The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with neuroscientist, bestselling author, and PBS presenter Dr. David Eagleman. They discuss brain plasticity, how perception works, whether free will exists (and if it’s superordinate), how willingness to engage with higher entropy indicates sophistication of thought, and the preconditions for forming a Ulysses contract. Dr. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and an international bestselling author. He is co-founder of two venture-backed companies, Neosensory and BrainCheck, and he also directs the Center for Science and Law, a national nonprofit institute. He is best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He is the writer and presenter of the international PBS series, “The Brain with David Eagleman,” and the author of the companion book, “The Brain: The Story of You.” He is also the writer and presenter of “The Creative Brain” on Netflix. This episode was filmed on January 13th, 2025.  | Links | For David Eagleman: On X https://x.com/davideagleman On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/davideagleman/?hl=en Website https://eagleman.com/ Read his most recent book: “Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain” https://a.co/d/cBY6tGx 

The conscious brain is a broom closet in the mansion of the brain with very little access to what's going on. There may be free will, but it's going to be a small player in this area. Every drive wants to philosophize in its spirit. Exactly. Okay, so let's unpack that. If you understand that aim constrains entropy, then you get some sense almost immediately

why people cling so desperately to their frameworks. This doesn't answer the free will question though. I thought we could walk through perception because it doesn't work the way people think it does. You know when it comes to this question of truth there is no singular truth because you've got a completely different set of experiences that have worried your brain, my brain, everyone's brain. We're all going to perceive different things and seek different things from the world. You said something else too that I don't think I've thought about exactly before.

Hello everybody. I had the opportunity to speak to David Eagleman today. David is an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. He doesn't run a lab there anymore because he runs two companies, Neosensory and BrainCheck. David recently did a course for Peterson Academy called Brain Plasticity. And in the largest sense, that's what we talked about today. Plasticity, to some degree, is an archaic term and based in an archaic metaphor, but it's been well adopted, thoroughly adopted in the neuroscience literature.

And it means something like adaptive flexibility. And human beings are unique in their degree of adaptive flexibility. Now, the advantage to that is that we can change our environment and we can change our perceptions, and we can adapt each generation to a radically new environment. And the price we pay for that is an intensely long period of socialization.

And so we talked about brain architecture. We talked about brain architecture, we talked about brain chemistry, we talked about the role of aim and intent, the role that aim and intent plays in determining perception, which is a very interesting philosophical issue because what would you say? The enlightenment view of the world, the empiricist view was that we create our structures of reality by aggregating something like objective data.

But the science of perception casts a dim light on that presumption because we prioritize our perceptions and we do that using our aim. And so we don't have perceptions that are devoid of value. And so we talked about that a lot as well. And so if you're interested in a walkthrough brain science from the structural perspective, the philosophical perspective, the neurochemical perspective to some degree,

if you're interested in perception and emotion and motivation and drive and the competition of personalities and motivational states in the psyche, then this is the podcast for you. So you just recorded a course for Peterson Academy. I did, yep. So on brain plasticity, which is really my favorite topic, it's about how brains absorb the world around them

and adapt to them. And the interesting part about this is that we are the only species that is as plastic as we are. So, you see a zebra get born, and in 45 minutes it's running around, or a dolphin is swimming after a few minutes of being born. But if you see a homo sapien get born, they're not doing it as quickly.

And the reason is Mother Nature essentially came up with a different trick with us, where she drops us into the world half-baked and we absorb the world around us, our language, our culture. We take everything that's happened before us and we springboard off the top of that. And this is the reason why Homo sapiens has taken over the planet and been so successful because we, unlike a horse that's essentially living the same life that horses have for generations,

we are living different lives every time. So that's what brain plasticity is about. And I actually don't use the word plasticity as much anymore because that was a term originally coined by William James because he was impressed by plastic manufacturing. You could mold something into shape and it would hold that shape. And he said, that's kind of what brains do. You learn the name of your fourth grade teacher and that gets written down and retained.

So he called that plasticity. But what we're looking at is a system of such complexity. We've got 86 billion neurons. We've got 200 trillion synaptic connections. And every moment of your life, this forest of neurons is reconfiguring and changing. And so I tend to call this live wiring instead of plasticity, only because I think the days of being impressed by plastic manufacturing are past us now. Where what we're looking at is a system that, you know, every second of your life from cradle to grave

is reconfiguring to represent the world around you and all of your experiences and all of your memories. Let's talk about perception. I was reading, let me just, the secret incognito, the secret Lives of the Brain, and you spend a fair bit of time in that book talking about perception. And so I thought we could walk through perception because it doesn't work the way people think it does. And the fact that it doesn't work the way people think it does has, I think, profound philosophical implications.

So I want to walk through some ideas that I've been developing with you and see what you think about them. So one of the things you pointed out, for example, in the book was that if you get people to look at a painting, which you might think of as a process akin to what a camera does when it takes a photograph. But you ask them different questions about the people in the photograph. So if I remember correctly, the example you used was a picture of a family in a domestic scene in a house. And you could ask them, people who are watching, who are looking at the painting, what those people were doing just before the painting image was fabricated,

or you could ask them how wealthy they are, or you could ask them how old they are. And while you're doing that, you can track the movements of the viewer's eyes. And what you see is that the pattern of visual movement, so of eye movement, is similar across people depending on the question that's asked, but different in consequence of the question. So for example, if you ask people how rich the people in the photograph are, they'll look at the clothing and the material objects in the painting, and if you ask them how old they are, they'll gaze at their faces.

And a painting isn't, when you're looking at a painting, it isn't necessarily that big an object, but there's still pinpoint perceptions that have a pattern that are, and the pattern reveals the relationship between the goal of the perception and the perception. I've got that, have I got that right? That's exactly right. And so the key is if you ask these people, if they did anything different while answering the question, they won't have any idea.

But their eyes are like, on a covert operation, doing the thing. So as you know, of course, eyes jump around about three times a second. Those are called saccades, and then in between there's little micro saccades. But the point is, we're not aware of that at all. So when your brain is going out to seek the answer to a question, it's running its mission and it's looking at all the points and

pieces that it needs to to gather the information. But we consciously are totally unaware of that. This of course is representative of most of perception. We don't know how we're gathering the data, but this is what we do. In fact, this is what my book incognito was about of course, was that almost everything in the brain is happening unconsciously. You just don't have any access to it and

really no awareness or acquaintance with it either. And this is just a good example of that. You used a couple of words that were interesting in that description. You talked about being, you said something approximating, being on a mission to answer a question. And then you talked about data. And so I want to take those two things apart. So one of the sub elements of the word question is quest. And a quest is a journey.

And a journey is a mission. Now, there's a big difference between being on a mission and gathering data. Now, like the empirical view of the world, I think we'll stick with the empiricists, particularly the empiricists believe that we gathered data about the world and that we could do that in an objective manner and that we built the world out of that data gathering process. But that's not the same,

it's really seriously not the same as answering a question or being on a quest, taking a journey or being on a mission. Because a mission is goal directed. And I've been trying to work out a paradox in recent years that emerges because of the difference in those two viewpoints. Data and you use both those metaphors in your analysis of the eye movement patterns, data implies something directly that's value free,

but mission implies value. It's definitely a mission. So in this case, you're asking a question about the painting and the subject is trying to answer that. But this is true for all of us in all cases. Let's imagine you're on a hike with friends here in Phoenix and you guys are walking along and one of your friends is a mycologist. So he notices the mushrooms that you don't notice and your other friend is a climatologist

and so he's noticing the tree line and where things have changed and you've got a friend who's a podiatrist and she's noticing the angle of your feet and so on. The point is that all the data is hitting all of your eyes but you guys are seeing different things. You're seeing, you're having different experiences of the world predicated on what questions you're asking. And that of course is predicated on who you are,

all of your experiences and what is relevant to you. And all your various aims. Yeah, well, so this is, the reason I focused in on the philosophical implications of this is because the empiricists, the philosophical implication of the idea of data as reality is that reality itself is value-free and value is added to the data. But mission is a whole different way of conceptualizing things because if the basis of data is perception and perception is mission-driven, then insofar as perception is reality,

reality is not value free. And that's at the level of perception, right? So this is why the difference is so crucial because the empirical presumption is the data is there, you add value to it. It's like, no, the value is built into the perception, right? And there's no place in the perception where the value isn't built in.

You talked about those micro, so when your eyes move, how many different levels of saccades are there? There's the big ones about three times a second, and then there's the micro saccades, which are always moving. That's for a slightly different reason. Right, and then you can also move your eyes voluntarily. Right, so there's lots of patterns of eye movement.

There's smooth eye, exactly, smooth pursuit eye movements when you're following something. Right. Yeah, exactly. Right, and then the fact that I can do this and then I can do this. Sure. And then also, one of the things that's interesting about, you could say the perception of perception

is that we're very much inclined to watch other people's eyes. Like generally when we're conversing with people, when we're interacting with them, we see their eyes and we can see their face, although somewhat less their whole head, but at least their face, which is an emotional display system around the eyes.

And the reason that we wanna watch someone's eyes is because we can see what they're looking at. And the reason we wanna do that is because we can infer their mission, right? We can infer their motivations, which is crucially important. Well, if you're in a defensive situation or a sexual situation or well,

any situation for that matter. And so by watching someone's eyes, you can infer their mission. But one of the corollaries of all of that on the philosophical side is that this is such a bizarre thing to understand, is that our aims structure our perceptions. Right? So I've been separating that. I want you to tell me what you think about this. when I was writing my last book, which is that a story is a description, you could say a story is a description of the value hierarchy that structures perception.

That's actually what a story is. And so part of the reason that we're so interested in stories is because, as you pointed out, when you look at the world, there's many, many ways you could look at any scene. Many, an infinite number of ways, in fact. So you have to navigate your way through every glance and the structure of navigation you use

determines the purpose of the perception, but it's also a strategy. And so if I know your story and I can see that you're successful, then I can adopt your mode of perception. It's not your mode of adding value to the world. It's way more fundamental than that. Is that, does that?

Yeah, tell me what you mean by adding value to the world. Well, you can think of the world as a place of dead facts that they're all equally perceivable. It's like, well, no, because perception's value-based. Because we've always thought, it's like, well, no, because perception is value based. Like, because we've always thought in some ways, folk psychology is perception first, right? And then it's motivation or emotion after that, let's say, and then it's cognition. And that, and sort of in a linear chain. And that turns out to be like, it's staggering. It's not just wrong, it's staggeringly wrong, because the values inform the perception so deeply that in many ways they determine the content

of the perception as we were talking about with regards to the painting. Yes, yeah, that's absolutely right. And the fascinating part is that all this is happening unconsciously, we're going and we're seeking out answers from the world, but, you know, and it's a matter of what your attention is drawn to also. So, you know, if I say, hey, what's the feeling

of your shoe on your left foot right now? You can become aware of that. You've got all the data, if we want to call it that, available to you, but you're only seeking little parts. And this all depends on your internal model of the world in terms of, you know, who you are, what is relevant to you. And that's the filter through which we interpret everything. And so, when it comes to this question of truth,

there is no singular truth because you've got a completely different set of experiences that have worried your brain, my brain, everyone's brain. We're all going to perceive different things and seek different things from the world. Something we might get into later that I'm very interested in, and I know you are too, is this collection of neural networks

or personalities that we have inside. And Nietzsche's view on this was that they each have their own truth. They're each perceiving. Yeah, we could talk about that right away. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

So I know you and I are both fans of Nietzsche and the... Every drive wants to philosophize in its spirit. Exactly. Okay. So let's unpack that. Yeah. So it's, you know, you've got all these neural networks that have different drives and Want different things and each what each you meant by that just for the listener of courses

You know that each of those drives Puts together a story or its truth about why it's seeing the world that way So the the the information that you would go out into the world to seek, the mission that you run depends on who's ascendant at that moment. That's for sure. Okay, fine. So let's delve into that. Okay, so when psychologists first started talking

about drives, who was that? Can't remember the name of the psychologist. He was an early behaviorist, but a sophisticated one. The name will come to me later. They were working at building a model of the nervous system, really from the reflex up. Okay. Right, and so their behavioral hypothesis was,

don't explain anything using any more complex terminology if you can explain it in terms of reflex. And you can get very basic neural systems that are reflexive, that are basically spinal. And they really run in an automatic way. And so then you could imagine chains of those reflexes. You can imagine those reflexes chained together so that more and more complex behaviors could come about. And there's some truth in that. But the problem with the drive metaphor is that it's kind of like a wind up doll, right? A drive implies first of all that it's motoric, that it's movement oriented, and second, second that it's algorithmic or deterministic.

Now, and Nietzsche offered a more sophisticated view than that when he associated drive with philosophizing, because a mechanistic and deterministic, motoric algorithm doesn't philosophize. And you can piece this together from Nietzsche's work, and it's really clear in Jung that it's much better to conceptualize what we think of as drives, as personalities. And then the huge advantage to that is that it brings in perception.

Because, and you already pointed this out, at least implicitly, when we were discussing the painting. If I'm angry with you, okay, so now you could say I'm under the grip of a drive, but it's much more sophisticated and accurate to say, it's no, that the personality of defensive or predatory aggression now has me in its grip. It's dominant from a neurological perspective.

It's suppressing all other personalities. And so then what that's gonna mean is that when you talk to me, any word that you say that I could interpret as irritating is going to be much more obvious. And anything that you say that would be peacemaking, I would regard cynically, let's say, and I would be looking in my interaction with you

for pathways to victory. And it wouldn't only be that I would see that, but also if you asked me to justify my actions while we were arguing, even if I became cruel, that drive that's a personality would have all those arguments at hand too. So it's a full-fledged personality. It also has its own emotional systems

because if I'm gripped by rage, I could easily be happy to see you suffer, right? And if I'm gripped by compassion, say, well, seeing you suffer is going to put me in pain. And so I think it would be very helpful if the psychological field in general updated its model of drive, so to speak, or even motivation for that matter, to concentrate more on this personality-like

model. Now, and you talked as well in the book about the diverse range of, I don't know, I think you used the word personality as well, the diverse... I called it team of rivals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By which I mean, you've got all these, you know, all these, let's call them personalities under the hood. You know, it's interesting because I think I,

maybe I dial it back one step from personality. You've got different neural networks that want different things and we can measure these. Just give an example, which is, you know, when you're making a financial decision about what you're gonna buy, you have certain networks that care about valuation, they care about the price point,

and they're thinking about, okay, how much is that worth, how much is that worth, why, so on. You have completely separate networks in front of load that care about the predicted emotional experience. Let's say you're looking at two restaurants that you're trying to choose between. So you're making a simulation of what you see, oh, that's gonna be delicious and good,

and that one's not gonna be so good. You've got other networks that care about the social context, as in what do my friends think of this? Is this cool or not so cool? All these things, you've got this and more, they're all battling it out under the hood. And they're all trying to steer the ship of state. And when you make a decision,

it's because of the vote of the neural parliament. So what's interesting, I do want to get at this because your view of a collection of personalities where one of them is dominant, and my view of a team of rivals is slightly different in this way, which is that, you know, there's this battle going on and you reach these sort of consensus things,

just like in a parliament, where different groups will collaborate and coordinate and say, okay, like, you know, two out of three think this and so we're gonna go for that restaurant. Well, that would be calculated, my suspicions are, is that enough of those rivals aggregate together, they can inhibit everything else. That's exactly right.

So they'll join forces and then their rivals will sink into silence because they've gripped the, they likely grip the neuropharmacological circuits that can inhibit the rivals. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So now some of that would be calculated unconsciously. Almost. But then maybe we can hash this out a little bit. the rivals. Yeah, I think that's accurate. So now some of that would be calculated unconsciously, right? Almost.

But then maybe we could hash this out a little bit. So imagine it's something like this. So you're making a decision. A lot of these you make pretty quickly. And so what I would presume that would mean is that the rival systems that are doing the computations already have a behavioral pathway specified in practice that's in keeping with their aim.

So nothing new has to be instantiated. But imagine that there are situations where a novel situation arises and rivals emerge, but there isn't a clear pathway even if one system obtains dominance. I suspect that's when you have to become conscious and you have to think. Because one of the mysteries in your book, and it's a mystery period, is given that we can compute so much unconsciously, and given how narrow the focus of consciousness is,

and even how limited its ability to control, let's say, what's it good for at all? Now, we do know where we do tend to become conscious, at least in some times of things that are novel. So novelty seems to have something to do with it. But so I'm curious about what you think about that. Yeah, great. I mean, the thing is,

when you look across the animal kingdom, you find these rivaling networks everywhere. So just as an example, you take a mouse, you put it in a maze, and you put cheese at the end, and you can put a little harness on the mouse and measure how much he's pulling towards the cheese. Then what you can do is switch it where instead of a piece of cheese,

you have an electrical shock at the end. And you can put the harness on and measure how hard he pulls away from the electrical shock, okay? Now what you do is you put a piece of cheese and an electrical shock at the end of the thing, and the poor little mouse gets stuck halfway and turns and turns and turns at exactly the place

where the two vectors cancel out, which is to say he's running both networks. Then he gets the cheese and avoids the shock, and he gets stuck there in the middle. You see this across animals, the stickle. Approach avoidance conflict. Yeah, exactly, it's the conflict part. Okay, take another animals, the stickleback. Approach avoidance conflict. Yeah, exactly, it's the conflict part. Okay, take another example.

The stickleback is a bird that will attack things that are red. And if you give it something, what's that? Fish. Oh, fish, right, yeah. No, no, wait. Stickleback? Stickleback gull, wait, what's the?

Oh, oh, oh. It's a bird. It's a gull? It's a bird, yeah. Okay, because there's a, okay. There's a stickleback fish too, okay. Yeah, this is a bird. I'm 99% sure I got the there's a stickleback fish too. Yeah, this is a bird. I'm 99% sure I got the name right, stickleback.

Okay, it'll attack things that are red. It will sit on anything that's egg-shaped. It'll sit on it. So if you put a red dot on an egg, it'll both sit on it and attack it at the same time. Okay, what these represent are rivaling networks. Here's where I think the role of consciousness is, is in mediating this.

And this is what we've gotten better and better at. And so when we have rivaling networks in a new, in a novel context. Well, that would be a novel context, right? Where you have a system that's automated, another system that's automated, but the conjunction produces a paradox. Okay, so we could think of the, okay.

So we can think of the reason for the emergence of the cortex in that regard. So I read a series of brilliant papers on hypothalamic cats, right? So these are cats whose entire cortex has deseribrate cats. Their entire cortex has been taken out in most of the limbic system,

and these are mostly female cats for various reasons. Female cats are more functional with only a hypothalamus as it turns out. And if you keep them in a simple environment, like a cage, they can pretty much do what cats do. Now they're hyper exploratory, which is pretty damn weird for an animal with almost no brain,

because that's not what you'd predict. And by the way, they can also walk on a treadmill. Right, right, right. Well, they can mate, they can eat predict. And by the way, they can also walk on a treadmill. Right, right, right. Well, they can mate, they can eat, they can regulate their temperature, they can defend themselves. Okay, so now imagine this. So now you have all these automated systems

that you described, but they can produce conflicts, and they can produce conflicts in the moment, and they can produce conflicts across time, and they can produce social conflicts. Okay, so now you need another part of the brain that emerges, as you said, to mediate those conflicts and that's what the cortex does. And that's, so that would imply

that some of that lengthy socialization that you described, actually what that socialization is, at least in part, is the environment-specific means in which those conflicts that will arise in consequence of built-in motivation will be mediated. Right? Yes. And now here's the thing. Rats and cats have cortex, but what we have that they are not so good at is the ability

to mediate well such that we don't get stuck in the middle of the maze, but we can make a decision about we can actually weigh in and say, okay, you know what, I'm not going to get stuck with these two networks. I'm going to, I'm going to sign on something. This is what I think consciousness is about. It's the higher level abstraction that allows you to say, okay, look, this isn't something that's automated. This is, you know, this is is a new situation I'm in, I don't know what to do here,

and then the CEO gets called up. And yeah, there's like a large, you take a large company, the CEO can't possibly know what's happening in the company. There's 100,000 employees, right? The CEO's job fundamentally is to wait for the phone to ring and say, hey, there's trouble here. There's something going on that we don't know what to do and the CEO makes a decision.

And also, of course, to do future planning. Yes. Consciousness is essentially about that. Yes. That's also a conflict mediation process, future planning, so that the present doesn't interfere with the future. Yeah, that's right. And so I think what I suggested in incognito is that maybe we can look at the way that

animals resolve conflict or don't, like the poor rat that gets stuck in the middle, and we can use that as at least a rough metric for the degree of consciousness that an animal has because the assertion there is that, you know, consciousness allows you to mediate these things and figure out a path forward there. Would you, okay, so a couple of things. So you could imagine a mechanism that would allow that to, okay, so here's two potential mechanisms. So like system A has a goal and system B has a goal, and now they're locked together.

Okay, so now you need a superordinate goal that's higher than both of those that can be used as a reference point to rectify the conflict, right? You can imagine chains of those superordinate goals, right? So we get stuck in a conflict here, we're gonna do this. We get stuck in a conflict here, we're gonna do this and so forth, like ad infinitum. Okay, so the cortex is going to produce those melding goals,

then that might be something like sequencing. I'm hungry and tired, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna eat now and then sleep, or I'm gonna sleep now and eat, and that way the conflict between those two things is reconciled in a higher order frame that would take the future into account. Yeah.

Right, and so, but then maybe the physiological mechanism is that, you know, so let's say you could turn left in the maze or you could turn right in the maze and you're spinning because you're in this conflict. The mechanism for resolution could be that the inhibitory capacity of the free cortex, so it's not bound by any given motivational state,

is shifted in favor of one of the systems, right? So, because focus of attention seems like that. If I'm, so if I'm angry, for example, and I really focus my attention, well, I could inhibit the rage or replace it with something, but I could also amplify it. There does seem to be a voluntary attention seems to be something like the capacity to amplify it.

You think that would be something like the turning of spare, multi-purpose neural tissue to one side of a particular operation. Yeah. The difficulty with the consciousness question, of course, as we know, is there's no single spot in the brain that is, you know, consciousness. And so when I think about rivaling networks, I tend to think about them rivaling directly with one another. You're of course totally correct that, you know, for example, visual attention can amplify

certain things. Right. It's like coming from visual cortex, you can pay auditory attention to something or something like that. Right. So you're gathering auditory attention to something or something like that. Right, so you're gathering more resources to that. Exactly. To that phenomenon. Exactly, but I have to confess that we just don't know

what consciousness is. Where does consciousness live in that? I mean, we can talk about visual attention, auditory attention and so on, but where's this, it's not like an extra bit that just pays attention consciously. So that's still a bit of a mystery. Yeah, yeah, well, it's a major mystery

because nobody can figure out what the awareness element is for, right? Especially since it's so limited. Yeah, well, what it's for, of course, is what you said at the beginning, which is the way that we go on missions into the world. You know, if I'm looking for the red object, then I find the red object.

If I'm looking for the thing that looks like a broom, then I find that in the crowded space and so on. So visual attention is what allows us to parse the world in a way that's aligned with our mission, that what we're trying to answer in that moment. Well, that's it. It's in the moment, right? It's gotta be something like that,

because you could imagine that there would be quests that are automatized so completely that the circuitry is completely there, right? But then there are new quests, so to speak, that, well, because they're new, the circuitry isn't there. Now, Goldberg pointed out out when he was looking at, as L. Conan Goldberg, he was a Lurius student, he pointed out that when we are learning something new,

much broader areas of the cortex are activated. It's much more energy demanding. And then as we learn something and automate it, this is in the typical right-handed male. So first of all, it's the patterns of cortical activation are very widespread and there's a lot of energy that's being what used probably because perceptions aren't well specified

and there's many potential pathways of action. And then the activation pattern shrinks away from the right hemisphere into the left, and then it moves from the left front to the back, and as it moves, it becomes smaller and smaller area until a little machine is built, essentially, that's automated. And once that's built, well, you don't need consciousness,

and it's hyper-efficient. That's exactly right. So the unconscious brain, which is most of what's happening, is all about speed and efficiency. So if you look at, for example, this study has been done with playing Tetris. So you take a bunch of people, male and female, of course, left and right-handed, and you teach them to play Tetris.

So when they're first learning, they're amateurs, their brain is on fire with activity, it's measured functional magnetic resonance imaging. So you're measuring their brains. After they become good at it, the activity shrinks and shrinks. Right. It's less and less.

I did this, I competed against this 10 year old world champion cup stacker. So he takes these cups and stacks them, it's this routine that you do as quickly as you can. I had never done it before. So we both wore high density EEG caps, electroencephalography, and we looked at what was going on. Of course, my brain was on fire with activities.

I was trying to figure out what the heck to do. But he, practicing four hours a day on this, his brain is essentially quiet while he does this incredibly rapid routine. So it's exactly right. The job of the brain is to take novel things and say, hey, if this is relevant and I need this, I'm gonna burn it down into the circuitry

so I never have to think about it again. Like bicycle riding, you know, when you're first learning, you're paying attention to your torso and your legs and you don't know what you're doing. When you get good at it, then you can text on your phone, you can talk to someone while you're biking because it's now part of the machinery of the brain.

Right, right. So you could think about consciousness as something that's continually climbing up a ladder of automated processes, right? So you think and practice, and that all automates, and you become hyper efficient in your perceptions and your actions, and that disappears in some ways from consciousness.

It becomes part of the substructure of consciousness. But then consciousness itself climbs on top of that. So it's like consciousness is like the bleeding edge of adaptation. Oh nice, oh I like that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. And what's interesting by the way,

I talked about this in the Brain Plasticity course and in my book LiveWired, what's interesting is that given who you are and what you've already packed down into your machinery, that determines what is relevant to you for the next thing, such that the only, you know, there's a million things you could learn or could pay attention to at every moment, but you're only going to take on those things that are relevant to you and push them down into the unconscious brain as a result.

And we know, for example, the acetylcholineurgic systems are involved in this process, which is to say they tag relevance. They say, hey, this is something that means something to you for whatever reason, who knows, but you really care about stamp collecting or genealogy or artwork or whatever it is that you care about. And so then you go on these missions from the world and you take stuff in and you start burning that stuff down and it means something to you.

Whereas the rest of the stuff just goes. Help me distinguish between the dopaminergic and the acetylcholinergic function. So if my understanding is that if I, and this is part of the structuring of perception, if I posit an aim, my perception is first going to specify a pathway to that aim. So that's how the world organizes itself. And then things in the world are going to stand out for me as things that will facilitate

my movement forward and things that will interfere. Everything else is irrelevant virtually. And there's a social equivalent. So people who will facilitate my movement forward are friends and people who won't are foes, right? And so you have tools and friends and obstacles and foes. And you can also perceive things that'll transform your aim. I think those are magical things, by the way. That's that category of narrative that's magic.

It transforms your aim and puts you into a new game. Okay, the dopaminergic system will tag progress towards a goal, and it'll reinforce the systems, neural systems that were active, just before that progress was made to make them more dominant. Now, that's partly an indication of relevance because what's positive towards a goal is relevant.

I don't understand how that differs from the cholinergic marking of relevance. So. Yeah, so you've got these insidial cholinergic systems that say, hey, this is important. I want you to initiate plasticity here. And by the way, these systems, just like dopamine actually, broadcast all around the entire brain.

So dopamine system is involved in saying, hey, that was better than expected. I wasn't expecting that to happen. You get a positive burst of dopamine. If in contrast, you're expecting reward and you don't get it, you get a decrease in the amount of dopamine. You have a little baseline going on.

Absence of an expected reward is technically a punishment. Exactly right. Yep. And so that's what the dopamine system is for, saying, oh, better than expected, worse than expected. But acetylcholine is what happens when you're saying, I want to make plastic changes to the system. Let me just give you an example.

Yeah, yeah. An experiment with mice and they have to learn how to reach through a narrow slot to grab pellets and whatever. And they get better and better at it. And the parts of their brain that are involved in this task actually grow in their real estate. Okay, now you take an equivalent set of rats,

you give them an acetylcholine blocker, they do exactly the same number of trials they're doing the thing, but they don't get better, and their brain doesn't change. They don't ever get better at the task. They're not faster at doing it because they don't have the plasticity available to them anymore.

Because you need the acetylcholine. By the way, something that of course we know is all of the neuromodulators and neurotransmitter systems, these are all working together in a very complicated dance. So, you know, dopamine is involved in saying like, hey, that was, you know, good, bad, better, or worse than expected. But acetylcholine is the thing that says,

hey, let's make plasticity available here. So it's a broader marker of relevance? Yeah. Is it like potential relevance? Is it something like that? And is there an emotional experience that's associated with that? I mean, if you block dopaminergic receptors,

people lose positive emotion. But what do they lose if acetylcholinergic transmission is blocked? What do they lose subjectively? I don't really answer that in humans. That's partly why I can't figure out how that damn, I can't get a handle on to understand how that system functions.

Yeah, it's interesting, because there's so many silicone blockers that are used in animals for things, but I don't know what the emotional experience is for a human on that. My guess, if I were just pulling someone out of a hat, would be that they just feel like they don't care about this particular thing. So for example, let's say you take a,

that's a major function, caring. And that's a weird emotional condition, because it doesn't exactly have a valence. It's more like, does the feeling of this matters? Could you characterize that as positive or negative? Because it could matter in a negative way, right? Because it could matter in a negative way, right? And it could matter in a positive way. So it seems like that would be something like

the broad category of potential significance. What happens to eye to pupillary diameter if acetylcholine increases? Do eyes dilate? I don't know, I don't know, good question. But just, you know, I'm trying to think through what it would feel like. Imagine that you were trying to learn a new sport

that you haven't played, you know, pickleball, let's say. So you're, we're both learning the sport at the same time. And for some reason, it's really relevant to us. But if one of us got to see the Kohling blockers, my assumption would be that we feel like, we just don't care about this thing. You know, I'm more interested in what's going on over there or something.

We wouldn't particularly care. So it sounds like it's a broader marker of relevance. Okay, well I'm gonna have to look that up and see if I can specify it more particularly. Okay, so you talked about, we had a bit of- Sorry, let me just give another example of that. You know, okay, so when somebody gets a stroke, and let's say they get a stroke

and they lose the function of their left arm, their left arm's mostly paralyzed, and they can do things with their right hand. Well, so the way that you need to operate to get the left hand working again, do you know what they do clinically? So what they do is what's called constraint therapy. This is the single best move.

You take the right hand, which is working well, and you pin it down, you strap some of it so that they're forced to use their left hand. Necessity. Yeah, exactly, necessity, that's irrelevant. So now I wanna get the sandwich to my mouth. I have to. I need to use the left hand. I need to get my zipper down to go to the restroom.

I have to use my left hand. These are the sorts of things that matter. This is what causes brain plasticity relevance. Okay, and if you strap down the functional hand and you used a cholinergic suppressor, would that stop the person from? That's exactly it. Right, and that seems to be, would they still try

or would they just stop trying? I don't know. I don't know what it is in humans would be this. Right, because you could imagine the acetylcholine might mediate trying or intensity of effort or duration or rate, but you could also imagine that it would mediate capacity to learn if the practice was occurring.

You know what, I think it wouldn't directly be mediating the trying, because I think what would happen is you would try it, but you wouldn't directly be mediating the trying because I think what would happen is you would try it, but you wouldn't have the plasticity that says, hey, something useful happened here, so let's make changes to the motor cortex over here. You just wouldn't have that. And so the system would stop trying that.

Okay. Okay, so back, we had a bit of a, I wouldn't call it a dispute, but a slight difference of agreement in relationship to this model of personality. And you talked about rivals. I mean, rival is a narrative-like metaphor, right? To have a rivalry is a rivalry between beings, generally speaking. It's all we ever have in a narrative metaphor.

But I think there's something worth taking apart is, because maybe you could say, well, if the rivalry is primarily played out at an unconscious level, then the metaphor of personality is not quite accurate. And so I'm just trying to think through if that's true, because if the systems are automated completely, I wonder if they're automated. I don't know if they would come replete with perceptions and thoughts exactly.

I have a suspicion that it's not, as Nietzsche said, that each, or he implied it maybe, that each one is coming with a personality or something. But my suspicion is that each one is reaching out to other spots, like visual cortex, like your limbic system, like your frontal cortex. When a network is dominant, it's sort of pulling information

and sort of constructing a personality. Well, that's a good idea. That's a good idea. Okay, so that would account for the archaic, the archaic conception of possession. It's something like that, right? Well, obviously, if a drive comes to dominate your behavior, it's taken possession of your personality.

Like clearly. Okay, so then you can imagine that there's... Okay, so maybe it's something like this. So imagine in a motivated state that there's an automated core, and that automated core isn't going to be accompanied by a tremendous amount of consciousness. But the more additional neural system it aggregates around it,

the more consciousness it accrues, right? And that would partly be because it's actually building something like a novel structure. It's got this automated core, which we would consider the drive, but then it's pulling in different elements of the totality of what's available, and that would make it more and more personality-like. Yeah, that's right. In terms of deciding what to say next, for example,

it's looking at your whole speech system, Wernicke's and Broca's and all these errors, and saying, am I gonna say something cruel or kind or whatever? But it's still using those basic mechanisms. It's taking advantage of the machinery that's there, and it just has the ability to draw on it differently than a different kind.

So I've been trying to, in keeping with this model of like superordinate aims that executive function could refer to to mediate conflict, I've been trying to understand if there are principles by which those superordinate aims are constructed so that they're valid. So what do you mean by valid? Well, that's a good question.

Not likely to produce conflict, for example. So for example, here's an idea. So you and I, we can think of each other as a loose aggregation of potential motivated states, but we can come to an agreement. Okay, now then we could judge the quality of the agreement, I think, by, there's a variety of standards. We could say, it's a higher quality agreement if it can sustain itself across a broader range of contexts.

So if we have a friendship, which is a kind of contract or agreement, and we can get along many different places and under many different situations, then we'd think of that as a deep friendship. So it's well-constituted friendship. And then we could also imagine that if the friendship maintained itself across time,

then that's another indication of its validity, right? And then we could imagine a third dimension would be if it was stable across context and stable across time, and it improved while we implemented it, that would be a third criteria. That would be like, that'd be a good evaluation strategy for a good marriage.

It works everywhere, it works for a long time. And as you play it out, it improves. Okay, so then I've been trying to think through if there's a set of rules that obtains, like they'd be like principles of ethics that bind those kinds of agreements. So I'll give you an example. So Piaget spent a lot of time analyzing how children

learned to play games with others and made friends. Okay, so the first rule of a game is something like both people have to wanna play it. Okay, then the next rule is something like you get a turn in the game and then I get a turn, right? So I have to sacrifice my turn to you, but vice versa. And that's a stable arrangement. Now, and the reason we're willing to do that

instead of me fighting to have the turn all the time is because it's a better game if I get to play it with you. So I'm, okay. So then you could imagine now, if we come to a voluntary agreement about the aim, we unite our perceptions, we unite our emotions, and then we reciprocate. Okay, now if we can do that once,

then we've established a precedent, and if we can repeat that, we have a friendship. Okay, but then that implies that the friendship is based, that there's rules. The aim has to be shared, the aim has to be shared. The aim has to be voluntary. The participation has to be reciprocal. Now, Panksepp showed this with rats when they were playing because Panksepp, first of all,

took a kind of dominance approach to play. He showed that if you took two juvenile rats and you paired them in an arena, they'd work to play, but that the rat that was 10% bigger across rats could reliably pin the smaller rat. So then that sort of provided proof, evidence for a dominance theory of play. But then Panksepp realized that rats don't play once.

They're communal. So then he paired them repeatedly, and he found that if the big rat didn't let the little rat win at least 30% of the time, the little rat wouldn't play anymore. So you can see there that there's an ethos that's emerging that's about... Now the reason I'm mentioning this is because... You're thinking about neural networks as being the rats and the kind of collaboration that neural networks work out through time?

That and across people, right? Okay, yeah. So I'm trying to figure out the preconditions for something like a stable social community. What works across time to mediate conflict and then what works across people? And that's like a bounded world. So here's what I think.

I think, so you have all these different drives, some of which are very primitive, hunger and thirst and sexuality. And so you've got all these different drives, but you have more sophisticated drives too, including various forms of short-term thinking versus long-term thinking. You have these different financial drives

that I was talking about with valuation or predicted emotional experience or social context. You've got all these different things going on. The way that they form these agreements through time, they form these friendships, let's say, I think that makes an integrated personality. That's what makes you, you, and me, me is the way that we let these things win or lose in different circumstances. In other words, all unconsciously,

these networks have worked out ways of saying, all right, look, I'm gonna let you in here and I'm gonna do this, and maybe there's an advantage to letting anger win out in this moment. I find that that works sometimes, but in this other moment, I know that letting compassion win out is gonna be the optimal thing for my marriage or whatever. Yeah.

Okay. So there are these things, but what interests me is that no matter how integrated a personality we think we have, we're constantly in conflict. I mean, every moment of our lives we think, oh, should I do this or that? We're making decisions, right? This is what decision making is about. And so there's a sense in which there's never a stable scenario where we say, okay, look, these guys have figured out how to get along. What I find interesting is ways that we can put ideas into place like the Ulysses contract.

So are you familiar with Ulysses contract? So, okay, just as you remember Ulysses contract. So are you familiar with Ulysses contract? So, okay, just as a, you remember Ulysses, Odysseus was coming home from the Trojan War and realized he was gonna pass the island of the sirens and he wanted to hear the song of the sirens, but he knew that like any mortal man, he'd crash into the rocks and die. So you remember what he did,

he filled his men's ears with beeswax, he had them lash him to the mast. And he said, no matter what I do, just keep on sailing. Okay, what was happening here was that the Ulysses of Sound Mind way back here knew that the future Ulysses would behave badly when he passed the island. Yes. He knew that there was no way he wasn't going

to behave badly there. So what he did is he made a contract with himself. He said, I enlist myself to the master that I can't do the wrong thing. Okay, so this is what philosophers call Ulysses' contract. And I'm fascinated by these because we use these in all kinds of ways in our lives.

And I actually, one of my next books is about this because I think it's the most practical way when you're in a moment of sober reflection to think about, okay, who do I want to be? And how can I establish Ulysses' contract with myself that I can't break? It's an unbreakable kind of contract. And so I'll just give you an example of this.

Why were you driven, why were you attracted to the terminology contract? Because it's not something you can break, because it's not that Ulysses said, okay, tie me to the thing, but leave a little string here that I can pull and let the ropes down or something. It's that he was bound to that mast. He was attached to it and could not get off the mast.

Okay, that's the important part. So- It's like a marriage contract. Yeah, exactly. But even more, you know, a marriage contract you can break also. But the key with Ulysses' contracts is you really want to make them unbreakable. Here's just a couple contract. Yeah, exactly. But even more, you know, a marriage contract you can break also, but the key with you, with these contracts is you really wanna make them

unbreakable. Here's just a couple examples. For example, in Alcoholics Anonymous, the first thing they have you do is clear all the alcohol out of your house, because even if somebody feels like, hey, look, I'm done, I'm not gonna drink, but I'll leave those things in case I have a party or whatever, they know that on some, you know,

festive Friday night or a lonely Sunday night on some, you know, festive Friday night or a lonely Sunday night or something, you might, okay. So you get rid of it so that the temptation can't be there or with drug addiction programs. First thing they tell you is look, don't ever walk around with more than 20 bucks in your pocket because even if you think you're over it, at some point someone's going to offer you drugs

and if you've got the money, you might spend it. So there's a million ways that we can make these kinds of contracts with ourselves. And the reason it's important is because what we're doing is setting up some kind of higher order ideal. And I know you think about this in terms of religion. I think religion is this religious, the religious enterprise is the, what would you say?

It's the establishment and analysis and experience of those higher order contracts. I think that's a way of defining it. So you can think of the higher order the contract, the more religious like it is. That's another way. This is a definition, by the way. I don't know that I agree with the definition,

but let me think, because all the Ulysses contracts that I try to always set up in my life, I don't think about them as being religious, although they are, I mean, they're- That's why it's a matter of definition. Okay, well, so let me ask you a couple of questions based on what you just said. Okay, because there were two ways you went,

as far as I could tell, and I can't reconcile them. So we started talking about games, and you started talking about the manner in which these teams of rivals interact, and there was a suggestion there for a moment that there is something game-like about it so that rival systems might be integrated into a higher order agreement, which is essentially what a game is, right?

I mean, when two teams are competing on a playing field, you could say they're competing, but they're also cooperating in that they're playing the same game. Like if the game degenerates into a fist fight, a basketball game fist fight and a hockey fist fight are the same thing, right? They're not basketball or hockey, they're a fight. Okay, so you can imagine a higher order agreement

that has a, okay, so then the question would be, is the mediation between rivals best conceptualized as a game? And you pointed in that direction for a minute, but then you switched to the Ulysses contract. So I'm wondering, like, how would you contrast a game with a contract? I think the contract is part of the game,

which is to say, which is to say, gosh, I know I'm gonna behave badly in that situation, so as one twist on this game, as a play in this game, I'm gonna put something in place so that I can't do it. It forbids it. It forbids it, exactly. It's a way of saying, look, I know I've got all these rivaling networks,

and I'm not gonna get through this. I know that right now I feel like I'm not going to drink or smoke or whatever somebody's trying to get or duck. Okay, so I've never had a drink or smoking problem, but one thing I do try to prevent is, you know, I'm in a restaurant and let's say it's a predefined meal and they put a dessert down. I want to have a taste of dessert, but I don't want to eat the whole thing. Okay?

And what happens is as I'm sitting there talking to everyone, I end up eating the whole thing like an idiot. So what I do is I take a bite or two, and then I take the table salt, and I cover the thing in salt, the chocolate cake. So that, that's my Ulysses contract, because I know that the me of three minutes from now is going to keep sticking my fork in it. So I'm making a contract with myself that I can't break,

because now the cake is ruined. And so this is just one play in the game of dealing with these... It seems to me that there's a deep analogy between that Ulysses contract and something like the rule of a game. I mean, if you set up a basketball game, there are moves that are forbidden, right? And so you can think of games as enabling principles. Here's things you can do in the game, but there's rules that are forbidding as well.

Is it with the Ulysses contract concept that you're looking at the rules of the game that forbid? Is that the fundamental concentration on the Ulysses contract side? There are limitations rather than enabling conditions? Because you have both in a game, right? Right.

Things you can't do and things you can't do. Every game's like that. Right. I guess you could think of it that way. I think of it as just another move in the game of life in a sense, which is to say, you know, I could eat it. It's a rich energy source. it's delicious sugar, whatever. And I've got this other move I can do.

I guess I think about it in terms of long-term versus short-term networks in the brain. And so how do I get those networks, because you know, we can image this in fMRI, we see these areas that are involved in long and short-term thinking. So how do I get these guys to play together in the same game, but in a way that aligns

with who I want to be with my long term thinking? Well, let's take that example, because I think it provides a very concrete representation of the relationship between superordinate and subordinate goals and future and present. Okay, so you already outlined the reasons to eat the chocolate cake, right? It's delicious, and it's delicious

because it is a source of energy and a high impact source of energy. So there's reason to eat it. And the reason is immediate and it's tied to immediate gratification. But now you're, so that's one game, the game of immediate gratification and energy acquisition. But you're putting that underneath a higher order game. Okay, so one of the questions we might ask is, well, what game are you playing

when you forbid yourself the cake? What's your aim there? That game has to do with health, has to do with keeping slim, has to do with all of the things, vanity, all of the things that I wanna make sure the kind of person I am who doesn't gulp down the entire chocolate cake.

Right, right, so self-control, discipline, attractiveness, health. Right, and so now one of the things we might ask ourself, see this is what I was trying to get at, you know, two discussions ago, trying to lay out the preconditions for what constitutes a higher order game, because one of the things we could ask is,

why prioritize the constraint over the eating? Like there's a reason for that because you value the constraint more. Now, but why? Why is the health, you know, you alluded to that. You said, well, part of it's future. There's more future, for example. This is just part of the passage into maturity, right? We realize that it's a long game.

And so we get to know that, as kids we eat the cake every time, maybe we get sick from it. And what we realize is that the things that we want for our lives are a different category of things. And so these are part of the networks that are right. So you brought in maturity. Okay, so that's, well, that's an extremely interesting

move and it seems to me to be precise and accurate because we could think of cortical development as maturation. We could think of socialization as maturation. Okay, so here's some principles for socialization. Those are the same in a sense of you know. I take turns, right? So that means that I regulate my lower order immediate motivations communally. Right. But then there's another axis, which is I regulate them in relationship to the future.

And the more mature you are, this is a definition again, you can tell me what you think about it. The more mature you are, the better you get at regulating the immediate in relationship to the future, but also the local in relationship to the communal. So if I'm really mature, I'm going to sacrifice the present for the future and the communal and that's better. That's a definition of better, right?

So we're starting to lay out a taxonomy of value in terms of conduct and in terms of perception. I totally agree. And by the way, you introduced this idea of thinking about the future and thinking about community, but I think we'd agree those are not orthogonal actions. Not at all. Exactly. They point in the same direction or in a similar direction.

I don't think there's any difference between your future self and a stranger. I think they're the same thing. So here's an example of that. This is so cool, I figured this out along 30 years ago. Psychopaths have no compassion, but they don't learn from experience either. And so that means that not only does the psychopath

have no compassion for you, he has absolutely no compassion for himself tomorrow. And then you think, oh well, those are the same thing. Right? There's no difference between those two things. That's the, because both, why? Why? Well, you're not feeling what your future self is feeling

now any more than you're feeling what someone else is feeling now. Like a normal person can, a mature person you might say, can think of their future self and they can think of the experience of that self and it matters. Just like they can think of the experience of someone else and it matters, the psychopath either can't or won't do that. Right? But it's the same mechanism.

You said, well, there isn't a conflict between future orientation and communal orientation. I don't think there is. I think they're the same thing. You know, I think they're very similar. Yeah, okay. Thinking about a stranger, thinking about yourself. For some reason, we have this special attachment

to our future selves. So we do things like put money into an IRA. We do all kinds of things that we're doing for our future selves, so our future self will be, you know, happy, we imagine, even though our future self will be unrecognizable to us. You don't know who that future person is. And you're making all kinds of decisions in deference to you.

Yeah, well, that begs the question, right? Which is, what are the preconditions for people to form an alliance with their future self? And it is, and you know, it could easily be, you tell me what you think about this. There was a psychiatrist, a very famous psychiatrist. He used to be taught in personality theory all the time. And I can't even remember his name now, but one of the reasons that he was taught personality classes is because he studied

the development of childhood friendships like Piaget. But one of his hypotheses was that essentially that the close friendships that children develop in early childhood, like a best friend, a best friend was something like, first of all, a practice trial for a long-term marriage, but also the way that you learn to take care of your future self.

So that it was through taking care of someone who wasn't you, that you developed the capability of making a relationship with something that was abstract and that that would transfer to your future self. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure I would think you would need that piece. Well, that's the question.

I'll think about that further, but here's what I would say. It's the experience of time that children have that allow them to think about time. In other words, if you and I talk about ancient Rome, we're at an age where we can kind of think about 2,000 years and think about what that means. An eighth grader learning about that in school really can't imagine 2,000 years.

Much less imagine 50 years, what that time scale. Or even next week. Exactly. But as you mature in the world, you're able to think about time scales that you simply weren't able to before. Right, so some of it's directly experiential. Exactly.

Because you do learn that if you do X today, two days from now isn't so good. Yeah. And you can make that connection, and that wouldn't be intermediated by some other person. Right. Right, so, well, there's no reason to assume that there aren't multiple

sources of information that would mature you. Agreed. Agreed. Okay, great. So where we get then is maturation leads to an ability to think long term. It's this capacity to think about who do I want to be is something that requires experience and some amount of wisdom. And this is, I know that we share an interest in stories and how this can set, this can help us set an idea in our heads for, hey, that's who I want to be. I hadn't thought about this because I've, you know, my short-term networks have been having fun and I've been, you've been in elementary school and middle school and so on, but now I'm really starting to think about this

and what impact I wanna make in the world. Anyway, when you have that idea in mind, even let's imagine a person is religious and really has established, hey, I wanna be like this deity or this role model of any sort. There's always conflict though, right? Because then you've got temptations

in front of you, all around you. And so there's always this rivalry. I only mention this going back 10 minutes because the issue of, you know, do these systems work out some sort of nice gameplay? Sort of, but there's also the fact that they're always in conflict. You're just always dealing with this, even when you have...

Well, that's also... Well, maybe I would say that even if you work out a harmonious game, which is probably not a bad model for a well-integrated psyche, right? It's a well-integrated game, because you're not across purposes to yourself, let's say. There's enough novelty that's constantly being infused that conflict's going to emerge. I mean, even imagine you have a stable marriage, right?

But a new problem emerges with a child. Well, that doesn't exactly mean that the marriage contract has been violated, but it does mean that now you have a new complex situation to deal with where you might say that not only is conflict inevitable in that situation, you might say that it's desirable because now imagine that your child has hit puberty or something and so like new problems emerge.

The truth of the matter is you actually don't know how to deal with those problems. And so conflict would be useful there insofar as it's identical with diversity of opinion. You know, and then you can imagine your wife has a temperamental take on the problem. And classically that would be she would be more compassionate and more upset. And you would be more judgmental and less upset. That's the classic male-female dichotomy in terms of temperament.

But you can imagine that those are useful stances to begin the problem-solving process too, because it's a completely open question of whether or not the child would say needs a more stringent future-oriented disciplinary structure, let's say, and to have that imposed, or whether they need more careful understanding

so that you can understand what the problem is. There's no way of mediating that without conflict. And so the fact of the conflict also wouldn't necessarily indicate that the initial contract was faulty. It's just that you're never gonna have a contract that'll deal with all possible novel situations. Hence possibly the reason for consciousness. That's right. Right.

And this allows us to go back and tie two pieces together, which is that, you know, the brain's job is really to burn things into the unconscious when it says oh, I've got this I've got that This is a routine I've seen before right but the reason we're always conscious the reason the brains always burning a lot of energy is because the world throws lots of me at us and so Despite all our best efforts every day is full of the unexpected and therefore we're always in these novel conflicts. Okay, now you said something else too

that I don't think I've thought about exactly before. We're talking about the different functions of consciousness. We would never presume that there's a single function, although dancing on the edge of chaos is not a bad comprehensive shorthand. Consciousness also seems to be the place where these visions of variant future play themselves out, right?

So that's the theater of the mind. And so you can imagine that if a new opportunity or crisis emerged, you could envision a variety of different futures, which would be a variety of different contracts or solutions or people that you wanted to be. And you play out those in the theater of the imagination. That seems to be conscious.

And it's logical that it would be consciousness if it's associated with novelty, because these new response patterns to this new emergent reality, they're not automatized. They can't be. That's right. Although I suspect that a lot of our future simulation is unconscious because some amount of our future sim is, you know, is something that we've... Right, it's using the machine. It's using the machine, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so we certainly can pull things up in the consciousness and think, okay, I really wanna understand what it would be like if I did this and if I moved to this other city and got this other job, but much of the time we're just slamming things forward. Well, then you could make a rule with that or principle for that, which is the deeper the crisis,

the less automated circuitry is at hand to deal with it. That's a definition of deep crisis, right? So, for example, like moving houses in the same city is not as complex as moving to a house in a new city. Right, and it's because more of your subroutines can be maintained if it's just moving within a neighborhood. That's right.

So, and that's, see, see, Carl Friston, the neuroscientist, he's derived a pretty decent model of anxiety as an index of entropy. And so, right, right. Cool. Right, right, and so that would be anxiety as entropy and entropy as disruption of automated subroutes. Let me make sure I can unpack that.

It's that if you're looking at a high entropy state where there's lots of possibilities, then you have higher anxiety. Anxiety actually indexes that, that's what it's for. But then the higher the degree of possibility, the less reliable the automated systems. That's almost by definition. And by the way, this goes back to what we were saying also about, you know, for example,

the Tetris players. Or let's just say, I don't know, let's say when you, did you play soccer as a kid? Okay, so when you first were learning how to play soccer, again, your brain, if we could have measured it while you were running around on the field, it's on fire because you're, you're trying to figure out, wait, where's the ball? Where's everyone else? You know, it's all knees and elbows and you don't know what's going on. Okay. A professional soccer player is a hundred times better than you, but his brain isn't burning nearly as much energy as the child trying to figure this out.

And so- That's right, he's in a much lower entropy state. Exactly, he's in a lower entropy state, and so- That's because his movements are more efficient, and it also matters. Sorry, but the reason is because the child is trying to simulate all the possibilities. The professional has sort of seen everything

play out before. That's the key, he's got the patterns, but the child has the high entropy state because, you know, what if I try this? What if I try that? Yeah. And so on. Yeah, and it's very localized too

because when the child is starting to play soccer, his field of attention is gonna be like this big, right? He's gonna be thinking, how many different ways can I move my foot? And that makes him a pretty spectacularly horrible soccer player because he's not paying attention to anything that's going on. In Gretzky, for example, the hockey player,

one of the things he was renowned for, and you can imagine this as a consequence of layered expertise, was that he was renowned for, and you can imagine this as a consequence of layered expertise, was that he had, he was paying attention to what was happening everywhere on the ice. Well, why? Well, because he didn't have to pay attention to skating. He didn't have to pay attention to how he was holding his stick. He didn't even have to pay attention to where the puck was on his stick because that was all automated so he could move up to higher and higher levels of abstraction. And what he famously said is,

I'm not thinking about where the puck is, I'm thinking about where the puck is going to be. Right, right, right. Well, and you do that when you learn to drive. Yes. Like as you get to be a better and better driver, you look farther and farther down the road. Yeah.

That's also the case too. They've studied this with expert piano players who are playing with sheet music. They look ahead of where they're playing. Yes. Right, and so what they're doing in some sense, look ahead of where they're playing. Yes. Right, and so what they're doing in some sense, I think probably what they're doing neurologically is disinhibiting automated subsystems.

And that's essentially, so I can give you an example of that. It's an example that sort of reconciles the free will deterministic conundrum. So if you do this, this is a ballistic movement. You wrote about these in your book, right? So if I do this, the lag time for neural transmission from here to here and back is longer than the duration of that movement.

So then the question is, how do I control that movement? And the answer is, well, I've automated this routine, which is why I can stop my hand, because I can't stop it voluntarily. So what happens is I have the routine at hand, I disinhibit it, and it runs, runs automated. Now, I have no free will during that ballistic movement. And so what seems to happen with free will, so to speak,

is that as the horizon of the future approaches, free will disappears. We devolve into automation as the present makes itself. Oh, that's very interesting. So a lot of what I've studied in my career has to do with time, our perception of time. And the bottom line, of course, is that we live slightly in the past.

Why? Because it takes time for signals to get, you know, processed and integrated, right? So when signals hit my, for example, I used to play baseball and, you know, when you're swinging at a fast pitch, this all happens unconsciously. The best you can do is this ball is traveling from the mound to the plate is to adjust your swing

up or down as you're already swinging. But all this is happening unconsciously. My experience has always been when I hit the ball, I become aware that I have just hit the ball. And I say to myself, throw it out the bat and run. Because it's already flying. The reason being, of course, because it takes at least half a second before you get conscious awareness of anything, the signals have to move around in your brain.

As you know, signals are very slowly in the brain, about a meter per second on unmyelinated axons, maybe 10 times faster than on myelinated axons. It's 10 times faster. Yeah, yeah. Okay, that's it. And what's interesting, we've got big bodies, right? So if I touch your toe, the signals have to travel all the way up,

up your leg and up your spinal cord to your brain. But here's the weird part, if I touch your toe and your nose at the same time, you'll feel those simultaneously. Right, right, right. And that's weird because how does your, does your brain feel the signal from the nose and then say, okay, I'm just gonna wait

and see if anything's coming up? Is that true if your eyes are closed? Yeah, yeah. That's weird. Yeah, so here's the thing. Yeah, yeah, I'm just gonna wait and see if anything's coming up. Is that true if your eyes are closed? Yeah, yeah. That's weird. Yeah, so here's the thing. Yeah, yeah, that's weird. This, by the way, led me to a hypothesis some years ago that taller people live further in the past

than shorter people because your brain has to wait for all the signals to come together, your vision, your hearing, your touch, touch from your toes, all this stuff to come together, it puts together your conscious perception of what's happening right now. And that's slightly longer lag time. Slightly longer lag time if you're taller, yeah.

It's a very funny hypothesis, by the way. So, yeah, so we live a little bit in the past, and during that time, I totally concur, we, there can't be free will involved in any of the processing or, you know, certainly reflexes, but also ballistic movements that we're doing. There's just, there's no possibility for free will to operate there.

If we do have free will, the argument I made at the end of incognito is that, you know, there may be free will. It's very difficult, neuroscience wise, to nail this question of if there is or not. But if there is, it's a bit player in a much larger system. And so, you've got all this unconscious processing, most of what's happening in the brain,

I think of the conscious brain as a broom closet in the mansion of the brain, I should say the conscious mind is a broom closet in the mansion of the brain, with very little access to what's going on. There may be free will, but it's going to be a small player if it's there. Well, but I mean, we could reconcile,

we could integrate what we discussed earlier with a free will view, because you could say, tell me what you think about this. I mean, obviously our choice isn't unconstrained. We're not omniscient. There's lots of things we can't do. So even if we're free will absolutists, we're still playing within a confined domain. But can't you say, given what we discussed throughout this entire conversation, that

you choose what to automate? I mean, imagine this. So you have a novel situation. You envision these variety of different futures. There's some volunteerism in that, but then you can direct your attention towards what you determine to practice. Now-

Right, this doesn't answer the free will question though, because if I choose this particular future, we can still question whether I had free will to choose that, or if I rewound history a thousand times, would I always choose that future? Well, but I guess the question then would be, if that's the case, why would it be useful to have the multiplicitous futures make themselves manifest?

Like, if there's no choice between them, why have an array? One argument for this is that when you simulate a future, you then feel emotionally what that future feels like, and you compare that to the next future and the next future. There's obviously truth in that. Yeah, and maybe you need to simulate each one in order to make your evaluation.

But the question is, you know, I say, oh, that future feels the best to me. That's who I want to be in long-term, but was it a free choice? I don't know. Just for the record, I don't come down one way or the other on the free will, because I don't know.

Well, I think we probably have the question formulated wrong in some fundamental way, which is why it can't be resolved but it's also there's also likely such a constant play of Indeterminacy and determinacy at every level of decision that you actually can't parse them apart that's right because I think your argument that we lay out these different simulations and then we evaluate them, well that's obviously what you do when you go see a movie, is like you're evaluating the decisions that different characters are making and you're feeling that and that is informative and you can think about that as deterministic. But then with that argument you have the problem, well the reason those simulations feel the

way they do is because you chose the aim that you were using to inhabit while you were doing the evaluation. And so it just flips you into the problem right away again. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And you said you were writing a new book. Yeah. We're running out of time.

Oh, OK. On this side. So tell us, I'd like to know where your interests are going and what your new book is about. Great. OK, well, I'm writing a couple of new books. And so one of them is called Empire of the Invisible, and this is about all the stuff that we don't see.

In other words, I've always been fascinated by this question of why do each of us think we know the truth, and if we could just shout it on X in all capital letters enough, everyone would come to agree with us. Everyone would see the wisdom of our point of view. I assume firsthand that that isn't true. Exactly.

So everybody on social media knows the truth and on any side of the spectrum, whether you're a, you know, a denizen of Wocastan or Magastan or whatever, everyone feels like it's clear. And my question is, why do we all have such limited internal models where we think we know the truth?

I'm saying this in a way that's free of any political opinion. I'm speaking meta politically now. And so this is what Empire of the Invisible is about, is how do we come to our internal models and why do we take them so seriously when we- Well, this is why Friston's work, by the way, is so helpful.

Well, if you understand, at least in part, that aim constrains entropy, then you get some sense almost immediately why people cling so desperately to their frameworks. Right? It isn't just that the framework lays out the pathway or specifies the perceptions. It restricts entropy.

Nice. Let me just unpack that for the listener. It's that when you say, okay, like, this is my view, I've got this, then the uncertainty is reduced. And yeah, you've got... Yeah, to almost nothing. Well, and then there's actual physiological consequences of that. Because what happens if you, especially involuntarily,

enter a high entropy state, you start burning up future resources. You burn up resources that could be conserved in the future, in the present, and what that actually does is age you. Right? So that's an elevate, imagine a chronically elevated stress response in response to additional uncertainty. That's right.

And one of the main, exactly, one of the main goals of the brain always is to reduce energy expenditure. Of course. On the immediate time scale. Yeah. Of course. Yep. Of course. So that's the other thing that happens too is that, and this is I think the other side of the emotional landscape. So a specified and constrained aim reduces entropy. That's very, that's like, I think that's the crucial issue. But it also sets up the framework within which hope is possible. Because to the degree that hope

is dopaminergically mediated, right, it's a consequence. See, Friston actually had a unified theory. He told me about this when I interviewed him. Because I had worked out the anxiety entropy theory with my lab in a separate paper, but he said something that I didn't know at all. Dopaminergic pleasure is also an entropy reduction phenomenon.

And this is why it's so cool. So imagine that you have your aim, your goal, and now you can compute the energy required to get there. Okay, now the farther you away from their goal, the more uncertainty there is in the pursuit. Now, if you take one step toward your goal and you do that successfully, you get a mark of positive emotion from that.

That's a dopaminergic kick, but that does indicate an entropy reduction. So both positive and negative emotion regulation are associated with entropy reduction. Oh, lovely. Yeah, no kidding. Oh, lovely. Yeah, no kidding. Well, that's a key thing to know when you're thinking, why are people so glued to their

worldviews? It's like, well, because their positive emotion is dependent on and the regulation of their negative emotion. It's like, oh, okay. And it's a positive feedback loop because once you have your point of view on something, then of course we know about confirmation bias and other ways where you seek data that merely validates and you ignore the data that speaks against it. Well, you can see that given what we talked about with regard to perception, you can see why that's the case. Once I specify an aim, what I'm going to see are things that move me

towards the aim. That means the contradictory information not only is irrelevant, should be irrelevant. Like if I'm trying to walk across the room, I shouldn't be attending to every potential obstacle that could conceivably exist, right? I've already simplified things. So the obstacles aren't even there. Right, exactly. By the way, which makes me wanna come back to a point

that you mentioned about socially seeing people as friends or foes. In fact, the way we see most people in the world are strangers, they don't need to worry about. Exactly, irrelevant. Most things are irrelevant. Exactly, most things are irrelevant. Yeah, yeah, and thank God for that.

Yeah, exactly, so that's analogous here. So hallucinogens seem to blow that into pieces, by the way. That's what they do, is they ruin your relevance. Oh, they cause you to pay attention, yeah, exactly right. Yeah, yeah, you pay pieces, by the way. That's what they do. Is they rule the relevance. Oh, they cause you to pay attention. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You pay attention, everything becomes relevant. So that's the awe-inspiring element of the experience,

but it's also very, very, very high entropy. Yeah. Right, right. And you know what I was gonna say, this also ties back to another thing about maturation. Maturation, as, who is it? I think it was Fitzgerald who said, is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind

at the same time. So what we're trying to do always is get our aim to reduce the entropy, our worldview. But as we mature, we say, okay, look, it could be this, on the other hand, it could be that. And the ability to hold that and not have that, to have a slightly higher entropy and not have that be stressful to us.

I don't know that I have the literal model. That's not a bad definition of a kind of a true confidence. Right? Right. But it's also, it is the model of sophisticated thinking because one of the things you do when you think is voluntary enter into a higher entropy state. Because to really think something through

is to allow internal conflict to manifest itself. Everything, the different ideas you have are different manifestations of different aims. And so when you think, this is what we're trying to train people in university, it's like be resilient in the face of voluntarily confronted entropy, at least on the cognitive side.

That's great. And maybe instead of think, we could call it something like reconsider, because it's, I mean, there's this, I only say this because thinking is sort of a term that might have too much semantic weight on it. But reconsider meaning, okay, I've already considered this. I know exactly how to think about it, low entropy,

but now I'm gonna reconsider this. I'm gonna think about what if I'm wrong about this? What if it's this totally other bottle? So there's also evidence, this is very cool too. There's evidence that if you do that involuntarily, the entropy state is higher than if you do it voluntarily. And the evidence is very profound. It's very profound. And so if you take it voluntarily. The evidence is very profound. It's very profound.

And so if you take a stance of voluntary confrontation with conflict, the stress consequence is much minimized over when it happens voluntarily. That's partly why exposure works in behavior therapy. So if you have someone who's traumatized and they're involuntarily exposed to a trigger, they get worse. But if they to a trigger, they get worse. But if they voluntarily expose themselves, they get better. Right? Even though the stimulus, so to speak, is the same. And I think it has something to do with a high-order meta-narrative. Like the highest-order meta-narrative should be something like,

I can contend successfully with, maybe with entropy, and certainly with chaos. That's the sort of creature that I wanna be, that I should be. Right, right. Because then when it comes up, you don't, you don't have a reaction to it. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, that's interesting. And I imagine this comes up a lot because people are involuntarily confronted with their, let's say their political views. Often there's a whole social component to that, which is I'm getting challenged by this person, maybe in front of other people, that sort of thing. And so there's all this other stuff that comes into play.

But if you get to sit in the piece of your own home and think, you know, what if I'm wrong? What if the other party's point on this bill is actually- What would that look like? What would that look like? Yeah, that's a much calmer situation. Yeah, well, the social element of that is is also an entropy issue as far as I can tell because imagine that this took me a long

time to parse through. So the higher you are in a hierarchy, social hierarchy, the lower entropy your state, your connection networks are better, your shelters better, your security is better, Like that's all part of being higher in hierarchy. Okay, now the question is what gives you the right to that position? And the answer to that is something like the accuracy and your accuracy in view and your competence, right, if it's a functional hierarchy.

Okay, so now I come along and challenge you. Okay, so part of that, I'm gonna cause internal distress in the manner that we described, but I'm also questioning the validity of your grip on the position in that hierarchy. So imagine a faculty meeting where you make a presentation or a professor makes a presentation and a first year graduate student stands up

and issues a successful challenge. Now, some of that's ideational, and you might say, well maybe he's got a better theory, but some of it is a challenge to the validity of the fact that you're higher in the hierarchy than he is. Absolutely. And you know that's played out. Yes, yeah. Right, so yeah.

So that's also an entropy issue, even the sociological element of it. Yeah, yeah. I'm always interested in these old, you know, the physicists in the early 20th century. You know, Einstein was giving a presentation, and I'm afraid I forgot if it was, I think it was Heisenberg who challenged,

a young kid challenged him, and Einstein said, you know, I think you're right. And he went home and worked on the problem for five days and came back, but I'm just, you know, these stories of that kind of challenge, and Einstein had, you know, a very mature reaction. Right, right. Well, that, I think a fair kind of challenge, and Einstein had a very mature reaction to it. Right, right. Well, I think a fair bit of the, what would you say,

the fundamental psychological necessity of something like hero mythology is the inculcation of the attitude that you just described as characteristic of Einstein. It's like, here's a challenge. It's like, I can handle that. Yeah. I don't have to get defensive. It's like, here's a challenge. It's like, I can handle that. I don't have to get defensive. It's not gonna throw me off.

Maybe there's opportunity. That's the dragon and the treasure, by the way. Maybe there's opportunity here in this challenge. Right, that's a very high order, it takes very high order maturation to realize that. In every challenge, there's opportunity. Right, right, right. And that's something you can practice.

It's an attitude that you can practice. Okay, we should stop this. We're gonna move to the daily wire side. What are we gonna talk about on the daily wire side? I think we should delve more into your book. Can you have some ideas? What else can we talk about? Yeah, my brain plasticity,

so we didn't talk about that at all, but I've got all kinds of cool stuff to talk about there. Okay, so everybody who's watching, if you wanna join us on the daily wire side for an additional half an hour, please feel free to do that. Apart from that, thank you very much for your time and attention.

Thank you very much for coming here to Scottsdale today. Much appreciated and for teaching our course on the Peterson Academy, which has got a lovely trailer, which I think we're going to incorporate into this podcast actually. And I know that the reaction to your course has been very positive so far. And so we're thrilled about that.

You can catch that on Peterson Academy, by the way. Thanks for your time and attention, everybody.