Huberman Lab - The Biology of Social Interactions and Emotions | Dr. Kay Tye

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

In this episode, my guest is Dr. Kay Tye, Ph.D., Professor of Systems Neurobiology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. We discuss the neural circuit basis of social interactions and loneliness. We also discuss how animals and people establish themselves in a group hierarchy by rank and how the brain responds to dominance and subordination. Much of our discussion relates to how social media impacts our sense of social connectedness or lack thereof. The topics covered in this episode are directly relevant to anyone interested in the neuroscience of mental health, work-life balance, abundance versus scarcity mindset, and interpersonal dynamics. Read the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/hubermanlab Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Kay Tye   00:02:56 Sponsors: LMNT   00:06:40 Amygdala; “Valence”   00:12:43 Novelty; Reward & Punishment Response   00:20:06 Amygdala & Hunger; Social Interaction   00:26:21 Social Media & Social Connection; Tool: Email & Time Management   00:31:21 Sponsor: AG1   00:36:30 Social Media; Friction & Feedback, Leadership   00:43:44 Social Isolation, Harlow Experiments, “Loneliness Neurons”   00:51:47 Social Homeostasis, COVID-19 Pandemic & Loneliness   01:01:29 Quality of Social Contact, Social Homeostasis, Social Media   01:09:42 Social Media, Relationships; Social Isolation & Exclusion   01:18:26 Empathy: Friend vs. Foe   01:28:40 Background & Empathy, Diversity, Emotional Regulation   01:34:34 Abundance vs. Scarcity Mindset   01:37:22 Social Rank & Hierarchy, Sibling Order, Development   01:45:54 Dynamic Hierarchy; Dominants vs. Subordinates; Mentors   01:55:32 Psychedelics: Research & Mechanisms; Psilocybin   02:06:28 Work-Life Balance, Fitness & Extracurriculars   02:11:56 Personal Life, Diversity, Happiness; Typical Day   02:15:42 Science & Academia; Future Directions   02:23:48 Research & Science Outreach   02:28:48 Zero-Cost Support, Spotify & Apple Reviews, YouTube Feedback, Sponsors, Momentous, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. K. Tai. Dr. K. Tai is a professor of neuroscience at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. She did her training at MIT and at Stanford, and is currently an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which is a highly curated group of individuals who are incentivized to do high-risk, high-reward work and pioneer new areas of biological study. Throughout her career, Dr. K. Tai has made fundamental breakthroughs into our understanding of the brain,

including demonstrating that a brain area called the amygdala, which most people associate with fear and threat detection, is actually involved in reinforcement of behaviors and experiences that are positive and involve reward. Her current work focuses on various aspects of social interaction, including what happens when we feel lonely or isolated. Indeed, today, K. Tai will tell us about her discovery of so-called loneliness neurons, neurons that give us that sense that we are not being fulfilled from our social interactions. She also describes a phenomenon she discovered called social homeostasis, which is our sense that we are experiencing enough, not enough, or just enough social interaction, irrespective. of whether or not we are an introvert or an extrovert. We also talk about social hierarchies and social rank, how people and animals tear out into so-called alphas and beta,

subordinates and dominance, et cetera, in all sorts of social interactions. I think everyone will find that discussion especially interesting. And we talk about the role of social media and online interactions and why despite extensive interaction with many, many individuals, those social media and online interactions can often leave us feeling deprived in specific ways. We talk about the neurochemical, the neural circuit, and some of the hormonal aspects of social interactions.

It's a discussion that by the end will have you thinking far more deeply about what is a social interaction and why certain social interactions leave us feeling so good, others feeling sort of meh, and why other social interactions or lack of social interactions can often and leave us feeling quite depleted, even depressed. It's a conversation central to mental illness and the understanding of things like depression and anxiety, PTSD, and isolation. And it's a conversation central to mental health

and in order to build healthy social interactions. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. And now for my conversation with Dr. K. Tai. Dr. K. Tai. Welcome. Andy Huberman. What a treat. Folks are going to hear you call me Andy and wonder if my name is Andy. I always know who I'm speaking to, according to whether or not they call me Andrew, which is my family and people that I know after a certain period of my life, Drew, which are people that know me through my very brief and non-illustrous career in boxing. And Andy, which are people that met me as I was coming up through science. Let's just put it this way.

There was another, Andrew. We did a coin flip and I lost. So Andy is fine. Andrew's fine. Whatever makes you comfortable. What's important today is not how anyone refers to me, but rather the discussion about your work, which is spectacular. I've known you a long time and I've been following your career. And it's just been amazing and wonderful to see the contributions you've made to some.

science and also to the culture of science. So we're going to talk about both of those things. To kick things off, let's talk about a brain structure that most people I think have heard of, but that is badly misunderstood. And that's the amygdala. Most people hear amygdala and they think, oh, fear. That's what the amygdala is all about. But you know, and I'm hoping you'll educate us on the fact that the,

amygdala is actually far more complex than that and far more interesting than that. So when you hear the word amygdala, where does your mind go? I agree that a lot of the bandwidth on the amygdala has been occupied by fear studies, but we've known actually for a really long time that the amygdala is important for all sorts of emotional processing since Cluver and Busey performed lesions on monkeys and found that monkeys would then have flat affective responses to all sorts of different stimuli. Poop, food, inanimate object, whatever it was, just nothing. No emotion. No emotional response.

No motivational significance. However you want to phrase it to things that usually would make you either, you know, disgusted or excited or neutral. And so I think that that knowledge about the amygdala was there from the beginning. It's not something I came up with. But then it's interesting. It's almost a meta statement or a meta observation about how scientific research progresses. Sometimes you make a lot of progress in one particular vein because it's easy to press forward there.

But it's important to also think about all the other parts and filling in the space in between to make sure you haven't missed anything. So the narrative about the amygdala became about fear. And I think also just when we think about survival, when you are an animal in the natural world, especially if you're a prey animal, which is the majority, you know, lots a lot of animals, then you need to prioritize escaping a predator. It's immediate threat on your survival versus rewards mating, drinking water, getting food. These things can be done later. Escaping this predator is paramount.

And so there should be some natural asymmetry in how we process emotion at baseline. And so that's something that we've looked into a lot as well. But I think that the big picture discovery that my team has contributed to our understanding of the amygdala is that it represents a fork in the road for processing emotional valence and thinking about all these old psychological theories about how do you emotionally evaluate the world. around you. What's the chain of events? Is there a chain of events? What's happening in a certain order versus what's happening in parallel? For example, one model is, you know, there's all this information that comes in, and then we have to filter out what's important. What's going to be something that I need to pay attention to versus what do I need to ignore? If I'm driving, I need to pay attention to the road, this light, this pedestrian, just started walking versus, you know,

what it feels like for my sock to be touching my foot, not super relevant right now, or my butt against the seat. Nothing I need to pay attention to. I need to focus on, you know, the dynamic information. Then you have to select, you know, the second step would be selecting whether it's good or bad and what you want to do with it. And so that process, I think the selection of whether you're assigning it a positive or negative valence happens in the amygdala. So glad you brought up this word valence. I think it's a word that some scientists, but most of the general public are probably not familiar with. So let's talk about valence. And then I want to go back to the amygdala and kind of explore some of its diversity of function a little bit more.

So when I hear the word valence, I think goodness versus badness of something. Is that? Basically, basically, it's been used in a lot of different fields. I think of that, you know, negative and positive numbers or, but it's an analogy that we take to just, mean, yeah, net positive, net negative. And it's an intentional departure from the word value. Value becomes very scalar. Everything's on, you know, it can be in the same direction with different magnitudes as often how we think about value.

It could be representing both valences, but often it's a small reward and a big reward or small punishment and big punishment is how experimentally we parse value. And so Valance is just asking about how you're, brain responds to things that are good or bad? What are neurons that might respond similarly to things that are good and bad? Those might be importance neurons rather than positive or negative valence neurons. So yeah, I think it's a, it's just a term that signifies that next step. So when we walk into, say, a novel environment, do you think that our amygdalas are active and really trying to figure out whether or not an environment,

a set of people or a person is safe, and really just check that box first in order to be able to do other things. Is this business of determining valence and the role of the amygdala in that, kind of the first gate that we have to walk through anytime we're in a new environment? For instance, you showed up here today

and you mentioned, you know, I think I locked my car and I said, you'll be fine in this neighborhood either way, And then you walked in and presumably you were taking in the new environment, meeting some new people. We had a little discussion about caffeine, a little discussion about alcohol. And presumably, because you and I know one another, you felt safe, I would hope so. But presumably the amygdala is always performing this role, even if we have some prior knowledge about something. Just figuring out, am I safe here? Where are the exits?

Where are the entrances? Who's here? What's their story? Do you think all of that is operating, and do you think it's always conscious or is it largely unconscious to us? Okay, so there's a few different questions there. First, I want to address the question about novelty, and then I want to come back to the other issue of conscious. But the way the amygdala works is its job is to assign meaning to anything that could have motivational significance. And so if it's a brand new thing, we're paying attention.

We're seeing if it mattered. Did it matter? And so I think anything that's novel, even if we don't know what it means, a loud sound you've never heard before, even if it signifies nothing of motivational significance, the first few times that you're presented with it, you'll get an amygdala response. So you see this in the lab, play the tone for the first time. And then there's a response that rapidly decays when the tone doesn't end up predicting anything that the animal can detect. Or human? Is this also true in humans? Yeah.

If you're the type of person that puts your phone on Do Not Disturb versus has it on vibrate. And, you know, sometimes it's always vibrating and it's just, it vibrates all the time. Whereas I put my phone on Do Not Disturb. And so when someone else's phone rings, it's very startling to me. But they don't even notice because that's just the sound the phone makes. It makes it all the time. So I think it has to do with how many times you're presented with it. And it's a startle response.

So the first few times that you are presented with a stimulus, the amygdala will respond. And then it decays very quickly. And then only if that stimulus predict something important or something rewarding or punishing, then will it begin to respond again. So it's like you're giving everything novel a chance to tell you in one trial, in single trial learning if something's going to happen. And so I think a fire alarm is a great example. You know, fire alarm goes off.

you're instantly, you're looking around. Is there anything happening? Even just people rushing out, you know, there's the salient thing that you're going to respond to. And, you know, if you have a lot of fire drills, then you might respond differently after a while. So I think that's the habituation component. You mentioned that the amygdala will respond to a novel stimulus. And if it predicts something interesting, then other things happen. We'll talk about those.

If not, the amygdala stops responding. And you said something really important, which is that the amygdala will respond to something that is predicting reward or punishment. And I think most people don't realize that. In fact, I think a lot of early career neurobiologists don't realize that, that the amygdala is not just involved in fear and punishment. So when we talk about the amygdala, presumably we're talking about the amygdala complex, a bunch of other things.

So is it true that there are neurons in the amygdala complex that predict reward and others that predict fear and punishment? Yeah. So as a graduate student, I worked on a part of the amygdala called the basalateral amygdala. It's still a complex within the broader amygdala. This brain region is cortical-like in that it's mostly glutamatergic neurons with some gabbergic neurons mixed in, but without the same structure that the cortex has. And I studied the amygdala in the context of reward.

I found essentially that when you induce plasticity, you get a synaptic strengthening. When animals learn things, amygdala neurons fire in response to cues that predict rewards. And this was coming into the context of a field that had shown that this happens with fear. And so this became, I remember the very first time I gave a presentation at a scientific conference, I was a junior graduate student. I was given a 10-minute talk at the, you know, inaugural amygdala Gordon Research Conference. Many famous professors were speaking, and there were two talks about the amygdala and reward, and I was one of them. And the response to the talk was just how is this possible?

How can the amygdala, how can you get the same readout for reward and fear? And really, it came to be, there's two possibilities. I mean, there's more possibilities, but the main two possibilities are number one, that the amygdala wasn't specific for fear at all. It just responds to anything important. If it's important, it responds, period. The other possibility is that the amygdala is sending,

has different neurons that respond to positive and negative predictive stimuli and sends this information to different downstream targets to respond differently. Obviously, I respond differently to a reward. I walk towards it. I consume it. A punishment.

I'm avoiding it. And so clearly the behaviors are diametrically opposed. And so to me, it seemed very possible, at least, that there was a divergence point, and maybe this could be it. And so we just did some very simple experiments when I first started my lab to trace the projection targets of amygdala neurons and record. And so everything's all mixed up together. So it's not obvious that this would be a fork in the road. But when you look at them, you do see that there are projections that come from the amygdala that are predominantly encoding either reward or fear.

And there's many different projections. And, you know, this is just the beginning. But this was a time when it was a novel concept to even think that neurons from one region could have completely different functions going to different downstream targets, which now seems totally obvious. And there's hundreds and hundreds of papers showing in now, but at the time it was difficult to get this work published because that's just not how people thought about information moving through the brain, I guess.

Well, I think, first of all, such important work and so wonderful to be early in the phase of recasting how the brain works, which is what you did. I think most people in the general public still think amygdala fear. And clearly it's able to signal reward and punishment, as you discovered and are now pointing out. I'm curious, does the amygdala have a direct line to some of the organs of the body that can change our bodily activation state, heart rate, breathing rate, muscle tension? Because I think most of us experience fear and reward as both in our head, in our brains, but also of the body? Great question.

Great question. So I'll tell you the clues that lead me to my current working model, which may, you know, is not necessarily the final word. But I would say that I think the amygdala complexes we're discussing it, these 13 subnuclei that reside, you know, in the temporal lobe, they are important for assigning importance, but they're not important for producing the actual autonomic arousal that we associate with panic or fear. The reason I say this is there's a famous case study patient SM who has bilateral damage to her amygdally and, you know, no responses to emotional faces, no responses to fearful stimuli.

But if you, capable of having the panic response due to low, to suffoccurfew, to suffocating, associated with suffocation. And so there's still the ability to produce that panic and arousal response. It's just not the cognitive evaluation of it. I think that's what we think the amygdala is doing, is assigning that. It does receive information from the rest of the body. There are, for example, ghrelin receptors in the amygdala, things that can sense hunger. And we've done some work looking at this, kind of inspired by, I'm not sure for this,

for you're familiar with this study, it's a controversial study, Dan Ziger, 2011, but where the Supreme Court judges, they looked at Supreme Court judge rulings on parole decisions across the day relative to meal breaks. And you can see, right after, it's like breakfast, you know, 90% everybody's getting parole, everybody's getting out,

yeah, and then it just drops till 10%. Then there's lunch, then we're back to 80%. And then it just reciprocity. drops to single digits again. So the judges are changing the leniency of their rulings, depending on how well-fed they are. You know, there are counter-arguments to this, but that is strongly what the data suggests. You know, it is not a controlled study. It's just a striking correlation. But it's the, it's not a completely novel concept, the hangary phenomenon. I'm sure, I don't know, everybody's different. I certainly experience it. But we, we think that when you are

getting strong signals from the body. For example, you know, I think, I think the amygdala is going to be able to detect a lot of different homeostatic inputs, even though we haven't, we don't have evidence for that yet. But for specifically energy balance, when you're hungry, your amygdala can detect it perhaps through grelin receptors or other, you know, mechanisms. And then what we see is that in that food deprive, after one day of food deprivation for mice, you can see this shift in the balance between the positive valence encoding projection neurons and the negative valence encoding projection neurons. At baseline, fear trumps all. The negative projection neurons, you know, can silence the reward projection ones, which makes sense. If I need to run away from this predator, you know,

I can't, I can't worry about eating this food right now. But if I'm in a near starvation like state, which for my, they have very high metabolism, so one day without food is a really big deal. they'll only last a few days. So at this point, they are kicking into survival mode where actually getting food becomes the greater need. And you'll see animals hunting in ways they normally wouldn't hunt when they're really desperate. And so this mode of food deprivation shifts things

so that the reward pathway actually has stronger power to influence and silence the. a fear pathway than before. Wow, the brain is so smart. It really is. It can take what we normally think of as a priority list. Fear and staying safe is more important than food reward. And then if food and acquiring food is critical to survival, it can invert all that is what you're saying.

Exactly. Amazing. And it happens, you know, in a day, it seems reversible. So that's something that we're looking at right now and thinking about how, specific is this to food? Is this true for lots of different things? What about exercise, other stressors that are, you know, potentially more positive? The amygdala is able to detect a lot of different signals from the environment, and we're not sure how all of that gets in there. So I think one of the detection of the environment has been, you know, really well worked out

in terms of our basic sensory modalities. But think about the things that really affect your emotions day to day, at least for me as a human in this society, the things that affect my emotions most of today are almost entirely social interactions, very subtle ones, ones that don't seem to threaten my life or safety. You know, very small, subtle social interactions are what, you know, have the greatest bearing, I think,

on my emotional evaluation and my emotional bandwidth. And what is that? How do we detect that? How do we assemble this information, apply all the nuance, you know, put on the onion layers of social programming to come out with whatever, you know, I interpret this gesture to mean? It's pretty incredible. And so that's kind of where my research program has been sliding.

Such a interesting area. Let's drill into it a bit. And to put it in context, maybe we talk about social media. So on social media, whether or not it's Instagram or X, those seem to be the two major platforms. I'm not on TikTok. People say stuff. Sometimes they say positive things. Sometimes they say negative things.

Sometimes they say things that are sort of neutral. So it seems to me that nowadays, if one is on these social media platforms, that we are we've sort of crowd sourced this phenomenon of social interaction in a way that we hadn't before because I grew up prior to the advent of social media and I could bring my physical body into certain environments and not others.

Even at high school I could hang out. We had an area called the Batcave where skateboarders and some other at that time misfits hung out with the quad where the cool kids hung out, etc. You could pick your niche. Social media is not like that.

You can pick followers. They can pick you, et cetera. But I think since most people have social media nowadays, it seems, or on there in some ways, that we've placed ourselves in the center of an arena, which we have a ton of incoming input. We all, most of us have amygdalas. Two of them amygdalas. You pointed out, one on each side of the brain.

And presumably we're on these platforms. to receive positive feedback and avoid negative feedback. However, there does seem to be a cohort of people who seem to like the friction of combat or kind of, let's just call it high friction interactions or moderate friction interactions. They like to argue. They like to parse ideas. It's not all bad necessarily. So have you ever looked at social media, in your own mind, looked at social media through the lens of amygdala filtering or through the lens of neural circuit filtering. And I wondered what's going on there

that someone without your in-depth knowledge of these brain circuitries would not think to look at that landscape. Or maybe we could just do that now as a kind of playful experiment. I like that. So a lot of people ask me about social media from the context of, is this of, is this social contact meaningful? As this positive? Does this count? Does this help you not feel lonely? And of course, I don't know the answer. We haven't done that particular study yet.

And I don't know, I don't know of that specific study having been performed. But my prediction is that it's not going to do much because I believe that a key component of what I would consider social contact heavily depends on having some interbrain synchrony, something. interaction and that is synchronous. And I think with social media, sometimes there can be an engaging dialogue that plays out in near real time. But generally speaking, it's asynchronous. You're looking at things that are happened that you're not a part of. You're excluded from all these things. They happened in Australia yesterday and I'm on there saying, cool, love it. Yeah. And then the person's already asleep.

Yes, exactly. So that's what you mean by asynchronous. Asynchronous like that. We're not experiencing things at the same time. It's not a shared experience, you know, that in terms of that, having that bond necessarily. And so I've never actually been asked about how the amygdala processes social media. I guess I think what happens is, you know, the amygdala is just responding to stimuli. It's sending a bottom-up signals. You know, it's a caricature of, bottom-up and top-down processing. Let's give an example that I'm walking down the street and all of a sudden I hear a really ferocious dog barking. I'm going crazy.

And then I get super scared. And then I realize, okay, there's a fence. So the amygdala detect, you know, heard the dog barking. Hey, there's a dog barking. And, you know, I'm freaking out. Then my prefrontal cortex realizes there is the first thing. It looks very sturdy. This fence looks stable.

And then I'm relaxing and I'm resuming my walking normally. You know, I think that's sort of the dance that our brain is doing when we have top down and bottom up information. Then we're trying to stay focused. So for me, I think when I'm on social media, there's so many stimuli that are evoking responses and to be completely transparent. And I know this is not something that everybody else does or can't do or is necessarily what's best for them.

But I work very hard to control input from the top down in terms of I really, really limit the amount. I basically don't check email or go. on social media, I would say I'm on social media or email less than one hour per week, basically per week. All I have to say to that is congratulations. We'll talk about social media again in a second, but as a fellow professor, email once a week.

I've heard of people scheduling their times for email responses, but once a week, that is awesome. I have people who help me get through it and then filter out what's important. Otherwise, I just, whenever I do my own email, I say, say yes to all these things. Then I make all these plans. And then I'm, and then I have to do many trips. And I'm responding fragmented, fragmented. And it's just, you know, overcommitting. And I think I know my limits. Sometimes it's difficult for me to be in my amygdala mode responding to stimuli and letting my prefrontal cortex do its thing. So I've set some very heavy prefrontal cortically selected limits of the input I put in so that my brain can function and be clear. I can't be creative. I can't have

epiphanies if there's all this clutter of like writing this person back and blah blah blah blah tweet tweet it's just you know get the trash out wipe squeegee squeegee the brain down so that we can actually grow something beautiful and new well and I want to reemphasize what I said in my introduction which is that I mean you are oh so productive and when I say productive I don't just mean productive like plug and chug you the work you've done is incredibly creative you transformed our understanding of what this famous structure, the amygdala, actually does. I mean, you've made so many important discoveries as a consequence of presumably other things, but including wiping away all this incoming and clutter.

As you said, controlling the top-down inputs. I have to ask, just from a practical standpoint, during that one hour a week, are you reading every email that came in or are you just being very selective about which emails? So you're not opening most emails? No, I don't open most emails. No, I just, I search for the ones that my assistant identifies as the one I need to open. There's like a list of things that I'd be interested in. And then we'll go through the list.

And then, you know, sometimes it requires me to go and find the email and respond to myself because that is. And then I would do that for, you know, 10, 10 minutes a day or something. Do you recommend? Just get out of there as soon as I can. I love it. Do you pass on this advice to the people that you train? I think it depends on what resources and what's your, what's your job right now, right? So I think as a trainee, I definitely did my, as a assistant professor, I did my own emails, but at a certain point, I was just never getting to the bottom.

And then it would just stress me out, make me feel overwhelmed. And what is my job? My job is to, number one, be a stable core of a sustainable research program. and that just requires me having a lot of mental health and well-being and clear-mindedness. And I need to be able to come up with creative ideas. I need to be able to sprint when there's a deadline. And I just can't exhaust my system with unnecessary, I would call them quadrant four in the time management quadrant. If you're familiar with this, you know, leadership management.

It's important, urgent. Yes. Certain things are urgent but not important. Some things are urgent and important. Things are neither important nor urgent. That's most emails are, like, if you read time management literature and you have the luxury to have someone else help you or something that's like so well trained to be really good at captcha chaptering things that are important. And, you know, sometimes I miss emails.

But emails are not the way my trainees would reach me. They would reach me in a different way. And then emails are for everyone else that I didn't give my number to, you know. I feel so honored to have your contact. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Athletic Girls. Green's. Athletic Greens, now called AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still

take athletic greens once or usually twice a day is that it gets to be the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important. It's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long-term health. And those probiotics and athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, athletic greens contains a number of adaptogens, vitamins, and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational and nutritional needs are met. And it tastes great. If you'd like to try athletic greens, you can go to athletic greens.com slash Huberman, and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up

Athletic Greens while you're on the road in the car, on the plane, et cetera. And they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's athletic greens.com slash Huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3K2. I think this is wonderful advice for people to hear. We have a future guest on this podcast named Cal Newport. He wrote the book, Deep Work, and he has another book called The World Without Email. He's a computer science professional professor at Georgetown where he talks extensively about the tremendous career, but also relationship and life value of doing essentially what you're describing. Although I do think, Kay, that you represent kind of the extreme of what I've become aware of in terms of people that can limit the amount of

time on social media platforms and email. Anyway, I just want to say, congratulations. I just want to say that again. I think it, even if people don't reduce to one hour per week, I think that making some effort toward reducing the amount of incoming, as you said, controlling the top down inputs to the amygdala, but also to the rest of the brain involved in creative processing, et cetera, is so key. And we actually do have agency. It's just as it's tough sometimes to build up that discipline. So you're doing a tremendous service by sharing that somebody as successful as you does this, presumably is successful in part because you do this. Could we, by extension, say that many people, since billions of people are on social media, are likely triggering the activation of their amygdala, clouding out other more potentially productive activation of their neural circuits by sort of just making themselves freely available to the thoughts and words and impulses of others?

I mean, to me, it seems the answer would be yes, but I'd like to know what you think. I mean, I think, and there's something to be said, there's definitely been moments where I've, you know, gone deep into social media and spent more time in a certain burst, right, that is isolated. I think that there's a lot to be learned from social media. So to actually, to bring it back to one point you mentioned earlier, on social media, sometimes people just want accolades and sometimes there's a lot of friction. One of the reasons I stay on social media, even though I'm making this big effort to social media. of declutter my consciousness is because of that feedback, especially when, you know, for someone like you, I imagine this has got to be super true. And even for me at a certain point of my career, it just felt like people don't want to

tell me bad news to my face as much anymore. Everybody's so positive all the time. And, you know, what they, what are they really thinking? And social media allows you the protection of... anonymity to say what you really think without consequence, essentially. And so on the one hand, the consequence-free nature of being able to just say things can be very dangerous. But at the same time, for me, I really value just being able to receive it. I'm, you know, I'm a big girl. I can filter out what I want when I get all the inputs. But if I don't receive the inputs, sometimes it's hard to learn from the

feedback I'm not getting. So even sometimes feedback's given in a not very nice way, I can still create a model for someone else that has this perspective that I can take with me and that can be another perspective I can honor easily in the future because I have this theory of mind for someone, someone would get upset about that. You know, that's something that could be harmful to people who are, you know, have this theory of mind. So I think it's super valuable from that perspective, and that's why I continue to use it. Great. Yeah, I really applaud that as well. I always read my teaching e-vals because they're anonymous. And yes, I do wonder, you know, what grade the different people who gave different

evals I got. I don't know that information. I sometimes wonder, do they attend the class, or are they just angry they didn't do well on the exam? But that really represents the small fraction of feedback that I wonder about. Most of it that's valuable to me is the, hey, you know, liked the course, but these parts really sucked, Professor Heberman, or this part was completely unclear or completely hated the way you blank, blank and blank, because that feedback is something I can really work with to improve. So I think course e-vals are similar to what you're describing. I think there's value there. If I were to just look at the positive feedback, and then ignore the negative feedback and write those people off,

then I don't think I could improve as a teacher. Actually, I always encourage comments and feedback and suggestions in the YouTube comments for this podcast for that reason. And I do read the comments. I go through and I read and a few of them sting. Yeah. But, you know, the positive feedback is great too. Sometimes it's more of this, please. Yep.

Or less of that, please. I think there's information in that. Yeah. So I think it sounds like you've been doing all of these things naturally. So actually, since I've had my research group, my lab, we do an anonymous lab survey every, it's supposed to be about every 18 months. And then it's a whole long process of going through it. And it's just evolved. I think it's the fourth or fifth time we've done it.

And so it's now, I think it's like 70 questions. It's so many questions. Maybe we should trim it down. But it ends up being hundreds of pages of text, you know, short answer, sometimes long answer. feedback from anonymously from people in my lab. My lab is pretty big. So it's, you know, I'm not even trying to really guess who is saying it. It's just feedback. And it takes me months to go through with it and get all the feedback. And it is so useful. I mean, in a class, the amount of content that you have is, it's restricted to this very specific time and space.

Whereas when you're mentoring someone over the course of course of years, there's a lot of different, there's a lot of different points of content and interaction and you know you're in the lab all 40 hours a week or whatever and you know going to meeting here there's just a lot of different different ways to improve in ways we've never you know I haven't had any training in how to be a really great mentor and so I'm getting that training now I'm making my own course and my mentees are my teachers and I really am grateful for the tutelage that they provide for free in the anonymous lab survey, sometimes it makes me cry, but sometimes it makes me feel really good about something that I'm doing that's working. And in any case, it makes me feel that I have ground truth.

I guess I still don't know. But when people say things that sting, it makes me feel like they're saying what they really think and they're not holding back. It doesn't, you know, and bad news feels like reality. And so that is very, something about that is rewarding. just to feel like I have reality rather than I'm getting something else, you know, the model doesn't quite fit. It's very unsatisfying with the model doesn't quite fit. I love the word ground truth. There's something so beautiful to that.

And I resonate with what you're saying. Let's go back to social interaction, something that your lab is doing lots of work on nowadays. And maybe we could shift to the sorts of social interaction that most of us are familiar with. the sitting across the table, having a coffee with somebody, that taking a walk with somebody, maybe a phone call. Yeah. Maybe a tough conversation. Maybe a playful, you know, unscripted conversation.

Maybe a meal at a holiday dinner. You know, there's a huge range there. What do we know about the value of social interaction at the level of sort of core biological needs? I get the level of neural circuits and maybe even hormones. I mean, you know, most people have heard of oxytocin. They think they love hormone. But there's so much more there for people to understand and know about, you know, how important is this thing that we call social interaction and how bad do things get when we're not

getting the right kinds of social interaction? You know, I think this is this is a great question. And I'm glad that it's become something that has been recognized at a more global and national scale, just the importance of having social support in our lives for our well-being. But social isolation or even just perceived loneliness has immense health consequences for all social species. So shortened lifespan, increased mood disorders, increased, actually morbidity and mortality for diseases like cancer or heart disease that, you know, might not be what we would normally think. And so I think understanding how each of those processes is happening, those mechanisms are far from

being worked out. But the correlational evidence is undeniable. We're now taking this into the lab, really, for the first time. And so something so simple as social isolation, how come we don't know way more about it? And I'm someone who stumbled. into the field of social isolation by accident prior to the pandemic. And so I'll just say, you know, the whole story on why there's such a gaping hole in our knowledge as a neuroscience community about social isolation really comes from Harry Harlow's work, this original work of maternal separation that was undeniably cruel. It caused irreparable damage to these baby monkeys and they never recovered. And sorry to interrupt.

I apologize. I'm just striving to not interrupt in my life. But so that people are on board, could you just briefly describe the Harlow experiments? Yes. So they're very famous experiments where they separated baby monkeys from their moms and then had either a wire sort of thing holding a bottle. So, okay, what do you miss most about the mom? Is it the wire?

Is it the food or is it the comfort? And then they had, so they had a wire thing with a milk bottle versus, you know, blankets and cuddly soft things. And the baby monkeys would go to the cuddly soft thing. But, you know, a blanket is not a replacement for a mother. Nobody's saying that it is. And through these experiments, there was extended maternal separation. And it was deemed cruel. There was permanent irreparable damage when you rehouse these monkeys.

They never re-socialized normally. They had lots of different mental and physical health problems. And I think in humans, we know that solitary confinement is considered torture. You know, social isolation is a difficult thing to study in a lot of conditions. And we stumbled onto it by a complete accident through working with a postdoc, a former postdoc in my lab, Jillian Matthews, who was a graduate student doing an experiment on, it was just trying to figure out if these dope, neurons would also respond to cocaine the way VT8, these ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons were known to respond to cocaine.

I wanted to see if these other dopamine neurons respond to cocaine. So sort of an incremental study. So when you do these cocaine studies, you inject the animal with cocaine or saline and leave the naive animal in the cage. And then you take brain slices, record from the neurons, and look at the synaptic strengths. And so, you know, the expected. outcome sort of was that these dopamine neurons would be similar to other dopamine neurons that

showed in long-lasting potentiation after a single dose of cocaine. But what happened instead was that, yes, there was potentiation of the cocaine animals. There's also potentiation in the salient animals relative to the naive group. And this was a huge puzzle. What was this? And it turned out through many, many different experiments that it's actually because when you inject animals with cocaine, you're separating them from the group. And I act all crazy. And this is just what the way people do the experiment. So you inject them with saline, you separate them. The naive animals just stay there. So with their other litter mates. I see. So the control group, the saline control group is actually a social isolation condition. So by accident, this control group that didn't make sense was how we

stumbled onto. So then we tried, is it novel cage? It's not the novel cage. It's the social isolation. And so that is how we became a lab that studied social isolation. It was a complete accident. We weren't sure what we were looking at. And then we found these neurons and we manipulate these neurons and they produced something very different than other dopamine neurons, which normally if you stimulate dopamine neurons, these ventraltegmental area, midbrain neurons, like 90% of the time when you hear people talk about dopamine neurons, they mean these ones, and they're the ones where you press the lever, stimulate the neurons. We'll press the lever thousands of times, you know. They love to be stimulated. Yes. And if you're a human and you do

cocaine, most people love cocaine, they're very prosocial when they're okay on cocaine. And so that's what dopamine neurons were thought to be doing. But these other dopamine neurons in the dorsal raffae, that I will also say is in the brainstem near to an aqueduct where you could detect signals from the body. But these other dopamine neurons in the Raffae, they, when you stimulate them, animals don't like it. They will not work for reward. They actually will move away from a space where they're being stimulated, you know, conditioned place and real-time place, aversion. I don't like the feeling of these neurons being activated. Please stop it. And yet, they would be pro-social. And so for a long time, this was super confusing. We couldn't understand it.

And then just because at the same time, we had a hunger study going on in the lab, we just thought about it, like, I can eat food because it's delicious and I want to eat this yummy treat. Or I can eat because I'm super hungry. I feel shaky. I'm just going to eat this nasty fiber bar out of my backpack because I'm so desperate. And I need, like, my blood sugar is dangerously low, you know. And so there's two reasons that you can eat.

And one of them is uncomfortable. Hunger is not comfortable. It's not a good feeling to be hungry. And so we thought about this, and that's kind of how we circularly came around to thinking, I think we've discovered the loneliness neurons, essentially. And so what is loneliness? And loneliness is this unpleasant need state of wanting social contact that would have this pro-social effect as well.

And so that's basically the very serendipitous loop-de-loop way that I came to be, studying how loneliness is represented in the brain. Amazing. Before we talk a bit more about these loneliness neurons and some of their inputs and outputs in the brain, how has the discovery of these neurons perhaps changed the way that you organize your day and week in life, right? if at all. For instance, are you more aware of how much time you spend alone versus with others? Are you more careful or discerning about who you spend your time with? I ask this because there's so many examples for me in the neuroscience literature where I learned

something new about how the brain works. And I think, oh, yeah, you know, it makes a lot of sense why my sleep isn't great. You know, it turns out that light exposure to the eyes at particular times of day really sets the whole body and brain into particular rhythms that, you know, explain why I was a little depressed when I was in graduate school, staying up all night doing experiments and I'd sleep much of the day and feel like I was getting eight, nine hours. I don't get eight to nine hours now, but, you know, and when I wake up early, for me personally, there's a bit of an antidepressant effect as long as I slept the night before. Seasonsal affect disorder is real. Right. So, you know, I think as new information comes online, at least for me, it's changed the way that I organized my life.

In subtle or in not so subtle ways. So the idea that there are neurons in the brain that encode loneliness, the absence of social contact, does that have you thinking, you know, after a few days of managing the lab, which as you point out, you have a very large lab, lots of social interaction, but it's work context, social interaction. Does that, has that led you to think, hey, you know, we should go out to dinner as a lab, or I should spend time with somebody who's not in science, or I should spend time by myself because I've had too much social interaction. I'm not asking for strict protocols here. I'm just wondering if you're willing to get, like, play in the sandbox of this with me a bit, how this information perhaps has shaped some of your choices.

You personally. And to be very clear, I'm not asking you to dictate what other people do. No, of course. Has it changed your social life? So it's really interesting that you ask this question. And now that you're asking it this way, I mean, of course when I learn new things, I take them and implement them into my life. But to be honest, in the cycle of learning and studying and being curious,

And I actually think where I reside more is when something's going on with me, my research program, you know, research is research. It becomes what the, it dictates what the research program evolves into. And so for example, so I just started studying loneliness a few years before the pandemic hit and then the pandemic hit. And it was just a step function like change. I went from, I'm never alone, unless you call being in an Uber alone, or being. on a plane and just, you know, constantly people in my office, even when I'm going to the bathroom,

someone's waiting for me outside, like, you know, I'm not, it's like I'm hurrying in the bathroom. I'm never alone. There's like four people in my bed kicking me in the face. I'm just, you know, there's just so much social contact. And then boom, you know, there would be a day. I wouldn't see another, like, you know, just the, not zero, but just extremely sudden drop of social contact when there's no more work. And, you know, it was just that, that period of.

time and it was it was very depressing it was just this huge I felt like I was in free fall and it made me you know at first it was really disruptive and I was worried about myself you know and then at some point I adjusted to it and then I got used to working from home I got started a garden like I got you know I just started a different life pattern that involved a lot of alone time and you know something an alone time personal life again grew where there wasn't any space for anything to grow before, and then I became comfortable with it. And so then I start thinking about that that's really where the idea of social homeostasis was born, this idea that, okay, why is it with acute social isolation? Humans, monkeys, mice,

you know, you acutely isolates the individual from the social group, you reintroduce them to the social group, rebound of pro-social interaction. Oh, so. so happy to see you. There's like all these affiliative interactions. A burst of affiliative interactions. Whereas with chronic social isolation in humans, monkeys, mice, even flies,

you reintroduced into the social group and you get territorial behavior, aggression, avoidance, anti-social behavior or just sort of a very different negative valence response to the exposure to the group.

And so this, maybe people brushed it off for a long time, is just, oh, it's confusing. This literature is inconsistent. Or maybe there's one model that makes it all make sense that is social homeostasis where, you know, you're used to getting this at a certain point. And so my effector system gets activated. I detect that I'm alone. It's, I want more. The deficits detected.

Then my effector systems gets activated this. And then I start spinning all the systems that try to get me back into contact. I'm calling my friends. I'm texting my friend. If I'm a mouse, I'm making ultrasonic vocalizations. I'm exploring outside of the borough. And then, you know, if my friends don't call me back, they're like, sorry, we don't want to see anyone until end of COVID. Bye.

Whatever it is, you know, it's not working. My correction efforts are failing or maybe a certain amount of time. We don't know. Then I give up. I stop calling. I stop going out. I just make a different life. You know, you don't leave the borough, whatever it is.

And there's in animals and humans, at least behavior. There's a near step function like drop off of attempts to, you know, you can see sort of date. Oh, then they just give up on dating after this one, you know, whatever happens. There's some straw that breaks the camel's back and then this person doesn't want to date anymore or doesn't want to go out anymore, whatever. And what is that? So that adaptation, then you're at a new baseline. You're expecting now your new normal.

I'm expecting to have a gardening day at home alone, not see anyone. And then a bunch of people come over. It feels like a surplus. So my previous optimum, you know, reintroduction to the social group, is now feeling like a surplus, an overload, overstimulated. And that's, I think, something that a lot of people experience, this whiplash of going into the pandemic and coming out of it. Different people to different levels. It depends on how much you, you know, isolated while you were in the pandemic. But I think thinking about your social set point as being.

being flexible and dynamic was a new concept to me. And then in my mind, the question is, what is the part of this process that is causing all these harmful health consequences like shortened lifespan, mood disorders, et cetera? Is it the initial detection that I'm missing something and affect your system activation? Because if that was the case, maybe I want to band-aid that. You know, maybe I want to get a pet, get a Zoom buddy. I don't know. You would have different prescriptions and advice to give people if that were the case.

versus you would give almost opposite advice if the thing that's causing it is the set point adaptation. Then you want to stave it off versus if you wanted to accelerate getting into the set point, which is better? You know, is it the adaptation or is it, you know, kind of trying to fix it. And so in one case, you would want to ease off the having the set point happen, the set point transition happened. And the other case, rip it off like a Band-Aid, cold turkey, just adjust. And then you'll be fine, you know, then you won't worry about it. Then you won't be lonely anymore because you'll just be comfortable being a lot.

You know, people talk about cognitive flexibility. And I think it's, it's sort of like that, but it's social flexibility. I want to be able to be alone. I also want to be able to be in a large group and be comfortable. And so I think what I've done, if anything, to change my lifestyle to accommodate these new insights I've had is to consciously create dynamic social experiences. Lots of social experiences, yes, but also protecting alone time, which I never did before. I just gave it all the way. And, you know, I realized that having that just made my social homeostatic system feel more elastic and flexible and resilient and less like a crisis if something, you know, I'm very

comfortable being alone. I'm super comfortable in my own skin now. And it requires investing in that relationship. I like how you framed earlier. I think we were not recording yet, but. the relationship with yourself as being a very important relationship. And when I think about brain states, you know, we don't know this yet, but my working model would be that different individuals, we represent their identities,

and whenever they're present, it creates a unique ensemble of that combination of people being present. And being alone is also a unique state that cannot be achieved. I have the brain state of being alone. I cannot achieve it if anyone else is around. and that's just what, you know, that's kind of the working model I have. I think what you're saying is essential for people to hear because it makes sense that loneliness would hurt. It makes sense that some people are more extroverted, which I think is defined as getting energy from social interactions

and resetting energy through social interactions as opposed to introverted, which, by the way, folks, introverts like myself, do enjoy social interaction. It's just that we reset through more solo or one-on-one time than we do in larger groups. That's my understanding of the introversion, extroversion literature. We can revisit that. But this notion of social homeostasis is, I think, so key. Important enough that I think we probably want to redefine it as many times or restate it, rather, as many times as it's necessary. Because I believe what you're describing is the same thing that one would experience with food.

If we eat a lot, we're consuming 3,500 calories a day. And then suddenly we only have access to 1,800 calories a day. It feels like a deficit because indeed it is. Whereas after some period of time at 1,800 calories a day, 2,200 calories a day, it feels like relative abundance, relative abundance. When the pandemic hit, I certainly was unhappy about the state of affairs in the world, of course, but I recall feeling like, oh my goodness, I finally don't have to commute 90 minutes in each direction to Stanford because I lived in the East Bay at that time. I felt like I had time to do things I hadn't done in a long time.

And thanks to Zoom, I was able to get certain things done, not others. Then after about six to eight months, when I realized this is going to carry on for a while, I remember feeling quite lonely and making some efforts. to repair that. I think social media, not to harp on social media, could do either one of two things, and I don't know which, in the context of social homeostasis. Either going on Instagram and seeing a lot of familiar faces and comments and accounts could make me feel like I'm getting

some social interaction such that then when I close that app and moved to my work at my desk or something, which these days has mostly done solo. that I would feel like I had social interaction. Or perhaps it's the equivalent of calories that then makes me feel more isolated when I'm not in the app. Perhaps.

I find it to be distinctly different than like the experience I had last night of going to dinner with someone I know quite well, sitting down and having an open-ended conversation and deciding to close out the night. only when we realized, you know, we got to get up tomorrow for work, so went our separate ways. There's something that felt very sating about it. So I wonder in this context of social homeostasis, whether or not the analogy of social interaction

to caloric intake, we could, is there another dimension to it where it's not just the total number of calories or the total amount of social interaction, but the quality of social interaction, the type of social interaction that actually feels like nourishment as opposed to just calories. I love where you're going with this. And so when we wrote this review the first time, we're conceptualing this idea of how your social set point can change based on if you're acutely isolated or chronically isolated. And the y-axis is the quality slash quantity of detected social contact, which is so fuzzy. And, you know, there's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's, again, one of the most challenging frontiers of this field because how, even if we measured

every single component that the brain can detect of the social contact, so much of it is about expectation, you know, like if I think I got a gesture, if I get a nod from the president, I'm like, oh, my God, did the president just nod at me? That's so exciting. Versus if I get a nod from my partner, I'm like, oh, my God, are they mad at me? What's going on? Why did I just get a nod? Right.

It totally matters. The gesture, you need to need. the identity. There's many different cognitive systems that need to all plug in to this wheel to make it spin. So I think that that is one of the, I think that's going to keep us busy for a while. But in terms of your question about social media and when you switch from, you know, getting social media feedback and then doing work, I think, I think it really depends. I mean, social media is such a large category. You can have many different types of responses. Generally, I think the bounds, so when you say social media versus a real-life interaction where you're with someone, maybe you're

touching, maybe you're not touching, but even if you're just having conversation, you have interbrain synchrony. You are having a lot of interbrain-synchronity. You're in the same place. But you can have interbrain security, even on the phone, right? Just a voice call is actually a lot more interbrain synchrony than messaging. I think text messages can bring a lot of anxiety and there's been a lot of commentary about that. And same thing with social media. I think the thing about social media that is perhaps the most harmful or negative, I think, in terms of when I'm thinking about social nourishment, you know, sort of making that term up on the fly here, but it's almost a withdrawal.

When social media is posted, it's not to you. It's to everyone. And you could be one of the people that receives this message, but it's not even to you. I'm not even talking to you. And I'm doing something that's without you. Otherwise, you'd be in this picture and not reading on social media, listening to whatever.

So it's like by almost exclusively you're posting about activities that you're being excluded from and someone's not even really talking to you unless they're direct messaging you. But then I kind of consider that a different category. if it's like a one-to-one communication. Social media to me is a blast, right? It's not, it's just, you know, catching up with someone on social media, I don't really see the merit of it because I'll just catch up with them when I catch up with them. And their kids will just be like way older.

But, you know, I don't know. I'll actually really catch up with them than just see pictures of, you know, I don't know. I feel mixed about it because it's not a real connection. And it doesn't for me sate my social appetite. to catch up to look at someone else's profile on social media. That doesn't actually do anything for the connection. I don't know, but I seriously doubt tons of oxytocin is released when I, you know, follow someone's feed about their vacation.

So I don't know. I think that it definitely matters the quality. And social media is different than real-life interactions for many reasons. I really appreciate your willingness to, explore in this in this context i think your mention of the fact that um real life interaction involves interbrain synchrony could be by text scaling up from that by phone um facetime or something akin to that video video chat um on social media there is comments back and forth um although that's time consuming and it's difficult because there's anonymity people are in different places

different time zones. If you don't know someone, it's different context. So I'm really, thanks to what you're describing, I'm really starting to think about social media as so different than in-person social interactions or by phone or video chat social interactions and how those would differentially impact social homeostasis. And it's leading me at least to conclude that at least for me that most social media interactions would create more hungry.

as opposed to a sating of the need for social interaction. I have to be careful with the analogies here, but since I can do this, I was almost going to make an analogy between pornography, in-person sexual intimacy. I suppose there's something in between where people could talk by phone, but we don't want to explore this in any kind of salacious way.

And then sexual intimacy with emotion, with positive emotion. There's a scaling factor there. And I'm not putting judgment or valence. I'm certainly not. That's not my place. As a good friend of mine says, I'm not a cop. I'm not telling people what to do they can't do.

But it's so interesting to think about these circuits within us that create these what you and I in our field call a pedative, the desire for or aversive, the desire to move away from type responses. and how so much of our life, aside from you, because you're regulating your social media and your email intake, but so much of life now is offering us the opportunity to tickle these circuits or even hit them hard with a sledgehammer. But we're not thinking about these homeostatic mechanisms of whether or not they're creating more hunger for or more satisfaction from. And I cannot emphasize enough how critical this is. And I think that's because, you know, I'm somebody who does spend a fair amount of time on social media.

A lot of my work exists on social media, YouTube, et cetera. And I would hope that the work that we're putting into the world with this podcast is creating a satiation or the desire for information rather than a hunger for more. I do hope that. But I recognize that educational material on social media represents a tiny, tiny fraction of what's there. So social homeostasis, I think, is a term that if people haven't already stamped into their mind, they should be stamping into their mind. And Dr. K-Tai deserves credit for that. I don't, I will say that, so you don't have to.

I've heard you say before you wrote in a review something akin to social contact is either positive or negative when it's deficient or in excess, which is, I think, what you're describing is social homeostasis. Is that right? When we talked about the quality and quantity, there's, just in terms of contact, just amount of contact, there's such a thing as just the right amount. There's some sort of thing that's too little. There's such a thing as too much. There's overcrowding, right? It doesn't matter who it could be your family.

It could just, sometimes it's like a lot. Maybe your family. Depends, depends. Do you know the famous Ram Dass quote? No. Think you're enlightened. Go spend a weekend with your parents. No disrespect, mom and dad.

I know, right. But I think with quotes, it matters so much. Like I was sort of saying before, you know, the same gesture from the president or my partner, it's going to feel very different to me, whether that was a slight or, you know, it's just, it's relative to what is appropriate for our rank, for our prior history of relationships for, you know, the environmental context. And so I think with social media in general, and I agree, social media is great for a lot of things. I mean, and I think that having a podcast like this that is accessible to the public, makes research more sustainable. So I have a lot of things to say about science communication that I'm very, you know, grateful for. But in terms of social media, think about the mutual investment.

When you are interacting with someone on social media, what are they investing in this connection? So if I put out a post about my vacation that is public, I'm investing 0.000,000,000,000, 0,0001% of my bandwidth to make contact with you. You know what I mean? And so it scales up from them. If you're making a voice call with someone, you're giving them at least most of your attention

for the time that you're on the call. That's a lot, right? Whereas, you know, so just thinking about the investment is another component. There's the real-time component, and then there's the investment component. Who is it coming from? It matters. If you're anonymous, I cannot tell what this means. You know, a compliment from an or a hate comment or a love comment from anonymity.

person, I don't know what to do with this. You know, like, I just literally don't know how to, you know, it doesn't really, it doesn't really do anything for me because I don't know how to interpret it. It's almost, you know, uninterpretable without this other dimension that my brain has evolved to look for, I think. So that's, you know, speculation. But I think social media is, is operating in a way that, that is not ethological and not designed to make us feel better. It's just designed to make us want to use it. And I think a lot of this comes down to things that are relative. You know, there's the famous observations.

If a monkey sees another monkey get a cucumber, it's happy with the cucumber. But if a monkey sees the other monkey get grape, monkey wants grape. You know, you want to keep up with the Joneses. You want what, if you see someone else having something, suddenly it feels like a loss that you don't have it, that you didn't even think of this thing that you needed, right? And so I think social media is exposing you to a lot of things that you don't, you know, that it's like this parameter space you didn't have. There's all these things you didn't know you were missing that you didn't need to miss out on. And so we have this whole project now.

We have two projects. One that's looking at social isolation and following what happens with social isolation across the time course to try to understand is it the amount of time or is it the amount of effort that you put into correcting. that deficit that that makes you leads you to the giving up you know kind of state change and another project that is about the quality of social contact specifically social exclusion so a different kind of deficit you're with your other animals but there's this this you know it's four animals that are our cage mates and three animals are one side able to drink a chocolate milkshake and the other animals excluded. And this one excluded animal will go up against the divider and, you know, look frantic and, you know, exhibit lots of behaviors that we would associate in humans with fear of missing

out, trying to reunite with the group, trying to get the attention of the group, trying to get over there, a lot of attending, looks frantic, and studying what we think is actually going on. And so I think coming up with paradigms to try to pro social isolation, and we don't even know what behaviors, animals exhibit when they're lonely. This is a challenging field because there's no number of lever presses. You know, there's no script to follow and there's no trial structure. And so for a neuroscientist, neuroscientists were trained to be rigorous about our statistics because of the stochastic nature of neural activity. and, you know, how do we process things without a trial structure? How do we be statistically rigorous when the animal is just free-floating, deciding whatever it wants to do?

And so that is kind of the crucible that my lab is working through right now to establish pipelines and techniques and ways to quantify social behaviors and peel off all the layers. I love where your lab is headed, which just means we're going to have to have you back on here again at some point in the future to get the answers to those questions that you're now addressing. I've long thought that we really know how we feel about somebody when something good happens to them or for them. And I never quite understood this at the level of mechanisms. How could I? It's not more of my lab studies. But, you know, I think that there's a natural sort of empathy if one is a healthy, empathic person to seeing a member of our own species and hopefully also to

observing the members of other species you know experiencing some discomfort we don't like that nor should we so another human is in emotional pain right you know the whale or the cry of loss is like one that just I think for any person who's empathically attuned is just like oh or an animal you hear an animal in pain like goodness, I mean, I'm not here to diagnose sociopathie, but if that doesn't evoke at least some sort of response of like, oh gosh, like what I wouldn't do to remove that pain, that their pain is your pain, empathy,

that seems like a very reflexive circuit, or at least I would hope so. But when somebody experiences something positive, I think it's normal and healthy to have a great, rated set of responses. If it's somebody that we really love, we may not even know them. We think, yeah, like you're just reflexively happy for them. Somebody that we dislike, I think there's a more natural tendency to be like, oh, you know, right? As opposed to if that person were in pain,

I would like to think that even if one didn't like them, that you would think like, oh, that sucks. I'm really sorry to hear that. So I feel like there's some asymmetry in these empathic interactions. They're both empathy. One has negative valence, pain. The other one has positive valence, another member of our species or other species receiving reward. And we can delight in that. I mean, I'm almost embarrassed to admit how many ferret and otter and raccoon accounts I follow,

because I love seeing them eat. I love seeing that little hands of the raccoons. There's some great raccoon accounts, by the way. And I delight in it. I like delight in it. I want to see the raccoons. win. I don't know why. I just, I love animals. And so I suppose that's why. So do you think that we are asymmetrically wired for this empathic attunement? Can we observe that in other animals?

I realize this might not be squarely in the wheelhouse of what your lab is focusing on. But I think it relates enough to the topics that we're covering today that I'm just, you know, if you'd like to speculate on what might be going on there. Yeah, I can definitely speculate. It's something that we think about a lot. But again, you know, there's some level of this, which is semantics. I think of empathy as being defined as being able to understand another animal's emotion and also taking it on. So I think something that's a little bit different than emotional contagion, right? I see a panic. I'm in a group of panic. It's not the same thing as empathy. empathy. Empathy's often used in sort of certain contexts, like feeling sorry for someone,

and it's maybe different for feeling happy for someone. And this is something I was just talking about with one of my graduate students the other day. Why is there, is there an asymmetry in empathy for positive and negative? Or is it just what we've studied? It's easier to study this. So there's a number of, you know, we don't know the answer. But I guess another conceptual framework to put out there, I'm not saying it's correct. It's, I think just a good tool for debate. But it's not so much that there's good people and bad people and that good people are empathic and bad people aren't.

So it's quite so simple. I guess the way I think about it is whether you view this other social agent as having aligned goals or agendas as you or are they adversarial. So if they're in your alliance, whatever that means, broadly defined versus adversarial. you would have a different feeling. And you know, it's, it's, you see this, I guess I was just, I was watching this. Okay, this is just sort of oversharing, but this is a podcast, not a primary research journal. So I can just say things, right?

So I watch some trash TV sometimes. And, you know, these reality competition shows where it's like, then you vote the two best friends into elimination and they have to, they have to eliminate each other. Mildly sadistic. But, you know, then they're best friends and they like, like they, you know, and then it's basically mutually exclusive. Either you can care about your friends. and feel bad not wanting to send them home, or you kick it, you just, you know, it's game time

and you compete. And so you can see different individuals wrestling with these two brain states and how to, like, what to do. But they are essentially, you know, my speculation is that viewing someone as a competitor and they're an adversary, they are standing in the way of me getting what I want, empathy goes down. It's like inversely correlated to empathy if you are viewed as a competitor.

So things that would contribute to you creating a model where in a social agent, it is an adversary as opposed to a potential ally is really what it's going to come down to the degree that you feel empathy. You know, like you, the second someone, you realize someone's out to get you, no empathy.

No more empathy for this person who I just realized is out to get me or something like that. Or, you know, in the case, case of being isolated for a long period of time, you've learned to exist on your own now. Maybe everyone's your competitor or adversary. None of you guys are really helping me do my data. I don't really need you guys for anything.

So, I'm eating this food or whatever. I think it just becomes different when you're part of an ecosystem and you realize that, you know, there's consequences and there's every action that you take, you know, every act of altruism will be recognized and there's, you know, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, some score being kept in your, when you're part of a society. And, um, and then when you're, when you're not, there's none of that. And so I think the degree to which you're integrated in society, um, it's almost like the extracellular matrix, you know, this is a really, this is an out there analogy, but, you know, when you think about synapses being made, um, connections between

people, there's also all the support material that facilitates certain patterns and certain connections from happening or not happening. And I think it's stuff that we haven't quantified yet, but it doesn't, you know, I think those things should be studied. Years ago, I worked with at-risk kids and a fair number of them had just arrived from a region of the world that had undergone dramatic sociopolitical evolution and change. And it was remarkable because we would put out a tray of food to eat. And then the format was everyone would serve themselves. And then you could go get more food if everyone finished.

And a couple of these kids that had come from these very deprived environments would just take more than their share. It was clear that by taking that other kids weren't going to get any. And I remember telling them, listen, we all have to eat more or less equal parts. And there is more. We can get more. And I'll never forget this kid's response. He just turned to me and he said, you can't hit us. And I said, that's true.

I can't hit you. And he said, so I'm just going to take as much as I want. And this took several weeks actually to work out, right? Because, of course, I would never hit him. And everyone's his adversary. Everyone's his adversary. And it was remarkable to see the evolution of these kids across that. It was about three and a half weeks.

At which point they actually became incredibly good at sharing. But it took a lot of work. It was almost as if even though they knew more trays of food could arrive. Yeah. Not limitless, but there was an abundance of food. Yeah. In the moment, they were solving for that short horizon moment. And here we're talking about human beings, capable of speech and expression of emotion, et cetera.

And he understood the fundamental rule, which was I couldn't hit him. Therefore, he could basically do what he wanted without that consequence. Which is the main consequence he'd face. Right. Exactly. And I remember, you know, it was so striking. I'll never forget that. And the evolution to a different, more altruistic state was wonderful, especially because of what I think what it did for him.

But I'll never forget thinking this is a human being who is essentially functioning like an animal. Like an animal. I mean, I had a bulldog Mastiff, and he was kind to other dogs. But if there were unattended to toys at the dog park, he was going to pick him up. And he put him right in front of himself. And this was down in San Diego, and he'd sit with them right in front of him. And I'm like, Costello, you're not going to play with all those toys. But if another dog came and he wouldn't, he would just sit in front of them.

But another dog would come and try and take one of those toys. And he had these giant mitts. And he would just, boom, stamp it out and drag it back. And so it seems that there are these very primitive circuits about a resource allocation and protection of resources that in the absence of understanding that there's a much bigger landscape. Like Costello Ventry figured out like tug's a fun game. Although most dogs couldn't play tug with them. There were a few that could. He was a 90-pound bulldog.

He was just a neck like this. But, you know, to see this in a human being was just so striking. I just as you're describing this, it's like this adversary versus neutral versus friend. It's just so striking. And it's got to be, you know, that the brain, as complex as it is, I've often wondered. And our colleague, Marcus Meister, once said that, you know, circuits in the brain can broadly be divided into these sorts of circuits into yum. yuck and meh, right? Which is far too simplistic, right?

But who am I to argue with the great Marcus Meister? And I'm not going to. But it's sort of interesting. We sort of bin our responses into yes, okay, let's cooperate or yes, let's cooperate. You're summarizing valence. Yeah. Or no way, no chance, like mine. Yeah.

Versus like meh, meh. And, you know, as complex as I'd like to think the brain is and we are, I mean, Maybe when it comes down to behaviors and how we interpret input and our decision making, maybe it's really all about feelings of safety and feelings of relatedness. Yeah. I think it's also about the experiential statistics that you have been exposed to. So this boy who says, I'm going to take all this food because you can't hit me. I mean, we don't know, but the picture that grows out of my imagination,

is this boy's had a lot of experiences of people hitting them. A lot of experiences of not enough food. And not a lot of experiences of strangers being nice to them. You know, like not a lot of people that you could trust. That's the experiential statistics that would fit this model. Someone like you who's coming in being like, oh, no, there's more, I'm going to give you guys more food for free. You know, I'm going to give you even more food for, it's, you know, the experiential statistics are you've come from a world of abundance where people are generous, you know, generosity. being, you've learned being generous can make you have a lifelong friend and all these amazing

opportunities that make your quality of life that food is, you're never going to think about food again. It's about the relationships because that's your experiential statistics. And so I think this is such a profound concept about neuroscience and the brain, about our social structures and how they form, what makes a structure egalitarian or despotic. Right? Like how can we as individuals take a structure that? that is one format, let's say despotic hierarchy,

and evolve it into something that's more egalitarian. And what are the levers and what are the parameters spaces that we can pull on? And I think these are questions that, I mean, it's hard to think of what could be more important. But that perspective of thinking about from experiential statistics, I think really supports, you know, the need of diversity, bringing in people to academia who had very different experiences, experiential statistics, different biases of what they're going of think is interesting to work on and study, and obviously, in every sector of our society.

So I think how can we get more diverse sets of experiences represented at each, decision-making body that really matters yeah amen to that and also to be able to understand that differences in background experience require that we we earlier you mentioned theory of mind this ability to get into the mindset of others and and sort of assume or presume certain mindsets in order to hopefully create a more benevolent environment for everybody you know it requires, you know, realizing that some people's social interactions are, you know, have been terrible or traumatic or, you know, it requires a departure from self, essentially. It requires

this empathy or something like empathy in all directions, right? I mean, in all directions. It requires that everyone at least makes some effort to try and understand that. I do wonder, and maybe someone would put it on the comments on YouTube, maybe you're aware, okay, of whether or not kids are being trained in that beautiful period of time of life where neuroplasticity is so robust, although it does continue to the authorize, lifespan, it is especially robust early in life,

to be in a healthy way, empathically attuned, to be able to have theory of mind, more robust theory of mind. Yeah, so I think it's really, I mean, I'm so I'm a parent, I have two kids that are in public school, and I think their public schools rated, you know, it's fine. We won't say where you left. It's all right.

But at the school, they definitely do get education about more holistic health and emotional regulation, I think, and considering others. That's a big focus of the school. And I think that's actually really important. I mean, you know, again, I'm super biased from my upbringing, but my kids are going to learn math whenever it's time to learn the math. They'll learn it whenever they need it. You know, whenever they need it, they're going to learn it in a couple, I don't know, a couple weeks and figure it out, do the thing. Most of the things that they learn, they're going to forget them and then have to relearn them. So what are the things that you're going to really need to know no matter what you choose to do?

And I think regulating your own emotions and engaging other individuals in a healthy, sustainable way that, you know, and I mean sustainable in terms of the longevity of the relationships. And I think those are the things that end up really mattering. So I think also this question about exposure to abundance and scarcity is really interesting too. I mean, I don't know if that's a direction we want to go into. Please. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, this whole, you know, it sounds sort of new agey when I say, you know, the abundance mindset, right? I mean, you see this in people who are, like, recently divorced or newly single for whatever reason.

Like, is the world a place where, like, finding partnership is relatively straightforward with some work involved? Or is it, like, there's only one person on the planet for you and they might be dead already, right? Like, is there, if someone else's business takes off, maybe someone you went to college or high school with, where their lab is doing really well, you're seeing them, you know, tremendously successful, that maybe they made $100 million in a new, in a company acquisition. Do you immediately feel like, oh, those are resources that I don't have, even though I'm not in that business? Or do you see it as, wow, there must be a lot of money out there that people could earn and potentially make? I really, you know, prescribe and believe in this abundance versus scarcity mindset framework. I think there's absolutes. Like the example we just talked about this, the kid, you know, there's just not food.

There's scarcity of food. Fact, you know. Of course, there are individuals that experience scarcity of various different needs. But many of us, we reach a threshold of abundance and then it becomes relative. We have everything we absolutely physiologically need if we're not comparing ourselves to anyone. else. But then once we enter the social arena, comparison is essential. Why do we compare ourselves to others? It's ingrained because social status is something that we need to attend to. A large part of our brain is devoted to representing our relative social rank, what's our place with a social

network, what's the dynamic? How do we fit into the social landscape? In comparison, I think, is just a way to do that. That's been evolutionarily conserved. perhaps for less of a good purpose at this point because so many of our basic survival needs are met for the large majority of humans on the planet today. Not for everybody, of course, but yet what is the percentage of humans who feel they have everything that they desire? How many people feel like they don't want for anything? And, you know, it's interesting because having things doesn't make you have an abundance

mindset. Having abundance is not sufficient to give you the mindset of abundance. That's such an important statement. I mean, just I don't think they could be restated enough. You've studied

social rank. People hear social rank and hierarchy and I have to guess that at least some neurons in their amygdala and other areas of the brain get buzzing because as soon as people hear social rank, they I think naturally started thinking, well, where am I in this social rank?

And how do I feel about how that rank is, you know, established and all sorts of interesting and important questions. Some people get very angry that there are billionaires on this planet, especially given that in most major cities, you don't have to go very far to see people who have very limited resources. So social rank is something that I think exists. in every little niche, like, you know, at work. And maybe even in the family, their social rank.

I have a sibling. I remember who got more of a piece of cake, like even a slight difference in that, well, you know, was something that my older sibling would point out because she was more effective at getting the slightly larger piece of cake because I was, until I was, you know, big enough to fend for myself. And my friends with larger sibling pools in their family, it was especially competitive.

I don't know if you've ever gone to a meal with somebody who had a lot of siblings. They eat fast. They, different resource allocation methods than if they were an only child versus one sibling. There's variation here. I'm generalizing. But yeah, let's talk about social rank.

What do we know about how social rank is organized in the brain, how we perceive our own social ranking? And, yeah, what's the modern science on this stuff? I find it fascinating. I'm not scared of any topic, well, most any topic. And I think this is one that affects us all. Yeah, I mean, I'll first say that social rank is something very specific to a certain type of hierarchy that assumes a linear hierarchy, which sometimes forms, but oftentimes there's different types of hierarchies that are flatter or amorphous. It's not really clear.

Who's the alpha on the playground? I don't know. There's this click here. It can be dynamic. Right, right. It's dynamic. It's not always organized as such. but if you get animals into a sort of small space,

you will see in many species, especially within the males, forming a linear hierarchy. And we wanted to explore this. And so I think one of the biggest challenges was studying social rank, and this is something we've struggled with as well, is how do you control for the individual identity

versus the actual rank. So what I mean by this is, let's say there's a study that says that neurons in a certain brain region fire to animals of different ranks according to the rank. Fire most of the alpha,

less, less, less, less, down to the rank. Does that tell us that this brain region encode social rank? Maybe in a loose sense. And I'm sure that when rank issues come up, a lot of the brain lights up for different reasons. But for example, let's say the amygdala would respond more to the alpha, maybe because it encodes social rank, but maybe also because whoever is the dominant is the one who's most likely to have consequences.

And so all of my interactions with the alpha are relatively high consequence. And so I'm sort of stressed out whenever I'm talking to alpha, paying attention. And, you know, you remember all the interactions you have with your boss more so than, you know, someone else. There's an attention hierarchy. Subordinates attend more to dominance. there's, it's almost hard to make this comparison because it's not all flat. Like the clean experiment, which we are still trying to do, it's, it's difficult to do the perfect experiment would be if you take an individual and change the rank. So for example, I like to use this example

with Barack Obama. So just indulge me. I know that this is from a while ago. But once upon a time, I met Barack Obama for a very brief moment when he was president. And maybe there's some neurons that light up, oh, wow, you know, there's the Barack Obama slash president neurons. But if they are identity neurons, once he was no longer president, if I was to be presented with Barack Obama, then they would still fire. If they were ranked neurons, then maybe after he was no longer president, it's just these neurons fired to whoever is president now. And so I think that experiment is very difficult to do and has not been done. But we're working on it right now in another experiment where we take.

We take animals and they're living in groups and we rank them all and then we re-house them. So everybody has a rank that they start with. Then we put all the alphas together, put all the betas together, et cetera, so that everybody forms a new rank. Then you have animals that went up, rank, went down a rank, or stayed the same for every group. And so that's something that we're looking at right now. So initially you take a pool of animals and then let's say you got your number one, two, three, four, just for sake of simplicity. Let's say I take the number four, lowest in that hierarchy.

but now I make them the top of a new hierarchy. That's right. That's right. Got it. And so it's really preliminary and we'll see what happens. But we're investigating, it seems that when you take alphas, intermediates or subordinates and put them together into new hierarchies, it takes them different amounts of time. And the dynamics are very different in forming the new hierarchy.

And so. In any kind of predictable way that you're willing to share or is it just too early? I think it's too early, but I'll just say, I guess it seems like, the intermediates might be taking the longest amount of time to form the hierarchy. They don't know where they sit in the hierarchy. They were flexible or something. Whereas the dominance, they are going to duke it out and then, you know, we're going to, we're going to battle. There'll be defeat.

It's quick. The fight doesn't last that long. Subordinates, you know, we have to still observe. This is all still, you know, being, we'll see if everything replicates. But certainly the dynamics are different. What the exact readouts, you know, we're working on. on what the features are, what key features to see. But it's kind of uncanny because these are genetically inbred animals

that are all housed in. These should be all, everyone should be the same theoretically. But this makes me think that during certain developmental periods, rank is shaping your long-lasting development. I think it's a similar phenomenon perhaps to the older child, younger child phenomenon where, you know, if you're the oldest, you go into the world and you have lots of different roles. You might be the bottom, you know, you're going to play on sports teams and be in different classes and how old you're trying.

But the leadership desire slash potential skill seems to be correlated in a very non-scientific way. Is that right? You know, the number of presidents that's often oldest or only children, this type of thing. It's a loose correlation. There's a lot of other reasons why it might not be behavioral, but there's sort of, you know, fluffy, fluffy correlations about that. I think there's something to it, though, when plasticity is happening, this becomes your most familiar state of assuming a certain role and that a tractor state deepens with more time spent there.

I find that so fascinating. I've also observed, and I think I've seen a few papers on, I don't know how rigorous these papers, are that youngest, or let's just say, say not oldest siblings. Here, we're setting aside single children that don't have any siblings, but that youngest siblings do tend to, quote, unquote, break the mold more in terms of socio and cultural norms of the family. They venture further in terms of experiences and value systems.

They're often seen as having had fewer constraints than the older sibling, which may or may not be true, but that the youngest siblings. often will take on risk that older siblings won't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's certainly been my observation. More nonconformists.

Right. I mean, I'm a younger brother of an older sister. But then there was times in our childhood where she was out of the house and I was at home just with my mom. So that sort of changes things. And this is very dynamic. I realize we're playing here in a kind of loose space. Yeah, yeah. But I find social ranks stuff to be super interesting.

I grew up in a big pack of mostly boys. That's just kind of how it worked out in my neighborhood. at the time. And it was very interesting because it was very clear it was a dynamic hierarchy where if we were skateboarding, certain kids were alpha. If we were playing soccer, other kids were alpha. If we were doing anything artistic, if it was kind of geeky knowledge and nerdy stuff, then it might have been somebody else who had the knowledge and had the information that

people wanted. So I think dynamic hierarchies are really interesting. And I think get us out. of that sort of more standard alpha, like kind of chest beating, telling everyone what to do, dictatorial model. I mean, and this is now fully out of any science land and into speculation opinion land. But I think that type of structure where when you're doing different tasks, different individuals become the alpha or the leader, because it's based on competence is very healthy.

I think structures where you have locked down, this is the hierarchy where someone's, the boss of you because of this one skill, but then there's all these other skills that they're not as, they're not superior, you know, they don't outrank you at. And so how do you work all that out? And so I think that's also something about keeping score. Like what is, what is the rank, right? And so we did this experiment where we designed a task. Animals are trained that a cue predicts reward delivery. Only one animal can get at a time. It's just a very narrow place. So if one animals getting it, you can't get it. Then we would have four animals that are cagemates, four mice that are cage mates, and we would have two of them duke it out at each point. We know the ranks.

The ranks are stable. They have a rank one, two, three, four in the cage. And everybody does a round robin. One's versus twos, ones versus three. They fight. Yeah. Well, they do round robin in this reward competition task. They're food deprived, you know, and we present rewards. What's the, what happens? And so subordinates do win some of the times, even though dominance win more. You know, they consistently win more. And we found that prefrontal cortical neurons, you could represent very stably and decode which animal was dominant, regardless of the trial. And then when you looked at whether we could decode competitive success, meaning who was going to win that next trial. So there's a new trial every 30 or 40 seconds.

And so but 30 seconds before, which is as far as we can measure, because then we're kind of into the previous trial, as soon as the last trial ends, even before the next trial ends, you can predict above chance significantly which animal is going to win the next trial. Just based on the firing pattern of prefrontal cortical neurons. So you can predict winners and losers. You can predict and understand where they are in the hierarchy as well based on the activation of neurons prior to the battle.

That's right. By analogy, it's like recording from the prefrontal cortex of two, let's say, business competitors or martial arts competitors, and you can predict who's going to win based on the pattern of firing in their brains prior to the competition. That's right. And so that suggests all sorts of things. Number one, it doesn't mean these competitions are not independent. There's something about the state of the animal.

And when we looked at, is it just whoever won the previous trial? That did not account for this. And so I thought this was really interesting. But when you look at the decoding accuracy for dominance versus subordinates about who will win the next trial, for dominance, it stays pretty flat. It just has to do with, I think, this is my speculation of our data, that, you know, they either are engaged or they're not engaged. The subordinates, the decoding accuracy is above chance, but then it shoots up someone. somewhere around closer to the Q presentation. And so my speculation about that is that the subordinates are looking at the dominance.

The dominant doesn't look like they're, it doesn't look like they're going to go for it. Okay. It looks like they're turning away. I'm going to go. I'm going to go. So it's not like they're both going out full every time. It's a calculation. Which trials, oh, he's not paying attention.

You know, it's like when you're driving in traffic and you're trying to find the moment to cut over and you're waiting for the person who's like texting. And there's a big space. And everybody's just getting in right here. You know, you can just see, you're like looking for clues about the state of love, you know, of competition. And then the dominance, they are not looking at the subordinate. They're just doing whatever they feel like doing. It's like there's a, I think there's that one scene in Mad Men where something happened in the work environment. And it was clear someone's account didn't sell or something didn't work out for one person versus the other.

And I think one of the character says to Don Draper, who's clearly one of the alpha, was in that work environment by virtue of role and position, says, you know, I sometimes think about the way that you blank, blank, blank, blank. And he goes on this brief tirade about how upset he was. And Draper says, oh, I don't think about you at all. And then the elevator, I believe, closes. And it really cemented his status in the office. As somebody who's really not paying much attention to what other people are doing, he's just making decisions according to what's going to be best for the firm. in some cases for himself and in some cases both. So I think that's essentially what you're talking about.

Yeah, I think it's kind of the nature of the structure. That's what makes you the alpha is you have other things that are occupying your attention. And your visionary status, hopefully, if you're a productive, successful alpha, and for a sustainable group. And then everyone else is, they don't need to have the big people. picture. They don't, you know, it becomes the reinforcement schedule is different. I'm just looking for validation. Am I playing my role? Okay. It's a very different mindset. I think, you know, as a scientist, when you're a trainee, sometimes you're a supporting member on a team where you're

getting instruction, someone telling you what to do versus the moment where you get your own project. And maybe you're working by yourself, maybe there's no one to command, but no one's telling you what to do. That is, to me, one of the biggest thresholds to step over. when you're becoming a scientist or an investigator, it's the first time where you just do something and, like, try an experiment. No one told you to do. And it feels super weird. It feels like you're sneaking around or something.

And then, you know, I think in today's mentorship chain, sometimes that happens too late. I think if we could have that experience happen earlier, I think that would only be good for the future of research. I agree. I was very fortunate that my graduate advisor told me, look, I'm going to help you, but I'm going to have two kids while you're in the lab, and I'm not going to be around a lot.

So you're going to have to figure it out, don't burn the lab down, don't kill yourself with any of the poisons in the lab. And then my postdoc advisor, the late and great Ben Barris, largely treated the postdocs as junior professors from an early stage. And I remember thinking he can't control the experiments I'm going to do. This is up to me. And a great number of us who were training with him at that time went on to have our own lab. So I think there's really something important to that model.

And of course, we're discussing the research field, but this could be exported to any number of different fields. Because what those mentors were essentially training us to do was to assume the role that we would eventually have as opposed to be subordinates. Do you watch Chimp Empire? So actually, just this week, yesterday and the day before this, a postdoc interview who worked with the chimps on Chimp Empire, visited and interviewed him in my lab and talked about his work. So I have not seen Chimp Empire, but it's at the very top of my to-do list. Oh, God, so good.

I don't want to spend the next 20 minutes talking about it, but you see all sorts of interesting behavior very relevant. element to human behavior, hierarchies, yes, but also altruistic behavior, allopathic grooming. I mean, in chimp culture, as I've learned from the show, assuming it's accurate, that who grooms who is very important. And there's all sorts of interesting maneuvers that subordinates make. And there's all sorts of interesting displays of vigor that the alpha makes to remind people that they are the alpha. and then as they age or make mistakes of judgment, the subordinates also will feign deference.

They'll be like, oh, yeah, you're the alpha. You're really tough. And secretly they're plotting to replace the alpha. So whether or not we're talking about a scene from Mad Men or we're talking about Chimp Empire, we're talking about research laboratories or any other landscape, kindergarten, I think these circuits are active in all of us. And the sooner that we acknowledge those and try and find, ones that generalize to the goodness of as many members as possible, we're not doing our task.

But clearly you're doing the task. So, okay, social rank is something that we need to acknowledge, no doubt, which actually leads me to what might seem like a desperate topic, but one that I know we're both very interested in and that you're focusing on now, which is psychedelics. because one of the interesting things about psychedelics is their capacity to increase neuroplasticity. But also some of the psychedelics, and I realize MDMA is not a classic psychedelic, but they are classified as empathogens. They increase empathy for self and others. So what are you looking into with psychedelics? Which psychedelics? And yeah, what brought you to the study of psychedelics?

And by the way, I've participated in clinical, because people will wonder, I have participated. in clinical trials for psilocybin and MDMA. I don't recommend people do psychedelics recreationally. I do think they hold great promise for the treatment of depression and trauma, but people need to be careful. There are certain people who could not and should not take psychedelics because it would be genuinely unsafe for them psychologically, especially young people. So there's my disclaimer, but they are fascinating compounds. So I guess I've always been interested in psychedelics. I think I wrote my undergraduate thesis about it's just about hallucinations produced by psychedelics,

psychotic breaks, and REM sleep and schizophrenia. Just comparing what is the common thread when our brain creates a reality that is not objectively there? And psychedelics, of course, is a way that we can experience that and bring. remember it and recall it in a way that's very difficult with REM sleep and sometimes with psychotic breaks. Obviously, schizophrenia is not something that you can transiently give yourself and have that experience. So I think having the ability to move into other brain states is what makes it so attractive. I think the other component is the plasticity. You can have an experience and perhaps the firsthand experience is you have an epiphany.

that you take with you, it's life changing, and your life habits are completely different for a long lasting way after this singular experience is kind of one of the things that makes it so different from all of the other therapeutic treatments that we've got, or most of the other ones I'd say. And so for me, you know, right now there's a lot of work going on exploring psychedelics as a therapy

for various different conditions, disease states. I think that's great. I think it's really important work. I'm glad a lot is being done on that. I think my focus is to turn over some rocks that might not have been turned over yet and just to get really down at a quantitative, rigorous mathematical level of what is a hallucination. For example, when I ask this question, what is a hallucination? I'm interested in the actual cellular mechanisms. Are we just, you know, we think about neurons having signal to noise and neuromodulation as changing that. Are we just changing the signal to noise ratio and then pattern completing all the noise and that's what a hallucination is? We just, you know, take that's we're just reinterpreting noise and putting sort of existing maps.

Everything's fitting to existing mold or map that we've already got that then appears as some hallucination. or is, and, you know, maybe it doesn't have to be hallucination. There's also obviously some various different thresholds of the psychedelic experience. But all these clinical statements, this human self-reported qualitative descriptions of the psychedelic experience. Things like having just more positive outlook, being, uniting one and self and other, like sort of, you know, clarity of the world, more labile in thoughts, more flexible thoughts. We are trying to just create actual ways to test them. So for example, this idea about what is going on in your mind when you, when you're having a psychedelic experience, all of these different states

might feel more labile. Maybe the transition probabilities between different brain states of happy, sad, nostalgia, you know, maybe it's just all looser. And so you can access everything because the transition probabilities are just high. Another possibility is that, and maybe it's dose dependent, at a certain dose you go into another brain state. And so previously, we've done this in the same project that I was just telling you about rank, we were recording for prefrontal cortical neurons and looking at all the behaviors. And so the behaviors for representing social rank, we don't know what they are. So we use computer vision to extract a bunch of behavioral motifs and then tried to understand what's the best model that would predict,

you know, what the animal's going to do next, not just wins and losses, but all the subtle gestures, are we going to fight, are we going to give it up, are we going to back off and predict the behaviors from prefrontal cortical activity? And the best model that we found was something called a hidden Markovian model, which essentially just means that there are hidden states. You might think of them as moods. You might give them some other name, but I'll use moods loosely. It's not perfect, but that's kind of one way that helps me think about hidden states where you have certain statistics of behaviors that you would produce. If I'm sad, there's certain things I'm going to do. It's a different statistics than when I'm happy, different probability

of going surfing if I'm sad or happy or, you know, things like that. So we basically found that there are a certain number of hidden states. And so if you are on psychedelics, would that change the number of states or just the transitions between them? We also found in, our prefrontal cortical representation that there's a certain distance of the representation of self and other in this, you know, dimensionality reduced activity space. So for mumbo-jumbo, that just means there's a representation of self and other. There's some quantifiable distance in abstract, you know, terms in the brain. And we can quantify if those representations get closer together and merge. Of self versus other. Of self versus other. So that's something that we

would want, we would be looking for if you are putting psychedelics on. These are questions that I'm interested in that are under construction. So right now, we're recording from animals while we're giving them psilocybin using neural pixels recordings. So we're according from thousands of neurons in prefronted cortex and other parts of cortex because the, you know, the shank goes to lots of places. And looking at how animals respond in a, conflict task. So there's there's trials where there's a queue that predicts reward, a cue that predicts shock, then there's some trials where both cues are presented and both outcomes are presented. And the reason for this conflict trial is that actually if you give, you know, moderate to

low doses of psilocybin or most drugs, honestly, animals can do this. You know, even on lots of different drugs, most people can still eat food and avoid getting hit by this truck. I mean, there are exceptions, of course. But generally speaking, you know, there's a lot of different brain states where you can still do these essential functions pretty robustly. But it's about what happens in the more ambiguous zone. What happens when there's a conflict? And what do you do? How do you – when it's a little gray, I think that's when you can see a shift in valence assignment.

So that's something that we've been looking for and trying to see if, you know, in clinical studies they're exploring set. and setting as maybe the factors that have in the past historically given very unpredictable outcomes for psychedelic therapies, it's possible that it's set and setting. It's also possible that there's individual variability. It's possible that there are biomarkers that can predict which individuals would be well suited for this type of therapy. And so those are also things that we're interested in. I find this so fascinating.

And I just want to applaud you again for taking on these hard questions. These are fairly high-level questions. Certainly there's a lot of clinical trials exploring psychedelics like psilocybin in their role in treating mental health. And there's at the same time a real dearth of studies exploring mechanistically how these compounds are working. I mean, I do want to tip my hat to all the folks that have explored dendritic changes. And so cellular changes in the level of neurons and on and on. But in terms of these higher-level states of self versus other recognition, in psychedelics.

You know, those are tough questions that need to be addressed mechanistically, and it's clear you're doing that. I think this notion that you're testing of whether or not psychedelics reveal more accessibility or lability, as you described it, between different states,

like, oh, wow, I can actually move from sad to happy. There's a route for that, and you can experience that as opposed to just being told that. Right. When you're feeling sad, feel your, you know, the field of psychology, pop psychology is in a real crisis right now, in my opinion, because we're told to feel our feelings,

but then we're also told to not react to our feelings, which sounds great. But if those feelings get intense enough, that's very hard for most people to do. So it's feel your feelings, but don't stay with, you know, there's the cathartic model, you know, like feel your feelings and get them out, screaming and et cetera. And then there's the no, you know, the more you engage in neural pathway, the stronger that neural pathway gets, and therefore you're just going to feel more anger. There's a lot of conflict right now in terms of the popular psychology version of this, whereas the clinical fields, I think, have an understanding that hasn't been translated. I think one other thing about psychedelics that is interesting is that the transitions into states is also more labile. Like if you start feeling a little sad, you know, there's the potential to feel very, very sad and to go into a state of sadness of an intensity you've never experienced before, which, by the way, could be therapeutically beneficial.

I think there's some evidence for that provided there's adequate support before, during and after those sessions. But I think most people feel when they're not on psychedelics, will feel emotions that are uncomfortable and we'll do all sorts of things to try and avoid those emotions. So I'm not speaking as a clinician here, but I just, again, I think the range in specificity of questions that you're asking about psychedelics, I find so exciting. another reason I'll say that we want to have you back to discuss those findings when they come out. Let's talk a little bit about you. Okay. I've known you for a while, but to be honest, I think this is the longest conversation we've ever had, which is one of the reasons I love doing this podcast.

I get to sit down with colleagues and have intellectual slash other conversations of substantial depth that I wouldn't have the opportunity to have elsewhere. I know enough about you, however, to know that you've been involved in various things. I'm not going to say peripheral to science, but you have other interests as well. As I recall, you have been a yoga instructor or you've been involved in the kind of wellness, fitness community industry. Tell us about that. And then I'm also curious about how you structure your day, your routines, given that you're a parent of, to young children. You run a very large laboratory operating at the very highest level.

And of course, you value important things like relationships and relationship to self and health and all these sorts of things. So not to make it too open-ended, but tell us of your interests and of your relationship to wellness and fitness and well-being. Yeah. I guess I think, you know, everybody comes to their calling. in some, what feels like a path that you couldn't predict. But when you look at outside, I guess both of my parents are a professor, so it doesn't look super surprising that I'm a professor. But that's not how it felt to me when I was in high school. I was a total rebel.

I just threw parties at my house. My parents were there. Sorry, everybody's listening. It's not, I don't recommend that. But I just cared about having fun and sports. And I think school wasn't maybe challenging. enough for me at that time. I didn't necessarily recognize that was what it was, but I've always enjoyed being really active, and that's what makes me feel good. I definitely agree with stuff

you've said on your podcast about having exercise routines in the morning that really influenced the rest of your day. I didn't always exercise in the morning. I have different phases, but yeah, after I was an undergrad, I took some time to travel around Australia. backpack around Australia, live in some very remote places, spend some time living in a tent. Then I was a yoga instructor. Then I went to grad school in the Bay Area. I had a very active hobby of, I was a semi-professional breakdancer. I was very into break dancing.

Really? Really? Really? Yes. We did, you know, halftime shows, or I guess technically third quarter timeout shows at Oracle Stadium for the Golden State Warriors. I was the one girl who could do a windmill, so they would use me. Okay, windmills.

Someone's going to find footage of this. Yeah, yeah. There's some, you know, very mediocre footage of me breakdancing. And I was just really into it. But I think that's where my work-life balance passion comes from. I talk about it a lot. I think about it a lot. And people say to me all the time, well, is this really true?

Why do you preach all this work-life balance stuff? when, you know, you must have been a workaholic at some point in your life. And I think, you know, when I was younger, I definitely didn't like the idea that you had to only be one thing. I wanted to be so many things. I couldn't decide. It was a huge challenge. I was going to be a writer.

I was going to be a yoga instructor. I was going to be, I never really thought I was going to be a professional dancer. I just wasn't good enough. And there's not careers to be made from dancing, really. It's very difficult. But, you know, had a lot of other interests. And I wanted to prove, I don't know who I wanted to prove it to. I think myself at first, and then eventually it made me feel like I should maybe prove it to everyone

that you can have a very whole life and not sacrifice everything. You don't have to choose between family and career or personal life. You can have them all. You just have to decide that it's a priority and own that and make those choices on a daily basis and comes down to time management. And so it's been a very, even though it looks like, oh, Kay just likes to have fun and have all these other hobbies, it's important because I think that we need more role models,

especially in academic science, where people bring their whole selves to their job. And even though your job is a very specific thing, because you have a role as a mentor, and, you know, I suppose the mentor, apprenticeship relationship, has evolved, then there's, I've, you know, lots of comments about that too, in academia. I still think, ultimately, when I was working in someone else's lab and I definitely looked up to them, they were the role model, obviously. I'm looking at, yes, they're science, but I'm looking at

how they make this all work. How are you doing this? How do they live their lives and how do they approach balancing it all? And so I guess I just wanted to put some more data points on the, on the scoreboard where people are having lots of hobbies and other non-work activities while still making meaningful contributions. And it doesn't make you less of a human, less of a scientist or less of a person because you're a whole human. If anything, perhaps it makes people better scientists. Yeah.

Did your exploration of yoga and or breakdancing inform anything about your research? or was it really about resetting your mind and body in healthy ways so that you could return to the lab feeling excited about returning to the lab? I think I've always been of the mindset where sometimes things don't go well in a certain arena and it's it doesn't feel good to have all your eggs in that basket. Stuff goes wrong. Sometimes the experiment doesn't work. Sometimes you find something out.

You lose the whole dataset. It's, you know, bad news happens in the lab. and I think just want to diversify your portfolio so that your happiness portfolio is not entirely based on your accomplishments at work. I think we just want to have more elements. And the same thing goes for, you know, at one point when I was really into dancing, I got a very serious injury. And it took this huge part of my life away from me.

I was so glad I had work. Thank God I have work. You know, I have something I can do else. And I just think having a lot of different parts of your life make you more flexible, more creative, more awake, more engaged. And, you know, when I don't, I definitely have been a workaholic when I was a postdoc and assistant professor period definitely did not make enough time for myself to have a richer, a rich personal life at certain points. And very quickly, I just wither away into a shell of a human, a shell, empty shell of the person I used to be. And it's noticeable.

Everybody can feel it. You can't pretend, you know, everyone that works with you, feels it eventually. And so I think that's a big thing. And so as I've taken feedback from my anonymous lab surveys and other forms of feedback and just reflecting, it's clear, you know, taking your lifestyle and having agency over designing your lifestyle to be ideal for you is super important. So a typical day for me might look like, okay, last workday. Let's say I woke up. Actually, so it was early high tide, so I got to wake up in the dark, pack on my bags,

go surfing, and then get home before surf, see my friends in the water. And I think surfing is a lot of things. It's exercise. It's a cold plunge. It's photons, some of your favorite things. Maybe a little bit meditative, maybe some social community. Then, and I, you know, go every time at the same day, so there's the same group of people. Then I go home, make the kids or snacks, breakfast, drop them off.

school. Then I go to a lab and then run lab meeting and have meetings. Most of my day when I'm at work is spent meeting with people, drawing on a whiteboard, mostly meeting with my trainees is what I like to spend most of my time on. Of course, there's other stuff that gets in the mix, like administrative, whatever. And then come home at a pretty early hour, pick up my kids, make dinner, and then go to sleep Kind of early. Kind of boring these days. That's my typical day. Sounds exciting to me. Sounds exciting to me. I think if one were to stay up late, then one feels sleep deprived if they wake up early. If you wake up late, you're missing out on the early morning sunrise, the surf, all of that. I've never surfed. Actually, I paddled out once when I was in college and there was no surf, so I would paddle back in. But keep hearing about this surfing thing. And people seem to love it. That's one of my concerns is that if you fall in love with it, you're going to spend a lot of time. time out in the ocean, but clearly it's all serving you well and must be wonderful to be a child in your home. I can imagine how much fun it is and how interesting it is. You mentioned several times mentorship and trainees and it's clear that reshaping the landscape of science for the next

generation coming up is something that's of real passion to you. I take great pleasure in in asking this because, you know, it wasn't long ago that you and I were graduate students and postdocs and more or less the same vintage, right? And as is the case, people retire, people die, this is the reality of life, and people move up the ranks as you have. So what are some of the things that you're most passionate about in terms of shaping the future of science, in particular research science, but maybe more broadly. broadly. And what are you doing about it? I think that academic culture has evolved. And I guess I

should start by just saying, first, as I was driving over here, it was just a beautiful drive, and I'm just thinking, it is so cool that we get to do this for a living. Isn't it amazing that studying whatever I find interesting to me is something that I can, you know, have a secure job for. And then just thinking about cool ideas and directions and talking about it, stuff that I would do for free is really my job. And I just am so grateful to have that. And I think there are a lot of beautiful sides of academia that sometimes don't get the airtime that they deserve. And of course, there's a lot of doom and gloom. There always has been when I was a grad student. There's lots of doom and gloom in the ether. There's plenty now.

I think perhaps it has become a little bit more dire, the plight of academia right now. There's been a nationwide drop of postdocs in general. There's just a mass exodus away from academia to industry. And I think that reflects the changing environment. And so I guess when I was a graduate student, I had this book in my desk drawer called Advice for Young Investiator, written by Ramonica Hall, which is a great book. It's thin.

It's a quick read. It's got some whimsical anecdotes and some important insights, I think. Also, a lot of misogyny, very much glamorizing workaholic tendencies. And, you know, there was definitely a picture of a scientist. This was the way to succeed. Other options not really offered. And I really struggled with that. I had a lot of imposter syndrome coming up through, I mean,

And someone asked me, when did I stop having imposter syndrome? I think maybe 2021. You know, very recently, I think I spent 20 years of my career having imposter syndrome wondering if I was good enough, if I was going to make it. Am I going to, do I have what it takes? And constantly doubting and questioning it. And I think that it would have been nice to not feel so alone at that period of my career. So I think some of the things that were described in this original book were really important for academic research to be born as a thing.

Like how do we make this be a thing that you can get paid for? You know, how do we make this be a job that people get to have? And then at this point, I think most people would agree we need science. Science is important. We want to, we want to, we benefit from science. And I think at this point, it's not so clear that we need elitism as much as we did before. It's not we're looking at a crumbling academic culture where we're struggling to retain people. And, you know, it's not a great sustainable dynamic.

I think trainees are not getting compensated well enough or treated, treated well enough that it's an attractive choice. And so I think we need to sort of make a change. And nothing wrong necessarily about the intentions that were set hundreds of years ago, but things change and where we are now. And things are changing very quickly. So I guess I get to make one of my childhood dreams, which is to write a book come true. In one of the benefits of social media, I did have a tweet kind of, you know, just sort of spontaneously ranting about, about how this book is problematic and it's very misogynistic.

And maybe we need another book for other types of people and that makes people feel more included. And this tweet went around and it's such, I didn't expect, you know, I didn't expect anything to come to this. I'm just, you know, living my daily life. And then my DM suddenly had literary agents and a book deal. And then, okay, now I'm writing this book. And so I'm at me about how.

halfway through, but I think the goal of the book, I don't really have time for this project, to be honest, but it's such an important project to me. I think that I want to see academia be one of the healthiest places. Why is it second only to the military in the pervasiveness of sexual misconduct? And, you know, things like, yeah, yeah. Did you know that? So actually, you know, factoid is academia is, the military is worse in terms of sexual misconduct retaliation issues that occur. But academia second. And it makes you wonder, what are the parameters that make this type of abuse so rampant?

I think one of the obvious ones is the clear ranks, how stable the ranks are, how the power structure. of academia and the military, very fixed, not super debatable, not difficult to move these. The ranks are, you know, they're there. And the power structure is very skewed. And those are the ingredients that facilitate abuse. And so I think in the military, I could see a very good argument for why that that strict, rigid hierarchical structure is necessary. There's not time for making mistakes.

Get it. But with academia, there's time. There's, what do we, we're not, you know, it's not a war. We're just studying stuff that we think is cool. Why is such a rigid hierarchy with such devastating consequences necessary? I would argue maybe it's not. And I think I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this for myself. I've found this professional leadership coach.

I love and just thinking about sustainability. How do we make in a sustainable ecosystem? And it's not something you find in a lot of leadership management literature that I've been exposed to do. So I'll take a note from the podcast and say, if anyone knows of literature that talks about developing sustainable ecosystems within leadership and management, I would love to hear about that in the comments, but I think that's a big hole. People think about making things stable.

The power structure should be stable, but actually being flexible and dynamic is what gives systems resilience and flexibility to survive. And right now, all the cracks in the towers of academia are showing, and it's time to see if this is, are we going to adapt and survive or are we going to crumble? There's a lot to unpack there.

And I'm grateful that you're drilling into all of that with, I'm sure, the same rigor and attention to asking the really critical questions that you have in your lab. Certainly, I observe the landscape changing very rapidly. I think there's also a lot to be learned and to explore that exports to other professions. I certainly believe that the more first-time opportunities to experience the beauty of doing research and biology in particular, because that's what I'm familiar with, the more likely that we are as a field of research and science to make more fundamental discoveries. In other words, the more people that get the experience of trying science, doing exploratory research science, the more likely we are to pull from that pool and within that point. there will be people of competence, talent, and also gifted. Like we're just sort of like increase the size of the net.

Yeah. And the net, of course, is netting something very specific, which is you and I both know that while training certainly matters, knowledge is important, that ultimately, you know, love of craft and passion and just being tickled by that research bug. Like once that neuron that gets tickled that lets us see something for the first time or know something down the microscope or in a data plot or something, there's really no going back. So I want to be very clear that I loudly applaud your efforts to extend the experience of research to people. And earlier you were telling me that you're doing this, that many of the people in your lab are first time researchers. They didn't come through the pedigree of research. Yeah, I know we do a lot of outreach. About 25% of my lab this summer was first time research experiences.

And so we've been really privileged to have the bandwidth to support that. I will say, though, I mean, on the same tip, I think what you've done with this podcast is incredible. You've made millions of people who didn't have access to science or neuroscience, be fascinated with neuroscience. And now imagine, what if every person that listen to this? podcast and thought, this is such a great podcast, I wish I could do some neuroscience. It could do it with some, you know, not full time. What if they could contribute in any, just whatever level that they wanted to? That's so much more contribution that we're currently missing out on because there's so many

barriers to be able to contribute to science. And I think removing the ones that are really there as well as the ones that are just perceived to be there is so powerful. But, I mean, the podcast is. a, you know, the proof is in the pudding. The proof is in this podcast how many people could fall in love with science if they were given a chance to. Well, thank you for that. It is indeed a labor of love for me.

And there are opportunities. Maybe we'll provide a link to a couple of them where certain projects in neuroscience are crowdsourcing data analysis. It's actually quite fun. There's the Kactone project where you can trace neurons. It's actually very, very pleasing. You can do it while listening to podcasts or a book. Kids can do it. You're tracing these.

neurons, basically filling in lines. It's like a coloring book. And you're contributing to the parcelation of understanding the structure of the brain, including the human brain. And without that crowdsourcing, it's just not going to happen. I mean, there are efforts to make machine learning do it and to do it through AI, but there's a lot to be gained from having actual humans do this, that those technologies don't quite yet approximate. So we'll provide a link to some of those projects. But this is K, Dr. Tai, of course. I want to thank you so much. First of all, for coming here today and sharing so much knowledge and also being willing to go into some places that were, by virtue of my questions, a little of speculative and really think about those and address those through the lens of deep mechanistic understanding of how these circuits work and to make it clear to people.

your enthusiasm for science is infectious in the most positive sense of the word. And I know that so many people are going to benefit from your knowledge and also from the work that you've been doing in your laboratory. You know, I've seen your star rise and it's still going, going, going, and it's just remarkable and extraordinary. But I must say, not at all surprising. So that and your advocacy work and for all you do and that you're doing, I just, on behalf of myself and everyone listening, I just want to extend a genuine and really heartfelt thanks. Thank you.

Thank you so much. And it's been such an honor to be on the Hubroom Lab podcast. It's legendary. So thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. We'll do it again. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion all about the biology of social interactions with Dr. K. Tai.

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