The One You Feed - Understanding the Science of the Mind with Paul Bloom

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

In this episode, Paul Bloom, delves into the importance of understanding the science of the mind. He explains the psychological benefits of balancing pleasure and values and also the impact of upbringing versus genetics on behavior. Paul's work captures the intricate nature of human motivation and the multifaceted aspects of what it means to be a good person. In this episode, you will be able to: Gain a deeper understanding of motivational pluralism in psychology and its impact on behavior Discover the significant role genetics play in shaping personality traits and behavior Uncover the psychological benefits of finding a balance between pleasure and core values Explore the impact of upbringing versus genetics on behavior and decision-making Learn effective strategies for managing depression and anxiety to improve mental well-being To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The idea that someone's going to solve your problems for you is a way of thinking that would be acceptable for a child, but it's not a mature way of thinking and it's never going to happen. 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 reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Paul Bloom, the Brooks and Suzanne Reagan Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University. Paul's research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. Today, Paul and Eric discuss his newest book, Psych, The Story of the Human Mind. Hi, Paul. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me on. Looking forward to this. Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book,

which is called Psych, The Story of the Human Mind. But before we do, we'll start like we always do with a parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with her grandchild and they say, 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 grandchild stops, they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent 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. So I hate parables. They all sound kind of sappy and silly, but I like this one.

This is maybe the only parable I like because it captures something deep and fairly non-intuitive. Where a lot of people think the way to become a good person, a good, kind person, loving, caring, reasonable, is to just try very hard. And the wisdom that the parable captures is that it's less direct than that. Often, I think, to become good and, you know, become good in any way you could imagine, it's not merely a matter of effort and wanting to do the right thing. It's a matter of setting up your life in such a way that you feed the good part of yourself. In some way, take something as sort of specific as wanting to write a book. We were talking about this a little bit before.

You don't just say, I'm going to really try hard to write a book. You try to set up the circumstances so that you naturally have a schedule for doing it. You have expectations, you have plans, you have deadlines. You talk to people about it, you're thinking your way through. And some of it's setting up your world, but some of it's setting up yourself, reading the right thing, thinking about the right things, getting in the right space. And to be a loving father or mother, husband, wife, partner, something like that, it's the same thing. You want to feed the good part of yourself and starve the bad part of yourself. And we could talk about this a little bit more, but I think one of the problems of everyday life is

there's many people desperate to feed the bad parts of you. And so I like the parable. This is the only one, so I'm very pleased that that's what you lead with. Yeah, I love that. Listener, as you're listening, what resonated with you in that? I think a lot of us have some ideas of things that we can do to feed our good wolf. And here's a good tip to make it more likely that you do it. It can be really helpful to reflect right before you do that thing on why you want to do it. Our brains are always making a calculation of what neuroscientists would call reward value. Basically, is this thing worth doing? And so when you're getting ready to do this thing that you want to do to feed your good wolf, reflecting on why actually helps to make the

reward value on that higher and makes it more likely that you're going to do that. For example, if what you're trying to do is exercise, right before you're getting ready to exercise, it can be useful to remind yourself of why. For example, I want to exercise because it makes my mental and emotional health better today. If you'd like a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. you call motivational pluralism. And part of the reason that I like this parable so much is I think it normalizes the fact that we all have this competing soup of things going on inside of us, these values and these desires and these wants. And it's not so simple to be like, well, I'm just this way or I'm just that way. It's far more complicated than that. But I'd never heard anybody use a term to

describe it. So talk to me a little bit about this idea of motivational pluralism and how you arrived there. So motivational pluralism is a sort of fancy term for something which I think is true and also a bit of common sense, which is we have many different motivations for many things we want. And I know some people think all we want is pleasure. All we want is ultimately to get pleasure and avoid pain. And everything we do is for that service. But I think this is a terrible theory of human nature. Some people say we want meaning. Some people say we want to be good people and that's all true, but we want many things. And this makes things complicated. This is why it's a bit of a soup, to use your term, because we have to do trade-offs. I can't just try to maximize one

thing. I want to be a good person. I want to have a good time. I want to have fun. I want to have a meaningful life. Maybe there's something spiritual going on here too. And you have to make trade-offs. And so being a good person is complicated, but I think that's a correct description of the situation that we're in. And so in that soup, it sounds like psychologists use a lot of different terms. They'll talk about values. They'll talk about desires. They'll talk about needs. In what ways are those things different or similar to you? And how important is it to start to tweeze those things apart? I think we have different motivations

that could be meaningfully pulled apart. One way to think about it is in terms of time scale. So, you know, if I have some M&Ms in front of me, I'll scoop them up and they pop into my mouth one by one. And each time getting a little, you know, blast of pleasure from it. It doesn't matter if it's a second long. But at the same time, I have two sons and I want to be a good father to them. And that's not a one second thing. That's a thing involving big life choices and plans and so on. So we have to navigate these differences. You could call the first thing a sort of short-term pleasure, avoiding pain. And the more long-term thing, you could call it values. And again, there are trade-offs.

I also wouldn't want to be around somebody or wouldn't want to be somebody who only focused on very long-term goals. There really is something about having an ice cream on a hot day. There's something to going outside when the sun is on your face and eating a delicious meal, having a nice drink with friends. Part of being a motivational pluralist is that I take pleasure seriously. I'm strongly opposed to people who think it's the be all and end all. I'm opposed to them on sort of moral grounds. I think that's actually a genuinely awful way to live your life. But I'm also opposed to them on psychological grounds. I don't think that's how the mind works. I think they're getting life wrong. But at the same time, pleasure is important and avoiding pain is important. And I don't think somebody would be fully human if they

disregarded all of that. It's just another sense in which I'm a pluralist. I'm a big believer in the philosophical idea of sort of a middle way, which is why motivational pluralism appeals to me so much. Because I do think we want to strike a middle ground between those two things that you're describing. And it's also had me thinking a little bit about two terms that we often use sometimes simultaneously. I think they're different, but you find them thrown together in a sentence, which is meaning and fulfillment, right? And I was reflecting a little bit and I was like, you know, I think meaning is probably largely derived from a values-based, longer-term perspective. And fulfillment is probably also derived maybe a little bit more from the pleasure.

And if you actually want both of those things, you kind of have to find the ground that you're describing, which is you have those things in some degree of balance. And people establish the balance in different ways. I'm really unwilling to give life advice here. I have set up my own balance, which satisfies me. It has a bit of both. Other people put it on the scale differently. Some people, I think, would love nothing more than a month-long vacation sitting at the beach, where they just relax, and they read novels, and they just swim, and it's nice, and eat and eat good food and they drink good drink and maybe with a special somebody. And that's just wonderful for them. For me, I could do that for about a week and then I go bananas. And I really want a long-term project. It has some difficulty. So I bring my laptop when I go on vacation. And while my partner's sleeping, I get up early in the morning and I try to write for an hour or two. And it's not a pleasure as it would be to just, you know, to just kind of sit and feel,

you know, have the sun on my face or read a novel, but it's satisfying. It gives me fulfillment in that sense. But, you know, your mileage may vary. I know people who can't go a day on vacation. They're workaholics in the best sense in that everything they do is sort of establishing flow and effort and difficulty. I go for the middle ground, as you're calling it. Yeah, I think you're right, though. I mean, this is a hugely personal endeavor, which is both wonderful and, as the existentialist would say, also sort of terrifying, right? Like no one can give you the right answer. You sort of have to feel your way into it for yourself. There's such an appetite for somebody to give you the right

answer. There's so many gurus online, particularly these days. And you know, I could name like 10 of them and you could name 10 of them that people, they really want to hear from somebody. This is how to live your life. And people can give advice. There's such a thing as constructive advice. There's such a thing as role models that will help you do things better. Could be people, could be books. I'm a big fan of Csikszentmihalyi's book on flow, which really changed how we think about things. There's Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning. This could help you. But the idea that someone's going to solve your problems for you is a way of thinking that would be acceptable for a child, but it's not a mature way of thinking that would be acceptable for a child, but it's not a mature

way of thinking and it's never going to happen. Exactly. I mean, it would be nice if you could be given the answers, but it just doesn't tend to work that way. You talk about one of your favorite studies of all time in psychology is a 1937 paper by Edward Thorndike. You use this when you're sort of talking about the fact that we have multiple motivations, but I found this, and I think it's probably the same reason you enjoy it so much, is it's kind of humorous, and yet it sort of lays out why we're not motivated by one sort of thing. Can you tell us about that paper? It's a great little study. It was done by Thorndike, who's a famous behaviorist, but it's not written as if it was by a behaviorist at all.

If you ever see a picture of him, you will see a very sort of formal man in a three-piece suit with a lot of facial hair looking extremely stern. But this was a goofy, fun study. He wanted to know what motivates people. And one way to know is you ask them what they'll pay to get and what they'll pay to avoid. And that will give you a mirror into how much they care about things. So he gave people a long questionnaire. And the questionnaire is hilarious. And some of the answers make sense. So people will pay a lot not to have their toe chopped off. They would pay a lot not to go deaf. They will pay a lot not to

be trapped in a small house for a year. And this sort of fits the sort of standard pleasure-pain thing. But they'll also pay a lot not to have to spit on a picture of their mother. They'll pay a lot not to have to walk through Times Square without a hat. This has done a long time of it. You look like an idiot without a hat. They'll pay a lot to lose the idea of life after death. They'll pay a lot for the protection and happiness of people around them. And one of my favorite contrasts is Thorndike asked people, how much

would I have to pay you to pull out one of your front teeth with pair of pliers? She said, oh my God. People say, you can think of the answer. Yeah, but people say, a lot of money. That's horrible. And then they asked, how much would I have to pay you to strangle a cat? And people asked for more for the second one. And that says something about people. It says that however horrible physical pain and disfigurement is, it's even more horrible to kill an innocent cat. And it says something about, back to motivational pluralism,

how important being good is to us. It's not just escaping from pain. It's also being a good person. 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.

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 tonight. 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, 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. You can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. but it's in the first couple episodes where Tony is going to see his therapist. But it made me think more about how Tony, the thing that makes him the most angry and that gets him walking out of therapy sessions early on are not questions about him as a mobster. They're about questions

about him being angry at his mother. His ability to admit that he's angry at his mother seems so foundationally against who he is that it pisses him off. And his mother in the series is just pretty unilaterally kind of an awful person. So I just think that's an interesting insight into that not spit on the picture of your mother, how that show sort of shows that with Tony just came to mind as I was thinking about mothers. It really is. There's another scene where Tony's talking to his psychiatrist who's figured out he's a mobster. And he's saying now people are behaving horribly. There's terrible, terrible behavior. We used to be so much more decent. And she's listening to him thinking he's talking about all the murders he's done and so on.

But it's very clear he's talking about people who are rats, who betray the cause, who betray the family, who talk to the cops, who squeal on their fellow mobsters. And there's genuine moral outrage. It's interesting. We think of bad people, and Tony is a very bad person, as people without souls, without conscience. But for the most part, they're people with the same highly tuned morality that we have. It's just as tuned in a different direction. Nobody thinks of themselves as villains. We all think of ourselves as good people doing good things. And this is kind of what makes moral disagreement and real political clashes so difficult. If it was just a good guys versus a psychopath, things would be a

lot simpler. But it's one team of people who see themselves as good guys against another team who see themselves exactly the same way. Yeah, there was some other TV show I was watching recently, and the character was describing why he loved Westerns. And he was like, because it was easy to know who the good guys were. You just looked for the white hats. Even if you weren't sure, even if their behavior, you just looked for the white hats. Even if you weren't sure, even if their behavior, you just looked for the white hats and that was it. You were done having to figure it out. And of course, real life is far more complicated than that. Yeah. There was some children's series that had the League of Evil Villains and, you know, of all the things about it, that was the most unrealistic because evil villains do not think

of themselves as evil villains. Everybody thinks of themselves as the good guys. In the book, you sort of talk about ways of thinking about how happy we are. And you describe sort of two ways that psychologists tend to do this. One is they may just ask you randomly throughout the day, you know, how happy or how satisfied you are. And the idea is that the more moments you report that it's good, you sort of add all those up. And the higher the total, the happier you are. The other approach seems to be you ask people more for overall satisfaction levels to their life. And you talk about how these two things are correlated, but they're not exactly the same.

Do I have that right so far? You have it exactly right. This is mostly the work of Danny Kahneman, the great psychologist of rationality and reason, who sadly passed away just a few weeks ago. But yeah, he drew this distinction. And so I was thinking about this question a little bit, because I am somebody who I've characterized it different ways over the years. I at one point would have characterized it as I have depression and maybe I did at certain points. Sometimes I would just characterize it as a generally melancholic temperament. Other times I might just say it's sort of a general tendency towards a low mood. And I was thinking about those two methods and it occurred to me that the method where you asked me about my overall level of

happiness or satisfaction is probably a better measuring tool for me. Because if you ask me and I reflect on my life, I will tell you it's pretty darn good. But I'm not sure moment to moment I would report that as often. And I'm just kind of curious for your thoughts on whether you've thought about in certain cases for certain people, maybe just picking one of those is the better model for them instead of asking which one is correct, because nobody can really seem to agree which is correct. I think, you know, looking at myself, I'm like, I think this one is going to lead me to maybe the answer that I want, which is one of being more satisfied. Well, this gets me back to being a pluralist, where the only answer I could give to be consistent is both.

Right. And in some way, we make choices. I think in some way also, you might want to entirely reject happiness to at least some extent. So I might choose to do something difficult and unpleasant that doesn't make me happy from moment to moment. And maybe doesn't even make me happy overall, but I think I'm living a good life. I'm doing the right thing. I'm helping out others. I'm being spiritual. I'm having a life of meaning. Suppose you had to choose. I actually have a good friend, Dan Gilbert, who's a real happiness maven at Harvard. And he's very much into the moment by moment. He thinks people are deluding themselves if they say,

talking about considering your life as a whole. So I'll put this to you. Suppose you had to choose. Life one is every minute is just delightful. You're just happy, cheerful, having a great time. But whenever you think about it, maybe you think about it for a minute a day, you think, oh, my life is empty. My life is terrible. But the other 99% of times you're filled with delight versus your life is miserable. You're just sad at every moment. But in that five minutes, you look back and say, I'm living the best possible life. This is a great, significant, important life. Which would you choose? Well, I think that I would probably choose the former. Probably me too.

I mean, if I'm just being honest about my makeup, I would definitely say the former. Probably me too. Yeah. I mean, if I'm just being honest about my makeup, I would definitely say the former. So those are the trade-offs. Now, I made it very extreme. Some people, you know, would choose a life of momentary happiness, regardless of how bad it was otherwise. Then, you know, there's a balance to be struck. I think we do have to make these choices from time to time. We have to figure out whether we're going to engage in something which will make us happy for the moment, even though later on we'll say that wasn't really the best life for me to be living. Or conversely, to give up things that would give us happiness, even if later on we say

that was the right thing. And those are just the trade-offs. And there's no ready-made answer to which one to go for. So I agree with you that happiness is not always the right metric. I wanted to stay with it for a moment or two, though. I think it's in the book. Sometimes I get confused when I prepare for a guest because I listen to them on podcasts and I read your sub stack. Anyway, recently, I've heard you talk about this idea. Why can't we just decide to be happy? We can choose to think about an elephant and think about an elephant. Why can't we just decide to be happy? We can choose to think about an elephant and think about an elephant.

Why can't we just choose to be happy? And your reason is that because happiness is a way of evaluating whether our life is going well and what going well means, it could be a variety of different things, but that's kind of the reason is because it's sort of like a gauge. Yeah. Do I have that kind of right? That's exactly right. And that's in the book. I think I got the insight, this way of thinking about it from Steven Pinker. And what Pinker points out is that happiness isn't a biological accident. It's not some sort of weird add-on. It's actually part of the motivational system that our brains have evolved. And it's for the most part, an indicator, like you say, of how things are going. We try to tweak it

and understandably so, we want to be happy. The best way to become happy is to make your life better so that the happiness is a correct indicator. We try to, you know, use drugs and use all sorts of techniques to kind of get around it. Sometimes I'm thinking of it like if you think of happiness as like a gas gauge that says how much fuel you have to go on, it would make you a lot happier to stick on a little sticker that always said full, but it wouldn't be very smart because it wouldn't be accurately tracking. It wouldn't help you get along with life. And I think similarly, sadness isn't necessarily a problem, though it can be. We could put aside issues of depression. But being sad could be extremely important information.

It says things are not going well. And act. Do something different. Do something different or at least stop doing what you're doing now. Same with anxiety. Anxiety doesn't feel good for the most part, but it's a useful indicator that there's something to be anxious about, something to attend to, something that should steal away your consciousness from other things. And this is a different perspective on negative emotions than many people have, but I think it's a more biologically

grounded one to see these as accurate reflections of how things are and useful tools for making your way through the world. I mean, the most obvious example is pain. Nobody likes pain. But pain is a signal you have injured yourself. You are in an uncomfortable position. You have to take your weight off. You have to get medical care. Without pain, and there are people, unfortunate people, who are born without the capacity to feel pain, life is far more difficult. Yep. The thing about that idea, and this is one I've also wrestled with a lot myself, idea, and this is one I've also wrestled with a lot myself, is that makes sense if the ways in which life would go well were maybe easier to understand. I mean, there's the classic example of the evolutionary mismatches that we get. So we get these signals that are driven by our

evolutionary past, our wiring, that are completely out of sync with the modern world. And it seems to me that particularly as culture has begun to play a larger role in our evaluation of our own happiness, that I wonder in what cases those signals are leading us astray. That's fair enough. Sometimes because of how we're constituted, because of our evolutionary history, our moods, our feelings, our emotions make sense, but they're actually in fact miscalibrated to the world we're in. Anger is a good case of this. So in a small community of people where we're always in constant interaction,

getting angry at a small slight, there's a logic to it. Because it suggests somebody is dominating you. You better move. You better respond or else it's going to get worse and worse and worse. But now we have the same emotion and I'm on Twitter and somebody says something about me and I get furious. Well, that's unreasonable. It's just some schmothers.

There's billions of people out there. Just block them and be done with it. And it doesn't quite work that way. We have these stone age minds. So sometimes it's fair enough. That's a fair correction. Sometimes our moods, our feelings, our emotions are not accurate indicators of how it's rational for us to respond to the world we're living in now.

I wanted to pause for a quick good wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change and a mistake I see people making. And that's really that we don't think about these new habits that we want to add in the context of our entire life, right? Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit in the life that we have. So when we just keep adding, I should do this, I should do that, I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't really thought about what we're not going to do in order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for you to think about where is this going to fit and what in my life might I need to remove. If you want a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass.

And would we say that mental illness, and let's set aside more serious mental illness like schizophrenia, let's talk about anxiety and depression. Would it be safe to say something along the lines of those are examples where our signals are increasingly disconnected from reality, meaning that we're picking up something that may not actually be there. So I think you're onto something. Let's put aside something like schizophrenia, which is sort of a different, or Parkinson's or something like that. And let's think about depression and anxiety. So those are the major illnesses people suffer from. This is what they go to therapy for. This is what they have medication for. It can be as simple as they're just the way we respond to a world we haven't evolved in because

some people aren't depressed. Some people aren't anxious. So we have to figure out why is one person so sad they can't get out of bed or so anxious they're afraid to leave the house, and another person is living a full normal life. And so you get these individual differences. But at the same time, I think that the key insight that we're getting at here is that these things are a matter of degree, which is it makes perfect sense to be sad at certain things, like a social slight or a loss of something you had wanted. It makes perfect sense to be anxious about something, like anything from climate change to being mugged on the street to having your partner angry at you. It drifts into mental illness, not as a difference of kind,

but as a difference of degree. Basically, depression isn't sadness. Depression is too much sadness. Anxiety disorders like panic attacks and the like are too much anxiety. And so there's a complicated titration process. In some ways, something like cancer is simple. And in fact, this is how we made so much progress on it, which is you don't want any cancer. You want to wipe out whatever cancer you have in your body. And so the medical project is clear and has been actually pretty successful over the last 50 years. But you don't want to eradicate sadness. You don't want to eradicate anxiety. So it's a much more complicated

problem. 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.

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. Brian 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. radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Back to talking about depression. I've looked at it two different ways over the course of my life and taken two different strategies. And I would say that my answer now is that there's a time for each of them. But one strategy is more based on kind of what we've described here, which is that I am not feeling good, thus something must be off in my life, whether it be an internal thing or the way I'm looking at a situation or it's an external thing, I'm in a bad job, a bad relationship, whatever it is, there's something that needs fixed and I'm going to interpret the signal in that way. And then there have been other times that I have decided to

treat it more like the analogy I use is like the emotional flu, meaning that when I get the flu, I just go, eh, I'm not going to figure out where I got this virus from. There's no real point. Just get some rest, take care of myself the best I know how. Don't listen to much my brain tells me right now because it's just going to be in a negative mood and just wait for it to pass. And I have found wisdom really in both of those approaches at times. There are times that what I would describe as depression or low mood seems to be almost entirely physiological. As in like, I can't figure out any mental things that I'm thinking that are really different, I can't figure out any mental things that I'm thinking that are really

different. And I can't figure out anything in my life that's really wrong. It's just I feel kind of, oh, and in those times, this sort of emotional flu metaphor turns out to be kind of helpful for me. And yet, at the same time, like you've said, I also don't want to rely on that too much because there may be actual useful signals in there. The good news for me is that depression is so clearly different for me than sadness or grief. It's a deadening. It's an almost nothing is occurring inside versus I don't know which writer said it. It's almost the difference between caring too much about things or not caring about anything at all, right? Depression is the not caring about anything at all. But I'm just kind of curious what your response is to that.

I agree with you. I think a lot depends on the intensity of something and how long it lasts and its effect on your life. But I think there's a gray wisdom to sometimes things are going wrong and you say, I'm just going to not focus on it. I'm just going to live my life and just ignore this, not put too much energy thinking about it, which could have its own problems and see what happens. And if it doesn't go away, it could be depression, could be anxiety, could be problems sleeping, could be everything from, you know, physical exhaustion of some sort. And then if it lasts long enough, then you kind of have to investigate what's going on.

And sometimes it's the world and sometimes it isn't. I was in a really dark mood a few nights ago and I'm talking to my wife about it. And I'm saying, oh, this isn't my life and this isn't my life. And she said to me, look, those things were in your life yesterday and you were pretty cheerful. And then she said to me, you know what I think? I think you got a bad night's sleep. And I said, yeah, I did get a really bad night's sleep. Yeah, get a good night's sleep.

If you're a kid, you know, if you've ever had a kid or you ever were a kid You're pretty hungry. You're a little crabby and then you know have a snack. Maybe if you're an adult sometimes you need a snack So yeah, some things don't have deep causes some things are superficial and it's worth pulling them apart Yeah, it's the classic line that I learned early in recovery Don't let yourself get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. Because those things will make you think that you want a drink. In your consciousness, that will arise as I need a drink. That's not actually what it is.

There may be something going on, but it might be as simple as, like you said, I'm hungry. I didn't get enough sleep last night. Whatever those things are. It's been a long time since I've been having a primary caretaker of a baby, but there's a list you go through when the kid's really upset. You know, is he hungry? Is he tired? Is he too cold? Is he too warm? Does he need to be held? And so on. And I think to some extent, we should apply this as adults, both to other people and to ourselves. Totally. Makes a lot of sense. So I would like to talk for a minute. You start the book off by talking about two of the major psychological approaches that most of us will have heard something about. And the first being Freud. And then the second being behaviorism.

And I'm wondering if you could just, in a couple sentences, give us what each of those roughly are. Yeah. So they're as opposite as can be. If you've heard of one psychologist, it's probably Freud. And Freud proposed this very complex theory of the mind involving internal dynamics, involving the unconscious, involving unconscious mechanism like repression and defense mechanisms, a lot of stuff revolving around anxieties, around sex. It's an incredibly baroque and complicated theory.

And it was so successful that we carry a lot of it in our heads right now. So, you know, if you say he has an anal personality, that's Freud. If you say, look, somebody says to their partner, look, I'm not your mother, that's Freud. Dr. Malfi talking to a soprano, it's Freud. Now, in some way, partially as a reaction to this, you get behaviorism associated with B.F. Skinner. And B.F. Skinner was the total opposite. He said, it's not that the mind is so complicated and rich with an unconscious dynamics and so on. Rather, it's much simpler than that. In fact, there's no mind at all.

Rather, it's much simpler than that. In fact, there's no mind at all. We could explain all of human behavior using simple behaviorist principles that work well for studying rats and pigeons. If you do something, it's because you were reinforced for doing in the past. If something bothers you, it's because it has a bad association with something. Dreams, emotions, consciousness, experiences. For Skinner, it was all nonsense. Now, I talk about these two figures,

I got to say, I think just about every specific thing Freud said was wrong. Edible complex, penis envy, his theory of psychosexual development, all wrong. But his main idea was right. His main idea that there's an unconscious mind, that it influences us in ways we don't know, has become part of bread and butter psychology. It's just accepted because it's true. Skinner is maybe the opposite. A lot of the insights of Skinner actually have turned out to be on a practical level good for things like training animals or certain sorts of treatments of people with mental disorders. Observations he made about reinforcement and so on seem to be true. His big idea was totally wrong.

His idea that humans are like rats, that you could study human behavior without appeal to the mind, is just, I think, the biggest mistake psychology has ever made, and we're just slowly still dragging ourselves out of it. Yeah, there's a behaviorist, I don't remember which one that said it, it's somewhere in your book, where the behaviorist basically claimed like, you know, give me any human and I could make them be a banker, a lawyer, a beggar, a thief, whatever it is. I could turn anybody into anything simply by what I reinforce, which is wrong on all sorts of different levels. This is John Watson's famous boast. It's from the Jesuits who said something about raising kids.

He modified it for behaviorism. But what Watson would say also is the difference between how you behave as a person and a dog behaves and a rat behaves, it's just a matter of different environmental contingencies. And if that seems ridiculous to you, it's because it is ridiculous. There's a human nature. You have capacities that a dog will never have. And to some extent, a dog has capacities you will never have.

But we have a nature to us, a nature that compels us to be social, to give us the power for abstract font, to give us capacities like language. And behaviorism ignored all of that. And so the revolution that displaced behaviorism was largely led by Noam Chomsky, the famous linguist, who's still around in his 90s doing podcasts and everything and making trouble. Chomsky pointed out the poverty of Skinner's conception of the mind. And argued, among other things, not only do we have rich mental capacities, but a lot of these are inborn, part of our nature. Not only do we have rich mental capacities, but a lot of these are inborn, part of our nature. And while some of Chomsky's specific claims have proven wrong, I think the main idea that there is a human nature, that we are born with powerful mental abilities that other creatures don't have, is something which is also part of bread and butter psychology. It's also broadly accepted because it's true. Well, I think the other thing that behaviorism is missing, in addition to the fact that we're not like a rat, is that I'm not exactly like you either.

That's right. It's the sort of idea of are we a blank slate or not, right? And anybody who's had little children can see pretty clearly like, no, we kind of come with some proclivities, you know? We come different than each other. And you can see that in little children right away, the ways that they're different from each other before they've been conditioned. I think that there are sort of two separate claims here. One is about the difference in humans and other creatures, which I think is powerful and part of our nature. The other one, as you're saying, is the difference between different people. And this falls under the

rubric of behavioral genetics. There's been a lot of interest in the question of why are people different? You know, I look around the world and some people are quicker on their feet than others. Some people are extroverts. Some people are aggressive. Some shy. Some people are good at picking up languages and have great spatial skills and are terrible at music. Others are the opposite.

And where do all these differences come from? As Skinner would say, you know, it's just, it's how they were raised, how they were reinforced, their environment. There's so much evidence now that it's not true. And there's so much evidence that a lot of the difference, let's roughly say 50% of the variation between people on every personality trait you could think of is carried by the genes. What this means is, if I want to get a good guess about the kind of person you are,

I could learn a lot from looking at your biological mother and biological father, even if they didn't raise you. If they were schizophrenic, there's a better than average chance that you'd be schizophrenic. If they're gifted at music, better than average chance you'd be gifted at music. Highly religious, that too. IQ, personality, extroversion, introversion. And so this is another attack on the skenarian conception that it's not just a human nature but we have individual natures that in some way are of course malleable i think early experience and later on choice can largely shape your destiny but in some sense are constrained by your genes just as i am not going to be

the world heavyweight boxing champion because i just don't have the body for it i'm not going to be the world heavyweight boxing champion because I just don't have the body for it. I'm not going to be a mathematical genius. Yeah, I think this idea is really interesting because it's not one that people often like to say that, you know, some amount of what we are is as a result of our genes. Right. And there's been, you know, psychological theories around growth mindset. You know, what I find interesting about that is that people take anything too far. Yes, my beliefs and how much better I can get at something or whether I'm good or not good at something absolutely influence it. And as you said, like, I'm not going to be an NBA basketball player. It doesn't matter if I devoted every second of the rest of

my life to it, even if I had started that when I was 18. Now, that's not to say that I couldn't have become a damn good basketball player. Yeah. It's a matter of degree. And these things do play a role. I mean, unfortunately, you could look at my parents and I have both the double whammy of the fact that I have their genes and they raised me, right? But you could look at them and you could see some of where i come from right you know depression mental illness in the family some of that i come by again sort of the double whammy of both genetics and then at the same time i am a dramatically different person than i either of my

parents were at the age that i am as a result of the experiences that i've had the choices that i've made the ways i've chosen to try and get better or be different. It's just back to where we started around pluralism. It's the nature-nurture thing. The answer is obviously both. Yeah, and I think that the physical analogy you're making works well. Nobody's surprised to hear that how tall somebody grows up to be has something to do with how tall their mother is and how tall their father is. It's not a perfect connection. You can't predict somebody's child's exact height.

There's variance for all sorts of reasons. Just as that much is true, it's also true that, you know, your abilities in all sorts of ways are to some extent constrained by your genes. But of course, it's also true that, you know, you go to chess camp, you learn how to play chess for a couple of months, you get trained in it for hours a day, you get better at chess. Nobody shows you a musical instrument your whole life. You're going to be really bad at music. We have natural gifts and natural deficiencies, and then environment comes in and builds on that. And it kind of makes life more interesting. Yeah, I really like that. So listener, in thinking about that and all the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be?

Remember, little by little, a little becomes a lot. Change happens by us repeatedly taking positive action. And I want to give you a tip on that, and it's to start small. It's really important when we're trying to implement new habits to often start smaller than we think we need to, because what that does is it allows us to get victories. And victories are really important because we become more motivated when we're feeling good about ourselves and we become less motivated when we're feeling bad about ourselves. So by starting small and making sure that you succeed, you build your motivation for further change down the road. If you'd like a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass.

So I thought we would end here. You and I are going to go into the post-show conversation where we're going to be discussing how much clinical psychology, which is the psychology that tries to make people better, how much it's improved or not improved over the years, whether it's stagnant and whether it's worth engaging in. Spoiler alert, as you say, if you're in distress, seek therapy. So I'm not going to make people pay to hear that. That's the takeaway. But it's an interesting discussion we're going to get to. But for right now, I thought we would end this episode with talking about two attitudes people might take towards psychology these days on the field as a whole, right? You've done this big overview of the whole field. You showed about what's good

about it, what's not good about it. And you say that there's two attitudes you think that might be useful for people who are looking at this field as a whole so this is how i end the book and i think both attitudes are important to have one is humility you know i'm on social media way too much and i hear many of my colleagues talk about with great confidence about the pronouncements of psychology and how they're going to change the world and how we should listen to psychologists. But there's so much we don't know. We don't yet have a good theory of consciousness, which is in some way the most fundamental aspect of being a person. We know how genes, the contribution genes make, what we were just talking about, the personality intelligence, but we know very little about what aspects of the environment are the other 50%. You are in many ways not like your parents. Why? What was it? What's the secret sauce that turns

a poor student into a good one? What are the factors that cause somebody with some propensity to schizophrenia to become schizophrenic as opposed to their identical twin who doesn't? And we don't know that. We have some theories as to why people do what they do, but we can't really predict behavior, either on an individual level or on the grand level. So there's a lot of cause for humility. And also, and we're going to get to later on, we have some ability to treat mental illnesses,

but it's nowhere near what it should be. If somebody has schizophrenia, it's not like you could take them and cure them, and a month later they're better. Or depression or anxiety, we're just not at that level. So humility. The second attitude is optimism. I think, and I talk about this in psych, I think we made some extraordinary discoveries about language, about memory, about emotions, about morality, about the brain, using the methods of science, extending it to ourselves. And I don't think there's any reason to expect things to suddenly stop working, to expect our science to suddenly grind to a halt.

So my own feeling, but the feel I love is that we got a long way to go, but there's no reason to doubt that we'll get there. I think that's a really great attitude. Again, back to sort of the pluralism we've been talking about before. It's kind of holding both those things to be true. We've made a ton of progress and we've got a long way to go. Like I said, you and I will talk in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like access to the post-show conversation, ad-free episodes, a special episode I do each week called A Teaching, A Song, and A Poem, and be part of our community, our community meetings, go to oneufeed.net slash join. Paul, thank you so much. I've really, really enjoyed this. I appreciate you being here. Same. This has been

a delight. Thank you for having me. 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

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