Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: part of the best of series, where we highlight some
Speaker 1: of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from
Speaker 1: the archives of the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 2: Enjoy.
Speaker 1: In this episode, I talk to renowned neuroscientists Lisa Feldman
Speaker 1: Barrett about emotions in the brain. Doctor Barrett is among
Speaker 1: the top one percent most cited scientists in the world
Speaker 1: and has been called the most important affect of scientists
Speaker 1: of our time. In this episode, doctor Barrett reveals what
Speaker 1: the true function of the brain is and it's not
Speaker 1: just for thinking. We also discuss the impact of past
Speaker 1: experiences on our cognition and what we can do to
Speaker 1: overcome our own detrimental patterns. Further into our discussion, doctor
Speaker 1: Lisa Feldman Barrett challenges the traditionally held view that emotions
Speaker 1: are universal in her own theory of constructed emotion. She
Speaker 1: argues that variability in emotional expression exists due to socialization
Speaker 1: and language differences. We also touch on the topics of hallucinogens, culture, education,
Speaker 1: relation ships, and authoritarianism. This was a really stimulating conversation
Speaker 1: and while we don't see eye to eye on everything,
Speaker 1: She really broadened my mind and had me thinking of
Speaker 1: new ways of thinking about emotions and the brain. There's
Speaker 1: no doubt that she's a legend in this field and
Speaker 1: it was a real honor chatting with her. So now
Speaker 1: I bring you doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett. Doctor Barrett, so
Speaker 1: great to chat with you today on the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 3: It's really great to be on the podcast. Thanks so
Speaker 3: much for having me.
Speaker 1: I've wanted to talk to you for a really long time.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, you're real leader in this field, and the
Speaker 1: way that you think about it is quite quite unique
Speaker 1: and different from some of the things. You know that
Speaker 1: a lot of people are even still being taught in
Speaker 1: introductory psychology textbooks, right, true, So yeah, we got we
Speaker 1: got to update this.
Speaker 3: We got up.
Speaker 1: We started your career as a clinical psychologist, Is that right?
Speaker 1: So that was your dream of.
Speaker 3: Going to clinical I don't know what I would say
Speaker 3: that was my dream. That was just where I ended
Speaker 3: up certainly. Uh. Yeah, you know, I had the choice
Speaker 3: to take the more academic route in cognitive psychology or
Speaker 3: the more academic route in a actually or potentially practice
Speaker 3: based route in clinical psychology, and I, for a number
Speaker 3: of reasons chose clinical psychology. But you know, my advisor
Speaker 3: was a social psychologist. I had one clinical and one
Speaker 3: social advisor, So I would say I I always had
Speaker 3: like one foot out the door, you know, even when
Speaker 3: I was training to be a clinician. Yeah, I'm glad
Speaker 3: that I have clinical training. I think it's actually served
Speaker 3: me really well in my research career. But but early
Speaker 3: on it became clear to me that I just really
Speaker 3: loved research, and I really loved the science end of things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean you're curious about everything because you've
Speaker 1: you've really you've started adding on other fields that you've
Speaker 1: started to integrate into your work. But you see that
Speaker 1: even early in your in your career, you know where
Speaker 1: you're you spend a decade training in psychophysiology and neuroanatomy, right,
Speaker 1: and neuroscience.
Speaker 3: And yeah, actually after I was a professor, so you know,
Speaker 3: and eventually I made my way back to cognitive and
Speaker 3: and other even adding on other fields. So I think
Speaker 3: that's one, you know, maybe one thing that marks my
Speaker 3: work is different or the work that I do with
Speaker 3: my colleagues and my in the lab that I that
Speaker 3: I developed so all my peeps over the years, is
Speaker 3: that you know, we read broadly and we draw broadly
Speaker 3: from a number of different disciplines within psychology and and
Speaker 3: also outside psychology, and that just gives you a really
Speaker 3: different perspective on psychological questions, psychological mechanisms, and and the
Speaker 3: underlying biological basis of those mechanisms.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I completely agree, and I was really excited to
Speaker 1: see you get into evolutionary developmental neuroscience and cultural evolution,
Speaker 1: systems engineering. All these kind of perspectives give you a
Speaker 1: system's view of the brain, which is I mean, it's
Speaker 1: so clear how that links to your theory of emotions,
Speaker 1: because if you take very discrete view of emotions or
Speaker 1: a very modular view, I should say, right, you could
Speaker 1: see how that's in some ways antithetical from a broader
Speaker 1: systems or network perspective or could be.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. In the nineteenth century, physiologists and neurologists and
Speaker 3: philosophers realized that there was the possibility of using the
Speaker 3: mechanisms and the labs, the lab procedures and so on
Speaker 3: of neurology and physiology to search for the physical basis
Speaker 3: of mental categories that have existed. Really in mental philosophy,
Speaker 3: going all the way back to ancient Greece. And when
Speaker 3: you take that approach, it sort of suggests to you
Speaker 3: a very modular approach where a word like episodic memory
Speaker 3: or semantic memory, or anger or sadness or fear refers
Speaker 3: to some specific set of psychological processes or a process
Speaker 3: which you know can be found in some modular part
Speaker 3: of the brain. But when you start with the brain
Speaker 3: and the nervous system and how it develops and how
Speaker 3: it evolved, and then you ask yourself, well, if you've
Speaker 3: given you know, we're a certain type of creature with
Speaker 3: a certain type of nervous system and a certain type
Speaker 3: of brain, how is it that that you know, nervous
Speaker 3: system in the context of other brains and nervous system
Speaker 3: of other people, how does that produce the thoughts and
Speaker 3: feelings and mental events that we have that we experience
Speaker 3: in this culture, but that are not general to all
Speaker 3: cultures in the world. Right, So you have really a
Speaker 3: single kind of nervous system architecture that can create many
Speaker 3: different types of minds, And so how does that work exactly?
Speaker 3: And it's not denying the fact that we feel anger
Speaker 3: and said this in fear, but it doesn't presume that
Speaker 3: there are ancient circuits for these emotions embedded somewhere in
Speaker 3: some you know, ancient beast lurking in your brain somewhere.
Speaker 3: It's a very different approach to start with the biology
Speaker 3: and then ask start asking questions about the psychology than
Speaker 3: doing it the other way around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I know that a question, the big
Speaker 1: question you're interested in is why do we have a brain? Why?
Speaker 1: Why does a brain exist? It's so metabolically expensive, and
Speaker 1: and and you've you've given answers such as it for
Speaker 1: regulation of our senses and for prediction. I know that
Speaker 1: prediction is a big one, and I've described the brain
Speaker 1: as a prediction, you know. But I want to take
Speaker 1: the question one step further because even more intriguing to
Speaker 1: me is why do we have a neocortex?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: Why?
Speaker 1: Why not just a brain? But but why do like me,
Speaker 1: when I say we, I mean me and you humans,
Speaker 1: why do we have a prefont Like why do we
Speaker 1: have a lateral prefontal cortex?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So let me just say that there's really debate
Speaker 3: amongst evolutionary by evolutionary neuroscientists as to whether the neocortex
Speaker 3: is actually new. Right, So there's some Uh, there's one
Speaker 3: way of looking at evolution brain evolution, which suggests that
Speaker 3: the neurons that create the so called neocortex the more
Speaker 3: neutral term is isocortex, actually are are present in all vertebrates,
Speaker 3: and are even present in animals that don't have a cortex,
Speaker 3: a ceriabral cortex, like birds for example. That there are
Speaker 3: homologous neurons there, and so what we think of as
Speaker 3: new may not be new at all. It's the organization
Speaker 3: that's new, you know. The evolutionary neuroscientist George Streeter has
Speaker 3: this great saying that as brains get bigger, they reorganize
Speaker 3: like companies. So it's not necessarily that new things emerge,
Speaker 3: but more that you know Barb Finley's work the neuroscientists
Speaker 3: Barb Finley suggests that all the vertebrates who've ever been studied,
Speaker 3: it looks like their brains go through exactly the same
Speaker 3: developmental stages you know, from embryos forward. But what changes
Speaker 3: is the duration of each stage. So some parts get
Speaker 3: some neurons grow for longer periods of time than others,
Speaker 3: and that produces these architectural differences, these anatomical differences in brains.
Speaker 3: And one answer to your question, or a partial answer
Speaker 3: to your question, is that we have a large cerebral
Speaker 3: cortex because we have what looks like a big neo cortex,
Speaker 3: because we live long lives, and the size of the
Speaker 3: brain is really tends to be very, very related to
Speaker 3: the longevity of the animal's life. Not perfectly, but they're
Speaker 3: not a perfect relationship there. But you know, we live
Speaker 3: long lives and we our brains function best when we
Speaker 3: can draw on past experience in order to predict the future,
Speaker 3: which becomes the present. And in order to do that,
Speaker 3: we need to have a lot of you know, a
Speaker 3: lot of storage space, as it were, although you know,
Speaker 3: brains don't store anything. They just reassemble past the past.
Speaker 3: They don't store it in any kind of way, any
Speaker 3: kind of biological way.
Speaker 1: I'll quote you. You said, you've said in another interview,
Speaker 1: remembering is reassembling the past and the present for the
Speaker 1: purpose of making sense of sense data and doing this predictively.
Speaker 1: I thought that was beautiful.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, for it's well, really for the purposes of
Speaker 3: regulating the body. And you know, so we make sense
Speaker 3: of sense data for the purposes of regulating the body.
Speaker 3: That's you know, we don't see and hear and smell
Speaker 3: because it's fun or because it's interesting. You know, sense
Speaker 3: is evolved when when the forebrain evolved, and because bodies
Speaker 3: got really complicated and animals had to have more awareness
Speaker 3: of their surroundings.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that that does link to I was going
Speaker 1: to ask you about the evolution of consciousness and we
Speaker 1: needed to have greater awareness of our surroundings. I mean,
Speaker 1: it seems like a good partial explanation for why the
Speaker 1: lights turned on at some point in human evolution.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, although you know that's I wouldn't say they
Speaker 3: turned on in human evolution. I mean, the evidence suggests that,
Speaker 3: you know, the cortex isn't really necessary for consciousness. So
Speaker 3: if you look at Bjorn Merker's work, it looks like,
Speaker 3: you know, really what you need is a mid brain,
Speaker 3: so you need the superior curriculus, and you need the
Speaker 3: things that's connected to including the hypothalamus, but that you
Speaker 3: don't need necessarily a cerebral cortex for for consciousness. And
Speaker 3: so have you read.
Speaker 1: Any Daniel Boor's work The Ravenous Brain? I have not,
Speaker 1: because us Daniel Boori's a neuse scientist at Camp University
Speaker 1: of Cambridge, He has a very interesting argument. He does
Speaker 1: link it very much to the the prefrontal cortex, the
Speaker 1: lateral prefun cortex, and nourbility for chunking and patterns that
Speaker 1: consciousness really is this ability to take lots and lots
Speaker 1: of sources of information and be able to perceive it
Speaker 1: in our in our field of view, and and and
Speaker 1: and he includes chunking is an important part of that.
Speaker 1: But but.
Speaker 3: Well, I would just say, I'm not it's not an
Speaker 3: I mean this. There's a very seminal paper in published
Speaker 3: in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in two thousand and seven
Speaker 3: where beyond Mrcer reviews the literature on people who basically,
Speaker 3: because of hydrocephaly and and other kinds of problems, have
Speaker 3: no cerebral cortex to speak of, and they're really quite conscious.
Speaker 3: So there's no question that what the cerebral cortex does
Speaker 3: is because of its architecture, it certainly allows us to
Speaker 3: compress information and abstract what you call chunking, I would
Speaker 3: call abstraction or you know, conceptualizing. It doesn't happen in
Speaker 3: the prefrontal cortex. It's not it's not the lateral prefrontal cortex.
Speaker 3: That's a misnomer, I would say, and doesn't actually, I mean,
Speaker 3: certainly that part of the brain is involved, but there's
Speaker 3: a whole architecture along the you know, the cortical sheet,
Speaker 3: which is basically compressing information in and reducing dimensionality of
Speaker 3: that information so that you can summarize a lot of
Speaker 3: details with features that are more abstract. It's just kind
Speaker 3: of like compressing an MP three or you know, like
Speaker 3: what Netflix uses when it streams movies to you over
Speaker 3: the internet.
Speaker 1: So I hope those things aren't conscious yet though, well.
Speaker 3: You know, actually there is a theory of consciousness which
Speaker 3: suggests that a certain degree of complexity is what produces
Speaker 3: consciousness and can produce consciousness in other agents that are
Speaker 3: not human or not living. I'm not going to get
Speaker 3: into that big because I don't really know. Yeah exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's not gonna Yeah it may be hot, but you know,
Speaker 3: just because something is interesting and comfortable intuitive doesn't make
Speaker 3: it you know, real or true. But in any case, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, it is interesting, but it's not something I
Speaker 3: know well enough to discuss. But what I do know
Speaker 3: is that it's important to make a distinction between experiencing
Speaker 3: something and being self Reflectively aware that you're experiencing it
Speaker 3: and the experience of the world that is, experiencing light,
Speaker 3: experiencing sound, experiencing smell doesn't require a cerebral cortex, but
Speaker 3: being aware of that, being self reflexively aware of it
Speaker 3: may in bulble cortex. I don't know that that could
Speaker 3: be true.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: A particular brain network that has fascinated me in my
Speaker 1: career is the default mode network or impoper radiant call
Speaker 1: it the imagine nation network. But it obviously does more
Speaker 1: than the social imagination. But social imagination is a big
Speaker 1: part of it in your ability to project yourself in
Speaker 1: the future. But it's a very self related network, very
Speaker 1: you know, right, and so, but it's always fascinating to
Speaker 1: me when that network, you know, people take like hallucigens
Speaker 1: or psychedelics and things that that alter that brain network.
Speaker 1: So the self, you know, is somehow altered in some way.
Speaker 1: What that experience is like, and then the experience of
Speaker 1: consciousness in those moments, it's very it's a very different
Speaker 1: state of consciousness. It's not it's not it's not most
Speaker 1: people's everyday state of consciousness being on LSD, at least
Speaker 1: not for me. Not my everyday experience. So anyway, I
Speaker 1: was just wondering your own career, have you made much
Speaker 1: contact with the default mode network in your own research,
Speaker 1: and what are your thoughts on it's on its evolutionary function.
Speaker 3: What is conventionally called the default mode network, which is
Speaker 3: a network that's been identified in the intrinsic you know,
Speaker 3: connectivity in the brain has many names, right, it has
Speaker 3: it has more aliases I think than Sherlock Holmes. Right.
Speaker 3: So it's been called the mental lin the imagination network,
Speaker 3: and the self network, and it's the memory network, and
Speaker 3: it's the context network, and it's the you know, okay,
Speaker 3: and so you know, scientists have a tendency to look
Speaker 3: at circuitry and then name it on behalf of whatever
Speaker 3: phenomenon they're interested in. But I guess I look at
Speaker 3: that network and I think, okay, it contains half of
Speaker 3: the circuitry in the brain that is responsible for regulating
Speaker 3: your body. So whatever else it's doing, whatever else it's
Speaker 3: doing psychologically speaking, it's also regulating your autonomic nervous system,
Speaker 3: your immune system, your endecrine system, and the other systems
Speaker 3: of your body. And so so this is just a hypothesis,
Speaker 3: you know, I don't study hallucinogens at the moment, but
Speaker 3: you know, one way to think about what's happening with
Speaker 3: psilocybin and other hallucinogens catamine even is that you know,
Speaker 3: even when your brain is at rest, it's still attached
Speaker 3: to your body and it's still regulate your Your body
Speaker 3: and your brain are still talking to each other when
Speaker 3: you're asleep, when you're at rest, you know, even when
Speaker 3: you're daydreaming, your brain is never detached from your body.
Speaker 3: So your body is always in training your brain, always
Speaker 3: in training your brain, except maybe when you take these hallucinogens.
Speaker 3: So maybe what's happening with hallucinogens and the reason why
Speaker 3: you can have these like completely wild experiences and the
Speaker 3: reason why you need a guide lest you go off
Speaker 3: the rails is that the normal constraints your brain is
Speaker 3: basically associating from one moment to the next. That's what
Speaker 3: predictions are, That's what imagination is, that's what daydreaming is.
Speaker 3: That's what you know, perceptual inferences, simulation, all these words
Speaker 3: we have. That's how you know something is important. You
Speaker 3: know in the science is that there are many names
Speaker 3: for it. But your brain is constrained by your body,
Speaker 3: and it's often constrained by the world. But when you
Speaker 3: go to sleep and the control networks in your brain,
Speaker 3: including the de doorsilateral prefroma cortex, you know, your brain
Speaker 3: is less constrained to associate, less constrained by the world
Speaker 3: because uh, information from the world sense data from the
Speaker 3: world is not processed as much. But there's still this
Speaker 3: anchoring in the body. And so sure, you know, crazy
Speaker 3: things can happen in your dreams, but some things don't
Speaker 3: happen because they're probably you know, weed it out. But
Speaker 3: when you relax that constraint, then you really do have
Speaker 3: more like a brain and a vat right, And and
Speaker 3: so maybe that's what's happened. I mean, I have no idea,
Speaker 3: but uh, you know, that's one thought that I've had often.
Speaker 3: And that's why people have this sense of they're disconnected
Speaker 3: from the self because many scientists, including Antonio Dimacio but
Speaker 3: others as well, have talked about a fundamental sense of
Speaker 3: self being rooted in the brain's modeling of the body.
Speaker 3: We don't experience it that way, but but there's some
Speaker 3: reasonable evidence to suggest that that that's really how it's working.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's so it's so it's such a new frontier.
Speaker 1: You know a lot of people, you know, good researchers
Speaker 1: that Johns Hopkins for instance, are looking into this issue.
Speaker 1: I mean, so much to be discovered. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to claim that I and that I have figured out.
Speaker 3: Oh no, but I mean I think it's really cool frontier. Actually, everybody,
Speaker 3: like all of these centers for studying psychedelics are popping up.
Speaker 3: There's one at mass General, there's one at Berkeley. Now
Speaker 3: there's like they're all you know, they're they're all popping.
Speaker 1: In London, London, Yeah, yeah, Now you know in your
Speaker 1: book seven and a half Lessons about the Brain, one
Speaker 1: of them is your brain is not for thinking? Can
Speaker 1: you tell my neurotic brain that fact? Can you?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 1: Like I mean, like you know, because I overthink everything.
Speaker 1: I have a shirt that says too busy, overthinking and.
Speaker 3: Overfeeling I need to get I need to get one
Speaker 3: of those shirts too. Well. The way I think of
Speaker 3: it is our brains are like the masters of deception.
Speaker 3: You know, they create our experience and they guide our actions,
Speaker 3: but they do it in ways that don't reveal how
Speaker 3: they're doing it. You know, they just and so your
Speaker 3: own experience is not a really great guide for what
Speaker 3: your brain is actually doing under the hood. And so
Speaker 3: so the way that I think about it is that
Speaker 3: based on evolutionary considerations is that you know, brains, not
Speaker 3: all animals have brains, and as you said, brains are
Speaker 3: really expensive metabolically. I mean that three pound blob of
Speaker 3: meat between your ears is the most metabolically expensive exactly
Speaker 3: organ that you have. And it's not frugal. So what's it?
Speaker 3: You know, its main job really is to keep your
Speaker 3: body alive, and to keep you alive and well and
Speaker 3: and thinking and feeling and seeing and so on are
Speaker 3: in the service of that task. Now, we don't live
Speaker 3: our lives that way, and we don't experience every feeling
Speaker 3: that we have in every you know, insult that we bear,
Speaker 3: in every hug that we give, and every you know
Speaker 3: jog that we take, and every argument that we have.
Speaker 3: You know, we don't experience our lives that way. But
Speaker 3: that does seem to be from my perspective, the best
Speaker 3: explanation for how to think about thinking and feeling and
Speaker 3: so on in the dynamics of the brain. And when
Speaker 3: you start thinking about it that way, it suggests it
Speaker 3: opens up all kinds of new avenues of thought for
Speaker 3: things like why we have an opioid epidemic, why do
Speaker 3: we have record levels of depression, you know in this
Speaker 3: country and around the world. Why does authoritarian thinking seem
Speaker 3: to emerge, you know during economic hardship. Mean there are
Speaker 3: psychological explanations that people give that are incomplete, I would say,
Speaker 3: because they don't consider what's happening at the biological level.
Speaker 3: And when you start to think about those factors, a
Speaker 3: lot of hypotheses sort of emerge. So it's very fruitful
Speaker 3: way to you know, think about what psychological functions are
Speaker 3: for exactly.
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Speaker 1: look forward to welcoming you in December. Well, let's pick
Speaker 1: one and double click on it. Can I pick the
Speaker 1: authoritarian during economic hardship one? Because that's super interesting to
Speaker 1: me and I'm trying to figure that one out myself,
Speaker 1: and the same with populism. You know, you see during
Speaker 1: certain environmental conditions, these environmental conditions, how is it interacting
Speaker 1: with the brain? You know, how can the biological perspective
Speaker 1: help explain this? Particularly from maybe even a prediction, because
Speaker 1: I could see where you're going. But I'd love to
Speaker 1: hear I'd love to hear what your your thoughts are.
Speaker 3: Sure. Sure. So the first thing, though, you know, that
Speaker 3: I would say is I want to make it really
Speaker 3: clear that what I'm offering here is is this hypothesis.
Speaker 3: I'm not claiming anything is true, and I'm also not
Speaker 3: reducing everything to biology. That this is not a reductionist
Speaker 3: explanation of anything. It's actually what I'm suggesting is that
Speaker 3: there are that this is a complex matter. And when
Speaker 3: I say complex, I don't I don't just mean like, wow,
Speaker 3: this is super complicated, although it is super complicated, but
Speaker 3: I mean, really in terms of the causation is complex,
Speaker 3: meaning there are multiple factors which are interacting with each other.
Speaker 3: And I think one of the factors that that's interacting
Speaker 3: with other with other, one of the one of the
Speaker 3: causal factors are one of the causal forces amongst many
Speaker 3: that are interacting is the state of your metabolism. So
Speaker 3: you know, the best way for me to describe it
Speaker 3: is to say, to use a to use a metaphor
Speaker 3: that I use in seven a half Lessons, which is
Speaker 3: that you know, your brain is running a budget for
Speaker 3: your body, and it's not budgeting money, it's budgeting salt
Speaker 3: and glucose and water and oxygen and all the nutrients
Speaker 3: that you know, you need to keep yourself alive and
Speaker 3: well because you have gazillions of cells in your body
Speaker 3: and they all need oxygen, and they all have to
Speaker 3: have waste removed and you know, and so there's a
Speaker 3: need to sort of make sure that nutrients get where
Speaker 3: they need to go before they're needed. If you wait
Speaker 3: until after they're needed, there's a tax that you pay
Speaker 3: little metabol attacks. So there's this body budgeting function that
Speaker 3: your brain is performing. And you know, when your brain
Speaker 3: is well, what do you do when your budget When
Speaker 3: your financial budgets in running a deficit, you stop spending.
Speaker 3: What does that mean for a brain? Well, the two
Speaker 3: most expensive things that your brain can do is move
Speaker 3: your body or learn something new. And so what happens
Speaker 3: when people are running a deficit in their body budget,
Speaker 3: when their metabolism metabolically they're just not it's not just
Speaker 3: it's not as efficient as it should be. Maybe they're
Speaker 3: not getting enough maybe they're not getting enough sleep, Maybe
Speaker 3: they're not eating healthfully, maybe they're not drinking enough water.
Speaker 3: Maybe they're economically burdened, maybe they're socially isolated. Or lonely.
Speaker 3: Maybe all of these things actually translate pretty direct into
Speaker 3: body budgeting burdens. I could go on and on and on,
Speaker 3: but what happens is you might feel fatigued, and you
Speaker 3: might you know, stop moving around as much. You might
Speaker 3: feel I should also say, there's a real feeling of
Speaker 3: unpleasantness that comes with body budgeting deficits, and then your
Speaker 3: brain's going to be looking for a cause for that unpleasantness.
Speaker 3: And if somebody conveniently points to an immigrant, or somebody
Speaker 3: who doesn't look like you, or somebody who is different
Speaker 3: from you in some way, that's an easy explanation for
Speaker 3: your feeling of unpleasantness. But more importantly, I think even
Speaker 3: more importantly than that, is that, you know, what's hard
Speaker 3: to deal with when you're running a deficit is complexity.
Speaker 3: Like you, people look for simple, single causes, They look
Speaker 3: for simplicity, and they look for no you know, things
Speaker 3: that certainty with no ambiguity. And so if you look
Speaker 3: at populism or authoritarianism or or totalitarian thinking, and you
Speaker 3: look at the analysis of that from a political standpoint,
Speaker 3: political science or historical standpoint, what you see scholars saying
Speaker 3: is these things tend to arise, people start looking for
Speaker 3: simple single causes, and they start looking for you know,
Speaker 3: certainty and aversion to ambiguity and uncertainty and so on.
Speaker 3: These things start happening when you know, people are stressed
Speaker 3: in some way, and what is stress stress is just
Speaker 3: literally your brain is preparing your body for a big
Speaker 3: metabolic outlay and it may or may not come. So
Speaker 3: you're starts squandering your resources, driving your body budget into deficit.
Speaker 3: So it's not only economic concerns that can cause this case. Right,
Speaker 3: So when you have a president or a leader of
Speaker 3: your country who just plunges the country into chaos where
Speaker 3: you can't predict, that is extremely metabolically costly for you.
Speaker 3: You won't feel it as a metabolic cost. You'll just
Speaker 3: feel like shit basically, you know, and it results in
Speaker 3: you know, over the long term, there there are consequences.
Speaker 3: So that's actually what I think is in part happening.
Speaker 3: I think that when you look at regimes that are
Speaker 3: like dictators and so on, you know, usually what precedes
Speaker 3: that is a period of chaos where the country is
Speaker 3: being thrown into chaos and uncertainty is really hard for
Speaker 3: a nerv human nervous system. It's really metabolically expensive. And
Speaker 3: what your brain attempts to do in uncertainty is learn.
Speaker 3: But if you don't have the spoons to learn, you're
Speaker 3: just going to avoid that uncertainty and that beuty and
Speaker 3: choose certainty instead. And you know what history tells us
Speaker 3: is that sometimes people will give away their freedom to
Speaker 3: get certainty in the moment because it's preferable to the
Speaker 3: pain and suffering and distress that comes with uncertainty. And
Speaker 3: I think that, you know, so, I think that actually
Speaker 3: adding not replacing social and psychological levels of explanation with biology,
Speaker 3: but I think adding the biology the layer actually helps
Speaker 3: knit together some things that you know, we didn't necessarily
Speaker 3: think of as being related before.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is perfectly in line with a framework that
Speaker 1: I've been using to try and understand some of the
Speaker 1: framework of psychological entropy. You know, like Jacob Parsh and
Speaker 1: Raymond Mahr and Jordan Peterson propos. Did you read their
Speaker 1: paper Psychological Entropy, A Framework for Understanding and Certainty Related Anxiety?
Speaker 3: I did. Yeah, awesome.
Speaker 1: I assume you're very well read in the literature. I
Speaker 1: was wondering what you thought of it sort of applying
Speaker 1: some of these free energy principles and things that are
Speaker 1: used in any self organizing system. But to the brain
Speaker 1: level of analysis and human psychology.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think the idea of psychological entropy is
Speaker 3: a good metaphor, like body budgeting is a good metaphor
Speaker 3: for the biological process of allostasis. I don't know that,
Speaker 3: Carl Fristen, And there's like a whole you know, a
Speaker 3: whole generation people talking about free energy, and to be honest,
Speaker 3: I don't. I got to see in high school physics,
Speaker 3: you know, I couldn't even pass high you know, college
Speaker 3: level physics. It was just not for me. So I
Speaker 3: really prefer to deal with things at the biological level.
Speaker 3: I can't get down to the to the to the
Speaker 3: fit level of physics, to be honest. So I'm kind
Speaker 3: of joking there, but I'm also kind of not joking.
Speaker 3: I don't know enough, really, and I don't understand the math.
Speaker 3: Even with my engineering colleagues to help me, they often
Speaker 3: don't understand the math that they read in these papers.
Speaker 3: So you know, I'm not saying the entropy the psychological entrepater,
Speaker 3: but the I'm talking about the you know, predictive coding paper.
Speaker 3: So I don't know at that level, but I do
Speaker 3: know that that I think psychological entropy is a good
Speaker 3: it's a good metaphor for what's happening at the level
Speaker 3: of the brain, which is that why do we even predict?
Speaker 3: Why do brains even predict in the first place. And
Speaker 3: the answer is to reduce uncertainty. It's to reduce ambiguity
Speaker 3: because you can't you're there. The whole point of a
Speaker 3: nervous system is to figure out what to do next.
Speaker 3: And if you can't figure that out, it's really expensive
Speaker 3: metabolically and you might die, so, you know, because you
Speaker 3: might not protect your or you might miss you know, uh,
Speaker 3: getting food or whatever. So so I would say, I
Speaker 3: don't know about the details of the mechanistic analysis, but
Speaker 3: I like the metaphoric quite a bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, me too, And I wouldn't. Yeah, claim to have
Speaker 1: fully understand and have comprehension over how free energy principle
Speaker 1: works in thermodynamics systems. Don't ask me at all.
Speaker 3: I don't. I'm not, you know, I'm like, I believe,
Speaker 3: I believe you know the second law of thermodynamics or whatever.
Speaker 3: I don't know exactly.
Speaker 2: I take it for granted.
Speaker 1: That's true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly, you know, and I mean it's sort
Speaker 3: of the same thing as you know, like quantum mechanics,
Speaker 3: you know, like I love Carlo Ravelli's writing because it
Speaker 3: makes sense to me. It describes, you know, quantum mechanics
Speaker 3: as this relate in relational terms, so nothing has a
Speaker 3: meaning except in relation to something else, and that to
Speaker 3: me makes a lot of sense. Actually, it's really consistent
Speaker 3: with the constructionist approach that we take. But don't ask
Speaker 3: me to read the math, man, I just you know
Speaker 3: that I'm not at that level really of being able
Speaker 3: to do that. But the ideas make a lot of
Speaker 3: sense to me totally.
Speaker 1: And one level of analysis that it really interests me
Speaker 1: when we talk about how the brain is a prediction machine,
Speaker 1: is the effect of early childhood trauma on brain wiring,
Speaker 1: especially during vulnerable periods, critical periods of brain development. Metaphor
Speaker 1: that really struck me as ringing true. Is this idea
Speaker 1: that our brain does a weather forecast to a certain
Speaker 1: degree if we are raised in very unstable and unpredictable
Speaker 1: and harsh and partially unpredictable environments growing up, that that
Speaker 1: does have certain effects on brain development that can cause
Speaker 1: us to sort of expect that the world will be
Speaker 1: unfair or unsafe in the future, and that that process
Speaker 1: has to be actively unlearned through through therapy, lots of therapy.
Speaker 1: That's why we're all in therapy as adults, you know,
Speaker 1: especially people who've gone through trauma, to actively unwarn that
Speaker 1: because fear learning and fear unlearning operate in different systems
Speaker 1: of the brain. So I just want to just get
Speaker 1: some of your thoughts on some of what I just said.
Speaker 1: Do you like that metaphor of kind of the weather
Speaker 1: forecast metaphor of early childhood trauma? And yeah, just where
Speaker 1: are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 3: Well? I think all brain function can be described as
Speaker 3: weather forecast, And in fact, a number of years ago
Speaker 3: I actually wrote an opinion piece that talked about maps
Speaker 3: of the brain and made analogies to weather maps versus too,
Speaker 3: you know, geographic maps and so on and so forth.
Speaker 3: But I guess it makes sense. But the way that
Speaker 3: I talk about it actually is to use the idea
Speaker 3: from psychology of an internal model. Human brains are not
Speaker 3: born complete, they're born under construction. So a little infant
Speaker 3: brain is not a miniature adult brain. It's a brain
Speaker 3: that's waiting for wiring instructions from the world, and it
Speaker 3: gets those wiring instructions through the sensory surfaces of your body.
Speaker 3: So some of the like your brain is wired to
Speaker 3: the ear shape that you have and the wideness of
Speaker 3: your eyes, and you know, it's wired by the sense
Speaker 3: data that it receives. It's also wired by the you know,
Speaker 3: variations in temperature and in light and in you know, warmth,
Speaker 3: and also by social interactions. So how much does a
Speaker 3: person make eye contact with the infant, how much does
Speaker 3: the person how much does a caregiver speak to the infant, Like,
Speaker 3: all of these things actually influence wiring of the brain.
Speaker 3: And basically what the brain is doing is it's bootstrapping
Speaker 3: into itself a model of its body in the world.
Speaker 3: And so if a child experiences adversity over a prolonged
Speaker 3: period of time or even it could just be one
Speaker 3: really intense instance of adversity, that becomes part of the
Speaker 3: child's model, by the brain's model, and that's what the
Speaker 3: brain uses to predict the future, which becomes the present.
Speaker 3: Your predictions, in a sense, you know, are always the
Speaker 3: result of past experience in some way. Oftentimes it's your
Speaker 3: own personal experience. But it could be you know, the
Speaker 3: stories that you hear from other people, or the things
Speaker 3: that you see on TV, or the books that you read,
Speaker 3: or the movies that you see, or the stuff you
Speaker 3: look at on YouTube or whatever. You know. Because humans,
Speaker 3: we don't have to experience everything ourselves. We also can
Speaker 3: learn from other people adversity, if it's prolonged or profound,
Speaker 3: will that brains wire themselves to function in those circumstances.
Speaker 3: And that's the that's the model of the world, of
Speaker 3: the body in the world that the brain takes forward
Speaker 3: into new environments. And so yeah, but the only thing
Speaker 3: I want to say was I don't think you you
Speaker 3: don't really ever unlearn anything. You just learn new things.
Speaker 3: And so the I mean, the evidence you know, suggests
Speaker 3: that old learning never goes away. It just becomes contextual
Speaker 3: you know, it's just becomes contextualized, so you learn new things.
Speaker 3: It doesn't replace the old learning, it just exists alongside it.
Speaker 3: And this sort of gets back to your point about
Speaker 3: like why do we have a big neo cortex, And
Speaker 3: the answer is because we don't unlearn things. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's why we have a big neocortex, so that we
Speaker 3: have lifetime memories that we can use to predict the future.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's so fascinating when you
Speaker 1: really think about it really concretely, the fact that our
Speaker 1: brain is stuck in this dark encasement it doesn't have
Speaker 1: like it's not and it's like trying to you know,
Speaker 1: through how many years of human well not just human evolution,
Speaker 1: but of organism evolution. It's taking everything, it's it's learned
Speaker 1: throughout the whole, you know, to try to predict and
Speaker 1: figure out like, okay, well that's happening. Well we know that,
Speaker 1: like there's a probability that this is, you know, and
Speaker 1: that's why we might jump at something that's actually not
Speaker 1: Once we process it, we're like, okay, well that wasn't
Speaker 1: actually scary. You know, we'll see something like run across
Speaker 1: the fore, you know, be like oh, you know it's
Speaker 1: like the brain predicting that, right that we should be
Speaker 1: scared by that. But it's just it's just so it's
Speaker 1: so immed I mean, it's such a it's all Isn't
Speaker 1: it all inspiring? You know to think about, you know,
Speaker 1: just like how much is built in that actually does
Speaker 1: allow us to function reasonably well, you know some it
Speaker 1: depends on my day, but you know well enough to
Speaker 1: be able to to take in all this information and
Speaker 1: have you know such quick you know reactions.
Speaker 3: You know. I have to say that as I was
Speaker 3: writing seven and a half lessons about the brain, I
Speaker 3: am it really changed how I look at little infants
Speaker 3: like you look at these little, helpless, little creatures, and
Speaker 3: there's a it's remarkable what's happening inside that skull? You know?
Speaker 3: And yeah, I mean I've certainly used the phrasing that
Speaker 3: you know, your brain is stuck in a dark, silent
Speaker 3: box and it's receiving sense data from your body and
Speaker 3: from the world. So you know, there's a change in
Speaker 3: air pressure which you experience as a sound of like
Speaker 3: you know, like a loud bang. So what is that
Speaker 3: loud bang? What caused that loud bang? Is it a
Speaker 3: car door slamming? Is it thunder? Is it a gunshot?
Speaker 3: You know, whatever the cause is will will lead you know,
Speaker 3: that's what's going to dictate what you do next. But
Speaker 3: you don't have access to the cause. You only have
Speaker 3: access to the consequence to the outcome. So your brain
Speaker 3: has to guess at the cause and what does it
Speaker 3: use to guess. It uses past experience, so you can't
Speaker 3: escape using past experience. If you do, you are experientially
Speaker 3: blind to to what you're presented with. But what you
Speaker 3: can do is you can cultivate new experiences for yourself
Speaker 3: that essentially seed your brain to predict differently in the future.
Speaker 3: So you're by doing this, you're basically cultivating your past.
Speaker 3: You can't reach back into your past and change it.
Speaker 3: I mean, you can go with the therapy and you
Speaker 3: can try to remodel, do a little remodel, you know,
Speaker 3: but you can't really re architect your past. What you
Speaker 3: can do, though, is cultivate experiences for yourself in the
Speaker 3: future that are novel, that are instructive, that are essentially
Speaker 3: like cultivating a new past, because once you've experienced it,
Speaker 3: it's learned and it's there and it's available to be
Speaker 3: used in the future. So oftentimes, the way I think
Speaker 3: of it as it's kind of like exercise. You know,
Speaker 3: cultivating a new experience for yourself can be scary, painful, uncomfortable.
Speaker 3: It can also be joyful, but you know, it's energetically costly,
Speaker 3: so is exercise. You're kind of making an investment in
Speaker 3: in who you'll be in the future.
Speaker 2: That's poetic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So yeah, well this is this
Speaker 1: is a major theme of your book, is that there
Speaker 1: are a lot of things we can you know, that
Speaker 1: we can do to influence our our mind, you know,
Speaker 1: and the patterns you know, and which does change you know,
Speaker 1: there's a reciprocal thing there. Well, okay, I only get
Speaker 1: too implicit dualism here, but I've wrote something on Twitter,
Speaker 1: like I wrote something like a seemingly innocuous comment like,
Speaker 1: it's very interesting to me that, how you know, it's
Speaker 1: not just as though the brain produces one a mind,
Speaker 1: it produces multiple minds. And it's really interesting me how
Speaker 1: through the course of human evolution, you know, some of
Speaker 1: these minds evolve for different purposes.
Speaker 2: It's amazing.
Speaker 1: How do we make any decisions? You know, like when
Speaker 1: we have all these things, and people will wrote things like, well,
Speaker 1: how do you know it's the brain producing the mind?
Speaker 1: How do you know it's not the mind producing the brain?
Speaker 1: And I'm like well, and I'm like, well, you know, look,
Speaker 1: as a cognitive scientist, I assume a couple of things,
Speaker 1: you know, or else I what is the purpose of
Speaker 1: my job if I don't assume them. One thing I
Speaker 1: assume is that the mind and brain are intricably connected.
Speaker 1: That and that the former that the mind depends on
Speaker 1: the I mean, isn't that a reasonable assumption?
Speaker 3: Well, of course, at disk is we're scientists. I think.
Speaker 3: The way I think about it is that, well, let
Speaker 3: me first just say that this idea of does the
Speaker 3: mind influence the brain in philosophy is called you probably know,
Speaker 3: it's called the downward causation problem. So the way I
Speaker 3: think about it is that the mind is what the
Speaker 3: brain is doing in a particular moment in time, and
Speaker 3: the mind is constituted as a set of mental features.
Speaker 3: It's like the psychological features the experiential features in a
Speaker 3: given brain state or where the brain is in its
Speaker 3: state space to be technical. So it's not like you
Speaker 3: have a mind and you have a brain, and you
Speaker 3: somehow have to figure out how these two realms relate
Speaker 3: to each other. You have a brain and your brain
Speaker 3: conjures constructs mental features, and those mental features are your
Speaker 3: mind at that moment, and that's it. There's really nothing
Speaker 3: and you know so, but what you do in the moment,
Speaker 3: So for example, if I smile at you or I
Speaker 3: scowl at you or you know, whatever I do or
Speaker 3: actually it's what your brain predicts I'll do influences what
Speaker 3: you do next, so and that influences me. So this
Speaker 3: is you know you, so you're so. Mental features can
Speaker 3: influence brain wiring. There is downward causation in that sense.
Speaker 3: In fact, one of the post docs in our lab,
Speaker 3: a brilliant guy named Jordan Terry o uh, He published
Speaker 3: a paper about a sense of should, like why do people,
Speaker 3: you know, why do people feel moral obligation? Why do
Speaker 3: they follow social rules? Like what's the value of that?
Speaker 3: Why do that? And the answer is, and it's all
Speaker 3: laid out with math, and you know, is that if
Speaker 3: I make myself predictable to you, then you are more
Speaker 3: predictable to me, and you being predictable to me is metabolically,
Speaker 3: you know, beneficial to me. Again, coming back to uncertainty
Speaker 3: versus predictability.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't be good if like the growth trajectory of most
Speaker 1: human relationships was, oh, we're starting to really understand each
Speaker 1: other's being.
Speaker 3: You know. Well, I mean that's a really complicated question,
Speaker 3: but I partly what I would say is that in
Speaker 3: I say, this is a clinician but probably also as
Speaker 3: a person. You know, it's hard, it sounds, it's going
Speaker 3: to sound really pop psyche, but actually think it's true.
Speaker 3: You know, you can't really get to know somebody else
Speaker 3: really well, and if you don't know yourself really well.
Speaker 3: And in my experience, people lie to each other less
Speaker 3: than they lie to themselves. So, you know, oftentimes in coversations,
Speaker 3: I'm sure you've had this experience. You know, it's like
Speaker 3: you're a platform for the person to perform who they
Speaker 3: believe they are. They're not really having a conversation with you,
Speaker 3: they're just you know, like I often feel like when
Speaker 3: I'm in a situation like that where I want to say,
Speaker 3: who are you saying this for? Like are you saying
Speaker 3: this for me? Are you saying this for yourself? Like,
Speaker 3: I you know, who's this for? Who is this? You know?
Speaker 3: What's this for?
Speaker 4: It?
Speaker 3: So, I think when there's discord in relationships, it's often
Speaker 3: because you know, people are unaware they're that they're you know,
Speaker 3: they're unaware of their own Yeah.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: Well, you do say in your book your brain secretly
Speaker 1: works with other brains. I think this really this principle
Speaker 1: relates to some of the things we're throwing around right
Speaker 1: now in concepts. My friend Andy Murphy Paul the journalist,
Speaker 1: wrote a really brilliant book that just came out called
Speaker 1: The Extended Mind, which drew on the work of Dave
Speaker 1: Chalmers Andy Clark.
Speaker 2: Did you have you had?
Speaker 1: Do you see that book?
Speaker 3: I've seen the book, and it's on my pile of
Speaker 3: books to read at the beach. So I allow myself
Speaker 3: when I go to the beach for two weeks every
Speaker 3: year and I only read novels, and I allow myself
Speaker 3: one science book one, just one, and I'm reading science
Speaker 3: all the rest of the year, you know, So that's
Speaker 3: a contender. Yeah, on my pile right right there.
Speaker 1: But you're but you're obviously familiar with the you know,
Speaker 1: the extended mind hypothesis.
Speaker 3: And oh absolutely, yeah, absolutely, But you know, I mean,
Speaker 3: you're you're probably really familiar with lots of scientific work.
Speaker 3: But it's really fun two and sometimes inferiating, but mostly
Speaker 3: fun to see how people see what they do with
Speaker 3: it when they're communicating to the public. So I love
Speaker 3: reading popular So I mean, I I before I wrote
Speaker 3: How Emotions Are Made, I probably read fifty pop with
Speaker 3: science books just to see kind of like how people
Speaker 3: did it and yeah, you know what I wanted to
Speaker 3: do and what I didn't want to do and try
Speaker 3: to figure that out. But it's it's fun to see
Speaker 3: how people handle these really complicated topics. It's fun to
Speaker 3: see the metaphors that they use and to think about
Speaker 3: them and play with them a little bit.
Speaker 1: Well, I do think you know, you're a book seven
Speaker 1: and a half. Your most recent book is can be
Speaker 1: likened to Hawkins's Seminal Guide to the Universe. You know,
Speaker 1: I do think it is the equivalent for the brain. No,
Speaker 1: I think you did it. So congratulations.
Speaker 3: That's that's very high praise. I'm very grateful for that comment.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you're very welcome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that it's also very There is
Speaker 1: a practical element to this book. I mean, you are
Speaker 1: making the case that the brain, our brains can create
Speaker 1: our reality to a certain degree. You know, you're not
Speaker 1: going all postmodern there, and let's say that to one
Speaker 1: hundred percent, you know, one hundred percent. We all have
Speaker 1: live in our own realities. We don't want to live
Speaker 1: in that world. We want to have some we do
Speaker 1: want to have some shared collective reality, but that we
Speaker 1: can modify, you know, our our predictive valiances, our probabilities,
Speaker 1: you know, and to get really nerdy about phrasing it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, absolutely yep.
Speaker 1: I would now at this point like to move into
Speaker 1: the emotions part and you know, kind of end on
Speaker 1: that discussion because I find your theory so provocative. And
Speaker 1: I find it provocative because it does challenge even my
Speaker 1: own standard ways of thinking about emotions, even ways I
Speaker 1: still think about emotion. It's I can't just get rid
Speaker 1: of it overnight. And and so let me tell you
Speaker 1: some ways I think about emotions. Do you tell me
Speaker 1: why I'm wrong, or maybe tell me why it's not
Speaker 1: a more nuanced tell me why it's incomplete. That's really
Speaker 1: how scientists talk. We don't say you're wrong. But you know,
Speaker 1: for instance, I'm interested in like emotional intelligence and that
Speaker 1: field of research and it's correlation with general intelligence and IQ.
Speaker 1: But there is a basic assumption in the emotional intelligence
Speaker 1: literature that people differ. There's individual differences in people's ability
Speaker 1: to identify emotions. There's even a whole test, you know,
Speaker 1: reading the emotions in the eyes test. You know, people
Speaker 1: with autism have greater difficulty with it. You know, like
Speaker 1: Simon Baron Cohen's research, et cetera, other people's research on
Speaker 1: that that there is kind of there are some implicit
Speaker 1: assumptions here that there there are, you know, universally evolutionary,
Speaker 1: evolved emotions that people differ in their ability to label,
Speaker 1: you know, across culture. Now, the more I read your
Speaker 1: research and really dig into it and understand the nuances
Speaker 1: of it, because I do think I do understand it finally,
Speaker 1: I've really it took me a couple of years to
Speaker 1: finally really wrap my head around what you were saying,
Speaker 1: just because it's a very complex there. Correct me if
Speaker 1: I'm wrong, But I think it does present a little
Speaker 1: bit of a different view on that, Am I right?
Speaker 3: Yes? It does that a lot different, a lot different. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So let me let me say that. Let's take the
Speaker 3: mind in the eyes test. Okay, So here's how the
Speaker 3: mind and the eyes test works. You show a set
Speaker 3: of eye, like two eyes from a photograph, just the eyes,
Speaker 3: and then you have four words that you give the
Speaker 3: subject or the respondent or this patient, and then they
Speaker 3: have to pick the word that matches the eyes and best.
Speaker 3: And when you do this, you see what looks like
Speaker 3: universal agreement That looks like something that innate, because how
Speaker 3: else could it be universal?
Speaker 1: And not only that, but there's only one correct answer
Speaker 1: on the test. I mean, like the whole sub sort
Speaker 1: of test is like see is fear right?
Speaker 3: But I would, but I'm not even at that point yet.
Speaker 3: I haven't even gotten okay, but I will get there
Speaker 3: in a minute. And that is what happens when you
Speaker 3: take those words away and you just get people to
Speaker 3: free label what is this person experiencing? Do you know
Speaker 3: what you get?
Speaker 1: I think people APPROXI me what the psychologist deemed the
Speaker 1: correct answer. But you're saying, no, no, they don't.
Speaker 3: I published a paper on this actually a couple of
Speaker 3: years ago. Well good, absolutely not.
Speaker 2: We need science, absolutely not.
Speaker 3: No. And in fact, it's the same thing with emotion
Speaker 3: perception studies. If you give a scowling face or a
Speaker 3: smiling face or whatever, and you give a set of
Speaker 3: words and the subject has to choose, the respondent has
Speaker 3: to choose the word to match the face, you get
Speaker 3: what looks like universal agreement as long as you're testing
Speaker 3: people from urban cultures. When you test people from remote cultures,
Speaker 3: the whole, the whole ballgame changes. You don't get anything
Speaker 3: like anything universal. But you do get something that looks
Speaker 3: like universality when you're testing people in large urban cultures
Speaker 3: around the world. But what happens when you test a
Speaker 3: Americans just Americans? When you take the words away, you
Speaker 3: don't see anything that looks like universality.
Speaker 1: Do you see in terms of semantic distance, like do
Speaker 1: you see like if someone's like that, like people say
Speaker 1: they're happy, do you know.
Speaker 2: What I mean?
Speaker 3: See valance? What you see is valance that people are
Speaker 3: basically around the world, and even even in remote cultures,
Speaker 3: people seem to distinguish valance and sometimes arousal. I'm not
Speaker 3: saying valence and arousal are universal. I'm just saying that's
Speaker 3: what you see, Okay. And when you look at patients,
Speaker 3: for example, we have semantic dementia, they can do They
Speaker 3: can sort faces on the basis you know, so you
Speaker 3: give them a bunch of faces and you ask them
Speaker 3: to sort them. They can sort on valance and arousal,
Speaker 3: but they can't sort on anger. Said for your disgust,
Speaker 3: Like if you can't access words and the meanings of words,
Speaker 3: you can't recognize fear or anger or sadness, recognize and
Speaker 3: then the point that you were getting at, which is, well,
Speaker 3: it's accurate. How is accuracy assessed? I mean within emotion research,
Speaker 3: these are post faces. These are not naturalistic expressions that
Speaker 3: people make. These are postpaces. They're all post faces. And
Speaker 3: in fact, when you do research with naturalistic faces, what
Speaker 3: you don't see anything like what looks like universality. And
Speaker 3: the reason why is that research suggests again in urban cultures,
Speaker 3: that people scowl when they're angry about thirty percent of
Speaker 3: the time. Now that's not chance, that's better than chance,
Speaker 3: but it means that's seventy percent of the time they're
Speaker 3: doing something else it's meaningful with their face to express anger,
Speaker 3: and that's low reliability from a scientific standpoint. And people
Speaker 3: also scowl when they're not angry. They scowl when they're confused,
Speaker 3: they scowl when they're concentrating really hard, they scowl when
Speaker 3: they have gas. That's low specificity. So the point here
Speaker 3: is that when it comes to you know, the expression
Speaker 3: of emotion variability is the norm, and most of the
Speaker 3: time when you see universe evidence of universality, it's constructed
Speaker 3: by these really constrained tests that actually are using artificial stimuli.
Speaker 3: So how does Simon Baron Cohen know that the person
Speaker 3: in the photograph with the eyes was you know, thoughtful
Speaker 3: or was sad? Or how does he know? Where's the criterion?
Speaker 3: As far as I know, there's no scientifically objective criterion
Speaker 3: for any of those words that anybody has ever been
Speaker 3: able to produce reliable across samples, so that they're a
Speaker 3: whole scaffold of assumptions, which once you start poking at
Speaker 3: those assumptions, you you know, the whole thing falls apart
Speaker 3: like a house of cards.
Speaker 1: Really well, well, that's very, very revolutionary because Paul Eckman's
Speaker 1: you know, studies are taught in almost every introductor psychology textbook.
Speaker 1: You know, very aware you're aware of this. I mean, look, Paul,
Speaker 1: I mean Paul Lackmann argue, there's six universal basic emotions anger, surprise, discussed, enjoyment, fear,
Speaker 1: and status. I'm not teaching you this, but this is
Speaker 1: from my audience. I'm teaching my audience this.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: And he's you know, argued universal. You know, he's gone
Speaker 1: to every you know, every culture in the world.
Speaker 3: No he hasn't, he hasn't.
Speaker 2: But he hasn't. But it's taught. That's how it's taught.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, yeah, exactly. So this is sort of the
Speaker 3: problem of textbooks, right. The problem of textbooks is that
Speaker 3: they they distill information, and they often errors that are
Speaker 3: made are often carried forward. And you know, like, if
Speaker 3: you go we did a little study of how is
Speaker 3: William James like I I learned when I was an
Speaker 3: intro psych and even later that William James proposed that
Speaker 3: each emotion like anger, said, fear, and so on, has
Speaker 3: its own physical pattern associated with it. If you go
Speaker 3: back and you read William James, like read read the
Speaker 3: Principles of Psychology, he says the opposite of that. So
Speaker 3: I'm like, how how did that happen? Like how how
Speaker 3: can you say? One? You write one thing over and
Speaker 3: over again, like in his book and in a couple
Speaker 3: of papers, and it gets morphed somehow into the James
Speaker 3: Lang theory. That's like a Frankenstein. I mean, Lang actually
Speaker 3: believed that there was one vasomotor, one physical pattern for anger,
Speaker 3: said to spear. But James believed that there were multiple
Speaker 3: feelings of anger, and every feeling of anger, every variation
Speaker 3: of anger, had its own physical comportment. So he's saying
Speaker 3: there is no essence of physical, essence of anger. It's
Speaker 3: a variety, you know, he's and so how does that happen? Right?
Speaker 3: And part of what we did was we went and
Speaker 3: we looked at intro site textbooks. And you know, I'm
Speaker 3: saying this for my lovely friends who write intro syite textbooks.
Speaker 3: You know, they try possible. It's a profitable business, and
Speaker 3: they try really hard. They try hard to keep updating,
Speaker 3: but you know, it takes a couple of years for
Speaker 3: information to make its way into the textbooks. And in
Speaker 3: the case of emotion, I'll say all I can say
Speaker 3: is that the evidence. I mean, Paul Eckman's work was
Speaker 3: revolutionary for its time, and he and his colleagues did
Speaker 3: fantastic work for their time. But they and so I
Speaker 3: don't want to you know, all of us, whether we
Speaker 3: agree with with someone or disagree, we stand on the
Speaker 3: shoulders of those giants, okay, And so that's not to
Speaker 3: be diminished. But Paul Eckman went to a couple of
Speaker 3: couple of remote cultures. He didn't go all over the world,
Speaker 3: and in fact, he didn't go to many of the
Speaker 3: places that and it's not a criticism, it's just he
Speaker 3: you know, maybe it was impossible to do that then,
Speaker 3: but you know, they were all in in and around
Speaker 3: Papua New Guinea, you know, for the most part, you know,
Speaker 3: in Southeast Asia. They weren't in Africa and in all
Speaker 3: of these other you know, parts of the world. And
Speaker 3: one of my former students actually published a review of
Speaker 3: all of the studies on remote cultures, including our own. Right,
Speaker 3: So we've been to two remote cultures, including studying the
Speaker 3: Hadza hunter gatherer is in Tanzania. And what you can
Speaker 3: see is that all of the studies that have been
Speaker 3: published in the last i want to say, maybe less
Speaker 3: than ten years all replicate each other, but they swamp
Speaker 3: the evidence from those early studies. So those early studies
Speaker 3: relied on very specific methods that didn't allow for certain
Speaker 3: discoveries to be made. And when you use a variety
Speaker 3: of methods in a variety of cultures with a variety
Speaker 3: of different constraints, you don't find universality. You just don't.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's revolutionary. Have you talked to have you
Speaker 1: ever talked to Acumen? Have you like, what do you
Speaker 1: think of my constructed theory of emotions?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's a really interesting question. So you know,
Speaker 3: when I was writing How Emotions Are Made the there's
Speaker 3: a chapter in there about, you know, emotional expression and
Speaker 3: emotion perception, and it's called constructing Universal constructing Universal emotions.
Speaker 3: And but you know, I was thinking, like, if I
Speaker 3: were him, I would be worrying about what is this
Speaker 3: person going to say, you know, because he's been attacked
Speaker 3: so many times, and that's not Michael.
Speaker 2: Fascist you know anthropologists.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. So I thought to myself, well, if I
Speaker 3: were him, I'd be pretty worried. And so I wrote
Speaker 3: him an email and I said, listen, I just you know,
Speaker 3: I just want to tell you. And he knew that
Speaker 3: I was writing the book because I asked to use
Speaker 3: some of the photographs of his photographs of faces. I
Speaker 3: had to get permission to use them in the book, right,
Speaker 3: And so I basically sent him a personal email and
Speaker 3: I said, listen, maybe you're worried. Maybe you're not, but
Speaker 3: maybe you are. And if you are, I'm going to
Speaker 3: tell you exactly what I'm going to say, you know,
Speaker 3: and maybe you're worried that I'm going to say. You know,
Speaker 3: this guy's an idiot. He's totally you know, off his
Speaker 3: rocker or he's you know, you know, his science is bullshit,
Speaker 3: you know, But I'm not going to say that. I
Speaker 3: just want it to be really clear with you. That's
Speaker 3: actually not what I'm going to say. Here's what I'm
Speaker 3: going to say. I'm going to say that you discovered
Speaker 3: something important, but it's not what you think you discovered.
Speaker 3: I think you discovered something else. I think you discovered
Speaker 3: the power of words actually to teach people emotion categories
Speaker 3: really quickly. That's what those studies actually show, because you know,
Speaker 3: if you give people, even in remote cultures, it's a
Speaker 3: little fuzzier, but in urban cultures, you give people emotion
Speaker 3: words and they can use them. They're learning how to
Speaker 3: use them in the task, and they can learn really
Speaker 3: fast words. And you can see this even in infants.
Speaker 3: Words are invitations to learn abstract categories. And that's what
Speaker 3: I think he showed inadvertent by the methods that he
Speaker 3: was using. But anyways, my point is that, you know,
Speaker 3: I just reached out to him, and you know, we
Speaker 3: had a nice chat over emails.
Speaker 2: He responded, He responded, He did.
Speaker 3: He responded really positively and warmly and said, you know,
Speaker 3: thank you so much, and I'm really grateful, and you know,
Speaker 3: maybe we should have a chat and you know maybe
Speaker 3: and I so I said, yeah, I would love to
Speaker 3: have a chat. Why don't we You know, James Gross
Speaker 3: and I a few years before that his studies of
Speaker 3: emotion regulation at Stanford, and you know, he and I
Speaker 3: do not hold exactly the same views on emotion and
Speaker 3: but we founded the Society for Affective Science together with
Speaker 3: some of our colleagues. And so I said, why don't
Speaker 3: we have a chat at SASS at the conference and
Speaker 3: we can have Bob Levinson, who is a very close
Speaker 3: colleague of Paul's, and I consider him a very good
Speaker 3: friend of mine. He's been very supportive, and I don't
Speaker 3: you know, he and I don't necessarily see eye to
Speaker 3: eye on the way that we interpret the evidence, but
Speaker 3: we can we have perfectly reasonable conversations about it, and
Speaker 3: we learn from each other and so on. You know,
Speaker 3: why don't we have it? Why don't we have a
Speaker 3: conversation there? And you know he thought that that was
Speaker 3: a great idea, but it never came to pass unfortunately.
Speaker 1: So well, if I could do anything to uh, if
Speaker 1: you ever want to have like a discussion on the
Speaker 1: Psychology podcast, I bring like three people together or something,
Speaker 1: you know, for like thousands of people to be able
Speaker 1: to listen to let me know, I.
Speaker 3: You know, I would love that. But I will tell
Speaker 3: you that for the most part, we've done debates before.
Speaker 3: I had a debate with dak Or Keltner at one
Speaker 3: meeting I had. We had a panel debate with a
Speaker 3: number of pick can't even remember all the people who
Speaker 3: were there. We've done these things before, and in general
Speaker 3: people are not comfortable. As a general rule, my colleagues
Speaker 3: are not comfortable with that kind of format. We we
Speaker 3: at the Society for effect of Science. The conference still
Speaker 3: goes on, and I mean James and I are not
Speaker 3: at the helm anymore. You know, we gave it away
Speaker 3: to our to our colleagues. But you know, we introduced
Speaker 3: lots of different mechanisms for people to have these conversations.
Speaker 3: Like we we invented salons, which are you know, you
Speaker 3: stick a first a scientist in a room with cookies
Speaker 3: and coffee and anyone can come for an hour and
Speaker 3: ask them anything they want, you know, like Ralph Adolphs
Speaker 3: and I did a salon together recently where you know
Speaker 3: he he very much is on the side of you know,
Speaker 3: basic emotions, so to speak, and that's what it's called
Speaker 3: in the field. And you know, he and I have
Speaker 3: debated each other twice in public. We wrote a paper
Speaker 3: together actually on facial expressions, where he agreed, I mean
Speaker 3: THEO for science to five. It was, I guess five
Speaker 3: of us from very different theoretical backgrounds decided to write
Speaker 3: a paper. Invited really to write a paper on our
Speaker 3: emotional expressions universal And so for two and a half
Speaker 3: years we we met over zoom. This was before COVID.
Speaker 3: We read over a thousand papers. We summarized the evidence
Speaker 3: from adults across cultures, from children across cultures, from I
Speaker 3: mean just you know, lots and lots and lots of evidence.
Speaker 3: Three of my colleagues believed in universality before we started
Speaker 3: the process, and at the end of the process, we
Speaker 3: were so concerned that we wouldn't be able to come
Speaker 3: to consensus that we came up with contingency plans just
Speaker 3: in case what we would do. Because we were invited
Speaker 3: to write a single paper, so we were like, well, can
Speaker 3: we write two papers, or can we write one paper
Speaker 3: and a dialogue, or can we you know, like we
Speaker 3: were sort of anticipating that we would not be able
Speaker 3: to come to consensus, but we did come to consensus,
Speaker 3: so that there is no universality and that you know,
Speaker 3: and that paper is freely available. It was written for
Speaker 3: you know, it's called in a journal called Psychological Science
Speaker 3: in the Public Interest, so it's, uh, it's available freely
Speaker 3: from the Association for Psychological Science, or you can just
Speaker 3: go to my academic website. It's there for free. But
Speaker 3: my point is that, you know, Ralph and I disagree
Speaker 3: on some things, but we agree on other things because
Speaker 3: Ralph is somebody who responds to the data, you know,
Speaker 3: and we've even written uh, you know, pieces together. But
Speaker 3: that's rare, you know, that's rare in general. So if
Speaker 3: somebody wants to have that discussion on your podcast, that
Speaker 3: I think that would be fantastic. But I will tell
Speaker 3: you that, I mean, I'm sure Ralph would do it.
Speaker 3: But we've we talked to each other. We've talked to.
Speaker 1: Each other in you.
Speaker 2: I gotta get Eckmann in you.
Speaker 4: Well, he's very you know, he's he's he's I don't
Speaker 4: know him, uh personally, but my understanding is he's not
Speaker 4: well and he's you know, he's aged.
Speaker 3: So I don't know. I mean, I don't know that
Speaker 3: he would want to do it, but certainly if he
Speaker 3: wanted to do it, I'd be delighted to do it.
Speaker 1: There's so many implications of your research for so many
Speaker 1: swaths of the field that I work in now, almost
Speaker 1: to the degree that it's like if I go full in,
Speaker 1: and I'm not full in on your theory, but if
Speaker 1: if let's say, I've become like a full disciple of
Speaker 1: your theory, that means that the way I need, like
Speaker 1: I talk to my colleagues like I need, I had
Speaker 1: to tell a lot of people to stop to change
Speaker 1: the way they think about So let's take two fields,
Speaker 1: evolutionary psychology and positive psychology, two fields that I work in. Okay, Now,
Speaker 1: in the field of evolutionary psychology, it's just everywhere evolutionary
Speaker 1: of the evolutionary of old function of sadness, you know,
Speaker 1: the modularity of the meeting motive, you know the emotion
Speaker 1: we feel when you know love. But then you know,
Speaker 1: in positive psychology there's the whole class of emotions called
Speaker 1: positive emotions, and that's like, you know, as though like
Speaker 1: that's they're absolutely these are the positive emotions and then
Speaker 1: then these other ones are not the positive emotions. So
Speaker 1: everywhere I look, you know, once I look through the
Speaker 1: lens of your theory, I start to see things very,
Speaker 1: very differently. So can you explain a little bit what
Speaker 1: you mean when you say emotions are learned and the
Speaker 1: difference between emotions and affect, And then can you talk
Speaker 1: all about, you know, the implications for a lot of
Speaker 1: these ideas in positive psychology and evolutionary psychology. I know
Speaker 1: these are big questions I'm asking you do you do
Speaker 1: you mind?
Speaker 3: You know? I just want people to pay attention to
Speaker 3: the evidence. That's it. Just pay attention to the evidence,
Speaker 3: and pay attention to what your experiments, the way they're designed,
Speaker 3: allow you to discover and what they preclude you from
Speaker 3: discovering by virtue of how you've designed them and the
Speaker 3: assumptions that you've made. Here's what I would say. Your
Speaker 3: brain is always regulating your body, and your body is
Speaker 3: always sending sense data back to your brain. You don't
Speaker 3: experience the sense data that's coming from your body to
Speaker 3: your brain in a high dimensional detail, because if you did,
Speaker 3: you would never pay attention to anything outside your skin ever. Again,
Speaker 3: you experience the interceptive environment of your body, the sense
Speaker 3: data from your body to your brain. Your brain's modeling
Speaker 3: of the state of your body as affect. So affect
Speaker 3: is kind of feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling worked up,
Speaker 3: feeling calm, feeling like you have energy, feeling like really fatigued.
Speaker 3: Affect is you can think of it as like a
Speaker 3: barometer for your body budget for Allostasis is the technical term.
Speaker 3: So your brain is always regulating your body. Your body
Speaker 3: is always sending sense data back to your brain. Your
Speaker 3: brain's always modeling the state of your body. And so
Speaker 3: affect is a property of consciousness. It's always with you.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it's in the foreground, you're experiencing it, you know,
Speaker 3: front and center because it's very intense. Sometimes it's in
Speaker 3: the background, but it's always there. Your brain is constantly
Speaker 3: striving to make sense, constantly making sense of sense data always,
Speaker 3: whether it's emotion or anything else, it's just you know,
Speaker 3: you are receiving sense data constantly through the sensory services
Speaker 3: of your body, your eyes, your ears, your nose, and
Speaker 3: inside your body. There are sensory services all sending information
Speaker 3: to the brain. These are the causes. These are sorry
Speaker 3: the consequences or the outcomes of some set of causes.
Speaker 3: Your brain doesn't know the causes. That's an inverse problem.
Speaker 3: And the way the brain solves the inverse problem is
Speaker 3: by drawing on past experience to make a guess at
Speaker 3: the cause, and it's doing it predictively. So when you're gaining,
Speaker 3: your brain guesses that the cause of a tug in
Speaker 3: your chest is anxiety because in the past, in this context,
Speaker 3: in this situation, that's what it was. Then your brain's
Speaker 3: constructing anxiety. You experience it as anxiety, it's not a
Speaker 3: fable or whatever. That's how you experience that tug in
Speaker 3: your chest. But you can deconstruct that tug in your chest.
Speaker 3: But you can deconstruct the feeling of anxiety into just
Speaker 3: a mere tug in your chest. That's what mindfulness meditation
Speaker 3: teaches you to do. Right. So the analogy that I
Speaker 3: give often is that if I want to paint this glass,
Speaker 3: which is a three dimensional object, and I want to
Speaker 3: render it on a two dimensional surface, one thing I
Speaker 3: could do is I could just see the glass in
Speaker 3: its three dimensional glory and try to draw it on
Speaker 3: a two dimensional surface, and what you'll get is a
Speaker 3: pretty shitty looking two dimensional drawing. But if I take
Speaker 3: this glass and I try to parse it apart into
Speaker 3: little piece of light, So I'm deconstructing it into pieces
Speaker 3: of light, and then I so I can see a
Speaker 3: little bit of blue and a little bit of green,
Speaker 3: and a little bit of silver and a little bit
Speaker 3: of white, and you know, and I take these pieces,
Speaker 3: like this long strip of green here, and I render
Speaker 3: these pieces individually on the page. Then you get a
Speaker 3: pretty decent looking three dimensional object. Except if you're me
Speaker 3: because I can't paint, then it still looks crappy. But
Speaker 3: the point is that you can teach yourself to deconstruct
Speaker 3: into data that's closer to the sense, data that's not
Speaker 3: as constructed. And you can do that even with your emotions.
Speaker 3: And I have to tell you, I just had spot.
Speaker 3: I'm recovering from spinal surgery. You can do it with pain,
Speaker 3: and in fact, Eric Garlands a scientists who has these
Speaker 3: fabulous studies showing that chronic pain can be deconstructed into
Speaker 3: discomfort and distress, so you can get rid of the
Speaker 3: distress and just experience the discomfort, and that alone reduces
Speaker 3: your opioid dependence. If you're suffering from chronic pain. So
Speaker 3: emotions are constructed the way every other perception is constructed,
Speaker 3: the way objects are constructed, the way thoughts are constructed.
Speaker 3: Everything you experience is constructed in part by what's going
Speaker 3: on outside your head and what's going on inside your head.
Speaker 3: And emotions are no different and the mechanisms are no different.
Speaker 3: So okay, where does the learning from? Where does the
Speaker 3: learning come from? Like, where do these past experiences of
Speaker 3: emotion come from? Well, they come from other people labeling
Speaker 3: your labeling events for you as sad or angry or
Speaker 3: as geigle or as you know, ligot or whatever the
Speaker 3: emotion categories are that are relevant to your cultural context.
Speaker 2: I get it.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for that explanation. And I look,
Speaker 1: this is what I'm thinking, what's might be going on
Speaker 1: in the literature. It's a different way of thinking about
Speaker 1: the the mind in the eyes test. But you know,
Speaker 1: I'm really interested individual differences and and and it's undeniable
Speaker 1: that some of those tests are predictive of well, less
Speaker 1: social awkwardness for sure, you know. But also it can
Speaker 1: predict lots of things, can predict psychopathology, It can predict
Speaker 1: why psychopathy, No that's.
Speaker 3: Where I'm going with why Yeah, this is.
Speaker 1: What I'm about to say. This is what I'm about
Speaker 1: to say. So I think that based on your theory
Speaker 1: and I could see it, I think it makes it
Speaker 1: makes sense. Is that probably the individual difference is variable.
Speaker 1: There is your ability to to understand the socialization processeds,
Speaker 1: the norm rule structure, you know, like like have you
Speaker 1: been able to learn in your society that that that's
Speaker 1: like when someone someone's like that, you don't say, why
Speaker 1: are you happy today? You know that that's like, so
Speaker 1: that's cool. That's like a taboo, a social taboo, and
Speaker 1: that people like on the auto the spectrum. Because I
Speaker 1: have studied that topic. I study or versity and I
Speaker 1: am very interested in autism in particular. Is that you
Speaker 1: know a lot of them have a bias where they
Speaker 1: don't look people in the eyes, you know, and and
Speaker 1: that and that seems to be a source of information.
Speaker 1: But but the question is maybe with your theory, it's
Speaker 1: a source of information that allows you to negotiate with
Speaker 1: the cultural norms that have set forth. So we associate
Speaker 1: certain eye information with what we've been taught about. What
Speaker 1: that means is that what you would.
Speaker 3: Say something like what I would say. What I would
Speaker 3: say is that that gays is very important in humans
Speaker 3: because that's how we regulate each other's attention. So if
Speaker 3: I look away and then I look back to you,
Speaker 3: you know, you're you're likely to look where I looked.
Speaker 3: And so part of part of what we do with
Speaker 3: gays is we regulate. We we sort of gesture to
Speaker 3: each other what is important and what is not important.
Speaker 3: What can you agnore or as noise, and what do
Speaker 3: you have to pay attention to a signal? So it's
Speaker 3: partly directing learning in this very social way. But also
Speaker 3: there are other problems, you know, in autism people on
Speaker 3: the spectrum, they also their brains are not wired in
Speaker 3: a way to allow them to do abstraction very well.
Speaker 3: And if they can't do abstraction very well, they're very concrete.
Speaker 3: Not a criticism, it's just observation. Then they can't use
Speaker 3: words as invitations to form abstract concepts. So they're going
Speaker 3: to have trouble using words. Oh wow, way, and so
Speaker 3: that's why they can't. That's why they can't do they
Speaker 3: the mind and the eyes task. You know, if you
Speaker 3: take a problem a deficit, Yeah, if you take I
Speaker 3: mean languages. It's not magic, okay. But if you take
Speaker 3: a three month old, a three month old and you
Speaker 3: say to that three month old, look, honey, this is
Speaker 3: a blurg. And then you put it down and the blurg,
Speaker 3: you know, the pencil you know, makes it noise like
Speaker 3: a beep. And then you say, look, honey, this is
Speaker 3: a blurg. You put it down, it makes a beep.
Speaker 3: And then you take this and you say, look, honey,
Speaker 3: this is a blurg. So what happens the baby expects
Speaker 3: this to beep. All these things they look different, they
Speaker 3: sound different, but they're functionally the same, because that's what
Speaker 3: the word is telling the baby. There's a function there
Speaker 3: that's the same. It beeps. And that is a very
Speaker 3: very simple illustration of how words are really powerful for
Speaker 3: learning abstractions that are in our big brains that can
Speaker 3: do all that compression that some non neurotypical brains have
Speaker 3: challenges with. So what I would say is that many
Speaker 3: of our treatments for psychopathology and many of our tests
Speaker 3: work predictively to some degree, but I don't work for
Speaker 3: the reasons that people think and why does that matter?
Speaker 1: That's so interesting?
Speaker 3: That matters because we really need if we really want
Speaker 3: to prevent illness and we want to enhance thriving and
Speaker 3: so on, then we need to understand the mechanisms better.
Speaker 3: And that's what motivates me to do the work that
Speaker 3: I do. I'm just really data driven, actually so, and
Speaker 3: if you just follow the scientific method and you try
Speaker 3: to prove, you try to find places where you're wrong.
Speaker 3: Like you know, when I first started doing work on emotion,
Speaker 3: I would say to people, tell me what you think
Speaker 3: the best evidence is. Tell me what you think the
Speaker 3: best evidence is that there are innate circuits in the
Speaker 3: brain for emotion. And then I would go and I
Speaker 3: would read every single thing that they told me. In fact,
Speaker 3: we even invited Yakpang Scept for a month to come
Speaker 3: to Boston College where I worked. He came and we
Speaker 3: for a month. Every day we met every day for
Speaker 3: a month, we ran a seminar and we went through
Speaker 3: every piece of evidence that he had. So I think
Speaker 3: all you have to do is be as skeptical about
Speaker 3: your own ideas as other people's ideas, and be open
Speaker 3: to every shred of data that's available, and look outside
Speaker 3: your own comfort zone to other fields which make other
Speaker 3: assumptions that you don't make and if your hypotheses are robust,
Speaker 3: they will be sustained, and if they're not, they won't.
Speaker 3: And science, I mean, I don't know. I don't I'm
Speaker 3: sure you agree. I mean, I just feel like science
Speaker 3: is not about being right. It's about figuring out how
Speaker 3: things work. And it's okay to be wrong, but you know,
Speaker 3: if you're going to be wrong, I want to know
Speaker 3: if I'm wrong. You know, I really want to know
Speaker 3: if I'm wrong, because it matters. You don't You can't
Speaker 3: help people if you don't you know, if you're if
Speaker 3: you don't know the veracity of what you're saying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love I love everything that you're saying. It
Speaker 1: just this debate seems to be so reminiscent of so
Speaker 1: many debates and cognitive science that get to the level
Speaker 1: of is it a general learning mechanism or is it
Speaker 1: a domain specific system in the brain. It could be
Speaker 1: likened to the great language debate, you know, between Chomsky
Speaker 1: and and I actually take more on Arthur Reeber point
Speaker 1: of view, which that was my whole dissertation. My whole
Speaker 1: cognitive science dissertation was on implicit learning, and I tried
Speaker 1: to show that some of these domain general learning mechanisms
Speaker 1: could explain some of the intelligence that had been explained
Speaker 1: by more to mean specific views. It just seems to
Speaker 1: me like we keep repeating these to these debeats in
Speaker 1: the field of cognitis science all over and over, and
Speaker 1: you know, and and I see this as another one.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, you you are one hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: percent correct. And what I so, what I think is
Speaker 3: really interesting is so, what is it about the human mind,
Speaker 3: right of the human brain that leads us always to
Speaker 3: these you know, like you know, so for example, if
Speaker 3: you look at Buddhist philosophy, right and yeah, people say, oh,
Speaker 3: it's very non essentialist. No, well, actually no it isn't.
Speaker 3: It's very non essentialist about the self. But the Abi
Speaker 3: Dharma states that this is you know what. The Dali
Speaker 3: Lama follows that there are there are dharmas, and those
Speaker 3: dharmas are essences, and they are indivisible like they're they're
Speaker 3: the they are the essences of consciousness. And then along comes,
Speaker 3: you know, a couple of centuries later, this guy named
Speaker 3: Dharma kirty. He says, oh, no, no, no, dharmas are
Speaker 3: constructed by the human mind with human concepts. That's like
Speaker 3: the whole debate right there, just summed up and like
Speaker 3: you know, and but look, it's like a different culture,
Speaker 3: it's a different time. So this idea of domain general
Speaker 3: versus domain specific, or systems versus modules, or you know,
Speaker 3: essences or I guess essences versus whatever. You know, you
Speaker 3: get my point. There's a there's I do. There's something. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's it comes up again and again and again, which
Speaker 3: leads you to think, like in a metascience kind of way,
Speaker 3: what is it about human explanation? You know, causal explanations
Speaker 3: that lead us always in the end to these two choices.
Speaker 3: And so I think it must reveal something about the
Speaker 3: way that we think, and and maybe even something universal,
Speaker 3: because it keeps. It comes up in many domains, It
Speaker 3: comes up in many cultures, in many time you know,
Speaker 3: historical times. You know, there's something about the way that
Speaker 3: our brain processes information that leads us to these different
Speaker 3: ways of thinking about the world. Even physics, you see
Speaker 3: it in physics. I mean it's just you know Newtonian
Speaker 3: physics versus you know, quantum mechanics. It's just there's something
Speaker 3: really interesting there.
Speaker 2: Well, I'll bring.
Speaker 1: This whole full circle, and then I'll end the interview
Speaker 1: because I want to be respectful of your time. But
Speaker 1: to bring it all full circle, I think what it
Speaker 1: is is it goes back to your whole idea that
Speaker 1: the brain is a prediction machine. And I think it's
Speaker 1: a need for order. It's a need, you know, when
Speaker 1: you can systematize things, when you can break things down
Speaker 1: in a do mean specific sort of ways, in discreet things.
Speaker 1: It actually reduces our psychological entropy. And scientists are humans too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh for sure. And in fact, there's actually a
Speaker 3: chapter about this, and I wrote about this actually and
Speaker 3: how motions are made, where I didn't use the phrase
Speaker 3: psychological entropy because I don't think the paper have been
Speaker 3: published at that point. But I took a quote from
Speaker 3: I think it was Alan Lightman maybe, or there's some
Speaker 3: really great quote. I think it's Alan Lightman, the physicist
Speaker 3: Alan Lightman, who said scientists love to put things into
Speaker 3: boxes and tidy little boxes with little names, and it
Speaker 3: really makes us feel better. It makes us feel like
Speaker 3: we've learned something about the world. And you know, and
Speaker 3: again I would say it's the reduction of uncertainty. You
Speaker 3: would say psychological entropy, but I would say it's the
Speaker 3: reduction of uncertainty or ambiguity. But you know, so to
Speaker 3: me that makes ontologies and concepts and categories like super
Speaker 3: interesting to study how people do it because the same
Speaker 3: foibles keep coming up again and again and again. And
Speaker 3: actually it's so funny that you bring this up, because
Speaker 3: I think this is what I'm going to write about
Speaker 3: when I retire finally, you know, like when I'm done,
Speaker 3: I'm going to write maybe some philosophy of psychology or
Speaker 3: history of psychology, sure where I'm going to address this
Speaker 3: issue directly, because I think this is well, I wouldn't
Speaker 3: say it's the issue, but I think it's a fascinating
Speaker 3: issue that and it's better to think of it as
Speaker 3: fascinating than depressing. It's like, geez, we've been having the
Speaker 3: same arguments for like four hundred years, you know, or
Speaker 3: like two thousand years. I mean, so I'd rather be
Speaker 3: fascinated than demoralize.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm still in the fascinated stage.
Speaker 1: Well, I found this a fascinating discussion today, doctor Barrett.
Speaker 1: Thank you for your revolution You're truly revolutionary research in
Speaker 1: our field, and for talking to me today on the
Speaker 1: Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 3: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for the wonderful discussion.
Speaker 1: Enjuli Pitt, Thanks for listening to this episode of The
Speaker 1: Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way
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