The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 296. Neuroscience Meets Psychology | Dr. Andrew Huberman

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Andrew Huberman discuss neurology, the way humans and animals react to specific stimuli, and how this knowledge can be utilized for personal growth. Dr. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist, and tenured professor in the department of neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He runs the Huberman Lab, which has made significant contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function and neural plasticity. Dr. Huberman’s most recent work revolves around the influence of vision and respiration on human performance and brain states such as fear and courage. In 2017, he was chosen to receive the Cogan award, which is awarded to the scientist making the most significant discoveries in the study of vision. Work from the Huberman Laboratory has been published in top journals including Nature, Science, and Cell and has been featured in TIME, BBC, Scientific American, Discover, and other top media outlets. In 2021, Dr. Huberman launched the Huberman Lab Podcast, and has since grown to over 1.5 million subscribers.______________________________________________________________________—Links— For Andrew HubermanInstagram https://www.instagram.com/hubermanlab/?hl=enTwitter https://twitter.com/hubermanlab?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5EauthorWebsite https://hubermanlab.com/Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2D2CMWXMOVWx7giW1n3LIg— Chapters —(0:00) Coming Up(0:57) Intro (3:18) Where anxiety stems from(11:57) Flipping the autonomic response(23:10) Power of the prefrontal cortex(30:00) Accessing our alternate selves(36:25) When you stimulate the Insular cortex(42:08) The one true world currency(46:38) Dopamine’s pleasure derives from anticipation(50:10) Depressive cascades(54:12) Assess errors by state, not trait(1:01:45) Dopamine chases outer stimuli(1:04:13) Can new stimuli rewrite our neural pathways?(1:09:27) Manifesting and the dopamine cycle(1:15:59) Adrenaline, micro-narratives(1:20:33) Sustained attention and reward(1:27:03) Zone of proximal development(1:32:23) Resisting the easy dopamine hit, avoiding addiction // SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL // Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/jordanbpeterson.co...Donations: https://jordanbpeterson.com/donate// COURSES // Discovering Personality: https://jordanbpeterson.com/personalitySelf Authoring Suite: https://selfauthoring.comUnderstand Myself (personality test): https://understandmyself.com// BOOKS // Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life: https://jordanbpeterson.com/Beyond-Order12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-...Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-m...// LINKS // Website: https://jordanbpeterson.comEvents: https://jordanbpeterson.com/eventsBlog: https://jordanbpeterson.com/blogPodcast: https://jordanbpeterson.com/podcast// SOCIAL // Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpetersonInstagram: https://instagram.com/jordan.b.petersonFacebook: https://facebook.com/drjordanpetersonTelegram: https://t.me/DrJordanPetersonAll socials: https://linktr.ee/drjordanbpeterson#JordanPeterson #JordanBPeterson #DrJordanPeterson #DrJordanBPeterson #DailyWirePlus #Psychology 

Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to have with me Dr. Andrew D. Huberman. He's a neuroscientist and tenured associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine Dr. Huberman and his lab have made contributions to the brain development brain plasticity and neural regeneration and repair fields His work and his labs work focuses on the visual system Elucidating the nature of neural mechanisms controlling light mediated activation of the circadian and autonomic arousal centers in the brain and mediating conscious vision or sight. His lab investigates how the brain works, how it changes through experience, as a field known

as plasticity, and how it repairs itself. He and his colleagues have worked to discover strategies for halting and reversing vision loss in blinding diseases and understanding how visual perceptions and autonomic arousal states are integrated to impact behavioral responses. His lab employs a large range of state-of-the-art investigative tools, virtual reality, gene therapy, anatomy, electrophysiology, and imaging, and behavioral analysis. In January 2021, Dr. Hubertman launched the Hubertman Lab podcast, concentrating on neuroscience and other scientific topics. It's done phenomenally well for a detailed scientific

podcast, attracting 1.5 million subscribers. It's very good to see you today, Dr. Hugh Memmon, and thank you for agreeing to talk with me. Delayed to be here. Your first book, 12 Rules for Life sits prominently on our bookshelf in our living room, and we've all read it, and learned a tremendous amount from you over the years, and certainly feel a kinship because of the shared relationship between University Provescib and Public Education as well. Right, right, right.

Yeah, well, we've got lots in common. I'm particularly interested in the neurological work that you've done on both anxiety and exploration, although there's plenty of topics to talk about today and plenty of overlapping interests. But it's been a while since I've reviewed the neuroscience literature pertaining to both anxiety and exploration. And so maybe we can start by you laying out what you've discovered and how you're thinking about what you think anxiety signifies, how it's related to exploratory behavior, which

I think you described as something approximating courageous approach, although you were talking about mice in that particular paper. And what you're thinking about with regards to the neural basis of these different behavioral responses, behavioral and emotional responses. Sure, I'd be happy to. And as you mentioned, that these days my laboratory mainly focuses on humans.

We still do some mouse work, but we, in partnership with people in psychiatry, we're doing essentially equivalent experiments on humans. We still do some mouse work, but we, on the in partnership with people in psychiatry, we're doing essentially equivalent experiments in humans. I'd be happy to elaborate there. You know, many people perhaps, but not everyone have heard of the autonomic nervous system, which simply means automatic. It's a bit of a misnomer because without going too much into the history of that, if you look back to the the origins of medicine and the time of Galen and so forth, when they were first dissecting cadavers

and whatnot, there was this idea of a nervous system or a portion of the nervous system eventually came to be that could control so-called vegetative functions, meaning that rate of digestion and the really what neuroscientists typically think of is boring stuff. But it's anything but boring.

It's the stuff that keeps you from urinating while you're asleep, unless you're a very young child, right? And it's the stuff that keeps your digestion going as you command your attention to other things. The autonomic nervous... It's all the things. It's all the things that are too complex for us to think through. That's right.

And they are, as you point out, immensely complex. And nowadays, with all this interest in the microbiome and things of that sort, these are tremendously complicated operations that are happening generally below our conscious awareness. And that are indeed vegetative. They can be controlled by emotion. We were all familiar with the idea

that when we are emotionally distraught that our digestion can be different, etc. But typically, we can't control, for instance, in a conscious way, the rate of our digestion or the speed of our heartbeat in any kind of direct way. We can have a particular pattern of thought to control those. But in general, those functions were thought to be vegetative and outside of our conscious control. The name autonomic nervous system sort of swallowed and overtook the vegetative and outside of our conscious control. The name autonomic nervous system swallowed and overtook the vegetative part,

so it includes that, but also three main aspects of body to brain signaling. Those three aspects are heart rate, could be quickening or slowing of heart rate. We are and we can be very aware of that, some of us more than others. Gut and especially the chemical composition and the extent to which our gut is empty or full. So heart stomach and then rate of breathing and sort of depth of breathing, meaning how much air we have available to us.

And I think the three main ways to think about the way that the brain and body communicate is that it's either going to be mechanical or chemical. Let's use the gut as an example. Your stomach can feel acidic or it can feel nice and warm and fuzzy, whatever that is in a chemical sense. Your heart rate can feel like it's going at a rate that's appropriate for your circumstances. If you're running, it could be quick.

And if you're sitting in a chair quietly at the doctor's office waiting to be called back there and all of a sudden your heart starts racing, then you would think, well, that's appropriate for that situation, but it's not uncomfortable, right? It's out of sync with what you are doing, which is sitting. So there's mechanical information, and then there's chemical information. And with respect to your lungs, you know, you can feel like you're out of air or you have plenty of air. You can feel like your breathing is labored or it's easy or in the chemical sense that the air that you're breathing, your lungs are burning or it feels easy to breathe. So basically there's chemical and mechanical signaling from the body to the brain and the brain interprets all of that and we put all of that under the umbrella of the so-called autonomic nervous system. And the autonomic nervous system can really be best thought

of along a continuum. And here I'll avoid complicated nomenclature, but I'll throw it out there for the Eficionados. Some people have probably heard of the parasympathetic and the sympathetic. That naming is a little bit misleading. Again, what we can really think about the autonomic nervous system as is a continuum

where more like a seesaw of it, one end is alertness and at the other end is calmness. That is translated to the so-called sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, but I'll call it the alertness and calmness system just for sake of simplicity. It's sort of like a seesaw and it has different neural circuits and basically whether or not you feel very alert or panicked or alert but calm or a little bit of anxiety. That's going to depend on the balance between this alertness system and the calmness system. If you're having a full-blown panic attack, then the alertness system is, you know, it's as if the seesaw is tilted all that way. If you have,

if you're deeply asleep, well, then the calmness system is really tilted down. You could say, that's portion of the seesaw. This is all kind of obvious and it dates back, you know, 100 years or so, which isn't that long in the history of science, but we've known this sort of thing for a while. Okay. What's interesting and I think more relevant nowadays is to think about one's own interpretation of those signals and how that relates to anxiety and as you pointed out, exploration and then to think about where the nodes of control are in the seesaw model that I'm putting forward, the seesaw has to include what I would call a hinge, a location in the middle in which you can voluntarily adjust the seesaw to either be more tilted toward

alert or more tilted toward a sleep. And for many people, they find that their overall level of autonomic arousal is either inappropriate or inadequate for the demands of their life. Inappropriate meaning their heart is racing, they feel more jittery, more as if movement would be the default and worry would be the default and pre an anticipation is the default, then is appropriate for their circumstances. Waking up in the morning and anticipation is the default then is appropriate for their circumstances. Waking up in the morning and feeling stressed, for instance, immediately, without any immediate cause or maybe stress about real life events.

For other people, they feel more exhausted than they would like. They're having a hard time leaning into the pressures of daily life. Both of those, even though they have sort of polarized phenotypes, they look very different in one case over energized, in one case under energized, both originate within the autonomic nervous system. And we can reliably say from work done in animals and humans that that is not the consequence of the alertness system or the calmness system being disrupted, but rather that that hinge in the middle is dysregulated.

And we now know what that hinge is. And this is based on work done by colleagues of mine at Stanford, in particular, a guy named David Spiegel, who's our associate chair of psychiatry. He's done a lot of work and actually his father did a lot of work in the application of clinical hypnosis, not stage hypnosis, but clinical hypnosis for the treatment of various things. But his work and some work in our laboratory now has shown that there's an area of the brain that you are familiar with Dr. Peterson, which is the prefrontal cortex. And in particular, the left door-salateral prefrontal cortex, if you really want to get down in the weeds about it, that has direct communication with two brain areas that are absolutely critical for this issue of whether or not you feel right for your circumstances, whether or not you translate that into a curiosity and exploration or whether or not you translate

it into this thing that we call anxiety. And those two areas are called the inter- your Singulate Cortex. Again, I apologize for all the names, but the inter- Singulate Cortex and the insula. And I think if I were to make a prediction about what the buzz word is going to be in popular neuroscience in the next five years, it's not the amygdala, it's not the prefrontal cortex, it's the insula. The insula has a couple of different regions, but one of its primary regions, the front end,

the anterior insula, is responsible for interpreting all those bodily signals. It essentially is a funnel for all those signals about breath rate, heart rate, conditions of the gut, whether or not your body feels ready to move or exhaust it, etc. And then all funnels into the insula. And then also coming into the insula is information from classical areas like the amygdala which are involved in threat detection and fear and also emotion and memory.

So the insula is really this incredible hub of information about somatic signals, about bodily signals, and then the prefrontal cortex, the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex in particular, is in communication with the insula, and it literally makes a... So let me ask you about that. So does that mean that the body, in some sense,

is reporting to conscious awareness. Now it reports unconsciously in all sorts of ways too. So it might report to the hypothalamus which is a very low-level brain control area by the way for those of you who are listening. It might report to the hypothalamus primarily unconsciously. But do you think it's the insula that's reporting on the nature of bodily states to the prefrontal cortex in a manner that allows us to be consciously aware of our body states. That's exactly.

Is that part of that integration system? That's exactly right. You are exactly right. The insula sits as a different sort of station in that it's reporting to the conscious areas of the brain to the prefrontal cortex. Right, so we can take them into, we can take our own physiological state into account

then when we're envisioning plans because part of what the Dorsal Outer prefrontal cortex does is allow us to envision different possible futures and those are plans and you're not going to make a plan to run two or three blocks to get to the corner store if you're so exhausted you can't get out of bed and you need a reporting mechanism that tells you what physical state you're in so that you can predicate your plans on that. You think the insulin at least in part is responsible for formulating those representations or for reporting those representations. That is exactly right.

In fact, the animal data and the human data, both lesion data and reversible inactivation data, support that in humans. So you have that exactly right. And as you mentioned, the prefrontal cortex, you know, you get sort of thrown out there for everything. I think nowadays people have probably heard of the prefrontal cortex and people hear about executive function, which of course is true.

But if we were to really dial back and say, what is the prefrontal cortex in the position to do? It's a flexible rule setting structure. How do we know that? I'm sure you are probably more familiar than I am with the classic strup task. You give somebody a bunch of cards with different words on them, and those words are written in different colors. And you tell the person, okay, just read the words to me.

Ignore the color that they're written in, just read them. And so they're saying their cat, dog, shelf, book, professor, student, et cetera. Then you quickly change the rules and you say, you know what, just tell me the color that the words are written in, but ignore what the words say. And people will do that, but there's a portion of time in which they slow down a bit. It's actually hard because you've done a rule switch. Much of life, as you know, and again, this is more your domain than mine, is about applying different rules in different contexts. Now, what we know is that the insula and the prefrontal cortex are both intimately involved in this conversation that establishes which rules are appropriate

for a given situation. So, for instance, if somebody were to say something that, quote unquote, triggers me, I'll use myself as the example, maybe someone will tweet something and I'll think, you know, and I immediately want to respond in a way that I know I can kind of like flip them on their back immediately. But then I think, ah, you know, maybe I want to refrain from that for a number of, any number of different rules or reasons, right? Well, then I have, I'm starting to apply different rules. I'm starting to think about the context that's outside of the autonomic response,

because in a strict, very animalistic way, in other words, in the absence of an insula in a prefrontal cortex conversation, really the only thing an animal or human needs to do is just respond to their arousal in, you know, it's either you can either retreat, you can stay put, or you can fight, right? That's really the only three major. And those are very fast responses generally. So, so, so, so, so, let me ask you about the role of the pre-federal cortex in what you described as rule, a switching. Because I would like to know what you think about whether or not the prefrontal cortex

is actually, let's say, switching rules, or if it's doing is switching context-sensitive behavioral patterns, that when we talk about, we describe as rules. It is the critical question that you're asking. The prefrontal cortex, in particular, the left dorsal adiopryphalocortex is in an incredibly unique position to not only establish different rules,

depending on context, and the way it does that is by accessing memory. So the hippocampus has access to prefrontal cortex and vice versa. It's almost always a reciprocal conversation. So it can pull memory thinking, oh, you know, the last time I responded like that didn't get me the result I wanted.

Or the last time I responded in this other way, I got the result I wanted. Again, regardless of situation. The other thing that the pre left or salato prefrontal cortex is exquisitely positioned to do. And this is beautiful work of a colleague of mine by the name of Nolan Williams also in psychiatry,

is because of its connections to some structures that then feed into the vagus nerve, it actually can slow the heart rate down. So in other words, let's say someone says something and your immediate impulse is to fight or to respond in a kind of knee jerk way. If you halt, I guess what the meditators and the mindfulness folks was called, the gap,

or if you can access some memory and think, ah, and you might be thinking, actually, there's a much better way to place the dart if I just kind of lean back a little bit, or it could be, silence might be the best response, or it could be that you're going to carefully access some data from your hippocampus to respond in a way that is most effective. For instance, here I'm talking about confrontation, but it could be any situation.

The left-door salato prefrontal cortex does two things. As it acquires a new ruleset, or starts to access information about a new or possible ruleset, it also sends a parallel signal to slow the heart down through the vagus nerve. And that is, I think, one of the more important and fascinating discoveries in the last five years. Those aren't data from my laboratory.

I wish they were. But it's very clear that when we start accessing alternate rulesets, there's a signal that quiets the body in some way and position. Is that partly how you calm yourself down? That's right. It is how you calm yourself down. And again, you have the clinical background, not I, but I confess I've been in therapy enough to know

that occasionally, one feels as if you're accessing some piece of information as the patient side, I can only report from the patient side. Accessing some, what feels an important piece of information, you're pulling on a thread of some sort, but then the therapist will say something, and it literally gives you that alternate view, and this notion of looking at things

through a different perspective, we often think about that as a switch in our cognitive frame in our thinking. But also, we now know there's this parallel signal that's sent to the body in which in order to access these alternate rule sets, new ways of looking at things, there's a calming signal literally sent to the body as well. And I find this conversation fascinating because normally we just think about anxiety and

exploration and rule setting and rule responses to rules, etc. as a kind of a the body sent signals and the brain does all this, what neuroscientists have always talked about is top down processing, right? Just sort of suppress the hypothalamus, control the limbic system. And that's true to some extent, but there's also, it's clear there are signals being sent to the body in parallel. And rather than look at the signals. It's more like conducting, then suppressing. Exactly. Like conducting like an orchestrator conduct. Exactly. And there's a very interesting phenomenon that takes place in people that have chronic anxiety

or for people who essentially stop accessing alternate rules and responses to these signals. And this is, I think, what is showing up in chronic anxiety, certainly in certain forms of depression, and when people enter states of rage and dysregulation, is that normally, we know, based on neuroimaging, that the prefrontal cortex is essentially leading the response of this anterior singulate cortex in the insula. So information is coming up from the body into the insula,

and then being fed to the prefrontal cortex. But then the prefrontal cortex is actually in a position to lead responses and it essentially is acting like the coach of a team. And the team is all these structures like the ACC and the inter-stingulate cortex and the insula, the heart rate and so forth. What happens in individuals who have chronic anxiety or damage to the prefrontal cortex or dysregulation of these circuitries is that that order actually reverses. The insula and ACC start leading and directing the response of

the prefrontal cortex. And I think, you know, we see this in I'm sure you've seen this clinically in individuals. And while this isn't necessarily a discussion about society at large, I mean, we see this in dysregulated arguments and dysregulated combat where people is essentially losing themselves and they default to one what appears to be very primitive rule set. It may or may not be the appropriate one, but you and I of course have the good fortune of knowing a number of people who've worked in special operations and things like that. You talk to any of those individuals And they know from experience and from training that their ability to access multiple rule sets and options in the moments of extreme autonomic

arousal is actually where they're power lies, right? It's the or a combat fighter or let's just take or debate, right? Something that you're far more versed in than I am, although I guess every academic has to deal with a bit of that, coming up, the thesis defense, et cetera. In a really good debate, you can't allow the autonomic response to overtake you, or you lose access to an enormous database that resides in your one's hippocampus, and you essentially then default to

the bodily state, right? And this is what we see when we see people become dysregulated in rage, etc. So if we were to zoom out and then ask, you know, where is the line between exploration and anxiety? I think that we can check off a few boxes for sure. First of all, that autonomic arousal, this tendency to be more alert or more in action than in non-action, is a very healthy response. I mean, the moment adrenaline is released from the adrenals, and as you know, there's a parallel signal in the brain, you know, you get adrenaline released from the adrenals if you get in a cold shower or somebody says something triggering or you are afraid of heights or something, but the brain has its own kind of adrenaline system, which is this structure in the back of the brain called

locus serulius. And it basically has a, it essentially sprinklers the entire brain with noradrenaline and adrenaline. It's a very interesting system. It lacks specificity. It basically wakes up the whole brain. If you were to, if I were to put a little, if I were to label the connections of the locusts are really, it's basically connected to everything. It just kind of sprinkles a caffeine-like substance on the entire brain, wakes you up. The adrenals in the body wake up the body. So two parallel systems wake us up. Sat associated with the orienting reflex. Yes. If you orient as the locust curilius wake up the brain.

Absolutely. Yes. So it's a key component of the so-called reticular activating system. You can activate an existing. Yeah. And incidentally, I should mention this because I was going to come to this later, but I think it's relevant now. If somebody has a lesion in their

dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, or if you transiently inactivate it with a technology, a non-invasive technology, like transcranial magnetic stimulation, they can now just put a magnet on outside the skull and quiet that area of the brain transiently. In animals or humans, what you find is that that person or human becomes incredibly accurate at any motor task. So for instance, if I were to give you a shooter game where you're supposed to shoot targets

and you're shooting targets. You'll have some hits and some misses like anybody. If I inactivate your Dorsalato prefrontal cortex, your accuracy goes through the roof. It's near 100%. But the one thing you can't do is decide whether or not you're shooting an enemy or a friend. So you can no longer establish rules. You just become very good at execution of the motor behavior.

Similarly, in an animal or person without a dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. When you see a trade-off there between specificity and flexibility. That's right. And so we see this theme over and over again, where as a purely sensory motor response machine, the prefrontal cortex isn't even necessary. In fact, if you get rid of it entirely,

people become like machines. If I click over here, somebody has no prefrontal cortex, basically everything becomes a stimulus, a puppy. Everything's a stimulus. You know, I used to have a bulldog. When he was a puppy, He had to worry about leaving cords out and everything went into his mouth. By the time he was, you know, a year old, apart because he was a bulldog, you just kind of lay there. You could put a toy in front of him and he wasn't into playing and just leave it alone. A baby, everything is as stimulus. Many adults become infants like in their responses, right?

When anxiety is high. In fact, I have a friend who's a psychologist. Tell me if you agree with this statement or not that anxiety makes children of us all. I don't know if that's true or not, but certainly has been my experience that when feeling anxious, I don't struggle with chronic anxiety, but certainly feeling have felt anxiety. Well, it simplifies us. I mean, all these underlying emotions and motivational states, these primordial instincts are simplification mechanisms. And so if we're unable to compute a complex and sophisticated pathway forward that takes multiple variables into account simultaneously, we can't

just do nothing. We're going to default to a more primordial and direct state. And then you might say the whole panoply of emotions and motivations lies there at the weight for us to grip our behavior if we're, what would you say, if we're paralyzed by inability to choose between multiple options. And so we do, to the degree that we're simplified by an emotion, then we're reduced to something more approximating in an infantile state. If you watch two-year-olds, and two-year-olds are particularly interesting in this regard, they basically just cycle through innate motivational states. It makes them really interesting to be around because when they're

in the interest in something, they're 100% interested in it. And then when they're angry, they're 100% angry. And if they're anxious, they're 100% anxious. And they can, and tired, they just instantly fall into a coma. And they just cycle through these with no overarching centralized integration. And it's partly because they likely don't really manifest any while integrating prefrontal, cortical capacity until they hit about three where they can start to engage in joint play states with other children, right? And then they can exercise, then they can modulate their underlying emotions in accordance with an abstract representation or goal,

sometimes that's jointly shared. That's part of developing sophistication. It's also why the idea that identity is subjectively defined is absolutely preposterous. It's like, it's subjectively defined for two-year-olds, but it's not subjectively defined for anyone who's sophisticated enough to negotiate with someone else. So tell me about, tell me what you think about this. My understanding of the prefrontal cortex is that over the course of evolutionary time, it grew out of the frontal cortex and that out of the motor cortex more specifically.

And so the best way to think about what the prefrontal cortex does in some sense is that it generates potential abstract patterns of action. It generates them in abstraction so that they can be assessed before they're implemented. And so it's like it's generating potential future selves. That's exactly right. You easy. potential future selves. That's exactly right.

You, that's okay. That's exactly right. And I'm glad you stated it not I, because you stated it far more clearly and succinctly than I've heard it stated before. It's as if it's running plays, I'm using a sports analogy, it's running plays and thinking about potential outcomes. You know that I'm using a sports analogy, it's running plays and thinking about potential

outcomes. You know that I'm not a chess player, although, you know, Lex Friedman's podcast and Lex Friedman are convincing me that perhaps I should learn because there's a lot of discussion about chess nowadays. And there's a lot of thinking as I understand about potential outcomes, you know, how many moves can you anticipate if this then that? It's sort of if this than that. Right. Thinking. And if you think about its connectivity, it's in a beautiful position based on its access to priors through the hippocampus of memory, it can take into account current state, bodily state, it can access information, for instance, about do I have the energy, do I have the resources to undergo a particular pattern of response. And that's through the insula and the ACC. And then the Dorsalato prefrontal cortex,

in this way of also being able to control the body, of being able to calm the body, this is a very unique pathway. Because typically we think of the heart rate as going up if we're excited or scared and heart rate going down if we're calm. But really the default of the neural inputs to the heart and to the breathing systems, et cetera, are to be very activated. And then the brain provides a suppressive, we're kind of a breaking on that entire, the vagus nerve.

Right. So it's a default on system. It's a default on system and the vagus nerve, which of course is a massive nerve pathway. Again, it makes it sound like one little nerve, but it's this huge superhighway of connections between brain and body, is classified in medical school as a parasympathetic pathway, meaning of the calming system, the kind of generically speaking, and indeed it is. And so the prefrontal cortex, we can think of, as, remember in the seesaw analogy, the hinge, the prefrontal cortex is more or less like the screwdriver that tightens that hinge. Essentially, make sure that the seesaw stays at a level, at a tilt that's appropriate for whatever it is that you happen to be doing.

Okay, now I presume it does that, so imagine, so to continue the evolutionary analog. So an animal that doesn't have a lot of behavioral flexibility, generally its reproduction strategy is multiple copies of itself, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands. And the reason for that is all the variability in the animal's behavior is genetically coded. And so for it to adapt to the transforming horizon of the future, it has to produce multiple variants of itself, most of which die with mosquitoes, for example. They produce thousands of eggs.

And if they all lived, we'd be knee deep in mosquitoes in like 10 years, but they almost all them die because they're not matched to the transformation that's coming down the pipeline. But with human beings, what we seem to have done is evolved a mechanism for manufacturing artificial selves in this game-like manner, and so we can put forward optional selves in abstraction and then kill them off when they're not necessary without us dying. And so the famous quote I think it was Alfred North Whitehead was that the purpose of thought was to let our thoughts die instead of us.

I love that. And it really makes us unique. Yeah, it's great. It's absolutely great. And so, and then it seems to me too, you tell me what you think about this, is that the abstracted artificial selves, avatars in some sense, that the prefrontal cortex generates or that it allows these underlying motivational and emotional systems to generate because they can generate simple avatars by themselves. I think when we describe those, we're describing, we're telling stories. When we describe one of

these alternative modes of action, that's precisely it's the verbal description of that is a story. That's right. And you make a very important point, which is's the verbal description of that is a story. That's right. And you make a very important point, which is that the prefrontal cortex is a rule changing, alternate self-accessing machine that can also calm the body. And here I'm making up a just so story because as I always say, I wasn't consulted at the design phase. And so I don't know why it's set up this way. I just know that it is set up this way.

One reason to suppress the somatic response, the bodily response, is that tends to be a unitary interpretation. Meaning at this moment, I feel alert but calm, so I feel good. But I'm guessing there's a lot of signals coming from the body, and in fact there are to my brain, but I tend to just say, I feel pretty good. In fact, I'm guessing there's a lot of signals coming from the body, and in fact, there are to my brain, but I tend to just say, I feel pretty good. In fact, I'm very delighted to be here, so I feel good.

Or if I'm very tired, I feel tired. Those tend to be very kind of bend responses, and they're fairly generic. Whereas your description of what the prefrontal cortex does, which is an accurate one, I should say, of imagining different selves and different outcomes, almost requires that we suppress how we feel in our body in the moment. I guess we can look to some of our podcasting colleagues like the Jocke Willings or the David Goggins who are either forcing themselves or are somehow up at 4.30 in the morning and train pushing through that, what I call limbic friction. You know, the limbic system is saying, I'm tired or I'm anxious and going against that. So there's literally a, there's a required suppression of the bodily response

in order to imagine how we would feel when we complete this, or how terrible we would... How much of that, how much of that, so let's parse that into two parts, because you can imagine there's an inhibitory component where you're directly in competition with an underlying urge. So the top-down story is, so for example, if you're responding to something in an irritable way that's being directed to you on Twitter, there's going to be a limbic rage response that's associated with that, which you can then suppress. But then the question there that's quite complex, I would say, is something like, to what degree do you think

you're directly suppressing that with the prefrontal cortex? And to what degree do you think you're spinning up an alternative self that if embodied wouldn't require that physiological response? And so you're switching to a new identity in which that limbic response is no longer, is no longer germane. And so the reason that it disappears is not because you directly suppress it in an inhibitory manner,

but because you replace what's necessary physiologically given your new understanding of the territory that you inhabit. I think it's some of both, but I've never been able to, do you really like wrestle that through? Yeah, so I think what you're getting to is what we know is that the prefrontal cortex and its associated networks contain a near infinite, if not infinite set of possibilities, right? I mean, of course, it's bottlenecked by experience and it's

bottlenecked by one's imagination, but the number of different possible cells that one could imagine is near-infinite if one were to spend time on it. Whereas the number of different bodily states that one can have are actually very finite. And if you think about the autonomic nervous system and in my laboratory, we've studied this typically in the context of fear and confrontation, that the simplest way to put this in a kind of, in a kind of pop neuro-science way would be, say, you know, we can either be back on our heels,

meaning retreating, or we can be flat-footed, sort of calm in our stance, or we can be forward center of mass, we can be in sort of pursuit and or competition. There really aren't other motor responses for an animal, including humans, right? You can either stay put, back up, or go forward. You know, and this is... Yeah, well, it's useful for people to know that that's the basic platform upon which emotions

are erected to is that emotions are like signals of those action tendencies, and they are very simple. It's back up, get away, stop or move forward. And so generally, we associate positive emotion with forward movement, and that would be positive emotion that's dopamine andurgically mediated, fundamentally. And then the halting would be, well, it can be calmness because there's nothing to do, but it can also be the paralysis that fear induces. And then panic and retreat are more, they're sort of on the border between anxiety and pain, I suppose. Pain responses. Yeah, exactly right. It's complicated in, yeah. So these three major categories I think encompass most, if not all, of the possible responses, as you said, and probably form the base set for all emotions. I mean, my laboratory study,

this mainly in the context of fear and confrontation, and that one of the reasons we started to explore this was the following. You know, we've all heard a fight or flight or rest and digest, right? Those correspond to the alertness system and the calmness system of the autonomic nervous system in their kind of extreme forms. But what we observed in animals, and then now in human studies, we published about a year ago, is that when people are confronted with an anxiety-provoking scenario, in our case we do this with virtual reality because we need to do it in the laboratory, we find that we find their pain point, essentially. And by pain point, I don't mean extreme fear.

I mean, the thing that can raise their autonomic arousal that has them in a mode of considering different options and trying to figure out what is strategic and what they're capable of in that moment could be heights could be confrontation with a predator animal it varies by person to people but everyone has their pain point even Even Navy seals that we brought to the laboratory or other people from the special operations community They all each and everyone has their pain point what they do in response to that pain point is really what's interesting. And what we found was that the pause or freeze response certainly was associated with autonomic arousal, with stress and anxiety. We measure this in the brain and body. But it was the lowest anxiety response.

People always think of panic, you know, just being paralyzed in panic. That's actually the lowest anxiety response. People always think of panic, you know, just being paralyzed in panic. That's actually the lowest anxiety response. Retreat was the next level up in terms of levels of heart rate change and levels of change within the insula of all places. We actually recorded from human insula through a partnership with neurosurgeons. And then we found that there were subset of individuals and animals in the parallel animal work that would confront a fear, not necessarily reflexively, but after some consideration, they would lean into the challenge, essentially confront the thing that was making them feel anxious. And it turned out that that response, surprisingly, was associated with the highest levels of autonomic

arousal. And this gave... Right, so that would be heart rate activation, particularly. particular heart rate activation and heart rate activation and a change in what it's called get of the so-called gamma wave activity in the insula we added electrodes in the insula what we found was that people who were willing to lean into that challenge yeah there the insula took on essentially a a change in its activity patterns this this gamma pattern, the heart rate increased, breathing increased, sweating increased.

So these are all the marks of an anxiety attack, but here, if you were to just look at the behavior of the person or the animal, what you'd find is that they were marching forward toward their fear. This is the, you know, and so then... That's voluntary exploration. Right. So now, you did an animal study with mice where you showed, if I remember correctly, that the mice that were showing tail flicking, which was a pro-dromat to that exploratory activity,

showed a particular form of brain activity that if you replicated with stimulation was more potentally reinforcing than sexual stimulation. Right. So here's where the surprise came, the additional surprise came in. We thought, okay, wow, well, there are animals. These mice will tailflick in response to a threat, which is essentially saying, come on, let's go. Let's fight, whereas other animals would retreat. And that tailflicking paralleled within the human studies with people being confronted with it, for somebody who's scared of heights to go through a virtual reality scenario of being up on a

high beam between buildings might not sound like a big deal to the average video gamer or to you and me, but it is a absolutely terrifying experience for those people. But a subset of them will just march out onto that platform or even explore jumping off the platform with the understanding that it's virtual and get very scared, but they will do it. And they also show these changes in insulin activity and changes in heart rate and breathing. What was interesting to us was the mouse data told us that if you stimulate the brain area that was associated with all of this,

it's an area of the midline thalamus, I don't want to get down into details of structures too much, but it was a very mysterious area, not been explored much before, had this incredible name of nucleus reunions, why I don't know, the neuroanonymous name these things peculiar ways, as you know. But if we were to stimulate that brain area in mice, we could convert a terrified, non-confrontational mouse into a mouse that was willing to confront its fears in a healthy and adaptive way. It wasn't being foolishly running into the jaws of a predator, it was being very strategic

in its confrontation. The interesting thing was if we introduced no fear stimulus, no heights, no predator, no nothing, and we just tickle this brain area, what we found is that animals and humans love that feeling. In fact, they will work for that feeling more than they will work for other stimulation. And in... How do, okay, so a bunch, I've got a bunch of questions about that. So the first is, how do you think that's related to hypothalamic dopaminergic release in exploratory states and the psychomotor stimulative effects

of drugs like cocaine and emphetamine? And then second, if you put someone in a chronic state of activating that brain area, say you did that by teaching them to approach their fears rather than to run from them, would that produce epigenetic changes that would transform them physiologically? Okay, so both very important questions. First of all, the dopamine system is absolutely critical here. In the animal studies, we identified because we could place tracers in the brain and measure connections that, indeed, this brain area in the midline phalmus connects directly to the

major hubs of dopamine release in the brain. They have names like nucleus accompanies, etc. Ventual tegmental area. Right. So that was great because it confirmed for us that... So it is tapping the primary approach related positive reward system. That's right. But it's a very major nucleus that allows that to happen, particularly in the face of voluntary

approach to feared stimuli. That's exactly right. And one thing about the dopamine system that's so important and also explains a lot of pathology, but also a lot of human evolution is that we have basically one major reward system, which is the dopaminergic system. I sometimes like the analogy that nowadays you know, nowadays you hear about cryptocurrency or the dollar versus the euro versus the this versus the that. There's only one currency in all of reality, actually, and this is dopamine.

Whether or not it's the dollar back to dopamine or it's euro back to dopamine or Bitcoin back to dopamine. In the end, whether or not someone has a billion dollars or two dollars, that currency resides as something that's transacted in the real world, but their notion of power and potential is dopamine-ergic. And so too, the potential for mates, the potential for food, how much food you have, you know, how much meat you have stored in the freezer, tells you a lot about your security and well-being for you and your family, right?

And that is translated into a dopaminergic internal representation of how safe and secure you are, et cetera. So this system of fear versus confrontation taps directly into the dopaminergic system, and there's a beautiful set of studies that were done in the 1960s, a publishing the journal science, as you know, one of the top journals to publish in. Again, this is not worth it that I did, but where they gave people, human beings, the option to stimulate a number of different brain areas, just sitting in the clinic. And some brain areas would evoke feelings of drunkenness, others would evoke feelings of vanger or others of sadness, others of sexual arousal, and the area

that these subjects all prefer to stimulate the most. In fact, they would just sit there and lever press pretty much all day long with this midline phalamous area. And the subjective feeling that they reported, I find this interesting, and we love your thoughts on this, is one of mild frustration, anticipation of something, although they didn't know what. And it's this idea, I think, that it's tapping into the dopamine system. And the dopamine system says something good is going to happen. That's right.

The key to something good is going to happen. Something good is going to happen. And it's an repetitive state in some sense, because it doesn't signify the acquisition of, it's not satiating, it's appetitant. That's right. And so it drives you forward. And you might think that being driven forward would be unpleasant.

But in some sense, if you're activating the systems that drive you forward voluntarily, then that's the most positive form of positive reinforcement you can have. I think I read animal researchers who said that when they watched animals who were bar pressing to receive stimulation in those brain areas, the animals would look forward as if something was about to appear that they wanted to have appear. Incredible. So that was part of that apprehension, part of that.

It's a hope system in some sense. It's the elicitation of hope. That's right. You know, it's dopamine and here I'm robbing words from others like my colleague Anna Lemke who you know, it's not about having it's about wanting. It's not about pleasure as much as it is about craving and motivation and drive and something critical what the Pants have called it seeking. Yeah, brilliant, brilliant. I never met pants up. Did you, did you met, you met Yock? I met him online. We were in a neuro,

we were in a neurological chat room, so to speak, for a neuropsychological chat room for about five years. And I had a chance to interact with him a fair bit. Oh, in that. So that was really good. And then VSC has done beautiful work. And thank you for calling people's attention to his work.

I know you've done that many times in such a key work. The dopamine system is in touch with the autonomic system, sure, because it has to register success versus failure of some pursuit. The prefrontal cortex is actually part of the dopamine reward system. People often overlook this and we just think about nucleus acumbens and ventral tech ventilary, but the prefrontal cortex, because as you pointed out before, it is generating possible outcomes, different rules, different selves are being projected into the future. You can think that the two marshmallow tasks, the classic, you know, give kids the option to either have a marshmallow now or wait and have two marshmallows and the cute little videos of the kids, you know, in the room with the marshmallows sniffing it, talking to it occasionally a kid will just stuff it in his mouth.

Another child will turn away, you know, delightful, right? And all sorts of ideas have come about how they do in life versus if they can wait or not wait. In any case, that's dopaminergic anticipation. The key thing with dopamine, I think that encapsulates the most of it is this notion of reward prediction error, which is very simple. If you are excited and anticipating something, you are generating some internal sense of the probability of it happening.

We're going to the ice cream store, kids. Let's go. We're going to have ice cream, we're going to have ice cream. It's closed. The disappointment that they experience actually brings them far lower than they would feel, much more sad than they would feel, than had you not told them you were going to get ice cream, which speaks exactly to what you were saying that it's an anticipation signal. So dopamine is going up, up, up, we're going to get ice cream, and then no.

So it drops below baseline. They would have been better off being not told they were going to the ice cream store just drive right by way. The danger of hope. The danger of hope. If you anticipate that it's going to be open, and again, this could translate to any scenario, and it's open, there's a dopamine orgic signal upon receiving the reward, but it then drops a little bit. This is the basis of addiction actually. Drops a little bit below baseline transiently. So we always think of the ice cream is the reward. Well actually the reward was right before you had that first lick of ice cream because you know you're going to get it. This is also true of sexual behavior. It's true of people who sell a company or they're anticipating something exciting or of a wedding. It's that it's that it's also sort of partially

explains this notion of postpartum depression, where people are so excited about something, the delivery of a child or something in the arrival. And then for some reason they feel let down, it's because the anticipation was that great. So many, many scenarios. There might be an exhaustion component there too. Well, it's also the case if I remember correctly that that dopamine kick. So imagine what it does is backtrack the neural systems that were activated as the reward was approached.

So then it feeds back reinforcement, not reward, but mediate cellular growth and maybe myelonization. It's increasing the efficiency of the neural connections of the systems that were activated just prior to receiving that reward in the order they were prioritized. In the order they were manifested. So the closer the behavior is to the receipt of the reward, the more it's reinforced and more likely to be manifested in the future. And then there's a decay function going back in time.

So, and that's partly how an addictive subpersonality can grow too, right? Because you can imagine that there's a certain state of mind that you're in, maybe it's a state of something approximating nihilistic hopelessness that grips you every time you're motivated to seek out your favorite drug. And that's fairly far back in the activation chain, but it's there every time you're motivated to seek out your favorite drug. And that's fairly far back in the activation chain, but it's there every time you take a hit.

So what happens is the dopaminergic reinforcement produced by the drug reinforces that nihilistic hopelessness that drives the drug seeking behavior. And that's how in part you develop a monkey on your back. I love the example, even though I'm sad that it happens for people, I love the example, even though I am sad that it happens for people. I love the example because what you're saying is that, and it's exactly right, that the memory for events and states of mind and emotions that preceded a successful collection of

reward or a rival at reward is set into a huge number of motor commands, some of which are subconscious. And the ultimate dopamine signal, I actually I experienced this the other day I can give an example. My girlfriend and I decided to go to the beach, we were going to do this little ritual that we've been talking about doing for a while. And I had on a piece of paper what we had written out, we were going to do. And I had in my back pocket and we got to the ocean and the sun was setting a sort of perfect timing for this and the piece of paper was gone and I thought oh my goodness how did I screw this up like of all the things you know I'm supposed to you know I've been I'm 47 years old this is like I should be able to to do this you know that you're I blew it yeah I blew it so I went back to the car long walk looking everywhere

it was not a windy day but I gosh, where's this piece of paper? Looking around didn't find it. All the way back to the car. It wasn't the car. All the way back. I was walking toward her. I saw her and I thought, okay, this is really embarrassing. I'm going to have to have to wing it or remember.

We didn't have our phones intentionally either. We couldn't look it up. Then I saw the piece of paper on the beach. It was partially buried in the sand. I picked it up and I was elated. What happened there was my dopamine had dropped way below baseline because I was disappointed that I'd lost it, disappointed in myself, et cetera.

And then I found it. And so your anticipation was for nothing. Exactly. So you got punished by yourself for that. Because that should be eradicated if you're highly anticipatory and it doesn't make itself manifest, then you are seriously wrong. So you're going to take an emotional hit as a consequence of that. I think that's also associated that emotional hit, that pain that you feel. I think that's actually associated with the beginning stages of the death of

the systems that mediated that initial response. because you should eradicate systems that make you anticipate that don't work, right? And that means those systems, which are already instantiated in a live in some sense, have to decay and die. And it strikes me as highly probable that you're going to pay a price in something approximating pain for the death of those malfunctioning systems. It's also why, because why wouldn't they fight for their lives to some degree? Why wouldn't they resist the decay and death that might be necessary to keep you going? Why? There should be some pain associated with that logically, because it is a biological

transformation. That's an interesting way to lens to view it through, that that self-image that I had in that moment of, you know, I'm a responsible partner who can take care of a simple thing, right, for this nice little ritual that we've been talking about doing for a while. I failed, right? So that part... Well, it's also so interesting. You think about that. This is a depressive cascade, eh?

And it's very hard to bind because imagine you anticipate something and then you make a mistake. Now the question then becomes, how significant is the mistake? And one view of your error would be, well, the paper blew out of my pocket and that could have happened to anybody. And the more catastrophic interpretation would be, and it's an extension of the thought path that you started to walk down. Well, I'm near 50 years old. I should be much more responsible than this.

And there's something wrong with me as a person. And then a depressive person would go even further. They'd say, well, not only is there something wrong with me in this decision, this is a decision like every other decision I make right now. I never make a good decision. In the past, I've never made a good decision. And there's no way I'm going to change in the future. And so the depressive takes that punishment response, let's say, that's a consequence

of failed anticipation and can't bind it. It just takes out all of their potential future selves. That's a good way of thinking about it. And so, then they're in a depressive pit. Yeah, that's too much learning from failure. Right, that's it. I'm really grateful for your insight on this because indeed, if I'm honest, my thought train went to the point of, I didn't think, oh, I'm a total failure because I lost

this piece of paper, I thought to myself, well, if it were a priority, I would have ensured I wouldn't have lost it. Right. Show interpret is not being a priority. Where are my priorities? Am I overspend? What's going on? You start to sift into the full set of questions. And then, of course, finding the paper resurrects the sense of self. I think it was in that movie, Pulp Fiction. Well, that binding problem is really tricky, because there's some good rules of thumb for that, which is one of the rules of thumb for that that's extremely useful, that's socially instantiated, is innocent until proven guilty.

Right, so you might say, when those thoughts come up, because they're adversarial and accusatory thoughts, you might say, well, that is part of the realm of possibility, but I shouldn't, when your child does something wrong that's minor, you don't say you're a rotten kid. Right? You say, you bind it, you say, look kid, here's a bunch of things you're doing right. But in this particular example, this is a specific situation, here's the minimal thing you did incorrectly and how to alter it.

And it's a really good habit of mind. It's like to address towards yourself as well as to other people, which is to say, well, what's the minimum crime that I am responsible for in this moment? And that's part of this miracle of the presumption of innocence, and especially without proof. A lot of what I did, my clinical practice to people who had a depressive temperament, was help them make a case for themselves. It's like, well, maybe you're as bad as you think you might be, but maybe not. Let's take the contrary argument. Let's make you as innocent as you can be in this situation and only narrow the repair to

the absolute minimum that needs to be manifested. Now, some people don't have that problem because they don't have a depressive state of mind, let's say. They're somewhat resilient to the cascading effects of punishment. Those are people who are low in trait neuroticism, by the way. So you could think of trait neuroticism as an index to which the degree failure co-activates punishment across a whole sequence of nested selves. The higher you are in neuroticism, the more likely a given

error is to a cascade up the hierarchy of possible selves. And it's a trade-off because sometimes when you make one little mistake, it is actually an indicator of a flaw in your character. But most of the time it isn't, and it certainly can't be responded to that all the time because then you'd never be able to make a mistake without wiping yourself completely out. And that's obviously not helpful. Is it fair to say that, at least in the raising of children and maybe in the raising of ourselves that we should as much as possible try and emphasize that errors are due to state not trait?

You know, yes, absolutely. And you do that in argument with your, with your, your wife as well. You want to make it, you want to make it as local and precise as you possibly can. So, and that's also one of the advantages to removing yourself from a rage or an anxiety state because a rage or an anxiety state is low resolution and global. And so it'll be globally accusatory. And so you want to specify it and you think, okay, well, what's the minimum necessary behavioral

transformation to ensure that similar mistakes are not replicated in the future? And generally that doesn't require, like, read, it's like if you're ruthless, you don't have to dig a new foundation. You can just fix a few shingles. And you might think, well, the rain's coming through, so you have to tear down the whole house.

It's like, well, no, you have to, and you might panic and run around because the water's coming in, but it's still a bad idea to dig up the foundations every time something trivial. Maintenance problem needs to emerge. And so one of the things that's very useful to learn is, like, well, is this only a trivial maintenance problem? And one of the advantages to that too is that if it's not the collapse of your entire self, let's say, and it's a trivial maintenance problem, you're much more able to activate that courageous response to anomaly that's part and parcel of exploratory behavior and eventually success. So when part of the trick of many sorts of,

I would say religious training enterprises, certainly the meditative enterprises is something like, how do you tell yourself a story, like a real story, though, a story that actually works, that's most likely to put yourself, put yourself into position where you can confidently approach the thing that's blocking your path. This notion, you brought up three points that I think immediately of the related neurology,

but I'm going to repeat them back to make sure I understand because they're very salient in my mind right now, which is this notion of the prefrontal cortex, trying different versions of self and working with, contending with bodily states in that in those moments. And the sort of either death or growth or resurrection of those different selves depending on the outcomes. The next notion of state or trade, I find fascinating. After I found that piece of paper, I felt like I was like the greatest, you know, I got this huge dopamine surge, because it's the delta. It's the difference between your baseline and the peak. Yeah, right.

So even though I'd lost it, right? I mean, I should have thought, oh gosh, I wasted 30 minutes of our time. But instead, I thought, I found this amazing, and I felt so elated. I think it was the movie pulp fiction. I think it was the John Travolta character said something. I'm gonna get this wrong, but, you know but he said it was almost worth losing that just to find it again.

He was talking about something. I forget what it was. And I think that captured it there as well. And then my question is, however, is, you know, we've been talking about if you lose something or if an outcome was not great, how that can fan out into an kind of overinterpretation of trait and this kind of depressive neurotic interpretation. What about the opposite?

Where certainly for every success that one has, you know, like for instance, if I had not dropped this piece of paper, I wouldn't have thought of it as a great success. I would have just thought of it as what I was required to do in that moment, right? It was sort of just beauty, right? And I'm not somebody who celebrates with everything I check off my list. I, you know, sometimes yes, they're bigger bigger things than others, bigger achievements than others. But I can imagine that certain people might over-inflate their wins. Manics. Manics over-inflate. When there it is that... So, well, dopamine system. Yeah, well, for a manic, every possible self

is wonderful, simultaneously. And so they're completely fragmented, right? Because every possibility is 100% dopamine energetically giving them a dopamine energy kick. And so it's complete, it's complete positive emotion catastrophe on the manic side. So these systems, they have to exist in such tight balance, right? Because all of your potential positive selves are not to be regarded

with exceptional enthusiasts. That's a form of pathology, even though like people don't like being treated for mania often because especially going into a manic state is very enjoyable because it is associated with enthusiasm. And that's all dopamine mediated positive emotion. But there are problems with positive emotion. And one is, well, it needs to be judicious and differentiated. You shouldn't be positive about everything,

which is why you shouldn't reward children indiscriminately. It has to be targeted. And so when a system loses its focus and target, its capacity to discriminate, then it becomes pathological. And people don't often think of pathologies of positive emotion, but mania is definitely that's definitely what it is. And it makes people impulsive too. And fragmented even in their speech.

Someone who's really manic is a different person every sentence. It's interesting because one thing that we know, again, about the dopamine system, it's about anticipation. The other thing that is absolutely clear about the dopamine system is that it is tapped to pursuit more than it is to outcomes,

but it is highly to pursue it more than it is to outcomes, but it is highly subjective to interpretation. This is exciting actually and holds great possibility. Putting mania aside, when dopamine is elevated, it tends to put our perception to things outside of our, I would say beyond the confines of our skin, that person, that potential lover or that food, that reward, that thing. it's that target. It's all about that target. And I think this explains why, why manic's are all about plans and the future. I'm going to do this and I'm going to be president. I'm going to do that

and et cetera. Yeah, you see the opposite in neuroticism because one of the one of the phenomenon cognitive phenomena that loads very heavily on neuroticism, it's self-consciousness. And so when you fall into anxiety, then there is this internal obsessiveness, which has to do with the panoply of sins in some sense, which parts of me are malfunctioning

and need to be eradicated. And one of the things I used to do with my socially anxious clients, so they would go into a social situation, often with eyes downcast, by the way, and they would be so intensely concentrating on their own internal sensations, that they would fail to make eye contact with anybody they were talking to, and then they would be awkward because they weren't reading the cues they could have read if they would have only looked, and then the conversation would become disjointed and then they would get anxious and fall into themselves and then it would just spiral.

And so one of the things that I taught them to do wasn't to try to calm themselves down but to try to calm the other person down. So when you go into a social situation, pay more attention to the other person. Like just focus your attention outward. And if the person had any social skill, sometimes I had clients who had no social skills. And so they were anxious socially because they actually didn't know how to behave socially. And so then you had to teach them the social skills. But some of them had the skills but wouldn't activate them because they

were so neurotically obsessed with their own inadequacy that they failed to attend to the cues that would elicit the proper responses. And all they had to learn to do was wash. And then they would automatically respond because they knew how to have a conversation. This brings us to some of the practical tools that I think my laboratory has been working on, which is, you know, many people have heard about the utility of mindfulness meditation, which most typically is close your eyes, focus on third eye center or your breathing, you know, bring your awareness to

your so-called interoception. You know, perception can be interoceptive from the skin inward or extraoceptive to the world outward. The data are showing that people who are overly socially anxious, for instance, they are too much in touch with their bodily signals. In fact, they can count their own heartbeats without taking their pulse with their finger, which is a great indicator of how interceptively aware you are. Those people would probably be best to avoid inward focusing, excuse me, meditations. Well, it's hard to say,

because there may be a variable there that's relevant. See, the reason that socially anxious people are so interoceptive is involuntary. Right. They get gripped by the negative emotion, and then that produces this intense, obsessive interoception. That might not happen if they did it voluntarily. I see.

Because you're going to activate an entire different system, the one you already talked about. This is why exposure therapy works so well in psychotherapy. It's like, well, I'm afraid of something. And if I go near it, then I'm possessed by negative emotion. Well, that's if you go near it accidentally. I'm going to have you go near it purposefully. And what you're going to find is that to the degree that you do it purposefully,

that response will be quelled. And that happens. It's extraordinarily reliable. And it does seem to be, this is why I was wondering about gene expression. So imagine that you have someone who's habitually avoidant. And maybe they're avoidant because when they become possessed by negative emotion, they become hyper aware of their internal state and they feel the panic. And so then they freeze or retreat. And they do that constantly. And so, and then, and then they're in this terrible negative emotional state all the time, because every time they see a stimulus that's associated with retreat,

they get gripped by these interoceptive sensations. And so you say to them, well, we're going to reverse that instead of you being gripped by that, by fiat, by the command of these underlying systems, you're going to expose yourself to that voluntarily. Now you could imagine that what you're doing is imposing the dominance of that nucleus reunions on the anxiety-provoking systems. And so I'm wondering, see, if you do that, we're repeatedly with people. Not only do they stop being afraid of the things that you're showing them, that they're

exposing them to, but they become more likely to approach other things they're afraid of, far more likely. In fact, it doesn't exactly look like people get more less afraid at all. It looks like what happens is they learn to get braver, and that generalizes. And so I was wondering when I was reading your research today, is it the case that if you put someone in chronically and voluntarily into a state where let's say the nucleus reunions is activated, that that transforms their character at the genetic level so that that's more likely to be the case in the future. So really retools them all the way down to the DNA. Yeah, incredibly important question. It's the question. Again, you're asking the exact questions

that we're pursuing now. And here's the answer. There are two modes of changing these responses in the neural circuitry. One lies in so-called neuroplasticity, which is they could be strengthening of synapses or just reordering of nerve connections. Could be the addition of miceels. There's a lot of excitement about the addition of new neurons, but really that only reflects a small percentage of changes in the brain of adults. It's actually more the rewiring of existing connections, but the mechanism doesn't matter so much.

Something gets rewired such that the response is then different going forward. And indeed that happens. Any system that taps into the dopamine system, and indeed, what we're talking, everything we're talking about today does, is highly subject to reward-induced neuroplasticity. In fact, so much so that some of the best experiments done on this have shown that if you give somebody a drug that transiently increases dopamine, works better if you also transiently increase

a cedal colon or something like that as well. But for the next hours, you know, one to four hours, the neuroplasticity is scaled up, right? It takes many fewer trials or many fewer cognitive behavioral therapy sessions. This has only been done a few times or many fewer learning sessions to create a permanent shift in the neurology such that okay. So does that mean that if you believe when you are at the outset of a task that you're doing something important?

So you're approaching a valued goal and you're and you have a lot of anticipation as a consequence of that, does that mean that you put yourself in a neurochemical state that facilitates learning? Absolutely. Without question. So if you believe what you're doing is important, if you truly believe that, because it's related to an important goal, and it's a pathway forward, then that's going to transform into a manifestation of neuroplasticity. Absolutely. And every time I hear about the sort of, you know, woo statements about, you know, I don't

want to offend anyone here, but sure, I'll just say, you know, you hear about the secret or manifesting or intention. All of that is really, it's capturing a fundamental principle of the way that our neurology works, which is that the prefrontal cortex as a rule setting, but flexible rule setting machine that taps into the dopamine system can absolutely adopt new rules for reward release in the brain. Again, there's basically only one reward system. There's also serotonin system, as you know, but the dopamine system is the major currency

of reward. So much so that, for instance, everyone the dopamine system is the major currency of reward. So much so that for instance, everyone knows that food is rewarding. We anticipate food, we eat a delicious steak or something and we feel rewarded. However, if you are somebody who can attach thought such as fasting is good for me, I'm going to do intermittent fasting

where I'm not gonna eat those foods and therefore I'm gonna attach my thinking to the rewards that will come with better health, better aesthetics, etc. The dopamine system responds. It's not just a belief in a narrative. It's a real response. And what actually starts to happen is that people start to enjoy the foods that they are

restricting themselves to more. They're actually beautiful data on this from my colleague Ali Crums laboratory at Stanford that if you believe a food is nutritious and good for you, it actually has better impact on your physiology. Of course, there are the rules of physiology and nutrition that still apply, right? You can't tell yourself that the guard is good for us, right? But there's a significant scaling up of the positive response that's associated with dopamine and hormonal cascades, which we can talk about in a moment. In the same way, if one adopts a sort of a Carol Dweckian growth mindset approach, okay, it's not about receiving the reward that the more the more strain I feel, the more effort that I'm putting in, the closer I'm getting to my goal, that over time will become a rewarding state such that one will pursue states of...

Yeah, well, it should be also proportional to the magnitude of the goal. That's right. Right? And so, this is, I think, why people are so obsessed in some sense with the search for fundamental meaning. It's because you want to be able to associate. So, imagine, this is a good story, so you can imagine two people laying bricks,

they're building a gigantic wall, and the one person thinks, oh my God, you know, this wall is gonna take 100,000 bricks, and I'm laying one at a time, and I'm wasting my life away, trivially adding to this gigantic brick wall, and what am I doing? This is absolutely miserable, brick by

brick, and the other person thinks in 300 years this is going to be a cathedral. And so the person in the second state is doing exactly the same thing at a local level, laying bricks, but each brick is related to a very high goal, and that means the reward that's attendant upon the laying of the brick is proportional to the goal, to the aim of the entire behavior process. And so it seems to me, so if you're aimless and goalless, and I know you've done some work on goal setting, if you're aimless and goalless, then you can't elicit any positive emotion. And if your goals are fragmented, which is also what happens if you're aimless or your goals lack unity, if your goals are fragmented, then no given behavioral manifestation can elicit any dopaminergic reward, because it's not a step forward to anything desirable.

And so there's no positive emotion. And so you can't learn, while according to your, according to your account, I didn't know that. See, I didn't know that when you put yourself in a state of apprehension in relationship to a valued goal, that your neuroplasticity improves and you can learn better. That's very, very cool. So, because I just developed this app for writing called essay. And one of the things we do is we tell people that when they sit down to write an essay, that's the first, the most important thing you have to do is you have to have a question in mind that you regard finding the answer to as worthwhile. Otherwise, the whole exercise is a lie. So even if you're assigned to topic, you have to find something within the topic that grips you

and provides you with the motivation that's appropriate to move forward with the essay, with the attempt. And it is a lie otherwise. Now, you're wasting your words. You're engaging in futile activity, and you're going to write something dull and terrible, and it's going to frustrate you and bore you while you're doing it. And that's because your own nervous system is telling you that you're participating in something that you have no belief in. And so, but if you do, if you're gripped by the questions like, God, I really want to answer this question. It's like, well, you're in a perfect condition to begin to write an intelligible essay, because you actually want the answer.

And then the writing exercise is going to be gripping because you're grappling with a real mystery. And that's not so cool if doing that also puts you in a state where you're much more likely learn, which makes sense, right? Because if you're doing something important and you seem to be moving forward, that's a really good time to learn. No, physiologically, that would make,

or evolutionarily, that would make perfect sense. Absolutely. The system, the dopaminergic system that we're talking about, anticipation and then action and reward, or in some cases, no reward, right? And the ability to persist toward a goal regardless is a generalizable system. You know, you had that chapter about, you know, get your room in order, right? Get your belongings in order.

This is, I think, very relevant right now. Even though it's important to have higher goals and lofty goals. The dopamine system is an incredible system because it is depletable and yet it's also renewable and it is self-amplifying. What I mean by that is let's say that I'm somebody who doesn't know what I'm working toward. I don't have a specific goal or question. By completing even what seemed like menial tasks, like making myself a cup of coffee, drinking it, cleaning up completely, drying the cup, and putting it back in the cupboard, what

happens is, even if you make that seemingly trivial goal, the goal, in addition to making the kitchen look nicer, it completes a circuit. It closes the dopaminergic circuit, and when is released and it will be, maybe not to the same extent as publishing a novel, but to some extent dopamine amplifies our ability to think into the future to make additional plans that are unrelated to what you just did. And it literally increases confidence and energy. Why? Well, for the following reason, we all think about caloric energy,

but what most people are never taught, and if I had 10 things I could teach people, one of them would be adrenaline. Epinephrine is neural energy. It's your ability to get up and go. It's the thing that makes you jittery when you're a little nervous, but it's also what allows you to move forward,

to go out for a run, to pursue any goal, cognitive or physical, etc. Epinephrine, which is also adrenaline, those are the same thing, is literally manufactured from the molecule dopamine. If you look at the biochemical cascade, it is dopamine is converted into adrenaline, which is the basis of all energy, all neural energy. And so, including thinking. And so, if one is not in a place of being able to set their goal on a particular lofty

goal, a graduate degree, a book, et cetera, yet, the way one gets to that is by completing things in their immediate environment from start to finish and closing the dopaminergic loop you literally. Yeah, well, those are at least, those are at least micro-narratons. That's right. Right. So, they're not integrated across a's right. Right, so they're not integrated across a long span of time, but they're not nothing. And so one of the things, well, I did write about this

in my first book, particularly about putting your life, putting your house in perfect order. It's like, well, if you're lost, one of the things you can do is look around and see what direction you could take locally, is fix something. And I used to tell my clients, this is a very good thing to know. Find something that you could do

that would make things better that you would do. And there's a humility in that too, because especially if you're in a low energy state, it's like, oh my God, you know, I don't have enough energy to make dinner. It's like, do you have enough energy to put a fork on the table? And sometimes people are so depressed

that that's really all they can do. It's like, can you take a small step forward, no matter how small that is? And so that's, I didn't see, I knew that adrenaline was a byproduct or a down the biochemical chain from dopamine, but I didn't get the significance of that fully. So basically what you're saying is that if you implement a micro routine, even something like washing a cup

and putting it back in the shelf, and you know that's a good thing because you have a shelf and there's cups on it, you've already decided that's an appropriate way to live is to have your coffee cups on a shelf. If you go ahead with cleaning out the cup and putting it on the shelf, then you've taken steps towards a valuable micro-gold. You get a dopamine kick from that. That transforms itself into adrenaline and energizes you. Which then that's partly the

reason that it has an antidepressant effect. That's right. And then you can lean into another behavior. I mean, some of the more successful classes have entered a press. And again, not for everybody are the ones of the dopaminergic adrenaline-ergic variety, right? Things like a priorone, as opposed to, you know, there's a lot of debate about SSRIs. They tap into a different system. You asked about gene expression changes. There's neuroplasticity, which is on the short scale. Completion of an even trivial task, like the putting away of the cup will

give you more dopamine, would give you more adrenaline, which in this analogy of either being back on one's heels, flat footed or forward center of mass, regardless of where one is starting out, let's say depressed is back on one's heels, it's going to tilt you forward a little bit. And then it's a question of what you do with it. So the cognitive appraisal is critical, because again, with the prefrontal cortex being so critical in establishing which of these loops gets repeated, the cognitive appraisal is critical. Because again, with the prefrontal cortex being so critical, and establishing which of these loops gets repeated,

the cognitive appraisal is critical. I'm somebody who can get things done, even if they're small. Now, if you do the cognitive appraisal, or you can take another cognitive appraisal there too, which is, it's small things are not small. That's right. Precisely for the reason that we just described. It's like you might have the cognitive appraisal that doing something local like cleaning up

your room is small, but it's not obvious at all that that's the case. It's not that trivial to put your immediate surroundings in order. And it can easily be the stepping stone to putting things in order on a broader scale. In fact, it's probably the necessary stepping stone to do that. And so they might seem small, but they're a step ahead. And the head is a good direction. Absolutely. And so they're not as small as you might think.

And so you can pat yourself on the back, especially if you're depressed a little harder than you might otherwise by saying, you know, you say, well, this is trivial, but I did it. It's like, no, if you're moving ahead, tilting yourself forward and you're in your metaphor, that's not small. You just keep doing that. You're gonna get out of this paralyzed or retreat mode.

And then God only knows what you're gonna be able to do. That's right. And I think that if people were to look at these neurological and psychological processes, because we're really talking about both, is as algorithms, right? These are algorithms that have been used by every animal. Think about the animal that's foraging for food. They go down one path, they're surprised, they find food, they go down another path, they

are sure they're on a scent, they are sure, and then they get nothing. Well, what happens? They learn to remember, they automatically remember, everything that led to that failure. And people are very good at remembering that. But be good at remembering the things that led to successes and then ride those neurochemical waves to the next node of exploration. You're talking about exploration versus anxiety.

You can also do this with people in your environment. This is something BF Skinner pointed out when he was training animals. He said, you can use threat and punishment to train animals. But he said the most effective mode of training isn't that at all. You use sustained attention and reward. And so imagine that you're training a rat

to climb up a ladder run by run and then do a little dance on the top and then climb down the other side. So what Skinner would do, his animals were hungry, by the way. They were starved to 75% of their body weight. So they were pretty dopaminergicly motivated by the provision of any food. He would watch them wander around in the cage where a ladder was, let's say, a little rat monkey bar apparatus. And then when the rat would get near the ladder, he'd give the food palette. And so then it was soon spending a lot of time near the ladder. And now and then, while

it was munching about, it would put one foot on the one paw on the first rung. It was like food palette. And then it would soon be doing that. And then sooner or later, it would put the next paw on and he'd reward it. And so Skinner, Skinner trained pigeons to pilot guided missiles by pecking on photos in relationship to the ground they were watching. Right, so he could use reward and the nonetheless. So one of the things you can do in your local environment and with yourself as well as you can watch people around you

and you can see when they make small steps towards manifesting some behaviors you'd like to see a lot more of. And then you can tell them in this very differentiated discriminatory manner, you can say, hey, look, here's the sequence of actions you just undertook. I saw that. I noted the process. And here's the delightful outcome. Good work. And man, if you do that repeatedly to people around you, and you don't want to do this in a fake or manipulated way, but if you're attentive to what people are doing that's to people around you. And you don't want to do this in a fake or manipulated way. But if you're attentive to what people are doing that's good

and you mark that with a reward, man, you produce behavioral transformations at a rate that's just beyond belief. I love it. And everyone feels great about it too. Yeah, it's really a good habit, man. It's giving credit, we're not separating the wheat from the chaff in the truest sense

to give credit where credit is due. Yeah, the behavior. And you can imagine your facilitating growth in the manner that you just described. And maybe what neurolog or genetic transformation we didn't get to the gene expression part yet. Yeah, the behaviorists like Skinner were truly brilliant. And I think one experiment that I think is worth mentioning, which is kind of speaks to the power of dopamine and why it's so vital to tap into these systems even through menial tasks and then to build on their self-amplifying mode so that you can take on bigger things in life, so to speak, positive goals. Is there's a classic experiment now that's been done in humans and in animals where you take two rats,

separate cages, or you could do this with humans where they're naturalistic conditions, where one of the rats or humans actually has their dopamine depleted. In humans, this happens through Parkinsonian things or the ingestion of drugs, which accidentally deplete the dopamine urge ignorance. And what you find is that if you give them an opportunity

to experience something pleasurable, like hit a lever and get a pellet of food, or people to access some very tasty food. Both people with dopamine and with very depleted dopamine, animals with dopamine or without dopamine will eat the food. They will pursue the food, but only if it's right in front of them. If you put any kind of task between a person or an animal and a reward. What you find is that a rat won't move one rat's length to press a lever to get the food.

So they are able to experience pleasure, but what they are unable to do is to embark on any kind of effort to achieve that pleasure. Right, so that's so cool. So that means that in part what the dopamine system is doing. So imagine that the purpose of the dopamine system is to elicit a satiating reward. That's right, fundamentally. Then the satiating reward is something that has to be approached in steps. In order to maintain the motivation necessary to approach the satiating reward, you have to mark each of the steps with a marker of pleasure. And so the dopamine system is marking the intermediary steps. And then it's doing that to overcome the reluctance that you'd have to

expend the energy in that micro routine that would otherwise be costly. By calculating the fact that there's a net reward that's nested in the ultimate satiation. And parsing that out across the, yeah, yeah. And sometimes people will experience tremendous anxiety in pursuit of their rewards. You know, the social situation or the goal or the book, you know, people imagine failure like crazy

as I'm sure, you know, all heard and seen. What's critical, again, is this cognitive appraisal, this interpretation of that, if you think of that anxiety as a natural system of getting you to move, of just biasing your body toward movement, toward action as opposed to inaction, because that's what anxiety really is,

it's a biased toward action. Then you can literally reshape the whole notion of what it feels like to have elevated heart rate, maybe trembling hands, maybe flushing in the face when one is doing public speaking. You do it enough times, you get pretty comfortable. Now there are situations in life I should just mention, such as sleep deprivation or in particular

that tend to make this whole set of systems with prefrontal cortex and limbic, stuff and ACC and insula kind of dysregulated. It makes it harder to manage. That goes without saying, right? The quickest way to peel somebody apart is to sleep to pry them for two or three nights. One night, you're probably fine. So all the basics of self-care,

of good nutrition, social connections, sleep, exercise, sunlight, those still apply. I just want to mention that. I want to make sure I answer your question about gene expression and permanent changes because I've failed to do that thus far. One of the things that is absolutely key about the dopamine system is that it has a fast component.

Dopamine is released, more adrenaline, AK, epinephrine can be released, and you can, you know, the sort of upward spiral of energy and sort of success. With the occasional drops, right? I mean, nobody succeeds in every task, right? Sometimes the phone rings or the doorbell rings and you fail goodness, you fail to clean the cup, you come home like, are you gonna crash into a puddle of tears? No, you just clean it then and then put it away, right?

Of course, but there's a slow system associated with achieving wins, even small wins. And that slow system is in the form of hormonal control that then translates to gene control. So two hormones in particular, testosterone and estrogen, which are present in both men and women, males and females, of course, but to varying degrees, are both secreted when the dopamine system is activated.

This has to do with the relationship between dopaminergic neurons and the pituitary gland, which releases gonatotropins and luteinizing hormones, which then stimulate the testes and the ovaries, et cetera, to release the so-called sex steroid hormones. The sex steroid hormones testosterone and estrogen, of course, are involved in reproductive biology, but they are both vitally important, provided they are in the proper ratios for motivational biology and for the following reason. The steroid hormones are so-called lipophilic

and they can cross from the outside of a cell through the cell membrane to actually into the nucleus of a cell and control gene expression. So when we achieve wins repeatedly, and again, this doesn't matter if you're male or female, you achieve wins repeatedly. Testosterone is the molecule that eventually accesses not just cells to control their immediate physiology, but goes into the nucleus of those cells and controls their gene expression and what it translates. So does that mean, okay, so does that mean that demotivated men are producing less testosterone?

We can say that the data show that repeated failures take testosterone levels lower than they would be otherwise. That is not to say that people with low testosterone will always fail those with higher testosterone. No, no, no, no, no, it's weird. But it would just be clear because I, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's really. But it was just to be clear, because I, no, no, no, you are correct. But just people sometimes get hitched on this causal part. But indeed, one of the quickest ways to boost someone's testosterone is to have them achieve a win of some sort. Now the win is translated. Well, one of the things you do, one of the things you do in behavior therapy constantly

is you help people calibrate the zone of proximal development. So imagine that's the God's key's term, right? And so if you're in the zone of proximal development, you're pushing your skill development one increment forward. And it's one that you can actually manage. And so if you see people who are entirely stymied, we're sort of back to the cup of coffee or the coffee cup example, you want to find something they can do locally this week that would constitute at least a micro-wind. And you just keep, and if you talk to someone, you say, well, why don't you try cleaning up your room because it's a complete catastrophic nightmare.

It's a good place to start. This is often the case with people who are really demoralized in whose life is utterly chaotic. And maybe they come back later and say, well, you know, I got one client. He just had a child, and he didn't want to mess up this child, but he was living at home. He was like 35 years old. He had a child out of wetlock by accident, but he didn't want to be a useless father. And he was very afraid he was going to be. And he had good reason to.

Like, he still lived at home. He lived in his high school bedroom, and it was a complete bloody mess. He was living like a 12-year-old, you know, a bad 12-year-old. And so I said, well, when was the last time that your carpet was vacuumed? And he said, well, sometimes my mother does it, but it's probably been months. I said, why don't you just bring the vacuum cleaner into the room and vacuum your carpet. That'll be your task for this week. And I knew that was a bigger task than you might think, because he'd been in that room for like 18 years, and it was a mess. And so cleaning it up at all was a big deal.

He told me that he'd dragged that bloody vacuum cleaner into the doorway and left it 45 degrees across the doorway and then stepped over it for the whole week without actually using it. Yeah, resistance, that was resistance from a psychoanelitic perspective because he saw the monster and was paralyzed. And so what we did was we reduced the task. I said, look, you've got some drawers in your in your bureau. They're probably a mess. Do you have a sock drawer? Yes. It's like clean up one half of the sock drawer this week. That's it. Just organize it. So you just keep cutting the tasks down week by week until you find the threshold for positive movement forward.

And then what's cool about that too is there's a pre-do principle issue associated with it. So if you can find out where the person can start, it isn't linear progress. It's exponential progress forward. And so even if they have to start at a micro level, it doesn't really matter because they get much better at it, very, very rapidly as they accrue successes. Maybe that's because they're learning in the way that you describe it.

Okay, so back to the gene regulation. It increases testosterone, the winds, and- Yeah, so testosterone's our associate winds do, winners tend to be able to win more, there's some, um, et cetera, but, you know, if we want to bring this into the common world, you know, a few years back when I started doing some public facing education, I started getting a lot of questions, especially on YouTube, from young males, um, about porn, pornography and masturbation. And this becomes very relevant here. We have to remember that this dopaminergic system

is generalizable to many different behaviors, right? Academic pursuits, sports pursuits, relationship pursuits. But fundamentally, it was, again, I wasn't a consulted design phase, but fundamentally it's tacked into the adaptive survival behaviors in every species including ours has at least two major motivations,

which is to protect its young and to make more of itself, to make more young, at some level. People can opt out of that, but one of the absolutely pathologic situations for any animal or human is to be able to access repeated dopamine surges without effort or any pursuit that self-directed. Or that's directed, I should say.

So for instance, cocaine, a drug which potently increases dopamine or methamphetamine, which potently increases methamphetamine, but doesn't require any sort of adaptive action pursuit, except to acquire the drug and spend money on it. No sacrifice. No sacrifice. No sacrifice. So essentially what ends up happening is the circuit that gets rewarded is only the drug seeking behavior and no other behavior will give the kind of potent dopamine release that cocaine or methamphetamine will, which is why they are so pernicious.

Now likewise, I'm not... Well, plus, plus they have that powerful reinforcing effect, right? So not only do you get that kick, but what's reinforced by the dopamine release is the behaviors that were right prior, particularly prior to the ingestion, and if it all that is, is the drug taking behavior, that's all the develops. That's right. You build that monster inside your head. That's right.

So I can see where you're going on the pornography. Right. So I was starting to get a lot of questions. I was kind of surprised. I thought, well, you know, I'm male and, you know, maybe that's why they feel comfortable last. But if you were saying that we're asking about pornography and they were asking, you know, I realize we want to, you know, to, I'll just be direct about.

They were asking whether or not masturbation was bad. They were asking whether or not masturbation with ejaculation was particularly bad. And here's my stance on this. I'm a biologist and neuroscientist, not a psychologist, but what we know for sure is that if an individual repeatedly engages in this circuitry, let's say masturbation and pornography with increasingly potent forms of stimulation that are on a screen. A couple of things happen. First of all, what's being reinforced? What's being reinforced is a high dopaminergic response

to watching other people engage in sexual behavior, which is very different than being in a first person sexual experience. Okay? So right there, you know that what's being reinforced is not actually any kind of improvement in communication skills, its voyeurism. And as these questions started to come in more and more, I started to realize there was a lot of kind of improvement in communication skills, its voyeurism, and as these questions started to come

in more and more, I started to realize there was a lot of kind of undertones of people talking about fear of or experience with sexual dysfunction that clearly pornography can lead to. And here I'm specifically talking about males, I actually don't know the literature on females, so here I'm talking about females don't use visual pornography to the same degree. They use literary pornography. I see. So, yeah. Yeah. So, and then you start to think about, okay, what happens in the cascade or the arc of

sexual arousal and orgasm? What happens is that initially there's a, it's parasympathetically dominant, meaning if somebody is too stressed, they actually can't engage in sexual behavior. The arousal response doesn't occur. Direction is blunted, but the actual orgasm response and ejaculation is strongly associated with the so-called sympathetic nervous system, which has nothing to do with sympathy, as everything to do with, it's a kind of a stress response, and then it reverses to a parasympathetic response.

And a hormone called prolactin increases dramatically after ejaculation in males. What does that do? That blunts dopamine release and testosterone for a very long period of time, which makes sense if pair bonding and sort of, you know, in our species anywhere, there's this idea that then other molecules would be exchanged with partners, pair bonding, potential for raising mates, et cetera. Without getting into a huge discussion about that, the point is this, masturbation and pornography are potently tapping into the dopamine system and can undermine the very

processes of what I consider healthy processes of finding a mate, dating, communication, eventually, if it's appropriate, sexual interaction, etc. Some of us are undermining parabonding. And parallel. So here's a question. If you're seeking sexual release through pornography and you go through the whole cycle and you get a prolactin release, do you bond with yourself? So this is very interesting.

Biology explains it as what's left there is kind of an open loop, a kind of an emptiness, because bonding with the self is a complicated notion. I mean, there's a healthy version of that, of course, loving oneself and self-referencing. And again, this is far more your domain than mine in terms of what a healthy self-relation is. But in the absence of a real partner there, of an absence of a real sexual partner,

there's an open loop of neurochemicals, including oxytocin and prolactin. The dopamine, remember, dopamine goes up during pursuit anticipation, then peaks and then crashes below baseline after orgasm and ejaculation. So this kind of low that people fear is putting them into an amotivated state. We can think of this, if I were to kind of expand on it, it would's this kind of neurochemical, psychological equivalent of making your home environment filthy for a while, not actually putting you into this positive amplification of dopamine. So it depletes the dopamine system. And it's likewise in drugs of abuse and addiction, it eventually depletes the dopamine system. Initially, there's a huge dopamine surge with

drugs of abuse like methamphetamine and cocaine. But over time, people are using more and more to achieve what is not such a great high. You even see this a little bit with kind of consumption of energy drinks, like people are taking more and more chemicals within their energy drinks and they're thinking about loud, fast music energy drinks. It's kind of stacking of dopamine-ergic tools.. Now that's not as pathologic. In fact, I'm there are some energy drinks I'll occasionally drink and I enjoy them. I don't think we need to be entirely afraid of pursuing or engaging in things that release dopamine. Obviously, healthy sexual behavior, food that we love, social engagement, all of these things can be dopamine orgic. It's the big peaks in dopamine that are not associated with any prior effort or organization

of self that are particularly dangerous for the human being. Yeah, well, you could see that you could see that that's a cardinal danger of of affluence then. That's right. This is why that children of, you know, you know, you know, you know, you cannot get rats addicted to cocaine if they live in their natural environments. Is that right?

You can only get rats addicted to cocaine if they're isolated rats in a cage. Yeah, they won't bar press for cocaine in the natural environment. And it's because they have alternative sources of dopamine and energy gratification. Very interesting. So, yeah.

That's very interesting. Yeah, the children of very wealthy people who are overindulged. I've seen that many times, many, many times, and it is a very sad sight. Yeah, well, they're not optimally deprived, and that issue of optimal deprivation, that's a killer issue for an affluent society. We're going to have to stop because it's been more than an hour and a half, and I don't want to stop because there were a bunch of things I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to talk to you about, and I should let everybody know who's listening.

If you go to Dr. Huberman's podcast, you can hear him discuss some of these things. We were going to talk about dreams, sleep, rest, and learning, because we didn't talk about the relationship between dreams and learning and reinforcement, which I'd love to talk to you about. We didn't talk about fasting, we didn't talk about physical health, aging, and how to ameliorate it. We didn't talk about salt, we didn't talk about flexibility, and we didn't talk about gratitude. So I would say we should probably do another podcast at some point. I would also tell everyone who's watching and listening that Dr. Huberman invited me onto his podcast. And so some of these things we can discuss when that happens because I would like to have that happen. And I would also like to, yeah, be good. It'd be good. We obviously have

lots to talk about. I would also tell people, I'm going to do another half an hour with Dr. Huberman on the Daily Wire Plus platform. I use that time to investigate a little bit people's success stories, I suppose. I think it's very useful for young people in particular to get exposed to individuals who've carved out success at least in some domains of their life and to find out what the story pathways are, let's say, the autobiographical pathways that facilitate that kind of success. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.