Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest who will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: we live in. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. Today,
Speaker 1: I'm really excited to have Colin Deyong on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Doctor de Young is Associate professor of psychology at the
Speaker 1: University of Minnesota. He specializes in personality psychology, but is
Speaker 1: especially interested in personality neuroscience. Besides being a prolific academic
Speaker 1: and researcher, I'm also honored to count him as a
Speaker 1: dear friend and collaborator. Hey, thanks so much for appearing
Speaker 1: on the Psychology Podcast, Colin. Thanks for having me, Scott,
Speaker 1: I'm excited to be here. Wow. Yeah, I'm excited to
Speaker 1: chat with you. And your body of work is truly
Speaker 1: impressive and you've covered so many different aspects of the
Speaker 1: personality structure, the personality hierarchy. In fact, I thought we
Speaker 1: could just start there because I don't think a lot
Speaker 1: of people are really aware of modern day personality research.
Speaker 1: They certainly don't view it as a hierarchy, but maybe
Speaker 1: you could discuss a little bit about sort of how
Speaker 1: personality is a higher sure. Yeah, So when I talk
Speaker 1: about what I study, I usually say that I study
Speaker 1: the structure and sources of personality. And so what you're
Speaker 1: asking about is on the structure side, and that's sort
Speaker 1: of about what are the important components of people's personality
Speaker 1: and how are they related to each other. And one
Speaker 1: of the big questions there is what are the important
Speaker 1: personality traits? And we know a lot about that, and interestingly,
Speaker 1: personality psychologists spent several decades basically trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what are the most important personality traits that we should
Speaker 1: be studying, and they actually came to a reasonably good consensus.
Speaker 1: And to say that these traits are arranged in a
Speaker 1: hierarchy means that we can think about personality traits at
Speaker 1: a really broad level, Like we could talk about, for example,
Speaker 1: somebody's tendency to experience negative emotions, let's say, and it
Speaker 1: turns out that if you are prone to experiencing one
Speaker 1: kind of negative emotion like anxiety, then unfortunately, you are
Speaker 1: also more likely to experience other kinds of negative emotion
Speaker 1: like anger, depression, or vulnerability. And so we can take
Speaker 1: these more specific personality traits and say that they're grouped
Speaker 1: together at a higher level of the hierarchy into some
Speaker 1: general tendency to experience negative emotion. And so the result
Speaker 1: of all this research has been something that's known as
Speaker 1: the five factor model or the Big five, which basically
Speaker 1: indicates that there are five very broad dimensions of personality.
Speaker 1: In other words, all these more specific traits tend to
Speaker 1: go together in various ways that indicate that there are
Speaker 1: five broad dimensions of personality. And so people talk a
Speaker 1: lot about the Big five, and those are probably the
Speaker 1: most common personality traits that are measured and studied, But
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that those are the only five personality traits, right.
Speaker 1: I think some people get confused sometimes because, Okay, so
Speaker 1: the five, the Big five are. There is extraversion, and
Speaker 1: we can come back later to what some of these mean.
Speaker 1: There's extraversion, there is neuroticism, that's basically what I was
Speaker 1: talking about, is negative emotion. There is conscientiousness, agreeableness, and
Speaker 1: the last one is called openness to experience or intellect.
Speaker 1: And there's story that's your favorite one. Well, I know,
Speaker 1: I think it's I think it's both of our favorite one,
Speaker 1: and we've written papers about it together, for sure. And
Speaker 1: so people sometimes think, oh, well, personality psychologists have found
Speaker 1: these five personality traits, I guess that's all there is
Speaker 1: to personality. But that's not really true at all, because
Speaker 1: each one of those traits, you can break it down
Speaker 1: into a narrower set of traits, and then often you
Speaker 1: can even break those down further into more specific traits.
Speaker 1: And so when we talk about personality, we're not just
Speaker 1: talking about the Big Five. We're talking about all of
Speaker 1: these different traits. And it just happens that most of
Speaker 1: them we can categorize into the Big Five. But sometimes
Speaker 1: it's useful to go down and to lower levels of
Speaker 1: the hierarchy and study these more specific traits. Good, and
Speaker 1: let's go above to the top level, because I think
Speaker 1: that's in more recent discovery that's true, right, And that's
Speaker 1: interesting because the original idea behind the Big five was
Speaker 1: that they were supposed to be the broadest level of
Speaker 1: personality traits, and they weren't supposed to be related to
Speaker 1: each other. They were supposed to be totally independent. But
Speaker 1: that turned out not to be true, and after people
Speaker 1: worked with them and did research with them for well,
Speaker 1: I guess a couple decades, almost basically, it was discovered
Speaker 1: that they have a regular pattern of association. So extraversion
Speaker 1: and openness tend to go together, and then low neuroticism
Speaker 1: or emotional stability and high agreeableness and conscientiousness tend to
Speaker 1: go together. So you end up with these two higher
Speaker 1: order factors, even above the Big Five. And a lot
Speaker 1: of my own research since I was in graduate school
Speaker 1: actually has been studying the nature of those two higher
Speaker 1: order factors that are even bigger than the Big Five.
Speaker 1: And we developed a theory to try to understand what
Speaker 1: they mean and to explain what they're about, and we
Speaker 1: refer to them as stability and plasticity. So stability is
Speaker 1: the combination of being emotionally stable, high in agreeableness that
Speaker 1: sort of like being socially stable, and then high end conscientiousness,
Speaker 1: which is like being let's say, motivationally stable. And then
Speaker 1: plasticity is the combination of extraversion and openness, and we
Speaker 1: think about as basically being a tendency to be flexible
Speaker 1: and exploratory. Right, So if you're plastic that means you
Speaker 1: can be flexible and adapt like yoga poses. As in
Speaker 1: yoga poses. Well, so it is true that people who
Speaker 1: are hiring extra version tend to be more physically active.
Speaker 1: So we think of extra version as being like the
Speaker 1: tendency to explore in the behavioral domain, right by talking
Speaker 1: to people or engaging in more activities. And then openness
Speaker 1: and intellect. That's more like the tendency to be exploratory
Speaker 1: in the cognitive domain, to think about things and come
Speaker 1: up with new ways of seeing things. Now you use
Speaker 1: the phrase socially stable, could an introvert consider those fighting words?
Speaker 1: Are you saying that introverts are socially unstable? They would
Speaker 1: just say that at all. I was no, No, certainly
Speaker 1: not no. I was associating social stability with agreeableness. Oh
Speaker 1: that's oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm
Speaker 1: sorry I heard extra version. Yes, no, sorry, maybe I misspoke,
Speaker 1: But that's a Agreeableness is a totally separate dimension from
Speaker 1: the extra version. Introversion dimension, And it's really more about
Speaker 1: whether people are altruistic and cooperative. And so those people
Speaker 1: who are highly agreeable, who are altruistic and cooperative, they
Speaker 1: tend to put effort into maintaining social harmony social stability. Right,
Speaker 1: They not only care about pursuing their own goals, but
Speaker 1: they want to make sure that other people have can
Speaker 1: pursue their goals and have their needs met. That makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense. And I apologize if I misheard you.
Speaker 1: I think I was thinking in my head that I
Speaker 1: wanted to discuss introversion extraversion. That was my segue. Oh
Speaker 1: ye do that? Yeah? So, I mean I find all
Speaker 1: of those dimensions fascinating. And my brain is kind of
Speaker 1: because I'm loaded with dopamine in this conversation right now,
Speaker 1: my brain is like, Okay, which one of the Big
Speaker 1: five do I want to explore right now? But let's
Speaker 1: pick the extra version domain right now now. Some people
Speaker 1: have suggested that the opposite of extraversion in the Big
Speaker 1: five pole that introversion is kind of a mislabeling or
Speaker 1: not the most descriptive. It should be just like detached
Speaker 1: or something like that. Detachment is a word that people
Speaker 1: have suggested. Yeah, this is a really interesting issue, and
Speaker 1: it sort of it goes back to the origin of
Speaker 1: the idea of extraversion and introversion with Carl Jung's theories,
Speaker 1: and so for Jung, extraversion meant people who had their
Speaker 1: energy and attention focused outward, whereas introvision was people who
Speaker 1: had their energy and attention focused inward. That's the prefix
Speaker 1: is extra and intro they mean outward and inward. But
Speaker 1: so part of what the problem was is that, you know,
Speaker 1: Jung's theory, although you know it's very insightful and very influential,
Speaker 1: it was based on his own personal intuitions and his
Speaker 1: clinical experience, and it turns out that what he describes
Speaker 1: as introversion is actually more like what today we think
Speaker 1: of as openness. Right, So Jung talked about introversion as
Speaker 1: people who were interested in imagination and fantasy and the
Speaker 1: world of ideas, and he thought that that was essentially
Speaker 1: the opposite of being outgoing and talkative and sociable and gregarious.
Speaker 1: But it turns out that that's not actually true. So
Speaker 1: when personality psychologists today talk about introversion as the opposite
Speaker 1: of extraversion, that word is sort of left over from
Speaker 1: Jung's terminology, But we are not talking about the same
Speaker 1: thing as the opposite of extraversion that he was, and
Speaker 1: that's just because empirically it's not right. So it turns
Speaker 1: out that what's at the other end of the trade
Speaker 1: dimension from extraversion is basically the tendency to be quiet
Speaker 1: and reserved, having you know, less energy, less enthusiasm. But
Speaker 1: that doesn't necessarily go along with being intellectual and imaginative.
Speaker 1: So it turns out that that's a separate dimension, that's
Speaker 1: the openness dimension. And so you can have extroverts who
Speaker 1: are high in openness and imaginative and thoughtful and you know,
Speaker 1: even introspective, and you can have introverts who are imaginative
Speaker 1: and open and introspective. But that's a you know, it's
Speaker 1: a different trade. Well, but this is where the things
Speaker 1: get a little controversial, because not only you didn't go
Speaker 1: far enough. Actually the research suggests that introversion is statistically
Speaker 1: negatively correlated with what Young actually referred to as introversion. Well, okay, right,
Speaker 1: so yes, this is true. But the problem is that
Speaker 1: you don't want to mislead people because I think there's
Speaker 1: often a tendency when you say something is correlated with
Speaker 1: something else, then they think, oh, that means that if
Speaker 1: I have one of those things, I have to have there. No, no,
Speaker 1: and that's really unfortunate interpretation of well it is, but
Speaker 1: it's very common, right, And I think that's because people
Speaker 1: in general are bad at statistics. There's all this there's
Speaker 1: a lot of research showing that even scientists often have
Speaker 1: bad statistical intuition. It's just not something that's easy for
Speaker 1: the human mind to grasp. So, yes, there is a
Speaker 1: weak positive correlation between extroversion and openness, which means that
Speaker 1: on average, the average extrovert would tend to be a
Speaker 1: little bit higher in openness and intellect than the average introvert.
Speaker 1: But it's like, I guess, such a small effect that
Speaker 1: it's easy to find introverts who are also high in
Speaker 1: openness and intellect, right, So it's certainly not really out
Speaker 1: the existence of those people. I think there's a real
Speaker 1: issue here, and that's the split between I mean, how
Speaker 1: the Big five personality researchers label or conceptualize introversion and
Speaker 1: how the most people in the general public when introversion
Speaker 1: is part of their identity. So as soon as is
Speaker 1: that's part of their identity, it's something that's much more
Speaker 1: than just the opposite pull of extroversion. If you actually read,
Speaker 1: like you know, my friend Susan Kane, she's done some
Speaker 1: great work. Well you know, she has a whole movement
Speaker 1: right as you know, and if you read the followers
Speaker 1: of her movement, people who identify themselves introverts and are
Speaker 1: proud of it, and they write blog posts and things
Speaker 1: of the Quiet Revolution about it. What they say are
Speaker 1: things like, I'm an introvert, I care deeply about others,
Speaker 1: I am deeply attentive and in tune with the real
Speaker 1: needs of others. I am artsy, I'm creative. So they're
Speaker 1: kind of in a way, in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: they're blending the positive polls of all the big five things.
Speaker 1: Oh that's interesting, yes, I mean so definitely the idea
Speaker 1: of being like artsy and imaginative that ties into Young's idea.
Speaker 1: But the idea of being attuned to others in more
Speaker 1: sense and you know, more empathetic, that's now getting into agreeableness.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so, you know, I think what happens is
Speaker 1: that there's a particular type of people who are really
Speaker 1: interested in personality, right, and they tend to be people
Speaker 1: who are high in openness, you know, because they're they're
Speaker 1: interested in ideas and understanding things, including themselves. And they
Speaker 1: tend to be people also who are interested in people
Speaker 1: in general, right, because that's also obviously a part of
Speaker 1: what personality is about. So I think that it probably
Speaker 1: that world of people who are really devoted to studying personality,
Speaker 1: you know, not in the scientific world, but in just
Speaker 1: the general population and on the Internet. It's going to
Speaker 1: be populated with a particular type of people. So the
Speaker 1: introverts that you get there are not going to be
Speaker 1: necessarily the same as just your average introvert in the
Speaker 1: general population. Well, that's not a representative sample of introversial
Speaker 1: not a representative right, So and you know, the funny
Speaker 1: thing is, I think exactly the same thing happened to Jung.
Speaker 1: So I think that the reason that Jung got the
Speaker 1: wrong idea that the opposite of extra vision was you know,
Speaker 1: basically high openness and imaginativeness artisticness, was that he was
Speaker 1: somebody who was really imaginative and creative himself, and his
Speaker 1: whole set of psychological ideas and his school of thought
Speaker 1: really attracted people with those kind of qualities. So basically,
Speaker 1: all the people that he was surrounded by, almost all
Speaker 1: of the patients that he saw. You know, if you
Speaker 1: go back and study it's historically, which I did my
Speaker 1: undergraduate degree was in the history of the history of science,
Speaker 1: focusing on psychology and psychiatry. And I actually wrote my
Speaker 1: honors thesis on Jung from a historical perspective. I'd love
Speaker 1: to lead that. Actually, I'd be happy to send it
Speaker 1: to you. I mean, you know, probably not quite as
Speaker 1: well written as it would be now. But you know,
Speaker 1: I was just an underground so but you know, one
Speaker 1: of the things that's clear is that he was just
Speaker 1: surrounded by all of these people who are super high
Speaker 1: in openness, very creative, very imaginative, interested in fantasy and
Speaker 1: the inner life. And so you know, those were the
Speaker 1: people that he knew so well and that he used
Speaker 1: to develop his theories. So for him, the kind of
Speaker 1: introvert that he knew, like the people who were quiet
Speaker 1: and reserved were also people who were intensely imaginative and
Speaker 1: thoughtful and interested in ideas. So that was how he
Speaker 1: ended up characterizing introverts as the opposite of extroverts. And
Speaker 1: I think, you know, maybe if you'd sampled in his
Speaker 1: experience a bit more widely in the population, he would
Speaker 1: have realized that there are plenty of people who are
Speaker 1: low in extroversion. They're not outgoing they're not sociable, they're
Speaker 1: not gregarious. At the same time, they're not particularly interested
Speaker 1: in the inner world either. See, because it turns out
Speaker 1: that there's just sort of this general dimension of interest,
Speaker 1: and there's being interested in the outer world. That's extraversion,
Speaker 1: and there's being interested in the inner world and that's openness.
Speaker 1: And those things actually tend to go together because some
Speaker 1: people just have more interest in everything than other people.
Speaker 1: And that's where this idea of plast city comes in,
Speaker 1: right when you If you look at what extra version
Speaker 1: and openness share, it's this general tendency to be engaged
Speaker 1: with the world and interested in different things and exploring it.
Speaker 1: You know, open to changing your views, changing your mind,
Speaker 1: changing your behavior, is changing your activities. Oh yes, and
Speaker 1: you wrote this paper on dopamine as the quote neuromodulator
Speaker 1: of exploration. Very sexy column, Very sexy. How science is
Speaker 1: it's all about the sexes. Yes, that's what that's why
Speaker 1: we do what we do. Really, this relates to what
Speaker 1: you were just talking about. Could you talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about what is dopamine. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: misconceptions about what the role dopamine actually plays in human
Speaker 1: behavior and cognition. Let's just start there, because I think
Speaker 1: there are a lot of miscus, that's sure. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: that's great, And you know that's that's a nice switch
Speaker 1: from talking about the structure of personality to the other
Speaker 1: half of my interest, which is the sources of person
Speaker 1: I know. Did you see what I did there? You
Speaker 1: see what I did? I liked it? Yeah, So you know,
Speaker 1: I'm really interested in the the mechanisms that underlye different
Speaker 1: personality traits, and especially in trying to figure out what's
Speaker 1: going on in the brain and get the hand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like what's going on in the ear lobe when you're
Speaker 1: trying the ear lobe probably doesn't have much to do
Speaker 1: with personality at all, that's true. So that's a good
Speaker 1: Like you picked the right organ. Okay, god, okay, careful,
Speaker 1: you're getting out of control of the open. Have you
Speaker 1: never listened to the Psychology podcast before, Colin? No, I
Speaker 1: hate to admit that I haven't, because generally speaking, I
Speaker 1: don't listen to talk radio or podcasts. So are you
Speaker 1: going to listen to this episode? Probably not? Actually, why
Speaker 1: I'm listening to it right now? Why do I do
Speaker 1: it again? Okay? Fair enough? Anyway, we like to be open.
Speaker 1: We like to be open. This okay, cool, we can
Speaker 1: mix it up, we can get a little funky anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So dopamine. So yeah, there's this idea that the general
Speaker 1: public often seems to have that dopamine is a pleasure chemical, right,
Speaker 1: Dopamine is what makes you feel good, But that's not
Speaker 1: quite right. It turns out that dopamine is what makes
Speaker 1: you want things, and sometimes wanting things feel good, like
Speaker 1: especially when you think you're going to get things that
Speaker 1: you want, or when you're moving toward things that are
Speaker 1: you know, exciting or pleasurable. Then dopamine goes along with
Speaker 1: feeling good. But that's actually due to a whole different
Speaker 1: set of neurotransmitters, different chemicals in your brain that are
Speaker 1: known as indogenous opiates. And so there's the opiates that
Speaker 1: are actually responsible for making you feel pleasure and making
Speaker 1: that you know, sense of excitement be a good thing.
Speaker 1: You can have dopamine without pleasure, though, and that's like
Speaker 1: you really want something but you're not getting it, and
Speaker 1: so you're feeling frustrated. That is also dopamine, right, that
Speaker 1: sense that I really need to do this, I want this.
Speaker 1: That's not always a good thing, right, It really depends
Speaker 1: on how well things are going and pursuing that goal.
Speaker 1: So it turns out that there's a lot of evidence
Speaker 1: from personality neuroscience that dopamine is one of the major
Speaker 1: drivers of extraversion. Right, So it turns out that what
Speaker 1: a lot of what extraversion is about is being more
Speaker 1: motivated by the possibility of rewards. So the reason that
Speaker 1: extroverts are more talkative and sociable. You know, we think
Speaker 1: of extra vision often as like a purely social thing,
Speaker 1: but it's not a purely social thing. It's just that
Speaker 1: most human rewards are social, like most of the things
Speaker 1: we care about are things like social affiliation or social status.
Speaker 1: And so with a more active and sensitive dopamine system,
Speaker 1: you have people who are more motivated to pursue those
Speaker 1: potential rewards. So, you know, an extrovert goes into a
Speaker 1: party and all those people that they don't know are
Speaker 1: a source of potentially rewarding interaction, like, Wow, who am
Speaker 1: I going to talk to next? That guy looks interesting,
Speaker 1: I'll talk to him. Right, So, an introvert goes into
Speaker 1: the same party they don't have. Their dopamine system is
Speaker 1: not particularly upregulated by this event, and so to them,
Speaker 1: they just look around and think, God, look at all
Speaker 1: these people. I don't know, this is going to be exhausting, right. Well.
Speaker 1: One of the ways that I like to think about dopamine,
Speaker 1: it's been described as essentially regulating the cost of effort.
Speaker 1: So doing stuff has a cost, right, like at its
Speaker 1: most basic cost, just in terms of energy. We have
Speaker 1: to use energy to survive. That's why we have to eat.
Speaker 1: We need all this energy, and our vigeites are designed
Speaker 1: to not squander it, right, to not use it when
Speaker 1: we don't have to, except it turns out to be
Speaker 1: a real challenge to figure out when you shoot or
Speaker 1: shouldn't be expending energy. And extroverts just happen to be
Speaker 1: tuned in such a way that they often think it's
Speaker 1: a good idea to expand energy, right, So dopamine basically
Speaker 1: gives you this signal like something good could happen if
Speaker 1: you put some effort out right now, And so they're like, yes,
Speaker 1: I definitely want to go and talk to five new
Speaker 1: people that I've never talked to before. So introverts are
Speaker 1: tuned in a way that's more likely to conserve energy,
Speaker 1: and so they just don't have that same sense of
Speaker 1: excitement and possibility when they go into that situation now
Speaker 1: in a situation where they're more comfortable and familiar and
Speaker 1: it's more like what they like. Of course they're going
Speaker 1: to enjoy that. Of course they're going to put the
Speaker 1: effort in. But it's all about where that threshold is right.
Speaker 1: And so extroverts just have kind of a low threshold
Speaker 1: for overcoming the cost of effort, and so that makes
Speaker 1: it like that sociable. It makes the more sociable, it
Speaker 1: makes them more talkative. It's like, you know, what's the
Speaker 1: cost of running your mouth off? Well, for an extrovert,
Speaker 1: it's quite low until you know, maybe the consequence is
Speaker 1: kick in once in a while. But it's not just socializing,
Speaker 1: it's also talking, it's also engaging in physical activity. So
Speaker 1: you know the cost of this is that extroverts take
Speaker 1: more risks and they get themselves into more trouble. I've
Speaker 1: always loved this one study where they went to emergency
Speaker 1: rooms and got people who are sitting around with you know,
Speaker 1: too much time on their hands, waiting to fill out
Speaker 1: personality questionnaires. Yeah, it's a great time with have you
Speaker 1: heard this before? Now I'm like that's just a great
Speaker 1: time to fill out a personality questionnaire. My arm is
Speaker 1: like hanging off. Yeah right, I'll fill out your darn questionnaire.
Speaker 1: But yeah, what they found was that people in emergence rooms,
Speaker 1: on average are more extroverted than the average people in
Speaker 1: the population, right, and an average person, so you know,
Speaker 1: and there's there are also studies that are probably a
Speaker 1: little bit more rigorous than that that have shown things
Speaker 1: like extrots have more traffic accidents and more speeding tickets,
Speaker 1: and you know, so extroverts engage in more risky behavior,
Speaker 1: but at the same time it also opens up various
Speaker 1: possibilities for them, so you know, as with most personality traits,
Speaker 1: it's really their trade offs to being high or low.
Speaker 1: Has done some beautiful work on from an evolutionary perspective,
Speaker 1: showing that's probably why you know, both sides of the
Speaker 1: Bell curve evolved, you know. Yeah, right, that's one that's
Speaker 1: one evolutionary theory about why there's such a range of
Speaker 1: personality across these traits, because there's not one optimal level, right,
Speaker 1: in different niches in the environment or in just different environs,
Speaker 1: entirely different levels are going to be advantageous anyway, So
Speaker 1: where I started with this before I went off on
Speaker 1: three tangents, was that there's all this evidence that people
Speaker 1: who are higher an extraversion have higher levels of dopamine function. Right,
Speaker 1: They're more sensitive to the reward properties of dopamine, and
Speaker 1: so there is a lot less evidence, but we've been
Speaker 1: developing this theory to suggest that dopamine is also one
Speaker 1: of the drivers of the openness and intellect domain, the
Speaker 1: thing that makes people more cognitively exploratory. So it turns
Speaker 1: out that there are two kinds of dopaminergic neuron in
Speaker 1: the brain. There's one kind that basically responds when something
Speaker 1: better than anticipated happens with, you know, a spike of dopamine,
Speaker 1: and then if something worse than anticipated happens, dopamine drops off.
Speaker 1: So one group of dopamine neurons is basically keeping track
Speaker 1: of the value of things, and that seems to be
Speaker 1: the kind that's related to extra version. Right, So you
Speaker 1: go to the party, you see some new people, You
Speaker 1: get the spike of dopamine that motivates you to go
Speaker 1: and talk to them, that gets you excited about the
Speaker 1: whole thing. Now, you know, let's say we walk into
Speaker 1: the party, and there's only like, you know, like five
Speaker 1: old people there that you don't know, and you're like
Speaker 1: some young guy and then like suddenly this is worse
Speaker 1: than you had hoped it would be. And then what's
Speaker 1: going to happen is your dopamine's going to drop off,
Speaker 1: and you're going to feel like, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: bored and disappointed, and you're going to want to go
Speaker 1: somewhere else. Now, that's just one kind of dopamine airon
Speaker 1: and the other one basically responds to unexpected events regardless
Speaker 1: of whether they're good or bad. And what it seems
Speaker 1: to be doing is essentially tracking something like salient or
Speaker 1: like whether things are a source of potentially interesting information.
Speaker 1: So it's not just about whether they're valuable or not
Speaker 1: in terms of like the things that you want the
Speaker 1: rewards that you can get out of them. It's more like,
Speaker 1: could you get information out of this situation? Right, So
Speaker 1: whenever anything unexpected happens, there's something you could learn about that.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, I didn't predict that, why did it happen?
Speaker 1: So then you could possibly learn about it? And so
Speaker 1: dopamine kicks in in that situation basically to drive you
Speaker 1: to explore that situation cognitively to start gathering information and
Speaker 1: thinking about, like, what's going on here? How do I
Speaker 1: model it? There's some pattern here that I haven't encountered before.
Speaker 1: And that's what openness and intellect is about, right, It's
Speaker 1: about this tendency to be sensitive to the reward value
Speaker 1: of information. So you know, extra visions about all those
Speaker 1: kinds of concrete rewards, like you know, social interactions, food, sex, money,
Speaker 1: Those are the kinds of things that extroverts are motivated by,
Speaker 1: but introverts are not. Sorry, if I almost did the
Speaker 1: union thing, there are motivated by can I learn something here?
Speaker 1: What can I undermine all that you almost almost took
Speaker 1: us back one hundred years in progress? Thanks? No, now
Speaker 1: you're making fun of me. I've done You're figured me
Speaker 1: out now. I just you know, my dope being dropped
Speaker 1: off because things didn't go the way that I wanted
Speaker 1: them to. No, you were on a role, Colu, and
Speaker 1: you were in a role. I'm sorry to break that up.
Speaker 1: Keep going, That's okay, but no, really, I mean I
Speaker 1: was at the end of that segment. Right. So what
Speaker 1: we've got now is the idea that dopamine drives this
Speaker 1: tendency to explore and to find things rewarding. But there's
Speaker 1: this fundamental difference between the dopamine processes that are involved
Speaker 1: in extra version and drive behavioral exploration and the dopamine
Speaker 1: processes that are involved with open and intellect and drive
Speaker 1: cognitive exploration. Yeah. I just love that, and well you
Speaker 1: know I love that now. But the thing is, like,
Speaker 1: has anyone made a direct link between what you're proposing
Speaker 1: there as the dopamine neurons that code for the reward
Speaker 1: value of information and the salient spray network. I would
Speaker 1: love to see a paper that makes a direct link
Speaker 1: between those two things. Oh man, well that's complicated. I
Speaker 1: don't know if we even want to go there, because okay,
Speaker 1: we just you see what I'm saying, though, you see
Speaker 1: I'm saying half a paper. We actually have a paper
Speaker 1: coming out where we show that this network that people
Speaker 1: often refer to as the salience network is actually mostly
Speaker 1: related to to conscientiousness, not a I don't know if
Speaker 1: we even want to go there. Are you kidding me? Okay,
Speaker 1: So here's the problem, right, This is just like different
Speaker 1: meanings of the word introversion. There's different meanings of the
Speaker 1: word salience, right, Because that's because in some ways, you know,
Speaker 1: everything that we care about is about salience, because what
Speaker 1: is salient is just what matters to us, right, And
Speaker 1: so yeah, this the salience network seems to be here's
Speaker 1: the way I guess the way to think about it.
Speaker 1: The salience network that neuroscientists talk about most often is
Speaker 1: really about emotional salience in terms of like you have internal,
Speaker 1: visceral and emotional states that are like this is painful,
Speaker 1: this might be rewarding. It's about the brain systems that
Speaker 1: alert you to the presence of some kind of emotionally
Speaker 1: relevant stimulants. So see, that's a little bit different from
Speaker 1: just realizing that there's something that you could learn, right,
Speaker 1: that there's something that you don't know about that salience
Speaker 1: and this other salience network is more about the thing
Speaker 1: that generates impulses, right, It's like you might not want
Speaker 1: to do that because it could hurt, or hey, you
Speaker 1: might want to go over there because you know, maybe
Speaker 1: there's something exciting or to eat over there. So it's
Speaker 1: more about like the generation of impulses. And then we
Speaker 1: think it's related to conscientiousness because part of that network
Speaker 1: is actually involved in regulating those impulses. Right, So being
Speaker 1: conscientious and being able to pursue goals effectively, Like, that's
Speaker 1: what conscientiousness is all about, right, It's about being able
Speaker 1: to avoid distractions, not be lazy, put in effort to
Speaker 1: go after those long term goals. Organize your goals properly, right,
Speaker 1: prioritize them correctly, figure out like what makes sense to
Speaker 1: do now you know, it's about being organized, being hard working.
Speaker 1: So anyway, in order to do that, what you need
Speaker 1: to do is basically effectively prioritize your goals, and that
Speaker 1: means that you need to be able to control those
Speaker 1: impulses so that like when the little alarm goes off
Speaker 1: it says, hey, something relevant over there, you need to
Speaker 1: basically assess it and say, well, is paying attention to
Speaker 1: that going to be useful for my long term goals?
Speaker 1: Or is that just some kind of short term thing
Speaker 1: that I should ignore? Is that just a distraction? Right?
Speaker 1: And so we think that conscientiousness basically has to do
Speaker 1: with how well people are able to prioritize their goals,
Speaker 1: and then that in turn essentially helps them to regulate
Speaker 1: which impulses they pay attention to, in which they inhibit.
Speaker 1: See that is a fundamentally different conceptualization of major function
Speaker 1: of the Statius network than I had. So I always
Speaker 1: like talking to you because you know, it opens my mind.
Speaker 1: I mean I had thought more generally, not just emotions,
Speaker 1: but information flow more generally that it kind of was
Speaker 1: like the baton debt passer to either the executive or
Speaker 1: the default mode network, Like it was like essential for
Speaker 1: at a war subcortical level in terms of where to
Speaker 1: direct the attention either to the outside world or either
Speaker 1: to really focus or either to more just free form
Speaker 1: sort of just like associative kind of processing of the information.
Speaker 1: But you're saying, yeah, well, you know these things that
Speaker 1: are complicated, and neuroscience is really just at the point
Speaker 1: where we've started to understand these major networks of brain function,
Speaker 1: so functional networks. You know, there used to be this
Speaker 1: sort of neuroscience approach that was very modular. It's like
Speaker 1: you take one region of the brain and you say, okay,
Speaker 1: what does this region of the brain do? And we
Speaker 1: don't really think that way anymore. We think more in
Speaker 1: terms of whole connected regions of the brain and the
Speaker 1: kinds of processes that they carry out in coordination with
Speaker 1: each other. Right, So we're at the point where we're
Speaker 1: starting to understand that these there are these major networks,
Speaker 1: but there's still a lot of work to be done
Speaker 1: to figure out a exactly what each network is doing
Speaker 1: on its own and then be even more complicatedly, how
Speaker 1: it interacts with all the other networks. So I am
Speaker 1: familiar with the work that you're talking about in which
Speaker 1: you can see this kind of informational flow between where
Speaker 1: the salience network essentially helps to regulate the switching between
Speaker 1: what's called the front a prioral control network and the
Speaker 1: default sort of imagination or simulation network. I don't think
Speaker 1: that that's actually inconsistent with what I was just saying
Speaker 1: about the link with conscientiousness, because I think one of
Speaker 1: the things that being conscientious is about is knowing when
Speaker 1: you need to engage with a task that presented to
Speaker 1: you in the external world, versus knowing when you can
Speaker 1: switch over to you know, thinking about things more internally
Speaker 1: and like planning for example. Right, So, you know, I
Speaker 1: think it would be misleading to think of the default
Speaker 1: network as just something that's involved in imagination or mind
Speaker 1: wandering or association. It's also what is in what you're
Speaker 1: doing when you're engaging in planning. Right, So if I
Speaker 1: sit here and think about what I have to do
Speaker 1: tomorrow in a very sort of you know, organized and
Speaker 1: efficient and boring way, that's my default network in operation,
Speaker 1: right because I'm imagining, like how am I going to
Speaker 1: structure my day, what needs to be in it. I'm
Speaker 1: projecting myself into the future. It is an act of imagination.
Speaker 1: It's just in the service of getting work done in
Speaker 1: my longer term goals. So I like that to reconcile
Speaker 1: those two things. It does. But then I'm trying to
Speaker 1: reconcile all that that you just said with the notion of,
Speaker 1: you know, my attempt to link this salience coding dopamine
Speaker 1: with the saliens network, I think that could still work.
Speaker 1: That could still work within that fame they you know,
Speaker 1: of course they interact with each other because everything in
Speaker 1: the brain interacts. The thing is that's interesting is like,
Speaker 1: you know, with the saliens coding dopamine nor like you
Speaker 1: could see how it gets really excited. Oh well, here's
Speaker 1: like the possibility for me to like reduce the discrepancy
Speaker 1: between what I know and don't know and then kind
Speaker 1: of like make a decision, which is going to be
Speaker 1: more efficient in reaching that goal. Is it going to
Speaker 1: be the executive network or the default mode network for
Speaker 1: this context that I'm in. Yeah, yeah, I do think
Speaker 1: that that's quite likely, you know. And the other thing
Speaker 1: is in that paper of mind that you men about
Speaker 1: dopamine and trying to understand the role of dopamine and personality,
Speaker 1: one of the things that we point out is that
Speaker 1: it's not just as simple one to one mapping. Like
Speaker 1: back in the eighties, people started developing these theories of
Speaker 1: personality where it was they were trying to take one
Speaker 1: neurotransmitter like dopamine and map it onto one personality trait,
Speaker 1: you know, Like there was this theory that dopamine equals
Speaker 1: novelty seek and the problem with those is that they
Speaker 1: were just a little bit overly simplistic, right. So it
Speaker 1: turns out that dopamine has these wide effects, right, So
Speaker 1: it's involved in both extraversion and openness, you know, cognitive function.
Speaker 1: And one of the things we do in that paper
Speaker 1: is to try to actually say what it's the whole
Speaker 1: range of things that it's related to, and actually industriousness
Speaker 1: of the tendency to work hard and persevere on things
Speaker 1: is one of the personality traits that's probably influenced by dopamine. Right.
Speaker 1: It's not quite essential as extroversion and openness, but there
Speaker 1: is this link between. There's a correlation between being high
Speaker 1: in intellect, being intellectually engaged and confident, being assertive, that's
Speaker 1: part of extra version, you know, being driven to get
Speaker 1: what you want, and then also being industry that's being
Speaker 1: hard working, being achievement oriented. And so I think all
Speaker 1: of those things are probably influenced by dopamine. And that's
Speaker 1: probably where this connection comes in that you're thinking about, right, So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and that's why dopaminergic medications work for ADHD, right,
Speaker 1: which is in large part a problem of low conscientiousness. Right.
Speaker 1: So you've got people who are wired in such a
Speaker 1: way that they just have a really hard time maintaining
Speaker 1: their focus on things, maintaining their attention, not getting distracted
Speaker 1: by things, right, And so that's partly about not having
Speaker 1: your dopamine system operating in the right way. So interesting,
Speaker 1: you give people a low dose of a dopaminergic drug
Speaker 1: and it kicks that into gear just in that so
Speaker 1: that now they can focus and stay on track. Right. Look,
Speaker 1: I find this conversation extremely fascinating, but we probably lost
Speaker 1: ninety percent of our audience of this point, so I
Speaker 1: think it was super super interesting topic. We can continue
Speaker 1: that back channel. I wanted to ask you a question
Speaker 1: I think will be very interesting to a lot of
Speaker 1: the audience, and that's the Myers Briggs Personality Inventory or
Speaker 1: whatever it's called, the MBTI, the Meyer Breaks. Yeah, people
Speaker 1: love the Myers breaks. Yeah. I would say the Myer
Speaker 1: Brigg is more well known than the Big Five. Yeah. Well, Scott,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a funny way in which now we're
Speaker 1: just circling back to the earlier part of our conversation
Speaker 1: because this now we're back. Now we're back to young again, right,
Speaker 1: I know, I know. So the Myers Briggs was created
Speaker 1: by a woman with some help with her mother. That's
Speaker 1: Myers and Briggs. What they were doing is that they
Speaker 1: were attempting to create an assessment based on Jung's theory
Speaker 1: of psychological types, which are you know, which is essentially
Speaker 1: the first theory of personality types. Well, it's not really
Speaker 1: the first theory, right, because the first theory goes all
Speaker 1: the way back to ancient Rome and Galen, the Greek physician.
Speaker 1: But so people have been thinking about personality types for
Speaker 1: a long time. Problem is, one of the things we
Speaker 1: know from modern personality science is that personality doesn't really
Speaker 1: come in types. It comes in these dimensional traits that
Speaker 1: where people can fall anywhere along the spectrum. Right, So
Speaker 1: personality is a bunch of different spectra. In order to
Speaker 1: understand someone, you need to know where they fall on
Speaker 1: these different SPECTRAU. Now, the interesting thing about the Myers Briggs.
Speaker 1: There are basically two problems with the Myers Briggs. The
Speaker 1: first one is that it categorizes everybody into these binary categories. Right,
Speaker 1: so you're either an extrovert or an introvert. You're either
Speaker 1: sensing or you're intuiting, you're either judging or perceiving. And
Speaker 1: the problem with that is that that's just not how
Speaker 1: personality works, right. Personality doesn't come in categories, it comes
Speaker 1: in spectra. So they could actually make the Myers Briggs
Speaker 1: a lot better if they stopped telling people, you know,
Speaker 1: that they were an I or an E and started
Speaker 1: just giving them like a score along the range is yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly Like. Well, and here's why this is a problem, right,
Speaker 1: because if what you have is a binary category, like
Speaker 1: if that was how personality really worked, and then what
Speaker 1: you would expect to see with the scores from those
Speaker 1: questionnaires is that they would be my moodally distributed, and
Speaker 1: that means that you would have like a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who scored high and a bunch of people who
Speaker 1: scored low, and very few people who scored right in
Speaker 1: the middle. But in fact what you find is the opposite,
Speaker 1: because what you really see is that there's a normal
Speaker 1: distribution right like the typical Bell curve, and so a
Speaker 1: lot of people, the majority of people are fairly near
Speaker 1: the average. And then of course you have some people
Speaker 1: who are very extroverted and some people are very introverted.
Speaker 1: So in other words, most people are what are called ambiverts.
Speaker 1: You know, when they try to deal with this, they
Speaker 1: come up with like, oh, let's add a third category.
Speaker 1: But really it's not a category at all. It's just
Speaker 1: the middle of that dimension. And the problem with treating
Speaker 1: it that way is that it makes your results unstable
Speaker 1: if you're one of the people who scores near the average,
Speaker 1: which is many people. So you know, people often complain
Speaker 1: that the first time they took the MBTI they were
Speaker 1: an extrovert and the next time they took it, they
Speaker 1: were an introvert, you know, And that's that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that their personality was changing. Possibly it could have changed
Speaker 1: just like a couple of points, which is just within
Speaker 1: the error of the test. Right, they could have answered
Speaker 1: one question differently perhaps and gotten an I instead of
Speaker 1: an E. And that's because they were someone who fell
Speaker 1: right near the average of the distribution, right near the cutoff,
Speaker 1: and the test just can't adequately deal with that. So
Speaker 1: the way that we do personality questionnaires from a scientific
Speaker 1: perspective is that you know, if we're measuring extroversion versus introversion,
Speaker 1: we just give you a percentile score, like you're at
Speaker 1: the fiftieth percentile, that means you're near the average, like
Speaker 1: half of people are below you and half of people
Speaker 1: are above you in that extraversion, or you're at the
Speaker 1: seventy fifth percentile, or you're at the ninetieth percentile, you're
Speaker 1: really high in extroversion. But you know, you just get
Speaker 1: a lot more information that way, and it creates a
Speaker 1: lot more accurate assessment of people's personalities. Okay, the second problem,
Speaker 1: the second problem is that it just doesn't divide up
Speaker 1: the personality space in quite the right way. One interesting
Speaker 1: thing is that the extraversion introversion scale in the MBTI
Speaker 1: is fine. It's basically just a modern extraversion scale. So
Speaker 1: if you think you're an introvert because of the mbt I,
Speaker 1: that actually doesn't say anything about your imaginativeness or your
Speaker 1: intellect or whatever else. That's just saying that you are
Speaker 1: relatively reserved and quiet and not you know, socially outgoing.
Speaker 1: So you know, somehow that that union interpretation about the
Speaker 1: inner life got welded onto this thing that's actually assessing
Speaker 1: something more like modern extraversion. So that's a little weird,
Speaker 1: but you know, so okay, so there's nothing wrong with
Speaker 1: the extra version introversion scale in the MBT I. The
Speaker 1: one that is the most problematic is the thinking feeling dimension.
Speaker 1: And actually, I bet this one will really interest you
Speaker 1: because I think you're somebody who's high in both thinking
Speaker 1: and feeling. I was totally going to bring up that
Speaker 1: point about that that breaks. Yeah. Well, so the problem
Speaker 1: with it is that it sets up these two things
Speaker 1: in opposition that aren't really opposed. So it basically has
Speaker 1: all these questions that forces you to choose whether you're
Speaker 1: more of a compactis feeling oriented person versus are you
Speaker 1: more of an analytical intellectually oriented And it turns out
Speaker 1: those things just are not negatively correlated, right, there are
Speaker 1: lots of they're not positively correlated either. They're essentially they're
Speaker 1: large that my dissertation showed the effective openness was part
Speaker 1: of HS. Yes, but openness is not part of thinking feeling. Right,
Speaker 1: So okay, here we need to go to a different
Speaker 1: level of the personality hierarchy. Right, Like, if you think
Speaker 1: anybody is still listening to this, who listened to the beginning?
Speaker 1: Now we can get back to this idea of the hierarchy. Right.
Speaker 1: So I keep referring to this openness dimension, and sometimes
Speaker 1: I say openness and intellect. It gets very confusing, and
Speaker 1: that's because there's sort of an old debate about what's
Speaker 1: the right way to characterize that one of the big
Speaker 1: five dimensions. And it turns out that it's not really
Speaker 1: openness to experience and it's not really intellect. It's both,
Speaker 1: and each of those things describes a different major sub
Speaker 1: factor within that dimension. Right, So you have to go
Speaker 1: down to the lower level of the hierarchy and then
Speaker 1: you've got openness actually as a different thing from intellect.
Speaker 1: And so intellect is about being interested in intellectual matters
Speaker 1: and let's say, you know, philosophical ideas, and openness is
Speaker 1: about being interested in art and patterns and aesthetics and fantasy.
Speaker 1: So they end up being kind of different. In the
Speaker 1: Myers Briggs the sensation intuition skill is actually a good
Speaker 1: measure of open specifically that sense of intuition and imagination.
Speaker 1: That's what sensation intuition is about. But it's not intellect.
Speaker 1: Intellect is not really related to sensation intuition very much.
Speaker 1: Intellect is the thinking part of thinking and feeling. And
Speaker 1: so what they did is they basically took that thinking
Speaker 1: and contrasted it with what turns out to be basically compassion,
Speaker 1: which is one of the two major sub factors of agreeableness. Right,
Speaker 1: So you basically are forcing people to choose whether they're
Speaker 1: intellectual or whether they're compassionate. It's not a good choice
Speaker 1: to make people commit to, because there are lots of
Speaker 1: people who are both compassionate and intellectual, and vice versa.
Speaker 1: Of course, there are people who are callous and unintellectual. Yes,
Speaker 1: I suppose what I was saying, isn't there a still
Speaker 1: statistically positive association between the two even if it's not large?
Speaker 1: Well to go together, compassion is positively correlated with openness
Speaker 1: or so, but what's the caution I have to look
Speaker 1: it up. I actually suspect it's it's it's statistically significantly positive.
Speaker 1: What I do know that's interesting, though, is that compassion
Speaker 1: does have a positive correlation with intelligence, right with IQ,
Speaker 1: and that seems to be mostly driven by its association
Speaker 1: with openness. So there is something about this ability to
Speaker 1: understand and reason about other people's mental states. It's associated
Speaker 1: with IQ, but it's not just IQ. It's tied into
Speaker 1: what people refer to as emotional intelligence, which has this
Speaker 1: additional association with the agreeableness. Yeah. Yeah, I say this
Speaker 1: because you know Seamer Epstein's research as well. A big
Speaker 1: part of my dissertation was trying to integrate Seemour Epstein's
Speaker 1: experiential rational thinking styles into the openness domain. So this
Speaker 1: is very relevant to what we're talking about. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: it turns out that is rational style maps on pretty
Speaker 1: clearly to intell life thinking. Yeah, no, definitely, but the
Speaker 1: experiential style is a lot more complicated. And I think
Speaker 1: that's because our unconscious processes are so much more extensive
Speaker 1: than our conscious ones. Right, So people think you are
Speaker 1: your consciousness, Well, no, your consciousness is like this sort
Speaker 1: of little small layer on top of what's really going
Speaker 1: on in your mind. And it turns out that the
Speaker 1: experiential skill turns out to be related to openness to compassion.
Speaker 1: That's great, really good description. Yeah, as you've actually used
Speaker 1: the phrase it's a compound trait. Yes, right, But I
Speaker 1: think that's interesting still because it is linked to compassion
Speaker 1: as well as intellect. I think that there's this real
Speaker 1: connection to imagination. Right. We were talking about the default
Speaker 1: network earlier. We have a paper that just came out
Speaker 1: earlier that shows that compassion is related not only do
Speaker 1: the ability to understand other people's mental states, so these
Speaker 1: kinds of theory of mind or emotional intelligence tests, but
Speaker 1: also both of those things are linked to specific patterns
Speaker 1: of connections in that brain network. Yeah. Right, And we
Speaker 1: also know that brain network is related to the whole
Speaker 1: openness and intellectivision, which is centrally related to imagination. And
Speaker 1: I think that's because in order to really be compassionate
Speaker 1: and sympathize and empathize with somebody else. You have to
Speaker 1: be able to imagine what their experience. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes perfect sense, Colin, and I keep thinking about
Speaker 1: the default mode network, and it sort of seems like
Speaker 1: there's such a strong tie between the self concept, self representation,
Speaker 1: self generate cognition, and the default mode network. So you know,
Speaker 1: the ability to have that strong self seems to be
Speaker 1: part of that story as well, that jigsaw puzzle. It's
Speaker 1: interesting to think about. Yes, well, and here's another interesting thing.
Speaker 1: So there's a front region of the default network, the
Speaker 1: same imagination network that is in the middle of the
Speaker 1: brain that is actually related to neuroticism, right to the
Speaker 1: try to experience negative emotion. So that's that region that's
Speaker 1: been implicated in self awareness and self consciousness because a
Speaker 1: lot of what you're doing there is basically evaluating yourself, right,
Speaker 1: And so people who are high in neuroticism seem to
Speaker 1: have less of a connection between that part of the
Speaker 1: default network and the amygdala, and so it's like they
Speaker 1: can't use their broader valuative networks to try to rein
Speaker 1: in their own negative emotions, right, So they have potentially
Speaker 1: a deficit in how they integrate their sense of themselves
Speaker 1: and how they evaluate themselves. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: And as you know, we're critical of that small wooded
Speaker 1: All paper that kind of equated default mode network functioning
Speaker 1: with neuroticism. You know, it's much more complex than that. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: you know what I didn't object to there saying that
Speaker 1: there was a link between neuroticism and some aspects of
Speaker 1: default network It was that they were trying to say
Speaker 1: that neuroticism is what drives creativity, right, we know that's
Speaker 1: not true. So okay, I wanted to say I wanted
Speaker 1: to move into your work on the cybernetic Big Five.
Speaker 1: It's a really interesting integration of a lot of what
Speaker 1: we talked. I'm trying to build little by little in
Speaker 1: this podcast, and I think we're now ready for that,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. So we talked about the
Speaker 1: Big Five, we talked about the hierarchy, we talked about
Speaker 1: potential neuro correlates of the Big Five. Now you put
Speaker 1: a lot of this within the framework of cybernetic functioning,
Speaker 1: and I thought you can talk about that a little bit. Yeah. Sure,
Speaker 1: So cybernetics dates back to the forties and fifties, it's
Speaker 1: a whole area of study and theory that was founded
Speaker 1: by a guy named Norbert Wiener, and it basically came
Speaker 1: about when you start to have the precursors to computers,
Speaker 1: and then as computers are developed, you've got these artificial
Speaker 1: control systems. And what happens is basically that he realizes
Speaker 1: that if you have a machine that is basically monitoring
Speaker 1: its progress and trying to adjust itself so that it
Speaker 1: reaches some goal, you're basically doing what an organism does.
Speaker 1: So you know, if you have like a guided missile,
Speaker 1: right that thing has to be able to adjust to
Speaker 1: receive feedback and adjust its own course to try to
Speaker 1: hit a target. If you have a chess computer, it
Speaker 1: has to take the you know, the pattern of pieces
Speaker 1: on the board and try to figure out what's the
Speaker 1: right move to make to win the game. And so
Speaker 1: there was this realization that there's this commonality between what
Speaker 1: all organisms do, which is that they try to pursue
Speaker 1: their goals to allow them to survive and reproduce. And
Speaker 1: these systems that we started to be able to build
Speaker 1: with technology and so cybernetics the original book is called
Speaker 1: Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the animal and the machine.
Speaker 1: And so it's this attempt to distill a set of
Speaker 1: principles to explain how these goal directed systems that regulate
Speaker 1: themselves by feedback from their environment, what are the principles
Speaker 1: by which does operate. And it's also now currently also
Speaker 1: known as control theory. It's basically at the heart of
Speaker 1: a lot of computing, robotics, you know, artificial intelligence. So
Speaker 1: my idea was that we know that human beings are
Speaker 1: goal directed systems, right, we know that there are cybernetics systems.
Speaker 1: What are you doing right now? I'm drinking and just
Speaker 1: how to drink of a glass of water? Right? And
Speaker 1: why are you doing that? Right? Because you're thirsty? And
Speaker 1: why are you thirsty? Because you have a feedback system
Speaker 1: in your body that monitors is how much liquid you
Speaker 1: have in you and that basically sends a signal when
Speaker 1: it needs to control your behavior to make sure that
Speaker 1: you have enough liquid that you don't die, you know,
Speaker 1: And that is a cybernetic mechanism. That's just the same
Speaker 1: way that a thermostat, you know, measures the temperature with
Speaker 1: a thermometer and then compares it to the goal temperature
Speaker 1: that's been set by the user, and then when they
Speaker 1: don't match, it either fires up the furnace or it
Speaker 1: turns on the ac right, So we function in exactly
Speaker 1: the same way. The thing that makes us different from
Speaker 1: you know, a thermostat or a chest computer is that
Speaker 1: we're so staggeringly complex in the array of different goals
Speaker 1: that we can pursue. Right. So we have so many goals,
Speaker 1: you know, all the way down to these very concrete
Speaker 1: things like just you know, needing to get enough liquid,
Speaker 1: needing to get enough food for energy to drive the
Speaker 1: whole system. But we have whole arrays of goals, and
Speaker 1: we are remarkably free compared to other species to take
Speaker 1: on all kinds of sort of seemingly unusual goals. But nonetheless,
Speaker 1: I would argue that virtually all of our behavior is
Speaker 1: driven by one goal or another. The one category that
Speaker 1: you might actually describe as a sort of exception for
Speaker 1: this is exploration, right, because sometimes you know, we don't know,
Speaker 1: we don't have anything we need to be doing right now,
Speaker 1: We're just going to sort of poke around and see
Speaker 1: what we find. But even there, you could say something
Speaker 1: like the goal is to acquire information. Right. That gets
Speaker 1: back to this idea of curiosity and openness and the
Speaker 1: rewarding properties of information. Anyway, so we're cybernetic systems and
Speaker 1: we have a certain biological similarity, right like all human beings,
Speaker 1: we've evolved to have a lot of species typical properties,
Speaker 1: but we also vary from each other, and we vary
Speaker 1: from each other in some of these very fundamental ways,
Speaker 1: like how motivated we are to seek rewards, or how
Speaker 1: sensitive we are to the possibilities of threats or punishments,
Speaker 1: how capable we are of ignoring distraction, and so all
Speaker 1: of those properties represent underlying cybernetic mechanisms that are operating
Speaker 1: to allow us to pursue any particular goal. So we
Speaker 1: can come up with all kinds of different weird goals,
Speaker 1: but as long as we once we have a goal,
Speaker 1: then we have to be able to pursue it, which
Speaker 1: means we have to be motivated by queues that indicate
Speaker 1: that we're moving toward that goal. Those are rewards. We
Speaker 1: have to be afraid of things that are going to
Speaker 1: block us from a goal, those are threats. We have
Speaker 1: to be able to ignore distractions. We have to be
Speaker 1: able to assess what's going on in the world in
Speaker 1: such a way that we can figure out whether we're
Speaker 1: making progress to our world, to our goal or not.
Speaker 1: And so the idea behind my cybernetic theory, and it's
Speaker 1: called cybernetic Big five theory because each one of the
Speaker 1: Big five personality traits basically represents variation in a fundamental
Speaker 1: mechanism or set of mechanisms that allow us to carry
Speaker 1: out these cybernetic processes that allow us to our goals effectively.
Speaker 1: Not how did you arrive at that insight? Well, it
Speaker 1: probably goes back to some of my early introduction to psychology,
Speaker 1: and I studied with Jordan Peterson. Well, of course, yeah,
Speaker 1: at this particular moment in history, everybody knows who Jordan is.
Speaker 1: And he was very interested in the idea that people's
Speaker 1: minds are organized by their goals, right, So he kind
Speaker 1: of introduced me to some of these cybernetic ideas, and
Speaker 1: he also introduced me to the work of Jeffrey Gray.
Speaker 1: And Jeffrey Gray was a brilliant neuroscientist and in some
Speaker 1: ways one of the early personality neuroscientists. Although he didn't
Speaker 1: really do research with humans, he did research in animals,
Speaker 1: but he certainly thought about how personality came out of
Speaker 1: variation in the brain, and that was partly because he
Speaker 1: worked with Hans iesenk and was really, I would say,
Speaker 1: the father of personality neuroscience. He was the first first
Speaker 1: developed like theories about what patterns of brain function were
Speaker 1: related to extraversion and neuroticism. He wasn't necessarily right. I mean,
Speaker 1: some of his ideas have proved to be at least
Speaker 1: suggestive in the right direction, but the technology he'd had
Speaker 1: available for neuroscience is quite limited at that time, so
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't really until neuroimaging fMRI developed in
Speaker 1: the nineties and started to be used widely that we
Speaker 1: started to make better progress. I want to say something
Speaker 1: about that for a second, just real quick. My reading
Speaker 1: of isa Zinc was more biological model, not neuroscience model.
Speaker 1: Maybe I haven't read all of his work. He's not
Speaker 1: actually positing precise neurological mechanisms, but more like neurotransmitters. I
Speaker 1: guess that is really yeah, I don't think that. I
Speaker 1: don't think you can really make that distinction. I mean,
Speaker 1: his theories were pretty low resolution, but that's because the
Speaker 1: capacity for right, you know, sort of measuring and understand
Speaker 1: the brain was pretty low resolution. At that time. I
Speaker 1: mean we're talking back in like the forties and fifties.
Speaker 1: Then they published it sort of a book length treatment
Speaker 1: of it, I think in the sixties at some point.
Speaker 1: But they were neurobiological, they were neuroscience, right, because what
Speaker 1: he thought was that is this arousal system in the
Speaker 1: brain called the ascending reticular activating system, which is really
Speaker 1: mostly involved in like whether you were, like how sleepy
Speaker 1: versus awake you are, so of this very broad system
Speaker 1: for arousal, and he thought that extraversion had to do
Speaker 1: with people's levels of arousal or later he changed it
Speaker 1: more to like arousability, how easily aroused you were, sort
Speaker 1: of across the whole cortex, based on this ascending reticular
Speaker 1: activating system, you know. And that's not quite right as
Speaker 1: far as we can tell now, but it was still
Speaker 1: you know, using the tools that he had, it was
Speaker 1: definitely it was generative, right. It led to a bunch
Speaker 1: of research, Oh sure, anyway, but Jeffrey Gray basically a
Speaker 1: post doc with Isaac and got interested in personality and
Speaker 1: was also a neuroscientist, and he's just brilliant. I think
Speaker 1: he's one of the most brilliant psychologists who's ever lived.
Speaker 1: He has an amazing book called The Neuropsychology of Anxiety.
Speaker 1: The second edition of that was published with Neil McNaughton,
Speaker 1: who had been one of his collaborators, I think also
Speaker 1: as a post doc maybe who I know and I've
Speaker 1: worked with. He's also brilliant. So they published this book,
Speaker 1: The Neuropsychology of Anxiety in two thousand and then a
Speaker 1: little later I can't remember, maybe it was two thousand
Speaker 1: and four, Gray published his last book, which is Trying
Speaker 1: to Understand Consciousness. Yeah, so really you actually suggested that
Speaker 1: book the prize. That's an amazing book, and the perspective
Speaker 1: on cybernetics that Gray lays out in that book really
Speaker 1: gave me insight. It really kind of allowed me to
Speaker 1: put all these things together, and you know, so it
Speaker 1: just kind of fit with my whole with the whole
Speaker 1: perspective that I had been thinking about with, you know,
Speaker 1: for a number of years, and I have this interest
Speaker 1: in personality, I had interested in neuroscience and neurobiological basis,
Speaker 1: and then with the way in which goals are crucial
Speaker 1: for organizing human behavior, and then cybernetics essentially just allows
Speaker 1: all of these things to be put together into coherent framework. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm a fan of your theory, as you know, and
Speaker 1: I've been trying to build on it and linking it
Speaker 1: to self actualization. So really like that, and you've extended
Speaker 1: it in some really interesting ways. Most recently you've made
Speaker 1: some link just to the mental illness, right, and kind
Speaker 1: of yes, that's right. Actually, this is what I'm really
Speaker 1: excited about right now, is that we've taken the theory
Speaker 1: and basically extended it to be a formal theory of psychopathology.
Speaker 1: So more and more what's being recognized in the world
Speaker 1: of clinical psychology and mental health is that mental illnesses
Speaker 1: are not these categorical entities. You know. It's not like
Speaker 1: getting some disease where you're infected by a microorganism and
Speaker 1: then like you know, as long as that's in your body,
Speaker 1: you're in trouble, and then once your immune system gets
Speaker 1: rid that you no longer have the disease. Mental illness
Speaker 1: doesn't work like that. Instead, what you have is a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of different risk factors, like in people's personalities
Speaker 1: and then in various traumatic things that they experience, difficulties
Speaker 1: in their lives that lead them to cease functioning properly, right,
Speaker 1: And what's happening there is it's cybernetic function that is
Speaker 1: being disrupted. Is when people are no longer able to
Speaker 1: effectively pursue their goals or to get the basic needs
Speaker 1: fulfilled that they have, you know, and basic needs are
Speaker 1: basically just the kind of goals that are actually evolved
Speaker 1: into its right, that we essentially can't escape. You know,
Speaker 1: you can make up some crazy goal like you know,
Speaker 1: I want to be like scable of it. Yes, the
Speaker 1: world's ski ball champion. We've talked about that before, and
Speaker 1: so how does it come about that anyone has the
Speaker 1: goal of being the world's ski ball champion. So they
Speaker 1: are those kinds of goals. But then there are much
Speaker 1: more basic goals, like you know, the need for affiliation
Speaker 1: for example. Now that varies from person to person, but
Speaker 1: almost everyone has some degree of need for affiliation and
Speaker 1: contact with other human beings. It's very rare that you
Speaker 1: have someone who has so little of that goal, which
Speaker 1: is you know, essentially an evolved mechanism, that they can
Speaker 1: be happy just being a hermit living in the woods
Speaker 1: and not talking to anyone for years. Right, most people
Speaker 1: have that basic need for affiliation, and so those are
Speaker 1: goals too, and all of these things are governed by
Speaker 1: these cybernetic processes. So the way that we're approaching psychopathology
Speaker 1: is basically to say, okay, we need a way to
Speaker 1: define what psychopathology is, and what it seems to be
Speaker 1: is essentially cybernetic dysfunction. So that's when your current set
Speaker 1: of goals and understanding of how the world is and
Speaker 1: strategies for you know, turning the current state of the
Speaker 1: world into the desires to the world when those aren't
Speaker 1: working for you. And not only that, but you are
Speaker 1: incapable of generating new ones, right, because there's a way
Speaker 1: in which, of course, just having things go wrong and
Speaker 1: having you know, some of your goals failed. That's not
Speaker 1: mental illness, right, That happens to everyone. That's just the
Speaker 1: vicissitudes of life. When people get into a situation where
Speaker 1: they're in that kind of a state where they don't
Speaker 1: know what to do, things aren't working right, and then
Speaker 1: they can't get out of it, right, that's when you
Speaker 1: get mental illness. And that can happen for a variety
Speaker 1: of reasons and in a variety of ways. I think
Speaker 1: you can't get out of it might not be objectively
Speaker 1: you haven't getten out of it, let's put it that way. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that some people are helpless are from it, right,
Speaker 1: saying the resources that they have, they have not been
Speaker 1: able to develop new ways of thinking about the world,
Speaker 1: new and changing their goals potentially or even just developing
Speaker 1: new strategies to pursue their goals. So they haven't been
Speaker 1: able to do that, and so they're essentially stuck in
Speaker 1: this space of dysfunction, right, They're stuck in this kind
Speaker 1: of chaotic and traffic state where they do not know
Speaker 1: how to proceed, They don't know what to do, and
Speaker 1: so they're often miserable. And you know, so if you
Speaker 1: think about that as the core of dysfunction, right, it's
Speaker 1: not like, oh, you have schizophrenia or you have bipolar disorder,
Speaker 1: or you have borderline personality disorder. No, the reason that
Speaker 1: you have psychopathology is that you are not functioning cybernetically.
Speaker 1: And then the question is, well, why do we have
Speaker 1: these different you know, people have tried to come up
Speaker 1: with these categories for different types of mental illness. What's
Speaker 1: that about? And so it turns out that the way
Speaker 1: in which mental illness manifests the array of different symptoms
Speaker 1: that people have, those have patterns of association and tend
Speaker 1: to appear together with each other in very much the
Speaker 1: same way that personality traits do. And it turns out
Speaker 1: and I think this will eventually be recognized as one
Speaker 1: of the major discoveries of the last you know, let's say,
Speaker 1: thirty or forty years. And it's certainly not my discovery
Speaker 1: that the structure of psychopathology and symptoms of mental illness
Speaker 1: is essentially the same structure as the structure of personality. Nice. Nice, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's huge, that's huge. Yeah. And so what that means
Speaker 1: is that mental disorders, in terms of the ways in
Speaker 1: which they are different from each other, are basically extreme
Speaker 1: and dysfunctional manifestations of normal personality traits. Wow. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: so what we're doing is we're essentially trying to combine.
Speaker 1: We think that the right way to proceed is essentially
Speaker 1: to combine what we know about personality and personality neuroscience
Speaker 1: with what we know about mental disorder and the neurobiological
Speaker 1: basis of mental disorders in order to get a better
Speaker 1: new system for understanding and treating mental illness. Where does
Speaker 1: environment play a role in this? You've talked a lot
Speaker 1: about biology, and you know, I'm glad you asked that
Speaker 1: because I find that this is a misconception that people
Speaker 1: often have. When we talk about something being biologically based,
Speaker 1: that does not mean that it is genetic, right, because
Speaker 1: we are biological creatures, right, We're biological systems. The cybernetic
Speaker 1: system that we are is the biological system, and so
Speaker 1: everything about your behavior and your experience is generated by biology.
Speaker 1: And so that's totally separate from our nurture question, from
Speaker 1: the question of genetics. And you know, what we know
Speaker 1: from behavioral genetics is essentially that everything is heritable, which
Speaker 1: means that everything, all of our patterns, our behavior are
Speaker 1: influenced by our genetics. But equally everything is influenced by
Speaker 1: the environment as well. So it's not nature or nurture.
Speaker 1: That debate is over. So at this point, basically, anyone
Speaker 1: who works with this scientifically thinks about it in terms
Speaker 1: of nature and nurture. And what we know is that
Speaker 1: you know, if something that happens to you in your
Speaker 1: environment is going to affect your personality, it has to
Speaker 1: affect your brain, right, because your brain is what is
Speaker 1: controlling your behavior and your experience. And if there's going
Speaker 1: to be a lasting change to your personality, there has
Speaker 1: to be some kind of lasting change to your brain.
Speaker 1: So it's all biological. And you know, when I'd say
Speaker 1: we're looking at the biology, that should in no way
Speaker 1: imply that it's purely genetic or that it can't be changed. No.
Speaker 1: In fact, I mean, obviously biology can be changed. That's
Speaker 1: part of why, you know, pharmaceuticals are used to try
Speaker 1: to treat mental illness because we think that if we
Speaker 1: change people's brains, we'll be able to help them and
Speaker 1: you know, change the way that they're changed their dysfunction
Speaker 1: into healthy function. Now, personally, I don't think that pharmaceuticals
Speaker 1: are necessarily, always, or even often the best route to
Speaker 1: treating mental illness. I think that our research into the
Speaker 1: treatment of mental illness is shockingly lagging behind what it
Speaker 1: should be, and that's partly because of all the money
Speaker 1: that can be made from pharmaceuticals. But you know, I
Speaker 1: think the thing is that what we need to do
Speaker 1: is help people, and this is what things like cognitive
Speaker 1: behavioral therapy do, right. We need to help people figure
Speaker 1: out what are different ways of thinking about the world,
Speaker 1: different goals that they might have, different strategies that they
Speaker 1: might use to pursue their goals. That is ultimately what
Speaker 1: is going to allow them to be healthy interpretations. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like that in yeah, exactly how they think about
Speaker 1: and interpret the world, how they evaluate it. And you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that pharmaceuticals can't sometimes help people with that, right,
Speaker 1: because so the way that I think about this is
Speaker 1: when you get people pharmaceuticals, you are essentially directly adjusting
Speaker 1: those cybernetic mechanisms that I was talking about that underlie
Speaker 1: personality traits, and so that can be useful. Right. It's like,
Speaker 1: if you are depressed, part of what's going on is
Speaker 1: probably that you have too much negative emotion, too much
Speaker 1: sensitivity to punishment, and not enough approach motivation, not enough
Speaker 1: motivation to actually pursue rewards effectively. So you know, potentially
Speaker 1: doing something like increasing levels of dopamine or well we
Speaker 1: can Serotonin's too complicated to talk about in this conversation,
Speaker 1: but anyway, you know, you can imagine you could make
Speaker 1: certain adjustments that would help people. But even if it
Speaker 1: does help, they still have to then figure out how
Speaker 1: to pursue their goals in life, right, what the right
Speaker 1: goals should be, and how they're going to pursue them,
Speaker 1: and that is, you know, ultimately, what is going to
Speaker 1: enable them to be well. Young used to talk about this,
Speaker 1: you know, like people always think about Young and like, oh,
Speaker 1: he was a mystic and he had such crazy ideas
Speaker 1: about what people needed to do. But he had this
Speaker 1: idea about stages of therapy that I really like. And
Speaker 1: the third one is what does he call it education?
Speaker 1: I think it's like confession, elucidation, education, and then transformation.
Speaker 1: I should probably check to see if I'm getting that
Speaker 1: right or not. But basically I was just thinking about
Speaker 1: this because Young was at at some level very sort
Speaker 1: of intensely practical person, and he recognized that, you know,
Speaker 1: after you've done the kind of psychodynamic depth work, you know,
Speaker 1: the kind of Freudian thing, and gotten deep into people's
Speaker 1: unconscious and figured out all of their unconscious you know,
Speaker 1: fears and impulses and wishes and these kinds of things
Speaker 1: that you really needed just to educate people. You needed
Speaker 1: to get them so that they could function adequately in
Speaker 1: the day to day practical world. It was only after
Speaker 1: that that he thought, then you might want to actually,
Speaker 1: you know, meet the collective unconscious and go for the
Speaker 1: far out stuff and go for transformation. But like he
Speaker 1: really had this sense that first you people just to
Speaker 1: be able to handle day to day life and you know,
Speaker 1: hold down a job and or to sure sure whatever
Speaker 1: you need to do, and you know, stort out, you're
Speaker 1: just everyday familial relationships and whatnot. So you know, a
Speaker 1: lot of it is about that, and pharmaceuticals sometimes can
Speaker 1: be really helpful to people and allowing them to do that,
Speaker 1: but it's certainly you know, okay. So there was a
Speaker 1: meta analysis that just came out in the past year
Speaker 1: that Brent Roberts did with some other people. They looked
Speaker 1: at the effects of different kinds of therapy on personality change.
Speaker 1: And you might think, well, aren't we using therapy to
Speaker 1: get people over mental illness. Well, yes, often we are.
Speaker 1: But nonetheless, people often assess personality when they are studying
Speaker 1: the effects of different treatment programs, and it turns out
Speaker 1: that you know, if you treat somebody for depression and
Speaker 1: they get better and that improvement persists, one of the
Speaker 1: things that you're doing is you're lowering their neuroticism. You're
Speaker 1: lowering their general tendency to experience negative emotion. And so
Speaker 1: it turns out that all different types of therapy have
Speaker 1: the effect in it of lowering people's neuroticism. But it
Speaker 1: turns out that things like cognitive behavioral therapy and you know,
Speaker 1: Ragierian or humanistic therapy, those things actually lower neuroticism more
Speaker 1: than pharmaceutical treatments, more than drug treats. Right enough, what
Speaker 1: about the act approach, acceptance and commitment therapy that Stephen
Speaker 1: Hayes is pioneered. Are you familiar with that? No, I'm not.
Speaker 1: I'm happy to explain it a little bit. And you
Speaker 1: can see how it might really kind of the core
Speaker 1: aspect of psychological flexibility, where you just really kind of
Speaker 1: accept all of your thoughts that arise with full acceptance
Speaker 1: and mindfulness, and it actually blakes you know, the emergining
Speaker 1: mindful CBT, you know field that is coming up. So
Speaker 1: can you see how that would be relate to the
Speaker 1: cybernetic dysfunction, Yes, definitely, And it has to do with
Speaker 1: one of the really important stages of the cybernetic process,
Speaker 1: which is when you know which most of these things
Speaker 1: are running constantly in parallel in our brains, so we're
Speaker 1: always monitoring whether we are where we want to be.
Speaker 1: There's essentially three things that has to happen in the
Speaker 1: cybernetic process, or well, actually we can expand it and
Speaker 1: say there are five things that have to happen. So
Speaker 1: one of our goals has to become activated enough that
Speaker 1: it motivates us to pursue it, so we've got an
Speaker 1: operative goal at any given time. Then we have to
Speaker 1: select some action or strategy that we think is going
Speaker 1: to work to pursue that goal, you know, and that's
Speaker 1: a decision making process. Then we have to actually carry
Speaker 1: it out that action. Then we have to understand like
Speaker 1: what the state of the world is after we've carried
Speaker 1: out that action, and then we have to compare that
Speaker 1: state of the world to our goal to where we
Speaker 1: want to be right And that last step of the
Speaker 1: process is really crucial, and it's basically where at any moment,
Speaker 1: we detect whether we are where we want to be
Speaker 1: or whether we're not where we want to be. You know,
Speaker 1: if we are where we want to be, then we
Speaker 1: can go on to the next goal. If we're not,
Speaker 1: we have to either try again or give up. And
Speaker 1: one of the problems for people who are high in neuroticism,
Speaker 1: the sensitivity to negative emotion is that they are really
Speaker 1: have a really sensitive mismatch detector. Right, So people who
Speaker 1: are really neurotic are basically just like you know, they're
Speaker 1: often unsatisfied with where they are. Most people would be
Speaker 1: in that situation like, yeah, this is fine, and the
Speaker 1: neurotic is sitting there being like this is terrible. This
Speaker 1: is not going the way it's supposed to go. And
Speaker 1: that's partly just because they have this very sensitive mismatch detector.
Speaker 1: And that means that they are prone to a lot
Speaker 1: of anxiety, a lot of inhibition, prone to giving up
Speaker 1: on things earlier than they should. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that they need to do is to basically learn
Speaker 1: that just because that mismatch detector goes off doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that you're doing everything wrong, that you have to abandon
Speaker 1: your goals, that everything's hopeless, right, And so basically what
Speaker 1: you're doing, it sounds to me that ACT therapy, and
Speaker 1: I know a lot more about mindfulness approaches than I
Speaker 1: know about ACT specifically, is that you are essentially training
Speaker 1: people to interrupt that process whereby when you detect a mismatch.
Speaker 1: It leads to a big disruption in the whole system
Speaker 1: and essentially ends up preventing you from pursuing your goals successfully. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that sounds about right right, because you've got to learn, like,
Speaker 1: you know, different people have different sensitivities. If you're the
Speaker 1: kind of person who's highly neurotic, well, you know, we
Speaker 1: may not be able to turn you into a happy,
Speaker 1: go lucky person, but hopefully what we can do is
Speaker 1: get you a bit of perspective on the fact that, yeah,
Speaker 1: these alarm bells are going to be going off for
Speaker 1: you as you go through your daily life more often
Speaker 1: than for other people, and you need to know how
Speaker 1: to cope with that properly. And the proper way is
Speaker 1: not just to give up or to assume that you
Speaker 1: know you're doing something wrong, or that everybody hates you,
Speaker 1: or whatever it is, you know, whatever worry it is
Speaker 1: that pops up at any given time. So you basically
Speaker 1: have to teach people how to be more careful and
Speaker 1: less evaluative in interpreting the reactions that they have to
Speaker 1: the world, become you know, less judgmental. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess that's what you mean by evaluative. You know,
Speaker 1: but just with your own thoughts, not evaluating kind of
Speaker 1: the ime distinction, kind of separating them a little bit. Yeah, absolutely, right, So,
Speaker 1: but a lot, you know, that's a lot of what
Speaker 1: mindfulness trands you to do. It trands you to in
Speaker 1: the habit, that sense of awareness and paying careful attention
Speaker 1: to what is going on in the world around you
Speaker 1: and in your head, but without immediately categorizing and labeling it.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh, that was bad, that was a failure
Speaker 1: that went wrong, you know, allowing you basically just to
Speaker 1: observe what's going on as you know, sensations or thoughts
Speaker 1: without you know, triggering that you know, ejection from that cycle. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why I found you know, MBSR Mindfulness Stress based
Speaker 1: reduction nbs are really really helpful in doing that. It's
Speaker 1: a mindfulness course. Yep. Cool. Well, this has been just
Speaker 1: such a stimuling, excellent conversation. So hey, Colin, I just
Speaker 1: want to thank you so much for coming and being
Speaker 1: on the Psychology Podcast and truly truly for influencing my
Speaker 1: own thinking and research, helping me and my work, but
Speaker 1: also just being such a great collaborator and friend. God,
Speaker 1: it's been great. I mean what we've been doing this
Speaker 1: now for over a decade. Yeah, yeah, like twelve or
Speaker 1: thirteen years, and you've been one of my most enjoyable collaborators,
Speaker 1: you know, and also just to friends of course, So
Speaker 1: it's yeah, it's great and this is this was a
Speaker 1: lot of fun. Thanks. I see, people don't realize. People
Speaker 1: don't realize we have conversations like this all the time,
Speaker 1: all the time. It is, yeah, right on a podcast,
Speaker 1: And that's why I do this podcast as well as
Speaker 1: I'm not like different when I'm not doing this podcast,
Speaker 1: do you know what I mean? I just like, I
Speaker 1: just it dawned to me, Wow, people might get value
Speaker 1: from all of the really nerdy conversations I like to
Speaker 1: have with people. And it's very edifying when it's very
Speaker 1: confirming when people do seem to enjoy it and get
Speaker 1: value from it. But I'm sure people will a lot
Speaker 1: of people will get value from this conversation. So thanks again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're welcome. Thanks for having me, Thanks for listening to
Speaker 1: the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If
Speaker 1: you'd like to react in some way to something you heard,
Speaker 1: I encourage you to join in the discussion at the
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