Speaker 1: It's true that our genes influence our personality traits, and
Speaker 1: that our personality traits influence our behavior. But it's not
Speaker 1: true that our genes determine our traits or that our
Speaker 1: traits determine our behavior. And that's the distinction that I
Speaker 1: think is really important because it gets away from the
Speaker 1: idea that we have no control. Welcome to the one
Speaker 1: you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance
Speaker 1: of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
Speaker 1: or you are what you think ring true, and yet
Speaker 1: for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
Speaker 1: episode is Kevin Mitchell, an author and associate professor of
Speaker 1: genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College, Dublin, whose research is
Speaker 1: aimed at understanding the genetic program, specifying the wiring of
Speaker 1: the brain and its relevance to variation in human faculties.
Speaker 1: Kevin is also the author of the science blog called
Speaker 1: Wiring the Brain and the author of the book discussed
Speaker 1: here in Nate, How the wiring of our brains shapes
Speaker 1: who we are. Hi, Kevin, welcome to the show. Thanks
Speaker 1: very much, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to
Speaker 1: have you on. We're going to be discussing your book
Speaker 1: in Nate, How the wiring of our brains shapes who
Speaker 1: we are. But before we get into that, we'll start
Speaker 1: like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandparent
Speaker 1: who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life,
Speaker 1: there are two wolves inside of us that are always
Speaker 1: a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
Speaker 1: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 1: and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it
Speaker 1: for a second, looks up at their grandparents as well.
Speaker 1: Which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Well. It's a great question.
Speaker 1: And you know, since you had emailed me that link
Speaker 1: and I looked at it, I thought about it a bit,
Speaker 1: and actually it really resonates with clearly just you know,
Speaker 1: in personal life anyway, I think it would resonate with
Speaker 1: everybody in terms of questions about how we choose actively
Speaker 1: to live our lives, not just the momentary decisions that
Speaker 1: we make, but the kind of policies that we have
Speaker 1: about the types of decisions will make over longer time frames.
Speaker 1: And that's something that I've been thinking about, both in
Speaker 1: the writing of the book and Nate and the one
Speaker 1: I'm working on now, which is about agency and free will,
Speaker 1: especially in response to people who look at the fact that,
Speaker 1: you know, some of our psychological traits have a genetic
Speaker 1: basis to them, which we'll talk about, and think therefore
Speaker 1: that there's nothing we can do about it. You know,
Speaker 1: something is in our DNA and we're just wired that way,
Speaker 1: and you know, we're not an active agent in that
Speaker 1: process at all, And I think that's not right. It's
Speaker 1: it's true that we are shaped a certain way. We
Speaker 1: are wired a certain way, but that's only, you know,
Speaker 1: a baseline, and I think our character emerges through our
Speaker 1: lifetimes very much based on the decisions that we actively
Speaker 1: make ourselves through that process. So for me, it struck
Speaker 1: a chord there with ideas that I've been thinking about
Speaker 1: and writing about. Yeah, as I look at your book,
Speaker 1: Innate and also your upcoming book, which you sent me
Speaker 1: a proposal for, and I get to read, it feels
Speaker 1: to me like your work is trying to strike a
Speaker 1: middle ground owned between on one hand, sort of, as
Speaker 1: you said, determinism, people who are saying we're just machines
Speaker 1: and we act out the programs that are put in
Speaker 1: us and and that's it. There's no free will. And
Speaker 1: then on the other hand, what I might call the
Speaker 1: human potential movement, which says you can be anything you want, right,
Speaker 1: And I feel like you're kind of staking out a
Speaker 1: middle position that says, look, you know, there actually is
Speaker 1: a fair amount of the way we are that's because
Speaker 1: of the way we are wired. And we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about how that wiring happens here in a minute.
Speaker 1: So a fair amount of it is that, but that's
Speaker 1: not the entire story, and there is some ability to
Speaker 1: have control of our thoughts, our emotions, our behavior. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's right, and I mean thanks for saying that,
Speaker 1: because I think that's exactly what I'm trying to do,
Speaker 1: is stake that middle ground, because those two positions you
Speaker 1: articulated are too extreme. You know, it's not the case
Speaker 1: that we can just be anything we want to be
Speaker 1: or completely overwrite, you know, our innate predispositions. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, it's also not true that those innate
Speaker 1: predispositions control everything about us in any given moment, or
Speaker 1: indeed over the trajectory of our lives. They're not just
Speaker 1: like you know, the tunings of a robot that will
Speaker 1: absolutely determine what it does at any moment. They're a
Speaker 1: baseline for us that does influence the way that we
Speaker 1: interact with the world. But I think, you know, one
Speaker 1: of the real themes of Innate and also the you know,
Speaker 1: all of the work really is about thinking about the relationship,
Speaker 1: especially between our genes and our traits as a trajectory.
Speaker 1: There's not a direct linear correspondence between those things. There's
Speaker 1: an influence over our lifetimes, you know, in conjunction with
Speaker 1: all of the experiences that we have and the environments
Speaker 1: that we are exposed to and everything else. So it's
Speaker 1: very much an interactive kind of picture, which in one
Speaker 1: sense is a little frustrating because it means the pictures
Speaker 1: just it's not a simple picture, right, you know, it's
Speaker 1: complex and it's nuanced, but I think it's also just
Speaker 1: more realistic. And so the debate that most people here
Speaker 1: is nature versus nurture, right, And that's what we're sort
Speaker 1: of talking about here. On one hand, it's my genes
Speaker 1: or it's my environment, which is it? Right? And I
Speaker 1: think any intelligent person now would go, well, it's certainly both.
Speaker 1: But you actually make a point that there is a
Speaker 1: third component to this that we're missing when we oversimplify
Speaker 1: down in nature and nurture. Can you share a little
Speaker 1: bit what that third component is? Sure? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: so that the nature nurture debate, you know, really goes
Speaker 1: back to the question of whether a child is just
Speaker 1: born the way they're going to be, or whether they're
Speaker 1: upbringing really shapes them. And I think any parents who's
Speaker 1: had certainly has had more than one child, knows that
Speaker 1: they come different. They're not blank slates. So the idea
Speaker 1: that everything about us is shaped by our environment and
Speaker 1: upbringing just doesn't fit with our common experience. And also
Speaker 1: the scientific evidence shows that that's just not true. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, it's also not the case that
Speaker 1: the predispositions that are genetics. If you think of nature
Speaker 1: or as corresponding to genes, which is that correspondence often drawn,
Speaker 1: that's not the whole picture because you can see two
Speaker 1: people who have the exact same genes, so identical twins,
Speaker 1: whose personalities and you know, cognitive and psychological functions may
Speaker 1: be clearly different from each other. You know, we can
Speaker 1: see that in humans, but you can see that in
Speaker 1: you know, experimental animals in biology and neuroscience, where I
Speaker 1: mean most of the work that's done on mice, for example,
Speaker 1: is done on genetically identical mice, and yet there's variation
Speaker 1: from individual to individual, even in incredibly tightly controlled environmental
Speaker 1: conditions as well. So it turns out that a lot
Speaker 1: of that variation just comes from the way that the
Speaker 1: brain develops. So if we think within the d n
Speaker 1: A of a fertilized egg, single cell fertilized egg, that
Speaker 1: we all start out life as there's a sort of
Speaker 1: a program, in effect, for making a human being with
Speaker 1: a human brain, and that program brings along with it
Speaker 1: the aspects of human nature that differentiate us from chimpanzees
Speaker 1: or art varks or tigers or any other animal. But
Speaker 1: you know, the relationship between the information and the genome
Speaker 1: and the end product is not like a blueprint. You
Speaker 1: can't look in the genome and say, you know, it
Speaker 1: says to make this many cells here, and make those
Speaker 1: connections like that. You know, there is no sort of correspondence.
Speaker 1: It's more like a recipe. And the consequence of that
Speaker 1: is that the recipe doesn't specify the end product. It
Speaker 1: just specifies a series of processes or steps to make
Speaker 1: the thing. And so you know, I like to say,
Speaker 1: you can't bake the same cake twice. It doesn't matter
Speaker 1: how good your recipe is. There's going to be some
Speaker 1: randomness in the way this stuff gets mixed, in the
Speaker 1: way that it gets cooked in the oven um that
Speaker 1: produces some variation in the outcome. That's true for our
Speaker 1: brains as well. The genome just doesn't specify everything about
Speaker 1: the way your brain is put together. It just specifies
Speaker 1: the rules, and then all these complicated processes happen that
Speaker 1: just have some variability in intrinsic to them, which is
Speaker 1: then a third source of variation besides genes and environment.
Speaker 1: Development itself, the process by which you know genetic information
Speaker 1: is realized to make an individual that adds variation as well.
Speaker 1: So basically what you're saying is, if you were able
Speaker 1: to do this, maybe you are able to do this.
Speaker 1: For all I know, if you were to take an
Speaker 1: identical egg in sperm that formed me, and you took
Speaker 1: both those and you said, all right, here you go
Speaker 1: go make Eric, what they make would be slightly different.
Speaker 1: Absolutely yeah, because the path of development would be slightly different,
Speaker 1: exactly right. I saw something recently, an article about a
Speaker 1: woman who was complaining that she had spent dollars to
Speaker 1: clone her cat, and it turned out she got a
Speaker 1: pat with a totally different personality and character and everything else,
Speaker 1: which was sort of funny to me because it was
Speaker 1: obvious that that was going to happen. You know, what
Speaker 1: makes us a person an individual is not just our
Speaker 1: d n A. If it were, then identical twins would
Speaker 1: be effectively the same person. And obviously they're not. Even
Speaker 1: from the moment they're born. The brains of identical twins
Speaker 1: are already clearly different from each other, and we can
Speaker 1: see that with neuroimaging and so on. So yeah, right
Speaker 1: from the get go, there's already some differences in the
Speaker 1: way that that genetic information gets expressed in any individual
Speaker 1: run of the program. If we were to group these
Speaker 1: things nature, nurture and development, though, we would say that
Speaker 1: nature genetics development. Those two things are what you would
Speaker 1: call innate, right, you know, they make up part of
Speaker 1: who we are. We're not going to intervene in any
Speaker 1: meaningful way in those things. Yeah, well, I may be
Speaker 1: taking a leap with that last statement. Yeah, the intervention
Speaker 1: bid is a slightly separate question, a little trick, and
Speaker 1: it's probably not one answer for everything. So what we
Speaker 1: can do if we want to understand where variation comes
Speaker 1: from in some say personality traits, right, you know, we
Speaker 1: can kind of measure various personality traits in different people.
Speaker 1: And I mean that's a bit arbitrre put a number
Speaker 1: on things like extroversion or neuroticism, or risk taking or
Speaker 1: shyness whatever, you know, all those kinds of things. So
Speaker 1: say we measured something like that, and then when we
Speaker 1: look across the population, we see there's a certain amount
Speaker 1: of variation in the population, exactly the same as if
Speaker 1: we measured height, and we see, you know, the typical
Speaker 1: sort of bell curve of lots of people in the
Speaker 1: middle and fewer people at the extremes. And then we
Speaker 1: can ask, well, where does that variation come from? And
Speaker 1: typically people have thought, well, it must be variation in
Speaker 1: genes or variation in environment and mathematically you can try
Speaker 1: and distinguish those and see how much of an effect
Speaker 1: or how much of a contribution, say, genetic differences make
Speaker 1: to those kinds of traits. And when people have done that,
Speaker 1: using things like twin studies and family studies, what they
Speaker 1: typically find is that maybe forty of the variants that
Speaker 1: we see sort of the width of the bell curve
Speaker 1: if you like, is attributable to genetic differences. And one
Speaker 1: way to think about as if everybody was a clone,
Speaker 1: the bell curve would be much much narrower, right right,
Speaker 1: which you can imagine for height that makes sense, but
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be zero. I mean, there's still be some
Speaker 1: variation left. And then the question is how much of
Speaker 1: that variation is due to you know, specific experiences or
Speaker 1: environmental influences or family upbringing versus maybe developmental variation. And
Speaker 1: one of the sort of surprising findings from a lot
Speaker 1: of these twin and family studies was that the family
Speaker 1: environment doesn't seem to affect these traits very much. It
Speaker 1: doesn't really affect how extroverted or neurotic or conscientious you are,
Speaker 1: which was a surprise. And you could see that by
Speaker 1: looking at people who are adopted, for example, who share
Speaker 1: no extra resemblance with their adoptive siblings than they do
Speaker 1: with anybody else on the planet. Basically, I mean, it
Speaker 1: really says parental upbringing there is not having much of
Speaker 1: an effect. And even twins who are reared apart sort
Speaker 1: of the opposite experiment. You identical twins who are reared
Speaker 1: in different families, and it turns out there about as
Speaker 1: similar to each other as they would be if they
Speaker 1: had been reared in the same family. So the message
Speaker 1: seems to be that parenting doesn't have much of an
Speaker 1: influence on those kinds of traits. It's important to nuance
Speaker 1: that bit because those are precisely the type of traits
Speaker 1: that psychologists have defined in a way like they're sort
Speaker 1: of you know, hardwired biological aspects of an individual. If
Speaker 1: you know, say fifty percent of the variance is due
Speaker 1: to genetic differences and then the family environment doesn't make
Speaker 1: much of a difference at all, then you're left with
Speaker 1: this question, well, what's the rest. Where's the rest of
Speaker 1: that variation coming from? And what I think is that
Speaker 1: a lot of that is just developmental variation. And the
Speaker 1: upshot of that is that many of those traits are
Speaker 1: even more innate than it looks like they are just
Speaker 1: from the genetics alone. There's a possibility to look at
Speaker 1: the results from twin studies and say, oh, it's only
Speaker 1: fifty genetic, the must be experience or environment. But that's
Speaker 1: not necessarily true. It could be just developmental, in which
Speaker 1: case a lot of that is still innate. And then
Speaker 1: we get into other questions about what does it mean
Speaker 1: to have innate predispositions and how do they influence behavior? Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's move there next. Let me sum up to where
Speaker 1: we are. Now. What we're saying is that you're arguing
Speaker 1: there's a pretty fair amount of our underlying traits that
Speaker 1: are innate. What the exact numbers are, nobody knows, but
Speaker 1: there's a lot of innateness in this, and again anybody
Speaker 1: common sense would show us to be the case. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's innateness in dogs, right, I mean you could just
Speaker 1: tell you've got different personalities, right, absolutely. So let's talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about what do we mean when we
Speaker 1: say underlying traits or predispositions. What are we saying when
Speaker 1: we talk about those. Yeah, it's a great question and
Speaker 1: it's a really key to I think undercutting a misunderstanding.
Speaker 1: So in personality psychology, what psychologists try to do is
Speaker 1: look for patterns across the behavior of many, many different people,
Speaker 1: across many many different contexts. So they're really trying to
Speaker 1: abstract away all the particulars of any individual's life so
Speaker 1: that they can look for dimensions along which people tend
Speaker 1: to vary in their behavior. In the English language, for example,
Speaker 1: there's about eight thousand words that describe something you would
Speaker 1: call a personality trait or a character trait or something
Speaker 1: like that. So you could say someone is is stubborn
Speaker 1: or strong minded, or strong willed, or obstinate, or well
Speaker 1: the whole load of other more insulting terms you can
Speaker 1: use depending on whether they're being you know, positive or negative.
Speaker 1: But when you look at those terms, what you find,
Speaker 1: I mean, the one the examples I just gave you,
Speaker 1: it's kind of obvious that actually they're all tapping into
Speaker 1: the same thing. If people vary in stubbornness or obstinacy
Speaker 1: or any of those other words, really that's all the
Speaker 1: one thing, right, And so what personality psycholoists have tried
Speaker 1: to do is say, well, how many things are there
Speaker 1: like that? How many dimensions are there that characterize people's
Speaker 1: behavior sort of independently from each other, That is, the
Speaker 1: dimensions are independent from each other. And there's lots of
Speaker 1: ways you can carve that up. I mean, the ancient
Speaker 1: Greeks had, you know, the four humors of bile and melancholy,
Speaker 1: and these sorts of things. You can have like you know,
Speaker 1: two or five or ten or sixteen or thirty different dimensions.
Speaker 1: But the most popular ones are the big five extroversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness,
Speaker 1: which all kind of mean like what the colloquial meanings
Speaker 1: sound like, and then agreeableness, which makes intuitive sense. And
Speaker 1: then the last one is openness to experience, which is
Speaker 1: sort of about imagination and creativity, openness to ideas and
Speaker 1: and so on, and those things together capture a lot
Speaker 1: of these basil dimensions along which people vary, and they
Speaker 1: seem to, in some way that's not well understood, reflect
Speaker 1: differences in the way the brain is wired. So really,
Speaker 1: when you're talking about personality, what you're saying is that
Speaker 1: people have a tendency to act in a certain way
Speaker 1: across many different contexts, and really it comes down to
Speaker 1: decision making. So in any given context, we're going to
Speaker 1: understand what the context is, use our knowledge and our
Speaker 1: experience to know kinds of options that we might have.
Speaker 1: But then I might, if I'm saying less extroverted than you,
Speaker 1: I might tend to choose one option more than you
Speaker 1: would because I'm slightly tilted that direction, if you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. So that's the way that I think
Speaker 1: of those as sort of tunings of these basil parameters
Speaker 1: in the brain. Although if you get into the neurobiology
Speaker 1: of it, what's interesting is that there isn't clear neurobiology
Speaker 1: of say, conscientiousness or neuroticism or extra version. There is
Speaker 1: a neurobiology of things that feed into them. So risk aversion,
Speaker 1: for example, is something that we can measure. Even in
Speaker 1: animal you can measure how risk averse a mouse is
Speaker 1: compared to another mouse, and we can go into the
Speaker 1: brain and tweak the neural circuits that we know in
Speaker 1: some way modulate that and change how risk averse an
Speaker 1: animal is. So there's a biology of decision making that
Speaker 1: has a lot of these underlying parameters, like how sensitive
Speaker 1: you are to rewards or threats or punishment, how confident
Speaker 1: you have to be before you make a decision, how
Speaker 1: long you're willing to wait for a reward, howeverse you
Speaker 1: are too risks, and how interesting you find novel things.
Speaker 1: All of those things they can feed into these sort
Speaker 1: of statistical constructs, which is really what those personality traits are.
Speaker 1: So the ideas that we have some of these basil tunings,
Speaker 1: our brains are really slightly tuned one way or another.
Speaker 1: And then the question is how does that actually manifest
Speaker 1: on our behavior on a moment a moment basis. And
Speaker 1: there I think you have to get into understanding the
Speaker 1: actual context of particular people in actual city suations, right,
Speaker 1: because the personality psychology abstracts away all of that idiosyncratic detail.
Speaker 1: But of course we're never behaving in just any given situation.
Speaker 1: We're always behaving in some particular situation and we're not
Speaker 1: just abstracted collection of personality traits. We're ourselves with all
Speaker 1: of our knowledge and experience and everything else. And so
Speaker 1: those predispositions are the starting point. But as we go
Speaker 1: through our lives, we adapt to our environments. We create
Speaker 1: in fact our own environments. We select them over time,
Speaker 1: and we make decisions about our own behavior and our
Speaker 1: own behavioral patterns over time, and we develop habits that
Speaker 1: actually most of our behavior on a moment moment basis
Speaker 1: is really habitual. You know. We may have habits of
Speaker 1: behaving one way or another that have been informed over
Speaker 1: the course of our lives by whether we're more or
Speaker 1: less extroverted or neurotic, but right now they're not being
Speaker 1: controlled by those traits, if that makes sense totally. I
Speaker 1: want to jump back to something you said there and
Speaker 1: make a point that I think you make in the book,
Speaker 1: and I think it's an interesting one, which is you're
Speaker 1: talking about, say something, a tendency towards more or less
Speaker 1: risk aversion. Right when we hear that these things are
Speaker 1: quote unquote genetic, those of us who are at least
Speaker 1: like me, who don't know that much, think, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: let's find the gene for risk aversion, and you make
Speaker 1: the point that it's a whole lot more complicated. Used
Speaker 1: to phrase, they're the neural circuits. So talk about the
Speaker 1: relationship between genetics and something is complicated as a neural circuit,
Speaker 1: and what do we know about how those inform each
Speaker 1: other or create each other. Yeah, so there's two sites
Speaker 1: that one is something that I've been working on for
Speaker 1: a long time, and there's a whole field of developmental neurobiology,
Speaker 1: which is just trying to understand what are the instructions
Speaker 1: for making a brain, how do they actually work When
Speaker 1: an embryo is developing, the brain gets set aside, you
Speaker 1: make nerve cells. They have to be arranged in really
Speaker 1: really specific ways and different parts of the brain, you know,
Speaker 1: all these regions. People will have heard about the cortex
Speaker 1: and the hippocampus and the cerebellum, and there's thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands of these. They're all really really very different from
Speaker 1: each other, and they have their own sort of computational
Speaker 1: architecture and layout of neurons amount connectivity within them, and
Speaker 1: then of course they all have to be connected up
Speaker 1: to each other in really stereotyped ways. So there's basically
Speaker 1: instructions encoded in the genome that specify at least the
Speaker 1: processes by which all of that wiring self assembles. I mean,
Speaker 1: the amazing thing is it does it itself, right, There's
Speaker 1: no one in charge telling it what to do. It's
Speaker 1: this self organizing system. Um and of course that's what
Speaker 1: you know, billions of years of evolution will will get you.
Speaker 1: Is this amazing thing, right. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: because that system develops based on these genetic instructions, and
Speaker 1: because we all have different genetics, right, because genetic variation
Speaker 1: just happens. Every time a sperm or an egg cell
Speaker 1: is created, some new mutations happened. Genetic variation enters the population,
Speaker 1: which is why we have diversity of human beings that
Speaker 1: we see. So what that means is that we then
Speaker 1: get some variation in the way the brain develops. Right.
Speaker 1: There may be slightly more cells here, slightly more connections there,
Speaker 1: and so the wiring of these things differs between people
Speaker 1: and in some ways that are really really complicated and
Speaker 1: complex and not well understood. That wiring manifests as our
Speaker 1: psychological traits. But you're right in saying that there isn't
Speaker 1: a very direct or specific relationship. So, first of all,
Speaker 1: most of our complex behavior can't be tied to one
Speaker 1: part of the brain or or another. That's really just
Speaker 1: a sort of an old fashioned simplistic idea saying, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm doing this with just this part of
Speaker 1: my brain or that part. It's all circuits, it's all interconnected,
Speaker 1: it's it's distributed brain systems. And then you know, on
Speaker 1: the genetic front, it's also not the case that just
Speaker 1: one gene specifies one part of the brain. It's loads
Speaker 1: of genes working together, and so it's complexity all the
Speaker 1: way down, which is a little bit frustrating if you're
Speaker 1: trying to, you know, make simple stories. We have a
Speaker 1: gene for intelligence, or a gene for neuroticism or something
Speaker 1: like that. It just turns out that mostly when we
Speaker 1: find those genetic variants, they're just generally sort of affecting
Speaker 1: how the brain develops, and that doesn't, unfortunately, tell us
Speaker 1: an awful lot about the biology of intelligence or social
Speaker 1: interactions or things like that. Those are really complex things,
Speaker 1: and the answer to understanding how they work is not
Speaker 1: in the genetics, even though differences in genes affect them.
Speaker 1: There's a phrase genetics load the gun, environment pulls the trigger.
Speaker 1: Have you heard that phrase before? Yeah, yes I have.
Speaker 1: What do you think of that phrase? I guess it
Speaker 1: depends on the context that it's applied to. Okay, say
Speaker 1: for something like intelligence, right, which is obviously really hot
Speaker 1: button topic. I would say that people differ in their
Speaker 1: intellectual potential, and whether they reach that potential is everything
Speaker 1: to do with education and environment and the opportunities that
Speaker 1: they're given. You could say the same for height, You
Speaker 1: could say the same for athletic skills or musical ability.
Speaker 1: You know, there's some innate differences between people, but then
Speaker 1: the environment and experience obviously hugely feed into the actual
Speaker 1: outcome in any person. So for me, the right way
Speaker 1: of thinking about it is as an interaction a long
Speaker 1: or across an extended trajectory, not just a momentary kind
Speaker 1: of thing. While in trotting out well known phrases about
Speaker 1: genetics and neurology, I'm gonna bring out another one, which
Speaker 1: is neurons that fired to other wire together. Head's law, Yes,
Speaker 1: which is great. It's attributed to Head, but actually it
Speaker 1: was a mentor of mine, Carla Schatz, who I think
Speaker 1: actually coined that term. But the idea is that brains
Speaker 1: are there to learn, right, So there's nothing hardwired about them. Really,
Speaker 1: there's nothing completely hardwired about them. They come they come
Speaker 1: to sort of pre wired, but they're prewired to learn.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of the ways in which we
Speaker 1: learn are one of the simplest ways anyways, by associating
Speaker 1: two things. So you know, this might be Pavlov ringing
Speaker 1: his bell and the dog associating with food, right. You know,
Speaker 1: in the lab it's often a tone and a mouse
Speaker 1: getting an electric shock or something like that, or an odor.
Speaker 1: And you know, so if you pair two things like that,
Speaker 1: then the neurons that represent them, if they're firing at
Speaker 1: the same time and they're connected either directly or they're
Speaker 1: both connected to a third brain area, then they can
Speaker 1: strengthen those connections. And that we think is in some
Speaker 1: way the physical basis for a memory. And you can
Speaker 1: see that even in the simplest of organisms, things like
Speaker 1: sea slugs, where they can habituate to their environment or
Speaker 1: they can learn to associates very simple things over time,
Speaker 1: and so the neurobiology of that is really well understood.
Speaker 1: And of course you know in human beings the things
Speaker 1: we learn over our lifetime. Are you know, things like facts? Right?
Speaker 1: We learned facts, We learn the properties of objects. We
Speaker 1: learned that a cat is a type of mammal and
Speaker 1: Felix is a particular cat. And you know, so we
Speaker 1: learned sort of categorical relations between things. We learned causal
Speaker 1: relations between things. That's how we come to understand the world.
Speaker 1: We know that if I don't feed Felix, he's going
Speaker 1: to die, that sort of thing. Sorry for the slightly
Speaker 1: grim example, but no problem. Felix is done. Felix is done.
Speaker 1: So we've learned from that the next cat, right, next cat? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean the idea that'say, neural plasticity. There
Speaker 1: was a big hulla blue about this, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: I don't know, fifteen twenty years ago and people suddenly
Speaker 1: started to say, oh, the brain is plastic. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course it's plastic. That's what it's for. That's how
Speaker 1: it that's how it learns. I never could quite understand
Speaker 1: what the surprise was over that. But again, it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean everything in the brain is plastic. It doesn't mean
Speaker 1: you can overwrite these predispositions that are pre wired in there.
Speaker 1: But what we do learn is how to adapt to
Speaker 1: our environments. We learn to do particular behaviors because we
Speaker 1: know that's a good thing to do in this situation,
Speaker 1: even if it goes against some of our you know,
Speaker 1: innate personality traits. For example, you know, I mean, shy
Speaker 1: people can learn to be perfectly good public speakers, even
Speaker 1: though it may exhaust them, you know, as opposed to
Speaker 1: energizing them in the way that it would somebody else.
Speaker 1: One of the interesting things I think when we think
Speaker 1: about the limits of personality traits and the idea that
Speaker 1: they don't determine our behavior but they influence it, is
Speaker 1: thinking about this distinction between personality and character traits. You know,
Speaker 1: those personality traits that have been defined in the field
Speaker 1: of personality psychology are designed to be these things that
Speaker 1: are abstracted away, as I said, from the details of experience.
Speaker 1: They're sort of overarching patterns, and they're neutral, right, they're not.
Speaker 1: It's not better or worse to be more or less conscientious,
Speaker 1: or more or less neurotic, or more or less extroverted.
Speaker 1: At least, it's not better or worse in every scenario
Speaker 1: you could find yourself in. Right, But then there's character
Speaker 1: traits which are very different, and there are things like
Speaker 1: the ones that you talked about in the parable of
Speaker 1: you know, kindness or greed or bravery or loyalty or
Speaker 1: temperance or justice, um. And those are things that you know,
Speaker 1: philosophers have been talking about since the time of Aristotle
Speaker 1: and Cicero and people like that, and when they've talked
Speaker 1: about them, there's a moral aspect to them right there.
Speaker 1: They're seen as virtues or vices. They're good or bad
Speaker 1: aspects of our behavior. And it's always been the case
Speaker 1: again from you know, Aristotle and Cicero on up, that
Speaker 1: they're not just things that happened to us, right We
Speaker 1: have a hand in them, We take some control, We
Speaker 1: have some responsibility for developing those character traits over our lifetime.
Speaker 1: And again they may be influenced and informed in a
Speaker 1: certain way by our psychological predispositions, and of course they're
Speaker 1: in some way reactive to our environments and experiences. But
Speaker 1: also we ourselves, you know, make decisions to act in
Speaker 1: a certain way over our lifetimes, so we're sort of
Speaker 1: predeciding things, not particular decisions, just ways of behaving that
Speaker 1: in effect constrain our future selves along a path that
Speaker 1: we have decided is a good one. Um. And of
Speaker 1: course sometimes that's us deciding it, you know, when we're young,
Speaker 1: it's our parents influencing us, saying, you know, don't know,
Speaker 1: don't hit Billy or share your food, you know, with Emma,
Speaker 1: or whatever it is, you know, trying to inculcate some
Speaker 1: positive character traits and behaviors. And of course there's societal
Speaker 1: and cultural and for some people religious or other sort
Speaker 1: of institutional norms and expectations that come into play to
Speaker 1: that that informed that arc of character development as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's a really helpful distinction. And you brought
Speaker 1: up parenting again, and I kind of want to swing
Speaker 1: back around to that because you said before, look, doesn't
Speaker 1: appear from the data that parenting has a real big
Speaker 1: impact on underlying personality traits. But you're not saying that
Speaker 1: parenting doesn't have an impact on the people we turn
Speaker 1: out to be in the lives that we live. You're
Speaker 1: saying it's not changing that innateness. But obviously we all
Speaker 1: know if you've got a parent who abuses you, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have a very different life than somebody who as
Speaker 1: a parent who doesn't potentially right. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, And
Speaker 1: I think that's been a misunderstanding of the surprising result
Speaker 1: from behavioral genetics that does show parents don't influence those
Speaker 1: innate underlying traits. It seemed to indicate wrongly that parents
Speaker 1: don't influence our behavior at all, or parenting doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: You know. That was a sort of sort of a
Speaker 1: shorthand message, which I think is absolutely wrong and just
Speaker 1: overinterprets the basic result. I think it's exactly as you've said,
Speaker 1: that parenting, you know, affects all kinds of aspects of
Speaker 1: our behavior without necessarily rewiring those underlying traits. Those are
Speaker 1: just the basis, you know, that's just the basement level
Speaker 1: of the building. And as we go through our lives,
Speaker 1: you know, the examples that we're given, the expectations that
Speaker 1: were set, the encouragement we get, or on the other hand,
Speaker 1: neglect or abuse or any of the sort of unfortunate
Speaker 1: you know, negative aspects of parenting as well, absolutely can
Speaker 1: shape the adaptations that we make, our so called characteristic
Speaker 1: adaptations to the world, which include ways of being right,
Speaker 1: ways of behaving that we call character traits. Once they
Speaker 1: get sort of crystallized through time, And actually I came
Speaker 1: across a really nice quote recently which is a bit
Speaker 1: apocryphal um, but I sawt ascribed to someone named Laosu,
Speaker 1: who was an ancient Taoist Chinese philosopher, and it goes
Speaker 1: something like, watch your acts, they become habits. Watch your
Speaker 1: habits they become character. And then I think it was
Speaker 1: what your character it becomes destined? To me, that captured
Speaker 1: a lot of the idea that we ourselves are making
Speaker 1: these decisions, and every decision we make can reinforce our
Speaker 1: own behavioral habits in good or bad ways. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's true that our genes influence our personality traits,
Speaker 1: and that our personality traits influence our behavior. But it's
Speaker 1: not true that our genes determine our traits or that
Speaker 1: our traits determine our behavior. And that's the distinction that
Speaker 1: I think is really important because it gets away from
Speaker 1: the idea that we have no control that you know,
Speaker 1: it's just in my d n A. I couldn't help
Speaker 1: it that way. It's my genetics. That's true only up
Speaker 1: to a certain point. Yeah, this distinction that we're talking
Speaker 1: about is one that's of key interest and importance to me,
Speaker 1: and what we're really talking about, I think is how
Speaker 1: much choice do I have? How much free will do
Speaker 1: I have? And I think this is a really interesting question,
Speaker 1: And a little background on me. I'm a recovering alcoholic
Speaker 1: and heroin addict, so I've been in my life in
Speaker 1: places where it felt like the amount of free will
Speaker 1: that I had to make a choice felt radically different
Speaker 1: to me. You know, two days after having had a
Speaker 1: drink of alcohol, when I'm addicted to alcohol, the amount
Speaker 1: of free will or choice I have feels radically different
Speaker 1: than it does to me fifteen years later. And we
Speaker 1: could certainly say some of that is just the physiology
Speaker 1: of what alcohol is doing in my body. But let's
Speaker 1: broaden that out a little bit and talk about, you know,
Speaker 1: how much let me say this differently. We can't say, like, well,
Speaker 1: how much free will does somebody have? Like who's the
Speaker 1: somebody and what's the circumstance. So talk to me about
Speaker 1: how you think about that idea of degrees of free
Speaker 1: will or choice. Yeah, it's a great question. It's one
Speaker 1: that I'm really interested in, and it's largely what my
Speaker 1: new book is about, looking at free will. The question
Speaker 1: of free will First of all, do we have it
Speaker 1: at all? Do humans have free will? Is it a
Speaker 1: real thing or is it an illusion? I think, you know,
Speaker 1: it's popular these days to kind of say, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: neuroscience or even genetics or psychology has shown that we
Speaker 1: don't have free will. We just our brain makes a
Speaker 1: decision and then maybe it informs us about it and
Speaker 1: we make up some reason about it. But really it's
Speaker 1: all just physical stuff happening in our brains. I think
Speaker 1: that's not right. I think it is true that we,
Speaker 1: as agents, and this extends to you know, animals and
Speaker 1: things as well, really do make decisions, and we really
Speaker 1: have causal power in the world as an entity. Right,
Speaker 1: We're not just pushed around by things in the environment,
Speaker 1: and we're also not just pushed around by our own parts.
Speaker 1: We're not just a place where complicated things happen, right.
Speaker 1: We're in the driver's seat for a lot of the time. However,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean we have complete absolute freedom, right, which
Speaker 1: is a kind of a non sensical, incoherent notion when
Speaker 1: you dig into it a bit, as some people would
Speaker 1: want to say, well, unless I can act unconstrained by
Speaker 1: any prior cause, then I'm not really free and I
Speaker 1: don't have free will, And to me, that doesn't really
Speaker 1: make any sense because acting for no cause also means
Speaker 1: acting for no reason, you know, on the basis of
Speaker 1: no information, just doing things at random. If living organisms
Speaker 1: did that, we'd never have evolved. The whole point of
Speaker 1: life is doing things for its own reasons to keep
Speaker 1: itself going right, And when we come from millions and
Speaker 1: millions and millions of years of evolution of life that
Speaker 1: has done that. So living things do things for their
Speaker 1: own reasons, and that's where agency, I think can be found.
Speaker 1: You know, if you get into the biology of that,
Speaker 1: and you get into the biology of decision making, how
Speaker 1: do we actually make a decision? Then you can see
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of things going on, all sorts of
Speaker 1: different neural systems at play at the same time. So
Speaker 1: we will, you know, look at a situation and we
Speaker 1: perceive a load of things. We map what's out in
Speaker 1: the world. We look for threats and opportunities. We have
Speaker 1: various goals. We monitor our own internal state to see
Speaker 1: am I hungry and my thirsty? You know, what do
Speaker 1: I want to do? We prioritize some goals versus others,
Speaker 1: we kind of run through in our minds a set
Speaker 1: of possible options, and then we weigh them up and
Speaker 1: decide what which is going to give me the best
Speaker 1: outcome here, either in the short term or the long
Speaker 1: term and so on. So there's really really complicated processes
Speaker 1: going on there, and not surprisingly, those things actually vary
Speaker 1: between people. So they vary in terms of say, risk taking,
Speaker 1: you know, that's a parameter that feeds into decision making
Speaker 1: and how much control you have, but also the level
Speaker 1: of sort of rational conscious control that we're each able
Speaker 1: to deploy. That's a trait that can differ between people,
Speaker 1: and actually in an obvious way, you can see that
Speaker 1: it develops across the lifetime because babies, said, don't have
Speaker 1: any rational conscious control. It's skill act lee that has
Speaker 1: to develop and that can be worked on and has
Speaker 1: to you know, as we mature. But you know, some
Speaker 1: people are more patient than others, some people are more
Speaker 1: perseverant than others, and so on. So you know, for me,
Speaker 1: one of the pieces of evidence that free will is
Speaker 1: a real thing is that people clearly differ in how
Speaker 1: much free will they have in a psychological sense. You know,
Speaker 1: some people are very able to control themselves. They're not impulsive,
Speaker 1: they plan over a longer time frame, they're able to
Speaker 1: prioritize longer term goals over shorter term ones, and so on,
Speaker 1: and other people um the opposite. But then also, you know,
Speaker 1: depending on our situations, if we're tired or hungry, or
Speaker 1: if we're intoxicated, or you know, any any of those things,
Speaker 1: of course they can change that, right, So the amount
Speaker 1: of freedom that we have is also determined by our
Speaker 1: current state, and then of course by environmental factors as well.
Speaker 1: You know, the number of options that we have at
Speaker 1: any given time can be curtailed in lots of ways.
Speaker 1: And you know, when it comes to things like addiction,
Speaker 1: then you're really really are curtailed. I mean, your capacity
Speaker 1: for rational conscious control really is inhibited by this overwhelming
Speaker 1: drive that's feeding into these decision making processes and just pushing, pushing,
Speaker 1: pushing towards getting that absolutely prioritizing that one goal over
Speaker 1: everything else, even if there's a harmful outcomes, and you know,
Speaker 1: changing the way that you weigh reward and punishment and
Speaker 1: all those kinds of things. So I think the biology
Speaker 1: of free will once we get past this sort of
Speaker 1: philosophical do we have it or not, which to me
Speaker 1: is just a kind of a red herring. It's clearly
Speaker 1: we do have, you know, the capacity for it. Then
Speaker 1: we get into more interesting discussions about well, how does
Speaker 1: it vary? What are the things that can impinge on
Speaker 1: it or inhibited? Addiction is one of those. I think
Speaker 1: it just is a very easy to understand. And when
Speaker 1: I say understand, sort of, I mean visualize what we're
Speaker 1: talking about. Addiction is tremendously difficult to understand as an
Speaker 1: overall phenomenon, but we can see, you know that an
Speaker 1: addict is clearly being driven by something you know. And
Speaker 1: so it's so interesting because what I loved about reading
Speaker 1: your one book and your proposal for the other book,
Speaker 1: which I can't wait till it comes out, because I
Speaker 1: love the way you arrive at we do have free will.
Speaker 1: There's so much of that was so fascinating. We just
Speaker 1: don't have time for. But one side, one extreme says well,
Speaker 1: just choose not to use the rug, right, just choose
Speaker 1: not to do it, And there's some truth in that.
Speaker 1: There is ultimately a choice being made, right, I'm choosing.
Speaker 1: The flip side says, I'm an addict. I'm out of control.
Speaker 1: I can't do anything about it. And the truth is
Speaker 1: somewhere in between. And is somebody who has been around
Speaker 1: people who have addictions most of my adult life and
Speaker 1: have had them a couple of times myself. I'm I'm
Speaker 1: so fascinated in what are the levers that are actually
Speaker 1: at work there? You know, Like, if I could have
Speaker 1: an answer to to one question, well, actually, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to say that there's a thousand questions I want
Speaker 1: the answer to, but one that would be up high
Speaker 1: on the list would be why do some people recover
Speaker 1: and others don't. I don't understand it, you know, because
Speaker 1: I've watched people I care about deeply die, you know,
Speaker 1: from the same disease that I have recovered from, and
Speaker 1: just don't understand it. But getting some insight into what
Speaker 1: some of those levers are I think is really interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And let me prep is this by saying, I'm not
Speaker 1: an expert in addiction biology, but I have some familiarity
Speaker 1: with it. But I think one of the key things
Speaker 1: to keep in mind is, you know, not to put
Speaker 1: all of the emphasis on the individual right, because of
Speaker 1: course there's the social context and the environment that's so
Speaker 1: so crucial and maybe absolutely a determining factor in you know,
Speaker 1: whether somebody does recover or remains addicted or worse. So
Speaker 1: I think that's the first thing is to say, even
Speaker 1: if there are genetic and neurobiological aspects to this, it's
Speaker 1: important not to say, well, that's where the explanation, the
Speaker 1: complete explanation is right now, having said that, there are
Speaker 1: some differences between people, and there is a genetics of addiction, right,
Speaker 1: you can you can do you can study the genetics
Speaker 1: of that. So a tendency towards addiction actually sort of
Speaker 1: a general tendency for any you know, alcohol or tobacco
Speaker 1: or um, you know, opiates or or other sorts of drugs.
Speaker 1: There does seem to be a general nderlying factor that
Speaker 1: makes some people more likely to develop addictions than others.
Speaker 1: Now that's given that they're exposed. You know that the
Speaker 1: opportunities are there to have these drugs and whatever other
Speaker 1: social factors are in there. So all of that is
Speaker 1: sort of averaged out if you will, and then you
Speaker 1: can see there's some genetic differences at work, and you know,
Speaker 1: some of them are really very specific. They actually affect
Speaker 1: the genes, say for metabolizing alcohol. So there are people
Speaker 1: this is a trait that's common in East Asian Japan
Speaker 1: in particular, people who can't metabolize alcohol well it builds
Speaker 1: up as an aldehyde that it makes them feel really sick,
Speaker 1: and it's actually protective. That variant is protective against developing alcoholism,
Speaker 1: because you feel so bad when you drink alcohol that
Speaker 1: those people just tend not to um. So there's a
Speaker 1: few sort of specific genetic variants like that that affect
Speaker 1: the proteins or the enzymes that actually metabolize the drugs,
Speaker 1: or the receptors that see in the neurons that that
Speaker 1: actually you know, like opioid receptors or nicotine receptors and
Speaker 1: so on. But then there's also a really broad kind
Speaker 1: of what they call polygenic effect, which just means loads
Speaker 1: and loads of genes are involved, which seems to feed
Speaker 1: into this general addictiveness personality trait, if you will. The
Speaker 1: biology there is just really not known. It's probably pretty
Speaker 1: generic and kind of complicated, and I'm sure it won't
Speaker 1: come down to, you know, one particular pathway. You know,
Speaker 1: it won't be just like dopamine signaling or something like that.
Speaker 1: It'll it'll be more complicated. Yeah, I was going to ask,
Speaker 1: and I think you just answered the question, But I
Speaker 1: was going to ask, when you look at some of
Speaker 1: those things that make people more susceptible to addiction. You know,
Speaker 1: we could broadly look at addiction. You know, we're seeing
Speaker 1: too two broad types of it. One is addiction to substances, right,
Speaker 1: and then the other is addiction to behaviors gambling or
Speaker 1: video games, your shopping, right. And sure, as you were talking,
Speaker 1: I was thinking, I wonder, you know, is that genetic
Speaker 1: predisposition lead to both of those equally or one versus
Speaker 1: the other. And I think, as you said, it's kind
Speaker 1: of complicated. But any thoughts on that. So there's an
Speaker 1: interesting paper just came out this week actually looking at
Speaker 1: this sort of general addiction factor, but it was substance addiction.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether the genetics or the neurobiology has
Speaker 1: in any way distinguished something like a gambling, you know,
Speaker 1: addiction the tendency towards that, or you know, like you said,
Speaker 1: the you know, addictions to shopping or Instagram or Twitter,
Speaker 1: or you know, any any of these other things that
Speaker 1: that are just behaviors that we that we develop. You know,
Speaker 1: my guess is that all of those things will have
Speaker 1: an input from lots of different personality and character traits.
Speaker 1: You know, how sensitive we are to rewards, how willing
Speaker 1: we are to take risks, how impulsive we are, how
Speaker 1: conscientious we are about planning, you know, over longer term,
Speaker 1: prioritizing longer term over short term gratification. All of those
Speaker 1: things will eating and probably in different profiles, in different
Speaker 1: ways and different people. So I think, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: the the upshot is that probably won't be any simple
Speaker 1: kind of linear relationships between genes and those behaviors, right,
Speaker 1: and the data between the role of adverse childhood experiences
Speaker 1: on you know, future addiction risk seems pretty clear. Also.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the things I think a lot
Speaker 1: about is and we kind of keep circling it, but
Speaker 1: I do work with coaching clients and a variety different things,
Speaker 1: is this idea of tendencies versus predispositions. Like I'll have
Speaker 1: people come to me and say, I'm the kind of
Speaker 1: person who X, right, And while there is value in
Speaker 1: recognizing your tendencies, there's also value in recognizing the ability
Speaker 1: to go beyond those. Yes, yeah, absolutely, And I think
Speaker 1: you know it's one of the interesting things. So some
Speaker 1: people would say, in talking about again about human free will,
Speaker 1: that we just have these traits, our brain is just
Speaker 1: wired us in way, and they would even say that,
Speaker 1: you know, we do things for reasons that are unknown
Speaker 1: to us and unknowable. We can't know why we do things.
Speaker 1: And also they'll say that, you know, my brain is
Speaker 1: wired just to do these causes that I had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with. So, first of all, that's wrong. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, as we talked about in terms of character development,
Speaker 1: we as agents play an active part in that throughout
Speaker 1: our lives. And secondly, the idea that our reasons are
Speaker 1: just opaque to us, that we can't know them is
Speaker 1: also just clearly wrong. I mean, those huge parts of
Speaker 1: our brains are devoted to reasoning about reasons, to thinking
Speaker 1: about our own thoughts, and we can express our motivations
Speaker 1: to other people. So it's very clear that we do
Speaker 1: have access to a lot of our motivations and reasons. Now,
Speaker 1: it may be effortful, we may be wrong sometimes, but
Speaker 1: but we're not wrong all the time. You know, we're
Speaker 1: actually really good at that, and in fact, we're really
Speaker 1: good at understanding other people's motivations. That's what a lot
Speaker 1: of social cognition is all about. We're really hyper specialized
Speaker 1: as a hyper social species for precisely that kind of
Speaker 1: cognition of reasoning about reasons and so what I think
Speaker 1: that gives is access understanding those things in the first place.
Speaker 1: Knowing that you have this kind of trait is super useful.
Speaker 1: So knowing that you're saying a procrastinator is really really
Speaker 1: helpful if you can then actively put in place behavioral aids.
Speaker 1: If you will that you know you're not going to
Speaker 1: do this task next week, You're you know you're going
Speaker 1: to put it off and do something else instead of it,
Speaker 1: So you make yourself put something in your calendar so
Speaker 1: you absolutely have to do it, and you know you
Speaker 1: develop the discipline to do that if you can. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm terrible at that, but but I try so clearly,
Speaker 1: not too terrible, because you're fairly well, Um yeah you'd
Speaker 1: be surprised, but yeah, but I think you know, all
Speaker 1: of us can try to do that. And for me,
Speaker 1: the key thing is in recognizing I'm not going to
Speaker 1: change my tendency to procrastinate, but I and put in
Speaker 1: place behaviors that allow me to adapt to that so
Speaker 1: that it doesn't drive me and have negative consequences in
Speaker 1: my life, right, and that I think is the key thing.
Speaker 1: So if we're thinking about you know, kind of self
Speaker 1: help and personal development, pushing against yourself or thinking that
Speaker 1: you can change those underlying predispositions, to me, that's a
Speaker 1: futile exercise and it's only going to lead to frustration
Speaker 1: and a kind of a cycle of bad outcomes. Whereas
Speaker 1: recognizing what they are and recognizing how they impact on
Speaker 1: your life and then saying well, I can prevent that
Speaker 1: impact by doing a B and C. To me, that's
Speaker 1: a much more positive and much more practical and effective
Speaker 1: way to approach things. I love what you said there
Speaker 1: in one way of thinking about that again, you know,
Speaker 1: making everything about me which is just for illustrative purposes.
Speaker 1: I think that I have an underlying well, I know
Speaker 1: I have an underlying tendency, which is if I take
Speaker 1: a substance, I'm probably going to want to take it
Speaker 1: all the time. I don't think that's going to change.
Speaker 1: The times I've thought it would change, I was wrong
Speaker 1: by and I've learned that through hard experience. So there
Speaker 1: are things that I can do that make that far
Speaker 1: less likely to be a problem, or to use another example,
Speaker 1: I have a terrible memory. It is appallingly bad, right,
Speaker 1: And I think that's one of those things that you
Speaker 1: would say, is you know, there's some genetic basis to
Speaker 1: to some of that. So, Okay, I've got a bunch
Speaker 1: of systems in place that just means I don't have
Speaker 1: to rely on my memory. Other people who've got a
Speaker 1: good memory might be able to. I just learned like,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna work that way. So I think, you know,
Speaker 1: knowing our tendencies and then devising strategies. And I love
Speaker 1: what you said earlier about addiction. I didn't get a
Speaker 1: chance to comment on it. Which is the environment and
Speaker 1: the support that's around us. Those things are so so critical.
Speaker 1: You know, when I look at why did I get
Speaker 1: sober and other people didn't at the same time as me,
Speaker 1: Some of that I look at and I go, it
Speaker 1: was the support systems that I had. It was my
Speaker 1: socio economic class. I mean, there were supports that I
Speaker 1: had under me that a lot of other people simply
Speaker 1: did not have. Yeah. Yeah, And I think, as I said,
Speaker 1: I don't have a lot of professional expertise there, but
Speaker 1: certainly from my general understanding, I think that that's exactly right,
Speaker 1: that those sorts of social supports are key, you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of knowing that you have a tendency, that
Speaker 1: one has an a tendency, a tendency towards wanting to
Speaker 1: take a drug, if you take it, you know, wanting
Speaker 1: to take it again. Then you know, the steps that
Speaker 1: you can take is make sure that you're not in
Speaker 1: the situation where those things are about right, you know,
Speaker 1: So you're preempting you know, you know that you're going
Speaker 1: to give into temptation if it's there. I don't mean
Speaker 1: you in particulars um and so you're you're just taking
Speaker 1: preemptive steps ahead of time to make sure you're not
Speaker 1: in the situation where you're exposed to that kind of
Speaker 1: temptation or or the opportunity. So yeah, I think those
Speaker 1: aspects are things that people can control in principle at
Speaker 1: least in practice. Some people may be able to control
Speaker 1: them better than others for reasons of their own biology
Speaker 1: or for reasons of sociology on the environmental context and
Speaker 1: the amount of freedom that they have to create their
Speaker 1: own environments themselves. Yep, there's a line that you wrote
Speaker 1: that I really loved and this sort of summarizes I
Speaker 1: think a lot of what we're saying in a pretty
Speaker 1: short way, which is the slate is most definitely not blank. Right,
Speaker 1: We're not blank slates, That's what you're saying. However, you
Speaker 1: say slates don't have to be blank to be written on,
Speaker 1: and I think that summarizes it really well, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course we're not a blank slate, and the slate
Speaker 1: can still be written on. Yeah, thanks for saying that,
Speaker 1: because that, to me does sum it up. And like
Speaker 1: you said, it's a middle ground, which I hope is
Speaker 1: the realistic position. You know that the two extreme positions
Speaker 1: of either complete freedom or total determinism are both false
Speaker 1: and there's a much more nuanced, interactive kind of story
Speaker 1: to be told. And it's a story that we're telling ourselves, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, we're very much the authors of our own
Speaker 1: stories in an ongoing way. We start with some sort
Speaker 1: of predispositions and so on, but we become ourselves through
Speaker 1: our lifetime that we we go on becoming ourselves in
Speaker 1: ways that we have a large input to as well.
Speaker 1: In your latest book, you're talking a little bit about
Speaker 1: why you think we have free will. And you say
Speaker 1: that the nervous system allows multiple signals to be simultaneously
Speaker 1: parsed and processed multiple, perhaps conflicting naimes must be weighed
Speaker 1: against each other and an action selected. And that made
Speaker 1: me think because I was just reading some paper a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks ago from an evolutionary psychologist who said
Speaker 1: that something similar to that. They think that's what emotions are.
Speaker 1: Emotions job is to help us sort out when some
Speaker 1: of these multiple subsystems arrive at a draw, so to speak. Right, like,
Speaker 1: one subsist and says do this, the other subsystem saying no,
Speaker 1: I don't think so in another one's like, wait, you
Speaker 1: know that emotions then arise as a way of deciding
Speaker 1: among those. As I read that line from you, I
Speaker 1: was kind of curious if you've heard that theory, and
Speaker 1: does it make sense to you? Yeah? Absolutely so. A
Speaker 1: way to think about this is think of the function
Speaker 1: of the brain. It's not for thinking. We use it
Speaker 1: for thinking, but it didn't evolve for thinking. It evolved
Speaker 1: for control, right. It involved for controlling us in a
Speaker 1: way that allows us to persist and actually, in the
Speaker 1: simplest sense, parts of our brain that control our physiology
Speaker 1: are rebalancing when our internal physiology goes a little out
Speaker 1: of whack, you know, they release hormones, they say, hey,
Speaker 1: you know you need to do this, you need to
Speaker 1: do that. And some of the ways that we ensure
Speaker 1: we keep persisting our behavioral So behavior is part of
Speaker 1: this control process, and it's obviously goal directed, and the
Speaker 1: overarching goal is to keep us alive in an evolutionary sense,
Speaker 1: to you know, keep us reproducing and so on. So
Speaker 1: if you think about that as a control system, then
Speaker 1: within that what you're going to want to have as
Speaker 1: some control signals that can specify certain drives. And I
Speaker 1: think the emotions exactly convey that kind of information. And
Speaker 1: so some of them are really powerful ones like fear
Speaker 1: and pain, for example, which can actually just say, you know,
Speaker 1: ignore everything else, stop ruminating about what decision to make here, rung,
Speaker 1: that's just just rung. That's it. So it's just like
Speaker 1: the signal is, don't do anything else. I'm taking over
Speaker 1: your running. That's it. And then you know, other ones,
Speaker 1: the sort of physiological signals like hunger and thirst, those
Speaker 1: are very much control signals as well, and what they do,
Speaker 1: I think is prioritize, so they upweight some of these
Speaker 1: possible actions because they upweight the drive that they're associated
Speaker 1: with versus all the others. So if you're very hungry,
Speaker 1: you'll be inclined to go and get something to eat.
Speaker 1: But for example, say you're an antelope approaching a watering
Speaker 1: hole and you're worried there's a line around, Well, then
Speaker 1: maybe your hunger will win, maybe your fear will win.
Speaker 1: And so these are balancing signals and so in some
Speaker 1: way they're you know, these internal control signals that basically
Speaker 1: are correlates of the weight of different drives that we have.
Speaker 1: So it's a sort of a monitoring our internal states
Speaker 1: as well as what's out in the world and saying,
Speaker 1: you know what, we need to prioritize this over that.
Speaker 1: And then the sort of you know, the conscious control
Speaker 1: can kick in if we're choosing to exercise it and
Speaker 1: we have that capacity in the moment, and of course,
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes we do and sometimes we don't. And again,
Speaker 1: some people are more driven by the short term emotions
Speaker 1: that they have. Again, like children, right, I mean, children
Speaker 1: are very driven by the short term emotions that they have.
Speaker 1: But as we get older and mature and we develop
Speaker 1: the skills of cognitive control. We become better at just
Speaker 1: kind of surveying those emotions and using them as one
Speaker 1: input in our decision making, rather than letting a single
Speaker 1: emotion drive you know, an action selection. Excellent, Well, Kevin,
Speaker 1: thank you so much. I've loved this conversation. I loved
Speaker 1: the book, and Nate, I loved the work you're doing
Speaker 1: on the upcoming book. I can't wait to see it,
Speaker 1: and thank you so much for coming on. Thanks billion,
Speaker 1: It's really a pleasure and super interesting conversation. Eric. Thanks.
Speaker 1: If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
Speaker 1: consider making a monthly donation to support the One You
Speaker 1: Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this
Speaker 1: monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits.
Speaker 1: It's our way of saying thank you for your support now.
Speaker 1: We are so grateful for the members of our community.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't be able to do what we do without
Speaker 1: their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.
Speaker 1: To learn more, make a donation at any level and
Speaker 1: become a member of the one you Feed community. Go
Speaker 1: to when you Feed dot net slash Join the One
Speaker 1: You Feed podcast. Would like to sincerely thank our sponsors
Speaker 1: for supporting the show,