Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast. In this episode, I talked
Speaker 1: to world renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett about emotions and
Speaker 1: the brain. Doctor Barrett is among the top one percent
Speaker 1: most cited scientists in the world and has been called
Speaker 1: the most important affective scientist of our time. In this episode,
Speaker 1: doctor Barrett reveals what the true function of the brain
Speaker 1: is and it's not for thinking. We also discuss the
Speaker 1: impact of past experiences on our cognition and what we
Speaker 1: can do to overcome our own detrimental patterns. Further into
Speaker 1: our discussion, doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett challenges the traditionally held
Speaker 1: view that emotions are universal. In her own theory of
Speaker 1: constructed emotion. She argues that variability in emotional expression exists
Speaker 1: due to socialization and language differences. We also touch on
Speaker 1: the topics of hallucigens, culture, education, relationships, and authoritarianism. A
Speaker 1: really stimulating conversation and while we don't see eye to
Speaker 1: eye on everything, she really brought into my mind and
Speaker 1: has me thinking of new ways of thinking about emotions
Speaker 1: and the brain. So now I bring you doctor Lisa
Speaker 1: Feldman Barrett. Doctor Barrett, so great to chat with you today.
Speaker 1: On the Psychology Podcast. It's really great to be on
Speaker 1: the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. I've wanted
Speaker 1: to talk to you for a really long time. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, you're you're a real leader in this field,
Speaker 1: and the way that you think about it is quite
Speaker 1: quite unique and different from some of the things you
Speaker 1: know that that a lot of people are even still
Speaker 1: being taught in introductors psychology textbooks, right, true, So yeah,
Speaker 1: we got to We've got to update this. We got
Speaker 1: up this. Now. You started your research career in as
Speaker 1: a we started your career as a clinical psychologist, Is
Speaker 1: that right you So that was your dream of going
Speaker 1: to clinical I don't know, I would say that was
Speaker 1: my dream. That was just where I ended up certainly.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah. You know, I had the choice to take
Speaker 1: the more academic route in cognitive psychology or the more
Speaker 1: academic route in a actually or potentially practice based route
Speaker 1: in clinical psychology, and I, for a number of reasons,
Speaker 1: chose clinical psychology. But you know, my advisor was a
Speaker 1: social psychologist. I had one clinical and one social advisor.
Speaker 1: So I would say I I always had like one
Speaker 1: foot out the door, you know, even when I was
Speaker 1: training to be a clinician. Yeah, I'm glad that I
Speaker 1: have clinical training. I think it's actually served me really
Speaker 1: well in my research career. But but early on it
Speaker 1: became clear to me that I just really loved research,
Speaker 1: and I really loved the science end of things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you're curious about everything because you've you've really you've
Speaker 1: started adding on other fields that you started to integrate
Speaker 1: into your work. But you see that even early in
Speaker 1: your in your career, you know where you're you spend
Speaker 1: a decade training in psychophysiology and neuroanatomy, right, and neuroscience
Speaker 1: and yeah, actually after I was a professor, so you know,
Speaker 1: and eventually I made my way back to cognitive and
Speaker 1: and other even adding on other fields. So I think
Speaker 1: that's one, you know, maybe one thing that marks my
Speaker 1: work is different or the work that I do with
Speaker 1: my colleagues and my in the lab that I that
Speaker 1: I developed so all my peeps over the years, is
Speaker 1: that you know, we read broadly, and we draw broadly
Speaker 1: from a number of different disciplines within psychology and and
Speaker 1: also outside psychology, and that just gives you a really
Speaker 1: different perspective on psychological questions, psychological mechanisms and and the
Speaker 1: underlying biological basis of those mechanisms. Yeah, I completely agree,
Speaker 1: and I was really excited to see you get into
Speaker 1: sharing developmental neuroscience and cultural evolution, systems engineering, all these
Speaker 1: kind of perspectives give you a system's view of the brain,
Speaker 1: which is I mean, it's so clear how that links
Speaker 1: to your theory of emotions, because if you take very
Speaker 1: discrete view of emotions, or a very modular view, I
Speaker 1: should say, right, you could see how that's in some
Speaker 1: ways antithetical from a broader systems or network perspective or
Speaker 1: could be yeah, exactly. I think you know, early on
Speaker 1: it occurred to me that in psychology really throughout the
Speaker 1: history of psychology, you know, so psychology really the history
Speaker 1: of the field, where the field comes from, is you
Speaker 1: know that in the nineteenth century, physiologists and neurologists and
Speaker 1: philosophers realized that there was the possibility of using the
Speaker 1: the mechanisms and the labs, the lab procedures and so
Speaker 1: on of neurology and physiology to search for the physical
Speaker 1: basis of mental categories that have existed really in mental
Speaker 1: philosophy going all the way back to ancient Greece, and
Speaker 1: when you take that approach, it sort of suggests to
Speaker 1: you a very modular approach where a word like episodic
Speaker 1: memory or semantic memory, or anger or sadness or fear
Speaker 1: refers to some specific set of psychological processes or a
Speaker 1: process which you know can be found in some modular
Speaker 1: part of the brain. But when you start with the
Speaker 1: brain and the nervous system and how it develops and
Speaker 1: how it evolved, and then you ask yourself, well, if
Speaker 1: you've given you know, we're a certain type of creature
Speaker 1: with a certain type of nervous system and a certain
Speaker 1: type of brain, how is it that that you know
Speaker 1: nervous system in the context of other brains and nervous
Speaker 1: systems of other people, how does that produce the thoughts
Speaker 1: and feelings and mental events that we have that we
Speaker 1: experience in this culture, but that are not general to
Speaker 1: all cultures in the world. Right, So you have really
Speaker 1: a single kind of nervous system architecture that can create
Speaker 1: many different types of minds, And so how does that
Speaker 1: work exactly? And it's not denying the fact that we
Speaker 1: feel anger and said in fear, but it doesn't presume
Speaker 1: that there are ancient circuits for these emotions embedded somewhere
Speaker 1: in some ancient beast lurking in your brain somewhere. It's
Speaker 1: a very different approach to start with the biology and
Speaker 1: then ask start asking questions about the psychology than doing
Speaker 1: it the other way around. Yeah, yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: know that a question, the big question you're interested in
Speaker 1: is why do we have a brain? Why does a
Speaker 1: brain exist? It's so metabolically expensive, and and and you've
Speaker 1: you've given answers such as it for regulation of our senses,
Speaker 1: and uh, for for prediction. I know that prediction is
Speaker 1: a big one, and uh and uh, I've described the
Speaker 1: brain as a prediction machine, you know. But I want
Speaker 1: to take the question one step further because even more
Speaker 1: intriguing to me is why do we have a neocortex?
Speaker 1: Like why? Why not just a brain? But but why
Speaker 1: do like me, when I say we mean me and
Speaker 1: you humans, why do we have a prefont like? Why
Speaker 1: do we have a lateral prefontal cortex? Yeah, So let
Speaker 1: me just say that there's really debate amongst evolutionary by
Speaker 1: evolutionary neuroscientists as to whether the neocortex is actually new right, So, uh,
Speaker 1: there's some Uh, there's one way of looking at evolution
Speaker 1: brain evolution, which suggests that the neurons that create the
Speaker 1: so called neocortex the more neutral term is isocortex, actually
Speaker 1: are are present in all vertebrates and are even present
Speaker 1: in animals that don't have a cortex, a cerebral cortex,
Speaker 1: like birds for example, that there are homologous neurons there,
Speaker 1: and so what we think of as new may not
Speaker 1: be new at all. It's the organization that's new. You know.
Speaker 1: The evolutionary neuroscientist George Streeter has this great saying that
Speaker 1: as brains get bigger, they reorganize like companies. So it's
Speaker 1: not necessarily that new things emerge, but more that you
Speaker 1: know Barb Finley's work, the neuroscientist Barb Finley suggests that
Speaker 1: all the vertebrates who've ever been studied, it looks like
Speaker 1: their brains go through exactly the same developmental stages you know,
Speaker 1: from embryos forward. But what changes is the duration of
Speaker 1: each stage. So some parts get some neurons grow for
Speaker 1: longer periods of time than others, and that produces these
Speaker 1: architectural differences, these anatomical differences in brains. And you know,
Speaker 1: the answer to your question really is or unanswered to
Speaker 1: your question. One answer to your question, or a partial
Speaker 1: answer to your question, is that we have a large
Speaker 1: cerebral cortex because we have what looks like a big
Speaker 1: neo cortex, because we live long lives, and the size
Speaker 1: of the brain is really tends to be very, very
Speaker 1: related to the longevity of the animal's life, not perfectly,
Speaker 1: but not a perfect relationship there. But you know, we
Speaker 1: live long lives and we our brains function best when
Speaker 1: we can draw on past experience in order to predict
Speaker 1: the future, which becomes the present. And in order to
Speaker 1: do that, we need to have a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of storage space, as it were. Although you know,
Speaker 1: brains don't store anything. They just reassemble past the past.
Speaker 1: They don't store it in any kind of way, any
Speaker 1: kind of biological way. I'll quote you. You said, you've
Speaker 1: said in another interview, remembering is reassembling the past and
Speaker 1: the present for the purpose of making sense of sense
Speaker 1: data and doing this predictively for the purposes of regulating
Speaker 1: the body. And you know, so we make sense of
Speaker 1: sense data for the purposes of regulating the body. That's
Speaker 1: you know, we don't see and hear and smell because
Speaker 1: it's fun or because it's interesting. You know, sense is
Speaker 1: evolved when when the forebrain evolved, and because bodies got
Speaker 1: really complicated and animals had to have more awareness of
Speaker 1: their surroundings. Yeah, so that that does link to I
Speaker 1: was going to ask you about the evolution of consciousness
Speaker 1: and we needed to have greater awareness of our surroundings.
Speaker 1: I mean, it seems like a good partial explanation for
Speaker 1: why the lights turned on at some point in human evolution. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But although you know that's I wouldn't say they turned
Speaker 1: on in human evolution. I mean the evidence suggests that,
Speaker 1: you know, the cortex isn't really necessary for consciousness. So
Speaker 1: if you look at Beorn Marker's work, it looks like,
Speaker 1: you know, really what you need is a midbrain, So
Speaker 1: you need the superior curriculus, and you need the things
Speaker 1: that's connected to, including a hypothalamus, but you don't need
Speaker 1: necessarily a cerebral cortex for consciousness. And so have you
Speaker 1: read any Daniel Boors The Ravenous Brain? I have not,
Speaker 1: because he just us. Daniel Boordie's a neuroscientist at camp
Speaker 1: University of Cambridge. He has a very interesting argument that
Speaker 1: he does link it very much to the the prefrontal cortex,
Speaker 1: the lateral prefuntal cortex, and our ability for chunking and
Speaker 1: patterns that consciousness really is, this ability to take lots
Speaker 1: and lots of sources of information and be able to
Speaker 1: perceive it in our in our field of view, and
Speaker 1: and and and he includes chunking is an important part
Speaker 1: of that. But but you're absolutely right. Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: would just say I'm not it's not an I mean this.
Speaker 1: There's a very seminal paper in published in Behavioral and
Speaker 1: Brain Sciences in two thousand and seven where Bjorn Murcer
Speaker 1: reviews the literature on people who basically, because of hydrocephaly
Speaker 1: and and other kinds of problems, have no cerebral cortex
Speaker 1: to speak of, and they're really quite conscious. So there's
Speaker 1: no question that what the cerebral cortex does is because
Speaker 1: of its architecture, it certainly allows us to compress information
Speaker 1: and abstract what you call chunking. I would call abstraction
Speaker 1: or you know, conceptualizing. It doesn't happen in the prefrontal cortex.
Speaker 1: It's not it's not the lateral prefrontal cortex. That's a misnomer,
Speaker 1: I would say, and doesn't actually, I mean, certainly that
Speaker 1: part of the brain is involved, but there's a whole
Speaker 1: architecture along the you know, the cortical sheet, which is
Speaker 1: basically compressing information in and reducing dimensionality of that information
Speaker 1: so that you can summarize a lot of details with
Speaker 1: features that are more abstract. It's just kind of like
Speaker 1: compressing an MP three or you know, like what Netflix
Speaker 1: uses when it's streams movies to you over the internet.
Speaker 1: So I hope those things aren't conscious yet though, well,
Speaker 1: you know, actually there is a theory of consciousness which
Speaker 1: suggests that a certain degree of complexity is what produces
Speaker 1: consciousness and can produce consciousness in other agents that are
Speaker 1: not human or not living. I'm not going to get
Speaker 1: into that debate because I don't really know exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to Yeah it may be hot, but
Speaker 1: you know, just because something is interesting and comfortable intuitive
Speaker 1: doesn't make it you know, real or true. But in
Speaker 1: any case, uh, you know, it is interesting, but it's
Speaker 1: not something I know well enough to discuss. But what
Speaker 1: I do know is that it's important to make a
Speaker 1: distinction between experiencing something and being self reflectively aware that
Speaker 1: you're experiencing it and the experience of the world that is,
Speaker 1: experiencing light, experiencing sound, experiencing smell doesn't require a cerebral cortex,
Speaker 1: but being aware of that, being self reflexively aware of
Speaker 1: it may in bulb a cortex. I don't know, but
Speaker 1: that that could be true. Yeah. A particular brain network
Speaker 1: that has fascinated me in my career is the default
Speaker 1: mode network or IMPOPA already and call it the imagination network,
Speaker 1: but it obviously does more than the social imagination. But
Speaker 1: social imagination is a big part of it in your
Speaker 1: ability to project yourself in the future. But it's very
Speaker 1: self it's a very self related network, very you know, right,
Speaker 1: and so, but it's always fascinating to me when that network,
Speaker 1: you know, people take like haucigens or psychedelics and things
Speaker 1: that that alter that brain network. So the self, you know,
Speaker 1: is somehow altered in some way, what that experience is like,
Speaker 1: and then the experience of consciousness in those moments, it's
Speaker 1: very it's a very different state of consciousness. It's not
Speaker 1: it's not it's not most people's everyday state of consciousness
Speaker 1: on LSD, at least not for me, not my everyday experience.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I was just wondering your own career, have
Speaker 1: you made much contact with the default mode network in
Speaker 1: your own research, and what are your thoughts on it's
Speaker 1: on its evolutionary function. So the default what is conventionally
Speaker 1: called the default mode network, which is a network that's
Speaker 1: been identified in the intrinsic you know, connectivity in the
Speaker 1: brain has many names, right, it has, it has more
Speaker 1: aliases I think than Sherlock Holmes. Right. So it's been
Speaker 1: called the mental line, the imagination network, and the self network,
Speaker 1: and it's the memory network, and it's the context network,
Speaker 1: and it's the you know, okay, And so you know,
Speaker 1: scientists have a tendency to look at circuitry and then
Speaker 1: name it on behalf of whatever phenomenon they're interested in.
Speaker 1: So true, And but I guess I look at that
Speaker 1: network and I think, okay, it contains half of the
Speaker 1: circuitry in the brain that is responsible for regulating your body.
Speaker 1: So whatever else it's doing, whatever else it's doing psychologically speaking,
Speaker 1: it's also regulating your autonomic nervous system, your immune system,
Speaker 1: your endocrine system, and the other systems of your body.
Speaker 1: And so for example, like one, This is just a hypothesis.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't study hallucinogens at the moment, but
Speaker 1: you know, one way to think about what's happening with
Speaker 1: psilocybin and other hallucinogens catamine even is that you know,
Speaker 1: even when your brain is at rest, it's still attached
Speaker 1: to your body and it's still regulated. Your body and
Speaker 1: your brain are still talking to each other when you're sleep,
Speaker 1: when you're at rest, you know, even when you're daydreaming,
Speaker 1: your brain is never detached from your body. So your
Speaker 1: body is always in training your brain, always in training
Speaker 1: your brain, except maybe when you take these hallucinogens. So
Speaker 1: maybe what's happening with hallucinogens and the reason why you
Speaker 1: can have these like completely wild experiences and the reason
Speaker 1: why you need a guide lest you go off the
Speaker 1: rails is that the normal constraints your brain is basically
Speaker 1: associating from one moment to the next. That's what predictions are,
Speaker 1: That's what imagination is, That's what daydreaming is. That's what
Speaker 1: you know, perceptual inferences, simulation, all these words we have.
Speaker 1: That's how you know something is important. You know in
Speaker 1: a science is that there are many names for it.
Speaker 1: But your brain is constrained by your body, and it's
Speaker 1: often constrained by the world. But when you go to
Speaker 1: sleep and the control networks in your brain, including the
Speaker 1: def dorsilateral prefronic cortex, you know, your brain is less
Speaker 1: constrained to associate, less constrained by the world because uh,
Speaker 1: information from the world, since data from the world is
Speaker 1: not processed as much. But there's still this anchoring in
Speaker 1: the body. And so sure, you know, crazy things can
Speaker 1: happen in your dreams, but some things don't happen because
Speaker 1: they're probably uh you know, weed it out. But when
Speaker 1: you relax that constraint, then you really do have more
Speaker 1: like a brain in a vat, right, And and so
Speaker 1: maybe that's what's happened. I mean, I have no idea,
Speaker 1: but uh, you know, that's one thought that I've had often.
Speaker 1: And that's why people have this sense of they're disconnected
Speaker 1: from the self because many scientists, including Antonio Dimacio but
Speaker 1: others as well, have taught talked about a fundamental sense
Speaker 1: of self being rooted in the brain's modeling of the body.
Speaker 1: We don't experience it that way, but but there's some
Speaker 1: reasonable evidence to suggest that that that's really how it's working. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so. It's so it's such a new frontier. You know,
Speaker 1: a lot of people, you know, good researchers that Johns
Speaker 1: Hopkins for instance, are looking into this issue. I mean,
Speaker 1: so much to be discovered. I'm not going to claim
Speaker 1: that I and I have figured out oh no, but
Speaker 1: I mean I think it's really cool frontier. Actually, everybody,
Speaker 1: like all of these centers for studying psychedelics are popping up.
Speaker 1: There's one at mass General, there's one at Berkeley. Now
Speaker 1: there's like they're all you know, they're they're all popping
Speaker 1: in London, London. Yeah. Yeah. Now you know in your
Speaker 1: book seven and a half Lessons about the Brain, one
Speaker 1: of them is your brain is not for thinking. Can
Speaker 1: you tell my neurotic brain that fact? Can you? You know? Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, like, you know, because I overthink everything. I
Speaker 1: have a shirt that says two big the overthinking and overfeeling.
Speaker 1: Need I need to get I need to get one
Speaker 1: of those shirts too. Well, you know, I mean our
Speaker 1: The way I think of it is, our brains are
Speaker 1: like the masters of deception. You know, they create our
Speaker 1: experience and they guide our actions. But they do it
Speaker 1: in ways that don't reveal how they're doing it, you know,
Speaker 1: they just and so your own experience is not a
Speaker 1: really great guide for what your brain is actually doing
Speaker 1: under the hood. And so the way that I think
Speaker 1: about it is that, based on evolutionary considerations is that
Speaker 1: you know, brains, not all animals have brains, and as
Speaker 1: you said, brains are really expensive metabolically. I mean that
Speaker 1: three pound blob of meat between your ears is the
Speaker 1: most metabolically expensive exactly or that you have. And it's
Speaker 1: not frugal. So what's it? You know, its main job
Speaker 1: really is to keep your body alive, and to keep
Speaker 1: you alive and well and and thinking and feeling and
Speaker 1: seeing and so on are in the service of that task. Now,
Speaker 1: we don't live our lives that way, and we don't
Speaker 1: experience every feeling that we have and every you know,
Speaker 1: insult that we bear, in every hug that we give,
Speaker 1: and every you know jog that we take, and every
Speaker 1: argument that we have. You know, we don't experience our
Speaker 1: lives that way. But that does seem to be from
Speaker 1: my perspective, the best explanation for how to think about
Speaker 1: thinking and feeling and so on in the dynamics of
Speaker 1: the brain. And when you start thinking about it that way,
Speaker 1: it suggests it opens up all kinds of new avenues
Speaker 1: of thought for things like why we have an opioid epidemic,
Speaker 1: why do we have record levels of depression, you know,
Speaker 1: in this country and around the world. Why does authoritarian
Speaker 1: thinking seem to emerge, you know during economic hardship. There
Speaker 1: are psychological explanations that people give that are incomplete, I
Speaker 1: would say, because they don't consider what's happening at the
Speaker 1: biological level. And when you start to think about those factors,
Speaker 1: a lot of hypotheses sort of emerge. So it's very
Speaker 1: fruitful way to you know, think about what psychological functions
Speaker 1: are for exactly Well, let's pick one and double click
Speaker 1: on it. Can I pick the authoritarian during economic hardship one?
Speaker 1: Because that's super interesting to me and I'm trying to
Speaker 1: figure that one out myself. And the same with populism.
Speaker 1: You know, you see during certain environmental conditions, what are
Speaker 1: these environmental conditions, how is it interacting with the brain?
Speaker 1: You know, how can the biological perspective help explain this?
Speaker 1: Particularly from maybe even a prediction because I could see
Speaker 1: where you're going, But I'd love to hear. I'd love
Speaker 1: to hear what your thoughts are. Sure. Sure. So the
Speaker 1: first thing, though, you know, that I would say is
Speaker 1: I want to make it really clear that I'm not
Speaker 1: offering here. What I'm offering here is is this hypothesis.
Speaker 1: I'm not claiming anything is true, and I'm also not
Speaker 1: reducing everything to biology, like this is not a reductionist
Speaker 1: explanation of anything. It's actually what I'm suggesting is that
Speaker 1: there are that this is a complex matter. And when
Speaker 1: I say complex, I don't I don't just mean like, wow,
Speaker 1: this is super complicated. Although it is super complicated, but
Speaker 1: I mean, really in terms of the causation, is complex,
Speaker 1: meaning there are multiple factors which are interacting with each other.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the factors that that's interacting
Speaker 1: with other with other, one of the one of the
Speaker 1: causal factors are one of the causal forces amongst many
Speaker 1: that are interacting is the state of your metabolism. So
Speaker 1: you know, the best way for me to describe it
Speaker 1: is to say, to use an to use a metaphor
Speaker 1: that I use in seven a half Lessons, which is
Speaker 1: that you know your brain is running a budget for
Speaker 1: your body and it's not budgeting money, it's budgeting salt
Speaker 1: and glucose and water and oxygen and all the nutrients
Speaker 1: that you know, you need to keep yourself alive and
Speaker 1: well because you have gazillions of cells in your body
Speaker 1: and they all need oxygen and they all have to
Speaker 1: have waste removed and you know, and so there's a
Speaker 1: need to sort of make sure that nutrients get where
Speaker 1: they need to go before they're needed. If you wait
Speaker 1: until after they're needed, there's a tax that you pay
Speaker 1: little metabolict tacks. So there's this body budgeting function that
Speaker 1: your brain is performing. And you know, when your brain
Speaker 1: is well, what do you do when your budget When
Speaker 1: your financial budgets in running a deficit, you stop spending.
Speaker 1: What does that mean for a brain? Well, the two
Speaker 1: most expensive things that your brain can do is move
Speaker 1: your body or learn something new. And so what happens
Speaker 1: when people are running a deficit in their body budget
Speaker 1: when their metabolism metabolically they're just not it's not just
Speaker 1: it's not as efficient as it should be. Maybe they're
Speaker 1: not getting enough maybe they're not getting enough sleep, maybe
Speaker 1: they're not eating healthily, maybe they're not drinking enough water.
Speaker 1: Maybe they're economically burdened, maybe they're socially isolated or lonely.
Speaker 1: Maybe all of these things actually translate pretty directly into
Speaker 1: body budgeting burdens. I could go on and on and on,
Speaker 1: but what happens is you might feel fatigued, and you
Speaker 1: might you know, stop moving around as much. You might
Speaker 1: feel I should also say, there's a real feeling of
Speaker 1: unpleasantness that comes with body budgeting deficits, and then your
Speaker 1: brain's going to be looking for a cause for that unpleasantness.
Speaker 1: And if somebody conveniently points to an immigrant, or somebody
Speaker 1: who doesn't look like you, or somebody who is different
Speaker 1: from you in some way, that's an easy the explanation
Speaker 1: for your feeling of unpleasantness. But more importantly, I think
Speaker 1: even more importantly than that, is that, you know, what's
Speaker 1: hard to deal with when you're running a deficit is complexity.
Speaker 1: Like you, people look for simple, single causes, They look
Speaker 1: for simplicity, and they look for no you know, things
Speaker 1: that certainty with no ambiguity. And so if you look
Speaker 1: at populism or authoritarianism or or tutalitarian thinking, and you
Speaker 1: look at the analysis of that from a political standpoint,
Speaker 1: political science or historical standpoint. What what you see scholars
Speaker 1: saying is these things tend to arise. People start looking
Speaker 1: for simple, single causes, and they start looking for you know,
Speaker 1: certainty and aversion to ambiguity and uncertainty and so on.
Speaker 1: These things start happening when you know, people are stressed
Speaker 1: in some way, and what is stress stress is just
Speaker 1: literally your brain is preparing your body for a big
Speaker 1: metabolic outlay and it may or may not come. So
Speaker 1: you're sort of squandering your resources, driving your body budget
Speaker 1: into deficit. So it's not only I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: only economic concerns that can cause this, right chaos. Right,
Speaker 1: So when you have a president or a leader of
Speaker 1: your country who just plunges the country into chaos where
Speaker 1: you can't predict, that is extremely metabolically costly for you. You
Speaker 1: You won't feel it as a metabolic cost. You'll just
Speaker 1: feel like shit basically, you know, and it results in
Speaker 1: you know, over the long term, there are consequences. So
Speaker 1: that's actually what I think is in part happening. I
Speaker 1: think that when you look at memes that are like
Speaker 1: dictators and so on, you know, usually what precedes that
Speaker 1: is a period of chaos where the country is being
Speaker 1: thrown into chaos and uncertainty is really hard for a
Speaker 1: nerve human nervous system. It's really metabolically expensive. And what
Speaker 1: your brain attempts to do in uncertainty is learn. But
Speaker 1: if you don't have the spoons to learn, you're just
Speaker 1: going to avoid that uncertainty and that ambiguity and choose
Speaker 1: certainty instead. And you know, what history tells us is
Speaker 1: that sometimes people will give away their freedom to get
Speaker 1: certainty in the moment because it's preferable to the pain
Speaker 1: and suffering and distress that comes with uncertainty. And I
Speaker 1: think that, you know, so, I think that actually adding
Speaker 1: not replacing social and psychological levels of explanation with biology,
Speaker 1: but I think adding the biology the layer actually helps
Speaker 1: knit together some things that you know, we didn't necessarily
Speaker 1: think of as being related before. Yeah, this is perfectly
Speaker 1: in line with a framework that I've been using to
Speaker 1: try and understand some of the framework of psychological entropy.
Speaker 1: You know that like Jacob parsh and Raymond Marr and
Speaker 1: Jordan Peterson proposed. Did you read their paper Psychological Entropy
Speaker 1: a Framework for Understanding Uncertainty related anxiety? I did, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did. Awesome. I assume you're very well read in
Speaker 1: the literature. I was wondering what you thought of it,
Speaker 1: sort of applying some of these free energy principles and
Speaker 1: things that are used in any self organizing system, but
Speaker 1: to the brain level of analysis and human psychology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think, I mean, I think that the idea
Speaker 1: of psychological entropy is a good metaphor, like body budgeting,
Speaker 1: a good metaphor for the biological process of alastasis. I
Speaker 1: don't know that, you know, uh, Carl Fristen, And there's
Speaker 1: like a whole you know, a whole generation of people
Speaker 1: talking about free energy, And to be honest, I don't
Speaker 1: I got to see in high school physics, you know,
Speaker 1: I couldn't even pass high you know, college level physics.
Speaker 1: It was just not for me. So I really prefer
Speaker 1: to deal with things at the biological level. I can't
Speaker 1: get down to the to the to the fit level
Speaker 1: of physics, to be honest. So I'm I'm kind of
Speaker 1: joking there, but I'm also kind of not joking. I
Speaker 1: don't know enough, really, and I don't understand the math.
Speaker 1: Even with my engineering colleagues to help me, they often
Speaker 1: don't understand the math. That they read in these papers.
Speaker 1: So you know, I'm not saying the entropy the psychological
Speaker 1: entry paper, but the I'm talking about the you know,
Speaker 1: predictive coding papers. So I don't know know at that level,
Speaker 1: but I do know that that I think psychological entropy
Speaker 1: is a good it's a good metaphor for what's happening
Speaker 1: at the level of the brain, which is that why
Speaker 1: do we even predict? Why do brains even predict in
Speaker 1: the first place, And the answer is to reduce uncertainty.
Speaker 1: It's to reduce ambiguity because you can't you're there. The
Speaker 1: whole point of a nervous system is to figure out
Speaker 1: what to do next, and if you can't figure that out,
Speaker 1: it's really expensive metabolically and you might die, so, you know,
Speaker 1: because you might not protect your or you might miss
Speaker 1: you know, uh, getting food or whatever. So so I
Speaker 1: would say, I don't know about the the the details
Speaker 1: of the mechanistic analysis, but I like the metaphor quite
Speaker 1: a bit. Yeah, me too, And I wouldn't. Yeah, claim
Speaker 1: to have fully understand and have comprehension over how free
Speaker 1: energy principle works in thermodynamics systems, don't ask me. That's
Speaker 1: all I'm not, you know, I'm like I believe, I believe,
Speaker 1: you know, the second law of thermodynamics or whatever. I
Speaker 1: don't know exactly. I take it for granted that's true. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: you know, And I mean it's sort of the same
Speaker 1: thing as you know, like quantum mechanics, you know, like
Speaker 1: I love Carlo Ravelli's writing because it makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: It describes, you know, quantum mechanics as this relation in
Speaker 1: relational terms, so nothing has a meaning except in relation
Speaker 1: to something else, and that to me makes a lot
Speaker 1: of sense. Actually, it's really consistent with the constructionist approach
Speaker 1: that we take. But don't ask me to read the math, man,
Speaker 1: I just can't. I you know that I'm not at
Speaker 1: that level really of being able to do that. But
Speaker 1: the but the ideas make a lot of sense to
Speaker 1: me totally. And one level of analysis that it really
Speaker 1: interests me when we talk about how the brain is
Speaker 1: a prediction machine, is the effect of early childhood trauma
Speaker 1: on brainwiring, especially during vulnerable periods, critical periods of brain development.
Speaker 1: Metaphor that really struck me as ringing true. Is this
Speaker 1: idea that our brain does a weather forecast to a
Speaker 1: certain degree. If we are raised in very unstable and
Speaker 1: unpredictable and harsh and partially unpredictable environments growing up, that
Speaker 1: that does have certain effects on brain development that can
Speaker 1: cause us to sort of expect that the world will
Speaker 1: be unfair or unsafe in the future, and that that
Speaker 1: process has to be actively unlearned through therapy, lots of therapy.
Speaker 1: That's why we're all in therapy as adults, you know,
Speaker 1: or especially people who've gone through trauma, to actively unwarn
Speaker 1: that because fear learning and fear unlearning operate in different
Speaker 1: systems of the brain. So I just want to just
Speaker 1: get some of your thoughts on some of what I
Speaker 1: just said. Do you do you like that metaphor of
Speaker 1: kind of the weather forecast metaphor of early childhood trauma
Speaker 1: and yeah, just what are your thoughts on that? Well,
Speaker 1: I think all brain function can be described as weather forecast,
Speaker 1: And in fact, a number of years ago I actually
Speaker 1: wrote an opinion piece that talked about maps of the
Speaker 1: brain and made analogies to weather maps versus to you know,
Speaker 1: geographic maps and so on and so forth. But I
Speaker 1: guess it makes sense. But the way that I talk
Speaker 1: about it actually is to use the idea from psychology
Speaker 1: of an internal model that your brain is really you know,
Speaker 1: a human brain, actually any brain, well most brains, well,
Speaker 1: you know what, let's just stick with humans. Human brains
Speaker 1: are not born complete, they're born under construction. So a
Speaker 1: little infant brain is not a miniature adult brain. It's
Speaker 1: a brain that's waiting for wiring instructions from the world,
Speaker 1: and it gets those wiring instructions through the sensory surfaces
Speaker 1: of your boy. So some of the like your brain
Speaker 1: is wired to the ear shape that you have and
Speaker 1: the wideness of your eyes, and you know, it's wired
Speaker 1: by the sense data that it receives. It's also wired
Speaker 1: by the you know, variations in temperature and in light
Speaker 1: and in you know, warmth, and also by social interactions.
Speaker 1: So how much does a person make eye contact with
Speaker 1: the infant, how much does the person how much does
Speaker 1: a caregiver speak to the infant, like, all of these
Speaker 1: things actually influence wiring of the brain. And basically what
Speaker 1: the brain is doing is it's bootstrapping into itself a
Speaker 1: model of its body in the world. And so if
Speaker 1: a child experiences adversity over prolonged period of time or
Speaker 1: even it could just be one really intense instance of
Speaker 1: adversity that becomes part of the child's model, by the
Speaker 1: brain's model, and that's what the brain uses to predict
Speaker 1: the future, which becomes the present. So you know, in
Speaker 1: a sense, your predictions, in a sense, you know, are
Speaker 1: always the result of past experience in some way. Oftentimes
Speaker 1: it's your own personal experience, but it could be you know,
Speaker 1: the stories that you hear from other people, or the
Speaker 1: things that you see on TV, or the books that
Speaker 1: you read, or the movies that you see, or the
Speaker 1: stuff you look at on YouTube or whatever. You know.
Speaker 1: Because humans, we don't have to experience everything ourselves, we
Speaker 1: also can learn from other people adversity, if it's prolonged
Speaker 1: or profound, will that brains whire themselves to function in
Speaker 1: those circumstances. And that's the that's the model of the world,
Speaker 1: of the body in the world that the brain takes
Speaker 1: forward into new environments. And so yeah, but the only
Speaker 1: thing I want to say was I don't think you
Speaker 1: you don't really ever unlearn anything. You just learn new things.
Speaker 1: And so the I mean, the evidence, you know, suggests
Speaker 1: that old learning never goes away, it just becomes contextual
Speaker 1: you know, it's just becomes contextualized, so you learn new things.
Speaker 1: It doesn't replace the old learning, it just exists alongside it.
Speaker 1: And this sort of gets back to your point about
Speaker 1: like why do we have a big neo cortex, And
Speaker 1: the answer is because we don't unlearn things. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's why we have a big neo cortex, so that
Speaker 1: we have lifetime memories that we can use to predict
Speaker 1: the future. Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's so fascinating
Speaker 1: when you really think about it really concretely, the fact
Speaker 1: that our brain is stuck in this dark encasement. It
Speaker 1: doesn't have like it's not and it's like trying to
Speaker 1: you know, through how many years of human well not
Speaker 1: just human evolution, but of organism evolution. It's taking everything
Speaker 1: it's it's learned throughout the wholes, you know, to try
Speaker 1: to predict and figure out like okay, well that's happening.
Speaker 1: Well we know that, like there's a probability that this is,
Speaker 1: you know, and that's why we might jump at something
Speaker 1: that's actually not Once we process it, we're like, okay,
Speaker 1: well that wasn't actually scary. You know, we'll see something
Speaker 1: like run across the fore, you know, be like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know it's like the brain predicting that, right, that
Speaker 1: we should be scared by that. But it's just it's
Speaker 1: just so it's so immed I mean, it's such a
Speaker 1: it's all isn't it all inspiring? You know to think about?
Speaker 1: You know, just like how much is built in that
Speaker 1: actually does allow us to function reasonably well, you know
Speaker 1: some it depends on my day, but you know well
Speaker 1: enough to be able to to take in all this
Speaker 1: information and have you know, such quick you know reactions.
Speaker 1: You know. I have to say that as I was
Speaker 1: writing seven and a half lessons about the brain, I
Speaker 1: am it really changed how I look at little infants
Speaker 1: like you look at these little, helpless little creatures, and
Speaker 1: there's a it's remarkable what's happening inside that skull? You know?
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean I've certainly used the phrasing that
Speaker 1: you know, your brain is stuck in a dark, silent
Speaker 1: box and it's receiving sense data from your body and
Speaker 1: from the world. So you know, there's a change in
Speaker 1: air pressure which you experience as a sound of like
Speaker 1: you know, like a loud bang. So what is that
Speaker 1: loud bang? What caused that loud bang. Is it a
Speaker 1: car door slamming, Is it thunder? Is it a gunshot?
Speaker 1: You know, whatever the cause is will will lead you know,
Speaker 1: that's what's going to dictate what you do next. But
Speaker 1: you don't have access to the cause. You only have
Speaker 1: access to the consequence to the outcome. So your brain
Speaker 1: has to guess at the cause, and what does it
Speaker 1: use to guess It uses past experience, So you can't
Speaker 1: escape using past experience. If you do, you are experientially
Speaker 1: blind to to what you're presented with. But what you
Speaker 1: can do is you can cultivate new experiences for yourself
Speaker 1: that essentially seed your brain to predict differently in the future.
Speaker 1: So you're by doing this, you're basically cultivating your past.
Speaker 1: You can't reach back into your past and change it.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can go with the therapy and you
Speaker 1: can try to remodel, do a little remodeling, you know,
Speaker 1: but you can't really re architect your past. What you
Speaker 1: can do, though, is cultivate experiences for yourself in the
Speaker 1: future that are novel, that are instructive, that are essentially
Speaker 1: like cultivating a new past, because once you've experienced it,
Speaker 1: it's learned and it's there, and it's available to be
Speaker 1: used in the future. So oftentimes, the way I think
Speaker 1: of it is it's kind of like exercise. You know,
Speaker 1: cultivating a new experience for yourself can be scary, painful, uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: It can also be joyful, but you know, it's energetically costly,
Speaker 1: so is exercise. You're kind of making an investment in
Speaker 1: in who you'll be in the future. That's poetic. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure. So yeah, well this is this is a
Speaker 1: major theme of your book, is that there are a
Speaker 1: lot of things we can you know, that we can
Speaker 1: do to influence our mind, you know, and the patterns
Speaker 1: you know, and uh, which does change you know, there's
Speaker 1: a reciprocal thing there. Well okay, I only get too
Speaker 1: implicit dualism here, But I wrote something on I wrote
Speaker 1: something on Twitter, like, I wrote something like a seemingly
Speaker 1: innocuous comment like, it's very interesting to me that, how,
Speaker 1: you know, the min it's not like the mind just
Speaker 1: produces one. It's not just as though the brain produces
Speaker 1: one a mind. It produces multiple minds. And it's really
Speaker 1: interesting me how through the course of human evolution, you know,
Speaker 1: some of these minds evolve for different purposes. It's amazing.
Speaker 1: How do we make any decisions? You know, like when
Speaker 1: we have all these things, and people will wrote things like, well,
Speaker 1: how do you know it's the brain producing the mind?
Speaker 1: How do you know it's not the mind producing the brain?
Speaker 1: And I'm like well, and I'm like, well, you know, look,
Speaker 1: as a cognitive scientist, I assume a couple of things,
Speaker 1: you know, or else I what is the purpose of
Speaker 1: my job if I don't assume them. One thing I
Speaker 1: assume is that the mind and brain are intricably connected.
Speaker 1: That and that the former that the mind depends on
Speaker 1: the brain. I mean, isn't that a reasonablesumption? Well, of
Speaker 1: course at disk is we're scientists. I think. The way
Speaker 1: I think about it is that, well, let me first
Speaker 1: just say that this idea of does the mind influence
Speaker 1: the brain in philosophy is called you probably know, it's
Speaker 1: called the downward causation problem. So the way I think
Speaker 1: about it is that the mind is what the brain
Speaker 1: is doing in a particular moment in time, and the
Speaker 1: mind is constituted as a set of mental features. It's
Speaker 1: like the psychological features, the experiential features in a given
Speaker 1: brain state, or where the brain is in its state
Speaker 1: space to be technical, and so it's not like you
Speaker 1: have a mind and you have a brain and you
Speaker 1: somehow have to figure out how these two realms relate
Speaker 1: to each other. You have a brain, and your brain
Speaker 1: conjures constructs mental features, and those mental features are your
Speaker 1: mind at that moment, and that's it. There's really nothing
Speaker 1: and you know, so, but what you do in the moment,
Speaker 1: So for example, if I smile at you, or I
Speaker 1: scowl at you, or you know, whatever I do or
Speaker 1: actually it's what your brain predicts I'll do influences what
Speaker 1: you do next, so and that influences me. So this
Speaker 1: is you know you, so you're so mental features can
Speaker 1: influence brain wiring. There is downward causation in that sense.
Speaker 1: In fact, one of the post docs in our lab,
Speaker 1: brilliant guy named Jordan Terry o h. He published a
Speaker 1: paper about a sense of should, like why do people,
Speaker 1: you know, why do people feel moral obligation? Why do
Speaker 1: they follow social rules? Like what's the value of that?
Speaker 1: Why do that? And the answer is, and it's all
Speaker 1: laid out with math, and you know, is that if
Speaker 1: I make myself predictable to you, then you are more
Speaker 1: predictable to me, and you being predictable to me is
Speaker 1: metabolically you know, beneficial to me. Again, coming back to
Speaker 1: uncertainty versus predictability. Wouldn't be good if like the growth
Speaker 1: trajectory of most human relationships was, Oh, we're starting to
Speaker 1: really understand each other's being. You know. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: that's a really complicated question, but I partly what I
Speaker 1: would say is that in I say this is a clinician,
Speaker 1: but probably also as a person. You know, it's hard,
Speaker 1: it sounds, it's going to sound really pop psyche, but
Speaker 1: actually think it's true. You know, you can't really get
Speaker 1: to know somebody else really well, and if you don't
Speaker 1: know yourself really well. And in my experience, people lie
Speaker 1: to each other less than they lie to themselves, so
Speaker 1: true know, oftentimes in conversations, I'm sure you've had this experience,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like you're a platform for the person
Speaker 1: to perform who they believe they are. They're not really
Speaker 1: having a conversation with you, they're just you know, like
Speaker 1: I often feel like when I'm in a situation like
Speaker 1: that where I want to say, who are you saying
Speaker 1: this for? Like, are you saying this for me or
Speaker 1: you saying this for yourself, like I you know who's
Speaker 1: this for? Who is this? You know? What's this for? It?
Speaker 1: So I think when there's discord in relationships, it's often
Speaker 1: because you know, people are unaware they're that they're you know,
Speaker 1: they're unaware of their own Yeah, I love it. Well,
Speaker 1: you do say in your book your brain secretly works
Speaker 1: with other brains. I think this really this principle relates
Speaker 1: to some of the things we're throwing around right now
Speaker 1: in concepts. Annie Murphy, my friend Amy, my friend Anny Murphy.
Speaker 1: Paul the journalist wrote a really brilliant book that just
Speaker 1: came out called The Extended Mind, which drew on the
Speaker 1: work of Dave Chalmers and Andy Clark. Did you have
Speaker 1: you had you see that book? I've seen the book
Speaker 1: and it's on my pile of books to read at
Speaker 1: the beach. Cool. So I allow myself when I go
Speaker 1: to the beach for two weeks every year and I
Speaker 1: only read novels, and I allow myself one science book
Speaker 1: one just one, because I'm reading science all the rest
Speaker 1: of the year, you know. So that's a contender. It's
Speaker 1: on my pile right there. But you're but you're obviously
Speaker 1: familiar with the you know, the extended mind hypothesis and
Speaker 1: oh absolutely, yeah, absolutely, But you know, I mean, you're
Speaker 1: you're probably really familiar with lots of scientific work. But
Speaker 1: it's really fun two and sometimes inferiating, but mostly fun
Speaker 1: to see how people see what they do with it
Speaker 1: when they're communicating to the public. So I love reading
Speaker 1: popular I mean I I before I wrote How Emotions
Speaker 1: Are Made, I probably read fifty popular science books just
Speaker 1: to see kind of like how people did it, and
Speaker 1: you know, what I wanted to do and what I
Speaker 1: didn't want to do and try to figure that out.
Speaker 1: But it's it's fun to see how people handle these
Speaker 1: really complicated topics. It's fun to see the metaphors that
Speaker 1: they use and to think about them and play with
Speaker 1: them a little bit. Well, I do think you know,
Speaker 1: you're a book seven and a half. Your most recent
Speaker 1: book is can be likened to Hawkins's Seminal Guide to
Speaker 1: the Universe. You know, I do think it is the
Speaker 1: equivalent for the brain. No, I think you did it.
Speaker 1: So congratulations, that's that's that's very high praise. I very
Speaker 1: grateful for that comment. Thank you. Yeah, Yeah, you're very welcome. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think that it's also very there is a
Speaker 1: practical element to this book. I mean, you are making
Speaker 1: the case that the brain, our brains can create our
Speaker 1: reality to a certain degree. You know, you're not going
Speaker 1: all postmodern there and say that to one hundred percent.
Speaker 1: You know, one hundred percent. We all have live in
Speaker 1: our own realities. We don't want to live in that world.
Speaker 1: We want to have some we do want to have
Speaker 1: some shared collective reality, but that we can modify, you know,
Speaker 1: our our predictive valiances, our probabilities, you know, And to
Speaker 1: get really nerdy about phrasing it, yeah, for sure, absolutely yep.
Speaker 1: I would now at this point like to move into
Speaker 1: the emotions part, and you know, kind of end on
Speaker 1: that discussion because I find your theory so provocative. And
Speaker 1: I find it provocative because it does challenge even my
Speaker 1: own standard ways of thinking about emotions, even ways I
Speaker 1: still think about emotion. It's I can't just get rid
Speaker 1: of it overnight. And and so let me tell you
Speaker 1: some ways I think about emotions. You tell me why
Speaker 1: I'm wrong, or maybe tell me why it's not more nuanced,
Speaker 1: tell me why it's incomplete. That's really how scientists talk.
Speaker 1: We don't say you're wrong, but you know, for instance,
Speaker 1: I'm interested in like emotional intelligence and that that field
Speaker 1: of research and it's correlation with general intelligence and IQ.
Speaker 1: But there is a basic assumption in the emotional intelligence
Speaker 1: literature that people differ. There's individual differences in people's ability
Speaker 1: to identify emotions. There's even a whole test, you know,
Speaker 1: reading the emotions in the eyes test. You know, people
Speaker 1: with autism have greater difficulty with it. You know, like
Speaker 1: Simon Baron Cohen's research, et cetera, other people's research on
Speaker 1: that that there is kind of there are some impuscit
Speaker 1: assumptions here that there there are, you know, universally evolutionary,
Speaker 1: evolved emotions that people differ in their ability to label,
Speaker 1: you know, across culture. Now, the more I read your
Speaker 1: research and really dig into it and understand the nuances
Speaker 1: of it, because I do think I do understand it finally,
Speaker 1: I've really it took me a couple of years to
Speaker 1: finally really wrap my head around what you were saying,
Speaker 1: just because it's a very complex. They correct me if
Speaker 1: I'm wrong, But I think it does present a little
Speaker 1: bit of a different view on that. Am I right? Yes,
Speaker 1: it does so or a lot different, a lot different. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so let me let me say that. Let's take the
Speaker 1: mind in the eyes test. Okay, yeah, So here's how
Speaker 1: the mind and the eyes test works. You show a
Speaker 1: set of eye, like two eyes from a photograph, just
Speaker 1: the eyes, and then you have four words that you
Speaker 1: give the subject or the respondent or this patient, and
Speaker 1: then they have to pick the word that matches the
Speaker 1: eyes and best. And when you do this, you see
Speaker 1: what looks like universal agreement. That looks like something that's innate,
Speaker 1: because how else could it be universal? And not only that,
Speaker 1: but there's only one correct answer on the test. I mean,
Speaker 1: like the whole asumption of the test is like see
Speaker 1: is fear? Yeah? But right? But I would but I'm
Speaker 1: not even at that point yet. I haven't even got okay, okay,
Speaker 1: but I will get there in a minute. And that
Speaker 1: is what happens when you take those words away and
Speaker 1: you just get people to free label what is this
Speaker 1: person experiencing? Do you know what you get? I think
Speaker 1: people approx to me what the psychologist deemed the correct answer,
Speaker 1: but you're saying, no, no, they don't. I published a
Speaker 1: paper on this actually a couple of years ago well,
Speaker 1: absolutely absolutely not no. And in fact, it's the same
Speaker 1: thing with emotion perception studies. If you give a scowling
Speaker 1: face or a smiling face or whatever, and you give
Speaker 1: a set of words and the subject has to choose,
Speaker 1: the respondent has to choose the word to match the face,
Speaker 1: you get what looks like universal agreement as long as
Speaker 1: you're testing people from urban cultures. When you test people
Speaker 1: from remote cultures, the whole the whole ballgame changes. You
Speaker 1: don't get anything like anything universal, but you do get
Speaker 1: something that looks like universality when you're testing people in
Speaker 1: large urban cultures around the world. But what happens when
Speaker 1: you test Americans just Americans? When you take the words away,
Speaker 1: you don't see anything that looks like universality. Do you
Speaker 1: see in terms of semantic distance, like do you see
Speaker 1: like if someone's like that, like people say they're happy?
Speaker 1: Do you know what I mean? See valance? What you
Speaker 1: see is valance that people are basically around the world,
Speaker 1: and even even in remote cultures, people seem to distinguish
Speaker 1: valance and sometimes arousal. I'm not saying valance and arousal
Speaker 1: are universal. I'm just saying that's what you see okay.
Speaker 1: And when you look at patients, for example, we have
Speaker 1: semantic dementia, they can do They can sort faces on
Speaker 1: the basis you know, so you give them a bunch
Speaker 1: of faces and you ask them to sort them. They
Speaker 1: can sort on valance and arousal, but they can't sort
Speaker 1: on anger, said, for your disgust, Like if you can't
Speaker 1: access words and the meanings of words, you can't recognize
Speaker 1: fear or anger or sadness recognize. And then the point
Speaker 1: that you were getting at, which is well, it's accurate,
Speaker 1: how is accuracy assessed? I mean within emotion research, these
Speaker 1: are post faces. These are not naturalistic expressions that people make.
Speaker 1: These are post faces. They're all post faces. And in fact,
Speaker 1: when you do research with naturalistic faces, what you don't
Speaker 1: see anything like what looks like universality. And the reason
Speaker 1: why is that research suggests again in urban cultures, that
Speaker 1: people scowl when they're angry about thirty percent of the time.
Speaker 1: Now that's not chance, that's better than chance, but it
Speaker 1: means that's seventy percent of the time they're doing something
Speaker 1: else it's meaningful with their face to express anger, and
Speaker 1: that's low reliability from a scientific standpoint. And people also
Speaker 1: scowl when they're not angry, they scowl when they're confused,
Speaker 1: they scowl when they're concentrating really hard, they scowl when
Speaker 1: they have gas. That's low specificity. So the point here
Speaker 1: is that when it comes to you know, the expression
Speaker 1: of emotion, variability is the norm, and most of the
Speaker 1: time when you see universe evidence of universality, it's constructed
Speaker 1: by these really constrained tests that actually are using artificial stimuli.
Speaker 1: So how does Simon Baron Cohen know that the person
Speaker 1: in the photograph with the eyes was you know, thoughtful
Speaker 1: or was sad? Or how does he know? Where's the criterion?
Speaker 1: As far as I know, there's no scientifically the objective
Speaker 1: criterion for any of those words that anybody has ever
Speaker 1: been able to produce reliably across samples, so that they're
Speaker 1: a whole scaffold of assumptions, which once you start poking
Speaker 1: at those assumptions, you you know, the whole thing falls
Speaker 1: apart like a house of cards. Really well, well, that's very,
Speaker 1: very revolutionary because Paul Eckman's you know, studies are taught
Speaker 1: in almost every introductor psychology textbook. You know, very aware,
Speaker 1: you're aware of this I mean, look, Paul, I mean
Speaker 1: Paul Ekman argued, there's six universal basic emotions anger, surprise, discussed, enjoyment, fear,
Speaker 1: and status. I'm not teaching you this, but this is
Speaker 1: from my audience. I'm teaching my audience this. Uh. And
Speaker 1: he's you know, argued universal. You know, he's gone to
Speaker 1: every you know, every culture in the world. And no
Speaker 1: he hasn't. But he hasn't. But he hasn't. But how
Speaker 1: it's taught, that's how it's taught. Yeah, no, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So this is sort of the problem of textbooks, right.
Speaker 1: The problem of textbooks is that they they distill information
Speaker 1: and they often errors that are made are often carried forward.
Speaker 1: And you know, like, if you go we did a
Speaker 1: little study of how is William James, like I learned
Speaker 1: when I was an interest psyche and even later that
Speaker 1: William James proposed that each emotion like anger, said, fear
Speaker 1: and so on, has its own physical pattern associated with it. Well,
Speaker 1: if you go back and you read William James, like
Speaker 1: read read the Principles of Psychology, he says the opposite
Speaker 1: of that. So I'm like, how how did that happen? Like,
Speaker 1: how can you say one you write one thing over
Speaker 1: and over again, like in his book and in a
Speaker 1: couple of papers, and it gets morphed somehow into the
Speaker 1: James Lang theory. That's like a Frankenstein. I mean, Lang
Speaker 1: actually believed that there was one vasomotor, one physical pattern
Speaker 1: for anger, said the Sphere. But James believed that there
Speaker 1: were multiple feelings of anger, and every feeling of anger,
Speaker 1: every variation of anger, had its own physical comportment. So
Speaker 1: he's saying there is no essence of physical essence of anger.
Speaker 1: It's a variety, you know, He's and so how does
Speaker 1: that happen? Right? And part of what we did was
Speaker 1: we went and we looked at intro syite textbooks. And
Speaker 1: you know, I'm saying this for my my lovely friends
Speaker 1: who write intro syite textbooks. You know, it's a propable
Speaker 1: business and they try really hard, they try hard to
Speaker 1: keep updating, but you know, it takes a couple of
Speaker 1: years for information to make its way into the textbooks.
Speaker 1: And in the case of emotion, I'll say all I
Speaker 1: can say is that the evidence, I mean, Paul Eckman's
Speaker 1: work was revolutionary for its time, and he and his
Speaker 1: colleagues did fantastic work for their time. But they and
Speaker 1: so I don't want to you know, all of us,
Speaker 1: whether we agree with someone or disagree, we stand on
Speaker 1: the shoulders of those giants, okay. And so that's not
Speaker 1: to be diminished. But Paul Ashman went to a couple
Speaker 1: of couple of remote cultures. He didn't go all over
Speaker 1: the world, and in fact, he didn't go to many
Speaker 1: of the places that and it's not criticism, it's just
Speaker 1: he you know, maybe it was impossible to do that then.
Speaker 1: But you know, they were all in and around Papua
Speaker 1: New Guinea, you know, for the most part, you know,
Speaker 1: in Southeast Asia. They weren't in Africa and in all
Speaker 1: of these other you know, parts of the world. And
Speaker 1: one of my former students actually published a review of
Speaker 1: all of the studies on remote cultures, including our own.
Speaker 1: So we've been to two remote cultures, including studying the
Speaker 1: Hadza hunter gatherers in Tanzania. And what you can see
Speaker 1: is that all of the studies that have been published
Speaker 1: in the last i want to say, maybe less than
Speaker 1: ten years all replicate each other, but they swamp the
Speaker 1: evidence from those early studies. So those early studies relied
Speaker 1: on very specific methods that didn't allow for certain discoveries
Speaker 1: to be made. And when you use a variety of
Speaker 1: methods in a variety of cultures, with a variety of
Speaker 1: different constraints, you don't find universality. You just don't. It'sy.
Speaker 1: Have you talked have you ever talked to document? Have
Speaker 1: you like, what do you think of my constructed theory
Speaker 1: of emotions? Yeah, so that's a really interesting question. So
Speaker 1: you know, when I was writing How Emotions Are Made
Speaker 1: the there's a chapter in there about, you know, emotional
Speaker 1: expression and emotion perception, and it's called constructing universality, constructing
Speaker 1: universal emotions. And but you know, I was thinking, like,
Speaker 1: if I were him, I would be worrying about what
Speaker 1: is this person going to say, you know, because he's
Speaker 1: been attacked so many times and that's not my fascist
Speaker 1: you know by anthropologists. I yeah, exactly. So I thought
Speaker 1: to myself, well, if I were him, I'd be pretty worried.
Speaker 1: And so I wrote him an email and I said, listen,
Speaker 1: I just you know, I just want to tell you.
Speaker 1: And he knew that I was writing the book because
Speaker 1: I asked to use some of the photographs of his
Speaker 1: photographs of faces. I had to get permission to use
Speaker 1: them in the book, right, And so I basically send
Speaker 1: him a personal email and I said, listen, maybe you're worried.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're not, but maybe you are. And if you are,
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you exactly what I'm going to say,
Speaker 1: you know, and maybe you're worried that I'm going to say.
Speaker 1: You know, this guy's an idiot. He's totally you know,
Speaker 1: off his rocker, he's you know, you know, his science
Speaker 1: is bullshit, you know. But I'm not going to say that.
Speaker 1: I just want it to be really clear with you.
Speaker 1: That's actually not what I'm going to say. Here's what
Speaker 1: I'm going to say. I'm going to say that you
Speaker 1: discovered something important, but it's not what you think you discovered.
Speaker 1: I think you discovered something else. I think you discovered
Speaker 1: the power of words actually to teach people emotion categories
Speaker 1: really quickly. That's what those studies actually show, because you know,
Speaker 1: if you give people, even in remote cultures, it's a
Speaker 1: little fuzzier, but in urban cultures, you give people emotion
Speaker 1: words and they can use them. They're learning how to
Speaker 1: use them in the task, and they can learn really
Speaker 1: fast words. And you can see this even in infants,
Speaker 1: words are in invitations to learn abstract categories. And that's
Speaker 1: what I think he showed inadvertently by the methods that
Speaker 1: he was using. But anyways, my point is that, you know,
Speaker 1: I just reached out to him, and you know, we
Speaker 1: had a nice chat over eat. He responded, He responded,
Speaker 1: He did. He responded really positively and warmly and said,
Speaker 1: you know, thank you so much, and I'm really grateful,
Speaker 1: and you know, maybe we should have a chat, and
Speaker 1: you know, maybe and I so I said, yeah, I
Speaker 1: would love to have a chat. Why don't we You know,
Speaker 1: James Gross and I a few years before that, his
Speaker 1: studies emotion regulation at Stanford, and you know, he and
Speaker 1: I do not hold exactly the same views on emotion,
Speaker 1: and but we founded the Society for Affective Science together
Speaker 1: with some of our colleagues. And so I said, why
Speaker 1: don't we have a chat at SaaS at the conference
Speaker 1: and we can have Bob Levinson, who is a very
Speaker 1: close colleague of Paul's, and I consider him a very
Speaker 1: good friend of mine. He's been very supportive, and I
Speaker 1: don't you know, he and I don't necessarily see eye
Speaker 1: to eye on the way that we interpret the evidence,
Speaker 1: but we can we have perfectly reasonable conversations about it
Speaker 1: and we learn from each other and so on. You know,
Speaker 1: why don't we have it? Why don't we have a
Speaker 1: conversation there? And you know, he thought that that was
Speaker 1: a great idea, but it never came to pass unfortunately.
Speaker 1: So well, if I could do anything to uh, if
Speaker 1: you ever want to have like a discussion on the
Speaker 1: psychology podcast, I bring like three people together or something,
Speaker 1: you know, for like thousands of people to be able
Speaker 1: to listen to let me know. I you know, I
Speaker 1: would love that. But I will tell you that for
Speaker 1: the most part, we've done debates before. I had a
Speaker 1: debate with dak Or Keltner at one meeting I had.
Speaker 1: We had a panel debate with a number of can't
Speaker 1: even remember all the people who were there. We've done
Speaker 1: these things before, and in general people are not comfortable.
Speaker 1: As a general rule, my colleagues are not comfortable with
Speaker 1: that kind of format. We we at the Society for
Speaker 1: effect of Science. The conference still goes on, and I
Speaker 1: mean James and I are not at the Helm anymore.
Speaker 1: You know, we gave it away to our to our colleagues,
Speaker 1: but you know, we've introduced lots of different mechanisms for
Speaker 1: people to have these conversations. Like we invented salons, which
Speaker 1: are you know, you stick a purse a scientist in
Speaker 1: a room with cookies and coffee and anyone can come
Speaker 1: for an hour and ask them anything they want, you know,
Speaker 1: like Ralph Adolphs and I did a salon together recently
Speaker 1: where you know he he very much is on the
Speaker 1: side of you know, basic emotions, so to speak, and
Speaker 1: that's what it's called in the field. And you know,
Speaker 1: he and I have debated each other twice in public.
Speaker 1: We wrote a paper together actually on facial expressions where
Speaker 1: he agreed. I mean four scientists five it was, I
Speaker 1: guess five of us from very different theoretical backgrounds decided
Speaker 1: to write a paper. Invited really to write a paper
Speaker 1: on our emotional expressions universal and so for two and
Speaker 1: a half years we met over zoom. This was before COVID.
Speaker 1: We read over a thousand papers. We summarized the evidence
Speaker 1: from adults across cultures, from children across cultures, from I
Speaker 1: mean just you know, lots and lots and lots of evidence.
Speaker 1: Three of my colleagues believed in universality before we started
Speaker 1: the process, and at the end of the process, we
Speaker 1: were so concerned that we wouldn't be able to come
Speaker 1: to consensus that we came up with contingency plans just
Speaker 1: in case what we would do because we were invited
Speaker 1: to write a so we were like, well, can we
Speaker 1: write two papers or can we write one paper and
Speaker 1: a dialogue or can we you know, like we were
Speaker 1: sort of anticipating that we would not be able to
Speaker 1: come to consensus, but we did come to consensus, so
Speaker 1: that there is no universality and that you know, and
Speaker 1: that papers freely available. It's was written for you know,
Speaker 1: it's called in a journal called Psychological Science in the
Speaker 1: Public Interest, so it's, uh, it's available freely from the
Speaker 1: Association for Psychological Science, or you can just go to
Speaker 1: my academic website. It's there for free. But my point
Speaker 1: is that, you know, Ralph and I disagree on some things,
Speaker 1: but we agree on other things because Ralph is somebody
Speaker 1: who responds to the data, you know, and we've even
Speaker 1: written you know, pieces together. But that's rare, you know,
Speaker 1: that's rare in general. So if somebody wants to have
Speaker 1: that discussion on your podcast, I think that would be fantastic,
Speaker 1: But I will tell you that. I mean, I'm sure
Speaker 1: Ralph would do it. But we talked to We've talked
Speaker 1: to you. We've got to get in you. I got
Speaker 1: to get ecmen in you. Well, he's very you know,
Speaker 1: he's he's he's not I don't know him, uh personally,
Speaker 1: but my understanding is he's not well and he's you know,
Speaker 1: he's aged. So I don't know. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: know that he would want to do it, but certainly
Speaker 1: if he wanted to do it, I'd be delighted to
Speaker 1: do it. There's so many implications of your research for
Speaker 1: so many swaths of the field that I work in now,
Speaker 1: almost to the degree that it's like if I go
Speaker 1: full in and I'm not full in on your theory,
Speaker 1: but if I if let's say I've become like a
Speaker 1: full disciple of your theory, that means that the way
Speaker 1: I need, like I talk to my colleagues like I need,
Speaker 1: I had to tell a lot of people to stop
Speaker 1: to change the way they think about it. So let's
Speaker 1: take two fields, evolutionary psychology and positive psychology, two fields
Speaker 1: that I work in. Okay, Now, in the field of
Speaker 1: evolutionary psychology, it's just everywhere evolutionary of the evolutionary of
Speaker 1: old function of sadness, you know, the modularity of the
Speaker 1: mating motive, you know, the emotion we feel when you
Speaker 1: know love. But then you know, in positive psychology there's
Speaker 1: a whole class of emotions called positive emotions, and that's like,
Speaker 1: you know, as though like that's they're absolutely these are
Speaker 1: the positive emotions. And then then these other ones are
Speaker 1: not the positive emotions. So everywhere I look, you know,
Speaker 1: once I look through the lens of your theory, I
Speaker 1: start to see things very, very differently. So can you
Speaker 1: explain a little bit what you mean when you say
Speaker 1: emotions are learned and the difference between emotions and affect,
Speaker 1: and then can you talk all about, you know, the
Speaker 1: implications for a lot of these ideas in positive psychology
Speaker 1: and evolutionary psychology. I know these are big questions I'm
Speaker 1: asking you do you do you mind? I don't mind,
Speaker 1: but I I guess what I would say, first of all,
Speaker 1: is I don't want disciples. You know, I just know
Speaker 1: that was a terrible word. That's not what it's say.
Speaker 1: You know, I just want people to pay attention to
Speaker 1: the evidence. That's it. Just pay attention to the evidence,
Speaker 1: and pay attention to what your experiments the way they're designed,
Speaker 1: allow you to discover and what they preclude you from
Speaker 1: discovering by virtue of how you've designed them and the
Speaker 1: assumptions that you've made. So here's what I would say.
Speaker 1: Your brain is always regulating your body, and your body
Speaker 1: is always sending sense data back to your brain. You
Speaker 1: don't experience the sense data that's coming from your body
Speaker 1: to your brain in high dimensional detail, because if you did,
Speaker 1: you would never pay attention to anything outside your skin ever. Again,
Speaker 1: you experience the interceptive environment of your body, the sense
Speaker 1: data from your body to your brain. Your brain's modeling
Speaker 1: of the state of your body as at effect. So
Speaker 1: affect is kind of feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling worked up,
Speaker 1: feeling calm, feeling like you have energy, feeling like really fatigued.
Speaker 1: Affect is You can think of it as like a
Speaker 1: barometer for your body budget for alyostasis is the technical term.
Speaker 1: So your brain is always regulating your body, your body
Speaker 1: is always sending sense data back to your brain. Your
Speaker 1: brain's always modeling the state of your body, and so
Speaker 1: affect is a property of consciousness. It's always with you.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's in the foreground, you're experiencing it, you know,
Speaker 1: front and center, because it's very intense. Sometimes it's in
Speaker 1: the background, but it's always there. Your brain is constantly
Speaker 1: striving to make sense, constantly making sense of sense data always,
Speaker 1: whether it's emotion or anything else, it's just you know,
Speaker 1: you are receiving sense data constantly through the sensory surfaces
Speaker 1: of your body, your eyes, your ears, your nose, and
Speaker 1: inside your body. There are sensory services all sending information
Speaker 1: to the brain. These are the causes. These are sorry,
Speaker 1: the consequences or the outcomes of some set of causes.
Speaker 1: Your brain doesn't know the causes. That's an inverse problem.
Speaker 1: And the way the brain solves the inverse problem is
Speaker 1: by drawing on past experience to make a guess at
Speaker 1: the cause, and it's doing it predictively. So when you're gain,
Speaker 1: when your brain guesses that the cause of a tug
Speaker 1: in your chest is anxiety because in the past, in
Speaker 1: this context, in this situation, that's what it was, then
Speaker 1: your brain's constructing anxiety. You experience it as anxiety. It's
Speaker 1: not a fable or whatever. It's That's how you experience
Speaker 1: that tug in your chest, but you can deconstruct that
Speaker 1: tug in your chest. But you can deconstruct the feeling
Speaker 1: of anxiety into just a mere tug in your chest.
Speaker 1: That's what mindfulness meditation teaches you to do. Right. So
Speaker 1: the analogy that I give often is that if I
Speaker 1: want to paint this glass, which is a three dimensional object,
Speaker 1: and I want to render it on a two dimensional surface,
Speaker 1: one thing I could do is I could just see
Speaker 1: the glass in its three dimensional glory and try to
Speaker 1: draw it on a two dimensional surface, and what you'll
Speaker 1: get is a pretty shitty looking two dimensional drawing. But
Speaker 1: if I take this glass and I try to parse
Speaker 1: it apart into little pieces of light, so I'm deconstructing
Speaker 1: it into pieces of light, and then I so I
Speaker 1: can see a little bit of blue and a little
Speaker 1: bit of green, and a little bit of silver and
Speaker 1: a little bit of white, and you and I take
Speaker 1: these pieces like this long strip of green here, and
Speaker 1: I render these pieces individually on the page. Then you
Speaker 1: get a pretty decent looking three dimensional object, except if
Speaker 1: you're me because I can't paint, then it still looks crappy.
Speaker 1: But the point is that you can teach yourself to
Speaker 1: deconstruct into data that's closer to the sense, data that's
Speaker 1: not as constructed. And you can do that even with
Speaker 1: your emotions. And I have to tell you, I just
Speaker 1: head spot. I'm recovering from spinal surgery. You can do
Speaker 1: it with pain. And in fact, Eric Garlands a scientists
Speaker 1: who has these fabulous studies showing that chronic pain can
Speaker 1: be deconstructed into discomfort and distress, so you can get
Speaker 1: rid of the distress and just experience the discomfort, and
Speaker 1: that alone reduces your opioid dependence if you're suffering from
Speaker 1: chronic pain. So, emotions are constructed the way every other
Speaker 1: perception is constructed, the way objects are constructed, the way
Speaker 1: thoughts are constructed. Everything you experience is constructed in part
Speaker 1: by what's going on outside your head and what's going
Speaker 1: on inside your head. And emotions are no different and
Speaker 1: the mechanisms are no different. So where does the learning from?
Speaker 1: Where does the learning come from? Like, where do these
Speaker 1: past experiences of emotion come from? Well, they come from
Speaker 1: other people labeling your labeling events for you as sad
Speaker 1: or angry, or as gegle or as you know ligot
Speaker 1: or whatever. The emotion categories are that are relevant to
Speaker 1: your cultural context. I get it. Thank you so much
Speaker 1: for that explanation. And I look, this is what I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: what's might be going on in the literature. It's a
Speaker 1: different way of thinking about the reading the mind in
Speaker 1: the eyes test. But you know, I'm really interested individual differences.
Speaker 1: And and it's undeniable that that some of those tests
Speaker 1: are predictive of well, less social awkwardness for sure, you know,
Speaker 1: but also it can predict lots of things, can predict psychopathology,
Speaker 1: it can predict But why does psychopathy? No, That's where
Speaker 1: I'm going with this. Why Yeah, this is what I'm
Speaker 1: about to say. This is what I'm about to say.
Speaker 1: So I think that based on your theory and I
Speaker 1: could see it, I think it makes it makes sense.
Speaker 1: Is that probably the individual difference is variable is your
Speaker 1: ability to to understand the socialization processs, the norm rule structure.
Speaker 1: You know, like like have you been able to learn
Speaker 1: in your society that that that's like when someone soone's
Speaker 1: like that, you don't say, why are you happy today?
Speaker 1: You know that that's like, so that's called that's like
Speaker 1: a taboo, a social taboo, and that people like an
Speaker 1: auto the spectrum because I have studied that topic. I
Speaker 1: study our diversity, and I am very interested in autism
Speaker 1: in particular. Is that you know a lot of them
Speaker 1: have a bias where they don't look people in the eyes,
Speaker 1: you know, and and that, and that seems to be
Speaker 1: a source of information. But but the question is, maybe
Speaker 1: with your theory, it's a source of information that allows
Speaker 1: you to negotiate with the cultural norms that have set forth.
Speaker 1: So we associate certain eye information with what we've been
Speaker 1: taught about. What that means is that what you would
Speaker 1: say something like what I would say. What I would
Speaker 1: say is that that gaze is very important in humans
Speaker 1: because that's how we regulate each other's attention. So if
Speaker 1: I look away and then I look back to you,
Speaker 1: you know, you're you're likely to look where I looked.
Speaker 1: And so part of what we do with gaye is
Speaker 1: we regulate. We sort of gesture to each other what
Speaker 1: is important and what is not important, What can you
Speaker 1: ignore as noise, and what do you have to pay
Speaker 1: attention to a signal? So it's partly directing learning in
Speaker 1: this very social way, but also there are other problems,
Speaker 1: you know, in autism people on the spectrum. They also
Speaker 1: their brains are not wired in a way to allow
Speaker 1: them to do abstraction very well. And if they can't
Speaker 1: do abstraction very well, they're very concrete. Not criticism, it's
Speaker 1: just observation. Then they can't use words as invitations to
Speaker 1: form abstract concepts. So they're going to have trouble using words.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, the way, and so that's why they can't.
Speaker 1: That's why they can't do the eye, the mind and
Speaker 1: the eyes tesk. You know, if you take a problem
Speaker 1: a deficit. Yeah, if you take I mean languages, it's
Speaker 1: not magic, okay. But if you take a three month old,
Speaker 1: a three month old and you say to that three
Speaker 1: month old, look, honey, this is a blurg, and then
Speaker 1: you put it down, and the blurg, you know, the pencil,
Speaker 1: you know, makes a noise like a beep. And then
Speaker 1: you say, look, honey, this is a blurg. You put
Speaker 1: it down, it makes a beep. And then you take
Speaker 1: this and you say, look, honey, this is a blurg.
Speaker 1: So what happens the baby expects this to beep. All
Speaker 1: these things they look different, they sound different, but they're
Speaker 1: functionally the same. Because that's what the word is telling
Speaker 1: the baby there's a function there that's the same it beeps.
Speaker 1: And that is a very very simple illustration of how
Speaker 1: words are really powerful for learning abstractions that in our
Speaker 1: big brains that can do all that compression that some
Speaker 1: non neurotypical brains have challenges with. So what I would
Speaker 1: say is that many of our treatments for psychopathology and
Speaker 1: many of our tests work predictively to some degree, but
Speaker 1: they don't work for the reasons that people think. And
Speaker 1: why does that matter? That's so interesting? That matters because
Speaker 1: we really need if we really want to prevent illness
Speaker 1: and we want to enhance thriving and so on, then
Speaker 1: we need to understand the mechanisms better. And that's what
Speaker 1: motivates me to do the work that I do. I'm
Speaker 1: just really data driven, actually so, and if you just
Speaker 1: follow the scientific method and you try to prove, you
Speaker 1: try to find places where you're wrong. Like you know,
Speaker 1: when I first started doing work on emotion, I would
Speaker 1: say to people, tell me what you think the best
Speaker 1: evidence is. Tell me what you think the best evidence
Speaker 1: is that there are innate circuits in the brain for emotion.
Speaker 1: And then I would go and I would read every
Speaker 1: single thing that they told me. In fact, we even
Speaker 1: invited Yakpangcept for a month to come to Boston College
Speaker 1: where I worked. He came and we for a month.
Speaker 1: Every day, we met every day for a month, we
Speaker 1: ran a seminar, and we went through every piece of
Speaker 1: evidence that he had. So I think all you have
Speaker 1: to do is be as skeptical about your own ideas
Speaker 1: as other people's ideas, and be open to every shred
Speaker 1: of data that's available, and look outside your own comfort
Speaker 1: zone to other fields which make other assumptions that you
Speaker 1: don't make. And if your hypotheses are robust, they will
Speaker 1: be sustained, and if they're not, they won't. And science,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know. I just I don't I'm
Speaker 1: sure you agree. I mean, I just feel like science
Speaker 1: is not about being right. It's about figuring out how
Speaker 1: things work. And it's okay to be wrong, but you know,
Speaker 1: if you're going to be wrong, I want to know
Speaker 1: if I'm wrong. You know, I really want to know
Speaker 1: if I'm wrong, because it matters. You don't you can't
Speaker 1: help people if you don't you know if you're if
Speaker 1: you don't know the veracity of what you're saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: I love I love everything that you're saying. It just
Speaker 1: this debate seems to be so reminiscent of so many
Speaker 1: debates and cognitive science that get to the level of
Speaker 1: is it a general learning mechanism or is it a
Speaker 1: domain specific system in the brain. It could be likened
Speaker 1: to the great language debate, you know, between Chomsky and
Speaker 1: and I actually take more on Arthur rieber point of view,
Speaker 1: which that was my whole dissertation. My whole cogniscience disertation
Speaker 1: was on implicit learning, and I tried to show that
Speaker 1: some of these domain general learning mechanisms could explain some
Speaker 1: of the uh intelligence that had been explained by more
Speaker 1: do mean specific views. It just seems to me like
Speaker 1: we keep repeating these these debates in the field of
Speaker 1: cogniscience all over and over, and you know, and and
Speaker 1: I see this as another one. You know, yeah, you
Speaker 1: you are one hundred and fifty percent correct. And what
Speaker 1: I so, what I think is really interesting is so
Speaker 1: what is it about the human mind, right of the
Speaker 1: human brain, that leads us always to these you know,
Speaker 1: like you know, so for example, if you look at
Speaker 1: Buddhist philosophy, right, yeah, people say, oh, it's very non essentialist. No, well,
Speaker 1: actually no it isn't. It's very non essentialist about the self.
Speaker 1: But the Abi Dharma states that this is you know what.
Speaker 1: The Dalai Lama follows that there are there are dharmas,
Speaker 1: and those dharmas are essences, and they are indivisible like
Speaker 1: they're they're the they are the essences of consciousness. And
Speaker 1: then along comes, you know, a couple of centuries later,
Speaker 1: this guy named Dharma Kiriti. He says, oh, no, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, dharmas are constructed by the human mind with
Speaker 1: human concepts. That's like the whole debate right there, just
Speaker 1: summed up in It's like, you know, and but look
Speaker 1: it's like a different culture, it's a different time. So
Speaker 1: this idea of domain general versus domain specific, or systems
Speaker 1: versus modules, or you know, essences or I guess essences
Speaker 1: versus whatever. You know, you get my point. There's a
Speaker 1: there's I do there's something. Yeah, it's it comes up
Speaker 1: again and again and again, which leads you to think, like,
Speaker 1: in a metascience kind of way, what is it about
Speaker 1: human explain and they you know, causal explanations that lead
Speaker 1: us always in the end to these two choices, and
Speaker 1: so I think it must reveal something about the way
Speaker 1: that we think, and maybe even something universal, because it keeps.
Speaker 1: It comes up in many domains, it comes up in
Speaker 1: many cultures, in many time you know, historical times. You know,
Speaker 1: there's something about the way that our brain processes information
Speaker 1: that leads us to these different ways of thinking about
Speaker 1: the world, even physics. You see it in physics. I
Speaker 1: mean it's just you know, Newtonian physics versus you know,
Speaker 1: quantum mechanics. It's just there's something really interesting there. Well,
Speaker 1: I'll bring this whole full circle and then i'll end
Speaker 1: the interview because I want to be respectful at your time.
Speaker 1: But to bring it all full circle. I think what
Speaker 1: it is is it goes back to your whole idea
Speaker 1: that the brain is a prediction machine. And I think
Speaker 1: it's a need for order. It's a need you know,
Speaker 1: when you can systematize things, when you can break things
Speaker 1: down in a do mean specific sort of ways, in
Speaker 1: discreet things, it actually reduces our psychological entropy. And and
Speaker 1: scientists are humans too, yeah, oh for sure. And in fact,
Speaker 1: there's there's actually a chapter about this, and I wrote
Speaker 1: about this actually and how motions are made where I
Speaker 1: didn't use the phrase psychological entropy because I don't think
Speaker 1: the paper have been published at that point. But I
Speaker 1: took a quote from I think it was Alan Lightman maybe,
Speaker 1: or there's some really great quote. I think it's Alan Lightman,
Speaker 1: the physicist Alan Lightman, who said scientists love to put
Speaker 1: things into boxes and tidy little boxes with little names,
Speaker 1: and it really makes us feel better. It makes us
Speaker 1: feel like we've learned something about the world. And you know,
Speaker 1: and again I would say it's the reduction of uncertainty.
Speaker 1: You would say psychological entropy, but I would say it's
Speaker 1: the reduction of uncertainty or ambiguity. But you know, so
Speaker 1: to me that may ontologies and concepts and categories like
Speaker 1: super interesting to study how people do it because the
Speaker 1: same foibles keep coming up again and again and again.
Speaker 1: And actually it's so funny that you bring this up,
Speaker 1: because I think this is what I'm going to write
Speaker 1: about when I retire finally, you know, like when I'm done,
Speaker 1: I'm going to write maybe some philosophy of psychology or
Speaker 1: history of psychology, sure where I'm going to address this
Speaker 1: issue directly because I think this is well I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say it's the issue, but I think it's a fascinating
Speaker 1: issue that and it's better to think of it as
Speaker 1: fascinating than depressing. It's like, geez, we've been having the
Speaker 1: same arguments for like four hundred years, you know, or
Speaker 1: like two thousand years. I mean, so I'd rather be
Speaker 1: fascinated than demoralize. Yeah, I'm still in the fascinated stage. Well.
Speaker 1: I found this a fascinating discussion today, doctor Barrett. Thank
Speaker 1: you for your revolution You're truly revolutionary research in our field,
Speaker 1: and for talking to me today on the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for the wonderful discussion.
Speaker 1: Enjoyed it. Thanks for listening to this episode of the
Speaker 1: Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way
Speaker 1: to something you heard, I encourage you to join in
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