Julian Dorey Podcast - #400 - “Human TERMINATOR!” - Harvard Neuroscientist on Psychopaths, Love, Telepathy & The Halo Effect

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

SPONSORS: 1) AMENTARA: Check out https://www.amentara.com/go/JULIAN and use code JD22 for 22% off your first order PREVIOUS EPISODE w/ BALAND: https://open.spotify.com/episode/34gzpfwIyqB9IfOgsh1Ste?si=3247bc95e1de49f3 JOIN PATREON FOR EARLY UNCENSORED EPISODE RELEASES: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey CLIPPERS DISCORD: https://discord.gg/8QmWEKJ3BT (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Baland Jalal is a Danish neuroscientist at Harvard University's Department of Psychology, whose work spans clinical neuroscience, cultural psychology, and the biology of altered state of consciousness. Originally from Denmark and of Kurdish-Iraqi descent, he is best known for his research on dreams and sleep paralysis. BALAND's LINKS: IG: https://www.instagram.com/balandjalal/# YT: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCumyt6mGLaVO4_N1LkAoXdA WEBSITE: https://balandjalal.com/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY IG: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://x.com/juliandorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 - Jordan Peterson, Romantic Love & Serotonin, TPJ Brain 7:09 - Prefrontal Brain Element in Love, Aggression & Love, S*xual Desire, Mother Theory 16:03 - Sensory Map of Body, Eyes & Vision, Cortisol & Romance 25:23 - The Mother-Child “Attachment Theory” Experiment 32:52 - Julian’s 2 Definitions of “Love” 38:27 - Struck by “the thunderbolt,” Are Soulmates Real? 42:36 - Females “Hot & Cold” Psychology, How Men Choose Females (Evolutionarily) 52:50 - “Super Normal” Stimulus, Learning Language, Brain Hemispheres, Women Reading You 1:05:04 - Falling in love w/ “the idea” of somebody, Halo Effect, Female Context 1:12:15 - Elegance & Grace, “Tough Guy,” Beauty & The Beast, “Love is letting go” 1:22:21 - Women do NOT want to be “saved” EXPLAINED 1:33:19 - Physical Attraction & S*x, The Coolidge Effect, Dopamine, The God Helmet 1:43:13 - Deranged Self, Delusions, Robots, Human Terminators 1:53:32 - Are psychopaths born, molded or both?, The Joker in Dark Knight 2:03:49 - 2 Types of Empathy, Free Will, Consciousness 2:13:59 - Dreams PROOF Free Will exists?, Reading Minds (Telepathy), History of Dreams 2:30:56 - The Illusion of Dreams, Controlled Hallucinations, Interstellar, Neuroscience & Physics 2:43:07 - Machine Brain Interfaces, Metaphysics CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 400 - Baland Jalal Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. And there were so many things you were talking about in the last episode where I'm like, I could ask him like 40 things. All right. We just got to pick one and roll with it. So there's some stuff I want to dig into deeper that we just kind of touch the surface of. And then other things I want to get to entirely new topics. But yeah, I also know, like you know Jordan Peterson.

You've been on a show before. I have a little bit of a relationship with him. He obviously is like they publicly announced he's not doing too well right now. Have you heard any updates on that on his health? I haven't. So what I know is from what's known publicly about his health. Unfortunately, you know, he went through some health battles as is known. But yeah, I sent him my greetings, you know, well wishes through his wife, Tammy.

But yeah, I'm not sure exactly what's happening there. Yeah, I never like to see that. Yeah, I hope he recover soon. Yeah, definitely for sure. So this course you did on love. Yeah. We talked about it at the very end. last time for the last 13, 14 minutes of that podcast, which I'm not sure when this one's coming

out yet. We'll figure that out. But, you know, we got into some of the pop culture with, you know, breaking down the Titanic and Jack played by Leo and how he kind of like courted Rose. So the sum of that, I think we could probably rehash just because a lot of people want to know, right? Didn't hear the last episode. And that was also at the very end. So they may not have gotten there. But you mentioned the different things you were teaching across the lectures for love. And you mentioned like sexual energy, transcendent love, parents love. So maybe we could just go one by one here and break down how theonjol put together each idea to explain it scientifically how love works. Well, I have to go back and retrieve some of those files because it's been, it's been a week, you know.

And I've done so much in that week after in terms of just lecturing. and talking about different things. So I definitely have to think. So what did I talk about? So romantic love, there are different stages of romantic love. There's obviously what's called infatuation. And you might call the initial. So when you see a woman for the first time you see a woman,

she walks by you. She's very attractive. She comes towards you and you just find her attractive, right? That's testosterone-driven. It's very much dopamine, ventral striatum of the brain. The ventral stratum is this portion of the brain important for dopamine, creating dopamine. As we know, dopamine is this reward chemical in the brain. It makes you agitated.

It makes you sort of your heart is beating, boom, boom, boom, boom, all that. So that's initial state, okay, very testosterone and dopamine driven. Second, what might happen then is romantic love kicks in. You might, you know, build a relationship with that girl. There's something going on that's a little bit deeper now. You start to get to know her and all that. And that is a different circuits in the brain. Now you're dealing with circuits like, if it kind of expands a little bit and it gets a bit deeper, you have things like serotonin dropping in the brain.

This is actually counterintuitive because serotonin is this feel good hormone. Now when you have serotonin in the system, you kind of feel relaxed, you feel kind of calm, you feel good, you're very sort of inner driven. So you feel you feel inner driven. You kind of have calmness in you. Now, when it goes down, you become more obsessive. In fact, in fact, in monkeys, if you, if you, if you, that circuit in the brain going from the medial prefrontal cortex, the mid prefrontal cortex to the basal ganglie and other regions of the brain involved in sort of obsessive thinking, if you, if you cut serotonin in that circuit, you become highly obsessive. So serotonin is very, very important for reducing obsessions. But obviously when you fall in love, you have a lot of obsessions. So serotonin goes out the window.

In fact, the prefrontal cortex, the very front of your brain, the logical reasoning, you know, planning part of the brain shuts down. So you have that. Second, second, you have a part of the brain called the TPJ, the temporal parietal junction. We talked about that last time. That is a region up here in this part of the brain. It's involved in creating a sense of a body image. So me, Baland, I feel like I occupy this body. I don't feel like I occupy, you know, Julian's body or.

Brad Pitt's body, unfortunately, okay? I occupy this body, right? Glad you like my jokes. These jokes sometimes are misfired during lectures. Nah, you're good. You're good. You got a bad audience if they're misfiring. Brad Pitt was looking good in F1.

I got to say, that motherfucker's like 65 or something shit. He was doing all right. He's pretty cool. He's pretty cool. Hey, guys, three quick things. Number one, if you haven't subscribed, please subscribe to huge help. Number two, if you'd like to join my Patreon

for early uncensored releases of the full episodes, you can join via the link of my description or in the pin comment below. And number three, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make content from the show and make money, you can join via the Discord link in my description below. So the TPJ creates a sense of a body image. It's up here. And it works by pulling sensory information from various senses,

seeing touch, taste, tactile sensations, and then draws that information and builds a sense of a self. So this is a very, a very key structure to know. It's important in just creating you by pulling information from the world. So you have the TPJ. Now the TPJ, when you are in a romantic situation, it actually shuts it down. And so there's a sense of unison with the lover. You feel like you're becoming one with her, you know?

It's actually very critical and key piece of it. And that doesn't happen at all during the infatuation phase. That's when it gets the romantic phase. This isn't the romantic phase. In the initial stages, in the pure, in the pure passionate infatuation stage, it's much more, it's much more passionate driven. It's much more sexual, you know what I mean? It doesn't have that.

These neural circuits are not active in the same manner, as we see now. It's clearly different when you actually have that romantic stage. Is there something specific, like a line in the sand, if you will, that happens or that needs to happen to cross officially from the infatuation stage to the romantic stage? It's a good question. I think what it is is reciprocity. So once you get, okay, so you see the girl, she's good looking, she's pretty, and you have the initial drive. Okay.

Then there's some reciprocity. Maybe you get to know her a little bit. There's some continuity in time, so you get to see her a few times. That can lead to the more sort of romantic stage now. The prefrontal kicks in. Now, the prefrontal is important because the prefrontal, I said it shuts down, but there's also a prefrontal element in romantic love. Let me explain. So when you first see the girl in the infatuation stage, there's also another structure called the insula.

It's up, it's in the behind the ears. It's very important, actually. This is the region of the brain that maps all your sensory states. So you're breathing, your heart rate, your, all that is. mapped onto the insula. Okay, so it maps all that. And so any given moment, I'm sort of looking at Joey, I'm looking around in the studio, my insula is kind of mapping all that and saying, how is my stomach right now, how's my heart, how does the external world map onto my internal world? That's the insular doing that. And then based on that, it sends signals back to my

prefrontal conceptual part of the brain and then it helps me build a narrative around the world, if that makes sense. Now when I see a girl for the first time, obviously there's a lot of insula going on. My heart is beating. Boom, boom, boom. I'm sweating a little bit. I could measure that if I wanted to using sort of galvanic skin response, skin conductance. Galbanic. Yeah, it's called galvanic skin response. So you can measure sweating on the on the body when you're, it's a micro sweating, you know, you can't really. So you have that. So there's clearly a physiological reaction. So you have the insular, very active. You have a part of the brain. I didn't mention before. It's called the hypothalamus. Hypothalamus. Did we talk about the hypothalamus? I think we touched it,

but it was in another context. It's one of the most fascinating part of the brains. It's fascinating because the hypothalamus is this marble-like structure and it's kind of deeper in the brain, but what it does is it has tons of functions. And it is very small, but it has tons of functions. For example, for example, when I have,

when I feel aggressive, okay? When I have aggression in me, okay, and I feel aggressive, guess what happens? The hypothalamus is all active. And it sends commands, to something called the pituitary and it then releases hormones. So cortisol, adrenaline is then released eventually

from the adrenal glands behind you here. You're behind your kidneys, above your kidneys. That's the hypothalamus. But it's also involved in sex drive. Curiously, the same part of the brain is evolved in sexual motivation and aggression. Which begs the question, like, why are some men motivated sexually

by aggressive scenarios? Like, why do you have male don't in prison, you know, in prison scenarios and male wanting to dominate others in the sexual component of that, or even rape scenarios, or men just being turned on by highly violence scenarios. Well, it turns out the same part of the brain that mediates, that processes aggression and processes sexuality is the same, it's the same, literally the same structure. That makes a lot of sense. And like you said, it can, that can be very dark if you used in the wrong ways. It can be very, yeah, absolutely. other ways though creates odd social situations that's why it's just as tell is all his time like whenever there's a woman involved shick it's weird right in the middle and i i kind of liken it sometimes

to like when you see dogs with a with a with a with a fire hydrant yep you know what i mean yeah like when two tough looking dogs could be walking up towards the hydrant and one of them pisses on it first and the other like can never come back to that hydrant yeah you know what i mean it's a very range thing, like this competitive thing that happens. Like, ah, you lose out once, you get your balls cut off in a way, is the other dog got it. Right. Sorry to talk about it this way, but this is how it is. And then it doesn't matter like, you go away, you come back. Yeah. You're kind of like, can't ever go on that street again. You know, it's a strange, strange thing. I think it kind of comes from that same. Same thing, yeah. Yeah. It's interesting with the, with the insula and how it

works and how aggression and sexuality, but it definitely can explain a lot of things. In fact, the insula is also the disgust part of the brain. So when I feel disgusted, you know, let's say you're touching some vomit over there and I watch you, I feel disgusted, for example. So there's a disgust component and that's the insula. It lights up like Times Square whenever I'm disgusted. But it turns out, it turns out that the insula is also activated when I experience social disgust. So for example, if you tell me that these people over there are barbarians, these people are evil, they want to occupy our land, they're just bad. The insula part of the brain also lights up.

So it turns out the same part of the brain lights up when I'm socially disgusted and when I'm actually disgusted. And that brings us to a key point of sort of how we dehumanize other people and how wars are generated in the world. Well, it turns out, if the same part of the brain turns out, you know, is activated with social, like with actual disgust and social disgust, you can see how you become disgusted, literally disgusted by another group of people, by somebody you think is evil and has bad intention. So the brain is kind of sloppy in ways.

It kind of reuses circuits all the time. And the more regions in the brain, the more closer the proximity, the more the cross-activation and sort of and misfiring, so to speak. So that is a principle in the brain. That's a principle. So there's often the sloppy wiring. And yeah, as I said, the closer, the better and, or sorry, the more potential for cross-activation. One of the most famous mushrooms in history isn't psychedelic, but it does something really interesting to the brain. The mushroom I'm referring to is called Aminita Muscaria, the red one with the white spots that you've seen in Alice in Wonderland and other folklore forever.

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The federal EV rebate is back. Eligible customers get up to $5,000 with the federal EVAP rebate on select 2027 volt and 2026 Equinox EV models. Visit your local Chevrolet. dealer today for more details. Are there ways to, I don't know, control these types of things and try to stop them from happening? Like, if you, if I know, for example, I'm going to fuck up some of the names of the different regions of the brain, you just gave like 10 of them. But if I know the one region of the brain is literally evolutionary wired to make me do X. And I know

that ahead of time. Is there a way for me to like, I don't know, do to do to do, like try to like program my brain to avoid that and actually be able to avoid the release of the hormones associated with whatever X feeling is? It's hard, but I think the knowledge of the fact that your brain repurposes itself all the time can be helpful. So just knowing that, for example, you have a wife and then you call her by your ex, by the ex-wife's name. Oh, that's a no-no. That is a no-no, right? But that is an example of how the brain sort of can reuse the same circuitry. Literally, the circuitry that I have from my mother as a child, and we could go into that, is the same circuitry I will use for a romantic partner 20 years later. So we can go in.

Sigmund Freudian stuff going on now. No, no. This is attachment theory. It's pretty well known. So this is a very robust finding. So we know that our attachments with our mothers and with our, our caregivers, that will translate into how we bond with future romantic partners. So this is well known. But on the repurposing and the cross-activation part, there's another really curious observation. So in the brain, right? So in the, by the way, if I'm going too heavy with the technical terms. This is great, bro.

Relax. You're good. Keep going. So here there's a strip called the Sensuier Map. This is a post-central gyrus for the nerds out there. post-central gyrus, it's a sensory map of the entire body. So just like we have a map for our neurological sense of being anchored in this body, we also have an actual sensory map for our body.

So if I was to hit my leg like this and slap it, literally there's a leg portion and there's a thigh portion in my brain on my map here. There's like actually there's a drawing almost, or literally there is a drawing of the actual human body on my body. my sensory map. So if I, on the vice versa, if I go up here and I stimulate that part of the brain, I would literally feel sensations in my leg. So I can go that way too. So I touch it, it lights up. I stimulate it. I feel it in the lake. Okay. Now, so it's, I kind of drawn like a human being, but it's kind of disproportional to the actual human size. In other words, you will find a big tongue and the tongue is huge, humongous. Gigantic. You will find lips are huge, okay, feet are huge. Hands, especially the fingers, are huge. Then Julian might ask,

how come, why do you have certain parts of the sensory map being larger than others? What do you think? Take a guess. My only guess is that it's tied to like the things you look for in evolution. And here's what I mean by that. Yeah. Like if you look at monkeys when they have to attack, they go for the face and the hands. So the hands can't fight back and the face, you know, gets blinded and whatever. And it's because like that's at the top of their thought process of what can disable the enemy.

And so I think my guess, very uneducated, but my guess would be there it has something to do with there are things that we subconsciously pay attention to more on people than other things and we make that maybe larger than life. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's very close. These are the parts that are more sensory rich.

that doesn't sound like I was that close. No, no, you're saying these parts are most important. That's what you're saying, right? Yeah. They're most important because they're rich in sensory receptors. Think about it. Your lips, right? Extremely sensitive.

Your tongue. You know, if you, if I take a needle and prick Julian's tongue, lots of pain, right? Very sensitive. Versus, you know, if I prick your stomach, not very sensitive. So because there's so many, so many neurons, devoted for your tongue, that part of the brain is, the map is just, the tongue is just huge. In fact, even your genitalia is huge up there. It's very sensory rich. Well, it's huge in all of our minds. Now, now, here's the punchline of all this, okay?

The punchline is the following. You will find in that map, even though it's kind of drawn as a human being, their feet are extremely close to genitalia in that map. And then you might ask, why this, why does the disfigurement? What's going on here? Why would you have, the feet being closed to the genitalia, right? Big foot, big, you know. And the answer seems to be that, have you ever somebody ever told you, like one of my, Ramachandra,

we talked about Ramashandran last time, you told me, yes, my mentor. He told me, you never want to have another man gave you wife a foot massage. Specifically, a foot massage is really bad. Now, I obviously wouldn't, I wouldn't go for any massage. But I'm saying, you know, foot massage you would definitely not go for.

It seems like because of the potential cross-activation between feet and genitalia, because they are so linked in the brain in that map, that explains why you can actually elicit sensual and erotic emotions by massaging the feet, if that makes sense. Is that why, like, people are so into that? It's like one of the biggest finishes online. I think so. I think so.

I definitely cross-activation is in the brain. is a major principle. And these two regions of the brain are just neighbors. They are literally next door to each other. And so you would expect some cross-activation when you touch the other, you might feel it in the other part. You're talking, when you say we're looking at the most sensory areas, in my head,

I'm getting a little biased towards like touch and feel. Yes. But obviously the senses are far beyond that and the most important sense maybe that we have. I don't know if that's correct, but is vision and seeing other people because my head immediately goes to the first thing I notice and someone is the thing I'm most drawn to is their eyes, particularly with women. If I don't like you be the hottest girl of all time. If I don't have that connection with your eyes, it's never going to have. There's something with the eyes.

Absolutely. Yeah, definitely the vision is important. And it is the most important sensory organ that we have this sensory region. I mean, there's 30 regions in the brain for vision alone. I think in the cortex you have about, so the brain is 100 billion neurons, and 30 billion is in the cortex. That's the outer layer. It had six parts, as we talked about last time. And in that sensory region, I think about one third of that whole region is devoted to vision alone. It's the sense most important for our survival.

So yes, absolutely, it is definitely crucial. But yeah, man, like, so as you were talking about, talking about you have the hypothalamus, the aggression, and the sex part of the brain activate when you have that initial view of that woman. There is the insula is active, so you have that whole body thing, testosterone is active. Then you ask me the key question, how does it flip over? And I think, as I said, it's reciprocity, is some kind of, some kind of, I won't say bonding because that's actually the next step. So if you have step, step one is romantic, it's infatuation, then you have the romance, and then you have as the third, the bonding attachment.

So that comes later. That comes later. That comes later. So the initial stages is kind of, it's very dopamine driven as well. So there's a lot of dopamine there too. In other words, it's excitement. It's intoxicating. You see her.

Then she goes away. It's this dance between knowing and unknowing. It's very tantalizing, very titillating all the time. But then you hit the attachments. stage and that's when you have something, you have oxytocin and vasopressin, these bonding hormones kick in and then they create safety around that person. You feel, you feel safe around them. You kind of feel like they will stay. They will not leave you. There's security. As we talked about last time, cortisol also goes through the roof during that romantic infatuation stage. That's why

you cannot stay there. Infatuation in particularly, infatuation and the romance stage, in fact. That six to eight weeks, for some, it's more, maybe three. months. So you, oh, so you time, you put a timer on it too. Yeah, that you can go forever. So I might say eight weeks. That part of, so it's interesting that that infatuation stage, and I'm sorry, that romantic stage, right? So let's call the first one attraction. Attraction stage. Attraction versus romantic obsession versus bonding. These are the three stages. Okay. Now, in the romance, the heightened romance state, that is about eight weeks, maybe max six months. You would run out.

Your brain literally, if I was to scan Julian in this romantic state and look at your brain, your dopaminergic neurons would look like somebody on crack cocaine. Literally, you would have a sense of, you would have a, you know, your brain would be hypersensitized to dopamine. And that also causes what's called globalization. So you go about in life and you see a dog and you find, oh, it's so cute. You look at a flower and it's, wow, it's so beautiful. And the sunset and everything, the whole world is, in fact, beautiful. And that's because when we fall in love, we don't only fall in love with that person.

We fall in love with the world. Yes. And the whole world becomes poetic when we do fall in love. and that is what it is. The timeline is what's interesting. Yeah. But let me start with this question. How would you define love if you had to define it?

And you can take as much time as you want to think about that. So I would define love as it would depend on the kind of attachment there is, right? So, or the kind of experience you have. So the love between my mother and father, I love that I have for them, the maternal and paternal love, is different. Interestingly, you have many of the same structures being activated. So you do have, when I, for example, have bonding with my mother.

You do have some of the same regions like the prefrontal might shut down a little bit. It's more kind of in the oxytocin bonding. So oxytocin gives you bonding and feeling of good, if that makes sense. But the key difference between romantic love and between love of a mother and paternal love, maternal love, is that hypothalamus region of the brain, that sexuality part that turns on. It dials up when you have romance. But you do, to go into this for a second, you do form power. and how you were nurtured with your mom and what you look for in a woman in many cases.

100%. Yeah. So this goes back to what's called attachment theory. And this is the idea that this goes back to some experiments that were done a very long time ago. And what they showed were, so you had like a kid, you put a kid in a room, in a laboratory, and the kid is there with the mom. There's a stranger in the laboratory too. Then you observe how that kid first interacts with the stranger when the mom is there. That's the first step. Will the kid feel, be clinging to the mom and just hold on to mom, mom, you know, or would it literally go over to the stranger

and play around? There's some toys in that room as well. That's the first observation. Next, the mom will leave. So mom leaves as the next step. And then you observe the kid. Does it cry? Does it feel?

So let's say, in some cases, it may. feel safe. It may just maybe be a little bit sad, but then after a few minutes, it kind of feels okay. It goes and plays with a stranger. It might explore the territory, even though it kind of feels a little bit abandoned, but it's okay. It feels okay overall. Then what happens is the mom comes back. How does the child react? Does it hug mom? Does it reject mom? What's the reaction? Now, depending on the child's reaction in all of these scenarios, that will show what kind of attachment you have

and what kind of attachment you will have later on in life. So a securely attached person, when mom leaves, first of all, they're not very clingy with mom when mom is there. And then when mom leaves, they will play around, have fun with the stranger a little bit, be very broadly explore the space. Then when mom comes back, they may feel a little bit sad, but then they feel okay and forgives her

and continues and move on. This is a securely attached. But then you have people that are insecurely attached, for example. So when mom, first of all, the mom is there, they're very clingy. They cling to mom all the time. They want to hold her and no one wants to go out to that stranger.

And then when mom leaves, they cry. They ignore the stranger. They just stay in their place. And then when mom comes back, they feel resentment towards mom. They don't want to forgive mom, and they just feel like, you know, mom abandoned them. How do both of those people translate later into romantic, how they form their romantic relationships? I'll get there. There's a third one is which really interesting.

This is this, okay. This is the distant. This is the kind of the ambiguously attack. Like, this is, this is not ambiguous. This is the one you call, so that these are the avoidant people. These are the avoidant. Look, these are very interesting. when mom is there they're very kind of cold detached from mom they're not really hugging mom much when she leaves they're kind of they don't show any reaction they don't show any kind of

sadness about her leaving when she comes back they're kind of duh by the way they don't play with the stranger when mom is away they kind of just sit there this is a very interesting type avoidant now now to your question how does it translate into actual relationships later on?

Literally that pattern will play out in how you bond with others. So if I have a romantic partner and I'm this securely attached, I will feel okay with hers once in a while leaving, right? I don't need to like, when she go on vacation, I don't panic. I don't become like, my heart won't like, you know, become all agitated. My physiology won't just go all over the, you know, place. I can feel calm. I can soothe my nervous system.

In fact, these experiments have been shown even with physiological measures. So you measure the body, the heart rate, sweating, and you literally see how the brain activates physiologically. And for the insecure children, you'll have all these physiological reactions. Heartbeat, no adrenaline, adrenaline, it's just all over the roof. Everything goes through the roof. Now, in romantic scenarios, securely attached people will be fine with the lover going on vacation.

They can soothe themselves, tell themselves, oh, it's okay. She's merely just left for a little, you know, vacation. They can soothe themselves. When she comes back, they may feel a little bit annoyed. If she didn't tell, you know, warned them or something that she was leaving,

but they can forgive easily, right? And then you can see the insecure how that kid would react. That kid would be, when, you know, very, very clingy. And then when she leaves, they become all agitated and just all sort of they can't control themselves. And then when she comes back, they feel angry at the lover.

Does the pattern clear? I hope I'm not. No, it's perfectly clear. I'm curious because those are polar opposites right there. Polar opposite. So on the first one who's not clinging and is secure. Yeah. There was a loving, I'm trying to figure out where the mom's responsibility of just how they handle love comes in here.

Like there was a loving relationship. with the mom, but there was an ability for in the environment early on from being an infant on, the mom was able to set some boundaries with like how much they were completely attached at the hip, if you will. Yes, yes. In scenario two, the mom maybe was literally attached at the hip to the kid to the point that the kid developed in a way that when that's not the case, they don't even know what to do with themselves. It's true. And I have a family member. I don't want to mention them because, you know, in the case, it's, it's, they might see this, for example, right? So, but I do know somebody from my family, you know, the way she interacts with her kids, she's making them clingy, you know, she's just giving them so much love, but it doesn't allow them to sort of explore the world. The love is just too much. It's too much. It's like, you know, you have to be with me all the time. I have to take care of you. And it's kind, it comes from a good place. Right. It's

love. But I feel like those those kids, whenever they go out to the world, they just can't be without mom. You have to let children go. You can't helicopter. Yeah, you have to let children go out and explore the world and be independent. You can't give them too much love, even though you love them, right? You do want to put breaks on that a little bit so your children become independent. Absolutely. It's just interesting how the nurturing aspect is how you later form the romantic aspect but with the romantic aspect you're adding the next layer of the hypothalamus gets involved yes and there's a sexual element to it obviously which is perfectly how it's supposed to be it's just evolution right there but it's in it's the part that keeps sticking out to me is the way

that you put a time length on yeah on where you go from phase to phase and i don't know it's it's definitely more anecdotal how i'm thinking about it because i'm thinking about like the three times in my life that I've been in love. And they didn't follow a time phase at all. One time was like, you know, a three-week kind of shotgun somewhere else in the world, total head over heels kind of thing that probably happened in like three days. Yes. Falling in love. Another one took probably about three weeks or so to get there. Another one took more like months. Where are my gloves? Come on, heat.

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but I'd love to get your thoughts on this when it comes to romantic love. I've always had two definitions for how love works and there's actually a different form on the way that I phrase each one. One is strictly the word love. Yeah. And love is like a feeling that kind of gets under your skin and gets into your nervous system. You cannot explain it, but it's when you see, in my case, seeing a woman where out of nowhere, there's that little thing where time stops. You connect with her in a way that you cannot possibly explain. And you don't really know this person well. Maybe you've talked to them a few times, but you don't know them that well. But you have this moment in this context, in this place, in this time, wherever it may be, where when you are looking at them,

you're seeing a piece of your soul in them. Yes. And you realize that you would get in front of a train and lay down your life for this woman. No questions asked, but you cannot explain. why. Yes. The second layer that happens is being in love. Yes. And there you have to, in my opinion, there's really two things that have to happen. The first one definitely has to happen. The second thing usually has to happen. The first one is you have to have gotten to know that person. Now, this could happen over a day or two where you're just sitting there talking like there's no clock on the wall and understanding every single person's about the, every single thing about this person life and them understanding every part about your life and just that magnetic chemistry is there.

I've been there. That's a great feeling. It could also take weeks and, you know, going on multiple dates or seeing seeing them in different contexts and, you know, slowly having, building yourself to these conversations. Yeah. The second part is there usually has to be something physical. Of course. Exchange. In a way, I don't mean to say exchanged like a trade, but you know what I mean? Like, there's a sexual element to it. Like once you cross that Rubicon and like you have sex with a woman, there's a connection

there and there is a, at least from what I've seen, there's usually a stronger connection from the woman to the male at the get-go, but there is definitely still a connection in most cases unless you're like having late night fucking drunk sex or something from the male to the female as well. If it's

someone that you do care about and you have that infatuation stage. Do you think that there's anything scientific to back up my anecdotal experience there and how I define those two words, two phrases, words, one of them's a word, the other one's a phrase. Julian, it's a beautiful definition, and I think, I like a definition. What I think is that as scientists, we often try to pinpoint various brain regions. We say this part of the brain lights up, this shuts down, this becomes titillated, this becomes

tantalized, you know. truth is as Richard Feynman said the physicist it doesn't hurt the mystery to know a little about it so knowing about love and knowing about the

brain parts that light up and shut down and all that is great and the chemistry of the hormones and all that but you mentioned something that really struck me in in Meet Joe Black when

have you seen that coffee shop scene is a very famous scene when he says you know lightning might strike. You know, he's talking about meeting the one, and then he says, Brad Pitt's character, he says, lightning might strike. And I think

we can spend centuries, decades, exploring the neuroscience of love. But when Shakespeare said, shall I compare thee to a summer's day, that art more lovely and more temperate, rough winds to shake the darling butts of May, and summer's least has all too short a date,

Sometimes to hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed. I think that captures much more than we can capture in brain scans. What Shakespeare is saying here, he's saying, in short, your love is much more beautiful than a summer's day. It's much more temperate. A summer's day has a short lease. Its complexion might be too, the sun might be. be too shiny, okay? And he's using all these vivid metaphors to capture what love is all about

that I think we can never capture using neuroscience and brain. So I think... Yeah, Billy Shakes was the truth. He was the truth. And I think there's something there. I think there's something there about love, about when lightning strikes that we cannot capture in words. There's a line that always stuck with Mios, a Sicilian saying that they put in the godfather when Michael sees Apollonia for the first time. Yes. And one of his guards says to him, he's been struck by the thunderbolt. Yeah. And you see it.

I mean, it's perfectly shown on screen, just like the two staring at each other. And she's not really sure what to think yet, but you know what he's thinking. And I, you know, the irony is obviously there's no such thing as a thunderbolt. But it's like this unexplained phenomenon where you hear it. And you know what it means even if it doesn't exist. Right. It's just a thing. And I've definitely experienced that before.

Where you are in a situation where you don't, that's the thing. I've experienced that at least four times before. And you never expect it to happen. That's the magic of it. You're never like, oh, this is how it's going to go. Or like this is going to unfold right now. You're like, what? And what the fuck just happened to me?

Absolutely. it is like lightning striking you and and as a poetic person myself somebody who loves poetry you know and and having a poetic view and a spiritual view of the world i literally cannot say other than it seems like a divinely divine thing when you do meet somebody and and there's that connection and then when you get to know them and it kind of just there's a harmony there and there's a sense of like you know souls connecting that definitely that's something something special that science cannot capture, but I do think poetry can sometimes tap into and give you, I give you a feel for what it feels like, that experiential, that personal sense of having

that connection. Oh, I agree completely. Yeah. Is there science to back the idea that some such thing as a soulmate exists, like people actually do have some, I always like the wedding crashers definition, this, a counterpoint of their soul and another person that exists on the planet? Yeah. It's a good question. I do, I kind of believe in that there are people out there that are divinely ordained to be ours and that just, you know, their souls are sort of souls connecting,

but obviously that's outside parameters of science. From a scientific perspective, we have what's, we have what is called a positive delusion. So when you do fall in love, you have to, you will need to be you need to have that feeling that she's the only one in the whole world that can she's the only one in other words like that Apollonia and

like Michael Corleone right in Sicilia that feeling must be there of that she's the only one and that is the prefrontal shutting down and the TPJ shutting down so you kind of feel one with her and and the dopamine centers are

because they're so hyperactive they can create delusions we know that when serotonin goes down when this chemical of calmness and all that goes down and eventually the dopamine goes up especially with dopamine going up

to the prefrontal cortex that's when delusions can occur like an OCD for example you have the exact same pattern OCD kind of looks like romantic love like that obsessional component right obsession about the girl has you texted me you go check the messages

has you texted and keep checking and you know so that's That's kind of like the OCD scenario. In OCD, you have tons of delusions too. The whole world is contaminated. Everything is dangerous. It's fascinating. That's on like the same wavelength.

Same wavelength, right? But definitely dopamine and delusions are a key component of that positive delusion of that she's the only one. But it has to be there. You have to have that positive delusion. That's important. You need it for romantic bonding, you know, for romantic love.

All right, real fast. I just got to use the bathroom, but I want to stay on this. This is really good. We'll be right back. All right. All right. We're back.

So how do you... Attraction is obviously a key part of forming love or getting to that point and whatever. But you also see the fact that male and female brains work entirely differently. They have different phases as well. And so attraction isn't like... just this vacuum all the time where you have it and then it's just there and that's what it is. You can go through hot and cold periods where it's like you like someone and then out of nowhere

you can't explain why but you hate them and then eventually you like them again and maybe you love them but then you really hate them. I'm not even talking about like when you're in a relationship just in general with friendships as well that could later become something like that. How do we scientifically maybe start with females? How does it happen to where females can can go so hot and cold on liking you one minute and not being about you the next minute. Hot and cold is interesting. Did we talk about emotional contrast last time? No.

Emotional contrast is an interesting one. So I wasn't aware of this previously, but I kind of became, I had to study this and learn about this. It's fascinating. So we as men are taught that we have to be kind of cool and laid back and not really give ourselves to a woman not show our emotions perhaps and just kind of be laid back and all that. And it turns out there's a powerful concept with emotional contrast where if you can be extremely hot, like very hot by the heart, I mean, extremely warm at one point in time. So you kind of reveal your emotions and you kind of let the person know that you're really into her.

But then you're cold the next push pull. That titillates the dopaminergic centers like, you know, drives them crazy. Obviously, you don't want to do this. You don't want to do this in a where you play games. But it teaches us that if you are vulnerable and let somebody know how you feel and they don't reciprocate that by going away, that can be one of the most attractive things ever to drive attraction. Attraction grows in space.

It grows in space, but it grows specifically when the dopaminergic neurons have something to anchor onto, to tether onto. So if you give them literally some warrant, some kind of clear signals of interest and then go away

and allow for the space, that's when really something happens versus like being, playing it cool all the time. So I think that is an interesting part of how dopamine works. I think that how does attraction work?

I think attraction works on a lot of things. There's a lot of, when it comes to attraction there are various components. There's the innate attraction. Females, for example, have for males and how males look. This is something innate they can't help. So broad shoulders, your big breast for some extent, extended muscle, muscular upper breast, you know, and upper chest, I should say. And a little bit of masculine traits could help. So women have this. They have. Women have this.

this innate inclination toward masculine traits, traits that signal testosterone, right? Yeah, we have it too in the other direction. You have it in the other direction. Hourglass. Instrogen, yeah. Hourglass. We have a specific interest in a figure that's called 0.0.70. That's the Playboy figure.

That's males will consistently rate that figure as most attractive. In fact, they will rate that 0.70 female figure as, you know, women who have this figure as more intelligent, as more healthy. as more as better, more moral, in every category is just better. So good. We'll put that up on the screen so people can see. It turns out, good and beauty is mediated

in the same part of the brain called the orbital frontal cortex. So that's why you see a Disney character like Bell, she's beautiful and she's good, right? There's tons of these examples. Jasmine is beautiful and good. And, you know, scar in Lion King, he's evil and he has a big scar and he's kind of skis. you compared to to to um to uh mufasa and and and simba and all those so there's that component and

they they and and good cartoonist will you know exploit that absolutely but yeah that's the orbital frontal cortex and so for female for males obviously big breasts clear skin clear skin is signal of good good health for females so if a female has clear skin that is a indicator of good health, parasite infection is probably less in such women. Think about old in Savannah days, right? So if she has clear skin, she's probably not infected by parasites in the womb. She had a better immune system probably, right? So these are all indicators of health and fertility. In fact, my mentor, Ramachandran has a paper is called Why Gentleman Prefer blondes. Okay. Now this paper, he meant it as a satire. But he said to me, and he said that publicly, that there's a

there's about 10% chance of it being true. But the argument is that male will prefer females that have very fair skin and are blondes because you can detect parasites and health easily on a skin that's fair. Like a more fair skin, more white skin. And also things, signs of blushing. For example, if she was to engage in cheat on you, you would know easily she would blush

and it would be more visible on the skin now since Rama has Ramachandran has said since that it's probably not all true but there could be some truth to that I mean I don't personally know if it's always true in my case I actually have probably more attracted to more brown

skin that's kind of how I but yeah I'm thinking of bias in my head right now that I like Mediterranean women yeah Italian but like their skin is very often like incredible and you can tell it's incredible like maybe I'm biased but they have like the best skin in the world

but what Ramashandran's talking about is that you can tell I think what basically what he's saying is in that theory you can see contrast more to be able to identify a weakness but also I don't know maybe I'm like trying to picture that in my head right now it's hard for me to yeah I guess it would depend on the tint or something, but like... I agree.

I think basically what I agree with in that theory is that men prefer clear skin. Clear skin. That's what we prefer. And that's a signet is, you know, an indicator of health and fertility. And so I think that is, I think that is correct. And yeah, man, I think overall, why do you, so you might ask how come Julian, how come Julian then prefers a woman with Mediterranean? How come I prefer a brown? I don't know. I never, that's like the last six, seven years. I didn't used to like have a type.

Yeah. I could tell you, damn well, I didn't have a type in college. I have a thing. But like, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, I know. Something happened there. So there's a theory to explain all this. So there's one theory where, so me personally, Beland, when I grew up in Copenhagen and ghetto in Copenhagen, they're only exposed to a lot of white women. He was a gangster, by the way. People didn't hear the last episode. Boulon was wielding that knife around. No, no, no.

He kept that thing on him. Definitely, you know, so what I was exposed to was white woman. And I think I had a little bit of that remnants of liking more, and this is talking about like a seven-year-old kid, right? But finding girls with more brown hair attractive, but obviously more of a Danish-European. Right? The blondes didn't turn me on in that way. Blue eyes. It's just probably genetically was a little bit too far from my taste. But then I find over the years, it kind of shifted more towards from Danish to more brown

to more and then more brown with each gradient, like with time. And we can talk about how that occurs in the brain. What's going on? Let's do that. Let's do that. So first of all, did we talk about the triangle and the square last time? No. This is,

so I sometimes mix these things up, Julian. I don't know where I talk about what. I don't want to repeat myself, obviously, but so. We really haven't done anything in this episode. You haven't? We haven't talked about last time. Oh, wonderful. Okay.

So, keep going. Appreciate it, brother. So you show a rat a triangle. Okay. Actually, you show a rat a rectangular figure versus a square. This is the rat, okay? rectangular square. Okay.

And each time you show the rat, the rectangular square, you give it a cheese. of cheese. Now guess what happens when you just show the rectangular versus the square? Which will it prefer? The rectangular or the square? The one that you get the cheese on? Rectangular. Now here's the kicker. Now you show a more rectangular shape than the original rectangular shape that the rat was exposed to. So you have the original rectangular shape that the rat saw that was paired with the cheese and then a different, even more rectangular. A longer one. A longer one. A longer one. A longer. elongated one. Which one will the

rat prefer? The elongated one. Correct. The question is why. It makes no as common. It doesn't make sense. Why would it prefer a longer one? Why would it go for a mutated

version? Because it's a bigger and better version of the thing that was already given them something. It has learned a rule, rectangularity, because the square

and the rectangular what differentiated between the two was the more rectangularity, the better. So it has learned rule. That is the essence of the difference between rectangular and square. It has learned a rule. Now, that gets to things like why caricatures are so, caricatures are so damn, you know, we like them so much. Okay? You look at a picture of Nixon or let's say, let's say Donald Trump, he's still

president, right? Should be careful. Let's say, let's say, let's say, you show them a picture of baland, but you take the eyebrows and you amplify them. You take the nose even more pointy. The face even more, like you create something that's even more beland than balant himself. This is what a character is about.

Just like that rectangular shape, right? When the guys draw the cartoons, yeah, yeah. This is called a supernormal stimulus. It's more the essence of me than actually me. And the brains become titillated by this. Okay? Now let's take this to attraction. When we initially,

find somebody attractive, there's a learning going on. So I see that girl, she's very pretty. You know, I'm seven, eight-year-old bland. I see that girl. I go, my God, my heart is pumping, no adrenaline in the system, testosterone, maybe a little bit, even though I'm a kid. But I have dopamine. I have all those things. Now, now, when I see her, my brain creates a template for her. I go, my God, she is beautiful. She's gorgeous. She is just the perfect, you know, girl I want to play with in the, in school, right? I want to play with her in school. It's wonderful. Now, my brain creates a circuitry around that girl, all the features, the hair color, the skin, all gets burned into the circuitry. Then, then, I play with her for maybe a year. Time goes by. I see another girl. Now I'm 13, 14.

And lo and behold, I'm attracted to her, even more than the one four or five years ago. And now you're 13, 14, so little Boulon's attracted to her too. As you're just saying, there's a sexual component, obviously. Definitely, this testosterone goes through the roof at this point. But my point is, in this next, why do you become attractive to the next girl? And here the point is that your brain says, or one theory suggests that we take the initial features of that girl. Let's say she had a certain shape of a nose, certain lips, and they tend to be amplified in the next person. She is even more that girl than the girl itself.

She has those amplified features and you go for that. So there's a development of the attraction. It takes a development where you take those features and they're amplified in the next person becoming a supernormal stimulus just like that rectangular shape. It's more rectangular than the original one. Does it make sense?

Yeah. So like when Kanye married Bianca, she had a bigger rack than Kim Kay, but she looked just like Kim Kay. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. So you have the original feature.

but they're amplified. So this is one idea for why how attraction then evolves. And definitely there is strong learning and plasticity component. So when you fall in love, there's two neurotransmitters that are crucial for plasticity. By plasticity, I mean the brain's ability to change its shape. So your brain is made up of different modules and structures. And these structures can change their shape so they can reorganize. And the way they do that is by having two neurochemicals.

One is dopamine, a sense of reward. So I see that girl, I find her attractive, I find her interesting, you have tons of dopamine. That's the first principle for plasticity. And then I have acetylcholine, which is my attention system. This is based on a structure called the nucleus basalis in the midbrain, or 20,000 cells. They have neurons that release this attention chemical, so I pay attention to her as well. So I have dopamine, I have attention, and I have the attention as well. attentive focus on that woman.

When I have this, I have tons of plasticity. By the way, when we are kids, we find ourselves in something called the critical period. The critical period is the fact that the brain is hyperplastic until like age 12 or 13. That's why when you learn a new language, after 13, like me, Beland learning English, it'll be kind of like English,

but Joey can tell it's not really, like there's something off with this English, right? It's not completely fluent. There's nothing off with your English. But it's not totally like, you could hear it, right? Especially when... I mean, you have a small accent. That's about it.

Right, but no, I snag a tense, for example. Lemitense can fullstantly flu me. I have any problem with snag tense. I don't know. What the fuck you just said. Okay? When I speak Danish, it's completely... I don't have any issues.

Even if I'm sleep, deprived, tired, I speak it, like, with no issues. But English, I have to put a bit of an extra effort because it's not my first language. It's not my mother tongue. In fact, did you know that it's... That first mother tongue is structured and processed in a different part of the brain versus languages we learn after 13. That doesn't surprise me at all.

But that makes sense, right? This is harder. Like when you are sleep deprived, you are tired and so forth, you will literally have a harder time with, in my case, English. It just becomes a little bit more clumsy. It just becomes a little bit more. Do you dream in English now? It's an interesting question. I've thought about this.

I don't pay attention to it. That's why I can't. You know, because. You got to get some subtitles on your dreams. Yeah. See what's happening. You know what's going on, Julian? I think is that because dreams are all about the right hemisphere and the right hemisphere is mute,

so the right hemisphere has no processing, has no idea of language. The left hemisphere, you have a structure called the vernicus that's involved in understanding language. And Broca's area involved in production of language. And this is, there's a fiber called acute fasciculus for the nerds out there that want to know that combines the two. Now, these are in the left hemisphere, and the left hemisphere has all the language potential, all the language abilities. Right is mute. Let me give you an example.

So if I was to communicate solely with your right hemisphere and show the right hemisphere the word run, right? I'll show you run. You know what it will do? It would literally start running. You'll start running when you see that word. And imagine now, this is a split-brain patient, so the left of the right brain are completely separated. They cannot, the left and the brain cannot communicate. So there's that caveat. So you can

actually sever the bridge between the two hemispheres, the two sides of the brain. So the left and the right operate separately now. I just want to add that caveat. So you have that. And then you flash the word run to the right hemisphere over here. The person start running. Then you stop them and say, Julian, why are you running? And they will say, oh, doctor, I felt like I'm two out of out of shape. I need to get in shape. I need to build some muscle. I need to, you know, do some more exercise and work out. They will not say that they saw the word run in the screen because they don't have access to language. They have no ideas about the left hemisphere when it speaks. It's just, it's just completely has no access to to that. Does it make sense? Yes. Yes. So,

that's an example of that. Is this also where maybe I'm relating a wrong idea here, but you, in our last conversation, you had been saying we can't totally understand the relationship between time and space and the brain because things aren't like you can't say that every synapse is measured by a certain amount of time. Some you can, some you can't. So when you're trying to relate the left and right brain as well and what one distinguishes and then the action, another one then takes, is it the kind of situation where it's different brain to brain, but the patterns are similar, so time and space is a little weird, but we understand, like, the direction it goes, if that makes sense?

It makes sense. So definitely the right and left hemisphere are processed the world differently. You might be tempted to let Taco Bell's new Lux value menu go to your head. Because 10 indulgences for $5 or less makes you feel fancy. Like you might think you need cloth napkins. Well, you don't. Just use the ones that come in the bag. Don't let the Lux go to your head.

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We talked about that last time. It's called the fusiform face area. Literally understanding faces and processing them and knowing this is Julian, this is Joey. Okay? This is Melissa, for example. Now, there's a separate pathway going from the visual cortex. So when I see Julian's face, it goes from the optic nerve, and then it jumps over the face recognition area to the emotional part initially. So in a split second, I know Julian is angry right now.

Julian is happy right now. Julian is a threat right now. He might kill me. That's right. Right? He has, you know what I mean? Yeah. My point is...

You better watch your step. My point is, even before visually recognizing somebody, you will know that. you will know the emotional expression. And women are particularly good at this, I can tell you. So they're very good at this. Yeah, they got us sized up on that. So, so to this, it's very interesting that you have a separate pathway and it's just, it just shows us that we are wired for survival.

And knowing whether this person over here on the Savannah is a friend or a foe is much more important than knowing who it is, in fact. Going back to your original question, what was your original question? I think we kind of went on a. off a tangent here. Which one? I think we were on attraction, talking about attraction, right? Right.

So I was talking about, oh, so you're going way back. I was, what I had asked you was, why does attraction get hot and cold? Why does it flip between like being so into someone and then being completely disgusted by that person? It works in directions of both genders. I started by asking you about why females may be like that, but us males are like that too. It just might be a different pattern. And then we pivoted to language and then we pivoted to plasticity. and then all that.

Yeah, I think going back to the original attraction question and the rat, and yes, this is how attraction work in the brain. I think there's that component to it of definitely. There's a huge prefrontal component to attraction as well. Just like pull the chair in a little bit. Yeah, I want you comfortable. Just like pull the chair in and sit like that. There's cool.

Sorry, I'm just lining you up on your mark here. That's okay. That's good. I cut you off, but we got to get the, we got to get the mics. Gotcha, got you. That's good. There's a huge prefrontal component to it. Have you seen coming to a.

America? Of course. Eddie Murphy? Yes. It's here in New Jersey, wasn't it? It was like there's New York. They filmed it in New York and then they had a, wasn't it? Queens, I think. It's like Queens. That's where a little bit of money going over a jersey. There's something going on there. Yeah. Now there's a scene in that movie where the princess, the princess servant, semi, okay, when they arrived in that and they work in that McDowell, that fake McDonald restaurant. And they're obviously into the girls that work there, the two boys, Eddie Murphy's character, The Prince and his servant, Semmy. Now, Semi is interested in Lisa's sister, Patricia.

Yeah. He wants her. He wants to pursue her. But she is not into him at all, at all. Okay? She's not attracted to him whatsoever. But eventually, as things progress, Sammy tells Patricia that he's actually a prince. he's lying he's the prince servant but he tells her that he's the prince and there's a complete

shift in her in her attraction to him she's suddenly find him attractive he's you know now he's he's the man and all that and my point is in attraction even though you have the initial you know parameters of attraction you find you have the has the right features he looks good he looks like the boy on the playground when you know we're a kid and all that but then there's a cognitive social hierarchy component oh this is a prince oh this is a you know you know multi-billionaire oh this is a this this is a that and so there is that there is that cognitive component in prefrontal processing in the prefrontal cortex saying oh my god this is an attractive person i think what you're also getting at with a bigger pattern is when people fall in love with the idea of somebody yes and this is something both

genders fall into the trap of this it's like you know a guy may may may tell himself he's in love with a girl because she's good looking, she's from a good family, nice enough, you know, offers to help out when you take it to other places, which makes you look great, has a great smile, you know, has a pretty good job, smart, and you're kind of like going down the checklist, like, oh, this is all awesome. And you tell yourself, you know, sex might be great, but you tell yourself, oh, I love this girl. Yes. Because you're also thinking about, well, what is my family going to think of them? What are my friends going to think of them? Is this the kind of person that like they're going to brag to their friends and family about?

And then you get to a point where you can't explain it, but you realize, wow, why do I not feel like that spark? And it's because you've been checking these boxes. And like, again, you also see the same thing happen with women towards men. They're like, oh, he's good looking. He has a good job. He's funny. my dad likes them whatever and then you know they wonder why it's not there so the hierarchy thing is more i guess the question i'm looking for here is when you're looking at like hierarchies or checking a box with people is that more of like a trap in the brain to where you used you believe that the different functions of the brain that require love are firing only to later learn that they never were at all?

Or do you actually get your brain to fire in those ways to later then kind of come back to Earth and be like, wait a minute, I never really felt that way? It's an interesting question. So there's something, what you're talking about is known as a halo effect, the exact thing that you find, like,

whatever you see as beautiful, you give them positive traits. Oh, she's dependable. Oh, she's a potential good wife potential. Oh, she's a good mother as well, potentially. So you have all this trickling, trickles down. Now, the question is then, how does it work? I think there's a gender, there's a gender specificity to it. So it's gender specific and it's also person specific.

So let's start with gender specificity first. Females are more context dependent in their love and attraction. So men, it's much more visual. Oh, she fits the category of, she's beautiful. She is attractive. She has all these features. She's nurturing and she may show signs of also being nurturing and being highly you know she's the short thing is we are very visually driven much more than the conceptual parts of her being nurturing and a good mother although we take that into account as well okay now on that note female on the other hand on the other hand are much more driven by context so there's the initial attraction but then the context comes in is this guy good potential

Can you make money? Is he has, is he driven? Is he ambitious? Does he have social status? How does he fit in the social hierarchy and attention structure? So females have something

called the attention structure. So you, for example, it would be high in the attention structure with all your videos and all that people pay attention to. But it's actually one of the things that females find very attractive is because in nature

we only pay attention to important stuff. So being high in the attention structure is attractive. Does that make sense? It makes total sense and it's also funny that like I'm way more attracted to the women that don't give a fuck about any of that. You are. But for them it's different though. Yes. For them is different. And the point here is that female have these wired in because for them childbearing nine months and then having to raise this child is a very heavy process. It's a very heavy duty.

It is a very costly. Oh, I'll raise the child. Sorry, you said raised a child. Yeah, raise a child. I thought you said erased a child. I was like, wait a minute. No, no, no, erase. No, no.

Okay. Raising a child and, and, and, and, and, and, and all that is a very costly process. It's a very costly thing. And so you need a male, a man that can provide and take care and be strong as well. Males, females like, uh, strong men. We talked about the bodyguard effect last time. They like men who can calm, composed, strong, can protect her. All these will help her with her pregnancy and then help raise the child in secure environment.

So there is that difference between males and females. And then there's the personal aspect. So I, for example, have heard, many have told me like mentors, Ramashandran, for example, he would often say, oh, this girl over here, she's perfect for you, Jalal. He used to call me Jalal For some reason he just kind of Last name He grabbed onto that

In his culture You always call people by their last name His name is not even Ramachandran It's Vileanur But he call it Ramachandran So they use last last name Now Jalal is a fun name to say

Belan's fun too But like Jalal is like It's got a little ring to it They got a little ring to it A little music in the A little bit musical Yeah So

So my point was He would find some lady in his lab In his laboratory that was maybe she fit the boxes of somebody, a scientist, kind of same area, you know, very driven and motivated and then attractive at the same time. And you say, Jalal, this is for you. Let's, let's do something here. Let's. And I was like, no. Even though if she was, even if she was pretty and she was, just me personally, I may find, and I may go to some country. I may go to Turkey. I may go to Iraq, my home country, the Kurdish region of Iraq,

and I may see a girl just walking about like at Polonia, and I would rather have her much more, like the girl that you see in lightning strikes versus the one who fits all the boxes. I don't give any, I don't give a damn about how educated she is, how much money she has, her heritage. In fact, I don't even like women who use their body too much to display their beauty.

This is something I do not like. I agree. There is a study. Research shows clearly that there's two kind of mating strategies strategies for men. So, and for females, too, by the way, it goes vice versa. If we look at faces initially when we see somebody and we kind of zoom in on that, that's a sign of a long-term mate, that we're interesting in long-term mating. If we look at the body, that's a sign of lust and short-term mating. And so for the women out there

And the women that I find that In later years I find that Especially as you know You become as you do more And you do lectures and you go around Females sometimes will come at you This is you know This is something that happens to men

And they throw at themselves At you with their bodies Thinking that they can use their bodies You know showing their breasts Showing their bodies And that will make you like them If I'm just I'm saying If you're female and you do that

you are titillating these short-term mating circuits in the brain of a male you know it's not the right thing to do it's not the might thing if you want a man to fall in love with you and really be into you the person personally i like women with some like some sense of graceful modesty a sense of like elegance elegance carrying her self with self-dignity not taking her body is is sacred like it's you know what i mean like it's not something that should just be thrown at men left and right but i see that in fact i don't know if it's just me but when i was younger and like in high school and things like that women were different maybe it's the times they were more elegant they were more sort of you fell in love with their you know

you potentially fall in love with their personality their beauty apollonia you see her face and you can make sense of her body like it's not like her body is invisible but it's just not like all over i just don't feel that i think it's what social media is done to people yeah and and i i've seen it happen in both directions too like that i don't think in any way men are are innocent yeah definitely these charges in any way either it's just it's a competitive nature it's getting on trends and you know oh she's dressing like that okay i'll dress something like that too even if you don't realize you're doing it right right it certainly happens. It does. So I see what you're saying and I also completely agree. I never, whenever I'm thinking of like a girl I'm attracted to, the first thing I'm thinking about is her face. It's the first

thing that pops in. I don't go like, oh, well, what's the size of her ass? Yeah. That may come second. But, you know, it's like you are thinking about the most important part, which is how I connect with you on a personal level. The soul, right? The eyes as the poets and the windows to the soul. It's where it all happens. And so that is my, and I think women just get it wrong. Just like we men get it wrong and think we have to be bad boys. We have to be macho. We have to, women like males that are hard and strong and and cold. But they can smell when you're not in your own skin trying to do that. They can smell that and it's simply not true. They do not like this. In fact, studies show that females and males for long-term mating prefer men that are kind and vice versa for both genders, kindness.

sincerity generosity charitable so this is a couple things there yeah first of all you just said for long term for long term meeting yeah and secondly when you say they're prefering is this based on what they're being polled at like when you ask them what they service yeah what they prefer yeah what they prefer in mail what kind of traits and this is so all right i'm gonna push back on this a little bit yeah i think that there's first of all i think there's a balance and in two worlds you have on one end of the spectrum, all of the characteristics that you just name on the other end of the spectrum, you would have like what Andrew Tate says, like, you're going to fuck everything, fuck them, you know, which is just like, I think that's crazy too.

Yeah. But there's a balance here that I think women want, even if they don't say it, if you are absolutely all those things at all time, caring, nurturing, whatever, you can eventually kind of become safe. Yeah, but in the wrong ways. Yes. I think, I think part of being safe. is also being something that in some small ways,

they always have to chase with you a little bit. What that doesn't mean is that you should try to set up systems or become something different to try to match that box of what that is. I think you have to absolutely be yourself. And if there are some weaknesses in attraction that exists with you being yourself, you have to live with that and make up for that in other ways.

But when you're saying like women want all those things in a long-term partner, yes, they want aspects that, but if you were all those kind of like almost more caring female characteristics 100% of the time, it'll get old for them. For most women, it does. I 100% agree. So when I say they prefer generosity and kindness and all that as long-term traits, that doesn't mean that you buy her like cars and roses and you're kind of totally into her in that sense.

It means that you have those traits overall in you, that you have kindness, that you have empathy, you have these, that you have these traits. A great example would be in two characters, in fact. Have you seen Beauty and the Beast? Of course. You have Gaston on the one hand, big neck, very masculine, muscles. He eats a dozen eggs a day. You've seen that? And he's just complete narcissist. So he's he has the dark tried traits that some people in social media might have. So he's Machiavellian, psychopathic and narcissistic. That's what Nadine was talking about when she was here. So we can go into those traits,

but these are traits that women find attractive when they are teenagers and more for short-term mating. These are the Gastong. These are the ultra-masculine red-pill psychos. Now, the beast, what is the beast all about? When Bell goes to the castle and meets the beast. initially the beast is a beast

he's terrifies her he's scary she doesn't like her but over time bell learns to like him he's kind of clumsy like the way he eats and you know when they get to know each other he's kind of messy but he's he's human you know there's something there that female

like about clumsy men too in the coffee scene me Joe Black Joe Black is also kind of clumsy kind of the coffee kind of spills over a little bit and he's kind of a little bit you know there's something endearing about that too, by the way. Now, so he has that, but the beast has capacity,

even though he likes Bell. First of all, he's not completely clingy. He lets her go, in fact. He says, go to your dad. The dad is being harassed by Gastong and his men. So he says, go, go to her, go to your dad. You are no longer a prisoner. She was held as a prisoner, by the way, Bell in the castle of the beast. He says, go to your dad. Oh, you are no longer my prisoner. You are free. What trade does it signify there? That's an example of not being clingy. Learning that love is sacrifice.

That love is all about loving somebody but understanding that you love them for you love them for who they are but you want them to be happy. That's what love is all about. Not you being possessive. It's not a possessive, narcissistic

love. For Gaston, it's all about a trophy. Bell is the trophy. I have another trophy on the wall. I have all my pictures of Gaston, but then I have Bell, the most beautiful girl in the village as the next trophy. The beast, on the other hand, it's all about I love her and I want to be happy. Let her go. That's the first trait. Second, now she, Bell goes out in the forest, and the wolves attack, the wolves attack, the wolves attack, there's that attack of wolves, and the beast can, he has this magic mirror so he can see what she's doing, and he sees that she's being attacked

by these wolves, and he comes and protect her and saccharacteries. And he comes and sacrificial. He's mortifies himself, in fact. He's almost dead. He's being eaten by these wolves, but he protects her and saves her. That's the bodyguard effect, strength, masculinity. All right? Then they go back to the castle and Bell is able to take care of him. That's another feature of romantic love when the women take cares of a man and he's sick, he's a bit. That's the mother, the maternal instinct, you see, attachment comes in. Now it's, that's not a very, That's not a sexual thing. That's more attachment.

That is oxytocin, these bonding hormones that we have, mother with a child has, for example. That kicks in now. And she starts bonding with the beast. So there's all these features of the beast having strength, sacrificing love. And then at the very end, Bell learns to love this beast that was so rude and held her as a prisoner.

And why did she do that? She does that because he gradually reveals his character. He's a character that is strong. But he lets her go. He lets her go because he knows that that is the right thing for her happiness. Love is all about sacrifice. Have you seen that scene in Titanic where Jack says to Rose, there's only so many boats, only so many boats on the Titanic?

And then he says to Rose, Rose, you go, I will take another boat, even though he knows there is no other boat. You take this boat. You go. And she kind of goes on that boat, and the boat goes down. and Jack is kind of looking at her, and she looks at Jack, and the boat goes down, and Jack knows for that moment,

he knows he will never see Rose again, and there's a sadness in his eyes. He's trying to hold back his tears, but there's a sadness in his eyes, and then Rose looks at him and looks at him, jumps back on the bloody ship. That's what love is all about. It was until that cold-hearted bitch

wouldn't let him on the fucking plank. There was a lot of room on that thing. There was a lot of room on that, Belmont. There was enough room for two people there and she let him die. 100%. No, I can... I'll never get over that. I'll take that.

I'll take that. But you see what I mean, right? You see that insanity of that action of that woman is what love is. It's insanity in that moment that she's ready to die with the man that she just had that poetic encounter with. How do you explain that scientifically? You tell me, Julian, because I have no idea. You're looking at me? It's crazy.

I'm from New Jersey. Right. It's like, right. Explain it scientifically. Yeah, there's a lot going on there. The Beauty and the Beast example is an amazing example, though. It is. Because you talk about love is sacrifice 100%.

And then, and this is where I love when philosophy and science kind of get like a little intertwined and you can't tell which is which at some point. But like love is sacrifice, great, 100%. then Bell gets into danger. Yes. And a biologically, you know, in this case, superior male is able to physically come in and protect and save her. Key word being saved there. Because I think people misinterpret this a lot.

They do. With the gender dynamics. It is a common trap for a man to think a woman wants to be saved. And they don't just mean physically like go protect her. if she got in trouble or something like that, but they think like you got to pull her in and, you know, kind of show her the way and save her in this world. It's so scary. The reality is that's actually usually the opposite of what they want. What they want is physical protection and to know that's there. That's evolutionary. But in many ways, women like to see men as some sort of

like, you know, from a mental perspective, some sort of like problem that they can help fix a little bit like they actually want to come in yeah and save you so it's like you exchange the physical saving protection for the mental and like kind of spiritual saving and protection that they want but men will often think that they need to do both for women and one is something that repels them completely because it's like they're yeah they're very often not in every case this is across the the masses and percentages here very often they're more like no i can take care of my own mind like i'm not i'm not i'm not I'm good. You don't need to come in and tell me how to think or that everything's going to be okay all the time. Yeah. I do definitely know what you mean. And there is that component to it. I think that's very true.

Can we say we get a little break? Oh, hell, yeah. We'll be right back. I'm going to say my bladder is expanding. Yeah, it's perfect. We'll be right back. Great. All right. We had started this whole loop talking about the phases of love. So infatuation, romantic and then bonding. Is that the third one? Yeah, yeah. And by the way, they don't have to come in right that order. So you can have, you know, you can have bonding first, romantic and then and then the, you know, infatuation. So it doesn't have to be, it depends. It's very, it can be cultural, culturally dependent. But it often is that's like literally often is you first seeing her and then having that romantic infatuation and then having the bonding. But it doesn't have to be that way. All right. So maybe a good way to go to this example would be one we started to talk about last time you and I were talking, which is the Titanic. Yes. Example with Jack and Rose, which you were just mentioned in a few minutes ago. But like, can you walk me through how like in the movie, how each phase worked and like when it crossed from one to the other?

That might be helpful for people to be able to understand. 100%. So I haven't watched a movie in a long time, but I've watched a lot of clips for my course, right? So Jack is on the ship and he sees Rose. The first time he sees her, she's up there and she's on the other deck, on the top deck, and he's down there. And she sees her and he's struck by lightning. That's the lightning striking. Yes.

So that's the first aspect. Then that's infatuation. That's infatuation. That's the infatuation state. That's attraction. Then you have afterwards. She's trying to kill herself, in fact. So she's fed up with all the high-class stuff, you know, her rich husband, you know, and that life, that high-class life, she feels it's constraining her and making her feel, you know, she doesn't feel good about that.

And so she wants to now kill herself, goes out on the, on the ship, on the edge of the ship, and wants to jump out, you know, out. Jack comes out and says, you know, you can't jump, you know, the water's too cold is going to kill you. like freezing and he's able to. What he does actually is an interesting trick, Julian. What he does is she is all, she's all limbic driven. So the emotional core of the brain, the fear part of the brain,

the amygdala, is hyperactive in her wanting to jump out of the ship and kill herself. What he does, he's actually a very clever trick. So I think, I'm not sure of the James Cameron thought of this, but what he does,

he says, he starts saying, well, do you know I'm from, like I'm from Milwaukee or something, you know, this and that. And he starts talking about like cognitive stuff. Yes. And then he goes, oh, by the way, the water is freezing cold as well and starts to talk about like prefrontal stuff.

And we know that when the prefrontal cortex is highly active, it will often dampen the activity of the amygdala and the fear centers. These two centers tend to not be active at the same time. They're very antagonistic. That's why in depression, for example, you see people with depression. you will have a literal activation of the emotional core of the brain, the amygdala, the ACC, and fear departments being activated in a temporal way that it precedes the prefrontal. So there is that. And Jack really is very clever.

He taps into that and he's able to get her off, put it in a prefrontal state of being. Emotional override of the logical. Of the logical part of the brain. So we have that. and then that is a source for bonding. He becomes the beast that saves Bell out of the, from the wolves. This is literally the same scenario, just her jumping down. He's much more of a verbal guy.

He's not the muscle guy, Leonardo DiCaprio, in that movie. And so this is his way of saving her. Next, what he does, he takes this lady and takes her on a journey. Rose basically And what way does he do that? Basically the way he does that is by saying, look, this is your life. Your life is trapped.

You feel you are trapped. You're being told 24 hours what to do. You have to eat this food. You have to dress this way. You have to obey this man. You know, this is your life. And she feels imprisoned. And so what Jack does is that he provides an alternative reality for her

that's intoxicating. It's an escape from her. her world. It's very dopaminergic driven. And we know love, obviously, you have a lot of dopamine. And so he's able to give her that. And women actually, I feel like, I don't even feel that, but there's women do like that when men can take a woman and take her on a ride in life. It's like you, when you take, when a father takes her child, when I take my child, when I take my child, and I play with my child, lift my child and throw her around and lift her and put her here and do all these crazy games with her

that are kind of a little bit aggressive but the child loves it, the little girl loves it. I think women unconsciously want that from a man as well. A man that can take her for a ride on a magic carpet just like Aladdin and Jasmine. Take her out of the palace, take her out of her world and show her a whole new world. Adventure.

Adventure. And I think, so women love that, and that's what Jack is doing. That's what Aladdin is doing with Jasmine as well. And so he does that and she falls in love with that. She goes back to being a teenager again, to having that ride. And then they bond, obviously, and there's some bonding going on and attachment as well. It's over the course of a few days.

But there's some bonding going on. And then eventually, now at some point in the move, we're not going into too many details. Roses leaves him. She says, no, I cannot go into your words. I cannot continue to be with you and he goes out on the deck that we talked about that last time. And then she later regrets. But he also, and you laid this out last time, he felt the emotion, he sat in it, but he was able to detach and not let it own him.

Again, he was the beast like the beast scenario. He let her go knowing that I want what is best for her. Yes. And when she leaves, I will stay in a masculine calm composure. I will not like the emotional, emotional part of the brain overwhelm my prefrontal cortex, so I become destabilized. And I think that's key for what a woman wanted to them in. The emotions have to be there. Like he looks devastated on that out on the front deck and all that. He looks devastated. You can

see he's kind of looking out with his eyes, like squirted and he looks out. And he's not happy. You can tell his heart is broken. But then when Rose comes out and says, I've changed my mind. And then he says, shh. And then they do that, that classical scene when, you know, they look out and I'm a king of the world and all that,

you know, that kind of, I'm flying Jack and all that. Point is that that's part of it. Eventually then, then obviously sinks, you know, the ship sinks and all that happens.

And, and, oh, there's another scene I have to say in that movie before we conclude this movie. On that, on that little thing, on the,

what do you call that, the when they're drowning at the very end oh on the board on the board there you know do you notice at some like he's down there he's dying right he's he's actually dead at this point he has given he has told well actually before he dies he says to rose he says to rose promise me that you will go on that you will live and you will have children and be happy and all that right he says all that stuff right when when then when the ship when the boats come back for her

Jack there's a boat exactly but you notice that she's he's ready to to give up but the only thing keeping her from giving up is the frack that's the promise she gave to Jack and she then continues

it's a intense love story but I think it captures what what love is all about what's happening in the brain the positive delusion positive delusion yeah this is the only person in the world that can be the one and this is really

these regions of the brain turning on and off in this pattern yeah it is kind of a perfect story the way they did that and crest that's why it's beautifully cinematically as well the ship and everything now what about the attraction though physically

that happens with sex and the reason I ask this is because obviously when you have sex Well, at least from the male perspective, this isn't always the case for females. It's harder for them with full orgasm and everything. But with men, like, sex is great. That said, even with us, like, it can eventually get stale. And then that is tied sometimes scientifically to us losing attraction for a woman.

Like, okay, this is kind of the same thing over and over again, where we allow it to then override all the other things that might be great in the attraction that's happening with the woman outside of the bedroom. but what is it in the brain that can kind of cause that to wear away, to where maybe it just gets stale, and then you're unwilling to think that that will change at some point? Do you mean the habituation where you become like, if it's repetitive? Is that what you're saying?

So the dopaminergic system, and this is known as the Coolidge effect, if you have, like you have a hamster or a rat or something, you know, it will engage in sexual, intercourse with other hamsters until a certain point. But then at some point, it will just stop. It will become desensitized. The dopaminergic neurons will stop firing.

And this is, you have your, did you know that dopamine in the brain is a set, we have a set amount at any given time? So I can only be happy at so much happy in a given week. And then eventually I have to go down to baseline and beneath baseline in order to have dopamine recharge. So I can't be having intercourse. be having intercourse 24 hours. I mean, the hamster would not be able to. But, but then, if you introduce a new hamster into that cage, it will start doing this sexual act again.

This is the coolidge effect. Eventually, the same dopaminergic stimulus or stimuli, if there are multiple hamsters, will desensitize the dopaminergic system. And if you provided novelty, then you will have potential attraction again. But let me tell you here, it's actually in that hamster or in a rat, right? When it's engaging in these acts, there's a circuit going from the in the amygdala, right, that

core, fierce end of the brain. It actually has many subcomponents. So if you go into the nitty-gritty of neuroscience and really look at it, there's sub-components. And there's a part of it called the bed nucleus of the striaterminalis.

Nucleus of the striaterminalis. That nucleus of the strata terminalis. That part of the brain, there's a circuit, there's a circuitry going to the hypothalamus, and you know the hypothalamus too well now, right? That circuit, if you sever it in these rats, guess what happens? It will stop mating altogether. Regardless, like you provided tons of new hamsters, it will just stop mating. Takes away the impulse for another one and doing it.

You have severed, you have cut the sexual circuit in the, brain you have removed sexuality by by by by severing the the the the the circuit in the amygdala to the hypothalamus the bed nucleus of stratuminalis to the nucleus to the hypothalamus that is a sex circuit and if you stimulate that part of the brain while it's even though the dopaminergous system is dying off it will keep engaging in the in the act so literally we have a sex circuit in rat that could perhaps also exist in humans it's very interesting It's very interesting we have this.

Absolutely. But the coolidge effects really is what explains it, that if males have, you know, are sexually engaged with a woman, they will eventually desensitized. That's why you also got to mix it up, too, you know? Like, if you start to make, you know, the way that you physically show love to be just kind of like a routine. Yes. Or, sure, I don't know how we'll get to that point, but it doesn't. for people, then you, it's like a cascading effect to the rest of the attraction. It just kills it. 100%. So, yeah, what I'm saying that when I'm saying that dopaminergic neurons will die off,

by that I mean, not that, you know, that you will start being not being attracted to your wife. It just needs novelty. It means that you have to detach some, you know, sometimes and so forth, meaning you don't you know some abstinence might help for for certain amounts of time could recharge the pneumergic circuits but yeah I think novelty is really is the key for that

but yeah man that the whole attraction love stuff is interesting I also covered transcendent love I'm not sure if you're interested in that transcendent love yeah love of God and spirituality I think that was that was a key part of it and so

of what I was talking about and so it's a completely different type of love now it's interesting with the romantic love though there's also a there's also a transcendent quality to it almost has a spiritual soul component but then when you're dealing with love of God and love of spirituality that's completely different realm

and so yeah that's very interesting yeah and what what makes it I mean it's obvious that it's it's a different thing but yes I guess like scientific what's so different about the way we express that love spiritually. Spiritual love. I'm gonna put up my jacket. I kind of feel a little bit chilly now. Yeah, yeah, we keep it, we keep it icy in here.

Yeah, it's a little trick of the trade. You don't want people hot in the chair because they get sleepy and they're not as good. So I like a cold rather than hot. Got a high air conditioning bill around here. You're doing hot cold on me, huh? Yeah, that's right. That's actually you're on to me.

All right. It was actually inspired by some people smarter than me who understand the way the human brain works when they're talking. Awesome. So, no, I think transcendent love is interesting. It taps into consciousness and what consciousness is all about and where it all comes about. If you look at the brain, there's a part we talked about before called the limbic structure of the brain. Now, in the limbic brain, in the limbic brain, if you use a helmet called, the God helmet and you stimulate that helmet

you literally feel divine beings you will have angels you will see angels you will feel there's have all kinds of spiritual experiences is Michael Persinger's helmet in 1990s very interesting work hmm you see angels people see reports seeing angels

what about like demons they might as well so it depends on your state and how you feel if you have in the temporal lobes if you have epileptic seizures meaning the neurons in the limbic structure go ballistic, they fire in a high rate and you have a seizure in that part of the brain, you can develop what's called temporal lobe epilepsy or temporal lobe personality. This is interesting.

So imagine this, just a part of the brain, which is a regular part of meat tissue in the brain, it becomes hyperactivated, and suddenly what happens is that you will become a spiritual person. You will say I am in communication with God. You'll become spiritual. You will start writing poetry. You focus solely on religious stuff. And you have all these spiritual qualities emerging from you, merely from these brain circuits going awry. So I think that's fascinating that that can happen. And it shows us where spiritual tendencies, might arise in the brain. It seems to be in that limbic circuit, in that limbic structure. Is there something, I don't want to get like way too meta here, but when it comes to like

the spiritual realm with things and how we may experience love or seeing things like you just described, whether it be angels or demons, I had started to talk with you last time about this, but we kind of got off it. Like, is there something connected to our, our, our concept? consciousness with that, meaning we are filling in the gaps of why we are even who we are by trying to create something larger than life or outside the known realm to explain it? Yeah, yeah. So in terms of having something outside our skulls, this is really difficult to answer. Is this true?

Is there something outside our skulls? Is there spiritual connection, something out there, you know, community? communicating with us. I think that is true as a spiritual religious person, yes, I do think it's true and it could very well be the true. We talked about the radio analogy last time. If you have a radio, you know, you play with it and the voice goes away, but really you don't know that this radio waves coming, right, similar to consciousness. So I think that is all true. But I think really in terms of consciousness about and self, self can get, let's talk about self a little bit. self is because then we can get to deeper into consciousness and spirituality. But let's start

there because what is self? And how can self get deranged? Now in the SPL region of the brain up here, if I have a stroke to that part of the brain, the SPL, I might say that my left hand that is now paralyzed belongs to you. So I lose ownership of that hand. That's very common. So mind you, This person is perfectly lucid, eloquent. You sit down with him, play chess with him. Everything is normal, but you tell him who does this hand belong to? And he'll say it belongs to you. So he develops this delusion.

Or, or in some cases, the doctor might say, lift your hand, raise it. And they will try to raise it. You know, they can't, obviously. But then they will say, oh, doctor. It is an inch from your nose, Doctor. So they will lie. They will confabulate. Where is Daredevil?

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Are you waving it? Yes, doctor, it's waving right now. It's waving at you. It's fine. It's not paralyzed. So they have these bizarre delusions of selfhood. There's a case of Oliver Sacks. We looked up Oliver Sacks last time.

He has a great case study of him. He's at a hospital and there's a patient of his and the patient is lying in bed and he keeps throwing down his own leg. He keeps throwing it down and he keeps pushing it and he calls the nurse and says, there's this hairy thing, you know, to the nurse. This is this hairy thing on my body. It won't, it just, it's attached to me. It won't go away.

What's happening? You know, and the nurse is saying, what are you talking about? It's your leg. And he's completely adamant that there's something attached to him that is not his. And this is always happens on the left side of the body. So it's the left leg or left arm. Why? Because we build a sense of a body image in the.

these right parietal structures up here. That's where we build a sense of a self. So you see that this can lead to these strange delusions of self. Let me give you yet another example that's even more bizarre. There are people out there that have healthy limbs. They have healthy limbs. Nothing is wrong with them. But for some reason, they want to amputate their healthy limb.

Mind you, it's perfectly healthy. In all respects, there's nothing wrong with the limb. They scan it. but the person says, keep saying, this arm doesn't belong to me. It's not my arm. And this could be any person. It could be the director of your bank. It could be your school principal.

It could be your father. It could be Uncle Joe Cashier, anybody. But they have this strange delusion that their arm does not belong to them. Then you might say, Julian might say, what's going on in the brain? What's happening? When you look at the brain and you scan their brains, and this has been none, you look at the Samatra sensory region, first of all, to see if they're going to see if they're going to sensory information is coming to the arm.

We talked about the sensory map. When you touch it, that part of the brain should light up. And lo and behold, it does. You touch it, it dances with activity. Fine. Next, you go back in the brain to the SPL regions where you construct a sense of a body image, but in a more abstract sense of a self.

When you look there, the arm is missing. There's a lack of representation of that arm in your body image. So that explains why they want to cut it off Each of us You, me, Joey, all of us have a body image A neurologically scaffolded Body image, a sense of a self

With certain boundaries Drawn into our brains burned into the circuitry And that will dictate What you feel like is your body And if an arm is missing in that template You would literally go and say

Oh my arm does not belong to me It belongs to somebody else In this case they will say I want to amputate that arm. It's not a part of me. Does this make sense, by the way? Yeah, it does. I'm kind of one.

I'm thinking of like extreme examples in my head, but like, I don't know if this is like a similar idea, but remember that lady Rachel Dolazzo? No. She was like 100% white, but then she started dressing like she was black and convinced herself that she was black and then told everyone she was black and then was in charge of like an NDACP chapter and then it all came out. Yeah, yeah. Is that because, like, in her head, she was like, no, I am black.

There's something similar going on with that, but in this case, it's definitely, definitely body image specific. It's specific to the sense of body image. And what's really interesting then, many of these folks go out and have the arm amputated. What do you think happen? Do they feel happy after the amputation or do they regret? Not happy, I'm going to guess. They actually feel thrilled. They do?

They do. They do. It's totally. Even after what, like, they don't like come to? like, oh shit, that was a bad idea. That would be the normal reaction, right? And that's what you see in many cases of similar situations. But in this case, absolutely thrilled.

They are excited, they're happy. The arm is no longer a part of me. I feel good. Now there's an even more bizarre twist to this whole saga here. These guys, coming back to our initial discussion about attraction, they tend to be attracted to people who are missing that limb that they want to have amputated. Okay, so imagine Baland over here sitting here.

He wants to amputate his life left arm. You with me? I'm with you. Okay, I want to amputate my left arm, and that is because the left arm is missing in the SPL, in that body image. Now, if you have a girl over there, and her left arm is actually amputated,

corresponding to the arm that you want to amputate, you will find her extremely attractive. In fact, if you have her duplicate, a copy of her with the full body, you'll say, nah, I'll go for the one with the amputation. It's like you complete me by missing some parts. Exactly. And the question is why.

What's going on? We think, and this is a theory that is proposed, that the SPL, the body image part of the brain, is hooked up to the visual part of the brain and the emotional core and the dopaminergic centers, explaining and dictating the human attraction to the human form. why does Beland find a human form attractive overall?

Why am I not attractive to like attracted? Why are humans not generally attracted to a chair, a table? I can find you a few, but yeah. There are some weirdos out there. But you get what I'm saying. 100%. On the savannah, the human brain doesn't want to have any ambiguity. You'd want to be fast at zooming in on that potential mate,

that human shape unambiguously behind the tree behind the bushes, And so it wants a shortcut, a circuit for saying, oh, this is a human body, find it attractive. Right? Now let's get weird. Yeah. But does it make sense? It makes sense. It makes sense.

But let's get weird. Go ahead. What about when we're living in a world where the physical form looks human, but you know it's AI? You know it's a robot. But I think that's exactly why robots are pretend very. tricky. That's why they can trick us because they look like us. They speak like us. They have potential emotions or not emotions, but they can mimic emotions extremely wide, like in a very subtle way. That's hard for us to discern and like know that this is a human versus a robot. I always

use the terminator as an example. You know, look at the terminator. I mean, at the very end when, have you seen, do you talk about the last scene in the before? I didn't, I don't know. I don't know. did. No, we didn't. But in the last scene, have you seen him when he's kind of like, he's blown to pieces? This is a very, very end. He's about to raise himself down the steel down into the lava thing, right? He first of all, he's, Arnold has a sense of humor. So he says, like, with one eye that's red and like his half, his face is blown off and arm is missing. He says, I need a vacation. This is the first thing he says. This is interesting. And then he, then he goes over to the edge, a very edge with Sarah Kana and John, John Connor. And he says,

John, I need to go away. I need to go because there's an extra chip up here that needs to go and into the, that needs to be destroyed so that humanity or cannot create AI and sky and sky net and all that. And that, of course, John Connor says, I order you not to go. I order you not to go. Stay. Right? I order you not to go. But then he says, then the Terminator says, he says,

as John is hugging him and saying goodbye he says and John is crying and the terminator says looks at him and says now I know why you cry it is something I can never do okay he's having a very clear understanding

what human emotion is all about human emotion is something that we feel although he will never be able to feel it because he doesn't have an emotional brain doesn't have a limbic structure So he can never feel emotion, but he can understand it, and it can feel very real, right?

And then eventually, of course, he kills himself. He goes down into the steel there and into the lava. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert, right, for those who didn't see it. Point of all this is that AI, machines, robots, will use what's called the DLPFC out here, the outer layers of the brain. They will use that for computation

of and trying to understand human emotions as well as possible. In other words, they will gauge what is human emotion all about. This is human emotions. This is how humans react in these scenarios. ABC, da-da-ra-ra. But there's no actual feeling

because to have a feeling, you have to have a medial prefrontal cortex, the middle of the prefrontal, and its communication to the amygdala and the emotional core. There's a wire that goes to the emotional. core. John Connor has that. That's why he cries and feels emotions. The Terminator, the AI robots do not have that. In fact, psychopaths, the medial prefrontal cortex, completely

shot off. There's no activity there. That's why they have no emotions. The Olympic amygdala completely shot off. Completely like the Terminator. Psychopaths are human terminators in that regard. They are AI's robots. They are calculated. They use their utilitarian DLPFC out here. This is part of the brain. And so that's, that's really the, the, the key. That's the difference between AI, psychopaths, and then human, the rest of us. Are psychopaths born, molded, or both? Interesting question. So there are, you have psychopaths on one hand, which are people that have no emotion, completely flat emotionally. These are the guys, that can sit at a church baptizing their niece or nephew while they are carrying out multiple

murderers. Michael Corleone. Or they can have spaghetti with their mother while a dead man is or near dead man is in the trunk trying to get out of the trunk. Good fellas. This is a psychopath. No emotion. They're being chased by the police.

Their heart rate doesn't go up. There's no, there's no, the heartbeat is just completely flat. You measure the sweating, nothing. Completely flat. There's no emotion. This is a psychopath. Born this way. Born this way.

Look at genes for serotonin, abnormalities. All kinds of abnormalities. These are, this is a psychopath. Tons of psychopaths, by the way, in politics and business. You don't say. Yeah. It's a very adaptive trade in certain professions. An adaptive trait.

Yes. If you can be a calculated, completely rigid, athlete who does all your, does everything that has to happen on time, you don't have emotion to interfere, your mother's illness, your wife's agony won't interfere with how you perform, and you can be a top athlete. Though I think the true athletes, the true athletes out there, the great ones, have heart. The messies of the world, the, the Maradonnas of the world, the Palais, they have heart, the greatness. You can be the perfect, you know, athlete otherwise, but the true greats, they do have heart.

They're blessed with something that can be captured, and they don't have this psychopathy like tendencies. But this is what a psychopath is all about. Psychopath is completely utilitarian, calculated. I'm going to give you an example. Something called the trolley problem. You know it. Should I mention it? Please mention it, yes. Okay, all right, so there's two tracks. On one track, there's one person. On another track, there's five persons, right?

A train is going fast towards the five people about to kill them. You're on a bridge. You can see all that. You can flip a switch, and the train will then go to and change its direction and go to the track and kill one person instead of the five people. You ask most people at this question, they will say unambiguously. they will just do it. I'll switch to the flip and I'll save that one person. Everybody says I'll do that.

Then there's a version of this where there's on the bridge there's a heavy guy, a chubby guy, he's in front of you, and as the train is coming beneath the bridge, and it's about to kill five people now, so it's not going towards one, it's going towards the five people, if you're with me. If he pushes this guy over, he will fall down on the tracks and he will he will die

but he will save the five people from dying. Now if you ask people if you have asked Joey you ask any person out there that's fairly normal they will say no I will not do it although the scenario

is the same right you're killing one person and saving the five but in this case people won't do it and then you might ask why is that the case and before I say

I answer this question a psychopath by the way we have no issues pushing that guy over He will say, I will push him over. And the reason is the following. In a normal healthy person like you and I, we consult our emotions. We consult the amygdala.

We consult the insula. I talked about before our bodily states. We consult all these brain regions, emotional core. And then the medial prefrontal cortex says, I just can't push this guy over. I cannot physically be like push him over and kill him. It's just too much. a psychopath doesn't have these parts of the brain he uses the utilitarian DLPFC again up here

and so for him it's very easy just to throw him over and push him over it's kind of you know it reminds me of that scene in the dark night where the joker sends the two boats off the off gotham city island and one boat is filled with pretty much all the criminals and the other boat is filled with all the citizens and they each hold a trigger to blow up each other's boats. And he's expecting that he says you got 15 minutes or you all die. And he's expecting people in the trolley problem of life,

regardless of whether it's the criminals or the so-called normal people, non-criminals of society, he's expecting them to push the fat man over. The criminals viewing the fat man as anyone else who's not them. The non-criminals viewing it as, oh, they're the criminals. they already made their choice, but neither boat does it because they're unwilling to break a moral boundary to save themselves. 100%. So this is a feature of the human brain.

When we make decision making, are we making decisions using the DLPFC or are we, you know, the psychopath part of the brain or are to say the logical part of the brain? Or are we using the medial prefrontal, which is a bridge between emotion and higher cognitive thinking? And this can be shown in other scenarios too. For example, if I was to say, Julian, do you want $100 now or $110 a week from now? Most people would say to this, they will say, I want $100 now. There's something special about the here and now, right?

Something. If I ask the same question, but I say, would you want $100, $100, 52 weeks from now, or $110, 53 weeks from now? then it changes. They say, give me the hundred and ten, fifty three weeks from now. Okay? The point is, in the latter scenario, when it's not about here and now, you use the DLPfc, utilitarian. But when it's here and now and something, you can have a reward now, you use the medial prefrontal cortex. So I think basically understanding this basic difference between the medial prefrontal cortex, what it does, how it's important.

important for decision making can enrich our lives. We should make more decisions using the the medial prefrontal cortex. We should consult our emotions for the right decisions. We shouldn't run to chat GBT and ask, how do I deal with this problem? How do I deal with this social conflict? Because it is the psychopath. That is, you are dealing with a psychopath when you're dealing with chat GBT and these kind of AI. And you're saying genetically a lot of them are pre-wired for that but do you also think that someone can be genetically not pre-wired for it and then they're you know you don't choose where you're born they're born into an environment that just completely molds and molds them that way yeah this is what yes this is true this can happen

this is known as a sociopath so that's the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath but a sociopath by the way is somebody who does have some emotion but through exposure being in a tough neighborhood just having maybe being beaten as a child having a lot of these bonding hormones kicked out of you almost so you've learned that the world is dangerous that you have to be callous

and literally it has epigenetic markers all the traumatic stuff that you witness as a child you know alcoholic parents perhaps and that can also shape you into a sociopath but a sociopath would always have a little bit of emotion a little bit of regret, a little bit of guilt. There's something there that's not completely absent. The psychopath is just no regret.

A psychopath, a psychopath will do the following. If you break up with a psychopath, like a stung type scenario, okay, somebody who sees a woman as a trophy, if you break up with that guy, you know what he will do? He might plan to get back to you by being romantic, so he'd be very romantic, get back to you. and then you'll wait a year make sure that she falls completely in love with him

and then just break up with him just to say oh this was all a ploy I did this just to get back to you for for insulting me and breaking up with me this is a psychopath calculated no empathy whatsoever zero empathy yeah yeah that was something like I remember when I was younger

there was someone who I actually really like a lot who was giving me like some theories on on how to like go get your goals and stuff And like, we had the definition of a psychopath so wrong because we're like, oh, you could use it in a positive way because you're just so driven to do what you want to do. In reality, like it's actually in many cases even worse, like you're pointing out than a sociopath because a sociopath can actually have the environment mold them into being that, not to excuse being sociopath. But you know what I mean? Like, like it's wild how much someone could just be born with that kind of tendency. And, you know, we use it.

I'm guilty of it. We use it in parliance. Like, I'm a psychopath to go get my goals and whatever. But in reality, like the root of the word itself and what it really is supposed to mean is entirely different and not a good way. Yeah, a real winner is somebody who I'm trying to get you, by the way, Belon, I'm trying to get you over here just because like you're fading into Maximus behind you. So come this way a little bit and come into the table. Yeah, yeah. I'm just looking at your mark and your hats like blending in with the background.

That's better. Grab a little bit of more water. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. We'll grab that. Keep going now. A real winner in life, I think, is somebody who can have the discipline, keep going, things get tough. They may have a death in the family or they may experience hardship.

They lose sleep over it, but they keep going. Yes. That fight between the emotional brain and the prefrontal cortex is definitely there. And they are suffering because of it. that seeing their ill father or something but they keep going they keep going for it and don't give up and they have that discipline regardless of how many tears and how many things that they have to hold back in order to complete the work in front of them that for me is a real winner not somebody who was completely cold and has no emotions whatsoever yeah yeah yeah yeah i think that would be an awful

way to go through life to where you don't you don't feel anything you don't get the chance to you also don't get the chance to empathize with how other people are feeling in a good or bad direction to learn from that regardless of what direction it's in you know what i mean like there's something about you never like to see someone around you sad or really down or something like that it's it's not a good feeling to see that at all but there's something that can be learned from that afterwards that also then magnifies the beauty of life right and magnifies the good things yeah yeah Empathy is an interesting one. So empathy is crucial.

There's two types of empathy, by the way. There's cognitive and affect of empathy. Cognitive empathy, psychopaths have tons of it. You use the outer layer of the brain, as you can mention, and you know what somebody else is thinking. You know what their mind is up to. You have access to their minds almost. Like you know, okay, this person is thinking this and that,

and you have access to that. That's the cognitive empathy. Then there's affective empathy. That's the type of empathy where you feel... You feel what they're feeling. You have emotional connectedness with them. Did we talk about this last time? I can't remember.

A little bit. Okay, go ahead. It's coming. Okay, good. So I just want to make sure we got that. Okay, good. So go back and listen to that. But my point is we have these two subsystems of empathy.

But empathy is crucial, and empathy can sometimes override even cognitive barriers. So we did some experiments back in this. day. I don't think we talked about this last time. I should tell you. So we have somebody over there. He's standing over there. He touches a contaminant. Let's say fake vomit. This is Ramashandar and I are doing. Are we doing it? Oh, is this the OCD experiment? Did we talk about this? Yeah, we did talk about this. Okay, so we didn't go back and listen to it. My point is that empathy is a crucial part of our well-being. And now I'm completely off rail of whatever I want to talk about because I was planning to go down the OCD stuff. That's all good. So. So,

I got plenty of other ideas to go with. I think, okay, so if we want to take a big view, big view of the brain and how self comes about, because we started with the self, and I wanted to touch upon the self. Self is the following. To me, self is this. Self is the prefrontal lobes. We engaged in mental time travel, a sense of balance and some Julian through time. I was a child.

I grew up in this ghetto Copenhagen refugee child, came to Denmark, came to the States, and so forth. Prefrontal cortex, building a sense of self. Then we talked about the insula and mapping your bodily states. That's also part of the sense of self. Then you have the hippocamp is the memory part of the brain, all your memories, part of the self as well. Then you have the superior parietal lobule, those regions involved in a sense of body image and my body belongs to me. That also helps you create the sense of self, the TPJ, sensory information and integrating all that. And I think conjointly these circuits in the brain creates what.

what's called the self. And from the self, then comes consciousness. You cannot talk about consciousness, a sense of a conscious being without a self. What would be, you can't have free-floating consciousness. You have to have a self that's mapped onto that consciousness and linked to that consciousness. So I think you have to have a self. You have to have these structures in the brain that conjointly create a self, and then you have consciousness. And then, did you talk about qualia last time? Qualia? Qualia. That does sound familiar.

It's not familiar. There were so many things. We talked about so many things, man. But qualia is an interesting one. Okay, we didn't talk about this. This is you need the following for a sense of consciousness. This is interesting. Okay.

Now, if I, if I am a, let's say I am a, there's a super scientist here from the future. He's here. He's mapping my brain. He's looking at my brain. And he says, I can see all the cascaded. of chemicals and all the neural firings in your brain as you're about to choose between two football players and choose which you like the best.

Messy or Cristiano? Okay? Does that make sense? Now, he can look at my brain and by looking at my brain, he will know even before I make the decision he will know that I'll choose Messi. Right. Okay? He'll know that. Then I might be mischievous and say, look, look, scientist,

before I choose Messier Christiano show it to me on a piece of paper and the sciences will do that he will show it to you and at this point you choose to choose the other one does that make sense and when you do that you defy him

does make sense my point of my point of this thought experiments is free will and consciousness and free will do we have free will or do we not have free will and there's a lot of debate about free will yeah and we have free will we don't think we talk about this we did we got this is actually some i'm glad you're bringing up i wanted to talk about this more but we couldn't dig into it we didn't have enough time what you were saying is that you were defining the three different ways that we can try to basically like measure for three will or something like that

and then also what you were saying is that this is where i brought it up earlier where the idea came from where you're about we can't totally measure time and space with consciousness in the brain such that it's hard to say whether it goes one way or another with free will. Did I say that right? We talked about, yeah. So free will is an interesting part. So see, this is when this is when sleep deprivation then starts to mess me up. I get consciousness and free will wrong. But no, do we have free will as human? This is the question, right? Do we have free will? And in order to have consciousness, you need to have a free will arguably, arguably, although many scientists, Do you know many scientists don't believe in free will?

Did you know this? I've heard some scientists say it's not real. I didn't know. I don't know if I would use the word many, but I'd trust you to use the word a lot more than me. You're in the space. In the space. Most scientists would actually say,

most neuroscientists would say we have no free will. And what basis? They would literally say, they would point to things like the experiment that I talked about last time where if you can actually know, you can look at your brain and measure the brain.

and even before a person consciously chooses to move his hand, the brain will pick that up. They will use that perhaps. And then they will look at all kinds of genetics, epigenetics, environment, and say, look, every decision you made before you went into that bank

and you shot that person was all driven by your neurochemistry, how much sleep you had last night. And then the person just wasn't the, you know, he was there, but then all that chemistry, genetics, epigenetics, environment, brain circuitry inherited

from the parents and all that just led up to that moment and pop you killed him so you have no free will so that's one view what i was trying to illustrate with this thought experiment is that even if you have access to the brain circuitry and activation before he makes a conscious choice it seems like you can always defy that at the very end that was my point so if you do have a choice between a and b at the very end if somebody should be shows you the answer, for example, you can choose to go the other way or you can choose not to go the other way and it becomes the infinite loop. Do we have a sense of conscious awareness, free will, and can we choose our own path? And I do think we do have veto power to ultimately make our own

decision. I do too. I don't think we're just some controlled robot and an experiment from an overlord to actually do the things that we command us to do. Like it's a fucking Sims game. I think so And part of that might be my bias to Not wanting life to be meaningless Because it would feel pretty meaningless If we knew otherwise But I do think some things could be like pre-programmed

To not necessarily happen But To create a cause and effect Like if certain people are born as a psychopath They are pre-programmed to create some sort of chaos In society That will then have a butterfly effect on many other people. Now, what that butterfly effect causes if the wave moves this way or that

way and causes this thing or that thing, I think that's where free will comes into it. And I think that if we didn't have free will, we wouldn't have such an understanding of the good and the bad on so many things. Obviously, there's gray area with stuff and, you know, you can have the conversation about what is all good or what is all bad. And we have many times in different contexts on this podcast. But, you know, there there is the light and the darkness that exists overall where people can see like ah or, you know, and if that makes sense. And so I do think free will plays a role in that. And I also think, you know, you are the dreams expert. We haven't talked a ton about dreams today, but, you know, we did get into dreams a lot last time and there's much more to go to. You spent so much of your

life on it. But I think that the ways, the way our consciousness can behave like in a format like that where we fall asleep and then this uncontrollable thing happens where we start to inject what's real, what's fake and create these stories in our mind that's almost like attached to a separate universe while our body is resting and physically rebuilding itself. I think that things like that actually prove free will. I don't think that that's like, you know, some uploaded software. that's injected into you. It's far too creative. It's far too complex. I guess the counter argument could be, well, what is creative or complex to an entity that's all knowing that's way above you doing it to you? I guess that's possible. But there's such clear beauty and chaos in the world

that it just wouldn't make sense to me as a human here on earth that free will would not be a thing. 100%. I think consciousness, for consciousness, you have to have some kind of free will and you have to have some kind of at least flexible output. So what do I mean? You look at a B, for example, and it's in its dancing, it does its wiggle dance when it's signaling to the other Bs where the hive is and all that. It looks very complicated and complex. But would most people say a B is conscious? No. Why wouldn't they say a B is conscious? They would say a B has no flexible output. It has one. singular algorithm and it will only do this all the time. So it's not conscious in fact. But a human being on the other hand, it has a choice. It can make that cola versus Pepsi or Messi versus Ronaldo question and choose one.

So we have flexible output. That's what makes us conscious. Another example would be let's take the dream world as you were talking about. You want to talk about sleep well? Let's talk about that as an example. during sleep paralysis, are you conscious versus are you conscious during sleep walking? So some people during deep sleep can wake up,

in fact, they jolt awake, but only so much so that they can start walking around in their house, they go around, they start maybe their car and start driving. This is well known. On the freeway, they go, eyes are wide open, but they're deeply asleep. This is called sleepwalking.

Now, if you stop that sleepwalker and say, look, Joe, Christiana or Messi, Pepsi or Cola, Paris or London, they will not be able to choose. Why, the prefrontal is shut down, so they have no sense of agency and they have no sense of flexible output. That person is not conscious.

We can be clear on that definition. It's like a bee or like any kind of like primitive animal with no consciousness. So that we can be clear on the definition here. This is not a conscious agent. But during sleep paralysis, in fact the person is conscious

because if I was to communicate with this person that's paralyzed and is aware of his surroundings and if I could communicate with him and in fact I can using his eyes because the eyes can move I could actually ask him who do you prefer

Pelle or Maradona and he could move his eyes two to the left that would mean Pelle or one to the right could be Maradona so that would be an example of consciousness so definitions are important and I think

having flexible output being able to choose between A and B and C, of course, this would be an example of why consciousness, what consciousness is and what is consciousness is and what is not conscious. So I think that is important. I think it's going to get really weird, though, for humanity in general when we actually can read each other's minds and stuff like that. I think that that could totally change the way people respond, even experiments. like this because you are conscious of the fact that other people are in your head all the time. I mean, I don't, I'm not trying to get too dystopian, but as a neuroscientist who's looking at

all the trends and, you know, science behind the brave new world we're entering, how close are we to whether it be neurolink or whoever's going to do it, setting up a world where we are literally all on each other's heads all the time? Reading mind is difficult. I would say what Neurrelink are doing with moving a screen with the brain and things like that

that's actually not too difficult because you have planning and motor regions of the brain and so you could easily hook that up with an algorithm to move a cursor on a screen and things like that you know to gauge what somebody else is thinking is a completely different business I think that one tantalizing

finding is in the dream world so you can you actually have studies creating movies of people's dreams. Creating movies of people's dreams. Images. Creating like images of what people is dreaming. So this is one way to have access to somebody else's brain. Now it's very premature. It's very early days.

Oh, wait. It's something you like plug into them that creates the imagery? Let me tell you. So what they do. So what they'll do is that they will have people lying in a scanner and show them images of a car, of a house, of a chair. of a chair

and so forth so they have those images and they keep them then they show them the same items as they are awake car chair so forth so they have

and they scan their brain they have those images then they dream and then when they dream about and they ask them to report and then they scan their brain as they're dreaming and they report down

oh in this in this dream I saw a car I saw a house I saw da-da-da-da-da At Medcan, we know that life's greatest moments are built on a foundation of good health, from the big milestones to the quiet winds. That's why our annual health assessment offers a physician-led, full-body checkup

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and they have the images as well. Then they put all that into the AI machine learning, create an algorithm, and then when they're dreaming and the brain is scanning their brain, once they hit it and they dream on that house they were talking about, based on the images they saw,

they can then feed the computer and they will start seeing a house of maybe a person walking, maybe and so forth. So this is, new stuff, very few subjects. I think it's from Japan, but it shows that you can, it's getting to the early days of being able to spit out somebody's dream and putting on it, put it on a screen. So we're going beyond just mind reading of base to base, of basic conscious communication. We're going

to mind reading fucking dreams. Yes, it started with just being able to say what a person is dreaming about. So they were able to say, okay, this person is dreaming about a car, is dreaming, but based on these photos, they can take their photos when they're looking at photos and scanning their brains and so forth. They were able to say a person is dreaming about a car, a house, and so forth, and like a chair and so one. They didn't have the specificity of saying, oh, this is a Ferrari versus a Honda. They didn't know that, but they just knew it was a car. But now it's gone too far as, as far as, like, they can put it on a screen and have, have some of those images pop up. But of course, it's not what the person is actually dreaming about the original one, but it's a, like a, it's a proxy of that.

Who knows what happens in 50 years, 100 years? It probably may have very vividly. life-like images of your dreams on a screen. Oh my God. It's getting crazy out here. It is. One of the things I really enjoyed about our conversation last time is how much you're also like a student of history with things. And I didn't really get to ask you like the history of dreams and how that's been reflected into our reality and to put that in English. Like there's so many ancient texts and stories that are told.

some are clearly more philosophical rather than literal. Others seem like they could be literal. But, you know, is it possible that things like, I'm usually a good example, is it possible of something like Moses with the burning bush could just be the reflection of not even Moses' dream, but someone else's dream that was just so warped with reality

in a way that they actually thought it was real? Could that be the case? it's hard to say, right, the burning bush and all that, what happens, what happened, and was it somebody else's dream, what happened, you know? It's hard to say, I can't answer that, but I don't know. But looking at the history of dreams, it's definitely an interesting, there's an interesting unfolding of patterns, and so initially the people would look at symbols and symbolized dreams and see them as messages from the God.

We talked about Joseph and Joseph's dream from the Bible, he's, you know, in the Quran and what he saw. Then later came along, Sigmund Freud and said, no, oh, in fact, dreams are the unconscious mind. You have something called the latent and the manifest content. The latent contents is all the symbols you're seeing jumping around in your brain. So you're seeing yourself on the moon having tea with the queen. Everything is spacey, time places, places, people, everything is warped. your brain cannot tackle these anxiety-inducing objects head on

so it creates a symbol and if you were to see them as a manifest content as they actually were you would be jolted awake so your brain uses these symbols this is Freud's idea and then you would have the person when he's awake analyzes dreams decode them and then by then removes

the neurosis the anxiety and that will heal him In many ways, Freud, I'm not a Freud in fact. In fact, I don't like Freud very much. But he was ahead of his time when it comes to dreams, like knowing it's the unconscious and there's something going on beyond just some divine messages. The brain is definitely involved, as we talked about at length last time. After that, came along other scientists and then looking at the brain and knowing that the brain is involved in various parts of the brain turn on and off when we are dreaming. And so that's kind of roughly the history of dreams, if that makes sense.

When did we, like what's the earliest where humankind people wrote down or left some history of dreams where they clearly defined it as the fact that it was a dream and that, you know, it was just when you were asleep, this is what they thought of. Interesting. So it wasn't like divine messages and all that. Right. It's hard. I don't know. I don't know exactly when the first time might have been. I'm inclined towards Freud in the sense of like,

in a major way that shifted society. In a serious way, in a major societal way where he actually made a, like had a treaties and had like an actual argument, but there may have been other people before him that might have mentioned that, but they might have been burned at the stake or something for not following the paradigm of the time

and the time, you know, the thought of the time. So. Well, I mean, I think one of the many things Freud talks about was the dreams of the unconscious mind also reflect like our attractions and stuff like that as well, right? So what we dream is that do we dream about people we're attracted to that we may not even know we're attracted to or that might feel attracted to us and we didn't know it? It's a tricky thing here because, yes, he did say it's the royal road to the unconscious that our unconscious. conscience mind is really bubbling away inside the dream, and that is what we are seeing, that it's our things that are beneath the surface, right? He just say that. But does that, but does, is that the whole story? So when I see myself attracted to that girl at work,

does it mean that I'm actually attracted to her and I'm trying to inhibit that? I don't think that's true necessarily. They, because dreams don't follow in a completely logical pattern. There may be some aspects of her you are attracted to, but people will actually have, see themselves being sexually engaged with family members, incest scenarios, or pedophilia, or same sex. There's all kinds of bizarre things in dreams. People will talk about it. That aren't reflective of how they feel.

No. Not whatsoever. So you can think of the instinctual brain being amygdala, the emotional part of the brain being 30% more active, and the prefrontal cortex shutting down. and then you just have this messiness of concepts created in your mind where you cannot make sense of who is person A, why am I attracted? Is this somebody else I'm attracted to? Maybe this is a beautiful woman's body, but the head of somebody else.

And things you cannot, like going into the realm of dreams is going down the rabbit hole. So trying to analyze that and say, look, no, I'm attracted to this person over here. and that's why I'm dreaming about them is I think it can be dangerous. It can be very dangerous. What's the difference between a dream and an illusion? Illusion. Okay, in dreams, there are several components to a dreams.

In dreams, you are delusional. You have false beliefs. You think that you may be a Superman and that you are living in a palace. This is called a delusion. So you have delusions when you're dreaming. You have amnesia, so you forget your dream.

There's amnesia. You have hallucinations as well, meaning you have perceptual view, you have perceptual perceptions that are not true. These are hallucinations. These are not happening in real life. You're not actually jumping up,

you're not flying in real life. You have hallucinations. And then you have you're temporarily psychotic as well. You have strange and bizarre scenarios unfolding. An illusion, on the other hand, is a something I see in real life that is not

actually the case. So that's an illusion. I have an illusion of something. I have an illusion. It's a false belief, but it's not a delusion. But it's a belief I have of something that is turns out not to be the case. Maybe we can look it up

the actual definition, but And delusion is obviously pathological. Definition of illusion or delusion? Yeah, an illusion can be a visual illusion, something that is... The definition of illusion is a thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses. Correct. So this would be an illusion. Yeah.

Okay. And whereas a delusion would be a false belief. The reason I'm asking, because, like, in some ways it seems like an obvious answer to me. One is like, one year asleep. The other one is just when you see something wrong. But like I'm wondering, the reason I ask the question, like, what's the difference between a dream and an illusion is because we almost have like the safety net in my mind of just accepting the fact that, well, a dream is really happening. Yes. When you're asleep, meaning in a different state.

But is it active? Like when we see an illusion, are we having the same, this is not the term for it, but like psychedelic aspects of the brain being activated that happen in a dream. because we're awake, we just differentiate it when we really shouldn't at all because when we're asleep, we're still the same person with the same brain. See what I'm saying? No, say that again. So I'm blanked up. So yeah, that got a little convoluted at the end. When we're asleep, it's almost like we are viewing ourselves as like different. We're not the same person because we're not here. We're not conscious at the moment. Whereas when we're awake, I'm Julian. I'm looking at this camera right now. I'm trying to figure out whatever I'm trying to figure out. I'm here.

in the moment, I'm present. Yes. So with an illusion, we may look at it and we know, like, right now, we're present and we're actually looking at this illusion, whereas with a dream, you know, we're asleep and we forget where we are. Yes. But in reality, the aspects of the brain that tie into both, meaning like that make us notice that this is an illusion or make us notice that this is a dream.

Yes. Are still being activated, regardless of what state we're in, sleep or awake. Well, he actually shuts down when we were asleep. So the part of the brain that can differentiate between real and false shuts down. And that's why everything in the dream feels so real. That's why when you see that monster or you see that girl or you have that conversation, it feels very real. Sense of self-agency shuts down.

And in fact, that's very adaptive. That's very adaptive. Why? Having a dream where you are running from an alligator, jumping over that stone, jumping into that river, removing that tree. What you're doing right there,

you are crystallizing circuits in the brain that can help you survive better. You help you survive much better. And you are training, dress rehearsing for real life inside the dream. If that makes sense. You make a dress rehearsal for real life in that dream.

It's like virtual reality, crystallizing the circuit, making you more inept and more being able to more powerfully deal with that in real life by having the circuitry laid down in the brain. This is really what the dream is all about. And then having that extra layer in the brain when sense of self-agency goes away,

that's really powerful because it makes it much more immersive. It feels much more real. So that is what a dream is all about. It's being in this scientific testing lab with no fatal consequences. And you do not know it's a testing lap so it feels much more immersive and real, if that makes sense.

Right. And so that's what a dream is all about. Yeah, I was struggling to, it's a very difficult question for me to ask. It's one of those where like I know in my head what I'm trying to say, but getting into words, people are probably like,

what the fuck did he just asked right there? Yeah. But the reason I was like trying to get it, the illusion part is because, like if I look at an image where they, you'll see these on, social media where they say, look at this in the middle for 10 seconds and it's going to move.

You suddenly see it moving. Yes. You know it's not moving, but you're suspended in belief in that moment that you're like, holy shit, it's moving and you kind of can't tell the difference between the two. So to me, when you talk about dreams like being a suspension from reality, I think there's it, you know, my non-academic opinion, I think there's a similar thing that's happening. when you are caught in the moment of being faced with this thing that is being told to you that it's an illusion, but you actually then believe like, oh, shit, it really is moving.

You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. No, look, the brain, obviously, what it does is it does have, it fills in the blanks all the time and creates, you know, it has, it fills in perceptual holes all the time. An example would be, an example would be, for example, let's say, I talk. about last time how you have conceptual parts of the brain, how when you look at an image, you can look at it from a conceptual point of view initially, or you can look at it from an actual sensory point of view. And these two blend, and then your brain makes up a decision based on both conceptual, hippocampus, vernica's area, these meaning parts of the brain, and the actual sensory

raw data, and then makes up, oh, this is a table, this is this, this is that. And then if you have damage, let's say, to the eye, to the eye, it will fill in the blanks. And it will will give you all kinds of inputs and say the world looks like this, it looks like that. And the reason it does this, you have the syndrome, that is because viewing the world is a controlled hallucination. The world is not actually, the world I'm seeing out there is not the actual world. It is a constructed world. It's a controlled hallucination. It's my conceptual brain, my memory centers, chit-chatting with my actually sensory centers and saying, oh, this is probably the world out there. It's making a prediction about the world.

world. So in other words, at any given moment, you can see the world in various ways. Let me give you an example. You know the Dalmatian dog, it kind of has splotches. Initially, you won't know it's a Dalmatian dog. Maybe you can look it up here, but it's like splashes, maybe not. But it has like splashes, and then you see it and it becomes a dog all of a sudden. Have you seen that? I don't think I'm familiar with this. Dalmesian dog splashes, illusion. Dalmatian dog splashes illusion Oh yes Okay so you're talking about where it's like

There's other illusions like this Where it's like do you see a shape? Oh now you see your dog And there's a perceptual click Yes Yeah this would be an example There's another What's called bi-stable illusion

So you look at a woman's face At one point it looks like an old lady Or it looks like a beautiful young chick so it kind of flips And that's again Your brain can conceptually drive this and then you can't see both

either you see one or the other showing you how seeing is very conceptually driven it's driven by our conceptual views of the world I'm getting way outside my bounds right here but I'm just I'm trying to tie some of this together to like time and space and how it's odd

if you look at the movie Interstellar which Kip Thorne advised on and it got a lot of things according to many scientists like conceptually solid I think there's some scientists are like well this couldn't happen or that couldn't happen but there were a lot of concepts

that they seem to do a great job with the idea that they enter this Matthew McConaughey and the team enter this black hole and then on the other side of black hole go to these planets such that when they physically go onto the planet's time has changed to 20 years per every hour or whatever it was something like that back home

Right. Meaning that when they're done this mission where they didn't age very much, they go home and Earth has aged 100 years or something like that. Is there a concept in them entering that black hole and then coming out on the other side onto the planets to where, how do I want to, this is so hard to ask? to where their consciousness has been suspended such that it seems that time has not passed, but time really did pass to them. But on earth, no consciousness was suspended, so time passed and the aging process took place in a way that it doesn't take place for McConaughey and his team on the other side of the black hole. It's a great question. Thank God.

It's hard to say exactly from the perspective of that movie. It's very hard to say whether how that would map. But consciousness, time can stand still in your brain. This is actually a clear-cut example of this. This is a man called HM. And his hippocampus region, he had his hippocampi, the two memories structures in the brain, jelly roll structures behind the ears.

You have two of them on each side. And they help you take short-term memory and store it in a long-term vault in the cortex, the outer layer of the brain. Now this poor chap, back in the body, the day he had both his hippocampi removed. So he has no hippocampus. So he's basically staying in the realm of like one or two minutes all the time and then he forgets everything else. So every time his wife appears, it's like seeing her for the first time in 30 years. She has

to have a conversation and he has forgotten everything. Three minute, two minutes has gone. She comes back and he's he's happy again for seeing her. And so you could sit there and you can sit there and you tell him the same joke over and over and he will just laugh find it funny you know you can he will find his wife attractive each time as if the first time he saw her and you know and you can introduce yourself to him the whole and whole evening and he will forget you after two minutes and you have to reintroduce yourself so this is an example of being stuck in time uh hm and his brain was like extremely well studied this would be an example of how consciousness can break down how time can

unravel for some people. Yeah, that's from a short-circuit perspective, though, internally, having to do with the brain organ itself? Do you mean time, perception itself that it can expand? We talked about how time can expand in dreams, for example, because neurons are firing more slowly in REM, in rats. And that could mean that the brain, time feels stretched out in dreams. I think there are some examples, for example,

Like when you look at an awe-striking thing, like you look at a mountain that's just beautiful. Like I was recently in California and I saw this mountain and we have nothing like this in Copenhagen, for example, and this beautiful mountain is stunning. Okay. I looked at that. And it's shown that people, when they look at awe-striking things like a mountain, a beautiful tree, time expands. It feels longer. Cortisol goes down, by the way, as well. and they become more charitable.

So if you are sitting underneath a beautiful awe-striking tree, you become more charitable, you become more helpful, you become more kinder as a person as well. And overall, time will just feel like it's stretching out. The converse scenario is when you are stressed, and the amygdala is hyperactive,

and cortisol is through the roof, and no adrenaline is through the roof. Time feels compressed. You feel like time is running out all the time, So that would be the conjuring example. What you're talking about is perception of time. Perception of time, yeah. Is there a way that perception meets physical reality scientifically?

Because that's what Interstellar was trying to say. Not, I mean, they were talking about time dilation more than anything. But what I'm wondering is that if the, if there's, if there's a way to determine that time dilation in what we're explaining scientifically is actually like a perception, an illusion itself such that it feels like and then physically manifest in a way such that they don't age. Yeah. And they feel like they only spend a year up there or something, but they actually did spend 80 and there's something where the consciousness was suspended.

Yeah. That like allowed them to not have that manifest physically, emotionally or mentally. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's way beyond my pay grade, but I'm curious about it. I understand. It's a deep question. But I think in interstellar, for example, they end up on that bizarre planet with the ice and all that. You've seen that?

And I think a few minutes there corresponds to like seven, eight years. I think it was every 20 minutes is like seven years or something like that. And then the poor chap is on the spaceship as he's been waiting 30 years. You've seen that? Yeah, 23. Yeah. So the question would be then, could you do something similar for consciousness? I don't think so because what is happening, this is actually.

this is actually time shrinking in a like you're like or expanding or whatever it might be depending on this is physics right time space and if you are in a certain atmosphere and how you know how things rotate rotation of the planets and all that and then time will feel different but you will physically age too you will like the brain will age the body will age and could something similar happen on earth i mean you would need you need to really be something that is more physics than neuroscience here because that that would require actually aging and and so forth of the body and the brain that's what i was thinking about a lot after our last conversation how much your world goes right up onto the edge such that it literally goes over the cliff into physics yeah you know even if

it's not intended to be that way like you're a neuroscientist you're studying in organ the brain and the effects it has but then the things that you've find and uncover in your various studies get right into like our physical reality. It does. It does. I think you're right. And I think as we're moving more into the future and we build machine and we have machine brain interface and you build like you have TMS machines that can scan your brain and you have

ultrasound that can go deep in the brain and activate neurons, deepen the brain and revive that neurons and things like that, it will be an interaction between physics and an engineer. and in one hand and then brain signs on the other. So I think as we move along, these specialized feel we need to, feels we need to cooperate a lot in order to get to, you know, to make advances if that makes sense. Hell yeah.

I got a million other things I want to talk with you about, but we're coming up close to three hours. So I think we should cut it there. We'll have to do this again. Of course, I already knew that before you came in. But there's just like, God, I could talk with guys like you all day because it just gets so fascinating. I appreciate you having patience with some of my questions too because it's very hard to take

some of these concepts especially as a non-scientist or something and, you know, express it into words and you're very patient with that. Well, I love it, man. Thank you for having me. And if I was rambling a bit today, forgive me my sleep deprivation and all that can hit you after time zones and travels and all that. This is the tail end of my travel. So I was in California coming as I was here, California coming back here and then going

to Copenhagen in a few hours. bags of it. Oh, you're flying to Copenhagen premiere? Nice. Yeah. So, all right. So I appreciate you fitting it in. Yeah. And you weren't rambling at all. Your explanations are great. Wonderful. There was some of, we had a wide range today, but then a lot of the stuff on love and attraction, I mean, Boulon's work on that is some of the greatest since finers. Oh, yeah. You know, you ever read finer before? No, I haven't. Oh, the 15, 1530 method. Is, is that interesting? You're a Harvard neuroscientist. You never read this? No, I shall. It's incredible stuff. I'll send you afterwards. His work in the field of love science is unprecedented.

Stu Feiner. But anyway, thank you so much for being here. B'Lahn. We'll do it again, my friend. Sounds great, brother. All right, everyone else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. What's up, guys? Thanks so much for watching the video. If you have not subscribed, please hit that subscribe button before you leave, as well as leaving the like on the video. It's a huge help. You can join my Patreon via the link in the description. And you can also join my clipping community via the Discord link down below. See you for the next episode. This time of year, the school calendar really starts to fill up, spring activities, testing season, and that final push toward the end of the year.

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