The One You Feed - Understanding How the Brain Works with Lisa Feldman Barrett

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

In this episode, Lisa Feldman Barrett explores the science of how your brain really works. Eric and Lisa discuss a variety of practical strategies to improve your emotional well-being and resilience, based on the latest neuroscience research. Get ready to see your brain in a whole new light as you learn about the inner workings of your brain. In this episode, you will be able to: Discover how social interactions directly impact your nervous system and overall well-being Uncover the brain’s crucial role in regulating your body and maintaining balance Explore the significance of emotional granularity for enhancing your overall well-being and self-awareness Learn effective strategies for managing body budget deficits and improving your emotional resilience Understand the pivotal role of the predictive brain in shaping your everyday experiences and emotions To learn more, click here!  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We can really contribute to the well-being of other people in very profound ways, sometimes with very simple actions, but we can also really create a significant physiological burden for another person, really without trying very hard. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited

edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We hope you'll enjoy this episode from the Archive. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who is among the top 1% most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She's a university distinguished professor at Northeastern University with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Barrett was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Neuroscience in 2019. She's the author of many books, including the one discussed on this episode,

Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Hi, Lisa. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me on your podcast. Yeah, it's such a pleasure to have you back on. I did not look at the date from when we had you on, but it's been two or three years, probably at least. So very happy to have you back on. We're going to be discussing your latest book, which is called Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandmother talking with her grandson, and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandmother, he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It means that you should always surround yourself by people who allow you to be your best self. That's very straightforward and yet so powerful. You know, one of the things we'll talk about, I'm sure, is the fact that we have a predicting brain and that really, as we cultivate experiences for ourselves in our lives, what we're doing is we're constantly cultivating the past in order to have more control over who will be in the future.

meaning in that if you create experiences for yourself or put yourself in situations or create environments for yourself that allow you to be your best self, then that's what your brain will wire itself to. And that's who you'll be in the future. Yeah, you have a line in the book that really struck me from lesson five about talking how our brain really works secretly with other brains, right? How they correspond. You say the best thing for your nervous system is another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is another human. And I was really struck by that and how powerful or how destructive our relations with other people can be. Well, we are social animals. And what that means is that we regulate each other's nervous systems. And we don't usually think about our interactions that way. We don't think about every hug we give or every insult we bear that way. But that is actually

what's happening. And we regulate each other really automatically, typically not, you know, deliberately or on purpose, but we do it in all kinds of ways, you know, with sights and sounds and smells and, and so on. Our brains are reacting to each other or, or actually not so much reacting, but sort of taking account of each other in these various channels. But humans also regulate each other with words. And that's because the parts of our brain that are important for understanding language and speaking are the same parts that regulate the systems of our body, our heart and our lungs and our immune system and our metabolism and so on. And so we can really contribute to the well-being of other people

in very profound ways, sometimes with very simple actions. But we can also really create a significant biological, physiological burden for another person, really without trying very hard. And so it's important to understand that you are in some way, you know, the caretaker of the nervous systems of the people around you, even if you don't think of yourself that way, or you don't really like that idea. It doesn't really matter. That's just really how it is. Yeah, I really like that phrase, the caretaker of other people's nervous systems. You know, and it's obvious, we want to be clear about where sort of, you know, our responsibility ends and others begins, but it is so clear how strongly we affect each other.

You know, Eric, I think it's really important to say that nothing in the universe works in simple, single causes. The fact that you are more responsible for other people than you might like does not in any way mean that they are not responsible for themselves. It's not a zero sum game. I think that's really important to say. And, you know, we live in a culture that privileges individual rights and freedoms. And that's great. I like living in that culture too, but it does present a particular quandary for us because we are social animals and we can make each other healthier or sicker. And we might not like that.

We might not believe it. It doesn't really matter what you believe and it doesn't really matter whether you like it or not. It just actually is the case. So who do you want to be? What case. So who do you want to be? What kind of a person do you want to be? If you think of yourself as somebody who has more responsibility for other people, for the fellows around you, that doesn't mean that you're letting them off the hook or that

you're not expecting them to have personal responsibility for themselves. Yeah, I think that's really important and true. It's not a zero-sum game. We are both responsible for others and responsible for ourselves. Makes me think of another line in the book that you say, you're talking about responsibility. And you say, sometimes we're responsible for things, not because they're our fault, but because we're the only ones who can change them. And you're talking about the impact, I believe, at that point in the book that our early patterning has on us, the way that

we are raised, what it does to us, and how prominent that is. But I love that idea because oftentimes when we say you're responsible for what happened, people think that the word that gets translated in mind is fault. It's my fault. And I love the way you say that. We're not responsible for things not because they're our fault, but because we're the only ones who can change them. And that is really true. We're the only ones who can, and very often we're the only ones who will. There's a distinction that you can make between responsibility and culpability. You can be not culpable for something, meaning it's not your fault.

But that doesn't really necessarily absolve you of the responsibility to change it. And sometimes we are responsible for things because we're really the only ones who can change it, even if we're not culpable for being in the situation that we're in. I first said this during a TED Talk, I first said this during a TED Talk, and I wasn't really sure how it would go over. And millions of people literally have responded extremely well to this idea. I think it gives people hope and energy to maybe take a little more charge of their life circumstances, even if life has not dealt them an easy hand. People experience it as the way that I meant it, which was to be supportive, but also to sort of nudge people in the direction of trying to take more control in their own lives.

Yeah, I mean, so much of my background is in the recovery community, addiction recovery. And it's absolutely true that one of the biggest predictors of addiction is having suffered trauma for which you are not at fault for. And yet, it's also absolutely true that one of the pillars of recovery is suddenly going, I am responsible for changing my relationship to my substances, you know? And so both those things are true at the same time. Yeah. I mean, I think that trauma, you know, and adversity, particularly if it visits you as a child, you're victimized twice, really. You're victimized the first time because of what happens to you, which is not your doing. And then you're victimized, in a sense, a second time because who's going to clean up the mess? It's only you, my friend. And that feels unfair. And it is unfair, but it's just how it is.

And once you realize that, there's a certain power, actually. There's a certain empowerment in realizing that, I think. Yeah, that's certainly been my experience. Let's circle back to some of the basics here of your work and some of these seven and a half lessons. And I want to start with really kind of where you start, which is what is the brain for? The typical idea we would have is the brain is for me to think and for me to learn things and for me to figure things out. And you're starting in a very different place than that. Why do I have a brain? Some people might argue that I don't, but let's assume I do.

Let's go with the assumption I do. Yeah. The why question is really hard to answer, should I do? Yeah, the why question is really hard to answer. But I think the better question, or maybe the better question for a scientist is really what is your brain's most important job? And it's fair. Yeah, you know, for that, we can look back to an evolutionary time to a time when the creatures really in the ocean didn't have brains. But like you, I was really interested. I actually, what partly got me started was the question of why do we even have a brain? Brains are really expensive organs. So your brain costs you something like 20% of your metabolic budget every day. That's the most expensive organ you have. And so what is a brain good for exactly? And why do we have it? And you know, where did it come from? So those were the

kinds of questions that were really intriguing me. And the answer is both, I think, really surprising and then also mundane at the same time, which is that your brain's most important job is not thinking. It's not feeling. It's not even seeing or hearing. Your brain's most important job is running the systems of your body. So right now, as we're talking to each other, and as our listeners are listening to us, inside each of us is a whole drama unfolding inside our bodies. And you can't really, I mean, I hope you can't access it. If you do, you have my sympathies.

But the way that I talk about it, the metaphor that I use is that your brain is running a budget for your body. It's not budgeting money, it's budgeting glucose and salt and water and oxygen and other chemicals and nutrients that your body needs to stay alive and keep well. And you can think about your actions as withdrawals. So when you learn something new, or when you exercise, when you move your body in any way, those are withdrawals from your body budget. And then you can make deposits into your body budget, you can, you know, sleep, and you can eat healthfully, and you can exercise, which is a withdrawal, it's like a investment in a future, healthy brain and body. So, you know, you can

think of that as sort of an investment that you expect to get a return on. And being around other people can add a little tax to your body budget, or it can give you a little savings in your body budget, it can make things a little cheaper to run. And you can think about addiction really, or think about something simpler, like having a cup of coffee, you can think about caffeine as borrowing energy from tomorrow to use today. And if you start to run a deficit in your body budget, you don't experience that directly as sensations in your body, you experience it as unpleasant feeling. So when you feel like crap, it's usually because you have expended energy that you haven't replaced yet. You've made a withdrawal that you

haven't replenished yet. These simple feelings, which are not emotions, feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling comfortable or uncomfortable, feeling worked up or feeling calm. These are simple feelings that tell you something about the state of your body budget. And you can use them. They don't tell you what's wrong. But they do tell you something about, you know, whether your body budget is running a deficit or whether you're flush and your body budget is solvent. And in this way, your brain is always budgeting for your body and your body is always sending sense data back to your brain. And your brain is always experiencing this as these simple feelings, which you can call mood or scientists call affect. And this goes on really for your whole life. So you don't experience your brain regulating your body. Usually you don't experience your life as, as if that's your brain's most important job,

but that actually is your brain's most important job. And so what you think and what you do and what you see even really is in the service of managing that body budget. Yeah, there's so many things in what you just said that I could choose to go with. One that I'm going to go with is one of my favorite lines from your previous book, which has stuck with me. I do one of these a week, so it's hard for things to stick with me a lot of times. But you basically are saying, if your body budget gets out of whack, then you're going to feel crappy no matter what self-help tips you follow. It's just a matter of which flavor of crap. And I love that. I think it's so true that at a foundational level, there are these foundational things that we have to do to take care of ourselves, or we're going to feel bad. Yeah, and it really does sneak up on you, Eric. That's the

funny thing, too. What I would say is that think about when you exercise. I know when I exercise, I exercise every day. And you know, when I'm usually about 20 minutes in, as I'm hitting my ventilatory load and building up carbon dioxide, it's harder to keep pushing forward with the exercise. I start to feel really uncomfortable and I want to stop. And actually, this is the point at which a lot of people stop. But you shouldn't stop. You should keep going. But why is it that this happens? It happens because I need more oxygen, I'm not expelling enough carbon dioxide fast enough, and I'm burning through glucose and water and other nutrients. So I'm starting to feel like crap, basically, to echo myself. But it doesn't necessarily mean something's

wrong in the larger sense, right? Sometimes we feel like crap because we're just working really hard at something and then we can replenish. So when I'm done exercising, I might have a protein shake or I might drink some water or, you know, I might make sure that I have to get enough sleep that night, what have you. When you're working really hard at something, when you're learning something really hard, when you have to really, really make some kind of metabolic investment, it can feel really uncomfortable. But sometimes feeling bad isn't necessarily a sign that anything's wrong. It might be a sign that you're just burning through resources really quickly and you need to replenish. But I guess I should back up and say, what is stress? Stress is just your brain preparing you for a major metabolic outlay.

You know, cortisol is not a stress hormone. It's a hormone that gets glucose into your bloodstream quickly because your brain believes that you have a big metabolic outlay to make, whether it's getting out of bed in the morning or giving a talk to the members of your team or taking a test or even just talking to somebody on a podcast, right? Maybe it's even listening to a podcast and listening to ideas that are really new and frankly counterintuitive to you. All of these things cost glucose and can make you feel unpleasant, but it doesn't necessarily mean that something's wrong. What it means is that you just need to replenish the energy. On the other hand, when you feel stressed,

when you're in a stressful situation, so your brain is preparing you for battle, right? And you don't need it, or you don't get enough sleep, you don't eat healthily, or you don't exercise on a regular basis, or you're on social media too much. Because one thing that's really expensive for a human brain is ambiguity and uncertainty. For example, COVID for the last year, full of uncertainty, has been a real body budget drain for a lot of people. You see reports of people anxious,

and they're depressed and they're really struggling. Why is that? It's because we didn't even enter COVID with balanced body budgets to begin with. We live in a world of casual brutality. We do all kinds of things to tax our body budgets all the time. And then it was with this level of depletion that we entered into COVID, you know, which has been a year of uncertainty and real angst for a lot of people. And so the point that I want to make here is that each time you spend too much or you spend but you don't replenish, you pay a little metabolic tax. It's really, really small. But each time you pay a little metabolic tax. It's really, really small. But each time you pay a little tax. And these taxes add up over time. And sometimes it can take years for them to add up. But,

you know, it's kind of like water dripping on a pipe. You know, the first drip isn't going to do anything. The second drip isn't going to do anything. But eventually, if it keeps going on, that water is going to bore a hole through that steel pipe. And your metabolism kind of works in the same way. And this is why adversity in childhood is a major predictor of physical illness in adulthood and middle age. in adulthood and middle age. You know, there were a number of studies done called viral challenge studies, which were done 10, 15 years ago, where they took people, volunteers, and they put them individually in hotel rooms, and they controlled what they ate and how they slept and so on. And then they put a virus, exactly the same amount of viral load in every person's nose.

And actually, one of these studies actually used a coronavirus. And only 20 to 40% of people developed symptoms. That means 60 to 80% of people who were exposed to the virus didn't get sick. That means that a virus is not the sole cause of illness because many people were exposed to the virus and didn't get sick. The other cause that's necessary but not sufficient that you need in order to get sick is a compromised immune system. So your brain has to be in a particular state in order for you to get sick.

And you know what was the biggest predictor of who got sick? Adverse childhood experiences. Exactly. Yep. Now, why is that? It's because the seeds of metabolic inefficiency are planted really, really early in life. And so your brain as a child wires itself to its world. And part of your brain's world is your body and the world that other people create for you. So if you have a brain that wires

itself to adversity to deal with adversity, you're paying an extra tax, and you just keep paying that tax and paying that tax and that makes you more vulnerable to stressors later in life. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've often wondered about why exercise remains a challenging thing to do sometimes. And what I mean by that is, I think every single time I've exercised, and that's been thousands of times at this point, when I'm done, I go, I'm really glad I did that. That was really wonderful. And yet, you would think with that sort of consistent positive reinforcement, I would hop up and be ready to run to exercise. Is it just the fact that it's such a withdrawal, that it sort of violates the principle of conserving energy, that there's just a natural

resistance in there? Do you think that could be part of it? I just, it's a phenomenon I don't fully understand. Because again, I would think that the positive reinforcement being so strong would make it always something I want to do. And it's not that it's hard to do, necessarily sometimes, but it's certainly harder than turning on the TV. Well, first of all, I don't think that conserving energy is really what nervous systems are about. I think nervous systems are really trying to optimize energy input and output. So many people love novelty. Some people love novelty more than others.

But most people don't like to eat the same food every day. And they don't like to wear the same clothes every day. And they don't necessarily like to do the same things every day. So things that are predictable are much cheaper, metabolically speaking, than things that are novel or unpredictable. That being said, you know, we still like novelty. So why is that? And the answer is, you know, we don't just go sit in a dark room and waste away. And the answer is because for living creatures, I don't really think we're trying to not spend. I think we're trying to spend efficiently. And I think the question that you're asking is a really good question. And it's a question that plagues me, honestly, because every morning I drag my ass out of bed and I procrastinate to go exercise, even though I know

I'm going to feel better at the end. But to get to that end, I have to get I have to go through some significant discomfort. And sometimes even when I'm in it, I'm happy to make the discomfort worse by pedaling harder or lifting more or whatever. But it's just getting myself to that point. It's, you know, and I've been doing this for more than 20 years at this point. And still, you know, every morning is a struggle. But I guess I would say, obviously, we have learned something because despite the fact that we know it's going to be unpleasant, we still do it. We've talked about the last time, you know, that I was on your podcast, and I'm sure we'll talk again that, you know, brains predict, they don't react to things. And so your brain is always predicting what it expects to happen next. And next can be in the next moment,

or it can be in the next 10 minutes, or it can be in an hour from now after you've run a couple of miles and you're in the shower. What you're asking me is a really interesting question that I don't have an answer for, because I don't think we know the answer to how a brain makes decisions about what the immediate outcome is versus what the outcome is going to be in an hour from now or in a year or 10 years from now. Because what you're asking me really is the same kind of question as, how can I get myself to not spend money now and put it away in my retirement savings account so that I'll have money later when I retire in, you know, X number of years. I mean, you know,

you need to do it. And you know, you'll be happy if you have money at the end of your life where you can retire and live well. And you probably don't need the shiny new thing that you want, or you don't need to go out to a restaurant, or you don't need to shiny new thing that you want, or you don't need to go out to a restaurant, or you don't need to do whatever it is you want to do in the moment to spend that money on. But yet, it's still a struggle. You know, some people experience what's called the pain of paying. This is a scientist at Carnegie Mellon came up with this phrase, which means the discomfort that you feel after you've spent money and you know you really shouldn't have um but yet people still do it so i don't have an answer for you all i'm trying to say is it's a pervasive phenomenon and it's a really interesting question that you know economists have tried to

answer and psychologists but i don't really think there's a terrific answer to that question yeah because i think that certainly the further off the reward is from the act itself, the harder it becomes. I know for me, exercise became a lot easier to do when I realized like the payoff for me is in 20 minutes or 30 minutes because it's in how I feel versus trying to go, well, the payoff is in three months when I look better or 25 years when I don't have heart disease. Yeah, that's fair. But I have to tell you that the payoff for me sometimes is an hour later when I'm in the shower, but sometimes it isn't. Yeah. I remember when I gave birth to my daughter and, you know, people tell you all these things about how beautiful and wonderful it's going to be when you nurse your daughter or your child or whatever. Let me tell you something.

It hurts a lot for many, many, many months. And yet women do it. And so why do they do it? You're not even doing it for yourself. You're doing it for this other little creature, which is like completely dependent on you. I mean, eventually it stops hurting, you know, after four months or something. But it's actually really uncomfortable at first. And when I mean uncomfortable, I don't mean psychologically uncomfortable.

I mean physically uncomfortable. But yet you do it and you do it willingly and you do it happily. So it's really hard to answer the question of how this works. But what I will say is that when your brain is predicting, part of what it's doing is it's not some abstract thing. Your brain is actually changing the firing of its own neurons to anticipate what the sensory consequences will be in a moment from now of whatever your brain is preparing you to do. So if your brain's going to stand you up, it's going to also raise your blood pressure so that you don't faint because that would be metabolically costly. You have mechanisms

basically that will raise your blood pressure as you stand so that oxygen can get to your head. At the same time, certain parts of your brain are preparing other parts to have the sensory feeling of standing up, of having your feet against the floor and your back straightened and so on and so forth. Now, if you've ever had a song going through your head that you cannot get out of your head, you know, it's kind of like that. Or, you know, sometimes I'll ask people to imagine an apple in their head. You know, can you imagine a red Macintosh apple, you know, in your mind's eye? Can you imagine grasping that apple in your hand? Can you imagine taking a bite out of that apple, sinking your teeth into the apple and hearing the crunch of the apple and tasting the apple. Many people can do this. You know, they have a ghostly image of an apple. They can hear the crunch. They can taste the apple.

They start to salivate sometimes. changing the firing of its own neurons to be prepared to taste an apple and see an apple and hear an apple and feel an apple even though there is no apple there. And this is what your brain is doing all the time. But when your brain is trying to predict something in the longer term future, it's harder to simulate, which is what this is called, this changing the firing of your own neurons to prepare for sensory changes in the next moment. Your brain just has a harder time doing that. So I can tell you that if you turn up the heat a little more or you turn up the air conditioning a little more so that you're a little more comfortable now, that's going to have a cost in terms of climate change later, which will make you much more uncomfortable. It's harder to simulate that change later on. And so it's less potent of an experience to control your actions.

So let's go into this brain prediction piece a little bit. And I'm about to wander into territory I have no business wandering into, but I'm going to do it anyway, which is, how do we know that our brains are doing this sort of prediction? So just for listeners to be clear, what neuroscientists are saying now is that our brain is predicting what's going to happen. And so if I'm looking out the window, there's actual sense data coming back to me. But my brain is also predicting and correct me anything, I'm going to get something wrong here. But my brain is also predicting what it expects it's going to see out there. And if those two things match up, then that sense data doesn't even necessarily ever reach different levels of the

brain, right? It just gets discarded because it's like, well, prediction matched. Now, if there's a difference in the sense data and what my brain predicts, there's a couple different things my brain can do. And we can talk about that. But from reading your book and other books, it sounds like this is what the brain is doing all the time and very predominantly. And I don't understand how we know that. And again, I'm wandering into a whole realm of not knowing how we know. But is that a question you can answer succinctly? know because there's just an overwhelming amount of evidence that this is the case. So we know because of how brains are structured, that parts of your brain that are supposed to be sensory parts that are supposed to be taking in information from the world, like primary sensory

region in your cerebral cortex called primary visual cortex, which is supposed to be the part of your cerebral cortex that receives visual sense data from your eye. You know, 95% of the neurons that connect to primary visual cortex come from other parts of your brain and not from the part that is bringing the sense data from your eye. So that's one way we know. Another way we know is that we can study animals, non-human animals, and we can look and see, watch the flow of information from neuron to neuron. And actually, we can now do this even in some humans who are hospitalized, and we can measure the changes in neurons when they're in the hospital. We can do experiments to see. At this point, probably over a thousand papers that have been peer-reviewed,

measuring neurons either directly or measuring brain imaging. For humans, when we brain image humans, we don't directly measure neural activity. We're measuring blood flow changes, which are related to neural activity. But there are many, many studies that directly show the prediction signals in action. There are, you know, anatomical studies, which provide the same evidence. Actually, what ended up convincing me that this was a really viable hypothesis is that at the same time I was reading work on electrical signal processing because neurons are electrical units. They function with electricity, actually. That's partly how they communicate with each other. And I was reading that literature,

and I was reading an anatomical, like anatomy, brain anatomy, and I was reading some work on experiments with non-human animals, and all of them were pointing to exactly the same hypothesis. But these literatures don't speak to each other. They were just all converging on the same idea. But I would say what usually convinces people is not data, it's their own experience. And so I'll just say, for example, have you ever had the experience that you are really thirsty and you drink a big tall glass of water and then your thirst is quenched immediately? Yep. really, really fascinating because it actually takes 20 minutes for any water that you ingest to make it into your bloodstream, to get back to your brain, to tell your brain that there's enough water in your system now. So how is it that your thirst is quenched immediately,

even though it takes 20 minutes for that information to make its way to the brain. And the answer is... I assumed it was prediction. Yeah, it's prediction. What's your favorite food, Eric? Pizza. Pizza. You know, I'm having pizza for dinner, actually. What is your favorite pizza? I'm kind of a plain cheese kind of guy. We're having margarita.

Okay. Yeah, margarita pizza with fresh mozzarella, thin crust. Oh, yeah. And so when you think about your simulate your favorite pizza, do you start to salivate? No. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

And in fact, sometimes when you sit down for dinner or for lunch, you might even start salivating a little bit beforehand. But why is that happening? That's prediction. Your brain is actually preparing you to ingest food because it's metabolically efficient to predict and correct. It's not at all metabolically efficient to react to things. For example, if you're a coffee drinker and you have coffee every day at the same time, You're a coffee drinker and you have coffee every day at the same time. And then one day you just don't have coffee at that time.

You get a headache. A lot of people have this experience. Why do you have a headache? Why do you get a headache? The answer is because your brain basically has learned that every day at a certain time, you are going to drink coffee and caffeine will cause vascular constriction in the blood vessels of your head and your brain really needs constant blood flow that doesn't change. So what it does is it dilates its blood vessels right around the time when you're supposed to be drinking coffee because the coffee is going to come and it's going to constrict those blood vessels

so the net result will be no change. But if one day you don't drink coffee, your blood vessels dilate and you have a headache. Prediction is why people become addicted to drugs because your brain starts to predict that those chemicals will be there. It adjusts the chemicals it makes to keep that level constant. I could keep going. Baseball, you know, there is no sport that would exist that involves any precision with bats and balls and stuff like that, sticks and pucks. If people did not have a predicting brain,

those games just wouldn't exist at all because they're all predicated on prediction. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

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app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's change our direction a little bit here. Boy, there's so many great things that we're just not going to get to. I feel like we've covered like two out of seven and a half lessons. But what I'd like to get to is kind of ground us here at the end in some practicality of what some of your research bears out. And again, I highly recommend this book, the previous book, there is a lot of really fascinating science about how our brains actually work to create our experience. But I'd like to end a little bit with what are some things that we can do knowing the predictive nature of the brain, knowing the way that emotions are constructed, which is a real big part of your earlier book. Knowing these things, what does that tell us about some things that we can actually do to make the quality of our day-to-day lives a

little bit better, to make us feel better? Well, there are a couple of things I think that are pretty basic. One is that we haven't really said where these predictions come from. So when your brain is making a prediction, so if we stop time, we just hold time constant, what's happening, your brain has taken stock of what's happening in your body, what's happening in the world, and it's going to predict what's going to happen next. And how's it making that prediction? Because it's using your past experience. It's basically asking itself, because it's using your past experience. It's basically asking itself, figuratively speaking,

the last time I was in a situation like this where I was experiencing these things and I just did these things, like what happened next? What caused it? What did I do about it? That's really what it's asking itself. So it's using your past experience. So what this means, as I said before, is that in a sense you're always cultivating your past

that your brain is going to use later to make predictions. So one thing that you can do is you can cultivate new experiences for yourself. You can curate new opportunities. These are kind of expensive, like they take effort because, you know, anything which is unexpected is going to be more expensive. That's why learning anything new is exhilarating. There can be arousal there. Sometimes you construct it into anxiety, but you could just as easily construct it into exhilaration or determination, you know, get your butterflies flying in formation.

So you can think of it a little bit like exercise. You're making an investment in a healthier brain. Only this time, instead of physical exercise, maybe what you're doing is you're exposing yourself to a movie that you have never seen before, that might be really different. Or you might meet someone new who's really different from you, and has different really views on life. Or you might, you know, one day when we could travel again, go to a place that's really different from yours, where the norms and customs are really, really different, like really challenge yourself. You can learn a new language, you can learn a new skill, there are all kinds of things that you can do that will cost in the moment. But you can think of that cost like an investment that you're making in a healthier brain. And the really cool thing is that most skills like this are like driving.

If you practice making the experience over and over and over again, you get kind of automatic at it, right? So just like driving at first, it's really hard, but then eventually get really good at it. So one example I'll give you is when I was preparing to write How Emotions Are Made, I have a colleague who studies positive emotions. You know, I was kind of skeptical, like, oh, yeah, sure. You know, awe. Awe is supposedly like really good for you, right? Yeah, okay, okay, okay.

You know, I'm fairly skeptical. I'm just by nature really skeptical. But I was like, all right, well, okay, I'm going to try it. So let's see what happens. So I'm going to every day for five minutes, I'm going to experience all I'm going to find something, I'm going to feel like a speck, I'm going to, you know, cultivate a sense of wonder and admiration, it's something larger than myself. And so I practiced every day. So it might be a little crack in the sidewalk, and like ugly little weed became a wondrous example of the power of nature

and, you know, humanity's inability to constrain it and control it, right? Or it might be, you know, so just things like this. It might have been the color of a particular flower or taking like a dandelion. You could see it as a weed that's going to just like destroy your lawn. But also, it's actually quite beautiful, actually, if you look at the structure. So I practice this day and day and day and a day out for five minutes. And sure enough, whenever things are super stressful, I can take a break. Just without moving, I can take a break. I can just shift my attention and cultivate awe in the moment. And for a moment, I'm a speck. And that means my problems are a speck. Just for a moment, it just gives my nervous system a break. And it allows me to take some deep breaths, which is a way of resetting your autonomic nervous system and kind of changing the trajectory of the moment, which is sometimes all you need. So I'm not trying to say that you

can just snap your fingers and form a couple of little mind tricks, and then you'll feel better. But I do think that this is one useful thing that you can do. Another useful thing that you can do, which is going to sound really like I'm being a mother, and I am a mother, and my daughter hates it when I say this, but it is I'm actually speaking to you as a neuroscientist. Get enough sleep, get enough sleep, eat healthfully, get enough exercise, and don't be around people who are a drain on your body budget. Unless you can replenish. Sometimes people say like, what's the one thing I can do to improve my life? And I'm like, get enough sleep. Seriously, it's not just that it makes you feel better.

Your brain doesn't run properly and your body doesn't run properly if you don't get enough sleep. But if you're caring for someone who's sick or you're caring for a little kid, that's a major drain on your body budget. So be aware of that. Make plans accordingly. The thing I like to reinforce is that, you know, not everybody can control everything,

but everyone can control at least one thing. Everybody has more control over their environment than they think. Most of us just don't have as much control as we would like, environment than they think. Most of us just don't have as much control as we would like. But that's not the same thing, right? And I would say it's not a zero-sum game. It's not a zero-sum game as we were talking about before. There's this idea in evolutionary biology, I'll use the fancy term, it's called niche construction. What is niche construction? Niche construction is the idea your niche is the part of your surroundings that matter to you. And so animals actively construct their niche. So when I say you're the architect of your experience, part of what I'm saying is engage in niche construction.

What does that mean for a human? Well, it probably means some boring things like don't keep potato chips in your house and don't drink too much caffeine and maybe make sure you walk and stretch enough and don't keep painkillers in the house or, you know, whatever. But it also means things like don't be around people who are constantly making withdrawals unless, of course, you're responsible for them and you've deliberately chosen that rule. Don't be around people who are a drain on your body budget. Engage in random acts of kindness. You know, I would say make sure you get a hug every day, but that's tricky because of COVID.

And it's also tricky now because we have to be respectful of each other's bodies and boundaries. But the truth is that physical touch is actually really important to humans. We have opioid receptors in our skin. It's important to be touched. But you know, if you can afford to get a massage and it's safe for you to do that, do it. If you can't, buy a soft sweater or a soft blanket. Use a stuffed animal. I mean, there are lots of ways that you can get that stimulation. And I don't mean to trivialize it, but it is really important. You know, being outside, for example, in the sun, you know, make sure you wear sunscreen, but being in the sun is really restorative. Each of these things, again, like none of them is going

to have a huge effect, but they're all going to sort of nudge you in the right direction, you know? Yep. That's one of my favorite phrases is little by little, a little becomes a lot. You know, these things, they all add up. One of the other things that you have talked a fair amount about, which I think is a really important one also, and maybe this is where we'll wrap up, is really increasing your, I think the term you use is emotional granularity. Talk a little bit about what does that mean to increase our emotional granularity and what are some practical ways to do it? If you think about what your brain is doing all the time, your brain is basically making sense of the sense data that come from the world and from your body. So when you hear a loud bang, what is that loud bang?

What caused it? And what do you need to do about it? Is it a car door slamming? Is it a car backfiring? Did somebody drop a box? Is it a gunshot? You know, what your brain understands the cause to be will determine what actions your brain takes, right? Similarly, if you have a tug in your chest, you know, your brain will ask, what is it? What caused it? You know, is it anxiety? Is it heartburn from eating too much food? Is it the beginnings of a heart attack?

This example actually is not trivial because when people go to the hospital with tightness in their chest, whether they and the emergency room physician make sense of that tug as anxiety or as the beginnings of a heart attack can determine whether or not that person lives to the next day. There are a countable number of mistakes that are made in that regard. I know at least three people who lost their mothers because the mothers went to the hospital and were told they had anxiety and they should go home. And they did go home and then promptly died of a heart attack. And in fact, this happened to a friend of mine who's man, and they didn't send him home at a time when they would have normally sent a woman home, and he had a heart attack right in the emergency room. And in fact, he had what's called a widowmaker heart attack, meaning that if the cardiologist hadn't been right there standing in front of him, he would have been dead. And you know why he went to the hospital, he had been feeling had a tight chest had all week, he went to the doctor, the

doctor did a bunch of tests said, there's nothing wrong with you. It's just anxiety. It's just anxiety. And then he went home, and he laid down. And as he was lying there, he remembered that he and I had had a conversation because I was on his podcast. And he read how emotions are made. And we were talking about this. And I was telling him this story. And how emotions are made. And we were talking about this and I was telling him this story and he thought, I'm just going to go to the hospital. And he went to the hospital and they did tests on him and they said, no, you're fine. You know, you can go home. And he said, but I'm not fine. I'm feeling worse and I'm feeling worse. It's getting more painful and more painful. And the tightness is getting more and more and more.

And they were like, okay, just wait here. We'll go get the cardiologist. And then he did. And then basically he had a heart attack right there. Your brain is always making sense of the sensations. And the way that your brain makes sense of sensations is predictively as we discussed. So it's not like the information comes in and your brain goes, Ooh, what's that? It's that your brain is making a guess about what the sensations will be in a moment from now. And part of that guess is not just what will they be, but also what caused it. Now, if you can make many guesses, if there are many possible guesses that your brain can make, and it can try to fit a guess to the situation, then your brain is going

to have a better chance of making the right guess. But if your brain can only make one or two guesses, it doesn't have a lot of options, it's just one or two, then the likelihood that your brain will make the wrong guess is higher. Granularity just means that your brain can make many guesses, right? So that a tug in your chest or a bang that you hear could be many, many, many different things, each one with its own situational context. And if your brain learns to make sense of sense data in many different ways, each one in a specific situation, then you have lots of options to know how to respond. So I guess another way to say it would be, let's say your body budget is running a deficit and you feel crappy. Well, what caused the crappy feeling and what should you do

about it? I don't know. I mean, you don't know because many things work to add together to make that crappy feeling. And it's hard to know what to do about it. But if your brain can make meaning of the sense data as more than just a crappy feeling, but specifically, you know, is it irritation or is it fatigue or is it I'm dehydrated or is it I'm anxious? It could be emotional. It might be something purely physical.

It might be, you know, feeling crap because I'm really determined to learn this thing and I'm really tenacious and I'm not going to let it go until I've learned it. The more options you give your brain, basically, or the more options your brain gives itself, the more you learn and the more options you learn, the more flexibility you have. And flexibility is the key to resilience. Yeah, I think that's well said. And the example that I use in my own life of that is that I think for a lot of years, I got in the habit of labeling a host of things as depression. There's not a lot of granularity in that. It's just like something crappy is happening inside and I go, I'm depressed. Not only does that not allow my brain to make a better decision

about what's actually happening and make a better decision, it reinforces a conception of what's happening with me, which is this thing. And I've really been paying a lot of attention over the last six months to what I would call depression and how often it's tiredness. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. 100%. I'll just tell you this one story and then we'll wrap up. A couple of years ago, I went to the doctor, new doctor, right? So my doctor had retired. So now I have a new doctor. And I go to the doctor and I say to the doctor, I'm really, really, really tired. I'm so fatigued. And he says, maybe you're depressed. And I go to the doctor and I say to the doctor, I'm really, really, really tired. I'm so fatigued. And he says, maybe you're depressed. And I say, no, I'm not depressed. I'm

just really, really, really tired. And he says, well, do you have any stress in your life? And I'm like, yeah, of course, you know, yes. I run a lab. It's a large lab. And, you know, of course, I have stress in my life, but I've always had stress in my life. And I'm really, really, really tired. And he said, Well, maybe you're depressed, and you just don't know it. And I was like, maybe you don't know the DSM criteria, you know, their criteria for depression. So let's think about what those criteria are. Do I have any of those criteria? You know, no, I'm not depressed. I'm tired. Okay, as I'm leaving, I'm not depressed. I'm tired. Okay, as I'm leaving, thinking I'm never coming back to this doctor again. The nurse says to me, honey, are you perimenopausal? Because unbeknownst to me, hormones like estrogen and testosterone are metabolic regulators. Dopamine, serotonin,

I mean, they're all metabolic regulators, they all have something to do with metabolism. So if you start losing your hormones, you know, men lose testosterone slowly over their adult life, women lose their estrogen, you know, over a couple of years, you know, she says to me, maybe you're tired, because you're going through menopause. Here's a book, read this book, you know, she gives me the title of a self help book. So I read the self help book, and then I go get, you know, 25 articles and start reading them. And sure enough, what is one of the major signs of menopause, it's fatigue, because you're losing your estrogen. Now, the point that I want to make is that physician,

unbeknownst to him, was attempting to construct my experience for me as depression. And what if I had accepted that and really felt it? Well, the first thing that would have happened is I would have started taking antidepressants, which actually could have had the effect of driving my body budget into a deficit position, even though, you know, it was in that position, because I was losing estrogen. Second of all, I'd start wondering what it is in my life, I have to make changes about because clearly something is wrong, like in a big way, because I'm depressed. I mean, it would have really been a trajectory shift for me. I mean, it would have really been a trajectory shift for me and not necessarily a good one,

I would say. So I think, you know, I have been depressed once in my life and it's not an experience that I'm eager to repeat, let's just say. It's agonizing to be depressed, but there is a way in which you can also understand depression as a bankrupt body budget, you know. So I'm not saying that you can cure depression by just like a bankrupt body budget, you know. So I'm not saying that you can cure depression by just like sleeping more and like, you know, getting a little exercise. But I do want to point out that depression is a metabolic illness. It is many things that there's immunological problems. But all of these problems, including the really negative mood results from

basic metabolic problem, you are bankrupt, basically. What do you do when you're bankrupt in your bank account? You stop spending. What does a brain do when its body budget is bankrupt? It stops moving your body and it stops you learning. So you are trapped in your head, basically. Context insensitive, you're just trapped in your head. Those are two major symptoms of depression. So it helps to know a little bit, I think about not just how to make sense of not just how to make 50 shades of crap, you know, crappy feelings of all different, you know, but it helps to also understand something about the biological basis of the moods that you experience, because that actually adds to your granularity, because

it allows you to have different action plans that you can take again, flexibility, and resilience. I could riff on that for another hour, because there were so many good points in that. But my pizza is getting cold. So but your pizza is getting cold, and we are way long. So I don't want pizza to get cold. That is a tragedy. So thanks so much, Lisa, for coming back on. I have really enjoyed talking with you again. It's always such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me back. And hopefully we'll have a chance to chat again. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying

thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?

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