Lisa Feldman Barrett: Counterintuitive Ideas About How the Brain Works
Guests: Lisa Feldman Barrett
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents14 chapters
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The following is a conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett,
a professor of psychology at Northeastern University
and one of the most brilliant and bold thinkers
and scientists I've ever had the pleasure of speaking with.
She's the author of a book that revolutionized
our understanding of emotion in the brain
called "How Emotions Are Made"
and she's coming out with a new book
called "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain"
that you can and should pre-order now.
I got a chance to read it already
and it's one of the best short whirlwind introductions
to the human brain I've ever read.
It comes out on November 17th,
but again, if there's anybody worth supporting, it's Lisa,
so please do pre-order the book now.
Lisa and I agreed to speak once again
around the time of the book release,
especially because we felt that this first conversation
is good to release now since we talk about
the divisive time we're living through
in the United States leading up to the election.
And she gives me a whole new way to think about it
from a neuroscience perspective
that is ultimately inspiring of empathy, compassion,
and love.
Quick mention of each sponsor,
followed by some thoughts related to this episode.
First sponsor is Athletic Greens,
the all-in-one drink that I start every day with
to cover all my nutritional bases
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Second is Magic Spoon,
low-carb, keto-friendly, delicious cereal
that I reward myself with after a productive day.
The cocoa flavor is my favorite.
Third sponsor is Cash App,
the app I use to send money to friends for food, drinks,
and unfortunately, for the many bets I have lost to them.
Please check out these sponsors in the description
to get a discount and to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that the bold,
first principles way that Lisa approaches
our study of the brain
is something that has inspired me
ever since I learned about her work.
And in fact, I invited her to speak at the AGI series
I organized at MIT several years ago.
But as a little twist, instead of a lecture,
we did a conversation in front of the class.
I think that was one of the early moments
that led me to start this very podcast.
It was scary and gratifying,
which is exactly what life is all about.
And it's kind of funny how life turns
on little moments like these
that at the time don't seem to be
anything out of the ordinary.
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
review it with Five Stars on Apple Podcast,
follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
or connect with me on Twitter @LexFriedman.
And now, here's my conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Since we'll talk a lot about the brain today,
do you think, let's ask the craziest question,
do you think there's other intelligent life
out there in the universe?
- Honestly, I've been asking myself lately
if there's intelligent life on this planet.
You know, I have to think probabilities suggest yes,
and also, secretly, I think I just hope that's true.
It would be really, I know scientists
aren't supposed to have hopes and dreams,
but I think it would be really cool.
And I also think it would be really sad
if it wasn't the case.
If we really were alone, that would be,
that would seem profoundly sad, I think.
- So it's exciting to you, not scary?
- Yeah, no, you know, I take a lot of comfort in curiosity.
It's a great resource for dealing with stress.
So I'm learning all about mushrooms and octopuses
and all kinds of stuff.
And so for me, this counts, I think, in the realm of awe.
But also, I think I'm somebody who cultivates awe
deliberately on purpose to feel like a speck.
You know, I find it a relief occasionally.
- To feel small.
- To feel small in a profoundly large
and interesting universe.
- So maybe to dig more technically
on the question of intelligence,
do you think it's difficult for intelligent life
to arise like it did on Earth?
From everything you've written and studied about the brain,
how magical of a thing is it
in terms of the odds it takes to arise?
- Yeah, so, you know, magic is just,
don't get me wrong, I mean,
I like a magic show as much as the next person.
My husband was a magician at one time.
But, you know, magic is just a bunch of stuff
that we don't really understand how it works yet.
So I would say, from what I understand,
there are some major steps in the course of evolution
that at the beginning of life,
the step from single cell to multicellular organisms,
things like that, which are really not known.
I think for me, the question is not so much
could it, you know, what's the likelihood
that it would happen again,
as much as what are the steps and how long would it take?
And if it were to happen again on Earth,
would we end up with the same menu of life forms
that we currently have now?
And I think the answer's probably no, right?
There's just so much about evolution
that is stochastic and driven by chance.
- But the question is whether that menu
would be equally delicious,
meaning like there'd be rich complexity of the kind of,
like would we get dolphins and humans
or whoever else falls in that category
of weirdly intelligent, seemingly intelligent,
however we define that?
- Well, I think that has to be true
if you just look at the range of creatures
who've gone extinct.
I mean, if you look at the range of creatures
that are on the Earth now, it's incredible.
And, you know, it's sort of trite to say that,
but it actually is really incredible.
Particularly, I don't know, I mean,
animals, there are animals that seem really ordinary
until you watch them closely
and then they become miraculous, you know,
like certain types of birds,
which do very miraculous things,
build, you know, bowers and do dances
and all these really funky things
that are hard to explain
with a standard evolutionary story.
Although, you know, people have them.
- Birds are weird.
They do a lot of, for mating purposes.
They have a concept of beauty that I haven't quite,
maybe you know much better,
but it doesn't seem to fit evolutionary arguments well.
- It does fit.
Well, it depends, right?
So I think you're talking about "The Evolution of Beauty,"
the book that was written recently by,
was it Frum, was that his name?
Richard Frum, I think at Yale.
- Oh, interesting, no, I didn't.
- Oh, it's a great book.
It's very controversial though,
because he's making an argument that,
the question about birds and some other animals
is why would they engage in such metabolically costly
displays when it doesn't improve their fitness at all?
And the answer that he gives
is the answer that Darwin gave, which is sexual selection.
Not natural selection, but you know,
selection can occur for all kinds of reasons.
There could be artificial selection,
which is when we breed animals, right?
Which is actually how Darwin,
that observation helped Darwin come to the idea
of natural selection.
- Oh, interesting.
- And then there's sexual selection,
meaning, and the argument that I think his name is Frum
makes is that it's the pleasure,
the selection pressure is the pleasure of female birds.
Which as a woman, and as someone who studies affect,
that's a great answer.
I actually think there probably is natural,
I think there is an aspect of natural selection to it,
which he maybe hasn't considered.
- But you were saying, the reason we brought up birds
is the life we got now seems to be quite incredible.
- Yeah, so you peek into the ocean,
peek into the sky, there are miraculous creatures.
Look at creatures who've gone extinct,
and you know, in science fiction stories,
you couldn't dream up something as interesting.
So my guess is that, you know,
intelligent life evolves in many different ways,
even on this planet.
There isn't one form of intelligence,
there's not one brain that gives you intelligence.
There are lots of different brain structures
that can give you intelligence.
So my guess is that the menagerie might not look
exactly the way that it looks now,
but it would certainly be as interesting.
- But if we look at the human brain versus the brains,
or whatever you call 'em,
the mechanisms of intelligence in our ancestors,
§02Transcript · 09:14–19:16
even early ancestors, that you write about,
for example, in your new book,
what's the difference between the fanciest brain we got,
which is the human brain,
and the ancestor brains that it came from?
- Yeah, I think it depends on how far back you wanna go.
- You go all the way back, right, in your book.
(laughing)
So what's the interesting comparison, would you say?
- Well, first of all, I wouldn't say that the human brain
is the fanciest brain we've got.
I mean, an octopus brain is pretty different
and pretty fancy, and they can do some pretty amazing things
that we cannot do.
You know, we can't grow back limbs,
we can't change color and texture,
we can't comport ourselves and squeeze ourselves
into a little crevice.
I mean, these are things that we invent,
these are like superhero abilities
that we invent in stories, right?
We can't do any of those things.
And so the human brain is certainly,
we can certainly do some things that other animals can't do
that seem pretty impressive to us.
But I would say that there are a number of animal brains
which seem pretty impressive to me,
that can do interesting things
and really impressive things that we can't do.
- I mean, with your work on how emotions are made
and so on, you kind of repaint the view of the brain
as less glamorous, I suppose,
than you would otherwise think.
Or like, I guess you draw a thread
that connects all brains together
in terms of homeostasis and all that kind of stuff.
- Yeah, I wouldn't say that the human brain
is any less miraculous than anybody else would say.
I just think that there are other brain structures
which are also miraculous.
And I also think that there are a number of things
about the human brain which we share with other vertebrates,
other animals with backbones,
but that we share these miraculous things.
But we can do some things in abundance.
And we can also do some things with our brains together,
working together that other animals can't do,
or at least we haven't discovered their ability to do it.
- Yeah, this social thing.
I mean, that's one of the things you write about.
How do you make sense of the fact,
like the book "Sapiens" and the fact that we're able
to kind of connect, like network our brains together,
like you write about?
I'll try to stop saying that. (laughs)
Is that like some kind of feature that's built into there?
Is that unique to our human brains?
Like how do you make sense of that?
- What I would say is that our ability to coordinate
with each other is not unique to humans.
There are lots of animals who can do that.
But what we do with that coordination is unique
because of some of the structural features in our brains.
And it's not that other animals don't have
those structural features, it's we have them in abundance.
So, you know, the human brain is not larger
than you would expect it to be for a primate of our size.
If you took a chimpanzee and you grew it
to the size of a human, that chimpanzee would have a brain
that was the size of a human brain.
So there's nothing special about our brain
in terms of its size.
There's nothing special about our brain
in terms of the basic blueprint that builds our brain
from an embryo is the basic blueprint
that builds all mammalian brains
and maybe even all vertebrate brains.
It's just that because of its size,
and particularly because of the size
of the cerebral cortex, which is a part
that people mistakenly attribute to rationality.
- Why mistakenly?
Isn't that where all the clever stuff happens?
- Well, no, it really isn't.
And I will also say that lots of clever stuff happens
in animals who don't have a cerebral cortex.
- Right.
- But because of the size of the cerebral cortex
and because of some of the features
that are enhanced by that size,
that gives us the capacity to do things
like build civilizations and coordinate with each other,
not just to manipulate the physical world,
but to add to it in very profound ways.
Like, you know, other animals can cooperate
with each other and use tools.
We draw a line in the sand and we make countries
and then we create, you know,
we create citizens and immigrants.
- But also ideas.
I mean, the countries are centered
around the concept of, like, ideas.
- Well, what do you think a citizen is and an immigrant?
Those are ideas.
Those are ideas that we impose on reality
and make them real.
And then they have very, very serious and real effects,
physical effects on people.
- What do you think about the idea
that a bunch of people have written about,
Dawkins with memes, which is like ideas are breeding.
Like, we're just like the canvas for ideas to breed
in our brains.
So this kind of network that you talk about of brains
is just a little canvas for ideas
to then compete against each other and so on.
- I think as a rhetorical tool,
it's cool to think that way.
So I think it was Michael Pollan.
I don't remember if it was in "The Botany of Desire,"
but it was in one of his early books
on botany and gardening,
where he wrote about plants,
sort of utilizing humans for their own evolutionary purposes.
But it's kind of interesting.
You can think about a human gut in a sense
as a propagation device for the seeds of tomatoes
and what have you.
So it's kind of cool.
So I think rhetorically, it's an interesting device,
but ideas are, as far as I know,
invented by humans, propagated by humans.
So I don't think they're separate
from human brains in any way,
although it is interesting to think about it that way.
- Well, of course, the ideas that are using your brain
to communicate and write excellent books,
and they basically pick you, Lisa,
as an effective communicator and thereby are winning.
So that's an interesting worldview,
to think that there's particular aspects of your brain
that are conducive to certain sets of ideas,
and maybe those ideas will win out.
- Yeah, I think the way that I would say it really though
is that there are many species of animals
that influence each other's nervous systems,
that regulate each other's nervous systems.
And they mainly do it by physical means.
They do it by chemicals, scent.
They do it by, so termites and ants and bees, for example,
use chemical scents.
Mammals like rodents use scent,
and they also use hearing, audition,
and that little bit of vision.
Primates, non-human primates, add vision, right?
And I think everybody uses touch.
Humans, as far as I know, are the only species
that use ideas and words to regulate each other, right?
I can text something to someone halfway around the world.
- That's fascinating.
- They don't have to hear my voice.
They don't have to see my face,
and I can have an effect on their nervous system.
And ideas, the ideas that we communicate with words,
I mean, words are in a sense a way
for us to do mental telepathy with each other, right?
I mean, I'm not the first person to say that, obviously.
But how do I control your heart rate?
How do I control your breathing?
How do I control your actions?
With words, it's because those words
are communicating ideas.
- So you also write, I think, let's go back to the brain.
You write that Plato gave us the idea
that the human brain has three brains in it, three forces,
which is kind of a compelling notion.
You disagree.
First of all, what are the three parts of the brain,
and why do you disagree?
- So Plato's description of the psyche,
which for the moment we'll just assume
is the same as a mind.
There are some scholars who would say,
a soul, a psyche, a mind,
those aren't actually all the same thing in ancient Greece,
but we'll just for now gloss over that.
So Plato's idea was that,
and it was a description of really about moral behavior
and moral responsibility in humans.
So the idea was that the human psyche
can be described with a metaphor of two horses
and a charioteer.
So one horse for instincts,
like feeding and fighting and fleeing and reproduction.
I'm trying to control my salty language.
Which apparently they print in England.
Like I actually tossed off a--
- F, S?
- Yeah, F, F.
- Okay.
§03Transcript · 19:17–30:29
- Yeah.
I was like, you printed that?
I couldn't believe you printed that.
- Without like the stars or whatever?
- Oh no, no, there was full print.
They also printed a B word and it was really quite, yeah.
- We should learn something from England.
- Indeed, anyways.
But instincts, and then the other horse represents emotions
and then the charioteer represents rationality,
which controls the two beasts, right?
And fast forward a couple of centuries
and in the middle of the 20th century,
there was a very popular view of brain evolution,
which suggested that you have this reptilian core,
like a lizard brain, inner lizard brain for instincts.
And then wrapped around that evolved,
layer on top of that evolved a limbic system in mammals.
So the novelty was in a mammalian brain,
which bestowed mammals with, gave them emotions,
the capacity for emotions.
And then on top of that evolved a cerebral cortex,
which in largely in primates, but very large in humans.
And it's not that I personally disagree,
it's that as far back as the 1960s,
but really by the 1970s, it was shown pretty clearly
with evidence from molecular genetics,
so peering into cells in the brain
to look at the molecular makeup of genes,
that the brain did not evolve that way.
And the irony is that the idea of the three-layered brain
with an inner lizard, that hijacks your behavior
and causes you to do and say things
that you would otherwise not,
or maybe that you will regret later,
that idea became very popular,
was popularized by Carl Sagan in the Dragons of Eden,
which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977,
when it was already known pretty much
in evolutionary neuroscience,
that the whole narrative was a myth.
- So, well, the narrative is on the way it evolved,
but do you, I mean, again, it's that problem
of it being a useful tool of conversation
to say like there's a lizard brain,
and there's a, like if I get overly emotional on Twitter,
that was the lizard brain and so on.
But do you--
- No, I don't think it's useful.
I think it's, I think that--
- Is it useful, is it accurate?
- I don't think it's accurate,
and therefore, I don't think it's useful.
So here's what I would say.
I think that, the way I think about philosophy and science
is that they are useful tools for living.
And in order to be useful tools for living,
they have to help you make good decisions.
The triune brain, as it's called, this three-layer brain,
the idea that your brain is like an already baked cake,
and the cortex, cerebral cortex,
just layered on top like icing,
the idea, that idea is the foundation of the law
in most Western countries.
It's the foundation of economic theory,
and it largely, and it's a great narrative.
It sort of fits our intuitions about how we work.
But it also, in addition to being wrong,
it lets people off the hook for nasty behavior.
And it also suggests that emotions
can't be a source of wisdom, which they often are.
In fact, you would not wanna be around someone
who didn't have emotions.
That would be, that's a psychopath.
I mean, that's not someone you wanna really
have that person deciding your outcome.
So I guess my, and I could sort of go on and on and on,
but my point is that I don't think,
I don't think it's a useful narrative in the end.
What's the more accurate view of the brain
that we should use when we're thinking about it?
- I'll answer that in a second,
but I'll say that even our notion of what an instinct is
or what a reflex is, it's not quite right, right?
So if you look at evidence from ecology, for example,
and you look at animals in their ecological context,
what you can see is that even things which are reflexes
are very context-sensitive.
The brains of those animals are executing
so-called instinctual actions
in a very, very context-sensitive way.
And so even when a physician takes the,
it's like the idea of your patellar reflex
where they hit your patellar tendon on your knee
and you kick, the force with which you kick and so on
is influenced by all kinds of things.
It's a reflex isn't like a robotic response.
And so I think a better way is a way that,
to think about how brains work,
is the way that matches our best understanding,
our best scientific understanding,
which I think is really cool
because it's really counterintuitive.
So how I came to this view,
and I'm certainly not the only one who holds this view,
I was reading work on neuroanatomy
and the view that I'm about to tell you
was strongly suggested by that.
And then I was reading work in signal processing,
like by electrical engineering.
And similarly, the work suggested that,
the research suggested that the brain worked this way.
And I'll just say that I was reading
across multiple literatures
and they were, who don't speak to each other.
And they were all pointing in this direction.
And so far, although some of the details
are still up for grabs,
the general gist I think is,
I've not come across anything yet,
which really violates and I'm looking.
And so the idea is something like this,
it's very counterintuitive.
So the way to describe it is to say,
that your brain doesn't react to things in the world.
It's not, to us it feels like our eyes
are windows on the world.
We see things, we hear things, we react to them.
In psychology, we call this stimulus response.
So your face is, your voice is a stimulus to me.
I receive input and then I react to it.
And I might react very automatically, system one.
But I also might execute some control
where I maybe stop myself from saying something
or doing something and in a more reflective way,
execute a different action, right?
That's system two.
The way the brain works though,
is it's predicting all the time.
It's constantly talking to itself,
constantly talking to your body.
And it's constantly predicting what's going on in the body
and what's going on in the world
and making predictions and the information
from your body and from the world
really confirm or correct those predictions.
- So fundamentally, the thing that the brain does
most of the time is just predict,
like talking to itself and predicting stuff about the world,
not like this dumb thing that just senses and responds.
Senses and responds.
- Yeah, so the way to think about it is like this.
You know, your brain is trapped in a dark, silent box.
- Yeah, that's very romantic of you.
- Which is your skull.
And the only information that it receives
from your body and from the world, right,
is through the senses, through the sense organs,
your eyes, your ears, and you have sensory data
that comes from your body
that you're largely unaware of to your brain,
which we call interoceptive,
as opposed to exteroceptive,
which is the world around you.
But your brain is receiving sense data continuously,
which are the effect of some set of causes.
Your brain doesn't know the cause of these sense data.
It's only receiving the effects of those causes,
which are the data themselves.
And so your brain has to solve what philosophers call
an inverse inference problem.
How do you know, when you only receive the effects
of something, how do you know what caused those effects?
So when there's a flash of light
or a change in air pressure
or a tug somewhere in your body,
how does your brain know what caused those events
so that it knows what to do next
to keep you alive and well?
And the answer is that your brain has one other source
of information available to it,
which is your past experience.
It can reconstitute in its wiring past experiences,
and it can combine those past experiences in novel ways.
And so we have lots of names for this in psychology.
We call it memory, we call it perceptual inference,
we call it simulation.
It's also, we call it concepts or conceptual knowledge.
We call it prediction.
Basically, if we were to stop the world right now,
stop time, your brain is in a state,
and it's representing what it believes
is going on in your body and in the world,
and it's predicting what will happen next
based on past experience, right?
Probabilistically, what's most likely to happen.
And it begins to prepare for what's going to happen
and it prepares your action,
and it begins to prepare your experience based,
so it's anticipating the sense data it's going to receive.
§04Transcript · 30:34–40:50
And then when those data come in,
they either confirm that prediction
and your action executes,
because the plan's already been made,
or there's some sense data that your brain didn't know
your brain didn't predict that's unexpected,
and your brain takes it in, we say encodes it.
We have a fancy name for that, we call it learning.
Your brain learns, and it updates
its storehouse of knowledge,
which we call an internal model,
and so that you can predict better next time.
And it turns out that predicting and correcting,
predicting and correcting,
is a much more metabolically efficient way
to run a system than constantly reacting all the time.
Because if you're constantly reacting,
it means you have no, you can't anticipate in any way
what's gonna happen, and so the amount of uncertainty
that you have to deal with is overwhelming
to a nervous system.
- Metabolically costly, I like it.
- And so what is a reflex?
A reflex is when your brain doesn't check
against the sense data,
that the potential cost to you is so great,
maybe because your life is threatened,
that your brain makes the prediction
and executes the action without checking.
- Yeah, so but prediction's still at the core,
that's a beautiful vision of the brain.
I wonder, from almost an AI perspective,
but just computationally,
is the brain just mostly a prediction machine then?
Like is the perception just a nice little feature
added on top, like the,
both the integration of new perceptual information?
I wonder how big of an impressive system
is that relative to just the big predictor,
model constructor?
- Well, I think that we can look to evolution for that,
for one answer, which is that when you go back,
you know, 550 million years, give or take,
we, you know, the world was populated by creatures,
really ruled by creatures without brains.
And you know, that's a biological statement,
not a political statement.
Really, world was--
- You're calling dinosaurs dumb?
You're talking about like--
- Oh no, I'm not talking about dinosaurs, honey.
I'm talking way back, further back than that.
Really, there are these little creatures
called amphioxus, which is the modern,
it's a, or a lancet, that's the modern animal.
But it's an animal that scientists believe
is very similar to our common,
the common ancestor that we share with invertebrates.
Because, basically because of the tracing back
the molecular genetics in cells.
And that animal had no brain.
It had some cells that would later turn into a brain,
but in that animal, there's no brain.
But that animal also had no head.
And it had no eyes, and it had no ears,
and it had really, really no senses, for the most part.
It had very, very limited sense of touch.
It had an eye spot for, not for seeing,
but just for in training to circadian rhythm
to light and dark.
And it had no hearing, it had a vestibular cell
so that it could keep upright in the water.
At the time, we're talking evolutionary scale here,
so give or take some hundred million years or something.
But at the time, what are the vertebrate,
like when a backbone evolved and a brain evolved,
a full brain, that was when a head evolved
with sense organs, and when,
that's when your viscera, like internal systems, evolved.
So the answer, I would say, is that senses,
motor neuroscientists, people who study
the control of motor behavior,
believe that senses evolved in the service of motor action.
So the idea is that, what triggered the,
what triggered, what was the big evolutionary change,
what was the big pressure that made it useful
to have eyes and ears and a visual system
and an auditory system and a brain, basically?
And the answer that is commonly entertained right now
is that it was predation.
That when, at some point, an animal evolved
that deliberately ate another animal,
and this launched an arms race between predators and prey,
and it became very useful to have senses.
So these little amphiox, these little amphioxi,
don't really have, they don't have,
they're not aware of their environment very much, really.
They, and so being able to look up ahead
and ask yourself, should I eat that,
or will it eat me, is a very useful thing.
So the idea is that sense data
is not there for consciousness.
It didn't evolve for the purposes of consciousness.
It didn't evolve for the purposes of experiencing anything.
It evolved to be in the service of motor control.
However, maybe it's useful.
This is why scientists sometimes avoid questions
about why things evolved.
This is what philosophers call this teleology.
You might be able to say something about how things evolve,
but not necessarily why.
We don't really know the why.
That's all speculation.
- But the why is kind of nice here.
The interesting thing is that was the first element
of social interaction is, am I gonna eat you,
or are you gonna eat me?
And for that, it's useful to be able to see each other,
sense each other.
That's kind of fascinating.
There was a time when life didn't eat each other.
- Or they did by accident.
So an amphioxus, for example,
it kind of gyrates in the water,
and then it plants itself in the sand
like a living blade of grass,
and then it just filters whatever comes into its mouth.
So it is eating, but it's not actively hunting.
And when the concentration of food decreases,
the amphioxus can sense this,
and so it basically wriggles itself randomly
to some other spot, which probabilistically
will have more food than wherever it is.
So it's not really, it's not guiding its actions
on the basis of, we would say
there's no real intentional action
in the traditional sense.
- Speaking of intentional action,
and if the brain, if prediction is indeed
a core component of the brain,
let me ask you a question that scientists also hate
is about free will.
So how does, do you think about free will much,
how does that fit into this, into your view of the brain?
Why does it feel like we make decisions in this world?
- This is a hard, we scientists hate this
'cause it's a hard question.
We don't know the answer to it.
- Are you taking a side?
- I think I have. - You would have free will?
- I think I have taken a side,
but I don't put a lot of stock in my own intuitions
or anybody's intuitions about the cause of things.
One thing we know about the brain for sure
is that the brain creates experiences for us.
My brain creates experiences for me,
your brain creates experiences for you
in a way that lures you to believe
that those experiences actually reveals
the way that it works, but it doesn't.
- So you don't trust your own intuition about free will.
- Not really, not really.
No, I mean, no, but I am also somewhat persuaded by,
I think Dan Dennett wrote at one point,
like the philosopher Dan Dennett wrote at one point
that it's, I can't say it as eloquently as him,
but people obviously have free will.
They are obviously making choices.
And so there is this observation that we're not robots
and we can do some things like a little more sophisticated
than an amphioxus.
So here's what I would say.
I would say that your predictions,
your internal model that's running right now,
that your ability to understand the sounds
that I'm making and attach them to ideas
is based on the fact that you have years of experience
knowing what these sounds mean
in a particular statistical pattern, right?
I mean, that's how you can understand the words
that are coming out of my--
- Mouth? - Right.
I think we did this once before too, didn't we?
When we were--
- I don't know, I would have to access my memory module.
- I think when I was in your--
- The class thing? - Yeah, I think we did it
just like that actually, so bravo.
- Wow. - Yeah.
- I have to go look back to the tape.
- Yeah, anyways, the idea though
is that your brain is using past experience
and it can use past experience in,
so it's remembering, but you're not consciously remembering.
It's basically re-implementing prior experiences
as a way of predicting what's gonna happen next.
And it can do something called conceptual combination,
which is it can take bits and pieces of the past
and combine it in new ways.
So you can experience and make sense of things
§05Transcript · 40:55–51:53
that you've never encountered before
because you've encountered something similar to them.
And so a brain in a sense is not just,
doesn't just contain information,
it is information gaining,
meaning it can create new information
by this generative process.
So in a sense, you could say, well,
that maybe that's a source of free will.
But I think really where free will comes from
or the kind of free will that I think
is worth having a conversation about
involves cultivating experiences for yourself
that change your internal model.
When you were born and you were raised
in a particular context,
your brain wired itself to your surroundings,
to your physical surroundings
and also to your social surroundings.
So you were handed an internal model basically.
But when you grow up,
the more control you have over where you are
and what you do,
you can cultivate new experiences for yourself.
And those new experiences can change your internal model
and you can actually practice those experiences
in a way that makes them automatic,
meaning it makes it easier for the brain,
your brain to make them again.
And I think that that is something like
what you would call free will.
You aren't responsible for the model that you were handed,
that someone, you know, your caregivers
cultivated a model in your brain.
You're not responsible for that model,
but you are responsible for the one you have now.
You can choose, you choose what you expose yourself to.
You choose how you spend your time.
Not everybody has choice over everything,
but everybody has a little bit of choice.
And so I think that is something
that I think is arguably called free will.
- Yeah, there's like the ripple effects
of the billions of decisions you make early on in life
are so great that even if it's not,
even if it's like all deterministic,
just the amount of possibilities that are created
and then the focusing of those possibilities
into a single trajectory,
that somewhere within that, that's free will.
Even if it's all deterministic, that might as well be,
just the number of choices that are possible
and the fact that you just make one trajectory
through those set of choices seems to be like
something like there'll be called free will.
But it's still kind of sad to think like
there doesn't seem to be a place
where there's magic in there,
where it is all just a computer.
- Well, there's lots of magic, I would say, so far,
because we don't really understand
how all of this is exactly played out at a,
I mean, scientists are working hard
and disagree about some of the details
under the hood of what I just described,
but I think there's quite a bit of magic, actually.
And also, there's also stochastic firing of,
neurons don't, they're not purely digital
in the sense that there is,
there's also analog communication between neurons,
not just digital, so it's not just with firing of axons.
And some of that, there are other ways to communicate.
And also, there's noise in the system,
and the noise is there for a really good reason,
and that is the more variability there is,
the more potential there is for your brain
to be able to be information-bearing.
So basically, there are some animals
that have clusters of cells,
the only job is to inject noise into their neural patterns.
- So maybe noise is the source of free will.
- So you can think about stochasticity or noise
as a source of free will,
or you can think of conceptual combination
as a source of free will.
You can certainly think about cultivating,
you can't reach back into your past and change your past.
People try by psychotherapy and so on,
but what you can do is change your present,
which becomes your past.
- Well, let me think about that sentence.
- So one way to think about it is that you're continuously,
this is a colleague of mine, a friend of mine said,
"So what you're saying is that people
"are continually cultivating their past."
And I was like, "That's very poetic."
Yes, you are continually cultivating your past
as a means of controlling your future.
- So you think, yeah, I guess the construction
of the mental model that you use for prediction
ultimately contains within it your perception of the past,
like the way you interpret the past,
or even just the entirety of your narrative about the past.
So you're constantly rewriting the story of your past.
Oh boy, yeah.
That's one poetic and also just awe-inspiring.
What about the other thing you talk about?
You've mentioned about sensory perception
as a thing that is just,
you have to infer about the sources of the thing
that you have perceived through your senses.
So let me ask another ridiculous question.
Is anything real at all?
Like how do we know it's real?
How do we make sense of the fact that,
just like you said, there's this brain sitting alone
in the darkness trying to perceive the world.
How do we know that the world is out there to be perceived?
- Yeah, so I don't think that you should be asking questions
like that without passing a joint.
- Right, no, for sure.
- Yeah.
- I actually did before this, so I apologize.
- Okay, no, well, that's okay.
You apologize for not sharing, that's okay.
So I mean, here's what I would say.
What I would say is that the reason why
we can be pretty sure that there's a there there
is that the structure of the information in the world,
what we call statistical regularities
in sights and sounds and so on,
and the structure of the information
that comes from your body, it's not random stuff.
There's a structure to it.
There's a spatial structure and a temporal structure,
and that spatial and temporal structure wires your brain.
So an infant brain is not a miniature adult brain.
It's a brain that is waiting for wiring instructions
from the world, and it must receive
those wiring instructions to develop in a typical way.
So for example, when a newborn is born,
when a newborn is born, when a baby is born,
the baby can't see very well
because the visual system in that baby's brain
is not complete.
The retina of your eye, which actually is part of your brain
has to be stimulated with photons of light.
If it's not, the baby won't develop normally
to be able to see in a neurotypical way.
Same thing is true for hearing.
The same thing is true really for all your senses.
So the point is that the physical world,
the sense data from the physical world,
wires your brain so that you have an internal model
of that world so that your brain can predict well
to keep you alive and well and allow you to thrive.
- That's fascinating that the brain is waiting
for a very specific kind of set of instructions
from the world, like not the specific,
but a very specific kind of instructions.
- So scientists call it expectable input.
The brain needs some input in order to develop normally.
And we are genetically, as I say in the book,
we have the kind of nature that requires nurture.
We can't develop normally without sensory input
from the world and from the body.
And what's really interesting about humans
and some other animals too, but really seriously in humans,
is the input that we need is not just physical.
It's also social.
We, in order for an infant, a human infant
to develop normally, that infant needs eye contact,
touch, it needs certain types of smells,
it needs to be cuddled, it needs, right?
So without social input, the brain,
that infant's brain will not wire itself
in a neurotypical way.
And again, I would say there are lots of cultural patterns
of caring for an infant.
It's not like the infant has to be cared for in one way.
Whatever the social environment is for an infant,
that it will be reflected in that infant's internal model.
So we have lots of different cultures,
lots of different ways of rearing children.
And that's an advantage for our species,
although we don't always experience it that way.
That is an advantage for our species.
But if you just feed and water a baby
without all the extra social doodads,
what you get is a profoundly impaired human.
- Yeah, but nevertheless, you're kind of saying
that the physical reality has a consistent thing throughout
that keeps feeding these set of sensory information
that our brains are constructed for, but--
- Yeah, the cool thing though,
is that if you change the consistency,
if you change the statistical regularities,
so prediction error, your brain can learn it.
It's expensive for your brain to learn it.
And it takes a while for the brain
§06Transcript · 51:55–1:01:30
to get really automated with it.
But you had a wonderful conversation with David Eagleman,
who just published a book about this,
and gave lots and lots of really very, very cool examples.
Some of which I actually discussed
in "How Emotions Were Made,"
but not obviously to the extent that he did in his book.
It's a fascinating book.
But it speaks to the point that your internal model
is always under construction.
And therefore, you always can modify your experience.
- I wonder what the limits are.
Like, if we put it on Mars, or if we put it
in virtual reality, or if we sit at home during a pandemic,
and we spend most of our day on Twitter and TikTok.
Like, I wonder where the breaking point,
like the limitations of the brain's capacity
to properly continue wiring itself.
- Well, I think what I would say is that
there are different ways to specify your question, right?
Like, one way to specify it would be the way
that David phrases it, which is,
"Can we create a new sense?"
Like, "Can we create a new sensory modality?"
How hard would that be?
What are the limits in doing that?
But another way to say it is,
what happens to a brain when you remove
some of those statistical regularities, right?
Like, what happens to a brain,
what happens to an adult brain when you remove
some of the statistical patterns that were there,
and they're not there anymore?
- Are you talking about in the environment,
or in the actual, like, you remove eyesight, for example?
- Well, either way.
I mean, basically, one way to limit the inputs
to your brain are to stay home and protect yourself.
Another way is to put someone in solitary confinement.
Another way is to stick them in a nursing home.
Another, well, not all nursing homes,
but there are some, right?
Which really are, where people are somewhat impoverished
in the interactions and the variety
of sensory stimulation that they get.
Another way is that you lose a sense, right?
But the point is, I think, that the human brain
really likes variety, to say it in a,
like a sort of Cartesian way.
Variety is a good thing for a brain,
and there are risks that you take
when you restrict what you expose yourself to.
- Yeah, you know, there's all this talk of diversity.
The brain loves it, to the fullest definition
and degree of diversity.
- Yeah, I mean, I would say the only thing,
basically, human brains thrive on diversity.
The only place where we seem to have difficulty
with diversity is with each other.
- Yeah. - Right?
But we, who wants to eat the same food every day?
You never would.
Who wants to wear the same clothes every day?
I mean, my husband, if you ask him to close his eyes,
he won't be able to tell you what he's wearing.
He just, right?
He'll buy seven shirts of exactly the same style
in different colors, but they are in different colors,
right, it's not like he's wearing--
- How would you then explain my brain,
which is terrified of choice,
and therefore I wear the same thing every time?
- Well, you must be getting your diversity.
- Elsewhere. - Well, first of all,
you are a fairly sharp dresser, so there is that,
but so you're getting some reinforcement
for dressing the way that you do.
But no, your brain must get diversity in--
- In other places. - In other places,
but I think we, you know,
so the two most expensive things your brain can do,
metabolically speaking, is move your body and learn.
Something new.
So novelty, that is diversity, right,
comes at a cost, a metabolic cost,
but it's a cost, it's an investment that gives returns.
And in general, people vary in how much they like novelty,
unexpected things, some people really like it,
some people really don't like it,
and there's everybody in between.
But in general, we don't eat the same thing every day,
we don't usually do exactly the same thing
in exactly the same order,
in exactly the same place every day.
The only place we have difficulty with diversity
is in each other.
And then we have considerable problems there,
I would say, as a species.
- Let me ask, I don't know if you're familiar
with Donald Hoffman's work about questions of reality.
What are your thoughts of the possibility
that the very thing we've been talking about,
of the brain wiring itself from birth
to a particular set of inputs,
is just a little slice of reality?
That there is something much bigger out there
that we humans, with our cognition,
cognitive capabilities, are just not even perceiving?
That the thing we're perceiving is just a crappy,
like Windows 95 interface onto a much bigger,
richer set of complex physics
that we're not even in touch with?
- Well, without getting too metaphysical about it,
I think we know for sure,
it doesn't have to be the crappy version of anything,
but we definitely have a limited,
we have a set of senses that are limited
in very physical ways,
and we're clearly not perceiving
everything there is to perceive.
That's clear.
I mean, it's just, it's not that hard.
We can't, without special,
why do we invent scientific tools?
It's so that we can overcome our senses
and experience things that we couldn't otherwise,
whether they are different parts of the visual spectrum,
the light spectrum,
or things that are too microscopically small for us to see,
or too far away for us to see.
So clearly, we're only getting a slice.
And that slice,
the interesting or potentially sad thing about humans
is that we, whatever we experience,
we think there's a natural reason for experiencing it.
And we think it's obvious and natural,
and that it must be this way,
and that all the other stuff isn't important.
And that's clearly not true.
Many of the things that we think of as natural
are anything but.
They're certainly real, but we've created them.
They certainly have very real impacts,
but we've created those impacts.
And we also know that there are many things
outside of our awareness that have tremendous influence
on what we experience and what we do.
So there's no question that that's true.
I mean, just, it's,
but the extent is how,
really the question is how fantastical is it?
- Yeah, like what, you know, a lot of people ask me.
I'm not allowed to say this.
I think I'm allowed to say this.
I've eaten shrooms a couple times,
but I haven't gone the full,
I'm talking to a few researchers in psychedelics.
It's an interesting scientifically place.
Like what is the portal you're entering
when you take psychedelics?
Or another way to ask is like dreams.
What are-- - Yeah, so let me tell you
what I think, which is based on nothing.
Like this is based on my, right?
So I don't-- - Your intuition.
- It's based on my, I'm guessing now,
based on what I do know, I would say.
But I think that, well, think about what happens.
So you're running, your brain's running this internal model
and it's all outside of your awareness.
You see the, you feel the products,
but you don't sense the,
you have no awareness of the mechanics of it, right?
It's going on all the time.
And so one thing that's going on all the time
that you're completely unaware of
is that when your brain,
your brain is basically asking itself,
figuratively speaking, not literally, right?
Like how is, the last time I was in this sensory array
with this stuff going on in my body
and this chain of events which just occurred,
what did I do next?
What did I feel next?
What did I see next?
It doesn't come up with one answer.
It comes up with a distribution of possible answers.
And then there has to be some selection process.
And so you have a network in your brain,
a sub-network in your brain,
a population of neurons that helps to choose.
It's not, I'm not talking about a homunculus in your brain
or anything silly like that.
This is not the soul.
It's not the center of yourself or anything like that.
But there is a set of neurons
that weighs the probabilities
and helps to select or narrow the field, okay?
And that network is working all the time.
It's actually called the control network,
§07Transcript · 1:01:32–1:11:17
the executive control network,
or you can call it a frontoparietal
because the regions of the brain that make it up
are in the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe.
There are also parts that belong
to the subcortical parts of your brain.
It doesn't really matter.
The point is that there is this network
and it is working all the time.
Whether or not you feel in control,
whether or not you feel like you're expending effort
doesn't really matter.
It's on all the time, except when you sleep.
When you sleep, it's a little bit relaxed.
And so think about what's happening when you sleep.
When you sleep, the external world recedes,
the sense data from, so basically your model
becomes a little bit, the tethers from the world are loosened
and this network, which is involved in, you know,
maybe weeding out unrealistic things, is a little bit quiet.
So your dreams are really your internal model
that's unconstrained by the immediate world.
Except, so you can do things that you can't do in real life
in your dreams, right?
You can fly.
Like I, for example, when I fly on my back in a dream,
I'm much faster than when I fly on my front.
Don't ask me why, I don't know.
- When you're laying on your back in your dream?
- No, when I'm in my dream and flying in a dream,
I am much faster flyer in the air.
- You fly often?
- Not often, but I--
- You talk about it like you,
I don't think I've flown for many years.
- Well, you must try it.
- I've flown, I've fallen.
- That's scary.
- Yeah, but you're talking about like airplane.
- I fly in my dreams and I'm way faster, right?
- On your back.
- On my back, way faster.
Now you can say, well, you know,
you never flew in your life, right?
It's conceptual combination.
I mean, I've flown in an airplane and I've seen birds fly
and I've watched movies of people flying
and I know Superman probably flies,
I don't know if he flies faster on his back, but--
- He's, I've never seen--
- Flying on his front, right?
But yeah, but anyways, my point is that, you know,
all of this stuff really,
all these experiences really become part
of your internal model.
The thing is that when you're asleep,
your internal model is still being constrained by your body.
Your brain's always attached to your body.
It's always receiving sense data from your body.
You're mostly never aware of it
unless you run up the stairs
or, you know, maybe you are ill in some way,
but you're mostly not aware of it,
which is a really good thing because if you were,
you know, you'd never pay attention
to anything outside your own skin ever again.
Like right now, you seem like you're sitting there
very calmly, but you have a virtual drama, right?
It's like an opera going on inside your body.
And so I think that one of the things that happens
when people take psilocybin or take, you know,
ketamine, for example, is that the tethers-
- Completely removed. - Are completely removed.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- That's fascinating.
And then- - And that's why
it's helpful to have a guide, right?
Because the guide is giving you sense data
to steer that internal model
so that it doesn't go completely off the rails.
- Yeah, I know there's, again, that wiring to the other brain
that's the guide is at least a tiny little tether.
- Exactly. - Yeah.
Let's talk about emotion a little bit if we could.
Emotion comes up often, and I have never spoken
with anybody who has a clarity about emotion
from a biological and neuroscience perspective that you do.
And I'm not sure I fully know how to,
as I mentioned this way too much,
but as somebody who was born in the Soviet Union
and romanticizes basically everything,
talks about love nonstop, you know, emotion is a,
I don't know what to make of it.
I don't know what, so maybe let's just try to talk about it.
I mean, from a neuroscience perspective,
we talked about a little bit last time,
your book covers it, how emotions are made,
but what are some misconceptions we writers of poetry,
we romanticizing humans have about emotion
that we should move away from
before to think about emotion
from both a scientific and an engineering perspective?
- Yeah, so there is a common view of emotion in the West.
The caricature of that view is that,
you know, we have an inner beast, right?
Your limbic system, your inner lizard.
We have an inner beast and that comes baked in
to the brain at birth.
So you've got circuits for angers, atmosphere.
It's interesting that they all have English names,
these circuits, right?
But, and they're there and they're triggered
by things in the world.
And then they cause you to do and say,
and, you know, so when your fear circuit is triggered,
you widen your eyes, you gasp,
your heart rate goes up,
you prepare to flee or to freeze.
And these are modal responses.
They're not the only responses that you give,
but on average, they're the prototypical responses.
That's the view.
And that's the view of emotion in the law.
That's the view, you know,
that emotions are these profoundly unhelpful things
that are obligatory kind of like reflexes.
The problem with that view is that
it doesn't comport to the evidence.
And it doesn't really matter.
The evidence actually lines up beautifully with each other.
It just doesn't line up with that view.
And it doesn't matter whether you're measuring people's
faces, facial movements,
or you're measuring their body movements,
or you're measuring their peripheral physiology,
or you're measuring their brains,
or their voices or whatever.
Pick any output that you wanna measure
and, you know, any system you wanna measure,
and you don't really find strong evidence for this.
And I say this as somebody who not only has reviewed
really thousands of articles and run, you know,
big meta-analyses, which are statistical summaries
of published papers,
but also as someone who has sent teams of researchers
to small-scale cultures,
you know, remote cultures,
which are very different from urban large-scale cultures
like ours.
And one culture that we visited,
and I say we euphemistically because I myself didn't go
because I only had two research permits,
and I gave them to my students
'cause I felt like it was better for them
to have that experience,
and more formative for them to have that experience.
But I was in contact with them every day by satellite phone.
And this was to visit the Hadza hunter-gatherers
in Tanzania, who are not an ancient people.
They're a modern culture,
but they live in circumstances,
hunting and foraging,
circumstances that are very similar,
in similar conditions to our ancestors,
hunting-gathering ancestors,
when expressions of emotion were supposed to have evolved,
at least by one view of, okay.
So, you know, for many years,
I was sort of struggling with this set of observations,
right, which is that I feel emotion,
and I perceive emotion in other people,
but scientists can't find a single marker,
a single biomarker,
not a single individual measure or pattern of measures
that can predict how someone,
what kind of emotional state they're in.
How could that possibly be?
How can you possibly make sense of those two things?
And through a lot of reading
and a lot of immersing myself in different literatures,
I came to the hypothesis
that the brain is constructing these instances
out of more basic ingredients.
So when I tell you that the brain,
when I suggest to you that what your brain is doing
is making a prediction,
and it's asking itself, figuratively speaking,
the last time I was in this situation
and this physical state, what did I do next?
What did I see next?
What did I hear next?
It's basically asking what in my past
is similar to the present?
Things which are similar to one another
are called a category.
A group of things which are similar
to one another is a category.
And a mental representation of a category is a concept.
So your brain is constructing categories or concepts
on the fly, continuously.
§08Transcript · 1:11:19–1:22:40
So you really wanna understand what a brain is doing.
You don't, using machine learning,
like classification models is not gonna help you
because the brain doesn't classify.
It's doing category construction.
And the categories change,
or you could say it's doing concept construction.
It's using past experience to conjure a concept,
which is a prediction.
And if it's using past experiences of emotion,
then it's constructing an emotion concept.
Your concept will be,
the content of it is,
changes depending on the situation that you're in.
So for example, if your brain uses past experiences
of anger that you have learned,
either because somebody labeled them for you,
taught them to you, you observed them in movies and so on,
in one situation could be very different
from your concept for anger than another situation.
And this is how anger, instances of anger,
are what we call a population of variable instances.
Sometimes when you're angry, you scowl.
Sometimes when you're angry, you might smile.
Sometimes when you're angry, you might cry.
Sometimes your heart rate will go up, it will go down,
it will stay the same.
It depends on what action you're about to take.
Because the way prediction, and I should say,
the idea that physiology is yoked to action
is a very old idea
in the study of the peripheral nervous system.
It's been known for really decades.
And so if you look at what the brain is doing,
if you just look at the anatomy,
and here's the hypothesis that you would come up with,
and I can go into the details.
I've published these details in scientific papers,
and they also appear somewhat
in "How Emotions Are Made," my first book.
They are not in the seven and a half lessons
because that book is really not pitched
at that level of explanation.
It's really just a set of little essays.
But the evidence, but what I'm about to say
is actually based on scientific evidence.
When your brain begins to form a prediction,
the first thing it's doing is it's making a prediction
of how to change the internal systems of your body,
your heart, your cardiovascular system,
the control of your heart, control of your lungs,
a flush of cortisol, which is not a stress hormone.
It's a hormone that gets glucose
into your bloodstream very fast
because your brain is predicting
you need to do something metabolically expensive.
And so that means either move or learn.
And so your brain is preparing your body,
the internal systems of your body,
to execute some actions, to move in some way.
And then it infers based on those motor predictions
and what we call viscera motor predictions,
meaning the changes in the viscera
that your brain is preparing to execute.
Your brain makes an inference about what you will sense
based on those motor movements.
So your experience of the world
and your experience of your own body
are a consequence of those predictions, those concepts.
When your brain makes a concept for emotion,
it's constructing an instance of that emotion.
That is how emotions are made.
And those concepts load in.
The predictions that are made
include contents inside the body,
contents outside the body.
I mean, it includes other humans.
So just this construction of a concept
includes the variables that are much richer
than just some sort of simple notion.
- Yeah, so our colloquial notion of a concept
where I say, well, what's a concept of a bird?
And then you list a set of features off to me.
That's people's understanding,
typically, of what a concept is.
But if you go into the literature in cognitive science,
what you'll see is that the way that scientists
have understood what a concept is
has really changed over the years.
So people used to think about a concept
as philosophers and scientists used to think
about a concept as a dictionary definition for a category.
So there's a set of things which are similar
out in the world.
And your concept for that category
is a dictionary definition of the features,
the necessary and sufficient features of those instances.
So for a bird, it would be--
- Wings, feathers.
- Right, a beak, it flies, whatever, okay.
That's called the classical category.
And scientists discovered, observed,
that actually not all instances of birds have feathers
and not all instances of birds fly.
And so the idea was that you don't have
a single representation of necessary
and sufficient features stored in your brain somewhere.
Instead, what you have is a prototype.
A prototype meaning you still have a single representation
for the category, one,
but the features are like of the most typical instance
of the category or maybe the most frequent instance,
but not all instances of the category
have all the features, right?
They have some graded similarity to the prototype.
And then, you know,
what I'm gonna like incredibly simplify now,
a lot of work to say that then a series of experiments
were done to show that in fact,
what your brain seems to be doing
is coming up with a single exemplar
or instance of the category and reading off the features
when I ask you for the concept.
So if we were in a pet store and I asked you,
what are the features of a bird?
Tell me the concept of bird.
You would be more likely to give me features of a good pet.
And if we were in a restaurant,
you would be more likely, you know,
like a budgie, right, or a canary.
If we were in a restaurant,
you would be more likely to give me the features
of a bird that you would eat, like a chicken.
And if we were in a park,
you'd be more likely to give me in this country,
you know, the features of a sparrow or a robin.
Whereas if we were in South America,
you would probably give me the features of a peacock
because that's more common
or it is more common there than here
that you would see a peacock in such circumstances.
So the idea was that really what your brain was doing
was conjuring a concept on the fly
that meets the function that the category is being put to.
Okay? - Yep.
- Okay.
Then people started studying ad hoc concepts,
meaning concepts that,
where the instances don't share any physical features.
But the function of the instances are the same.
So for example, think about all the things
that can protect you from the rain.
What are all the things that can protect you from the rain?
- Umbrella, like this apartment.
- Right.
Your car. - Not giving a damn.
Like a mindset.
- Yeah, right, right.
So the idea is that the function of the instances
is the same in a given situation,
even if they look different, sound different,
smell different, this is called an abstract concept
or a conceptual concept.
Now, the really cool thing about conceptual categories
or conceptual, yes, conceptual category,
a conceptual is a category of things
that are held together by a function,
which is called an abstract concept or a conceptual category
'cause the things don't share physical features,
they share functional features.
There are two really cool things about this.
One is that's what Darwin said a species was.
So Darwin is known for discovering natural selection.
But the other thing he really did,
which was really profound, which he's less celebrated for,
is understanding that all biological categories
have inherent variation, inherent variation.
Darwin wrote in "The Origin of Species"
about before Darwin's book,
a species was thought to be a classical category
where all the instances of dogs were the same,
had the exactly same features,
and any variation from that perfect platonic instance
was considered to be error.
And Darwin said, "No, it's not error, it's meaningful."
Nature selects on the basis of that variation.
The reason why natural selection is powerful and can exist
is because there is variation in a species.
And in dogs, we talk about that variation
in terms of the size of the dog
and the amount of fur the dog has and the color
and how long is the tail and how long is the snout.
In humans, we talk about that variation
in all kinds of ways, right, including in cultural ways.
So that's one thing that's really interesting
about conceptual categories is that Darwin
was basically saying a species is a conceptual category.
And in fact, if you look at modern debates
about what is a species, you can't find anybody agreeing
on what the criteria are for a species
§09Transcript · 1:22:43–1:32:28
'cause they don't all share the same genome.
We don't all share, we don't.
There isn't a single human genome.
There's a population of genomes,
but they're variable.
It's not unbounded variation, but they are variable, right?
And the other thing that's really cool
about conceptual categories is that they are the categories
that we use to make civilization.
So think about money, for example.
What are all the physical things
that make something a currency?
Is there any physical feature that all the currencies
in all the worlds that's ever been used by humans share?
- Well, certainly, right, but what is it?
Is it definable?
So it's getting to the point that you make this function.
- It's the function, right.
It's that we trade it for material goods.
And we have to agree, right?
We all impose on whatever it is, salt, barley,
little shells, big rocks in the ocean that can't move,
Bitcoin, pieces of plastic, mortgages,
which are basically a promise of something in the future,
nothing more, right?
All of these things, we impose value on them.
And we all agree that we can exchange them
for material goods.
- Yeah, and yes, that's brilliant.
By the way, you're attributing some of that to Darwin,
that he thought--
- No, I'm saying that what Darwin--
- 'Cause that's a brilliant view
of what a species is, is the function.
- Yeah, what I'm saying is that what Darwin,
Darwin really talked about variation in,
so if you read, for example, the biologist Ernst Mayr,
who was an evolutionary biologist,
and then when he retired, became a historian
and philosopher of biology.
And his suggestion is that Darwin,
Darwin did talk about variation.
He vanquished what's called essentialism,
the idea that there's a single set of features
that define any species.
And out of that grew really discussions
of the, like some of the functional features
that species have, like they can reproduce,
they can have offspring,
the individuals of a species can have offspring.
It turns out that's not a perfect,
that's not a perfect criterion to use,
but it's a functional criterion, right?
So what I'm saying is that in cognitive science,
people came up with the idea,
they discovered the idea of conceptual categories
or ad hoc concepts, these concepts that can change
based on the function they're serving, right?
And that it's there, it's in Darwin,
and it's also in the philosophy of social reality.
The way that philosophers talk about social reality,
just look around you.
I mean, we impose, we're treating a bunch of things
as similar, which are physically different.
And sometimes we take things that are physically the same
and we treat them as separate categories.
- But it feels like the number of variables involved
in that kind of categorization is nearly infinite.
And that's-- - No, I don't think so
because there is a physical constraint, right?
Like you and I could agree that we can fly in real life,
but we can't, that's a physical constraint
that we can't break, right?
You and I could agree that we could walk through the walls,
but we can't, we could agree that we could eat glass,
but we can't. - Oh, there's a lot
of constraints, but I just-- - Yeah, we can agree
that the virus doesn't exist
and we don't have to wear masks.
- Right, yeah.
- But physical reality still holds the trump card, right?
But still there's a lot of-- - The trump card,
well, pun unintended.
- Pun completely unintended, but there you go,
that's a predicting brain for you.
(Zubin laughs)
But there's a tremendous amount of leeway.
- Yes. - Yeah, that's the point.
So what I'm saying is that emotions are like money.
Basically, they're like money, they're like countries,
they're like kings and queens and presidents,
they're like everything that we construct
that we impose meaning on.
We take these physical signals and we give them meanings
that they don't otherwise have by their physical nature.
And because we agree, they have that function.
- But the beautiful thing, so maybe unlike money,
I love this similarity is, it's not obvious to me
that this kind of emergent agreement
should happen with emotion,
because our experiences are so different
for each of us humans, and yet we kind of converge.
- Well, in a culture we converge, but not across cultures.
There are huge, huge differences.
There are huge differences in what concepts exist,
what they look like.
So what I would say is that--
- They feel like.
- What we're doing with our young children
as their brains become wired to their physical
and their social environment, right,
is that we are curating for them,
we are bootstrapping into their brains a set of emotion.
Concepts, that's partly what they're learning.
And we curate those for infants,
just the way we curate for them, what is a dog?
What is a cat?
What is a truck?
We sometimes explicitly label,
and we sometimes just use mental words.
When your kid is throwing Cheerios on the floor
instead of eating them, or your kid is crying
when she won't put herself to sleep or whatever.
We use mental words.
And a word is this, words for infants,
words are these really special things
that they help infants learn, abstract categories.
There's a huge literature showing that children
can take things that don't look infants,
like infants, really young infants, pre-verbal infants,
can take, if you label, if I say to you,
and you're an infant, okay?
So I say, "Lex, Lexi, this is a bling."
And I put it down and the bling makes a squeaky noise.
And then I say, "Lexi, this is a bling."
And I put it down and it makes a squeaky noise.
And then I say, "Lexi, this is a bling.
"You, as young as four months old,
"will expect this to make a noise, a squeaky noise.
"And if you don't, if it doesn't, you'll be surprised
"because it violated your expectation, right?
"I'm building for you an internal model of a bling."
Okay, infants can do this really, really at a young age.
And so there's no reason to believe
that they couldn't learn emotion categories
and concepts in the same way.
And what happens when you go to a new culture?
When you go to a new culture,
you have to do what's called emotion acculturation.
So my colleague, Batia Mesquita in Belgium,
studies emotion acculturation.
She studies how when people move
from one culture to another,
how do they learn the emotion concepts of that culture?
How do they learn to make sense
of their own internal sensations
and also the movements, the raise of an eyebrow,
the tilt of a head?
How do they learn to make sense of cues from other people
using concepts they don't have,
but have to make on the fly?
- So there's the difference in cultures.
Let me open another door.
I'm not sure I wanna open.
But difference between men and women.
Is there a difference between the emotional lives
of those two categories of biological systems?
- So here's what I would say.
We did a series of studies in the 1990s
where we asked men and women
to tell us about their emotional lives.
And women described themselves
as much more emotional than men.
They believed that they were more emotional than men,
and men agreed.
Women are much more emotional than men.
Okay, and then we gave them little handheld computers.
These were little Hewlett-Packard computers.
They fit in the palm of your hand.
A couple of pounds, they weighed a couple of pounds.
So this was like pre-Palm Pilot even.
Like this was, you know, 1990s, like early.
And we asked them, we would, you know,
ping them like 10 times a day,
and just ask them to report how they were feeling,
which is called experience sampling.
So we experience sampled.
And then at the end, and then we looked at their reports,
and what we found is that men and women
basically didn't differ.
And there were some people who were really,
had many more instances of emotion.
So they were, you know, they were treading water
in a tumultuous sea of emotion.
And then there were other people
who were like floating tranquilly, you know, in a lake.
It was really not perturbed very often,
and everyone in between.
But there were no difference between men and women.
And the really interesting thing is
§10Transcript · 1:32:29–1:42:10
at the end of the sampling period, we asked people,
so reflect over the past two weeks and tell it.
So, you know, we've been now pinging people
like again and again and again, right?
So tell us how emotional do you think you are?
No change from the beginning.
So men and women believe that they are different.
And when they are looking at other people,
they make different inferences about emotion.
If a man is scowling, like if you and I were together,
and so somebody's watching this, okay?
And yeah, hey, who am I saying?
Hey, hi, yeah, hi.
- By the way, people love it when you look at the camera.
If you and I make exactly the same set of facial movements,
when people look at you, both men and women look at you,
they are more likely to think,
oh, he's reacting to the situation.
And when they look at me, they'll say,
oh, she's having an emotion.
She's, you know, yeah.
And I wrote about this actually
right before the 2016 election.
- You know what, maybe I could confess.
Let me try to carefully confess.
- But you are really gonna.
- Yeah, that when I,
that there is an element when I see Hillary Clinton,
that there was something annoying about her to me.
And I, just that feeling,
and then I tried to reduce that to,
what is that?
Because I think the same attributes
that are annoying about her,
when I see in other people, wouldn't be annoying.
So I was trying to understand, what is it?
Because it certainly does feel like that concept
that I've constructed in my mind.
- Well, I'll tell you that I think,
well, let me just say that what you would predict about,
for example, the performance of the two of them
in the debates,
and I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times actually,
before the second debate.
And it played out really pretty much as I thought
that it would, based on research.
It's not like I'm like a great fortune teller or anything.
It's just, I was just applying the research,
which was that when a woman,
a woman's, people make internal attributions, it's called.
They infer that the facial movements and body posture
and vocalizations of a woman reflect her inner state,
but for a man, they're more likely to assume
that they reflect his response to the situation.
It doesn't say anything about him.
It says something about the situation he's in.
- That's brilliant.
- Now, for the thing that you were describing
about Hillary Clinton,
I think a lot of people experienced,
but it's also in line with research, which shows,
and particularly research actually
about teaching evaluations is one place
that you really see it,
where the expectation is that a woman will be nurturant
and that a man, there's just no expectation
for him to be nurturant.
So he's, if he is nurturant, he gets points.
If he's not, he gets points.
They're just different points, right?
Whereas for a woman, especially a woman
who's an authority figure, she's really in a catch-22.
'Cause if she's serious, she's a bitch.
And if she's empathic, then she's weak.
- Right, that's brilliant.
I mean, one of the bigger questions to ask here,
so that's one example where our construction
of concepts gets us in trouble.
- But remember I said science and philosophy
are like tools for living.
So I learned recently that, if you ask me,
what is my intuition about what regulates my eating?
I will say carbohydrates.
I love carbohydrates.
I love pasta.
I love bread.
I just love carbohydrates.
But actually, research shows, and it's beautiful research.
I love this research 'cause it so violates my own
deeply, deeply held beliefs about myself,
that most animals on this planet who have been studied,
and there are many, actually eat
to regulate their protein intake.
So you will overeat carbohydrates
if you, in order to get enough protein.
And this research has been done with human,
very beautiful research, with humans, with crickets,
with like bonobos, I mean, just like
all these different animals, not bonobos,
but I think like baboons.
Now, I have no intuition about that.
And I, even now, as I regulate my eating,
I still just have no intuition.
It just, I can't feel it.
What I feel is only about the carbohydrates.
- It feels like you're regulating around carbohydrates,
not the protein.
- Yeah, but in fact, actually, what I am doing,
if I am like most animals on the planet,
I am regulating around protein.
So knowing this, what do I do?
I correct my behavior to eat,
to actually deliberately try to focus on the protein.
This is the idea behind bias training, right?
Like if you, I also did not experience Hillary Clinton
as the warmest candidate.
However, you can use consistent science,
since the consistent scientific findings,
to organize your behavior.
That doesn't mean that rationality is the absence of emotion
because sometimes emotion or feelings in general,
not the same thing as emotion, that's another topic,
but are a source of information
and they're wisdom and helpful.
So I'm not saying that,
but what I am saying is that
if you have a deeply held belief
and the evidence shows that you're wrong,
then you're wrong.
It doesn't really matter how confident you feel.
That confidence could be also explained by science, right?
So it would be the same thing as if I,
regardless of whether someone is a,
like Charlie Baker, right?
Regardless of whether somebody's a Republican
or a Democrat,
if that person has a record that you can see
is consistent with what you believe,
then that is information that you can act on.
- Yeah, and then, so try to,
I mean, this is kind of what empathy is
and open-mindedness is.
Try to consider that the set of concepts
that your brain has constructed
through which you are now perceiving the world
is not painting the full picture.
I mean, this is now true for basically every,
it doesn't have to be men and women,
it could be basically the prism
through which we perceive actually
the political discourse, right?
- Absolutely.
So here's what I would say.
You know, there are people who,
scientists who will talk to you about cognitive empathy
and emotional empathy and I prefer to think of it,
I think the evidence is more consistent
with what I'm about to say,
which is that your brain is always making predictions
using your own past experience
and what you've learned from books and movies
and other people telling you
about their experiences and so on.
And if your brain cannot make a concept
to make sense of those,
anticipate what those sense data are
and make sense of them,
you will be experientially blind.
So, you know, when I'm giving lectures to people,
I'll show them like a blobby black and white image
and they're experientially blind to the image,
they can't see anything in it
and then I show them a photograph
and then I show them the image again,
the blobby image and then they see actually an object in it.
But the image is the same.
It's there, they're actually adding,
their predictions now are adding, right?
Or anyone who's-- - It's a beautiful example.
- Anybody who's learned a language,
a second language after their first language
also has this experience of things
that initially sound like sounds
that they can't quite make sense of
eventually come to make,
they eventually come to make sense of them.
And in fact, there are really cool examples
of people who were like born blind
because they have cataracts or they have corneal damage
so that no light is reaching the brain
and then they have an operation
and then light reaches the brain and they can't see.
For days and weeks and sometimes years,
they are experientially blind to certain things.
So what happens with empathy, right?
Is that your brain is making a prediction.
And if it doesn't have the capacity to make,
if you don't share, if you're not similar,
remember, I mean, categories are instances
which are similar in some way.
§11Transcript · 1:42:12–1:52:57
If you are not similar enough to that person,
you will have a hard time making a prediction
about what they feel.
You will be experientially blind to what they feel.
In the United States, children of color
are under prescribed medicine by their physicians.
This is been documented.
It's not that the physicians are racist necessarily,
but they might be experientially blind.
The same thing is true of male physicians
with female patients.
I could tell you some hair-raising stories,
really, where people die as a consequence
of a physician making the wrong inference,
the wrong prediction,
because of being experientially blind.
So we are, you know, empathy is not, it's not magic.
We make inferences about each other,
about what each other's feeling and thinking.
In this culture, more than,
and there are some cultures where people
have what's called opacity of mind,
where they will make a prediction
about someone else's actions,
but they're not inferring anything
about the internal state of that person.
But in our culture, we're constantly making inferences.
What is this person thinking?
And we're not doing it necessarily consciously,
but we're just doing it really automatically
using our predictions, what we know.
And if you expose yourself to information,
which is very different from somebody else,
I mean, really what we have is,
we have different cultures in this country right now
that are, there are a number of reasons for this.
I mean, part of it is, I don't know if you saw
the "Social Dilemma," the Netflix.
- Heard about it.
- Yeah, it's a great, it's really great documentary.
- About what social networks are doing to our society?
- Yeah, yeah.
But you know, nothing, no phenomenon
has a simple single cause.
There are multiple small causes
which all add up to a perfect storm.
That's just how most things work.
And so the fact that machine learning algorithms
are serving people up information on social media
that is consistent with what they've already viewed
and making, is part of the reason
that you have these silos.
But it's not the only reason why you have these silos,
I think.
There are other things afoot
that enhance people's inability
to even have a decent conversation.
- Yeah, I mean, okay, so many things you said
are just brilliant.
So the experiment, experiential blindness.
But also from my perspective,
like I preach and I try to practice empathy a lot.
And something about the way you've explained it
makes me almost see it as a kind of exercise
that we should all do, like to train,
like to add experiences to the brain
to expand this capacity to predict more effectively.
- Absolutely.
- So like what I do is kind of like a method acting thing,
which is I imagine what the life of a person is like.
Just think.
I mean, this is something you see with Black Lives Matter
and police officers.
It feels like they're both, not both,
but I have, because of martial arts and so on,
I have a lot of friends who are cops.
They don't necessarily have empathy
or visualize the experience of the other.
Certainly, currently, unfortunately,
people aren't doing that with police officers.
They're not imagining, they're not empathizing
or putting themselves in the shoes of a police officer
to realize how difficult that job is,
how dangerous it is, how difficult it is to maintain calm
and under so much uncertainty, all those kind of things.
- But there's more, there's even, that's all that's true,
but I think that there's even more,
there's even more to be said there.
I mean, like from a predicting brain standpoint,
there's even more that can be said there.
So I don't know if you wanna go down that path
or you wanna stick on empathy,
but I will also say that one of the things
that I was most gratified by, I still am receiving,
it's been more than three and a half years
since "How Emotions Are Made" came out,
and I'm still receiving daily emails from people, right?
So that's gratifying.
But one of the most gratifying emails I received
was from a police officer in Texas
who told me that he thought that "How Emotions Are Made"
contained information that would be really helpful
to resolving some of these difficulties.
And he hadn't even read my op-ed piece
about when is a gun not a gun,
and using what we know about the science of perception
from a prediction standpoint, like the brain is a predictor,
to understand a little differently
what might be happening in these circumstances.
So there's a real, what's hard about,
it's hard to talk about
because everyone gets mad at you when you talk about this.
And there is a way to understand this
which has profound empathy
for the suffering of people of color
and that definitely is in line with Black Lives Matter
at the same time as understanding
the really difficult situation
that police officers find themselves in.
And I'm not talking about this bad apple or that bad apple.
I'm not talking about police officers
who are necessarily shooting people in the back
as they run away.
I'm talking about the cases of really good,
well-meaning cops who have the kind of predicting brain
that everybody else has.
They're in a really difficult situation
that I think both they and the people
who are harmed don't realize.
The way that these situations are constructed,
I think it's just, there's a lot to be said there, I guess,
is what I wanna say. - Yeah, is there something
we can try to say in a sense?
From the perspective of the predictive brain,
which is a fascinating perspective to take on this,
all the protests that are going on,
there seems to be a concept of a police officer being built.
- No, I think that concept is there.
- But it's gaining strength, so it's being re,
I mean, is it sure? - Yeah, it is, yeah.
- It is there. - For sure.
But I think, yeah, for sure, I think that that's right.
I think that there's a shift in the stereotype
of what I would say is a stereotype.
There's a stereotype of a black man in this country
that's always in movies and television,
not always, but largely, that many people watch.
I mean, you think you're watching a 10 o'clock drama
and all you're doing is kicking back and relaxing,
but actually, you're having certain predictions reinforced
and others not.
And what's happening now with police is the same thing,
that there are certain stereotypes of a police officer
that are being abandoned and other stereotypes
that are being reinforced by what you see happening.
All I'll say is that if you remember,
I mean, there's a lot to say about this, really,
that regardless of whether it makes people mad or not,
I mean, the science is what it is.
Just remember what I said.
The brain makes predictions about internal changes
in the body first and then it starts to prepare motor action
and then it makes a prediction about what you will see
and hear and feel based on those actions.
So it's also the case that we didn't talk about
is that sensory sampling, like your brain's ability
to sample what's out there, is yoked to your heart rate.
It's yoked to your heartbeats.
There are certain phases of the heartbeat
where it's easier for you to see what's happening
in the world than in others.
And so if your heart rate goes through the roof,
you will be more likely to just go with your prediction
and not correct based on what's out there
because you're actually literally not seeing as well.
Or you will see things that aren't there, basically.
- Is there something that we could say by way of advice
for when this episode is released
in the chaos of emotion,
sorry, I don't know a better term,
that's just flying around on social media?
- Well, I actually think it is emotion in the following sense.
It sounds a little bit artificial
in the way that I'm about to say it,
but I really think that this is what's happening.
One thing we haven't talked about is brains evolved,
didn't evolve for you to see,
they didn't evolve for you to hear,
they didn't evolve for you to feel,
they evolved to control your body.
That's why you have a brain.
You have a brain so that it can control your body.
And the metaphor, the scientific term
for predictively controlling your body is allostasis.
Your brain is attempting to anticipate
the needs of your body and meet those needs
before they arise so that you can act as you need to act.
And the metaphor that I use is a body budget.
You know, your brain is running a budget for your body.
It's not budgeting money,
§12Transcript · 1:52:58–2:02:34
it's budgeting glucose and salt and water.
And instead of having one or two bank accounts,
it has gazillions.
There are all these systems in your body
that have to be kept in balance.
And it's monitoring very closely,
it's making predictions about like,
when is it good to spend and when is it good to save
and what would be a good investment
and am I gonna get a return on my investment?
Whenever people talk about reward or reward prediction error
or anything to do with reward or punishment,
they're talking about the body budget.
They're talking about your brain's predictions
about whether or not there will be a deposit or withdrawal.
So when you,
when your brain is running a deficit in your body budgets,
you have some kind of metabolic imbalance,
you experience that as discomfort.
You experience that as distress.
When your brain, when things are chaotic,
you can't predict what's going to happen next.
So I have this absolutely brilliant scientist
working in my lab, his name is Jordan Theriault
and he's published this really terrific paper
on a sense of should, like, why do we have social rules?
Why do we, you know, adhere to social norms?
It's because if I make myself predictable to you,
then you are predictable to me.
And if you're predictable to me,
that's good because that is less
metabolically expensive for me.
Novelty or unpredictability at the extreme is expensive.
And if it goes on for long enough,
what happens is first of all,
you will feel really jittery and antsy,
which we describe as anxiety.
It isn't necessarily anxiety.
It could be just something is not predictable
and you are experiencing arousal
because the chemicals that help you learn
increase your feeling of arousal, basically.
But if it goes on for long enough,
you will become depleted
and you will start to feel really, really, really distressed.
So what we have is a culture full of people right now
who are, their body budgets are just decimated
and there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty.
When you talk about it as depression, anxiety,
it makes you think that it's not about your metabolism,
that it's not about your body budgeting,
that it's not about getting enough sleep
or about eating well
or about making sure that you have social connections.
You think that it's something separate from that.
But depression and anxiety
are just a way of being in the world.
They're a way of being in the world
when things aren't quite right with your predictions.
- That's such a deep way of thinking.
Like the brain is maintaining homeostasis
- It's actually allostasis.
- Allostasis, I'm sorry.
It's constantly making predictions
and metabolically speaking,
it's very costly to make novel,
like constantly be learning to making adjustments.
And then over time, there's a cost to be paid
if you're just in a place of chaos
where there's constant need for adjusting
and learning and experience novel things.
- And so part of the problem here,
there are a couple of things,
like I said, it's a perfect storm.
There isn't a single cause.
There are multiple cause,
multiple things that combine together.
It's a complex system, multiple things.
Part of it is that people are,
they're metabolically encumbered and they're distressed.
And in order to try to have empathy for someone
who is very much unlike you,
you have to forage for information.
You have to explore information
that is novel to you and unexpected,
and that's expensive.
And at a time when people feel,
what do you do when you are running a deficit
in your bank account?
You stop spending.
What does it mean for a brain to stop spending?
A brain stops moving very much,
stops moving the body, and it stops learning.
It just goes with its internal model.
- Brilliantly put, yep.
- So empathy requires,
to have empathy for someone who is unlike you
requires learning and practice,
foraging for information.
I mean, it is something I talk about in the book
in "7 1/2 Lessons About the Brain."
I think it's really important.
It's hard, but it's hard.
I think it's, you know,
it's hard for people to have,
to be curious about views that are unlike their own
when they feel so encumbered.
And I'll just tell you, I had this epiphany, really.
I was listening to Robert Reich's "The System."
He was talking about oligarchy versus democracy.
And so oligarchy is where very wealthy people,
like extremely wealthy people,
shift power so that they become even more wealthy
and even more insulated from the, you know,
the pressures of the common person.
It's actually the kind of system
that leads to the collapse of civilizations,
if you believe Jared Diamond.
Just say that.
But anyways, I'm listening to this,
and I'm listening to him describe in fairly decent detail
how the CEOs of these companies,
there's been a shift in what it means to be a CEO
and not being, no longer being a steward of the community
and so on, but like in the 1980s,
it sort of shifted to this other model
of being like an oligarch.
And he's talking about how, you know,
it used to be the case that CEOs made like 20 times
what their employees made.
And now they make about 300 times on average
what their employees made.
So where did that money come from?
It came from the pockets of the employees.
And they don't know about it, right?
No one knows about it.
They just know they can't feed their children,
they can't pay for healthcare,
they can't take care of their family,
and they worry about what's gonna happen to their,
they're living like, you know, months a month, basically.
Any one big bill could completely, you know,
put them out on the street.
So there are a huge number of people living like this.
So all they, what they're experiencing,
they don't know why they're experiencing it.
So it's, and then someone comes along
and gives them a narrative.
- Yeah.
- Well, somebody else butted in line in front of you.
And that's why you're this way.
That's why you experience what you're experiencing.
It just for a minute, I was thinking,
I had deep empathy for people who have beliefs
that are really, really, really different from mine.
But I was trying really hard to see it through their eyes.
And did it cost me something metabolically?
I'm sure.
I'm sure.
- But you had something in the gas tank.
- Well, I--
- In order to allocate that.
I mean, that's the question is like,
where did you, what resources did your brain draw on
in order to actually make that effort?
- Well, I'll tell you something, honestly, Lex.
I don't have that much in the gas tank right now.
(Lex laughing)
Right, so I am surfing the stress that,
stress is just, what is stress?
Stress is your brain is preparing for a big metabolic outlay
and it just keeps preparing and preparing
and preparing and preparing.
- You as a professor, you as a human?
- Both, right?
For me, this is a moment of existential crisis
as much as anybody else, democracy, all of these things.
So in many of my roles,
so I guess what I'm trying to say is that
I get up every morning and I exercise.
I run, I row, I lift weights, right?
You exercise in the middle of the day.
I saw your like, daily thing.
- I'm obsessed with it.
- Yeah, I hate it, actually.
You love it, right?
You get a--
- No, I hate it.
- I hate it, but I do it religiously.
- Yeah.
- Why?
Because it's a really good investment.
It's an expenditure that is a really good investment.
And so,
when I was exercising, I was listening to the book
and when I realized the insights
that I was sort of like playing around with,
like, does this make sense?
Does this make sense?
I didn't immediately plunge into it.
§13Transcript · 2:02:36–2:12:53
I basically wrote some stuff down, I set it aside,
and then I did what I,
I prepared myself to make an expenditure.
I don't know what you do before you exercise.
I always have a protein shake, always have a protein shake,
because I need to fuel up
before I make this really big expenditure.
And so, I did the same thing.
I didn't have a protein drink, but I did the same thing.
And fueling up can mean lots of different things.
It can mean talking to a friend about it.
It can mean, you know, it can mean
making sure you get a good night's sleep before you do it.
It can mean lots of different things.
But I guess I think we have to do these things.
- Yeah, I'm gonna re-listen
to this conversation several times.
This is brilliant.
But I do think about,
you know, I've encountered so many people
that can't possibly imagine
that a good human being can vote for Donald Trump.
And I've also encountered people
that can't imagine that an intelligent person
can possibly vote for a Democrat.
And I look at both these people,
many of whom are friends,
and let's just say, after this conversation,
I can see as they're predicting brains
not willing to invest the resources
to empathize with the other side.
And I think you have to, in order to be able to,
like, to see the obvious common humanity in us.
I don't know what the system is
that's creating this division.
We can put it, like you said, it's a perfect storm.
It might be the social media.
I don't know what the hell it is.
- I think it's a bunch of things.
I think it's-- - It's just coming together.
- There's an economic system, which is disadvantaging
large numbers of people.
There's a use of social media.
Like, if you, you know, if I had to orchestrate
or architect a system that would screw up
a human body budget, it would be the one that we live in.
You know, we don't sleep enough.
We eat pseudo food, basically.
We are on social media too much,
which is full of ambiguity,
which is really hard for a human nervous system, right?
Really, really hard.
Like, ambiguity with no context to predict in.
I mean, it's like, really?
And then, you know, there are the economic concerns
that affect large swaths of people in this country.
I mean, it's really, I'm not saying everything
is reducible to metabolism.
Not everything is reducible to metabolism.
But if you combine all these things together--
- It's helpful to think of it that way.
Then, somehow it's also,
somehow it reduces the entirety of the human experience,
the same kind of obvious logic.
Like, we should exercise every day in the same kind of way.
We should empathize every day.
- Yeah.
You know, there are these really wonderful,
wonderful programs for teens,
and also for parents of people who've lost children
in wars and in conflicts, in political conflicts,
where they go to a bucolic setting,
and they talk to each other about their experiences.
And miraculous things happen, you know?
So, you know, it's easy to,
it's easy to sort of shrug this stuff off
as kind of Pollyanna-ish, you know?
Like, what's this really gonna do?
But you have to think about,
when my daughter went to college, I gave her advice.
I said, "Try to be around people
"who let you be the kind of person you wanna be."
You, we're back to free will, you have a choice.
You have a choice.
It might seem like a really hard choice.
It might seem like a unimaginably difficult choice.
You have a choice.
Do you wanna be somebody who is wrapped in fury and agony?
Or do you wanna be somebody who extends
a little empathy to somebody else,
and in the process, maybe learn something?
Curiosity is the thing that protects you.
Curiosity is the thing, it's curative curiosity.
- On social media, the thing I recommend to people,
at least that's the way I've been approaching social media.
It doesn't seem to be the common approach,
but I basically give love to people
who seem to also give love to others.
So it's the same, similar concept of surrounding yourself
by the people you wanna become.
And I ignore, sometimes block, but just ignore.
I don't add aggression to people
who are just constantly full of aggression
and negativity and toxicity.
There's a certain desire when somebody says something mean
to say something, to say why,
or try to alleviate the meanness and so on.
But what you're doing essentially
is you're now surrounding yourself
by that group of folks that have that negativity.
So even just the conversation.
So I think it's just so powerful
to put yourself amongst people
whose basic mode of interaction is kindness.
Because I don't know what it is,
but maybe it's the way I'm built,
is that to me is energizing for the gas tank
of that then I can pull to.
- For sure.
- When I start reading "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"
and start thinking about Nazi Germany,
I can empathize with everybody involved.
I can start to make these difficult,
like thinking that's required
to understand our little planet Earth.
- Well, there is research to back up what you said.
There's research that's consistent
with your intuition there.
You know, that there's research that shows
that being kind to other people,
doing something nice for someone else,
is like making a deposit to some extent.
You know, 'cause I think making a deposit
not only in their body budgets, but also in yours.
Like people feel good
when they do good things for other people.
You know, we are social animals.
We regulate each other's nervous systems
for better and for worse, right?
The best thing for a human nervous system is another human.
And the worst thing for a human nervous system
is another human.
So you decide, do you wanna be somebody
who makes people feel better,
or do you wanna be somebody who causes people pain?
And we are more responsible for one another
than we might like, or than we might want.
But remember what we said about social reality, you know?
Social reality, you know,
there are lots of different cultural norms
about, you know, independence,
or, you know, collective, you know, nature of people.
But the fact is we have socially dependent nervous systems.
We evolved that way as a species.
And in this country,
we prize individual rights and freedoms.
And that is a dilemma that we have to grapple with.
And we have to do it in a way,
if we're gonna be productive about it,
we have to do it in a way that
requires engaging with each other,
and which is what I understand the, you know,
the founding members of this country intended.
- Beautifully put.
Let me ask a few final silly questions.
So one, we've talked a bit about love,
but let me, it's fun to ask somebody like you
who can effectively, from at least neuroscience perspective,
disassemble some of these romantic notions,
but what do you make of romantic love?
Why do human beings seem to fall in love,
at least a bunch of '80s hair bands have written about it?
Is that a nice feature to have?
Is that a bug?
What is it?
- Well, I'm really happy that I fell in love.
I wouldn't want it any other way.
(Lex laughing)
But I would say--
- Is that you, the person speaking,
or the neuroscientist?
- Well, that's me, the person speaking.
But I would say, as a neuroscientist,
babies are born not able to regulate their own body budgets
'cause their brains aren't fully wired yet.
When you feed a baby, when you cuddle a baby,
everything you do with a baby
impacts that baby's body budget
and helps to wire that baby's body budget,
helps to wire that baby's brain
to manage eventually her own body budget to some extent.
That's the basis, biologically, of attachment.
Humans evolved as a species to be socially dependent,
meaning you cannot manage your body budget on your own
without a tax that eventually you pay many years later
in terms of some metabolic illness.
Loneliness, when you break up with someone that you love
or you lose them, you feel like it's gonna kill you,
but it doesn't.
But loneliness will kill you.
§14Transcript · 2:12:55–2:20:10
It will kill you approximately,
what is it, seven years earlier?
I can't remember exactly the exact number.
It's actually in the web notes to seven and a half lessons.
But social isolation and loneliness will kill you earlier
than you would otherwise die.
And the reason why is that you didn't evolve
to manage your nervous system on your own.
And when you do, you pay a little tax,
and that tax accrues very slightly over time,
over a long period of time,
so that by the time you're in middle age or a little older,
you are more likely to die sooner
from some metabolic illness,
from heart disease, from diabetes, from depression.
You're more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease.
I mean, it takes a long time for that tax to accrue,
but it does.
So yes, I think it's a good thing
for people to fall in love.
- But I think the funny view of it is that it's clear
that humans need the social attachment to,
what is it, manage their nervous system,
as you're describing.
And the reason you wanna stay with somebody for a long time
is so you don't have,
is the novelty is very costly for our--
- Well, now you're mixing, now you're mixing things.
Now you're, you know, no, you have to decide whether.
But what I would say is when you lose someone you love,
it feels like you've lost a part of you.
And that's because you have.
You've lost someone who was contributing
to your body budget.
We are the caretakers of one another's nervous systems,
like it or not.
And out of that comes very deep feelings of attachment,
some of which are romantic love.
- Are you afraid of your own mortality?
We two humans sitting here.
- Yeah.
- Do you think, do you ponder your mortality?
I mean, you're somebody who thinks about your brain a lot.
It seems one of the more terrifying,
or I don't know, I don't know how to feel about it,
but it seems to be one of the most definitive aspects
of life is that it ends.
- It's a complicated answer,
but I think the best I can do in a short snippet
would be to say, for a very long time,
I did not fear my own mortality.
I feared pain and suffering.
So that's what I feared.
I feared being harmed or dying in a way
that would be painful.
But I didn't fear having my life be over.
Now, as a mother, I think I have fear.
I fear dying before my daughter is,
ready to be without me.
That's what I fear.
That's really what I fear.
And frankly, honestly, I fear my husband dying before me
much more than I fear my own death.
- There's that love and social attachment again.
- Yeah, because I know it's just gonna,
I'm gonna feel like I wish I was dead.
- Yeah, a final question about life.
What do you think is the meaning of it all?
What's the meaning of life?
- Yeah, I think that there isn't one meaning of life.
There's many meanings of life,
and you use different ones on different days.
But for me-- - Depending on the day.
- Depending on the day, but for me, I would say,
sometimes the meaning of life is to understand,
to make meaning, actually.
The meaning of life is to make meaning.
Sometimes it's that.
Sometimes it's to leave the world
just slightly a little bit better
than the Johnny Appleseed view.
Sometimes the meaning of life is to
clear the path for my daughter or for my students.
So sometimes it's that.
And sometimes it's just,
you ever have moments where you're looking at the sky
or you're by the ocean?
Or sometimes for me, it's even like I'll see
a weed poking out of a crack in a sidewalk.
And you just have this overwhelming sense
of the wonder of the world.
The physical world is so wondrous,
and you just get very immersed in the moment,
like the sensation of the moment.
Sometimes that's the meaning of life.
I don't think there's one meaning of life.
I think it's a population of instances,
just like any other category.
- I don't think there's a better way to end it, Lisa.
The first time we spoke is, I think, if not the,
then one of, I think it's the first conversation I had
that basically launched this podcast.
Yeah, that's actually the first conversation
I've had that launched this podcast.
- Oh, wow.
- And now we get to finally do it the right way.
So it's a huge honor to talk to you,
that you spent time with me.
I can't wait for, hopefully,
the many more books you'll write.
Certainly can't wait to, I already read this book,
but I can't wait to listen to it
because as you said offline, that you're reading it,
and I think you have a great voice.
You have a great, I don't know what's a nice way to put it,
but maybe NPR voice.
- Thank you.
- In the best version of what that is.
So thanks again for talking today.
- Oh, it's my pleasure.
Thank you so much for having me back.
- Thank you for listening to this conversation
with Lisa Feldman Barrett,
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And now let me leave you with some words
from Lisa Feldman Barrett.
It takes more than one human brain to create a human mind.
Thank you for listening.
I hope to see you next time.
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