WEBVTT - Ep16 "Why is everyone who disagrees with you misinformed?" 0:00:05.640 --> 0:00:09.040 Why is there so much polarization in the world, and 0:00:09.080 --> 0:00:11.000 what does this have to do with the brain, And 0:00:11.039 --> 0:00:12.480 what does any of this have to do with how 0:00:12.480 --> 0:00:16.560 you picture a cat, or why we respond to certain 0:00:16.600 --> 0:00:20.920 cartoons or the British nobleman Lord Gordon, or the Iroqui 0:00:21.040 --> 0:00:25.600 Native Americans? And why do you naturally feel that everyone 0:00:25.600 --> 0:00:29.880 who disagrees with you is a troll or misinformed? And 0:00:29.960 --> 0:00:33.320 if you could just shout loudly enough in all caps 0:00:33.400 --> 0:00:37.000 on Twitter, they would see that you're right. Why can't 0:00:37.040 --> 0:00:43.880 they see that you know the truth? Welcome to inner 0:00:43.960 --> 0:00:48.519 Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an 0:00:48.520 --> 0:00:52.080 author at Stanford University, and I've spent my whole career 0:00:52.360 --> 0:00:56.800 studying the intersection between how the brain works and how 0:00:56.840 --> 0:01:10.760 we experience life. It hasn't escaped anybody's notice that we 0:01:10.800 --> 0:01:15.880 are in a time in which polarization and disagreement is 0:01:16.080 --> 0:01:19.279 higher than most of us have seen in our lives 0:01:19.319 --> 0:01:22.000 so far, and so in the past decade I've become 0:01:22.120 --> 0:01:27.680 very interested in the brain science behind that behind polarization, 0:01:28.080 --> 0:01:32.040 and more generally, how we come to believe our own 0:01:32.120 --> 0:01:36.320 political opinions and why we're so certain that everyone else 0:01:36.560 --> 0:01:39.680 is wrong, and how if we could just talk to them, 0:01:39.800 --> 0:01:43.280 if they could just listen to us, they would see 0:01:43.319 --> 0:01:46.280 the light and they would know that we are right 0:01:46.720 --> 0:01:50.640 and they were mistaken. Now, I want to set the stage. 0:01:51.040 --> 0:01:54.760 Polarization is not a new thing. Although we are in 0:01:54.800 --> 0:01:58.720 a polarized era right now, this is far from unique. 0:01:58.800 --> 0:02:01.840 Just think about the Civil War in America, where you 0:02:01.920 --> 0:02:05.720 had brothers and neighbors taking up arms against one another, 0:02:06.200 --> 0:02:09.560 or in the nineteen sixties and seventies, people here held 0:02:09.680 --> 0:02:13.079 vastly different opinions about the war in Vietnam and how 0:02:13.120 --> 0:02:16.800 to treat the returning soldiers or take stuff that's even bigger, 0:02:16.919 --> 0:02:20.959 like Nazism in Germany, which was the most advanced country 0:02:21.040 --> 0:02:24.080 in Europe. The thing to recognize is that in the 0:02:24.160 --> 0:02:28.560 nineteen thirty four elections in Germany, every single seat in 0:02:28.600 --> 0:02:32.960 the Reichstag, the German Parliament, was either Communist Party far 0:02:33.040 --> 0:02:36.840 left or National Socialist Party far right. Or look more 0:02:36.880 --> 0:02:40.360 generally at the whole twentieth century, the Communist Revolution in 0:02:40.480 --> 0:02:44.840 China or in the USSR, or the Hutu massacre of 0:02:44.880 --> 0:02:48.640 the Tutsi in Rwanda, or the Camera Rouge in Cambodia, 0:02:48.960 --> 0:02:53.160 and on and on. There's nothing new about polarization and 0:02:53.200 --> 0:02:55.600 people taking up arms. And what I want to talk 0:02:55.600 --> 0:02:59.359 about today is why so the question on lots of 0:02:59.360 --> 0:03:01.560 people's mind, it seems to be, is this because of 0:03:01.639 --> 0:03:04.359 social media. I don't think that has much of anything 0:03:04.400 --> 0:03:06.360 to do with it. Keep in mind that all the 0:03:06.400 --> 0:03:10.840 examples I just named preceded Twitter and Facebook, and those 0:03:10.880 --> 0:03:13.960 were much worse than what we have going on currently. 0:03:14.480 --> 0:03:17.560 The fact is it doesn't take much to get people 0:03:17.680 --> 0:03:21.320 all worked up over different opinions and taking up arms, 0:03:21.360 --> 0:03:24.400 and you don't need social media for that. And my 0:03:24.480 --> 0:03:27.560 goal today is to explain why it is so easy 0:03:27.960 --> 0:03:31.000 for people to get so worked up and believe their truth. 0:03:31.400 --> 0:03:33.240 So this is what we're going to explore. Why does 0:03:33.280 --> 0:03:37.440 everyone have different opinions? And why does everyone with a 0:03:37.520 --> 0:03:43.160 different opinion to yours seem misinformed or obstreperous or like 0:03:43.240 --> 0:03:47.560 a troll. So I'll start with a cartoon and a story. 0:03:48.200 --> 0:03:51.440 The cartoon was one that I saw recently on Twitter. 0:03:51.680 --> 0:03:54.520 It shows a bunch of people walking on a road 0:03:55.080 --> 0:03:57.120 and up ahead there's a fork in the road and 0:03:57.160 --> 0:04:01.600 off to one side there's a small number of smart, 0:04:01.600 --> 0:04:06.559 thoughtful people that are following a windy path marked complex 0:04:06.680 --> 0:04:09.360 but right, and on the other side of the fork 0:04:09.640 --> 0:04:12.160 there is a very packed group of people and they're 0:04:12.200 --> 0:04:16.000 all walking and it's labeled simple but wrong, and this 0:04:16.080 --> 0:04:18.840 takes them to a cliff that they eventually tumble off of. 0:04:19.600 --> 0:04:21.560 Now I'm going to come back to this cartoon later, 0:04:22.120 --> 0:04:24.960 and when I come back, we're going to understand this 0:04:25.080 --> 0:04:26.280 in a slightly different way. 0:04:26.600 --> 0:04:28.520 But first I want to turn to this. 0:04:28.640 --> 0:04:32.159 Story, which is a true story. Many years ago, I 0:04:32.200 --> 0:04:35.279 got my PhD in neuroscience. I was a second year 0:04:35.320 --> 0:04:38.520 graduate student when the new class of first year students 0:04:38.560 --> 0:04:41.520 came in and one student really stood out, and I'm 0:04:41.520 --> 0:04:42.920 going to call her Tanya. 0:04:43.640 --> 0:04:44.919 She seemed very sweet. 0:04:45.000 --> 0:04:48.600 And what we found out was that Tanya had extraordinary grades, 0:04:49.160 --> 0:04:52.600 and she'd come from a very impoverished neighborhood in Chicago, 0:04:52.960 --> 0:04:56.280 but she had these incredible grades and these incredible letters 0:04:56.279 --> 0:05:01.000 of recommendation and great scores on her gres. So during 0:05:01.040 --> 0:05:03.159 the first month or two of school, she was given 0:05:03.240 --> 0:05:05.719 a special award and there was going to be a 0:05:05.720 --> 0:05:09.440 banquet for it, and to my surprise, she asked me 0:05:09.640 --> 0:05:11.320 if I would be her date to the banquet. 0:05:11.720 --> 0:05:12.520 So I said yes. 0:05:12.640 --> 0:05:14.719 I didn't know her well, but I thought she seemed 0:05:14.800 --> 0:05:17.640 very sweet, and so I said yes. So the banquet 0:05:17.680 --> 0:05:20.680 was supposed to be on Friday of that week, but 0:05:20.760 --> 0:05:25.800 as it turns out, the banquet never happened. Why it's 0:05:25.800 --> 0:05:29.039 because on Tuesday of that week, Tanya was in the 0:05:29.240 --> 0:05:32.719 women's restroom with one of the administrators at the school 0:05:33.160 --> 0:05:36.440 and they started talking. The administrator said, Wow, Tanya, everything 0:05:36.520 --> 0:05:38.400 is so amazing about you and. 0:05:38.400 --> 0:05:39.680 Your grades and your skills. 0:05:39.960 --> 0:05:44.040 I want to know how your school cultivated a thinker 0:05:44.160 --> 0:05:47.719 like you. And so Tanya just had some humble answer, 0:05:47.839 --> 0:05:50.760 and so this administrator decided she was going to call 0:05:50.800 --> 0:05:54.560 the school and find out how they produced somebody like Tanya. 0:05:54.680 --> 0:05:56.279 So she calls to. 0:05:55.880 --> 0:05:58.560 Talk to one of the professors that wrote a letter 0:05:58.600 --> 0:06:01.760 of recommendations for Tanya. And so she dials up and 0:06:01.839 --> 0:06:04.320 she gets the secretary and she asks to speak to 0:06:04.360 --> 0:06:09.720 the professor, and the secretary says who, and the administrator 0:06:09.760 --> 0:06:12.080 repeats the name. I'm looking for, Professor so and so, 0:06:12.240 --> 0:06:15.119 and the woman on the other end says, there's nobody 0:06:15.200 --> 0:06:18.160 here by that name. So the administrator says, yeah, this 0:06:18.200 --> 0:06:20.760 is the professor that wrote this letter, and the secretary says, 0:06:21.120 --> 0:06:23.320 I've worked here thirty years and there is nobody here 0:06:23.360 --> 0:06:26.039 by this name. So turn out to be a fake 0:06:26.279 --> 0:06:29.560 letter of recommendation. So the administrator calls the second letter 0:06:29.600 --> 0:06:33.640 of recommendation, same story. So she calls the third recommender 0:06:33.720 --> 0:06:36.000 and gets connected, and it turns out that it was 0:06:36.360 --> 0:06:41.240 Tanya's mother's office. And so what quickly became unraveled is 0:06:41.279 --> 0:06:46.040 that Tanya had faked everything her transcript or GRES. And 0:06:46.080 --> 0:06:47.920 this was by the way back in the nineties. So 0:06:47.960 --> 0:06:51.599 she did this by digitally scanning her gres and then 0:06:51.720 --> 0:06:56.760 changing them with early versions of photoshop, and then reprinting them. Anyway, 0:06:57.000 --> 0:06:59.440 one of my colleagues equipped that she should get a 0:06:59.440 --> 0:07:03.120 PhD just for the cleverness of her deception. But the 0:07:03.200 --> 0:07:07.279 thing that struck me was how blind we all were 0:07:07.640 --> 0:07:11.760 to the deception. We were completely fooled by it. So anyway, 0:07:11.800 --> 0:07:15.080 the graduate school said to her, WHOA, there's something really 0:07:15.160 --> 0:07:16.960 strange here, and you have to come up with an 0:07:17.000 --> 0:07:20.960 explanation for this, And Tanya just ran away. But one 0:07:21.000 --> 0:07:23.320 of my classmates caught her on the way out at 0:07:23.360 --> 0:07:25.800 the door, and she had an excuse for everything, and 0:07:25.840 --> 0:07:29.200 she said, I got screwed by this person, and this 0:07:29.200 --> 0:07:31.640 person cheated me, and I thought they were writing a 0:07:31.680 --> 0:07:33.960 real letter, and I thought the school was accredited, but 0:07:34.000 --> 0:07:37.160 they lied to me, so she had an excuse for everything. Now, 0:07:37.240 --> 0:07:39.800 obviously the details of this story stuck with me through 0:07:39.840 --> 0:07:42.120 the years because I had almost gone on a date 0:07:42.160 --> 0:07:45.400 with this girl. Anyway, that was the end of the 0:07:45.480 --> 0:07:50.160 Tanya story, or so I thought. A couple of years later, 0:07:50.320 --> 0:07:54.240 someone pointed me to an article from the Yale University newspaper, 0:07:54.760 --> 0:07:58.000 and that's how we learned that Tanya had left our 0:07:58.080 --> 0:08:01.920 school and gone to ya next and faked her way 0:08:01.960 --> 0:08:05.720 into graduate school there, and Yale had caught her. This 0:08:05.880 --> 0:08:08.200 was just like the first time, but Yale was mad 0:08:08.240 --> 0:08:11.240 because they had been paying her a stipend, and so 0:08:11.280 --> 0:08:14.440 they put her in jail. And I pictured the girl 0:08:14.480 --> 0:08:16.320 that I almost went on a date with sitting on 0:08:16.440 --> 0:08:20.480 a cement bench in jail, and the next newspaper article 0:08:20.480 --> 0:08:25.880 I found showed that in jail, Tanya had bitten two guards, 0:08:26.320 --> 0:08:28.320 and at some point she was released from jail, and 0:08:28.360 --> 0:08:32.320 then we heard nothing about her after that until two 0:08:32.400 --> 0:08:36.160 years later. Because Tanya went home to where she lived 0:08:36.200 --> 0:08:40.240 in Chicago, and she and her mother decided to do 0:08:40.440 --> 0:08:44.160 a big drug deal with two men who turned out 0:08:44.200 --> 0:08:48.000 to be undercover agents, and they got caught and she 0:08:48.160 --> 0:08:51.640 was going to be sentenced for a long time, and 0:08:51.720 --> 0:08:54.840 so she and her cousin came up with an idea. 0:08:55.679 --> 0:08:58.400 So they went out and they found a woman who 0:08:58.440 --> 0:09:02.120 was a drug addict, who who was approximately her size 0:09:02.160 --> 0:09:04.640 and looked a bit like her. And they said, hey, 0:09:04.920 --> 0:09:07.200 we're going to give you free drugs if you come 0:09:07.240 --> 0:09:10.240 to the dentist. And she said she was doing an 0:09:10.280 --> 0:09:13.439 insurance scam, and she said, come to the dentist and 0:09:13.480 --> 0:09:16.280 say that your name is my name. And she had 0:09:16.280 --> 0:09:18.760 the woman wearing gloves to the dentist office so there 0:09:18.760 --> 0:09:22.520 wouldn't be any fingerprints, and she accompanied her and she 0:09:22.600 --> 0:09:25.720 signed the paperwork for her. And then after they had 0:09:25.720 --> 0:09:29.640 the imprints, they brought this woman home and they smashed 0:09:29.640 --> 0:09:31.880 her on the head with a brick and they injected 0:09:31.920 --> 0:09:34.840 her with a bunch of insulin to make her pass out. 0:09:34.960 --> 0:09:37.000 That's all they had access to and that's why they 0:09:37.320 --> 0:09:41.319 used the insulin. And their plan was to kill this 0:09:41.400 --> 0:09:45.000 woman and burn the body so that the dental imprints 0:09:45.040 --> 0:09:47.880 would be found and they would conclude that Tanya was 0:09:47.960 --> 0:09:50.319 dead and then she wouldn't have to go to jail. 0:09:50.520 --> 0:09:53.560 As it turns out, this poor woman eventually came to 0:09:53.880 --> 0:09:57.240 in the basement of Tanya's cousin's house and she managed 0:09:57.280 --> 0:10:00.080 to scramble out of the window and she ran a 0:10:00.080 --> 0:10:02.600 crossed the street to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. She 0:10:02.679 --> 0:10:05.960 screamed for help, and Tanya realized that the woman had 0:10:06.000 --> 0:10:08.960 just escaped, and she ran into the Kentucky Fried Chicken 0:10:09.040 --> 0:10:11.800 right after her and started screaming that the woman had 0:10:11.840 --> 0:10:14.920 stolen her money. And everything was very confusing, but the 0:10:14.920 --> 0:10:17.720 police showed up and they couldn't figure out what was happening, 0:10:17.760 --> 0:10:18.920 so they arrested everyone. 0:10:19.000 --> 0:10:20.760 Here was this woman with blood. 0:10:20.440 --> 0:10:23.120 All over her, so they just took everyone into the station, 0:10:23.760 --> 0:10:29.720 and eventually the whole thing became unraveled and everyone involved 0:10:29.760 --> 0:10:33.839 in this case was jaw dropped. As this story unfolded, 0:10:34.280 --> 0:10:39.120 the ease and creativity with which Tanya thought of a 0:10:39.280 --> 0:10:42.040 plan that went, okay, how about I just kill this 0:10:42.080 --> 0:10:45.080 woman and then burned the body. And when you burn 0:10:45.160 --> 0:10:47.920 the body, the dental imprints are the things that last. 0:10:48.000 --> 0:10:50.960 And so because this woman had gone to the dentist 0:10:51.120 --> 0:10:54.800 under Tanya's name, then the world would conclude I'm dead 0:10:54.880 --> 0:10:57.640 and then I won't go to jail, and I was thinking, Wow, 0:10:57.720 --> 0:11:00.400 I almost went on a day with this woman. So 0:11:00.679 --> 0:11:02.640 this was one of the moments in my life when 0:11:02.640 --> 0:11:06.640 I was struck by how different people can be on 0:11:06.800 --> 0:11:11.240 the inside and how little insight we have into the 0:11:11.400 --> 0:11:16.600 cosmos of someone else's brain and mind. And happily this 0:11:16.760 --> 0:11:19.720 was positioned at the very beginning of my neuroscience career, 0:11:19.840 --> 0:11:23.480 and it influenced what I've been studying since. It has 0:11:23.480 --> 0:11:27.880 always struck me as fascinating the differences between people. Everyone 0:11:28.400 --> 0:11:32.000 is very different on the inside, sometimes much more than 0:11:32.040 --> 0:11:35.240 we expect. Now it turns out my father was a 0:11:35.280 --> 0:11:38.320 forensic psychiatrist and he was involved in most of the 0:11:38.800 --> 0:11:42.640 big mass murder cases in New Mexico where I grew up. 0:11:43.080 --> 0:11:45.680 One of them was a guy named William Wayne Gilbert 0:11:45.720 --> 0:11:50.040 who had killed three people cold blooded murder, and my 0:11:50.120 --> 0:11:53.240 father became the psychiatrist in that case. Now, I was 0:11:53.280 --> 0:11:56.760 a child and we went to some social event with 0:11:56.840 --> 0:12:00.240 my father, and I remember somebody saying to my father, 0:12:00.920 --> 0:12:04.960 Gilbert should not get the death penalty because presumably he 0:12:05.040 --> 0:12:08.640 feels terrible for what he's done. Presumably he feels deep 0:12:09.000 --> 0:12:13.520 regret for having killed three people. And as a kid, 0:12:13.760 --> 0:12:18.160 I remember totally feeling like I agreed with that, but 0:12:18.240 --> 0:12:21.680 I remembered my father's surprise at the statement, because my 0:12:21.760 --> 0:12:25.840 father had just spent hours in deposition with Gilbert, and 0:12:25.920 --> 0:12:29.319 he explained to this man genuinely and professionally that it 0:12:29.559 --> 0:12:35.000 simply wasn't the case that Gilbert had regret, because when 0:12:35.040 --> 0:12:38.400 William Wayne Gilbert would think about the idea of going 0:12:38.440 --> 0:12:41.920 to murder somebody, he said, he had the same level 0:12:42.040 --> 0:12:45.320 of excitement that he did as a child on the 0:12:45.400 --> 0:12:48.200 night before Christmas. That's what it felt like for him 0:12:48.480 --> 0:12:52.080 when he was thinking of killing someone. And so my 0:12:52.200 --> 0:12:54.880 father's point to this man and to me when I 0:12:54.920 --> 0:12:58.840 was eight years old, is you can't actually stick yourself 0:12:58.880 --> 0:13:01.440 in other people's shoes, as much as you'd like to. 0:13:01.880 --> 0:13:05.280 You think everybody's just like me, especially when you're a child, 0:13:05.880 --> 0:13:08.920 but in fact people can be quite different on the inside. 0:13:09.440 --> 0:13:11.920 And it turns out that the governor of New Mexico 0:13:11.960 --> 0:13:15.840 at the time commuted William Wayne Gilbert's sentence since he 0:13:15.920 --> 0:13:18.320 was sentenced to death, so Gilbert was not going to 0:13:18.400 --> 0:13:21.520 die now, and to show his gratitude, he managed to 0:13:21.600 --> 0:13:24.920 smuggle a pistol into the prison and led one of 0:13:24.920 --> 0:13:29.559 the most stunning prison breaks from a maximum security penitentiary 0:13:30.000 --> 0:13:33.720 where he let out several other murderers. And so for 0:13:33.800 --> 0:13:36.480 a few months it was very tense in New Mexico 0:13:36.840 --> 0:13:40.280 because there was this group of mass murderers on the loose. 0:13:40.600 --> 0:13:43.520 They were finally found again, but only after this very 0:13:43.559 --> 0:13:45.640 scary month or two where they were hiding out and 0:13:45.640 --> 0:13:48.600 taking hostages. So all this stuff really got me thinking 0:13:48.640 --> 0:13:53.280 from a young age about the differences between people. So 0:13:53.360 --> 0:13:56.840 I'll just mention one more anecdote here, my father deposed 0:13:56.840 --> 0:13:59.719 a guy who was on trial. This guy had gone 0:13:59.720 --> 0:14:03.079 into Western Union office and asked the clerk to use 0:14:03.080 --> 0:14:05.480 the phone, and the clerk had said, sorry, but the 0:14:05.520 --> 0:14:07.640 phone is only for the back office people and not 0:14:07.679 --> 0:14:12.480 for customers. So this guy jumped the counter and beat 0:14:12.559 --> 0:14:15.520 the clerk almost to death. And the interesting part is 0:14:15.520 --> 0:14:18.360 that he said to my father during the deposition, but 0:14:18.679 --> 0:14:21.440 anybody would have done the same thing in that situation, right, 0:14:22.160 --> 0:14:25.240 And he meant it. He was being genuine because we 0:14:25.320 --> 0:14:30.280 all have an internal model of the world what constitutes 0:14:30.600 --> 0:14:34.880 appropriate behavior in the world, and we assume that everyone 0:14:34.960 --> 0:14:38.520 else's model is the same as ours, and this guy 0:14:38.720 --> 0:14:43.440 genuinely could not imagine anyone having a different reaction in 0:14:43.520 --> 0:14:48.800 that circumstance. Now, when we think about the differences between people, 0:14:48.840 --> 0:14:53.000 were used to thinking about extreme cases like Tanya or 0:14:53.240 --> 0:14:56.800 William Wayne Gilbert or this guy in the Western Union office. 0:14:56.840 --> 0:15:01.440 These people, presumably have psychopathy paths make up about one 0:15:01.480 --> 0:15:05.200 percent of the population. These are people who simply don't 0:15:05.280 --> 0:15:08.480 care about your feelings. You're just an obstacle that they're 0:15:08.480 --> 0:15:10.960 trying to get around to get what they want. But 0:15:11.040 --> 0:15:14.120 this idea that other people can be different from you 0:15:14.320 --> 0:15:19.760 on the inside can be generalized. So take something like schizophrenia. 0:15:20.440 --> 0:15:24.200 You see a man on the street corner and he's yelling. 0:15:24.280 --> 0:15:27.000 He's in an angry dialogue with somebody who's not there. 0:15:27.080 --> 0:15:31.640 He's delusional, he's not in contact with reality. So in 0:15:31.680 --> 0:15:34.840 situations like this, you look at the man and you say, Okay, 0:15:35.240 --> 0:15:39.320 I guess that man's internal model isn't the same as mine. 0:15:39.360 --> 0:15:42.600 He's not experiencing reality the same way I do. So 0:15:42.680 --> 0:15:45.760 you might think, okay, I get that about different models 0:15:45.840 --> 0:15:49.400 on the inside for psychopaths and for people with schizophrenia, 0:15:49.440 --> 0:15:52.440 But otherwise the intuition is that the rest of us 0:15:52.480 --> 0:15:55.320 are all about the same. But there are some important 0:15:55.320 --> 0:15:58.040 things to note here. First, when it comes to something 0:15:58.160 --> 0:16:02.480 like psychopathy or schizophrenia, we tend to think about these 0:16:02.520 --> 0:16:06.560 as being categories, like Okay, that person's psychopathic and I'm not, 0:16:06.800 --> 0:16:10.320 or that person is schizophrenic and I'm not. But in fact, 0:16:10.840 --> 0:16:13.280 all of these things are now appreciated as living on 0:16:13.360 --> 0:16:18.040 a spectrum, so you have different degrees along the spectrum. 0:16:18.120 --> 0:16:22.320 So take psychopathy for example. There's a well used way 0:16:22.400 --> 0:16:25.240 to measure this. It's a questionnaire and you score a 0:16:25.240 --> 0:16:28.120 certain number of points on this from one to forty, 0:16:28.560 --> 0:16:31.280 and in the United States, if you're above a thirty, 0:16:31.600 --> 0:16:34.720 then you are labeled a psychopath. You don't want to 0:16:34.720 --> 0:16:38.240 be roommates with the guy who scores twenty nine on 0:16:38.320 --> 0:16:42.160 this test, even though they're not technically a psychopath, they 0:16:42.200 --> 0:16:46.200 share a lot of the fundamental characteristics, so it's a 0:16:46.320 --> 0:16:49.560 spectral issue. And by the way, this is the same 0:16:49.600 --> 0:16:52.920 with everything in psychiatry. This has been the direction of 0:16:52.960 --> 0:16:57.400 the Bible of psychiatry called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. 0:16:57.680 --> 0:17:00.520 It used to be all about categories, and now everything 0:17:00.600 --> 0:17:04.200 is about living on a spectrum, but let's keep drilling down. 0:17:04.560 --> 0:17:07.520 When we look at mental illnesses more generally, we find 0:17:07.600 --> 0:17:11.680 things that influence people's thoughts or feelings or behaviors, including 0:17:11.720 --> 0:17:16.119 not just things like schizophrenia or psychopathy, but you presumably 0:17:16.200 --> 0:17:22.560 know people with clinical depression or bipolar disorder, or anxiety disorder, 0:17:22.880 --> 0:17:27.760 or obsessive compulsive disorder or borderline or narcissistic or avoidant, 0:17:27.880 --> 0:17:32.000 or an eating disorder, or dissociated identity disorder or panic disorder, 0:17:32.320 --> 0:17:34.880 or many other things like that. There are at least 0:17:34.880 --> 0:17:38.200 one hundred and fifty seven of these in the Diagnostic 0:17:38.200 --> 0:17:43.120 and Statistical Manual, So it becomes increasingly difficult to assert 0:17:43.800 --> 0:17:48.840 that everybody is exactly like you on the inside. Despite 0:17:48.880 --> 0:17:53.080 superficial appearances, people can be very different in terms of 0:17:53.080 --> 0:17:55.920 what is happening on the inside. And if you've read 0:17:55.920 --> 0:17:58.159 my books or listen to my other podcasts, you know 0:17:58.280 --> 0:18:01.679 that when we see people with two strokes or brain 0:18:01.760 --> 0:18:04.800 injuries to different parts of the brain, it's not hard 0:18:04.840 --> 0:18:07.680 to say, oh, I guess their reality is a little 0:18:07.720 --> 0:18:11.040 bit different than mine. But it proves harder to think 0:18:11.080 --> 0:18:15.840 about this in terms of everybody that you know and love, 0:18:16.119 --> 0:18:19.720 because we assume that the people in our lives have 0:18:19.920 --> 0:18:22.359 essentially the same thing going on on the inside. That 0:18:22.400 --> 0:18:26.760 we do the same opinions, the same way of sense making, 0:18:26.800 --> 0:18:30.600 the same way of gathering meaning, the same political views 0:18:30.640 --> 0:18:34.520 on the world as you do, but they don't. Everyone 0:18:34.600 --> 0:18:38.439 that you know is having a slightly different reality going 0:18:38.480 --> 0:18:41.919 on than you are. We are very different people on 0:18:42.000 --> 0:18:44.600 the inside. Now, I want to be clear that I'm 0:18:44.640 --> 0:18:47.560 not just saying this as a philosophical claim. We can 0:18:47.640 --> 0:18:51.520 increasingly measure so many examples of this, and this is 0:18:51.520 --> 0:18:54.119 something I've worked on in my lab for most of 0:18:54.119 --> 0:18:58.199 my career. Neuroscience has always cared about the big disorders, 0:18:58.240 --> 0:19:02.399 the things that are most obvious and societally costly. But 0:19:02.480 --> 0:19:06.560 when we start looking at the more innocuous details, we 0:19:06.800 --> 0:19:10.879 uncover these clear and measurable ways that reality can be 0:19:10.920 --> 0:19:14.560 different inside different heads. So, for example, imagine that you 0:19:14.640 --> 0:19:17.360 and I and a bunch of other people are looking 0:19:17.800 --> 0:19:20.240 over Times Square in New York. We're standing on a 0:19:20.280 --> 0:19:24.000 corner and enjoying watching the crowd. So you open your 0:19:24.040 --> 0:19:26.159 eyes and there's the world and all its blues and 0:19:26.200 --> 0:19:29.240 golds and greens. But if you happen to be colorblind, 0:19:29.280 --> 0:19:32.520 you're seeing it differently than the person next to you. 0:19:32.560 --> 0:19:36.679 Maybe you can't distinguish reds from greens those look exactly 0:19:36.760 --> 0:19:38.840 the same to you. Or maybe you have a more 0:19:38.880 --> 0:19:41.879 extreme form of color blindness in which there are no 0:19:42.000 --> 0:19:44.720 colors at all, just shades of gray. So for you, 0:19:44.840 --> 0:19:47.280 in the person next to you, the internal experience can 0:19:47.320 --> 0:19:50.160 be quite different, even though you're looking at the same scene. 0:19:50.600 --> 0:19:53.080 And we now know that a small. 0:19:52.800 --> 0:19:56.960 Fraction of the female population has not just three types 0:19:56.960 --> 0:20:00.359 of color photoreceptors in their eyes and their retinas, but 0:20:00.880 --> 0:20:05.080 four types of color photoreceptors, which means they are seeing 0:20:05.280 --> 0:20:09.920 colors that the rest of us can't even imagine. This 0:20:09.960 --> 0:20:12.800 is called tetrachromacy, and I'll come back to this in 0:20:12.840 --> 0:20:15.160 a future episode, But the point I want to make 0:20:15.240 --> 0:20:17.920 now is that we might all be watching the same 0:20:18.040 --> 0:20:35.959 corner in Times Square, but having totally different internal experiences. 0:20:37.920 --> 0:20:39.920 This is the type of issue that I've been studying 0:20:39.920 --> 0:20:41.680 in my lab for many years, so you might have 0:20:41.760 --> 0:20:47.000 heard about my episode on synesthesia. In synesthesia, people have 0:20:47.080 --> 0:20:50.840 a blending of the senses. About three percent of the 0:20:50.880 --> 0:20:54.680 population will, for example, see a letter on a page 0:20:55.000 --> 0:20:58.679 and that'll trigger a color experience for them on the inside. 0:20:58.880 --> 0:21:02.400 So maybe s's a purple for you, and L triggers 0:21:02.400 --> 0:21:05.760 a green experience, and so on. It's different for every synesthete, 0:21:05.840 --> 0:21:09.280 and there are many forms of synesthesia. You might hear 0:21:09.320 --> 0:21:12.119 a sound and that triggers a visual experience, or you 0:21:12.200 --> 0:21:15.680 taste something and it puts a feeling on your fingertips. Essentially, 0:21:15.760 --> 0:21:19.080 any sense can end up having crosstalk with any other 0:21:19.160 --> 0:21:22.760 sense in these different forms of synesthesia. And my colleagues 0:21:22.800 --> 0:21:26.359 and I have documented dozens and dozens of forms throughout 0:21:26.359 --> 0:21:30.240 the population. Now, synesthesia is not considered a disease or 0:21:30.280 --> 0:21:34.760 a disorder. It is simply an alternative reality. The point 0:21:34.800 --> 0:21:38.440 is that people can have very different experiences on the inside, 0:21:38.600 --> 0:21:42.399 but to a synesthee, their experience is precisely as real 0:21:42.440 --> 0:21:45.919 as anything you might experience. So in neuroscience, this is 0:21:46.000 --> 0:21:49.159 just one more recent appreciation that from one person to 0:21:49.200 --> 0:21:51.639 the next, reality can be a little bit different. And 0:21:51.720 --> 0:21:53.879 let me give you one more example that's even newer, 0:21:54.200 --> 0:21:59.080 the issue of how we imagine a visual scene inside 0:21:59.080 --> 0:22:02.840 our heads. So I'm going to ask you to picture 0:22:03.040 --> 0:22:07.800 this picture a gray and white cat on a picnic 0:22:07.840 --> 0:22:13.199 table eating colorful cereal and looking at you suspiciously, So 0:22:13.359 --> 0:22:16.280 really picture that in your head now. There were two 0:22:16.400 --> 0:22:19.760 researchers who began looking at this question of mental imageries 0:22:19.800 --> 0:22:23.919 some years ago, Stephen Costlin and Zen and Felicition, and 0:22:23.960 --> 0:22:28.720 they ended up disagreeing very strongly. Coslin said, when you're 0:22:28.720 --> 0:22:32.720 imaging something, you're essentially running your visual cortex to see 0:22:32.720 --> 0:22:36.960 this like a movie. It's like vision. And Felician said, 0:22:37.200 --> 0:22:41.639 that's ridiculous. You're not seeing something. It's purely conceptual. It 0:22:41.680 --> 0:22:45.800 doesn't involve seeing in vision. And they both did experiments 0:22:45.840 --> 0:22:49.240 back and forth, and Felician said, look, you're insane. It's 0:22:49.240 --> 0:22:52.640 not stored like a picture, and Costlin said, no, you're insane. 0:22:52.680 --> 0:22:55.800 It's not stored like a proposition. You're actually seeing it. 0:22:56.119 --> 0:22:59.040 And it was very difficult for a conclusion to be 0:22:59.080 --> 0:23:02.800 reached here. Both argued passionately for their side of the argument, 0:23:03.080 --> 0:23:05.639 and this went on for twenty years in the literature. 0:23:06.480 --> 0:23:08.760 So why couldn't they come to an agreement on this. 0:23:09.640 --> 0:23:14.760 The answer is Coslin had what we now call hyper fantasia, 0:23:14.840 --> 0:23:18.720 which means he has extremely vivid mental imagery. When he 0:23:18.800 --> 0:23:23.560 imagines something, it's as vivid as real seeing. Now, this 0:23:23.680 --> 0:23:26.639 is the opposite of what Felician had, which is called 0:23:27.000 --> 0:23:31.840 a fantasia, where mental visual imagery is not present. He 0:23:31.840 --> 0:23:35.240 doesn't see anything in particular, He just has a concept, 0:23:35.560 --> 0:23:39.600 and all of this lives on a spectrum from hyperfantasia 0:23:39.640 --> 0:23:43.359 to a fantasia. Everyone in the population is somewhere on 0:23:43.760 --> 0:23:44.920 this spectrum. 0:23:45.040 --> 0:23:46.280 So think about this for a moment. 0:23:46.359 --> 0:23:51.000 Picture an ant crawling on a checkered tablecloth towards a 0:23:51.119 --> 0:23:55.080 jar of purple jelly. Are you closer to the hyper 0:23:55.119 --> 0:23:57.760 fantasia side, where you're seeing it like a movie, or 0:23:57.920 --> 0:24:01.000 closer to the a fantasia side where you can understand 0:24:01.000 --> 0:24:04.560