The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Structuring Your Perceptions (part one)

Episode Date: February 16, 2020

This is Part One of a Jordan B. Peterson"12 Rules for Life lecture" recorded in Canberra, Australia on February 15, 2019 Thanks to our sponsor: https://www.uber.com

Welcome to the Jordan Beed Peterson Podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter. I updated you last week on Dad's health. He's improving every week and I'm really hoping we'll be back in North America later this week. So yay for that. I really, really, really miss home. Not being able to speak a language in a foreign country is pretty disconcerting and we've

been here for a month and a half. Literally going into a store and buying anything is a chore. I definitely have a new appreciation for immigrants who have to learn a new language after immigrating to a new country. I hope you enjoy this episode. It's called Structuring Your Perceptions Part 1 and was recorded in Canberra, Australia on February 15th, 2019. Structuring Your Perceptions Part 1, a Jordan B. Peterson 12 rules for life lecture. Well, thank you. You're either very enthusiastic or there's a very large number of people in a small room.

Well, it's very nice to be here and thank you all for coming. I'm really looking forward to this talk. I've been pulling together ideas tightly over the last couple of weeks and I'm really interested to see if I can weave a variety of things together that I've never quite been able to get to cohere. So we'll see if that works. So I'm going to concentrate tonight on Rule 10, which is be precise in your speech, which I think is a very interesting rule, because it's way more complicated than it looks.

Well, like, oh, I would say that's true of all the rules. It's funny, because one of the criticisms that's been leveled at the book is that the rules are clichés or that they're obvious and that's true, both of those are true. It wasn't like I didn't know that when I wrote them. The question, of course, is why do certain maxims become clichés in some sense? Why are they universally regarded as true? Because that's what happens with a cliché.

And then what happens if you forget why they're true, which is even more important than the answer is, well, if you start to forget why the axioms that you take for granted are true, then you're in trouble. And then you need to revisit the underlying structure of the axioms, of the presupposition, so that you can relearn consciously why it is that you need to know these things. And so that's what I was trying to do with 12 rules.

And that's what I'm trying to do with rule 10, which is to be precise in your speech. So I'm going to give you a run through of a very large psychological domain tonight, right from the bottom to the top if I can manage it. And I think you'll find it interesting, hopefully interesting. It's certainly been trying to sort this out, has kept me seriously interested for 30 years.

And so it's a very compelling topic. But more than that, it's also really useful practically. Because it helps you understand all sorts of things that you can't really understand otherwise like your emotional response to the world and the magnitude of your emotional response and the reason that there are positive and negative emotions and the reason that it matters to you whether your belief system remains intact and the reason that it matters that you share your belief system with other people because that really does matter.

And what it is that a belief system is aiming at and why it has to aim at something. And what it should aim at, all of those things. And I think all of those are answerable questions. And I really think they need to be answered. They're not optional. If you don't know the answers, well, if you don't know the answers

and you're guided by tradition, like an unbroken tradition, well, that's fine. Then you're guided by an unbroken tradition. But if your tradition is fragmented and all of those answers have been replaced by questions or worse by ignorance and doubt, then you have nothing and you're disoriented in the world and you can't be disoriented in the world because then you're lost and it's not a good thing to be lost. It's intrinsically a bad thing to be lost. And so you don't want to be lost. So let's look into this and see how

far we can get. So the first thing that I would like to explain to you is that, and this is a very complicated technical problem and it's caused havoc in many disciplines, scientific and otherwise. So the first complicated problem is that there are an awful lot of ways of looking at the world. And in fact, there's so many ways of looking at the world. Even something simple, like if I look at this carpet, for example, if I was a painter and I wanted to paint this area, you know, to make an artistic portrayal of it, although I'm not sure exactly why I would.

But if I did want to, you know, when I just glance at it, I see, well, this is a gray, this piece of carpet, and the wood here is basically brown, and that's that, and these speakers are black. So I kind of have an iconic perception of the area that I'm looking at. An icon, like an animated icon. You know, and that's why we can watch animated programs like The Simpsons, let's say, where most things are really flat in color, and they're even too dimensional. You see that even more in South Park, right?

I mean, Jesus, the animation in South Park is just dreadful, but it's complete. But it's okay, it's purposeful, and it's completely irrelevant, because the simplified icons are perfectly useful with regards to representing what needs to be represented, and they're all we need. And a lot of what we perceive when we look at the world, a lot of what we see are simplified icons instead of the world. In fact, really what we see when we look at the world are simplified icons,

even if we have very detailed perceptions because we're just not, there's just not enough of us to see everything that's there. Now, I had a friend who did a series of portraits of his feet in different parts of the country wearing different shoes. He was kind of interested in this idea that wherever he was he occupied a place that he had some physical control over. And so I have a couple of his paintings where he's standing on a highway, like a a blacktop highway by the side of the road, one in the desert, and he did an unbelievably careful job of outlining all of the pebbles and the rocks and everything, all the variations in color

in that black top, and with the yellow lines. And it looks very realistic, and it took a tremendous amount of concentration on his part to do that, because, you know, when I look at this floor, I can say, well, what color is it, and it's, I can say, well, what color is it? And it's, I can say, well, it's brown. But if you look at it, that's just, that's just wrong. You know, it's, it's basically something approximating brown, but there's white in it, and there's yellow, and there's orange, and there's black, and there's, there's, there's an infinite number of variations of color and maybe not infinite,

but there's millions of variations and that's close enough to infinite to be a big problem. And so, you know, if you're going to make an accurate representation, even if something is extraordinarily simple as a tiny fragment of the world, it's almost impossibly complex, which is, and that's why it's often so interesting to look at something like a photo-realistic painting, you know, to see that someone can manage that degree of perceptual accuracy. And you kind of take it for granted, because you look at it and you think, well, that looks just like the thing.

It's like, well, that's hard, because the thing is complicated, and to make a representation looks just like the thing, that's no simple matter. And most of the time we don't bother with it. And like we really don't bother with it. You can't believe how much we don't bother with it. So there's this scientist named Dan Simon, who's a real scientist and a real psychologist. And he did some unbelievably interesting experiments on a phenomenon called change blindness. That's one of the names of it.

It's part of a broader category of phenomena called perceptual blindness. And so here's one of his experiments. It's a really, it's the sort of experiment you can't bloody well believe until you see that it actually happened. And it's replicated many times. This is actually a reliable psychology experiment. And there aren't that many of them. And so this is one of them. And I'm not being cynical about that.

I mean, psychology is a very complicated science. And the fact that a lot of it doesn't replicate is not surprising, because it's really hard to learn things about people. It's amazing we get any of it to replicate. So what Simon did, Dan Simon was, he set up some cameras on the top of some buildings at Harvard campus. And there's a lot of people walking through Harvard campus, students obviously and faculty members, but lots of tourists and people who are there, well, because maybe they want to bring their kids there sometimes, or they just want to see it. It's a beautiful place and a historic place and it's worth seeing. And so there's always people wandering through and they don't know where they're going. So what Simon did was had some students play like a trick on people that were walking

through. It was a, you know, not a mean trick or anything, just a trivial trick. And so what he would do is he'd have the undergraduates come up to somebody who was walking through who looked like a tourist, and the undergraduate would be holding a map, and then they would start to interact with the tourist

and ask for directions using the map. Now obviously a map is already an iconic representation, right? And it needs to be because you don't want a map that's as complicated as the territory because then you'd have to carry the whole territory around with you. You want the simplest possible representation of the situation that gets you from point A to point B. Okay, so that's worth thinking about right off the bat because that's like a rule for perception. You want the simplest representation that you can possibly manage that will get you from point A to point B. And that implies the utility of simplicity, but it also implies that what you're doing

all the time is going from point A to point B. And so we'll keep that in mind. Anyways, so here's the undergraduate standing here with the map and here's the tourist standing here helping the undergraduate. And then over here, there's two other undergraduates and they're carrying a door and the door, they're carrying it like this. I guess no, they're carrying it like this. And the door is up like this and it covers their faces, right? And so they rudely walk right between the person who's now giving directions and the undergraduate who's asking for directions. And as they walk through, the undergraduate grabs the door like this and keeps walking and the other undergraduate who is holding the door

takes the map and stands there. And so basically what's happened is that there's now a new undergraduate asking for instructions and more than half of the people upon whom this trick is played, don't notice. And the reason for that is, well, who cares what undergraduate you're giving instructions to? It's like they're interchangeable, right? So, and so, and then, and then he and Simon played around a lot with this, like he'd have people of different height and people with different clothing on.

And you could get tremendous variation in the people who were being swapped and no one would notice. Now, on the one hand, no one's gonna think, well, Jesus, someone just swapped a person on me. So it's a violation of expectation, but you might expect that a violation of expectation like that would really attract your attention rather than be something you wouldn't notice, right?

And for the longest time before Simon's work, that is what people thought. They thought the bigger the violation of expectation, the more likely you would be to perceive it. And that turns out not to be the case. It's much more specific than that. So that's pretty damn cool. I mean, that experiment got really famous.

And then he did another one, which was quite similar, where people would come to a counter at a convenience store. And the person behind the counter would be helping them with something. And then they'd say, excuse me, and duck down beneath the counter. And then another person would pop up and continue helping them. Same thing, about 50% didn't notice the switch. And so that's, see, right now, people could be just popping in and out, right beside you everywhere here.

And you wouldn't even notice, long as they didn't do anything strange while they were disappearing and reappearing, you wouldn't notice. If you close, you could try this. If you close your eyes for a second, and then guess at the color of the clothing that the person to the right of you is wearing. Just close your eyes for a second and guess. The probability that you know is like zero.

I suspect even, you could even try this, close your eyes for a second, and see if you can remember what color the chairs you're sitting on are. Now, maybe you do, and maybe you don't, but you don't have to. That's the thing that's cool, because who cares if they're, they have to be red, but it doesn't matter if they're red because if they were black, you could still sit on them. And all you care about, really, while you're sitting on a chair,

is that it functions as a chair. And so the color isn't that relevant, and so you don't need to remember it any more than you remember the texture or any of the number of other things that you might consider about the chair. As long as the thing that you're perceiving fulfills the function that you're undertaking well you're looking at it, then your perceptual representation is good enough. And it's so interesting because that's actually a definition of truth. It's a very interesting definition of truth. You know, we're all ignorant people. We don't know everything.

Our knowledge about everything is bounded. And so fundamentally, we flounder in a sea of ignorance. And so you kind of wonder, well, how the hell is it that you ever manage anything? Because you can keep asking questions until you run out of answers. So how do you ever know what you should be doing? And the answer is, well, you pick bounded goals, and we'll talk about how you do that, and then you pick low-resolution perceptions, and if the low-resolution perceptions allow you to meet your bounded goals, then they're good enough. They're true enough. And it's not a denial of the idea that there's such a thing as truth,

because that would be foolish. It's an attempt to explain how it is that people, such as us, who have very limited perceptual capacities, and who are ignorant, beyond comprehension, can still actually manage in the world. Now, that's one way we do it. We bind our goals and then we simplify our perceptions. There's lots of other ways that we simplify the world

so that we can act in it, but that's two of them. So now Simon did another experiment, which was very, very famous, called, I think he called it, gorillas in our midst, which was a nice funny takeoff of the gorillas in the midst book by Fawsey, I believe it was. So it was witty. You don't see that the scientific article very often.

But it was witty. And he did this crazy experiment where he set up a videotape in front of some elevator doors. And the camera was pretty close. And there were six people in the video. And they were, I would say, they were about as far from the camera as the second row of people here is from me. So close, they weren't like huddling over in the corner

there this high, they filled up the video. So you could distinguish their individual facial features. So there was no game being played here. Now, and three of the people in the video were dressed in white and three of them were dressed in black. And the black team had a basketball and the white team had a basketball and the white team had a basketball and the

your goal when you came into the lab was to do what the lab instructor asked you because you're a good participant and socialized and so you were going to do that and all you were asked to do was to count the number of times that the white, dressed team passed the basketball back and forth. And so the video started and everyone was mulling, mulling? No, mulling, mulling around. Mulling is when they're thinking. I was mulling about mulling, I guess. They're all bouncing the basketballs around and, you passing and throwing and so forth and and intermingling and

You're watching the white team pass and it takes three minutes and you're focused on it You want to do a good job because you're in a university lab and you don't want to be a complete bloody clunk about it So maybe you want to at least demonstrate that you can count So you're focused and then that's interesting too, because you might ask yourself, well, why the hell are you doing what the instructor is asking you to do in the experiment? It's not self-evident, and you could be playing tricks on him or her, but you likely wouldn't.

But you go in there and you do your best. It's like, well, why? Well, the context sort of requires it. Well, then the question is, well, what is it about the context that requires it? There's a whole set of unwritten rules about why you would go there and participate cleanly and honestly in an experiment like that.

You don't know what the rules are. Same rules that basically enabled you to come and sit in here tonight all together as strangers in a civilized manner and all do basically exactly the same thing. And without fear, there's 1,400 of you in here, right? That means at least 14 of you are really, you should probably be institutionalized. Right?

Right, I'm serious about that. I'm not pointing any fingers. And maybe one of them is me. You know? But all of you came in here and look, you're all sitting peacefully together. And not only that, you're all doing the same thing. Like, notice, you're all pointing at the front of the theater.

You wouldn't be feeling very good if you were sitting in the fifth row and the person in the fourth row in front of you was turned around and looking at you. Right? That makes you laugh. And you see, well, you see right there, how important, how important it is that adherence to social norms,

how important a rule, adherence to social norms plays in your emotional regulation. So you watch everybody come in, you don't know who the hell they are, the stage is set, the entire room is set to tell you how to act. It's basically set up so that this is the focal point, and there are chairs, and you walk in here, and the chairs tell you to sit in them, they're facing forward and the fact that they're facing forward suggests to you that you orient your attention toward the stage and because you're socialized creatures and you understand architecture

and social behavior, then you all do that and because you all do that then you can all sit here even though you don't know each other and you cannot be nervous out of your mind. And you know, people can be pretty crazy. And like I said, there's, let's say, 1% of the people in here are not as stable as you might want them to be, but it doesn't matter. They're stable enough to abide by this set of rules and that's enough to keep everybody's emotions regulated.

So that's very important. So anyways, and so that's part of the reason, for example, why when you go to a university and you participate in this psychology experiment that you do what's required of you, you went there voluntarily and you play the game. And that's part of, well, let's call it part of being socialized or part of being a good citizen

or part of being trustworthy or part of being predictable or All of those things that can be you know, they can degenerate into well What is that when you're too much like other people? There's a word for that Too conventional, let's say it can degenerate into conventionality But most of the time you want people to do what people do and and and normal people so to speak because it just keeps life a hell of a lot simpler if that's the case and it's a real favor that you do to other people to do the same thing right which is you know in many businesses people go to their business and they wear a suit well why

well suit is a derivation of a uniform, a military uniform. And uniform means uniform. Well, why do you want everybody to wear a uniform? Is because you don't want to deal with their bloody diversity, right? It's like, I don't want to hear about your diversity. For God's sake, you know, I mean, I'd be listening forever

about how idiosyncratic and peculiar you are and how many problems you have in your life and what a bloody catastrophe your family is and all of that. And there is a time and a place for that, but not always. Sometimes there's a time to wear a uniform and be just like everyone else as you pursue a agreed upon goal for agreed upon reasons, right? And that's society. Society is also the opportunity now and then to have what would you call privilege of expressing your trouble or your individuality.

But like a little of that goes along ways. It's crucial. It's crucial. It's absolutely vital. But a little of it goes a long ways. So, you don't underestimate the utility of conventional behavior. It's way more important to you than you think. You don't want to be, well, think about how, what happens when you walk down the street?

And you're walking down the street and there's somebody there who's obviously not functioning very well. Homeless person, a hygienic mess, a conceptual mess. They're talking to themselves. Well, now you have to check and see if they're talking on their cell phone because like everybody's walking down the street talking to themselves. But assuming they're not, they're muttering, or maybe they're yelling, gesturing to things that aren't there. And like your natural response to that is to give the person a relatively wide birth and not to make eye contact, because that indicates interest, right? It indicates interest, and that's a come on eye contact. So, and so you don't do that, and the reason you don't do that is because that person is

not abiding by social norms. And it isn't like you're judging them because you hate them or despise them or anything like that. You might feel like you might feel real bad that it's like, well, it's really bad when you see this sort of thing in Canada because it's like 30 below and there's people out there on the street who are in that situation. And no's pleased about that but by the same token you don't know what to do about it and you don't want to get involved because how, what are you going to do?

You don't know what to do, you haven't got to clue what to do about a situation like that and the probability that you're going to help that person compared to having them tear you down is extraordinarily low. So you don't like violation of social norms at all, really, not at all, especially when they're accidental. Purposeful, that's different. The comedian will do that, a comedian's on stage, and he'll say something or she'll say something

that you're not really supposed to say. But everybody's there to hear, or someone say something that they're not supposed to say. And so that constitutes an acceptable violation. And we can all have a laugh about that and be a little relieved that we're not quite as conventional as we normally are. But even then, it's within tight constraints. And so, okay, so back to the gorilla video.

So there you are, being conventional and doing your best to count the basketballs like a good student, even though you're not a student. And the video runs for three minutes and the experimenter says, well, how many times did the white team pass the basketball back and forth? And you say, 16, because you were paying attention. And the experimenter says, very good. And you feel good about that. And then they say, did you see anything that you didn't expect?

Did you see anything strange during the video? And you say, well, what do you mean? And they say, well, did you see the gorilla? And you say, what do you mean did I see the gorilla? It's like, you know, if a gorilla comes dancing out on stage here, you think you're going to see the damn gorilla, right? That there's no question about that.

And so a question like that, just it isn't a sensible question. And the experimenter says, well, halfway through the video, a gorilla came out in the middle of the stage, right, where the basketball players were, and beat his chest for like three seconds, and then walked off the stage, and you say, no, no. And so he says, well, how about if we replay it? This time, don't count the balls. Okay, so that's interesting, eh?

Because now you're doing something different, eh? Your attention was focused very, very precisely on a task, and that was to pay attention to the basketball and to see it move, right? And even though the video screen isn't very big, and you kind of have a sense that you see the whole thing while you're big, and you kind of have a sense that you see the whole thing while you're watching it, you don't. You see little pinpricks of it because your eyes are always darting around like little laser beams, and you're kind of making the world out of these laser beam perceptions and organizing it, but you see extraordinarily clearly only with a tiny fragment

of your visual field. There's a part of your brain, I call the fovea, which is very heavily innervated optically. And it sends neurons to part of your brain, the visual cortex. And each of the neurons is represented by 10,000 neurons at the first level of processing in the visual cortex. And you just can't handle that for your whole eye.

Like if you, if that was the case for your whole eye, your head would be this big. And then you'd be laying on the ground. And even though you could see, you wouldn't be able to move. So that wouldn't be helpful. So you have this central vision, phobia, and you're moving it around all the time. And you can tell, like if I look at,

well, if I look at someone in the second row, if I look at you, for example, sir, I look at you, and I can see your eyebrows and your eyes and your nose and your mouth, I can see your eyebrows moving, but the two people beside you, they're pretty blurry. It's all you when you moved your head, and I can see that, as long as I look at you, I really can't see your eyes.

You, I can't even tell your gender. You, I can't even tell your gender. You, I can't even tell you from the chair. And so that's not much of a gradient, you know? But normally I'd be looking back and forth and I'd be keeping track of all of you. But I can only really see your face and the expression on your face and everything else gets blurry. Now it's interesting if I look at you and I do this for me if you would.

So I'm going to look at you, bury your teeth, go like this, there I can see that. And so what we do is we have very acute central vision and when we do very high resolution processing with it, especially of faces, because faces are unbelievably informative. And then out towards the periphery, we use, like way out here, we use movement. So like dinosaurs, you use the Jurassic Park, dinosaur can't see anything, unless it's moving. Neither can a frog. Neither can you, not out here. You can in the middle of your visual cortex, but not out here.

Your vision is actually black and white out here as well. And so, and then there's other things that you might see preferentially, like a little farther away from the full-veal center, you're attuned to emotional display. So, you can see eye movements and you can see teeth, because, well, it's important if something near you that's alive moves its eyes, that's a clue that something's going on, it's also important if something near you shows its teeth because well, it might eat you and you should probably clue into that and so that'll attract your full-veal vision and then you'll do high-resolution processing. Anyways, that's how it works. So now you reverse the video and the the the the

the experimenter reverses it so that you can watch the whole thing reverse, you know, so that you know there's no tricks. Then he plays it forward and sure enough, man, minute and a half out in the video, outcomes this guy, it's not a real gorilla, because he didn't have the research money to train a real gorilla. Okay, so it's a guy in a gorilla suit, but it's not this guy, you know? I could say it's not Ben Shapiro, I suppose I could say that. You know, it's a big guy. I mean, he's like six foot four and he's in a big gorilla suit and he comes right out

in the middle and all the basketball players are playing around him. And he looks right at the camera, right in the center of the video and he beats his chest and he does it for like a few seconds, you know, and then he Ambles off. It's not like he zips in does this and runs off. It's no, it's casual man And he's and so he beats his chest and he wanders off and and you don't see that and you think Yeah, sure. I'd see it. It's like no, you wouldn't you wouldn't see it I had a graduate student. I showed it to twice, and he missed it both times. He even remembered.

Like he remembered seeing it. He missed it the second time. And then Simon made a second video, which is called, I don't actually don't remember. It doesn't matter. Same thing, same team structure. Okay, so three and three, black and white. And he made this because everybody had watched the gorilla video.

Now they thought they were smart. They said, oh, now I know why. Now I've learned to see. I'll see everything. And so the gorilla comes out and beats his chest and warms it off. And you ask the experimental victims what they saw. And they said, ah, 16 interchanges, passes, and a gorilla. And they think smart, and Simon says, well, let's rewind it and see what happens.

And so he rewinds it. And then you find out that halfway through one of the black team players left. So there's like two instead of three and that's actually quite a lot fewer people, right? You lost like 50, you lost 33% of the team. It's a lot. You think you might notice that. You don't. And so you don't notice that. And then the curtain changes from red to gold. And not just a little bit like completely. And so you don't notice that. And then the curtain changes from red to gold. And not just a little bit, like completely. And so you saw the gorilla,

but you missed the fact that one third of the team left, and you missed the fact that something that shouldn't change color that's really large, that's right there in the scene changed. And so the moral of that story is sometimes when you're looking for a gorilla, other unexpected things happen. And so you're kind of screwed both ways, right? You think, well, I'm gonna look at the world my normal way, but I'm gonna be paying attention for what changes. And so

then you're paying attention for the thing you think will change, and some other thing completely changes, and you miss that. Blind, unbelievably blind. It's really, those are miraculous experiments. Because psychologists really were convinced before that that if something unexpected happened, you would see it. But we learned from that, we learned about what unexpected meant. And unexpected means something very specific. It doesn't just mean unexpected. Because look, there's unexpected things happening all the time around you.

Unexpected so that you will perceive it means unexpected in a way that interferes with the specifics of your ongoing goal-directed activity. So for example, had the white team been passing the basketball back and forth, and the gorilla had come out and grabbed the ball and left, you would have noticed that, because your job was to count the number of passes, and that would have directly interfered with your job.

Whereas if the gorilla just wanders out, he's a new relevant figure like the black team, because you zeroed out the black team when you're watching the ball being passed back and forth between the white players. The black teams just become icons of essentially irrelevant. And so the gorilla comes out, he's kind of like a black team member,

and so you just don't pay any attention to him because he isn't causing any trouble. And so that's kind of like a black team member and so you just don't pay any attention to him because he isn't causing any trouble And so that's that's kind of a lesson We don't see the world unless it causes trouble and so that's And then another lesson is we don't really like to see the world when it causes trouble that's the next lesson and And there's reasons there's very good reasons for that. Okay, so let's take that apart a bit.

So, what is it that you use to frame in the world so that you can see it? Now, with the gorilla video example, what happened was you framed your perceptions because you had an aim, right? And your aim was to aim your eyes at the ball and then to count accurately the number of passes. Very specific aim, very high resolution aim, right? There's a trillion other things you could have been doing with your life at that moment. But that was what you were doing.

You were sitting in that chair, you were narrowly focused on a video screen, which is narrow focus to begin with, and then you were focused on a team, but even more than that, you were focused on a ball, and you were focused on the movement of the ball, and that's what you were doing. So you had taken the whole world,

the entire complicated, insanely complicated world, and reduced it to only that. And it wasn't that easy to set the situation up so that you could do that. That's the other thing is because you think, well, what about all that world that you weren't paying attention to? What the hell is it up to while you're sitting there watching people play ball on a video? And the answer is, well, we've done an awful lot of work screening out the rest of the complexity so that you don't have to deal with it. So you can just ignore it.

Like even you're sitting here and you're paying attention to the lecture, we hope. And why is it that you can do that? Well, I mean, there's a lot of reasons. Well, first, someone built this. It wasn't easy to build this. This is a hard thing to build. And it's standing up, right? That's good. It's built solidly enough so that none of you are worried too much that it's going to collapse while we're talking.

You can just take that for granted. You think the floor is going to stay in place. You think the seats aren't going to move. You trust your fellow citizens. So you're not so nervous that you're distracted by what they might do, as we already said, what they might do while they're sitting there. That means that your society is so civilized and social that you don't really have to be worried about being robbed and you don't really have to be worried about being molested.

You can just assume that everybody's going to act. Well, kind of like you're going to act. And so you can ignore all that. And, you know, the electricity is on. And so that's kind of helpful, because it indicates that the background infrastructure is working. And the sound equipment is working, the amplification is working. And so you know that there's a competent staff here.

And, like, there's a lot of work going into allowing you to sit here and pretend that the only part of the world that matters for the next hour and a half or so is the dialogue that we're having. It's walls, it's like you're in a wall, inside a wall, inside a wall, inside a wall, et cetera. And I haven't even described all the walls. You're in a city, and it functions pretty well. And the city's in a state, and it's not doing too badly. And the state's in a country, and it's well defended. And it has a good legal structure. And the economy's doing all right. So you're not all sitting there worried

about where your next meal's going to come from. I mean, God, there's, it's, there's so much work has gone into enabling you to zero your perceptions into this, you know, tiny fragment of reality and to act like you're seeing the world. It's a complete bloody miracle that, that, that we can manage that. And a tremendous amount of our social organization is exactly that. It's, it's to make things orderly and predictable enough functional as well, so that we can concentrate on the tiny things that we can concentrate on without being terrified out of our skulls.

And it's no simple thing to manage that. And we by and large have managed it, which is extraordinarily cool. And very much worth being grateful for, even though it's hard to be grateful for it, which is extraordinarily cool and very much worth being grateful for. Even though it's hard to be grateful for it, because look, as you sit here, you're not worried. Because you're not worried, you're not paying attention to anything that's making you not worried, right? Because you only pay attention to the things that get in the way.

And so there isn't anything getting in the way, and so you don't pay any attention to it. And so you take it for granted. And that's very dangerous. You don't wanna take things that are that miraculous for granted because they're unlikely, and they take a lot of work to make work and to continue to work. And so we should always be thankful

when we can come to an event like this. And it's peaceful and productive because that's really something. It's hard to be conscious enough to remember that. How do you structure your perceptions? Well look, you're a moving creature. That's an important thing. Creatures have been moving around for a long time, for billions of years, and you're one of them.

You've come from a very long line of creatures who move. And the fact that we move is very much relevant to understanding the mechanisms of our perception. Because part of what we're doing is trying to move from one place to another all the time. And basically, that's what adds valence to life. It's what adds value to life. Because you think, well, why do you want to move from one place to another? It's the old joke about the chicken. Why did the chicken cross the road? And the answer is, because he thought the other side of the road was better. Obviously, unless he was a deluded chicken and was aiming

at something worse. It's like, why do you move from one place to another? Throughout your life, why do you do one thing instead of another, you think, well, here I am, and it has its problems, this place that I'm at. Maybe it's not as bad as it could be, but there's some other place that would be slightly better than the place I'm at.

And so that's where you're headed. And you're always in a valence gradient because of that. Where you are isn't quite good enough and where you're going is better. Or if that reverses on you, you think, well, where I'm going isn't so good, but where I'm headed is worse. That's not good, right? You don't want to be in that situation. We don't aim at that. That's a mistake. What we're trying to do is climb uphill all the time.

And we're interested in that. We're interested in that because that's what interest is for, technically, biologically. Interest is to get you to go to the next place that's slightly better. And that can be physical, it can be conceptual, it doesn't matter. It can be both of those. So you're at point A and you're going to point B, whatever point B happens to be.

Now, so we can take that apart because it tells you how perception works. So let's say I'm standing here and I want to go over to that speaker on the far side of the stage. And I'm looking at the stage and I'm thinking, I'm not thinking by the way, I'm seeing. You know your eyes, this isn't how, this is how your eyes don't work, okay? You don't look at the world, see objects, think about the objects, evaluate the objects, and then decide what to do. You don't do that. Well, you do a little bit, but it's very hard,

and it takes a tremendous amount of work. Your eyes, neurologically, they're connected all through your body. Like your eyes are connected right to your spinal cord, for example. So if you're walking down a pathway and something looks like a snake beside you and you happen to catch it out of the corner of your eye. You'll jump and it isn't because you saw the snake and thought snake and then thought snakes are dangerous and then thought I better jump and then

send a message to your muscles consciously to get you to jump because like the snakes not only bitten you by then it's got you half digested by the time you've done all that. So that isn't how it works. It's like snake pattern, couple of neuronal connections, snake jump pattern, leap, really fast, fast enough so that maybe you'll get out of the way before the snake strikes you. And that's like in the hundreds of a second. You don't have time to see the damn snake.

You have a time to map the pattern of the snake onto your spinal cord. It turns out, your spinal cord is a lot more complicated than you think. If you take paraplegic people and you suspend them by their arms over a treadmill, they'll walk. Now, not voluntarily because they can't walk voluntarily, but the tread their legs will move on the treadmill because there's enough brain in this spinal cord to do that kind of activity. And actually when you're walking, really what you're doing is leaning forward and falling. So now you know, sometimes you see people who actually look like that.

But so a lot of what you're doing is automatic perception. Your eyes and your eyes are mapping the world, dyes are mapping the world onto your body and onto your motivations and onto your emotions and onto your perceptions. And the perceptual part is actually quite a long ways down the chain of processing. So there are these people who have, they call it,

what's the name of it? It's cortical blindness. And so they're blind, you ask them, can you see? They say no, well you think, okay man, you're the one that would know. So if I ask you, if you're blind and you say no, well then you're blind. It's like, maybe, okay, you're blind and you say no, well then you're blind. It's like maybe.

Okay, you're one of these people. Can you see? No, okay, we're gonna play a game. I'm gonna hold up my hand and you're gonna guess which hand. Okay, right, left, right, right, left, right. It's like, can you see my hand? No.

Well, how come you're guessing accurately? And the answer is, well, your eyes are mapping onto other parts of your brain that don't have much to do with direct, conscious, visual perception. So maybe, like, if I'm looking at you, and you're sitting sort of like this, part of what happens is when I look at you,

I map the way that your body is onto my body so that I can feel it. That helps me understand who you are. And so my eyes feel the way that your body is configured and then use my body as a representational structure, either directly or in imagination so that I can understand who you are. Well, so if you have cortical blindness,

that's what you do is you look at someone, you map their body onto your body, and then you can feel whether which hand is up, even if even though you don't know that, you can't perceive it. And if you take the same people, and you can do these experiments with galvanic skin response, it's pretty straightforward. You just measure electrical resistance in the palm of the hand. And that can change pretty quickly with emotional response, like very rapidly. And so, like if I put a galvanometer on your hand, and then I show you a frightening picture,

your skin conductance increases because you sweat a little bit. So, you can tell if people are responding emotionally by using a device like this, and so you can take people with cortical blindness, and you can show them pictures of people's faces that are angry or fearful, and they'll show a galvanic skin response to the emotion, because the eyes are still mapped onto the part

of the brain that processes emotion. So that's quite cool. And then even simpler things, like for example, if I want to have a glass or I want to have some water here, which I actually do, then I look at this thing there, and you know, you think, well, I see bottle and I think bottle and I think drink and I think walk over and pick it up and drink and it's not true

What happens is that at least in part is that my eyes see that shape and then they directly map the shape onto the configuration of my hand and so that that's kind of what it would mean to Understand what that thing is right because to understand it would be to know that it was a Gripable object that was usable for a certain function. And so my eyes map directly onto my motor system. And so by the time I come over here I've already see that. I've already got my hand in exactly the right shape and size to grip this. And it's almost perfect. And that's a form of imitation, too, because you know this is like this. And that's quite cool too, because that's the beginning of representation. So, because if you had a three year old, and two year old, let's say the two year old couldn't talk,

and sort of pointed to that and went like this, if you had a clue, you'd think, oh, the baby would like to have the bottle. Well, why? What's that? That's not a bottle. That's like a claw. It's not a bottle.

But you look at the baby and you can infer the motivations of the baby and the baby's pointing, so specifying an area of perception for you, and then makes a gesture. And so you put all that together and you think, ah, you know, and you go get the bottle and you give it to the baby and the baby's happy. And that's representation. It's part of how we get a grip on the world and understand the world.

So, okay, so now I'm over here and I want to go over there for whatever reason. I guess for the purposes of the demonstration of this part of the lecture. So I'm set myself up emotionally here for success or failure, right? Because if I get over there, then I succeed. And if I don't get over there, I fail. So I'm taking a risk here. And I'm setting up this gradient. I've decided in this particular circumstance that that side of the stage is preferable to this side.

Okay, so now I'm in an emotional world all of a sudden that's laid on top of the perceptual world. This place isn't as good as that place. Now, then we could think about how I could get there and we could think about qualities of pathway. And I would say, this is a pretty good pathway. I mean, I might trip over this. And so I see that. And I get a little twinge of negative emotion about that thing because it's a thing I could trip over. And that's actually what you see. You don't see objects. You see places you could fall off of. You see things you could trip over. You see obstacles and tools. And you see them directly. You don't see objects and think about them as tools and obstacles.

You see tools and obstacles. And after thousands of years of cogitation, you're able to think about that scientifically and turn those into objective objects. We see a falling off place. We know this with little babies. If you take a space like this, imagine there were two little cliffs like this, this far apart, and you put a piece of glass over them. And you have a baby that can only crawl, six months old.

The baby will not crawl over the glass. Now, it's not because the baby has fallen off places like this before. It's because the baby sees a falling off place where you might die. And there's an emotional response to that, like you would have if you get too close to the balcony on a high rise. You see a falling off place, and you can bloody well see that with your whole body, right? You get a, most people at least get a sense of vertigo and they get a sense that they might go over. And so they don't take chances. They might play with it, but generally speaking, you know, you're on alert. That's a place you might die. And we're living creatures. And we care about whether or not we're going to die.

And so we don't see the object and then make it dangerous. We see the damn danger and then derive the object. So anyways, this isn't a bad pathway because I could walk to that speaker with virtually nothing in the way. Little danger here might trip over that rug. Other than that, it's looking pretty good. So then I look at this pathway, and what happens is

the part of my brain that produces positive emotion, produces some positive emotion. Because part of the reason, this is really, really important. It's a crucial thing to understand. Part of the reason that you produce positive emotion is because you see an open pathway toward a valued goal. Okay, so you got to think that through. The first thing that implies is, you need a valid goal.

You need a valued goal. No valued goal, no positive emotion. So that's really worth thinking about, especially if you start to think about that in a more sophisticated way, because then you might also think about that in a more sophisticated way, because then you might also think the more valued the goal, the more positive emotion you see when you see an open pathway to it. And so that implies that open pathways are important, and it implies that valued goals are important, assuming that you want to be happy. I don't mean satisfied. I don't mean you've just had a turkey dinner for Thanksgiving,

and now you have Thanksgiving in Australia? No, that you don't have anything to be thankful for except kangaroos. So, okay, but in North America, you need a whole turkey, and then you're thankful that you're not a turkey, and then you go to sleep on the floor floor like a lion that's just eating a whole wildebeest and that's not exactly happy, it's just done, right? Satiated, it's a different form of positive emotion and it's not the part you really like. You know, if you're going out for a night of wild drug use, you don't

take a pill that makes you feel like you ate a whole turkey. You take cocaine or methamphetamine or something like that. And the reason you're alcohol or nicotine or caffeine. And the reason you do that is because those drugs activate the system that's activated when you perceive a valid goal and you can see a clear pathway to it. That's why you like those drugs. That's why they're addictive. They make you feel as if you're doing something useful. And that's the basic biochemistry of dopaminergic agonists, and those are drugs of abuse.

And so, you know, one of the ways, if you are addicted, or abusing drugs that are of that form, one thing that you might consider is that you should get a life. Because I'm dead serious about this. It is not merely a matter of getting off the drug. It's like, well, I'm going to get off the drug, and now I'm going to sit and watch TV. It's like, bored to death. No, not going to work. You might get rid of the dependence.

You might get rid of the addiction. And that doesn't even take that long, technically speaking, although it takes a while for the cute addiction to go away. But you need a replacement. You need to have something to do that's better than the damn drug. And actually, that's most of the reason why most people aren't addicted to drugs of that sort all the time.

And the reason is, well, sometimes they're fortunate enough not to really be powerfully affected by the drug. It's a bit of genetic variation. But a lot of the other reason is they have better things to do. If you take rats, you take a rat, rats a social guy. He likes to live in a rat family and do rat things with his rat friends. And you can't get him addicted to cocaine if he lives in his natural habitat. He'll mostly ignore it.

But if you take him by the tail and you drop him in a cage, He can't get him addicted to cocaine if he lives in his natural habitat. He'll mostly ignore it. But if you take him by the tail and you drop him in a cage, and now he's like bored, lonesome, isolated rat, and then give him access to cocaine, he'll just bar press forever. He'll ignore water, food, sexual access, just bar press for cocaine. And it's because he doesn't have anything better to do. He's not even a rat. He's just a, he's like you in solitary confinement. It's sort of you, but it's you with no future,

it's you with no past, it's you with no present, it's you with no friends, it's you with no community. So it's sort of you, but it's a truncated and miserable version of you. And if there's cocaine in that cell, you might think, God, you know, if you put animals, if you isolate animals, and you set them up so that they can voluntarily give themselves electric shocks. If you isolate them, they will do that just for entertainment.

If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning, the architecture of belief, where his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life and Antido to Chaos, both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. See JordanB Peterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books that you've favored bookseller. Remember to check out jordanbpeterson.com's last personality for information on his new e-course. Tag Jordan or I on Instagram to share your results from the Discovering Personality Course. I really hope

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