Camp Gagnon - Top Neuroscientist: How To Control Fear & Anxiety | Joseph LeDoux

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

🏞️ Sign up for free and exclusive updates: https://camp.beehiiv.com/subscribeJoseph LeDoux is one of the greatest living neuroscientists in the world. He is an expert in understanding fear and anxiety. He’s in the tent today to explain why I’m anxious, where consciousness comes from, and how to be less afraid. WELCOME. TO. CAMP. 🏕️Thank you to our sponsors:Morgan & Morgan, Bluechew, Bespoke, and BakscapeEdited and Produced by @99OvrAll** TIME STAMPS **00:00 Why are we anxious today?...

Why am I anxious? Well. Joseph Lidu. Greetings. How are you, sir? Very good. Thank you so much for joining me, man. I really appreciate it.

I've listened to a bunch of your interviews, and I'm very, very interested to talk to you. You have quite an eclectic life, if I should say so myself. I will say, I think you're probably my favorite, probably my favorite son of a bull riding, Cajun neuroscientist. It's also the front lead singer of a band. Yeah, I think I've got that market corner.

Yeah, I think you're the one. So obviously we're going to talk about a bunch of different things. Consciousness, the realm of existence, the amygdala, of course, parts of the brain, how all of this is working, why some people are afraid of other things and why some people aren't afraid at all. But the place that I want to start, why am I anxious? Well, so the easy answer is through some combination of your genes and your experiences, you have more worried than other people if you think you're more anxious than other people. A lot of people are anxious today, so it's hard to know where to place the line. Do you think people are more anxious today than they were 20 years ago than they were 100 years ago? You know, I used to get that question a lot, and I would always say, you know, imagine a family of serf living outside of a castle in the middle ages with the king and all of that.

Everyone inside of the castle is comfortable and all these people living on the outside. They must have been miserable and completely. anxious about their lives. So anxiety is not something new. It's always going to be part of life. The philosopher Kirkregor said that anxiety is the price we pay for freedom. He put it in terms of the, you know, Adam choosing to eat the apple as the man's first attempted freedom. And because of that, every human since then has suffered anxiety because of that cost of, of, of that cost of being free. Now, I don't necessarily by the religious story, but

I think there is some truth to that, that we have an unusual ability to make decisions as human beings. We have much more complex brains than any other kind of animal. And so we can

imagine things and do things that other animals can't do. So what I like to say about the kind of transformation of the Kierkegaard thing is a transposition, I guess you could say, is that what I think of is that the prefrontal cortex is the price we pay for anxiety. In other words, the prefrontal cortex is what allows us to anticipate the future, to plan, to reminisce about the future and the past and so forth

in your conscious mind. And because we had that ability to envision things that could happen to us that are bad in the future, that's the price we pay. Anxiety is the price we pay for that ability to envision, even the good stuff. I mean, you know, it's good when we can envision happy things or things will work out creatively. But when we are constantly stuck envisioning something bad that may or may not happen, just because we worry about it, then we have a problem with anxiety. Hey, what's up, guys? Sorry to interrupt this amazing program, but I need a little bit of half.

help. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can probably see our subscriber number right down here. And if you're able to, it would mean the world if you could subscribe. That is the best way to support this show. Because when you subscribe, I'm able to show it to potential guests or to different brands and stuff like that. And it really, really helps grow the show, get us cooler guests, have cooler conversations. And it helps everything so, so much. So if you don't mind, thank you so much. Let's get back to it. Hmm, that's interesting. So, I mean, put that fall out a reason that other animals that seem to exhibit, like, behavioral or, you know, psychological anxiety also have some semblance of, you know, future thinking or not free will

necessarily, but some ability to envision the future? So as you go from, you know, humans to apes, to other apes, to monkeys and down the line evolutionarily, that's not to say that, you know, this is some special line. It's just the line we happen to be in and we're not special. We're just different from every other animal. And the capacities we have that, allow us to do things that other animals can't do, like build buildings and, you know, play guitars and things like that. Those are, those don't make us better. They're just, they make us different.

And so other animals, you know, let's say monkeys, they have excellent decision-making capacities, not as sophisticated as humans, because humans can hold several things in mind at one time and be making decisions about all three sort of simultaneously. Whereas monkeys can only hold one thing in mind at a time. And so they don't have that opportunity. It's not that they lose the first thing when they go to it, but they have to jump back and forth. And then lower mammals, when they have one thing in their mind,

they lose it if they go to another thing. They can't go back to it as part of that thought process. Oh, interesting. So humans can think of two or three things simultaneously. Maybe more, but yeah. I mean, some. Let's say three. You're giving a lot of...

We're pushing at three. I mean, I can do two barely. But, like, yeah, I could think of something that's going to happen in two weeks, and I can also think of something that's going to happen in a year, and I can also think about what I'm doing right now. And I can kind of do all of them simultaneously, more or less. I mean, the key thing is that you can focus on one, and then you turn to another one.

That first one doesn't go away. Right. It can be held in the workspace. It's psychological permanence. It's not permanent, but it's there temporarily to work on. So you can call that up, put it aside right here in the same space, look up another thing, think about that, and maybe think about how those two relate, and maybe think of the third thing and how it relates to all three. Because you can hold all of those in mind in working memory. Working memory is a workplace where you temporarily do mental work.

and the human brain can hold several things in mind going back and forth, focus on one, you don't lose the other two. But monkeys will lose the second, if they go to a second when they lose the... Sorry, the monkeys can go to a second and come back to it, but they can't put them together.

That makes sense. And then the other, like rats and other kind of mammals, dogs and cats, can only hold one thing. in mind and that's it. And when they go back to something, they're starting brand new. Oh, that's quite interesting. And so because of the complexity of our minds and our ability to sort of juggle a bunch of

different things and kind of look at how they're all connected and related to each other and find those intersections, that's going to induce more intersections for anxiety. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. Yeah, that's the price we pay. That's interesting. Yeah, I guess because I guess all anxiety is sort of, it's kind of entreatment. To the condition is that you're thinking about future events,

that there's some type of thing that you're looking to, either in the immediate future or the distant future, that then is bringing about a sense of dread or nervousness. Yeah, I mean, that's the difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is an emotion about something that is here. You're afraid that thing is going to do something to you. Whereas anxiety, the fear is not there. The danger is not there.

It's just possibly going to be there, or it may never happen. So many animals experience fear. Fear is a pretty common trait amongst. Well, it depends on what you mean by fear. And I've been on a, I would say now, it's been a 12-year rant about fear because, you know, I'd been studying animals' responses to danger

and discovering the role of the amygdala and all of that for many, many years. And the procedure we used was called Pavlovian fear conditioning. So that's a, it's like, you know, Pavlov's dog, when he tastes the meat, if they ring the bell at the same time, then he salivates next time he hears the bell. Well, with fear conditioning, it's kind of the same thing, except it's a, you hear the bell or the sound, but you have something unpleasant happened to you, like a mild shock to the feet of the rats. So what the rat then, when it hears the sound, will freeze because that's what rat, that's what many animals do, including humans, as a sudden response. to either an actual threat or something that's predicting a threat. So the question is we have no bloody idea what's going on in the head of a mouse or rat or even a dart or a cat.

We can estimate from their behavior, but the problem is behavior is a very inaccurate readout of the mind. Why? Well, there are multiple levels of behavioral control in the brain. For example, the lowest level is a reflex. So you step on something sharp, you lift your foot. All right. Or if you are startled by something that, you know, you freak out like that. But these are automatic built-in responses in the nervous system

that are so useful that they become hardwired like that. The next level up are what the behavioral biologist or ethologist called instincts, fixed action patterns. They're like reflexes and that they're automatically elicited by a stimulus, but they're more complex kinds of responses. You know, reflexes tend to involve single muscle groups or, you know, coordinated sets of muscle groups, whereas a fixed action pattern or instinct is more of a whole body kind of coordination. You know, you're not just freezing or lifting your leg. You might be running away from something or retracting from something, avoiding something. So what would be an example of this?

Well, so you, let's say freezing as an example. It's not a reflex. It's a whole body movement in response to a danger. So a rat is walking around, all of a sudden the sound goes on that's been paired with shock. The rat will freeze dead in its tracks. Now, you think that's a simple kind behavior but every muscle in the body is you know kind of frozen to keep the reduce any kind of movement the only thing they move is their head back and forth slightly just to check the scene see what's going on and it's very small and sudden now the reason that freezing is so important is because predators respond to movement so if you remain still the predator may get bored and then go off and do something else

but as soon as you move, they're going to attack. So it's a whole body innate program that keeps you alive in a dangerous situation by not doing anything. Would you say that that is still non-conscious? Like a reflex is non-conscious. We haven't gotten anywhere near.

We're not even close to conscious. No. Okay. Next level up is a habit, stimulus response habit. So, you know, you learn to do something over and over again, and you do it so many times that you no longer have to think about it. So this was kind of discovered scientifically as a research tool

in the late 1900s by a guy named Thorndyke. And so what he did was he put a cat into a box that had kind of latches and stuff and strings all over. And the cat was a little food-deprived, so it was a little hungry. and so he put a piece of fish outside the box. And the cat is in the box and it sees the fish, it's pissed off that it can't get to the fish. So it's like walking around and doing things.

And it bumps into something and the door opens. So it goes and gets the fish. The next day, same thing. Might not quite have put it together. He tries other things, but then bumps the door again and then it opens. So soon he learns that every time he bumps the door, he can eat the fish. So there are two ways that could be thought about.

One as a habit that you see the fish, you see the door, you bump the door so you can get the fish. Or it could be a goal directed habit, action, goal directed action. The difference is a goal directed action is something that you cognitively have to represent in your mind, a goal in your mind, and make a plan to achieve that goal. A habit is automatic. You see the stimulus, you respond. You see the stimulus, you respond. And once those habits are sort of encrusted or built into your basal ganglia,

part of the brain, subcortical brain, which is important for a lot of kind of sophisticated behaviors. What happens then is the habit, becomes unchangeable. It becomes resistant to change because it's been wired and so strong. So that's why, you know, if you bite your fingernails or something, it's hard to stop or, you know, take drugs and get addicted. It's hard to stop because the habit system is so strong. And neurologically, those synapses, like those neural pathways are carved out. Is that true when you're creating a habit? They're what?

Like the neural pathways are actually like carved. The pathway is already there. Okay. You don't create, you don't grow new pathways across the brain like that. What happens is the, at the, a neuron has a cell body. All cells have a cell body. Neurons, in addition, have these fibers that go out. One is called an axon.

And that can go some distance away from the neuron. And the axon, the end of the axon is the place where a neurotransmitter is released. So when a neuron is active, it fires an electrical impulse called an action potential. That action potential starts in the cell body, goes down the axon, step by step, kind of propagated down the axon, and when it gets to the end, the electrical response causes the opening up of the vesicles that hold the transmitter, and the transmitter is released into the so-called synapse. And as the transmitter crosses the synapse, that causes the next neuron to fire. And the next one and so forth.

So the more times you do that, or let's say each time you do that, the connection gets stronger and stronger. It gets to, you know, more transmitters released and more over and over again. So that then it's very solidified. and that way it's hard to break because it's been ingrained in a sense. And now have you ever heard these things? There's a little bit of a detour. Have you heard these things that you can, you know, if you do something for 21 days, it'll create a habit.

It'll basically make those synapses stronger. Yeah. Well, the thing is, the more you do something, the more likely it becomes a habit. I see you have some guitars here. So if you practice every day, you get better. And it becomes a bit more. You know how to reach the chords and, you know, they can just play it.

The first time you try to play the guitar is like your fingers are all over the place, right? But then it becomes a habit and you just pick the guitar up and you can form those chords and that's that without thinking about it. Someone says, play a C chord. You don't say, you just do it. It just is, it's, the synapses are so strong in your mind that your brain just knows exactly where to go without really thinking about it. Interesting. Okay, so we talked about three kinds of responses that are controlled, unconscious. reflexes, instincts or fixed action patterns, and habits.

The next level is what I call goal directed behaviors a few minutes later, earlier. Goal directed behaviors, again, have an internal representation of the goal. So let's say if you are in a restaurant and you love nice cold raw oysters and you eat some oysters and then two hour or three hours later you get sick because they weren't properly treated or there was some bacteria in it now normally and so what you have to do you form a connection in your mind between the fact that you feel sick now the nausea and that you ate oysters okay that's a two-hour space if you try to do Pavlovian conditioning in an experiment with the tone appears now

and then you have to wait two hours for the shock. It may like the taste of the oyster is now, but the effect of the oyster is two hours later. If you have to do that in an experiment, it doesn't work because it's not Pavlovian conditioning per se. It needs to be instantaneous. It's a kind of Pavlovian conditioning because normally you need that close association,

the overlap of the two stimuli, the unconditioned stimulus like the tone, the conditioned stimulus like the shock. But with this kind of taste learning, it's more of a, you know, it's kind of a natural thing that animals have learned in the while because they don't get sick immediately

when they eat something bad. There's a time course between the eating and the sickness. and nature has figured out a way to allow that kind of learning to connect back in time. So you think all animals do that? Well, certainly all mammals. I'm not sure about other species.

So if a mammal, you know, like a dog or something, eats spicy pepper off the ground. There's a branch with habaneros and it eats it and it feels the sensation and its stomach hurts, it is able to make a memory and say that's,

not what I need. Right. And then that's able to pass on. This actually came up, you know, it was discovered by sheep herders in the West that their sheep would eat something and then get sluggish. And then the former notice they would never eat that thing again that they ate and identified through this kind of memory as dangerous. So the key thing is that what, over the two-hour period,

what's being associated is not the taste with the sickness anymore, but the memory of the taste and the sickness. So it's a cognitive representation. And a lot of our behavior is like that. It's based on these internal representations. So that is a kind of, that's not necessarily conscious. I wouldn't even say it's conscious, but it's cognitive. So the next level then is to have these kinds of conscious representations.

And for that we need a mental model, which is a situational, contextual, you know, what is going on in this situation? So you and I are in this indoor tent. and we know exactly what this is. We know it's an interview. You've done lots of interviews. I've had lots of interviews. So we don't have to kind of guess what's going to happen.

We just know. We have a mental model of what an interview is. I've never been at an interview in a tent, but now I have that mental model. Exactly. So for your next one, you'll be prepared. Thank you for that. Of course.

Gotcha. Yeah, so the mental model is about, it puts you in the kind of situation you're in. So if you go out with your friends tonight in the bar, you're in a different mental model and different things going on. Or if you're in a movie theater, it's a different thing. You're in a restaurant, it's a different thing. We have these with things called schema that we acquire as we go through life.

Schema are situational memories about specific kinds of things that you do in your life. And so the schema are the basis of the mental model. you walk into a situation, the sensory systems pick up what's going on in that situation. Though that information is combined with memory, and once that's combined, you now have a perception rather than a sensation. Perception is a meaningful sensation. Right. And that meaningful sensation then opens up this kind of bag of goods about such situations. and assembles a situation of the moment in your head.

So the scheme, you get the interview schema or the basketballs game schema. The movie theater schema. Whatever schema. And that schema becomes then how you start to make predictions, mental model kinds of predictions, cognitive predictions, about what to do in that situation. Now you have a, you've got the situation mapped out in your head, but now you have to figure out how to do it

because there are lots of things you possibly could do. So that's when we get now into the level of the conscious realm, which is the middle model itself is not conscious. In my theory, what consciousness is is a readout of the middle model. It's a narrative readout. You've created this situation psychologically through the cognitive processes.

And that situation has all kinds of inputs. It's got sights and sounds and whatever's going on in your body, especially if it's an arousing situation. You might be tense or you might be joyous or whatever, but a lot goes on in a complex situation. All of those things are encoded differently in the brain. And what the middle model does is it puts all of those things together into one episode.

of the moment. And when you say mental model, I just want to be clear, the mental model is your brain effectively attempting to create some type of simplicity with all of the data that's happening in your mind.

Is that fair to say? It's trying to create a complex situation that is representative of what is going on around you and what you need to do to deal with what's going on around you. Got it.

And this is happening automatically. Yeah, yeah. And so once that mental model is created, then you have to turn that into various things. You might want to talk about it. You might want to act on it in a goal-directed way, choose an action to do, or, well, in addition, and you want to be conscious of it. Those are the three things that go on. Now, because the neural pathways that control your, actions and your speech and that give your conscious experiences its content, those are different pathways out of the middle model. Those are different pathways out of the middle model. And because of that, there can be additional processing. So you start with one narrative that's been, the story has been compressed into a narrative of code, which I'll explain

in the second, that then goes to all three of those things, to speech, to behavior, goal-directed behavior, and to conscious content. When you say conscious content, is that awareness of your consciousness? The awareness of the middle model and the world, you know, and the situation

So it needs those three things, speech, behavior, and awareness. You can have, you don't need of all. You can speak without being conscious. Like, almost everything I'm saying here, I'm not consciously planning. I've got a schema of this situation. I know what we're talking about.

You ask me a question that activates a schema. It puts me in... The door was open. Sorry about that. You can keep on. So you're not conscious. You just have a schema of interview, and so now you say, okay, now I'm going to share this component.

And I just start talking. And I'm not planning anything. You stop me in and I have to think. That's when I'm consciously talking. Right. But you didn't plan every word for the next hour. I have no plan. Right.

So the conscious content of the moment is one of the narrative outputs of the middle model. So is speech and so is goal directed behavior. Now those are three very different things. And so the pathways that generate them are going to be different. That's why what you say and what you say and what you're, do in a situation, don't always coincide. You know, maybe, but sometimes it's not the same thing. Hmm.

Like, do you have an example of that offhand? Let's say you... Like, I can think of maybe tell me if this would be one. Like, I tell people all the time don't eat sugar and you should work out every day. Yeah. But then when I wake up, I eat sugar and I might not work out. So I know my brain. That's not in real time.

Though in real time, let's say you're having an argument with your friend or partner or something. And I say, stop yelling at me. We shouldn't yell at each other. All right. So the speech might be, you know, I hate you, right. But you're, well, let's say your actions are aggressive, right? But you're talking in a nice way. Okay, so you're talking to your friend or a partner in a nice way, but you're talking.

the partner can tell that you're like, you're snorling and so, but you're not necessarily planning that. It's just kind of coming out. What about like cuteness aggression? Like where you hold something so cute, like a little kitten. Right. And like you grit your teeth and like you grimace and you're like, you get, like you almost get an aggressive behavioral component. But your speech and the way you're talking about this thing is, oh, I love you so much, you're so cute. Would that be an example of your brain and your speech and your behavior?

being antithetical. And both of those can differ from what you're conscious of. Hmm. You know? Because you sometimes say stuff and you ask yourself, why do I say that? You know? Or in an argument, you say something and you know it's wrong, right?

But are you going to correct it? But you need to say something and it sounds good in the argument, so you just say it. Yeah. You know, it's just like, you know, you're awful. I don't like it. But you don't really mean it, right? And you hear it and you say, no, I didn't.

mean that. So do you then apologize or do you take the, you know, I can't apologize. She's done something to me, so I got to keep going. Right. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because it's 24. And it's time to talk about something important. When you are seriously hurt, your injury could be worth millions. Yes, that's right. The world is a crazy place. And one person's negligence can result in another's settlement. And that's why I got to talk to you about Morgan and Morgan. Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm. They have over 100 offices nationwide and over a thousand lawyers. Yes, these are the big boys.

You know them, you see them, you see their billboards all over the world. If you ever drove down I-90 from Florida to New York, I'm telling you, you've seen the billboards. All right. Have you ever watched a UFC fight? You've seen them right on the banner. I'm telling you, these are the biggest guys in the game, all right? With over $20 billion recovered for over 500,000 clients, Morgan and Morgan has a proven track record of fighting to get you for.

full and fair compensation. The annoying thing with most attorneys is that in order to submit a claim, you got to call them up, you got to talk to their people, you got to go back and forth on emails, you got to hope that they see it. They might charge you just even look at their claim. Here's the cool thing with Morgan and Morgan. With eight clicks or less, you can submit a claim, and one of their licensed attorneys will take a look at it and get back to you. It's that easy. It's like ordering something off Amazon. It's just a couple clicks. You can submit your claim very easily and cheap. Yeah, how about zero dollars? That's how much it cost to submit a claim with Morgan and Morgan. Extremely easy. No fee required. So if you are ever injured, you can go check

out Morgan and Morgan. Their fee is free unless they win. That's right, unless they win for you. Unless they fight and get you compensation, you're not paying a single dollar. That's a pretty good deal. So for more information, go to for the people.com slash gagnon. That's correct. F-O-R-the-people.com slash gagnon or dial pound law that's pound 529 from your cell phone that's for the people F-O-R the people dot com slash gag non or dial pound law pound 529 from

your cell phone this is a paid advertisement now let's get back to the show after the short disclaimer so this is your brain basically having those three sort of separate this mental model that has these three kind of different outputs I guess you could say

that's it's trying to take in all of this data of your existence and all of your past and all of the things that your brain has ever consumed and everything it's consuming right now. And this mental model is putting into those three different little channels. And they're all different from each other. So as a result, you can have three different behaviors all happening from the same mental model in any given time.

Not only that. Once you're conscious of the middle model, you can then have goal directed behavior and speech from that as well. Simultaneously. Simultaneously. Is that in addition to the three? Well, you never know. the point is you never know

if you're just watching someone or the person's in an experiment, you don't know which middle model, the conscious or the non-conscious middle model, is controlling which behavior? Is it goal-directed and conscious

or is it just goal-directed? Are you speaking consciously or are you just speaking through the middle of the narrative? So this is a complicated thing, right? And This is brand new in my new book, The Four Realms of Existence. But the point is that if we know the complications,

we can try to understand them as features of the brain rather than as impediments to our understanding. And I think the most important thing is that what is that narrative that's coming out that can talk to speech, to go to directed behavior, and populate consciousness. What kind of thing is that? And this is the interesting part. It's called an amoral language of thought.

An amodal language of thought. So language of thought is something popularized by the philosopher, Jerry Fodor, in the 1980s. but he thought of it more as kind of like real language but the current view and I subscribe to this is that it's not anything it's not a language the language of thought that enters our consciousness is not verbal or visual or auditory or anything else it's a modal it's abstract

you've taken all these inputs collapse them down into a kind of gestalt hole, and now they are read out through an abstract, a modal pathway that splits and goes to goal-directed behavior for your actions, to speech. So because it has no particular modality, it can be used in different output modalities.

So when I wake up and I go to the gym in the morning, I don't say to myself, I need to, now I'm going to go to the gym. Now I'm going to put on my shoes. It is just behavior that I've done for a long time. It's habitual. It's ingrained in my mind. And I know that I do it every day. And so as a result, those things and those processes that I'm doing just exist.

When I walk to the gym, I'm just sort of on autopilot, so to speak. And if a car drives in front of me and I stop, Like that is reflexive, and I'm not consciously thinking of all these things all the time. And I guess would you say that as the amoral sort of language of thought? Well, the amodal language of thought is under involved in everything you think and say. Always. Always. I don't think – well, I guess it's possible, let me think about it.

It's possible that from speech itself, you could have direct connections to the – motor control regions that might allow you to act on the basis for your speech to control it. But I think the more interesting thing is how it all kind of comes together and is through one system like that. Now, I gave this lecture at Yale a few months ago and a very smart young graduate student said she thinks she has a way to separate, to define when we're talking based on the non-conscious mental model versus the conscious. And what it is, she said, well, if you're consciously talking, there's going to be less jumping around from a sentence of the content from sentence to sentence. It's going to be more thematic within the paragraph, whereas if it's unconsciously,

if it's the unconscious middle model, it's going to be jumping around more because you don't have that kind of extra control level in there. And this has been used in analyzing text and all kinds of things in psychology. It's kind of like an AI program where you can analyze the flow and content And you subscribe to that as well? I subscribe to it. I mean, I think it sounds cool. We haven't tried it. Yeah.

So I guess the deliberation of the thought is a way to discern. Yeah. If everything someone is saying is very linear, it's all very cogent and all working all together, you would say it's conscious. No, sometimes it's just flowing good, you know. But if you're driving down the road, everything's cool. Thinking about something else. And then a car comes close to you and you shift into, oh, you know, alertness.

And so then you start driving more consciously. And what is the importance of being able to discern that? Like, why is that valuable to us? Being able to say, oh, now someone is speaking consciously or someone is speaking in the thought. Well, I don't know. It could be important in analyzing, for example, what politicians say. Hmm. You know, and what negotiators say.

Interesting. In what capacity? it. Well, like if you're trying to determine whether someone is being truthful or not, I'm not sure which way it would go. Would the liar have lied so many times that it sounds more coherent as possible? Interesting. But I guess what I'm saying is there could be, you could tell the difference perhaps, but not necessarily know which one it was in complex life like that. that. So all of these different mental models and all of these sort of languages of thought

you think are all sort of working together to create what we understand as consciousness. Yeah. I mean, there are so many theories of consciousness and there's no agreement on which one is the top gun. But, you know, and it's, I've been doing consciousness since 19. 1974 when I did my PhD, studying split-brain patients and consciousness. And that was, I've been thinking about that ever since, like 50 years now. You know, I was, there were two things you couldn't really work on in the 1970s, 80s. One was consciousness and the other was emotion because it was a kind of consciousness.

the neuroscience community did not accept those as like real topics. My first grant submitted in 1985 called something like the Neuropathways of Emotion was rejected because neuroscientists don't study emotion. That was what the reviewer said. So, you know, it pissed me off, but I also, you know, I'm pretty good at bouncing back after being pissed off. So I rewrote the grant, changed the title, added a couple of things that the guy didn't like, or gal, whatever it was.

And I got the grant. And in fact, I didn't just get it. But the agency, the National Institute of Mental Health, turned it into what's called a merit award. So instead of giving me a five-year grant, they gave me a 10-year grant. And then they renewed that 10-year grant 10 years later. So I had 20 years of funding from that grant. Wow.

So even though the guy didn't like it at first, it paid off. Wow. You got to stick with it even though you get hit down. And that was specifically studying emotion. Well, it's studying Pavlovian conditioning, you know, and so-called fear conditioning. And why was I doing that after studying consciousness and split-brain patients? Well, at the time, the techniques available to study, the human brain were quite limited. And what I wanted to study was consciousness or emotion I wanted to study.

And I thought, well, let me go back to the split brain again. So one of the things we found in the split-brain patient that has been on my mind for literally 50 years, we had a patient where we presented, well, let me say what a split-brain patient is, because not everybody's going to know what that is. These are people who have intractable epilepsy. This was in the 1970s. The medications weren't helping these people very much. They were having seizures all the time.

many of them were like teenagers and so they had their whole lives ahead of them even though they had terrible lives up until that point because they had no social life, they're just so sick. So I don't know who figured out if you go and split the brain in half, they're going to be better. It's got to like, really? It seems radical.

It was radical. But the surgeons had figured this out somehow and they would separate the two hemispheres, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, from being connected anymore. The corpus callosum, the pathway that goes between the two sides, meant that when that's separated section,

means that everything, it's like everything you do in Vegas stays in Vegas. Everything the right hemisphere does stays in the right hemisphere. Everything the left hemisphere does stays in the left hemisphere. But you can see your behavior. Each hemisphere can see the behavior of the other, what the other is doing. So the left hand is controlled by the right hemisphere.

Opposite hand, right hemisphere controls left hand. Left hemisphere controls right hand. So if you put a picture on a screen and there's a dot in the middle of the screen and you told the patient to stare at that dot, everything to the left will go to the right hemisphere. Everything to the right will go to the left hemisphere. to the right will go to the left hemisphere. So you put a picture of an apple on the left side, goes to the right hemisphere.

You said, what did you see? The left hemisphere is where language is, the guy says, I didn't see anything. Really? The left hemisphere doesn't have that. They're not talking to each other. But he's able to see the apple? No, because it was flashed briefly

to the left side of the screen. Left side didn't see that because the left side is looking at the right side of the screen. So the right hemisphere sees the apple. Left hemisphere doesn't see anything. But then you have the right hand, sorry, the left hand from the right hemisphere, point to what it saw, and it points to a picture of an apple. And now the left hemisphere saw, sees the apple.

And it makes up us to, oh, yeah, I saw that. But he has no conscious thought or conscious memory of seeing it. It never saw it, but he's telling a story that makes his behavior make sense. He doesn't want to look like a fool. He said, yeah, yeah, I saw the apple. But his eyes did see it. Well, the left hemisphere. See, each eye goes to both hemispheres.

Right, right, right. But if you're staring at a dot, everything to the left goes to the right hemisphere. And because they're not talking to each other. So only the right hemisphere saw the apple. Wow. But when the left hemisphere, when the left hand from the right hemisphere points to the apple, the left hemisphere can say,

oh yeah, I saw an apple, it makes it up. It tells a story. To fill in the gap. To like not be embarrassed about not knowing what was going on. It's so bizarre. And so we did this study where we put two things. It was a snow scene. This was up in Vermont.

a snow scene on the left side and a chicken claw on the right side so the country boy knows about chickens and knows about snow and so the left side sees the snow scene

that goes to the right hemisphere the right side goes to the left hemisphere where it's a chicken claw over there and that goes to the left hemisphere so now you say and now the two hands

each point to something the right hand's pointing to a shovel. I'm sorry. The right hand is pointing to a chicken and the left hand's pointing to a shovel. So you said, why did you do that? Talking to the left hemisphere. I said, well, I saw a chicken claw,

so I pointed to a chicken with my right hand. Makes sense. And then he said, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed. The left hemisphere didn't see the snow scene. The left hemisphere had no idea what that was, but the right hemisphere saw the snow scene point to the shovel with the left hand. And so the left hemisphere is now seeing the left hand finger point to the shovel,

and he sees the chicken and the shovel, and he says you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed. So you just make up a story to fill in the gap between these two, things that your brain is able to point to acknowledge but is not able to actually cognitively put the story together. Exactly. Now, you say, okay, well, that's a neurological problem. Neurological patients confabulate all the time.

But my mentor and I, Mike Kazanek was my mentor and we were good buddies and we're up in Vermont staying in some crappy hotel somewhere, motel. And so we find a nice restaurant to go hang out. eat some food and have some Jack Daniels. And so, you know, after a couple of Jack Daniels, we're like kind of going a little while speculating, well, what the hell was going on that day? And, you know, the conversation evolved.

And what we kind of ended up concluding was this is not some unusual thing in life. This is not just because the guy has his brain split in half that this is happening. This is what we do all the time. splitting his brain in half just gives us the opportunity to actually see how that works, because we know it's impossible for his left hemisphere to have seen the chicken to point to the shovel. Right.

So we just thought, okay, well, this is how we all go about our lives. We have so many unconscious systems in our brain, all those things I was telling you about, that control our behavior. And when we see our brain controlling behaviors that we didn't consciously control, it's a source of cognitive dissonance. It's not, you know, it makes you feel uncomfortable because you didn't do it. You know, you're supposed to be the boss of your body, right? Right.

I mean, the whole Christian religion is based on you, our control of your body. Right. If you sin, you're going to hell. Free will. And the legal system, you know, it's your body. If you do it, it's yours, you know. So, but what we're thinking is that the, we're thinking, and I think it's still true, is that we spend narratives all the time to make sense of our lives.

Again, going back to the examples we're talking about, where you're having an argument and you say something, you regret it instantly, but your pride won't let you take it back, so you just keep fighting. Or if you can rise above that and take it back, then you kind of shut up. You know, you kind of shut it down right there, and it doesn't escalate into an argument. Right. So it's all about the narrations. We're constantly narrating.

Our mind is a gigantic narrator. If these things are happening in our mind all the time, right, where we just are sort of filling in gaps for things that our brain is taking in and we're just automatically doing it, how many people would you say are just on autopilot? They're just going through days and years of their life without really, really, all the time. Yeah. your step back and let's talk about three kinds of consciousness before we go further because I think that will you know it gives a kind of foundation for thinking about some of these things including something you said earlier so the smartest psychologist since William James William James is the father of American psychology in the late 19th century but the next guy in line for the genius award in psychology

is Indel Tollving. He died recently. He is the person who invented the distinction between semantic and episodic memory. Semantic memory is memory for facts and concepts, but it's not personal. Episodic memories about your personal life, things that have happened to you over the course of your life. And then there's a third kind of memory called procedural memory, which is more routine. So it's like automatic habits and things you just do over and over again. but then he assigned each of those a kind of consciousness in other words the basis of as the basis of a kind of consciousness so episodic memory memory of your personal life right so my mom has blonde hair that would be episodic memory is that fair if well yeah or is that too factual uh that's kind of factual uh it may be up it may

be episodic to you because it's personal but and and most episodic memories have actual components. So what's an example of episode of... Okay, so let's say you're going to go back to your family's home or town in Montreal and visit a restaurant. Okay, you've been to Montreal before.

So instead, let's go to... Have you ever been to Torino in Italy? Okay. So you're going to go to Torino on a trip and you're excited because they have great food there. So you find a great restaurant. You look at the menu.

browse it. You know exactly what you're going to order when you get there. You know what it looks like you've seen the pictures on the inside and the outside. So you get there and you go in, you order the dish, you plan, and you eat it. Later, you remember it as a personal episode. But let's say you never made it to the restaurant. All you had was your survey of the menu beforehand in the pictures. That would be just a factual memory. But episodic memory, You have the ambiance of the meal. I can smell it. The smell, the sounds.

Italian chicken, da, da, blah. It's an experiential thing. Experiential memory versus just sort of like a date of fed memory. And, you know, John Lott, he didn't know what, he was a philosopher in the 17th century, British philosopher. He didn't know episodic and semantic memory, but he said something that is basically in line with episodic memory, which is the way we know that we are, the same person today as we were when we were a child is because we have memory that is continuous through that time so we can remember that. And then later another psychologist in modern times Jerome Bruner said that our minds are storied or narrative-like and structure. That the way we know that we are a

single unity and that we persist over time is because we create narrations and we update them all the time. Revise them, change them, our narrations are constantly on the move. Right. And that's how my mentor, Mike Kazanagan and I were thinking about what these things that people were doing to explain their behavior was all about. We have all these non-conscious systems in our brain. They're producing these behaviors, and it's disturbing that, you know, when you're not in control of yourself, if you believe you have free will. So we generate these stories that kind of seem it all together. We narrate it, and then we narrate it again. There's a story about these, I think it was a Vietnam War veteran who was a war hero.

And he went from town to town telling his heroic story. And it started out, you know, one way at the beginning. And each stop, it got more and more heroic. By the end, he was like a mega hero. Yeah, yeah. So the more we'd tell ourselves this stuff, the more we'd believe it, you know. And this is the, you know, this is like we can jump right into politics here because politics today is all narratives, you know.

You have a narrative on one side and a narrative on the other side. And sometimes within each side you have multiple narratives going on. And that's where all our stories come from and all our beliefs. Once you buy into a narrative as a belief, then that belief becomes a dogma and you can't change it. And why are our brains so obsessed with narrative and storytelling? It just allows us to maintain a sense of unity that given all the diverse systems in our brain that can do things, it's useful for our conscious mind to kind of confabulate the fact that we don't have control over everything. but it's a source of anxiety if we don't.

So we just kind of wipe that away. And it also allows us to know that we lived in the past as ourselves, you know, as a child. We grew up. We had a day. We had a birthday. We don't remember that. It's too young. But by the time you're two or three, you're beginning to have these kind of episodic memories and conscious memories of your experiences.

Although they're always colored by the family picture albums. and you know you see those and forget them but then that's how you remember your life you know from those stills the whole narrative develops around those that seems like you knew that stuff but it was too early in your life interesting so you create fake memories

yeah absolutely all memories are kind of fake in the sense all memories are fake what do you mean by that well then it's the thing you remember is never exactly the thing that you experience it's always going to be somewhat different

because when you put it into the brain, it's not like it goes into a warehouse and is locked up. It goes into the brain as information that is kind of distributedly. The brain is kind of, it's like the brain is deciding where, it's like, imagine kind of an AI system

that's sorting what's coming in and saying, yeah, this goes with that kind of stuff and this goes with that kind of stuff and this goes of that kind of stuff and then later when you recall it you got to put it back together and how much

how many of those little separate things you were able to pull together you don't know but you only need a few to kind of give enough to narrate it as you think it had happened and the things you don't remember your brain just fills in

and you truly feel like oh I was wearing a blue shirt when this happened but your brain just made it up Right. And, you know, that's why two people on a vacation have completely different memories of what they saw. You know, the author, I shouldn't say, I'm not going to say her name, but a famous author and her husband were once on vacation. And I think it was like at Cape Cod or something. And he remembers the beautiful swan in the pond off of the porch deck.

And she remembers that happening in California or something. It's one different parts of the country. So they had the same experience about the same thing, but the place that had happened is completely different in their memory. Interesting. So how important is it that we tell ourselves stories that are beneficial and help our lives rather than negative? Is it possible that if you just tell yourself the same negative story over and over,

that that thing could become obviously we know we've heard that trope like oh if you tell yourself a bad story you'll end up believing it but is it true that within our brains neurologically that we can create a false image of ourself based off of the stories that we tell ourselves absolutely yeah I mean definitely the

for example you know that the the diagnosis explosion for children You know, kids, many kids have some kind of diagnosis now. Families often want a diagnosis to, you know, explain why my child is not doing as best, you know,

what we wanted it to do. ADD, ADHD, autism, things like that. And, you know, I've just heard this from students that say, you know, we all have diagnosis, you know, for some kind. And so once you have a diagnosis, you think of yourself as an anxious person or a depressed person. So they're trying to get away from that kind of talk because it's not like you are a schizophrenic.

You might have schizophrenia. You don't have schizophrenia. You might have problems. But schizophrenia itself, none of these things are real things. These are categories, fear, anxiety, schizophrenia. These are all categories that are made up to kind of put symptoms into a group. But now it's known that, for example, it used to be that, you know, you would say, well, okay, if your heart's beating faster and you're worried about something.

then you have anxiety. But if you look at across all kinds of conditions, where there's some kind of, you know, a person is anxious no matter what in a medical condition, right? Or even a psychological condition. You're anxious about what's going on. So anxiety is going to be there all the time. So there's a movement in psychiatry to kind of play down the names of categories

and talk more about symptoms. Interesting. Because there's a difference between someone that, gets anxiety and someone that has anxiety frequently or has anxiety all the time. Is that a fair assessment? I'm not sure. I don't know if I could say that. Because we all have anxiety. Yeah, but it's a future of human nature.

It's intrinsic to being a human being. We all are going to be anxious. So what is the diagnosis of quote unquote anxiety? It seems discretionary. Oh, you're anxious. If it interferes with your routine life. but if your routine life is doing anxiety-inducing things does that make you an anxious person or does that just mean what you're doing is inducing anxiety? If it makes you unhappy and it's interfering with your ability to do your job

to be a parent to be a teacher or whatever, you know, whatever, then you have a problem that you need help with. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you have, that you can't fix it. I mean, a lot of these things are narrowed. right? Once you adopt the narrative of a condition and begin to live that narrative, it's harder to manage in a sense because you're locked into it.

Once you've adopted the narrative. Right. I have ADHD. That is who I am. And so everything I do is going to be underneath this lens. But I think the good news is that because narratives are, told to yourself, you tell them to yourself, you can learn a new narrative.

What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because you are a man who needs a personal shopper. Yeah, I said it. You need someone that's going to shop for you. Now, here's how you're going to do it. You're going to go check out my good friends over at Bespoke Post. All right, these guys do something absolutely amazing, okay?

They scour the internet, every single corner in recess of the internet to find the coolest items that you want, that you didn't even know that you needed. I'm telling you, this stuff is amazing. I went on bespoke post. I submitted kind of just like a very regular onboarding quiz. It was like 10 questions or less. It was super easy.

And it just asked kind of the things that I like to do. I like to hike. I like to go camping. I like to have a couple drinks with the boys. You know what I mean? Just kind of what my lifestyle is. And then within a couple days, they sent me this box. I submitted my questionnaire and I got a box of amazing fines.

This is an amazing leather wallet. This is like a beautiful wallet that I would actually use. This is a, the name is Swedish for first, which makes a lot of sense because this is a perfect starter wallet. If you're someone that's looking to get into the nice crafted leather wallet game, throw your Velcro nonsense away, okay? And with bespoke post, you're going to be getting something delivered directly to your door that's going to be a great first step into the leather wallet game. But that's not it. I also got this sick multi-tool right here. It's a bottle opener, which is probably what I'll be using it for the most.

But then it can do everything. You can do a bunch of stuff. It can pry stuff. You can cut stuff. Cut open packages. I even use this just like in my sock. It's just like walking around the city. You'd never realize how many times you got to open a package.

You need a screwdriver to screw something in. You need a bottle opener. It's a multi-tool that can do a ton of stuff. It's made out of stainless steel. It's super nice. It's not going to rust. It's airport safe. Bespoke post is not going to get you caught in a jam.

And here's what's amazing about it. You only pay for what you keep. So before they even send it to you, they show you everything that's going to be coming in. And they say, hey, Mark, we looked at your whole profile. We looked at who you are. We think we know you better. the new you know you and this is what we think you're going to love fortunately for me i loved everything so i was

like yeah send me all that looks awesome i'm going to be using all of this stuff but if you're not like me and you're like actually i don't really drink that much anymore i'm not going to take the bottle opener they go hey that's fine we'll keep it and we're not going to charge you so if you were interested in joining one of the coolest membership clubs on the internet having the greatest items across the web delivered directly to your door for an extremely affordable price i want you to check out bespoke post com that is b-es-p-o-k-E-P-O-K-S-T dot com slash camp-gagnon that's c-a-m-m-g-G-A-G-N-N-B-N-B-B-B-P-P-P-P-P-P-G-N-B-O-N. And if you use the promo code Camp-Gagnon, you are going to receive 15% off your first monthly shipment. Just click the link in the description. That is bespokepost.com slash camp-gagnon. Stop wasting time. You need to get on this

right away and get all of your goodies sent directly to your door immediately. Now let's get back to the show. Yeah, how do people break their existing narratives to create better, more productive narratives? You know, this is something that is happening in psychotherapy now that help people re-narrate the things that are, that they're kind of stuck on. And I think that's going to be very useful. And, you know, all of the things that used to be like sort of laughed at, like meditation and so forth, And I think that is a very, very helpful component to, certainly for anxiety to kind of calm down. Problem with, you know, I've done a bit of meditation.

And the problem is that the time you need it the most when you're really anxious is the hardest time to do it. Right. So that's why it's a life, I think it's probably to work really well. It's got to be a lifelong kind of commitment. Yeah. Habituation. You're just constantly meditating every day or whatever. the thing is. I didn't finish the memory and consciousness thing.

Can I go back to that? Yeah, please. So we talked about episodic memory. And the other kind of memory is semantic memory. Episodic memory is associated with a kind of consciousness called auto-noetic consciousness. It's self-awareness consciousness. And many people think that's a kind of human, unique, pretty special human capacity. Noetic consciousness is more about semantic and factual information, conceptual information.

Other animals clearly have semantic memory, but it would be nonverbal semantic memory, obviously. So semantic memory is not just verbal, but it can be semantic knowledge. You know what this is when you look at it. You don't have to label it as a bottle. You kind of have a visual understanding of it. So animals know semantic things in their lives non-verbally. So that certainly extends through mammals. I'd want to go down to reptiles and fish because I don't know enough about it.

But certainly we see the ability to have semantic memory in mammals. The third kind of memory is procedural memory. and this is often talked about like habits and other things that are kind of hardwired automatic responses but the weird thing is endel tolalving gave a kind of consciousness to procedural memory too called it anoetic consciousness and I struggled with that for so long procedural memory is supposed to be unconscious so how can you have an unconscious basis of a conscious or how can you have a conscious

experience of something that's unconscious? So it just really troubled me and a year or two before he died I called him and we talked about it and he said well he was really more interested in semantic and episodic memory and he didn't he needed a name for

it needed a kind of consciousness for the third but it didn't pay too much attention to it but then I found some other researchers who were talking about anoetic consciousness that was very relevant to the kind of work that I had done for many years on the amygdala and so-called fear conditioning and so forth. And the idea that they had was that the amygdala was the seat of fear. And many, many people like that. And many, many people think that I invented that.

And it's not true. I didn't invent that. I always said the amygdala is an implicit or unconscious processor of danger and fear, not a conscious place where fear bubbles up out of. So what these people were talking about when they said that the amygdala is the home of conscious fear, was they were talking about an anoetic state of fear. So what I came to conclude is that this whole procedural memory thing is a grab bag. It's just a, you know, a category that's not episodic and semantic and therefore not conscious.

So they put all kinds of stuff in there. It's the third other thing. Just piled, anything that wasn't in the first two categories, put them down there. And what that means is that perhaps there are some of those things that are more conscious, more unconscious than others, right? So what I'm getting at is William James talked about something called the fringe of consciousness. And by that what he meant was states that sit right on the edge

that are not quite conscious and not quite unconscious. So you mentioned walking into your home, I think, earlier, or walking into here or something. Let's take the example you walk into your home. You don't have to tell yourself this is my home. Same thing with your body.

You don't have to tell yourself this is my body. You don't have to tell yourself this is my mind normally. And so but then when you walk into your apartment if all of a sudden you see like chairs are turned over

and some books are pulled off the shelf, that bumps you from this anoetic state where everything is right, where you don't have to think about it, to a state of something is wrong. It goes from rightness to wrongness, binary. And once wrongness is kicked in, semantically, you evaluate that situation as it's a situation of danger, you label it that way, and then episodically or auto-noetically, you bump that into, you start worrying, you're afraid because maybe the person is still in there, maybe they're going to come back for you.

They took something. What happened to my stuff? And so you quickly bump through the lowest fringe conscious level up to the most conscious level when you go from rightness to wrongness in the James Inn sense. So the difference between my theory of what the amygdala does and what the theory of those other folks that say that fear is in the amygdala.

Mine is that fear is not in the amygdala. What is in the amygdala is a defensive survival circuit. It's a circuit that has been evolving since the beginning of life four billion years ago, that every organism from the first bacterial cell that ever lived had to be able to detect danger and respond to danger. And that's been true of every organism

that has ever lived since then. in animals with the nervous system, all animals with nervous system, whether a bug, an octopus, a snail, fly, all have some circuit that detects danger and allows you to protect yourself automatically, reflexively like, or innately like, in danger. And, of course, mammals have that too,

and that's what the amygdala does. It detects in response to danger. Fear is the cognitive interpretation that you are in harm's way. So the amygdala is sending signals to the body. Those body signals are coming back to the brain and contributing to a schema that is developing. The fact that you look outside around you

and you see that there's a predator or someone scary looking with a knife, that goes into the schema as well. So highly aroused things with knives and so forth. before it doesn't take much to pattern complete the schema into one of fear. Now, what is fear? Your fear is different from mine because we've each had different experiences with danger over the course of our lives. We've learned fear in different ways. Some people are afraid of dogs. Most people aren't. Right. Or even, yeah, but anything, you know, it's like we all have a set of

memories, semantic and conceptual memories about what fear is. And that's the fact that, That's true of people all around the world. So because you can translate the word fear around the world, some say that fear is universal. But what's universal around the world is danger. And it's danger that everyone has because each person not only has their own personal learning of schema, but they learn it within a certain culture. So different cultures are going to have different schema that your personal schema will be layered in. And so what you experience is danger and when you respond to danger and how you respond to it and how you think you respond to it and whether you'd like to respond to it differently and all of that, all of that is bundled into the schema and becomes the template for the mental model that allows you to know you're in a fearful situation.

You're experiencing fear. So the amygdala is processing threat. It's not necessarily processing fear. And that's the distinction that you're trying to make. Because obviously I know from your work, people have sort of misinterpreted a decision. say, oh, the amygdala is the fear center of the brain. That's what it does. But really, it's just telling your body, like, hey, there's a threat that we're detecting,

and then it goes to your body, and then we'll go back and form into your general consciousness of saying, oh, now we're afraid of something. But fear, if it's not happening in the amygdala, where is it happening? That's happening in the, you know, again, we talk about how there's different theories of consciousness. My theory of consciousness is that there are circuits in the prefrontal cortex that are, constructing these schema, sorry, that are receiving the schema from the hippocampus and ventrometrial prefrontal cortex, not that you need to know what that is, but just other areas

are constructing memory areas are constructing the schema, sending it to the prefrontal cortex. The mental model is developing in the prefrontal cortex and working memory, and then that becomes the basis for the amoral narrative that goes out to speech and behavior and consciousness. Interesting. And you're able to discern this because there's some places in the world where people are afraid of different things. Or there might be something that's not actually threatening the people are afraid of. Is that reasonable? Well, there's a lot of cross-cultural studies of emotion. So I guess, like, I wonder if there's something like, I don't know, maybe like cockroaches or something where there's some cultures where people are very afraid. They don't really pose any real threat. But in America, we're very afraid of them. And maybe in other cultures, you know, I grew up in Florida.

We see palmetto bugs everywhere. And if we see one, we just kind of shoe them off. we're less afraid of them. Whereas if you're living in the city, if people see a cockroach, they'd freak out. Well, it depends on the cultural narratives that are there. So if way back there was some maybe spiritual angle or the cockroaches were some evil thing.

And then that gets carried forward in folk psychology and becomes part of the culture, then people will kind of in the background and have that kind of sense that they're dangerous or Creek B or something. Mm-hmm. But that threat is coming from the amygdala because of cultural reasons,

not because it's actually grounded in actual. Well, we don't want to overdo the amygdala, you know, processing threat. The amygdala is a, what it's dedicated to, in terms of threat, is predatory threats. Mm-hmm. So it's hardwired by evolution to respond to, you know, natural predators of the species.

so for cats be dogs and for mice to be cats and you know and so forth. Interesting. So I'm curious what your thoughts are as far as like epigenetics. Yeah, yeah, probably a lot of that. Epigenetics is so complicated and there's a lot of controversy because I think a lot of people don't understand it. And I'm one of those. Like if you've seen these videos of like people put a cucumber behind their cat and then the cat will turn around and they'll see the cucumber and they'll leap with fear,

and run away. And people have kind of positive that it's because they see the cucumber and they associate it with a snake. And then as a result, they think there's a snake behind them and they jump. All of these cats have never seen a snake before.

They're house cats. There's a guy at UC Davis in California that used to study these animals in the Sierra Nevada's. And it was a certain kind of, I think it was some kind of squirrel or something that had been living there

for millions of years. And there was a fault line and they never had found snake fossils above the fault line, only below. So no snakes up there. But there were some of these squirrels up there and some down below. And so when the ones down below would be put in the presence of a snake,

they would, you know, freak out. Kick and spit and do it out. Kind of an innate ritual they would go through. But they grabbed some from up on top and put them with the snake, and they did the same thing. So I've been to five million years, not enough to get rid of that. Interesting. So even though there was millions years of distance, it was still ingrained in the biology of the animal.

How interesting. Who knows what that means, but it's, it's, it's, a good story. Are there any things that you think we possess as humans that are like sort of remnants of something or threats? We possess what? Like remnants of fear or remnants of anxiety that exist within our brains that might be ancestral. Ah, it's hard to know. I mean, the human brain's so complicated and our experiences are so, you know, varied and you don't know what happens in early family life. You know, that's a secret. that nobody knows what's going on, really.

So if a parent is doing something bad to a young child, the child can't remember, but its brain likely can form certain kinds of memories. For example, the amygdala is mature a little bit faster than the hippocampus. So, I mean, I used to talk about this in the 1990s in my book, The Emotional Brain, that, you know, you could have a person who's exposed to some kind of trauma very early in life, like, you know, six months old, say hospital trauma or something that happens, bad.

I don't mean like sex and stuff, but, you know, just any kind of harmful thing where you feel helpless even as a young infant, that the amygdala memories would be there, even though the hippocampus, which is where we have our conscious memories formed, was not online. So the idea is that throughout life, there could be stimuli that had been kind of Pavlovian condition through that emergency situation, like bright lights and an emergency room or sharp objects or something that could be triggers throughout life. Interesting. Yeah, that's very strange that our brains, even from a very early age, can possess those. and like still remember those things,

that the amygdala would still hold on to it. Well, you know, every cell in your body is a memory cell in a sense, I mean in your brain. You know, because what do cells do, neurons do? They send axons to other neurons, and those axons, fire action potentials, and activate the next cell. Now, that's what memory,

that's how memories are formed through this kind of synaptic interaction between cells. So if you've got some rapid firing of action potentials, the cell is going to learn. Learning is the way we talk about is an abstraction of what's going on in a group of cells to account for some memory that is very gross in the world. But, you know, your whole brain is a learning machine. On a molecular level, each different cell is still possessing those memories. Or maybe it's not, you know, the, There's no real like memory content.

Right. It's synaptic and physiological. They're, I guess, controlling like small pieces of our ability to recall memories. And then clusters of cells, I guess, are now more responsible for creating the whole picture. And then anything that we can't recall, we'll just make it up. Now, what is the, in your opinion at least, like the most practical application of your understanding of consciousness and the way that you see sort of like the states of being. I know obviously your new book is the four states of being. What is the way that people can apply that information to their lives in order to better themselves?

I think I'd like to talk about the practical implications of the amygdala first since we're on that topic. And, you know, the reason that I go on these tirades about the amygdala is not a fear center is not because of, you know, ivory tower, academic arguments. I mean, there's some of that, but, you know, it's not just because I'm competing with some of the thing. about what the amygdala does. The point is that if you take a rat or a mouse, put them in a pharmaceutical lab and the researchers test drugs on the animal and find that the animal is, let's say, freezes less in the presence of that drug. That is interpreted is that the amygdala was less reactive.

and therefore the mouse or rat was less fearful and therefore when you give that drug to a person they'll be less fearful. Right, that would make sense. But it doesn't work. And why is that? Because the amygdala is not the source of fear. You can turn off the amygdala

but that's not going to make a person have relief from mental anguish. The amygdala is involved in detecting and responding to danger. It's a control system for behavior and physiology. Fear is the psychological interpretation, the narrative that you are in harm's way. The narratives that you carry to psychotherapy have to be changed through psychotherapy. There's no way you can take a pill, swallow it.

It's going to go into your stomach, down through your digestive system, into your bloodstream. It's going to go to every possible. place in your body because the bloodstream is just going to pass it around, including your brain. It's going to find the magic spot in the brain that's responsible for fear, and all of a sudden,

you're cured. That's not going to happen. Fear is not, you can't change the content of a mental state, which is what fear is, with a drug that makes an animal freeze less. It doesn't make sense. And so which drugs would people use to... I don't think we should use

drugs. Not for not for changing mental anguish. You can use drugs. Okay, let's say, do you like heavy metal music? Okay, well, I won't say this thing. I know, no, go ahead, go ahead. It's not my favorites. I don't like heavy metal music.

No offense, but, so let's say I go to a restaurant here in Williamsburg tonight, and they're playing it loud and with my wife. I don't want it in a restaurant. I'm with you there. Okay, but let's say there's loud music in a restaurant, and, you know, it's annoying because you can't hear what your party says. You ask the waiter to turn it down. They turn it down.

And it's lower. But it's still the same old lousy song you didn't like, but it's not. It's less aversive and less annoying. And I think a lot of the medications that are developed in animals do that. They turn down the volume of the brain on those things. So your heart beats a little less fast. Your palms are sweating less.

you're less likely to be tense and freezing, but you're still anxious. Why? Because anxiety is a state of mind, and we have to fix that. To relieve the mental angst, why do people go to therapy? They want to feel better.

Right. And if you give them drugs that don't make them feel better, they're going to complain that it's a failure. And so many people are unhappy with medical therapy, you know. And they're seeking symptomatic. relief, I guess. They say, oh, I get anxious when I go to work and I need to go to work, so give me something that's going to make me not feel anxious when I go to work. And so they'll be described something like Xanax, I guess, or, you know, Zoloft or some type of antidepressant

or something. And that will allow, that will basically affect the physiological sensation that they're feeling about their anxiety. But it's not actually affecting the anxiety and self. Let me backtrack a little bit because what I'm saying is applying probably more to SSRIs than to Benzos. Now, with Benzos, there's an interesting situation. So, yes, you can feel lighter, not as tormented by all that because it is doing all the GABA receptors, these are inhibitory receptors in the brain for inhibitory neurons.

and so when you inhibit the brain, you know, everything kind of turns down. And so a lot of psychiatrists say that you're getting a general emotional blunting. It's not specifically anxiety that's targeted. But you do get a kind of blunding. The problem is if we want to develop something that's better and it really help people, we can't just take the general, you know, because we need to be able to say how we're going to change anxiety. not everything at the same time.

Because if we, a lot of the drugs are, it's a long story, but basically I think that the part of the problem is that the medical feel of psychiatry has been sold to bill of goods about the amygdala being the answer to all of these problems. And it's happened because, you know, my scientific,

colleagues and also I was doing this for a long time too talking that way but then I realize that we're never going to help people if we're trying to do it through studies of animals we're not going to help them with the mental anguish we can help them with the behavioral and physiological symptoms which is fine but ultimately you have to change the mental anguish in the person you've got to be able to help them with that and that can't happen I don't think with the medication can you talk Can you talk through just like a hypothetical of this type of situation? Like there's someone that might be anxious or it might be depressed. And so they get prescribed an SSRI.

And what is that doing to them physiologically? And what is it doing to them psychologically? And why is there a disconnect? So I think the, you know, I think it goes back to the volume issue. You know, in anxiety, it's turning down the volume. And depression, the volume is kind of down anyway. So I don't know a lot about depression, so I won't say anything about that. But in anxiety, I think, you know, you're just kind of messing with the volume of the radio.

Which is good. You have to do that. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because we got to talk about your amazing dick game. Yes, you. You right now, listen to my voice, my deep, soothing voice. You have an amazing dick game. Or maybe you know some of an amazing dick game.

Maybe you got a boyfriend. Who knows? But if you have an amazing dick game, there's a way that you can make it better. And that's with the good people over at Blue Chew. Blue Chew is an amazing service that basically delivers a chewable tablet that has the same active ingredients as Viagra, Seattle, all that stuff. But this is the chew. It's at fraction of a cost. And it's never been easier to get your hands on the greatest dick game of your life.

Never been easier. I'm telling you. You can go to bluechew. And you can submit all your information to a licensed person, a legit person that will then mail you a discreet, very unassuming, but very, very powerful package. You know what I'm talking about? The powerful package to your home. That's how easy it is. You don't got to go talk to a doctor and be like, yeah, you know, I want, no, nope, easy.

You got to just go on the internet. Yo, bluechoo.com, I want to get the best dick given of my life. And that's how you do it. Easy as that. And for the listeners of this show, of this program, you are going to get free. first month of Blue Choo. You were going to be getting Blue Choo for free. All you got to do is pay $5 ship, and that's a cup of coffee.

Black to be delivering that BBC. You know what I'm saying? That's Blu-C-H-E-W.com. Use the promo code Gagnon, G-G-N-O-N-N-N-N, and receive your first month for free. That's Blu-C-C-O-C-C-M for more details and important safety information. And thank you so much, Blu-choo.

I'm telling you, man, check out this product. Even if you're one of these people that's like, I don't know, I don't really need it. What are you talking about? it could be better. It can always be better. Let's say you're in the 1% you're about to be in the 0.01%

with Bluetooth. Let's get back to the show. So if someone's on anxiety medication and they feel better, are you suggesting that there's still an underlying anxiety, like anxious rumination that exists? No, because placebo is a terrific, you know,

a great aid. You know, if you can get the placebo effect. Interesting. You know, I'm not a doctor. so I can't really be I shouldn't be talking about specifics and I'm just talking about all this from the point of view of my 50 years as a neuroscientist and you know I really think that we have a problem in science

where we get stuck on dogma things will arise and they are so clear and true at the beginning that it gets carried forward and never questions I think that's what's happened with the whole fear thing, that the amygdala was able to disrupt some behavioral tasks in animals, and therefore it became the best shot at, you know, it was making rats freeze less or avoid less. So, okay, maybe that's all we need to fix people,

because how did modern psychiatry come to be what it is? well, you had Freud as the dominant force in, you know, all the way through either Freud or the Freudians that followed him through mid-century. And by that time, psychiatry was trying to become more scientific. And what that meant to them at the time was put Freud in the rearview mirror. Because there was, you know, there was a lot of questions about Freud and whether it was what was good and what was bad, but they threw the whole thing out, the baby with the bathwater. So what Freud had, what they didn't like about Freud was subjectivity, the personal feelings of the patient. And that was easy to get rid of because the behaviorist had dominated psychology for decades where you couldn't talk about consciousness.

It was all about behavior. So it was a kind of perfect storm where psychiatry wanted to get rid of Freud. behaviorism was saying that we can solve everything through behavior we don't need a mind and so psychiatry used behaviorist to test animals test drugs in animals to help cure people and we still haven't recovered from how psychiatry has marginalized subjectivity ever since that every therapist wants their patient to feel better, but there are no metrics for feeling in a sense. You know, the insurance companies want objective markers

or is the person getting better. Right. Check these three things. And even cognitive behavioral therapy, which started out as having a lot of cognition in it, gradually became more and more behavioristic and checking off boxes and stuff. And, you know, every psychiatrist,

or every therapist wants their patient to feel better. And they all talk about the things I'm talking about, that you have to deal with the symptoms, but you also have to deal with the subjectivity. But they don't do it. I think there's got to be a systematic approach. Step one, tame the amygdala. Cut out the behavior in physiology.

How would you do that? Well, maybe drugs would do that. You might also try. EMDR. What's that? That's eye movement desensitization therapy. It was viewed as a kind of kooky thing for a while, but now it's pretty well accepted that if you have the patient move their eyes back and forth or the therapist is

touching them simultaneously back and forth on one side of the body of the other, it kind of is distracting to the mind. And so it's kind of like, in a way, it's kind of like meditation where you're removing distractions from the mind. So if you could be doing, for example, cognitive behavioral extinction for a spider phobia while doing EMDR and the spider phobics don't like spiders and they don't want to do this kind of exposure to spiders because they don't like them. It's really too terrifying to them. But if you could distract the patient with EMDR or meditation or something else, then you might be able to allow the patient enough exposure subliminally in a sense.

The patient's conscious mind is here, but the peripheral vision is also seeing it, and that's going to the amygdala. Interesting. Have you ever seen these, I forgot what they're called. I had a friend that had one. They're basically these mats that have small little, like, dull plastic spikes on them, and you lay down on the mat. And it's about like, I don't know, this big.

It's about like size of your back. And it's similar kind of like to that tap therapy or to that eye movement therapy where you would lay down and you would feel a sensation. It's not, it's unpleasant-ish, but it's not painful, really. It just kind of is enough to sort of make your mind focus on these little pricks in your back. And as a result, it's able to actually reduce anxiety because your brain is allocating more focus to this thing than to whatever's going on in your life. Anything that kind of distracts you from those anxious thoughts,

because anxious thoughts not only are anxious thoughts, but they also are top-down drivers of body physiology and other things. That's why I think working out is so great for people, because it genuinely decreases the amount of energy that you have to anxiously ruminate. You're able to expend energy in a way. Obviously, body image and things like that and movement makes you feel good, but genuinely taking out the, just taking out the energy that you have to think about,

oh, how am I doing, what is going on in my future, what is my friend think of me, all of these little anxious thoughts, it's able to kind of cold those, which I think is really beneficial. Do you ever, have you ever heard of anyone doing research into, like, fitness or anything like that as a cure for anxiety?

A colleague of mine at NYU, Wendy Suzuki, has been doing a lot of brain and body health stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's a, for me at least, that's been something that's been really beneficial. What else would you recommend if there's people that are feeling like anxiety

or things like that that would potentially help? Well, let me finish the three steps. So the first step was taming the amygdala. One way you could do that is through these EMDR, possibly, or other kinds of distraction methods. But another is by subliminal presentation. So you can flash a stimulus on a screen very, very quickly, and consciously you won't notice it.

It's too flash to reach the threshold of consciousness, too fast. But if, let's say, it's a picture of a spider, that will reach the amygdala through the subliminal presentation. And we know that because the studies have shown that the amygdala is activated by these subliminal pictures of spiders. Even if the observer is not even conscious of the image. Wow. Consciously, you don't know it's there, but you can keep presenting it over and over,

and possibly extinguishing the amygdala and its physiological reactions. So that would be a way of allowing the spider phobic to have some relief on the kind of behavior and physiology side without having to actually consciously be exposed to it. So step two would then be to begin changing your memories about, who you are. And that really works, flashing something that quickly, even if you're not conscious of your observation of it. Well, yeah, it goes to your brain. It activates your amygdala and your heart begins to beat fast. I mean, that just seems wild. So in this, you know, podcast right now, if I put on the screen a picture of a spider really quickly,

so fast that no one saw it, you could technically, they technically would feel a potential, like, induced anxiety or fear. I don't know, but, you know, there's a lot of, distance between, you know, you're talking about a few milliseconds. So I don't know what happens to those milliseconds over the transmission speed over the internet and everything. Probably okay. I wonder if people do that in like movies or like news or something. There was a, in one of the Bush, I think it was the Bush Gore election.

I could be wrong about which one, whether it was that or not. But there was a Republican campaign. where they flashed on the screen, Democrats was like in full print, and then they pulled out rats and only flashed it microscopically. So Democrats' rats said that the rats was going into the brain. Oh, wow.

That's so far. I mean, I have no idea how affected that was. I mean, my trigger something in your brain. If your brain is able to comprehend things that are happening so fast that your eyes can't. Yeah, but the in in inignal. It's more going to be about the body and physiology rather than the content, I think. Well, let's say you're making a scary movie and you're like, hey, we can scare people with the content of the movie,

but we can also add some type of subliminal flash. I'm sure that's all in there. Wow. You know, certainly, you know, that all it takes to really get a good scene going is like a thump, a noise or something, anything sudden, right? Right. Yeah, that's interesting. But even like a noise you would be conscious of. You would see it and go, oh, they've made a noise.

That's why I got startled. I'm sure there's... I wonder if it works with other things. Like, if you were to show like a picture of a beautiful woman and flash it, where you're so fast your eye doesn't comprehend it. I wonder if your brain... Lots of studies of that. And the same has been found.

Your brain's able to comprehend it? Well, I think there are, you know, studies that are measuring, you know, or sexual organs during that kind of thing. I don't know if they're still doing that. There was a professor I knew in graduate school that had a whole program. I don't want to talk. It's too controversial.

Oh, really? It was about just, it was studying sexual arousal in students. Which was all okay back then. Were you a part of the study? No, no, no. Are you sure? You weren't a subject? He was in the department.

I just knew about it. It was like we all were curious about it because it was, but I hadn't. Yeah, it's pretty titillating. I think they were, I was a graduate student. I think these were all undergraduates. That's wild. But I don't know. I only know this through a rumor I did.

Fair. Good answer. That's wild. Okay, so back to. Yeah, so it tamed the hippocampus by altering one's memories of themselves and facts and things of the situation. And then, so once you've done that, you've prepared the brain in a way that it's ready for psychotherapy

where you can just go talk without all the noise bombarding them. And I think, you know, psychotherapists probably do all of that. They want to reduce arousal, they want to change memories and they want to have conversations.

But maybe you've got to do it in a sequence. Because if it's all done at once, you're taxing the brain too much. It doesn't like to be doing too many things at one time. So it needs to be sequential. I think so. You know, get rid of the amygdala. tame it down, change some memories, and then talk.

Are there programs for this that try to use this approach? I've been talking about it for years as far as I know nobody's ever done it. Interesting. I mean, I feel like it would be worth, like, trying for anxiety. Yeah. Because, like, I'll feel anxious sometimes, right? Like, something will happen, and I'll just kind of get this, like, rumination where I'm like, oh, man, I'm worried about that thing in the future.

And if I'm able to use this sort of three-step process, is there a way that you think people can practically do it? it every day. Like if I'm feeling anxious about, you know, a show that I have coming up or something that's going on in my life, is there anything I can do based off that model that I can apply to myself? Well, I don't know how you tame the amygdala yourself, except by, you know, meditation and if you couldn't do that. Okay, so let's say I'm meditating regularly. That's going to kind of tame my amygdala. Yeah, meditate before your show to calm down the arousal. Then, you know, think about, you know, maybe while you're meditating, try to come up with memories of things that, you know,

you feel you could change and would like to change and would feel better if you changed. Not necessarily memories, but aspects of you that you remember. And but the next part you need a therapist to talk through it. I wonder if there's almost... But I think the first two would be a good story. Yeah, I almost wonder if there's a component of like... Like, you hear people talk about manifesting all the time where they think, oh, think of...

You know, visualize yourself doing something that you wish that would happen or visualize yourself scoring a goal and a soccer game. Whatever the thing is that's happening, I wonder if you can... If what's happening in your brain when you're doing that... And obviously those things will make you feel good, right? You're envisioning a future scenario. But I wonder if those things are almost creating a false memory for you.

where what is the difference between envisioning a future thing and creating a false memory? There's almost nothing, right? It's just you visualizing yourself doing something that has never happened. I mean, false memory is bad when somebody implants it in you.

Of course. You know, there was all that controversy in, I guess, when was it, the 90s of therapists and inserting like satanic rituals into the patient's minds. Yeah. But what if you could insert your own false memory, something positive? Right.

And that you could meditate and then try to create a fake memory for yourself of something positive that you've done in the past. I mean, one of the things we were doing in our research for a while was called Reconolidation, which is a, you know, memories are stored through a process called consolidation, where proteins are synthesized and kind of blew the memory together. And a guy in my lab, very brilliant from Montreal, actually Toronto, he was originally from, no, it's from Montreal, came up with some studies where we were, he rediscovered something that had been swept under the rug in the 1960s called Reconciliation.

And in this, the idea is that, you know, if you, for, let's go back to consolidation. In order to consolidate a memory, you have to have protein synthesis during the post-memory time, the post-learning time. So if you block protein synthesis after learning, then the animals don't remember. If you block the protein synthesis, then they won't remember. Right. Because the protein synthesis is necessary to store the memory. But this other body of research said that if you block...

block protein synthesis after remembering, then you lose the memory because you have to restore it each time you take it out. Wow. That sounds like a men in black, you know, flash gun. And boy, we got so many, we were on NPR, radio lab, it's all over the place. It works in animals. It's much harder to get in humans. And so what would be an example of how it would work in animals?

okay, you give a ratatone shock pairing. They hear a noise, they get shocked, they freeze. Okay. If you, after, right after they are conditioned, you give them a protein synthesis inhibitor, then they don't freeze later. And then you play the tone, they should freeze up because they're about to get shocked,

and they don't. So they don't remember the tone shock association. Wow. So for the reconsolidation, you condition them, play the tone, they freeze, and then the next day you play the tone again block protein synthesis and then the next day you test them

and the memory's gone. And what is the administration of the protein synthesis inhibitor? Like what is that? So the traditional way would be you would inject it intra-paternion like around you, a navel basically. And it's because there's good absorption there

and it goes throughout the body. This would be in a rap. and the but what we were doing was we knew where the memory was being formed and stored in the amygdala so we were putting the protein synthesis inhibited directly in the amygdala you knew where the memory is being stored yeah the amygdala was that was the whole i see i see just in the amygdala generally yeah the amygdala was where you know if you if you damage that area the brain, rats could no longer be conditioned. And humans as well, if they have brain damage in the amygdala. And so if we injected the protein synthesis inhibitor in the amygdala after learning,

then they wouldn't show the memory later. And if we injected it after remembering, again, they wouldn't have it later. Interesting. Are you able to control what thing they don't remember, quote unquote? Or is it just disrupting the amygdala in general and making the them, like if you showed that same rat to a snake, would the rat be afraid of the snake? No, this is a stimulus specific. So whatever stimulus is remembered, that is the stimulus that's lost. So it's very specific to the stimulus. Interesting.

So it's not just making them forget everything they're afraid of. It's just one specific stimulus. Interesting. So hypothetically, let's say there's, and again, I know we're having difficult time doing this with humans. but if there was a girl that was bit by a dog when she was young and she has a lifelong fear of dogs, hypothetically it would be possible to inject a protein synthesis inhibitor into her amygdala

when she was with a dog and then testing her the next day. Hypothetically, because you can't do that in the human brain and you wouldn't use protein synthesis inhibitors. Why? Too toxic. In the amygdala you put such a small amount in. It's not toxic, but in all the early,

studies. They had to put in a lot and the animals were always sick so they didn't know if they were like unmotivated or they really, but with the amygdala studies, we were able to show it. Interesting. So what would you use for humans that could make it do that? So we were able, in rats, we were able to show the propranolol in the amygdala did the trick. So we tried, we and others have tried that and there's some partial success in humans, but it's not perfect. Here's the problem that in the rat studies we're talking about a single little tiny pure tone you know one little kind of sound that we are able to quote a race very controlled it's very controlled yeah it's very controlled but a human memory in a traumatic situation is very complex right and the assumption that you could

go from the rat single stimulus to the human very complex memory was misguided, you know. I mean, we were excited about it, but it just never. That's why it didn't work out. Has anyone picked up on that research? Oh, it's still going on. Oh, wow. It's been since 2000 this started, so 24 years. Do you know what the current status is?

Still trying to get it to our I mean, there's pretty big implications of that. That really is like a men in black, you know, flash device to make you forget something. I mean, your example was perfect because the problem with trauma is if you need to treat it with a say a if you had a drug that you want to treat that

with you'd have to do it right after the experience in the emergency room right immediately because you only have a few hours for consolidation to be blocked but theoretically with reconsolidation you can have age-old memories and block them by retrieving the memory Wow. And we got hit up by the George Bush's bioethics panel because they said, memory is sacrosan. You can't mess with memory. But every therapy session is messing with memory and learning.

Oh, really? They didn't want you to mess with memory, quote. They wanted to say that for themselves. Yeah, I guess. But I assume this is something that, like, the military could use. Yeah. Well, all of that came up. Like, maybe, you know, the drug cartels are going to use.

it in some way. I forget exactly how it was going to be. Everybody is talking about all the possible ways that could really cause trouble. Oh, that's wild. I had no idea that you invented the device to make people forget memories. Well, if anybody invented it was Kareem,

but all we did is we turned it into something we could study in the brain. Wow, I mean, that's so interesting. I could see, like, a military application of that. Imagine you get someone that knows information. They're a hostage. You torture them. give you the information and then to make them forget they ever got tortured and then you send them home

and they go what happened you go man nothing i went there i sat there for two days and i went home and then the other people don't i mean that's wild yeah i mean that there's a lot of benefit for that also nefarious things that could be done with that as well we're gonna take a break real quick because you have back hair yeah and if you're like any other dude in the world with back hair you probably have your wife your girlfriend your boyfriend you probably have to ask them hey could you get the spot on my back. I know this is embarrassing. I know this is awkward. Maybe you're a Greek guy. Who knows what your problem is, but I have your solution. It's called Backscape. Backscape is this fancy little gizmo right here. Look at this. It is an all in one handle

with the smoothest shave you've probably ever seen in your life. You just take this right back here and you can hit every hard-to-reach spot on your entire body. Now I'm sure you're wondering, Mark, this seems like overkill, right? This seems crazy, right? A whole apparatus, just to shave your back. This is going to be so inconvenient. Here's where it gets wild. You're watching this? The top of the shaver pops out.

Easy. Now you have a tiny little handheld shaver that can get every other part of your body. Let's see you've got chest hair. Maybe you've got leg hair. Maybe you got a little, some bushes. That's where this comes in, baby. As easy as that, it can slide in and out

of the 2.0 friction fit handle. Just that easy. This folds up, one button, and this is going underneath. your sink, out of sight, out of mind. No one even has to know. Backscape is so confident that you're going to love this product that if you don't love it, they will give your money back.

That's how confident they are. They're willing to put their money on the line. And for the listeners of this show, we're going to offer you 10% off with the promo code Camp on your first order on any of the kits on their website. That's right. You go to Backscape, B-A-K-S-C-A-P-com, and use the promo code Camp, C-A-M-P.

you will get 10% off your first order on any of the kits on their website I'm telling you guys this is the way we're shaving from now on this is how we're shaving our backs our butts our faces probably you probably shave your head with this

I don't even know I never will but if you're looking for the shaver of the future it's at backscape.com let's get back to the show so the Four Realms of Existence is my new book it came out in October 23 and the stuff we were talking about

at the beginning was really kind of along those lines because it talks about four ways that human beings exist. One is biological. Now, every organism that has ever lived from the first bacterial cell to today of all the animals

and plants and fungi on earth is biological. But some biological organisms also have nervous systems and they can also exist neurobiologically. That allows new efficiencies and digestion

and prey and predator interactions and all kinds of things like that. The biological realm is involved in all those things we talked about in terms of reflexes, instincts, habits, and so forth that require no cognition, just automatic responses. The next level is the cognitive level, and that does involve cognition, of course, and is where we form these interoperations. representations of the world based on schema for these middle we have these middle maps based on schema and we use those and thinking planning deciding acting and so forth and and being conscious

and finally is the conscious level so those are the four realms now i'm going to just tell you a quick little story about i'm sorry could you just say the four again it's biological so biological neurobiological, cognitive and conscious. Got it. There's a very interesting theory about cognition, which is that it starts with the fact that if you look at experiments on birds,

especially corvids like shrub jays, they have capacities that rival some of those and monkeys, and apes. Oh, really? They are incredibly intelligent. Now, not all birds can do that, only some. Like crows and ravens, I've heard, are very intelligent.

All in that category there. So, what is it that connects those birds and mammals? Because mammals obviously have that, all the mammals have that, too. Warm-bloodedness. Now, not all... birds are cognitive, but they're all warm-blooded. So there's something about being warm-blooded and the environment in which a particular group grows up

that allows cognition to kick in. So what is it? Okay, so warm-blooded evolved in parallel with decision-making, thinking, planning, and so forth. Because to maintain a warm-blooded body, you've got to burn a lot of energy to get the fuel to maintain the warm-blooded body.

So even the act of fueling is using energy. Interesting. Virtually being warm-bloodedness, you now are in a decision matrix where you have to make the proper decisions to maintain your warm-bloodedness. And that requires you to be making optimal choices. That's interesting.

So, yeah, so the idea is that if you're warm-blooded, you need to, before you go out willy-nilly looking for food, if you have a mental map of the environment, and you know that over here, at this time of year, it's a good time to find water and a good time to find certain fruits. Whereas if you go to a different place, you might be, you might find something there in the summer, but not in the winter. And so the idea is that you need to know, first of all, what you need right now, where you're going to get it,

is it going to be there? If not, where else can you go? And can you do all that in one round and get back to your people, your buddies, your animals, the other birds, in the amount of time where you're not stuck out overnight with predators attacking you. You seem to make a choice.

Yeah. So it's all about choices. and it seems that birds, these certain birds and mammals have that. But if you go to other reptiles, birds are kind of reptiles. If you go to reptiles in general, they can't do it. Fish can't do it. Alligators, things like that. Yeah.

Because there's no cost. There's no cost to their biological features, being cold-blooded if they're not able to, you know, the winter's going to come around and they can just stay in the water and put their nose out and be fine. Interesting. So the way this evolved was. the first thing that happened was, speaking of alligators, you know, their limbs are on the side, hanging off the side.

Whereas in warm-blooded animals, the limbs are under the body cavity, right? The underneath. And that allowed you to run and breathe at the same time. So that allowed to be more effective as a predator and more effective as a prey and more efficient in all of your locomotive. activities. And all of those things required the more energy. So you had to keep becoming more sophisticated

cognitively to solve all the other. Interesting. So dogs obviously is like, you know, their front and hind legs are directly underneath their body cavity. Whereas all mammals. All mammals. All amalgators would be outside. Mammals and birds again. Interesting. And that's to create efficiency in their ability to move and breathe in order to maximize and be most efficient with their decision making. Yeah. Interesting. And so, pigeons, for example,

they don't seem particularly bright to me. I don't think they're in that category of, you know, the ones that have been tested are mainly these jays and rays and crows and so forth. But I'm so curious why those animals specifically, why those birds specifically are somewhere like toes. It probably has to do something about, you know, let's say in mammals this new thing happened. very early in their trajectory.

So all mammals would then have inherited that capacity. But if in birds, it didn't happen until, you know, the crows came along because of some environmental condition. It's not, you know, the point is that it's parallel evolution. It happened. Something similar happened for different reasons in different animals. Simultaneously. And so that part of the ancestral tree.

for whatever reason, possessed those intelligent traits. That's interesting. All mammals have their appendages underneath their body cavity? Wow. Well, yeah. I mean. Whales, I guess, kind of? Well, whales, they, I don't know.

That's a good question. They don't have legs. But they're little like fins, I guess, are like proto hands. I guess. I'm assuming they have some kind of, you know, adjustment internally for the respiration. to be able to work while they're paddling and stuff. Interesting.

Wow. Or maybe that's why they like spitting the... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But they are pretty smart. Yeah, exactly. So maybe the whole theory is wrong. This is not my theory. No, no, that's really interesting.

No, that's really, really interesting. Yeah, I love that idea. Yeah, that warm-bloodedness is the feature that would give them some type of biological mental advantage. That's so interesting. And because I guess the cold-bloodedness, I guess, so tell me then, I'm not sure if you would know this specifically, but like for snakes or something, if they're not able to, you know, like why are they less bound by the decision matrix? Because they can go longer periods of,

I guess, like abstinence from food or hibernation or things like that without the cost. What do you mean? Like for like cold-blooded reptiles or something like that. Why are they able to make worse decisions or why are they not so bound by that decision matrix as warm-blooded animals? Well, I think they, you know, they live locally, right? They're not going long distances. So they don't have as much energy expenditure to go longer distances. You know, they get their heat from being in the sun.

Oh, interesting. And then they hibernate it in the winter. So, yeah, I guess their bodies might be more efficient in that way, that they're able to sort of possess external. I mean, there are some animals. I think some reptiles and some insects and stuff that have kind of a temporary warm-bloodedness. You know, it's like situational. Right.

That they can, like, maybe bees have something that heats them up while they're flying. But it's not intrinsic to their nature. It's like warm-blooded animals have it 24-7, you know. Interesting. Interesting. So now the four states of being, like you had said, biological, neurobiased. biological, cognitive, conscious. Which one do you find is the most interesting to you to think about which element of that?

Oh, consciousness, of course. That element of the research is the one that sticks out to you the most. Do you see them as tiered? They're not stacked on top of each other so much as they are tiered, but they are tiered in a kind of symbiotic way. Like the neurobiological evolved out of the biological. but it also enhances the biological. So it's a loop.

The cognitive evolved out of the neurobiological, but it also helps the neurobiological, the conscious, so forth. And so all animals possess behavioral, or biological, sorry. Yes, all organisms possess. All organisms possess biological. Every living thing that has ever lived

is a biological organism. That's most of life. I see. So only animals have nervous systems. so only they can go up. And then so on and then humans, would you say, are the only ones that possess all four? No, I think, I used to be kind of down on animal consciousness.

Now I'm not, what I say about animal consciousness is that I don't deny it, but we have to be, you know, judicious about it because we can't be willy-nilly about just saying it looks like it's conscious. This goes back to our very beginning of our discussion where, you know, You think if a rat's freezing, it must be afraid. But freezing is a neurobiological realm activity that has no cognition and no consciousness. Right. So we can't use that.

And that's part of the whole problem in talking about the amygdala as a fear sooner. Just because the amygdala controls freezing doesn't mean it makes fear. Fear is a cognitive conscious realm of this time. And then as far as this research specifically in this book that you've written, what do you feel like are the most, I guess, broadly reaching applications or implications from the research. If I were to read the book or someone else would read the book, is there something that I can take away to my regular life and think, like, oh, wow,

here's how these states affect me. There's a lot of, in the conscious part, I think it's the best part. I go into a lot of new concepts about consciousness, this dual mental model thing and how we can, you know, what we say and what we do, necessarily the same in this anoetic narrative and at the very end I pose the by my argument is that AI will never be conscious because consciousness requires a four billion year evolutionary history of biological accidents that

led to that led to the first organisms that could be conscious which may be mammals but I don't know. Wow. So as a neuroscientist you don't believe that AI will ever be conscious. No. Because there's not enough time. It'll always be programmed to look conscious, but not to be conscious. Because consciousness is so ingrained in all of our four realms. You know, it depends that your conscious mind dies if your biological realm dies, right? So we need metabolism from the biological realm to fuel all of the parts of all four realms, including the biological realm that's got to fuel off of metabolism. But also the neurobiological is dependent upon the biological, but it enables the cognitive. The cognitive enables the conscious.

So they're all entwined, and that entwinement is a... The history, you know, the starting of the entwignment goes back, I would say, 800 million years ago to the first animals. So they went from being single cell organisms that had a visceral internal life and a somatic external life. In other words, they had to get stuff from the outside world, but they had to have metabolism on the inside to maintain that and manage it. But then with the nervous system coming along in the first animals about 800 million years ago, the nervous system made the visceral metabolic activities more efficient, and it made the external activities supplying the fuel more efficient. And then when the cognitive comes along, it makes the neurobiological more efficient.

Same story all the way up and down. So what I'm saying is that ultimately you get to the conscious, realm, which has evolved through all those steps. It's slowly been, it's almost like, I don't want to say, it's, the body wasn't being prepared for it, but it was creating the possibility of having it. And it depends on all of those other realms. I mean, I guess I'm curious as to why time and body are so fundamental to consciousness, right? Like, I wonder if there's a way that you could speed up conscious progression through the use of computers. And also to say that computers also have a physical presence.

Right. Like, these, you know, like neural networks exist on a physical computer that is the body, so to speak. Right. So why can't that be the body for, you know, the computers as we have our own body? So, I mean, just take a neural network that, you know, there's lots of efforts to create, to rewire of the brain in neural networks. But, you know, that's like saying that a neuron is a single thing. I mean, every neuron is incredibly complicated in terms of its molecular structure, all of its entwine. And, you know, every one of the, you would have to create every feature of every one of those

neurons, and they're going to be different for every neuron to some extent, in order to get to the kind of biological state or artificial state, that would possibly at least get to the threshold of consciousness. I guess in my mind, I just think, sure, we had millions and millions of years plus, you know, like an evolving homo sapient body to create human consciousness. But I guess I wonder, one, why do we, that's the only, that's how we created human consciousness.

Why can AI not create its own consciousness or a different type of consciousness? It would still be able to have speech. It would still be able to have awareness. It would still be able to have some type of behavioral pattern. It could create the same exact mental model that our consciousness behaves under. I guess I don't know why it's necessary condition for it to be time and body. So the thought I was looking for is that if you take

you remember telling you about tolving's noetic and not a nootic consciousness the beauty of those two states of epithotic and semantic memory is that you can study those in animals and you never know in an animal whether they

cross the finish line. In other words, in humans, we know that when we have an episodic memory, we've crossed the consciousness finish line because we experience it. But you can have episodic memory that may only take you to the finishing line. It's the necessary step, and it does a lot for you even if you're not conscious. And noetic memory, sorry, semantic memory takes you to the border of noetic consciousness. But animals have those, but we never will know if they are crossing the finish line

and actually conscious. Hmm. And you'll never know in AI whether they can do that too. Hmm. Well, my wife is calling. Sorry about that. No, sorry. I'll call it back at me.

Okay. So... Interesting. Yeah, this makes a lot of sense. So now, the amygdaloids. Yeah. So the amygdaloids are... We were a science, we were a science band back in 2006 when we started. And it was just kind of an accidental thing. I was playing guitar with a professor at NYU,

and we were playing around at parties and stuff. And we had to kind of focus on, you know, kind of 60 songs that were about mind and brain, like Mother's Little Helper and manic depression, and 19th Nervous Breakdown. And I said, I can write some songs like that. And so I started writing songs. And we got invited to give a lecture.

I got invited to give a lecture at Union Hall in Park Slope for a secret science club. And they said, we'll have entertainment after us. So I'll bring the entertainment. So a new postdoc had arrived. She was a drummer. And she had a research assistant who was a bass player. So we had a whole band. We went and played, you know, I did the lecture.

Then we played the songs and the audience really loved the new song, the original songs about mind and brain. One was called the Mind Body Problem and the other was called When the Night is Dark. And, you know, we kind of caught on. We were written up in the New York Times and salon and all kinds of magazines, Rolling Stones, all kinds of stuff. So, and I travel the world giving lectures, and every time I go, they ask so I can bring the amygdaloids. I say no, but I can bring my friend Colin, and so we play. I mean, that's awesome. What's better than going, giving a speech about, you know, the amygdala, the brain, the four states of being, and then doing a little concert afterwards?

Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty sweet. We've got some videos on YouTube that, you know, like have 90,000 views, and it's been a great run. Yeah, it's great. Do you have merch? Do you have amygdaloids merch? Sorry, we have merch, yeah. I'm going to need a T-shirt. Okay.

I need a T-shirt or a hat or something. All right. I think that would be nice. Yeah, we'll wrap the amygdloids in here. I think y'all would look good. You know, the thing that's unique about us, we invented our own genre. Heavy mental.

That's far. I like that. And everybody who reads it thinks, really, you play heavy metal? That's great. Heavy mental is great. That's awesome. Check out the music.

When's your next show in New York? When are you doing it? You know, it's, we haven't had a show in New York in a long time. I'm playing in Rio. Come on. In June. I'm not going to Rio. I can't make it to Rio.

Help us find a club. It's like so hard to go to a venue. Yeah, okay. All right. I got some ideas. We can cook something up. Let's do a team thing. You do some comedy. We'll do some music.

Let me sing. Let me join the band. Come on. I can join the band. I can play a little bit. I'm not trying to brag, you know. But I can play some sea chords. We can do some covers.

we could do some obviously amygdaloids originals this will be great good i'm looking forward to it well joseph thank you so much for coming on thank you i really appreciate the time let's do this again soon great time