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March 17, 2016 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
54:54
2016 Personality Lecture 11: The Psychobiology of Traits, Continued
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Okay, so The last time we talked I started to walk you through the nervous system a little bit and We started
with the monkey business illusion and one of the things that's really remarkable about the monkey business illusion is that and Change blindness experiments in general is that they demonstrate to you just to what degree you You could either describe yourself as blind or focused And I think focused is actually better than blind.
You know, like a laser beam doesn't cover much area, but it really illuminates what it strikes.
And people are sort of like that.
We're really beamed into a single point.
And there's something metaphysically spectacular about that, I think, because that single point that we're narrowed down to is in some sense the thing that writes the world, you know, because As we interact with the world,
we're able to turn it one way or another in all sorts of complicated ways, and I mean, I know our powers in doing so are obviously constrained to a substantial degree, but by the same token, that focal point of concentration enables us to interact with the world and then at least Seemingly, to change it according to our will.
Which is, you know, it's like we take a future that's potential, and we interact with it at a focal point, and then it transforms itself into a past that's in some sense fixed and real.
So that's pretty strange.
So I guess, you know, you don't want to underestimate the utility of a point.
So, I want to talk to you a little bit first more about what you're blind to, and then what the consequences of that are.
So, this here is a little diagram of a computer, believe it or not.
Conceptual diagram of a computer.
It's predicated on—I'll tell you a quick story.
If I've told you this story, please stop me, but I don't think I've told you guys this story.
So one day back in about 1987, I was working on my computer, and I was, you know, typing some long essay in DOS, and you really had to back up in those days because the programs didn't do any backup for you, and so if the thing shut off, And you hadn't been super careful and you're just going to lose all of it.
So that's what happened.
I was typing when the computer went off.
And so I had an emotional reaction to that, right?
Now, an emotional reaction to that is kind of an interesting event because I would say that you're not even working with the computer until it quits.
And the reason I would say that is because, if you think about it, when the computer is functioning, The fact that it's an extraordinarily complicated device is basically irrelevant to you.
What you're working with Roughly speaking is the screen, but not really, not even the screen.
You're working with maybe at the phrase or even the word that's presented on the screen, you know.
You're typing the word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, and only out past that domain of consideration do you start thinking about the hardware technology that underlies what you're doing.
You don't want to think about that at all.
When something's working, you don't have to see it.
And so that gives you a clue as to consciousness, you know.
Consciousness is an error-detecting and correcting phenomenon.
And you're not conscious of things that are going well.
So, you know, which might explain to some degree why a lot of our life seems to be made up of suffering.
You know, if things are going well, it isn't exactly like you're happy if things are going well.
You just don't notice when they're going well.
Sometimes, if they unexpectedly go well, then that makes you happy.
But otherwise, it's just...
The same old thing, even if it's amazing.
You know, I was, yesterday, I was eating breakfast with my son, and I was complaining about the fact that I had to eat canned smoked tuna.
Because I don't really like fish, but I have to eat fish for a variety of different reasons.
And I thought, Jesus, what are you complaining about?
I mean, really, you know what a tuna is like?
Those things are, like, they're like small whales, right?
They weigh, like, 600 pounds.
They're impossible to catch.
So there's some poor characters out there hauling in tuna, which is impossible.
Then they have to clean them and freeze them and smoke them and can them, and all I have to do is go to the store and pick up this, like, can of tuna, and then I can complain about it for breakfast.
It's really quite staggering.
The fact that I can even ever eat a tuna is a...
It's a complete bloody miracle, but it's not the sort of thing that makes me happy, because, you know, I just expect that, which is very pathetic, but that's how it goes.
So, anyways, back to the computer.
So, it stops working.
Well, and I would say that's when I notice the computer, and there's nothing more annoying than noticing the computer when you're in the middle of writing an essay, because what the hell do you know about computers?
You know, nothing.
What are you going to do?
Turn it on and off.
Well, that's like problem-solving Process number one, right?
It usually works, thank God, but then if it doesn't work, well, you know, then you're into either the software or the hardware.
So, anyways, I turned it on and off, and that didn't work, and so then I turned on light to see if I could see, you know, if something had happened at the back of it, but the light didn't go on, so then I thought, aha, the power probably went out, or I blew a fuse, so I went and looked to see if the fuse was burned out, but it wasn't,
and then I noticed that all the power in the house was off, and then I noticed that I went outside down to the corner store to get something I don't remember what and then when I went outside I noticed that all the street lights were off and then the entire power grid in Montreal was out.
And then the entire power grid for like half of Quebec was out and a big chunk of eastern North America.
And do you know why have I told you this story?
Good.
Because there was a solar flare.
And so, you know, the sun is a big hydrogen bomb, right?
So I don't know if you guys know this, it's a cheerful piece of information for you if you need to be cheered up, but if you happen to have a hydrogen bomb and you exploded it, you know a hydrogen bomb has an atom bomb for its trigger.
Did you guys know that?
You need to know that, because it's important.
Because an atom bomb is a big thing, right?
But it's just a trigger for a hydrogen bomb, so a hydrogen bomb is unimaginably bigger than an atom bomb.
Anyways, if you blew a hydrogen bomb in the atmosphere over Central North America, you could probably wipe out maybe all of the electronic equipment in the entire continent permanently.
Because what happens is when a hydrogen bomb goes off, there's an electromagnetic burst, and as that propagates, it'll hit your electronic equipment and propagate across the wires and produce a big spike in current, voltage, I think, and it'll just Blow it.
So your cars won't work, your tractors won't work, your subways won't work, your cars won't work, your computers won't work, your satellites won't work.
It's like done.
And also, just to cheer you up even more, back in the late 1800s, I think it was in the 1860s, there was this, oh, let's go back to the sun.
So the sun's a big hydrogen bomb, and now and then it freaks out and emits like You know, a big solar flare, which is something that's gone wrong on the sun, and maybe it blows out this solar flare almost to the, you know, the orbit of Mercury, and then that burst of radiation comes zooming towards Earth, and then nine minutes later it hits, and if it's a decent electromagnetic pulse then it'll wipe out the power grid in Quebec, and that's what happened.
So the reason my computer didn't work was because the sun was misbehaving.
And so, I like that.
It was very illuminating to me because it just shows you how many things have to be stacked on top of each other, working perfectly for some thing that you're doing to actually function.
So anyways, back in the late 1800s, in the 1860s, there was a massive solar flare, and it produced a burst of power on the telegraph lines, and it lit some telegraph operators on fire.
And so this does happen.
It happens about once a century, and we just missed one last year.
So while you're worrying about global warming, you can be considering the much higher probability that a solar flare will knock out all of our electronics and send us back to, like, 1860.
So, the point is, is that a lot of things—first of all, that there's a lot of things going on to make up an object that you don't detect with your vision, you know?
Like, you never think, well, the reason that the computer works is because the sun is, you know, acting properly.
But it is, of course, the case.
That endless numbers of things have to be stabilized that you don't see.
And you might say, well, the sun isn't part of the computer, but, well, that's wrong.
It's not part of the computer in some sense when it's behaving, but as soon as it stops behaving, it's instantly part of the computer.
You know, and then—so here we've got—you know, and then you might say, well, let's say the power hadn't gone out and the computer stopped working, and, well, then you might think, well, I'll never buy that brand again, you know, and maybe the brand is associated with,
you know, the operation in some country where corruption is rife and things are made improperly and the parts don't work very well so you might think, well I made a stupid purchase decision and of course that's connected to the political system of that place and the economy and You know, and then weird little things can happen down at the micro level as well as the macro level, so computers have now got so—computer chips have now got so small—you know, they have little wires in them, right?
The chips.
The wires are now so small that because of quantum uncertainty.
So quantum uncertainty basically tells you that you can't really tell where an electron is if you want to know how fast it's going.
And you can't tell how fast it's going if you want to know where it is.
But more than that, it also says you can't really know where the thing is, and so what that means is that once you get your wires short enough, some of the electrons might not be in the wires where they're supposed to be, and they actually cause short circuits.
So, that's another issue.
There's other levels of reality that are micro-levels that you can't detect at all.
So there's macro-levels that are way beyond you.
You know, political systems, economic systems, biological systems, physical systems outside of that, and then there are these micro-systems layered all the way down, and things can go wrong at any one of those levels, and a lot of that's invisible to us.
You know, the same thing happens when something goes wrong with you.
It's like, what's wrong with you?
Maybe you're malfunctioning at the molecular level.
Your DNA isn't working properly so you get cancer or maybe some virus.
Which is even smaller than the DNA, comes in and, you know, takes up residence, and that's really not so good.
Or, you know, maybe you're eating something wrong and you have an organ malfunction, or maybe your family's screwed up and you're stressed half to death, and the reason they're screwed up is because you live in a, let's say, a society that's not friendly to your particular immigrant type, and so the real reason that you're sick is because of, you know, people's inability to get along with one another, and so on and so forth and so on.
God only knows where you're supposed to focus.
But, focus we do.
And one of the things that motivation allows you to do is to figure out what you're going to focus on.
Now, you think, God, there's all these things to focus on.
There's an infinite number of things to focus on.
How in the world do you ever figure out how to focus on anything?
Well, the answer to that is evolution, fundamentally.
It's like, you can view evolution in the following way, you know.
If you can kind of think about the background of reality, I think the best way to think about it is this interplay of patterns, complex patterns, sort of like music.
And those patterns are always changing in a sort of dynamic way, and they exist at multiple levels, just like complex music does.
Imagine that what you're trying to do is to dance to the music, to align yourself to the music, and it keeps changing on you, and so, well, what do you do?
Well, if you can change, then you can change to the music.
But if you can't change, then That's it.
You're not dancing anymore.
Okay, so let's assume that there's two ways of solving that problem.
One way is just sheer number.
You're a single-celled organism or a mosquito, and you don't have that much neural capacity for transformation, and so you don't know what the melody's going to be when you lay your eggs if you're a mosquito, and so you produce, like, a million eggs, and some of them can dance to the current beat, and the others can't, and so they all die.
And so that's what happens over the course of evolution for a very, very long time.
The melody keeps changing, and then what creatures do is propagate a whole variety of variants of themselves, and in the case of, like, small animals, or fish even, or crayfish, or that sort of thing, you know, they just overproduce offspring like mad and hope that one of them can dance to the current tune.
And then, you know, we get three and a half billion years later, roughly speaking, here we all are and what we've got is this dynamic nervous system and it enables us to take an external pattern and map it to a neurological pattern Or multiple neurological patterns because we can interpret things, right?
And then to output that to multiple behavioral patterns.
And so in some sense what we've done is we've internalized the process of evolutionary variation into ourselves.
And the more complex, roughly speaking, the more layers your nervous system has.
Imagine there's a pattern on your skin and then that's interpreted by a pattern of nerves.
And then those nerves have an output—their sensory nerves, we'll say—and then those have an output to motor nerves and then those have an output to muscles.
That's you, roughly.
You know, you're maybe a four-layer thing in that regard.
But then you grow all these extra layers of neural tissue, you know, so that the layers are hundreds of Cells thick, hundreds of layers thick, and then you can map a whole bunch of patterns in the external world onto a whole bunch of patterns in the neural world and then onto a whole bunch of patterns in the motor world.
And so that makes you dynamically adaptable.
But you learned all that through this incredibly painful process of evolution which basically consisted of the death of like 99.999% of everything that ever lived, right?
Species and individuals alike.
So, now, why is that relevant?
Well, how do you figure out how to focus in on something?
Well, a big part of that is actually Let's see how we do it.
Well, first of all, what are you focusing on in here?
Well, not poisonous snakes and, you know, rampaging lions and chimpanzees, because they're not in here.
And the reason they're not in here, roughly speaking, is because, well, you live in a culture that's very, very highly advanced, and it's got walls like mad—this is a carcassonne, I think, A French city, medieval city, it still exists.
Beautiful city.
You see how the medieval people solved this problem.
It's like, well, you can't deal with much.
Okay, well, what do you do?
Build some walls, keep a bunch of stuff out.
You don't have to worry about the rampaging barbarians, then, because they just can't get in.
And so a lot of the reason that you can handle the insane complexity of the world is because it's not even neurological, right?
It has virtually nothing to do with your physiology.
It's just that you're, you know, you're You're in a university, and the university is protected by the city, and the city is protected by the province, and the province is protected by the country, and the country is protected by its, you know, all of its multiple entanglements, and you're just—you're inside walls, inside walls, inside walls, inside walls, and so on, and so your world's pretty simple.
You can just sit there in relative warmth and comfort and not have to worry about anything.
So that's one solution.
There's a cultural solution.
Then, you know, inside the cultural solution obviously there's architectural solutions of various sorts.
And then there's political and economic institutions that are pretty stable and they keep you from having to deal with chaos.
You know, I mean, you could see that chaos breaking out a little bit in the previous weeks, right, in the American election because the Trump people and the left-wingers are going at it at the Trump rallies.
And, you know, you can see that's just tinder that could just blow up at any point and then all that The protection that's there because of these very complex games that we've agreed to play, like the democracy game, you know, that just all flies by the wayside, and all of a sudden you have to contend with what people are like, and that is not something you want to do.
Those people, they're capable of anything.
Which is good, but also really bad.
Well then the next thing is you've got a body.
Now that's where the evolutionary process really kicks in.
And so the reason your body is the way it is, roughly speaking, is because it's mimicked the external environment.
So just like, you know, Piaget talks about children using their bodies to mimic the external environment, you know, voluntarily, your body is set up Through this evolutionary process so that you can focus on precisely that subset of things that seems to keep something like you going for long enough for you to make another one of something that's more or less like you.
And, you know, it only really works for about a hundred years.
That's pretty much where it tops out.
And so, you don't solve the problem very well.
You don't solve the problem of radical complexity very well.
But you solve it well enough so that you live long enough to reproduce.
I'm speaking strictly biologically, and that appears to be good enough.
And part of the reason why you seem to expire—because you might think, well, evolution is like, why don't people just live for like 500 years instead of 100 years, you know?
Because you'd think that someone who could Continue to reproduce for 200 years instead of 100 years would have it all over someone who could only manage it for 50 years, say.
But it turns out that your genes have a better time of it if you just put them into a new body and shuffle off this mortal coil so you're not using up too many resources while your children and grandchildren are trying to You know, survive.
And so that's an evolutionary solution.
Death is not technically inevitable.
There are creatures that are roughly immortal.
Goldfish, for example, which is really annoying.
It's like, really?
Goldfish?
Because they're carp.
And carp basically just keep growing.
And it isn't obvious that they senesce or age.
They get killed because they get, you know, diseases and this sort of thing.
You know, they're 300, 400-year-old carp.
And some turtles seem to not age, really.
And then, of course, your DNA's been there ever since life started.
So, it doesn't really age, either.
And it corrects itself.
So, things can last a very, very long time, but not us.
So, anyways, we're put inside this body that frames things for us and starts narrowing things down, and this, you know, our psychophysiological selves have a limited range of interests and desires and needs, however you want to construe that, you know, and then that gets instantiated more into the nervous system.
And, you know, it's a mistake to think—people always think your brain is in your head and that's really not a very bright way of thinking about it.
I don't know exactly why we think that way because, well, there's the nervous system.
You can see it right there.
There's a lot of your nervous system that's not in your head.
You know, the motor and sensory systems are distributed throughout your body.
Your spine is smart enough so that if it gets severed and we put you over top of a treadmill, suspend you, you can walk.
You don't know you're walking, and you can't control it, but your legs will do a perfectly good job of walking without you being involved at all.
So, you know, your spine is brain tissue for all intents and purposes.
Your brain is distributed through your body.
And so—and then, you know, it's evolved so that it's pretty good at going around specifying what it needs.
And so, you know, we talked about the hypothalamus the other day—that was it—and how it, you know, Accounts for what I called sub-personalities that are motivated towards particular ends.
And those ends are, you know, obviously the things that we would identify as fundamental biological necessities.
But then they transform themselves as we interact socially into more and more complex fundamental biological necessities.
You know, because it's a tricky thing because people talk about needs as if they're biologically instantiated.
You know, like they're the fundamental building elements of motivation.
But it's not really that obvious, eh?
Because, you know, you might say, well, being hungry is a biological need but being a doctor isn't.
Well, not really, because, you know, if you do end up being a physician, you pretty much solve the food acquisition problem permanently, right?
So, it's just a higher order manifestation of the same thing, and it's higher order because instead of just eating once, you eat every day for the next 40 years, and instead of just feeding you, you feed you and your family and maybe some other people too.
So, thinking of that as something that isn't rooted in biology is not accurate.
It's a kind of a continuous complexification.
From the simple, local, time-bound, immature sub-personalities that can only fulfill themselves in this moment and with help, to the development of those circuits, which I would say is your personality, that are capable of providing you with what you need in order to live and to be attractive to other people across very large spans of time.
It's like a tree, you know, it's like a tree expanding upward.
It's a good metaphor.
All right, so that's fine.
So motivation sets up your perceptual frame.
And so people often talk about motivation as if it's a drive or a need.
Not that those terms are particularly well defined.
A drive, I suppose, is a deterministic sequence of motor output, something like that.
But it's not accurate, because the motivation actually—it specifies what you look at.
It specifies right what you see.
And then it specifies as well what you're going to respond to emotionally.
So just imagine this.
Say I'd offered a $10,000 prize for the person who counts the number of basketballs correctly.
And then, you know, you're doing your best to count the number of basketballs and the monkey illusion and somebody stands up in front of you like this and blocks your view.
Well, what emotion are you going to feel?
It's negative emotion, right, in all likelihood, and so that might be anxiety, because you're not going to win.
It might be fear, or anxiety because you're not going to win, but also like fear because what the hell is this crazy person doing.
Anger, right, that's another negative emotion, although there's a positive attack element to it, you know.
Frustration, disappointment, maybe some grief, like a whole undifferentiated mess of negative emotions.
Well, why?
Well, in some sense, the motivational system specifies the map and the goal.
It's a little more complicated than that because it also specifies where you are.
But it's like you can think about it as a map with a destination.
That's why stories are like that, you know, because we inhabit maps like that all the time.
And then what emotions do, roughly speaking, is tell you whether or not things are going the way you want them to as you're on that path.
And so the emotions, in some sense, have to have a motivational specification before they're Before they're properly functional.
But what should you get angry at?
Well, generally you get angry at things that either interfere with your progression towards a valued goal or upset the entire sub-personality, you know, that contains the goal itself.
What would you call it?
That's a more serious failure.
You know, if you have to—it's one thing to fail when you're trying to do something, it's another thing to fail so hard you have to give up the whole project.
We would rather just fail at some element than have to give up the whole project, right?
It's one thing to fail an exam, it's another thing to fail out of university.
And, you know, I think the reason for that—I thought about that for a long time.
Why is it worse to fail out of university, assuming you want to be in university, than it is to fail an exam?
How does your brain compute that?
You know, because you can't tell all the consequences, right?
So it's not self-evident, but it seems to me that it's something like—you think about these functional subpersonalities as having a temporal and spatial range of applications.
So, if you're a university student, you're sort of stabilized for, like, four years, right?
And wherever you go, you can say—people say, well, what do you do?
And you can say, I'm a university student, and everybody's happy about that.
You know, it's not—from an economic perspective, it's probably worse than being unemployed, right, in some sense.
But you can't just go tell people that you're unemployed and then you have a nice little, you know, high status slot in society.
It doesn't work that way, but you can do that as a university student.
You know, so it fulfills your social obligations and it makes you feel like you're doing something at least vaguely useful and, you know, apart from the learning and all the other things that are positive about it.
What happens is that map basically covers a space and time—the time is four years—and the space is everywhere you go during those four years.
Then if that map burns up, it's like you're exposed on all fronts for that entire four-year period.
And that might even be the two years previously, right?
For example—because it's strange to think that—but if you bail out of university halfway through your third year, You've also destructured the map that you used to organize your memories in some sense of the previous two and a half years, right?
Because, first of all, they were the memories of someone who was doing just fine and going through university, and now all of a sudden they're the memories of someone who failed.
Those aren't the same memories.
And so it's weird that, you know, it's weird that an error can alter the past.
But it can, and often does.
I mean, any relationship breakup that's of any significance will do exactly the same thing, especially if you're betrayed, right?
It's like, it's not just the present and the future that dissolve into chaos and take you on a little trip to the underworld.
It's also your revision, the necessity of revising your past.
So anyways, so then I would say, well, failing a class, well, the class will restructure you in some sense and focuses you for a certain subset of The general going to university map.
So it's going to be less traumatizing to do poorly on a class than it is to fail out of university because the amount of space and time that those respective maps covers differs.
And so what you're trying to do always is to lay out a functional game—that's a good way of thinking about it—on the space-time territory that you inhabit.
And if you understand that then you can start to understand a little bit about emotions.
So, let's—yeah, yeah.
Now, okay, I have to put a little coda in there, and that's—look, motivations and emotions are not technical terms.
They're sort of like id and ego, you know?
They're terms that you can use to structure a debate.
Like, I showed you the hypothalamus, and you see it's made out of all those little nuclei.
They're not the same, so you can't say that every part of the hypothalamus is doing something that you can fit into a class—motivation.
And motivations and emotions overlap.
So, you know, I would say hunger, that seems to be—some of them seem more purely motivation, you know?
Like, if you have an unsettling altercation with someone, it tends not to make you hungry.
You know, whereas it might make you angry, it might make you happy, it might make you sad, you know.
So, hunger is something that seems to pop up one of these maps, and then emotions guide your way through it, or tell you where you are on it.
But then you have complex motivation emotions like pain, and also anger, because pain has a goal in it, right?
Get away, but it's also—or stop, or get away, it's usually get away.
But it also has an emotional feeling, right?
It feels bad.
And so it feels like an emotion.
Pain.
Grief is like pain.
Disappointment is like pain.
So loneliness is like pain.
And I mean this technically.
All of those things can be addressed rather successfully with opiates, by the way.
So technically they're the same.
But pain, you can't really, like, is being hurt an emotion?
Well, people will say that.
I feel hurt.
Whatever.
And anger is another one of those that's sort of ambivalent, because anger has a goal, right?
It's like, remove obstacle.
Remove or destroy obstacle.
In a sense, that's the goal of anger.
But people talk about it as an emotion.
So, we're oversimplifying.
But it doesn't matter, because it's a useful oversimplification, and that's sort of what a theory is, right?
It's a very useful oversimplification.
So all right, so I kind of laid out what I think are the basic motivations there.
Hunger, thirst, pain, anger.
Thermal regulation, you don't want to be too hot or too cold.
Panic or escape.
Affiliation or care.
Sexual desire.
Exploration.
Play.
And you can kind of divide those into self-maintenance motivations and self-propagation motivations, roughly speaking.
Sort of just a way to keep track of them.
And then emotions, so the hypothalamus is involved in a lot of that.
It's not the only thing, but it's involved in a lot of that.
And so, here's sort of how I've conceptualized one of these maps, and we've seen this thing before.
You're at point A because if you're using a map, or if you're in a game, You know, there's a starting point, or you're a player, either way.
There's you there, and then you're going somewhere, right?
And you have to do something to get there, okay?
So that's the little map.
And maybe you have to go make a peanut butter sandwich, or you have to go turn the thermostat down, or you need to call your friend, or whatever.
But it's the same kind of structure that you're using in all those different situations.
And they switch.
You know, now you're finished being hungry, now you're thirsty, then you're lonesome, you know?
It's like, it's Sisyphus.
It's one, that's...
That's right.
It's one damn thing after another, roughly speaking.
And so that's what keeps you alive.
And you have to be chasing things all the time because your natural tendency is to run out of fuel and decay.
And so that's entropy.
You have to fight that.
And so that's a continual battle because you're pretty organized and it's really hard for something that organized to just stay organized, you know?
It's a lot easier.
There's a million ways to mess up your room.
There's like one way to clean it, or maybe ten, you know, but you get the point.
So, and it's the same with anything that's extraordinarily complex.
There's not that many ways it can stay in order, and there's a lot of ways it can fall apart.
So, that's why you're running all the time on a treadmill.
You're fighting the second—is it the second law of thermodynamics?
Is entropy the second law of thermodynamics?
I think so.
That's a major one.
So, you know, good luck in your scrap, because you're going to need it.
So, these little underlying biological systems pop up the primary maps, and then those are elaborated upward into maps that are more and more complicated, and the more and more complicated maps maybe solve two problems at the same time for a week, or they solve ten problems at the same time for twenty years.
That's why you want a job or a career, right?
I mean, a whole bunch of problems are solved immediately as soon as you're employed.
So, I mean, you have some other problems, but But that's inescapable anyways.
Okay, so you're inside one of these, so you're always motivated.
You're always running around after something.
And, you know, that's another thing to know, too, because The basic state of human beings is not quiescence, you know.
You're not napping in front of a fireplace.
If you're not pursuing something that you're motivated to pursue, then generally what you're doing is figuring out how to pursue other things that you're motivated to pursue, and that's exploration.
So if you're not actively motivated by biological necessity, we'll say for the sake of simplicity, Then the next motivation kicks in is, well, prepare for the next time that you're so motivated.
And that really accounts for our capacity to explore.
We're always zooming around the world trying to figure out what to do with it next.
You know, acquiring more information or even when we're entertaining ourselves, because we're almost always looking at stories when we entertain ourselves, we're still acquiring information that has functional significance and so attractive to us that we find it innately It's rewarding just to observe that sort of thing.
And it's even in strange situations, like people who go to horror movies.
It's like, what's wrong with them?
You know?
It's like, why do you want to go get scared or disgusted?
Because that's horror, right?
Fear and disgust.
The plain uncertainty horror movies like the Blair Witch Project, that's pretty much all fear.
And then, you know, the slasher movies and that sort of thing, that's pretty much all disgust.
And you might say, well, why bother exposing yourself to that?
And part of it is, Get over it.
You know, it's exposure because life has terrifying elements and it has disgusting elements and you're going to have to learn to maintain yourself in the face of that, you know?
I mean, certainly illness is going to challenge your capacity to deal with disgust and, you know, there's any number of reasons to be terrified, so you go to movies and you practice Facing it, then you observe that you can, you know, and I mean there's other motivations too, but those are the sort of the healthy ones that go along with people wanting to expose themselves to dangerous situations.
So, so even in that you see exploration and the preparation for what's going to happen next, and the exploratory circuit's a very very fundamental circuit.
It's also hypothalamically mediated, so the way the hypothalamus works, it's quite cool, is that On one hand, it pops up all these little maps that you can occupy that have their core in, we'll say, biological necessity, so roughly Freud's id.
But when those things all shut down because they're satiated—that's a technical term, by the way, satiated, it means satisfied—and it's a form of reward, you know?
So it's sort of how you feel after you've eaten a good meal and you're in a warm room and your friends are around you and, you know, maybe you go to sleep.
If it's your family, you know, because I'm thinking about Thanksgiving or something like that.
It's just everything is taken care of and so you fall asleep.
That's sort of, that's satiation.
You can see that in animals all the time because they spend a lot of time satiating.
Dogs, they sleep a lot.
Cats, they sleep a lot because, you know, they've already attacked their cat food and so that's pretty much it for the day.
Human beings, you know, we tend not so much to enter into states of satiation.
Now what happens when you're in one of those little units, you know, one of those little motivated things, there's a couple of things that can happen.
We've got it here.
Maybe it's in the next one.
Probably.
Yeah, yeah, this is good.
Okay.
Okay, so we talked about motivations as sort of setting up this little frame, and then we can talk about emotions.
So, there you're going somewhere, and there's this little straight line that'll take you It's a nice, efficient way to get there.
Now, why do you want to do it efficiently?
Well, because you use up the least amount of resources in that, so then you can maintain some resources for doing the next thing that you need to do.
So you care about efficiency and simplicity.
So you want to go like the crow flies to your destination.
And so then what happens along the way?
Let's say you just get to go straight.
Well, basically what happens is that you're motivated by your perception of the goal, or intermediary goals, because the goals can be linked together.
And then, as long as things are going according to plan, you know, as you move towards the goal in an untrammeled way, you're going to feel mild, positive emotion.
And the reason for that is that you're turning the environment—the environment almost never has Most of it's irrelevant.
The rest of it has a positive or negative valence.
And if things are going according to plan, it has a mild positive valence.
Right?
You think things are okay, and really what you're doing is you're observing two things.
You're observing that the things that should be happening, if you know what you're doing, while you're acting, are happening.
And so each step forward is an indication that you're getting closer to your goal.
That's incentive reward.
That's incentive reward.
And that's the sort of reward that you actually think of as fun.
An incentive reward is produced by activation of the exploratory system that's in the hypothalamus.
It has its roots in the hypothalamus, and that's the dopaminergic system.
And that's the system that cocaine and amphetamines and all those other drugs that people really like to take hyperactivates, making them feel like they're doing something important and useful.
Even though, in all likelihood, they're not.
So the dopaminergic drugs in some sense hijack your incentive reward systems.
And it's incentive reward because you're incentivized to continue moving forward.
Anything that you look at that makes you want to touch it or move forward to it basically activates the dopaminergic system.
Now, so you say, well, what happens when you're on your way to somewhere?
Well, roughly what happens is Neutral things, which is okay, you can ignore them.
Positive things or negative things.
Positive things happen when things are going according to plan, or even better than according to plan.
You know, you're walking to school, it's raining, somebody you know stops and offers you a lift.
It's like, well, you're doing okay getting to school and that was fine, but all of a sudden you're getting there a little faster and you're not getting wet, so that cheers you up.
It's an indication that you're able to save resources while you're moving towards a goal.
Dopaminergically mediated.
You know, and then we can imagine a different scenario where you're walking to school in the rain, and somebody drives by you—maybe it's even the same friend, and they don't see you, and there's a puddle right beside you, and not only do they not stop, but they completely cover you with oily and frigid water, and so, you know, that's not so good.
You're angry about that and upset.
Why?
Well, your day is—you might say, my day is ruined.
What does that mean, exactly?
Well, it means that you had a little map on top of your day, and you were hoping that the day and the map would correspond, and then all of a sudden the map burned up, and God only knows what's going to happen to the day.
And so it's like the bottom has dropped out of your map.
And then you have to worry about your clothes and catching cold and all those things and turning around and going home and what it'll mean if you miss class and so on and so forth.
So basically that's the domain of chaos that we talked about.
So that's a negative thing, but it's also—the thing about negative things is they're sort of hard to disentangle from unexpected things.
You know, because most of the things that happen to you that are negative are also unexpected because you don't go around trying to make negative things happen.
Well, what happens when something negative happens?
Well, you get a negative emotion.
Pain, anxiety, disgust.
Those seem to be the big three.
And they're mediated by different systems.
We don't understand the disgust system very well.
It doesn't load with neuroticism, which is quite weird because all the other negative emotions load on trait neuroticism.
Pain, pain seems to be what you experience if your receptive surfaces are, you know, if your physiological self is subject to stimulation of an intensity that's sufficient either to develop it, to damage it, or to damage the receptors.
So, you know, but pain is complicated.
It's not just physical pain, you know, from physical damage.
It depends on how you define physical damage.
If someone dies, that's pain.
If you're alone and isolated, that's pain.
If you're depressed, that's pain.
If you're frustrated or disappointed, that's pain.
Frustrated might mean something gets in the way of you moving towards a goal, and disappointment might mean the whole damn structure just collapsed on you.
Either way, that's pain.
Now that's, you know, the behaviorists would have called that an unconditioned, like a painful stimulus, they would have called that an unconditioned stimulus.
You don't have to learn for that to be bad.
It's sort of built-in bad.
Then they would think about anxiety in response to the unexpected as learned.
So, like the behaviorists would think that you need to learn what predicts something painful.
And if you learn that something predicts something painful, then you get anxious to it, or afraid of it.
But it turns out that it's more complicated than that.
So, you know, what the behaviorists would think is that pain, in some sense, is the fundamental negative emotion.
And then, you know, maybe you're a kid and you stand up underneath the table and you whack your head on it when you're learning to walk.
And then when you go under the table, now you get anxious because you've learned that if you stand up under the table, you bang your head and that hurts.
And so anxiety under those circumstances is a learned behavior.
It's a conditioned response.
Got it?
Okay, but it's more complicated than that because anxiety can also be an unlearned response.
So if you just...
If you encounter something you've never seen before, it's going to make you anxious.
And there's actually a circuit that mediates anxiety.
So it's not just a secondary derivation of the pain circuitry, it's its own little unit.
And it's sort of like you figured out over time, over evolutionary time, Not to get hurt because, you know, you don't want to be damaged, but then you've learned how to detect the probability that you will get hurt for so long that you've also evolved a system just to respond to that.
And so some of that responds to things that you have learned are dangerous.
Some of it responds to things that are generally just dangerous—blood, spiders, insects of various sorts.
Facial expressions that indicate fear or disgust or anger.
Broken limbs.
Bodies, especially mutilated ones.
You know, you can think.
You know what's in horror movies?
That's all sort of primary fear stimuli, right?
And it's built right into you.
Now, psychologists debate about whether it's built in or whether you can just learn it really easily.
But I would say there's sort of a continuum.
Some of it seems pretty damn built in.
Snake fear, for example.
Chimps who've never seen snakes, you bring one into their cage, if it's a rubber snake, poof, they hit the roof.
And then they look at it.
And snakes in the wild, a chimp will go up to a big snake in the wild and hoot at it.
They have this special snake, they call it a snake rod, and they'll look at the thing.
And some of them will just look at the snake for like 24 hours.
So, you know, partly they're afraid of it.
Partly they want to explore it.
So what they do, they get close to it and the fear increases.
And then they back up and the fear decreases and the curiosity increases.
And so what happens is they move back and forth until they're right on the line where they're afraid but they're curious.
And so then they're stuck and they're looking at it.
And you experience that all the time actually because when you are engaged in something that's meaningful, that's where you are.
And that's like the line between order and chaos.
You know, because you want to solve it, it's important.
Maybe you're, I don't know, maybe you're reading papers about some illness that you hope to work on or study.
It's like, well, you're worried about the damn illness, you know?
All you're doing is confronting it through the paper, so, you know, you're fairly well sheltered from it.
You don't want it to exist and you'd rather it wasn't around, but you're curious so you're going to get engrossed in it.
And most of you, to the degree that you're immersed in anything, are partly immersed because you perceive it as a problem.
So, you know, that's like existential anxiety in a sense.
It's like it's just part of being.
There's problems that have to be solved.
They produce anxiety.
They're complicated.
You find a way of approaching them so that the anxiety doesn't overwhelm you and so the curiosity is optimized.
That's an incentive-reward activation.
And then you're awake because the anxiety keeps you awake and so does the curiosity.
And you think, yeah, this is a good place to be.
And it is a good place to be because you're optimally protected right there and you're optimally learning.
So yes, that's a good place to be.
You could think about that as an answer to the Nietzschean problem of how you create value.
You don't exactly create it.
You find it.
There's problems that need to be solved.
They automatically engage your emotions, both positively and negatively.
You've got to find the right balance.
And it's something like contending, you know.
It seems to me that human beings have to have something to contend with, or they can't tolerate themselves, you know, because life seems like a stupid joke if you don't have something worthwhile to do.
But you could have something worthwhile to do, and so then maybe it's not so stupid and And absurd and tragic.
And that's at least a good way to think about it.
So you've got satiation on the one hand, on the positive side, and the behaviorists would have considered that an unconditioned response too.
They really thought about that as reward initially.
You know, so you take a rat, he's hungry, you feed him something.
Reward.
Now Skinner, he used to train rats, right, and he was a very, what would you call it, very Well-renowned behavioral psychologist, and he could train rats to do damn near anything.
And what he would do is starve them to three-quarters of their body weight, because then they were damn motive—they were basically, you know, hungry rats.
They were hungry, lonesome rats, because they lived that isolated existence, which rats don't like, and then they would starve down to three-quarters of their body weight.
When the behaviorists used rats as a model for people, they actually used hungry, lonesome rats as a model for rats as a model for people.
And you might think, well, what kind of model is that?
But it turns out it's a pretty good model, because you're a lot more like a scared, hungry rat than you'd like to admit, which is partly why you can empathize with one, right?
Everybody's sitting there thinking, oh, the poor rats.
By the way, the more you thought that, the more agreeable you are.
So how many people were feeling pretty sorry for those rats?
Yeah.
So, how about men?
How many men were feeling sore for those rats?
Oh yeah, about three.
Yeah.
There's a big gender difference in agreeableness between men and women, by the way.
So, just so you know, we'll talk about that more.
So now, the behaviors also thought that you had this primary set of rewards—called them unconditioned—and then you had to learn that some things predicted them.
Like, oh, classically, maybe, Rat would push a lever and get a pellet.
As soon as he's pushing that lever like that, he's pretty happy about pushing that lever.
Okay, and he learned the conditioned association between lever pushing and getting a reward.
But it turns out that because that's been around for so long, you also have a system for it.
So it's not just a learned association to what satiates you.
It's a whole system, and that's the dopaminergic system.
And the serotonin system seems to be the thing that satiates.
So, you know, if you have a big turkey dinner, it's like up goes the serotonin levels, it's like you don't have to do anything.
And serotonin is a calming and regulating neurochemical, which is why antidepressants stop your neurons from taking up serotonin before you've had a real chance to use it to regulate your nervous system.
But dopamine tells you, hey, good things are on their way.
And that's pretty much what people run on.
And you can think about that as hope.
So incentive reward is sort of like hope, or promise.
I think promise is a better term.
So there's pain and satiation, and those are really ancient systems.
And then there are newer systems that are anxiety and promise.
And those are related to those more fundamental negative and positive emotions.
And those things regulate you while you're on your path.
Now, there's one more level of complication.
Because you think, what can happen on either way to your goal?
Nothing.
Irrelevant.
Okay, so that's the irrelevance that enables you to not see the gorilla.
And almost everything around you is irrelevant.
And I think that's partly why people don't like to have their little maps of the world destroyed.
Because if your map of the world is thoroughly demolished, everything becomes relevant.
And you do not want everything to become relevant.
It's just too much for you.
So you wake up and you're naked and it's dark in the middle of a jungle.
It's like everything's relevant!
You're not going to like that.
It's going to burn you out quick.
And so most of the time you have to be protected so that almost everything's irrelevant.
And then you can focus on the few things that you're capable of handling and you do that.
So you're in your little map and then as you move towards it your emotions play.
And the negative emotions appear when things are not going well and the positive emotions appear when things are going well.
That's basically how your emotions work.
You've got your satiation and your pain, then you've got your threat and your promise, and then on top of that you've got a more complicated thing, which is novelty, because that's the other thing that can happen when you're on the way from point A to point B. Something you didn't expect, So, what—and you don't understand.
So, you're walking down the street and there's someone laying there face down on you're walking down the street and there's someone laying there face down Okay.
And, you know, they're disheveled, and so, well, what's your emotional response?
Well, you didn't expect it, so you're going to be taken aback a bit.
That's anxiety.
It's like, you're moving towards your goal, the anxiety stops you.
Now, you could think of the space-time area around that person as unexplored territory.
Now, you don't want any unexplored territory in your map because God only knows what's going to happen there.
Okay, so what are you supposed to do?
Well, maybe you cross the street.
You think, well, that person's drunk.
Or maybe you think, well, they're a homeless person.
Maybe they're lying on a sleeping bag.
You think, well, they're just asleep.
You know, you're going to stop, and then you're going to observe, and then you're going to use little cues to try to put your map back together.
And your map is, what's going on here and what should I do about it?
And so, it's partly this interplay between anxiety and curiosity.
Now, you can just step around and continue, but maybe that'll upset your moral map.
What kind of person am I, you know?
Maybe I should have done something about it.
Or maybe you think, there's no damn way I'm going to get involved in this because, you know, who knows what'll happen if I step in there.
And, you know, fair enough.
Who knows what'll happen if you step in there?
The point is that it's like your map, which has made everything irrelevant, has got a hole in it, and now some of what's complicated is shining through, and that thing that's shining through—so that's like what the phenomenologist talked about as shining forth.
That thing that's shining through, it's like you don't know what to do about it.
What should you do?
Well, you should do what you do do, and what you do is you prepare to do everything.
And that's an emotional response to novelty.
It's like, well, if you don't know what to do, you should prepare yourself for anything.
And that's stress.
You could prepare that something good will happen.
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