The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - How Do You Become Who You Want to Be?: The Science Behind Identity, Purpose, and Motivation with Taylor Guthrie

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

Our personal concept of identity shapes every decision we make – ranging from life-altering choices to our smallest daily preferences. Identity influences our values, the relationships we build, and how we respond to an increasingly unpredictable world, whether in constructive or destructive ways. But how are these identities formed, and how might we take a more deliberate role in cultivating a healthy sense of self – and therefore a healthier way of relating to the world? In this episode, Nate is joined by social neuroscientist Taylor Guthrie to delve into the neuroscience of identity, exploring how the brain constructs a sense of self and the implications for our modern societal challenges. They discuss the role of values and personal narrative in identity formation, the impact of technology and consumerism on self-perception, and the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as they relate to purpose and success.  How is today's consumer culture undermining our ability to actively participate in the development of our own identities? Could a better understanding of how we think about ourselves be key to fostering better relationships with others? Ultimately, how could purposeful reflection – about who we are and who we want to be – lead to lives that are richer in connection, community, and fulfillment?  (Conversation recorded on June 24th, 2025)     About Taylor Guthrie: Taylor D. Guthrie, PhD, is a social cognitive neuroscientist who studies how the human brain constructs a sense of self, both individually and in relationship with others. Taylor's work bridges neuroscience, psychology, and culture. He investigates how attention and value systems interact with brain networks to form narrative identity – and how modern cultural forces like social media, status-seeking, and consumerism can hijack this process.  Additionally, Taylor has earned the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Oregon. He also creates public-facing content, including The Cellular Republic, a lecture series that demystifies cognitive and social neuroscience. Now preparing for a postdoctoral fellowship in the Netherlands, Guthrie continues to explore how identity transformation – at both individual and collective levels – could support meaningful responses to today's ecological, psychological, and cultural challenges.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

As we're growing up, a lot of our motivation is given to us from the outside, telling you what to care about and what your identity should be and what your sense of self should be. And you're now catering a lot of your motivation towards performing this role to get this validation, this recognition and these signals that I'm doing it right. Whereas intrinsic motivation is the side where I've actually done a lot of the reflective work of really understanding for myself, like, why I'm doing something. What is it about this thing that's really aligned with who I, am. And a lot of those things feel effortless. If they were actively enjoying it, if they were

passionate about it, they could find the energy. They could find the motivation and continue to engage just because it's like, oh yeah, that's, that's me. That's important to me. You're listening to the great simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today I'm joined by social, cognitive neuroscientist Taylor Guthrie to discuss how the human brain constructs a sense of self, both individually and in relationship with others, and how understanding this could support meaningful

responses to our ecological, psychological, and cultural challenges. Taylor Guthrie earned his doctorate at the University of Oregon, where his research focus on the default mode network and the neural mechanisms underlying identity, motivation, and social cognition. His current research investigates how attention and value systems interact with the brain to form identity and how modern cultural forces like social media, status seeking, and consumerism hijack this process. Taylor has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology and neuroscience and also creates public-facing content, including The Cellular Republic, a lecture series that demestifies cognitive and social neuroscience. In this episode, Taylor offers a framework for how we can understand the ways in which we create an idea of who we are,

and subsequently who we want to be and how our modern systems get in the way of these ideals. More importantly, having a strong sense of self impacts how we interact and relate to others in groups and communities. By moving beyond the external consumption-driven signals, perhaps we can learn how to better navigate the complex relationships that have long been foundational to human existence long before the carbon pulse. Additionally, if you are enjoying this podcast, I invite you to subscribe to our Substack newsletter where you can read more of the system science underpinning the human predicament. We often increasingly post essays there where my team and I post special announcements related to the Great Simplification. You can find the link to subscribe in the show description.

With that, please welcome Taylor Guthrie. Taylor Guthrie, welcome to the program. Thanks, Nate. I'm excited to be here. Professor Guthrie, Dr. Guthrie? A little bit of both have done quite a bit of teaching. But, yeah, PhD, Dr. G is what my students refer to me as. Dr. G.

I had my students just call me Nate because my dad's a real doctor, so Dr. Hagan's makes me squeamish. I mean, that's my spouse, it was my spouse's idea. She's like, Dr. Guthrie sounds too dry, like liven it up a little bit. But actually, that dovetails into our conversation today. So you are a social cognitive neuroscientist who studies how the brain constructs identity and a sense of self. So I've invited you today to explore how identity development works and Kelsupri's why and how that's relevant to the global crises that we face today. So let's start with the core foundations of your work. What is identity from a neuroscience perspective and why is it important in the world situation that

we have today? I think what might be really important at the beginning of the conversation is to suggest for you, for any of the listeners, to really try your best to suspend any preconceived notions that you have around terms like self and identity because they bring a lot of baggage to the table historically, philosophically, politically, politically, right? because what I think we want to do throughout the conversation is try to build these concepts up from what we know about how the brain works and honestly how the brain reacts to stimuli that have self-relevant kind of nature involved in them. So just us talking about self and identity triggers our self and identity to be on alert because we might learn something that's uncomfortable. Yeah, no, absolutely.

I mean, it's the nature of language. I mean, this is something that we've talked about in philosophy for a while now, the whole structuralist movement and all. of these things that trying to have conversations about any of these things, we're tied up in what the language brings to the table, right? And all of it is tied in these cultural paradigms and kind of religious practices and all of these things that are built around concepts like the self. So people bring a lot to the table when we're trying to think about these things. And what I try to do from kind of a scientific perspective is really try to just look at what the brain is doing when it's reacting to information that has kind of a self-relevant flare to it.

are these things that are describing traits that are kind of that describe me versus other people. Is this me thinking about my own experience versus thinking about other people's experiences? Even things like, is this something that I own versus something that I don't own? Interestingly, something we can kind of circle back to later is this, am I thinking about people that are close to me versus people that are not close to me? All of these different things that have this kind of self-relevant kind of flavor to them have a very similar activation pattern in the brain, especially in a region called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex.

It's kind of the middle of the frontal lobe up here. This may be an episode that instead of playing at one and a half speed, people are going to have to slow it down to get all your words. So what is identity, either from a neuroscience perspective or a lay perspective? Yeah, no. I mean, from the neuroscience perspective, this region in the brain, this is a really robust finding. If we put one person an MRI scanner, we tell them to think about themselves in some kind of meaningful way, any of these different ways that I described, we're going to get this particular region. in their brain to activate. What does that mean to get a region in the brain to activate? There's more blood flow there or oxygen or what does that mean? So, I mean, you're getting at the nuance of kind of

MRI kind of exploration in general. We're looking at blood flow with a lot of these things. And blood flow is something that follows activity because the neurons that just fired now need to be replenished with resources. And so we're following the blood flow back to these regions. And what's really interesting is that it's localized, that the blood flow goes specifically to the neurons that need the nutrients. And I mean, this is really interesting. We found kind of fascinating, reliable, consistent things from kind of these methods. Whenever you're talking about anything in terms of MRI, we're talking about contrast. So we're saying, what is more active when I'm doing this than when I'm doing something else, when I'm not doing something? And what we see is that

when we engage people in kind of self-related thought versus other related thought, we consistently see more activity in a particular region of the brain. And it's kind of the middle of the frontal lobe up here. A lot of people in these kind of social neuroscience circles kind of refer to this as like the self region of the brain. I don't think I go that far. But it's, I think when you ask like, what is the identity from a neurological perspective, when you kind of step outside of these studies that are just looking at kind of stimuli that are self-relevant in some way. And you look at things from like neuroeconomics where they're having people do value-based choice. Like, am I deciding whether I want this thing or whether I want this thing?

We also see a really similar activation profile in this region of the brain. And I think what a lot of the studies are kind of pointing towards is that this region that pops up a lot for self-related stuff seems to be involved in value integration across multiple cognitive streams, right? Is this thing important for me right now versus important for me in the future? What's the context of the environment right now? Is it hot? Is it cold?

Do I have the resources to do this thing? if I've been successful in the past. All of these inputs are put together into kind of a holistic picture of kind of what's important to me right now. So values a big part of the picture, I think, in thinking about self. It's what we lose when we meditate or do psychedelics, this idea of equanimity, kind of lose a sense of like good and bad. And this region does get kind of dysregulated and lose activity in those moments. You just said that when people meditate or do psychedelics, they have equanimity. that area in the brain that measures the self kind of quiets down?

Yeah, yeah. No, this is a pretty kind of consistent result that we've seen in a lot of these studies. Because something that I'm leading to with a lot of this, so value is a big part of this. These are heavily tied to regions of the brain that are involved in kind of dopamine processes and value kind of type things, especially kind of short term versus long term things. But we see especially this region and some of the other regions that all kind of get into that are involved in something called the default mode network, tend to get kind of dysregulated. They tend to be a lot less active when we do things like mushrooms LSD, when we're in heavy

meditation and these. And something, a kind of phenomenon that's described by people from a kind of subjective perspective is this idea of equanimity of kind of losing a sense of good and bad and pleasant and kind of just being in the moment, being flooded by kind of the emotional experience or whatever it is. And I think that tracks with what we see from the brain. And it's from kind of a value perspective that we're kind of turning off these top-down models of what I should care about, what I value in this moment. What does identity mean again?

What's the core definition? And then I want to follow up to what you just said. So value is a big part of this is that our brain is constantly engaging in this process of deciding what's important. But that our identity is not that I chose to eat the apple right now instead of the bag of Doritos. identity also has a temporal component to it. It's not that I just value this thing right now, but I continue to value this thing. And I use this model that I have of what's important to me

to inform my future progress, to decide what I'm going to value in the future. And that becomes the basis for self-regulation, because now I can use that as an input into the value integration process of saying, you know, I can think five years down the road, 10 years down the road, towards health, towards all of these things.

And now that can be used to kind of override some of these kind of momentary signals that I'm getting of the Dorito bag and the value in this moment. So are there certain people as a percentage of the population who don't have many values, and therefore they won't look to the behaviors that improve their sense of self five years or 10 years from now? I think that's what a lot of our culture incentivizes, and I think it's going to be a big part of this conversation, because a lot of these processes can be motivated from the outside. They can, we can be kind of told what to value and a lot of our kind of consumerist kind of cultural ideas are about kind of buying something and doing something right now. You have to think about this as a,

as an integrated value signal. And for me to actually engage in self-regulation, I have to have a strong enough kind of authentic idea of who I am and what I want in the future to actually be an input into that kind of integrated value signal. So that's clear how it applies to the human predicament, the great simplification. If our values are fluid and influenced by media and cultural stories, we can't ground and tether and work towards something that truly has value to us. But I think that there's another side to that, right? And something that's, I think, really important to consider. There's definitely a negative side to kind of the way that we can outsource some of this identity to the groups that we're a part of, right? We allow them to tell us what we value.

We allow them to kind of design these kind of pre-made selves. I mean, look at all of the influencers on TikTok that just give you this like pre-packaged consumerist self or whatever it is. That's kind of the negative side of this, the side that perpetuates the consumerist cycle that we're in, that really kind of feeds into we need to buy more, we need to grow more, all of this. But the other side, I think that a lot of the social input to identity is default. I think that's what we started as was kind of socially identified creatures. And if we're in the right kind of group and the right kind of environment and context, the group perspective can actually be really beneficial for us as humans. Because this whole process of creating an authentic self and reflecting and doing this work

and thinking about who I am and developing these long-term things, that's really hard. It's effortful. And a lot of people don't even have time for it. I mean, I'm in that boat with kids and jobs and all of this. And so we can also kind of lean on these external factors if we're a part of a community that has the kind of values that align with hours or future stuff. You mentioned authentic self. What does that mean?

So, I mean, that gets into a lot of these ideas around kind of self-determination, around using your own internal signals as feedback, rather than these external signals as feedback, not relying on the likes and all of the kind of recognition and things that you're getting from your social media feeds as evidence that you're being the kind of self that you need to be. And a lot of what we do in life. I mean, this is something that we do as children.

We're given a prescription of like who we are and what we need to do and what we need to kind of adhere to. But we, over time, start to develop kind of a sense of what we like and what we want and where we want to go. And the more we engage in this kind of externally driven kind of pursuit for self, I think it leads to kind of these hollow views of it where we're not kind of pursuing things that are aligned with what we truly want. So how does the brain actually develop an identity over a lifetime? I assume that when you're born and you're a toddler, you don't have an identity. When does the identity start to exist? And then how important is technology in creating an identity? And how do that identity formation change?

I mean, you can speculate in our hunter-gatherer times versus today. The developmental process is fascinating. I mean, I'm watching two little boys grow up right now. It's really interesting. And they go through flavors of identity, kind of precursors to identity that are more tied to kind of independence and autonomy, wanting to do things themselves and kind of practice and try new things. Right. And a lot of that happens through childhood. But most of childhood is this very constrained environment. I'm providing them with the rules of how to navigate it safely, what kind of proper etiquette is and politeness. and all of these things. And so I'm very much kind of creating the kind of self that's possible for them. And what we see is that through childhood, there is this really interesting connectivity pattern that happens in the brain, where the brain becomes really overconnected. Like, you have more synapses, like twice as many more synapses as a child than you do as an

adult because you're just kind of overlearning the entire environment, really seeing, like, what are people telling me? Like, what are the rules of all of this? But this really fascinating thing happens during adolescence. And during adolescence, that's when a lot of this identity formation kind of comes to the forefront. And a lot of it is based around taking this really overconnected brain that we have and then pruning it down to really be focused on the things that are kind of authentic, that are going to help me become an effective adult in the world that's not reliant on this kind of dependent nature of my parent-child relationship. And that process right there, you think, like, there is a huge power, it's something we can come back to in kind of the adolescent experience. And I think the adolescents of today are really the ones that are going to change the world because they have a lot of drives towards novelty, towards this kind of pursuit for authenticity.

But they're also incredibly vulnerable to kind of the technology side that you mentioned, where if I'm embedded in this culture that's constantly kind of getting me to get my signals about identity and self from these social comparative process, and who's got the most likes and who's got the most whatever and kind of geared towards buying products or like I need to be that person that's got those all those Lamborghinis or whatever. That is that is kind of creating a person who thinks that that's what they need going into adulthood. And adolescence is like the most plastic period that we have. And then a lot of that starts to solidify as we get into adulthood. It's a lot harder to change your brain after that after that fact. So if if someone's identity today is X, um, what percent of X was kind of created during childhood and, um, teenage years versus as a 40, 50 year old adult? I'd say if I'd put

number. I mean, this is totally speculative. But, um, if I was to put a number to it, I think that a good 70 to 80% is probably adolescence, like up to adolescence. I mean, look at textbooks of development. Like the first 20 years of life is three quarters of the book. And then the last like 80 years of your life is like a tiny sliver of the book. It doesn't do justice to the fact that development continues, that we go through these other kind of phases in life as we get older. But it's a different kind of form of identity creation because our responsibilities change. Our values and priorities change.

But we're still, I think, building on the foundation of what we build. in adolescence. And it's a lot harder to change when we're older. So you mentioned earlier a term default mode network, and I've heard that quite a bit this year. Could you define that and why is it important? I mean, that's central to the work that I do. It's a network that seems to be really expanded in the human species compared to our ape ancestors. And the brain region that I mentioned earlier that lights up for self-related stuff. It's kind of the middle of the frontal lobe here is one of the main hubs of this network. And it seems to be a lot of this kind of newer, really cool work that's being done around the default mode network seems to show that it's involved in temporal integration.

So what that essentially means is that it's able to keep information online for long periods of time so that we can then integrate that with kind of new incoming information. And so it's essentially building a model of who we are and what we want and allowing us to think about the past, to project into the future, and using that as something that can be used for self-regulation, that can be used for exploration, values, and all of these kind of things. It's very social in nature. When you look at social neuroscience, almost every social neuroscience study gets default mode activity.

Because when we, the reason it's called default mode is actually a relic of how it was found. because we were doing these studies where we were having people try to remember something or pay attention to something. And like I mentioned earlier, whenever you do brain science, it's always a contrast. It's like, where is there more activity now than when you're not doing something or when you're doing something else? And there was this really clever researcher, Marcus Rakel, who flipped the script. He said, instead of asking what's more active when I'm paying attention or remembering something, what's more active when I'm not doing anything? And all of a sudden, this network pops up.

And so a lot of the early work was looking at how, like, this is just what our brain does when we're not doing anything. And that's where kind of default mode came from. But the more that we've dug into this and the more that we've started to understand the default mode network, it is not a passive network at all. It's the main thing that allows us to engage in mental time travel. It's what takes us out of the present moment and allows us to reflect. It allows us to project into the future. It's the whole process of this kind of model creation. So contrast for me,

a human who has an incredibly active default mode network versus someone's who's more quiescent and not too active? What might we see in those two individuals? I think it's a hard question to answer because a lot of the current kind of conversation around the default mode network is very much painting it as this negative thing, that it's the source of all of our ailments because, you know, when we're mind wandering, we're not as happy as when we're engaged, we're in the present moment. A lot of mindfulness. this stuff is about kind of turning down the default mode network and turning it off. And in those moments, like we mentioned earlier, that's what we experience as equanimity. And a lot of these

kind of spiritual practices are based around kind of dissolving the ego, dissolving the self, which is kind of reflected in these regions kind of being dysregulated. But I kind of approach this from another perspective that there needs to be a balance because the default mode network is also the most powerful tool that we have as individuals to actually create the world that we want, because it's what we use to engage in our self-creation and who we are and who we can be to actively reflect. But it's how it's being used. That's the main question, because it also is something that when I'm depressed and I have this version of myself that I'm a worthless person and nothing is ever going to work right and I'm never going to achieve anything, that becomes the

model that I'm now ruminating on. And the default mode activity in that moment is more about reaffirming how worthless I am, right? Whereas if I kind of harness the power of it, I can use it for kind of positive, flexible models of myself. So is there kind of a positive feedback thing going on with the default mode network? If you're depressed and telling those stories, it feeds on itself. And if you're motivated and have a positive view of your identity, that feeds on itself. I think so. The way that I think about a lot of these things is kind of couched and what's called kind of control theory or cybernetics. I view a lot of this as as feedback loops that essentially we're creating a model of what we think we are, what we think we value and where

we're going. And that model then becomes something that is now, it's like a thermostat, right? A thermostat, you can set it to a certain temperature. That's the set point. And then when it goes off of that set point, you get error signals. And you're like, hey, we're not, we're not there. So we need to readjust our behavior. When you really look at what a lot of lot of these models are capable of doing in terms of directing your attention, especially reflexive attention, right? So a lot of people, when they talk about attention, they're talking about kind of control, like directing the spotlight of attention. But if I define myself, let's just say, like, silly example, if I say, I'm a Jeep person. And that's like my whole identity is about

souping up my Jeep and making it the best Jeep ever. All of a sudden, I'm going to see jeeps everywhere. This happened to my brother. He just like started driving Jeeps. He's like, I see. them everywhere. And there's not more jeeps around. It's now you are tuned into those things. You're training your attention to reflexibly capture those things. And how once that happens, how difficult is it for the Jeep identity to change to an electric bike identity? Yeah. I think that it requires a lot of scaffolding, right? I think there's, I think there's two ways to get there in a lot of these kind of situations. And one of them is very effortful. It's the, the active process of like, you know what, I saw something, I'm reflecting on it.

Am I really, like, is driving a Jeep really the best thing? You know, I saw a documentary about the state of the world. And now, you know, that's making me question what I'm doing. And I'm engaging in this forward thought process and really changing my model. And I, but the other side of it, too, is because that's so effortful, oftentimes we can also turn to these, these groups that are part of our identity, that like, these are people that I respect. These are people that, uh, that kind of give me a sense of what I'm.

I think should be important. And so if you're surrounded by people that are kind of pushing the whole, like, hey, why are you still driving a Jeep when there's electric cars around? That pressure itself can cause the model to shift as well. Or the other way, right? They could reject it because it's a threat to their identity. Absolutely. And what's the distinction there? How does one time reject and the other time it confirms and moves to something else. I mean, I think a lot of it has to do with where this thing lies on your your value list, right? I mean, how often do you actually do an inventory of like what you care about and where your values are? The higher this thing is on importance to me, the more I'm going to engage in egoistic self-protective measures. That's like, this is a core

component of who I am. And if you're telling me that this is negative, then I'm going to defend that. And I'm oftentimes not going to listen to rational arguments or whatever it is because I'm engaging in kind of ego protection in these situations. But now if I'm embedded in a group of people that now in terms of the value list, the core value list, if I now have belonging as being higher on the list than me being a Jeep person, then now that conformity pressure is going to have a bigger influence on me changing my perspective. So when we met a few months ago and had a brief conversation, one of the things that I was most interested in unpacking with you with respect to our cultural challenges ahead and with respect to identity was this concept of external or extrinsic motivation or intrinsic motivation, which ties all this together, I think, with values and default mode network and the authentic self. So can you define extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and how do those affect identity and identity formation? Coming back to development, you look at a lot of as we're growing up, a lot of our motivation is kind of given to us from the outside through rewards, through punishments, through these kind of things, even through internal feeling states, right? Like things

like guilt and shame are also external motivators. It's the fact that I, need to belong to this group. I need to kind of get recognition and acceptance for this group. And my behavior is not aligning with that. And so I need to get it in line with these other people. And so a lot of the extrinsic motivation is very tied to all of these things that we've been talking about in terms of externally motivated identity structures and things like that, where you have these outside influences that are telling you what to care about and what your identity should be and what your sense of self should be. And you're now kind of catering a lot of your motivation towards a kind of performative nature that I need to keep performing this, this role that I'm in

in order to get this validation, this recognition and these signals that I'm doing it right. Whereas intrinsic motivation is the side where I've actually done a lot of the reflective work of really understanding for myself like why I'm doing something, right? We engage in so many things, like the types of social norms that are out there that we never question the fact that like why I have so many students that, are just like, they're getting a degree because their parents told them to get a degree. And like, right, that I, it really requires this reflective element of why am I doing these things. Like, what, what is it about this thing that's really aligned with, with who I am,

with the things that have given me joy that have, that have, like, produced passion inside of me, right? And a lot of those things are things that when we talk about motivation, we talk about effort, feel effortless, right? the extrinsic side of it is very effort-laden. And the kind of motivation theoretical framework is really interesting because there was, for a while, there was this kind of a theory called ego depletion that we only have like a certain amount of cognitive resources.

And once we use those up, then we're not able to think clearly anymore. We're not able to be motivated anymore. And a lot of those theories started to fall apart in the face of kind of intrinsically motivated results that like even if this person was, kind of deprived of resources and whatever it was, if they were actively enjoying it, if they were passionate about it, they could find the energy, they could find the motivation and continue to engage. And I actually see this in kind of the brain studies that I do,

that like when we really get people to think about things that are important to them versus important to other people, it's not effortful. I have people just sitting in a scanner, just listening to stories that either they told or other people told. And their brain is so much more engaged, especially these kind of default mode regions and things, without them trying to be, just because it's like, oh, yeah, that's, that's me. That's important to me, right? And this is something I try to put, this is a big part of my philosophy as a teacher. I try to make things as self-relevant as possible with through the discussions that I do and everything, because the more you can tie it to who you are and, and what you like and the things that you do, it becomes so much

more effortless to actually integrate it and become, like, familiar with it. So would you say, that our modern Western culture, one of the big ills facing us is we've somehow, via technology, and via the path that we've been on, outsourced our identity so that it's externally, technologically, culturally created, as opposed to in the past or other cultures, it might be more internally constructed and maintained. It's a hard one to say because in the past, I wouldn't say that it was entirely intrinsically motivated because being a part of the group, being a part of the tribe, like serving the role that was ascribed to me at birth, right? I'm a peasant. I was born a peasant.

I'm born a farmer. Like, that was still something that was very externally driven, right? It was still a part of who we are. I think that there's a power in kind of the freedom of the society that we have that allows us to be intrinsically motivated if we want to because we have, we have more options. We have more availability to actually do that if we're willing to engage. engage and actually like do the work that's required for that kind of stuff. But our system is not designed for that. Our system is designed for immediate consumption. And that's what a lot of these identity narratives push. Okay. So let's imagine a young person late teens, early 20s, who has had a

very healthy family life, ideal parents, and does well in school and has friends. And does well in school and has friends and has a reasonably healthy self-identity perception. But then they start getting exposed and eventually, you might say, addicted to algorithms, ads, social media status, likes, and those things. Can you as a neuroscientist describe neurologically and behaviorally when someone's identity starts to be shifted and shaped by external forces like that. I think a lot of these processes very much mirror the addictive kind of nature of substances themselves because a lot of these algorithms, a lot of these things are designed specifically to give us short-term replacements for things like acceptance for things like belonging,

things that we have a really strong value for. And it's ironic. I mean, we're more connected than we ever have been, but we're also more lonely than we have been. They're hollow versions of what used to be a warm hug, what used to be a like a vulnerable, reflective moment with another person, right? And instead, we're thinking that we're getting some of these things. We're seeing these other people that are living this connected life or living this perfect life or whatever. And we're seeing something funny. And it's something that's delivered to us in these short, fast, kind of rewarding ways. And in these situations, whenever I have some

in this moment that's giving me value, that's giving me reward. I don't need to engage in long-term planning in these moments because I'm getting something right now that's valuable. Same with a lot of the addictive tendencies of kind of substances and things like that. I think the person that you described is going to have somewhat more resilience to some of these processes because of what they've come from. Because when you look at addiction, a lot of addiction is that I'm engaging in these short-term pleasures because I'm covering up some kind of pain in my life, that it's It's a form of escapism that life is hard. I mean, even this person that grew up in this perfect neighborhood, this perfect family,

he could have a crappy job. He could be embedded in this hustle culture and just be burnt out and doing a job that's not aligned with who he is and what he wants to do. And that's another thing that pushes him towards like, okay, well, if I'm not getting what I want from this external environment, then I'm just going to engage in kind of short-term pleasure. So is there some sort of an overlap or correlation between, people that have the temperament and biology leaning towards the tendency towards addiction and people who are intrinsically motivated and have an externally created identity. I don't know how much work has been done to say that specifically.

I would speculate that that's probably true. That, I mean, we're at a point now. When you look at like the DSN, the diagnostic statistical manual that therapists use, for diagnosis and things like that. There's been a really interesting thing that's happened with the, like, labeling of addictive disorders, right? It started with just certain categories like alcoholism and kind of drug like addiction. And we're at the point where now gambling is in the DSM.

And that's a behavioral addiction, right? And there's been a lot of push to move things in like technology addiction, phone addiction and things like that. Because you see very similar activation patterns in the brain with these things that you do when, people are engaged in addictive substances themselves. You see craving, you see withdrawal. Like when you take a teenager's phone away from them, I'll show you withdrawal, right? That they're going through this process of now craving that short-term reward that they had. And now there's this friction that they feel because now they have to engage in something that is more effortful.

So I had Robert Sapolsky on the show. And one of the things that he's famous for, at least one of the things that I learned from him back in the day is the we don't seek the reward we seek unexpected reward and the intermittence of dopamine where we're like cherry cherry bar or whatever that and so I'm just thinking that social media and living in a world that has 24-7 access to scrolling and all the things provides us way more intermittent reward lands than, for instance, our hunter-gatherers are growing up as a peasant. So it both adds to our addiction and gradually in a slow but inexorable way makes us collectively as a large group of humans more extrinsically defined.

I think so, right? You look at what dopamine, I mean, there's so many misconceptions, like misconceptions about dopamine. And Robert Zepolsky addresses this great. I actually watched your episode for Robert Zupolski. And I've watched all of his lectures on stress, like huge respect for him. I have a very different perspective on determinism. Me too. Me too. But I think that something that's really interesting there is that dopamine is about desire. It's about the pursuit for reward. And when we have these spikes in dopamine, it's usually around these kind of unexpected rewards. We we habituate or we start to like get used to things that we've seen before.

And that's very similar to the addictive process, right? That tolerance, that as I continue to do this, I don't get the same kind of reward from it. So now I engage with it more than I used to. But when you look at kind of that desire aspect, that dopamine aspect, it takes a lot more effort to get to a long-term goal than it does to any of these short-term delivery systems that we have now. And I look at attention, kind of like a pie chart. Like we can only pay attention to so many things in a given day. And we live in a culture that pushes these kind of 40 to 60 hour work weeks. And it's this whole thing where like, okay, you're supposed to work and then you're supposed to go home and relax and engage in these things that you consider relaxing.

And it pushes this idea that like you need to be spending that time when you're not working engaging in these mindless things. And so it really doesn't allow for the kind of powerful reflective work that we need to engage in. So are there similarities between cultivating? on intrinsically driven identity and addiction recovery processes? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Really interesting work from one of my colleagues, Elliot Birkman, has this whole identity value model that he, you know, has been looking at the process of kind of value-based choice

and addiction and all of these things and shows that a lot of the people that are successful in overcoming addiction and overcoming kind of weight loss and all of these things. things are not people that set specific goals, right? I've always been really kind of weary of the idea of like a diet that you have this like, okay, I'm going to lose 20 pounds and then I'm done, right? But then what happens when you lose that 20 pounds? Then are you right back to where you were and enjoying the hamburger, right? Instead, what has been really powerful in the research is adopting identities that actually support the behaviors that would be healthy in the first place, right? And so if I can continuously remind myself and build value around the fact,

that I'm healthy and that being healthy is going to be something that's going to be beneficial long term. I can think about myself 10, 15 years in the future when my joints are starting to break down and how the exercise now and how the food I eat now is going to have a huge impact on my longevity, on my overall well-being. I have to engage in these things continuously to remind my brain that that is a value signal. And when I'm able to do that, then it makes the choice different than just like, oh, I'm on a diet and I need to not eat this thing. It's like, no, I don't eat this thing because I'm a healthy person. So as a behavioral scientist, as a college professor, and as a obviously aware and observant human, when you're at a party or at a cafeteria at a university and you're

just looking at lots of humans, can you get just an intuitive sense based on your own pattern recognition of which people are primarily externally validated or intrinsically motivated with their own sense of self just by watching their interactions. To a certain extent. And I mean, you see this in the students that you interact with. It's always interesting that like you have this huge class, 150, 200 people and you really have like a group of like 10 to 15 people that actually care. And that might be kind of oversimplifying it.

But you see that there are these people that are like, I'm here because this is valuable. That not just because I paid for it, not just because my mom wants me to do it. Oh, wait a minute. So just caring about something generally like the people that are watching this podcast, I would put in that category that they generally, they genuinely care about our collective future. So that right there is a. clue that they have more of a self-constructed identity instead of externally driven? I think so, to a large extent. And again, this gets really muddied up because, like, even, even this, like, idea of me valuing the future of humanity and things is still connected

socially in some way to this conversation, to this podcast, all of these things. But it's whether or not I'm integrating it with a kind of self-designed value system, right? That, like, I've heard this thing, and that aligns with the work that I've done, the values that I have, the, the ideas and reflections that I've gone through where I'm like, you know what, I need to not have this rigid kind of self and identity model. I need to have something that's more flexible and something that's open to hearing these ideas. So can you summarize which cognitive functions you think we need to be aware of and try to quiet versus which ones we could creatively use to our advantage to build an intrinsically motivated identity. I think attention is key in a lot of these things. I've come to that own,

that conclusion on my own just in the past like month or two. Yeah, yeah. Because it's just, it's amazing when you start really not the controlled attention like I was talking earlier, but the reflexive attention. What are you being pulled towards? Like, and a lot of the times, we may think that we have certain values, but like what are you actually spending your time paying attention to. What is pulling you? What is kind of distracting you? Because those are the things that your brain considers to be really important. When you really consider what the brain is doing, right? We are taking in billions of bits of information in any given moment. Like all of your touch sensors, your mouth sensors. I see that you want to say something. Yeah, I'm sorry. And I, you know,

this is a really central and very interesting topic to me. Yeah. Both in my own life and in the world, You know, I'm interrupting you all the time, so where's my attention? But I'm just, I actually think this underpins something central to our lives. And I'm thinking about a meme or I'm sure I could find an image somewhere online of someone hiking in a beautiful forest. And there are birds and old growth and smells and it's full of life. Yet they're on their phone playing Candy Crush or something like that. What's going on in the brain of someone like that? and can you help us understand that?

I mean, that's kind of what I was building, right? Like, the fact that the brain is taking in so much information, most, like, consciousness researchers are kind of an agreement that we're only aware of, like, 2% of what our brain is processing in any given moment, right? So when you really think, like, what is getting to conscious awareness? Like, what is it that I'm, like, actually paying attention to? I'm actually engaged with. That says a lot about what your brain actually thinks is important, right?

And in that moment, like, you have not built a model in your head about your connectiveness with the wider environment, with life, with all of these things. Yes and no, right? Because that person, maybe it's me or someone like me, knows that they care about birds and wildlife. They know that they value that. And yet they still are compelled to do the technology thing in the moment. And I think that comes back to the priority list that we talk. about earlier. And this can ebb and flow with resources. I mean, the body and the brain are constantly engaged in economic things, right? What do I have right now? What kind of resources do I

have on board? And do I really have the kind of capacity right now to really embed myself in the moment? Or am I just looking for an escape from all of this, this hard work I've been doing all day or whatever it is, right? That it's not just that like, it's always at the top of the priority list, right? When you look at like salience type stuff, salience is highly regulated by your current context and your current state, right?

If I am craving food, it's because I'm hungry, right? If I walk by a restaurant and I smell some nice smelling food or whatever, I'm going to be like, ooh, yeah, that smells really good. And I'm going to start craving food. But if I just had a huge meat, meal, that same smell is not going to produce the same type of craving inside of me. Right. And so wherever I'm like, you have to constantly go through this engagement of like right now,

where does the priority list kind of set? So that supports the notion of taking care of yourself, exercise, sleep, nutrition, social interactions so that you are satisfied. And then you go into your day, in that. and you're better able to access your true values, maybe? I think so, because, yeah, I mean, in that moment, what's more valuable to right now is escape. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so, like, if I want to be connected, I need the, I need the space. I mean, this is, this is a really, I think, important, bigger kind of picture that we're painting right now, because the type of self that I'm capable of being is incredibly constrained by my context, right? Like, something that I mentioned in terms of Sapolsky, huge respect for Spolski. I've watched tons of his lectures, but I always have this really big issue with his hard determinist approach because of the fact that, I mean, I've even heard you say it

on other episodes, the Victor Frankel quote of stimulus and response and the space in between and that's where we're making choice. I agree with everything that Sapolsky says in terms of our current moment being incredibly constrained by the past ones, right? By the last five minutes, by the last month, the last year, our whole history is a species. It's not free will, but it's still will. I'm still deciding whether I'm valuing this thing in the current moment. And I'm using that to kind of build this model that I have of what I want to go towards next. And I think that the whole process of actual change, of meaningful change, kind of requires the will of me deciding to value something else instead of just having this purely deterministic view of it. So say someone

has the will to right now play a more intentional role in their identity development. going forward. What are some tools or practices they could use to do so? So there's a really interesting divide between what they call the will and the way, right? The way is knowing what to do, right? And that's often not enough. Like most people know that they shouldn't be eating crappy food, right? And then the will is more of the like, okay, I know I should eat the crappy food, but I need to engage in this process right now of reminding myself of this kind of future prospect and these other value signals. There's a, I can't remember if it was a, need, or Sartre, but there was a parable that they used of the gambler who he was kind of ruining his family's life.

He was spending all of his money, wasting all of his money. And he had this reflective moment where he's like, you know what, I need to change. I need to do something. I need to stop gambling. And then the next day he's walking past all the gambling tables, right? And in that moment, it wasn't enough for him to have reflected yesterday. He now needs to bring all of that to bear right now for it to be a value-sick. Because then we involve our discount rates that we make great plans to change tomorrow until tomorrow becomes today.

Yep, absolutely. Okay, so he had to reflect in the moment. So, and there's something, too, so that came out of, I mentioned Elliot Birkman earlier, and there was a really interesting thing that fell out that they didn't expect in a lot of their research, because they were kind of looking at this kind of the will in the way and how we can kind of build up the will. And something fell out of the research that was actually interesting that they called plan that what's even more powerful than just having kind of a strong will and an ability to reflect in the moment is to actually have a meaningful plan of how I'm measuring these things, right?

If I, it's one thing to say, like, I want to be a healthy person. And now I'm in this moment where I'm like, okay, should I choose this or this, right? If I had gone through the process of really deciding for myself, you know what, what healthy actually means is doing this much exercise, getting this much sleep and tracking whether or not I'm on board with these things because it comes back to this kind of thermostat idea. When I create this concept in my head that's tied to my identity and tied to who I am, I'm using it to judge my progress. So it's kind of like awareness homeostasis. Yes. And that's a great way of putting it because I think that when you look at kind of the trajectory of evolution and like where we're at in terms

like what these networks are actually doing, I think that it's it's a process of self-awareness. That it's something that like we're becoming more. And you look at like the, There's a part of the brain called the insula that is incredibly expanded in the human species. And it's essentially a map of our internal processes of what our body is doing. And it's allowing us to build a model of what is going on contextually, allowing us to see what our body is doing and how it's reacting and how that's tied to our context and our outside environment. And so we're able to build so much more of a self-aware model than any other animal on this planet. But then we have to be able to use that for self-regulatory processes. So the will in the way, like for instance, your college students, you're a teacher, so you're explaining to them the way, but the will has to come from them.

It does. And that's why I design my courses the way that I do. I'm very, like I have discussions that they do that are optional and extra credit and are incredibly reflective and self-relevant. because it's something that it's like, okay, if you really want to implement these things that you're learning, I mean, I teach group dynamics, which is like we spend how much of our lives embedded around other people and in relationships. It's like if you want to just sit here and listen to these theories, that's great. But how are you going to actually put them into practice in your life? So let's move to that group dynamics. Can groups have identities neurobiologically in the same way that individuals can? And have you scanned that in FMRIs? So it's interesting. There's nuance to it. And some of this is going to be really speculative, right?

Because social neuroscience is an incredibly new field. And so there's a lot of work that I want to do that we just haven't had the ability to do in a lot of respects. Like I throughout my entire PhD, I collected, I think, 180 participants. And it was a quarter of a million dollars to run that. And so doing these things is incredibly difficult. But this comes back to kind of sociological debates that have happened between like Durkheim and Gordon Alport. Durkheim was a sociologist who very much believed that like groups have a kind of will in a sense. Like you can treat a group like an individual.

Gordon Alport was on the psychology side. He's like, you can't trip over a group. Groups don't exist, right? We need to just study the individual. And I think a lot of what has happened over time is that we're at a, I mean, it's a dialectic. Everything is dialectic. We have like, it's just this, it's just that. but it's usually a synthesis of both,

that the groups themselves are a collection of these individual identities, and they can kind of have a personality, I think, to a certain extent. And so these different cultures have different identities, so to say. I know that Green Bay Packer fans definitely have a specific identity. So what actually happens cognitively and behaviorally when people come together in groups, say football fans or some high school or, or any number of group affiliations. What's going on in the brain?

So we are just scratching the surface of this, but what we're finding is really cool. It's something called neural synchrony. And again, really hard to study because, like, I can't add at a football game, like I can't have everybody in a giant million dollar scanner while we're doing this thing. There are some newer technologies

that are allowing us called FNIRs. It's a functional near infrared, but it's not, It doesn't penetrate as deep as MRI does. But what we're seeing across a lot of these things is that when I'm around people that are meaningful to me, that are a part of my in-group, I have very similar activation patterns to them. So there was this really fascinating study that was done by Carolyn Parkinson in California. She had this whole business school that she mapped out in terms of the social network. So she knew exactly who was friends with who.

And then she brought a certain kind of percentage of that group in and scanned their brains. and she showed them random media files. So like comedy clips and news clips, like a whole range of what you might experience from these things. And she could predict how close of a friend you were by how similarly your brain was activating to these different things. And we're, I mean, I see this in my work. I show that if I'm really good friends with you,

that my kind of pattern of activity when I'm thinking about a third person is really similar to yours. And I'm about to start a postdoc position in the Netherlands. and we're actually looking at this longitudinally because what we've seen so far is kind of a chicken or the egg thing. We know that people that are really close have very similar brain activity

in these regions that are kind of producing concepts. When they're together, or just generally. When they're together, I mean, we've seen, like when people are playing music together, it's like super in sync. When people are playing games together, they're actually more in sync with the people that they're playing with and not their opponents.

Is this a mirror neuron thing? It's a difficult question. Mirror neurons have not lived up to, I think, what we thought they might be when we first started studying it. Mirror neurons, I think, are more involved in motor mirroring than conceptual mirroring. But a lot of this is entrainment. We use the same language. We talk about the same things. And so we start to form similar concepts that are kind of reflected in the brain in a similar way.

The only proof I have that mirror neurons exist is when I eat a sandwich or something, my golden retriever, I'll choose along with me. And does the random Fred Willard question here, do non-human animals have identities in the sense that we're talking? Like, does my dog have an identity or do they don't have the same brain regions? They do have the same brain regions. I mean, when you look evolutionarily, all the way back to early vertebrates, we all have the same brain regions. There's a popularized kind of tripartite theory of the brain where, like, Early reptiles just had the middle of the brain and then mammals have the middle. That's completely false.

What really differentiates different species is how much they use those parts of the brain and those parts of the brain get expanded. There's something called phylogenetic refinement that Paul Chisic is a really big part of that shows that what we're engaging in is actually an expansion of old abilities. So when we think about what we're doing in terms of like narrative exploration and all of these kind of things, the frontal lobe where a lot of this stuff is is used for, movement. And it's used to plan out, like, what do I need to do to go and grab that actual thing? And what we see in animals is that they're doing that. They're making plans. They're able to kind of

work through these things. But there's this really interesting gradient in the front of lobe. The further back you get in the front of lobe, the more concrete the things are that you're actually engaging with. Like, I'm actually picking up this water bottle. I'm doing that in terms of motor planning. But then the further you get to the front, these parts of the brain that are lot more expanded in humans, it becomes a lot more abstract. And so now I'm moving through abstract space. I'm moving through the future. I'm moving through the past. Right. It's still a sequence of motor actions of like, what am I moving towards? But now it's a model that's more long term and more long horizon. And we as humans have much more long horizon capability than any other planet on the species

or species on the planet. Yeah, this is fascinating. If the world didn't have so many challenges, I might go back into college and study all this stuff. The brain and how it relates to our future is just so fascinating to me. So what are the qualities, Taylor, of individual humans that comprise a cooperative, effective, and resilient group, the type of groups that I think we're going to need as we increasingly enter uncertain times? I think what we're battling, honestly, is group think. So when I kind of go through a lot of these group dynamic principles to my students, a lot of kind of the red bow that's tied around like what it means to be a good group is cohesion. That's how we kind of measure the health of a group, is how cohesive it is. But cohesion can also serve to put us in a position where we're facing entirely kind of really heavy conformity pressure. And that's, I think, where we're at. And a lot of the vital pressures that we're at right now is that like me ascribing to this group now means that I need to accept everything that the group stands for. I need to accept all of their values. I can't

have any other opinion than the one that I have, right? I think that the healthiest groups are the ones that are able to develop a sense of cohesion, right? So I like the people in my group. I can communicate with them. I feel safe around them to be vulnerable to share intimate moments with them. And also, there's a normative structure in the group that actually supports diverse opinion, that supports kind of speaking out against the normative structure that we have so we can adapt so that we can grow. A lot of the normative structures that we see in the current system are ones that perpetuate the system, that are ones that we can't question or else we're considered kind of outside of it and the black sheep or whatever it is. But we need cooperative groups

that are kind of aligning with these values of diverse opinion, of conflict resolution. Yeah, we're going to run out of time because I just have so many questions. What about this hypothetical experiment where you have 150 students next year in the Netherlands or whatever? And you notice in the first few weeks the 10 or 15% that are just grounded and have full awareness and a scaffolded value system that is internally, intrinsically built, or at least that's your suspicion.

And you break people into groups of five. If you put five of those people together and then five of the more distracted people together, would you assume that, what would you assume? So this job that I'm taking is taking a lot of what we've found around, especially these things like neural synchrony that we talked about, that we start to mirror these other people around us, but adding a longitudinal

element to it. So we're trying to see what happens over time, because a lot of what we found has been this kind of chicken or the egg phenomenon. We don't know if we're surrounding ourselves with people who already see the world the same way, or if there's some process of kind of becoming a cohesive group, becoming integrated with each other, that's causing us to become aligned with each other. And we're actually going to be directly looking at that. We're going to be scanning people over multiple time periods. We're going to be tracking entire social networks and seeing who becomes friends with who. And a big part of it is looking at self-regulation, which is tied to your question, right? If I am someone, let's say that I'm someone who has

low self-regulation, that I'm very impulsive. I have a hard time like maintaining long-term goals and all of these things. But I'm now put into a group with the high achievers. And I value their belonging and acceptance. Do I start to mirror that self-regulation? But the other way around can happen too. If I'm someone who's a high achiever that has long-term goals and I now surround myself with people who are low self-regulation and impulsive, do I now start mirroring that? And how strong is that effect? I would bet that the first example is you would upregulate to have more discipline and values. And the second would also the new person that was self-regulated would slide, but only a little bit. That would be my hypothesis. I think that there's some nuance there,

right? Because a lot of it comes back to this value idea of identity. That is it, when I get put into this group of high achievers, do I actually respect their opinions? Do I want to be in their group? Do I value the group? Is it something that I would consider as part of my identity? Like, this is a group that I want to be a part of. Because as when we actually look at like group identity type processes, a lot of them are strongest when they align with identity. When I start to, I actually do this, I do this example with my students. I just put up the question, who am I on the board? Right? And I have them, like five minutes, just write down whatever comes to mind. And when you actually reflect on that

list, 70, 80 percent of it is usually relationships with other people, that I'm defining my identity as being a father, as being a scientist, as being a brother, a sister, a friend. Two thoughts to come to mind. Firstly, I find myself attracted to people who I perceive have a strong intrinsic value system and are not swayed externally. Maybe everyone is that way, but I find that definitely that is the case for me. Maybe because a lot of the topics that we cover here, climate change, energy depletion, biodiversity loss, all these things are still a little bit fringe from the main cultural narrative. And so independent thinkers who are able to stand on their feet without being buffeted by the spheres of influence from social media and the

cultural narrative, that has value to me. Yeah. Does that make sense? No, absolutely. And because of that, their perspectives are going to mean more to you, right? We look at biases within these groups and who we look to for kind of these outsourcing type methods. It's social comparison processes. I'm either comparing upwards and I'm saying, look, these other people, they have a perspective that I value that I want to integrate with my own. Or we engage in downward social comparison where we say, look, they're they're not like me. I don't need to integrate anything that they have to say, right? But that whole process is is laden with where their group sits in terms of my priority list and where kind of the authority structure in that group sits in terms of like, do I actually care about the acceptance and the belonging that comes from this, from the leaders, from authority, whatever it is. So here's another thought, reflection. I don't know the brains of other people. I only know my own. And apparently I only know 2% of it.

But five or six years ago when I was teaching college, I had an identity and I was a teacher and I had one-on-one interaction with 25, 50 students during a semester. And then I came back to my farm and I took care of my animals and I wrote books and things like that. That was a certain lifestyle and perception of my value system and my identity. Now we have 200,000 total followers and I've become a podcaster. And unfortunately, my identity is becoming I'm a podcaster.

And I don't really like that because it's changed me, I think, a little bit more externally motivated than I used to be. Can you opine on that? Yeah. I mean, I was in a similar boat. I was, I was drowning through grad school. I had, I had a kid that was born in 2020, and, like, they don't pay us a living wage to get a PhD. And so, um, I took on a lot. And I tried to, to start my own podcast and, uh, my own channel and all of these things and, like, very much found myself, like, drowning in the statistics around who was watching it and how much they were watching it and all of these things where those started to become the signals that I was listening to. And I think a lot of the message that I think is important through a lot of this is becoming more aware of the signals

that your own body is feeding you, right? Really understanding like what emotion is to a large extent. If we really kind of expand this thermostat perspective, right, that I have this idea of what it means to be a good podcast or I have an idea of what it means to be a good father or whatever it is, I am now reflexively looking out to the world to make sure that I am in tune with this model that I have of who I am. Right. And I am now going to receive error signals that are telling me like, look, you just lost your cool. You didn't have a good moment with your child. Like, is that really what it means to be a good father? And now I'm actually experiencing negative emotional states that are a signal to me that I'm in misalignment with the actual identity that I have. And the really interesting thing that I think this leads to is that, you know, a lot of these kind of contemplative practices and like mindfulness practices are about getting rid of the self and about dissolving the self.

And I take more of kind of a Nietzsche perspective on this in that when you do the meditative practices, you are in that moment kind of dissolving it. But then you go back to your life and you're still engaged with your relationships and your work and all of these things. I think what a lot of these contemplative practices are doing instead are just creating a more flexible model that instead of having this. really rigid idea of who I am and what I need to do to feel like I'm successful, it's that I'm more open to the equanimity. I'm more open to the ambiguity. I'm saying, like, I don't need to process these negative emotions every time I'm a little bit off of this, like, ideal state that I have for myself. Like, if I have this rigid model of myself that I need to be perfect for anybody to like me, now I'm getting error signals all the time. And the work that's done

through cognitive behavioral therapy is kind of this model reworking that I'm saying like, okay, I have this really rigid sense of who I need to be and what I need to do. And that's what's producing a lot of these negative effects. And so really listening, like, what is the body telling me? And how do I kind of adapt and grow to my current environment and develop a kind of more healthy, flexible model that allows me to navigate this in a better way? So I've noticed that many people increasingly in today's world are bogged down. by day-to-day survival or taking care of their kids or overstimulated by technology and

kind of an impersonal society. And so they don't have a lot of bandwidth to do the things to work on themselves and intentionally create a intrinsic formation of their identity. So you've mentioned in your work that it's helpful to have some sort of a guide or a leader. or a mentor to model their identity after, what does that mean and what are the qualities such a person, a leader might have? No, and I'm not suggesting to join a cult. But it's something that I can actually relate to.

Like I said, like I mean, it's really hard. Like I espouse these things, but then actually finding the time to like sit and maybe journal or think about like what are these things that are happening right now. Are they still in line with who I am, with who I want to be? It's honestly, I mean, the word privilege has a lot of baggage associated with it, but it's true. Like having the time to actually do this work is something that is a privilege. And people that have the money, that have the time, that have the space, they can do a lot more of this self-exploration than someone that's bogged down with 50, 60 hours a week and kids and all of this stuff.

Right. And that's where I think it's really powerful to be embedded within a community that is aligned with the values that you have. and especially having leadership within those communities, that's actually kind of modeling the type of values that are integrated with what you think. So wherever you are on the spectrum of fully extrinsically motivated to fully intrinsically motivated, if you become part of a group,

and that group is someone, some populated by people that are intrinsically motivated and have awareness of the moment and all the things, that's a process that we should seek out, right? Is those sorts of groups in our lives? It's interesting, right? So there's something that I really try to do with my students is break down the concepts of individualism and collectivism, right?

Because when you say those words, you immediately start thinking of like large cultural, like there's individualistic cultures and collective cultures. when a lot of the evidence actually shows that these cultures are like 60% collective and 40% individualistic. And when you break it down even further, you really need to understand that it's a spectrum that we're on that's incredibly dynamic, that there are certain contextual features that will prop up our individualism in a moment where intrinsic motivation is really important in that moment, where I'm really considering my values and who I am and whether this is important to me. But then there are other moments where being a part of a cooperative group environment, is more important. And there's this great quote that I think about all the time that I can't remember who said it, but it said that if the individual's goals and the group's goals were the same,

there'd be no difference between individualism and collectivism. Right. And so when you're talking about being embedded in a group of other intrinsically motivated people, the only way that you can actually obtain a cooperative group is if those intrinsically motivated people have similar collective goals, right? Because as soon as my individual goals are in tension with what the group is trying to do, that's where conflict is bred. And you need to have certain structures in place. We're talking about kind of good how to develop like a well-functioning, healthy group. It's ones that have a normative structure that allows for a really healthy conflict resolution process of aligning these goals and aligning kind of cooperative type things. So you are a social neuroscience PhD about to be

a postdoc, about to do some cool research. But you also follow this podcast. Yeah. You know, wearing your social neuroscience hat, what do you think the most fertile soil is in your academic research domain to helping the future of the human predicament from what you understand from watching this podcast and others? Honestly, it's going to sound kind of out of of left field, but... That's quite okay.

Changing the perspective that we have on adolescence. Oftentimes, we view adolescence as this just like chaotic period that like the parents just have to like get through and like there are these hormonal teenage monsters or whatever. This is the most powerful time of the human experience in terms of identity creation, in terms of flexibility. There's a very different pattern of dopamine in young people and like through the adolescent period where there's this strong drive towards novelty and towards kind of getting a

like think about the fact that when you're a child you are completely dependent on your parents right and then you get to this point where now you're like embedded in these social structures you're meeting these other people you're seeing other perspectives and it becomes this point where you're like look I've been told that this is the way the world is my whole life and I want to think about it differently and there's actually a push towards higher degrees of novelty during adolescence And so having a kind of cultural kind of paradigm or something that actually supports the adolescent experience that produces kind of cooperative groups that are forward thinking that are allowing these these kind of adolescents to develop a sense of like where the earth is going to be in 50 years and 100 years and how their action right now can impact that. Because I think that they are the true movers of the progress that's coming next. So some sort of a social neuroscience applied module.

in high schools, for instance. And I mean, not even just a social neuroscience module, but like the reason, honestly, the reason we're moving to the Netherlands is because of the community type practices there. There's way lower addiction rates. There's lower teen pregnancy rates. And a lot of that is because of the fact that they have a very community-oriented way of living. They get people, they get these children involved in things where when you look at risk-taking

in adolescence, oftentimes it's pitched as this just like, oh, they're just like, reckless and they're just getting into these just like dangerous things or whatever, that's because those are the types of risks that are available to them. If instead we're giving them positive risks to take, like trying out for a play or being part of some type of sports team or some type of community event or whatever, they're getting a lot of that risk taking out in a different way and building resilience, building community at the same time. And so instead, yeah, not just, education, but entire kind of structure reforming. The human equivalent of the rat playground experiment.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, rats, rat Disneyland. This has been fascinating. And I've only asked you probably 10% of the questions. So what sort of general advice, either as a neuroscientist or just as a human being,

do you have for people following this conversation for their lives at this time of kind of cultural upheaval? Honestly, the frontal lobe is a superpower, like our ability to reflect meaningfully, to engage in this mental time travel of really kind of looking back and looking forward. I mean, we talk about the future of humanity. The future of humanity requires long horizon type thinking. It requires having a perspective of saying, like, look, I'm not going to engage in this thing right now because I know where it's leading. I know what this thing can produce if I keep doing these things.

that's part of the process, right, is use your frontal lobe, use it. So be a time traveler. Be a time traveler, right? And we see, like, in addiction, in kind of, they can be tied to some of these technology things as well, that you see dysregulated frontal lobe activity. And I often kind of think about a lot of this frontal lobe activity as hope creation, that you're able to create a sense of, like, what we hope the future can be, that then serves as one of your value inputs.

So how important to being intrinsically motivated and have an internally built identity are the stories that we tell ourselves or are the things that we're exposed to? For instance, some people who and the universe of people that listen to this podcast may be in the pre-tragic and the stories, even though they're science tethered on this program, can be really intense and upsetting. Yeah. So there does need to be a balance of the time traveler needs to go forward 30, 50 years and envision some positive outcome for society. So how important are stories? I think they're central to this.

So there's really interesting narrative work. Dan McAdams does a lot of this stuff, where they, They do these really intense interviews with people, and they have them tell them about really positive experiences in their past, really negative experiences, walk through their personal ideology and what they care about. And they build these really extensive documents on each of these people. And then they go through them and they look at these stories that these people are telling about themselves. This is actually an influence for some of the work that I've done that we're about to publish. But a lot of what you see in these stories are these two flavors of things that happen when people experience. like traumatic events and have to do with the type of story that we're telling. And they,

they call it redemptive arcs and contamination. So there's one group of people, when something bad happens to them or when they experience something negative, when they're, they can't control the stress in their lives, whatever it is, they become defined by it. And it becomes the story where this is who I am, so I'm always going to be bad things happen to me. That's just the way that it is. They tend to be very statically rigid in terms of their model, that their model is not something that's open to being kind of modified in any given way. But you have these other people that's really interesting. I mean, these are just people just telling stories about their lives, but they tell it in a redemptive way where, look, this thing happened to me, but it's a source of

growth in my life, that I'm using it to move forward and to move towards something different, right? And it's tied into a lot of the work on just growth mindset in general, something I very much push with my children, instead of saying, like, oh, you're so good at this. Like, that was really good effort. Like, you're getting better. What comes to mind is Stuart Smalley from the old Saturday night live episodes on the daily affirmations. Is that a real thing that people start in the morning or before they go to bed, they do some sort of catechism about their self-worth and things that are their value? Does that take root in our neurobiology? I think it absolutely does, right? It's not something that I personally do. I think I probably could benefit from it. It depends on whether you have

to it, though? Is it just like a hollow routine that you're doing? Or is it filled with actual vulnerable reflection that's leading to growth? There's this kind of metaphor that I use in my students when I talk about neuroplasticity that I think is really powerful because neuroplasticity, the idea is thrown around all over the place. Like, our brain can change. Like, change your brain. But what's not talked about is how hard it is. So take the example of this metaphor that, let's say that I'm building a path through the forest, right? And And this path is one of my bad habits. It could be waking up too late.

It could be doing cocaine. It could be doing any of these bad things or negative things that I'm doing, right? Every time I engage in that activity, I'm laying down work on that path. I'm pulling the weeds and pushing the rocks to the side. To eventually, I've done it so many times that now the path is paved. There's handrails. There's lights. I don't even have to think anymore about doing this anymore.

It's effortful, effortless, right? I just walk. I don't have to think about where I'm stepping. But let's say one day, I, I, actually think about where this path is leading and I don't like the destination anymore. And I decide, you know what, I want to change. I want to change my brain. I want to engage in neuroplasticity. I now have to decide that I have to step off this really nice paved path that's really easy to walk. And I have to start bushwhacking through the forest. I got to get my machete out and start

cutting bushes back. And usually what you see is that motivation is really high at the beginning. It's like, I want to change. This thing is not, it's not positive for me in my life. It's not healthy. And so they're out there and they're cutting stuff back and they're making this new path. all the while not knowing whether the end of the new path is going to be any better than the old one. But what happens is that every day, that effort gets harder. Because that old path was really easy to walk, but now I got to wake up. I got to get my machete out again. I got to keep walking and keep building this new path, right?

And the really insidious part of all of this is that if at any point I decide that this effort that I'm putting in is too much, that old path never goes away. It might be a little overgrown, but I can just like brush it off and it's fine. And now I'm walking back to nowhere again or to the place. that was negative for me in the first place. And that comes back to these positive affirmations. It comes back to the gambler parable that I gave you, right? Is that it requires us to continually reaffirm these things.

We can't just have this moment where like, this is who I want to be. And then a moment comes by and you're just like, oh, I'm ordering donuts again, right? True story. That was a couple of nights ago, right? But like, you have to engage in those moments continuously and you have to recognize the value of that change as you move forward. So what recommendations do you have for your students or for young humans becoming aware of all this? And maybe a prequel to that question is what is your observation of the 18, 19, 20, 23-year-old students that that you have from the beginning of the semester, understanding all this to the end? What have you learned and what have you shared from them?

I have some really powerful moments with some of these students. I teach group dynamics is a big one because it's so embedded in our lives. And I have these people come to me like I've never thought about conflict the same way. Like thinking about conflict not being a negative thing but being something that builds structure and build intimacy and all of these things. I teach a psychoactive drugs class and I have these people coming that are just like, I just thought these drugs are so cool. And now having this like really nuanced perspective, a lot of what I get from them is that information is power, right? that having the ability to even think about these things, because that's the problem, right?

It's not free will. It's entirely constrained by the language that I have to describe it. And so if I can actually, like, engage with these theories and think about them in a meaningful way, it allows me to then start embedding them into my identity model that I have, right? And so be curious, right? Be flexible and know that, like, you're never going to know everything. My five-year-old all the time is just like, I know everything. just like you're never going to know everything right and that's a good thing because you're always open to new possibilities and so have have some of your students been transformed by this knowledge I think so I mean I've had I've had people reach back after time that like the way they

interact in relationships the I mean I talk about authenticity a lot in these contexts and the tension between authenticity and acceptance that exists all around us that like there are moments where I want to be authentic. I want to do these things that are kind of aligned with who I believe I truly am, but I'm always at odds with the collective forces around me. And bringing awareness to that, I think it's been really powerful for a lot of these students in recognizing that, like, I don't need to be controlled by what Nietzsche would say, these thou shouts, like, your parents, you shalt do this, your friends, you should do this,

that these other perspectives that people have of who you are is not who you are. right, that you need to develop an internally generated feedback system instead of entirely relying on external feedback. And is there a checklist on how we do that to develop such an internal feedback system? I mean, a lot of it, I think, is really starting to become more aware with your biology, with your process in general. I mean, that happens through things like mindfulness, happens through things like cognitive work, somatic processing, realizing that these feelings that we're having, these emotions, these like pain signals, they're signals, right? I view, I really like, I would love to come back and talk about like the superorganism because I have a lot of thoughts.

My entire channel is called the Cellular Republic. I've had a really interesting, similar idea for a long time. But I view the mind in many respects as kind of a governing force in the body. And we have to have this perspective that like I'm, as the governing entity, I'm receiving these signals from my body that are telling me like, hey, what you're doing sucks. And it's like the water in Flint, Michigan or whatever. It's like I keep smoking and keep like harming these cells in my throat or whatever it is. And they're sending me a signal that they want to be a part of a more holistic and healthy community. And being able to tune into those things and actually listen to these signals in a meaningful way, I think is really important.

What do you care most about in the world, Taylor? My family. And, you know, I actually, I think back to the conversation that I had with you before we decided to do this podcast. And you asked me, you know, you said, what, what do you think is going on in the world in terms of these like calamities and this polycrisis and everything? And I was actually kind of taken a back in a way because I remember as an adolescent, as in early 20-something year old, caring passionately about these things, just like, like, voraciously watching these documentaries and diving in. And then I was just like hit in the face with life. and then I got to this point too where I became a father. And now it's like it's really hard to engage in this kind of pessimistic look of the future

when I'm trying to raise these young children to live to their potential. And so it's been a really interesting journey these last like three, four weeks since that last conversation. I've like re-embeding myself in some of these things and trying to think about because I've been so tied to like my family and my work. This has been a really interesting experience to think about how much. my work applies to some of these things. If you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse, what is one thing you might do to change human and planetary futures for the better? Oh, yeah.

That dizziness is the anxiety or anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, right? So many options there that it's hard to narrow it down to one because like things that I want to do with the magic wand would be subtle. I want to have faith in humanity. I want to, I think one of the magic wand things that I would probably wave is getting rid of shorts and TikTok and a lot of the things like I have, I do this addiction class where I do a go without assignment. And they have to give something up for, I do three weeks. I'd love to do 30 days, but they're not up for it. And at the beginning, they're like, this is going to be so easy. And I have, I give them the choice. I'm like, can give it up whatever.

And I have some people that'll do cigarettes, like super ambitious. And I have other people that give up TikTok. And they're like, whatever, it's TikTok. And the expletives in these papers, just like how beep and hard this was, really speak to how powerful these things can be. So with your magic wand, you would get rid of shorts and TikTok. And what you're really saying there as a neuroscientist is there are aspects of our society that act as speed bumps and quite large ones at that to get to our awareness homeostasis. Absolutely. And it's something that when you really look at what these shows,

shorts and these TikTok things and everything are doing is that they're oftentimes curating the type of self that these influencers are putting out there that's entirely product-driven and consumer-driven in a lot of ways. And so it's making the outsourcing type stuff really, really easy. And it's consuming the time that people would have had to engage in meaningful journaling practices or reflective or meditative practices or whatever it is that can actually lead to health and longevity in the future. We didn't talk about journaling, but that sounds like something that would be supportive for intrinsic identity building and awareness and other things probably.

No, and it's a lot of it, not just journaling, just like what happened today or whatever, but true like vulnerable, reflective journaling, one where you're constantly questioning your biases. There's a philosopher. He's really wacky when you hear him, but a lot of his messaging is really interesting. He has this idea that ideology is not really about what you believe, but what you're blind to being able to believe, right? That when we accept these values and these other things from these kind of consumerist things that we're a part of, it blinds us to possibilities that we could explore otherwise. And so a lot of the work I do with my students, a lot of the work that I try to do when I have the capability is to question constantly whether or not I'm bringing bias to the table.

So you mentioned the cellular republic, and I didn't know that you knew that much about my work. But if you were to come back on the program, either on a roundtable or another solo episode, what is one topic of personal interest that you're passionate about, that you would be willing to take a deep dive? on that is relevant to the theme of this podcast. Yeah, I think it's evolution, honestly. I in many ways see the evolution of the organism as being something that very much mirrors the evolution of society, that societies evolve in a very similar way as organisms do. And you mentioned earlier, the whole, like, can these groups have kind of an identity per se? And I think that they do in many respects, because of these similarities and the dynamic processes that are involved. And when you look at, like our current system is honestly kind of like in one of the earlier species like it hasn't developed the ability for self-reflection it's it's reactionary it acts like an animal does in terms of continuously looking for growth looking for consumption trying to feed itself on the resources it thinks that it needs and what it doesn't have is a frontal lobe to actually consider the implications of its actions so what what is the societal

equivalent of a frontal lobe. I don't know, right? I have some like curious ideas about potentials for AI, not exactly what AI is right now, but in terms of something that could serve an integrative function to kind of like make sense of a lot of these complex polycrisis signals that are coming together to allow for a more meaningful, reflected process. Do you have any closing words for our listeners, Taylor Guthrie. I really appreciate the opportunity to do this. This has been a really fun conversation. I hope we have a chance to maybe do this again.

But I think a lot of what I kind of challenge people to do is to really consider how much your groups influence the way that you think about the world. A lot of the times we think that we're doing things intrinsically. And when you really kind of narrow it down and you think, you answer that question, who am I? And you see how many of those things are tied to these relationships around us. Are those authentic relationships? Are those relationships that are actually serving your passion,

your joy, or are those ones that are defining you in some externally driven way? Choose your groups wisely. Yes. Thanks so much, Taylor. Good luck with your move to Holland and with all your postdoc work. To be continued, my friend. Thanks so much, Nate. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit The Great Simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media and produced by

Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyan, and Lizzie Siriani.