0:00 There are these experiments where they
0:01 trained people to experience anxiety but
0:04 as determination because exactly the
0:06 same physical state could be experienced
0:09 completely different. And what they
0:10 discovered is that at first it's really
0:12 hard but you practice practice practice
0:14 and then eventually becomes really
0:15 automatic. So the first thing to
0:17 understand is that Dr. Lisa Feldman
0:19 Barrett is a worldleading
0:20 neuroscientist. Her groundbreaking
0:22 research reveals that emotions like
0:24 anxiety and trauma are built by the
0:26 brain and we have the power to control
0:28 them. The story is that you're born with
0:30 these innate emotion circuits, but
0:32 you're not born with the ability to
0:33 control them. That's false. Really,
0:35 what's happening is that your brain is
0:37 not reacting. It's predicting. And every
0:40 action you take, every emotion you have
0:42 is a combination of the remembered past,
0:45 including any trauma. And so, you don't
0:47 have a sense of agency about it because
0:49 it happens really automatically, faster
0:51 than you can blink your eyes. How does
0:53 this change how we should treat trauma?
0:56 Sometimes in life, you are responsible
0:58 for changing something. Not because
1:00 you're to blame, but because you're the
1:02 only person who can. I mean, I had a
1:04 daughter who was clinically depressed,
1:06 was getting D's in school, she wasn't
1:08 sleeping, she was miserable. At first,
1:10 she was so resistant, but then she made
1:13 the decision that she wanted to be
1:14 helped. And did she recover? Yes, she
1:16 did. So, if you want to change who you
1:18 are, what you feel, understanding these
1:21 basic operating principles is the key to
1:24 living a meaningful life. So, what is
1:26 step one to being able to make that
1:27 change? So,
1:31 this has always blown my mind a little
1:32 bit. 53% of you that listen to this show
1:35 regularly haven't yet subscribe to the
1:37 show. So, could I ask you for a favor
1:39 before we start? If you like the show
1:40 and you like what we do here and you
1:42 want to support us, the free simple way
1:43 that you can do just that is by hitting
1:45 the subscribe button. And my commitment
1:47 to you is if you do that, then I'll do
1:48 everything in my power, me and my team,
1:50 to make sure that this show is better
1:52 for you every single week. We'll listen
1:53 to your feedback. We'll find the guest
1:55 that you want me to speak to and we'll
1:57 continue to do what we do. Thank you so
2:02 much. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, you have
2:06 a really remarkable twisting career
2:10 journey. It's almost quite difficult to
2:13 uh encapsulate in a particular mission
2:15 or a particular uh summary of the
2:17 journey you've been on and the the
2:19 twists and turns you've taken. But if if
2:22 I were to ask you now what mission
2:24 you're on with the work that you're
2:25 currently doing, are you able to
2:28 summarize
2:29 that? My goal is as a science
2:32 communicator is to try to take really
2:33 complicated science and present it in a
2:36 way that people can use. You know, maybe
2:39 they use it to entertain their friends
2:40 at a dinner party. Maybe they use it to
2:44 um help their kid who's, you know,
2:46 struggling with depression. That was
2:48 certainly in my case something that I
2:50 had to deal with. Maybe they're using it
2:52 to improve their workplace or improve
2:55 the productivity of their of their peeps
2:58 or whatever. The point being that that's
3:01 ultimately that's what science is for.
3:03 It's for, you know, living a better
3:06 life. And average everyday people
3:10 without PhDs can do that if they have
3:14 the right information.
3:16 I'm probably attempting to understand
3:20 how it is that a brain like ours that is
3:23 attached to a body like ours that is
3:26 pickled in a world like ours produces a
3:31 mind. What is it? What is happening that
3:35 allows you to have thoughts and feelings
3:39 and memories
3:41 um and and
3:44 actions and somebody from another
3:47 country, another culture also has a
3:50 mental life which looks nothing like
3:52 yours. How is it that the same kind of
3:56 brain plan with the same general kind of
3:59 body plan can produce such different
4:02 types of minds when they are when those
4:05 brains are wired in a sense finish
4:09 wiring themselves in cultural and
4:11 physical contexts that are so widely
4:13 different.
4:15 when you just talked about your pursuit
4:17 of understanding how a brain like ours
4:20 creates the mind and the reality that we
4:23 have. If I'm able to understand all of
4:25 that as many people who read your book
4:27 about the brain and emotions were able
4:29 to understand, what is it that it offers
4:31 me in my everyday life? Oh my god. It
4:33 offers you the opportunity to have more
4:35 agency in your life. And what does that
4:37 mean? It means you have more choice. It
4:39 means you have more control. It means
4:41 that you can architect your life. I
4:42 mean, you can't control everything that
4:44 happens to you. You can't control every
4:47 moment of feeling. Um, but you have more
4:50 control than you probably think you do.
4:52 Everybody has more control over what
4:55 they feel and what they do than they
4:57 think they do. That control doesn't look
5:01 the way we expect it to. It's much
5:04 harder to harness than we would like it
5:07 to be. Some people have more
5:10 opportunities for that control than
5:13 other people do, but everybody has the
5:15 opportunity to have more control. And of
5:19 course, the flip side is also more
5:20 responsibility
5:22 um for the way they live their lives.
5:25 And I think that's a really good thing.
5:28 And I think it's a really good thing now
5:30 when you know world events are swirling
5:33 around you and you feel like, you know,
5:35 you're just being buffeted around. Even
5:37 within that craziness, there is there
5:41 are opportunities
5:43 to to be more of an architect of your
5:46 own experience and your own life. I
5:50 think a lot of people find that um
5:54 optimistic and helpful. Yeah. Because
5:57 life can feel like we are a puppet and
5:59 we are just responding to what happens
6:01 around us. And if it rains outside then
6:04 we're sad. If person sends us a message,
6:06 then we're annoyed and that we're just
6:08 these sort of reactive creatures
6:10 reacting to whatever happens around us.
6:11 But you're telling me that if I have a
6:12 greater understanding of the brain and
6:14 how it works and emotions, then I can
6:16 seize back some of that control and live
6:18 a more intentional life. Yes, exactly.
6:20 And I think for me, I mean, I started
6:23 um I started my career studying the
6:27 nature of emotion, but really it became
6:29 a flashlight into understanding how a
6:32 brain works.
6:34 Why do we even have a brain? It's a very
6:37 expensive organ. That piece of meat
6:39 between your ears is the most expensive
6:42 metabolically the most expensive organ
6:44 you have. Um, so what's it good for?
6:47 What's its most basic function? How does
6:50 it work in relation to the body? I think
6:53 that certainly on your show, you've had
6:55 a number of people who talk about the
6:57 relationship between the brain and the
6:59 body in some way, but I think scientists
7:01 for a long
7:02 time forgot or ignored the fact that the
7:07 brain is attached to a body, right?
7:09 Because we don't feel all the drama like
7:11 right now in each in you, in me, in all
7:15 of our listeners, right? We all have
7:17 this like drama going on. It's really
7:20 quite intense and there's a lot of going
7:22 on and none of us are aware of it. I
7:24 hope if you are aware of it, I'm really
7:26 sorry. It probably means that something
7:28 is, you know, you're not feeling well
7:31 today. But it's a good thing that we're
7:33 not aware of what's going on inside our
7:34 own bodies most of the time because we'd
7:36 never pay attention to anything outside
7:37 our own skin again, right? But the
7:39 problem is that in science, it often
7:42 begins with starting with your own
7:43 subjective experience and then trying to
7:45 formalize that. And I mean, if you look
7:47 at any science, physics is like that,
7:49 too. You just have to go back several
7:51 hundred years or maybe a little longer
7:53 to to see it. And so, it turns out that
7:56 a lot of what you experience as
7:58 properties of the world, of the way the
8:00 world is, really is very rooted in your
8:03 brain's regulation of your body. Um, and
8:07 so I guess I'm I started with emotion,
8:11 but it really became a much larger
8:13 project to try to understand, well, what
8:16 is a brain? How is it structured? How
8:18 did it evolve? How does it work? What's
8:20 its most basic function? And where do
8:23 thoughts and feelings and actions,
8:26 perceptions, what role do they play in
8:28 that function? So, it's a bit flipping
8:31 the question, right? Most people start
8:33 with what is an emotion? What is a
8:36 thought? What is a memory? They define
8:38 it and then they go looking for its
8:40 physical basis in the brain or in the
8:43 body. That's a pretty bankrupt
8:46 perspective from I mean after a hundred
8:48 years there weren't really good answers.
8:51 So we flipped it around and we said okay
8:54 well given that we have the kind of
8:57 brain we
8:58 do what can it do? What does it do? And
9:02 in its normal functioning, how does it
9:05 produce mental events that in our
9:07 culture our thoughts and feelings and
9:09 perceptions and actions? In other
9:12 cultures, they're different
9:14 conglomerations of features. Right? So
9:16 for us, a thought and a feeling are
9:18 super distinct. We experience them as
9:21 very separate. In fact, really since the
9:24 time of Plato, we've had this kind of
9:26 narrative where, you know, the mind or
9:28 the brain is a battleground between your
9:31 thoughts and your feelings, right? In
9:34 for control of your action. If your
9:36 thoughts win, you are a rational
9:38 creature. You are a healthy creature.
9:42 You are a moral creature. If your
9:45 instincts and your emotions win, you
9:47 know, your inner beast, then you are
9:50 irresponsible. You are childish. You are
9:54 immoral. You are mentally ill. That's
9:57 the narrative that we work in. In some
9:59 cultures, thoughts and feelings are not
10:02 separate. They are
10:05 really, it's not that you have them at
10:07 the same time. It's that they are one
10:09 thing. They are features of the same
10:12 mental event. In some cultures, your
10:15 body and your mind are not separate.
10:18 There are no separate experiences for a
10:22 physical sensation versus a mental
10:24 feeling. They're really one thing. So
10:26 our minds are not the human nature. It's
10:30 just one human nature. And there are
10:31 other human natures too. And we have to
10:33 figure out
10:34 how general brain plan, a general body
10:38 plan for a neurotypical human produces
10:42 such wide variation
10:44 um depending on the cultural context in
10:47 which it grows. as it relates to
10:49 neuroscience and understanding the brain
10:51 and the way that we create reality. Was
10:53 there a Eureka moment for you where you
10:55 realize that most of us have it wrong or
10:59 that there's an underlying misconception
11:01 about the way that our brain creates our
11:03 reality? I would say yeah sure there was
11:06 a Eureka moment but it was a long slow
11:09 burn. When I was a graduate student, I
11:12 wasn't studying emotion. I was
11:15 studying the self. How do you think
11:19 about yourself? What is your self-esteem
11:21 like? How do you conceive of yourself?
11:24 Right? This is a an important topic in
11:27 psychology. And I was measuring
11:30 emotion as an outcome variable. And the
11:35 measurements weren't weren't the
11:37 measures weren't working. And I thought,
11:39 well, I need to be able to just
11:41 literally objectively measure when
11:43 someone is angry or when they're sad or
11:46 when they're happy. I don't want to have
11:48 to ask them because they could be wrong.
11:50 And in that phrasing of the question,
11:53 there's a presumption, right, that there
11:55 is an objective state called anger. That
11:58 generally most instances of anger will
12:01 look the same regardless of person and
12:03 context. And I very quickly realized
12:07 that there are no essences that
12:11 anybody's been able to discover. Right?
12:13 So recently in the last couple of years
12:16 um researchers did a metaanalysis which
12:19 is a big statistical summary of of
12:21 hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
12:23 experiments. And what they discovered is
12:26 that and this is just in urban cultures,
12:29 right? We're not even talking about
12:31 remote cultures now. Just in urban
12:33 cultures, when someone is angry, they
12:35 people scowl about 35% of the time when
12:37 they're angry. A scowl is like a like a
12:41 scowl like a right like you know you
12:43 knit your eyebrows, you you frown,
12:46 right? So it's okay. But that means 65%
12:49 of the time when people are angry
12:51 they're doing something else that's
12:52 meaningful with their
12:54 face. And half the time when people
12:57 scowl, they're not angry. They're
12:59 feeling something else. They could be
13:02 concentrating really hard. You could
13:04 have just told them a bad joke. They
13:06 could have a bad bout of gas. You know,
13:09 a scowl is not the expression of anger.
13:13 It is an expression of anger in some
13:16 contexts and it's also an expression of
13:19 other states in other contexts.
13:22 So what this means is that you know
13:25 there's no really strongly reliable
13:29 expression for anger that is specific to
13:31 anger. And the same is true for every
13:34 other emotion that's ever been studied.
13:37 It's really clear that you're in anger
13:39 or sadness or pick an emotion. You know
13:41 your heart rate can go up, it can go
13:42 down. It can stay the same. Your blood
13:44 pressure can go up. It can go down. It
13:46 can stay the same. the physiology that
13:49 is occurring in your body is related to
13:51 the your your brain's preparation for
13:54 particular behaviors. So let's start
13:56 with that then. So the the predictive
13:58 brain is this idea that I only pretty
14:00 much know from you. I'd never heard it
14:02 before. When we say the predictive
14:04 brain, what does that mean and what does
14:06 it not mean? So when you are living your
14:11 everyday life? Yeah. Like right now?
14:14 Like right now. So, right now, I'm
14:16 guessing that I'm saying things to you
14:19 and um you're perceiving what I'm saying
14:22 and then you're reacting to it. That's
14:24 how it feels to you, right? Yes. Okay.
14:26 And that's how it feels to me, too. So,
14:28 we sense and then we react. That's the
14:32 way most people experience themselves in
14:35 the world. That's not actually what's
14:38 happening under the hood. Really what's
14:40 happening is that the brain, your brain
14:43 is not reacting, it's
14:46 predicting. And what that means is if we
14:50 were to stop time right now, just freeze
14:52 time, your brain would be in a state and
14:56 it would be
14:59 remembering past experiences that are
15:03 similar to this state as a way of
15:07 predicting what to do next. Like
15:10 literally in the next moment, should
15:12 your eyes move? Should your heart rate
15:15 go up? Should your breathing change?
15:18 Should your blood vessels dilate or
15:20 should they constrict? Should you
15:22 prepare to stand? Right? Movements. And
15:26 these movements, the preparation for
15:28 movement, literal copies of those
15:32 signals become predictions for what you
15:35 will see and hear and smell and taste
15:39 and think and feel.
15:43 So under the hood, your brain is
15:45 predicting what movements it should
15:48 engage in next and as a consequence what
15:51 you will experience because of those
15:54 movements. So you act first and then you
15:59 sense. You don't sense and then react.
16:02 You predict action and then you sense.
16:08 So give me a example which brings this
16:10 to light of how my brain is predicting
16:14 and then taking action. Okay. So right
16:17 now you and I are having a
16:19 conversation and I'm speaking and you're
16:22 listening
16:24 and you're what what what's really
16:27 happening in your brain is that based
16:31 on many gazillion
16:36 repetitions of listening to
16:39 language. Your brain is predicting,
16:42 literally predicting every single word
16:45 that will come out of my
16:50 Yeah. Okay. And how surprising would it
16:54 have been if I didn't say mouth, I said
16:57 some other orifice of my body that words
17:00 were coming out of. That would have been
17:01 pretty
17:02 surprising because your brain is
17:04 predicting
17:05 that. your brain is always predicting
17:09 and it's correcting those predictions
17:11 when they're
17:13 incorrect. And you know, I I have this
17:16 um video that I often show when I'm
17:18 giving a talk to scientists or to
17:21 civilians, giving a talk and I I it
17:26 creates a situation where they can
17:29 predict something and they can they can
17:32 feel that a prediction is not just this
17:34 abstract kind of thought. It's your
17:37 brain is is literally changing the
17:40 firing of its own sensory neurons to
17:44 anticipate incoming sensation. So you
17:47 start to feel these sensations before
17:50 the signals actually arrive for you to
17:53 perceive them. You start to have the
17:55 experience before the world gives you
17:57 those signals. I read I think it was in
18:00 your book but it might have been
18:01 elsewhere about the example of being
18:03 thirsty.
18:04 Yes. So, um, when you, um, drink, so say
18:09 you're super thirsty and you drink a big
18:13 glass of water, when do you stop being
18:15 thirsty? Almost
18:17 immediately. But actually, it takes 20
18:19 minutes for that water to be absorbed
18:22 into your bloodstream and make its way
18:24 to the brain to tell the brain that you
18:28 are no longer in need of fluid. Because
18:32 across millions of opportunities, you
18:35 have learned that certain movements now
18:39 and certain um sensory signals now will
18:43 result in that mental state. Or here's
18:47 another
18:48 example. So right now, keep your eyes on
18:51 me. You're looking right at me. And in
18:52 your mind's eye, I want you to imagine
18:55 um a Macintosh apple. Like a not a
18:59 computer, but like an actual piece of
19:01 fruit. Okay. Can you do it? Yeah. Can
19:04 you see it? Yeah. Um what color is it?
19:07 Green. Okay. Does it have any red? No.
19:10 Okay. So, it's a Granny Smith apple.
19:13 Yeah. Okay. What does it taste like?
19:15 Like, imagine imagine grabbing it. Yeah.
19:19 biting into it, hearing the crunch of
19:21 the apple. What does it taste like? It's
19:24 like sweet. Like a little tart, maybe.
19:27 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is it juicy? It's very
19:29 juicy. Yeah. Okay. So, if I were imaging
19:32 your brain right now, what I would see
19:34 is I would see changes in the signal
19:37 that is um related to neural activity in
19:40 your visual cortex even though there is
19:42 no apple in front of you. And I would
19:45 see a change in activity in your um
19:48 auditory cortex even though you didn't
19:51 really hear the crunch. My mouth is
19:53 watering as well. And your mouth is
19:54 watering. And in fact, every time you
19:57 sit down for a meal, your um brain
19:59 directs your saliva glands to produce
20:03 more saliva to prepare you to eat and um
20:07 digest the food. So that usually happens
20:11 in advance of even sitting down to a
20:14 meal. That is all prediction. That's all
20:17 of that is your brain preparing itself
20:20 for what's coming. Um because predicting
20:24 and correcting is a much more efficient
20:26 way to run a nervous system, really any
20:29 system, than reacting to the world.
20:32 Here's another example. Do you drink
20:34 coffee? Yes. Okay. Do you drink coffee
20:36 every day at the same time? Usually.
20:39 Yeah. Okay. And are you one of these
20:41 people that if you miss having coffee at
20:44 that time, you get a headache? I mean,
20:46 it's happened before. Yes. Well, I used
20:49 to be a person who drank a lot of
20:52 coffee. And um and I love coffee, but I
20:55 don't drink it anymore. But I loved it.
20:56 And I drank it always at the same time
20:58 every day. And if I didn't drink it, I
21:02 would get a at that time of day, I would
21:04 get a massive
21:05 headache. And the reason why, and this
21:08 is true really of every medicine you
21:10 take, every everything which anything
21:12 which affects your physiology, if you do
21:14 it on a regular basis, your brain will
21:16 come to expect it. And what that means,
21:19 come to expect it, is that coffee has
21:23 chemicals in it that will constrict your
21:26 blood vessels um everywhere. But in the
21:30 brain, the brain is attempting to keep
21:33 its to keep the blood flow pretty
21:37 constant and even. And so if every day
21:40 at 8:00 in the morning, you're drinking
21:44 something that's going to constrict your
21:45 blood vessels, then at 7:55
21:48 approximately, I don't know the exact
21:50 timing, but a little bit before uh you
21:52 know, 8, your brain will dilate the
21:55 blood vessels in preparation for that
21:58 constriction. So they remain constant
22:01 and if you don't drink that substance
22:03 then you have this big dilation and you
22:06 get a very very bad headache.
22:09 I was just wondering then about as you
22:11 were talking I thought you were going to
22:12 talk about how sometimes when I set an
22:15 alarm I seem to wake up like 5 minutes
22:16 before the alarm. Yeah, sure. That's an
22:18 example. Here's another example.
22:20 Exercise. Okay. If you wanna if you want
22:24 to play tennis better, if you want to
22:26 run a a faster mile, what do you do?
22:30 Train. Train. And you do the same thing
22:32 over and over and over and over again.
22:34 And you get better and faster and you
22:36 burn fewer calories. You get more
22:38 efficient. Why? Because your brain is
22:40 predicting really well. That's what
22:43 muscle memory is. It's not literally a
22:45 memory in your muscles. It's a memory in
22:47 your brain. Your brain is controlling
22:49 your muscles. And so if you practice the
22:53 same set of movements over and over and
22:56 over again, you just get really
22:57 efficient at them because your brain is
22:59 able to predict better. Now, if you're
23:02 somebody who's exercising because you
23:04 want to become healthier or you want to
23:06 lose weight or you right, you don't want
23:09 to practice the same exercise over and
23:12 over and over again because you will be
23:14 burning fewer calories because you're
23:17 being efficient. That's the goal, right?
23:19 So instead, you do interval training,
23:22 right? If somebody's calling out to you
23:24 every 30 seconds a different set of
23:26 movements and you can't predict what
23:28 they are, then your your brain will make
23:31 a prediction. It'll be wrong. You'll
23:33 have to adjust and so you end up burning
23:36 more calories and you end up throwing
23:38 yourself out of balance um which we call
23:41 alostasis. So you become disregulated
23:43 and then you your brain has to work to
23:45 get itself back in again. And so that's
23:47 a different kind of workout. These two
23:50 different kinds of workouts are
23:51 completely predicated on the fact that
23:54 sometimes you want to be able to predict
23:56 better. Sometimes you want to be able to
23:58 disrupt yourself and get back into the
24:00 pocket quickly. Right? So basically
24:04 you're learning how to um take in
24:08 prediction error things signals you
24:10 didn't predict and adjust to them.
24:13 What does this say about the nature of
24:16 trauma and other mental health illnesses
24:19 like depression, anxiety, etc. Because
24:22 is this a misfiring of my predictions? I
24:25 say this because predictions reliant on
24:27 something happening in the past and
24:29 forming a pattern like a pattern
24:30 recognition system. So if I grew up and
24:32 there were certain patterns that are now
24:36 not the case, so if I grew up and every
24:38 time a man walked into the room, he hit
24:39 me. And now when a man walks into the
24:41 room and I'm 35 years old, I'm getting
24:43 that same sort of prediction in my
24:45 brain. So I've got a fear of men, for
24:47 example. Is this does this somewhat
24:49 explain childhood trauma and why it's so
24:52 hard to shake and why as adults we can
24:54 sometimes have dysfunctional lives?
24:58 I would say as a general principle, yes.
25:02 Um there are a lot of you know the devil
25:05 is in the details, right? But yeah,
25:07 sure. Um, so trauma is not something
25:10 that happens in the world to
25:13 you. Everything you experience is a
25:16 combination of the remembered past and
25:17 the sensory present. So there could be
25:20 an adverse event that occurs. You're in
25:22 an earthquake. Someone dies who's close
25:25 to you. Something bad happens to you.
25:28 Someone hurts you in some way. Um, there
25:31 could be an adverse event that is not
25:34 traumatic to you because you're not
25:38 you're not using past experiences to
25:40 make sense of it as a
25:43 trauma. On the other hand, something
25:46 that is could be like an everyday
25:49 experience to somebody else to
25:52 you, it links to a a set of memories
25:57 that are very traumatic. We're very
25:59 traumatic. those events were very
26:00 traumatic. Um, and so to you it is a
26:03 trauma. So trauma is not an objective
26:06 thing in the world. It's also not all in
26:08 your head. It's a rel trauma is a
26:11 property of the relation between what
26:13 has happened to you in the past and what
26:15 is occurring in the present. So here's
26:17 an example. There is an anthropologist
26:20 who works at Emory University and she
26:23 studies um people um in in a lot of
26:27 different cultures and she studies
26:28 trauma in a lot of different cultures.
26:30 And there was this one girl that she she
26:33 wrote about, a case study of a girl
26:35 named Maria um who was a young
26:38 adolescent
26:39 girl and she lived in a culture where it
26:44 was more normative for men
26:48 to
26:50 physically be very physical with women
26:54 and and girls.
26:56 So in our culture, we would we would say
26:59 it's physical abuse, but in her culture,
27:03 this is just what men did. She didn't
27:06 exper would slap her around and she
27:10 didn't like it, but she didn't show any
27:12 sign of trauma. The way she made sense
27:15 of it was that men are just It
27:18 was very much a this is not about me,
27:21 this is about them. It's not pleasant.
27:25 But she slept okay. Her grades were okay
27:28 in school. She had friends. She didn't
27:31 have any signs of trauma at
27:34 all. Then she watched
27:37 Oprah and she heard all of these women
27:40 talk about having been the subject of
27:45 physical abuse from their boyfriends or
27:49 their fathers or, you know, their
27:51 husbands.
27:53 And
27:54 she recognized the similarity in the
28:00 physical circumstances of these women's
28:03 descriptions and and her physical
28:05 circumstances. And she also observed
28:09 them
28:10 experiencing traum traum like you know
28:13 symptoms of trauma. And all of a sudden
28:16 she started to um have difficulty
28:20 sleeping and she her grades dropped and
28:23 she had trouble concentrating and she
28:26 became socially withdrawn.
28:29 her way of making
28:31 meaning, her way of, if you think about
28:36 physical movements as actions, she made
28:40 different meaning of those actions and
28:43 she experienced
28:45 trauma where she didn't before. Now, if
28:49 you're somebody who believes that there
28:50 is an objective world out there where,
28:54 you know, cause and effect, Yeah. that
28:57 that really there was some kind of
28:58 latent trauma in her and she didn't
29:01 experience it before but then it was
29:03 like triggered and then she be you could
29:06 tell a whole story like that and people
29:08 do tell whole stories like that but
29:10 that's not what the best scientific
29:12 evidence suggests is happening. What's
29:14 happening is that the
29:17 physical movements were the same. The
29:21 psychological experience of those
29:23 movements was different because
29:26 experience is a combination of the
29:30 sensory present, the physical present
29:32 and the remembered past. And the you
29:37 need both in order to have a particular
29:40 kind of experience. So the way to
29:42 describe what happened to Maria's
29:44 trajectory was that she experienced
29:48 something as an
29:50 unfortunate aspect of like physical life
29:55 and then it became about her. It became
29:59 something not not this person was doing
30:01 something bad but this person was doing
30:04 something bad to her because of who she
30:07 is. And she was also shown how she
30:09 should be responding to that by watching
30:11 Oprah's show and watching these other
30:12 individuals responding in a certain way.
30:14 Right? So it became about her as a
30:18 person, not just about, you know, her
30:20 stepfather was an And if you
30:23 think about it, what we do in this
30:25 culture when when people go into therapy
30:27 for trauma, right, is we're attempting
30:29 to to actually reverse the narrative.
30:33 So, we try to teach people that it's not
30:36 when something traumatic happens to
30:38 them. It's, and I want to be really
30:41 clear what I'm saying, right? I'm not
30:43 saying that when people experience
30:45 trauma, it's their fault. I'm not in any
30:48 way saying they're culpable for what's
30:51 happened to them. But sometimes in
30:55 life, you are responsible for changing
30:58 something, not because you're to blame,
31:02 but because you're the only person who
31:05 can. The responsibility falls to
31:08 you. And so in this culture, we try to
31:12 teach people who've experienced trauma
31:15 that they can experience those physical
31:17 events that happened to them in the past
31:19 in some other way.
31:22 And when they do, they no longer feel
31:25 traumatized anymore. My mind's a little
31:28 bit blown for a number of different
31:30 reasons because it's a real paradigm
31:32 shift to think that we are giving
31:34 meaning to the thing that happened in
31:35 our past and sometimes that meaning is
31:37 coming from watching other people give
31:38 it meaning and we're inheriting that
31:40 meaning that oh yes, that's called
31:42 cultural inheritance. It's like a
31:44 cultural it's like a contagion.
31:47 So it turns out that you know there's
31:50 there's one kind of old evolutionary
31:52 theory right this is called the modern
31:55 synthesis where inheritance is really
31:58 your genes you inherit in you whatever
32:00 you inherit you inherit by your genes
32:02 and then natural selection you know
32:05 chooses some gene patterns and not
32:08 others and and that's really how
32:10 inheritance works across
32:13 generations. Most evolutionary
32:15 biologists don't don't hold to that view
32:18 anymore because for the most part there
32:21 are many many ways to inherit things and
32:23 a lot of what we think of as inheritance
32:25 is really more what's called epigenetic
32:29 meaning it doesn't really involve DNA
32:31 very much and I would say the way I like
32:34 to say it is that we have the kinds of
32:37 nature that requires a nurture we have
32:39 the kind of genes that require
32:42 experience
32:43 before anything is wired into our
32:45 brains. And most of our characteristics
32:48 work that way. Very few characteristics
32:51 work just by genes alone. What always
32:54 happens in a neurotypical uh brain is
32:57 that you're born with your brain
32:59 incomplete. Right? An adult brain has
33:03 has this we we say that it's wired to
33:06 its world. That world includes its own
33:08 your own body. Um, but a baby um is not
33:12 a baby's brain is not a miniature adult
33:14 brain. It's a brain that's waiting for
33:16 wiring instructions from the world and
33:19 from its own body. So your brain is
33:22 wired for you to see out of eyes that
33:25 are the exact distance of your eyes from
33:28 each other. If somehow, you know,
33:31 magically we could transplant your brain
33:32 into somebody else's skull, you would
33:35 not be able to see out of that skull.
33:37 You would not be able to see out of
33:38 those eyes because they're not in the
33:40 right place. You hear with ears. You
33:45 your ability to hear comes from signals
33:48 that are shaped by the shape of your
33:51 ear. So your brain is wired to hear out
33:54 of these ears. Not any ears, these ears.
33:58 Similarly, you as a baby, you are taught
34:02 the meanings of physical signals. You're
34:05 taught how to make sense of these
34:07 things. That's called cultural
34:09 inheritance. Many things that we think
34:12 of as hardwired into the brain are
34:15 actually culturally inherited across
34:18 generations. That's how people survive
34:21 in a
34:22 particular environment. You know, so
34:25 like in the 1800s and 1900s when
34:28 explorers would go off and they would go
34:30 off to Antarctica or here or there and
34:32 they would very quickly die. The Inuit
34:35 live there, they live perfectly fine.
34:36 How? Well, because they had culturally
34:38 inherited knowledge. We're
34:41 always transmitting
34:45 um knowledge to each
34:47 other and that knowledge becomes fodder
34:52 for our own predictions. So your
34:54 predictions don't just come from your
34:57 personal experience. They also come from
34:59 you watching television, you talking to
35:02 guests, you reading books, watching
35:05 movies. Um also your brain like most um
35:10 human brains can do something really
35:12 fantastic which is you can take bits and
35:15 pieces of past experience and put them
35:18 together in a brand new way so that you
35:21 can use the past to experience something
35:25 new that you've never experienced
35:26 before.
35:28 You talked a second ago about therapists
35:30 try and make you think about the past
35:32 differently, but I do think there's an
35:35 underlying belief in our culture and
35:36 society and on social media that if
35:40 something happened to you, almost like
35:41 this Freudian approach of if this
35:42 happens to you, this is who you become.
35:45 And I was reading that book, The Courage
35:47 to be Disliked over Christmas. And it
35:48 kind
35:49 of it changed my view on this quite
35:53 profoundly and in an important way
35:54 because it helped me to understand. And
35:56 I think it basically says that what
35:58 happens to us doesn't create who we are.
36:00 We use what happened to us and we apply
36:02 meaning to it which then determines the
36:04 behavior we have. And really
36:06 interestingly in that it means that many
36:07 of the beliefs I have about myself, who
36:09 I say I am, my identity and therefore
36:11 like the ways that I behave every day,
36:13 whether they're productive or
36:15 unproductive are actually
36:17 just choices I've made to apply meaning
36:20 to the past. Does that make sense? It's
36:24 completely makes sense. And this is
36:26 really this is such like a profound I
36:28 don't know if the whoever's listening
36:29 now understands what I'm saying here but
36:32 we said at the start of this
36:33 conversation you go through life
36:34 thinking you're a puppet and you're
36:35 being controlled by what happened to you
36:37 who you are your identity but actually
36:39 your identity is just this this
36:42 construction
36:44 of meaning that you've given to the past
36:47 so to serve your purpose now as it says
36:49 in the book. Yes, I would say it
36:51 slightly differently, but the message is
36:53 the same. I think
36:56 um there are in the sensory present,
37:00 right? There are sightes, there are
37:02 sounds, there are smells, some stuff's
37:04 going on inside your own body, right?
37:07 And these signals are are going to your
37:10 brain. They have no inherent
37:12 psychological meaning. They have no
37:14 inherent emotional meaning. They have no
37:16 inherent mental meaning.
37:18 What gives them
37:20 meaning is the are your memories from
37:24 the past. You are creating you are a
37:27 meaning
37:28 maker. Meaning isn't a set of features
37:32 like a dictionary definition. So meaning
37:35 the meaning of this cup isn't that it
37:38 it's made of metal and that I mean we
37:41 certainly can talk about those features,
37:42 but the meaning of this cup in this
37:45 moment is what I do with it. So it could
37:48 be a vessel for drinking. It could be a
37:50 weapon. It could be, you know, a flower
37:53 holder. It could be uh a measuring cup.
37:57 It the meaning of the vessel is what I
38:02 do with it in the moment. That's its
38:05 meaning. And so the meaning of the
38:09 vessel isn't in the
38:11 vessel. And it's also not only in my
38:14 head. The meaning is the transaction.
38:18 It's the relationship between this the
38:21 features of this vessel, this object and
38:25 the signals in my brain which are
38:28 creating my actions. In fact, even the
38:30 fact that this is a solid
38:34 object, the property of
38:36 solidity is not in the object. It's
38:39 because I have a body of a certain type
38:43 with certain features that makes me
38:47 experience this as solid. The solidity
38:49 isn't in me and it's not in the object.
38:52 It's in the relationship between the
38:54 two. That means everything everything
38:58 you experience is partly of your own
39:02 making. You don't have a sense of agency
39:04 about it because it happens really
39:06 automatically. It's happening
39:08 automatically now as we're talking. It's
39:11 happening faster than you can blink your
39:13 eyes,
39:15 but it's still happening. And that means
39:19 if you are partly even if you even
39:22 though you don't have a sense of
39:24 agency you are
39:28 partly in
39:30 control and also therefore responsible
39:34 for the meaning that is being
39:38 made. And when I said at the outset of
39:40 our conversation that my goal was to try
39:43 to, you know, as a science communicator
39:45 was to try to explain to people
39:49 that they have more control over their
39:52 lives. They have more control over who
39:55 they are in any given moment than they
39:58 think they do to give them more agency
40:01 in their lives. This is this is exactly
40:04 what I mean.
40:07 You you don't have an enduring
40:10 identity. You are who you are in the
40:13 moment of your
40:15 action. And actions are a combination of
40:18 the remembered past, so stuff your brain
40:21 is using to
40:22 predict that's how it's that your
40:24 brain's assembling super
40:27 automatically and the sensory present.
40:30 Right? So if you want to change who you
40:32 are, you want to change what you feel,
40:35 you want to change what your impact is
40:36 on someone
40:38 else, you have a couple of choices. You
40:42 can try to go back into the past and
40:45 change the meaning of what's happened
40:47 before so that you'll remember
40:50 differently. You'll predict differently
40:51 in the future. That's what psychotherapy
40:53 is. That's what you know, heartfelt
40:56 conversations at two o'clock in the
40:58 morning or with your friends or
40:59 whatever. That's really hard
41:02 Doesn't doesn't always work so well. The
41:05 other thing that you can do though is if
41:07 you realize that whatever you experience
41:10 now becomes the seeds for predictions
41:13 later, then you can invest in creating
41:18 new experiences quite deliberately for
41:20 yourself. Now you can expose yourself to
41:23 new ideas. You can expose yourself to
41:26 people who are different than you. You
41:28 can practice cultivating particular
41:30 experiences like you would practice any
41:33 skill. And that
41:35 will any
41:38 new concepts you learn, new experiences
41:41 you have in the moment, if you practice
41:44 them, they become automatic predictions
41:47 in the future. So let me take that and
41:50 try and apply it to this example of this
41:52 silver cup in my hand. So psychotherapy
41:56 would try and go back into the past and
41:59 explain to me why this actually isn't
42:01 something I should drink out of and that
42:03 it could be other things. Whereas what
42:05 you're saying is another approach is if
42:07 I go and get some flowers right now and
42:09 I put them in there, I'm creating a new
42:11 prediction for the future because I've
42:13 created a new pattern in the present of
42:14 this actually being a vase for flowers.
42:18 And I can start to create a new pattern
42:19 that silver cups like this one aren't
42:22 just for drinking out of. They are also
42:24 vasees for flowers. Exactly. Okay. So, I
42:27 can either go back in the past and try
42:28 and convince myself that the cup isn't a
42:30 cup. Or I can in the present moment
42:32 create a new pattern which will mean
42:35 that in the future my brain will predict
42:36 next time it sees a silver cup. It won't
42:38 just think drink out of it Steve. It
42:39 will think pop some flowers in it.
42:40 Right? And remember it's it's actually
42:43 the thinking comes after the action.
42:45 Right? So what will happen is the next
42:48 time that you are approaching a table
42:49 where a silver cup might be your brain
42:51 will already be starting to prepare the
42:54 actions to go get the flowers and then
42:56 you will think oh right I can use this
42:59 as a oh look there's a great vase right
43:02 so in your brain it's action your first
43:05 your brain is controlling it's
43:08 preparing the actions of the visca what
43:11 we call visceral motor so does your
43:13 heart rate need to change do your blood
43:15 vessels muscles need to dilate? Do you
43:16 need to breathe differently? It's
43:18 basically anticipating the needs of the
43:20 body and attempting to meet those needs
43:22 before they arise. That supports your
43:25 physical movements, right? So, if you're
43:27 going to if you're walking over
43:29 somewhere to pick up some flowers and
43:32 cut the stems and whatever that those
43:34 are all physical movements that require
43:35 glucose and oxygen and like so all
43:38 of that has to get prepared in advance,
43:40 milliseconds before the actions start to
43:43 be prepared. So it's not what you think
43:45 determines what you feel. It's what you
43:48 prepare to
43:49 do determines your thoughts and your
43:52 feelings and the sights and sounds and
43:54 smells and sensations. That's how it
43:56 really works under the hood. So meaning
43:59 is in terms of what you
44:02 do and then as a consequence of that it
44:06 meaning is a a consequence it becomes
44:08 what you feel and what you think and so
44:10 on. So let me give you some specific
44:12 examples then. So if I'm scared of
44:14 spiders, how would I go about overcoming
44:18 that fear of spiders using route number
44:21 two that you described there?
44:24 So one of the ways that you change to
44:27 change predictions, you can't just will
44:29 yourself to change a prediction. I am
44:31 really afraid of
44:33 bees. I I had a traumatic experience
44:37 when I was five. I'm afraid of bees. I
44:40 know a lot about bees. I'm actually a
44:43 gardener and I I and I know a lot about
44:47 the evolutionary biology of bees. But
44:50 when I am outside, if a bee comes
44:53 around, my first reaction is to either
44:55 run or to freeze. Right? I'm afraid of
44:59 bees. I could talk to myself until the
45:02 cows come home. It won't matter. I
45:04 can't. Right? So, what I have to do is
45:06 dose myself with prediction error.
45:09 Meaning I have to interact with bees in
45:13 a way that changes my
45:16 actions which will change my lived
45:19 experience. And I can't just do it all
45:21 at once. It's not like a good idea would
45:24 not be for me to say would not have been
45:26 for me to um go to like um somebody who
45:29 has beehives and you know put on a suit
45:32 and go work. I mean that would be like
45:34 overwhelming, right? So
45:36 instead, maybe I don't
45:39 run. Maybe I stand and watch. Maybe I
45:43 get closer to a bee. Maybe I plant
45:47 bushes and flowers that bees like a lot
45:50 to bring bees to me so that I can sit
45:54 and just be around them while they're
45:56 buzzing and doing their thing. Maybe I
45:59 deliberately let myself get
46:01 stung at some point, which I did. But
46:05 you know you're dosing yourself with
46:08 your brain is making a set of
46:09 predictions. Those
46:11 predictions there are a set of
46:14 predictions. That means your brain isn't
46:16 preparing one action. It's preparing
46:18 multiple actions. So you need to prove
46:21 to your brain that those predictions
46:24 are wrong. Yes. So exactly you need you
46:28 are setting up circumstances so you can
46:30 prove to yourself that your predictions
46:32 are wrong. If you're predicting well you
46:35 have a few action plans. If you're
46:38 predicting
46:39 poorly let's say overgeneralizing maybe
46:42 you have a hundred plans. It's like if
46:43 there's tremendous uncertainty your
46:45 brain doesn't know which action plan to
46:48 so there might be many of them right
46:51 sensory signals are coming into your
46:54 brain from the sensory surfaces of your
46:56 body from your retinas from your cookia
46:58 you've got sensory surfaces on your skin
47:01 inside your body in your muscle cells
47:03 all these signals coming to your brain
47:04 they help
47:06 select which prediction signal will be
47:10 completed as action
47:13 and lived
47:15 experience. Okay. So let's say you put
47:19 yourself deliberately in in a situation
47:21 where the incoming signals will
47:25 not select any prediction because
47:28 there's too much unpredicted signal
47:31 there. It's error. There's another name
47:33 in psychology for taking in prediction
47:36 error. Exposure therapy learning. Oh
47:41 okay. Yeah. Exposure therapy which is a
47:43 kind of learning. All learning all
47:46 learning is you taking in prediction
47:50 sign prediction error signals you didn't
47:53 predict or there's no signal that you
47:56 did predict. You predicted a signal it's
47:58 not there. So what you do is you set up
48:01 situations for yourself that you will
48:05 take in signals that are novel. Right?
48:09 And this seems like an easy thing to
48:12 do. We people actually sometimes seek
48:16 novelty. All right. But too much
48:20 novelty, it it is not necessarily a good
48:23 thing all the time. Particularly if you
48:27 know you're
48:29 metabolically it's expensive
48:30 metabolically to take in prediction
48:32 error and learn something new. Like the
48:34 biggest costs that your brain expends
48:37 energy on are moving your body, learning
48:41 something new, and dealing with
48:43 persistent
48:44 uncertainty. Those are really expensive
48:47 things for us. So, if you're
48:49 metabolically encumbered in some way,
48:52 say you're depressed or you have anxiety
48:55 disorder or maybe you have heart disease
48:58 or diabetes or you're living under
49:01 chronic stress, you don't have the
49:03 spoons necessarily to take in prediction
49:06 error. You're just going to go with your
49:08 predictions. You aren't going to learn.
49:09 You aren't going to be able to update
49:11 those predictions. You're going to be
49:13 stuck. You're going to be stuck in your
49:16 head, right?
49:18 every experience, every action a
49:20 combination of the remembered present,
49:22 the remembered past, the predictions and
49:24 the sensory present. But the sensory
49:27 present is there just to select which
49:31 remembered past you're going to act
49:34 on. And
49:36 sometimes under in moments of great
49:40 metabolic
49:41 load, the brain just goes with its own
49:44 predictions and ignores what's out there
49:46 in the world. I was thinking earlier on
49:48 as you were speaking about this sort of
49:51 social contagion where we can apply
49:54 meaning to our lives and what happened
49:56 to us and then consequently make
49:59 ourselves sad because we see how other
50:01 people on Tik Tok or Instagram are
50:03 feeling. And it made me think that you
50:06 must you must think the world is crazy
50:08 to some degree. You must see social
50:10 contagion in the world where suddenly
50:12 everybody becomes traumatized because
50:14 trauma's become almost popular, you
50:16 know, to think about what happened to
50:18 you and create meaning to it and then
50:19 suffer that meaning. But there's other
50:21 types of social contagion where which
50:24 are spreading through society. I mean,
50:26 young people are getting more and more
50:27 anxious. They're getting more and more
50:28 depressed. We're self diagnosing
50:30 ourselves with different illnesses and
50:32 different things.
50:34 But now you've explained to me how the
50:36 brain works, I'm thinking, gosh, as a
50:38 society, we are bonkers.
50:41 Well, well, we're living out lies. Yeah.
50:44 I think I guess the way I I I do I do
50:48 find it frustrating at times, but but
50:50 but only because I think we are meaning
50:54 makers as an animals are meaning maker.
50:57 We create meaning. We create meaning by
50:59 virtue of living like by virtue of
51:02 interacting with with things in the
51:04 world by interacting with each
51:06 other. Very few meanings are
51:10 given that that is that they exist
51:12 independently of us. And so what I find
51:16 frustrating is that there's a lot of
51:19 suffering
51:22 and understanding these basic operating
51:27 principles of the brain will not remove
51:31 all
51:32 suffering but it it could ameliate it
51:35 could remove some. And people don't
51:38 understand that they are
51:46 sometimes making their suffering worse
51:49 than it has to be. You pulled on the
51:51 word responsible. Well, I want to be
51:54 really clear that again I'm not saying
51:57 people are are to blame. Culpability and
52:00 responsibility are not the same thing.
52:03 Culpability is blame. Are you blamew
52:05 worthy? Right? You can nobody I'm not
52:10 saying people are to blame for their own
52:11 suffering. I'm saying that people can be
52:15 more responsible in by taking more
52:18 responsibility they could reduce their
52:21 suffering some. That's not the same
52:23 thing as saying you know that they that
52:26 it's their cause their cause to begin
52:27 with. So I'll give you an example.
52:29 Social contagion. Contagion is an
52:32 interesting word. It means that you are
52:34 infected by
52:35 something even a virus. There are these
52:39 experiments that were done 15 20 years
52:41 ago where um these are done by Sheldon
52:44 Cohen who is a psychoimmunologist which
52:47 means he's a psychologist and he studies
52:48 how immunology
52:51 um that is your immune system is related
52:53 to your psychological state. And so what
52:56 he did across a number of experiments is
52:58 he took people and he sequestered them
53:00 in hotel
53:02 rooms. And then he took the same dosage,
53:07 the same concentration of virus and he
53:10 put it in every person's nose. And then
53:13 he controlled how much they slept, how
53:15 much they ate. He measured their
53:17 symptoms. He like weighed their tissues
53:20 after they blew their nose. I mean like
53:22 he did right just really really really
53:24 really careful metrics and across these
53:27 experiments somewhere between 20 to 40%
53:30 of
53:31 people became symptomatic with
53:33 respiratory
53:35 disease. That means the virus is
53:40 necessary but it is not sufficient to
53:43 cause illness. Another necessary but not
53:47 sufficient cause is the state of each
53:49 person's immune system. That is your
53:53 brain and your immune system have to be
53:55 in a particular state in order for you
53:58 to be infected by a virus in these
54:01 experiments. So the point that I'm
54:03 making here is exactly the same about
54:05 suffering. Al so let's take anxiety for
54:09 example.
54:10 You know, we in a as this in a culture,
54:15 we automatically make meaning of certain
54:19 types of signal patterns as anxiety.
54:21 When there's a lot of uncertainty,
54:23 um there's an increase in in
54:25 norepinephrine and some chemicals in the
54:27 brain. Um that often goes with an
54:30 increase in um heart rate and so on. And
54:34 we automatically make meaning of this
54:37 physical state as anxiety.
54:40 But exactly the same physical
54:42 state could be
54:44 determination. It could be just pure
54:47 uncertainty. Again, meaning making is
54:50 about action. Right? So when you are un
54:53 when you are experiencing high arousal,
54:56 even if it's super unpleasant as as
54:59 determination, you do something
55:01 different than if you experience it as
55:04 anxiety or uncertainty. So here is an
55:07 example. There are people who experience
55:10 test anxiety. Really serious test
55:13 anxiety prevents people from finishing
55:16 courses or graduating from college.
55:19 People who graduate from college have a
55:22 lifetime trajectory of earning that is
55:24 hundreds of thousands of dollars more
55:26 often than somebody who drops out of
55:29 college. So test anxiety over the long
55:32 run, it's more than just a bit of
55:34 discomfort. you know it has serious
55:36 implications for o your earning
55:38 potential across your life. There are
55:41 these experiments that were done where
55:43 they trained people to make sense of
55:46 high arousal
55:49 uh physical states not as anxiety but as
55:54 determination. And these people learned
55:57 to do this first they practice like a
55:59 skill. It's like driving. At first it's
56:01 really hard. you have to give a lot of
56:02 effort to it, but you practice,
56:04 practice, practice, and then eventually
56:05 becomes really automatic. And then what
56:08 happens? They are able to take tests.
56:10 They're able to pass tests. They're able
56:12 to continue taking courses and so on. I
56:15 watched this actually happen right in
56:16 front of my eyes. My daughter, when she
56:18 was 12 years old, she was testing for
56:20 her black belt in
56:22 karate. Her her sensei was a 10th degree
56:26 black belt. This guy, a 10th degree
56:29 black belt is the highest you could be.
56:31 Mhm. This guy could break a board like
56:33 by looking at it. He was a scary scary
56:36 dude. And my daughter was like not even
56:39 5t tall when she was 12. And she's she's
56:43 this tiny little thing. And she's got to
56:46 spar with like these hulking like 15,
56:49 16, 18 year old boys. She's got to
56:51 actually spar with them. And so, you
56:55 know, she's and this is across several
56:57 days. She's got to do this really. And
56:58 so I'm sitting there, her, you know, I'm
57:00 her dad and me were sitting there. We're
57:02 watching her. And so her sensei, you
57:04 know, saunters up to her and he says,
57:08 "Sweetheart, get your butterflies flying
57:10 in
57:13 formation." And I was like, "That's
57:15 amazing. Get your butterflies
57:18 flying in formation." He's not saying,
57:20 "Calm down, little girl. That would
57:22 actually be bad. You don't want to be
57:25 calm. You need that arousal. It's there
57:27 for a reason. It's uncomfortable, but
57:30 you need it. He's saying, "Use it." That
57:34 to me was like a perfect example of find
57:37 a different
57:38 meaning for that
57:40 arousal. And that meaning is the action
57:44 that you will engage in. No matter how
57:47 hard it
57:48 is, no matter how much it doesn't really
57:50 look like what it's supposed to, the
57:52 control is there. It's there. It's not
57:56 there all the time. It's harder to get
57:58 all, you know, yada yada, but it's
58:00 there. And it means
58:03 that you have more
58:06 agency. You have more control. You're
58:10 never going to have as much control as
58:11 you want. It's always going to be harder
58:14 to get.
58:16 Your options aren't always going to be
58:18 the
58:19 same, but you can always find a little
58:21 more
58:23 control over what you
58:26 do and what you experience and that's
58:30 the key to living a meaningful life. Are
58:33 you somewhat concerned about the world
58:35 that young people are growing up in
58:36 where they're scrolling on social media
58:38 and social media is telling them what
58:41 certain feelings are? So they are just
58:44 being programmed
58:46 constantly. Yeah, they are to be
58:49 anxious, to be depressed, to be sad.
58:51 They are. Yes, they are. And think about
58:53 it too. Social media is pernitious
58:57 uncertainty there. You know you first of
59:01 all even when we're sitting face to
59:04 face we have all of these cues we have
59:07 all these signals I can see your face I
59:10 can hear your voice even when all this
59:13 information is there's still some
59:16 uncertainty right we're not reading each
59:18 other bodily movements are not a
59:21 language to be read it's a bad
59:25 metaphor right we're guessing we're
59:28 always guessing
59:29 And we're using a lot of signals to
59:32 guess. But when you're on social
59:35 media, you have have very few signals.
59:39 There is a lot of ambiguity. There is a
59:42 lot of
59:44 uncertainty and the only thing that you
59:46 can do is fill in that uncertainty with
59:49 your own guesses which could be
59:52 bad. Right? So people who go on Tik Tok
59:57 and
59:59 whatever are giving up, they're
60:03 like volitionally giving up their agency
60:06 and they don't know it. What do you mean
60:09 by that? They're choosing to be led.
60:12 They're choosing to be
60:17 influenced. I I'll give you an example.
60:20 I've listened to podcasts
60:22 about metabolism. I've listened to
60:25 podcasts about, you know, skin care.
60:28 I've listened to, you know, I'm curious.
60:30 I'm curious about like what kind of
60:32 information people put out there. I
60:34 probably turn off 90% of the I get like
60:37 10 minutes into something and I will
60:39 turn it
60:42 off. That's what it means to be a
60:44 consumer. You have choice. I think
60:47 people are they don't realize that by
60:50 virtue of what they do and what they
60:52 don't do, they are making choices about
60:56 what will be retained in their heads
60:59 that will then be used
61:02 automatically later. Brainwashing a
61:06 little bit except that you're you're the
61:09 one who's you're you're choosing it. You
61:12 know, I'm empathic and I'm not blaming
61:14 people, but they could things could be
61:17 better for them. You
61:18 know, I mean, I had a an a daughter who
61:22 was clinically depressed. That was one
61:24 of the most frustrating experiences I've
61:27 ever had in my life in addition to being
61:28 really tragic. I mean, I can talk about
61:30 it now without breaking into tears. That
61:32 took a long time. But at first, she was
61:36 so
61:37 resistant. Eventually, you know, she
61:39 made the decision that she wanted to be
61:41 helped and then we completely changed
61:44 her life. But she had to make that
61:46 decision. I couldn't force her to do it.
61:48 And I feel like a little bit it's the
61:51 same kind of situation now where there's
61:53 so much out there in the
61:55 wellness industry. There's so much, you
61:58 know, um, swirling around on Tik Tok and
62:01 on other areas of social media and not
62:05 all of it is useful and some of it's
62:07 really harmful. Do you mind if I pause
62:10 this conversation for a moment? I want
62:11 to talk about our show sponsor today,
62:13 which is Shopify. I've always believed
62:15 that the biggest cost in business isn't
62:16 failure, it's the time you waste trying
62:18 to make decisions. Time spent
62:20 hesitating, overthinking, or waiting for
62:22 the right moment. When I started my
62:24 first company at 20 years old, I had no
62:26 experience and no money. What I did have
62:28 was an idea and the willingness to move
62:30 fast, and that made all the difference.
62:33 If you've been thinking about starting
62:34 your own business, Shopify makes this
62:36 entire process so much easier. With
62:38 thousands of customizable templates, you
62:40 don't need coding or design skills. You
62:42 just need a willingness to start.
62:43 Shopify connects all your sales channels
62:45 from your website to social media. and
62:47 it handles the backend payments,
62:49 shipping, and taxes, too, so that you
62:51 can stay focused on moving forward and
62:53 growing your business. If you're ready
62:54 to start, visit
62:56 shopify.com/bartlet and sign up for a£1
62:59 per month trial period. That's
63:02 shopify.com/bartlet. The advantage you
63:04 have as a objective on Looker is you
63:06 have a huge amount of information and
63:09 knowledge, which is guiding you to make
63:11 better decisions. But a lot of people
63:12 don't have that information and
63:13 knowledge. In fact, they have counter
63:15 information and knowledge. So, when I
63:17 think about what it takes for someone to
63:19 make a change in their life, um whether
63:22 it was your daughter or whether it's
63:23 someone else who feels like they're
63:24 stuck and they feel like they're trapped
63:26 in an algorithm or trapped in a life
63:27 that they want to break out of based on
63:30 everything you know and based on the
63:32 experience you had with your daughter.
63:34 What is step one to being able to make
63:37 that change? Because I'm really curious
63:38 as to what it was about your daughter
63:40 that made her decide that she wanted the
63:42 help.
63:44 Well, I think that the the general
63:48 answer is baby steps. It rarely works to
63:52 completely change everything all at
63:54 once. I'm not saying it never works, but
63:56 it rarely works that way. Um it so for
64:00 example, you know, you could
64:04 deliberately get off social media for
64:08 one day a week or do something else
64:12 instead with a friend or go for a walk
64:15 or just and build it into it. Build it
64:18 into your day as a scheduled thing. So
64:20 that's the other thing is that you can't
64:22 do things because you want to do them.
64:24 You have to force yourself to do them.
64:26 So for example, I had major back
64:29 surgery, major back surgery, very
64:31 serious. And um I knew that um after I
64:36 had back surgery that I was going to
64:38 experience sensations I had never had
64:41 before. Just like you know if you go for
64:43 a filling in your tooth, right? And then
64:46 you know something's there that wasn't
64:47 there before and then your tongue is
64:49 like constantly poking at the tooth and
64:52 you're not supposed to but you do
64:53 anyways because your brain is foraging
64:56 for information. It's foraging for
64:58 prediction error. Mhm. And then
65:01 eventually it adjusts its predictions
65:04 and then it ignores the sensations
65:07 because they're not relevant. Right. So
65:09 that was going to happen on a massive
65:11 scale for me and I knew that I had made
65:15 a plan before surgery to dose myself
65:19 appropriately with prediction error so
65:22 that I would not develop chronic pain
65:24 because chronic pain is like a set of
65:26 bad predictions that that don't update.
65:28 Right? So your brain still believes that
65:30 there's um tissue damage in your body
65:34 when there's no more tissue damage. So
65:36 does that mean that pain often is just a
65:39 figment of your imagination? No, that's
65:41 the wrong way. That is the wrong way to
65:43 think about it. The way to think about
65:45 it is every
65:48 experience remembered past and sensory
65:51 present. So pain is in your
65:54 head, vision is in your head,
65:58 hearing is in your head. You don't hear
66:00 in your ears, you hear in your head in
66:02 your brain. You don't see in your eyes.
66:05 You need your eyes. You need your ears.
66:08 But you don't see in your eyes. You see
66:13 in your brain. So pain is a combination
66:18 of the just like vision is a combination
66:21 of the remembered past and the sensory
66:24 present. Okay. Okay. So it's both. So
66:26 chronic pain happens
66:29 when your brain was receiving signals
66:34 from the body that there was tissue
66:36 damage, no susceptive signals they're
66:39 called, and it was making sense of them
66:41 as
66:43 pain. And when you're recovering from an
66:46 illness, that's metabolically taxing. So
66:50 there's not as much metabolic re there's
66:53 not as much of your metabolic budget
66:55 devoted to
66:57 learning. So you can be in a situation
67:00 where your brain doesn't update itself
67:03 and you still
67:05 experience pain even though the the um
67:10 the tissue damage is no longer there.
67:13 It's just like seeing a a green apple in
67:16 your mind's eye when there is no apple
67:18 in front of you. It's not all in it's
67:21 not all in your head in the in the you
67:25 know insulting sense. It's just it's a
67:28 normal consequence of how brains work.
67:32 The injury is gone though but the signal
67:34 of the injury is still replaying itself.
67:36 Yeah. Exactly. Just like um it's like a
67:38 phantom limb. It's like tinidis is also
67:40 like that. Oh gosh. Yeah. I had that for
67:42 a little while. Yeah. So, um, so I I
67:45 tried really hard to set a schedule for
67:48 myself,
67:49 um, you know, um, that would allow me to
67:54 sort of like optimally dose myself, but
67:56 with prediction error, but that
67:58 meant, you know, that I I had to follow
68:01 that schedule. And I think if you're
68:03 committed to changing your habits, this
68:06 is how you change any habit really. you
68:09 change the context and you um and then
68:13 you practice you practice new um new
68:19 behaviors. So with my
68:22 daughter, depression, we think about
68:25 depression in our lab um as um let me
68:30 back up and say your brain's most
68:32 important job really is not thinking.
68:35 It's not feeling. It's not even seeing.
68:37 It's regulating your body. It's
68:39 regulating your metabolism. Basically,
68:42 that's your brain's most important job.
68:44 Your brain's most important job is
68:45 anticipating the needs of your body and
68:48 preparing to meet those needs before
68:49 they arise. The metaphor that we use for
68:53 this predictive regulation of the body,
68:56 which is the formal term is
68:58 calledasis. Um that's the scientific
69:01 concept, but the but the metaphor is
69:04 body budgeting. It's running a budget
69:06 for your body. Your brain is running a
69:08 budget for your body. It's not budgeting
69:10 money. It's budgeting salt and glucose
69:12 and oxygen and um potassium and like all
69:16 of the nutrients and chemicals that are
69:19 necessary
69:21 um to um run an energetically costly
69:25 body. You know, you've got all these
69:27 really low-level kind of processes. You
69:30 can just think of them as vital parts of
69:32 to keep yourself alive. Mhm. So, some of
69:35 your energy budget goes to
69:37 that. Some of your energy budget goes to
69:40 repair and growth. So, you get if you
69:44 get taller, you need more cells. When
69:46 you learn something, you have to thicken
69:48 up your myelin and your your neurons.
69:51 You've got to grow more receptors and
69:53 stuff. That's, you know, the kind of
69:56 growth and and repair. And then the rest
69:58 of it is all for anything effortful.
70:01 What is effortful? like work or going to
70:04 the gym, dragging your ass out of bed in
70:06 the morning is effortful. Yeah, learning
70:08 something new is effortful. Dealing with
70:12 uncertainty is effortful. Everything we
70:15 call stress. Stress is just really your
70:18 brain is predicting a big metabolic
70:20 outlay because there's some effort
70:23 involved, right? Some motivated effort
70:26 involved. So those are the three things
70:30 that make up your energy budget. And the
70:32 really important point, you as an
70:36 organism have a fixed amount of energy
70:38 that you can produce in a
70:41 day.
70:42 Meaning ATP, like these little chemicals
70:46 that these little protein things that
70:48 you know your cells use as literal
70:51 energy that come from glucose and and
70:53 other things like fats and so there's
70:56 nothing I can do to increase it. Well,
70:58 you're in a range. Okay. But there is a
71:01 finite limit upper limit for that range
71:06 because you are a because you're a human
71:09 organism and you've got to do these
71:11 three things these right vital
71:15 functions growth and repair and then
71:18 everything else. If you got a lot of
71:20 psychosocial stress going on or you have
71:22 some kind of disease that's taking up,
71:26 you know, much of the budget, then you
71:28 don't have a lot of budget left for
71:30 other stuff that you need to do, right?
71:32 So, what your brain will attempt to do
71:34 is to cut costs. If you look at the
71:37 symptoms of depression, they are um
71:41 symptoms of um that are related to
71:44 cutting costs. distress, fatigue,
71:48 problems concentrating,
71:50 um lack of sensitivity to the context
71:53 that you're in. All of these things are
71:56 indicative of um reduced um metabolic
72:00 outlay. And then depression also has
72:04 symptoms that are related to increased
72:07 costs like 70% of people who are
72:11 depressed have uh inflammatory problems.
72:13 So they have enhanced inflammatory
72:16 um systemic inflammation and and your
72:20 your immune system is a very expensive
72:24 system to run. So if you have persistent
72:28 and um systemic
72:32 inflammation, you're that's like a
72:34 persistent tax on your budget. you're,
72:37 you know, meaning things are costing
72:39 more than they necessarily need to. And
72:44 even, you know, like there are these
72:46 really interesting studies. I think
72:48 they're interesting as a scientist, as a
72:49 person, I find them like slightly
72:51 horrifying, but you know, like if you
72:53 within two hours of eating a meal, if
72:56 you encounter stress, social stress,
72:59 it's as if you ate 104 more calories
73:03 than you actually ate. So you're so
73:06 inefficient in metabolizing that it's
73:08 like it's like having eaten 104 more
73:12 calories than you did.
73:14 And the your even good fats will be
73:17 metabolized as if they're bad fats and
73:20 potentially stored as Yeah. So if you if
73:23 you add up 104 calories at every meal
73:27 for a year, that's almost 11 pounds.
73:29 That means that if you are in a
73:31 stressful
73:33 environment and um for a year and you
73:36 ate exactly the same thing as you ate
73:39 the year before, you would gain 11
73:40 pounds. In depression, we know for
73:42 example that um there's cortisol
73:45 dysregulation in depression. That means
73:47 there's dysregulation in um metabolism
73:51 because cortisol is a metabolic, you
73:54 know, it's it's a metabolic chemical. Um
73:56 people who take uh SSRIs they take for
74:00 depression anti-depressants are SSRIs
74:03 usually or SNRIs that means they are
74:06 acting on serotonin to keep more
74:09 serotonin in the in the juncture uh
74:13 between neurons. Serotonin is a
74:15 metabolic regulator. Norepinephrine is a
74:18 metabolic regulator. These are um
74:21 chemicals that are directly involved in
74:25 your
74:26 metabolism. So it's not an a belief that
74:30 depression is a metabolic has a
74:32 metabolic basis to it. I think the
74:34 question is what is the elixir of all
74:38 these metabolic influences that would
74:40 lead somebody to um develop a depressive
74:44 state. Um,
74:47 but the point, the simple point that I
74:50 was making is I actually came to this
74:52 idea about metabolism and depression
74:54 because I was doing a ton of
74:56 reading trying to figure out how to help
74:58 my kid. What were her symptoms at that
75:00 time? Just if there are any parents that
75:02 listening right now that can relate or
75:03 anybody that's listening that could
75:04 relate. Yeah. Well, I will tell you that
75:07 I've given this talk before um about
75:09 depression in adolescence. Adolescence
75:12 is a um it's like a it's like a perfect
75:16 storm of metabolic u vulnerability for
75:19 many many reasons. You know your brain
75:22 is trapped in a dark silent box called
75:24 your
75:25 skull. It's receiving signals from the
75:28 body and from the world. It doesn't know
75:30 what the causes of those signals are.
75:33 It's receiving the effects. It has to
75:35 guess at the causes. What are the
75:37 guesses? Predictions from the past.
75:40 Right? So it doesn't know about hormone
75:43 surges immediately as they happen. It,
75:47 you know, it takes 20 minutes or so or
75:50 sometimes a little less depending on
75:51 where the hormonal changes are and what
75:53 their origin is for the brain to receive
75:56 the signals of those changes and then it
75:58 has to guess at what the causes are. The
76:01 narrative that's used in
76:04 psychiatry and medicine is a narrative
76:07 that goes something like this. It goes
76:09 back to this like your brain is a
76:11 battleground, right? So the idea is that
76:14 you know you're born the the story is
76:16 that you're born with these innate
76:19 emotion circuits. You're not you don't
76:21 have innate emotion circuits. You don't
76:23 have any emotion circuits actually, but
76:24 the narrative is you're born with these
76:26 innate emotion circuits. They work, but
76:28 you're not born with the ability to
76:30 control them. That has to develop over
76:32 time.
76:34 So in adolescence, the idea is that
76:37 um mood disorders arise because you're
76:41 you don't have enough cognitive control
76:44 and you have too much emotion. So you've
76:46 got this unbridled emotion and that's
76:48 the problem. That's a
76:52 really compelling narrative. It's
76:55 just neurobullshit basically. There's
76:58 not a good evidence for that narrative.
77:01 I I heard it was a chemical imbalance.
77:04 Yes. Well, the sometimes people talk
77:07 about that chemical imbalance in terms
77:09 of serotonin being a happy chemical and
77:13 dopamine being the reward chemical. And
77:16 that's also uh that's such a
77:18 simplification that it's not even wrong.
77:22 Okay? Dopamine is not a reward chemical
77:24 and serotonin is not a happiness
77:26 chemical. They're both metabolic
77:28 regulators.
77:30 You see increases in dopamine in some uh
77:34 neurons during episodes of
77:37 punishment. And
77:40 serotonins does many things in your body
77:43 in many places. But one of the things
77:46 that it does in controlled experiments
77:49 is it allows animals
77:52 to spend to forage to engage in activity
77:57 physical activity and learning when
78:00 there is no immediate metabolic uh
78:04 reward at the end. There's no there's no
78:06 deposit at the end. Mhm.
78:09 Um so dopamine is seen more I think now
78:14 by many neuroscientists as a a chemical
78:18 that is necessary for
78:21 effort whether that is a physical effort
78:23 or learning something a mental effort of
78:26 learning something it's not really
78:28 specific to reward per se. So, at first
78:32 with with my daughter, you know, she
78:35 went from being a a really
78:38 exuberant, engaged, socially, very
78:41 socially connected kid, um, who, you
78:44 know, she did great in school. And it's
78:46 not like she had, you know, it's not
78:47 like she was a perfect kid, but she was
78:49 pretty in enthusiastic and pretty
78:52 exuberant and had a lot of friends. And
78:55 and then, you
78:58 know, by the time she was in 10th grade,
79:03 she was withdrawn. She was getting D's
79:05 in school. She couldn't concentrate. She
79:08 wasn't sleeping. She um she was
79:11 miserable. She was really suffering, but
79:14 she was miserable to be around. And and
79:16 to be honest, at the beginning, we
79:18 thought she was being
79:20 lazy. We thought, you know, she didn't
79:22 want to do anything. She wanted to spend
79:23 all this time in her room. She didn't,
79:26 you know, she wanted to get rid of all
79:27 of her activities. And we thought, come
79:29 on, man. Step up. Like, why are you, you
79:33 know, we thought she was being lazy. I
79:34 mean, really, it just never occurred to
79:36 me in a million years because she had no
79:39 mood symptoms as a kid. Like, none. And
79:43 then all of a sudden, she just she
79:45 appeared to have no energy to do
79:46 anything. But it to us it looked like
79:48 she was being lazy and she didn't want
79:50 to do her homework and she seemed really
79:51 disengaged and and
79:54 and it it took me a while to realize, oh
79:58 no, this is something else. She was
80:01 having trouble remembering conversations
80:04 that we had. And at first I thought, oh,
80:06 you're not paying attention to me. But
80:08 then it seemed really clear that even in
80:13 day-to-day conver she couldn't tell me
80:15 what was happening in her day. She just
80:16 had no details. That's also a sign of
80:19 depression where you lose the episodic
80:22 memory of details of the day. You can
80:24 only talk in gists. You can't give
80:27 specifics about times and places and
80:30 events. You just lose, you don't retain
80:32 that information long enough to be able
80:34 to remember it later. There's no
80:36 consolidation of that information. And
80:39 um when she was in 10th
80:43 grade, you know, she came home with D's
80:47 in school, D's in mathematics. And this
80:49 is a kid who was doing fun, you know,
80:51 she was doing rudimentary algebra when
80:52 she was eight. And
80:55 um we told her that we she had to be we
81:00 had to have her assessed
81:02 because we just didn't know what was
81:04 going on. And that's when we realized
81:06 that she was clinically depressed.
81:08 The other thing I I should say is that,
81:11 you know, she had very bad menstrual
81:13 cramps. And so a lot of one
81:18 um one treatment for bad menstrual
81:22 cramps is to put girls on birth control
81:25 pills because it it evens out the um
81:29 hormonal fluctuations of the month and
81:31 it does actually improve menstrual
81:34 cramps. But it's pretty well known now.
81:36 It wasn't so much known then that um
81:40 there is somewhere between a 40 and 70%
81:43 increase in the likelihood of major
81:45 depressive episode in young women who
81:48 use birth control pills. If it's a
81:51 combination estrogen progesterone pill,
81:54 it's more like 40%. If it's a
81:56 progesterone only pill, which a lot of
81:58 young women take because it has fewer
82:01 side effects, you have a 70% increase in
82:04 in a ma in major depressive episode. And
82:06 this is in the first study that I read
82:09 about this was in a million women. And
82:12 when I read that
82:14 study, I remember exactly where I was.
82:16 It was like a flashbulb moment. I read
82:18 the study. I called her pediatrician, my
82:21 daughter's pediatrician, and I said,
82:22 "She's coming off pill
82:24 today, today. So, tell me if there's
82:27 anything. Are there any side effects or
82:29 can we just stop it?" And he's like,
82:30 "Well, in my opinion," and I'm like, "I
82:33 don't give a about your opinion. I
82:35 have just read a study that is like, you
82:37 know, it's a large-scale epidemiological
82:39 study of a million women today. She's
82:43 coming off today." And this was after or
82:46 before she was experiencing depression.
82:48 This was after it was it was um
82:53 maybe a year after she was diagnosed.
82:57 Much later I read um I was reading a
83:00 book by uh Naomi Orescus the historian
83:03 of science and she wrote a book called
83:05 Why Trust Science? And it's a wonderful
83:08 book. But in the book she talks about
83:10 she gives examples of places of
83:13 phenomena where the public didn't trust
83:16 science and they should have and this is
83:18 one of them. Apparently it's been known
83:20 for a really long time. And I just want
83:23 to point out that
83:25 estrogen, progesterone,
83:28 testosterone evolved as metabolic
83:32 regulators. I'm highlighting it because
83:35 in a lot of because in a culture that
83:38 separates mental from physical, we don't
83:41 think about the role of metabolism in
83:44 vision or in even in mood. That's a
83:48 really recent thing. In our lab, we one
83:50 of the things we study now is the role
83:53 of metabolism in in really basic really
83:57 really basic psychological phenomena.
84:01 um like just as a fundamental building
84:04 block of your mind basically.
84:06 So your daughter exhibits those
84:08 symptoms. I'm really curious to hear
84:11 what conventional medicine at that point
84:13 told you you should do with a daughter
84:15 in that situation at that time versus
84:17 what you did. You have this wealth of
84:19 information. You you have a medical
84:20 background. Yeah. So I should say this
84:22 was you know this was um some years ago,
84:26 right? So currently there is a kind of a
84:30 revolution going on where um there's
84:33 actually something called metabolic
84:35 psychiatry. Now back when this was when
84:38 you know when I was reading about this
84:40 it sounded crazy when I saw what my
84:43 daughter
84:45 was what that she was suffering like
84:47 really suffering. It's really hard for
84:49 me to talk about this because as I'm
84:52 talking to you about this, I'm thinking
84:53 I I just I wish that I, you know, I wish
84:57 that I had figured this out earlier.
84:59 But, um, but anyways, what we did was I
85:05 we found I found every possible route
85:07 that I could think of to target her um
85:12 her body budget. So, basically target
85:14 her metabolism. And then we we we
85:18 basically came up with a a daily routine
85:21 which she participated in making um to
85:25 see if we
85:28 could put her on a different trajectory,
85:32 you know, and that involved everything
85:35 from getting off social media
85:38 because first of all, she was using like
85:40 a lot of kids do, she was using
85:43 um her screens late at night and at that
85:49 point and again this was something I
85:50 just happened upon right but it actually
85:53 at an at a NCI at a national inst cancer
85:56 institute meeting um you know we have
86:00 retinal ganglen cells we have cells in
86:03 our retina that um regulate circadian
86:06 rhythm and they're sensitive to light at
86:10 the wavelengths that comes from your
86:12 screen from a screen. So if you look at
86:15 those screens at night, your brain
86:18 thinks it's daytime, like your circadian
86:21 rhythm. You give yourself a circadian
86:23 rhythm disorder basically. And it will
86:25 be harder to get um into a regular sleep
86:28 cycle. And you need that regular sleep
86:31 cycle in order for toxins to clear and
86:33 in order to consolidate um what you've
86:36 learned during the day so that you can
86:38 remember it later. And there a whole
86:40 bunch of restorative things happen
86:42 during deep sleep that you really need.
86:44 And if you can't get enough deep sleep,
86:47 that will make your budgeting problems
86:49 worse basically. So we targeted her. We
86:52 got her off social media. Well, first of
86:55 all, off screens after, you know, like
86:58 7:00, 8:00 at night, no screens. Um, off
87:02 social media to reduce social
87:04 uncertainty, social stress. I got up
87:06 with her at 5:30 every morning. made her
87:09 breakfast, sat with her while she ate
87:11 breakfast. So, made sure that she was
87:14 eating nutritious food, not pseudo food
87:17 like, you know, Pop-Tarts and like
87:19 that. We had to start
87:21 her like exercising again. So, she
87:25 started to walk long distances. We she
87:28 started doing Pilates like not not
87:30 Pilates on a map, but like Pilates with
87:32 a reformer that would make anybody cry,
87:35 you know. Why exercise as it relates to
87:37 this budget and the metabolic functions?
87:40 Because
87:41 exercise um basically
87:45 um exercise throws your throws your it's
87:49 like your brain it's like you're you're
87:51 throwing yourself out of uh metabolic
87:54 balance so that the brain can learn to
87:56 get itself back in. you're basically
87:59 improving the resilience of your of your
88:02 physical systems is is basically the way
88:04 to so she's not you know she needed
88:09 something more like interval training
88:11 which is what these Pilates classes were
88:14 as opposed to you know practicing to
88:17 play tennis or whatever something that
88:19 would would where she you know after a
88:23 certain period of time she'd be
88:24 disregulated metabolically and then
88:27 she'd drink water and you know eat
88:30 something healthful and um and then her
88:33 system basically was learning to become
88:35 more flexible again not so stuck. Mhm.
88:40 So again it it was like dosing with
88:42 prediction error or like showing the
88:45 providing the brain with opportunity to
88:46 learn that it was wrong. And then um
88:50 omega-3s. So we we took I can't remember
88:54 the exact dose, but I I do it out high
88:57 omega-3s, low omega sixs. With her
89:01 doctor's permission, we also used a baby
89:03 aspirin once a day with on a full
89:06 stomach to reduce systemic inflammation.
89:10 um before bed. I mean, before bed, we
89:12 had always done um like a cuddle, you
89:16 know, like when she was little, we would
89:17 read a story or whatever. And in her
89:20 early adolescent years, you know, she
89:23 rejected that and then we brought it
89:26 back. So an hour before bed, we would
89:30 either me or her dad, sometimes all
89:32 three of us, we would read a book
89:34 together or, you know, he would read a
89:36 book to us or we would I I she we would
89:38 sit and talk and she would tell
89:41 me, you know, all the things that were
89:43 happening at school that she could
89:45 remember and sometimes they were really
89:47 horrible and I just had to empathize.
89:49 That was really hard for me because I
89:51 just wanted to fix it. I just wanted to
89:53 fix it. And it was really I had to
89:56 really draw on my own um experience as a
90:00 therapist to just sit with the distress
90:05 and empathize rather than say do this,
90:09 do this, do this, do this. It took me a
90:12 long time to learn that and I'm still
90:14 sometimes struggling with that. Why was
90:15 that important? because then she feels
90:18 heard and and she feels understood. And
90:23 when you It took me a long time to learn
90:24 this. When she when she would tell me
90:26 that, you know, someone had done
90:28 something terribly
90:30 mean. If I did anything other than
90:33 empathize, she would feel like I hadn't
90:36 heard
90:37 her. And social support is a
90:41 major I mean, we are the caretakers of
90:44 each other's nervous systems. Humans are
90:46 social animals. It's hard to
90:49 believe. Uh I think in a culture like
90:51 ours where we're so individualistic,
90:54 right? And it seems like a political
90:56 statement or something. It doesn't
90:57 really matter what your political views
91:00 are. We evolve the way we evolve, man.
91:03 We are social animals. We affect each
91:05 other metabolically. We can add savings
91:09 and we can add taxes. And you know the
91:12 best thing for a human nervous system is
91:15 another
91:16 human. The worst thing for a human
91:18 nervous system is another human. The
91:21 wrong one. There are so many experiments
91:25 showing such I mean I just saw a set of
91:28 experiments from one of my former
91:29 postocs that was just amazing.
91:32 um where she looked at glucose
91:35 metabolism in mothers and babies and I
91:38 think she also did it in dating partners
91:40 if I'm not mistaken and she looked at
91:42 them alone and like and then together
91:46 like alone during a task and then
91:48 together during a task and mothers and
91:50 babies that are attached well they're
91:53 actually their glucose metabolism is
91:55 more efficient like literally more
91:58 efficient and I believe she I I believe
92:02 she also showed this with dating
92:04 partners too. You know there are these
92:06 studies these old studies showing that
92:08 um that you know it's like less
92:13 calorically demanding to walk up a hill
92:15 with a backpack if you're with a friend
92:17 than if with you're with a stranger. And
92:19 I mean there's all these really batshit
92:22 crazy findings that if but if you
92:24 realize that humans are literally
92:26 affecting each other on a physical basis
92:28 whether they're aware of it or not
92:30 whether they intend it or not it's
92:32 completely irrelevant or it's
92:34 unnecessary I would say to have that
92:36 effect um to have the effects be there
92:39 um then it starts to it starts to make
92:42 sense you know like the idea that and
92:44 again meta analyses show that you will
92:46 live years longer years on average years
92:50 longer if you are in if you have a a
92:54 social um life filled with people who
92:58 you trust and who trust you.
93:03 So is that why you got the family around
93:05 just before bed because it was
93:07 regulating her nervous system, her her
93:10 body? Yeah. Sometimes she she sometimes
93:13 she still says this to me actually.
93:14 She'll say, "Can you just be my friend
93:16 for a minute and not my mother?
93:19 I'll be like, "Yes, I can." And then I
93:21 actually have to do it, which is
93:22 sometimes
93:23 hard. Or I will say to
93:26 her, this is for parents, anybody who
93:29 has an adolescent or an adult um child,
93:33 this is this is like one of my I I don't
93:35 know how I came up with this, but it's
93:36 like golden, right? I say to
93:38 her, "Can I I'm having a mother moment
93:43 where I feel the need to nag you about
93:45 something, and if I can just nag you for
93:47 a minute about it, I I won't need to
93:49 tell you again." So, I'm basically
93:52 asking her permission. Can I tell you
93:54 this thing, which I really want to tell
93:56 you, and I know you don't want to hear
93:59 it, but you would be being doing me a
94:01 real kindness if you would just listen
94:02 to me for a minute. And I know it's me.
94:04 It's all me. It's not you. It's all on
94:06 me. this is me, but I just I would be
94:10 better if you could just let me. And
94:13 most of the time she says, you know,
94:16 with great forbearance, right? Like,
94:18 sure, mama, go ahead. Sometimes she
94:21 says, "Not
94:23 today." And then I actually have to
94:25 listen, you know? So, yeah. But there
94:29 were probably other things I'm not
94:30 thinking of right now. I've written them
94:32 all down because a lot of people have
94:33 asked me this question. And what I like
94:35 to say is this is I'm not a physician.
94:38 This I'm not a psychiatrist. This is not
94:40 a recommendation or recipe for your
94:43 children. I'm just telling you what I
94:45 did as a scientist. And you wrote down
94:48 what you did. You still have a copy of
94:50 that. So I can link it below for anyone
94:51 that does want to read what you did.
94:54 Yes. But it's again it's I it's what you
94:58 did for your daughter at that time.
94:59 Yeah. just as a person who had read the
95:02 literature I it's not a it's not
95:05 um this is not medical advice it's I'm
95:08 really
95:09 strongly and also I should say I you
95:13 can't force your adolescent to do
95:16 anything you can't even force your kids
95:18 really to do anything unless you
95:20 threaten them with physical harm they
95:22 have to make that choice themselves
95:24 right and did she recover
95:28 yes she
95:30 And I think one of the reasons why she
95:33 is good now, it's not that she never has
95:36 challenges with her mood, but she
95:38 understands them in physical terms. She
95:41 doesn't understand her mood as being a
95:45 psychological problem. She understands
95:47 it as
95:50 a symptom or a barometer of her body
95:54 budget. This is something I learned from
95:56 your work while I was researching which
95:58 was really really helpful to me. And
95:59 it's pretty much exactly what you just
96:00 said, which is sometimes I'm in a not so
96:03 good mood.
96:04 And if I'm not conscious about that,
96:07 then the bad mood can wreak havoc,
96:09 right? It can I can be short with people
96:11 or whatever. And when I was reading your
96:12 work and thinking about bad or good
96:15 moods through the context of this body
96:17 budget, it makes you pause for a second
96:19 and go, what am I missing? And it makes
96:22 you very conscious of what you then do.
96:24 It almost makes you suddenly take hold
96:25 of the wheel and go, "Okay, so there's a
96:28 problem here. It's a physical problem. I
96:29 didn't get sleep last night. I haven't
96:30 eaten." Whatever it might be. Be really
96:32 aware of what this makes you do or feel
96:35 or think and hit and the actions you
96:38 need to take are maybe cancel everything
96:41 you were planning today and go back to
96:42 bed. Well, but I think that you just put
96:45 your finger on the really important
96:46 thing. It's that it changes what you do
96:50 next. Yeah. And that changes the
96:52 trajectory of what happens. And I think
96:55 this is this is really it's not like a
96:57 magic cure. But it and again, you know,
97:00 but when someone is when when you feel
97:03 really distressed, you either look to
97:05 the world like what is wrong with the
97:07 world or you look to yourself. What is
97:09 wrong with me? And really it could be
97:11 maybe there is something wrong with the
97:13 world. Maybe there is something wrong
97:14 with you. But most likely it's something
97:18 there's a body budgeting
97:20 problem. Even if it's the case that
97:23 there's something wrong with the world,
97:24 you're better equipped to deal with that
97:26 thing. If you
97:27 are managing your body budget, you
97:30 really do need to design your calendar
97:32 as much as you possibly can in the
97:33 confines of the profession you have
97:35 around that body budget. And for me, the
97:37 big a big change I made two years ago,
97:39 super privileged that I get that
97:40 everyone can do it. I couldn't do it
97:41 when I was working in call centers was I
97:44 implemented a rule where there's no
97:45 meetings before 11:00. And it just means
97:47 for me that I never set an alarm. So I
97:50 wake up when I'm fully recharged. And it
97:53 was like the most profound thing. I
97:54 should have done this way sooner. But
97:56 it's had such a big impact on my life
97:58 because you can almost guarantee that
97:59 it's very very rare for me to be
98:01 underslept. Although it happens because
98:02 I have to travel and stuff a lot. But
98:04 that really had a profound impact on my
98:06 life. Yeah. And I think you know and as
98:08 a leader and as a Exactly. And I think
98:11 honestly if
98:13 leaders take this
98:16 seriously then the hope is that there'll
98:20 be
98:21 some realization that this is also
98:24 important for for everybody and you know
98:28 we have a society that is structured in
98:30 a particular way but there's no
98:31 requirement that it's structured in this
98:33 way. There's, you know, the biggest
98:37 predictor of work productivity after,
98:40 you know, is sleep and hydration. And
98:43 after you take away sleep and hydration,
98:45 I think exercise is up there, too. You
98:47 know, some of us have more choices than
98:49 others, right? But it's important I
98:53 think for people who are people who are
98:57 CEOs, who are who are leaders, who are
99:00 business leaders to understand that um
99:03 there's there are good business reasons,
99:06 there are good economic reasons to take
99:10 this seriously. Am I right in
99:12 thinking that
99:13 alcohol impacts your body
99:16 budget and it therefore makes it harder
99:20 for you to exhibit all the other
99:22 behaviors and expend energy in other
99:24 areas and also therefore increases the
99:27 probability that you'll be depressed.
99:31 So
99:32 um I should say that I am not an expert
99:35 in the metabolism of alcohol.
99:38 So I'm going to extrapolate based on
99:41 what I do know. And what I would say
99:43 there is that sometimes people will
99:46 drink alcohol like they will eat
99:48 chocolate or um you know they doing it
99:51 for the taste or for the experience of
99:55 you know the ambiance and experience of
99:56 it, right? But a lot of people end up
99:59 using alcohol. They might start that way
100:02 or they might start because they're
100:04 doing something with friends but then
100:05 they realize that it has a mood um it
100:08 affects their mood. Anything which
100:11 affects your mood like people talk a lot
100:12 about emotion regulation but it's
100:14 actually mood regulation. Again you know
100:17 your mood is this these simple feelings
100:20 that are with you all the time. You know
100:22 your brain is always regulating your
100:25 body. Your body is always sending
100:26 signals back to your brain which it out
100:29 of which it makes mood. So mood is a
100:34 property of
100:35 consciousness. It's with you
100:37 always. Sometimes in moments you will
100:40 make sense of the signals and the mood
100:43 that goes with it in terms of the
100:45 outside world and that's when you
100:47 experience emotion, right? Where your
100:49 actions are relating the two together in
100:52 terms of your mood. But a lot of the
100:55 time we don't we we just experience mood
100:59 as a property of consciousness. You
101:01 know, this is a delicious drink. That
101:03 guy is an You're very
101:05 trustworthy. The mood is embedded in the
101:08 perception of the world. And when
101:11 people, it's just like actually
101:13 sometimes o opioids have this effect
101:16 also. They are they're mood altering,
101:18 meaning they're they are if they're
101:21 manipulating your mood, they are
101:22 manipulating your
101:26 metabolism. And when people get
101:29 addicted, they often get addicted
101:32 because they're regulating their mood.
101:34 They're attempting to reduce their
101:37 suffering. the problem with or a problem
101:42 I shouldn't say the problem because I
101:43 don't know exactly how mood h exactly
101:46 how alcohol affects
101:49 metabolism my my expectation is that
101:51 it's not just one it's not just in one
101:54 way and also I do know there are context
101:56 effects actually so you can drink
101:58 exactly the same amount of alcohol and
102:00 it can have different effects in
102:01 different contexts that totally blew my
102:03 mind when I saw that research so I'm
102:05 thinking it's not a simple relationship
102:07 but one thing I do know is that your
102:10 predictions become
102:13 um
102:15 sloppier and you don't take in
102:18 prediction error. you you don't learn.
102:22 You you won't you you won't update any,
102:25 you know, so there and so and your
102:29 behaviors are not necessarily well
102:32 calibrated to the situation that you're
102:34 in, which can have all kinds of
102:36 downstream difficult problem. You know,
102:37 you can make things uh in the downstream
102:40 worse for yourself um and make it harder
102:43 to do budgeting later. Isn't it
102:45 incredibly annoying when you're in a
102:46 rush to leave your house, but you can't
102:48 find your phone or your wallet? Now,
102:50 because of Apple, if you have an iPhone,
102:53 you can usually track it using Find My.
102:55 But until recently, the same hasn't been
102:57 possible if you've lost your wallet. But
102:59 that has now changed because of today's
103:01 sponsor, Extter. Extter is the first of
103:04 its kind. By partnering with Apple,
103:06 they've created a trackable wallet so
103:08 that if you ever lose yours, you can
103:10 find it within seconds. And this is it.
103:14 And you might recognize Extter from
103:17 their collaboration with Leon Messi.
103:19 It's super slim, made from recycled
103:21 aluminum with built-in RFID blocking
103:24 properties to protect from identity
103:26 theft. And with one click, all your
103:30 cards pop up so you can tap and go. I
103:33 often talk about 1% improvements. And
103:35 when I look at Extter, to me, it's the
103:38 culmination of so many 1% improvements
103:40 on the traditional wallet. So, if you're
103:42 looking for an upgrade, head to
103:44 extra.com and use code Steven for an
103:47 additional 10% off their spring sale,
103:49 which ends on May 19th. Head over there
103:52 now and check it out. And you also get
103:54 free shipping and a 100day trial. That's
103:57 extra.com with code Steven. I wanted to
104:00 um ask you about something I heard you
104:02 say and I've I've actually had other
104:04 guests on my podcast say it and I wasn't
104:05 ever sure if it was true until I heard
104:07 you say it which is that we can change
104:09 our emotions
104:11 by
104:13 smiling because if if the brain is
104:17 predicting then presumably if I do a big
104:19 smile and I go yes then the brain is
104:22 going to predict good feelings and going
104:25 to cause good feelings etc etc and going
104:27 to cause me to feel nice about self.
104:30 Well, yes and no. I think um you know
104:33 people smile when they're not happy too.
104:37 People smile when they're angry. People
104:39 smile when they're plotting the demise
104:41 of their enemy. You know, people smile
104:43 for all kind. People smile when they're
104:45 when they're afraid. But can I make
104:47 myself happier technically by smiling?
104:49 The metaanalytic evidence suggests that
104:52 there is a slight effect that it's that
104:55 there's um that there's a
104:59 small Yeah. Yeah. Crinkle your You have
105:02 to crinkle. There you go. It's like
105:04 putting put a pencil between your
105:06 teeth. Go. Go ahead. Yeah. Now smile.
105:09 Now crinkle. Okay. So, it's like that.
105:13 And I And the the the So, what I would
105:15 say is it's a it's a minuscule effect
105:17 size. It's like it's very small. I do
105:19 feel happier. Do you? Yeah. But that's
105:21 because I made you do something silly.
105:23 Maybe. Maybe. Okay. But anyways, the
105:25 point being that it's overblown as a as
105:28 an effect. Um I think
105:32 um there's a small my recollection is
105:36 that the meta the last meta analysis I
105:38 read was that there was a small effect,
105:40 but a small effect means it doesn't work
105:43 for everyone and it doesn't work always.
105:45 it it's just really really a very very
105:47 small effect. You must have a
105:49 perspective on ADHD which has become a
105:51 huge topic of conversation in society. I
105:54 I was diagnosed with ADHD. I don't
105:56 necessarily take it to mean anything
105:58 because I've seen so many variations of
106:00 ADHD my friends but there's been this
106:02 big rise of
106:03 ADHD and linked to the work that you've
106:06 done on the brain being a
106:08 predictive tool. So my general response
106:13 is the following that um people there's
106:16 a rise in people self- diagnosing and in
106:20 using diagnosis as an explanation
106:24 for behavior or for their why people
106:27 experience what they experience or
106:28 whatever. Diagnoses are not explanations
106:31 of anything. They're
106:33 descriptions. They don't explain
106:36 anything. And to treat a diagnosis like
106:39 it's an explanation is a form of
106:42 essententralizing which is not a good
106:44 thing. Okay? It means that you're
106:47 assuming that there's some kind of
106:50 underlying unchanging essence which is
106:53 responsible for in fact there is
106:56 something called psychological
106:57 essentialism where you don't even know
106:58 what the essence is. You just assume
107:00 it's there and that it's the cause of
107:02 all these symptoms. But a diagnosis is
107:05 just a description of symptoms. And
107:08 diagnosis are mostly useful for
107:11 billing hours of treatment. They're not
107:15 optimized
107:17 for pockets describing pockets of
107:20 behavior that are, you know, or
107:22 collections of behavior that tend to go
107:24 together because people sometimes think
107:26 that serotonin and dopamine are the
107:27 reason why someone has ADHD. That's like
107:30 one of the theories that I've So, there
107:32 are multiple serotonin receptors. There
107:34 are multiple dopamine receptors. They
107:36 don't all do the same thing. Serotonin
107:38 doesn't do one thing. Dopamine doesn't
107:41 do one thing. Does different things in
107:43 different places of the bo in the body
107:45 and the brain depending on what the
107:46 receptors are. And also, every resource
107:51 of
107:52 resilience and every symptom of
107:55 difficulty has a context to it. There
107:58 are requirements the way our society is
108:02 structured. There are requirements for
108:06 sitting and paying attention to
108:07 something for long periods of time. Mhm.
108:11 And that requirement is hidden in the
108:14 background. It's there so frequently
108:16 that we forget that that's the
108:19 conditional that's the condition upon
108:22 which diagnoses are made.
108:26 So
108:28 whatever first of all ADHD is not one
108:31 set of symptoms. It's a variety. It's
108:33 like it's a you know there's a lot of
108:37 variation in the way that in you can
108:40 have different symptom profiles and have
108:41 the same diagnosis because it's just
108:43 descriptive and there are lots of
108:45 symptoms. Some of those symptoms also
108:47 occur in they overlap with other
108:50 syndromes, other diagnostic clusters.
108:53 But the point is that they all when you
108:56 diagnose someone it makes it sound like
108:58 that's a property of that person. Yeah.
109:00 But it's not. It's a property of a
109:02 person in the context that they're in
109:05 and social expectation by by many
109:09 respects like can he pay attention in
109:11 school? Well, right. And the way that
109:13 school is organized is, you know, you
109:16 sit for long periods of time. Well, it
109:19 it may be that um there are other
109:22 circumstances in which not holding your
109:26 attention on one thing for a long period
109:28 of time could be advantageous. So my
109:30 point is that there are very few things
109:32 that are just categorically good or
109:35 categorically bad. There's always a
109:37 hidden condition. There's always a
109:39 hidden context. And so I think it's
109:41 really important to foreground that
109:43 context. You're not broken. you're just
109:46 your suitability to a certain context
109:49 has been deemed to be un like doesn't
109:52 fit. It's not productive for that
109:53 context and that may sound like weasel
109:56 words or it may you know but it's not
109:58 because because it's important that
110:01 competencies are by context and the and
110:05 again I would say this is not you know
110:08 being me being a bleeding heart you know
110:10 progressive or whatever. I mean I am a
110:12 bleeding heart progressive but this is
110:14 not an example of that. This is an
110:16 example of me being pragmatic.
110:19 You can regulate each other. Something
110:21 you talked about earlier on which I
110:22 found really really interesting. Um I
110:24 was reading about a study where of
110:26 25,000 people and they found that people
110:28 having a heart attack were 14% more
110:30 likely to survive if they were married.
110:33 Um, but the other thing that I found
110:34 interesting is that we can we regulate
110:35 each other with words and I think you
110:37 did a
110:38 study on assessing the power of words to
110:41 facilitate
110:43 emotion. You were co it was a study you
110:45 co-authored. Well, we've studied the
110:48 power of words in many contexts,
110:52 including words as invitations to make
110:55 sense of, you know, so if if a an
110:58 instance of emotion is you making
111:00 meaning of what is going on inside your
111:02 body in relation to the
111:05 world, then you can you invite pe every
111:08 time you use an emotion word, you invite
111:10 people to make meaning in that way. So
111:13 you've proven then that certain words
111:15 can calm us down. Well, yes, but I
111:18 wouldn't say I've proven anything.
111:20 Scientists don't, you know, shown,
111:22 demonstrated. Yeah. Demonstrated in a,
111:25 you know, in a context, right? Like we,
111:27 you know, scientists don't like the f
111:29 word, the fa fact. I like the other f
111:32 word, but that fact. Fact. That's a
111:34 tough one because it means something
111:36 that holds under all circumstances in
111:38 all contexts and that's very rarely the
111:41 case. So, but yes, we have. So, and I
111:44 mean so if you've done it probably a
111:46 million times, you text things to
111:50 people, do you not? Yeah. Yeah. And when
111:52 you text a couple of words to your
111:56 partner or your friend, you can change
111:59 their heart rate, you change their
112:01 breathing rate, you can change all kinds
112:03 of chemicals, all kinds of protein
112:05 synthesis just with a couple of words.
112:08 Again, you know, we live in a we, you
112:10 know, free, you know, free speech is
112:12 important, freedoms are important, but
112:14 freedoms come with responsibilities.
112:18 Like it or not, we regulate each other's
112:21 nervous systems in all kinds of ways,
112:23 including with
112:25 words. And um for better or for worse.
112:28 For better or for worse. Exactly. So you
112:31 you really made me think differently
112:32 about stress as well generally because
112:34 if I think about my life through the
112:36 lens of this metabolic budget and stress
112:40 is a burden to this budget then if I
112:44 don't limit my stress I'm much more
112:46 likely to go over budget and if I go
112:48 over budget my immune system might be
112:50 the thing that I cut the costs of or
112:54 uh something else right I mean I mean
112:57 there's good st you can't be without
112:59 stress that would mean you'd be without
113:01 effort. So you know sometimes scientists
113:03 will talk about good stress and bad
113:05 stress which really just means stress
113:07 that is planned and where you replenish
113:10 what you spend and stress that is
113:12 pernitious and you don't chronic stress
113:15 then chronic stress or you know so what
113:18 I would say is just you know if you're
113:20 in a stressful
113:22 meeting a meeting where it's affecting
113:26 your mood that means you've there's been
113:28 some metabolic impact
113:31 take into account what that means. With
113:33 all that you know about the brain, I
113:34 wondered if you if it's changed your
113:37 view at all
113:38 on religion and God and spirituality and
113:42 if there is a higher power at all. The
113:44 brain is such a wonderfully complex
113:45 beautiful thing. You know, as the
113:47 objective observer in 2025 looks at a
113:48 brain goes this is fantastic. Many
113:51 people then conclude that there must be
113:54 a creator of that brain. But also we've
113:56 talked so much today about meaning and
113:57 the point of it all. So, everything
113:59 you've learned about the brain and
114:00 neuroscience and psychology, has it made
114:02 you believe in a god? No.
114:06 Has it made you more atheist or
114:08 agnostic? I'm pretty firmly an
114:13 atheist.
114:15 Um, I don't think that the wondrous
114:19 complexity of nature or or the brain or
114:24 the nervous system requires a designer.
114:28 And that logic doesn't make sense to me.
114:30 So this is obviously a terrible leap,
114:33 but do you therefore think that there's
114:34 no inherent meaning to life outside of,
114:37 you know, the like reproduction? And
114:40 I'm just reading for the second time
114:43 this book. It's called Open Socrates.
114:46 Okay. And it's a really wonderful book
114:50 and I've learned a lot about Socratic
114:53 philosophy that I didn't know. And one
114:56 of the
114:57 things that Socrates thought was
114:59 important was asking this question of
115:01 what is meaning and that you shouldn't
115:04 be asking this question in 15minute
115:08 increments. You should be really asking
115:10 this question about the expanse of your
115:14 life. And so I think if
115:17 anything being a scientist who
115:21 studies how a brain in in constant
115:25 conversation with a body and the other
115:27 brains and bodies in our world and even
115:31 the physical nature of our world. How
115:35 that creates lots of different kinds of
115:38 minds including our very western
115:41 mind. that makes me um think uh more
115:45 about the importance of philosophy
115:47 actually because I think philosophy is
115:50 asking the same kinds of questions that
115:52 religious belief tries to answer and for
115:55 me that's a better path. I think it's a
115:59 more comfortable path. I've often been
116:01 asking questions like this my whole life
116:03 actually. So it makes me feel more like
116:06 what's the point? Like what is the
116:08 ultimate point? I think the answer for
116:10 me, the ultimate point is to leave the
116:15 world a little better than I found it.
116:18 It's like the Johnny Apple Seed, uh, you
116:21 know,
116:22 philosophy. Um, you know, like as a
116:24 scientist, scientists often, you know, a
116:27 lot of us, we don't do what we do for
116:29 money. Money is not bad, but we don't do
116:31 what we do for money. We do it for other
116:33 motivations, right? To know, to be, to
116:35 be curious, to try to discover things.
116:39 And at some point we start to think
116:41 about well what's your like what's your
116:43 legacy right most of us are not Darwin
116:47 um we're not William James we're not you
116:50 know Heisenberg we're not you know most
116:53 of us are not those
116:55 people so what's your
116:59 legacy and in the end I realized that
117:02 I've published a lot of peerreview
117:04 papers when people introduce me you know
117:06 they give some kind of like you know
117:08 about my citation you know people
117:10 whatever Dr. Lisa is one of the most
117:12 influential figures in the field of
117:14 emotion, neuroscience, and the nature of
117:17 the brain. She is among the top 0.1%
117:20 cited scientists in the world for her
117:22 revolutionary research in psychology and
117:23 neuroscience. Yeah, that's all nice,
117:26 super nice. Um, but actually my legacy
117:29 is really the people who I've trained,
117:33 the
117:34 minds that I've had the
117:37 opportunity to engage with. And if I
117:42 were going to be bean counting, I might
117:45 be bean counting the number of
117:47 laboratories that now exist that didn't
117:50 exist before.
117:52 um gener several generations of
117:54 scientists who I
117:56 trained or who who you know and also who
118:00 trained me I mean along the way. So
118:02 that's my legacy in some ways really.
118:05 It's the people. It's the people and the
118:08 ideas. And I would like to think just to
118:11 actually to just wrap up to where we
118:13 started.
118:15 Um, you know, when I when I used to do a
118:18 lot of classroom teaching, I I would
118:20 feel like what I told myself is if I can
118:24 change the the trajectory, the outcomes
118:27 of just one person in this class, just
118:30 one, then I will have done my job, you
118:34 know. And I kind of feel that way a
118:36 little bit sort of the same about the
118:39 public the public face of what I'm
118:42 doing, right? public uh educa public
118:45 science education.
118:47 If I can
118:49 help, if something that I've learned or
118:52 something I've communicated can help
118:54 somebody
118:56 else live a more
119:03 intentional life of agent with agency
119:06 where they're choosing and they're
119:09 impacting
119:11 their loved ones or their
119:14 children, then then That's my then I've
119:18 done my job. That's my legacy. And the
119:21 hard thing about that kind of a legacy,
119:24 a legacy of ideas impacting people's
119:27 lives, is that you don't ever know what
119:30 your impact
119:33 is. But that's part of the
119:38 deal. We have a closing tradition on
119:40 this podcast where the last guest leaves
119:41 a question for the next guest not
119:42 knowing who they're leaving it for.
119:44 question
119:45 is how to live a life without attaining
119:49 anything. I have some context on this
119:52 person. They are a black belt shaoling
119:56 monk. So they talk a lot about identity
119:59 being sure and they and living without
120:01 um encumbrances and attachments and so
120:03 on. Right. It's it's it's it sounds like
120:05 a very Buddhist question. Yeah. The the
120:08 problem is that I think even a Buddhist
120:10 attains something. They attain
120:12 enlightenment. So they don't have
120:14 attachments necessarily. They don't have
120:16 wealth. They don't have power. They
120:17 don't But they attain something. They
120:19 attain
120:21 enlightenment. They attain tranquility.
120:25 How about then how to live life without
120:27 your
120:30 identity making you unhappy?
120:34 Well, I think it's important to
120:37 remember that you don't really have an
120:40 identity that is separate from the
120:43 moment that you're in. It's not like
120:45 there's an essence to you.
120:49 And what I would say is that every
120:53 everything you experience, everything
120:55 you do is a combination of the
120:57 remembered past and the sensory present.
121:00 That means to change who you are, you
121:03 can
121:05 change what you remember or how you
121:08 predict or you can change the sensory
121:11 present. You can change the sensory
121:13 present by literally getting up and
121:14 moving somewhere else like going for a
121:16 walk or or you can change the sensory
121:18 present by what you pay attention to.
121:21 Mindfulness for example, right? you
121:23 there are there are some sensory signals
121:26 that are front and center in your
121:27 attention and there are some that are in
121:29 the background lurking for example you
121:32 can right now you're not paying
121:34 attention to some sensory signals but
121:36 the minute that I say them point them
121:38 out you will be like the pressure um of
121:41 the chair against your back and your
121:44 legs now they're in the forefront of
121:46 your attention because I just mentioned
121:47 them so what I would say is that there
121:51 is no essence to who you are you are
121:54 what you
121:55 do in the moment. You are what you do
122:01 and you can change what you do. You can
122:04 change what you experience the
122:06 consequence of the lived experience
122:08 which is the consequence of what you do
122:10 by what you
122:12 remember and what the context is. So
122:18 that's my answer. If you always remember
122:20 that you will never be
122:23 attached, you will never crave or
122:26 strive, you know, to have things and
122:29 like all of these artificial things
122:30 which prop up the illusion that you are
122:32 and you have an essence to you that you
122:34 c that you know is unchanging across
122:37 situations. Yeah, we um I we um are very
122:41 quick to fall into the trap of thinking
122:42 we are what we did and that's um I much
122:46 prefer I am what I do because that means
122:49 that I have agency to make a different
122:50 decision in the moment irrespective of
122:52 what I did in the past. But it but
122:54 that's the trap we fall into. In 10
122:56 minutes time I bet I'll be downstairs
122:57 and I'll be back into the trap of
122:58 thinking that I am Steven Barllet who
123:01 did this thing for 32 years or did you
123:05 know Lisa thank you. Thank you so much
123:08 for um thank you for everything that you
123:09 do. I've I've you've changed my mind in
123:11 a really profound way and that's quite
123:12 hard because I sit here quite a lot so
123:14 have lots of conversations about the
123:15 brain and about lots of lots of new
123:18 studies that have come out etc etc but
123:20 you've completely changed my my mind and
123:22 made me think from in a completely
123:25 different way which I'm really grateful
123:26 for. So, thank you so much because
123:28 that's a gift and that's not a gift that
123:30 I always get doing this job, but um it
123:32 really is a gift and it's one that I
123:34 think will help me to live a better life
123:35 ultimately. But hopefully also for
123:37 everybody that's listening and thank you
123:38 for stepping into the uh public
123:41 communication side of your life
123:46 because I was going to say it's um
123:49 someone that knows what you know and
123:50 that has done the work that you've done.
123:53 It is so important to the to the extent
123:55 that I almost consider it to be like a
123:57 really critical responsibility because
123:59 there's people like us that sit on these
124:01 podcasts who aren't in the laboratory
124:03 that are getting our information from
124:04 social media, Tik Tok or any any odd
124:06 person that says anything and it's
124:08 really really important that people like
124:09 you step out more and share what you
124:11 know. Um and thank you so much for
124:13 writing these books because they are
124:15 absolutely brilliant and just like
124:17 you've changed my mind today. I think
124:19 these books will change a lot of
124:20 people's lives. I highly recommend this
124:22 book. how emotions are made. I'm going
124:23 to link it below. The secret life of the
124:25 brain and also for something a little
124:26 bit shorter but equally accessible. Um
124:29 this book here, seven and a half lessons
124:31 about the brain.
124:33 Thank you so much. We're done. Thank you
124:35 so much. I'm going to let you into a
124:37 little bit of a secret. You're probably
124:38 going to think me and my team are a
124:39 little bit weird, but I can still
124:40 remember to this day when Jamaima from
124:42 my team posted on Slack that she changed
124:44 the scent in this studio. And right
124:46 after she posted it, the entire office
124:48 clapped in our Slack channel. And this
124:50 might sound crazy, but at the Diary of
124:51 SEO, this is the type of 1% improvement
124:53 we make on our show. And that is why the
124:55 show is the way it is. By understanding
124:58 the power of compounding 1%s, you can
125:00 absolutely change your outcomes in your
125:03 life. It isn't about drastic
125:04 transformations or quick wins. It's
125:07 about the small consistent actions that
125:10 have a lasting change in your outcomes.
125:12 So, two years ago, we started the
125:14 process of creating this beautiful
125:15 diary, and it's truly beautiful. Inside
125:17 there's lots of pictures, lots of
125:18 inspiration and motivation as well. Some
125:21 interactive elements. And the purpose of
125:23 this diary is to help you identify, stay
125:26 focused on, develop consistency with the
125:29 1% that will ultimately change your
125:31 life. So if you want one for yourself or
125:32 for a friend or for a colleague or for
125:34 your team, then head to the diary.com
125:36 right now. I'll link it below. This has
125:39 always blown my mind a little bit. 53%
125:42 of you that listen to this show
125:43 regularly haven't yet subscribed to the
125:45 show. So, could I ask you for a favor?
125:47 If you like the show and you like what
125:48 we do here and you want to support us,
125:49 the free simple way that you can do just
125:51 that is by hitting the subscribe button.
125:53 And my commitment to you is if you do
125:54 that, then I'll do everything in my
125:56 power, me and my team, to make sure that
125:58 this show is better for you every single
126:00 week. We'll listen to your feedback.
126:01 We'll find the guests that you want me
126:03 to speak to, and we'll continue to do
126:04 what we do. Thank you so
126:08 [Music]
126:09 much. Heat. Heat. N.
126:13 [Music]
126:19 [Music]
Расширение Chrome