The Joe Rogan Experience - #1344 - Joseph LeDoux

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

Joseph LeDoux is a neuroscientist whose research is primarily focused on survival circuits, including their impacts on emotions such as fear and anxiety. His latest book "The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains" is now available.

here we go joe thank you thank you for being here really appreciate it man it's a pleasure to be here this is a fascinating subject i've been really looking forward to talking to you because the conscious mind and how we how we evolved our conscious mind how we have our conscious mind i mean that is uh one of the more unique things about being a person it is how did it happen well well it's only a four billion year story. It's a subtitle. We have some time. So shall I tell you how I got into it and how I ended up thinking about that problem?

So I'd been working on how the brain detects and responds to danger for most of my scientific career. A little bit before that, I'd actually studied consciousness and these people who have their brains split apart to control epilepsy called split brain patients. So I got interested in consciousness and also in how behaviors that might be produced non-consciously affect what we know about ourselves. So we see ourselves doing something and then we kind of consciously build that into our narrative of what we are. But a lot of what we do, we do non-consciously. And when we interpret it, that kind of solidifies the fact that you have a non-conscious system

that's controlling your behavior when in fact you didn't do it but that system did. So you got to make sense of it and generate an explanation, a narrative. So that was where I got started. And I tried to figure out, well, what would be some kinds of non-conscious systems? And I said, well, maybe emotion systems are producing behaviors that we don't fully understand. And I started studying that and ended up figuring out how this part of the brain called the amygdala receives information about the environment and then controls, orchestrates all the responses, fight-flight kinds of responses to help you protect yourself. And after many years of doing that, I started asking, well, how far back does this ability to detect and respond to danger go? We know that bugs and flies can do that. of danger go. We know that bugs and flies can do that. And research had been done showing that bugs and flies have certain molecules in their brain that are important in these kinds of

protective defensive behaviors and including the ability to learn about them and store those as memories. So it's easier to work on those little tiny invertebrates than it is to do studies in a complex brain, even like a rat brain, which is pretty complex. So given that what these people had discovered about invertebrates, I and others who were studying mammals decided to see if the same molecules might be involved in mammalian learning. And in fact, it was. So now that raises the question, you've got the same molecules doing the same thing,

the same molecules, same genes doing the same thing in ancient invertebrates and in animals like us. So you ask where back in time is the ancestor that made that possible? If we've got the same genes, either it kind of happens spontaneously separately or there's a common ancestor. And indeed, there's a common ancestor. And that goes back to the first organism, first animal that had a bilateral body, which means it had a left, right, front, and a back, and a top and a bottom.

So it has kind of three-dimensional sides before that there were animals like jellyfish that were radial but no front and back they just have a top and a bottom and before that there are sponges which have no front back top bottom they just kind of randomly organized so that's kind of the that's the story of animals, sponges to jellyfish to these bilateral animals. So the ancestor, the bilateral animal that we're talking about gave rise to those two lines, one that became all these invertebrates like flies and bugs and snails and octopus and all those things, and another to animals like us, vertebrates, all the fish, reptiles, mammals, birds, and so forth.

So those are two separate lines that inherited these genes that make the memory and defensive behavior possible. So you say, well, how far back does it stop there? And no, it doesn't, because you can find those genes on through jellyfish and then keep going into single-cell organisms. Now, these are like protozoa, things that give you intestinal parasites. So they can give you upset stomach and things like amoeba, paramecia that you might have heard of in biology class in high school or something. These have no nervous system, and yet they detect and respond to danger. They learn about their environment. They do all these sorts of things. And where do they come

from? Well, if you go all the way back to where they came from, an even simpler kind of organism, to where they came from, an even simpler kind of organism, still single cell, of course, like bacterial cells. Now, these guys go back to the beginning of life. The first cell that ever lived some 3.7 billion years ago that gave rise to the entire history of life was a bacterial-like cell that started dividing. Now, what's interesting,like cell that started dividing. Now what's interesting, that cell that started dividing is the mother of every bacterial cell that ever lived. So that cell is more like that cell is still alive because they reproduce by cell division. So that cell just keeps reproducing,

and part of that first cell ever is still with us today in all the bacterial cells that are around. It's kind of a mind-blowing thing. It's incredibly mind-blowing. Do we have any idea why the first cell decided to divide? Well, I shouldn't say it's the first cell that decided to divide. It's the first cell. Bacterial cell? It's the first cell that was able to sustain life long enough to give off offspring that could sustain and sustain and sustain. So there were probably lots of experiments before a kind of cell or kind of group of cells had the right stuff to be able to do that. So those others never made it because they didn't have quite enough of what it took to be a cell that could do that. So the first cell, I mean, it's kind of a

hypothetical cell. It's called LUCA, the last universal common ancestor of life. Whoa. Yeah. And so that's about 3.7, 3.8 billion years ago. But it could have been a bunch of cells, you know, a collection of cells, cell types, that one of which then, you know, populated all of life. The weird thing about life is not just that it's different, and it varies so much, but that it's ever increasing in its complexity. Well, If you go back to the single cell and then you come all the way to today to a person. Right.

Like what a weird sort of transformation. You know, it's dangerous to talk about as if we're moving towards some kind of goal. Right. Is it dangerous? That we are the goal. We're not the goal. I don't think we're the goal.

No, we're definitely not the goal. I've been more and more thinking that artificial life is the goal well i mean there's no goal of life of course there's survival is the only goal of every organism and that's uh that's what that first cell was able to do is to generate a set of biological properties that could sustain itself long enough to reproduce. That's all you have to do. You have to live long enough to reproduce. And to do that, you have to have energy resources. So you have to incorporate nutrients. You've got to balance your fluids. Otherwise, you have to keep your ion straight or the cell will get too big and explode or get too small and collapse. You've got to thermoregulate because all of these things depend on the right kind of internal temperature.

And you have to reproduce. Those are the survival requirements of a cell. But they're also the survival requirements of a human. So the same things that a bacterial cell has to do to live through the day and create a species is exactly what we do every day to reproduce ourselves. We have to eat, drink, defend against danger, incorporate nutrients and balanced fluids and ions that way, defend, reproduce. And so that was the mind-blowing thing. See, I wrote the whole three quarters of the book as a scientific journalist because I didn't know any of this stuff. I had to just learn it.

And it was a lot of fun, but it took a long time. I would imagine. When you think about the original Luca and then human beings, do you ever try to extrapolate? Do you ever try to, like, keep the process rolling in your mind and see where is this going to go? Oh, yeah. So at the end of the book, I paint a not a not so rosy picture of where it's going well yeah so let's talk about the end of the book so okay um i you know say okay well our we have these two kinds of of uh significant experiences in our lives that occupy the human mind. One is the kind that we can call an awareness of facts. This thing is here. And the other is what we might call call a self-awareness, where it's me that is aware that that is a bottle. So that's a higher level.

And that is what appears to be unique to the human mind, the ability to represent the self as a subject. In other words, to have these subjective experiences that have a personal past. that have a personal past. It's not just the past, but your past. You lived it. And a personal present and a potential future that you can imagine different scenarios of you existing in in the future. So that requires, I mean, that's called autonoetic consciousness, the ability to self-know about where you are in time.

And it depends. This is an idea that was proposed by a guy named Endel Talving, a very distinguished psychologist who's retired now. But his idea was that the unique aspect of the human mind is mental time travel, the ability to project ourselves in the past, present, and future. And without that kind of consciousness, we're limited to kind of factual information. Something is there. I might be able to say, oh, food is there or drink is there or a sexual partner is there,

but not necessarily that I want that food. You might have a kind of biological urge towards it. Now, from the outside, it looks like everything we do is intentional and willful. So I think I'm controlling my behavior. You think you're controlling yours. I see you do something that I might have done in a similar situation. I think you intentionally control that. We see a dog doing something that would be similar to what we do.

We think we know why the dog is doing that because it had some intention. But the fact is if we start taking these things apart in the brain, we see that the systems that control very simple behaviors are not the ones that are doing all this high-level conscious thought. Take the example of the area I've worked on for all these years, which is threat detection. Now, this part of the brain called the amygdala is key to the detection and response to threat in a kind of basic sense. You know, a threat comes up, you freeze if there's a snake, for example. Now, because of that, it's been assumed that the reason you freeze is because you're afraid.

And therefore, that the amygdala is also making the fear, because the amygdala experiences the fear, and that's why you produce the response. But for the longest time, and throughout most of my career, I've said the amygdala does not consciously experience fear. And yet my work has been used to kind of sell and defend this idea of the amygdala is the brain's fear center. And I think that's completely wrong. Why do you think it's been misinterpreted?

It's completely wrong. Why do you think it's been misinterpreted? It's a long, complicated story. But, you know, it's – partly it's my fault because I was not as vigilant as I should have been when I was describing it. See, what I did was I would talk about the amygdala as a non-conscious state of fear, non-conscious implicit fear. amygdala as a non-conscious state of fear, non-conscious implicit fear. And I would say that while the neocortex is where we consciously experience fear, and those are separate, but that was too complicated. You know, the journalists kind of ignored it, and it was just, it just became the amygdala is the brain's fear center. Even the scientists ignored it because, you know, we were studying.

And I kind of gave up after once. I said, okay, we talk about it in terms of fear. Because there was a lot of money to be directed towards research if you're studying fear and how you could treat that. But I think it's been kind of a wrong path because it's led to the development of medications that don't really work. So all the big companies are getting out of the anti-anxiety business, anti-fear business, because people still feel fearful or anxious when they take them. You mean like Xanax? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Companies are getting out of the Xanax business? Benzos, Xanax, yeah. I mean, they're not, either that or they're repurposing them for other purposes, you know. But, so what happens is, you, the way these things, you know, these things,

the basic drugs were discovered in the 60s, almost accidentally in some cases, you know, not rather than by some hypothesis. So the only thing that's been discovered since then is more versions of the same thing with, you know, slightly fewer side effects. But there's been no new discovery of a new kind of drug that's going to help people. And why is that? Well, the way the drugs are discovered is they take a rat or a mouse, put it in a challenging situation, give it some different medications,

and the ones that make the animal less timid in those situations is assumed to make the animal less fearful. And that's why he's less timid. So when you give it to a person, they should be less fearful. But what you find is, say, a person with social anxiety might find it easier to go to the party. They're less timidid but still anxious while they're there. And the reason is that we now know is that damage to the amygdala in a person doesn't necessarily also eliminate the feeling of fear. It gets rid of the body responses but not the feeling. So it was a misunderstanding of what behavior can tell us. We treat behavior as if it's an ambassador of the mind,

but behavior is really a tool of survival. It goes back to those first cells that ever lived who had to defend against danger. Bacterial cells move in the water, and then they come across a gradient of some chemical that's a toxin. As soon as they detect that, they bounce away and go in a different direction. If they find a gradient of something that is a nutrient, they keep going and absorb it.

So they have the ability to detect what's useful and harmful in their lives. These are not there for psychology. They're simply there to keep the organism alive. And many of the behaviors that persist throughout the whole history of life are like that. They're there because each of the cells in the body has to do all these things to stay alive. And so the organism as a whole has to do it as well. Defend against danger, incorporate nutrients, balance fluids, thermoregulate, reproduce. So these are survival tools, not mind tools. Now, we can use our mind in conjunction with these things. And because we can, we conflate every time we're freezing in the front of a snake to the fact that the fear is what's causing it.

But the fear is a separate process. It's the awareness that that stuff is happening to you. The awareness that that stuff is happening to you. The awareness that that stuff is happening to you? So, no self, no fear. That's my t-shirt. It's my merch on the book. Now, how do things like Xanax work? What's the mechanical process? Okay, so that's part of the class of drugs called benzodiazepine. And they bind to receptors in the brain. The brain has receptors for all kinds of chemicals, and many of these things are things that exist in nature.

And what they bind to is a receptor called the GABA receptor, which is the major inhibitory transmitter in the brain. So when you have a benzodiazepine binding to a GABA receptor, what it's going to do is increase inhibition. So the kind of simple reason why those things can help is they kind of inhibit. So they tone down the brain a bit. And so things that would normally trigger a response no longer trigger it. So it's like increasing the threshold for something to bother you in a sense. And a lot of people enjoy that with alcohol.

You're not supposed to? Well, alcohol also attacks those receptors. So it's like you get double the effect. Right. Is that why they tell people don't have Xanax or alcohol? Yeah, because you can, you know, if you take a lot of Xanax and drink a lot of booze, you can OD. Or you could just say crazy things and not totally be aware. Do you remember that story about a woman? She was, I believe she was a publicist, and she got on a plane.

She was flying to Africa, and she said, I'm going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white. LOL. She thought she was just being funny, and you laughed. And she landed in Africa. That must have been a surprise.

Do you know the story? No, but there are other stories like that this was one of the original stories of someone ruining their entire life with just putting you know one little tweet online she thought she was being funny like she she would say a bunch of snarky things like that a bunch of funny trying to be funny but she was on xanax and drinking yeah and woke woke up completely oblivious and her life had been destroyed. She was fired. She was a social pariah. And I'm pretty sure that was Xanax and alcohol that she was blaming it on.

Yeah, well, these are powerful drugs. So back to how they work and they work. So a drug like that, all of the drugs that we take go to the entire body. They're not able to just find their way to one little spot in the brain and do their trick. There's this talk about magic bullet drugs that might be able to be targeted for specific circuits. But that's fantasy at this point. So if you reduce inhibition in the entire brain, yes, you might reduce anxiety. But you're also going to change a lot of other things. So you're going to make, for example, forethought and ability to rein in

things like the stuff the woman was saying more difficult because they're attacking the prefrontal cortex where you have some inhibitory control over behavior. They're going to alter your ability to retrieve and store memories and to attend to things. And to the extent that these drugs have a positive effect on some people, it's been said that part of the reason is that it's kind of a general blunting of emotion. It's not an anti-anxiety drug. It's just kind of a dulling of everything. And you get anxiety, anti-anxiety as a part of that.

But if we want to understand how to do better, we have to figure out what the brain circuit that's really making us anxious is and not just what's making us not toning down everything. It's kind of like you go to a restaurant, the music's too loud. Somebody says, please turn it down. So they turn it down a little bit. The music stays the same. It's the same song, but it's not as annoying, you know, because you've turned the volume down.

And I think that's a lot of what these medications can do is turn the volume down a bit or turn it up, you know, depending on what you do. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there some sort of a slingshot effect, like after you take these things and your anxiety is ramped up afterwards? Well, it can be a rebound effect. There can also be kind of a lot of people next day feel depressed because the stuff is out of your system and just kind of, you know, if you take, it's kind of like taking sleeping pills. Things like Ambien are of the same general category of drug, benzodiazepines.

And so you get this hangover the next day. Okay. So it's just a physiological response to the medication. It's not that if you alleviate some anxiety, then the anxiety wants to come back even stronger. No, I mean, so I, you know, I've often, I've proposed in my previous book that we each have an anxiety set point that, you know, let's say you're worried about something. And all of a sudden, that gets resolved. That just makes room for the next thing to work with. So, you know, we each kind of fill that void because our brain is, you know, we've developed a brain that has a certain kind of set point for everything it's doing.

And that just makes room for – to fill that up. If you're an anxious person, you probably will always be somewhat anxious. So there's no magic bullet that's going to take that out. What you have to do is attack the process from knowledge of how it all works. And that requires that we have a more sophisticated understanding than is possible from simply observing behavior. Because behavior does not tell you necessarily what's on the mind. Behavior tells you how the brain has responded. how the brain has responded.

But just to go back to the fear threat example, let's say I bring you into the laboratory and show you a picture of something like a blue square. My colleague Liz Phelps, who used to be at NYU, is now at Harvard, did experiments like this. And every time the blue square would come on, the person would get a mild shock to their finger. And so then she would present the blue square subliminally. That means really quickly with something that follows it,

that kind of masks it. And that prevents the information from getting into the conscious mind. And so the person said I didn't see anything but if you put the person in an imaging machine fMRI and image what's happening that stimulus that threat the blue square gets to the amygdala turns it on the heart begins to race, palms are sweating, but the person has no fear. The person doesn't know it's there and doesn't experience fear. The amygdala is not about fear.

It's about detecting and responding to danger. In order to be afraid, that has to reach your conscious mind so that you can experience it as a state of this autonoetic consciousness that we're talking about a self-involved consciousness that's hard for people to separate yeah well the idea that there's a physical response but that your mind's unaware of it right but when you understand that that's why you come to understand that's why the medications are not working they're targeted to work on these underlying systems in rats or mice, but that's not where we are experiencing our anxiety.

But these medications are very profitable, right? People enjoy it. Millions of prescriptions get written. Are they just going to phase those out? They'll probably, you know, they're probably all going off patent. And because the company can't find anything new, they're not going to keep pursuing it because it's not going to be a profit anymore. But don't people still want them? I mean, it seems like that's a really popular medication. Yes, it'll be like they'll go to, you know,

they'll become generics, and people will be able to get them for less money. And they'll just do with whatever they want. Yeah. Off-label, whatever. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, I do think that, for example, the drugs that are available do help people because it's important to reduce the behavioral timidity and the physiological

arousal that goes with that. Because if you don't treat that, then the conscious mind will be reactivated by those responses. If you only treat the conscious mind, then the physiological stuff will bring the conscious stuff back. Everything will bring back everything else unless you treat the whole system. And to do that, you have to understand the system. And we've just misunderstood it, I think, for so long. I have a friend who, he takes it every day. Takes Xanax every day.

And he says he needs it. He says without it, he's just a mess. Well, you know, whatever gets you through the day, I guess. You know, I'm not a therapist. I'm not advocating that. I know, I understand. But from your perspective, from an understanding of the human mind and all the systems that are at work, it seems like that's really not the way to do it. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, I'm sure that that's, you know, in a sense, maybe that's his crutch, his way to get through the day and um he's come

to believe that he needs that much like an alcoholic believes they need to drink yep yeah but i'm not calling him and you know well i'll call him he does like to drink too yeah but he's a great guy uh what these these systems that are in place and all of the various things that have gotten us to 2019 as a human species, when you study anxiety and you study fear and all these different things, are we experiencing high levels of it because there's not as much real physical danger as our ancestors experienced. And it's almost like we're looking for it when it's not necessarily there. Like we're programmed to be able to deal with it. Yeah, that's a good point. I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think that's a good way to think about it. I mean, you know, the philosopher Kierkegaard said that anxiety is the price we pay for the human ability to choose.

And this is where our autonoetic consciousness comes in, our ability to think of ourselves as having a past and a future and to be able to plan and choose in the future. You know, he said it started with Adam making the first choice as a human in the Garden of Eden, and that was where it all began. making the first choice as a human in the Garden of Eden, and that was where it all began. So in our ability, you know, you can rephrase that statement by saying our ability to choose is what allows us to be anxious because that is what anxiety is, a worry about are we going to make the right decision? You know, how can we deal with this thing that's coming up? It's a worry about the future.

Yeah, and the ability to think about the possibilities, like what could go wrong, what could go right, am I doing the right thing? And then to contemplate all those various choices. Anxiety. Yeah. choices. Anxiety. Yeah. So like, you know, you're walking through the woods as a snake, you might freeze, but almost instantly that fear that is generated by you freezing and seeing the snake morphs into anxiety. You know, will the snake bite me? If it bites me, will I get to a doctor? Will he have the anecdote? If I die, what will happen to my family you know just that's word that's anxiety so these are they're kind of separate fear is about a danger that's present anxiety is about one that hasn't happened yet

almost always as soon as you're afraid that makes you anxious about what's gonna happen and then there's general existential angst mm The life itself, the existence is just a, what is this? Yeah. And all of that is due to our prefrontal cortex, our ability to conceptualize, to imagine things that have never been imagined before,

to create art, to create architecture, build buildings, imagine going to the moon, designing an instrument to do that and actually pulling it off and make sure it can get back. All of that is something that our special kind of consciousness enables. But it has a dark side, which is it also allows us to be incredibly selfish and self-centered and narcissistic and to support tribes and groups. And, you know, unless we, I mean, I think that the world survives best when it's either completely isolated, all the cultures are isolated, or if we could also somehow be together in a more unified way. Because the direction we're going now, where each country is isolating itself, but is still so entangled with all the others is a recipe for disaster.

Is this because we evolved essentially without long-term travel? I mean, we kind of evolved to stay in whatever area the resources were in when we were hunters and gatherers. And then somewhere along the line, somebody figured out boats and how to get on a horse, and the next thing you know, you're visiting people. I think it's more about, you know, we have a special kind of inquisitiveness that we can – because we can mentally model the next step and plan what are the options, you know, try to anticipate the problems that are going to come up and take those steps. And that's a pretty special thing. But it also allows us to plan in a kind of devious way where me or my group is going to benefit.

And if mine benefits, I don't want the other one to benefit because we've got to keep everything separate. So it's consciousness. Our kind of consciousness is our greatest achievement but also probably our worst aspect. But it's what makes us human. It is. Imagining humans with no consciousness is impossible. No. There's no way to go in that direction that's so is is the key to this thing as the human race is it managing our

consciousness and perhaps maybe work like yours giving us the tools to understand what are the mechanisms involved that maybe that can help us sort of navigate our biological traps? Maybe. I mean, I think it's, you know, certainly we don't, I think the, I mean, I have no idea what your position on climate change is, but personally I think that things are happening and something needs to be done. That's clearly things are happening. and something needs to be done.

That's clearly things are happening. And that, you know, I read a couple of editorials, probably in the New York Times or something, a couple of months ago. One was about how, yes, things are changing and we have a right to worry, but we shouldn't worry about the earth as the famous quote is, Gaia's a tough bitch. So the earth will survive but the configuration of life on it is unlikely to continue to be the same

under those conditions. The more that everything changes, the conditions of life change. And the first things to go, and this is what happened to the dinosaurs, are large, energy-demanding organisms. Because as the conditions change, the climate that we've lived in, we've succeeded because we were able to benefit from that kind of climate. But as the climate begins to change, our kind is not going to be able to succeed as well because those conditions are, you know,

the waters are rising, the deserts are expanding, all these things are happening, and it's just not going to be... You know, species don't last that long. A few million years and they go. So our time may be... We've only been around for what 300 400 thousand years and something well it depends on what what we call we yeah but the neanderthals were around quite a bit longer than that yeah they're not here anymore so we don't have a i mean

i think that we can use our minds to try and help us get through this. But that's only going to work if we can do that collectively. That's the scary part. We have to work together collectively as a world because these are not local issues. These are global issues. Yeah, right. And that is – how does that good luck getting you know especially getting other countries like china to comply yeah but you

see that small successes i mean like auto companies deciding well we need to you know rein in the emissions and there's probably a profit motive uh underline that at some point sure and people are conscious there's green dollars yeah motive underlying that at some point. And people are conscious. There's green dollars. Yeah. Right. Like you want to – like when you think about technological achievements and you think about the conscious mind and the ability to create and the creative process, do you envision the possibility of some sort of a technological solution to a lot of the problems that we're facing? I think it has to be a social solution.

Social. How so? We have to figure out how to balance this worldwide. We can do whatever we want in this country if we could do what we want in this country. If we could do what we want. Even if we were the best country in the world for the environment, that wouldn't solve the problem. It's a worldwide problem. Amazon forest, that's affecting a lot of people. It's just not a simple thing that one country can solve. Right. But if one country takes steps and imposes some sort of a technological solution that pulls carbon from the atmosphere, that does enhance some sort of a cooling process to bring homeostasis, to bring some sort a like generally agreed upon state of the

environment if that's technologically possible I mean that's going to come out of the creative mind right well you know I don't want to go too far off into my not area of expertise like climate and so that I just think there's I think of it from the kind of the social perspective and what our brains are contribute but I don't want to I don't think I can really address the details of all that. Right. But even like socially, if we did address it socially, we're still going to have to deal with the actual physical limitations of just the environment that we live in

and what we've done and how to somehow or another mitigate it. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. But, yeah, so I think, think you know creators coming along and trying to find technical solutions that's great when you analyze the human mind and knowing what you know about the thought processes and the way people think and where when you see people in denial of climate change and when you see people that are so enamored with the the concept of capitalism

and big business that they don't really think that it's a big deal or they want to deny that it's a big deal so that they can continue short-term profits right what is that like those mechanisms like watching that take place in the monkey mind yeah what are you what are you thinking when you see that happen with humans you know i don't think it's simple um it's not simply denial of climate change for climate reasons i think there's a lot of um social you know within certain groups there's social stigma for being pro-environment. And so it's— Tribal. Tribal. It's people cling together, and it's a kind of form of self-protection that by identifying a set of issues that we all can agree upon because they're kind of dictated top down in a sense that are our thing

and then that thing is somebody else's thing. Yeah, that's a weird aspect of being a human being, right? These tribal identity things where if you're in this group, you must be pro-choice. If you're in this group, you must be pro-life.. If you're in this group, you must be pro-life. You must be anti-war. You must be pro-Second Amendment.

There's very little deviation. And that's left, right. That's everything. I mean, the belief systems, rigid belief systems, are just part of being. And when you look at politics and you know that these belief systems are... Do you find it odd that we have these sort of polar opposites or at least left-right choices, red-blue choices, that we've limited ourselves to these very distinct tribes?

Right. Yeah, I think that's unfortunate, but that's where we are. Is there a way out of that? The political scientists have to take that one. We're going down a weird road. What do you think is the source of creativity? Like somewhere along the line, I mean, and we've seen it, right? I mean, there's some speculation and scientists have sort of generally agreed that some monkeys are in the Stone Age.

That some primates are in what would be considered Stone Age. They're starting to use tools. They're starting to use sticks. There's a famous photograph that I love of an orangutan. Where are we going to get a copy of that? We should get that orangutan with a spear. Make a note of that. There's a crazy orangutan image of an orangutan holding onto a branch

and then spearfishing. It's amazing. And apparently he had seen humans do it so that's where he learned the behavior imitation yes but still that is a primate using a weapon to try to spear fish look at this photo is that incredible nice i mean that is incredible mean, that's like really thoughtful and skillful. And the way he's hanging, I mean, my goodness. Look at that. I love that picture. That picture is amazing.

Yeah. Now, the creativity that allows you to get food when you couldn't get food, allows you to escape from environmental conditions, allows you to escape from predators, all these things are rewarded by the continuing of your genetics. But there are other things that come into play. One of the specialties that came along, I think, is a byproduct of having language. And by language, I don't mean words, but what language did,

what was required for language to come out of the brain, which is the development of a cognitive sort of architecture in our brain that allowed all kinds of mental jumping around. So, for example, for most animals to learn, you know, who to trust and who not to trust and in a given situation who's going to do what to whom by just looking around, they have to go through trial and error learning and see the experience all of that a lot. But the human mind can simulate, create a mental model, and instantaneously make those kinds of predictions on the basis of very limited information. And this is based on something, well, the relation to language is that syntax gives you those kinds of options because you have past, present, future states that can be related to you and to others and so forth.

And personal pronouns are very important in terms of me, I, mine, you, yours. The point when those come in in a child is the first point when I think self-awareness can fully be tested and shown. And some people say, well, they have it, but they just couldn't express it. Others say, no, that the arrival of the pronouns, personal pronouns, are very important in the child's development of a sense of self. But anyway, so language changes the brain, changes the cognitive architecture of the brain, and allows for something, just to throw out a technical term, hierarchical relational reasoning,

which is the ability to think across kind of conceptual categories, laterally and horizontally, so that information, you can just jump around. And that's kind of what creativity is, the ability to just jump around and that's kind of what creativity is the ability to just jump around in middle space and come up with something by a unique combination of those things do you do you think that there's variation in terms of the the types of languages like chinese versus spanish versus that they allow you to interface with the world in a different way because the languages are structured very differently.

I think that's absolutely right, but I don't know enough about other languages to say exactly how. I think it was Malcolm Gladwell. I think it was the outliers who discussed this, like the limitations of certain languages in terms of pilots. Was that Gladwell? I think it was. They were discussing how Korean Airlines because they have sort of a hierarchy of you

know the way you're supposed to treat the upper levels of management up and then that they had to force these pilots to all speak English so that they didn't have this hierarchy like that this presumed hierarchy of being able to address situations. That planes had crashed because co-pilots were in their place. They were put in their place and they weren't allowed to address pilots. And that once they had switched over to English, that the language, like there's so many different versions of dealing with your boss or someone who's an upper level person.

There's so many different ways that you were supposed to address them and that they had eliminated all that by using English. It's very different than the way people communicate, say, in some African countries. Right. That we have these different styles of interpreting the world around us, and those in turn have a profound effect on the way we sort of interface with the world. I think that's definitely right. So it's interesting to think about emotion and language. So it's often said that an emotion like fear is universal across the world. But I don't think that's actually correct. What's universal is danger.

And the way fear is interpreted by different cultures is obviously different. I mean, Asians have a different kind of perspective on fear. Every culture has their own perspective on fear. So fear is the kind of cultural assembly that you have in your brain in response to danger. So every culture has to have a language of fear, but not because fear is universal, but because danger is universal. And what they interpret as danger is different.

Right. And fear, for one person, something could create fear, whereas for another person, the exact same situation would not, depending upon their personal experiences and maybe even their genetic makeup. Well, yeah, I mean, genes contribute. So every part of our brain is under some kind of genetic influence. So every, for example, the amygdala will be genetically kind of slightly more roughed up in one person than another, so a little more sensitive to danger.

And so that person might be responding more to danger, in part because of genes, but also maybe because of experiences that they've had. And so then the conscious mind is seeing those responses and starting to conclude, oh, I'm an anxious, fearful person. And all of that information gets collected in what's called a fear schema, which is a body of knowledge of everything you know about danger, including the world is enough to go into your brain and activate those memories about danger that give you in a non-conscious representation, an activation of this fear schema that is what then bubbles up into consciousness. That's your experience of fear is what has been activated in your fear schema. Knowing what you know and then watching whatever anxieties or fears may play out in your own mind, is that, for lack of a better term, a mind fuck for you?

You know what I mean? Because you studied this so much and then you're a human, so I assume you have the same anxieties. I have a lot of anxieties. And we all do. Yeah. And truthfully, it helps to some extent. So I used – in 1996, I published a book called The Emotional Brain.

And a few years later, I started finding out from therapists that the – a lot of patients were reading the book with their therapist, and they were saying that it was really helping them understand how different things were happening, that the amygdala was causing them to react in certain situations. But their fear was their conscious understanding of those reactions, and those were not the same thing and that separation helped them you know navigate their own situation and in a situation of danger separating out okay that's my body is responding this way my mind is responding this way and these are two separate things i need to work on and control have you studied various ways that people mitigate anxiety and fear, like meditation and yoga and all these different things that sort of change people's states. I mean, I haven't studied it myself, but I have researched it a bit. I try to do meditation myself because I think it's probably the most direct and effective way in the moment. Sitting in the room outside waiting for it.

Just had my hat and sunglasses on, just trying to chill out, meditate a little bit, get ready for you. Do you do that on a regular basis? It's hard to maintain it because life gets busy, and it seems like the hardest time to do it is when you need it most. Yeah. I think it's one of those things like hygiene where you sort of have to say, well, it's hard to take a shower. You have to take a shower.

Don't stink. You have to brush your teeth. You get cavities. You have to meditate. You'll go crazy. Yeah, it's perfect. That's the way it should be done. I think that is what it is. or created to sort of in some way alleviate anxiety or enhance perspective.

Do you spend much time dwelling on the creation of those things and what's going on there? What do you mean by the creation? Well, like a human had to figure out how to meditate. A person had to figure out these modalities, these different ways to sort of interface with. these different ways to sort of interface with. So let's take that to the nature of most approaches to fear and anxiety today. Just hold off the meditation part slightly. Okay.

So we have psychopharmacology is a major line of attack, and also what's called cognitive behavioral therapy, which arose as a form first called behavioral therapy because it came out of the behaviorist movement, which said there's no consciousness, that the human is a stimulus response organism that is based on a history of reinforcement with certain kinds of situations. So behavior therapy was about using Pavlovian or operant conditioning to change how the brain would respond to threats and how people would act in those situations. It wasn't about the mind at all. It was all about behavior.

And then cognition was added to that. So that became cognitive behavioral therapy. But again, the cognitive change was used as a way of changing behavior because so much emphasis has been placed on behavior in our culture, including in the drug therapy world. It's all based on changing measurable things like behavior and physiology. And I think that that's why all of these things, in some sense, have not worked out as well as we would like. in some sense have not worked out as well as we would like.

You know, the best medications and the best CBT trials will give you like 75% record of help in a group. That's pretty great though, isn't it? I've still got 25. Yeah, but you also have to extract out the placebo effect. And in many of these drug studies, for example, antidepressant drugs, the placebo effect is only, the drug effect is only slightly better than the placebo effect. But when you have cognitive behavioral therapy, there's, I mean, you're actually going for the placebo effect, right? I mean, you're trying to- There's nothing wrong with placebo effect. In that sense, though, you are trying to sort of, you're trying to there's nothing wrong with placebo effect in that sense though you are trying to sort of you're trying to use some sort of strategy with your mind in therapy

whether it's meditation what are you doing you're trying to enact change right and if that change is enacted there's not a pill involved right so it is kind of like the same mechanism that's involved in a placebo effect your mind is creating this this right new change yes and so but the question is a person that goes through the motions but doesn't get the therapy right how much are they changed by simply by kind of going through it you know there's so many variations with humans i'd like to find out out, like, are they lazy? Are they self-destructive? And why is that the case? Maybe all of the above. All the above.

Yeah, whenever you have – I think 75% is amazing. Yeah. Can you consider if you have a group of people, what are the odds – if you have a group of 100 people, what are the odds that 25 of them are going to be lazy? Pretty good, right? Yeah. Pretty – I mean, I would bet a ton of money that 25% of those people don't do what they're supposed to do all the time. Right. So, you know, you're right. But I think the issue is, from a scientific point of view,

we need to know exactly what really works, what's different from placebo. Right. So that we can see what to build upon. For medication. For medication, for cognitive therapy as well. But the therapy thing is so strange to me because, okay, maybe we're using the wrong word with placebo. Because placebo is a word for a medication that has a psychosomatic effect, right? Well, it's the control group that

doesn't get the treatment so that you get that it's not really doing anything physiologically but your body is interpreting it as medicine and saying all right change is coming and then the change comes and that is a real thing but when you're thinking about cognitive behavioral therapy you're thinking about using techniques and strategies to change the way you think and behave though so the the concept of the placebo effect doesn't really apply there well you have to have a control group right in the study you have to have randomized control in order to make it so when you have cognitive behavioral therapy and you have randomized control and you have a control group do you just give them shitty therapy we need to get uh a therapist on here to give you the answer to that because i don't know the answer

have you gone to therapy yourself i have yeah did you do that to examine this um i you know i i mainly went into it with for the meditation port to try and uh calm some of my you know restlessness To try and calm some of my restlessness. Has writing and all this study that you had to do to write these books, has that enhanced you? I mean, you have much more of an understanding about what's at play than the average person does. Well, you know, again, it's kind of like the patient who's reading The Emotional Brain with their therapist. I think by writing those books, I learn a lot, and it helps me see things. It doesn't necessarily help me lead my life any better, but I think I understand it better. But no self, no fear.

Yeah. no fear. Yeah. Well, no self, no fear means that you have to have this autonautic consciousness ability in order to be afraid. And that is a special human quality, the ability to put yourself in the moment, in your past and in your future. If it's not you that's going to be harmed by that snake, then you don't have to worry about what it's going to do to you. So if you are part of it, then you worry, and it becomes, you know, it's an emotion when you're involved. So I think emotions, this is a crazy idea that's in the book, that emotions didn't arise through natural selection. Really? Well, that's the idea that they were byproducts of other capacities that came along. First, you had some kind of crude language that enabled this hierarchical and

relational reasoning to jump across. Language gave you categories to conceptualize things. Hierarchical reasoning allowed you to jump across those categories. And those kinds of things allow you to conceptualize yourself as an entity with an experience. So you had to have a self that could do that kind of reasoning across those conceptual categories. And that is what enabled an emotion, the ability to put yourself into a significant situation. So now that it's here, now that we have, once emotions are there, then they become selected. But they weren't selected by, for example, the amygdala having evolved to be the fear center

and inherited that from animals. Animals probably have some kinds of experiences, but scientifically, it's very hard to know what they have. Well, we know dogs have emotions, right? Dogs get sad. Well, I wouldn't say that. Dogs get happy. Well, you see their behavior.

Right. But I'm not saying they aren't, but scientifically, you can't measure that. Right. But if you have a dog and you come home and he's so excited to see you and he's running around circles that seems very emotional well akin yeah but i don't said let's talk about the brain for a second okay so the parts of the brain circuits in the brain that um are involved in this kind of autonoetic emotion that I'm talking about, this self-involved emotion that's so human, such a human quality.

The part of the brain that I think is important, and this is still a hypothesis, it's not a fact, is something called the frontal pole. It's the very, very front part of the prefrontal cortex. That region is unique to the human brain. Not even another ape has that. Now, other parts of the prefrontal cortex are present in other primates, all of the primates, but not in any other mammal. So if we can figure out in the human brain what that frontal pole does and what that other part that all primates have do, then that gives us an anchor for speculating about what other primates, what kinds of experience other primates have given what those parts of the brain enable in us. And that would allow us to then extract what other mammals don't have that we have

because they don't have those parts of the brain. So it's a kind of use of the brain to tell us some things about what might exist in other animals. But there's no way to ask a dog what's on your mind. Could we measure the brain with an fMRI or something along those lines where you get a reading of – Darrell Bock But that's not an answer. I mean, it's correlate. So a human – like I can – if you ask me, is there a pin here on the table? is there a pin here on the table? I say, yes, I can respond verbally,

or I can point to it. But when I'm responding verbally, I can only do that for something I'm conscious of. I can't respond to something I'm unconscious of by naming it. Follow that? Other animals can only respond non-verbally. So they don't have that other kind of response that is only reflecting a conscious state.

So I'm not saying they don't have anything, but scientifically it's very hard to know what they have. And the fact that we can study, we know in, for example, fear, that the fear itself probably doesn't depend on the amygdala. But all the behavior that we see does makes us have to be cautious

about observing behaviors that look like they're based on fear, love, and all these other emotions when we can't really know because we can't measure that. I mean, it's a tough problem. Again, I'm not saying it's not there. It's just like scientifically, you know, you have to be stringent.

What's the evidence? Yes, yeah, you have to. Now measuring it in humans is, I mean, there's this concept of people, I'm an emotional person, you know, I'm emotional. I get emotional. People love to say those kind of things. Is it possible to measure varying degrees of emotional response in terms of how it's affecting a person physiologically, whether or not these emotional responses are physiological, Physiologically, whether or not these emotional responses are physiological or whether you've gone down a well-grooved psychological path that you've been sort of participating in your whole life so that you have these sort of triggers.

This happens and then up, I'm going to start crying. This happens up, I'm going to get angry and people sort of fall into those paths without self reflection, without this ability to be objective and introspective and go, why am I reacting this way? Like what? Maybe you should stop being so emotional, Joe. Right? Anybody ever said that to you? Joe Keen I guess my wife has said. Darrell Bock Sure. Well, what does that mean? Like what? You know what I mean? Like this Like the varying degrees of emotional response and whether or not those are beneficial or whether or not they detract from your experience or inhibit your ability to be productive. So, you know, you've really nailed a lot of interesting stuff in there. And, you know, it's a very kind very deep analysis of what's going on.

The problem is that our language is so bad that all these terms that we have, we borrow from what's called folk wisdom or folk psychology. They've come through the ages. And this is true in every aspect of science, that you have folk terms. You know, folk physics becomes real physics, and then the folk stuff goes away. Folk biology becomes real biology, and then, you know, the folk stuff goes away. But in psychology, the folk stuff never goes away because we always experience the folk aspect of it when we have a conscious experience that's what our conscious minds is our folk psychology of ourselves and of others and of other animals but the um um underneath that is the part that we can get rid of the folk psychology of because we can understand how behavior is controlled, how these physiological responses are controlled. And it ain't because we've had fears causing it.

But when you're afraid, you're almost always running from the bear and feeling fear. And so you assume that when you're running from the bear, fear is what causes you to run. But fear is not the answer. Fear is your awareness that all that shit is happening to you. But also the ability to contemplate the consequences, right? Yeah. This bear is going to get me. He's going to eat me.

Yeah. So that's all one interpretation after another running forward. the ability to contemplate the consequences, right? Yeah, yeah. This bear's going to get me, he's going to eat me! Yeah. Enhances the fear. That's all one interpretation after another running forward. But no self, no fear. That's no possible either, right? Well, no, I mean, you need the self to be afraid. Yeah. So, I mean, that's your, and to be consciously afraid.

But you can react to danger without the self. And that's what, you mean, that's your – and to be consciously afraid. But you can react to danger without the self. And that's what – that's key. You find yourself freezing or you're walking in New York City and you jump back and the bus goes flying by. So you've reacted to danger. But only afterwards do you feel fear when you cognitively become aware that that's happened. Well, and that's sort of a situation. But in a situation like where you're walking down a dark alley and then you see some guy who seems to be following you yeah you're like oh boy yeah so now you're you're in a situation where you're in a potentially dangerous

situation so now you're anxious about what's going to happen so you're not starting with fear you're starting with anxiety worry about what's going to happen nothing there's nothing there that's made you but then one of you ramps it up says hey joe yeah why don't you come over here man i'd like to borrow some money from you you're like oh shit so it's fear is that fear now you've got a specific threat and yeah so you now you're into fear and then that's going to morph into another anxiety about what the hell is this guy going to do to me right But all of that, the dark alleyway is going to go into your brain and trigger your muscle tension, your heart to race and so forth. And the dark alley is going to go to your cortex. And you're going to be interpreting the fact that you're in a dark alley and your heart is racing in terms of being anxious and fearful and all of that.

But they're happening separately. It's not one bundle. It's like separate things in the brain. And once we understand that, it becomes, I think, a much easier problem how to approach problems of fear and anxiety. You've got to separately treat the behavior and the physiology from the conscious thoughts. And in between those two, you've also got to change the cognitions that underlie the conscious thoughts. And in between those two, you've also got to change the cognitions that

underlie the conscious experience, but also the cognitions can trigger behavior. So, you know, one of the things we've proposed, I proposed this in my last book, Anxious, was a kind of test program for exploring this, where it would be kind of a three-part, three-step program. First, you'd have to do it with something simple, like a spider phobic. A what? A spider phobic or a snake phobic. Oh, okay. So you would do exposure therapy subliminally.

Subliminally. That means you'd present the picture of a snake or the spider so fast that the conscious mind doesn't know it's there. So like those old hungry-eat-popcorn things? Yeah, exactly. Just to have the movies? Yeah. Okay. And that's a very common technique in psychology, too. So, they would show you a film and there'd be one or two frames of a spider if you had a raccoon over you? Or just a picture. But it could be a film, yeah. Okay.

But it would have to go very fast in the film. So, with a picture, you'd just present it really quickly. And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film. So, you'd have to go very fast in the film. So, you'd have to go very fast in the film. And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film. And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film. And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film.

And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film. And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film. And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film. And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film. And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film. And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film. And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film. And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film. And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film. And then, you'd have to go very fast in the film so it would so with a picture you just present it really quickly and um because you know normally if you show a spider phobic uh try to do exposure therapy they don't want to do it because they don't want to deal with spiders

but they they their conscious mind doesn't know it's happening because it's going through subliminally. So the amygdala is being tamed by the exposure, and now they can look at the picture without the body reacting. They're not jumping. Their heart isn't racing because the amygdala has been turned off, so all those body responses have calmed down. So now the person can kind of undergo some cognitive change about looking at spiders and so forth. And then finally, once you've done those two steps, the brain's ready for talk therapy and meditation and other kinds of mindfulness approaches.

Because all of the impediments to all that have been put aside by these first two steps. So has anybody ever like officially cured someone of arachnophobia or phidiophobia or, you know, fear of snakes or spiders? Like those seem to be almost like deep-seated genetic fears. Well, we, I mean, our ancestors, yes, had a snake. But they vary, which is what's weird. Our ancestors certainly experienced venomous snakes. But there's something about some people have an almost illogical reaction to it. It's often been speculated that this is some sort of a genetic memory of someone perhaps in their ancestry line surviving a snake attack or losing someone to a snake?

It's more, you know, it turns out that it's more about the ability to rapidly learn about those kinds of dangers than to innately respond. So there seems to be, it's called prepared learning. So you have an evolutionarily based thing that's with you that everyone has some version of, but it varies from individual to individual. And then some people are prone to rapidly learn that, either because of other experiences or because of their particular genetic makeup. And so they tend to go down the road of acquiring these kinds of phobias. Now, so it's the problem with treating that by just extinguishing it through exposure is that the extinction is always impermanent. You know, once you've been reduced, nothing is wrong. This is true in a rat or a person.

Let's say the rat has been given a tone that's been paired with a shock, and then it hears the tone 20 or 30 times, stops responding. But then if it goes back in the room or the chamber where the shock had occurred, the tone will again elicit it. And the spider phobic returns to the place where he or she was bitten by a spider or a place where spiders are supposed to be present. It can come back. So these are imperfect temporary solutions.

They're not enough. And that's why, I mean, these are called reinstatement and things like that because they pop back up. So maybe medications can help tamp that down a bit. So medications are useful in that sense of being able to control the behavior and the physiology, but less so in terms of changing the mental state. Because how could you possibly design a medication that would know how to change the content of a mental state?

That seems like an impossible task. And that's what you want to do. You don't want to change all mental states. You want to change the one content. I'm afraid of spiders. Darrell Bock Yeah. It's so fascinating though how people vary so widely in their reaction to certain fears or to certain things that could induce fear, whether it's dogs or whatever irrational thing that people have. The source of that is really often speculated that there's like some sort of a genetic component to it.

Do you buy into that? So let's say that in any kind of situation like that, there are multiple systems in the brain that are going to be involved. We're going to isolate the amygdala as a hypothetical part of that system that is detecting and responding to the stimulus. So we're going to go into the amygdala and focus on one little part of it called the lateral nucleus. That doesn't matter, but it's the part that gets the input from the outside world. So that is the gateway into the amygdala. So now let's talk about, let's say it's got, I don't know, 100,000 cells and neurons. And each of those neurons is going to have a bell curve that's based on the genes that made that

cell and whatever kinds of electrical signals it's had throughout the life of the organism. So you're going to have 100,000 bell curves of various degrees that when the stimulus comes in, those cells that are activated, their little bell curves are going to determine how much they respond to that. And that's going to propagate to other cells that have their own bell curves in areas and so on down the line that what happens at the level of behavior is a very complicated kind of summation of all those bell curves, of all those cells that happen to be activated. So it's not like one thing is programmed. It's not like a brain areas program.

So it's not like one thing is programmed. It's not like a brain area is programmed. It's all about what's happened at those specific cells, both through genetics and experience. So we often kind of oversimplinid and now what we are now, and you think of all these various components that are at play, do you ever try to imagine what a human of a thousand years or 10,000 or 100,000 years from now will be like? Oh, they're going to be different. You know, we're not, every organism is in constant change you know the racial mixing interbreeding happens and so random mutations random mutations we're living longer and so you know that's creating people having babies later that will change a lot of stuff. So we're going to be a different thing.

At some point we may split out into a whole new kind of human. The thing about people having babies older, I mean, there's certainly physical limitations when people start having babies older. But on the plus side, you're dealing with someone that has a lot more life experience that's raising a child versus my mom had me when she was 20, 21. What the fuck do you know when you're 21? You don't know much. But if you're a woman who has a child when you're 40, well, hey, that's a rich life

of a lot of experiences. And maybe you can impart some of that wisdom to your child and look at things in a different way and maybe that in turn will raise a child that's more balanced. I'm talking out of my area here, but I think that probably the eggs sit around for a long time and I don't know what the effect of aging on the egg is. I just don't know. Well, there's also a big factor with the male sperm. And male sperm, yes.

They're thinking that's one of the main contributors to autism is older men. And schizophrenia, supposedly, I've heard, that older fathers are more likely to have male sons that are schizophrenic. Yeah, that makes sense. I wouldn't say that as a fact, but I've heard that. Well, it all makes sense that there'd be some glitches in the matrix. Yeah, I mean, we're not supposed to live that long. Are we not?

What are your thoughts on people that are trying to live longer and trying to sort of squeeze out as much time as they can on this rock? I don't know. It's like I see a lot of old people that just don't want to live anymore, and I understand that. Your body starts falling apart. Your mind is going, what's the point at that point? Yeah, I get that.

But what about the people that can keep it together? Yeah. I guess if you keep it together, you want to like, you know, okay, let's go as far as we can. Let's go to the moon and go to Mars. Well, pharmacological solutions to it. I mean, if there was some sort of a genetic component that they identified to aging and they gave the option to reverse the process, would you participate? Or do you like it?

Do you like the finite nature of this existence? I do. I think so. It's like – I knew you like the finite nature of this existence? I do. I think so. It's like... I knew you were going to answer that. I think I don't... I'm not... I take certain medications,

but I'd rather just live most of my life as possible without them. So... What medications do you take? You know, blood pressure, mainly blood pressure stuff. Yeah. Do you exercise? Not enough.

That's got a big effect on anxiety and a big effect on just a general alleviation of angst. That's a good example of something I know I should do. Is that a discipline issue? I used to be kind of disciplined, but. What happened? I've been using it a lot to, you know, to do things like I really want to do, like writing or making music. And so those are the things that kind of. I know I should like do the exercise, too too so I can do more of that longer.

Yeah. Do you think you have a finite amount of discipline? Possibly. Each person has that sort of anxiety quotient, that discipline quotient that we kind of – you probably can work that like a muscle. Yeah. I would imagine you can. Yeah, you could become something different. Me and my friends did this thing that we did last year called Sober October.

The entire month, no alcohol, no marijuana, no drugs, and crazy exercise. Like last year, we had a competition to see who could exercise the most. We wore these heart rate monitors, and we measured points. You get a certain amount of points at 80% of your max heart rate per minute. My point is one of the things that I got out of this, and we all got out of it, we all talked about it because we were exercising hours and hours a day, an incredible alleviation of anxiety, incredible.

I exercise regularly, but I don't exercise at that level that that level that we were doing because we were in this competition was really a lot of cardio but my god that runner's high is real yeah i felt amazing i mean i felt like so good all the time the alleviation of angst was unlike anything the internal chatter yeah that sort of can fuck with your head yeah that just didn't exist anymore well i think that that's wonderful that you're saying that because you have so many followers and i think that's such fantastic information to convey to them it is and it's so available to all of us i mean anybody that can move their body can experience

this and i don't recommend what we did because we were working out five hours, six hours a day. But even, you know, I walk, I live in New York, so I walk a lot. That's great. Right? You have to. Yes. But I mean, just that alone is, it's, there's many people that don't walk.

You know, you just sit here and then you move to that spot. You sit there and you get in the car and you sit there. You get on the train, you sit there. And there's very little use of the body and the body starts to atrophy yep by pumping that blood through the system and cleaning out the pipes and getting that air into the lungs and forcing yourself to move when it's over you feel better i'm breathing better already i just feel it right i'm imagining it i'm imagining this exercise um what do you take what about nature do you do you take any

time in nature at all do you go to central park oh well we have a house up in sullivan county in the catskills oh that's nice how often you get a chance to get out there uh we spend a lot of time there in the summer oh that's great and do you feel better when you're up there yeah definitely interesting right it takes a couple of days to like you know get into the rhythm yeah but then it's good. But once you do, do you ever think, man, what the fuck am I doing living in Manhattan with all these buildings? My wife's a New Yorker, so I'm by birth. A week there, we need to go in.

Then we want to come back. My friend Jeff has a place on Fire Island. It's a beautiful place. Beautiful. And he lives in Manhattan as well. But he says like as he's gotten older. You're in Brooklyn. He says as he's gotten older, he really doesn't think that he could live in Manhattan anymore if it wasn't for this ability to escape. Right.

And go somewhere and just wake up in the morning, look out, see the ocean, have a cup of coffee. Moving to Brooklyn was kind of like that, getting out of Manhattan. Yeah. I don't know. If you don't live in New York, that may not make a lot of sense to you. Explain to people what the difference is. So Manhattan is just like supercharged all the time, and it's not a trite thing. It's a true thing that once you get out of Manhattan, everything is just a notch down.

Yeah. A hive. Step off the subway and you kind of feel a little bit more relaxed. Do you think that's because Brooklyn, I mean, it's just speculative, but there's still a lot of people in Brooklyn. Yeah. But there's no skyscrapers. Few. I mean, there's starting to be lots of tall buildings and stuff. What's like a tall building in Brooklyn? Like 30. 30. Yeah. But there's no skyscrapers. Few. I mean, there's starting to be lots of tall buildings and stuff.

What's like a tall building in Brooklyn? Like 30. 30. Right. Residences, you know. What's Manhattan? Like 80s. There's like 80s and 90s. There's some giant buildings. I looked out the other day, I guess, from the airplane, and there's something in

North Manhattan that looks like it's way above the Empire State Building in terms of size. I don't know what that is. Have you thought about that existence in terms of how unnatural it is and how recent it is, this ability to jam untold millions?

How many people are in Manhattan? Oh, boy. I have no idea like i think eight million or something in new york city but probably and then of course computers as well so eight million plus all the people that come in from the different places to work there and just stuffed into an incredibly small area and stacked on top of each other yeah that has got to be a completely new psychological state for the human animal right yeah there's just i remember when i first got into psychology i was reading something about

something called a behavioral sink um it was about how rats living in an impoverished environment under highly crowded conditions, their behavioral repertoire sort of diminished a lot. So I think that was sort of used to kind of challenge urban living and to blame a lot of urban decay in the 70s on. I don't think it was necessarily a good idea, but it was kind of a way to explain some things that I think it wasn't really good at explaining. It's true that people do live under fairly crowded conditions, but you can't explain everything in terms of very simple processes. processes. Are you aware of those studies that they did where they set cameras up on streets and they set them at distance apart and they measured footsteps, how fast people walked,

and then they measured the way people talk, how many syllables and how many sentences they can get in in a certain amount of time. And through measuring footsteps and how fast people walked and the way they talked, they could accurately determine how big the city was that they lived in. Oh, interesting. Yeah. They could accurately figure out whether or not they lived in a high population density, whether or not they lived in a small town by the way they talked and the way they walked. Interesting.

That there's a profound effect. I used to have a colleague at NYU named John Borch. He's at Yale now. And he used to do these studies where he was a social psychologist. He would have people, students, come into the lab and take these letters, and they were scrambled, and they'd have to unscramble them into sentences. I guess it was words, and you'd have to unscramble them and put them into a sentence. And if the unscrambled sentence was about being older and elderly, anything about being elderly in age, it would take the students longer to walk down the hallway

to get to the elevator afterwards. It's just like activating this kind of schema of aging that top-down had some kind of effect on the way you walk that well that makes sense and you do see what's really interesting to me is when you see the differences between people who are the same age who behave and think very differently and i always wonder how much of that is biological, how much of that is psychological, how much of that is like, well, this person just has a better genetic makeup. And so in their 50s, they still have tons of energy,

whereas this person maybe has a shit makeup and bad lifestyle choices, and they look like what we considered an old man when we were younger. Right. look like what we considered an old man when we were younger. Well, I mean, we're all so complicated, and there's so many factors that go into shaping how we end up at any point in our life. Where do you think selfishness came from? Autonometic consciousness. So that's this ability to put yourself into an experience, which, as I said earlier, is

responsible for our greatest achievements as a species, but also is what will potentially do us in. It allows us to not only envision a world in which we can be selfless, not selfish, but help others, but also how to exclude others. And I think it's a natural, basic animal instinct to stay alive, obviously. Richard Dawkins had the theory of the selfish gene. Animals are incredibly selfish in their struggle for existence. So that kind of automatic selfishness is there. But what the autonautic mind allows us to do is to be intentionally, willfully selfish, to allow us to choose to do these things for our own personal good. For example, I think that the

personal good. For example, I think that the autonautic human mind is the only entity in the history of life that's been ever to put the organism, now we're talking about the conscious mind being a small part of what's going on in the cortex, to put all of the rest of the brain and all of the body at risk for the simple sake of a thrill. Mountain climbing, swimming in shark-infested waters, or taking drugs at dangerous levels. No other organism can commit suicide in the sense of intentionally planning to put an end to an entity that it knows has the possible end. So our conscious minds are special in good ways and bad ways.

Yeah, the conscious mind that seeks thrills, what do you think is the root of that? I've always wondered why certain people are drawn to doing flips on motorcycles or certain people are drawn to climbing mountains with no ropes. What do you think that is? I'm just guessing. I don't really know. But I think that we each have these kind of physiological states that we try to maintain.

Our homeostatic levels are different. And some people need a little more adrenaline or a little more – I hate to use adrenaline in a kind of cheap way of just saying – it's just more of a rush or kind of body activity because all that also affects the brain. And so consciously, you strive, you may go looking for those kinds of things to get the rush. And it's sort of on the spectrum of addiction in a sense where you need that physiological change that the drug induces.

But, you know, we also have addictions in our lives that are habits and things that we develop and pursue that aren't necessarily good for us but that we kind of feel compelled to do. Do you know who Alex Honnold is? Yeah. Yeah, I've had him on the podcast a couple of times, and every time I talk to him, my hands start getting sweaty. I get so nervous. For folks who don't know who we're talking about, he's probably the most famous free solo climber in the world,

and he climbs these seemingly impossible mountains with no ropes, and there's video of him doing it, these seemingly impossible mountains with no ropes. And there's video of him doing it, like this drone footage of him climbing these peaks. And my hands just start pouring sweat when I watch it. But when I talk to him, what's really interesting is he's a calm, rational, intelligent man who's very thoughtful. And he's a very kind guy. He doesn't seem like some – you know, I think of – when I think of someone who likes to do flips with a motorcycle or do radical, I think of some crazy, wild, thrill-seeker,

some dude who just needs to constantly – or a woman who needs to be constantly freaked out. He's not that guy and when he describes it what's really interesting is he goes it's very mellow he's like if there's any if there's really a thrill i've done something horribly wrong like the real thrills are so scary because that means you're about to die so he's instead of getting the thrill he's getting that peace yeah but he's, instead of getting the thrill, he's getting that peace. Yeah, but he's getting a peace from putting himself at extreme risk. And there's also the thing of other people praising you for your risk-taking, which is an odd thing about humans. Well, there's a natural selection aspect of it with females and mates,

that females are attracted to men that do those crazy things and take crazy risks for some strange reason, whether it's some sort of a remnant of our ancient past, like that thrill-seeking man is not going to be – he's not going to shy away from combat. He will protect our children or something like that. Right. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of evolutionary psychology you know you know that a lot of that is speculative of course of course but it's the thrill seeker is uh that's one it's one of the weirder things when

everything's great and you have plenty of food and you live in cities and like okay look i'm not getting enough juice here. Yeah. I'm going to have to learn how to hand glide or something, you know? And, yeah, some people may do it for attention. Yes. Yeah, the things people do for attention. Creativity is – that to me is one of the more interesting aspects of being a human being.

It's our ability to create things and our desire to create things. And in a way, that's also along the same lines, right? Because you're getting rewarded for it. Well, probably, yeah. So, I mean, all these things are, as a child is developing and growing up and passing through different kinds of situations in life, I think a lot of stuff happens kind of randomly. So the child may do something that someone views as creative. And so, as you said, the child is rewarded for that.

So then that allows them to figure out, explore kind of how they did that and maybe continue to do it. But other people may simply have minds that go in that direction on their own where, as we talked about earlier, their thoughts are able to jump across conceptual categories and sort of transcend those categories into completely new ideas and so forth. And I don't think we know how the brain does that at all. That's a very good question for the future, but it's not something we have a great deal of understanding of now. I mean, there could be an area of research on it that I just don't know about. It's a big field. But I certainly don't know the answer to how creativity comes about.

Well, it's interesting, too. Creativity has a reward system built in for the person who creates. Even without recognition from others, there's some fundamentally satisfying feeling of creating something. It's fun. Yeah. Why do you think that is? Well, novelty is rewarding, not reinforcing. And certainly creativity is novelty.

It's like anything that is novel that you do has a kind of charge effect to it, I would think. Yeah. uh that you do has a kind of you know charge effect to it i would think yeah i mean it's people like you who study this stuff to me are so important because most of us are just banging into walls just trying to figure out why we do what we do and to have an ability to understand the scientific explanations for the various things that are at play it's it's so it's so critical because you can kind of like almost not necessarily stop the process but at least be aware of it while it's going down is that part of what you wanted to do when you were writing well i want to thank you for um you know crediting me for that but the um you know a lot of what we've been talking about, we've just been having a conversation.

My work is rather limited and all. I don't work on creativity and all these things. But you work on the way the mind works. I think about how the mind works, but I work on how the brain detects and responds to danger. So that allows me to go back to my early work on consciousness and to bring it in and layer it on top of all that other stuff. But yeah, I get tremendous value out of sitting there writing. Because when you start a book, in my case, I think this is probably true of many people, you have no idea how you're going to get to the end.

You have a beginning, and you just see where it goes. So this idea of writing a proposal that lays out the whole thing to me doesn't work because you just don't know where it's going. And the fun part is getting to the end. The brain reacting to danger. Did you do any interviews with people who are soldiers or interview fighters or people that are involved in extreme activities? I haven't done a lot of interviews. I mean, I have talked to people like that. Individual cases are interesting because they give you stuff, but it's not data. So the data you have to go out and collect.

What do you got there for notes? You got a pile of notes or just anything you want to discuss? I just thought, just brought this. I think we covered most of what I want to say. The amygdala is not a fear center. Behavior is not primarily a tool of the mind. It's a tool of survival. We think we know why we do the things we do and others do them, but we don't really because our conscious mind is not privy to all of the things that the body and brain are doing.

Now, when you wanted to examine danger and you want to examine the mind and how it reacts to danger and fear and threats, what were you trying to get out of this? Well, I started out thinking this was a way to study emotion. And at the time, I'd been studying these human patients with split-brain surgery. Can you explain that? Because you glossed over that earlier. But the split-brain surgery is an alleviation of epilepsy?

It's a way to control epilepsy that can't be controlled in any other way. Medications are not working. So you have young kids, teenagers that have lived most of their life paralyzed by epilepsy and not being able to lead a life. There was one patient who basically his parents were constantly having to hold him down on a mattress he was seizing so often. And this is only done in a very extreme set of conditions. And it's not done that much anymore. But when it's done, the connections between the two sides of the brain are separated.

So information on one side doesn't cross over to the other. How do they do that? They open up the skull, pull the two. You've got kind of two loaves of bread sitting next to each other, and they're connected by threads, which are axons that go between them. And so you pull apart here, and you can see where those axons are when you open up from the top. So imagine like a hot dog bun.

Okay. And so you open it up at the top, and you can look down in the center and imagine that there was like a bunch of wires crossing between the two sides of the bun. So those wires would then be surgically sectioned. And so now you end up with two sides of the brain separate and independent. So typically language is on the left side, so you can talk to that side. The right side doesn't have language. So you have to ask, well, what can it do? So if you present a stimulus that only the right hemisphere sees, and you do that by flashing a picture of an apple on the left side of space, because everything to

the left of center goes to the right space because everything to the left of center goes to the right hemisphere and everything to the right of center goes to the left hemisphere so you send a stimulus to the right hemisphere and you say what did you see and the left hemisphere answers because that's where the language is he says i didn't see anything so okay you say reach into this bag and see what's in there. If the right hand goes in, that's connected to the left hemisphere, can't find it. The left hand goes in connected to the right hemisphere, which saw the apple, it pulls out the apple. So the right hemisphere has information that the left hemisphere can't talk about.

What is life like for people once they've done that operation? Well, slowly, the left hemisphere kind of comes to dominate again. And, you know, they come to live with it. And how does it prevent seizures? Well, the folklore of it, I don't know if this is actually true, but what is often said is that it prevents the seizures from jumping back and forth. Because the electrical activity jumping back and forth sort of gets into a kind of endless loop that can't stop. But cutting that isolates the seizures in the two hemispheres and makes each one more controllable by taking a medication.

Jesus. Imagine being the first guy to try that out. Yeah, really. I got an idea. Let's split your brain like a hot dog bun. But what we were interested in in these patients that we were studying, this was my mentor, Michael Gazzaniga, and I were studying these at Dartmouth Medical School. We were at Stony Brook out on Long Island. We would drive up to Dartmouth to see these patients.

How does the left hemisphere cope with the fact that the right hemisphere has performed a behavior that the left hemisphere that you talked to didn't command. So we would put information in the right hemisphere. The guy would stand up, say, why did you do that? I needed to stretch. Or scratch his hand and say, oh, I had an itch, so I needed to scratch it. And so time after time, the left hemisphere would generate a narrative that made its behavior make sense.

So that's why I got interested in how non-conscious systems would be generating behaviors that we generate narratives to explain. Because at the time that we were doing this, because at the time that we were doing this, the idea of cognitive dissonance was very popular. And what that means is that when cognitively, when you do something behaviorally that is incongruent with what you cognitively know, it's disturbing. It causes dissonance. And so you have to engage in some kind of dissonance reduction.

So our hypothesis was these narratives that the left hemisphere is generating about right hemisphere behaviors was a way of the left hemisphere's conscious mind kind of keeping it all together. The consciousness thinks that it's in charge, that the brain and body are its, charge, that the brain and body are its, it's the control center, and everything else is there to satisfy its whims. And so it generates these narratives to keep that sense of unity going, even though it's no longer unified. That is so fascinating that the brain tries to seek some sort of an explanation for the actions that you provoked right externally and that's why i got into emotion because well maybe emotion systems produce these you got something jamie when i'm looking this up uh alien hand syndrome came up do you know

anything about this i don't i'm sorry okay so there's a long article explaining this thing called alien hand syndrome and also known as dr strangelove syndrome picture of dr strangelove the explanations are very strange about people's hands doing something that they're not explaining it's kind of the same yeah do they generate an explanation when they do that it just explains different scenarios people have had like a leg walk in the wrong direction or uh buttoning up your shirt with your left hand the right hand starts unbuttoning that seems to be like some sort of a neurological problem well they split they split brain patients right after surgery when things are really fucked up. Squirrelly.

It would be like pulling the pants down with one hand and pulling them up with the other. Oh, wow. There's one patient I saw in the hospital, a young kid. The left hand reaches out to grab the nurse on the ass. Can I say that? Yeah, sure. And the right hand is pulling it back oh my god oh my god so there's like a physical struggle yeah there's like this

and you know and it all kind of like over time they don't come back together but the some they negotiate something where it's not so dramatic the woman who thinks her alien hand wants her to be a better person yeah see i'm thinking these are some sort of physiologic. Yeah. Well, it's a, what a crazy solution to epilepsy. I know there's other solutions that, but that is. That is a last ditch effort. Yeah.

So for severe, severe cases. And I guess not done that often. Do those people go on to eventually sort of achieve some sort of a normalization? Yeah. You know, the kids have lived so long in the state by the time they get their brains changed like that that I don't know really ultimately what became of all these people because I moved on to other fields. But I think in general, they live a somewhat better life, but I doubt they ever live a completely full normal life. I mean, how could you after all that?

I'm really interested in the brain creating these narratives to explain. Yeah, that's... Because there's so many people that do things like that. Yeah. Right? They'll try to explain their life away and give themselves excuses and give themselves reasons for behavior. And one of the things you see with the more rational people is it's never their fault. It's always someone else's fault. Well, that's the four billion year story that I tell.

How we got to these narratives. That's what it's all about. Wow. Listen, man. This is amazing stuff. Please tell everybody your books, where they can get them, how they can find them. Are they available in audio as well? Right.

Yeah. So the new book is called the deep history of ourselves the four billion year story of how we got conscious brains and you can get that on amazon you can get the audible on audible.com you know barnes and i think all the the major booksellers have the the books last book was anxious it also has an audible version i always wanted to get like christopher walken to do my why don't you do it did you not not do it no i didn't do it they didn't ask me i mean they i would want you to do it yeah it's your work right i get bummed out when someone else reads like one of the good things about like pinker and gladwell they read their own books like

uh they've never offered it to me you You should demand it. Demand it. For my memoir, I'll definitely... Oh, there you go. Have to. Well, thank you for being here. I really, really appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks for all your work. Did I just say one thing? Yes, please. Sometimes I, when I release books, I also release music to go with them. So Anxious had a

record with it, and Deep History has some songs of life that are on the deephist history.com website oh that's cool so you're you are a musician you're bringing that up right yeah i got a couple of bands and a couple bands well the main band is uh the amygdaloids amygdaloids.com oh that's awesome and you know it's a rock band we we created our own uh genre heavy mental songs about mind and brain and mental disorders

they're love songs but most rock songs are love songs about mental disorders anyway yes yeah you're just being more specific

and then an acoustic duo so we are which is a lot easier to get around without drums and amps and stuff it's two acoustic guitars

awesome and we play the acoustic versions of the amygdaloids alright well thank you Joe appreciate it thanks for being here it's all right well thank you joe appreciate it thank you thanks for being fun thank you oh that's great