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

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
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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
to
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%
of
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
in
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
more
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
so
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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think about what it takes for someone to
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
as
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
be
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.
So
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
um
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
to do budgeting later. Isn't it
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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
by
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
of
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.
So
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
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much. Heat. Heat. N.
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