it for material goods.
01:23:47 And we have to agree, right?
01:23:49 We all impose on whatever it is, salt, barley,
01:23:52 little shells, big rocks in the ocean that can’t move,
01:23:55 Bitcoin, pieces of plastic, mortgages,
01:23:58 which are basically a promise of something in the future,
01:24:00 nothing more, right?
01:24:02 All of these things, we impose value on them.
01:24:06 And we all agree that we can exchange them
01:24:09 for material goods.
01:24:11 Yeah, and yes, that’s brilliant.
01:24:13 By the way, you’re attributing some of that to Darwin,
01:24:16 that he thought.
01:24:16 No, no, I’m saying that what Darwin.
01:24:18 Because it’s a brilliant view
01:24:19 of what a species is, is the function.
01:24:21 Yeah, what I’m saying is that what Darwin,
01:24:24 Darwin really talked about variation in,
01:24:28 so if you read, for example,
01:24:29 the biologist Ernst Mayr,
01:24:31 who was an evolutionary biologist,
01:24:33 and then when he retired,
01:24:34 became a historian and philosopher of biology.
01:24:38 And his suggestion is that Darwin,
01:24:42 Darwin did talk about variation.
01:24:45 He vanquished what’s called essentialism,
01:24:48 the idea that there’s a single set of features
01:24:51 that define any species.
01:24:56 And out of that grew really discussions
01:25:02 of some of the functional features that species have,
01:25:07 like they can reproduce, they can have offspring,
01:25:10 the individuals of a species can have offspring.
01:25:12 It turns out that’s not a perfect criterion to use,
01:25:18 but it’s a functional criterion, right?
01:25:20 So what I’m saying is that in cognitive science,
01:25:23 people came up with the idea,
01:25:24 they discovered the idea of conceptual categories
01:25:26 or ad hoc concepts, these concepts that can change
01:25:30 based on the function they’re serving, right?
01:25:33 And that it’s there, it’s in Darwin,
01:25:38 and it’s also in the philosophy of social reality.
01:25:42 The way that philosophers talk about social reality,
01:25:44 just look around you.
01:25:46 I mean, we impose,
01:25:47 we’re treating a bunch of things as similar,
01:25:49 which are physically different.
01:25:52 And sometimes we take things that are physically the same
01:25:55 and we treat them as separate categories.
01:25:58 But it feels like the number of variables involved
01:26:02 in that kind of categorization is nearly infinite.
01:26:04 No, I don’t think so,
01:26:06 because there is a physical constraint, right?
01:26:08 Like you and I could agree that we can fly in real life,
01:26:13 but we can’t.
01:26:14 That’s a physical constraint that we can’t break, right?
01:26:18 You and I could agree that we could walk through the walls,
01:26:21 but we can’t.
01:26:22 We could agree that we could eat glass,
01:26:24 but we can’t.
01:26:25 Oh, there’s a lot of constraints, but I just.
01:26:25 Yeah, we could agree that the virus doesn’t exist
01:26:28 and we don’t have to wear masks.
01:26:30 Right, yeah.
01:26:33 But physical reality still holds the Trump card, right?
01:26:37 But still there’s a lot of.
01:26:38 The Trump card, well, pun unintended.
01:26:41 Pun completely unintended, but there you go,
01:26:43 that’s a predicting brain for you.
01:26:44 But there is a tremendous amount of leeway.
01:26:49 Yes.
01:26:50 Yeah, that’s the point.
01:26:51 So what I’m saying is that emotions are like money.
01:26:55 Basically, they’re like money, they’re like countries,
01:26:59 they’re like kings and queens and presidents.
01:27:02 They’re like everything that we construct
01:27:05 that we impose meaning on.
01:27:07 We take these physical signals and we give them meanings
01:27:10 that they don’t otherwise have by their physical nature.
01:27:13 And because we agree, they have that function.
01:27:19 But the beautiful thing, so maybe unlike money,
01:27:23 I love this similarity is it’s not obvious to me
01:27:26 that this kind of emergent agreement
01:27:29 should happen with emotion,
01:27:31 because our experiences are so different
01:27:33 for each of us humans, and yet we kind of converge.
01:27:36 Well, in a culture we converge, but not across cultures.
01:27:39 There are huge, huge differences.
01:27:41 There are huge differences in what concepts exist,
01:27:44 what they look like.
01:27:48 So what I would say is that what we’re doing
01:27:54 with our young children as their brains become wired
01:28:00 to their physical and their social environment
01:28:03 is that we are curating for them.
01:28:05 We are bootstrapping into their brains
01:28:07 a set of emotion concepts.
01:28:11 That’s partly what they’re learning.
01:28:13 And we curate those for infants
01:28:15 just the way we curate for them what is a dog,
01:28:17 what is a cat, what is a truck.
01:28:19 We sometimes explicitly label
01:28:22 and we sometimes just use mental words.
01:28:26 When your kid is throwing Cheerios on the floor
01:28:30 instead of eating them, or your kid is crying
01:28:33 when she won’t put herself to sleep or whatever.
01:28:37 We use mental words.
01:28:39 And a word is this, words for infants,
01:28:44 words are these really special things
01:28:46 that they help infants learn abstract categories.
01:28:49 There’s a huge literature showing that children can take
01:28:54 things that don’t look infants,
01:28:56 like infants, really young infants,
01:28:58 preverbal infants can take, if you label,
01:29:03 if I say to you, and you’re an infant, okay?
01:29:07 So I say, Lexi, this is a bling.
01:29:13 And I put it down and the bling makes a squeaky noise.
01:29:17 And then I say, Lexi, this is a bling.
01:29:22 And I put it down and it makes a squeaky noise.
01:29:24 And then I say, Lexi, this is a bling.
01:29:30 You, as young as four months old,
01:29:34 will expect this to make a noise, a squeaky noise.
01:29:39 And if you don’t, if it doesn’t, you’ll be surprised
01:29:41 because it violated your expectation, right?
01:29:44 I’m building for you an internal model of a bling.
01:29:49 Okay, infants can do this really, really at a young age.
01:29:53 And so there’s no reason to believe
01:29:55 that they couldn’t learn emotion categories
01:29:58 and concepts in the same way.
01:29:59 And what happens when you go to a new culture?
01:30:04 When you go to a new culture,
01:30:07 you have to do what’s called emotion acculturation.
01:30:11 So my colleague Bacha Mesquita in Belgium
01:30:13 studies emotion acculturation.
01:30:15 She studies how, when people move
01:30:16 from one culture to another,
01:30:18 how do they learn the emotion concepts of that culture?
01:30:21 How do they learn to make sense
01:30:23 of their own internal sensations
01:30:25 and also the movements, the raise of an eyebrow,
01:30:29 the tilt of a head?
01:30:30 How do they learn to make sense of cues from other people
01:30:34 using concepts they don’t have,
01:30:37 but have to make on the fly?
01:30:40 So that’s the difference between cultures.
01:30:43 Let me open another door.
01:30:45 I’m not sure I wanna open,
01:30:46 but the difference between men and women.
01:30:49 Is there a difference between the emotional lives
01:30:53 of those two categories of biological systems?
01:30:57 So here’s what I would say.
01:31:00 We did a series of studies in the 1990s
01:31:04 where we asked men and women
01:31:07 to tell us about their emotional lives.
01:31:10 And women described themselves
01:31:11 as much more emotional than men.
01:31:13 They believed that they were more emotional than men
01:31:15 and men agreed.
01:31:17 Women are much more emotional than men.
01:31:19 And then we gave them little handheld computers.
01:31:24 These were little Hewlett Packard computers.
01:31:26 They fit in the palm of your hand.
01:31:28 They weighed a couple of pounds.
01:31:29 So this was like pre palm pilot even,
01:31:31 like this was 1990s and like early.
01:31:36 And we asked them,
01:31:41 we would ping them like 10 times a day
01:31:45 and just ask them to report how they were feeling,
01:31:48 which is called experience sampling.
01:31:51 So we experienced sampled.
01:31:53 And then at the end,
01:31:57 and then we looked at their reports
01:31:59 and what we found is that men and women
01:32:01 basically didn’t differ.
01:32:02 And there were some people who were really,
01:32:05 had many more instances of emotion.
01:32:07 So they were treading water in a tumultuous sea of emotion.
01:32:15 And then there were other people
01:32:17 who were like floating tranquilly in a lake.
01:32:21 It was really not perturbed very often.
01:32:23 And everyone in between,
01:32:25 but there were no difference between men and women.
01:32:28 And the really interesting thing is at the end
01:32:30 of the sampling period, we asked people,
01:32:33 so reflect over the past two weeks and tell it.
01:32:36 So we’ve been now pinging people like again
01:32:39 and again and again, right?
01:32:41 So tell us how emotional do you think you are?
01:32:44 No change from the beginning.
01:32:45 So men and women believe that they are different.
01:32:50 And when they are looking at other people,
01:32:53 they make different inferences about emotion.
01:32:56 If a man is scowling,
01:32:59 like if you and I were together
01:33:01 and so somebody is watching this, okay?
01:33:04 And yeah, hey, who are you saying?
01:33:07 Hey, hi.
01:33:08 Yeah, hi.
01:33:09 By the way, people love it when you look at the camera.
01:33:15 If you and I make exactly the same set of facial movements,
01:33:20 when people look at you, both men and women look at you,
01:33:25 they are more likely to think,
01:33:27 oh, he’s reacting to the situation.
01:33:30 And when they look at me, they’ll say,
01:33:33 oh, she’s having an emotion.
01:33:34 She’s, you know, yeah.
01:33:36 And I wrote about this actually
01:33:40 right before the 2016 election.
01:33:46 You know what, maybe I could confess.
01:33:49 Let me try to carefully confess.
01:33:51 But you are really gonna.
01:33:53 Yeah, that when I,
01:33:57 that there is an element when I see Hillary Clinton
01:34:02 that there was something annoying about her to me.
01:34:06 And I, just that feeling,
01:34:09 and then I tried to reduce that to what is that?
01:34:13 Because I think the same attributes
01:34:17 that are annoying about her
01:34:19 when I see in other people wouldn’t be annoying.
01:34:22 So I was trying to understand what is it?
01:34:25 Because it certainly does feel like that concept
01:34:28 that I’ve constructed in my mind.
01:34:30 Well, I’ll tell you that I think,
01:34:32 well, let me just say that what you would predict about,
01:34:35 for example, the performance of the two of them
01:34:39 in the debates, and I wrote an op ed
01:34:42 for the New York Times actually before the second debate.
01:34:46 And it played out really pretty much
01:34:48 as I thought that it would based on research.
01:34:51 It’s not like I’m like a great fortune teller or anything.
01:34:53 It’s just, I was just applying the research,
01:34:54 which was that when a woman,
01:34:58 a woman’s, people make internal attributions, it’s called.
01:35:03 They infer that the facial movements and body posture
01:35:07 and vocalizations of a woman reflect her interstate.
01:35:10 But for a man, they’re more likely to assume
01:35:12 that they reflect his response to the situation.
01:35:15 It doesn’t say anything about him.
01:35:16 It says something about the situation he’s in.
01:35:19 Now, for the thing that you were describing
01:35:22 about Hillary Clinton, I think a lot of people experienced,
01:35:27 but it’s also in line with research, which shows,
01:35:30 and particularly research actually
01:35:34 about teaching evaluations is one place
01:35:36 that you really see it, where the expectation
01:35:39 is that a woman will be nurturant
01:35:42 and that a man, there’s just no expectation
01:35:46 for him to be nurturant.
01:35:47 So if he is nurturant, he gets points.
01:35:51 If he’s not, he gets points.
01:35:54 They’re just different points, right?
01:35:56 Whereas for a woman, especially a woman
01:35:58 who’s an authority figure, she’s really in a catch 22.
01:36:02 Because if she’s serious, she’s a bitch.
01:36:05 And if she’s empathic, then she’s weak.
01:36:09 Right, that’s brilliant. I mean, one of the bigger questions
01:36:12 to ask here, so that’s one example
01:36:15 where our construction of concepts gets in trouble.
01:36:20 So, but remember I said science and philosophy
01:36:24 are like tools for living.
01:36:26 So I learned recently that if you ask me
01:36:30 what is my intuition about what regulates my eating,
01:36:34 I will say carbohydrates.
01:36:36 I love carbohydrates.
01:36:37 I love pasta.
01:36:38 I love bread.
01:36:39 I love, I just love carbohydrates.
01:36:42 But actually research shows, and it’s beautiful research.
01:36:45 I love this research because it so violates my own
01:36:49 like deeply, deeply held beliefs about myself
01:36:53 that most animals on this planet who have been studied
01:36:57 and there are many actually eat
01:37:00 to regulate their protein intake.
01:37:04 So you will overeat carbohydrates
01:37:06 if you, in order to get enough protein.
01:37:10 And this research has been done with human,
01:37:12 very beautiful research with humans, with crickets,
01:37:15 with like, you know, bonobos.
01:37:17 I mean, just like all these different animals, not bonobos,
01:37:19 but I think like baboons.
01:37:21 Now that I have no intuition about that.
01:37:24 And I, even now as I regulate my eating,
01:37:27 I still, I just have no intuition.
01:37:30 It just, I can’t feel it.
01:37:32 What I feel is only about the carbohydrates.
01:37:35 It feels like you’re regulating around carbohydrates,
01:37:38 not the protein.
01:37:38 Yeah, but in fact, actually what I am doing,
01:37:41 if I am like most animals on the planet,
01:37:43 I am regulating around protein.
01:37:45 So knowing this, what do I do?
01:37:48 I correct my behavior to eat,
01:37:51 to actually deliberately try to focus on the protein.
01:37:56 This is the idea behind bias training, right?
01:38:00 Like if you,
01:38:01 I also did not experience Hillary Clinton
01:38:09 as the warmest candidate.
01:38:12 However, you can use consistent science,
01:38:19 since the consistent scientific findings
01:38:21 to organize your behavior.
01:38:24 That doesn’t mean that rationality
01:38:26 is the absence of emotion,
01:38:28 because sometimes emotion or any feelings in general,
01:38:33 not the same thing as emotion, that’s another topic,
01:38:37 but are a source of information
01:38:41 and their wisdom and helpful.
01:38:42 So I’m not saying that,
01:38:44 but what I am saying is that
01:38:45 if you have a deeply held belief
01:38:46 and the evidence shows that you’re wrong, then you’re wrong.
01:38:50 It doesn’t really matter how confident you feel.
01:38:53 That confidence could be also explained by science, right?
01:38:56 So it would be the same thing as if I,
01:38:59 regardless of whether someone is like Charlie Baker,
01:39:02 regardless of whether somebody is a Republican
01:39:04 or a Democrat,
01:39:05 if that person has a record that you can see
01:39:09 is consistent with what you believe,
01:39:11 then that is information that you can act on.
01:39:15 Yeah, and then try to,
01:39:17 I mean, this is kind of what empathy is in open mindedness,
01:39:21 is try to consider that the set of concepts
01:39:25 that your brain has constructed
01:39:27 through which you are now perceiving the world
01:39:30 is not painting the full picture.
01:39:32 I mean, this is now true for basically every,
01:39:35 it doesn’t have to be men and women,
01:39:36 it could be basically the prism through which we perceive
01:39:39 actually the political discourse, right?
01:39:41 Absolutely, so here’s what I would say.
01:39:49 There are people who, scientists who will talk to you
01:39:52 about cognitive empathy and emotional empathy
01:39:54 and I prefer to think of it,
01:39:59 I think the evidence is more consistent
01:40:01 with what I’m about to say,
01:40:03 which is that your brain is always making predictions
01:40:08 using your own past experience and what you’ve learned
01:40:11 from books and movies and other people telling you
01:40:14 about their experiences and so on.
01:40:17 And if your brain cannot make a concept
01:40:22 to make sense of those, anticipate what those sense data are
01:40:25 and make sense of them, you will be experientially blind.
01:40:31 So, when I’m giving lectures to people,
01:40:34 I’ll show them like a blobby black and white image
01:40:37 and they’re experientially blind to the image,
01:40:42 they can’t see anything in it.
01:40:44 And then I show them a photograph
01:40:45 and then I show them the image again, the blobby image
01:40:48 and then they see actually an object in it.
01:40:51 But the image is the same.
01:40:53 It’s they’re actually adding,
01:40:55 their predictions now are adding, right?
01:40:57 Or anybody who’s learned a language,
01:41:03 a second language after their first language
01:41:07 also has this experience of things
01:41:10 that initially sound like sounds
01:41:12 that they can’t quite make sense of,
01:41:14 eventually come to make sense of them.
01:41:18 And in fact, there are really cool examples
01:41:20 of people who were like born blind
01:41:23 because they have cataracts or they have corneal damage
01:41:28 so that no light is reaching the brain.
01:41:33 And then they have an operation
01:41:35 and then light reaches the brain and they can’t see.
01:41:41 For days and weeks and sometimes years,
01:41:45 they are experientially blind to certain things.
01:41:47 So what happens with empathy, right?
01:41:51 Is that your brain is making a prediction.
01:41:54 And if it doesn’t have the capacity to make,
01:42:04 if you don’t share, if you’re not similar,
01:42:06 remember categories are instances
01:42:10 which are similar in some way.
01:42:12 If you are not similar enough to that person,
01:42:16 you will have a hard time making a prediction
01:42:17 about what they feel.
01:42:19 You will be experientially blind to what they feel.
01:42:24 In the United States, children of color
01:42:29 are under prescribed medicine by their physicians.
01:42:34 This is been documented.
01:42:38 It’s not that the physicians are racist necessarily
01:42:43 but they might be experientially blind.
01:42:52 The same thing is true of male physicians
01:42:54 with female patients.
01:42:56 I could tell you some hair raising stories really
01:43:00 that where people die as a consequence
01:43:03 of a physician making the wrong inference,
01:43:07 the wrong prediction because of being experientially blind.
01:43:11 So we are, empathy is not, it’s not magic.
01:43:21 We make inferences about each other,
01:43:23 about what each other’s feeling and thinking.
01:43:26 In this culture more than,
01:43:28 there are some cultures where people
01:43:31 have what’s called opacity of mind
01:43:33 where they will make a prediction
01:43:34 about someone else’s actions
01:43:35 but they’re not inferring anything
01:43:37 about the internal state of that person.
01:43:39 But in our culture, we’re constantly making inferences.
01:43:43 What is this person thinking?
01:43:44 And we’re not doing it necessarily consciously
01:43:47 but we’re just doing it really automatically
01:43:48 using our predictions, what we know.
01:43:51 And if you expose yourself to information
01:43:57 which is very different from somebody else,
01:43:59 I mean, really what we have is we have different cultures
01:44:03 in this country right now that are,
01:44:07 there are a number of reasons for this.
01:44:08 I mean, part of it is, I don’t know if you saw
01:44:10 the Social Dilemma, the Netflix.
01:44:14 Heard about it.
01:44:15 Yeah, it’s a great, it’s really great documentary and…
01:44:20 About what social networks are doing to our society?
01:44:23 Yeah, yeah.
01:44:24 But nothing, no phenomenon has a simple single cause.
01:44:31 There are multiple small causes
01:44:35 which all add up to a perfect storm.
01:44:37 That’s just how most things work.
01:44:41 And so the fact that machine learning algorithms
01:44:45 are serving people up information on social media
01:44:48 that is consistent with what they’ve already viewed
01:44:51 and making, is part of the reason that you have these silos
01:44:57 but it’s not the only reason why you have these silos.
01:45:00 I think there are other things afoot
01:45:04 that enhance people’s inability
01:45:09 to even have a decent conversation.
01:45:13 Yeah, I mean, okay, so many things you said
01:45:15 are just brilliant, so the experiential blindness
01:45:20 but also from my perspective, like I preach
01:45:24 and I try to practice empathy a lot
01:45:27 and something about the way you’ve explained it
01:45:30 makes me almost see it as a kind of exercise
01:45:33 that we should all do, like to train,
01:45:35 like to add experiences to the brain
01:45:38 to expand this capacity to predict more effectively.
01:45:42 Absolutely.
01:45:43 So like what I do is kind of like a method acting thing
01:45:47 which is I imagine what the life of a person is like.
01:45:52 Just think, I mean, this is something you see
01:45:54 with Black Lives Matter and police officers.
01:45:58 It feels like they’re both, not both,
01:46:01 but I have, because martial arts and so on,
01:46:03 I have a lot of friends who are cops.
01:46:06 They don’t necessarily
01:46:11 have empathy or visualize the experience of the other.
01:46:14 Certainly, currently, unfortunately,
01:46:17 people aren’t doing that with police officers.
01:46:19 They’re not imagining, they’re not empathizing
01:46:22 or putting themselves in the shoes of a police officer
01:46:26 to realize how difficult that job is,
01:46:28 how dangerous it is, how difficult it is to maintain calm
01:46:32 and under so much uncertainty, all those kinds of things.
01:46:35 But there’s more, there’s even, that’s all that’s true,
01:46:37 but I think that there’s even more,
01:46:39 there’s even more to be said there.
01:46:41 I mean, like from a predicting brain standpoint,
01:46:44 there’s even more that can be said there.
01:46:47 So I don’t know if you wanna go down that path
01:46:48 or you wanna stick on empathy,
01:46:49 but I will also say that one of the things
01:46:52 that I was most gratified by, I still am receiving,
01:46:57 it’s been more than three and a half years
01:46:59 since How Motions Are Made came out
01:47:00 and I’m still receiving daily emails from people, right?
01:47:04 So that’s gratifying.
01:47:05 But one of the most gratifying emails I received
01:47:09 was from a police officer in Texas
01:47:12 who told me that he thought that How Motions Are Made
01:47:19 contained information that would be really helpful
01:47:24 to resolving some of these difficulties.
01:47:28 And he hadn’t even read my op ed piece
01:47:33 about when is a gun not a gun?
01:47:35 And like using what we know about the science of perception
01:47:39 from a prediction standpoint,
01:47:41 like the brain is a predictor,
01:47:43 to understand a little differently
01:47:45 what might be happening in these circumstances.
01:47:49 So there’s a real, what’s hard about,
01:47:52 it’s hard to talk about because everyone gets mad at you
01:47:57 when you talk about this, like, you know.
01:47:59 And there is a way to understand this
01:48:02 which has profound empathy
01:48:05 for the suffering of people of color
01:48:10 and that definitely is in line with Black Lives Matter
01:48:15 at the same time as understanding
01:48:18 the really difficult situation
01:48:21 that police officers find themselves in.
01:48:23 And I’m not talking about this bad apple or that bad apple.
01:48:26 I’m not talking about police officers
01:48:28 who are necessarily shooting people in the back
01:48:30 as they run away.
01:48:31 I’m talking about the cases of really good,
01:48:34 well meaning cops who have the kind of predicting brain
01:48:39 that everybody else has.
01:48:42 They’re in a really difficult situation
01:48:45 that I think both they and the people
01:48:50 who are harmed don’t realize,
01:48:55 like the way that these situations are constructed,
01:48:58 I think it’s just, there’s a lot to be said there I guess
01:49:01 is what I want to say.
01:49:02 Yeah, is there something we can try to say in a sense,
01:49:06 like what I’m, from the perspective of the predictive brain
01:49:09 which is a fascinating perspective to take on this,
01:49:15 you know, all the protests that are going on,
01:49:18 there seems to be a concept of a police officer being built.
01:49:22 No, I think that concept is there.
01:49:25 But it’s gaining strength, so it’s being re, I mean.
01:49:30 Yeah, it is.
01:49:31 Sure, it is there.
01:49:32 But I think, yeah, for sure, I think that that’s right.
01:49:35 I think that there’s a shift in the stereotype
01:49:42 of what I would say is a stereotype.
01:49:44 There’s a stereotype of a black man in this country
01:49:48 that’s always in movies and television,
01:49:50 not always, but like largely, that many people watch.
01:49:56 I mean, you think you’re watching a 10 o clock drama
01:50:00 and all you’re doing is like kicking back and relaxing,
01:50:02 but actually you’re having certain predictions reinforced
01:50:07 and others not.
01:50:07 And what’s happening now with police is the same thing,
01:50:12 that there are certain stereotypes of a police officer
01:50:16 that are being abandoned and other stereotypes
01:50:19 that are being reinforced by what you see happening.
01:50:23 All I’ll say is that if you remember,
01:50:26 I mean, there’s a lot to say about this, really,
01:50:28 that regardless of whether it makes people mad or not,
01:50:33 I mean, I just, the science is what it is.
01:50:37 Just remember what I said.
01:50:39 The brain makes predictions about internal changes
01:50:45 in the body first and then it starts to prepare motor action
01:50:49 and then it makes a prediction about what you will see
01:50:52 and hear and feel based on those actions, okay?
01:50:57 So it’s also the case that we didn’t talk about
01:51:01 is that sensory sampling,
01:51:04 like your brain’s ability to sample what’s out there
01:51:07 is yoked to your heart rate, it’s yoked to your heartbeats.
01:51:12 There are certain phases of the heartbeat
01:51:15 where it’s easier for you to see what’s happening
01:51:17 in the world than in others.
01:51:20 And so if your heart rate goes through the roof,
01:51:26 you will be less likely, you will be more likely
01:51:28 to just go with your prediction and not correct
01:51:32 based on what’s out there
01:51:34 because you’re actually literally not seeing as well.
01:51:39 Or you will see things that aren’t there, basically.
01:51:43 Is there something that we could say by way of advice
01:51:48 for when this episode is released
01:51:52 in the chaos of emotion?
01:51:57 Sorry, I don’t know about a term
01:51:58 that’s just flying around on social media.
01:52:01 What’s?
01:52:02 Well, I actually think it is emotion in the following sense.
01:52:07 And it sounds a little bit like,
01:52:10 it sounds a little bit like artificial
01:52:14 in the way that I’m about to say it,
01:52:16 but I really think that this is what’s happening.
01:52:18 One thing we haven’t talked about is brains evolved,
01:52:24 didn’t evolve for you to see,
01:52:25 they didn’t evolve for you to hear,
01:52:26 they didn’t evolve for you to feel,
01:52:28 they evolved to control your body.
01:52:30 That’s why you have a brain.
01:52:31 You have a brain so that it can control your body.
01:52:34 And the metaphor,
01:52:36 the scientific term for predictively controlling your body
01:52:39 is allostasis.
01:52:40 Your brain is attempting to anticipate the needs
01:52:45 of your body and meet those needs before they arise
01:52:48 so that you can act as you need to act.
01:52:51 And the metaphor that I use is a body budget.
01:52:55 You know, your brain is running a budget for your body.
01:52:57 It’s not budgeting money,
01:52:58 it’s budgeting glucose and salt and water.
01:53:01 And instead of having, you know,
01:53:04 one or two bank accounts, it has gazillions.
01:53:06 There are all these systems in your body
01:53:08 that have to be kept in balance.
01:53:10 And it’s monitoring very closely,
01:53:14 it’s making predictions about like,
01:53:16 when is it good to spend and when is it good to save
01:53:19 and what would be a good investment
01:53:21 and am I gonna get a return on my investment?
01:53:23 Whenever people talk about reward or reward prediction error
01:53:27 or anything to do with reward or punishment,
01:53:29 they’re talking about the body budget.
01:53:32 They’re talking about your brain’s predictions
01:53:34 about whether or not there will be a deposit or withdrawal.
01:53:39 So when your brain is running a deficit
01:53:47 in your body budgets,
01:53:48 you have some kind of metabolic imbalance,
01:53:51 you experience that as discomfort.
01:53:55 You experience that as distress.
01:53:58 When your brain, when things are chaotic,
01:54:00 you can’t predict what’s going to happen next.
01:54:05 So I have this absolutely brilliant scientist
01:54:08 working in my lab, his name is Jordan Theriot
01:54:13 and he’s published this really terrific paper
01:54:17 on a sense of should, like why do we have social rules?
01:54:22 Why do we adhere to social norms?
01:54:27 It’s because if I make myself predictable to you,
01:54:31 then you are predictable to me.
01:54:33 And if you’re predictable to me, that’s good
01:54:36 because that is less metabolically expensive for me.
01:54:41 Novelty or unpredictability at the extreme is expensive.
01:54:46 And if it goes on for long enough,
01:54:48 what happens is first of all,
01:54:50 you will feel really jittery and antsy,
01:54:53 which we describe as anxiety.
01:54:56 It isn’t necessarily anxiety.
01:54:58 It could be just something is not predictable
01:55:04 and you are experiencing arousal
01:55:06 because the chemicals that help you learn
01:55:09 increase your feeling of arousal basically.
01:55:13 But if it goes on for long enough,
01:55:15 you will become depleted
01:55:17 and you will start to feel really, really,
01:55:20 really distressed.
01:55:22 So what we have is a culture full of people right now
01:55:27 who their body budgets are just decimated
01:55:32 and there’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty.
01:55:36 When you talk about it as depression and anxiety,
01:55:39 it makes you think that it’s not about your metabolism,
01:55:43 that it’s not about your body budgeting,
01:55:46 that it’s not about getting enough sleep
01:55:48 or about eating well or about making sure
01:55:51 that you have social connections.
01:55:55 You think that it’s something separate from that.
01:55:57 But depression and anxiety are just a way
01:55:58 of being in the world.
01:56:01 They’re a way of being in the world
01:56:04 when things aren’t quite right with your predictions.
01:56:08 That’s such a deep way of thinking.
01:56:10 Like the brain is maintaining homeostasis.
01:56:16 It’s actually allostasis.
01:56:17 I’m sorry.
01:56:19 And it’s constantly making predictions
01:56:22 and metabolically speaking,
01:56:24 it’s very costly to make novel,
01:56:26 like constantly be learning to making adjustments.
01:56:29 And then over time, there’s a cost to be paid
01:56:35 if you’re just in a place of chaos
01:56:39 where there’s constant need for adjusting
01:56:42 and learning and experience novel things.
01:56:46 And so part of the problem here,
01:56:49 there are a couple of things.
01:56:50 Like I said, it’s a perfect storm.
01:56:52 There isn’t a single cause.
01:56:54 There are multiple cause,
01:56:55 multiple things that combine together.
01:56:57 It’s a complex system, multiple things.
01:57:01 Part of it is that they’re metabolically encumbered
01:57:08 and they’re distressed.
01:57:10 And in order to try to have empathy
01:57:12 for someone who is very much unlike you,
01:57:16 you have to forage for information.
01:57:19 You have to explore information
01:57:22 that is novel to you and unexpected.
01:57:25 And that’s expensive.
01:57:27 And at a time when people feel,
01:57:31 what do you do when you are running a deficit
01:57:33 in your bank account?
01:57:34 You stop spending.
01:57:37 What does it mean for a brain to stop spending?
01:57:40 A brain stops moving very much,
01:57:43 stops moving the body and it stops learning.
01:57:46 It just goes with its internal model.
01:57:48 Brilliantly put, yeah.
01:57:50 So empathy requires,
01:57:54 to have empathy for someone who is unlike you
01:57:57 requires learning and practice, foraging for information.
01:58:04 I mean, it is something I talk about in the book
01:58:07 in seven and a half lessons about the brain.
01:58:08 I think it’s really important.
01:58:10 It’s hard, but it’s hard.
01:58:13 I think it’s hard for people to have,
01:58:16 to be curious about views that are unlike their own
01:58:22 when they feel so encumbered.
01:58:26 And I’ll just tell you, I had this epiphany really.
01:58:30 I was listening to Robert Reich’s The System.
01:58:34 He was talking about oligarchy versus democracy.
01:58:39 And so oligarchy is where very wealthy people,
01:58:41 like extremely wealthy people,
01:58:46 shift power so that they become even more wealthy
01:58:51 and even more insulated
01:58:52 and from the pressures of the common person.
01:58:58 It’s actually the kind of system
01:59:00 that leads to the collapse of civilizations
01:59:04 if you believe Jared Diamond.
01:59:05 Just say that.
01:59:06 But anyways, I’m listening to this
01:59:08 and I’m listening to him describe in fairly decent detail
01:59:13 how the CEOs of these companies,
01:59:18 there’s been a shift in what it means to be a CEO
01:59:21 and no longer being a steward of the community and so on,
01:59:25 but like in the 1980s, it sort of shifted
01:59:27 to this other model of being like an oligarch.
01:59:30 And he’s talking about how it used to be the case
01:59:35 that CEOs made like 20 times what their employees made
01:59:45 and now they make about 300 times on average
01:59:48 what their employees made.
01:59:49 So where did that money come from?
01:59:51 It came from the pockets of the employees.
01:59:55 And they don’t know about it, right?
01:59:57 No one knows about it.
01:59:58 They just know they can’t feed their children,
02:00:00 they can’t pay for healthcare,
02:00:03 they can’t take care of their family
02:00:05 and they worry about what’s gonna happen to their,
02:00:08 they’re living like months a month basically.
02:00:11 Any one big bill could completely
02:00:13 put them out on the street.
02:00:15 So there are a huge number of people living like this.
02:00:17 So all they, what they’re experiencing,
02:00:19 they don’t know why they’re experiencing it.
02:00:22 And then someone comes along and gives them a narrative.
02:00:26 Well, somebody else butted in line in front of you
02:00:29 and that’s why you’re this way.
02:00:32 That’s why you experience what you’re experiencing.
02:00:35 And just for a minute, I was thinking,
02:00:39 I had deep empathy for people who have beliefs
02:00:44 that are really, really, really different from mine.
02:00:50 But I was trying really hard to see it through their eyes.
02:00:55 And did it cost me something metabolically?
02:00:59 I’m sure, I’m sure.
02:01:02 But you had something in the gas tank.
02:01:04 Well, I. In order to allocate that.
02:01:07 I mean, that’s the question is like,
02:01:08 where did you, what resources did your brain draw on
02:01:13 in order to actually make that effort?
02:01:14 Well, I’ll tell you something, honestly, Lex.
02:01:17 I don’t have that much in the gas tank right now.
02:01:19 Right, so I am surfing the stress that,
02:01:26 stress is just, what is stress?
02:01:28 Stress is your brain is preparing for a big metabolic outlay
02:01:31 and it just keeps preparing and preparing
02:01:33 and preparing and preparing.
02:01:35 You as a professor, you as a human.
02:01:37 Both, right?
02:01:39 For me, this is a moment of existential crisis
02:01:42 as much as anybody else, democracy, all of these things.
02:01:45 So in many of my roles, so I guess what I’m trying to say
02:01:50 is that I get up every morning and I exercise.
02:01:55 I run, I row, I lift weights, right?
02:01:58 You exercise in the middle of the day.
02:02:00 I saw your like, you know, daily thing.
02:02:03 Yeah, I hate it actually.
02:02:06 You love it, right?
02:02:07 You get a…
02:02:07 No, I hate it.
02:02:08 I hate it, but I do it religiously.
02:02:13 Why?
02:02:14 Because it’s a really good investment.
02:02:16 It’s an expenditure that is a really good investment.
02:02:20 And so when I was exercising, I was listening to the book
02:02:25 and when I realized the insights that I was sort of like
02:02:28 playing around with, like, is this, does this make sense?
02:02:31 Does this make sense?
02:02:32 I didn’t immediately plunge into it.
02:02:34 I basically wrote some stuff down, I set it aside
02:02:38 and then I did what I prepared myself to make an expenditure.
02:02:42 I don’t know what you do before you exercise.
02:02:44 I always have a protein shake, always have a protein shake
02:02:48 because I need to fuel up
02:02:50 before I make this really big expenditure.
02:02:52 And so I did the same thing.
02:02:55 I didn’t have a protein drink, but I did the same thing.
02:02:58 And fueling up can mean lots of different things.
02:03:01 It can mean talking to a friend about it.
02:03:03 It can mean, you know, it can mean making sure
02:03:07 you get a good night’s sleep before you do it.
02:03:08 It can mean lots of different things,
02:03:10 but I guess I think we have to do these things.
02:03:17 Yeah, that’s a good question.
02:03:20 Yeah, I’m gonna re listen to this conversation
02:03:24 several times, this is brilliant.
02:03:26 But I do think about, you know, I’ve encountered
02:03:31 so many people that can’t possibly imagine
02:03:35 that a good human being can vote for Donald Trump.
02:03:38 And I’ve also encountered people that can’t imagine
02:03:43 that an intelligent person can possibly vote for Democrat.
02:03:47 And I look at both these people,
02:03:52 many of whom are friends, and let’s just say,
02:03:57 after this conversation, I can see as they’re predicting
02:04:00 brains not willing to invest the resources
02:04:04 to empathize with the other side.
02:04:06 And I think you have to in order to be able to,
02:04:10 like, to see the obvious common humanity in us.
02:04:14 I don’t know what the system is
02:04:16 that’s creating this division.
02:04:17 We can put it, like you said, it’s a perfect storm.
02:04:20 It might be the social media,
02:04:22 I don’t know what the hell it is.
02:04:23 I think it’s a bunch of things.
02:04:24 I think it’s, there’s an economic system,
02:04:27 which is disadvantaging large numbers of people.
02:04:30 There’s a use of social media.
02:04:34 Like if you, you know, if I had to orchestrate
02:04:37 or architect a system that would screw up
02:04:40 a human body budget, it would be the one that we live in.
02:04:44 You know, we don’t sleep enough.
02:04:45 We eat pseudo food, basically.
02:04:48 We are on social media too much,
02:04:51 which is full of ambiguity,
02:04:52 which is really hard for a human nervous system, right?
02:04:55 Really, really hard.
02:04:57 Like ambiguity with no context to predict in.
02:04:59 I mean, it’s like, really?
02:05:01 And then, you know, there are the economic concerns
02:05:03 that affect large swaths of people in this country.
02:05:06 I mean, it’s really, I’m not saying everything
02:05:09 is reducible to metabolism.
02:05:11 Not everything is reducible to metabolism,
02:05:13 but there, if you combine all these things together.
02:05:18 It’s helpful to think of it that way.
02:05:20 Then somehow it’s also,
02:05:24 somehow it reduces the entirety of the human experience,
02:05:27 the same kind of obvious logic.
02:05:28 Like we should exercise every day in the same kind of way.
02:05:31 We should empathize every day.
02:05:34 Yeah.
02:05:35 You know, there are these really wonderful,
02:05:37 wonderful programs for teens
02:05:41 and sometimes also for parents of people
02:05:44 who’ve lost children in wars and in conflicts,
02:05:47 in political conflicts,
02:05:48 where they go to a bucolic setting
02:05:51 and they talk to each other about their experiences.
02:05:54 And miraculous things happen, you know?
02:05:59 So, you know, it’s easy to sort of shrug this stuff off
02:06:04 It’s easy to sort of shrug this stuff off
02:06:10 as kind of Pollyanna ish.
02:06:12 You know, like, what’s this really gonna do?
02:06:13 But you have to think about,
02:06:20 when my daughter went to college, I gave her advice.
02:06:23 I said, try to be around people
02:06:29 who let you be the kind of person you wanna be.
02:06:32 We’re back to free will.
02:06:35 You have a choice, you have a choice.
02:06:40 It might seem like a really hard choice.
02:06:41 It might seem like an unimaginably difficult choice.
02:06:46 You have a choice.
02:06:47 Do you wanna be somebody who is wrapped in fury and agony?
02:06:54 Or do you wanna be somebody who extends a little empathy
02:06:59 to somebody else?
02:07:00 And in the process, maybe learn something.
02:07:02 Curiosity is the thing that protects you.
02:07:07 Curiosity is the thing, it’s curative curiosity.
02:07:12 On social media, the thing I recommend to people,
02:07:16 at least that’s the way I’ve been approaching social media.
02:07:20 It doesn’t seem to be the common approach,
02:07:22 but I basically give love to people
02:07:27 who seem to also give love to others.
02:07:30 So it’s the same similar concept of surrounding yourself
02:07:34 by the people you wanna become.
02:07:36 And I ignore, sometimes block, but just ignore.
02:07:40 I don’t add aggression to people
02:07:43 who are just constantly full of aggression
02:07:46 and negativity and toxicity.
02:07:48 There’s a certain desire when somebody says something mean
02:07:52 to say something, to say why,
02:07:59 or try to alleviate the meanness and so on.
02:08:01 But what you’re doing essentially
02:08:03 is you’re now surrounding yourself
02:08:05 by that group of folks that have that negativity.
02:08:09 So even just the conversation.
02:08:11 So I think it’s just so powerful
02:08:15 to put yourself amongst people
02:08:18 whose basic mode of interaction is kindness.
02:08:23 Because I don’t know what it is,
02:08:26 but maybe it’s the way I’m built,
02:08:28 is that to me is energizing for the gas tank
02:08:32 that then I can pull to when I start reading
02:08:36 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
02:08:38 and start thinking about Nazi Germany.
02:08:40 I can empathize with everybody involved.
02:08:43 I can start to make these difficult thinking
02:08:47 that’s required to understand our little planet Earth.
02:08:52 Well, there is research to back up what you said.
02:08:54 There’s research that’s consistent
02:08:56 with your intuition there,
02:08:58 that there’s research that shows
02:09:00 that being kind to other people,
02:09:04 doing something nice for someone else
02:09:06 is like making a deposit to some extent.
02:09:11 Because I think making a deposit
02:09:15 not only in their body budgets,
02:09:17 but also in yours.
02:09:18 Like people feel good when they do good things
02:09:22 for other people.
02:09:24 We are social animals.
02:09:26 We regulate each other’s nervous systems
02:09:28 for better and for worse, right?
02:09:30 The best thing for a human nervous system is another human.
02:09:36 And the worst thing for a human nervous system
02:09:40 is another human.
02:09:41 So you decide, do you wanna be somebody
02:09:44 who makes people feel better
02:09:49 or do you wanna be somebody who causes people pain?
02:09:53 And we are more responsible for one another
02:09:58 than we might like or than we might want.
02:10:02 But remember what we said about social reality.
02:10:05 Social reality, there are lots of different cultural norms
02:10:10 about independence or collective nature of people.
02:10:20 But the fact is we have socially dependent nervous systems.
02:10:24 We evolved that way as a species.
02:10:27 And in this country,
02:10:29 we prize individual rights and freedoms.
02:10:32 And that is a dilemma that we have to grapple with.
02:10:38 And we have to do it in a way
02:10:40 if we’re gonna be productive about it.
02:10:41 We have to do it in a way
02:10:43 that requires engaging with each other,
02:10:48 and which is what I understand
02:10:50 the founding members of this country intended.
02:10:57 Beautifully put.
02:10:58 Let me ask a few final silly questions.
02:11:01 So one, talked a bit about love,
02:11:05 but it’s fun to ask somebody like you
02:11:08 who can effectively, from at least neuroscience perspective,
02:11:13 disassemble some of these romantic notions.
02:11:15 But what do you make of romantic love?
02:11:18 Why do human beings seem to fall in love?
02:11:22 At least a bunch of 80s hair bands have written about it.
02:11:27 Is that a nice feature to have?
02:11:29 Is that a bug?
02:11:31 What is it?
02:11:31 Well, I’m really happy that I fell in love.
02:11:35 I wouldn’t want it any other way.
02:11:37 But I would say.
02:11:38 Is that you the person speaking or the neuroscientist?
02:11:41 Well, that’s me the person speaking.
02:11:44 But I would say as a neuroscientist,
02:11:47 babies are born not able to regulate their own body budgets
02:11:51 because their brains aren’t fully wired yet.
02:11:54 When you feed a baby, when you cuddle a baby,
02:12:00 everything you do with a baby
02:12:02 impacts that baby’s body budget
02:12:04 and helps to wire that baby’s brain
02:12:09 to manage eventually her own body budget to some extent.
02:12:13 That’s the basis biologically of attachment.
02:12:20 Humans evolved as a species to be socially dependent,
02:12:26 meaning you cannot manage your body budget
02:12:31 on your own without a tax
02:12:35 that eventually you pay many years later
02:12:40 in terms of some metabolic illness.
02:12:43 Loneliness, when you break up with someone that you love
02:12:47 or you lose them, you feel like it’s gonna kill you,
02:12:52 but it doesn’t.
02:12:53 But loneliness will kill you.
02:12:55 It will kill you approximately,
02:12:57 what is it, seven years earlier?
02:12:59 I can’t remember exactly the exact number.
02:13:01 It’s actually in the web notes to seven and a half lessons.
02:13:05 But social isolation and loneliness will kill you earlier
02:13:10 than you would otherwise die.
02:13:11 And the reason why is that you didn’t evolve
02:13:15 to manage your nervous system on your own.
02:13:18 And when you do, you pay a little tax
02:13:20 and that tax accrues very slightly over time,
02:13:24 over a long period of time
02:13:26 so that by the time you’re in middle age or a little older,
02:13:30 you are more likely to die sooner
02:13:33 from some metabolic illness,
02:13:35 from heart disease, from diabetes, from depression.
02:13:38 You’re more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
02:13:40 I mean, it takes a long time for that tax to accrue,
02:13:47 but it does.
02:13:47 So yes, I think it’s a good thing for people to fall in love.
02:13:53 But I think the funny view of it is that it’s clear
02:13:58 that humans need the social attachment
02:14:01 to, what is it, manage their nervous system
02:14:05 as you’re describing.
02:14:08 And the reason you wanna stay with somebody for a long time
02:14:12 is so you don’t have, is the novelty is very costly for.
02:14:16 Well, now you’re mixing thing.
02:14:18 Now you’re, you know, you have to decide whether.
02:14:21 But what I would say is when you lose someone you love,
02:14:25 it feels like you’ve lost a part of you.
02:14:29 And that’s because you have.
02:14:32 You’ve lost someone who was contributing
02:14:36 to your body budget.
02:14:37 We are the caretakers of one another’s nervous systems,
02:14:40 like it or not.
02:14:41 And out of that comes very deep feelings of attachment,
02:14:47 some of which are romantic love.
02:14:50 Are you afraid of your own mortality?
02:14:55 We’re two humans sitting here.
02:14:57 Do you think, do you ponder your own mortality?
02:15:01 I mean, somebody thinks about your brain a lot.
02:15:05 It seems one of the more terrifying or, I don’t know.
02:15:12 I don’t know how to feel about it,
02:15:13 but it seems to be one of the most definitive aspects
02:15:16 of life is that it ends.
02:15:18 It’s a complicated answer, but I think the best I can do
02:15:21 in a short snippet would be to say,
02:15:24 for a very long time, I did not fear my own mortality.
02:15:27 I feared pain and suffering.
02:15:33 So that’s what I feared.
02:15:36 I feared being harmed or dying in a way
02:15:38 that would be painful.
02:15:41 But I didn’t fear having my life be over.
02:15:45 Now, as a mother, I think I fear dying
02:15:54 before my daughter is ready to be without me.
02:16:03 That’s what I fear.
02:16:05 It’s, that’s really what I fear.
02:16:10 And frankly, honestly, I fear my husband dying before me
02:16:13 much more than I fear my own death.
02:16:16 There’s that love and social attachment again.
02:16:19 Yeah, because I know it’s just gonna,
02:16:23 I’m gonna feel like I wish I was dead.
02:16:27 A final question about life.
02:16:29 What do you think is the meaning of it all?
02:16:32 What’s the meaning of life?
02:16:36 Yeah, I think that there isn’t one meaning of life.
02:16:38 There’s like many meanings of life.
02:16:41 And you use different ones on different days.
02:16:43 But for me.
02:16:45 Depending on the day.
02:16:46 Depending on the day.
02:16:47 But for me, I would say sometimes the meaning of life
02:16:51 is to understand, to make meaning actually.
02:16:55 The meaning of life is to make meaning.
02:16:58 Sometimes it’s that.
02:16:59 Sometimes it’s to leave the world
02:17:03 just slightly a little bit better
02:17:06 than like the Johnny Appleseed view, you know?
02:17:09 Sometimes the meaning of life is to clear the path
02:17:21 for my daughter or for my students.
02:17:26 So sometimes it’s that.
02:17:28 And sometimes it’s just,
02:17:34 even in moments where you’re looking at the sky
02:17:38 or you’re by the ocean.
02:17:42 Or sometimes for me it’s even like
02:17:45 I’ll see a weed poking out of a crack
02:17:51 in a sidewalk, you know?
02:17:52 And you just have this overwhelming sense
02:17:56 of the wonder of the world.
02:18:03 Like the world is, just like the physical world
02:18:06 is so wondrous and you just get very immersed
02:18:12 in the moment, like the sensation of the moment.
02:18:18 Sometimes that’s the meaning of life.
02:18:19 I don’t think there’s one meaning of life.
02:18:21 I think it’s a population of instances
02:18:24 just like any other category.
02:18:28 I don’t think there’s a better way to end it, Lisa.
02:18:30 The first time we spoke is I think if not the,
02:18:35 then one of, I think it’s the first conversation I had
02:18:39 that basically launched this podcast.
02:18:41 Yeah, that’s actually the first conversation
02:18:43 I’ve had that launched this podcast.
02:18:45 And now we get to finally do it the right way.
02:18:49 It’s a huge honor to talk to you,
02:18:50 that you spent time with me.
02:18:53 I can’t wait for hopefully the many more books you write.
02:18:56 Certainly can’t wait to, I already read this book,
02:19:00 but I can’t wait to listen to it
02:19:02 because as you said offline that you’re reading it
02:19:05 and I think you have a great voice.
02:19:07 You have a great, I don’t know what the nice way to put it,
02:19:10 but maybe NPR voice in the best version of what that is.
02:19:14 So thanks again for talking today.
02:19:16 Oh, it’s my pleasure.
02:19:17 Thank you so much for having me back.
02:19:20 Thank you for listening to this conversation
02:19:22 with Lisa Feldman Barrett and thank you to our sponsors,
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02:19:44 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
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02:19:51 or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
02:19:55 And now let me leave you with some words
02:19:57 from Lisa Feldman Barrett.
02:19:59 It takes more than one human brain to create a human mind.
02:20:04 Thank you for listening.
02:20:06 I hope to see you next time.