Speaker 1: This is the Anxiety Bites podcast and I am your host,
Speaker 1: Jen Kirkman. Hi, everybody, Welcome to another episode of Anxiety Bites.
Speaker 1: I am your host Jen Kirkman. Today, my guest is
Speaker 1: one of the nation's leading neuroscientists, Joseph led. His groundbreaking
Speaker 1: research has deepened our understanding of the brain mechanisms that
Speaker 1: underlie emotion and memory, which has opened the door to
Speaker 1: new treatments and specifically has opened the door for behavioral
Speaker 1: therapies for children and adults with anxiety disorder. Joseph lad
Speaker 1: has been working on the link between emotion, memory and
Speaker 1: the brain since then. He's credited with putting the amygdala
Speaker 1: in the spotlight and making this previously esoteric subcortical brain
Speaker 1: region a house whole. Name. Lid founded the Emotional Brain Institute.
Speaker 1: He's also a professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and
Speaker 1: Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at ny U Langon Medical Center.
Speaker 1: In addition to articles in scholarly journals, he's the author
Speaker 1: of the books The Emotional Brain, The Mysterious Underpinnings of
Speaker 1: the Emotional Life, and Synaptic Self, How our brains become
Speaker 1: who we are. He also has a book called Anxious
Speaker 1: and his latest book, which we didn't really talk about.
Speaker 1: That's why it's not at the top of my brain
Speaker 1: right now. But oh my god, what's going on with this?
Speaker 1: I just tried to put his name into um Amazon
Speaker 1: and but it just didn't It just didn't go so well. UM.
Speaker 1: His latest book, though, is The Deep History of Ourselves,
Speaker 1: the four billion year Story of How we got conscious
Speaker 1: brains that came out in twenty and his book before
Speaker 1: that was called Anxious, Using the Brain to Understand and
Speaker 1: Treat Fear and Anxiety. Now Anxious is literally I mean,
Speaker 1: it's so dense and in the best of ways, it's
Speaker 1: just so packed with science and information. It's it's honestly
Speaker 1: like taking a home study college course. It's it's so informative. UM.
Speaker 1: And The Deep History of Ourselves, the four billion year
Speaker 1: Story of how we got conscious. We didn't talk about
Speaker 1: that book, but we skirted around some of the issues
Speaker 1: that he talks about in the book. So at one
Speaker 1: point in the interview, I asked him a question about
Speaker 1: you know, emotions and our soul and the concept of
Speaker 1: that and and uh. And I also asked him if
Speaker 1: if neuroscientists are control freaks who are really trying to
Speaker 1: just conquer figuring out the brain. And you know, he
Speaker 1: was kind of like, no, I mean, you've got to really,
Speaker 1: you know, the brain is part of this four billion
Speaker 1: year evolution, and as slow as it may seem to us,
Speaker 1: you know, we are evolving. So there really is no
Speaker 1: completely mastering knowing the brain, I guess. But it was
Speaker 1: interesting talking to Joseph because I've always known his work.
Speaker 1: I knew that he was someone who, um it was
Speaker 1: kind of a pioneers, as I just said in the
Speaker 1: intro and getting the word the amygdala into our lexicon,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people just casually say the amygdalasa
Speaker 1: fear center, and that's really an oversimplification that it's beyond
Speaker 1: and over simplifications just not true exactly. But um, he
Speaker 1: does explain how the amygdala has something to do with
Speaker 1: a fear response, but there's no such thing as like
Speaker 1: the fear center of the brain. And so I feel
Speaker 1: like our talk today when before I interviewed him, I
Speaker 1: thought it might be this very scientific talk and it was,
Speaker 1: but from my end, because I'm not a neuroscientists, I
Speaker 1: don't have the language quite that he does. I don't
Speaker 1: have I can't quite follow um every trail of questioning
Speaker 1: and talking with someone in the academic way. So as
Speaker 1: he's speaking in an academic way, I can follow the train.
Speaker 1: I understand what he's saying, but I'm not learned enough
Speaker 1: to speak it back. So I would kind of come
Speaker 1: up questions in the moment that we're more like, okay,
Speaker 1: so let's talk about you know, the emotion of that,
Speaker 1: and do think there's a human soul? And as I
Speaker 1: didn't expect the interview to go that way, and it
Speaker 1: was it was my limitations that that made me take
Speaker 1: it that way. But I think it's good because I
Speaker 1: am not a neuroscientist. I'm not here to be you know,
Speaker 1: one on one neuroscientist and neuroscientist. I'm here to be
Speaker 1: all of our voices, and so it may seem like
Speaker 1: I'm a dingdong and that's fine, but I also really
Speaker 1: enjoy the you know talk. You know, him kind of
Speaker 1: reminded me of talking to um Dr Lisa Felman Barrett,
Speaker 1: who I talked to in one of the earlier episodes,
Speaker 1: and their work is very similar and they have they
Speaker 1: agree mostly on on their discoveries and on things in
Speaker 1: the brain, because you know, even within the brain, there
Speaker 1: there is an exact science, but there are some moments
Speaker 1: here and there that that tend to hindle a little
Speaker 1: bit on a philosophy. And there is this interesting intersection
Speaker 1: that I've never really dug too deeply into with either
Speaker 1: of these guests between um, I think, between philosophy and neuroscience,
Speaker 1: where there are just some things that are a thousand
Speaker 1: percent proven, but the way you look at it or
Speaker 1: interpret it or put a narrative to it is kind
Speaker 1: of up to your own personal philosophy, if that makes
Speaker 1: any sense. And so with Dr Lisa Film and Barrett,
Speaker 1: you know, I think she's very like no bones about it, like,
Speaker 1: here's how the brain works when you're having a panic attack.
Speaker 1: This is what's going on in your brain. And with
Speaker 1: Joseph Lead, it's the same science and it's the same um. Yes,
Speaker 1: this is coming from our brain and our nervous system,
Speaker 1: and our brain is processing. But he brings it more
Speaker 1: to talk about emotions, and so in his work he's
Speaker 1: used the brain to understand our emotions, and I think
Speaker 1: in other neuroscientists work it's like using the brain to
Speaker 1: understand anxious response. And so I didn't get too deeply
Speaker 1: into emotions with Joseph lad And and part of me
Speaker 1: regrets it because I really didn't. I don't think I
Speaker 1: really quite thought to frame the interview that way, um,
Speaker 1: because I first wanted to understand the brain concepts that
Speaker 1: he was talking about. But I did find it fascinating
Speaker 1: that in his work that he discovered what he was
Speaker 1: famous for is saying, you know, we can study rats
Speaker 1: all we want, and we can stimulate them and then
Speaker 1: take things away from them and watch them get addicted
Speaker 1: or watch them get anxious, but we cannot determine human
Speaker 1: feelings from that because these an almos just they do
Speaker 1: not have feelings. And I know that it is very
Speaker 1: controversial to all of you out there, Like my cat
Speaker 1: definitely has feelings, and I can tell my cats thinking something,
Speaker 1: and listen, I I say the same thing about animals,
Speaker 1: and I'm all for projecting our feelings onto animals. But um,
Speaker 1: I think you get at what he was saying scientifically,
Speaker 1: is that like it's it's sort of that problem we
Speaker 1: run into, right if any of you out there, like myself,
Speaker 1: have been medicated for anxiety or depression. When you talk
Speaker 1: to a doctor about it, who only has, you know,
Speaker 1: a half hour with you to explain all of this
Speaker 1: in very very simplified layman's terms. They go into their
Speaker 1: spiel about we're just like cave in and we have
Speaker 1: these leftover responses and we're having panic attacks and this
Speaker 1: medicine helps blah blah blah blah blah. And you know,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, like the medicine definitely
Speaker 1: can help with some of the physical response and you know,
Speaker 1: getting more serotonin flowing in our brain and all of that,
Speaker 1: but you would still have to account for the fact
Speaker 1: that you're human being with emotions that are based on
Speaker 1: memories and that are based on habits and patterns. And
Speaker 1: that gets into my original talk with my first guest,
Speaker 1: Dr jud Bruger, who you know, has really approached looking
Speaker 1: at anxiety and panic as a habit, and so that's
Speaker 1: where it's always going to be, Like there is no
Speaker 1: magic pill for anything, you know. Taking it back to
Speaker 1: my conversation um that I had on the episode about
Speaker 1: ketamine invasions, you know, it's like, there are things that
Speaker 1: can help us get to a point where we are
Speaker 1: maybe relaxed enough or out of the deep despair of
Speaker 1: depression enough to then do something cognitive or emotional about
Speaker 1: our behaviors. Um but there isn't a magic pill in
Speaker 1: that sense, and so a lot of these animal studies
Speaker 1: they don't get to the heart of what somebody needs
Speaker 1: who's having um any anxiety, panic, depression, or just you know,
Speaker 1: being alive and being having emotions about that. And so
Speaker 1: I really think it's fascinating that at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, all of our brains process the same way basically,
Speaker 1: but it's our memories and our life experience that makes
Speaker 1: the brains say, oh, I'm in this situation again, whether
Speaker 1: or not it is, you know, a lot of times
Speaker 1: again well, especially in terms of panic, we think we're
Speaker 1: in a dangerous situation where we're not, and that could
Speaker 1: be based on our memories, you know. But so it's
Speaker 1: a little ethereal like, but I think our conversation will
Speaker 1: make sense. And he's he's so fun and so pleasant.
Speaker 1: I was so honored that he came on the show.
Speaker 1: And my favorite part is that he's in a band
Speaker 1: called the Amygdaloids, and we talked a little bit about that.
Speaker 1: But um, I hope you get a lot out of
Speaker 1: our conversation and I'll just let you enjoy my conversation
Speaker 1: with neuroscientist Joseph le Do. Just to start off for fun,
Speaker 1: I heard you have a band called the Amygdala's and
Speaker 1: I see the guitar, Oh, the mag Deloyd's. Tell me
Speaker 1: about that band. Well, we were, you know, in UH
Speaker 1: around two thousand five or so. I met a colleague
Speaker 1: here at n y U who had also written books
Speaker 1: for the general public, and so we had dinner together
Speaker 1: and we discovered we both have Stratocaster Fender Stratocaster guitars
Speaker 1: and that you know, like classic rock and roll, and
Speaker 1: so we got together me jam played some plastic rock
Speaker 1: and had a good time UM. And eventually a young
Speaker 1: post doc arrived and UH and didn't I didn y U.
Speaker 1: And she came to a party, probably a Christmas party
Speaker 1: or something we were playing at UH, and she said, well,
Speaker 1: I played drums, so she joined the band. And and
Speaker 1: then November four, November first, two thousand and six. I
Speaker 1: remember the date very clear because it was a big
Speaker 1: moment in my life. We got invited. I got invited
Speaker 1: to give a lecture at something called the Secret Science
Speaker 1: Club in Brooklyn. And this is a kind of you know,
Speaker 1: local Park Slope um group that would just be interested
Speaker 1: in science and they would have people come in and talk.
Speaker 1: And so they said, well and we'll have some entertainment.
Speaker 1: After that said I'll bring the entertainment. So right right
Speaker 1: as that was happening, the drummer Daniella Schiller Um, who
Speaker 1: had a research assistant named Nina Curly, and the guitar
Speaker 1: player was Tyler voc Well, Nina Um turned out to
Speaker 1: be a bass player, so she joined the group. So
Speaker 1: we you know, we did our uh let me clarify.
Speaker 1: So the day right before the show happened, we were
Speaker 1: written up before anything happened in the Long Island newspaper
Speaker 1: called I forget what it's called, but anyway, it was
Speaker 1: they called it. They described our show as heavy mental,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I love it, and so we named
Speaker 1: our first album to that. But so we played. We
Speaker 1: had a kind of set list that was all about
Speaker 1: classic rock songs about mind and brain, like Jimmy Hendricks's
Speaker 1: Many Depression or Mother's Little Helper from the Rolling Stones
Speaker 1: nine Nervous Break, all that kind of sting. A lot
Speaker 1: of rock songs are about mind and brain and mild
Speaker 1: disorders anyway, so we had those, and then I wrote
Speaker 1: a couple of songs for the gig and the crowd
Speaker 1: really liked those, so I started writing more and more
Speaker 1: and we ended up by our first album. We called
Speaker 1: it Heavy Mental uh, and we ended up probably with
Speaker 1: five of Nigda Lloyd's albums or so, and then I
Speaker 1: have two or three, maybe four others that I've done
Speaker 1: without the Amigna lords. So that is very cool. And
Speaker 1: do you do any originals? They're all originals. They're all
Speaker 1: originals enough to do covers. We do originals. That's great,
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. Well, I'm going to start with
Speaker 1: tell me why, for better or for worse, you are
Speaker 1: known as the reason we know what the amygdala is.
Speaker 1: And if you can tell us what it is, and
Speaker 1: you know, as I said, be as smart as you
Speaker 1: want to be, I'll help you dumb it down if
Speaker 1: you need to. Okay, so here we go. Um Well,
Speaker 1: I got interested in the question of how the brain
Speaker 1: makes emotions in the nineties seventies when I was a
Speaker 1: graduate student studying split brain patients. These are people knew
Speaker 1: the two halves of the brain have been separated, the
Speaker 1: connections have been separated to prevent seizures from spreading around
Speaker 1: in the brain. It was a treatment for epilepsy and
Speaker 1: people who were without any other hope of having a
Speaker 1: treatment because the medications back then weren't so hot. Well,
Speaker 1: it's not done very often anymore because the medications have improved.
Speaker 1: The most important thing about these people is when you
Speaker 1: cut the connections between the left hemisphere in the right hemisphere,
Speaker 1: You've got language in the left hemisphere. So when you
Speaker 1: talk to the person, that's who's responded. The right hemisphere
Speaker 1: can't talk, but it can get You can put a
Speaker 1: stimulus over there by presenting it to the left side
Speaker 1: of visual space that goes to the right hemisphere. And
Speaker 1: so the classic findings from the nineteen sixties by my mentor,
Speaker 1: who's Mike Santaga, showed that, you know, the right hemisphere
Speaker 1: could detect and respond to stimuli that you present to it,
Speaker 1: even though it couldn't talk about it. It was, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of awaken, alive and responsive, so it had some
Speaker 1: kind of sentience in a sense. But the left hemisphere
Speaker 1: seemed to be the one that was like in charge
Speaker 1: and conscious and could talk to you and tell you
Speaker 1: about its life and all of that. So that was
Speaker 1: kind of the key flanning. So you for example, they
Speaker 1: would put an apple picture of an apple in the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere and then put the left hand into a bag,
Speaker 1: and you know, it would feel around and to pull
Speaker 1: out the apple instead of banana or you know, what
Speaker 1: to look for. It didn't. It knew what to look
Speaker 1: for on the perceptual stimulus that have been put into
Speaker 1: the right hemisphere, so left hand could pull it up.
Speaker 1: So it was definitely awakened, responsive and all of that.
Speaker 1: But I can ask one quick thing, Uh, the reason
Speaker 1: it knew what an apple felt like was not just
Speaker 1: from the picture, but from memories that it had in
Speaker 1: life of Okay, we aren't born with knowing what apples
Speaker 1: are or anything else. You know, you gotta learn that stuff.
Speaker 1: And Stuart as a semantic memory. So anyway, this was
Speaker 1: kind of like what the early work was on. And
Speaker 1: by the time I came along, I was at a
Speaker 1: graduate student at Stony Brook on on Long Island, that's
Speaker 1: where Mike was at the time, and we had a
Speaker 1: new group of patients and these patients were operated on
Speaker 1: at Dartmouth Medical School. So we cooked up a kind
Speaker 1: of camper trailer behind a orange punkin orange forward van
Speaker 1: and we drive it up to New England and study
Speaker 1: these patients that were being operated on up there. And
Speaker 1: we had this one patient who seemed really, really unusual.
Speaker 1: So what we found was that in addition to being
Speaker 1: able to speak out of the left hemisphere, it could
Speaker 1: read in the right hemisphere. Couldn't talk out of the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere, but he could read. So that allowed us
Speaker 1: to put complicated questions into the right hemisphere, like who
Speaker 1: are you? And then we had a bunch of scrabble
Speaker 1: letters out there and the left hand would come out
Speaker 1: and they spelled Paul p u h. That was his name.
Speaker 1: So that right hemisphere, even though it couldn't talk, I
Speaker 1: knew who he was. When we asked it what you
Speaker 1: want to do when you grow up, the response was, well,
Speaker 1: I want to be a race car driver. And the
Speaker 1: left hemisphere, on the other hand, would say it wanted
Speaker 1: to be a draftsman when you would talk to it.
Speaker 1: So you've got a sense of self in the right hemisphere,
Speaker 1: you've got a vision of the future. You know, these
Speaker 1: are like the hallmarks of consciousness, self identity, and future thought.
Speaker 1: So this was the first evidence that you could have,
Speaker 1: you know, literally two minds in one brain like that,
Speaker 1: and um, it was. It was fascinating. But one of
Speaker 1: the one of the things we discovered is that when
Speaker 1: we would put a stimulus into the right hemisphere and
Speaker 1: asked the left hemisphere, why did you do that? So
Speaker 1: like if we told if we put the word stand
Speaker 1: in the right hemisphere, the guy would stand up. So
Speaker 1: he said, why did you do that? Because left hemisphere
Speaker 1: didn't know why he stood up because only the right
Speaker 1: hemisphere saw the stimulus. He said, well, I needed to stretch.
Speaker 1: And if if we had him, you know, if we
Speaker 1: said scratch and so he's or itch or something, he
Speaker 1: could scratch his hand. He said, why did you do that? Well,
Speaker 1: I had a niche. Or if we made him laugh
Speaker 1: and he said laugh, he would la, why do you laugh?
Speaker 1: You guys are really funny. So the left hemisphere was
Speaker 1: generating a narrative to make his behavior makes sense. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, this is incredible. Let me just recap. I
Speaker 1: just want to dumb it down. So the reason actually
Speaker 1: that the guy stood and scratched and laughed was because
Speaker 1: you told him too. But uh so let me ask you.
Speaker 1: So I knew you were going to say this, like
Speaker 1: he created the narrative. Well, if I stood, I obviously
Speaker 1: needed to stretch. Is there anywhere in that brain that
Speaker 1: he was aware that you wrote stand Like, it's not
Speaker 1: like a lie, It's like he really thinks he had
Speaker 1: to stretch. Yes, And this, you know, this was so
Speaker 1: you know, when we see these patients at night after
Speaker 1: the day's work, we'd go to a bar and you know,
Speaker 1: have a bite to eat and have a few drinks
Speaker 1: and talk about the day's events. And you know what
Speaker 1: we came up with was, well, this isn't just like
Speaker 1: a pathology of the brain. This is what we do
Speaker 1: all the time. Our brain is constantly generating behaviors unconsciously,
Speaker 1: and in fact, most of our behaviors controlled unconsciously. But
Speaker 1: you know, we all believe free will. So it's disturbing.
Speaker 1: It creates cognitive dissonance to think that you aren't controlling
Speaker 1: your own behavior. So if you see yourself behaving in
Speaker 1: a way that you didn't program, you know, you kind
Speaker 1: of generate a narrative to make it all makes sense.
Speaker 1: Are if you you know, if you were having an
Speaker 1: argument with your partner and you say something really awful, well,
Speaker 1: then you justify because you know my partners being awful,
Speaker 1: so that it doesn't matter, you know. And this is
Speaker 1: what we do all the time. We renarrate our experiences.
Speaker 1: We create these narratives and renarrate constantly. And that's what
Speaker 1: having a sense of self is is a narration about
Speaker 1: who we are. And it's just a constantly moving target.
Speaker 1: And one of the things we concluded was, well, maybe
Speaker 1: emotion systems would be the systems that are generating a
Speaker 1: lot of these unconsciously controlled behaviors. Emotion, emotion, So um,
Speaker 1: you know, I said, well that's what I want to study.
Speaker 1: When I leave your lave, I'm gonna go study emotions.
Speaker 1: And the only way to do that really was to
Speaker 1: study animals, um, not not to understand their emotions per se,
Speaker 1: but to understand these behaviors and the circuits in the
Speaker 1: brain that might be controlling these behaviors. So, as a
Speaker 1: long way of telling you what you asked about, what
Speaker 1: I did was I adopted a procedure that was well
Speaker 1: known and well characterized from behaviorist times and psychology, where
Speaker 1: they created all kinds of Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning tests
Speaker 1: to study animal behavior. While I use this Pavlovian fear
Speaker 1: conditioning task, which was you know, kind of stock in
Speaker 1: trade of the field. UM. And the reason it seems
Speaker 1: so good is because you could take a stimulus that
Speaker 1: had no meaning for the animal or rat, give it
Speaker 1: one stimulus, one tone, for example, pair that with a
Speaker 1: mild electric shock one time, and then every time later
Speaker 1: that the red herd that stimulus, it would freeze, and
Speaker 1: blood pressure and heart rate to go up, stress hormones
Speaker 1: would be released, all the same things that would happen
Speaker 1: in a human. So even though humans have different things
Speaker 1: that are threatening them and upsetting them, the way the
Speaker 1: brain responds is kind of similar in a rat in
Speaker 1: a human. And you were the us to do the
Speaker 1: rap thing, right, I know you're quite famous. Well, uh,
Speaker 1: I was the first to implicate the amygdala. Well, there
Speaker 1: was another guy working at the same time where there
Speaker 1: were two of us at the time, actually three, I
Speaker 1: guess you could say. When there was it was a
Speaker 1: trio that The first Society Neuroscience meeting where I presented
Speaker 1: any and that's the big meeting for neuroscientists, UM where
Speaker 1: I presented any of this stuff on the amygdala was
Speaker 1: in I don't on nineteen eighty seven or something like
Speaker 1: the eighties, six, eight seven, And there were two other
Speaker 1: guys and because they put all the relevant posters together
Speaker 1: there Mike Davis was on this side, Bruce Calp was
Speaker 1: on this side, and we're kind of looking at each other.
Speaker 1: I thought I was the only one doing this, you know,
Speaker 1: and so um, we kind of became friends and colleagues
Speaker 1: and competitors and all that stuff. Um, but we kind
Speaker 1: of set the tone of the field because we were
Speaker 1: all doing Pavlovian conditioning. We're all interested in the amygdala.
Speaker 1: And the reason you said, well you were, you're responsible
Speaker 1: of putting this out in the poll. Like I wrote
Speaker 1: a book called The Emotional Brain in nine that summarized
Speaker 1: all of our work that was going all the work
Speaker 1: was being done at the time on this basically US three.
Speaker 1: And then some other people were coming in at that time.
Speaker 1: And so I got the reputation for having, um, you know,
Speaker 1: at least put this on the map in a sense.
Speaker 1: Wasn't that I discovered the amygdala. People have known about
Speaker 1: the amygdala and you know, various things for a long time,
Speaker 1: but the circuitry how the stimulus gets there and gets
Speaker 1: out was unknown, and that's what we contributed and the
Speaker 1: emotional part two, because I know that I had read
Speaker 1: that in the past, um, you know, like in the seventies. Um,
Speaker 1: And this is where it gets like I understand it,
Speaker 1: but it's hard to say, like emotion was being thought
Speaker 1: of like a subjective conscious experience, and like psychology is
Speaker 1: perception and memory, and you could learn a lot about
Speaker 1: the way the brain processes by doing like animal experiments,
Speaker 1: but there's more to it because we're not animal. But
Speaker 1: then there's an argument about, um, what consciousness is and
Speaker 1: isn't and what creates it? Right? Is that kind of
Speaker 1: so let me rephrase you now, yeah, yeah, yeah, please
Speaker 1: correct the podcaster because I don't know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: but I think I get it. Well. You know, we
Speaker 1: had this procedure called fear conditioning. So if you're if
Speaker 1: you're doing fear conditioning, that implies your conditioning the state
Speaker 1: of fear. So then the question is what is the
Speaker 1: state of fear? And all these people who had been
Speaker 1: using this procedure had a behaviorist background in one way
Speaker 1: or another. Behaviorist, of course, eliminated all subjective experience in psychology.
Speaker 1: There was no they weren't No one was allowed to
Speaker 1: talk about consciousness for decades, from the nineteen fifteen to
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty or maybe even later. You know, it's like
Speaker 1: everything was shut down. There's just about behavior um and
Speaker 1: so fear was not a subject of experience for behaviors.
Speaker 1: It was a relationship between a dangerous stimulus and a response.
Speaker 1: So then some behaviors said, well, in the brain, there
Speaker 1: must be something that is connecting that that stimulus in
Speaker 1: that response, and so there must be a circuit, and
Speaker 1: that circuit became a fear circuit, because fear would be
Speaker 1: what would connect the stimulus in the response. Now, from
Speaker 1: my splip brain work, going back, the idea that I
Speaker 1: had at the very beginning and that I have had
Speaker 1: ever since, although it wasn't as clear as I could
Speaker 1: have been, is that the conscious experience of an emotion,
Speaker 1: or of any kind of conscious experience is a cognitive
Speaker 1: interpretation of the situation that we're in. It's not an
Speaker 1: innate state. But the idea that you have a fierce
Speaker 1: circuit that we've inherited from our animal ancestors, as Darwin
Speaker 1: gave us. That gave Darwin gave us that idea. Darwin
Speaker 1: was a great biologist, but it's been said he was
Speaker 1: not so hot a psychologist, but he paved the way
Speaker 1: and made the psychology of emotion this tradition of having
Speaker 1: inherited emotions from animals. Now really all you could see
Speaker 1: in an animal, whether you're Darwin or me or anybody else,
Speaker 1: all you can see is their behavior. So from imagine
Speaker 1: you see a dog that's been hit by a car
Speaker 1: and it's riding on the side of the road and screaming,
Speaker 1: and of course you project feelings onto that the guy.
Speaker 1: The dog is in pain. He's yes, the dog is
Speaker 1: in pain, but you're not seeing the dog's pain. All
Speaker 1: You're seeing his reflexes. You know, all this shaking and crying.
Speaker 1: Those are just innate responses. But that is not what
Speaker 1: reveals the essence of pain or fear or anything else.
Speaker 1: It reveals It reveals these innate responses. Yea. So here's
Speaker 1: the deal. So if if the amygdala was literally a
Speaker 1: fear center, as many people have thought, and as I
Speaker 1: was introduced over the decades as having discovered the amygdala
Speaker 1: makes us feel fear, and you know, for years I
Speaker 1: just dismissed it. It doesn't matter. I'm just doing the research.
Speaker 1: But eventually it started to bother. But let's say, given
Speaker 1: this idea that the amygdalus of fear center. Think about this,
Speaker 1: So if I present a stimulus to you subliminally, that
Speaker 1: means you don't know what the stimulus is, but it
Speaker 1: goes into your brain. And if it's a picture, say
Speaker 1: of a snake or something, it will go to your brain.
Speaker 1: Your amygdala will be activated because we can image your
Speaker 1: brain while and you're looking at this, and you see
Speaker 1: your your amygdala is activated, your heart beat is is increased,
Speaker 1: your palms are sweating, and so forth. But you don't
Speaker 1: feel fear. You don't even know the stimulus is there.
Speaker 1: And you say, well, do you feel anything that you
Speaker 1: say no? Did you say anything? You say no. So
Speaker 1: the amygdala is responding to danger nonconsciously. There's no subjective
Speaker 1: fear in the amygdala that is connecting the stimulus to
Speaker 1: the response. So we when we're afraid, Let's say we're
Speaker 1: running from danger and running from a bear face William
Speaker 1: James idea, you're running from a bear. Um, So are
Speaker 1: you running from the bear because you're afraid or is
Speaker 1: there some other reason? So the fact is because we
Speaker 1: expect that when we're running from a bear it's because
Speaker 1: we're afraid. That's what we come to think about, because
Speaker 1: we've been told that all our life that you know,
Speaker 1: fear is the reason we do that. Um. But really,
Speaker 1: what is going on in your brain is that there's
Speaker 1: a stimulus that goes into your brain. It goes to
Speaker 1: the amygdala and causes the behavioral responses like freezing and
Speaker 1: so forth and running away, But it goes to your
Speaker 1: cerebral cortex, in fact, to your prefrontal cortex, and that's
Speaker 1: where you construct this cognitive interpretation of the situation. Given
Speaker 1: that you're unconsciously triggered to run away because the amygdal
Speaker 1: is activated, just like to splip brain patient. You know
Speaker 1: you you respond automatically, and then you cognitively interpret that as, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm afraid because you have in your brain what's called schema.
Speaker 1: These are like memories, collections of memories about topics. You
Speaker 1: have a schema about who you are, everything you know
Speaker 1: about yourself, and all the good stuff you like about
Speaker 1: yourself and stuff you hate about yourself, stuff you'd rather
Speaker 1: be than who you are, blah blah blah, everything you
Speaker 1: know about yourself. Same thing with emotions fear. You have
Speaker 1: a fear schema, everything about danger and fear and all
Speaker 1: that's bundle into that and all you need is a
Speaker 1: little piece of information like Okay, there's a snake at
Speaker 1: my feet and bound. That schema is patterned, completed, and
Speaker 1: that is presented into your conscious mind as fear. So
Speaker 1: that's why you feel fear, because you have cognitively conveyed
Speaker 1: that information into your con is mine. So every conscious
Speaker 1: experience until the last micro second of it becoming conscious
Speaker 1: is unconscious. It's a cognitive stream of information, and sometimes
Speaker 1: that stream crosses the finish line and makes you conscious,
Speaker 1: and other times it doesn't. So I guess my question is,
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean just because you suddenly have your first
Speaker 1: conscious thought about what the stimulus represents, it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that's right either. Is that correct? It doesn't mean it's right,
Speaker 1: I mean, but what it means is you know, if
Speaker 1: you have that feeling, that is your feeling. Nobody can
Speaker 1: tell you you didn't have that right, it's it's your
Speaker 1: it's incorrigible. You may be wrong to have that feeling,
Speaker 1: and in some social morals you know, ethical sense of something,
Speaker 1: But if that's what you felt, that's what you felt.
Speaker 1: There's no going back on that. And do you mean
Speaker 1: feeling by sensation or do you mean emotional feeling? No
Speaker 1: emotional feelings. So if you feel fear and your partner says, oh,
Speaker 1: you're you're not afraid, you angry, you know, or something like, um,
Speaker 1: they don't know what's what you felt? Right, maybe you
Speaker 1: should have been angry, but are jealous or you know whatever.
Speaker 1: But what you felt is what you felt. And so
Speaker 1: that's why I think this. You know this, You have
Speaker 1: this preconscious processing and that depending on how the schema
Speaker 1: are activated and and sort of pattern completed into an experience,
Speaker 1: is what you feel. And then that can change in
Speaker 1: the microsecond again, you know, because emotions are dynamic, they
Speaker 1: don't it's not just like you're locked in. As the
Speaker 1: situation changes, you have to reevaluate and you re experience
Speaker 1: something new. The fear goes from anger to jealousy. And
Speaker 1: we'll continue the interview on the flip side of a
Speaker 1: quick message from our sponsors. So if a magdala isn't
Speaker 1: the fear center, it's just a part of it. Well,
Speaker 1: so that the brain doesn't really have psychological centers in
Speaker 1: the first place, right, So, and anything is a product
Speaker 1: of a complex circuit that spans all kinds of brain areas.
Speaker 1: So you know, you start at the eye, and that's
Speaker 1: going to go into the brain and go to the cortex,
Speaker 1: and it's going to go to the amygdala, and then
Speaker 1: we'll go to the prefinal cortex and go all over.
Speaker 1: And when let's say, okay, let's just take simplify, we've
Speaker 1: got a stimulus that's going to the amygdala causing you
Speaker 1: to uh, your arousal to kick in and you're gonna
Speaker 1: now have your panic attack. Is cognitively you've interpreted that
Speaker 1: through the prefonal cortex. That's what's going on, um. But
Speaker 1: the fact that the arousal is in your brain activating
Speaker 1: circuits that amplify brain activity and attention, and your brain
Speaker 1: arousal uh through circuits that are flooding your cerebral cortex
Speaker 1: with nora ephron and seratonin and dopamine and all that.
Speaker 1: So you're you're consciously being very alert now. So there's
Speaker 1: a feedback between the behavioral output there and you know
Speaker 1: what the amygdala is doing and what the cortex is doing,
Speaker 1: so they're not completely different. But the content of the emotion,
Speaker 1: what the emotion is not determined by that low level
Speaker 1: information from the amygdala. That's that's kind of like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you go into a restaurant in Park Slope and it's
Speaker 1: the music is too loud. Maybe more like Manhattan, but whatever,
Speaker 1: so that music is too loud. I'm in Williamsburg, so
Speaker 1: it's always too loud. It's like the New Vegas. It's
Speaker 1: always something that's streets. It's New York's Bourbon streets. Anyway,
Speaker 1: you go into a bar restaurant and the music is
Speaker 1: too loud, and so you know you're a certain aids,
Speaker 1: so you ask the way to to turn it down,
Speaker 1: and they turn it down. It's the same annoying heavy
Speaker 1: metal song. It's just less annoying when you've turned down
Speaker 1: the volume. And so the same thing with emotions. I
Speaker 1: think that the arousal and so forth doesn't tell you
Speaker 1: what you're experiencing. It just tells you that you know
Speaker 1: it's it's unpleased. You know it's it's too much, and
Speaker 1: so you can turn it down through meditation, you can
Speaker 1: through whatever you know, if you can get that drugs,
Speaker 1: whatever you can do, you you turn that down and
Speaker 1: then it's less annoying. It's it's less irritating to have
Speaker 1: those kinds of emotions. So, you know the problem with
Speaker 1: medications though, is that imagine how these drugs are developed.
Speaker 1: You have a drug company that has a bunch of
Speaker 1: rats or mice, and they put them through these behavioral
Speaker 1: tests like Pablovian fear conditioning or you know, barious avoidance
Speaker 1: tests and so forth, and they find a drug that
Speaker 1: makes the animal less timid, in other words, are explored toward.
Speaker 1: And so the assumption is what we inherited fear from
Speaker 1: rats for, not rats, for from our our mammalian ancestors. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so if a rat is freezing less when it
Speaker 1: has the drug, it's because it's less afraid or less anxious. Therefore,
Speaker 1: when we give the drug to a human, they should
Speaker 1: be less afraid, less ancious. But what you find is
Speaker 1: instead is that the person with social anxiety on the
Speaker 1: medication finds it a little easier to go to the party.
Speaker 1: They're a little less timid, little less avoidant. But when
Speaker 1: they get to the party, they're still, you know, very
Speaker 1: kind of anxious. So if the psychiatrist had said okay,
Speaker 1: instead of saying, this is a medication that will make
Speaker 1: you less anxious. If the psychiatrist it's a this is
Speaker 1: a medication that will um attack your symptoms of arousal
Speaker 1: and avoidance and so forth, it will be easier to
Speaker 1: go to the party and then while there, if you
Speaker 1: know that all this arousal and stuff is part of
Speaker 1: just the the underlying machinery of of your problem, you
Speaker 1: can then use that knowledge and use the medication to
Speaker 1: reduce your arouse a little bit, and use that knowledge
Speaker 1: to then go in, spend a few minutes at the party.
Speaker 1: If it's too much, step out for a little while,
Speaker 1: if you smoke or have a smoke, or go to
Speaker 1: the bathroom, do something, get out, and then go back
Speaker 1: in and you'll be able to um. You'll find that
Speaker 1: this allows you to cope with your situation. You've been
Speaker 1: anxious all your life, You're probably always going to be
Speaker 1: somewhat anxious. But if you can bring these symptoms, these
Speaker 1: physiological and behavioral symptoms under control, it's gonna be less
Speaker 1: of a problem for you. So when you put rats
Speaker 1: and mice through these things, what you're doing is activating
Speaker 1: their migdal and other subcortical circuits to control these behaviors.
Speaker 1: But if a drug is doing that and not changing
Speaker 1: your subjective experience. It's not doing what you want. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not doing everything you want. Because if you don't
Speaker 1: feel subductively better at the end of therapy, it didn't
Speaker 1: work if you're still fearful and anxious. But if you
Speaker 1: know that fear and anxiety is not the body stuff,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's part of it. It's gonna be there,
Speaker 1: like the heavy metal music when you turn the volume
Speaker 1: that it's still going to be there, but it's gonna
Speaker 1: You're gonna be better able to cope with the situation
Speaker 1: if you turn the volume down through meditation or drugs
Speaker 1: or whatever. But the drugs can't help the kind of
Speaker 1: subjective emotional part where you show up at the party,
Speaker 1: you're having the same stimulus and you might be like, oh,
Speaker 1: why aren't I better? I thought this was supposed to
Speaker 1: not make me hate this? So is that where the
Speaker 1: problem comes in is like they're judging their experience and
Speaker 1: what therapy isn't teaching is like you're going to still
Speaker 1: feel the same way, but you're just going to have
Speaker 1: the bandwidth two if you choose to talk to yourself differently,
Speaker 1: or is that kind of it that's exactly right, because
Speaker 1: you know, it's like you're taking anxiet idea and putting
Speaker 1: it into one package, as if there's a medication that's gonna,
Speaker 1: you know, make that whole package better. And the medications
Speaker 1: are designed to change animal behavior, so they're not gonna necessary.
Speaker 1: How would they possibly change a subjective experience? How could
Speaker 1: you take a pill? It goes into your digestive system,
Speaker 1: it's broken down, enters your bloodstream, goes to every part
Speaker 1: of your body, miraculously finds the exact right part of
Speaker 1: the brain, and all of a sudden you're better Like that.
Speaker 1: It's impossible. God, Well, okay, so go with me here
Speaker 1: in my terrible analogy. But I do want to talk
Speaker 1: about your I'm not gonna say dislike, but where you
Speaker 1: think neuroscience helps a little more than psychiatry with this stuff.
Speaker 1: But go with my terrible example. So I have been
Speaker 1: trying to get every guest to be on my side
Speaker 1: about this, but but I'm probably wrong, and that's why
Speaker 1: most of them haven't been. But I'll I'll tell you
Speaker 1: where I'm going in a second. But when I first
Speaker 1: first first first went to therapy, I don't know I
Speaker 1: was to whatever. I. I had had undiagnosed panic attacks
Speaker 1: and anxiety for years and when I went what she
Speaker 1: said at the time was mind blowing. Now I found
Speaker 1: a very annoying, but I got the old your adrenaline
Speaker 1: is going your fear or whatever you want to say.
Speaker 1: She the fear the thing everything that you guys are
Speaker 1: doing to the rats, you know, stimulating them and they're freezing.
Speaker 1: So this is an old caveman instinct. And when we
Speaker 1: were running from the blank that was chasing us, Uh,
Speaker 1: we needed that fear because that fear told us to run,
Speaker 1: and that's how we saved our lives. And that's how
Speaker 1: we evolved. Okay, And I kept being like a first
Speaker 1: I was blown away, and she's like, so we just
Speaker 1: have some old wiring and so you know, there's nothing
Speaker 1: chasing you. There's no wild board chasing you. So now
Speaker 1: you can use your brain to calm yourself down cognitive
Speaker 1: behavior therapy. But I've always been like, Okay, I understand
Speaker 1: that a cave person probably ran from a large animal,
Speaker 1: but we don't know. We didn't talk to any of
Speaker 1: these people. They didn't leave a diary, So I'm saying, like,
Speaker 1: how are we to say, let me put it this way.
Speaker 1: I'm at the doctor and they hit my knee with
Speaker 1: the little reflex thing, and I kicked because it's a reflex. Now,
Speaker 1: if somehow that practice goes out of style and no
Speaker 1: one does it again for a thousand years, and somebody
Speaker 1: tells the story, well, Bobby, humans used to have their
Speaker 1: knee banged on by a doctor and they kick because
Speaker 1: they were so afraid of the doctor. And it's like, no, no,
Speaker 1: there was no emotion. I kicked because it was a reflex.
Speaker 1: So when I'm told that the cave people were running
Speaker 1: from animals because they were afraid and that I need
Speaker 1: that fear to keep me alive, I'm telling you there's
Speaker 1: not that's not right. I know that we cannot um
Speaker 1: decide that cave people ran from the emotion of fear.
Speaker 1: I feel like you're you're saying it's a it's a
Speaker 1: not a reflex, But like that amygdala says, run and
Speaker 1: then maybe you can put the story over. And I'm
Speaker 1: running because I'm afraid, or I'm running because I need
Speaker 1: to stay alive, But you might not even be afraid,
Speaker 1: like if you're trying to save your own life. In
Speaker 1: other words, they were trying to tell me that this
Speaker 1: emotion called fear made people run, and I that's where
Speaker 1: they lost foot set me too. So so I'm saying
Speaker 1: because I'm saying, like, you guys are telling me this
Speaker 1: is an old chemical thing for my brain, but then
Speaker 1: you're switching it up and saying in the middle of
Speaker 1: the same sentence, fear made them run. And I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: that's not a chemical. And people would be like and
Speaker 1: they would get you know, and I I They're like,
Speaker 1: you're trying to undo this so you can hold onto
Speaker 1: your panic, And I was like, I just want you
Speaker 1: to make sense, and I keep begging people, won't anyone.
Speaker 1: I'm so done with this caveman thing. It's not accurate
Speaker 1: and I don't have the reasons for it because I'm
Speaker 1: just a comedian with a podcast. But if you call bullshit,
Speaker 1: tell me why in your smart way, because I don't
Speaker 1: know how to say it. Well, I don't know if
Speaker 1: I'm smart, but here's my way. Well, so no more
Speaker 1: about it than me. I'll tell you that. Um. So
Speaker 1: this goes back to why do we run? Because a
Speaker 1: stimulus activates these circuits in the brain at a very
Speaker 1: low level that control these automatic responses. So what the
Speaker 1: amygdala has are in age circuits that detect and respond
Speaker 1: to danger. So that will trigger you know, fleeing, freezing
Speaker 1: so called you flights, light, that kind of stuff. But
Speaker 1: that's not the fear. Fear is the cognitive interpretation of
Speaker 1: the situation. And you know, it's the cave men, you know,
Speaker 1: cave men, cave people were people, they were humans, so
Speaker 1: they had some kind of conscious awareness, you know, and
Speaker 1: so in parallel they were afraid. But the story develops
Speaker 1: out of their folk psychology that the reason we rans
Speaker 1: because we were afraid, and that's what gets passed on
Speaker 1: through the millennia too down to us. We're told that
Speaker 1: the reason we run from dangerous because we're afraid. But
Speaker 1: if you look at the research on fear and behavior responses,
Speaker 1: there's a whole research on what's called discordance, which means
Speaker 1: that behavioral and physiological responses don't necessarily line up with
Speaker 1: how afraid you are. You could be very afraid psychologically
Speaker 1: consciously and you're flatlining, or you can be highly highly
Speaker 1: aroused and not afraid at all. You know, so you
Speaker 1: can't use you know, you can't just measure heart rate
Speaker 1: in someone and say that's fear, that's wrong. You have
Speaker 1: to Yeah. We wrote this paper recently called putting the
Speaker 1: Mental back in the Mental Disorders, and the purpose of
Speaker 1: that was that psychiatry since the nineteen forties and fifties
Speaker 1: UM has been on this road to its objectifying everything.
Speaker 1: It started as a response a way of putting Freud
Speaker 1: in the rear view mirror that you know, okay, you've got.
Speaker 1: Freud was, you know, did some weird stuff kids and
Speaker 1: had all these ideas that with some of them were
Speaker 1: kind of crazy, and so they said, we don't want
Speaker 1: any part of this. So instead of just saying okay,
Speaker 1: well there were some bad parts of Freud because he
Speaker 1: was all about the subjective mind, they got rid of
Speaker 1: the entire subjective mind. Behavior is we measure anxiety as
Speaker 1: a behavioral response or physiological response, and so the drug
Speaker 1: companies brought in medications to do that. Behavioral therapy came
Speaker 1: along as well, which is that you know it's you
Speaker 1: can use Pablovian extinction to reduce UM fear because fear
Speaker 1: is a condition behavioral response UM. And then cognitive behavior
Speaker 1: therapy came along to add a cognitive component, but it
Speaker 1: quickly became over the decades, became less and less cognitive
Speaker 1: and more and more about metrics. You know, as the
Speaker 1: insurance companies took over the whole field, you had to
Speaker 1: have objective measurements, objective metrics. You could check off five
Speaker 1: boxes on a list of twenty and say, well that's anxiety.
Speaker 1: But you could have PTSD. Let's say there's twenty items
Speaker 1: you can check. If you have three or four, then
Speaker 1: I don't remember what it is. But let's say there's four.
Speaker 1: You have to have four to be have PTSD, but
Speaker 1: you can have about a thousand combinations of four to
Speaker 1: make PTSD. So PTSD is a you know, just a name,
Speaker 1: an invention. It's not a thing. None of these psychological
Speaker 1: conditions are things. They're collections of symptoms that we categorize
Speaker 1: in a certain way, and we assume that there's a
Speaker 1: brain center for those categorizations, which is crazy. There's no
Speaker 1: brain center for anxiety. Anxiety is a state of mind
Speaker 1: that we can scoct on the basis of all the
Speaker 1: situational of information we have at hand. I make so
Speaker 1: much sense because you know, when I go on stage
Speaker 1: to perform a lot of times I will feel my
Speaker 1: heart racing. I notice, I shall breathing. I literally couldn't
Speaker 1: be less afraid on stage. I should be, but I'm not.
Speaker 1: I mean, most normal people don't like getting up in
Speaker 1: front of people. I literally don't care. To Montorval, I'm
Speaker 1: I if you measured my heart read the same way
Speaker 1: you do if you Here's how I know I'm afraid,
Speaker 1: in other words, is I don't want to do it,
Speaker 1: and I'm standing there like I can't. I can't. I can't,
Speaker 1: I can't, I can't me on stage. I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: I feel all these things. Okay, I'm getting out there.
Speaker 1: And that's how I know that what I'm feeling isn't fear.
Speaker 1: It's just I don't know what, maybe excitement or something. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't even care, Like my brain doesn't even go
Speaker 1: cognitive in that moment. I don't even I'm not even
Speaker 1: interested in figuring it out because one thing I know
Speaker 1: is I'm not afraid. So if I'm not afraid, I'm
Speaker 1: basically not interested. Um, because if I'm afraid, I have
Speaker 1: to do something about it. If I'm not, then I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna go do the show. But when I'm afraid,
Speaker 1: like you try to get me on a roller coaster,
Speaker 1: or try to get me to bungee jump. I will
Speaker 1: stand there. I'll never do it, but I will feel
Speaker 1: the same physical symptoms. But but my one thing will
Speaker 1: be I'm frozen, I can't, I can't. Or if I'm
Speaker 1: having a panic attack on a mall, i will run
Speaker 1: as though something is chasing me and the fear. If
Speaker 1: you stopped me right then I'd say, yes, I'm afraid.
Speaker 1: I'm afraid I'm dying and I need to be around people.
Speaker 1: I need to get close to the hospital or something.
Speaker 1: And uh, but I understand now that that so that
Speaker 1: could be categorized as anxiety because not because hopefully I'm
Speaker 1: getting this right, it's anxiety, not because I have this
Speaker 1: special disorder where my um sensations start going, my adrenaline
Speaker 1: starts pumping. That's not the anxiety. The anxiety is what
Speaker 1: I tell myself, you're dying, so you must run. But
Speaker 1: so people with anxiety disorders, the diagnosis is in is
Speaker 1: in the head of what we think. But it's not like, oh,
Speaker 1: if you get that like racing hard a lot of times,
Speaker 1: if you go on stage, you have anxiety. Anxiety is
Speaker 1: on a physical diagnosis in any way right, even though
Speaker 1: people talk about it though like it is, well that's
Speaker 1: I mean, that's just my opinion. So um, other people
Speaker 1: have a different opinion on all this stuff. I go
Speaker 1: back and forth. I I changed my mind every day.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I just love to think about it. So
Speaker 1: the thing is that, certainly when you're anxious, there can
Speaker 1: be a lot of physiological symptomatology that goes with it,
Speaker 1: but you can also be anxious without that, So it's
Speaker 1: not the defining feature. The defining feature of an anxious
Speaker 1: state of mind is the state of mind itself. Now
Speaker 1: the good news and that is if it's all in
Speaker 1: our minds, that means it's changeable without you too much
Speaker 1: other stuff. So, you know, I think that the way
Speaker 1: to do it is you have to take a three
Speaker 1: step approach. So first you need to retain them one
Speaker 1: and one way that you might be able to do that,
Speaker 1: And this would only work for like, you know, phobias
Speaker 1: and stuff where you have a specific stimulus, is you
Speaker 1: present the stimulus subliminally to the person. Let's say you're
Speaker 1: spider phobics. Spider phobics don't like cognitive behavior therapy because
Speaker 1: they have to be exposed to the spiders. But if
Speaker 1: you subliminally present that spider to their amygdala, you will
Speaker 1: You can extinguish the amygdala. You can weaken the amygdalas
Speaker 1: response by repeating the spider over and over again without
Speaker 1: the conscious mind having to deal with it and freak
Speaker 1: out about seeing this the spik How do you do that?
Speaker 1: Present brief flashes like super fast. You don't know it's
Speaker 1: their subliminal stimulation, and so you I don't know if
Speaker 1: this will work. This is an idea, but you just
Speaker 1: flash and flash and flash, and the person doesn't know
Speaker 1: it's there, and so your heart begins to tame the
Speaker 1: heart rate and so forth. And then once you've prepared
Speaker 1: the amygdala that way, you can now turn to the
Speaker 1: hippo campus and memories. So um, you've got in addition
Speaker 1: to implicit memories controlled by the amygdala. You know, you
Speaker 1: see the spider in your heart will beat. You can
Speaker 1: weaken that through the extinction subconscious, extinction sublimeral. But now
Speaker 1: you can you've prepared the rest of the brain to
Speaker 1: deal with the information. So through the hippo campus you
Speaker 1: now can change memories about spiders and things you know
Speaker 1: about spiders and things that your relationship to spiders and
Speaker 1: all of that. So now you've prepared two parts of
Speaker 1: the brain in a way that you can do regular
Speaker 1: al talk therapy without having all the baggage that would
Speaker 1: get in the way of it. Interesting, So you're not
Speaker 1: opposed to talk therapy, And how else are you going
Speaker 1: to change the mind? I don't know. Well, I think
Speaker 1: that you're saying though, that like there there should be
Speaker 1: a nice understanding of neuroscience, like maybe if people read
Speaker 1: books on their own, you know, to understand the brain,
Speaker 1: um so that it's less like special to them. Is
Speaker 1: that makes sense. I think I'm one of the only
Speaker 1: neuroscientists who has these particular beliefs about that. It's all that. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: it's about the subjective experience, you know, the subjects. Neuroscientists
Speaker 1: don't like all the subjective stuff because neuroscience is an
Speaker 1: output of behaviorism. It's it's cold in a way. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like it's because we've you know, all of
Speaker 1: the people that were trained were trained by behaviors, and
Speaker 1: so that became the way that the field was was
Speaker 1: created and all the methods we use, our behaviorist methods.
Speaker 1: But it you know, It took me a long time
Speaker 1: to come around to this that if the only way
Speaker 1: to ultimately change mental experiences through mental interactions. You know,
Speaker 1: you've got to have that sort of one on one relationship,
Speaker 1: But you can't do that until you get some of
Speaker 1: the other stuff out of the way. Neuroscience is important
Speaker 1: because it can help us with the tools that get
Speaker 1: some of that stuff out of the way, but ultimately
Speaker 1: we've got to deal with it psychologically. So are there's
Speaker 1: a dumb question, but are our emotions real? Does that
Speaker 1: make sense? Like? Can we can we just um narrow
Speaker 1: everything down to like it's just the brain doing a thing,
Speaker 1: and the brain is meant to keep us alive, not
Speaker 1: keep us happy. You know, all the talking points, our emotions,
Speaker 1: emotions are real, I mean they there. Every thought you
Speaker 1: have is real to you, and that's where that's where
Speaker 1: our reality is. Our conscious minds create reality and that
Speaker 1: if that's my reality, then that's where we have to,
Speaker 1: you know, work on changing it. But all of that
Speaker 1: other stuff has to be dealt with and tame before
Speaker 1: you can really deal with that, because otherwise it will
Speaker 1: keep getting in the way. You know, if you let's
Speaker 1: say you you just talk therapy. You just change, um,
Speaker 1: you know, the person's relationship to all of this. Well,
Speaker 1: every time the spider comes along, it's going to reactivate
Speaker 1: the whole stuff that that you've kind of like talked about.
Speaker 1: So you've got to get rid of that underlying stuff
Speaker 1: so that you're now ready to talk about it and
Speaker 1: can support a persistence in the future. Um that doesn't
Speaker 1: involve all that stuff. You've got to shape the mind
Speaker 1: and allow it to do what it can do, but
Speaker 1: you've got to get rid of you've got to control
Speaker 1: the other stuff to allow that to happen. Anxiety bites
Speaker 1: will be right back after a quick little message from
Speaker 1: one of our sponsors. So going back to the person
Speaker 1: that was having the split brain Uh experience, I'm so
Speaker 1: obsessed with this. So back to the guy who you
Speaker 1: held up a sign that said stand, and he stood
Speaker 1: and then said, well I stood because I just sort
Speaker 1: I flashed it through these subliminal presentations. Oh, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I don't think I quite understood at the beginning it
Speaker 1: was subliminal. Okay, Well it was actually it was you
Speaker 1: know it was it was not that short, so it
Speaker 1: was three hundred milliseconds rather than thirty milliseconds for subliminal,
Speaker 1: but it was going to his right hemisphere, which couldn't
Speaker 1: talk and couldn't communicate with the left hemisphere, so it
Speaker 1: was subliminal to the left hemisphere. I understand. Okay, that
Speaker 1: makes total sense. So in that sense though, um, is
Speaker 1: he having an emotion that makes sense? Like or is
Speaker 1: that person able to have emotions if their two sides
Speaker 1: aren't connected. Yes, they are, So the left hemisphere had
Speaker 1: a rich emotional life, um that he could talk about.
Speaker 1: It's much harder to probe the the right hemisphere because
Speaker 1: there's only one patient of all the patients that I'm
Speaker 1: aware of, that could read in the right hemisphere like this,
Speaker 1: got it, And so it was only one that we
Speaker 1: could test this. So it might all be bogus because
Speaker 1: it's all based on one patient. But the importance of
Speaker 1: it to me was that it stimulated my thought process
Speaker 1: is about how cognition, cognitive interpretations of situations are the
Speaker 1: basis of our narratives, and the narratives are who we
Speaker 1: are ultimately. I love that because yeah, I mean you
Speaker 1: just you know, I know that they're us have to
Speaker 1: keep it simple, and they just want to assure you
Speaker 1: that you're normal. But like all this talk of like,
Speaker 1: well they did the study on animals, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I know, I'm not the animals, So what am I
Speaker 1: supposed to do with these thoughts? And you know, and
Speaker 1: then the thoughts feedback into the body and then it's
Speaker 1: like that loop of like fear and adrenaline. The animal
Speaker 1: behavior studies and physiology studies are crucial to the development
Speaker 1: of medications that can change behavior in physiology, but they
Speaker 1: can't change subjective experience. So in my last question, I'll
Speaker 1: I'll leave you with this thought. I have a thought
Speaker 1: to leave you with. I. First of all, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is everyone out there, this is scratching the surface.
Speaker 1: And I know you have a book called Anxious, but
Speaker 1: your most recent book, um, is called The Deep History
Speaker 1: of Ourselves, the four billion year story of how we
Speaker 1: got conscious brains? And um, what I want to ask
Speaker 1: you about that is, is there another word? Does conscious
Speaker 1: mean anything more than what we were talking about? Like
Speaker 1: a thought that is obvious to you. It's not your
Speaker 1: subconscious you know you're thinking it is it? Conscious has
Speaker 1: nothing to It's not an emotion. It's not emotion, right, Well,
Speaker 1: your emotions are conscious states that's true, right, but uh,
Speaker 1: but scientifically, when you say conscious, you're not like secretly
Speaker 1: saying emotion. You're just saying any state you're aware of. Yes,
Speaker 1: So you know this is this goes back to the
Speaker 1: mind body problem. And you know how um, the idea
Speaker 1: of a soul that is, I've been thinking soul this
Speaker 1: whole time. Go ahead, Yeah, the soul was they cart
Speaker 1: called the mind the soul. But he also is responsible
Speaker 1: for kind of introducing consciousness into philosophy, and the conscious
Speaker 1: soul was how we chose our actions. Uh, and you know,
Speaker 1: he was a Catholic and so he wanted to he
Speaker 1: said that we choose our actions m consciously and that's
Speaker 1: what you know, either gets us into heaven or hell. Um.
Speaker 1: So the soul and the mind we're kind of the
Speaker 1: same thing at some point in philosophy. And eventually, you know,
Speaker 1: the idea of a physical basis for the mind, which
Speaker 1: is still kind of hard for some people to accept.
Speaker 1: But you know, I'm a materialist. I think the mind
Speaker 1: is a physical part of the neurons and so forth.
Speaker 1: It's you know, it's a different set of neurons. You've
Speaker 1: got neurons and that are that are going to make
Speaker 1: you conscious, but you've got neurons that are also going
Speaker 1: to control your behavior unconsciously. Um, they're just two different
Speaker 1: kinds of of neural activity. Um. You know, like John
Speaker 1: Locke said that, how do I know I'm the same
Speaker 1: person today as I was, you know, and when I
Speaker 1: was a kid? It's because you have memories that ties
Speaker 1: you across time, tie you across time. And so there
Speaker 1: are three kinds of consciousness that are important. And I
Speaker 1: get this from the psychologists Endel Tolving, who I think
Speaker 1: was the you know, the smartest psychologist since William James.
Speaker 1: He's that we have something called automoetic consciousness, which is
Speaker 1: our ability to know this John Lock kind of thing,
Speaker 1: our ability to know who we are, that we had
Speaker 1: a beginning, we will have an end. No other animal
Speaker 1: knows that it had a beginning and an end. It's
Speaker 1: just in the moment, right. But we can reflect on
Speaker 1: our past and our future, and that capacity depends on
Speaker 1: our prefinal cortex. Now, the second kind of consciousness is
Speaker 1: called noetic consciousness, knowledge of factual actual you know, factual
Speaker 1: and conceptual information about the world. Probably most mammals, all
Speaker 1: mammals probably have this kind of semantic knowledge. It's nonverbal semantic,
Speaker 1: but it's semantic um. And then there's another kind of
Speaker 1: consciousness that's also shared by all mammals, called a noetic
Speaker 1: and this was the puzzling one, but in a nutshell,
Speaker 1: what it is, I think, is the sense that your
Speaker 1: mental states and body states are yours, without any content,
Speaker 1: it's just there. The reason we know this is because
Speaker 1: there are people who lose this connection to their mental
Speaker 1: and body states. They don't believe that they're theirs. They
Speaker 1: don't have that's that sense anymore. It's terrible. So what
Speaker 1: the what this a nootic consciousness does is allows your
Speaker 1: mental states to feel right. And that's not something you
Speaker 1: ever acknowledge that it feels right, only apparent when it
Speaker 1: doesn't feel right. So in these people who don't have it,
Speaker 1: then it becomes apparent that we're always feeling right, are
Speaker 1: feeling wrong if if we do something that's not quite right,
Speaker 1: we have a twinge of that wasn't you know? It's
Speaker 1: not it's not always about morals, but it's all about
Speaker 1: is it what we expect that we should think and feel?
Speaker 1: And so these three kinds of consciousness, you know, the
Speaker 1: lowest kind anoetic is said to only to be what
Speaker 1: lower mammals will have as their main way of interacting
Speaker 1: within mark they know what, you know, there's a mate
Speaker 1: or there's food. Uh and then because it feels right,
Speaker 1: but they don't have content of that feeling of rightness,
Speaker 1: so they don't know that, oh, there's my girl. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like it feels right, so then we're gonna do
Speaker 1: the thing, you know, and then they no. Eddache is
Speaker 1: something that in the most sophisticated sense, it's probably something
Speaker 1: that primates brought in more of a kind of knowledge
Speaker 1: of the world in a more sophisticated kind of way,
Speaker 1: made possible by prefinal cortex, because the kind of prefinal
Speaker 1: cortex that lower mammals have is very different from the
Speaker 1: kind that that primates have. And then automo edic again
Speaker 1: requires another kind of consciousness that's probably due to this
Speaker 1: region in the prefinal cortex that only humans have. It's
Speaker 1: a small little piece but allows you to subjectively know
Speaker 1: your experiences. So I think that's the way to think
Speaker 1: about the about what you know, what consciousness is doing
Speaker 1: in different animals. But there is still I think now
Speaker 1: again I can't prove this, uh A soul, even though
Speaker 1: it may die with the brain, because I in other words,
Speaker 1: like I'm probably just saying an individual or subjective set
Speaker 1: of feelings. But in music where they say like it's
Speaker 1: all about the notes you don't hear are jazz, I
Speaker 1: guess I feel like in this whole conversation there's been
Speaker 1: a blank space of a thing we're not saying. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know what you're talking about, subjective emotions, conscious, it's
Speaker 1: different for each person. We're not rats. I feel what's
Speaker 1: been missing is like I keep wanting to say the
Speaker 1: word soul, and when I asked about the the guy
Speaker 1: with the split brain, I'm thinking I'm saying emotions, but
Speaker 1: like I'm also kind of thinking soul, like there's a
Speaker 1: soul to us, like you can feel it, you vibe
Speaker 1: with certain people. I know it's all chemicals, but I
Speaker 1: like to use the word even though I don't think
Speaker 1: it lives on. Is there room for that in neuroscience?
Speaker 1: Well so, I think there's room for what you're talking about,
Speaker 1: But I wouldn't call it a soul because you know,
Speaker 1: I'm really strict on the language because we get so
Speaker 1: you take a word like fear and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: you're saying, well, if this is this part detects part
Speaker 1: of the brand, detect and response to danger. It's a
Speaker 1: fear center. It acquires all the subjective baggage of fear.
Speaker 1: And I think you have the same problem with soul.
Speaker 1: But this, a noetic consciousness is what you're talking about,
Speaker 1: this low level kind of awareness of who you are
Speaker 1: without ever having to say it, and you feel right
Speaker 1: about yourself, not in a moral or good or bad sense,
Speaker 1: but that it's just you. When things break from that
Speaker 1: a noetic state of rightness, then you have to come
Speaker 1: to terms with it, you know. So you get a
Speaker 1: twinge of a noetic wrongness, and all of a sudden
Speaker 1: you have cognitive dissonance, and so you have to cognitively
Speaker 1: reinterpret your situation because it felt wrong, not and again
Speaker 1: not in a moral or just it didn't feel like
Speaker 1: what you know, really expect. So last I wanted to
Speaker 1: ask you this, um, Do you think this is a
Speaker 1: philosophy question for the neuroscientist? You know, I know all
Speaker 1: humans experience all the ranges of feelings, including anxiety. Do
Speaker 1: you think a neuroscientist is a highly sensitive person who
Speaker 1: wants to study the brain. We all want control, but
Speaker 1: you guys want the most control. You want to slay
Speaker 1: the dragon. You want to win at chess, you want
Speaker 1: to beat the computer and be like, you can't surprise me. Brain,
Speaker 1: most complicated thing on planet Earth. I just conquered you.
Speaker 1: Is there any kind of do you guys have control issues?
Speaker 1: Do you think? Why are you neuroscientists? So you know,
Speaker 1: I don't think you can put it all into a
Speaker 1: machine or I haven't need that, because you know, our
Speaker 1: conscious minds are the product of this four billion year
Speaker 1: evolutionary history, and you would have to recreate all the
Speaker 1: little steps to get it all right, because it's not
Speaker 1: just about having a let's say, okay, we know the
Speaker 1: circuit for I to know it the consciousness, and it's
Speaker 1: got like, you know, fifteen million neurons and they're connected
Speaker 1: this way. But it's not just about the connections. It's
Speaker 1: about all of the hidden molecular and genetic changes that
Speaker 1: took place over that four billion years. That and in
Speaker 1: the process, all this behavioral feedback from all of that
Speaker 1: four billion years of acting and responding. So it's not
Speaker 1: just about you know, putting a model of the circuit
Speaker 1: in the computer and all of a sudden, it's conscious.
Speaker 1: You gotta have that. You've got that long history of
Speaker 1: evolution that makes it makes this crazy thing we call consciousness.
Speaker 1: So here's my my thing for you. Um. You know
Speaker 1: you have your program here is called Anxiety Bites. Um.
Speaker 1: So we the Amictaloids, had a song that we played
Speaker 1: a lot that a lot of people like, and and
Speaker 1: it's called Anxious, And in it we have this line
Speaker 1: it sucks to be anxious, So it's like anxiety Bites,
Speaker 1: but anxiety sucks too. So oh I love it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh my god, we should play it. Can we play
Speaker 1: it at the end of the episode. Do we owe
Speaker 1: your royalties? Okay? Good? Oh my god, this is so exciting.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. This is our first music experience on
Speaker 1: Anxiety Bites. I love that. I hope you enjoyed my
Speaker 1: conversation with Joseph lad as much as I did. I
Speaker 1: don't know if we got the rights to play his
Speaker 1: band's song, Anxious by the Amygdaloid. So, um, even though
Speaker 1: it's his song, there's still all these kind of rights things.
Speaker 1: And so if you just heard five seconds of a
Speaker 1: song that was Anxious by the Magdelades, if you didn't,
Speaker 1: then you didn't hear it. But you can check out
Speaker 1: his band by going to the link in the show notes.
Speaker 1: And I'm still cracking up the I have this like
Speaker 1: renowned neuroscientist on and I'm like, okay, but guys, we
Speaker 1: really got to plug his band right now. Um. Here
Speaker 1: are the takeaways from my chat with Joseph lad Split
Speaker 1: brain therapy UM used to be a treatment for epilepsy,
Speaker 1: but they used it as an experiment working with people's
Speaker 1: memory and emotion. When separated from the left hemisphere, the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere of the brain can respond to stimuli even
Speaker 1: though it can't talk about it, and the left hemisphere
Speaker 1: of the brain, when separated from the right hemisphere, can
Speaker 1: be conscious and can talk about what it's experiencing. Our
Speaker 1: brain creates narratives about who we are, and that's what
Speaker 1: having a sense of self is a narration about who
Speaker 1: we are. Our emotions cannot be fully understood just by
Speaker 1: studying reactions that animals have to stimulus. The conscious experience
Speaker 1: is a cognitive and reputation of the situation we are in.
Speaker 1: It's not in innate state. Darwin gave us the idea
Speaker 1: that we have a fear circuit inserted from animal ancestors.
Speaker 1: He was a great biologist, but admittedly not a great psychologist.
Speaker 1: The tradition of thinking that we inherited emotions from animals
Speaker 1: is faulty because you can see an animal in pain
Speaker 1: and they are responding to stimuli, maybe about making noises
Speaker 1: or yelping or limping. But we as humans project our
Speaker 1: ability to have feelings about the stimuli onto what the
Speaker 1: animal is experiencing, and we are not correct about that.
Speaker 1: The amygdala can be activated when we are presented with
Speaker 1: a stimulus. It can cause an increased heartbeat, but that
Speaker 1: can be a non conscious response. The notion that we
Speaker 1: run from a bear because we're afraid is not necessarily
Speaker 1: scientifically proven. It could be just because the amygdala is stimulated,
Speaker 1: which causes a behavioral bonds. Once the stimulus goes to
Speaker 1: your cerebral cortex, that's where you construct a cognitive interpretation
Speaker 1: of the situation. We feel fear because we have cognitively
Speaker 1: conveyed that information to our conscious mind. Medication can help
Speaker 1: with some aspects of anxiety, but it would be impossible
Speaker 1: for one pill to treat the subjective personal experience of
Speaker 1: millions of people with anxiety. Our conscious minds create our reality,
Speaker 1: but that does not mean that our reality is made up.
Speaker 1: Our emotions are absolutely real as we experience them. Alrighty um,
Speaker 1: I will say, as we wrap up season one of
Speaker 1: Anxiety Bites, we just have a few more episodes left,
Speaker 1: and you certainly can send an email. I don't know
Speaker 1: if I'll be able to read on air before we
Speaker 1: wrap up your butt. Anxiety Bites weekly at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1: You can talk about the episodes you've heard, share them
Speaker 1: on social media. I always do these fun and cool
Speaker 1: audio gram clips. You can find them. They are my
Speaker 1: pinned tweets on Twitter and my handle is at Jen
Speaker 1: Kirkman j E n k I r K m A
Speaker 1: N and that is also my handle on Instagram. And again,
Speaker 1: all of this information is right in the show notes
Speaker 1: and you can click right on it. Thanks again for
Speaker 1: listening and remember Anxiety Bites, but you're in control. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.