That Neuroscience Guy - Q & A with a Neuroscientist

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

How does imposter syndrome affect your brain? Is there a limit to how much you can learn? In today's episode, we do a rapid-fire Q&A session using questions listeners have asked recently. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. Okay, we haven't done this since season one, but today I'm going to just answer some questions and do a bit of a Q&A. season one, but today I'm going to just answer some questions and do a bit of a Q&A. I've got a whole stack of questions I've got that I think would be really hard to do a full episode on, and I'm just going to answer the questions and focus in on some of the things you've asked me. Someone wrote in and they basically wanted and said exactly, I'd love to know about imposter syndrome in neuroscience, real or made up. This is actually a really good question.

And it also depends a little bit on what you mean by imposter syndrome. So if you're talking about yourself and you feel like an imposter in a situation, that's usually tied to issues with self-esteem. Basically, your brain is sending a message to you that you're not good enough or you don't fit in or you don't have the qualifications. And what I mean by self-esteem, again, we talked about this in the last episode, but remember this idea, left brain is maintaining a worldview, right brain is modifying the worldview and telling the left brain and the prefrontal cortex specifically to update. Well, basically, if you believe you're an imposter, and I just mean the classic situation where you feel like you don't fit in, Well, that typically is your left brain having a worldview that basically sees yourself not as good as you probably actually are. And then hopefully with a bit of luck in those situations through experience on the job and realizing that you can do it, then it updates your worldview and you don't feel like an imposter. And I'll give you an example of that. I like mountain climbing and I was up on a glacier a couple of years ago with

some friends and I was looking around at all these people with crampons and ice axes and I definitely felt like I was faking it, like I wasn't a real mountain climber. And I don't know if that's what you're getting at. But after a couple of successful summits and learning to navigate glaciers, my worldview changed. And I realized I actually am a mountain climber. Now there's another level to imposter syndrome too. This is when you believe someone else is an imposter.

Typically you see this with what's called the Capgras delusion, which I've talked about in the past. And it's an interesting one. With the Capgras delusion, which I've talked about in the past. And it's an interesting one. With the Capgras delusion, what happens is people believe a significant other is not that person. So you might come home and believe that your wife or your brother is not your wife or your brother, but an imposter. And again, this isn't made up. What's happening with the Capgras delusion is there's a disconnect between the emotional

response to seeing this person and actually seeing them. So you see your brother and it looks exactly like your brother and there's no emotional response. Now we're not talking gushing or tears, but just a low level emotional response, which we've talked about in the past. And because of that lack of response, your brain has to draw a conclusion and it comes to the conclusion that it's an imposter. And if you want to read more about this, you can look up the Capgras delusion. So there's two answers. And in both those cases,

the imposter syndrome is real. Another question that came in, there's a couple about learning. Is there a limit on learning new things? Well, no. You can learn throughout your lifespan. People well into their elderly years can learn. Even people with dementia can still learn a little bit. It also depends on what things you're learning. As your body changes, it might be harder to learn to play tennis, but that's more of a physiological issue than a brain issue. And you can't really fill up your brain. It's not

actually a thing. Now, what can happen, and this is the next question, do you have to limit yourself or where is the limit? Well, the answer is no one really knows. But what can happen is if you start learning too many things that are too similar, so they overlap, that can disrupt your memories, right? So in principle, if you learned Italian, Spanish, and French, for most of us, because those languages have a lot of similarities, there might be some disruption of what you're doing. Now, if you were going to do that, typically what you would do is learn one first and then one second and one after that. And once the memory is solid, it wouldn't be disrupted as much. So is there a limit to learning new things? In principle,

no, to the best of our knowledge. Do you have to limit yourself? In principle, no. But where is the limit? Well, this idea that if things are too similar within the brain, they would get disrupted. And that's literally because the neural pattern that's the memory. So the group of neurons that get crammed together and overlap to form the memory, well, they, they're just common between these things and your brain can't figure out which pattern is which. The third part to this question, again, I want to answer this one. Can someone learn in a distributed way, 10 things in parallel in one hour chunks every day? It's the word parallel that gets me here. Obviously, you can learn a bunch of new things in chunks that are serial. This is how schools work, right? You go to math, you go to English, you go to social studies. But if you're trying to learn things at the same time,

yes and no. When I talked about learning earlier, I talked about the concept of random practice. In random practice, basically, you can alternate between two skills or two types of knowledge. And people typically struggle when they do this, but what we find is they perform better if this is how they learn. So imagine you're learning to play basketball and I teach you how to shoot a basketball and teach you how to pass a basketball. And I get you to alternate between these two things. Well, if you do that and you do alternate between them, even if it's like every trial of practice, you're fine. This is also true if you were studying. If you were studying biology and say calculus,

to pick a university topic, you could do alternate between these things. But there's certain rules to this. You can't alternate like every 30 seconds. It's pretty hard to do. It would depend on how complex the information was. And also 10 would be too much to alternate. You'd get disruption because of that. And at some point your brain just couldn't separate the information and process it. Okay. Some other questions have come up here.

Seeing purple spots, why are spots in vision with migraines, concussions, or macular issues, and why are they often purple? Not truly understood is the answer here. It's got something to do with the visual processing and just a default brain response. There's a couple of theories out there, but I didn't find anything where I kind of said to myself, yeah, this is a definitive answer. So I'm going to choose to sit on the fence on that one, but I did want to address it. We should have asked Marla back when she was on the show back in the day. Here's another question. Can you do a podcast on the effects less oxygen to the brain can have over time and not being able to breathe properly?

Well, I mentioned earlier in this episode that I like mountain climbing, and this is why people die on Mount Everest, literally. They die for actually other reasons, but the precursor to this is lack of oxygen. Basically, when there's a lack of oxygen to the brain, your brain can't perform efficiently. We talked about this a couple episodes back, but your brain needs blood circulation and oxygen to recharge neurons. If you can't recharge those neurons, basically what happens is your brain isn't functioning as effectively. So when I said

this is why people die on Mount Everest, it's because literally they make poor decisions because guess what? Their brain isn't functioning as effectively as it does when it's got the right amount of oxygen. So as a result of that, we, we, our brains don't work well and we make bad decisions. So I remember when I was up near Everest Base Camp a couple of years ago, it was actually before COVID, so it was almost a decade ago. But the lack of oxygen basically leads you to say, well, I should keep climbing up when clearly you shouldn't, right? Typically, when you're climbing, you monitor your O2 saturation, which is literally the amount of oxygen in your blood. And if it drops too far, you need to turn around. What happens on Everest is people don't do that.

They make poor decisions because your brain needs oxygen to function effectively. This is an interesting question, and maybe this will be the one I wrap things up with. Why is sorry the hardest word? Why do we find it so hard to say sorry or admit we're wrong? What's going on in our brain when this happens? This actually relates to a theme that seems to be the last couple of episodes. But at the end of the day, a lot of people tend to have, and, you know, I don't know the exact numbers because there's people on the opposite end, but a lot of people tend to believe that the choices they make are right and the things they're doing are correct. And this is your worldview.

This is the left prefrontal cortex. All right. And your brain doesn't want to change this worldview. This worldview is that you've done things right, all right, and you're okay. You're a good person. So saying sorry is hard because you're admitting you're wrong. Your brain, for a lot of people, doesn't want to do this. Now, as I said, there's a subset of people where sorry is an incredibly easy word. So you could almost say we have two categories. People that, for saying sorry is easy, well,, basically they have a worldview where they're always wrong.

And because of that, they're always used to apologizing. Hopefully that makes sense. But this is your left brain saying sorry is hard because your left brain believes that you're probably right or you're right most of the time. And it's hard to do. There's also an emotional response to this as well, which is your amygdala, as we know. This is why, when we talked about this on the episode on breaking up specifically, but you can see the parallel,

which is it's very, very easy to break up with someone by text, even though there's a social stigma against it, because there's an emotional separation or distance. It's hard to do in person because your amygdala is firing away, telling you, don't break up with this person, or, you know, I'm embarrassed. Well, it's true with sorry as well. When you're in front of someone and you need to say sorry, your amygdala is going to be firing like crazy.

And basically, that's reinforcing to your brain that this is difficult and challenging and potentially something I don't want to do. So even though your logical brain, the prefrontal cortex might be saying, hey, I should say, sorry, I screwed up. Your emotional system is biasing values and trying to convince you not to do it. Anyway, answered a bunch of questions. We'll do it once or twice more this season, mostly because there's so many great questions and a lot of them don't lead themselves to full episodes. But hopefully for those of you that emailed those questions in, you found those answers useful.

Thank you for sending them in. Remember, if people want to send in questions or show ideas, follow me on Twitter at thatneuroscienceguy or just email us, thatneuroscienceguy at gmail.com. Of course, there's the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com. I bump it Of course, there's the website thatneuroscienceguy.com. I bump it every week, so I'll stop this week and not do it. And thank you so much for the listening to the podcast. Please subscribe.

It really helps us and reinforces that you like us talking about the neuroscience of daily life. My name is Olof Kreg Olsson, and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you soon for another neuroscience bite