Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Dr. Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Antonio Damasio, a Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy, and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.Trained as both neurologist and neuroscientist, Antonio has brilliantly captured the complicated Interplay b/t biology and psychology and culture — and doing it in a way that provides the highest dignity between each discipline, through a structurally artistic and rigorously scientific process.His work is built on deep curiosity, deep thinking, and deep contribution to humanity.Antonio has made seminal contributions to the understanding of brain processes underlying emotions, feelings, and consciousness.His work on the role of affect in decision-making has made a major impact in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. He is the author of several hundred scientific articles and is one of the most eminent psychologists of the modern era.His most recent work addresses the evolutionary development of mind and especially the role of life regulation in the generation of cultures._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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and by trade in training, a sports psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create. And the whole idea behind these conversations, behind this podcast, is to learn how the extraordinaries think and do. We want to understand what they're searching for. We want to understand how they organize their inner world and their outer life. And we want to understand the nuances that they've come to understand and the mental skills that have allowed them to refine their craft. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive

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Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters. And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value, and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Now, this week's conversation is with Dr. Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Antonio is trained as both a neurologist and a

neuroscientist, and he has brilliantly captured the complicated interplay between biology and psychology and culture, and doing it in a way that provides just the highest dignity between each discipline through a structurally artistic and rigorously scientific process. And his work is built on deep curiosity, deep thinking, and deep contribution to humanity. Antonio has made seminal contributions to the understandings of brain processes, underlying emotions and feelings and consciousness. And his work on the role of affect in decision making has made a major impact in neuroscience, psychology, as well as philosophy.

And I wanted to speak with Antonio because his deep thought, I mean, really deep thought in understanding the nature of the mind. He doesn't waste words, using them beautifully to describe the fascinating invisible world of what it means to be a human. And with that, let's jump right into this conversation with Antonio Damasio. Antonio, how are you? I'm fine. Yeah, the rain has more or less stopped, but I love the rain anyway. This is more than a treat. This is a pleasure and it's an honor to sit down with you. You've made such a significant impact in the fields of biology and neuroscience and psychology and, and, and, and. But the interaction

between these sciences, both considered hard and soft, is not an easy task. And you have straddled very complicated ideas and concepts that are research-informed, that are insight-driven, and that are game-changing in the field of handfuls of disciplines. So I want to hopefully spend this time to understand how, how have you done this? How have you organized your life, both internally and externally to pursue a life that I would very easily recognize as being a master of craft. And I don't know if you would say that or see that, but I want to understand how. And your insights are world-changing,

so hopefully we'll get some of those as well. Very good. It's very difficult to... We have a long history to look back upon and you have had different periods of life in science and a life in the arts. It's a bit difficult to have a general, to talk about a general plan, especially because to begin with there was no general plan. You know, a lot of the things that I ended up doing, I ended up doing because I liked the themes, I liked the area of thinking that those works were connected to.

And I would say that I had both a number of very good indications about where I wanted to go, and also false starts in the sense that the way I was starting was probably not the most rapid and the most efficient way of achieving what I wanted. Basically, I wanted to understand human minds. And this, of course, sounds very pretentious, but it was not pretentious at all for me. I think that I knew that that's what I wanted to do, maybe when I was 12 or 13, maybe even earlier. And I think it came from the fact that I was reading very early, and I was reading all sorts

of things, all sorts of novels in particular, and books about history. And I was very interested not only in the pleasure of reading, but also in the world of ideas. And I kind of interests I had, or that I was going to be a writer, a novelist. And then for a period, because I loved cinema, I thought, no, this is much more modern and correct to go straight to the images and just be a filmmaker. And I actually had a great camera and I went around doing films by myself. Is this during the teenage years? Yeah, probably 14, 15, 16. And this was in Portugal at the time? It was in Portugal, yeah. And I was in the Lycée,

which has no direct correspondence to middle schools here it's a very different thing it's much more especially in those years it was much more like college is than than a secondary school so at a young age you were recognized as having a big motor, a high interest, a thirst for understanding. So literally the beginnings of an academic internal world. Yes. And the interest was, I would say, very well defined in terms of human beings and human minds how people go about solving problems how people do what they do how do how do you know the kind of things that you normally find in definitions of psychology example, and then by that time we're beginning to be part of the world of neuroscience,

and that classically I've been part of the world of philosophy. So what is interesting is that my career in cinema was short. You know, I made a bunch of movies. I detested absolutely what I did. I thought that I was going to have an incredible neck to work with a camera and do incredible shots. By the way, at that time, I remember, I thought that I was probably going to be an Orson Welles. Okay, I love this. But I'm picking up some threads here that I want to make sure that we're on the same page. One is at a young age, you began to identify with your intelligence. And there's a concept that I've seen play out over and over and over again with world-class doers, athletics in particular, is that a young age, we're building our identity.

And when we're exceptional at something, we begin to foreclose our identity. I am an athlete. And that foreclosure becomes a dangerous proposition later in life. And so I'm wondering if you were beginning to build and or foreclose your identity. And then the other thing is, did you know that you were going to be or want to be a world changer, whether it was Orson Welles in the cinema or who you ended up becoming? It's hard to say.

I have the impression that I probably did. I have the impression that I probably, I certainly wanted to be something valuable. Let's put it this way. But in the end, I don't think I was, I represented that

very clearly, for example, to others. I tried to be as modest as I could. I think personally, probably, I wasn't very modest. But anyway, before we personally, probably, I wasn't very modest. But anyway, before we go out of track, let me just tell you that. So the cinema was done away with.

I wrote reviews for a while. I actually wrote some very good reviews, but that was quickly superseded. And then I had a great professor of philosophy in my lycée, who was actually a philosopher himself. He was not just a teacher of the thing, but he was a contributor to the field. And he said, you know, what you really want to do is not philosophy. You want to be a neurologist.

And that was intriguing because I was in Portugal, and there was this well-known fact. There was a man who was a major neurologist in Portugal, a man by the name of Agos Muniz, who, for example, had invented the technique for cerebral angiography, which is a diagnostic method that, until the advent of modern neuroimaging, was in practice for decades and decades. And that man was an intriguing personality. He was one of the leading figures in the School of Neurology in Lisbon, at the University of Lisbon. And he had received the Nobel Prize in 1949. And what my professor of philosophy was telling me is, look, this is a man who works on ideas, he works on the brain, and what you need to do is be in the forefront of this

and you should study neurology. And then I made a decision to go to medicine and eventually study neurology, which people made an immense amount of fun because they'd say, how do you know you want to become a neurologist? I do, and I'm going to be a neurologist. And what ages was that? This happens at 17. Okay, so relatively early.

Yeah, quite early. Yeah. I think, I have the impression that people of earlier generations not only matured earlier, but were sort of forced to define themselves much earlier. You know, I'm delighted to see that there are people around me, you know, students that are 25 years old and still don't know what they want to do,

but they're very bright and very capable. And I actually totally approve of that, that people enjoy their lives and come to something with probably less struggle than I ended up doing, because then I had to gradually adjust my choice, which was neurology, to what I really wanted to do. So it's just not that neurology gave me the path to what I wanted to do. It just permitted me to do what I wanted to do because, of course, I ended up being a card-carrying physician and researcher in the brain.

So that gave me huge possibilities. But what people were doing in, for example, in the School of Neurology in Lisbon was very valuable, but none of it interested me. So in fact, I had then to come to the United States to find the people who had similar interests and who could be my mentors. And I did find them all, and that worked very well. So it's a question of, I think you're quite right,

there's a little bit of a premature closure on what you want to do. And that has both, of course, enormous advantages. And it means that you are more mature anyway, so that's good. But it has the risks that you can be then thrown into a path that doesn't move. What were you searching for when you made the move from Portugal to the United States? What was that thing that you were hungry for at that time? Well, there was one very specific thing. There was a major figure in neurology at the time and in what became neuroscience.

We're still not. Neuroscience is a very recent label. You know, people call themselves. I mean, the Society for Neuroscience was created in 1971. So that tells you how young it is. But people only started calling themselves neuroscientists or neurobiologists well into the 80s and 90s. Until then, people were something else. They were neurochemists or they were psychologists.

Psychobiology. Remember that movement? Yeah, exactly. And so those things were not, and there was nothing like, for example, a cognitive neuroscientist. So the labels are a little bit odd. At any rate, there was this great neurologist at Harvard by the name of Norman Gashwind. And Norman Gashwind is a remarkable individual, trained both at Harvard Medical School and at Queen Square. Queen Square is a major institution of neurology in London, very famous.

So famous that it's known by the address, not by, it's really called the Institute of Neurology at Queen Square, but everybody knows it as Queen Square. And in those days, days was a fabulous place. So I knew that this man, Norman Gershwin, had done very spectacular, for the time, very spectacular studies on language and the brain. So things that sort of picked up on earlier discoveries in the history of neurology, and that brought, joined linguistics with brain structure and allowed us to understand better how the brain was organized to produce language, to understand language and to produce language.

And so relatively simple, you know, the people I knew, I wrote to him. And this man was really marvelous, probably on the recommendation of the people who knew me and on what I wrote to him, said, just come over. And I came in, actually, at that time I came with my wife, who would be my wife, but was not my wife then, but was also a person that had similar, first of all, she had a general interest that was the same. She was interested in brain structure, not in the brain function so much. This is your wife.

This is my wife. Yeah. She's still my wife. Hannah. Hannah. And she's made incredible contributions as well. The two of you. Yeah.

Exactly. But at that time, her interests were both parallel and joining in many parts. At any rate. What do you guys argue about? Because you guys are – you're really intense. Have people told you that? No, never. you're really intense do you have people told you that uh no never you're really intense i want to know the lighter side that's i want to know the dark side but you're really intense and i i don't have the pleasure of knowing your wife but

like like let's go into the human side for just a minute like what do you guys two big brains two very large contributors in the field of a complicated space. We talk about music, we talk about the visual arts, we talk about travel, we talk about food, we talk about literature. And we also talk quite a lot about science, but it depends. For example, right now she's in the middle of resolving a big problem that has to do with the tail end of a study, and it consumes most of her hours. And I'm doing a number of things like preparing certain talks and writing papers

and so forth. So we sometimes we don't, we talk more about other things than about the science itself. But we constantly talk about, it's really a full range of topics. So you are squarely working to understand or to articulate what you have come to understand – consciousness, the self, feelings, emotions, culture? Yeah, and there it pays to give it some order. because at that early phase in which we were being guided by Norman Gershwin, the interest was very, very strongly on language, because, of course, it's such a powerful tool for us, for humans, and most of our communication is done through language, and it's an entry into what humanity is and an entry into what living beings are. because it is something that in those days I would not have described that way.

It comes at the top. You see, the very top of our organization mentally is through processes of reasoning, processes of language, processes of decision on, for example, moral grounds. Those are the very, very top echelons of what it is to have a human intellect. And in order to understand how all of this incredible machine has been put together, the thing that I strongly recommend is that you start at the bottom. Don't go to the top floor of the high

rise. Go to the basement. Because otherwise you're not going to understand. So downstream is decisions, is thinking, is language. Upstream is more primal? Yeah. So are you thinking about, when you say that, are you thinking from a

structural standpoint? Like from the brain stem up into the cortex? Precisely. Or are you thinking from a structural standpoint, like from the brain stem up into the cortex? Precisely. Or are you thinking something more, I don't want to say spiritual, but more esoteric in a way with simpler structurally, simpler in terms of the general organization of the brain, and it has to do with fundamentals of what a human mind and many other minds, not just human, end up having, which have to do with affect, have to do with the regulation of life, and have to do with affect in all of its aspects, emotions and drives, and very importantly, the transformation of those emotions and drives in terms of mental experiences, which go by the name of feelings.

Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. and drives in terms of mental experiences, which go by the name of feelings. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentus. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn to their mission, helping people achieve performance for life. And to do that,

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Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FindingMastery at checkout again that's felix gray you spell it f-e-l-i-x-g-r-a-y.com and use the code finding mastery 20 at felixgray.com for 20 off okay so you're you're putting emotions primary to to language to thoughts? Oh, absolutely. Right? Okay. And then you're saying that the internal world of feelings and emotions, and if I have it right, emotions are the physiological construct, or no, the physiological expression

or artifact that you can measure, and feelings are the sensations from more of a psychological experience. You've got it almost perfect. I would just change a few little things in your description to make sure that we're all on the same page. Emotions, as actually curiously the name implies, are about movement. So when you emote, there's movement going on in your face.

There's movement going on in a variety of internal organs, there's movement going on in your hands perhaps, or your eyes. Different parts of the body adjust to a certain emotion with a certain way. You have a posture for fear, or many postures for fear, that you don't have when you're happy. You have postures for happiness. But all of it is about movement. When you're talking about feeling, you're talking about a mental experience.

So emotions are something that you can see, that you can describe, that you can film, that you can rate in many ways. And they're there as a result of our evolution to produce certain effects generally automatically. You don't call for an emotion. You don't tell yourself, I'm going to be happy right now. You can, but watch out because the success rate is low, or I want to be dramatically sad right now. It doesn't work. So these are things that are called on automatically and that exist as devices in our evolution. These are devices that were in skeletal form already present in single-cell organisms billions of years ago and have become more and more complicated as organisms

became more complicated and then they translate themselves in creatures that have brains and complicated brains such as ours capable of a mind they translate themselves as a mental experience and that mental experience is feeling. So you can feel sad, or you can feel happy or in fear. That is your experience. It's something that is happening in your mind, although the fact that it happens in your mind does not mean that it's not happening in your brain. On the contrary, it is happening in your brain.

And in fact, right now, this is something that appears in my last book, The Strange Order of Things. The book is titled that way precisely because the way all this appeared in evolution goes against your intuition. I read your intro three times. Good for you. I mean, you know, like it's, you're on the, I don't mean to say this out loud because, but I want to like the pulse that you have and the precision of language is remarkable. And for me, that's the artifact of mastery. Okay. Right.

And so. Good for you. I was so excited so good for me i was so excited to be able to say you know like what you're doing is so complicated and i don't think you make it simple but you make it um precise yeah and and and i and i hope you know actually the the fact that it is precise but it's not necessarily understandable the first time you read it is not saying that I'm doing something wrong and it's not saying that you're doing something wrong. It's just that it is complicated and you have to honor the complication. One of the big problems is with simplification, is that there are things that you can simplify and things that you can't. I mean, if you simplify the process of life, you're being extremely gross and it's unacceptable

because it is complicated. You know what I heard for the first time this year was people want to live forever by outsourcing their, and I don't know if they know what they're talking about, like outsourcing. There's a difference between mind and brain in my lexicon right and so they want to outsource their brain or do they want to outsource their mind and it's first of all mind-boggling i don't understand it no you know you shouldn't understand because nor do i want it exactly there there it's easy you shouldn't understand it. Anyway, just to finish the story. So there's this huge difference between things that came early in the game when we, I'm meaning all of creatures before us,

were not thinking creatures, were living creatures that had a being, but that being was not experienced. And those things, nonetheless, were there to make creatures behave in a suitable way to make them continue their lives. So the possibility of living and continuing on living for a certain period of time depended on having those resources such as emotion, feeling, sensing of conditions. And yet there is no mind to accompany that. You could not mentalize that, you could not experience that. At least that's what I, the way I interpret it.

And then at some point, much later in the history of evolution, you develop the possibilities of having a mind in the proper sense. And that appears only after nervous systems appear. And nervous systems, nervous systems are really, you, jokingly, I like to call them an afterthought of nature. An afterthought, the nervous system. And are we talking about the central nervous system and the peripheral? The entire thing. Yeah, okay.

The whole kit and caboodle. The nervous system begins to appear at about 500 million years ago. So since life begins about 4 billion years, you realize what a new kid on the block we're talking about. Really, when you say it that way, it feels like it's growing pains. You know, when humans grow and there's kids growing, there's a growing pain. It's like I can see the central nervous system starting to sprout in a small little way yeah and and there there's you know one can one can overdo the the the idea that you retrace evolution when you were growing up but sometimes it works and and that's

actually something that i think you're you you put the finger on, there are lots of things that happen in the pains of growth that probably reflect the different ages at which certain resources of our brain and mind have appeared in evolution. And there are certain things that are sort of settled and certain things that are not. At any rate, to conclude the story, for your sake, long after you have this control over how you emote,

how you feel, how you respond in relation to the world around you, once you develop a mind, the whole panorama opens, and now you're also allowed to think about the things that you have experienced emotively. And you're allowed to think about ways in which you can either prevent certain things or maximize other things. And that's the whole game. Everything that we do, everything that we do from the moment we have some maturity, whether it is professionally or whether it is in a variety of areas that have to do with the general culture or with the politics, you name it, aimed at reflecting on the conditions under which you were led into pleasure or pain. And if you're smart, you're going to try to maximize one and reduce the other. Everything you do is around this fundamental set of problems, which, of course, hides another problem or another issue, if you

want, it's not a problem, and it's life itself. We are given this gift, and all creatures that are living are given a gift, and some of those creatures actually have some control, after a certain point in their lives, over what their destiny is going to be. It's, of course, a very incomplete control. I mean, here we're not fully in control. First of all, if we can control our health, it's already good news. But we're not in control of the weather or earthquakes or politics, and all of them can impinge on our life big time. But at least we get a modicum of control.

And that's the sort of normal course. And it's only in that phase that things like reasoning, language, creativity, the modulation of our take on what our life is and what our surrounds. It's only then that that takes on. And so when you, because you're interested in mastery, you're interested in how you get to have a certain control over what you do professionally,

I could say that I started at the wrong point. So by destiny, I ended up being an expert on language and the brain when what I wanted to understand is how this whole thing is put together at a much more deeper level. And if I had stayed there, I would not have been able to understand it. I would have become a better and better expert on language and the brain, and it would not have been for nothing. I probably would have done very good work of which I would be proud,

and I would have a few prizes and things like that. But that's not what I wanted. So a lesson here for your interest in mastery is that if you really, again, there are degrees of mastery. I had that mastery that was fine, but I wanted more. And that more required recognizing that I had, in a way made a mistake and and correcting inflecting the course and that I can tell you exactly when it happened and it happened in night around 1990 around 1990 I made for my entire laboratory, I made a decision that we were going to study processes of emotion. And I knew exactly what I wanted to dedicate the efforts to.

And there were incredibly interesting things that we were doing that I had to do not just with language but with memory. How did you know how did you do you listen to your feelings and emotions and listening is not quite the right word or do you think or do you work to integrate the two so it is it's always a loop it's always a loop because you you you can you can reason and of course you have to reason you have facts, you can you can reason over those facts and

come to a certain conclusion. But then at the same time, if you have had the good luck of connecting reasonably well your your emotional life with what you do, then your emotions and feelings ought to be telling you something about whether or not you're in the right course.

But you have to have developed that. One should not recommend to people to listen to their feelings if they have not matured the way in which those feelings are connected to their history of success or failure. If you don't do that, you're going to listen to your feelings and you're going to end up a great big mess. Powerful insight. And what do you do or how would you recommend people become more finely tuned to their internal world from an emotional feeling standpoint? That's a very difficult question to answer because I know that I just did it by practice. It was never one day in my life that I decided I'm going to start listening to these things and make the correspondences.

It just happened. Nor did I take a course on how to tune myself to my feelings. So it's a question of whatever you are. I'm sure that it can be decomposed and studied, probably it is already, and there are people who can give you a course on how to master that. Emotional intelligence. Yeah, sure. Yeah, which I always have some resistance because, you know, I don't want to be pretentious but I think I

know what I need and if I don't, if I make mistakes I learn from my mistakes it's not a big deal and by the way let me just say one more thing because we're talking I'm not talking to you alone I'm talking to your listeners

listen to all this with a grain of salt and I'm not talking to you alone, I'm talking to your listeners. Listen to all this with a grain of salt and try to discount the seriousness with which I'm speaking because you're asking me serious questions, so I have to delve into this history. Actually, I'm giving you a sort of history that I don't remember giving to anybody recently or ever, because I normally resist answering questions of this sort, because you always come out pretentious.

So your listeners are going to listen to me and say, oh my God, that guy is so full of himself and he knows everything. He's got it all solved. And that is not right. It's not right because, first of all, it's not the way it is in reality. But when you tell the story, when you sort of clean up the edges and the false starts and the mistakes, it looks better. But in reality, these stories are complicated and they unfold over many years and there are lots of mistakes and stupid choices and so forth. So to temper this idea that it all went very well uh let's factor in the the the mistake and this i really appreciate it and because you know you walk into we're at the brain and creative

brain and creativity institute here at usc and you walk into your lobby i mean it's like it's remarkable you know like the institute itself is remarkable. Your insights in science are remarkable. And then your humility to say, hey, listen, I don't want to be pretentious, but I spent a long time trying to figure this thing out. I've made lots of mistakes. So I appreciate the freshness in that. But it's true. Yeah, no, I, yeah, no, it's genuine. And it's, if one doesn't say that, one looks like an idiot and and ought one ought to look like an idiot because that's not the way life is life is is very complicated unless of course you're an idiot and then you all is well it's all simple all simple yeah so right now you and i are having

a conversation okay and there is a meta experience like you're aware of your experience of you right now. And we'll call that consciousness. Yeah, I would buy that. Although, if you would ask me to define consciousness, I would not define it that way. Although certainly that happens in consciousness, and you cannot have those awarenesses that you're talking about without consciousness. Right. This is, so like on a very practical standpoint, I do want to know, I want to hear you say

it. I've read it many times, like your definition of consciousness or your articulation of it. But right now you and I are having a conversation and you're aware of your experience. And then you're also aware of my experience as best as you possibly can. You're listening to the words and you're picking up micro expressions. You're calibrating them with how you think they make sense for you. And then you're responding and I'm doing the same thing. So I'm aware of my internal conversation and experience. I'm aware of your internal, your external conversation. So in this interplay that's taking place, this beautiful neurochemical, neuroelectrical, maybe even hormonal exchange between two humans talking about something that's complicated, what are you driven by? so what what is it that you are craving more than anything else as a primary driver

to you becoming you you just ask complicated questions right you don't have simple ones is that not fair did i add too many things in there no no no yeah it's a perfectly fair question it's just not easy to respond. I could strip it down and say, what motivates you? But I think that that… No, no, no. It's better. What motivates you is a terrible way of asking.

You asked it in the correct way. Well, first thing, different things depending on the times. I think it's a myth that people are driven by one thing and it's all very clear in their minds. Maybe there are some people that are that way. I'm not. I'm, you know, there's sort of micro drives. There's certain things that you're doing at a certain point that you want to clarify, that you want to achieve.

And then there can be days in which what is driving you is the prospect of being with a group of friends that you know that you're going to have dinner with and you really look forward to that and you even sort of prepare yourself for that in the sense that you may think about how to best contribute to that or it may be a trip or or a talk that you know that you're going to give you know right now actually i'm just telling you about things that are quite real because all of them are in my radar.

And there's one, for example, tomorrow I'm going to be meeting with a colleague that I've never met. He's a colleague in the sense that he's a very accomplished biologist. And we have corresponded. I have a lot of admiration for his ideas. But I'm really driven by the fact that I'm looking forward to this meeting, which will be tomorrow, here. And I've invited a few of my students to then join us for lunch. And I'm thinking about how that plays into what my tomorrow is going to be. That's certainly a very important drive, but it's sort of a micro-drive.

On the other hand, I have lectures that I have been putting together that are going to be given in the last week of June or even July. And these are important talks, and I've been thinking about what I want to achieve there. Now, all of this is at the practical level. Then there are other things about which, using a little bit of modesty, I'm not going to talk about, which are sort of more personal and have to do with what one is as a human being

in relation to, you know, a spouse, in relation to friends and so forth. And that's different and that's not easily discussable, but it is within the range of important drives and aims. And in fact, those are the ones that command everything. If you're reasonably put together mentally, everything you do, like, for example, looking forward to this meeting for which you have to prepare yourself you you that's part of the overall mixture of goals in your life and that's why I was setting up that question about this experience that's happening between us, call it a relationship. And what I'm curious about for people is are they primarily driven by their internal needs, pain, pleasure, fame,

understanding, something about themselves, or are they primarily driven by an interconnection with others? So it's like relationship based achievement based. Is it, um, insight based, you know, and I'm trying to sort that out. And it sounds like you're one of your, so, okay. Pain and pleasure is a primary driver for organisms. And as we move up the chain, we get to experience, um, life in, in, with emotions and feelings, and then think about those emotions and feelings and think about things that don't have emotions and feelings and then think about those emotions and feelings and think about things that don't have emotions and feelings. Maybe that's not possible. I'm not sure. But it sounds like what you're saying is that your primary drivers are relationships and,

well, maybe I don't do an and. Is it relationships? Or is it like unlocking something? Or is it like external rewards? I don't get that from you, but I'm sure that it's in there somewhere. It's clearly all of it. It's all, it's all of it. It's all of it. Everything that you named would place some part in what I am and what I try to do. So I think it's all of the above. The proportions are very different. And again, the proportions, you know,

some people are extremely disciplined and very serious about themselves, and by temperament, they don't stray from a particular path. You could call it rigidity, but it's rigidity and seriousness. And so things become very clear, what you want and what you don't want. And there's some people that are a little bit more elastic. I'm of the elastic type. So I cannot say that the priority of my desires and my goals is the same every year. You know, things change because circumstances change.

What is important to recognize is that there are certain limits beyond which it doesn't change. In other words, a priority may change, but in other words, there are things that you will do and things that you will not do. There are things that you will like and things you will not like. So within, there is a rigid background structure, but the surface is somewhat more elastic. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day and Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft.

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And for me, that includes how I take care of my body. I've been using Caldera Lab for years now. And what keeps me coming back, it's really simple. Their products are simple. And they reflect the kind of intentional living that I want to build into every part of my day. And they make my morning routine really easy. They've got some great new products I think you'll be interested in. A shampoo, conditioner, and a hair serum. With Caldera Lab, it's not about adding more. It's about choosing

better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20 off your first order that's caldera lab c-a-l-d-e-r-l-a-b.com slash finding mastery okay and would you consider yourself a high risk taker low moderate and if there's there's different types of risk there's emotional risk there's financial risk there's intellectual moral did i say moral you know there's there's social risks there's a handful of different types of risks and i'm wondering if the the thought about the elastic

approach is actually another way to think about high risk, meaning that I can, I can get into the fringes of things and still be okay because I have an appreciation for that. And then I'm thinking like I'm snapping into some, you know, the, like the, um, what's the nerve I'm thinking about? Uh, like vagal, uh, Vegas tone, you know, like that there's some sort of tone, maybe thing that takes place for people that are different in their capacities for risk i think in general i probably would describe myself as medium to low risk tolerance i don't but again that that differs with what you're dealing with. I think I can allow myself to take risks intellectuallytaking, for example, in sports or in the way I drive or in whether or not I would be insured.

So it's a mixture of things. Overall, even in terms of, you know, I'm sort of giving myself credit for elasticity when I compare myself to certain people I know that are completely rigid and I cannot convince them to change a little bit to accommodate some different style of doing. But in the end, I'm not that elastic because I'm certainly very predictable. So I think the test of the elasticity is the predictability. And I would say that people around me predict very well what they can get when they ask me certain things. So in the end, I'm probably not elastic.

You are not a reductionist, I'll tell you that. I went through all of this different effort to give myself elasticity and i have none that's great what drives you nuts what are the things that you know whether it's conversations like this or it likes scooters scooters oh absolutely now i tell you what literally what drives me nuts, it's, first of all, the behavior, this is a consuming passion of mine, the behavior of people who drive mostly these new instruments that they use with very little caution. For example, there is this passage under our institute where it has been clearly marked for a decade that it is a no-driving zone.

If you are on a bike, it says there very clearly, if you are on a bike, get off your bike and walk it. If you are on a bike, it says there very clearly, if you are on a bike, get off your bike and walk it. If you're on a scooter, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And people constantly violate the rules. It's flaunting a rule that is in front of them. Wait, hold on. I love this because you're a rule breaker. Intellectually, you broke rules. Right, but you're not going to break these rules and you're not going to break rules that put other lives in danger and you probably put some careers in in danger like when you change the way that yeah like okay your your model about brain and consciousness and there was in neuroscience there was a pervasive idea that the mind was an artifact of the brain.

And there was no real consciousness. Don't worry. Let's talk bikes. Am I wrong? That you changed that model? No, I think I contributed along with other people to change the model. But the risk to people was... Okay. I was being extravagant

very extravagant yeah okay if you have a guy that is on a scooter and he's on top of it reading his email or texting and he's doing it at high speed and in fact over the past few days he's been doing it at high speed and with pouring rain and completely wet floors where people can skid. And the signs say, don't do it. And they refuse to do it. I had to scream at a lady this morning. You know, I was crossing in pouring rain. I was crossing in front of a car that stopped at the pedestrian passage and waited. And there was this girl that biked around the car at full speed and almost hit me. So, of course, I had to scream at her, watch what you're doing.

It doesn't make any difference because people are not ready to confront this and to tell the little angels that they cannot thrive that way. The gift of a prefrontal cortex that has not fully been developed. They probably have the prefrontal cortex very well developed, but they're not ready to concede a freedom that they think they have that's a cool way to think about it yeah what what are the experiences in your life that you are looking to increase and this is a sneaky way about motivations to think about but what what are the experiences you want to increase in the back half of life for you? I don't know. I want to… Well, I want to… It's so much that it's difficult to to put together again it's a it's a it's a big stew of things um we could create some artificial boundaries like if you couldn't work at the

brain and creativity institute like if you had to you know what would it be in that what would it look like that way or if you only knew that you had two years left here, you know, at your institute, like we could create some artificial boundaries there. Well, I think certainly something that I want to expand is the possibility of doing, of putting together ideas and inspiring experiments that respond to the questions I have had scientifically. That's definitely very important. being able to explain better in a more complete way certain phenomena that have

interested me and sort of having a sense of closure on some of those questions that's definitely a great motivation but we have to be to watch carefully because on some of those questions, that's definitely a great motivation. But we have to watch carefully because the sense of closure tends to be false. You see, there's nothing,

especially when you deal with things, little things like mind or biology. You close a chapter, but then another one opens behind it. So it's a complete illusion to say that, well, I want to resolve that problem, because you won't. And it's interesting because all around us you have very great examples in the science of the 20th century and of already the 21st

of things that looked like they were closed, and yet they were not, and new things open. One case in point is the Human Genome Project. It's a very sharp one, but it's general. It's a problem. Then there are things that are personal in terms of personal achievement of happiness. Those are much easier to define and more difficult to talk about, but they have to do with human relations and they have to do with simple enjoyments.

I'm passionately interested in music and in painting, and those are things that are... If I could spend more time with those things in my life, I would, except I don't have the time. But it's important if we i know you're not a reductionist and i don't want to take a broad stroke on something that is finely delicate um if you finish this thought it all comes down to how would you finish that thought it all comes down to it all comes down to life and when when you think about life, what are we doing here? It's a very epistemological type esoteric question, but do you have a point of view about what we're doing? Yes, I have a point of view about what we're doing in a very narrow, simple-minded way.

What we're doing, for example, as members of a society, as members of a profession that is not the easiest thing to define, but it's perfectly possible. What we are doing in a broader scheme of things, it's impossible to answer. And it can be, one has to allow each of us the freedom to explore that question and to come to some conclusions. One of the conclusions may be that you really don't know. that some people that are very fortunate can reach, which is that they know precisely why they have been planted on earth and what they're going to do and what they're going to do to others, how they're going to contribute and so forth. But they enter the realm of the unknown. They enter a realm about which people can make very informed conjectures

and can have things like faith, and that's perfectly fine. In fact, all of this range of what we are, quote-unquote, what we are doing, plays beautifully, and it goes with the extreme variety of life you know life is not one thing only but there is life there is human life now in the 21st century with all the problems we have around us and in the even now with all

the progress in science and the progress in philosophy and reflection on what we are, we're not in a good condition to answer with certitude the question that you posed. But you have an obligation, I think, to answer it yourself and to have a certain sense of clarity for what you're doing. And it may change. Again, the point of changeability is, I think, extremely important because you're interested in mastery. Well, mastery of what?

You're, with good luck, you are multiple masters in a lifetime. Well, yeah, it's funny you say luck because you certainly are one of the few people that could say that because you have command over multiple disciplines. Are you being modest? No. There are tons of people that have lots of command

and capacities. I mean, I don't know. I'm going to appreciate your humility, but at the same time, respectfully disagree that what you've done is tremendous. And so... Be my guest. I think that's right. World-class performer, artist. And if someone like Yo-Yo Ma were to come to you and say, okay, Professor Damasio, emotions, on consciousness, on thought. I hear this thought about self-talk. I hear this stuff about arousal and emotional regulation. When I go to perform or create, whether that's on stage or a brushstroke behind closed doors, I get overwhelmed. And it's hard for me to authentically express what's inside.

And imagine that that performer comes to you. What would you want to help him do better or her do better or do less of? Like, where would you start with your brilliance? How would you help a world-class thinker do or be able to express more eloquently okay so i'm going to start by denying the possibility or probability of your scenario with the person you chose uh meaning yo-yo ma yeah oh yeah we could take him out of the picture we could insert anybody i was just i was just like honoring that i know that you understand intimately this is not conjecture this is like your mind is is brilliant perfectly formed intellectually and perfectly capable artistically and he doesn't need to improve anything beautiful yeah yeah so let's take him out there was more more for me to honor that I know you know what world leading feels like. of great creators in the world of music, the world of literature, the world of cinema,

theater. We have artists. It's something that we, me and my wife, we have always been very interested in the work, obviously. But we've been interested in how people are and how people do what they do. And really, the last thing you can imagine is a formula that would fit every one of those people because they're so different, the way people operate. And for a friend around, you can, it's very easy for a friend to point out where a person is actually making a mistake

in a certain decision or in a way of operating. But it doesn't make any difference because people are what they are. And things make sense. And generally with successful people, even their defects help them. The defects turn into enormous advantages. Yeah, it's beautiful. Beautifully textured and well understood. I've been on record for a while saying there are no hacks, there's no shortcuts, there's no tricks, tips. It is an adventure

of discovery. And to reveal and unfold and to make a decision and to course correct, you know, or to course adjust. And, you know, it's a, it's a life path, you know, certainly not an end game in and of itself. I want to thank you for your time. I want to thank you for your insight and your contribution. And last thing, where can people find you and your books and where can that happen? Where can they find the books? Well, they should find them in bookshops, but they don't exist anymore.

So we'll find them in all the right distribution centers. I understand that there's a new development that substitutes bookstores. So that's highly, highly recommended. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And we will make sure that people find your books.

The Strange Order of Things is a game changer. And so thank you again. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify.

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