Speaker 1: And I think having a relatively richer understanding of emotions,
Speaker 1: how they work, feelings, moral emotions, moral psychology has helped
Speaker 1: in my conversations with kids and with the staff who
Speaker 1: work with them, teachers, counselors, clinicians, doctors.
Speaker 2: So it's informed how I speak to the individual I
Speaker 2: work with, which includes the kids.
Speaker 1: In one of the podcasts I was on, it was
Speaker 1: kind of reframed as second chances.
Speaker 2: All the kids I work with are second chance kids.
Speaker 3: I love this. Today it's my great pleasure to introduce
Speaker 3: Mark Hauser to the podcast. Mark is a researcher, educator, consultant,
Speaker 3: former Harvard professor, and author of the recent book Vulnerable Minds,
Speaker 3: The Harm of Childhood Trauma and the Hope of Resilience.
Speaker 3: Doctor Hauser's scientific research includes over three hundred published papers
Speaker 3: and seven books focusing on how the brain evolves, develops,
Speaker 3: and is altered by damage and neurodevelopment disorder. In this
Speaker 3: rich and important discussion, we talked about adverse child experiences
Speaker 3: or aces, and why it's important to distinguish them from trauma.
Speaker 3: We also discussed Mark's new framework for thinking about the
Speaker 3: dimensions of childhood adversity and the challenges and promises of
Speaker 3: implementing the kind of approach he advocates for. This was
Speaker 3: an ultimately uplifting and hopeful discussion and I'm really glad
Speaker 3: to see the work Mark is doing to help all
Speaker 3: kinds of vulnerable minds. So, without further ado, I bring
Speaker 3: you Mark Hauser. Mark Hauser, Wow, welcome to the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 2: Lovely to be here.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's so good to see you, Sane. What incredible
Speaker 3: new book that you've written here that covers a lot
Speaker 3: of themes that are very prominent in our culture today,
Speaker 3: such as adversity, challenge, trauma, and then you focus on
Speaker 3: you know where it sometimes matters the most in our childhood, right, yes, yes,
Speaker 3: So how many years now have you been working on
Speaker 3: the issue of childhood adversity?
Speaker 1: So it kind of depends on how you answer the
Speaker 1: question of work on because in many ways my kind
Speaker 1: of research history has been heavily influenced by developmental ideas,
Speaker 1: you know, going back to collaborations with Nolam Chomsky and
Speaker 1: Steve Pinker, which are of course developmental issues, but evolutionary
Speaker 1: issues too. But in terms of the practical side of it,
Speaker 1: which is really kind of the new piece about fourteen
Speaker 1: years now working in schools, and of course not all
Speaker 1: of it has been really on children with trauma histories,
Speaker 1: but children with different kinds of disabilities.
Speaker 3: Well that's right, Maale. You know, yes, very nice in neurodiversity. Yes,
Speaker 3: and to what extent do you think neurodiversity? I wouldn't
Speaker 3: expect to start off with this question, but yeah, you
Speaker 3: have me thinking, now, can neudiversity be an outcome of adversity? So?
Speaker 3: I think so.
Speaker 1: I think in a sense that is often used today,
Speaker 1: the neurodiversity kind of movement or idea really has to
Speaker 1: do with how we think about disability in some ways.
Speaker 1: I think that's how I at least would frame it, and
Speaker 1: that we have a diversity of options that our genomes
Speaker 1: in some ways create, affected by heather.
Speaker 2: Interact with the environment.
Speaker 1: So traumatic experiences can certainly shape how we respond. And
Speaker 1: you know, soon we'll get into these ideas. But sometimes
Speaker 1: the traumatic experience can lead to what the psychologist Bruce
Speaker 1: Ellis talks about as hidden talents that which I really
Speaker 1: like as well, and sometimes, of course it can really
Speaker 1: undermine real functioning.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, I'm glad that you brought the Bruce Ellis
Speaker 3: work on that because he actually draws a little bit
Speaker 3: on my advisor's work, Robert Sternberg. Yes, I'm talking about
Speaker 3: how some of these kids can develop practical intelligence. Yes,
Speaker 3: they can go underlooked in our schools. So I'm sure
Speaker 3: you've seen that.
Speaker 1: Too, absolutely, And I think what's come out of that
Speaker 1: work as a sort of a side effect, in some sense,
Speaker 1: there's been.
Speaker 2: Some beautiful work on.
Speaker 1: Autism where a lot of the cognitive biases that non
Speaker 1: autistic individuals succumb to autistic individuals do not, and.
Speaker 2: That paints is very interesting.
Speaker 1: For example, some of the rational biases, like the famous
Speaker 1: bat and ball experiment of you know, a dollar and
Speaker 1: ten cents, you get much fewer individuals.
Speaker 2: Or autistic you know falling.
Speaker 1: And that, I mean, that's you know, that's fascinating. It
Speaker 1: paints an interesting picture about just, you know, diversity of
Speaker 1: ways of viewing the world.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I often think I might be a bit on
Speaker 3: the spectrum. I can't stand pretense. I'm allergic to pretense,
Speaker 3: you know, but some people seem to love the pretense.
Speaker 3: It seems like most of the world. When scroll through Instagram,
Speaker 3: I feel like I'm scrolling through a screen of pretense.
Speaker 3: What's going on? Why is that so? Why is pretense
Speaker 3: so awarring to humans?
Speaker 1: I don't know the seductive nature of that, And I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's because the social media world has
Speaker 1: just sucked people into that universe so much. I think
Speaker 1: it's interesting that you say that you kind of have
Speaker 1: an allergy to it. You know, it's interesting in the
Speaker 1: schools I work in, where there are some schools that
Speaker 1: have a very high proportion of individuals on the spectrum,
Speaker 1: it's funny. You'll you'll see these kinds of kids kind
Speaker 1: of posing and doing all these things.
Speaker 2: And the autistic kids are just like, look, let's get
Speaker 2: out of here. Don't want anything to do with it.
Speaker 3: We're not big in a small talk. No small talk. Well,
Speaker 3: let's talk about aces because it's a it's a controversial
Speaker 3: topic within within our field. It's nice to sit with
Speaker 3: a with a with a colleague, you know, you know,
Speaker 3: someone who's in the same field as me. We can
Speaker 3: talk shop. You know. Some people have criticized the ACE
Speaker 3: research as too simplistic and and and some said, well,
Speaker 3: some stuff that's replicated. Can you kind of give me
Speaker 3: the latest if there is any consensus at all in
Speaker 3: the field what what do you see as the as
Speaker 3: the most as the guts consensus about the ACE research
Speaker 3: and the extent to which particularly it causes long lasting
Speaker 3: extent to what This is the key question, right, The
Speaker 3: extent to which ace's early in childhood call cause long
Speaker 3: lasting changes in the brain that make it very very
Speaker 3: hard to change in adulthood.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Good.
Speaker 1: So, I think where I like to start is that
Speaker 1: I think the work that was in some sense published
Speaker 1: and brought to the four in nineteen ninety eight by
Speaker 1: doctor Vincent Felidi and his colleagues put on the map
Speaker 1: the importance of adverse childhood experiences. It wasn't that people
Speaker 1: were not aware of the fact that adversity can shape development.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is an old topic.
Speaker 1: But the fact that it was brought to the four
Speaker 1: in some sense for the medical community, who to this
Speaker 1: day not necessarily asking about someone's childhood experiences, that was
Speaker 1: in some sense the shock to fully experience that he
Speaker 1: had never bothered to ask in his obesity clinic whether
Speaker 1: adversity was an issue, and it was brought up to
Speaker 1: the fore by a patient who said, I had been
Speaker 1: sexually abused as a child. And so then he finds
Speaker 1: of course that eighty percent of the population and morbially
Speaker 1: abse people in his population were sexually abused incredibly, and
Speaker 1: that was a shock to.
Speaker 3: Assist that, I'm shocked right now. That's not the general population.
Speaker 2: No, not general population.
Speaker 1: This but but, and this is important is he then
Speaker 1: goes and presents this work and this is not in
Speaker 1: the eighties.
Speaker 2: He goes and presents this work.
Speaker 1: To a group of medical people who are in the
Speaker 1: eating disorder area, so they're professionals, right, And he's effectively
Speaker 1: laughed off the stage. He said, come on, these people
Speaker 1: are making stories up because they're overweight.
Speaker 2: That's you. Don't believe that to you.
Speaker 1: And then that night at dinner, a man from the
Speaker 1: CDC is say next to him says, look, I don't
Speaker 1: know if you're right or wrong.
Speaker 3: Why would overly people logically be more likely to make
Speaker 3: up stories than non overly That.
Speaker 1: Was the impression of the doctors that if they're coming
Speaker 1: up with an excuse rather than they got an eighty
Speaker 1: year and excuse it.
Speaker 2: They're trying to excuse it away.
Speaker 3: See I see.
Speaker 1: And so the CDC guy says, look, I don't know
Speaker 1: if you're right or wrong, but if you're right, we've
Speaker 1: got a real medical problem on our hands, and we
Speaker 1: need to find out. This is how the Ace's study
Speaker 1: was initially born. So they you know, test seventeen thousand people,
Speaker 1: not just the obese population obviously, and they find lo
Speaker 1: and behold that aces are common, and they find that
Speaker 1: there's a strong correlation with some of the biggest health
Speaker 1: risks known to mankind.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: That then quickly moves into the hands of the World
Speaker 1: Health Organization, which sort of spreads out this questionnaire globally
Speaker 1: and fast forward let's say till twenty ten, twenty twenty
Speaker 1: or so, and we find that the following stats.
Speaker 2: The World Health.
Speaker 1: Organization reports about a year ago that globally, annually one billion.
Speaker 2: Children are mal treated every.
Speaker 1: Year in where global across the world, we have eight
Speaker 1: billion people one eighth of those children, there's more children
Speaker 1: of it. That's a mind numbing stat, okay, And that
Speaker 1: and for me, you know, that's the kind of crushing
Speaker 1: status that when we get these things please contribute to
Speaker 1: something we want to hear about individuals. And for me,
Speaker 1: of course, I experienced individuals who are like this daily.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of the replication issue at some level.
Speaker 1: That these are not part of dictatorships or democracies, or
Speaker 1: heavily religious or non religious, or educated or not.
Speaker 2: These are global phenomenon.
Speaker 1: Okay, where I think things have gotten into trouble. And
Speaker 1: this brings into the four is there's been a blending
Speaker 1: of aces with its effects. But aces, as the acronum says,
Speaker 1: adverse childhood experience. It's not the response to the experience.
Speaker 1: So it's often confused with trauma. But trauma is the response.
Speaker 3: I love that you said that, and I would even
Speaker 3: go one step further and say something a bit controversial.
Speaker 3: It's the story that you created based on the response
Speaker 3: to a real experience that happen to you.
Speaker 2: A story, and what I would add to it.
Speaker 1: And this is a distinction I make in the book
Speaker 1: is that from adverse child experiences, some respond with trauma
Speaker 1: and some resond resiliently.
Speaker 3: People I think George Bonano has found most people are
Speaker 3: resilient and some even dare we say, have post traumatic growth.
Speaker 2: Completely, So there can be strength of growing out it.
Speaker 1: And we need to understand both what are the past
Speaker 1: that leads some to be more vulnerable and others to
Speaker 1: be more resilient. And part of What the book does
Speaker 1: is it pulls from the science is to try to
Speaker 1: understand better what the sciences is telling us about that
Speaker 1: spectrum from vulnerable to resilience, which you can move across,
Speaker 1: everybody can, but our biology is going to hand us
Speaker 1: some piece that's going to put us somewhere in that spectacle.
Speaker 2: Said that, and then we're gonna move.
Speaker 3: So the dirty word the G word, you know, In
Speaker 3: my new book I'm working on, I have a section
Speaker 3: called the dirty G word, Yes, because it's amazing to
Speaker 3: me the extend to which the trait neuroticism colors your
Speaker 3: world and even makes it more likely that you'll you'll
Speaker 3: label things as traumas that someone who scores low neuroticism is,
Speaker 3: like I wasn't traumatizing. You can have two people in
Speaker 3: the same family, right, one who scores high scores low,
Speaker 3: have the same experiences in childhood being treated the same
Speaker 3: by the parent, and then you you can find gross
Speaker 3: differences in one person's interpretation of their childhood is traumatic.
Speaker 3: And that's interesting, isn't it. Talking about it. I'm even
Speaker 3: talking about like fraternal twins. Oh completely, yeah.
Speaker 2: That's right. And I think.
Speaker 1: Different experiences can also shape how we respond. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a lovely kind of strategy that's often used in schools,
Speaker 1: but it should be actually used by anybody, which is
Speaker 1: it's goes by the name the size of the problem.
Speaker 1: So the idea is, imagine three boxes of different sizes,
Speaker 1: a tiny one.
Speaker 2: A middle size one, and a big one.
Speaker 1: Okay, So when you're in a calm state, what would
Speaker 1: you consider to be a small problem, right, And so
Speaker 1: you might model it and say, well, you know, I
Speaker 1: bang my toe against the wall.
Speaker 2: It hurts, but you know it's temporary. Tiny problem. Big problem.
Speaker 1: My mom's got cancer and is unlikely to survive, okay
Speaker 1: for me, painful experience.
Speaker 3: That's so.
Speaker 2: And then the middle is I've got a deadline.
Speaker 1: I'm going to go to a podcast with Scott and
Speaker 1: the traffic is killing me and I'm stressing out. I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna make it on time. It's kind of middling
Speaker 1: sized problems. I have no control over it, which is
Speaker 1: also stressful. The thing is that as you experience different
Speaker 1: kinds of things in the world, those boxes can get reshaped,
Speaker 1: as you see as for example, for me working in Kenya,
Speaker 1: where there's three million orphans in the world, and I
Speaker 1: see their experience. I go, my problems are never in
Speaker 1: kind of the big box relative to.
Speaker 3: Those kids you've worked with.
Speaker 1: So for the last three years we haven't. We actually
Speaker 1: have a nonprofit called International.
Speaker 3: Do they actually look like what the commercials will make
Speaker 3: them look like?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: No, okay, talk to me.
Speaker 2: So we'll talked about that.
Speaker 1: So sub Saharan Africa, so you know, the last third
Speaker 1: of the continent has fifty four million orphans, some of
Speaker 1: the biggest populations orphans in the world. Kenya itself, a
Speaker 1: country of about fifty million people, has three million.
Speaker 3: They put them all.
Speaker 2: So these are so they're.
Speaker 1: Almost about a thousand orphanages at Kenya, not the government, right, okay, okay.
Speaker 1: And so one of the things that we're doing is
Speaker 1: trying to bring resources to these places. Because I'm sure
Speaker 1: we'll get back to this. Part of the story about
Speaker 1: neglect and deprivation grows out of the incredible scientific work
Speaker 1: out of Romania with the Romanian orphanages, and and part
Speaker 1: as a result of that work, virtually all the orphanages
Speaker 1: in Eastern Europe were shut down because they were basically institutions.
Speaker 1: There were incredibly deprived children. As the nineteen nineties Shame
Speaker 1: of Nation documentary pointed out they're like Nazi concentration camps
Speaker 1: for little kids. The difference is, it's important, is that
Speaker 1: in many low to middle income countries, these orphanages, which
Speaker 1: in canadayre called children's.
Speaker 2: Homes, are very different.
Speaker 1: You don't see kids who are gaunt and unhealthy and
Speaker 1: look like they're not going to be able to walk
Speaker 1: two steps. And in part it's because you find these
Speaker 1: long lived staff who stay with these kids, who become
Speaker 1: the nurturing parents effectively and enable those kids to grow up.
Speaker 2: But the funding is.
Speaker 1: Coming from churches, from donors. It's really shoe string kind
Speaker 1: of budget.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you, you're hallucinating me so much right now.
Speaker 3: I don't think most of US Americans know any of
Speaker 3: this shit. They don't and we're blind to it. And
Speaker 3: maybe a lot more people that have about more compassion
Speaker 3: if they we could take a trip over there.
Speaker 2: I think that's right.
Speaker 1: And I think you know, part of the angle of
Speaker 1: the book, which I know you're aware of the psychologist,
Speaker 1: is that you know, psych cology has had this experience
Speaker 1: that our population of study tends to be this weird,
Speaker 1: distorted population in some sense, and part of the angle
Speaker 1: of my book, which I think is quite different from
Speaker 1: most books on therapeutic traumatic issues, is it has a
Speaker 1: very strong cross cultural lens that I'm talking about our species.
Speaker 3: At some level.
Speaker 1: And I think that's important because strategies to help children
Speaker 1: have to be cross culturally sensitive.
Speaker 3: Well, that was actually gonna be my next question with
Speaker 3: I love the extent to which you really your book
Speaker 3: is different from a lot of other books in trauma
Speaker 3: by taking this cross cultural lens. But you know, American culture,
Speaker 3: let's talk about America's obsession with trauma. Yes, because there's
Speaker 3: TikTok trauma, which I think might be different than how
Speaker 3: psychologists define trauma. But now you have you know, every
Speaker 3: back pain, every back pain, every just just every neurotic
Speaker 3: thought is now a trauma. First of all, do you agree, like,
Speaker 3: do you see it kind of getting a little bit
Speaker 3: out of control and far outside the realm of what
Speaker 3: we would call trauma.
Speaker 2: I do.
Speaker 1: I think the word has become part of the coloquial language.
Speaker 1: It's become part of the common use of words, and
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting.
Speaker 2: I began to get your insights into this too. As
Speaker 2: a psychologist.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of times in the science is
Speaker 1: when words that have a technical definition become part of
Speaker 1: the language, science tends to retreat and become almost more technical,
Speaker 1: so that the layperson can't access the information. In some ways,
Speaker 1: my book is an attempt to kind of address that,
Speaker 1: because the gap in terms of what we understand the
Speaker 1: sciences and what practitioners understand is monumental.
Speaker 2: So sadly, I think you're right that in.
Speaker 1: This country, especially, the word trauma has become part of
Speaker 1: the common lore.
Speaker 2: People use it.
Speaker 1: I think I described in the book. I had a
Speaker 1: friend of mine who I saw downtown living in California.
Speaker 1: He looked really out of sorts, and I said, hey,
Speaker 1: you know what's going on.
Speaker 2: He goes, it's the worst day of my life. I said, well,
Speaker 2: what happened?
Speaker 1: He goes, my son's soccer urnmost canceled. I'm like, if
Speaker 1: that's your worst day, I want your life.
Speaker 2: So that's yeah, none zero.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So, so of.
Speaker 1: Course the term trauma in some ways, well it's Greek origin,
Speaker 1: but PTSD grew out of kind of the early sixties
Speaker 1: and the war veterans who were initially called just crazy,
Speaker 1: and then of course it becomes part of the DSM
Speaker 1: in terms of PTSD, and it has this technical term.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting there and thing especially for you as
Speaker 1: a psychologist, is there's been some push of late, even
Speaker 1: of the DSM terminology and for the reason of thinking
Speaker 1: about children.
Speaker 2: So let me give you an example.
Speaker 1: If you fall under the classifications of mental health issues
Speaker 1: in the that then licenses you to insurance coverage.
Speaker 2: If you don't, it doesn't, so it's now out of pocket.
Speaker 1: There are now many, many cases of children who have
Speaker 1: significant traumatic responses. You can see it physiologically, neurobiologically, but
Speaker 1: they don't fall under the criteria of PTSD. There are
Speaker 1: several psychiatrists and psychologists, Besil Vanderkoke being one, who have
Speaker 1: argued for a new diagnosis, which is called developmental trauma disorder.
Speaker 2: Which is in particular for children.
Speaker 1: And here's the reason why I think it's important. I
Speaker 1: discussed this in the book. PTSD in the traditional sense
Speaker 1: is due to exposure to violence. Oh, a lot of
Speaker 1: traumatic responses are not necessarily due to violence. Children who
Speaker 1: have been severely deprived are heavily traumatized, and yet they
Speaker 1: don't count. Neglect is neglectsidered out, attachment issues, right, abandonments, right,
Speaker 1: But they're not in necessarily violent.
Speaker 2: And so they've been trying now for probably ten.
Speaker 1: Years to get DTD developmental trauma disorder into the CM,
Speaker 1: but the powers that be have rejected it, even though
Speaker 1: they've followed the guilence for what counts as getting something in.
Speaker 2: So there's been a lot of controversies. I'm sure you're aware.
Speaker 1: Of that the DSM either puts in too many things
Speaker 1: or not enough.
Speaker 3: Oh. I got a lot of issues with the d
Speaker 3: also that it treats everything binary. Yes, you either have
Speaker 3: the disorder or not. And you know, I'm friends with
Speaker 3: the task force trying to show the continuum that all
Speaker 3: these things are on. But you know, I'm glad you
Speaker 3: brought up Bessel. Bessel who was author of The Body
Speaker 3: Keeps the Score. You know, I of course have a
Speaker 3: great respect for his long career, and he's done a
Speaker 3: lot the field, but I kind of see the ideas
Speaker 3: in his book, or even just the notion that the
Speaker 3: body keeps the score. Let's double click on that a second.
Speaker 3: It's run a muck in our society and and people
Speaker 3: don't realize that that's not actually how it works. So
Speaker 3: the brain, you like, like trauma's not like let's talk
Speaker 3: about memory for a second. Memory is not stored in
Speaker 3: the body. His memory comes from the brain, and we
Speaker 3: can have I prefer the term survival stress. And I
Speaker 3: wanted to see your thoughts because I do like to
Speaker 3: give it in a nuanced a way. I'm not, like,
Speaker 3: you know, trying to tear down. I'm trying to have
Speaker 3: more nuance around the idea, because it's too simplistic to
Speaker 3: have this notion that, like the collective memory, the memory
Speaker 3: of our trauma is stored in our body and we
Speaker 3: can't our brain can't access it, and we're doomed forever.
Speaker 3: To me, that's a disempowering message. I think the truth
Speaker 3: is actually more empowering. Thext into which top down processes,
Speaker 3: you know, really can help influence our physiology and ours.
Speaker 3: There are a lot of techniques, you know. I'm a
Speaker 3: big fan of psychodrama, for instance, you know good my
Speaker 3: friend Dan Thomasulo is a leader in that he's here
Speaker 3: in New York City, So shout out to Dantell. But so,
Speaker 3: I just think there's a kind of a disempowering message
Speaker 3: going around about trauma that it's like it's there's unseen
Speaker 3: force within your body that is causing everything you do,
Speaker 3: and you really there's really not that much hope in
Speaker 3: being able to act sin, you know, because it's in
Speaker 3: your body, not your mind. But as you know, George
Speaker 3: Bonano told me over coffee once. I don't know a
Speaker 3: lot to repeat everything he said to me over coffee,
Speaker 3: but he's like, if you've had trauma, you remember it
Speaker 3: like it's in your brain. It's not it's not hit.
Speaker 3: If you've experienced trauma, it's not hidden. I mean, we're
Speaker 3: over that whole, you know, Elizabeth loftis you know, Craze
Speaker 3: in the I mean, I don't want to go back there,
Speaker 3: you know, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: I do know. So so let's let's pull apart some
Speaker 1: of these pieces because I think they're they're interesting in themselves.
Speaker 1: So I think it's a kind of a strong version
Speaker 1: of the Body keeps the Score, which I think many
Speaker 1: have interpreted as I think there's a weaker version, which
Speaker 1: is the more interesting version. The strong version is what
Speaker 1: you've painted, which is that there's a memory my kneecap
Speaker 1: for you know, seeing my mom.
Speaker 2: Get hit hit by a car.
Speaker 1: Well, that's clearly false because there is no memory system
Speaker 1: in my recap.
Speaker 2: But there's a more interesting version, which is that there's
Speaker 2: a body.
Speaker 3: Response survival stress.
Speaker 1: Survival stress which includes the autonomic and the immune system.
Speaker 1: And I think why I think that is critically important
Speaker 1: is because of two reasons. One, sometimes what we see
Speaker 1: operationally in an individual cognitively suggests no trauma, but the
Speaker 1: body is hammered.
Speaker 2: So here's a perfect example.
Speaker 1: This was This is a case that Felidi himself, you know,
Speaker 1: talked about. Several years after he had published the original paper,
Speaker 1: a woman contacted him and said, look, I'm.
Speaker 2: So glad to see this report.
Speaker 1: You know, I am today a Seventh Court Circuit judge.
Speaker 1: So clearly on every cognitive level, she has made it right.
Speaker 2: She's in her fifties, she was.
Speaker 1: Pimped out by her father a kid sexually year after
Speaker 1: year after year.
Speaker 2: So this is one ace. Now let's keep that in
Speaker 2: mind too, because.
Speaker 3: We'll come back to that face out should count.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: Let's yeah, let's come back to that, right, because because
Speaker 1: the A score is about a number of different types,
Speaker 1: pretty intense, intense, so we'll.
Speaker 2: Come back to that.
Speaker 1: Let's let's remember to come back to that she was
Speaker 1: sitting on four different types of cancer. Her immune system
Speaker 1: was completely destroyed, even though she was cognitively top of
Speaker 1: her class.
Speaker 2: Judge, I mean, you know, you name it well.
Speaker 1: So I think the reason why I think that's important
Speaker 1: is because her body has kept the score of the
Speaker 1: traus stress in terms of the immune system, in the
Speaker 1: same way we see epigenetic tracking of things, right.
Speaker 3: I was just gonna say that.
Speaker 1: So I think that's that's the it's the weaker but
Speaker 1: the more interesting part.
Speaker 2: I agree, And that's where I.
Speaker 1: Think Besil vonakokes and if you you know, I've been
Speaker 1: to many of the conferences he has in Boston.
Speaker 2: And the group.
Speaker 1: The heavy focus is on things like you know, emdr
Speaker 1: you know I I things and yoga and breathing. It's
Speaker 1: all body work because there is a sense in which
Speaker 1: there's a scarring.
Speaker 2: To the body.
Speaker 1: Of course, there is scarring to the brain too, and
Speaker 1: that's what the memory is held. But I think we've
Speaker 1: not given enough attention to what's happening the body. And
Speaker 1: men and the children I work with directly, they have
Speaker 1: no body awareness. They're talking to you, and what's happening
Speaker 1: is I can see their fiscally like and they have
Speaker 1: no somatic awareness.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I get it. I get it, I really do.
Speaker 3: I wonder how how necessary it is for you know
Speaker 3: the word to think of it in terms of it's
Speaker 3: because of that one thing, you know, that that that trauma,
Speaker 3: as opposed to well, this is the way my body
Speaker 3: is right now, and let's change it, let's work on it.
Speaker 3: But I feel like there's this people, there's something in
Speaker 3: human nature that wants to understand why am I the
Speaker 3: way I am? And I always get a little I
Speaker 3: don't know, I wary when people want to reduce everything
Speaker 3: to that one event, to that one thing that happens,
Speaker 3: the one thing. You know, the reason why I'm an
Speaker 3: asshole to everyone around me is because of that one thing. Yes,
Speaker 3: I get I get a little worry about that, you know,
Speaker 3: because we're so we're so multi determined for systems.
Speaker 1: So okay, So that that's a nice segue into this
Speaker 1: kind of one ACE idea. So you raised the question
Speaker 1: at the beginning of controversial pieces of the Ace's story.
Speaker 2: So the first one we've kind of tackled, which is
Speaker 2: that there's been a confusion about the.
Speaker 1: Experience versus the response. So we've kind of we'll come
Speaker 1: back to that, but that's a key one.
Speaker 2: The second is that the ACE score.
Speaker 1: Is somehow indicative of the individual's potential problems. And there's
Speaker 1: two problems with that. The first is the originators of
Speaker 1: the ACE questionnaire, which was ten questions about different types
Speaker 1: of adverse childhood experiences. That was never intended as a
Speaker 1: questionnaire about the individual.
Speaker 2: It's populating.
Speaker 3: That was supposed to be about population into different populations
Speaker 3: and get a pulse on correct.
Speaker 1: Oh, I didn't know that, Okay, And that's really important
Speaker 1: because in California, for example, it's been used by insurance
Speaker 1: to coverage.
Speaker 2: If you have an ACE.
Speaker 1: Score of four or more, you get a coverage which
Speaker 1: is different than less than four. Has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with the individual though.
Speaker 3: That just blew my mind, yepow.
Speaker 1: And we know from the science that the individual score
Speaker 1: is not predictive of what's going to happen to them.
Speaker 3: Well, and that's the key thing that's a seeing criticized.
Speaker 3: I've seen very weak correlations.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's really week and it's weaking two interesting ways.
Speaker 1: One is the ASS questionnaire is a retrospective questionnaire. What
Speaker 1: happened to you Scott as a child?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's so problematic and we know that's problematic,
Speaker 3: so we know just how memory, how valuable memory is completely.
Speaker 1: So that's problem number one. The second problem is it
Speaker 1: assumes that the number of types is an accurate lens
Speaker 1: on health risks as opposed to what I bring up
Speaker 1: in my book, which is different dimensions of adversities.
Speaker 2: Let's take apart some of these.
Speaker 1: The first is that they operationally define childhood as birth
Speaker 1: to eighteen.
Speaker 2: That's a pretty big swath of time. As a psychologist,
Speaker 2: you're well aware.
Speaker 1: That there are these different sensitive and critical periods for
Speaker 1: different things, and they're happening at different ages within that span.
Speaker 1: Just to give one example of something that's recent that
Speaker 1: we all experience, COVID hits.
Speaker 2: Who does it hit hardest teenagers? Why?
Speaker 1: Because the teenage years are a critical period for social interactions.
Speaker 2: They were deprived for two years.
Speaker 1: Of social interactions. Social interactions to teenagers who are like
Speaker 1: milk to a baby, They're needed and this has been
Speaker 1: well documented scientifically. So you have globally this massive response
Speaker 1: by teenagers to that deprivation. The mental health crisis, and
Speaker 1: I know you've had guests that have talked about this
Speaker 1: has been pushed higher because of what COVID did to
Speaker 1: that teenage group. This is irrespective of cell phone, social
Speaker 1: media and all the rest. It just bumped it up.
Speaker 1: We are seeing kids in school now who, let's say,
Speaker 1: are chronologically fourteen, who are actually developmentally like nine.
Speaker 3: Hold on, so my brain goes to, like the intelligence
Speaker 3: quot and how it was originally scored. What would we
Speaker 3: call this quotient? Yeah, it's an interesting question.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's probably close to the EQ, but it's
Speaker 1: probably like seq social emotional question question right.
Speaker 3: Where you are emotionally developed? How mostly developed are you?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean I mean think think about you know, theory
Speaker 1: of mind, you know, or related to Interrelli's beliefs, you know, intentions, desires,
Speaker 1: and so forth.
Speaker 2: These kids were deprived of those critical periods.
Speaker 3: This is explain the crybabies on campus right now.
Speaker 2: Yes, an over exaggeration at babies. Oh wait, well well
Speaker 2: that's that's.
Speaker 1: Actually it's funny and it's also really potentially poignant because
Speaker 1: the Adverse Childhood Experiences questionnaire stops at eighteen, but we
Speaker 1: know developmentally that that frontel is continuing twenty five exactly.
Speaker 1: And the other piece of it that I'm going to
Speaker 1: add in today is that pre natally, we know that
Speaker 1: stress to the mother directly affects the developing fetus. And
Speaker 1: there was a study that was published last year, actually
Speaker 1: fascinating study that was done with moms who were exposed
Speaker 1: to Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey, and they compared it
Speaker 1: with mothers who had their babies kind of before versus
Speaker 1: mothers kind of well afterwards.
Speaker 2: But here's what they found.
Speaker 1: They followed those babies up the age of five. Girls
Speaker 1: who were in the womb during Hurricane Sandy had five
Speaker 1: to six times higher rates of anxiety and depression and
Speaker 1: boys had six times higher ADHD in opposition of defiance
Speaker 1: because of the stress of the mom.
Speaker 3: Well that's super interesting, right. I wanted to actually double
Speaker 3: cook on their gender differences. So I'm glad you kind
Speaker 3: of brought them up, because in the beginning you brought PTSD,
Speaker 3: and you brought up numbers like one billion have been
Speaker 3: but I actually want to break it down by gender
Speaker 3: a little bit. Yeah, I continually amazed when I look
Speaker 3: at the striking gender differences in peak SD. It's women
Speaker 3: really do disproportionately report higher levels of PTSD than men.
Speaker 3: Men have their own issues, Don't get me wrong. You know,
Speaker 3: like there are things with ADHD, we can autism, you know,
Speaker 3: we can bring up we all got issues. But but
Speaker 3: what do you think what do you think is going
Speaker 3: on there? Though? Like why why? Why is that the case?
Speaker 1: So yeah, as a general cut, when you look at
Speaker 1: the kind of the mental health landscape, the broad again,
Speaker 1: sex differences a lot of variation. But as a broad cut,
Speaker 1: girls women tend to be more internalizers, boys men externalizers,
Speaker 1: and we certainly see that a lot.
Speaker 2: But what cross cuts some of that.
Speaker 1: Is also the type of adversity. For example, it's certainly
Speaker 1: not the case that boys are immune sexual abuse, as
Speaker 1: we know from the church scandals. That's important, right, But
Speaker 1: a lot of the understanding of sexual abuse has come
Speaker 1: primarily or more often from.
Speaker 3: The female side, right.
Speaker 1: So for example, this is an incredible study that was
Speaker 1: done out of Germany. They showed that women who were
Speaker 1: abused as children before the age of puberty as opposed
Speaker 1: to after, there's an area in the brain in the
Speaker 1: somatosensory cortex that maps to the genitals glitteris and females
Speaker 1: that area is smaller in girls who were sexually abused
Speaker 1: before puberty.
Speaker 3: What's the implication of that for their own lived experience
Speaker 3: growing up.
Speaker 1: As so as adults sexually averse painful experiences during sex
Speaker 1: pleasures pleasure see.
Speaker 2: Which has been documented.
Speaker 1: But now you've got this neuroanatomical landmark. And as you
Speaker 1: I'm sure no, the amount of stensity cortex in some
Speaker 1: ways is a map of kind of the body and
Speaker 1: the extent to which it's innervated. So for example, our
Speaker 1: lips and our fingers have a massive space, and that's
Speaker 1: the area our kneecaps do not right, and so the clitorist,
Speaker 1: obviously a heavily innervated area, is basically shrunk in girls
Speaker 1: who are before puberty. Again pointing to that timing issue.
Speaker 1: It's not just adversity and type, but the timing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I transcend I write about you know, Titra's
Speaker 3: research t I c HS and some other research showing
Speaker 3: so clearly how depending on what kind of way you're maltreated,
Speaker 3: the brain has very specific ways it organizes itself to
Speaker 3: protect you from the emotional pain of it. But I
Speaker 3: went down a list of things, so you mentioned one,
Speaker 3: but we can we can mention other things, many types
Speaker 3: emotional abuse exactly, And the migdala does correct. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the lens that I use in the book
Speaker 1: as a framework is what I called the adverse ts
Speaker 1: T for letter T, because there are five different dimensions
Speaker 1: of adversity. One we've already talked about the type of adversity,
Speaker 1: The second is timing. The third is tenure how long
Speaker 1: it lasts.
Speaker 3: To be confused with academic.
Speaker 2: Tenure, which.
Speaker 1: The fourth, uh is what I call turbulence, which is
Speaker 1: the predictability or controllability.
Speaker 3: Of the adversity.
Speaker 2: And the fifth is toxicity.
Speaker 3: Oh boy, what would non toxic abuse be.
Speaker 1: Well, there's not, so there's not there's no toxicity, but
Speaker 1: sever and And you know, one of the things I
Speaker 1: bring up in the book, which is kind of maybe
Speaker 1: topical today a little bit, is during the Me Too movement,
Speaker 1: Matt Damn is coming, you know, don't we want to
Speaker 1: distinguish between you know, a poorly time sexual joke and rape.
Speaker 1: And he got taken the town for that. But of
Speaker 1: course we do, because it makes a difference in terms
Speaker 1: of how the body responds. Body and brain respond totally
Speaker 1: differently to a poor sexually time joke, which can be
Speaker 1: certainly aversive, versus being raped.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think that like in a lot
Speaker 3: of ways, trauma is in the eye of the beholder.
Speaker 3: I mean someone who you could imagine someone's experience, lived
Speaker 3: experience being who has been raped and who is at
Speaker 3: a comedy club and here's a rape joke, and to
Speaker 3: that person in their unit, like everyone else around him
Speaker 3: like ah, but in her or his universe, like they're
Speaker 3: feeling an panic. And I guess in some ways, a
Speaker 3: lot of it does come down to just like honoring
Speaker 3: someone's experience of something. And maybe that makes me sound
Speaker 3: really woke to say such a thing, but I am
Speaker 3: a big believer in you know that kind of Let
Speaker 3: there be a little subjectivity here where like I don't
Speaker 3: know what it's like for someone else to experience. I
Speaker 3: wouldn't even downplay or make fun of someone who has
Speaker 3: a visceral reaction to a joke that I find fun. Yes,
Speaker 3: I would probably still honor that person has that experience. Yes,
Speaker 3: I guess I would want them to also honor that
Speaker 3: I don't have that experience. So maybe it works both ways,
Speaker 3: is my point. It does.
Speaker 1: No, that's a very nice point, and it brings up
Speaker 1: something that's both a practical issue and then kind of
Speaker 1: an empirical experimental issue on the practical level, of course,
Speaker 1: and this is this is the comedy about the woke
Speaker 1: piece is that you know everything's got a trigger warning.
Speaker 1: Now everything does right, And that's a course problematic in
Speaker 1: and of itself. That said, as someone who works with
Speaker 1: children with significant traumatic experiences, one of my first experiences
Speaker 1: this actually happened the first year I started doing this work.
Speaker 2: I walk into a middle.
Speaker 1: School and this little boy both side of the classroom
Speaker 1: as like, I don't think I did anything, and the
Speaker 1: teacher comes up, a lovely teacher and puts her on
Speaker 1: my shoulder and says, look, I'm sorry, it's not you.
Speaker 2: You haven't just looked like his father, who beats him
Speaker 2: almost every night.
Speaker 3: Eat.
Speaker 2: So I was the trigger.
Speaker 1: Okay, next time I can in the classroom, I sat
Speaker 1: down on the ground and looked away from him. So
Speaker 1: I was smaller than him and I wasn't paying attention
Speaker 1: to him. And then he comes up to me and goes,
Speaker 1: what's matter. You're not gonna talk to me. But now
Speaker 1: I kind of calm the unsafe environment down, okay, which
Speaker 1: is he needs to learn not to generalize that all
Speaker 1: men are not going to be abusive. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of the reversal typical psychology where we want generalization for learning.
Speaker 1: With him, it's taking generalization away so he can feel safe.
Speaker 3: Well, that's wonderful, patients, you had there to do that.
Speaker 3: You know, fear learning and fear unlearning are different, operating
Speaker 3: in different parts of the brain, different and so we
Speaker 3: have to learn.
Speaker 1: So let me, let me just give me just let
Speaker 1: me just then the second piece, because I think it's
Speaker 1: critical what you asked.
Speaker 2: The toxicity level.
Speaker 1: Of course, at some level it is subjective. But here's
Speaker 1: where I think we've made progress. You know what you
Speaker 1: and I might consider to be neglect of a parent,
Speaker 1: and then you look at what's happening to these orphans.
Speaker 2: It's night and day, right.
Speaker 1: However, one of the things that's come out of, for example,
Speaker 1: the word comparing the Romanian orphan children, which was really
Speaker 1: severe toxic at the highest level deprivation. They had nothing,
Speaker 1: no stable staff, poorly nutritious food, constrain, living quarters, I mean,
Speaker 1: you name it.
Speaker 2: It was the worst on a spectrum.
Speaker 1: But we know that socioeconomic scales mean something, and you
Speaker 1: can map people onto those and you can see the
Speaker 1: effects on grades and attendance and all these other things.
Speaker 1: So there's an important piece that dimension and experimental work
Speaker 1: on animals, for example, has been able to experimentally tightrate
Speaker 1: that to see what's kind of the minimal experience that
Speaker 1: one would need. And of course, the now thought of
Speaker 1: as horrible experiments by.
Speaker 2: Harry Harlow were those experiments.
Speaker 1: I mean, we may not like them ethically, which I
Speaker 1: certainly point out in the book, but they did try
Speaker 1: to tight trate what's needed for developing monkey to have
Speaker 1: functional social relationships. That's what the experiment was up tight
Speaker 1: trading deprivation.
Speaker 3: I mean, that was that was the part of your
Speaker 3: career was studying, right, monkeys. You were a professor at
Speaker 3: Harvard and you studied. You were a big name in
Speaker 3: the stud morality. Right, you studied morality. You stayed monkeys.
Speaker 3: What happened? Something happened at Harvard? What happened, What happened?
Speaker 3: What happened to you?
Speaker 2: What happened? What happened?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So you know, this is something that I really
Speaker 1: haven't talked about.
Speaker 2: And you know, my motivation for not talking about.
Speaker 1: The misconduct cakes, which I do mention at the front
Speaker 1: of the book, was designed really in some ways by
Speaker 1: my part to protect my students.
Speaker 2: I had a very, very large lab. I wanted to
Speaker 2: make sure that what was ever.
Speaker 1: Happening to me went on for five years while I
Speaker 1: was at Harvard, that it didn't hurt them. And you know,
Speaker 1: I'm glad to say that all those students went on
Speaker 1: to have tremendous careers.
Speaker 3: So it is the implicit assumption there. So you're saying
Speaker 3: you didn't forge data yourself.
Speaker 1: So what I own as the head of a lab
Speaker 1: was that I was trying to do too much. I
Speaker 1: was not as careful as I should have been.
Speaker 3: Okay, So it's unintentional, is what you're saying.
Speaker 2: Unintentional?
Speaker 3: That's my direct question. Was it into unintentional?
Speaker 2: Intentional?
Speaker 3: She didn't sit down one day and you're like, let
Speaker 3: me see how I can finance the state and finances
Speaker 3: and finesse finesse the data that.
Speaker 2: You didn't do that I did not.
Speaker 3: That's that's a big difference.
Speaker 2: It is a big difference.
Speaker 1: And you know, I I want to just note that
Speaker 1: when I think of the potential damage that misconduct Kennon
Speaker 1: has done.
Speaker 2: I think of two things.
Speaker 1: One, it causes researchers to invest time in looking at
Speaker 1: things that are false, and it, in course, it wastes
Speaker 1: taxpayer money grants. In my case, the case ended and
Speaker 1: I had to retract to one paper. Several years after
Speaker 1: that paper was retracted, two independent labs replicated the actual result.
Speaker 2: So I wasn't involved in those.
Speaker 1: They did them themselves, and so the you know, the
Speaker 1: the result that we had was wrong because of the
Speaker 1: experimental design was wrong and it led to a false conclusion.
Speaker 1: But the actual result was actually replicated by two and.
Speaker 3: So that's just like a human to human question. Do
Speaker 3: you feel like the punishment was too harsh for the
Speaker 3: quote crime? Because because your career, right took a big hit.
Speaker 3: I mean, this must be emotional for you, right, because
Speaker 3: I mean, you're a human who went through this. You're
Speaker 3: not just some sort of abstract entity. They were like, oh,
Speaker 3: look at Marca, I mean, what what was it? What
Speaker 3: has it been like for you? Like I really care?
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, thank you for the question. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: So I guess the first thing to say is that
Speaker 1: I resigned.
Speaker 3: You weren't actually fired at the end of.
Speaker 1: At the end of the at the end of the investigation,
Speaker 1: the dean at the time said, you know, this has
Speaker 1: not been your most shining moment, but you are still
Speaker 1: member of our faculty. And then, for a variety of reasons,
Speaker 1: it just became not a place where I could really work,
Speaker 1: and for my own emotional sanity and for my family
Speaker 1: and my students.
Speaker 3: Did you have like colleagues and friends who kind of
Speaker 3: turned on you? Or yes, he just lost who I lost? Friends?
Speaker 1: Who I lost his friends. However, as you probably know,
Speaker 1: and you know the back of the book, some of
Speaker 1: my closest friends and colleagues, Steve Pinker and Susan Carey,
Speaker 1: stat as friends and they've blurbed the book, and I,
Speaker 1: you know, and I maintain friendships. And since that time happened,
Speaker 1: some colleagues asked me to come back to academia, and
Speaker 1: I decided I did not want to, in part because
Speaker 1: I had found this second chapter, which to me, to
Speaker 1: be totally honest, I probably wouldn't have found it because
Speaker 1: I simply I had plans of being an old part
Speaker 1: professor at Harvard rest of my life.
Speaker 3: You know what you had, postraumatic growth? Would you would
Speaker 3: you agree that that's what?
Speaker 2: Yes, I do.
Speaker 1: I do, and I certainly feel that in interesting ways,
Speaker 1: I didn't think I'd find something that I.
Speaker 2: Could do meaningfully that could use some of my skills.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it turned out that almost all of my
Speaker 1: skills have paid off in this whole new area.
Speaker 3: How did the morality work you did, then, How does
Speaker 3: that play a role in the work you do today
Speaker 3: at all? Or is it? Are they really complete separate
Speaker 3: chapters of your life.
Speaker 2: They're not.
Speaker 1: They're not completely separate because and I'll just give you
Speaker 1: a couple of examples. One of the consequences of certain
Speaker 1: kinds of traumatic experience, in particular things like sexual abuse
Speaker 1: and physical abuse, is that it brings very strong moral
Speaker 1: emotions to the victims shame.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's true. That's true.
Speaker 1: And I think having a relatively richer understanding of emotions,
Speaker 1: how they work, feelings, moral emotions, moral psychology has helped
Speaker 1: in my conversations with kids and with and with the
Speaker 1: staff who work with them, teachers, counselors, clinicians, doctors. So
Speaker 1: it's informed how I speak to the individual I work with,
Speaker 1: which includes the kids.
Speaker 2: And maybe it's had a height level of compassion for others.
Speaker 2: I think, you know.
Speaker 1: In one of the podcasts I was on, it was
Speaker 1: kind of reframed as second chances.
Speaker 2: All the kids I work with are second chance kids.
Speaker 3: I love this. Well, this is personal to you too.
Speaker 3: You're a second chance. I'm giving you a second chance
Speaker 3: right now completely by having you on the second of
Speaker 3: So let's talk about hope. Let's let's spend the rest
Speaker 3: of this interview today talking about this toolkit that you've
Speaker 3: developed and and and have you really seen examples firsthand
Speaker 3: of huge transformations and some of these kids in the
Speaker 3: way that they there their their sort of prospects in
Speaker 3: their head for their future.
Speaker 2: Yes, let me illustrate one. I'll give you two.
Speaker 1: This was a charming story in many ways.
Speaker 2: So I'm in this class. I'm teaching a class.
Speaker 1: So I've in a lot of the programs I work
Speaker 1: and I teach a class on critical thinking because to me,
Speaker 1: as kids, we need this.
Speaker 2: They need this. They act too impulsively.
Speaker 1: They don't stop before they think, you know, and think
Speaker 1: that they do. So I'm in his class and we're
Speaker 1: talking about similarities different between humans and other animals. And
Speaker 1: we've talked about the similarities and we and then the
Speaker 1: question that gets posted this class about ten or so
Speaker 1: middle school aged kids about ten to twelve years old,
Speaker 1: is what's uniquely human? And this one boy leaps out
Speaker 1: of his chair.
Speaker 2: And says sentience.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, so, I say to him, did you
Speaker 1: say sentience or sentence?
Speaker 2: He says, what the fuck? Mark? Why would I say sentence?
Speaker 2: Not even an answer to the question, Like, okaya, my bad,
Speaker 2: I'm old, I'm old. I can't hear that.
Speaker 3: Well that's incredible.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it gets better.
Speaker 3: That's a future Steven Pinker right there.
Speaker 1: So I say, okay, so, my bad, I said, does
Speaker 1: anybody here know what what sentience means.
Speaker 2: In their crickets? I said, Charlie, can you uh tell
Speaker 2: us what sentience?
Speaker 1: Music goes rolls his eyes, Well, okay, you know, well,
Speaker 1: it's like kind of the experience of what it's like
Speaker 1: to experience, Like I can't really know what it's like
Speaker 1: to experience what you're experiencing sort of, really, I really
Speaker 1: can't know what it's like to experience what other.
Speaker 2: Animals are experiencing. But yeah, it's the feeling of experience
Speaker 2: that's really good. I said, where did you learn about it?
Speaker 1: He goes, you know, YouTube, those guys, I think, I
Speaker 1: don't if they're philosophers or scientists, but like, you know,
Speaker 1: Pinker Dennett Chalmers.
Speaker 2: I'm like, and my jaw drops. He's like, what haven't
Speaker 2: you read them?
Speaker 1: This is a kid complete deprivation, neglect at home, parents,
Speaker 1: with mental health issues.
Speaker 2: But through this program.
Speaker 1: Of people believing in him, now he had the biology
Speaker 1: of an incredible brain, but deprived and neglected.
Speaker 2: Comes in filthy, doesn't wash. School does as best they can,
Speaker 2: but the school is there day after day. I could
Speaker 2: give him books.
Speaker 1: He has grown over the last three years. He's now fourteen, thirteen, fourteen,
Speaker 1: he's taking the high school class I'm giving on human
Speaker 1: rights and civics, and he's just blossoming because his trust
Speaker 1: in the kids. So there are many many cases like that.
Speaker 1: Similarly in Kenya where we're doing the work. Three years
Speaker 1: ago I went to an orphanage. A little boy had
Speaker 1: literally just been dropped off the doorstep, emaciated.
Speaker 2: Almost no clothes, mute. Of course, know the history was
Speaker 2: about four and a half years of age.
Speaker 1: We came back this year to the same orphanage to
Speaker 1: put in a library. Little boy is bright eyed, talking, reading.
Speaker 3: Playing, incredible.
Speaker 1: So those transformations happen, they're slow, they're hard. But for me,
Speaker 1: where the next steps are is that a lot of
Speaker 1: the ideas evidence that I cover in the book is
Speaker 1: not in the hands of practitioners, and that's what's said, Well.
Speaker 3: What is the toolkit it consists of.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the.
Speaker 1: Toolkit is really, for me a broad swath of things
Speaker 1: for a couple of reasons.
Speaker 2: One is that, like.
Speaker 1: Almost in anything in life, there's not one shoe fits all.
Speaker 1: But the reason to really take that seriously is because
Speaker 1: these five different dimensions of adversity create what I call
Speaker 1: traumatic signatures. So in the same way that neuropsychologists have
Speaker 1: uncovered ways in which when certain parts of the brain
Speaker 1: are damaged, you get these signatures which indicate the cognitive deficit,
Speaker 1: the ephasia's right prosobagnosia, faced deficit, and so forth. Traumatic
Speaker 1: experiences can create other signatures that if we understand them,
Speaker 1: we can better respond with specific traumatic toolkits.
Speaker 2: Okay, So that's the key idea. Well, just as a.
Speaker 1: Simple cut, there's many more dimensions. What abuse typically does
Speaker 1: is it creates and you mentioned the term before, it
Speaker 1: creates this hypervigiline amygdala.
Speaker 2: You are on high alert. The world is unsafe. Okay. So,
Speaker 2: for example, that little boy who bolted when he saw me.
Speaker 1: He is like a gazelle on the savann who sees
Speaker 1: a lion attack the group. The gazelle doesn't conclude that
Speaker 1: lion's bad. They conclude all lions are bad, and that's
Speaker 1: the right conclusion. Highly adaptive. Yeah, okay, so they've overgeneralized adaptively.
Speaker 1: And what schools, therapists, parents, communities have to do is
Speaker 1: help tamp down that amygdala so that the world doesn't
Speaker 1: feel unsafe.
Speaker 2: So part of that.
Speaker 1: Work can be breathing methods, getting control over the breathing system,
Speaker 1: the size of the problem, types of stuff, other kinds
Speaker 1: of therapeutic work, so a whole variety of things to
Speaker 1: help tamp.
Speaker 2: Down so they don't generalize. Compare that with what.
Speaker 1: Happens with the lovely little child I mentioned before sentience.
Speaker 2: He's deprived.
Speaker 1: He does not have a hyperactive emiglo. Deprivation undermines the
Speaker 1: development of the funnel lobe and therefore the executive system,
Speaker 1: so the systems for learning, attention, short term working memory,
Speaker 1: self regulations. Yeah, that's right exactly. So he had a
Speaker 1: system that was designed to learn the cortex active working absolutely,
Speaker 1: but for him, the association of actions and consequences were undermined.
Speaker 1: He wasn't getting the kind of feedback because the whole
Speaker 1: reward system was not really wired.
Speaker 3: I see.
Speaker 1: So for them, it's developing those systems of self regulation.
Speaker 1: He flipped when I say sentence right, completely emotionally justsregulated
Speaker 1: in that sense, right. And attention wasn't great constantly looking around, right,
Speaker 1: So very different systems. So how do we design these
Speaker 1: systems so that we can nurture the pieces that need nurturing.
Speaker 1: So part of it are the sort of these social
Speaker 1: emotional breathing, meditative attentional work, sometimes medication, depending.
Speaker 2: On that extreme the case.
Speaker 3: Maybe.
Speaker 1: But one of the things I cover towards the end
Speaker 1: of the book is what I call the neuroengineering approaches.
Speaker 2: And many of these are.
Speaker 1: Not yet ready for prime time for kids yet, but
Speaker 1: they hold out hopes.
Speaker 2: Let me mention two.
Speaker 1: One of the techniques which has now been approved by
Speaker 1: the FDA for depression is transcranial magnetic stimulation. So this
Speaker 1: is kind of the magnet apply to the cortex exactly and.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Yes, And here's a result which I just love because
Speaker 1: it shows how understanding brain function with new technology can
Speaker 1: really begin to be moved.
Speaker 2: In these applied areas.
Speaker 1: So consider populations of individuals that have had visually overwhelming
Speaker 1: traumatic experiences. So many traumatic experiences are necessarily visual, but
Speaker 1: car accident war veterans where the visual input just floods
Speaker 1: the memories night mirrors, and they're constantly flooded and distracted.
Speaker 2: To no end by these visuals.
Speaker 1: So there's an area in the kind of the back
Speaker 1: of the brain that my ex colleague Steve Costlin spent
Speaker 1: decades uncovering, which is the visual imagery area.
Speaker 2: So you invite individuals with.
Speaker 1: These kind of visually traumatic experiences to come in, and
Speaker 1: you invite them to bring back those images, and while
Speaker 1: they're doing it, you are stimulating the visual imagery area incredible,
Speaker 1: And what you find is you basically fade the visual
Speaker 1: imagery component without losing the memory of the experience, so
Speaker 1: that now when it comes back, they're just not flooded
Speaker 1: as much by those images.
Speaker 3: That's like a top. Now that's what I was talking
Speaker 3: about earlier, exactly right. It seems more hopeful to me,
Speaker 3: It's much more hopeful.
Speaker 1: So you also don't get the galvanic skin response because
Speaker 1: it's not causing that response. So in sometimes yes, the
Speaker 1: body keeps the score, but it's coming out. The memory
Speaker 1: keeps the score, but the body is showing some of
Speaker 1: the outputs.
Speaker 3: Well that's what. Yeah. In another way, Lisa Feldman Barrett says,
Speaker 3: the body is the scorecard. Yes, the brain keeps the
Speaker 3: score and the bodies of the.
Speaker 2: Score card exactly right.
Speaker 1: The ledger CONTs similar TOIL, very similar.
Speaker 2: So that's one.
Speaker 1: The second, of course, which is, you know, become part
Speaker 1: of the popular press. But I think it's I cover
Speaker 1: a lot more of the science in the book. Is
Speaker 1: the sort of psychedelics revolution. Oh yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: the key thing that kind of note here for your listeners,
Speaker 1: of course, is that it's not let's just go have
Speaker 1: an LSD trip. It's therapy assisted psychedelic use.
Speaker 2: It's not microdosing.
Speaker 1: It's therapy assisted of a particular kind of therapy. And
Speaker 1: to me, what I love about the science is that
Speaker 1: it's beautiful science. And it's beautiful to me in the
Speaker 1: following way. So what they do are they called doubly
Speaker 1: blind experiments, So neither the patient nor the therapists know.
Speaker 2: Who got the placebo and who got the psychedelic nice. Okay.
Speaker 1: The second reason why it's beautiful science is because we're
Speaker 1: beginning to really understand the mechanism of how the psychedelics.
Speaker 2: Are affecting the brain.
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, so in the case of major depression, it's
Speaker 1: psilocybin mountic mushrooms. In the case of PTSD, often complex PTSD,
Speaker 1: it's MDMA. So let me talk about the MDMA one
Speaker 1: because I think I really like this hopefulness of this
Speaker 1: result in both the depression case and the in the
Speaker 1: PTSD case, they're picking individual populations that are what are
Speaker 1: called treatment resistant, meaning they've gone for at least a
Speaker 1: decade where neither medication nor therapy has had any impact.
Speaker 3: Let's be really frustrating, really frustrating.
Speaker 2: So these are people at their end their rope right there.
Speaker 1: Of course, they're just suffering all the horrible, horrible.
Speaker 3: People like that. Let's get them some help.
Speaker 2: Let's get themselves.
Speaker 1: Eight weeks of md M A and therapy knocks the
Speaker 1: PTSD diagnosis by down by seventy percent. That's why they're
Speaker 1: very close now to FDA approval, because they've gone through
Speaker 1: the key kind of criteria for getting FDA prod.
Speaker 3: This is super interesting. MDMA obviously operates in a different mechanism.
Speaker 3: It's a different system than than psilocybin, for instance, and
Speaker 3: so they both have their own mechanisms of action. Correct.
Speaker 3: Do you think what the it's like It has to
Speaker 3: do with serotonin sort of situation going on there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, serotonin and potentially oxytocin, and this comes.
Speaker 2: From animal work.
Speaker 1: So this is a really really cool result. So this
Speaker 1: is a guy named Roman Nardeau who's a kind of
Speaker 1: neuroscientist who's actually used MDMA with mice.
Speaker 2: This is no therapy.
Speaker 3: Do they start hugging each other and dancing?
Speaker 1: Yes, here's the really cool thing. You reopen the critical
Speaker 1: period for social interactions in mice with MDMA and oxytocin.
Speaker 3: That's incredible.
Speaker 2: So this is.
Speaker 1: Where the combination of work with animals and humans is
Speaker 1: really beginning to shine the light on what's going on mechanistically,
Speaker 1: and that opening of the critical period is the key part.
Speaker 1: Is of course, people who take MDMA ecstasy parties.
Speaker 2: It's because of the social.
Speaker 1: Stuff and that's what's it's opening up as sociality, which
Speaker 1: of course and critically is opening it up to therapy
Speaker 1: in the same way that silos in depression major depression,
Speaker 1: the default network which is kind of the autobiographical piece
Speaker 1: is taking the first position in our thinking. For depressed people,
Speaker 1: that's why I can't get out of their own way.
Speaker 1: It's like, why am I always so sorry? Why am
Speaker 1: I always so sad?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: What psilocybin does is it quiets that system down and
Speaker 2: opens up other networks, like the salience network, making the
Speaker 2: individual more open to therapy.
Speaker 3: It self is such a source of our suffering, isn't it.
Speaker 1: You'd rather be an Apleasia. I'd rather be an Apleasia,
Speaker 1: no self.
Speaker 3: Self, That's yeah. I mean when you think of the
Speaker 3: you know, just our self narratives and how that kind
Speaker 3: of creates wars, I'm not just internal strife, but it
Speaker 3: explains a lot of strife around the world. But I
Speaker 3: also think the default network is really good for creativity though,
Speaker 3: so I've done. I've published studies showing it's not all bad.
Speaker 3: It's all I call it the imagination network totally. That's right. Hey,
Speaker 3: this was such an elucidating conversation and so important. I
Speaker 3: can tell that you are. I'm glad I met you.
Speaker 3: You know you're not the villain that you've been made
Speaker 3: out to be. At a certain point in my life
Speaker 3: when you were made out to be. It's such a
Speaker 3: I'm glad I met you. You are, You're obviously so compassionate,
Speaker 3: and you you get authentically emotional when you talk about
Speaker 3: helping these kids. I am sitting right next to you,
Speaker 3: and I see it and it's so authentic, and it's
Speaker 3: just it's beautiful. Thank you, so thank you for everything
Speaker 3: you're doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you for the conversation. It's been awesome.
Speaker 3: Yeah,