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(Major Discovery) No_1 Neuroscientist: Anxiety Is Just A Predictive Error In The Brain!

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There are these experiments where they

trained people to experience anxiety but

as determination because exactly the

same physical state could be experienced

completely different. And what they

discovered is that at first it's really

hard but you practice practice practice

and then eventually becomes really

automatic. So the first thing to

understand is that Dr. Lisa Feldman

Barrett is a worldleading

neuroscientist. Her groundbreaking

research reveals that emotions like

anxiety and trauma are built by the

brain and we have the power to control

them. The story is that you're born with

these innate emotion circuits, but

you're not born with the ability to

control them. That's false. Really,

what's happening is that your brain is

not reacting. It's predicting. And every

action you take, every emotion you have

is a combination of the remembered past,

including any trauma. And so, you don't

have a sense of agency about it because

it happens really automatically, faster

than you can blink your eyes. How does

this change how we should treat trauma?

Sometimes in life, you are responsible

for changing something. Not because

you're to blame, but because you're the

only person who can. I mean, I had a

daughter who was clinically depressed,

was getting D's in school, she wasn't

sleeping, she was miserable. At first,

she was so resistant, but then she made

the decision that she wanted to be

helped. And did she recover? Yes, she

did. So, if you want to change who you

are, what you feel, understanding these

basic operating principles is the key to

living a meaningful life. So, what is

step one to being able to make that

change? So,

this has always blown my mind a little

bit. 53% of you that listen to this show

regularly haven't yet subscribe to the

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before we start? If you like the show

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everything in my power, me and my team,

to make sure that this show is better

for you every single week. We'll listen

to your feedback. We'll find the guest

that you want me to speak to and we'll

continue to do what we do. Thank you so

much. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, you have

a really remarkable twisting career

journey. It's almost quite difficult to

uh encapsulate in a particular mission

or a particular uh summary of the

journey you've been on and the the

twists and turns you've taken. But if if

I were to ask you now what mission

you're on with the work that you're

currently doing, are you able to

summarize

that? My goal is as a science

communicator is to try to take really

complicated science and present it in a

way that people can use. You know, maybe

they use it to entertain their friends

at a dinner party. Maybe they use it to

um help their kid who's, you know,

struggling with depression. That was

certainly in my case something that I

had to deal with. Maybe they're using it

to improve their workplace or improve

the productivity of their of their peeps

or whatever. The point being that that's

ultimately that's what science is for.

It's for, you know, living a better

life. And average everyday people

without PhDs can do that if they have

the right information.

I'm probably attempting to understand

how it is that a brain like ours that is

attached to a body like ours that is

pickled in a world like ours produces a

mind. What is it? What is happening that

allows you to have thoughts and feelings

and memories

um and and

actions and somebody from another

country, another culture also has a

mental life which looks nothing like

yours. How is it that the same kind of

brain plan with the same general kind of

body plan can produce such different

types of minds when they are when those

brains are wired in a sense finish

wiring themselves in cultural and

physical contexts that are so widely

different.

when you just talked about your pursuit

of understanding how a brain like ours

creates the mind and the reality that we

have. If I'm able to understand all of

that as many people who read your book

about the brain and emotions were able

to understand, what is it that it offers

me in my everyday life? Oh my god. It

offers you the opportunity to have more

agency in your life. And what does that

mean? It means you have more choice. It

means you have more control. It means

that you can architect your life. I

mean, you can't control everything that

happens to you. You can't control every

moment of feeling. Um, but you have more

control than you probably think you do.

Everybody has more control over what

they feel and what they do than they

think they do. That control doesn't look

the way we expect it to. It's much

harder to harness than we would like it

to be. Some people have more

opportunities for that control than

other people do, but everybody has the

opportunity to have more control. And of

course, the flip side is also more

responsibility

um for the way they live their lives.

And I think that's a really good thing.

And I think it's a really good thing now

when you know world events are swirling

around you and you feel like, you know,

you're just being buffeted around. Even

within that craziness, there is there

are opportunities

to to be more of an architect of your

own experience and your own life. I

think a lot of people find that um

optimistic and helpful. Yeah. Because

life can feel like we are a puppet and

we are just responding to what happens

around us. And if it rains outside then

we're sad. If person sends us a message,

then we're annoyed and that we're just

these sort of reactive creatures

reacting to whatever happens around us.

But you're telling me that if I have a

greater understanding of the brain and

how it works and emotions, then I can

seize back some of that control and live

a more intentional life. Yes, exactly.

And I think for me, I mean, I started

um I started my career studying the

nature of emotion, but really it became

a flashlight into understanding how a

brain works.

Why do we even have a brain? It's a very

expensive organ. That piece of meat

between your ears is the most expensive

metabolically the most expensive organ

you have. Um, so what's it good for?

What's its most basic function? How does

it work in relation to the body? I think

that certainly on your show, you've had

a number of people who talk about the

relationship between the brain and the

body in some way, but I think scientists

for a long

time forgot or ignored the fact that the

brain is attached to a body, right?

Because we don't feel all the drama like

right now in each in you, in me, in all

of our listeners, right? We all have

this like drama going on. It's really

quite intense and there's a lot of going

on and none of us are aware of it. I

hope if you are aware of it, I'm really

sorry. It probably means that something

is, you know, you're not feeling well

today. But it's a good thing that we're

not aware of what's going on inside our

own bodies most of the time because we'd

never pay attention to anything outside

our own skin again, right? But the

problem is that in science, it often

begins with starting with your own

subjective experience and then trying to

formalize that. And I mean, if you look

at any science, physics is like that,

too. You just have to go back several

hundred years or maybe a little longer

to to see it. And so, it turns out that

a lot of what you experience as

properties of the world, of the way the

world is, really is very rooted in your

brain's regulation of your body. Um, and

so I guess I'm I started with emotion,

but it really became a much larger

project to try to understand, well, what

is a brain? How is it structured? How

did it evolve? How does it work? What's

its most basic function? And where do

thoughts and feelings and actions,

perceptions, what role do they play in

that function? So, it's a bit flipping

the question, right? Most people start

with what is an emotion? What is a

thought? What is a memory? They define

it and then they go looking for its

physical basis in the brain or in the

body. That's a pretty bankrupt

perspective from I mean after a hundred

years there weren't really good answers.

So we flipped it around and we said okay

well given that we have the kind of

brain we

do what can it do? What does it do? And

in its normal functioning, how does it

produce mental events that in our

culture our thoughts and feelings and

perceptions and actions? In other

cultures, they're different

conglomerations of features. Right? So

for us, a thought and a feeling are

super distinct. We experience them as

very separate. In fact, really since the

time of Plato, we've had this kind of

narrative where, you know, the mind or

the brain is a battleground between your

thoughts and your feelings, right? In

for control of your action. If your

thoughts win, you are a rational

creature. You are a healthy creature.

You are a moral creature. If your

instincts and your emotions win, you

know, your inner beast, then you are

irresponsible. You are childish. You are

immoral. You are mentally ill. That's

the narrative that we work in. In some

cultures, thoughts and feelings are not

separate. They are

really, it's not that you have them at

the same time. It's that they are one

thing. They are features of the same

mental event. In some cultures, your

body and your mind are not separate.

There are no separate experiences for a

physical sensation versus a mental

feeling. They're really one thing. So

our minds are not the human nature. It's

just one human nature. And there are

other human natures too. And we have to

figure out

how general brain plan, a general body

plan for a neurotypical human produces

such wide variation

um depending on the cultural context in

which it grows. as it relates to

neuroscience and understanding the brain

and the way that we create reality. Was

there a Eureka moment for you where you

realize that most of us have it wrong or

that there's an underlying misconception

about the way that our brain creates our

reality? I would say yeah sure there was

a Eureka moment but it was a long slow

burn. When I was a graduate student, I

wasn't studying emotion. I was

studying the self. How do you think

about yourself? What is your self-esteem

like? How do you conceive of yourself?

Right? This is a an important topic in

psychology. And I was measuring

emotion as an outcome variable. And the

measurements weren't weren't the

measures weren't working. And I thought,

well, I need to be able to just

literally objectively measure when

someone is angry or when they're sad or

when they're happy. I don't want to have

to ask them because they could be wrong.

And in that phrasing of the question,

there's a presumption, right, that there

is an objective state called anger. That

generally most instances of anger will

look the same regardless of person and

context. And I very quickly realized

that there are no essences that

anybody's been able to discover. Right?

So recently in the last couple of years

um researchers did a metaanalysis which

is a big statistical summary of of

hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of

experiments. And what they discovered is

that and this is just in urban cultures,

right? We're not even talking about

remote cultures now. Just in urban

cultures, when someone is angry, they

people scowl about 35% of the time when

they're angry. A scowl is like a like a

scowl like a right like you know you

knit your eyebrows, you you frown,

right? So it's okay. But that means 65%

of the time when people are angry

they're doing something else that's

meaningful with their

face. And half the time when people

scowl, they're not angry. They're

feeling something else. They could be

concentrating really hard. You could

have just told them a bad joke. They

could have a bad bout of gas. You know,

a scowl is not the expression of anger.

It is an expression of anger in some

contexts and it's also an expression of

other states in other contexts.

So what this means is that you know

there's no really strongly reliable

expression for anger that is specific to

anger. And the same is true for every

other emotion that's ever been studied.

It's really clear that you're in anger

or sadness or pick an emotion. You know

your heart rate can go up, it can go

down. It can stay the same. Your blood

pressure can go up. It can go down. It

can stay the same. the physiology that

is occurring in your body is related to

the your your brain's preparation for

particular behaviors. So let's start

with that then. So the the predictive

brain is this idea that I only pretty

much know from you. I'd never heard it

before. When we say the predictive

brain, what does that mean and what does

it not mean? So when you are living your

everyday life? Yeah. Like right now?

Like right now. So, right now, I'm

guessing that I'm saying things to you

and um you're perceiving what I'm saying

and then you're reacting to it. That's

how it feels to you, right? Yes. Okay.

And that's how it feels to me, too. So,

we sense and then we react. That's the

way most people experience themselves in

the world. That's not actually what's

happening under the hood. Really what's

happening is that the brain, your brain

is not reacting, it's

predicting. And what that means is if we

were to stop time right now, just freeze

time, your brain would be in a state and

it would be

remembering past experiences that are

similar to this state as a way of

predicting what to do next. Like

literally in the next moment, should

your eyes move? Should your heart rate

go up? Should your breathing change?

Should your blood vessels dilate or

should they constrict? Should you

prepare to stand? Right? Movements. And

these movements, the preparation for

movement, literal copies of those

signals become predictions for what you

will see and hear and smell and taste

and think and feel.

So under the hood, your brain is

predicting what movements it should

engage in next and as a consequence what

you will experience because of those

movements. So you act first and then you

sense. You don't sense and then react.

You predict action and then you sense.

So give me a example which brings this

to light of how my brain is predicting

and then taking action. Okay. So right

now you and I are having a

conversation and I'm speaking and you're

listening

and you're what what what's really

happening in your brain is that based

on many gazillion

repetitions of listening to

language. Your brain is predicting,

literally predicting every single word

that will come out of my

Yeah. Okay. And how surprising would it

have been if I didn't say mouth, I said

some other orifice of my body that words

were coming out of. That would have been

pretty

surprising because your brain is

predicting

that. your brain is always predicting

and it's correcting those predictions

when they're

incorrect. And you know, I I have this

um video that I often show when I'm

giving a talk to scientists or to

civilians, giving a talk and I I it

creates a situation where they can

predict something and they can they can

feel that a prediction is not just this

abstract kind of thought. It's your

brain is is literally changing the

firing of its own sensory neurons to

anticipate incoming sensation. So you

start to feel these sensations before

the signals actually arrive for you to

perceive them. You start to have the

experience before the world gives you

those signals. I read I think it was in

your book but it might have been

elsewhere about the example of being

thirsty.

Yes. So, um, when you, um, drink, so say

you're super thirsty and you drink a big

glass of water, when do you stop being

thirsty? Almost

immediately. But actually, it takes 20

minutes for that water to be absorbed

into your bloodstream and make its way

to the brain to tell the brain that you

are no longer in need of fluid. Because

across millions of opportunities, you

have learned that certain movements now

and certain um sensory signals now will

result in that mental state. Or here's

another

example. So right now, keep your eyes on

me. You're looking right at me. And in

your mind's eye, I want you to imagine

um a Macintosh apple. Like a not a

computer, but like an actual piece of

fruit. Okay. Can you do it? Yeah. Can

you see it? Yeah. Um what color is it?

Green. Okay. Does it have any red? No.

Okay. So, it's a Granny Smith apple.

Yeah. Okay. What does it taste like?

Like, imagine imagine grabbing it. Yeah.

biting into it, hearing the crunch of

the apple. What does it taste like? It's

like sweet. Like a little tart, maybe.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is it juicy? It's very

juicy. Yeah. Okay. So, if I were imaging

your brain right now, what I would see

is I would see changes in the signal

that is um related to neural activity in

your visual cortex even though there is

no apple in front of you. And I would

see a change in activity in your um

auditory cortex even though you didn't

really hear the crunch. My mouth is

watering as well. And your mouth is

watering. And in fact, every time you

sit down for a meal, your um brain

directs your saliva glands to produce

more saliva to prepare you to eat and um

digest the food. So that usually happens

in advance of even sitting down to a

meal. That is all prediction. That's all

of that is your brain preparing itself

for what's coming. Um because predicting

and correcting is a much more efficient

way to run a nervous system, really any

system, than reacting to the world.

Here's another example. Do you drink

coffee? Yes. Okay. Do you drink coffee

every day at the same time? Usually.

Yeah. Okay. And are you one of these

people that if you miss having coffee at

that time, you get a headache? I mean,

it's happened before. Yes. Well, I used

to be a person who drank a lot of

coffee. And um and I love coffee, but I

don't drink it anymore. But I loved it.

And I drank it always at the same time

every day. And if I didn't drink it, I

would get a at that time of day, I would

get a massive

headache. And the reason why, and this

is true really of every medicine you

take, every everything which anything

which affects your physiology, if you do

it on a regular basis, your brain will

come to expect it. And what that means,

come to expect it, is that coffee has

chemicals in it that will constrict your

blood vessels um everywhere. But in the

brain, the brain is attempting to keep

its to keep the blood flow pretty

constant and even. And so if every day

at 8:00 in the morning, you're drinking

something that's going to constrict your

blood vessels, then at 7:55

approximately, I don't know the exact

timing, but a little bit before uh you

know, 8, your brain will dilate the

blood vessels in preparation for that

constriction. So they remain constant

and if you don't drink that substance

then you have this big dilation and you

get a very very bad headache.

I was just wondering then about as you

were talking I thought you were going to

talk about how sometimes when I set an

alarm I seem to wake up like 5 minutes

before the alarm. Yeah, sure. That's an

example. Here's another example.

Exercise. Okay. If you wanna if you want

to play tennis better, if you want to

run a a faster mile, what do you do?

Train. Train. And you do the same thing

over and over and over and over again.

And you get better and faster and you

burn fewer calories. You get more

efficient. Why? Because your brain is

predicting really well. That's what

muscle memory is. It's not literally a

memory in your muscles. It's a memory in

your brain. Your brain is controlling

your muscles. And so if you practice the

same set of movements over and over and

over again, you just get really

efficient at them because your brain is

able to predict better. Now, if you're

somebody who's exercising because you

want to become healthier or you want to

lose weight or you right, you don't want

to practice the same exercise over and

over and over again because you will be

burning fewer calories because you're

being efficient. That's the goal, right?

So instead, you do interval training,

right? If somebody's calling out to you

every 30 seconds a different set of

movements and you can't predict what

they are, then your your brain will make

a prediction. It'll be wrong. You'll

have to adjust and so you end up burning

more calories and you end up throwing

yourself out of balance um which we call

alostasis. So you become disregulated

and then you your brain has to work to

get itself back in again. And so that's

a different kind of workout. These two

different kinds of workouts are

completely predicated on the fact that

sometimes you want to be able to predict

better. Sometimes you want to be able to

disrupt yourself and get back into the

pocket quickly. Right? So basically

you're learning how to um take in

prediction error things signals you

didn't predict and adjust to them.

What does this say about the nature of

trauma and other mental health illnesses

like depression, anxiety, etc. Because

is this a misfiring of my predictions? I

say this because predictions reliant on

something happening in the past and

forming a pattern like a pattern

recognition system. So if I grew up and

there were certain patterns that are now

not the case, so if I grew up and every

time a man walked into the room, he hit

me. And now when a man walks into the

room and I'm 35 years old, I'm getting

that same sort of prediction in my

brain. So I've got a fear of men, for

example. Is this does this somewhat

explain childhood trauma and why it's so

hard to shake and why as adults we can

sometimes have dysfunctional lives?

I would say as a general principle, yes.

Um there are a lot of you know the devil

is in the details, right? But yeah,

sure. Um, so trauma is not something

that happens in the world to

you. Everything you experience is a

combination of the remembered past and

the sensory present. So there could be

an adverse event that occurs. You're in

an earthquake. Someone dies who's close

to you. Something bad happens to you.

Someone hurts you in some way. Um, there

could be an adverse event that is not

traumatic to you because you're not

you're not using past experiences to

make sense of it as a

trauma. On the other hand, something

that is could be like an everyday

experience to somebody else to

you, it links to a a set of memories

that are very traumatic. We're very

traumatic. those events were very

traumatic. Um, and so to you it is a

trauma. So trauma is not an objective

thing in the world. It's also not all in

your head. It's a rel trauma is a

property of the relation between what

has happened to you in the past and what

is occurring in the present. So here's

an example. There is an anthropologist

who works at Emory University and she

studies um people um in in a lot of

different cultures and she studies

trauma in a lot of different cultures.

And there was this one girl that she she

wrote about, a case study of a girl

named Maria um who was a young

adolescent

girl and she lived in a culture where it

was more normative for men

physically be very physical with women

and and girls.

So in our culture, we would we would say

it's physical abuse, but in her culture,

this is just what men did. She didn't

exper would slap her around and she

didn't like it, but she didn't show any

sign of trauma. The way she made sense

of it was that men are just It

was very much a this is not about me,

this is about them. It's not pleasant.

But she slept okay. Her grades were okay

in school. She had friends. She didn't

have any signs of trauma at

all. Then she watched

Oprah and she heard all of these women

talk about having been the subject of

physical abuse from their boyfriends or

their fathers or, you know, their

husbands.

And

she recognized the similarity in the

physical circumstances of these women's

descriptions and and her physical

circumstances. And she also observed

them

experiencing traum traum like you know

symptoms of trauma. And all of a sudden

she started to um have difficulty

sleeping and she her grades dropped and

she had trouble concentrating and she

became socially withdrawn.

her way of making

meaning, her way of, if you think about

physical movements as actions, she made

different meaning of those actions and

she experienced

trauma where she didn't before. Now, if

you're somebody who believes that there

is an objective world out there where,

you know, cause and effect, Yeah. that

that really there was some kind of

latent trauma in her and she didn't

experience it before but then it was

like triggered and then she be you could

tell a whole story like that and people

do tell whole stories like that but

that's not what the best scientific

evidence suggests is happening. What's

happening is that the

physical movements were the same. The

psychological experience of those

movements was different because

experience is a combination of the

sensory present, the physical present

and the remembered past. And the you

need both in order to have a particular

kind of experience. So the way to

describe what happened to Maria's

trajectory was that she experienced

something as an

unfortunate aspect of like physical life

and then it became about her. It became

something not not this person was doing

something bad but this person was doing

something bad to her because of who she

is. And she was also shown how she

should be responding to that by watching

Oprah's show and watching these other

individuals responding in a certain way.

Right? So it became about her as a

person, not just about, you know, her

stepfather was an And if you

think about it, what we do in this

culture when when people go into therapy

for trauma, right, is we're attempting

to to actually reverse the narrative.

So, we try to teach people that it's not

when something traumatic happens to

them. It's, and I want to be really

clear what I'm saying, right? I'm not

saying that when people experience

trauma, it's their fault. I'm not in any

way saying they're culpable for what's

happened to them. But sometimes in

life, you are responsible for changing

something, not because you're to blame,

but because you're the only person who

can. The responsibility falls to

you. And so in this culture, we try to

teach people who've experienced trauma

that they can experience those physical

events that happened to them in the past

in some other way.

And when they do, they no longer feel

traumatized anymore. My mind's a little

bit blown for a number of different

reasons because it's a real paradigm

shift to think that we are giving

meaning to the thing that happened in

our past and sometimes that meaning is

coming from watching other people give

it meaning and we're inheriting that

meaning that oh yes, that's called

cultural inheritance. It's like a

cultural it's like a contagion.

So it turns out that you know there's

there's one kind of old evolutionary

theory right this is called the modern

synthesis where inheritance is really

your genes you inherit in you whatever

you inherit you inherit by your genes

and then natural selection you know

chooses some gene patterns and not

others and and that's really how

inheritance works across

generations. Most evolutionary

biologists don't don't hold to that view

anymore because for the most part there

are many many ways to inherit things and

a lot of what we think of as inheritance

is really more what's called epigenetic

meaning it doesn't really involve DNA

very much and I would say the way I like

to say it is that we have the kinds of

nature that requires a nurture we have

the kind of genes that require

experience

before anything is wired into our

brains. And most of our characteristics

work that way. Very few characteristics

work just by genes alone. What always

happens in a neurotypical uh brain is

that you're born with your brain

incomplete. Right? An adult brain has

has this we we say that it's wired to

its world. That world includes its own

your own body. Um, but a baby um is not

a baby's brain is not a miniature adult

brain. It's a brain that's waiting for

wiring instructions from the world and

from its own body. So your brain is

wired for you to see out of eyes that

are the exact distance of your eyes from

each other. If somehow, you know,

magically we could transplant your brain

into somebody else's skull, you would

not be able to see out of that skull.

You would not be able to see out of

those eyes because they're not in the

right place. You hear with ears. You

your ability to hear comes from signals

that are shaped by the shape of your

ear. So your brain is wired to hear out

of these ears. Not any ears, these ears.

Similarly, you as a baby, you are taught

the meanings of physical signals. You're

taught how to make sense of these

things. That's called cultural

inheritance. Many things that we think

of as hardwired into the brain are

actually culturally inherited across

generations. That's how people survive

in a

particular environment. You know, so

like in the 1800s and 1900s when

explorers would go off and they would go

off to Antarctica or here or there and

they would very quickly die. The Inuit

live there, they live perfectly fine.

How? Well, because they had culturally

inherited knowledge. We're

always transmitting

um knowledge to each

other and that knowledge becomes fodder

for our own predictions. So your

predictions don't just come from your

personal experience. They also come from

you watching television, you talking to

guests, you reading books, watching

movies. Um also your brain like most um

human brains can do something really

fantastic which is you can take bits and

pieces of past experience and put them

together in a brand new way so that you

can use the past to experience something

new that you've never experienced

before.

You talked a second ago about therapists

try and make you think about the past

differently, but I do think there's an

underlying belief in our culture and

society and on social media that if

something happened to you, almost like

this Freudian approach of if this

happens to you, this is who you become.

And I was reading that book, The Courage

to be Disliked over Christmas. And it

kind

of it changed my view on this quite

profoundly and in an important way

because it helped me to understand. And

I think it basically says that what

happens to us doesn't create who we are.

We use what happened to us and we apply

meaning to it which then determines the

behavior we have. And really

interestingly in that it means that many

of the beliefs I have about myself, who

I say I am, my identity and therefore

like the ways that I behave every day,

whether they're productive or

unproductive are actually

just choices I've made to apply meaning

to the past. Does that make sense? It's

completely makes sense. And this is

really this is such like a profound I

don't know if the whoever's listening

now understands what I'm saying here but

we said at the start of this

conversation you go through life

thinking you're a puppet and you're

being controlled by what happened to you

who you are your identity but actually

your identity is just this this

construction

of meaning that you've given to the past

so to serve your purpose now as it says

in the book. Yes, I would say it

slightly differently, but the message is

the same. I think

um there are in the sensory present,

right? There are sightes, there are

sounds, there are smells, some stuff's

going on inside your own body, right?

And these signals are are going to your

brain. They have no inherent

psychological meaning. They have no

inherent emotional meaning. They have no

inherent mental meaning.

What gives them

meaning is the are your memories from

the past. You are creating you are a

meaning

maker. Meaning isn't a set of features

like a dictionary definition. So meaning

the meaning of this cup isn't that it

it's made of metal and that I mean we

certainly can talk about those features,

but the meaning of this cup in this

moment is what I do with it. So it could

be a vessel for drinking. It could be a

weapon. It could be, you know, a flower

holder. It could be uh a measuring cup.

It the meaning of the vessel is what I

do with it in the moment. That's its

meaning. And so the meaning of the

vessel isn't in the

vessel. And it's also not only in my

head. The meaning is the transaction.

It's the relationship between this the

features of this vessel, this object and

the signals in my brain which are

creating my actions. In fact, even the

fact that this is a solid

object, the property of

solidity is not in the object. It's

because I have a body of a certain type

with certain features that makes me

experience this as solid. The solidity

isn't in me and it's not in the object.

It's in the relationship between the

two. That means everything everything

you experience is partly of your own

making. You don't have a sense of agency

about it because it happens really

automatically. It's happening

automatically now as we're talking. It's

happening faster than you can blink your

eyes,

but it's still happening. And that means

if you are partly even if you even

though you don't have a sense of

agency you are

partly in

control and also therefore responsible

for the meaning that is being

made. And when I said at the outset of

our conversation that my goal was to try

to, you know, as a science communicator

was to try to explain to people

that they have more control over their

lives. They have more control over who

they are in any given moment than they

think they do to give them more agency

in their lives. This is this is exactly

what I mean.

You you don't have an enduring

identity. You are who you are in the

moment of your

action. And actions are a combination of

the remembered past, so stuff your brain

is using to

predict that's how it's that your

brain's assembling super

automatically and the sensory present.

Right? So if you want to change who you

are, you want to change what you feel,

you want to change what your impact is

on someone

else, you have a couple of choices. You

can try to go back into the past and

change the meaning of what's happened

before so that you'll remember

differently. You'll predict differently

in the future. That's what psychotherapy

is. That's what you know, heartfelt

conversations at two o'clock in the

morning or with your friends or

whatever. That's really hard

Doesn't doesn't always work so well. The

other thing that you can do though is if

you realize that whatever you experience

now becomes the seeds for predictions

later, then you can invest in creating

new experiences quite deliberately for

yourself. Now you can expose yourself to

new ideas. You can expose yourself to

people who are different than you. You

can practice cultivating particular

experiences like you would practice any

skill. And that

will any

new concepts you learn, new experiences

you have in the moment, if you practice

them, they become automatic predictions

in the future. So let me take that and

try and apply it to this example of this

silver cup in my hand. So psychotherapy

would try and go back into the past and

explain to me why this actually isn't

something I should drink out of and that

it could be other things. Whereas what

you're saying is another approach is if

I go and get some flowers right now and

I put them in there, I'm creating a new

prediction for the future because I've

created a new pattern in the present of

this actually being a vase for flowers.

And I can start to create a new pattern

that silver cups like this one aren't

just for drinking out of. They are also

vasees for flowers. Exactly. Okay. So, I

can either go back in the past and try

and convince myself that the cup isn't a

cup. Or I can in the present moment

create a new pattern which will mean

that in the future my brain will predict

next time it sees a silver cup. It won't

just think drink out of it Steve. It

will think pop some flowers in it.

Right? And remember it's it's actually

the thinking comes after the action.

Right? So what will happen is the next

time that you are approaching a table

where a silver cup might be your brain

will already be starting to prepare the

actions to go get the flowers and then

you will think oh right I can use this

as a oh look there's a great vase right

so in your brain it's action your first

your brain is controlling it's

preparing the actions of the visca what

we call visceral motor so does your

heart rate need to change do your blood

vessels muscles need to dilate? Do you

need to breathe differently? It's

basically anticipating the needs of the

body and attempting to meet those needs

before they arise. That supports your

physical movements, right? So, if you're

going to if you're walking over

somewhere to pick up some flowers and

cut the stems and whatever that those

are all physical movements that require

glucose and oxygen and like so all

of that has to get prepared in advance,

milliseconds before the actions start to

be prepared. So it's not what you think

determines what you feel. It's what you

prepare to

do determines your thoughts and your

feelings and the sights and sounds and

smells and sensations. That's how it

really works under the hood. So meaning

is in terms of what you

do and then as a consequence of that it

meaning is a a consequence it becomes

what you feel and what you think and so

on. So let me give you some specific

examples then. So if I'm scared of

spiders, how would I go about overcoming

that fear of spiders using route number

two that you described there?

So one of the ways that you change to

change predictions, you can't just will

yourself to change a prediction. I am

really afraid of

bees. I I had a traumatic experience

when I was five. I'm afraid of bees. I

know a lot about bees. I'm actually a

gardener and I I and I know a lot about

the evolutionary biology of bees. But

when I am outside, if a bee comes

around, my first reaction is to either

run or to freeze. Right? I'm afraid of

bees. I could talk to myself until the

cows come home. It won't matter. I

can't. Right? So, what I have to do is

dose myself with prediction error.

Meaning I have to interact with bees in

a way that changes my

actions which will change my lived

experience. And I can't just do it all

at once. It's not like a good idea would

not be for me to say would not have been

for me to um go to like um somebody who

has beehives and you know put on a suit

and go work. I mean that would be like

overwhelming, right? So

instead, maybe I don't

run. Maybe I stand and watch. Maybe I

get closer to a bee. Maybe I plant

bushes and flowers that bees like a lot

to bring bees to me so that I can sit

and just be around them while they're

buzzing and doing their thing. Maybe I

deliberately let myself get

stung at some point, which I did. But

you know you're dosing yourself with

your brain is making a set of

predictions. Those

predictions there are a set of

predictions. That means your brain isn't

preparing one action. It's preparing

multiple actions. So you need to prove

to your brain that those predictions

are wrong. Yes. So exactly you need you

are setting up circumstances so you can

prove to yourself that your predictions

are wrong. If you're predicting well you

have a few action plans. If you're

predicting

poorly let's say overgeneralizing maybe

you have a hundred plans. It's like if

there's tremendous uncertainty your

brain doesn't know which action plan to

so there might be many of them right

sensory signals are coming into your

brain from the sensory surfaces of your

body from your retinas from your cookia

you've got sensory surfaces on your skin

inside your body in your muscle cells

all these signals coming to your brain

they help

select which prediction signal will be

completed as action

and lived

experience. Okay. So let's say you put

yourself deliberately in in a situation

where the incoming signals will

not select any prediction because

there's too much unpredicted signal

there. It's error. There's another name

in psychology for taking in prediction

error. Exposure therapy learning. Oh

okay. Yeah. Exposure therapy which is a

kind of learning. All learning all

learning is you taking in prediction

sign prediction error signals you didn't

predict or there's no signal that you

did predict. You predicted a signal it's

not there. So what you do is you set up

situations for yourself that you will

take in signals that are novel. Right?

And this seems like an easy thing to

do. We people actually sometimes seek

novelty. All right. But too much

novelty, it it is not necessarily a good

thing all the time. Particularly if you

know you're

metabolically it's expensive

metabolically to take in prediction

error and learn something new. Like the

biggest costs that your brain expends

energy on are moving your body, learning

something new, and dealing with

persistent

uncertainty. Those are really expensive

things for us. So, if you're

metabolically encumbered in some way,

say you're depressed or you have anxiety

disorder or maybe you have heart disease

or diabetes or you're living under

chronic stress, you don't have the

spoons necessarily to take in prediction

error. You're just going to go with your

predictions. You aren't going to learn.

You aren't going to be able to update

those predictions. You're going to be

stuck. You're going to be stuck in your

head, right?

every experience, every action a

combination of the remembered present,

the remembered past, the predictions and

the sensory present. But the sensory

present is there just to select which

remembered past you're going to act

on. And

sometimes under in moments of great

metabolic

load, the brain just goes with its own

predictions and ignores what's out there

in the world. I was thinking earlier on

as you were speaking about this sort of

social contagion where we can apply

meaning to our lives and what happened

to us and then consequently make

ourselves sad because we see how other

people on Tik Tok or Instagram are

feeling. And it made me think that you

must you must think the world is crazy

to some degree. You must see social

contagion in the world where suddenly

everybody becomes traumatized because

trauma's become almost popular, you

know, to think about what happened to

you and create meaning to it and then

suffer that meaning. But there's other

types of social contagion where which

are spreading through society. I mean,

young people are getting more and more

anxious. They're getting more and more

depressed. We're self diagnosing

ourselves with different illnesses and

different things.

But now you've explained to me how the

brain works, I'm thinking, gosh, as a

society, we are bonkers.

Well, well, we're living out lies. Yeah.

I think I guess the way I I I do I do

find it frustrating at times, but but

but only because I think we are meaning

makers as an animals are meaning maker.

We create meaning. We create meaning by

virtue of living like by virtue of

interacting with with things in the

world by interacting with each

other. Very few meanings are

given that that is that they exist

independently of us. And so what I find

frustrating is that there's a lot of

suffering

and understanding these basic operating

principles of the brain will not remove

all

suffering but it it could ameliate it

could remove some. And people don't

understand that they are

sometimes making their suffering worse

than it has to be. You pulled on the

word responsible. Well, I want to be

really clear that again I'm not saying

people are are to blame. Culpability and

responsibility are not the same thing.

Culpability is blame. Are you blamew

worthy? Right? You can nobody I'm not

saying people are to blame for their own

suffering. I'm saying that people can be

more responsible in by taking more

responsibility they could reduce their

suffering some. That's not the same

thing as saying you know that they that

it's their cause their cause to begin

with. So I'll give you an example.

Social contagion. Contagion is an

interesting word. It means that you are

infected by

something even a virus. There are these

experiments that were done 15 20 years

ago where um these are done by Sheldon

Cohen who is a psychoimmunologist which

means he's a psychologist and he studies

how immunology

um that is your immune system is related

to your psychological state. And so what

he did across a number of experiments is

he took people and he sequestered them

in hotel

rooms. And then he took the same dosage,

the same concentration of virus and he

put it in every person's nose. And then

he controlled how much they slept, how

much they ate. He measured their

symptoms. He like weighed their tissues

after they blew their nose. I mean like

he did right just really really really

really careful metrics and across these

experiments somewhere between 20 to 40%

people became symptomatic with

respiratory

disease. That means the virus is

necessary but it is not sufficient to

cause illness. Another necessary but not

sufficient cause is the state of each

person's immune system. That is your

brain and your immune system have to be

in a particular state in order for you

to be infected by a virus in these

experiments. So the point that I'm

making here is exactly the same about

suffering. Al so let's take anxiety for

example.

You know, we in a as this in a culture,

we automatically make meaning of certain

types of signal patterns as anxiety.

When there's a lot of uncertainty,

um there's an increase in in

norepinephrine and some chemicals in the

brain. Um that often goes with an

increase in um heart rate and so on. And

we automatically make meaning of this

physical state as anxiety.

But exactly the same physical

state could be

determination. It could be just pure

uncertainty. Again, meaning making is

about action. Right? So when you are un

when you are experiencing high arousal,

even if it's super unpleasant as as

determination, you do something

different than if you experience it as

anxiety or uncertainty. So here is an

example. There are people who experience

test anxiety. Really serious test

anxiety prevents people from finishing

courses or graduating from college.

People who graduate from college have a

lifetime trajectory of earning that is

hundreds of thousands of dollars more

often than somebody who drops out of

college. So test anxiety over the long

run, it's more than just a bit of

discomfort. you know it has serious

implications for o your earning

potential across your life. There are

these experiments that were done where

they trained people to make sense of

high arousal

uh physical states not as anxiety but as

determination. And these people learned

to do this first they practice like a

skill. It's like driving. At first it's

really hard. you have to give a lot of

effort to it, but you practice,

practice, practice, and then eventually

becomes really automatic. And then what

happens? They are able to take tests.

They're able to pass tests. They're able

to continue taking courses and so on. I

watched this actually happen right in

front of my eyes. My daughter, when she

was 12 years old, she was testing for

her black belt in

karate. Her her sensei was a 10th degree

black belt. This guy, a 10th degree

black belt is the highest you could be.

Mhm. This guy could break a board like

by looking at it. He was a scary scary

dude. And my daughter was like not even

5t tall when she was 12. And she's she's

this tiny little thing. And she's got to

spar with like these hulking like 15,

16, 18 year old boys. She's got to

actually spar with them. And so, you

know, she's and this is across several

days. She's got to do this really. And

so I'm sitting there, her, you know, I'm

her dad and me were sitting there. We're

watching her. And so her sensei, you

know, saunters up to her and he says,

"Sweetheart, get your butterflies flying

formation." And I was like, "That's

amazing. Get your butterflies

flying in formation." He's not saying,

"Calm down, little girl. That would

actually be bad. You don't want to be

calm. You need that arousal. It's there

for a reason. It's uncomfortable, but

you need it. He's saying, "Use it." That

to me was like a perfect example of find

a different

meaning for that

arousal. And that meaning is the action

that you will engage in. No matter how

hard it

is, no matter how much it doesn't really

look like what it's supposed to, the

control is there. It's there. It's not

there all the time. It's harder to get

all, you know, yada yada, but it's

there. And it means

that you have more

agency. You have more control. You're

never going to have as much control as

you want. It's always going to be harder

to get.

Your options aren't always going to be

the

same, but you can always find a little

control over what you

do and what you experience and that's

the key to living a meaningful life. Are

you somewhat concerned about the world

that young people are growing up in

where they're scrolling on social media

and social media is telling them what

certain feelings are? So they are just

being programmed

constantly. Yeah, they are to be

anxious, to be depressed, to be sad.

They are. Yes, they are. And think about

it too. Social media is pernitious

uncertainty there. You know you first of

all even when we're sitting face to

face we have all of these cues we have

all these signals I can see your face I

can hear your voice even when all this

information is there's still some

uncertainty right we're not reading each

other bodily movements are not a

language to be read it's a bad

metaphor right we're guessing we're

always guessing

And we're using a lot of signals to

guess. But when you're on social

media, you have have very few signals.

There is a lot of ambiguity. There is a

lot of

uncertainty and the only thing that you

can do is fill in that uncertainty with

your own guesses which could be

bad. Right? So people who go on Tik Tok

and

whatever are giving up, they're

like volitionally giving up their agency

and they don't know it. What do you mean

by that? They're choosing to be led.

They're choosing to be

influenced. I I'll give you an example.

I've listened to podcasts

about metabolism. I've listened to

podcasts about, you know, skin care.

I've listened to, you know, I'm curious.

I'm curious about like what kind of

information people put out there. I

probably turn off 90% of the I get like

10 minutes into something and I will

turn it

off. That's what it means to be a

consumer. You have choice. I think

people are they don't realize that by

virtue of what they do and what they

don't do, they are making choices about

what will be retained in their heads

that will then be used

automatically later. Brainwashing a

little bit except that you're you're the

one who's you're you're choosing it. You

know, I'm empathic and I'm not blaming

people, but they could things could be

better for them. You

know, I mean, I had a an a daughter who

was clinically depressed. That was one

of the most frustrating experiences I've

ever had in my life in addition to being

really tragic. I mean, I can talk about

it now without breaking into tears. That

took a long time. But at first, she was

resistant. Eventually, you know, she

made the decision that she wanted to be

helped and then we completely changed

her life. But she had to make that

decision. I couldn't force her to do it.

And I feel like a little bit it's the

same kind of situation now where there's

so much out there in the

wellness industry. There's so much, you

know, um, swirling around on Tik Tok and

on other areas of social media and not

all of it is useful and some of it's

really harmful. Do you mind if I pause

this conversation for a moment? I want

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make a change in their life, um whether

it was your daughter or whether it's

someone else who feels like they're

stuck and they feel like they're trapped

in an algorithm or trapped in a life

that they want to break out of based on

everything you know and based on the

experience you had with your daughter.

What is step one to being able to make

that change? Because I'm really curious

as to what it was about your daughter

that made her decide that she wanted the

help.

Well, I think that the the general

answer is baby steps. It rarely works to

completely change everything all at

once. I'm not saying it never works, but

it rarely works that way. Um it so for

example, you know, you could

deliberately get off social media for

one day a week or do something else

instead with a friend or go for a walk

or just and build it into it. Build it

into your day as a scheduled thing. So

that's the other thing is that you can't

do things because you want to do them.

You have to force yourself to do them.

So for example, I had major back

surgery, major back surgery, very

serious. And um I knew that um after I

had back surgery that I was going to

experience sensations I had never had

before. Just like you know if you go for

a filling in your tooth, right? And then

you know something's there that wasn't

there before and then your tongue is

like constantly poking at the tooth and

you're not supposed to but you do

anyways because your brain is foraging

for information. It's foraging for

prediction error. Mhm. And then

eventually it adjusts its predictions

and then it ignores the sensations

because they're not relevant. Right. So

that was going to happen on a massive

scale for me and I knew that I had made

a plan before surgery to dose myself

appropriately with prediction error so

that I would not develop chronic pain

because chronic pain is like a set of

bad predictions that that don't update.

Right? So your brain still believes that

there's um tissue damage in your body

when there's no more tissue damage. So

does that mean that pain often is just a

figment of your imagination? No, that's

the wrong way. That is the wrong way to

think about it. The way to think about

it is every

experience remembered past and sensory

present. So pain is in your

head, vision is in your head,

hearing is in your head. You don't hear

in your ears, you hear in your head in

your brain. You don't see in your eyes.

You need your eyes. You need your ears.

But you don't see in your eyes. You see

in your brain. So pain is a combination

of the just like vision is a combination

of the remembered past and the sensory

present. Okay. Okay. So it's both. So

chronic pain happens

when your brain was receiving signals

from the body that there was tissue

damage, no susceptive signals they're

called, and it was making sense of them

pain. And when you're recovering from an

illness, that's metabolically taxing. So

there's not as much metabolic re there's

not as much of your metabolic budget

devoted to

learning. So you can be in a situation

where your brain doesn't update itself

and you still

experience pain even though the the um

the tissue damage is no longer there.

It's just like seeing a a green apple in

your mind's eye when there is no apple

in front of you. It's not all in it's

not all in your head in the in the you

know insulting sense. It's just it's a

normal consequence of how brains work.

The injury is gone though but the signal

of the injury is still replaying itself.

Yeah. Exactly. Just like um it's like a

phantom limb. It's like tinidis is also

like that. Oh gosh. Yeah. I had that for

a little while. Yeah. So, um, so I I

tried really hard to set a schedule for

myself,

um, you know, um, that would allow me to

sort of like optimally dose myself, but

with prediction error, but that

meant, you know, that I I had to follow

that schedule. And I think if you're

committed to changing your habits, this

is how you change any habit really. you

change the context and you um and then

you practice you practice new um new

behaviors. So with my

daughter, depression, we think about

depression in our lab um as um let me

back up and say your brain's most

important job really is not thinking.

It's not feeling. It's not even seeing.

It's regulating your body. It's

regulating your metabolism. Basically,

that's your brain's most important job.

Your brain's most important job is

anticipating the needs of your body and

preparing to meet those needs before

they arise. The metaphor that we use for

this predictive regulation of the body,

which is the formal term is

calledasis. Um that's the scientific

concept, but the but the metaphor is

body budgeting. It's running a budget

for your body. Your brain is running a

budget for your body. It's not budgeting

money. It's budgeting salt and glucose

and oxygen and um potassium and like all

of the nutrients and chemicals that are

necessary

um to um run an energetically costly

body. You know, you've got all these

really low-level kind of processes. You

can just think of them as vital parts of

to keep yourself alive. Mhm. So, some of

your energy budget goes to

that. Some of your energy budget goes to

repair and growth. So, you get if you

get taller, you need more cells. When

you learn something, you have to thicken

up your myelin and your your neurons.

You've got to grow more receptors and

stuff. That's, you know, the kind of

growth and and repair. And then the rest

of it is all for anything effortful.

What is effortful? like work or going to

the gym, dragging your ass out of bed in

the morning is effortful. Yeah, learning

something new is effortful. Dealing with

uncertainty is effortful. Everything we

call stress. Stress is just really your

brain is predicting a big metabolic

outlay because there's some effort

involved, right? Some motivated effort

involved. So those are the three things

that make up your energy budget. And the

really important point, you as an

organism have a fixed amount of energy

that you can produce in a

day.

Meaning ATP, like these little chemicals

that these little protein things that

you know your cells use as literal

energy that come from glucose and and

other things like fats and so there's

nothing I can do to increase it. Well,

you're in a range. Okay. But there is a

finite limit upper limit for that range

because you are a because you're a human

organism and you've got to do these

three things these right vital

functions growth and repair and then

everything else. If you got a lot of

psychosocial stress going on or you have

some kind of disease that's taking up,

you know, much of the budget, then you

don't have a lot of budget left for

other stuff that you need to do, right?

So, what your brain will attempt to do

is to cut costs. If you look at the

symptoms of depression, they are um

symptoms of um that are related to

cutting costs. distress, fatigue,

problems concentrating,

um lack of sensitivity to the context

that you're in. All of these things are

indicative of um reduced um metabolic

outlay. And then depression also has

symptoms that are related to increased

costs like 70% of people who are

depressed have uh inflammatory problems.

So they have enhanced inflammatory

um systemic inflammation and and your

your immune system is a very expensive

system to run. So if you have persistent

and um systemic

inflammation, you're that's like a

persistent tax on your budget. you're,

you know, meaning things are costing

more than they necessarily need to. And

even, you know, like there are these

really interesting studies. I think

they're interesting as a scientist, as a

person, I find them like slightly

horrifying, but you know, like if you

within two hours of eating a meal, if

you encounter stress, social stress,

it's as if you ate 104 more calories

than you actually ate. So you're so

inefficient in metabolizing that it's

like it's like having eaten 104 more

calories than you did.

And the your even good fats will be

metabolized as if they're bad fats and

potentially stored as Yeah. So if you if

you add up 104 calories at every meal

for a year, that's almost 11 pounds.

That means that if you are in a

stressful

environment and um for a year and you

ate exactly the same thing as you ate

the year before, you would gain 11

pounds. In depression, we know for

example that um there's cortisol

dysregulation in depression. That means

there's dysregulation in um metabolism

because cortisol is a metabolic, you

know, it's it's a metabolic chemical. Um

people who take uh SSRIs they take for

depression anti-depressants are SSRIs

usually or SNRIs that means they are

acting on serotonin to keep more

serotonin in the in the juncture uh

between neurons. Serotonin is a

metabolic regulator. Norepinephrine is a

metabolic regulator. These are um

chemicals that are directly involved in

your

metabolism. So it's not an a belief that

depression is a metabolic has a

metabolic basis to it. I think the

question is what is the elixir of all

these metabolic influences that would

lead somebody to um develop a depressive

state. Um,

but the point, the simple point that I

was making is I actually came to this

idea about metabolism and depression

because I was doing a ton of

reading trying to figure out how to help

my kid. What were her symptoms at that

time? Just if there are any parents that

listening right now that can relate or

anybody that's listening that could

relate. Yeah. Well, I will tell you that

I've given this talk before um about

depression in adolescence. Adolescence

is a um it's like a it's like a perfect

storm of metabolic u vulnerability for

many many reasons. You know your brain

is trapped in a dark silent box called

your

skull. It's receiving signals from the

body and from the world. It doesn't know

what the causes of those signals are.

It's receiving the effects. It has to

guess at the causes. What are the

guesses? Predictions from the past.

Right? So it doesn't know about hormone

surges immediately as they happen. It,

you know, it takes 20 minutes or so or

sometimes a little less depending on

where the hormonal changes are and what

their origin is for the brain to receive

the signals of those changes and then it

has to guess at what the causes are. The

narrative that's used in

psychiatry and medicine is a narrative

that goes something like this. It goes

back to this like your brain is a

battleground, right? So the idea is that

you know you're born the the story is

that you're born with these innate

emotion circuits. You're not you don't

have innate emotion circuits. You don't

have any emotion circuits actually, but

the narrative is you're born with these

innate emotion circuits. They work, but

you're not born with the ability to

control them. That has to develop over

time.

So in adolescence, the idea is that

um mood disorders arise because you're

you don't have enough cognitive control

and you have too much emotion. So you've

got this unbridled emotion and that's

the problem. That's a

really compelling narrative. It's

just neurobullshit basically. There's

not a good evidence for that narrative.

I I heard it was a chemical imbalance.

Yes. Well, the sometimes people talk

about that chemical imbalance in terms

of serotonin being a happy chemical and

dopamine being the reward chemical. And

that's also uh that's such a

simplification that it's not even wrong.

Okay? Dopamine is not a reward chemical

and serotonin is not a happiness

chemical. They're both metabolic

regulators.

You see increases in dopamine in some uh

neurons during episodes of

punishment. And

serotonins does many things in your body

in many places. But one of the things

that it does in controlled experiments

is it allows animals

to spend to forage to engage in activity

physical activity and learning when

there is no immediate metabolic uh

reward at the end. There's no there's no

deposit at the end. Mhm.

Um so dopamine is seen more I think now

by many neuroscientists as a a chemical

that is necessary for

effort whether that is a physical effort

or learning something a mental effort of

learning something it's not really

specific to reward per se. So, at first

with with my daughter, you know, she

went from being a a really

exuberant, engaged, socially, very

socially connected kid, um, who, you

know, she did great in school. And it's

not like she had, you know, it's not

like she was a perfect kid, but she was

pretty in enthusiastic and pretty

exuberant and had a lot of friends. And

and then, you

know, by the time she was in 10th grade,

she was withdrawn. She was getting D's

in school. She couldn't concentrate. She

wasn't sleeping. She um she was

miserable. She was really suffering, but

she was miserable to be around. And and

to be honest, at the beginning, we

thought she was being

lazy. We thought, you know, she didn't

want to do anything. She wanted to spend

all this time in her room. She didn't,

you know, she wanted to get rid of all

of her activities. And we thought, come

on, man. Step up. Like, why are you, you

know, we thought she was being lazy. I

mean, really, it just never occurred to

me in a million years because she had no

mood symptoms as a kid. Like, none. And

then all of a sudden, she just she

appeared to have no energy to do

anything. But it to us it looked like

she was being lazy and she didn't want

to do her homework and she seemed really

disengaged and and

and it it took me a while to realize, oh

no, this is something else. She was

having trouble remembering conversations

that we had. And at first I thought, oh,

you're not paying attention to me. But

then it seemed really clear that even in

day-to-day conver she couldn't tell me

what was happening in her day. She just

had no details. That's also a sign of

depression where you lose the episodic

memory of details of the day. You can

only talk in gists. You can't give

specifics about times and places and

events. You just lose, you don't retain

that information long enough to be able

to remember it later. There's no

consolidation of that information. And

um when she was in 10th

grade, you know, she came home with D's

in school, D's in mathematics. And this

is a kid who was doing fun, you know,

she was doing rudimentary algebra when

she was eight. And

um we told her that we she had to be we

had to have her assessed

because we just didn't know what was

going on. And that's when we realized

that she was clinically depressed.

The other thing I I should say is that,

you know, she had very bad menstrual

cramps. And so a lot of one

um one treatment for bad menstrual

cramps is to put girls on birth control

pills because it it evens out the um

hormonal fluctuations of the month and

it does actually improve menstrual

cramps. But it's pretty well known now.

It wasn't so much known then that um

there is somewhere between a 40 and 70%

increase in the likelihood of major

depressive episode in young women who

use birth control pills. If it's a

combination estrogen progesterone pill,

it's more like 40%. If it's a

progesterone only pill, which a lot of

young women take because it has fewer

side effects, you have a 70% increase in

in a ma in major depressive episode. And

this is in the first study that I read

about this was in a million women. And

when I read that

study, I remember exactly where I was.

It was like a flashbulb moment. I read

the study. I called her pediatrician, my

daughter's pediatrician, and I said,

"She's coming off pill

today, today. So, tell me if there's

anything. Are there any side effects or

can we just stop it?" And he's like,

"Well, in my opinion," and I'm like, "I

don't give a about your opinion. I

have just read a study that is like, you

know, it's a large-scale epidemiological

study of a million women today. She's

coming off today." And this was after or

before she was experiencing depression.

This was after it was it was um

maybe a year after she was diagnosed.

Much later I read um I was reading a

book by uh Naomi Orescus the historian

of science and she wrote a book called

Why Trust Science? And it's a wonderful

book. But in the book she talks about

she gives examples of places of

phenomena where the public didn't trust

science and they should have and this is

one of them. Apparently it's been known

for a really long time. And I just want

to point out that

estrogen, progesterone,

testosterone evolved as metabolic

regulators. I'm highlighting it because

in a lot of because in a culture that

separates mental from physical, we don't

think about the role of metabolism in

vision or in even in mood. That's a

really recent thing. In our lab, we one

of the things we study now is the role

of metabolism in in really basic really

really basic psychological phenomena.

um like just as a fundamental building

block of your mind basically.

So your daughter exhibits those

symptoms. I'm really curious to hear

what conventional medicine at that point

told you you should do with a daughter

in that situation at that time versus

what you did. You have this wealth of

information. You you have a medical

background. Yeah. So I should say this

was you know this was um some years ago,

right? So currently there is a kind of a

revolution going on where um there's

actually something called metabolic

psychiatry. Now back when this was when

you know when I was reading about this

it sounded crazy when I saw what my

daughter

was what that she was suffering like

really suffering. It's really hard for

me to talk about this because as I'm

talking to you about this, I'm thinking

I I just I wish that I, you know, I wish

that I had figured this out earlier.

But, um, but anyways, what we did was I

we found I found every possible route

that I could think of to target her um

her body budget. So, basically target

her metabolism. And then we we we

basically came up with a a daily routine

which she participated in making um to

see if we

could put her on a different trajectory,

you know, and that involved everything

from getting off social media

because first of all, she was using like

a lot of kids do, she was using

um her screens late at night and at that

point and again this was something I

just happened upon right but it actually

at an at a NCI at a national inst cancer

institute meeting um you know we have

retinal ganglen cells we have cells in

our retina that um regulate circadian

rhythm and they're sensitive to light at

the wavelengths that comes from your

screen from a screen. So if you look at

those screens at night, your brain

thinks it's daytime, like your circadian

rhythm. You give yourself a circadian

rhythm disorder basically. And it will

be harder to get um into a regular sleep

cycle. And you need that regular sleep

cycle in order for toxins to clear and

in order to consolidate um what you've

learned during the day so that you can

remember it later. And there a whole

bunch of restorative things happen

during deep sleep that you really need.

And if you can't get enough deep sleep,

that will make your budgeting problems

worse basically. So we targeted her. We

got her off social media. Well, first of

all, off screens after, you know, like

7:00, 8:00 at night, no screens. Um, off

social media to reduce social

uncertainty, social stress. I got up

with her at 5:30 every morning. made her

breakfast, sat with her while she ate

breakfast. So, made sure that she was

eating nutritious food, not pseudo food

like, you know, Pop-Tarts and like

that. We had to start

her like exercising again. So, she

started to walk long distances. We she

started doing Pilates like not not

Pilates on a map, but like Pilates with

a reformer that would make anybody cry,

you know. Why exercise as it relates to

this budget and the metabolic functions?

Because

exercise um basically

um exercise throws your throws your it's

like your brain it's like you're you're

throwing yourself out of uh metabolic

balance so that the brain can learn to

get itself back in. you're basically

improving the resilience of your of your

physical systems is is basically the way

to so she's not you know she needed

something more like interval training

which is what these Pilates classes were

as opposed to you know practicing to

play tennis or whatever something that

would would where she you know after a

certain period of time she'd be

disregulated metabolically and then

she'd drink water and you know eat

something healthful and um and then her

system basically was learning to become

more flexible again not so stuck. Mhm.

So again it it was like dosing with

prediction error or like showing the

providing the brain with opportunity to

learn that it was wrong. And then um

omega-3s. So we we took I can't remember

the exact dose, but I I do it out high

omega-3s, low omega sixs. With her

doctor's permission, we also used a baby

aspirin once a day with on a full

stomach to reduce systemic inflammation.

um before bed. I mean, before bed, we

had always done um like a cuddle, you

know, like when she was little, we would

read a story or whatever. And in her

early adolescent years, you know, she

rejected that and then we brought it

back. So an hour before bed, we would

either me or her dad, sometimes all

three of us, we would read a book

together or, you know, he would read a

book to us or we would I I she we would

sit and talk and she would tell

me, you know, all the things that were

happening at school that she could

remember and sometimes they were really

horrible and I just had to empathize.

That was really hard for me because I

just wanted to fix it. I just wanted to

fix it. And it was really I had to

really draw on my own um experience as a

therapist to just sit with the distress

and empathize rather than say do this,

do this, do this, do this. It took me a

long time to learn that and I'm still

sometimes struggling with that. Why was

that important? because then she feels

heard and and she feels understood. And

when you It took me a long time to learn

this. When she when she would tell me

that, you know, someone had done

something terribly

mean. If I did anything other than

empathize, she would feel like I hadn't

heard

her. And social support is a

major I mean, we are the caretakers of

each other's nervous systems. Humans are

social animals. It's hard to

believe. Uh I think in a culture like

ours where we're so individualistic,

right? And it seems like a political

statement or something. It doesn't

really matter what your political views

are. We evolve the way we evolve, man.

We are social animals. We affect each

other metabolically. We can add savings

and we can add taxes. And you know the

best thing for a human nervous system is

another

human. The worst thing for a human

nervous system is another human. The

wrong one. There are so many experiments

showing such I mean I just saw a set of

experiments from one of my former

postocs that was just amazing.

um where she looked at glucose

metabolism in mothers and babies and I

think she also did it in dating partners

if I'm not mistaken and she looked at

them alone and like and then together

like alone during a task and then

together during a task and mothers and

babies that are attached well they're

actually their glucose metabolism is

more efficient like literally more

efficient and I believe she I I believe

she also showed this with dating

partners too. You know there are these

studies these old studies showing that

um that you know it's like less

calorically demanding to walk up a hill

with a backpack if you're with a friend

than if with you're with a stranger. And

I mean there's all these really batshit

crazy findings that if but if you

realize that humans are literally

affecting each other on a physical basis

whether they're aware of it or not

whether they intend it or not it's

completely irrelevant or it's

unnecessary I would say to have that

effect um to have the effects be there

um then it starts to it starts to make

sense you know like the idea that and

again meta analyses show that you will

live years longer years on average years

longer if you are in if you have a a

social um life filled with people who

you trust and who trust you.

So is that why you got the family around

just before bed because it was

regulating her nervous system, her her

body? Yeah. Sometimes she she sometimes

she still says this to me actually.

She'll say, "Can you just be my friend

for a minute and not my mother?

I'll be like, "Yes, I can." And then I

actually have to do it, which is

sometimes

hard. Or I will say to

her, this is for parents, anybody who

has an adolescent or an adult um child,

this is this is like one of my I I don't

know how I came up with this, but it's

like golden, right? I say to

her, "Can I I'm having a mother moment

where I feel the need to nag you about

something, and if I can just nag you for

a minute about it, I I won't need to

tell you again." So, I'm basically

asking her permission. Can I tell you

this thing, which I really want to tell

you, and I know you don't want to hear

it, but you would be being doing me a

real kindness if you would just listen

to me for a minute. And I know it's me.

It's all me. It's not you. It's all on

me. this is me, but I just I would be

better if you could just let me. And

most of the time she says, you know,

with great forbearance, right? Like,

sure, mama, go ahead. Sometimes she

says, "Not

today." And then I actually have to

listen, you know? So, yeah. But there

were probably other things I'm not

thinking of right now. I've written them

all down because a lot of people have

asked me this question. And what I like

to say is this is I'm not a physician.

This I'm not a psychiatrist. This is not

a recommendation or recipe for your

children. I'm just telling you what I

did as a scientist. And you wrote down

what you did. You still have a copy of

that. So I can link it below for anyone

that does want to read what you did.

Yes. But it's again it's I it's what you

did for your daughter at that time.

Yeah. just as a person who had read the

literature I it's not a it's not

um this is not medical advice it's I'm

really

strongly and also I should say I you

can't force your adolescent to do

anything you can't even force your kids

really to do anything unless you

threaten them with physical harm they

have to make that choice themselves

right and did she recover

yes she

And I think one of the reasons why she

is good now, it's not that she never has

challenges with her mood, but she

understands them in physical terms. She

doesn't understand her mood as being a

psychological problem. She understands

it as

a symptom or a barometer of her body

budget. This is something I learned from

your work while I was researching which

was really really helpful to me. And

it's pretty much exactly what you just

said, which is sometimes I'm in a not so

good mood.

And if I'm not conscious about that,

then the bad mood can wreak havoc,

right? It can I can be short with people

or whatever. And when I was reading your

work and thinking about bad or good

moods through the context of this body

budget, it makes you pause for a second

and go, what am I missing? And it makes

you very conscious of what you then do.

It almost makes you suddenly take hold

of the wheel and go, "Okay, so there's a

problem here. It's a physical problem. I

didn't get sleep last night. I haven't

eaten." Whatever it might be. Be really

aware of what this makes you do or feel

or think and hit and the actions you

need to take are maybe cancel everything

you were planning today and go back to

bed. Well, but I think that you just put

your finger on the really important

thing. It's that it changes what you do

next. Yeah. And that changes the

trajectory of what happens. And I think

this is this is really it's not like a

magic cure. But it and again, you know,

but when someone is when when you feel

really distressed, you either look to

the world like what is wrong with the

world or you look to yourself. What is

wrong with me? And really it could be

maybe there is something wrong with the

world. Maybe there is something wrong

with you. But most likely it's something

there's a body budgeting

problem. Even if it's the case that

there's something wrong with the world,

you're better equipped to deal with that

thing. If you

are managing your body budget, you

really do need to design your calendar

as much as you possibly can in the

confines of the profession you have

around that body budget. And for me, the

big a big change I made two years ago,

super privileged that I get that

everyone can do it. I couldn't do it

when I was working in call centers was I

implemented a rule where there's no

meetings before 11:00. And it just means

for me that I never set an alarm. So I

wake up when I'm fully recharged. And it

was like the most profound thing. I

should have done this way sooner. But

it's had such a big impact on my life

because you can almost guarantee that

it's very very rare for me to be

underslept. Although it happens because

I have to travel and stuff a lot. But

that really had a profound impact on my

life. Yeah. And I think you know and as

a leader and as a Exactly. And I think

honestly if

leaders take this

seriously then the hope is that there'll

some realization that this is also

important for for everybody and you know

we have a society that is structured in

a particular way but there's no

requirement that it's structured in this

way. There's, you know, the biggest

predictor of work productivity after,

you know, is sleep and hydration. And

after you take away sleep and hydration,

I think exercise is up there, too. You

know, some of us have more choices than

others, right? But it's important I

think for people who are people who are

CEOs, who are who are leaders, who are

business leaders to understand that um

there's there are good business reasons,

there are good economic reasons to take

this seriously. Am I right in

thinking that

alcohol impacts your body

budget and it therefore makes it harder

for you to exhibit all the other

behaviors and expend energy in other

areas and also therefore increases the

probability that you'll be depressed.

um I should say that I am not an expert

in the metabolism of alcohol.

So I'm going to extrapolate based on

what I do know. And what I would say

there is that sometimes people will

drink alcohol like they will eat

chocolate or um you know they doing it

for the taste or for the experience of

you know the ambiance and experience of

it, right? But a lot of people end up

using alcohol. They might start that way

or they might start because they're

doing something with friends but then

they realize that it has a mood um it

affects their mood. Anything which

affects your mood like people talk a lot

about emotion regulation but it's

actually mood regulation. Again you know

your mood is this these simple feelings

that are with you all the time. You know

your brain is always regulating your

body. Your body is always sending

signals back to your brain which it out

of which it makes mood. So mood is a

property of

consciousness. It's with you

always. Sometimes in moments you will

make sense of the signals and the mood

that goes with it in terms of the

outside world and that's when you

experience emotion, right? Where your

actions are relating the two together in

terms of your mood. But a lot of the

time we don't we we just experience mood

as a property of consciousness. You

know, this is a delicious drink. That

guy is an You're very

trustworthy. The mood is embedded in the

perception of the world. And when

people, it's just like actually

sometimes o opioids have this effect

also. They are they're mood altering,

meaning they're they are if they're

manipulating your mood, they are

manipulating your

metabolism. And when people get

addicted, they often get addicted

because they're regulating their mood.

They're attempting to reduce their

suffering. the problem with or a problem

I shouldn't say the problem because I

don't know exactly how mood h exactly

how alcohol affects

metabolism my my expectation is that

it's not just one it's not just in one

way and also I do know there are context

effects actually so you can drink

exactly the same amount of alcohol and

it can have different effects in

different contexts that totally blew my

mind when I saw that research so I'm

thinking it's not a simple relationship

but one thing I do know is that your

predictions become

sloppier and you don't take in

prediction error. you you don't learn.

You you won't you you won't update any,

you know, so there and so and your

behaviors are not necessarily well

calibrated to the situation that you're

in, which can have all kinds of

downstream difficult problem. You know,

you can make things uh in the downstream

worse for yourself um and make it harder

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extra.com with code Steven. I wanted to

um ask you about something I heard you

say and I've I've actually had other

guests on my podcast say it and I wasn't

ever sure if it was true until I heard

you say it which is that we can change

our emotions

smiling because if if the brain is

predicting then presumably if I do a big

smile and I go yes then the brain is

going to predict good feelings and going

to cause good feelings etc etc and going

to cause me to feel nice about self.

Well, yes and no. I think um you know

people smile when they're not happy too.

People smile when they're angry. People

smile when they're plotting the demise

of their enemy. You know, people smile

for all kind. People smile when they're

when they're afraid. But can I make

myself happier technically by smiling?

The metaanalytic evidence suggests that

there is a slight effect that it's that

there's um that there's a

small Yeah. Yeah. Crinkle your You have

to crinkle. There you go. It's like

putting put a pencil between your

teeth. Go. Go ahead. Yeah. Now smile.

Now crinkle. Okay. So, it's like that.

And I And the the the So, what I would

say is it's a it's a minuscule effect

size. It's like it's very small. I do

feel happier. Do you? Yeah. But that's

because I made you do something silly.

Maybe. Maybe. Okay. But anyways, the

point being that it's overblown as a as

an effect. Um I think

um there's a small my recollection is

that the meta the last meta analysis I

read was that there was a small effect,

but a small effect means it doesn't work

for everyone and it doesn't work always.

it it's just really really a very very

small effect. You must have a

perspective on ADHD which has become a

huge topic of conversation in society. I

I was diagnosed with ADHD. I don't

necessarily take it to mean anything

because I've seen so many variations of

ADHD my friends but there's been this

big rise of

ADHD and linked to the work that you've

done on the brain being a

predictive tool. So my general response

is the following that um people there's

a rise in people self- diagnosing and in

using diagnosis as an explanation

for behavior or for their why people

experience what they experience or

whatever. Diagnoses are not explanations

of anything. They're

descriptions. They don't explain

anything. And to treat a diagnosis like

it's an explanation is a form of

essententralizing which is not a good

thing. Okay? It means that you're

assuming that there's some kind of

underlying unchanging essence which is

responsible for in fact there is

something called psychological

essentialism where you don't even know

what the essence is. You just assume

it's there and that it's the cause of

all these symptoms. But a diagnosis is

just a description of symptoms. And

diagnosis are mostly useful for

billing hours of treatment. They're not

optimized

for pockets describing pockets of

behavior that are, you know, or

collections of behavior that tend to go

together because people sometimes think

that serotonin and dopamine are the

reason why someone has ADHD. That's like

one of the theories that I've So, there

are multiple serotonin receptors. There

are multiple dopamine receptors. They

don't all do the same thing. Serotonin

doesn't do one thing. Dopamine doesn't

do one thing. Does different things in

different places of the bo in the body

and the brain depending on what the

receptors are. And also, every resource

resilience and every symptom of

difficulty has a context to it. There

are requirements the way our society is

structured. There are requirements for

sitting and paying attention to

something for long periods of time. Mhm.

And that requirement is hidden in the

background. It's there so frequently

that we forget that that's the

conditional that's the condition upon

which diagnoses are made.

whatever first of all ADHD is not one

set of symptoms. It's a variety. It's

like it's a you know there's a lot of

variation in the way that in you can

have different symptom profiles and have

the same diagnosis because it's just

descriptive and there are lots of

symptoms. Some of those symptoms also

occur in they overlap with other

syndromes, other diagnostic clusters.

But the point is that they all when you

diagnose someone it makes it sound like

that's a property of that person. Yeah.

But it's not. It's a property of a

person in the context that they're in

and social expectation by by many

respects like can he pay attention in

school? Well, right. And the way that

school is organized is, you know, you

sit for long periods of time. Well, it

it may be that um there are other

circumstances in which not holding your

attention on one thing for a long period

of time could be advantageous. So my

point is that there are very few things

that are just categorically good or

categorically bad. There's always a

hidden condition. There's always a

hidden context. And so I think it's

really important to foreground that

context. You're not broken. you're just

your suitability to a certain context

has been deemed to be un like doesn't

fit. It's not productive for that

context and that may sound like weasel

words or it may you know but it's not

because because it's important that

competencies are by context and the and

again I would say this is not you know

being me being a bleeding heart you know

progressive or whatever. I mean I am a

bleeding heart progressive but this is

not an example of that. This is an

example of me being pragmatic.

You can regulate each other. Something

you talked about earlier on which I

found really really interesting. Um I

was reading about a study where of

25,000 people and they found that people

having a heart attack were 14% more

likely to survive if they were married.

Um, but the other thing that I found

interesting is that we can we regulate

each other with words and I think you

did a

study on assessing the power of words to

facilitate

emotion. You were co it was a study you

co-authored. Well, we've studied the

power of words in many contexts,

including words as invitations to make

sense of, you know, so if if a an

instance of emotion is you making

meaning of what is going on inside your

body in relation to the

world, then you can you invite pe every

time you use an emotion word, you invite

people to make meaning in that way. So

you've proven then that certain words

can calm us down. Well, yes, but I

wouldn't say I've proven anything.

Scientists don't, you know, shown,

demonstrated. Yeah. Demonstrated in a,

you know, in a context, right? Like we,

you know, scientists don't like the f

word, the fa fact. I like the other f

word, but that fact. Fact. That's a

tough one because it means something

that holds under all circumstances in

all contexts and that's very rarely the

case. So, but yes, we have. So, and I

mean so if you've done it probably a

million times, you text things to

people, do you not? Yeah. Yeah. And when

you text a couple of words to your

partner or your friend, you can change

their heart rate, you change their

breathing rate, you can change all kinds

of chemicals, all kinds of protein

synthesis just with a couple of words.

Again, you know, we live in a we, you

know, free, you know, free speech is

important, freedoms are important, but

freedoms come with responsibilities.

Like it or not, we regulate each other's

nervous systems in all kinds of ways,

including with

words. And um for better or for worse.

For better or for worse. Exactly. So you

you really made me think differently

about stress as well generally because

if I think about my life through the

lens of this metabolic budget and stress

is a burden to this budget then if I

don't limit my stress I'm much more

likely to go over budget and if I go

over budget my immune system might be

the thing that I cut the costs of or

uh something else right I mean I mean

there's good st you can't be without

stress that would mean you'd be without

effort. So you know sometimes scientists

will talk about good stress and bad

stress which really just means stress

that is planned and where you replenish

what you spend and stress that is

pernitious and you don't chronic stress

then chronic stress or you know so what

I would say is just you know if you're

in a stressful

meeting a meeting where it's affecting

your mood that means you've there's been

some metabolic impact

take into account what that means. With

all that you know about the brain, I

wondered if you if it's changed your

view at all

on religion and God and spirituality and

if there is a higher power at all. The

brain is such a wonderfully complex

beautiful thing. You know, as the

objective observer in 2025 looks at a

brain goes this is fantastic. Many

people then conclude that there must be

a creator of that brain. But also we've

talked so much today about meaning and

the point of it all. So, everything

you've learned about the brain and

neuroscience and psychology, has it made

you believe in a god? No.

Has it made you more atheist or

agnostic? I'm pretty firmly an

atheist.

Um, I don't think that the wondrous

complexity of nature or or the brain or

the nervous system requires a designer.

And that logic doesn't make sense to me.

So this is obviously a terrible leap,

but do you therefore think that there's

no inherent meaning to life outside of,

you know, the like reproduction? And

I'm just reading for the second time

this book. It's called Open Socrates.

Okay. And it's a really wonderful book

and I've learned a lot about Socratic

philosophy that I didn't know. And one

of the

things that Socrates thought was

important was asking this question of

what is meaning and that you shouldn't

be asking this question in 15minute

increments. You should be really asking

this question about the expanse of your

life. And so I think if

anything being a scientist who

studies how a brain in in constant

conversation with a body and the other

brains and bodies in our world and even

the physical nature of our world. How

that creates lots of different kinds of

minds including our very western

mind. that makes me um think uh more

about the importance of philosophy

actually because I think philosophy is

asking the same kinds of questions that

religious belief tries to answer and for

me that's a better path. I think it's a

more comfortable path. I've often been

asking questions like this my whole life

actually. So it makes me feel more like

what's the point? Like what is the

ultimate point? I think the answer for

me, the ultimate point is to leave the

world a little better than I found it.

It's like the Johnny Apple Seed, uh, you

know,

philosophy. Um, you know, like as a

scientist, scientists often, you know, a

lot of us, we don't do what we do for

money. Money is not bad, but we don't do

what we do for money. We do it for other

motivations, right? To know, to be, to

be curious, to try to discover things.

And at some point we start to think

about well what's your like what's your

legacy right most of us are not Darwin

um we're not William James we're not you

know Heisenberg we're not you know most

of us are not those

people so what's your

legacy and in the end I realized that

I've published a lot of peerreview

papers when people introduce me you know

they give some kind of like you know

about my citation you know people

whatever Dr. Lisa is one of the most

influential figures in the field of

emotion, neuroscience, and the nature of

the brain. She is among the top 0.1%

cited scientists in the world for her

revolutionary research in psychology and

neuroscience. Yeah, that's all nice,

super nice. Um, but actually my legacy

is really the people who I've trained,

the

minds that I've had the

opportunity to engage with. And if I

were going to be bean counting, I might

be bean counting the number of

laboratories that now exist that didn't

exist before.

um gener several generations of

scientists who I

trained or who who you know and also who

trained me I mean along the way. So

that's my legacy in some ways really.

It's the people. It's the people and the

ideas. And I would like to think just to

actually to just wrap up to where we

started.

Um, you know, when I when I used to do a

lot of classroom teaching, I I would

feel like what I told myself is if I can

change the the trajectory, the outcomes

of just one person in this class, just

one, then I will have done my job, you

know. And I kind of feel that way a

little bit sort of the same about the

public the public face of what I'm

doing, right? public uh educa public

science education.

If I can

help, if something that I've learned or

something I've communicated can help

somebody

else live a more

intentional life of agent with agency

where they're choosing and they're

impacting

their loved ones or their

children, then then That's my then I've

done my job. That's my legacy. And the

hard thing about that kind of a legacy,

a legacy of ideas impacting people's

lives, is that you don't ever know what

your impact

is. But that's part of the

deal. We have a closing tradition on

this podcast where the last guest leaves

a question for the next guest not

knowing who they're leaving it for.

question

is how to live a life without attaining

anything. I have some context on this

person. They are a black belt shaoling

monk. So they talk a lot about identity

being sure and they and living without

um encumbrances and attachments and so

on. Right. It's it's it's it sounds like

a very Buddhist question. Yeah. The the

problem is that I think even a Buddhist

attains something. They attain

enlightenment. So they don't have

attachments necessarily. They don't have

wealth. They don't have power. They

don't But they attain something. They

attain

enlightenment. They attain tranquility.

How about then how to live life without

your

identity making you unhappy?

Well, I think it's important to

remember that you don't really have an

identity that is separate from the

moment that you're in. It's not like

there's an essence to you.

And what I would say is that every

everything you experience, everything

you do is a combination of the

remembered past and the sensory present.

That means to change who you are, you

can

change what you remember or how you

predict or you can change the sensory

present. You can change the sensory

present by literally getting up and

moving somewhere else like going for a

walk or or you can change the sensory

present by what you pay attention to.

Mindfulness for example, right? you

there are there are some sensory signals

that are front and center in your

attention and there are some that are in

the background lurking for example you

can right now you're not paying

attention to some sensory signals but

the minute that I say them point them

out you will be like the pressure um of

the chair against your back and your

legs now they're in the forefront of

your attention because I just mentioned

them so what I would say is that there

is no essence to who you are you are

what you

do in the moment. You are what you do

and you can change what you do. You can

change what you experience the

consequence of the lived experience

which is the consequence of what you do

by what you

remember and what the context is. So

that's my answer. If you always remember

that you will never be

attached, you will never crave or

strive, you know, to have things and

like all of these artificial things

which prop up the illusion that you are

and you have an essence to you that you

c that you know is unchanging across

situations. Yeah, we um I we um are very

quick to fall into the trap of thinking

we are what we did and that's um I much

prefer I am what I do because that means

that I have agency to make a different

decision in the moment irrespective of

what I did in the past. But it but

that's the trap we fall into. In 10

minutes time I bet I'll be downstairs

and I'll be back into the trap of

thinking that I am Steven Barllet who

did this thing for 32 years or did you

know Lisa thank you. Thank you so much

for um thank you for everything that you

do. I've I've you've changed my mind in

a really profound way and that's quite

hard because I sit here quite a lot so

have lots of conversations about the

brain and about lots of lots of new

studies that have come out etc etc but

you've completely changed my my mind and

made me think from in a completely

different way which I'm really grateful

for. So, thank you so much because

that's a gift and that's not a gift that

I always get doing this job, but um it

really is a gift and it's one that I

think will help me to live a better life

ultimately. But hopefully also for

everybody that's listening and thank you

for stepping into the uh public

communication side of your life

because I was going to say it's um

someone that knows what you know and

that has done the work that you've done.

It is so important to the to the extent

that I almost consider it to be like a

really critical responsibility because

there's people like us that sit on these

podcasts who aren't in the laboratory

that are getting our information from

social media, Tik Tok or any any odd

person that says anything and it's

really really important that people like

you step out more and share what you

know. Um and thank you so much for

writing these books because they are

absolutely brilliant and just like

you've changed my mind today. I think

these books will change a lot of

people's lives. I highly recommend this

book. how emotions are made. I'm going

to link it below. The secret life of the

brain and also for something a little

bit shorter but equally accessible. Um

this book here, seven and a half lessons

about the brain.

Thank you so much. We're done. Thank you

so much. I'm going to let you into a

little bit of a secret. You're probably

going to think me and my team are a

little bit weird, but I can still

remember to this day when Jamaima from

my team posted on Slack that she changed

the scent in this studio. And right

after she posted it, the entire office

clapped in our Slack channel. And this

might sound crazy, but at the Diary of

SEO, this is the type of 1% improvement

we make on our show. And that is why the

show is the way it is. By understanding

the power of compounding 1%s, you can

absolutely change your outcomes in your

life. It isn't about drastic

transformations or quick wins. It's

about the small consistent actions that

have a lasting change in your outcomes.

So, two years ago, we started the

process of creating this beautiful

diary, and it's truly beautiful. Inside

there's lots of pictures, lots of

inspiration and motivation as well. Some

interactive elements. And the purpose of

this diary is to help you identify, stay

focused on, develop consistency with the

1% that will ultimately change your

life. So if you want one for yourself or

for a friend or for a colleague or for

your team, then head to the diary.com

right now. I'll link it below. This has

always blown my mind a little bit. 53%

of you that listen to this show

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show. So, could I ask you for a favor?

If you like the show and you like what

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what we do. Thank you so

[Music]

much. Heat. Heat. N.

[Music]

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YouTube Transcript:(Major Discovery) No_1 Neuroscientist: Anxiety Is Just A Predictive Error In The Brain!

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YouTube Transcript:
(Major Discovery) No_1 Neuroscientist: Anxiety Is Just A Predictive Error In The Brain!