The following is a conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at
Northeastern University and one of the most brilliant and bold thinkers and scientists
I've ever had the pleasure of speaking with. She is the author of a book that revolutionized
our understanding of emotion in the brain called How Emotions Are Made and she's coming out with
a new book called Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain that you can and should pre-order now.
I got a chance to read it already and it's one of the best short
whirlwind introductions to the human brain I've ever read. It comes out on November 17th but again
if there's anybody worth supporting it's Lisa so please do pre-order the book now. Lisa and I agree
to speak once again around the time of the book release especially because we felt that this
first conversation is good to release now since we talk about the divisive time we're living through
in the United States leading up to the election and she gives me a whole new way to think about it
from a neuroscience perspective that is ultimately inspiring of empathy compassion and love.
Quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts related to this episode.
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Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
As a side note let me say that the bold first principles way that Lisa approaches our study of
the brain is something that has inspired me ever since I learned about her work and in fact I
invited her to speak at the AGI series I organized at MIT several years ago but as a little twist
instead of a lecture we did a conversation in front of the class. I think that was one of the
I think that was one of the early moments that led me to start this very podcast. It was scary and
gratifying which is exactly what life is all about and it's kind of funny how life turns
on little moments like these that at the time don't seem to be anything out of the ordinary.
If you enjoy this thing subscribe on YouTube review it with five stars and up a podcast
follow on Spotify support on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman.
And now here's my conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Since we'll talk a lot about the brain today do you think let's ask the craziest question do you
think there is other intelligent life out there in the universe? Honestly I've been asking myself
lately if there's intelligent life on this planet. You know I have to think probabilities suggest yes
and also secretly I think I just hope that's true it would be really um I know scientists aren't
supposed to have hopes and dreams but I think it would be really cool and I also think it would be
really sad if it if it wasn't the case if we really were alone that would be that that would seem
profoundly sad I think. So it's exciting to you and that's scary?
Yeah no you know I take a lot of comfort and curiosity it's a great it's a great
resource for dealing with stress so I'm learning all about mushrooms and octopuses and you know
all kinds of stuff and so for me this counts I think in the realm of awe but also I think
I'm somebody who cultivates awe deliberately on purpose to feel like a speck you know I find it
a relief occasionally. To feel small. To feel small in a profoundly large and interesting universe.
So maybe to dig more technically on the question of intelligence do you think is
difficult for intelligent life to arise like it did on earth from everything you've written and
studied about the brain how magical of a thing is it in terms of the odds it takes to arise?
Yeah so you know magic is just don't get me wrong I mean I like I like a magic show
as much as the next person I my husband was a magician at one time but you know magic is just
a bunch of stuff that we don't really understand how it works yet so I would say from what I
understand there are some major steps in the course of evolution that at the beginning of life
the step from single cell to multicellular organisms things like that which are really
not known. I think for me the question is not so much could it you know what's the likelihood
that it would happen again as much as what are the steps and how long would it take and
if it were to happen again on earth would we end up with the same you know menu of life forms that
we currently have now and I think the answer is probably no right there's just so much about
evolution that is stochastic and driven by chance. But the question is whether that menu
would be equally delicious meaning like there'd be rich complexity of the kind of like would we get
dolphins and humans or whoever else falls in that category of weirdly intelligent seemingly intelligent
however we define that. Well I think that has to be true if you just look at the range of creatures
who've gone extinct I mean but if you look at the range of creatures that are on the earth now
it's incredible and you know it's sort of tried to say that but it actually is really incredible
particularly I don't know I mean animals there are animals that seem really ordinary until
you watch them closely and then they become miraculous you know like certain types of
birds which do very miraculous things build you know bowers and do dances and all these
really funky things that are hard to explain with a standard evolutionary story although
you know people have them. Birds are weird they do a lot of formating purposes they have a concept
of beauty that I haven't quite maybe you know much better but it doesn't seem to fit evolutionary
arguments well. It does fit well it depends right so I think you're talking about the evolution of
beauty the book that was written recently by was it from um was that his name Richard from I think
at Yale? Oh actually no I didn't oh it's a great book it's very controversial though because he
is argue he's making an argument that the question about birds and some other animals is why would
they engage in such metabolically costly displays when it doesn't improve their fitness at all
and the answer that he gives is the answer that Darwin gave which is sexual selection
not natural selection but you know selection can occur for all kinds of reasons there could
be artificial selection which is when we breed animals right which is actually how Darwin that
that observation helped Darwin come to the idea of natural selection oh and then there's sexual
selection meaning and the argument that that I think his name is from makes is that that it's
the pleasure the selection pressure is the pleasure of female birds which as a woman
and as someone who studies affect that's a great answer I actually think there probably is natural
I think there is an aspect of natural selection to it which he maybe hasn't considered.
But you were saying the reason we brought up birds is the life we got now seems to be quite
incredible. Yeah so you peek into the ocean peek into the sky there are miraculous creatures look
at creatures who've gone extinct and you know in science fiction stories you couldn't dream up
something as interesting so my guess is that you know intelligent life evolves in in many
different ways even on this planet there isn't one form of intelligence there's not one brain
that gives you intelligence there are lots of different brain structures that can give you
intelligence so my guess is that the menagerie might not look exactly the way that it looks now
but it would certainly be as as interesting. But if we look at the human brain versus the
brains or whatever you call them the mechanisms of intelligence in our ancestors even early
ancestors that you write about for example in your in your new book what what's the difference
between the the fanciest brain we got which is the human brain and the ancestor brains
that it came from. Yeah I think it depends on how far back you want to go. You go all the way back
right in your book so what's the interesting comparison would you say. Well first of all I
wouldn't say that the human brain is the fanciest brain we've got I mean an octopus brain is pretty
different and pretty fancy and they can do some pretty amazing things that we cannot do
you know we can't grow back limbs we can't change color and texture we can't comport ourselves and
squeeze ourselves into a little crevice I mean these are things that we invent these are like
superhero abilities that we invent in stories right we can't do any of those things and so
the human brain is certainly we can certainly do some things that other animals can't do
that seem pretty impressive to us but but I would say that there are a number of animal
brains which seem pretty impressive to me that can do interesting things and really impressive
things that we can't do. I mean with your work on how emotions are made and so on you
you kind of repaint the view of the brain as less glamorous I suppose than you would otherwise
or like I guess you draw a thread that connects all brains together in terms of homeostasis
and all that kind of stuff. Yeah I wouldn't say that the human brain is any less miraculous
than anybody else would say I just think that there are other brain structures which are also
miraculous and I also think that there are a number of things about the human brain which
we share with other vertebrates other animals with backbones but
that are that we share these miraculous things but we can do some things in abundance
and we can also do some things with our brains together working together that other animals
can't do or at least we haven't discovered their ability to do it. Yeah this social thing how I
mean that's one of the things you write about what's how do you make sense of the fact uh
like the book sapiens and the fact that we're able to kind of connect like network our brains
together like you write about I'll try I'll try to stop saying that uh is that is that like some
kind of feature that's built into there is that unique to our human brains like how do you make
sense of that. What I would say is that our ability to coordinate with each other is not unique
um to humans there are lots of animals who can do that and we um but what we do with
that coordination is unique because of some of the structural features in our brains and
it's not that other animals don't have those structural features it's we have them in abundance
so you know the human brain is not larger than you would expect it to be for a primate of our
size if you took a chimpanzee and you grew it to the size of a human that chimpanzee would have
a brain that was the size of a human brain so there's nothing special about our brain in terms
of its size there's nothing special about our brain in terms of the the basic blueprint that
builds our brain from an embryo is the basic blueprint that builds all mammalian brains and
maybe even all vertebrate brains it's just that because of its size and particularly because
of the size of the cerebral cortex which is the um a part um that people mistakenly attribute to
rationality you know mistakenly is well where all the clever stuff happens well no it really
isn't and I will also say that lots of clever stuff happens in animals who don't have a cerebral
cortex but um but uh but because of the size of the cerebral cortex and because of some of the
features that are enhanced by that size that gives us the capacity to do things like build
civilizations um and coordinate with each other not just to manipulate the physical world but to
add to it in very profound ways like you know other animals can cooperate with each other and
use tools um we draw a line in the sand and we make countries and we even then we create you
know uh we create citizens and immigrants but also ideas I mean the countries are centered around
the concept of like ideas is well my well what do you think a citizen is and an immigrant those
are ideas those are ideas that we um impose on reality and make them real and then they have
very very serious and real effects physical effects on people what do you think about the idea
that a bunch of people have written about dolphins with memes which is like ideas are breeding like
we're just like the canvas for ideas to breed in our brains so this kind of network that you
talk about of brains is just a little canvas for ideas to then competing against each other and so
on I I think is a rhetorical tool it's cool to uh think you know think that way so um I think it
was Michael Pollan I don't remember it was in the botany of desire but it was in one of his early
books on um on botany and gardening where he uh wrote about um and he wrote about uh you know
plants sort of utilizing humans for their own you know evolutionary purposes which is kind of
interesting you can think about a human gut in a sense as a propagation device for the seeds of
you know tomatoes and what what have you so it's kind of cool um so I think I think rhetorically
it's an interesting device but you know ideas are as far as I know um invented by humans propagated
by humans um so you know I don't think they're separate from human brains in in any way although
it would it is interesting to to think about it that way well of course the ideas that are using
your brain to communicate and write excellent books uh and they basically picked you uh Lisa
as an effective communicator and and thereby are winning so that's an interesting worldview
to to think that there's particular aspects of your brain that are conducive to certain
sets of ideas and maybe those ideas will win out yeah I think the way that I would say it really
though is that there are many species of animals that influence each other's nervous systems that
regulate each other's nervous systems and they mainly do it by physical means they do it by
chemicals scent they do it by you know so so termites and ants and bees for example use chemical
scents mammals like um like rodents use scent and they also use hearing audition and that little
bit of vision um primates you know non-human primates add vision right um and um I think
everybody uses touch humans as far as I know are the only species that use ideas and words
to regulate each other right I can text something to someone halfway around the world
they don't have to hear my voice they don't have to see my face and I can have an effect on their
nervous system and ideas the ideas that we communicate with words I mean words are in a
sense a way for us to do mental telepathy with each other right I mean I'm not the first person to
say that obviously but how do I control your heart rate how do I control your breathing how
do I control your actions with words it's because those words are communicating ideas
so you also write I think let's go back to the brain you write that Plato gave us the idea
that the human brain has three brains in it three forces which is kind of a compelling notion
uh you disagree first of all what are the three parts of the brain and uh why do you disagree
so Plato's description of the psyche which for the moment we'll just assume is the same
as a mind there are some scholars who would say you know a soul a psyche a mind those aren't
actually all the same thing in ancient Greece but we'll just for now gloss over that so Plato's idea
was that and it was a it was a description of really about moral behavior and moral responsibility
in humans so the idea it was that you know the human psyche can be described with a
metaphor of two horses and a charioteer so one horse for instincts like feeding and fighting and
fleeing and uh reproduction i'm trying to control my salty language um which apparently they print
in england like i actually tossed off of which fs yeah ff yeah i was like you printed that i
couldn't believe you printed that without like the stars or whatever oh no no there was full print
yeah they also printed the a b word and it was really white yeah anyways we should we should we
should learn something from england indeed anyways but instincts and then the other horse represents
emotions uh and then the charioteer represents rationality which controls you know the two
beasts right and um fast forward you know a couple of centuries and uh in the middle of the 20th century
there was a very popular view of brain evolution which suggested that you have this
reptilian core like a lizard an inner lizard brain uh for instincts and then wrapped around
that evolved on layer on top of that evolved a limbic system for uh in mammals so the the novelty
was in a mammalian brain which uh bestowed mammals with gave them emotions the capacity
promotions and then um on top of that uh evolved uh a cerebral cortex um which in in largely in
primates but but very large in in humans um and it's not that i personally disagree it's that as
far back as the 1960s but really by the 1970s it was shown pretty clearly with evidence for
molecular genetics so peering into cells in the brain to look at the molecular makeup of genes
that the brain did not evolve that way and the irony is that um you know the the idea of the
the three-layered brain with an inner lizard you know that hijacks your uh hijacks your behavior
and causes you to do and say things that uh you would otherwise not or maybe that you will regret
later that idea um became very popular was popularized by uh Carl Sagan in the Dragons of Eden
which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 when it was already known pretty much in evolutionary
neuroscience that the whole uh narrative was a myth so well the narrative is on the the way it
evolved but do you i mean again it's that problem of uh it being a useful tool of conversation
to say like there's a lizard brain and there's a like if i get overly emotional on twitter
that was the lizard brain and so on uh but do you no i don't think it's useful i think it's a i
think that is it is it uh is it useful is it accurate i don't think it's accurate and therefore i
don't think it's useful got it so here's what i would say you know i think that um the way i think
about philosophy and science is that they are useful tools for living and in order to be useful
tools for living they have to help you make good decisions the triune brain as it's called this
this three-layer brain the idea that your brain is like an already baked cake and uh you know the
cortex cerebral cortex just layered on top like icing um the idea that idea is the foundation of
uh the law in most western countries it's the foundation of uh economic theory and it large
and it's a great narrative it sort of fits our intuitions about how we work but it also um
it's in addition to being wrong it lets people off the hook for uh for nasty behavior you know
um and it also suggests that emotions can't be a source of wisdom which they often are um in fact
you you would not want to be around someone who didn't have emotions that would be that's a psychopath
right i mean that's not someone you you know want to want to really uh have have that person
deciding your outcome so i guess my and i could sort of go on and on and on but my point is that
um i don't think i don't think it's a useful narrative in the end
what's the more accurate view of the brain that we should use when we're thinking about it
i'll answer that in a second but i'll say that even our notion of what an instinct is or what a
reflex is it's not quite right right so if you look at evidence from um ecology for example and you
look at animals in their ecological context what you can see is that even things which are reflexes
are very context sensitive um the the brains of those animals are executing so-called instinctual
actions in a very very context sensitive way and so you know even when a physician you know takes
the you know it's like the idea of your patellar uh reflex where they hit you know your patellar
tendon on your knee and you you kick the the force with which you kick and so on is influenced by
all kinds of things it's it's a reflex isn't like a robotic uh response and um so i think a
is a way that to think about how brains work is the way that um matches our best understanding
our best scientific understanding which i think is really cool uh because it's really counterintuitive
so how i came to this view and it's i'm certainly not the only one who holds this view i was reading
work in on neuroanatomy and the the view that i'm about to tell you was suggest strongly suggested
by that and then i was reading work in signal processing like by engineering electrical engineering
and similarly it the work suggested that that the the research suggested that the brain worked this
way and i'll just say that i was reading across multiple literatures and they were who don't speak
to each other and they were all pointing in this direction and so far although some of the details
are still up for grabs the general gist i think is i've not come across anything yet which really
violates and i'm looking um and so the idea is something like this it's very counterintuitive
so the way to describe it is to say that your brain doesn't react to things in the world it's
not it to us it feels like our eyes and our our windows on the world we see things we hear things
we we react to them um in psychology we call this stimulus response so um your face is
your voice is a stimulus to me i receive input and then i react to it uh and i might react very
automatically you know system one uh and uh oh but i also might execute some control where i maybe
stop myself from saying something or doing something and um more in a more reflective way
execute a different action right that system too the way the brain works though is it's predicting
all the time it's constantly talking to itself constantly uh talking to your body and and it's
constantly um predicting what's going on in the body and what's going on in the world and
making predictions and um the information from your body and from the world really
confirm or correct those predictions so fundamentally the thing that the brain does most of the time
is just predict like talking to itself and predicting stuff about the world not like
this dumb thing that just senses and responds senses and yeah so the way to the way to think
about it is like this you know your brain is uh trapped in a dark silent box yeah that's very
romantic of you um which is your skull and the only information that it receives
from your body and from the world right is through the senses through the sense organs
your eyes your ears and um you have a sense sensory data that comes from your body uh
that you're largely unaware of uh to your brain which we call interoceptive as opposed
to exteroceptive which is the world around you and but your brain is receiving sense data
continuously which are the effect of some set of causes your brain doesn't know the cause
of these sense data it's only receiving the effects of those causes which are the data
themselves and so your brain has to solve what philosophers call an inverse inference problem
how do you know when you only receive the effects of something how do you know what caused those
effects so when there's a flash of light or um a change in air pressure or uh tug somewhere in
your body how does your brain know what caused those events so that it knows what to do next
to keep you alive and well and the answer is that your brain has one other source of information
available to it which is your past experience it can reconstitute in its wiring um past experiences
and it can combine those past experiences in novel ways and so we have lots of names for this
in psychology we call it memory we call it perceptual inference we call it simulation um
uh it's also we call it concepts or conceptual knowledge we call it prediction basically if
we were to stop the world right now stop time your brain is in a state and it's representing
what it believes is going on in your body and in the world and it's predicting what will happen
next based on past experience right probabilistically what's most likely to happen and it begins to
to um prepare your action and it begins to prepare your the prepare your experience
based so it's anticipating the sense data it's going to receive and then when that those data
come in they either confirm that prediction and your action executes because the plan's already
been made or um it uh or there's some uh sense data that your brain didn't predict that's unexpected
and your brain takes it in we say encodes it we have a fancy name for that we call it learning
your brain learns and it updates its storehouse of knowledge which we call an internal model
and uh that you so that you can predict better next time and it turns out that
predicting and correcting predicting and correcting is a much more metabolically
efficient way to run a system than constantly reacting all the time because if you're constantly
reacting it means you have no you can't anticipate in any way what's going to happen
and so the the amount of uncertainty that you have to deal with is uh overwhelming to a nervous
system metabolically costly i like it and so what is a reflex a reflex is when your brain
doesn't check against the sense data that the potential cost to you is so great maybe because
you know your life is threatened that your brain makes the prediction and executes the action
without checking yeah so but prediction is still at the core that's a beautiful vision of the brain
i wonder from almost an ai perspective but just computationally is the brain just mostly a prediction
machine then like is the perception just the nice little feature added on top like the
both the the integration of new perceptual information i wonder how big of an impressive
system is that relative to just the big predictor model construct well i think that we can we can
look to evolution for that for one answer which is that when you go back you know 550 million years
give or take we you know the world was populated by creatures really ruled by creatures without
brains um and um you know that's a biological statement not a political statement really
rolled with calling dinosaurs dumb you're talking about like oh no i'm not talking about dinosaurs
honey i'm talking way back further back than that um really these they're these little little creatures
called umphioxis which is the modern it's a or a lancet that's the modern animal but it's an
animal that scientists believe is very similar to um our common the common ancestor that we share
with invertebrates um because uh basically because of the tracing back the molecular genetics and
cells and that animal had no brain it had some cells that would later turn into a brain but in
that animal there's no brain but that animal also had no head and it had no eyes and it had no ears
and it had really really no senses for the most part it had very very limited sense of touch
it had an eye spot for um not for seeing but just for um in training to circadian rhythm to
light and dark um and it had no hearing it had a vestibular cell so that it could keep upright in
the water at the time or prox we're talking evolutionary scale here so you know give or
take some hundred million years or something but at the time you know what are the vertebrate like
when a when a backbone evolved and a brain evolved a full brain that was when a head evolved with
sense with sense organs and when um that's when your viscera like internal systems involved so
the answer i would say is that um that senses nervous motor neuroscientists people who study
the control of motor behavior believe that um senses evolved in the service of motor action
so the idea is that like what triggered the what triggered what was what was the big evolutionary
change what was the big pressure uh that made it useful to have eyes and ears and a visual system
and an auditory system and a brain basically and you know and the answer that um is you know
commonly entertained right now is that it was predation that when at some point an animal
evolved that deliberately ate another animal and this launched an arms race between predators
and prey and it became very useful to have senses right so these these little amphiox these little
amphioxy it you know don't really have they they don't have an they're not aware of their
environment very much really they um uh and so being able to look up ahead and you know ask
yourself you know is that you know should i eat that or will it eat me um is is a very useful thing
so the idea um is that sense sense sense data is not there for consciousness it's didn't evolve
for the purposes of consciousness it didn't evolve for the purposes of experiencing anything
it evolved uh in the to be in the service of motor control however maybe it's useful
um this is why you know scientists sometimes avoid questions about why things evolved that
this is what philosophers call this teleology you might be able to say something about how
things evolve but not necessarily why we don't really know the why that's all speculation
but the why is kind of nice here this the interesting thing is uh that was the first
element of social interaction is am i going to eat you or are you going to eat me and for that
it's useful to be able to see each other sense each other uh that's kind of fascinating that
there was a time when life didn't eat each other or they did by accident right so an
amphiox is for example well um it kind of like gyrates in the water and then it plants itself
in the sand like a blade of like a living blade of grass and then it just filters
whatever comes into its mouth right so it is it is eating but it's not actively hunting hunting
and when um the concentration of food decreases it the amphyoxys can sense this and so it
basically wriggles itself randomly to some other spot which probabilistically will have more food
than wherever it is so it's not really you know it's not guiding its actions um on the basis of
it's not we would say there is no real intentional action um in that in that in the traditional sense
speaking of intentional action and if the brain is put if prediction is indeed a core component
of the brain let me ask you a question that scientists also hate is uh about free will
so how does uh do you think about free will much how does that fit into this into your view of the
brain why does it feel like we make decisions in this world this is a hard we scientists hate this
because it's a hard it's a hard question we don't know the answer to you taking a side
I think I have free will I think I have taken a side but it I don't put a lot of stock in
my own intuitions or anybody's intuitions about the cause of things right our one thing we know
about the brain for sure is that the brain creates experiences for us are my brain creates
experiences for me your brain creates experiences for you in a way that lures you to believe that
those experiences actually reveals the way that it works but it doesn't so the so you don't trust
your own intuition about not really well not really no I mean no but but I am also somewhat
persuaded by you know I think Dan Dennett wrote at at one point like um uh you know the philosopher
Dan Dennett wrote at one point that um it it's I can't say it as eloquently as him but it people
obviously have free will they are obviously making choices so it's you know and so there
is this observation that we're not robots and we can do some things like a little more sophisticated
than an amphyoxys so um so here's what I would say I would say that your predictions your internal
model that's running right now right that your ability to understand the sounds that I'm making
and attach them to ideas is based on the fact that you have years of experience knowing what
these sounds mean in a particular statistical uh pattern right I mean that's how you can understand
the words that are coming out of my mouth right I think we did this once before too didn't we
when we were I don't know I would have to access my memory module I think when I was in your class
yeah I think we did it just like that actually so bravo wow yeah I have to go look look back to the
tape yeah anyways the um the idea though is that your brain is using past experience and it can
and it can use past experience in um so it's remembering but you're not consciously remembering
it's basically re implementing prior experiences as a way of predicting what's going to happen next
and it can do something called conceptual combination which is it can take bits and pieces
of the past and combine it in new ways so you can experience and make sense of
things that you've never encountered before because you've encountered something similar to them
um and so a brain in a sense is not um just um doesn't just contain information it is information
gaining meaning it can create it new information by this generative process so in a sense you
could say well that maybe that's that's a source of free will but I think really where free will
comes from or the kind of free will that I think is worth having a conversation about is um involves
cultivating experiences for yourself that change your internal model when you were born and you
were raised in a particular context that your model your brain wired itself to your surroundings
to your physical surroundings and also to your social surroundings so you were handed an internal
model basically um but uh when you grow up the more control you have over your where you are
and what you do um you can cultivate new experiences for yourself and those new experiences
um can change your internal model and you can actually um practice those experiences
in a way that makes them automatic make meaning it makes it easier for the brain your brain to
make them again and I think that that is something like what you would call free will you aren't
responsible for the model that you were handed that someone you know your your caregivers uh
cultivated a model in your brain you're not responsible for that model but you are responsible
for the one you have now you can choose you choose what you expose yourself to you choose
how you spend your time not everybody has choice over everything but everybody has a little bit
of choice um and and so I think that is uh something that I think is arguably called free will
yeah there's this like the the ripple effects of the billions of decisions you make early on in life
have are so great that uh even if it's not even if it's like all deterministic
like just the amount of possibilities that are created and then the focusing on those
possibilities into a single trajectory uh that somewhere within that that's free will even if
it's all deterministic that might as well be uh just the number of choices that are possible and
the fact that you just make one trajectory through a set of choices seems to be like
like something like they'll be called free will but it's still kind of sad to think like
there doesn't seem to be a place where there's magic in there where it is all just the computer
well there's lots of magic I would say so far because we don't really understand uh how all
of this is exactly played out at a uh I mean scientists are working hard and disagree about
some of the details under the hood of what I just described but I think there's quite a bit of magic
actually and also there's there's also um stochastic firing of neurons don't they they're not purely
digital in the sense that there is there's also analog communication between neurons not just
digital so it's not just with not just with firing of axons and some of that uh they there's there
are other ways to communicate and also um uh there's noise in the system and the noise is there
for a really good reason and that is the more variability there is the more potential there
is for your brain to be able to be information bearing so um basically you know there are
some animals that have clusters of cells the only job is to inject noise uh you know into
their um neural patterns so maybe noise is the source of free will so you can think about you
can think about stochasticity or noise as as a source of free will or you can think of of um
conceptual combination as a source of free will you can certainly think about um cultivating uh
you know you can't reach back into your past and change your past you know people try by
psychotherapy and so on but what you can do is change your present um which becomes your past
well let me think about that sentence so one way to think about it is that you're continuously
this is a colleague of mine a friend of mine said so what you're saying is that people are continually
cultivating their past and I was like that's very poetic yes you are continually cultivating your
past as a means of controlling your future so you think uh yeah I guess the the construction
of the mental model that you use for prediction ultimately contains within it your perception
of the past like the way you interpret the past or even just the entirety of your narrative about
the past so you're constantly rewriting the story of your past oh boy yeah that's one poetic and
also just awe inspiring what about the other thing you talk about you've mentioned about
sensory perception as a thing that like is just you have to infer about the sources of the thing
that you have perceived through your senses so uh let me ask the another ridiculous question is
anything real at all like how do we know it's real how do we make sense of the fact that
just like you said there's this brain sitting alone in the darkness trying to perceive the world
how do we know that the world is out there to be perceived yeah so I don't think that you should be
asking questions like that without passing a joint right no for sure yeah I actually did
before this so I apologize okay no well that's okay for you apologize for not sharing that's okay
so I mean here's what I would say what I would say is that the reason why we can be pretty sure
that there's a there there is that the the structure of the information in the world
what we call statistical regularities in sights and sounds and so on and the structure of the
information that comes from your body it's not random stuff there's a structure to it there's a
spatial structure and a temporal structure and that spatial and temporal structure wires your brain
so an infant brain is not a miniature adult brain it's a brain that is waiting for wiring
instructions from the world and it must receive those wiring instructions to develop in a typical
way so for example when a newborn is born when a newborn is born when a when a baby is born
that baby can't see very well because the visual system in that baby's brain is not complete
the the retina of your eye which actually is part of your brain has to be stimulated with
photons of light if it's not the baby won't develop normally the to be able to see in a
in a neurotypical way same thing is true for hearing the same thing is true really for all
your senses so the point is that um that the physical world the sense data from the physical
world wires your brain so that you have an internal model of that world so that your
brain can predict well to keep you alive and well and allow you to thrive that's fascinating that
the brain is waiting for a very specific kind of set of instructions from the world like not
not the specific but a very specific kind of instructions so you scientists call it
expectable input the brain needs some input in order to develop normally and so we're and we are
genetically you know we as I say in the book we have the kind of nature that requires nurture
we can't develop normally without sense input sensory input from the world and from the body
and what's really interesting about humans and some other animals too but really seriously in
humans is the input that we need is not just physical it's also social we in order for an
an an infant a human infant to develop normally that infant needs eye contact touch it needs
certain types of smells it needs to be cuddled it needs right so without social input the brain
it's that that infant's brain will not wire itself in a neurotypical way and again I would say
there are lots of cultural patterns of caring for an infant it's not like the infant has to be
cared for in one way whatever the social environment is for an infant that it will will be reflected
in that infant's internal model so we have lots of different cultures lots of different ways of
rearing children and that's an advantage for our species although we don't always experience it that
way that is an advantage for our species but if you if you just you know feed and water a baby
without all the extra social doodads what you get is a profoundly impaired human yeah but
nevertheless you're kind of saying that the physical reality has a has a consistent
thing throughout that keeps feeding these set of sensory information that our brains are constructed
for but yeah the cool thing though is that if you change the consistency if you change the
statistical regularities so prediction error your brain can learn it it's expensive for your brain
to learn it and it takes a while to for the brain to get really automated with it but
you know you had a wonderful conversation with David Eulman who just published a book about this
and gave lots and lots of really very very cool examples some of which I actually discussed in
how emotions were made but not obviously to the extent that he did in his book which is
it's a fascinating book and it's but it speaks to the point that your internal model is always
under construction and therefore you always can modify your experience. I wonder what the limits
are like if again if we put it on Mars or if we put in virtual reality or if we sit at home during
a pandemic and we spend most of our day on Twitter and TikTok like I wonder what were the
breaking point like the limitations of the brain's capacity to to properly continue wiring itself.
Well I think what I would say is that there are different ways to specify your question right like
one way to specify it would be the way that David phrases it which is can we can we create a new
sense like can we create a new sensory modality how hard would that be what are the limits in doing
that and but another way to say it is what what happens to a brain when you remove some of those
statistical regularities right like what happens to a brain what happens to an adult brain when you
remove some of the statistical patterns that were there and they're not there anymore.
Are you talking about in the environment or in the actual like you remove eyesight for example
or did you. Well either way I mean basically one way to limit the inputs to your brain are to stay
home and protect yourself. I see yeah. Another way is to put someone in solitary confinement
another way is to stick them in a nursing home another well not all nursing homes but you know
but there are some right which really are where people are somewhat impoverished in the interactions
that end the sensory the variety of sensory stimulation that they get another way is that
you lose a sense right but the point is I think that you know the human brain really likes variety
to say it in a you know like a you know sort of Cartesian way you know variety is a good thing
for a brain and there are risks that you take when you restrict what you expose yourself to.
Yeah you know there's always talk of diversity the brain loves it to the fullest definition
and degree of diversity. Yeah I mean I would say the only thing basically human brains thrive on
diversity the only place where we seem to have difficulty with diversity is with each other.
Yeah right but we who wants to eat the same food every day you never would who wants to
wear the same clothes every day I mean my husband if you ask him to close his eyes he won't be able
to tell you what he's wearing he just right healed by seven shirts of exactly the same style in
different colors but they are in different colors right it's not like he's right. How would you then
explain my brain which is terrified of choice and therefore I wear the same thing every time.
Well you must be getting your diversity. Well first of all you are a fairly sharp dresser so
there is that but so you're getting some reinforcement for the best of the way to do
but well your brain must get diversity in other places but I think we you know
so there are the two most expensive things your brain can do metabolically speaking
is move your body and learn something new so novelty that is diversity right comes at a
cost a metabolic cost but it's a cost it's an investment that that gives returns and in general
people vary in how much they like novelty unexpected things some people really like it some people
really don't like it and there's everybody in between but in general we don't eat the same
thing every day we don't usually do exactly the same thing in exactly the same order in exactly
the same place every day. The only place we have difficulty with diversity is in each other
and then we have considerable problems there I would say as a species.
Let me ask I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman's work about this questions of
reality what are your thoughts of the possibility that the very thing we've been talking about
about of the brain wiring itself from birth to a particular set of inputs is just a little
slice of reality that there is something much bigger out there that we humans with our cognition
cognitive capabilities is just not even perceiving that the thing we're perceiving is just the
crappy like windows 95 interface onto a much bigger richer set of complex physics that
we're not even in touch with. Well without getting too metaphysical about it I think we know for
sure it doesn't have to be the you know crappy version of anything but we definitely have a
limited we have we have a set of senses that are limited in very physical ways and we're clearly
not perceiving everything there is to perceive that's clear I mean it's just it's not that hard we
can't without special why do we invent scientific tools it's so that we can overcome our senses
and and experience things that we couldn't otherwise whether they are you know different
parts of the visual spectrum you know the light spectrum or things that are too
microscopically small for us to see or too far away for us to see so clearly we're only getting
a slice and that slice you know the interesting or potentially sad thing about humans is that we
whatever we experience we think there's a natural reason for experiencing it
and we think it's obvious and natural and it must be this way and that all the other stuff
isn't important and that's clearly not true many of the things that we think of as natural are
anything but we've they're certainly real but we've created them they certainly have very
real impacts but we've created those impacts and we also know that there are many things outside
of our awareness that have a have tremendous influence on what we experience and what we do
so there's no question that that's true I mean just it's it's um but but the extent is how
fantastic you know really the question is how fantastical is it yeah like what you know a lot
of people ask me I'm not allowed to say this I think I'm allowed to say this I've eaten shrooms
a couple times but I haven't gone the full I'm talking to a few researchers in psychedelics
it's an interesting scientifically place like what is the portal you're entering when you take
psychedelics or another would ask us like dreams what are so let me tell you what I think which
is based on nothing like right so I don't your intuition it's based on my it's based on my
I'm guessing now um based on what I do know I would say but I think that well think about
what happens so you're running your brain's running this internal model and it's all
outside of your awareness for you see the you feel the products but you don't you don't sense the
you have no awareness of the mechanics of it right it's going on all the time
um and so one thing that's going on all the time that you're completely unaware of
is that um when your brain your brain is basically asking itself figuratively speaking not literally
right like how is the scent give it the last time I was in this sensory array with this stuff going
on in my body and I and that this chain of events which just occurred what did I do next what did
I feel next what did I see next and so it doesn't come up with one answer it comes up with a distribution
of it possible answers and then there has to be some selection process and so you have a network
in your brain a sub network in your brain a population of neurons that helps to choose
it's not I'm not talking about a homunculus in your brain or anything silly like that
um uh this is not the soul it's not the center of yourself or anything like that but there is
um it um a set of neurons that weighs the probabilities um um and and helps to select
uh nor narrow the field okay and that that network is working all the time it's actually
called the control network the executive control network or you can call it a frontal parietal
because the regions of the brain that make it up or in the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe
there are also parts that belong to the subcortical parts of your brain it doesn't really matter the
point is that that there is this network and it is working all the time whether or not you feel in
control whether or not you feel like your expending effort doesn't really matter it's on all the time
except when you sleep when you sleep it's it's a little bit relaxed and so think about what's
happening when you sleep when you sleep the external world recedes the sense data from so
basically your model becomes a little bit the tethers from the world are loosened
and this network which is involved in you know maybe weeding out unrealistic things
is a little bit quiet so use your dreams are really your internal model that's unconstrained
by the immediate world except so you can do things that you can't do in real life
in your dreams right you can fly like i for example when i fly on my back in a dream i'm much faster
than when i fly on my front don't ask me why i don't know when you're laying on your back in
your dream no when i'm in my dream and flying in a dream i am much faster flyer in the air
often you talk about it like you i don't think i've flown for many years well you must try it
i've i've uh flown i've fallen that's scary yeah but you've flown you're talking about like
yeah i fly i fly in my dreams and i'm way faster right on your back on my back way faster um
now you can say well you know you never flew in your life right it's conceptual combination
i mean i've flown in an airplane and i've seen birds fly and i've watched movies of people flying
and i know superman probably flies i don't know if he flies faster on his back but
he's voices he's i've never seen flying on his front right but yeah but anyways my point is that
you know all of this stuff really um all these experiences really become part of your internal
model the thing is that when you're asleep your internal mall is still being constrained by your
body your your brain's always attached to your body it's always receiving sense data from your
body you're mostly never aware of it uh unless you run up the stairs uh or you know uh maybe you
um are ill in some way but you're mostly not aware of it which is a really good thing because if you
were you know you'd never pay attention to anything outside your own skin ever again like right now
you seem like you're sitting there very calmly but you have a a virtual whole thing drama right
it's like a like a like an opera going on inside your body and so i think that one of the things
that happens when people um take psilocybin or take uh you know catamine for example is that
the tethers are completely removed yeah yeah that's fascinating and then and and that's why
it's helpful to have a guide right because the guide is giving you sense data to steer that
internal model so that it doesn't go completely off the rails yeah another so again that wiring to
the other brain that's the guide is at least a tiny little tether exactly yeah let's talk about
emotion a little bit if we could emotion comes up often and i have never spoken with anybody who um
who has a clarity about emotion from a biological and neuroscience perspective that you do and i'm
not sure i fully know how to as a as a i mentioned this way too much but as somebody who is born in
the soviet union and romanticizes basically everything talks about love non-stop you know
emotion is a i don't know what to make of it i don't know what so maybe uh let's just try to
talk about it i mean from a neuroscience perspective we talked about a little bit last time your book
covers it how emotions are made but what are some misconceptions we writers of poetry we
romanticizing humans have about emotion that we should uh move away from before to think about
emotion from both a scientific and an engineering perspective yeah so there is a common view of
emotion in the west the caricature of that view is that um you know we have an inner beast
right your delimic system your your inner lizard um we have an inner beast and that comes baked in
to the brain at birth so you've got circuits for anger, sadness, fear it's interesting that they
all have English names these circuits but um that and they're there and they're triggered by
things in the world and um then they cause you to do and say and you know so when your fear
circuit is triggered you widen your eyes you um gasp your uh your heart rate goes up you prepare
to flee or um uh to freeze um and these are these are modal responses they're not the only responses
that you give but on average they're the prototypical responses that's the view and um that's the view
that's the view of emotion in the law that's the view um you know that emotions are these profoundly
unhelpful things that are obligatory kind of like reflexes um the problem with that view
is that it doesn't comport to the evidence um and it doesn't really matter the evidence actually
lines up beautifully with each other it just doesn't line up with that view and it doesn't matter
whether you're measuring people's faces, facial movements or you're measuring their body movements
or you're measuring their peripheral physiology or you're measuring their brains or their voices
or whatever pick any any um output that you want to measure and you know any system you want to
measure and you don't really find strong evidence for this and I say this as somebody who who not
only has reviewed really thousands of articles and run you know big meta analyses which are
statistical summaries of published papers but also as someone who has sent teams of researchers to
small-scale cultures you know remote cultures which are very different from urban large-scale
cultures like ours and one culture that we visited and I say we euphemistically because
I I myself didn't go because I only had two research permits and I gave them to my students
because I felt like it was better for them to have that experience and more formative for them to
have that experience but I was in contact with them every day by satellite phone and um this was
to visit the HADSA hunter-gatherers in Tanzania who are not um an ancient people they're a modern
culture but they live in circumstances hunting and foraging circumstances that um are very similar
in similar conditions to our ancestors hunting gathering ancestors when expressions of emotion
were supposed to have evolved at least by one view of okay so you know for many years I was sort
of struggling with um this set of observations right which is that I feel emotion and I see
I perceive emotion in other people but scientists can't find a single marker a single biomarker
not a single individual measure or pattern of measures that will can predict how someone
what kind of emotional state they're in how could that possibly be how can you possibly
make sense of those two things and through a lot of reading and a lot of and immersing myself in
different literatures I came to the hypothesis that the brain is constructing these instances
out of more basic ingredients so when I tell you that the brain when I suggest to you that
what your brain is doing is making a prediction and it's asking itself figuratively speaking
the last time I was in this situation and this you know physical state what did I do next what
did I see next what did I hear next it's basically asking what in my past is similar to the present
things which are similar to one another are called a category
a group of things which are similar to one another is a category and a mental representation
of a category is a concept so your brain is constructing categories or concepts on the fly
continuously so you really want to understand what a brain is doing you don't using machine
learning like classification models is not going to help you because the brain doesn't classify
it's doing category construction and the categories change right or you could say it's doing concept
construction it's using past experience to conjure a concept which is a prediction
and if it's using past experiences of emotion then it's constructing an emotion concept
your concept will be the content of it is changes depending on the situation that you're in so for
example if your brain uses past experiences of anger that you have learned either because somebody
labeled them for you taught them to you you observed them in movies and so on
and in one situation could be very different from your concept of for anger than another situation
and this is how anger instances of anger are what we call a population of variable instances
sometimes when you're angry you scowl sometimes when you're angry you might smile
sometimes when you're angry you might cry sometimes your heart rate will go up it will go down
it will stay the same it depends on what action you're about to take because the way prediction
and I should say the idea that physiology is yoked to action is a very old idea in in the study
of the peripheral nervous system that's been known for really decades and so if you look at what the
brain is doing if you just look at the anatomy and you what here's the hypothesis that you would
that you would come up with and I can go into the details I've published these details in
in scientific papers and they also appear somewhat in how emotions are made my first book they are
not in the you know seven and a half lessons because that book is is really not pitched at that
level of explanation right it's just giving it's really just a set of little essays but the evidence
but what I'm about to say is actually based on on on scientific evidence when your brain begins to
make form a prediction the first thing it's doing is it's making a prediction of how to change the
internal systems of your body your heart your cardiovascular system the control of your heart
control of your lungs right a flush of cortisol which is not a stress hormone it's a hormone that
gets glucose into your bloodstream very fast because your brain is predicting you need to do
something metabolically expensive and so so either that means either move or learn okay and so your
brain is preparing your body the internal systems of your body to execute some actions to move in
some way and the and then it infers based on those motor predictions and what we call viscera
motor predictions meaning the the the changes in the viscera that your brain is preparing to to
execute your brain makes an inference about what you will sense based on those motor movements
so your experience of the world and your experience of your own body
are a consequence of those predictions those concepts when your brain makes a concept for
emotion it's constructing an instance of that emotion and that is how emotions are made
and those concepts load in the predictions that are made include contents inside the body
contents outside the body and it includes other humans so just this construction of a concept
includes the variables that are much richer than just some sort of simple notion
yeah so our colloquial notion of a concept where you know where I say well what's a
concept of a bird and then you list a set of features off to me that's that's people's
understanding you know typically of what a concept is but if you go into the literature in cognitive
science what you'll see is that the way that scientists have understood what a concept is
has really changed over the years so people used to think about a concept as philosophers and
scientists used to think about a concept as a dictionary definition for a category so there's
a set of things which are similar out in the world and your concept for that category is a
dictionary definition of the features the necessary insufficient features of that of those instances so
for a bird you know it would be wings feathers right a beak it flies whatever okay that's called
the classical category and scientists discovered observed that actually not all instances of birds
have feathers and not all instances of birds fly and so the idea was that you don't have a single
representation of necessary insufficient features stored in your brain somewhere instead what you
have is a prototype a prototype meaning you still have a single representation for the category one
but the features are like of the most typical instance of the category or maybe the most
frequent instance but not all instances of the category have all the features right they have
some graded similarity to the prototype and then you know what I'm gonna like incredibly simplify
now a lot of work to say that then a series of experiments were done to show that in fact
what your brain seems to be doing is coming up with a single
example or instance of the category and reading off the features when I ask you for the concept so
if we were in a pet store and I asked you what are the features of a bird tell me the concept of
bird you would be more likely to give me features of a good pet and if we were in a restaurant
you would be more likely you know like a budgie right or a canary if we were in a restaurant
you would be more likely to give me the features of a bird that you would eat like a chicken and
if we were in a park you'd be more likely to give me in this country you know the features of a
sparrow or a robin whereas if we were in South America you would probably give me the features
of a peacock because that's more common or it's or it is more common there than here that you
would see a peacock in such circumstances so the idea was that really what your brain was doing
was conjuring a concept on the fly that meets the function that the category is being put to
you okay yeah okay then people started studying ad hoc concepts meaning
concepts that where the instances don't share any physical features but the function of the
instances are the same so for example think about all the things that can protect you from the rain
what are all the things that can protect you from the rain uh umbrella
like this apartment right um your car not giving a damn
like like a like a mindset yeah right right so the idea is that the function of the instances
is the same in a given situation even if they look different sound different smell different
this is called an abstract concept or a conceptual concept yeah now the really cool thing about
conceptual categories or conceptual concept or yes conceptual category or conceptual
as a category of things that are held together by a function which is called an abstract concept or
a conceptual category because the things don't share physical features they share functional
features there are two really cool things about this one is that's what Darwin said a species was
so Darwin is known for discovering natural selection but the other thing he really did
which was really profound which he's less celebrated for is understanding that all biological
categories have inherent variation inherent variation Darwin wrote in the origin of species
about before Darwin's book a species was thought to be a classical category where all the instances
of dogs were the same had the exactly same features and any variation from that uh perfect
platonic uh instance was considered to be error and Darwin said no it's not error it's meaningful
nature selects on the basis of that variation the reason why natural selection is is powerful
and can exist is because there is variation in a species and in dogs we talk about that variation
in terms of the size of the dog and the amount of fur the dog has and the color and the how
long is the tail and how long is the snout in humans we talk about that variation in all
kinds of ways right including in cultural ways so that's one thing that's really interesting
about conceptual categories is that Darwin was basically saying a species is a conceptual category
and in fact if you look at modern debates about what is a species you can't find anybody agreeing
on what the criteria are for a species because they don't all share the same genome we don't
all share we don't there isn't a single human genome there's a population of genomes but
they're variable it's not unbounded variation but they are variable right and the other thing
that's really cool about um conceptual categories is that um they are the categories that we use
to make civilization so think about money for example what are all the physical things that
make something a currency is there any physical feature that all the currencies in all the
worlds that's ever been used by humans share well certainly right but but what what is it
is it definable so it's getting to the point that you make this function there it's the function
right it's that we trade it for material goods and that and we have to agree right we all impose
on whatever it is salt barley little shells big rocks in the ocean that can't move bitcoin pieces
of plastic mortgages which are basically a promise of something in the future nothing more
or right all of these things we impose value on them and we all agree that we can exchange them
for material goods yeah and uh yes that's brilliant by the way you're attributing some of that to
darwin that he thought no i'm no i'm saying that what is a brilliant view of what a species is
is the function yeah what i'm saying is that what darwin darwin really talked about variation
in um so if you read for example the biologist Ernst Mayer who was an evolutionary biologist
and then when he retired became a historian and philosopher of biology and his suggestion is
that darwin did talk about variation he vanquished what's called essentialism the idea that there's
a single set of features that define any species and um out of that grew um really discussions of
the function you know like some of the functional features that species have like they can reproduce
off they can have offspring the individuals of a species can have offspring well turns out
that's not a perfect uh you know that's not a perfect uh criterion to use but it's a functional
criterion right so what i'm saying is that in cognitive science people came up with the idea
they discovered the idea of conceptual categories or ad hoc concepts these concepts that can change
based on the function they're serving right and um uh that it's there darwin it's in darwin and it's
also in the philosophy of social reality you can the way that philosophers talk about social
reality just look around you i mean we impose we're treating a bunch of things as similar which
are physically different and sometimes we take things that are physically the same and we treat
them as separate categories but it feels like the number of variables involved in that kind of
categorization is nearly infinite and that's no i don't think so because there is a physical
constraint right like you and i could agree that um we can fly in real life but we can't
that's a physical that's a physical constraint that we can't break right you and i could agree
that we could walk through the walls but we can't we could agree that we could eat glass but there's
a lot of constraint but yeah we could agree that the virus doesn't exist and we don't have to wear
masks right yeah but you know physical reality still holds the trump card right but still there's a
lot of hard well pun unintended pun completely unintended but there you go that's a predicting
brain for you um uh but but there is a tremendous amount of leeway yes yeah that's the point so
i what i'm saying is that emotions are like money basically they're they're like money they're like
countries they're like um kings and queens and presidents they're like everything that we construct
that we impose meaning on we take these physical signals and we give them meanings that um they
don't otherwise have by their physical nature and because we agree yeah they have that function but
that's the beautiful thing so maybe unlike money i love this similarity is it it's not obvious to me
that this kind of emergent agreement should happen with emotion because our experiences
are so different for each of us humans and yet we kind of converge well in a culture we converge
but not across cultures there are huge huge differences there are huge differences in what
category what concepts exist what they're um what they look like um so what i would say is that um
they feel like what what we're doing with our young children as we uh as their brains become
wired to their physical and their social environment right is that we are curating for them we are
bootstrapping into their brains a set of emotion uh concepts that's partly what they're learning
and we curate those for infants just the way we curate for them what is a dog what is a cat what
is a truck we sometimes explicitly label and we sometimes just use mental words um when you know
your kid is you know throwing Cheerios on the floor instead of eating them or your kid is crying
when you know she won't put herself to sleep or whatever you know we use mental words and um
a word is this words with for infants words are these really special things that they
help infants learn abstract categories there's a huge literature showing that children can take
things that don't look infants like infants really young infants both preverbal infants
can take if you label if i say to you and you're an infant okay so i say lex lexie this
is a bling yeah and i put it down and the bling makes a squeaky noise and then i say i'm excited
by this this is a bling and i put it down and it makes a squeaky noise and then i say lexie this
is a bling you as young as four months old will expect this to make a noise yeah a squeaky noise
and if you don't if it doesn't you'll be surprised because it violated your expectation right
i'm building for you an internal model of a bling yeah okay infants can do this really really at
a young age and so there's no reason to believe that they couldn't learn emotion categories and
concepts in the same way and in in one and what happens when you go to a new culture when you go
to a new culture you have to do what's called emotion acculturation so my colleague bacha meskita
in belgium studies emotion acculturation she studies how when people move from one culture to another
how do they learn the emotion concepts of that culture how do they learn to make sense of their
own internal sensations and also the movements you know the rays of an eyebrow the tilt of a head
how do they learn to make sense of cues from other people using concepts they don't have
but have to make on the fly so there's the difference in cultures let me open another door
i'm not sure i want to open but uh difference between men and women is there um difference
between the emotional lives of those two categories of biological systems so here's
what i would say you know we did a series of studies um uh in the 1990s where we asked men and
women to tell us about their emotional lives and women describe themselves as much more emotional
than men they believe that they were more emotional men and men agreed women are much more emotional
than men okay okay and then we gave them little handheld computers these were little Hewlett Packard
computers they fit in the palm of your hand couple of pants they weighed a couple of pounds so this
was like pre palm pilot even like this was you know 1990s and like early and um we um asked them we
would you know ping them like 10 times a day and just ask them to report how they were feeling
which is called experience sampling so we experienced sampled and um and then at the end
and then we looked at their reports and what we found is that men and women basically didn't
differ and there were some people who were really had many more instances of emotion so they were
you know um they were treading uh water in a tumultuous sea of emotion and then there were
other people who were like floating tranquilly you know in a lake of it was really not perturbed
very often and and everyone in between but there were no difference between men and women and the
really interesting thing is at the end of the sampling period we asked people um so reflect
over the past two weeks and tell it so you know we've been now pinging people like again and again
and again right so tell us how how emotional do you think you are no change from the beginning
so men and women believe that they are they believe that they are different and when they
are looking at other people they make different inferences about emotion if a man if a man is
scowling like if you and I were together and some so somebody's watching this okay and um yeah hey
whoever's saying hey yeah hi um by the way people love it when you look at the camera um
if you and I make exactly the same set of facial movements
when people look at you both men and women look at you they are more likely to think
oh he's reacting to the situation and when they look at me they'll say oh she's having an emotion
she's you know yeah and I wrote about this actually um uh right before the 2016 election
you know what maybe I could confess let me try to carefully confess but you are really gonna
yeah that I'm that when I that there is an element when I see Hillary Clinton
that there was something annoying about her to me and I just that feeling and then I tried to
reduce that to what what is that because I think the same attributes that are annoying about her
when I see in other people wouldn't be annoying so I was trying to understand
what is it because it certainly does feel like that concept that I've constructed in my mind
well I'll tell you that I think well let me just say that um that that what you would predict about
for example the performance of the two of them in the debates and I wrote an op-ed for the New
York Times actually um before the second debate and it played out really pretty much as I thought
that it would based on research it's not like I'm like a great fortune teller or anything it's just
I was just applying the research which was that when a woman um a woman's um people make internal
attributions it's called they they infer that the facial movements and body posture and vocalizations
of a woman reflect her interstate but for men they're more likely to assume that they reflect
his response to the situation it doesn't say anything about him it says something about the
situation he's in that's brilliant now for the thing that you are that you were describing about
Hilary Clinton um I think a lot of people experienced but it's also in line with research which shows
and and particularly research actually on um in about teaching evaluations is one place that you
really see it where the expectation is that a woman will be nurturant and that a man there's
just no expectation for him to be nurtured so he's you know if he is nurtured he gets points
if he's not he gets points they're just different points right whereas for a woman
especially a woman who's an authority figure she's really in a catch 22 right because if she's
serious she's a bitch and if she's empathic then she's weak right that's brilliant I mean one of
the bigger questions to ask here so that's one example where our construction of concepts gets
right but remember but so but remember I said science is a science and philosophy or like tools
for living so I learned recently that if you ask me what is my intuition about what regulates my
eating I will say carbohydrates I love carbohydrates I love pasta I love bread I love I just love
carbohydrates but actually research shows and it's beautiful research I love this research
because it so violates my own like deeply deeply held beliefs about myself that most animals on
this planet who have been studied and there are many actually eat to regulate their protein intake
so you will overeat carbohydrates if you in order to get enough protein and these
research this research has been done with human very beautiful research with humans with crickets
with like you know bonobos I mean just like all these different animals not bonobos but I think
like baboons um now that I have no intuition about that and I even now as I regulate my eating
I don't I still I just have no intuition it just I can't I can't feel it what I feel is
only about the carbohydrates it feels like you're regulating around carbohydrates not the protein
yeah but in fact actually what I am doing if I am like most animals on the planet I am regulating
around protein so knowing this what do I do I correct my behavior to eat to actually deliberately
try to focus on the protein that this is the idea behind bias training right like if you
um I also did not experience Hillary Clinton as the warmest candidate however you can use
consistent science since the consistent scientific findings to organize your behavior
that doesn't mean that rationality is the absence of emotion because sometimes emotion
or sent any feelings in general not the same thing as emotion um that's another topic um but
you know our our source of of information and their wisdom and helpful so I'm not saying that
but what I am saying is that if you have a deeply held belief and the evidence shows that you're
wrong then you're wrong it doesn't really matter how confident you feel you that confidence could
be also explained by science right so it would be the same thing as if I regardless of whether
someone is a republic Charlie Baker right regardless of whether somebody's a republican
or a democrat if that person has a record that you can see is consistent with what you believe
then that is information that you can act on yeah and and then so try to I mean this is kind of
what empathy is in open-mindedness is try to um consider that the set of concepts that your
your brain has constructed through which you are now perceiving the world is not painting the full
picture I mean this is now true for basically every it doesn't have to be men and women it could be
basically the prism through which we perceive actually the political discourse right
absolutely so so here's what I would say um the you know there are people who scientists who will
talk to you about cognitive empathy and emotional empathy and I I prefer to think of it I think the
evidence is more consistent with what I'm about to say which is that your brain is always making
predictions using your your own past experience and what you've learned from you know books and
movies and other people telling you about their experiences and so on and if your brain cannot
make a concept to make sense of those anticipate what those sense data are and make sense of them
you will be experientially blind so you know when I'm giving lectures to people I'll show them
like a blobby black and white image and they're experientially blind to the image they can't
see anything in it and then I show them a photograph and then I show them the image again the blobby
image and then they see actually an object in it but the but the image is the same yeah it's there
they're actually adding their predictions now are adding right or it's a beautiful example anybody
who's learned a language a second language after their first language also has this experience of
things that initially sound like sounds that they can't quite make sense of eventually come to make
they eventually come to make sense of them and in fact there are really cool examples
of people who were like born blind because they have cataracts or they have corneal damage so that
no light is reaching the brain and then they have an operation and then light reaches the brain
and they can't see for days and weeks and sometimes years they have they are experientially blind to
certain things so what happens with empathy right is that your brain is making a prediction
and if it doesn't if it doesn't have the capacity to make if it doesn't if you don't share if you're
not similar remember you mean you know categories are instances which are similar in some way if
you are not similar enough to that person you will have a hard time making a prediction about what
they feel you will be experientially blind to what they feel in the united states children
of color are under prescribed medicine by their physicians this is been documented it's not that
the physicians are racist necessarily but they might be experientially blind
the same thing is true of male physicians with female patients I could tell you some
hair-raising stories really that where people die as a consequence of a physician making the wrong
inference the wrong prediction because of being experientially blind so we are you know empathy
is not it's not magic it's we make inferences about each other about what each other's feeling
and thinking in this culture more than there are some cultures where you know people have what's
called opacity of mind where they will make a prediction about someone else's actions but
they're not inferring anything about the internal state of that person but in our culture we're
constantly making inferences what is this person thinking what is and we're not doing it
necessarily consciously but it's we're doing it really automatically using our predictions what we
know and if you expose yourself to information which is very different from somebody else I mean
really what we have is we have different cultures in this in this country right now
that are there are a number of reasons for this I mean part of it is I don't know if you saw the
social dilemma the the Netflix heard about it yeah it's a great it's really great
documentary and well it's what social networks are doing to our society yeah yeah but you know
nothing no phenomenon has a a simple single cause there are multiple small causes which all add up
to a perfect storm that's that's just you know how most things work and so the fact that machine
learning algorithms are serving people up information on social media that is consistent
with what they've already viewed and making you know is part of the reason that you have these
silos but it's not the only reason why you have these silos I think there are other
there are other things afoot that enhance people's inability to even have a decent conversation
yeah I mean okay so many things you said are just brilliant so the experiment experiential
blindness but also from my perspective like I preach and I try to practice empathy a lot
and something about the way you've explained it makes me almost see it as a kind of exercise
that we should all do like to train like to add experiences to the brain to expand this capacity
to predict more effectively so absolutely so like what like what I do is kind of like a method acting
thing which is I imagine what the life of a person is like you know just think I mean this is something
you see with black lives matter and police officers it feels like they're both not both but I have
because martial arts and so on I have a lot of friends who are cops they don't necessarily
um have empathy or visualize the experience of the other certainly currently unfortunately
people aren't doing that with police officers they're not imagining they're not empathizing
or putting themselves in the shoes of a police officer to realize how difficult that job is
how dangerous it is how difficult it is to maintain calm and under so much uncertainty all
those kind of things you know but there's more there's even that's all that's true but I think
that there's even more there's even more to be said there I mean like from a predicting brain
standpoint there's even more that can be said there so I don't know if you want to go down that
path or you want to stick on empathy but I will also say that one of the things that I was most
gratified by I still am receiving you know it's been three more than three and a half years since
how motions are made came out and I'm still receiving daily emails from people right so
that's gratifying but one of the most gratifying emails I received was from a police officer
in Texas who told me that he thought that how motions are made
contained information that would be really helpful to resolving some of these difficulties
and he hadn't even read my op-ed piece about when is a gun not a gun and you know like using
the what we know about the science of perception from predict from a prediction standpoint like
the brain is a predictor to understand a little differently what might be happening
in these circumstances so there's there's a real what's hard about it's hard to talk about because
everyone gets mad at you when you talk about this like you know and there is a way to understand
this which has profound empathy for the suffering of people of color and that definitely is in
line with Black Lives Matter at the same time as understanding the really difficult situation
that police officers find themselves in and I'm not talking about this bad apple or that bad
apple I'm not talking about police officers who are necessarily shooting people in the back as
they run away I'm talking about the cases of really good well-meaning cops who have the kind
of predicting brain that everybody else has they're in a really difficult situation that I think
both they and the people who are harmed don't realize like the way that these situations are
constructed I think it's just there's a lot to be said there I guess is what I want to say.
Is there something we can try to say in a sense like what I'm from the perspective of the predictive
brain which is a fascinating perspective to take on this you know the all the protests that are
going on there seems to be a concept of a police officer being built. No I think that police I
think that concept is there but it's gaining strength so it's being re I mean yeah it sure
yeah it is there but I think yeah for sure I think that that's right I think that there's a shift
in the stereotype of what I would say is a stereotype there's a stereotype of of black
man in this country that's always in movies and television not always but like largely
that many people watch I mean you know you think you're watching a 10 o'clock drama and all you're
doing is like kicking back and relaxing but actually you're having certain predictions reinforced
and others not and what's happening what's happening now with police is the same thing
that there are certain stereotypes of a police officer that are being abandoned and other
stereotypes that are being reinforced by by what you see happening. All I'll say is that if you
remember I mean there's a lot to say about this really that you know regardless of whether it
makes people mad or not I mean I just I the science is what it is just remember what I said
the brain is makes predictions about internal changes in the body first and then motor it
starts to prepare motor action and then it makes a prediction about what you will see and hear and
feel based on those actions okay so it's also the case that we didn't talk about is that sensory
sampling like your brain's ability to sample what's out there is yoked to your heart rate
it's yoked to your heartbeats there are certain phases of the heartbeat where it's easier for you
to see what's happening in the world than at others and so if your heart rate goes through the roof
you will be less likely you will be more likely to just go with your prediction
and not correct based on what you what's out there because you're actually literally not
seeing as well or you will see things that aren't there basically.
Is there something that we could say in the by way of advice for when this episode is released
in the chaos of emotion so I don't know by the term that's just flying around on social media
what's. Well actually I think it is it is emotion in the following sense you know and it sounds a
little bit like it sounds a little bit like artificial when I in the way that I'm about to
say it but I really think that this is what's happening you know one thing we haven't talked
about is you know brain's evolved didn't evolve for you to see they didn't evolve for you to hear
they didn't evolve for you to feel they evolved to control your body that's why you have a brain
you have a brain so they can curl your body and the metaphor that there's a the scientific term
for predictively controlling your body is allostasis your brain is making is attempting to it's
tempting to anticipate the needs of your body and meet those needs before they arise so that you
can act as you need to act and the metaphor that I use is a body budget you know your brain is running
a budget for your body it's not budgeting money it's budgeting glucose and salt and water and
instead of having you know one or two bank accounts it has gazillions there are all these systems in
your body that have to be kept in balance and it's monitoring very closely it's making predictions
about like when is it good to spend and when is it good to save and what would be a good investment
and am I going to get a return on my investment whenever people talk about reward or reward
prediction error or anything to do with reward they're or punishment they're talking about
about the body budget they're talking about your brain's predictions about whether or not there will
be a deposit or withdrawal so when you when your brain is running a deficit in your body budgets
you have some kind of metabolic imbalance you experience that as discomfort you experience
that as distress when your brain when things are chaotic you can't predict what's going to happen
next so I have this absolutely brilliant scientist working in my lab his name is Jordan Terrio and
he's published this really terrific paper on a sense of should like why do we have social rules
why do we you know adhere to social norms it's because if I make myself predictable to you
then you are predictable to me and if you're predictable to me that's good because that
that is less metabolically expensive for me novelty or unpredictability at the extreme
is expensive and if it goes on for long enough what happens is first of all you will feel really
jittery and antsy which we describe as anxiety it isn't necessarily anxiety it could be just
something is not predictable and you are experiencing arousal because the chemicals that help you learn
increase your feeling of arousal basically but if it goes on for long enough you will become depleted
and you will start to feel really really really distressed so what we have is a culture full
of people right now who are their body budgets are just decimated and there's a tremendous amount
of uncertainty when you talk about it as depression anxiety it makes you think that it's not about
your metabolism that it's not about your body budgeting that it's not about getting enough
sleep or about eating well or about making sure that you have social connections it's
you know it's you think that it's something separate from that but depression and anxiety
are just a way of being in the world they're a way of being in the world when things aren't
quite right with your predictions that's such a deep way of thinking like the the brain is maintaining
homeostasis it's actually allostasis i'm sorry and it's it's constantly making predictions
and metabolically speaking it's very costly to make novel like constantly be learning to
making adjustments and then over time there's you know there's a cost to be paid if you're just
yeah in in a place of chaos where there's constant need for adjusting and learning and
experience novel things and so part of the problem here there are a couple of things like I said you
know it's a perfect storm there isn't a single cause right there are multiple cause multiple
things that combine together it's a complex it's a complex system multiple things part of it is that
people are they're they're metabolically encumbered and they're distressed and in order to try to
have empathy for someone who is very much unlike you you have to forage for information
and you you have to explore information that is novel to you and unexpected and that's expensive
and at a time when people feel what do you do when you are running a deficit in your bank account
you stop spending what does it mean for a brain to stop spending a brain stops moving very much
stops moving the body and it stops learning it just goes with its internal model brilliantly put
yeah so empathy requires to have empathy for someone who is unlike you requires learning and
practice you foraging for information I mean it is something I talk about in my in the book in
seven and a half lessons about the brain I think it's really important it's hard but it's hard I
think it's you know it it's hard for people to have to be curious about views that are unlike
their own when when they feel so encumbered and I'll just tell you I had this epiphany really
I was listening to Robert Reich's the system he was talking about oligarchy versus democracy
so oligarchy is where very wealthy people like extremely wealthy people
shift power so that they become even more wealthy and even more insulated and from the
you know the pressures of the common person it's actually the kind of system that
leads to the collapse of civilizations if you believe Jared Diamond just say that but anyways
I'm listening to this and I'm listening to him describe in fairly decent detail how
the CEOs of these companies there's been a shift in what it means to be a CEO and not
not being no longer being a steward of the community and so on but like in the 1980s it's
sort of shifted to this other model of being like an oligarch and he's talking about how
you know it used to be the case that um that CEOs made like 20 times what their um their
employees made and now they make about 300 times on average what their employees made
so where did that money come from it came from the pockets of the employees
and they don't they don't know about it right no one knows about it they just know
they can't feed their children they can't pay for health care they can't take care of their family
and they worry about what's going to happen to their you know they're living like you know
months a month basically any one big bill could completely you know put them out on the street
so there are a huge number of people living like this so all they what they're experienced they
don't know why they're experiencing it so it's and then someone comes along and gives them a narrative
yeah well somebody else butted in line in front of you and that's why you're this way that's why
you experience what you're experiencing it just for a minute i was thinking i had deep empathy
for people who have beliefs that are really really really different from mine
but i was trying really hard to see it through their eyes and did it cost me something
metabolically i'm sure i'm sure i'm but you had something in the gas tank well i in order to
allocate that i mean that's the question is like where did you what resources did your brain yeah
draw on in order to actually make that effort well i'll tell you something honestly lex i don't
have that much in the gas tank right now right so i am surfing the stress that you know stress is
just what is stress stress is your brain is preparing for a big metabolic outlay and it
just keeps preparing and preparing and preparing and preparing you as a professor you as a human
both right it's for me this is a moment of existential crisis as much as anybody else
democracy all these things so in many of my roles so i guess what i'm trying to say is that
i get up every morning and i exercise i run i row i lift weights right you exercise in the middle
of the day i saw your like you know daily things with it yeah i hate it actually you love it right
you get a no i hate it i hate it but i do it religiously yeah why because it's a really good
investment it's an expenditure that is a really good investment and so
so when i was exercising i was listening to the book and when i realized the insights that i was
sort of like playing around with like is this does this make sense this makes sense i didn't
immediately plunge into it i basically wrote some stuff down i set it aside and then i did
what i i prepared myself to make an expenditure i don't know what you do before you exercise i
always have a protein shake always have a protein shake because i need to fuel up before i make
this really big expenditure and so i did the same thing i didn't have a protein drink but i
but i i did the same thing and fueling up can mean lots of different things it can mean talking
to a friend about it it can mean um you know it can it can mean get making sure you get a good
night's sleep before you do it it can mean lots of different things but i i guess i i think we have
to do these things i uh yeah that this i'm gonna re-listen to this conversation several times this
is brilliant uh but i do i do think about you know i've encountered so many people that can't
possibly imagine that a good human being can vote for Donald Trump and i've also encountered people
that can't imagine that an intelligent person can possibly vote for democrat and i i look
at both these people many of whom are friends and uh let's just say after this conversation
i can see as they're predicting brains not willing to invest the resources to empathize
with the other side and i think you have to in order to be able to like to see the obvious
common humanity in us i don't know what the system is that's creating this division we can put it
at the like you said it's a perfect storm it might be the social media it might be i don't know what
the hell i think it's a bunch of things i think it's just coming together there's there's an
economic system which is disadvantaging large numbers of people there's a use of social media
like if you you know if i had to orchestrate or architect a system that would screw up a human
body budget it would be the one that we live in you know we don't sleep enough we eat pseudo food
basically um we are on social media too much which is full of ambiguity which is really hard for a
human nervous system right really really hard right ambiguity with no context to predict in i
mean it's like really and then you know there are the economic concerns that affect large swaths of
people in this country i mean it's really i'm not saying everything is reducible to metabolism not
everything is reducible to metabolism but there if you combine all these things together it's helpful
to think of it that way then somehow it's also uh somehow it reduces the entirety of the human
experience the same kind of obvious logic like we should exercise every day in the same kind of way
we should uh we should empathize every day yeah you know there are these really wonderful wonderful
programs for for teens and sometimes also for parents of people who've lost children in in
wars and in conflicts in political conflicts where they go to a bucolic setting and they
talk to each other about their experiences and um miraculous things happen you know so um
you know it's easy to uh it's easy to sort of shrug this stuff off as kind of Pollyanna-ish
you know like what's this really going to do but um you have to think about
about when my daughter went to college i i gave her advice i said uh try to be around people
who let you be the kind of person you want to be you were back to free will you have a choice
you have a choice it might seem like a really hard choice it might seem like a unimaginably
difficult choice you have a choice do you want to be somebody who in is wrapped in in fury and
agony or do you want to be somebody who extends uh a little empathy to somebody else and in the
process maybe learn something curiosity is the thing that it protects you curiosity is the thing
it's curative curiosity on social media the thing i recommend to people um at least that's the way
i've been approaching social media i don't it doesn't need to be the common approach but i
basically uh give love to people who seem to also give love to others so it's the same similar
concept of surrounding by yourself by the people you want to become and i ignore sometimes block
but just ignore i don't i don't add aggression to people who are just constantly full of aggression
and negativity and toxicity there's a certain desire when somebody says something mean to to um
um to say something um to you know say why or try to alleviate the meanness and so on but what
you're doing essentially is you're and you're you're now surrounding yourself by that group of
folks that have that negativity so even just the conversation so i you know i i think it's just so
powerful to uh to put yourself amongst people who are yeah who whose basic motive interaction
is kindness because uh i mean i don't know what it is but maybe i'm just the way i'm built is
that to me is energizing for the gas tank of that then i can pull to for sure when i start reading
the rise and fall of the third rike and start thinking about nazi germany i can empathize
with everybody involved i could start to think make these difficult uh like thinking that's
required to understand our little planet earth well there is research to back up what you said
there's research that's consistent with your intuition there you know that there's research
that shows that being kind to other people doing something nice for someone else is like making a
deposit uh to some extent you know because i think um making a deposit not only in their
body budgets but also in yours like people feel good when they do good things for other people
you know we are social animals we regulate each other's nervous systems for better and for worse
right the best thing for a human nervous system is another human and the worst thing
for a human nervous system is another human so you decide do you want to be somebody who makes
people feel who who who makes people feel better or do you want to be somebody who causes people
pain and we are more responsible for one another than we might like or than we might want but remember
what we said about social reality you know social reality so you you know there are lots of different
cultural norms about uh you know independence or we're you know collective you know nature of people
but the fact is we have socially dependent nervous systems we evolved that way as a species
and in this country we prize individual rights and freedoms and that is a dilemma
that we have to grapple with and we have to do it in a way if we're going to be productive about it
we have to do it in a way that um uh requires engaging with each other and which is what i
understand the you know the founding members of this country uh intended beautifully put let me
ask a few final silly questions so one talked a bit about love but let me it's fun to ask somebody
like you who uh can effectively from at least neuroscience perspective disassemble some of
these romantic notions but what do you make of romantic love well why do human beings seem to
fall in love at least at least a bunch of 80s hair bands have written about it uh all right is that a
nice feature to have is that a bug what is it well i'm really happy that i fell in love i wouldn't
want it any other way um but i would say uh is that you the person speaking or the neuroscientist
well i mean that's me the person speaking but uh i would say as a neuroscientist babies are born
not able to regulate their own body budgets because their brains aren't fully wired yet when you
feed a baby when you cuddle a baby when you everything you do with a baby impacts that
baby's body budget and helps to wire that baby's body budget um has to wire that baby's brain to
manage eventually her own body budget to some extent that's the basis biologically of attachment
humans evolved as a species to be socially dependent meaning you cannot manage your body
budget on your own without attacks that eventually you pay many years later in terms of some metabolic
illness right loneliness when you break up with someone that you love or you lose them right it
you feel like it's gonna kill you but it doesn't but loneliness will kill you it will kill you
approximately you know what is it seven years earlier i can't remember exactly the exact
number it's it's actually in the web notes to um seven and a half lessons but um social isolation
and loneliness will kill you earlier than you would otherwise die and the reason why is that
you're not you didn't evolve to manage your nervous system on your own and when you do you
pay a little tax and that tax accrues very slightly over time over a long period of time
so that by the time you're in you know middle aged or a little older you are more likely
to die sooner from some metabolic illness from heart disease from diabetes from depression
you're more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease i mean it's the it you know it takes
a long time for that tax to accrue um but it does so yes i think it's a good thing for people
to um to fall in love but i think the the funny view of it is that uh it's clear that humans
need the social attachment to uh what does it manage their nervous system is as you're describing
and the reason you want to stay with somebody for a long time is so you don't have is the
novelty is very costly for for well now you're mixing now you're mixing thing now you're you know
you have to decide whether but i what i would say is when you lose someone you love you um it feels
like you've lost a part of you and that's because you have you've lost someone who was contributing
to your body budget we are the caretakers of one another's nervous systems like it or not and um
um out of that comes very deep feelings of attachment some of which are romantic love
are you afraid of uh your own mortality we're too human sitting here
yeah i do you think do you ponder your mortality i mean you're somebody who thinks about your brain
a lot it seems one of the more um terrifying or i don't know i don't know how to feel about it but
it seems to be one of the most definitive aspects of life is that it ends it's a complicated answer
but i think the best i can do in a short snippet would be to say for a very long time i did not
fear my own mortality i feared the i feared pain and suffering so that that's what i feared i feared
being harmed or dying in a way that would be painful um but i didn't fear having my life be over
now as a mother i think i i have fear i fear dying before my daughter is um ready to be
without me that's what i fear it's
that's that's really what i fear and frankly honestly i fear my husband dying before me
much more than i fear my own death there's that love and social attachment again yeah because
i know i it's i know it's just gonna i'm gonna feel like i wish i was dead yeah a final question
about life uh what do you think is the meaning of it all what's the meaning of life
yeah i think that there isn't one meaning of life there's like many meanings of life
and you know you use different ones on different days but for me depending on the day depending
on the day but for me i would say um sometimes the meaning of life is to understand
to make meaning actually the meaning of life is to make meaning um sometimes it's that
sometimes it's to um leave the world just slightly a little bit better than it like the
johnny apple seed view you know sometimes the meaning of life is um to um you know like clear
the path for my daughter or for my students you know it's to you know so sometimes it's that
and sometimes it's just um you know like you know even of moments where you're looking at the sky or
you're you know by the ocean or sometimes for me it's even like i'll see a you know like a weed
poking out of a crack in a sidewalk you know and you just have this overwhelming sense of the like
wonder of the um of the world like the world is like just like the physical world is so
wondrous and you just get very immersed in the moment in the moment like the sensation of the
moment sometimes that's the meaning of life i don't i don't think there's one meaning of life
i think it's a population of instances just like uh just like a any other category i don't
think there's a better way to end it lisa the first time we spoke is um i think if not the then one
of i think it's the first conversation i had that basically launched this pocket yeah that's actually
the first conversation i've had to launch this podcast and now we get to finally do it uh the
right way so it's a huge honor to talk to you that you've spent time with me uh i can't wait for
hopefully the many more books you'll write certainly can't wait to uh i already read this this book
but i can't wait to listen to it because as you said offline that you're reading it and i think
you have a great voice you have a great i don't know what's the nice way to put it but maybe npr
voice thank you in the best version of of what that is so thanks again for talking today oh it's
my pleasure thank you so much for for having me back thank you for listening to this conversation
with lisa feldman barrett and thank you to our sponsors athletic greens which is an all-in-one
nutritional drink magic spoon which is a low carb keto friendly cereal and cash app which is an app
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discount and to support this podcast if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five
stars on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter lex
freedman and now let me leave you with some words from lisa feldman barrett it takes more than one
human brain to create a human mind thank you for listening i hope to see you next time