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March 17, 2016 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:18:47
2016 Personality Lecture 10: The Psychobiology of Traits
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Hi guys.
So, we're going to talk about the brain today.
Last lecture I talked to you a little bit about constructive elevation and what it means to measure something.
So, I'm going to take a bit of a detour.
So, I told you about measurement problems last time.
If you do your measurement properly in psychometrics, if you're studying personality, if you're studying individual differences, there are roughly six things that you can discover.
And they can be broken up different ways.
That's the big five model, extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness.
And they can be subdivided, as you should know, because in principle you've read the paper that subdivided them into ten.
That turns out to be quite useful, but for now we'll just presume that there are five.
And then the other factor of human function that's pretty easy to derive and measure is IQ. Now IQ Likely nests under openness, because openness looks like it's something roughly like intellect, which is interest in ideas, but that's probably an ability with ideas, but that's probably measured better by an IQ test.
So if I ask you how smart you are, and you say you're pretty smart, that would give you a relatively high score on the intellect scale.
But if I tested your IQ, I will get a better measure than that.
So in some sense IQ nests inside the Big Five model.
But you can think about it as a separate thing, and I think it's reasonable to do that.
So, you know, it depends on what you're up to, fundamentally.
Now, when the Big Five was first invented, invented or discovered, depending on how you look at it, as I mentioned briefly as well, it was brute force statistics, basically.
So the idea behind the Big Five is that It's called the lexical hypothesis.
And the lexical hypothesis is that because human traits are so important to us, because we want to understand ourselves, and perhaps even more importantly, we want to understand other people, and because we have language, there's a reasonable probability that we've encapsulated the structure of human personality within our language.
And so If you analyze the linguistic representations properly, then perhaps you can extract out the central personality features, and that's basically what the lexical hypothesis is.
And it's important to know the lexical hypothesis, and it's a bit more sophisticated than that, because it basically presumes that you can extract out valid information about personality from adjectives, descriptive adjectives, from phrases and from questions, and you'll get the same basic Dimensional structure, regardless of which of those techniques you use.
And that turns out to be true, for all intents and purposes.
Now, the lexical hypothesis depends on its validity—depends for its validity on the initial claim.
That personality is accurately represented within the structure of language.
And so, one of the things I would say is that there's a weak Big Five hypothesis and a strong Big Five hypothesis, okay?
The weak Big Five hypothesis is that, insofar as you use language to describe personality, personality has a five-factor structure that's reliably extractable.
Now, the strong Big Five theory is that, no, no, personality has a five-factor structure And it's accurately represented in language, but when you pull out the structure from language, what you're pulling out is actually representative of genuine personality.
Now, the weak hypothesis is, I would say, it's established.
And it's worth knowing, because what it means is that if you invent a questionnaire, That has anything to do with self-description.
It might be self-description at multiple different levels of analysis.
Like values, for example, instead of just adjectives.
Or attitudes instead of just adjectives.
I mean, these categories are sort of unclear.
What's the difference between your attitude and your temperament?
Well, you know, it's usually defined by the sentence that you use the words in, right?
You extract out the words.
They sort of stand there alone.
It's very difficult to clarify their meaning.
Anyways, the lexical hypothesis, I think, is one of the most well-established, it's one of the most well-validated claims in psychology.
I think it might be the most validated claim, apart from maybe the work that has extracted IQ out from cognitive questions.
Basically, it was brute force statistics, you know, people develop different lists of adjectives, and you can complain in some ways about how they did it, and we'll talk about that later, but because they tried to throw out the evaluative words like good and evil, for example, those aren't in the big five.
So they tried to only use adjectives that didn't necessarily seem to be, like, highly Or, like, valued or devalued.
So, introvert and extrovert, well, they're opposites, but, you know, is it better to be an introvert?
Is it better to be an extrovert?
It's like, well, it's not obvious, so all the words that cover that dimension can be kept in because there's no value judgments associated with it, and the originators of the Big Five theory wanted to keep it as free of values as possible.
Now, that's already a hypothesis, right?
It's a hypothesis that you can come up with an accurate description of human personality Even if you eliminate all the words that have to do, that are clearly valenced.
And we did an experiment here a while back that was pretty interesting.
We got hold of a data set of descriptive adjectives and we put all the evaluative words back in.
So, you know, like nasty and horrible and awkward and cruel and then the good words as well, you know, moral, pleasant, uplifting, all those things.
And we had people rate people they liked and people they didn't like using that expanded list.
We got a real archetype, in some sense, of the hateable person, and a tremendous number of the words that were used came from the evaluative dimension.
So I think that when you throw out the evaluative words, you actually throw out a lot of what people actually use descriptive words to describe, because, you know, whether you like someone or don't like someone, if someone's likable or unlikable, that's pretty important phenomena, you know?
I mean, You hang around the people you like, generally speaking, and you don't associate with the people you don't like, so it's a fundamental choice.
But we'll talk about that later, because there's reasons that happened, and the reasons were valid, and it's not that easy to fix it.
And besides that, the standard five-factor model has all sorts of utility.
So, but you need to know what its strengths are and its limitations are.
Now, hypothetically, what you do to draw out the five-factor model is you take Imagine the set of all descriptive adjectives, okay?
And then you take a random sample of those descriptive adjectives, so that it's not biased.
You're not going to use all of them because, you know, if you ask someone to describe themselves on a questionnaire using all the adjectives we have that describe personality, they'd be there for like a day, and so that's not very official.
So you want to take a random sample.
Maybe you only sample the words that people are most likely to use.
So, for example, if you go online you'll find that there are word frequency tables.
You know, and most of your language—most of the—about 500 words covers about 80% of what you say.
So, you know, and I don't remember what the lexicon of the typical person is.
I think it's in the neighborhood of 3,500 words, but that might be wrong.
But there's like 750,000 words in the English language, you know.
It's an omnivorous language.
It just pulls words in from all over.
And so you hardly use any of those words, you know.
There's ones that are used extraordinarily infrequently.
So, what you could do is you could look at the total set of adjectives and then you could pull out, you know, identify the ones that are used, you know, the thousand most frequently used words and that probably covered 95% of the territory and then you could pick out Random set of a hundred.
Then you can administer it to people.
Then you can factor analyze it.
You administer it to lots of people.
Then you factor analyze it, you get five relatively clear and stable factors.
And the most, the one that comes out first, so it's the dominant factor in some sense, or the easiest to measure, or maybe the best represented language or something like that, it's extroversion versus introversion.
And extroversion is a positive emotion dimension.
And it's associated with enthusiasm and assertiveness.
And assertive people will say, they'll dominate the conversation with language.
Or they'll, well that's basically, that's about the right way to think about it.
Enthusiastic people, they're up for anything.
You know, they're the ones that are always smiling and telling jokes and having parties and that sort of thing.
And generally extroverts really like to be around people.
So they're happy.
They're gregarious.
They're assertive.
They're enthusiastic.
They're noisy.
They blink more than introverts.
Now, why that is, I have no idea, but apparently they do.
So if you notice someone blinking a lot, you can assume that they're extroverts.
If they're not conscientious, like, you know, there's this idea of people being impulsive, it's a very badly defined term, so when you hear a psychologist talking about impulsivity, the first thing you can realize is they don't know, you don't know what the hell they're talking about because probably there's no such thing as impulsivity.
But, extroverted people who are not very conscientious tend to That's one of the things that you might think about as associated with impulsivity.
There's all sorts of other things, though, too.
Okay, so there's a positive emotion dimension, and that's extroversion.
And there's a negative emotion dimension, and that's neuroticism.
And neuroticism seems to break down into something like withdrawal and volatility.
And volatile people are touchy.
So, you know, they'll react quite a lot if something negative happens.
So if you tease them, they might get upset.
Or if you start fighting with them, In a sort of provocative way, instead of sort of calming everything down, they'll just ramp it up.
And if there's two of you that are volatile and you're having a conversation and the conversation goes a little bit, you know, into unpleasant territory, you can really get each other going.
So, yes?
Both.
Both, yeah.
I mean, that's part of the problem with using the word emotion because, you know, is an emotion an internal state or a set of behaviors?
And the answer to that is, as far as we can tell, it's both.
So, now, I'm going to start talking about extraversion and neuroticism, and part of the reason for that is because I think the evidence for the relationship between those traits and the way the brain functions is in some sense the clearest.
Now, you remember, the Big Five were extracted out using statistical procedures, right?
So there's no reason to assume, necessarily, that the traits would bear any straightforward relationship to brain function.
Because they weren't derived from analysis of brain function, at least not directly.
They were extracted from analysis of linguistic representations of other people's and their own behavior.
But it turns out that there's quite a concordance between certain elements of neuropsychological theory and the positive and negative emotional Traits—extroversion and neuroticism.
And so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to talk to you about how positive and negative emotion are instantiated, in some sense, neurologically.
But I'm going to put that in a broader picture of brain function, because Well, because, first of all, why not?
And second, because a lot of the things I'm going to tell you about the brain today will sort of retroactively shed light on some of the clinical theories that we've already talked about.
So, which is nice, you know, because one of the ways that you find out if something is true, and this is something we also talked about during the last lecture, is that it manifests itself even when you use different measurement techniques.
And so, you had this statistical derivation You know, which basically took place—it really started to accelerate, I would say, first in the 1960s and then in the 1980s.
It made a big comeback in the 1980s.
But paralleling that were theories of brain development.
And they weren't really—the scientists that were doing the one sort of research really weren't communicating with the scientists that were doing the other kind of research.
So they were methodologically separate.
They used different techniques as well.
They weren't talking back and forth much, and they were using different measurement techniques.
So if they both come up with the same thing, then you think, oh, well, there's probably something to that, because, you know, the sighted people discovered it, and the people who could hear discovered it.
It's the same kind of idea.
So, and, you know, this has been worked out in a fair bit of detail over the last Thirty years, really.
The papers that you're supposed to read with this, they're difficult papers.
I believe you're reading Gray, which is a model of the limbic system and basal ganglia, applications to anxiety and schizophrenia.
And I think you have goals in behavior, that's the Carbon Shire paper.
I put the Swanson paper in as optional, that's Cerebral Hemisphere Regulation of Motivated Behavior.
That is a tough paper, and so is the Gray paper.
And it's partly because these guys Both of them.
Gray's paper is a distillation of a very, very thick book that's very, very difficult and that's been written twice.
It was published first in 1982 and then again in 1999.
It's a brilliant book.
It's had a tremendous impact on psychology.
Gray was one of those people who, he was so damn smart it's just painful, you know.
His reference list, I don't know how many papers are in his reference list, like 2,000?
And one of the really weird things about Gray that makes him stand out among scientists is he actually read all those papers, and more than that, he understood them!
And so that's really something.
And so Gray's book on anxiety, he did a lot of work with animal behavior, and I'll tell you, if you want like solid psychological information, About how the brain works, the people you pay attention to are the animal, the people who are studying animal behavior and animal brains.
They know what they're doing.
They're so methodologically careful, they're very, very reliable.
And the human neuropsychologists and the people who use PET scanners and MRIs and all that thing, they're way, way, way behind the animal researchers.
Because the animal researchers can just get in there at a lot higher resolution and they can do much more stringent experiments and they tend to be more methodologically careful and more scientifically minded.
So anyways, the Grey book is a brilliant book.
It took me like four months to read that damn book and I mean I really had to take it apart because he probably poured thirty years of work into it, something like that.
He worked a lot in thirty years.
You know, he did a lot of experimentation and he read a lot, and so he built a bottle of the brain's function that was based partly on Russian neuropsychology, partly on cybernetic theory, partly on animal behavior, partly on neuropsychopharmacology, and so that's the study of how drugs affect behavior and cognition,
and then partly Partly from a higher-order conceptual perspective, and then he stacked all those things up, one on top of the other, to make sure that the picture was the same at every single level of analysis.
It's absolutely brilliant work, and it took the social psychologists, like, they really started thinking about Gray, although he published his book in 1982, they probably started thinking about Gray seriously in about 2005.
So it took 23 years for his book to start to Make its wide-scale entrance into, you know, the more general psychological community.
Anyways, and so you're going to read this paper, which is a model of the limbic system and basal ganglia, and it's a distillate—30 years were distilled into the book, and then that was distilled into this paper.
You know, it's rough going.
And then the Swanson paper, he's another guy, same kind of guy.
He's a developmental neuroanatomist.
And if you're really interested in psychology, I would really recommend reading those papers.
Because, like, they're hard going, but if you get it, you have this substrat of knowledge underneath you that's really firm.
And I really like Swanson's paper.
The guy's a genius.
What's so cool about Swanson's paper is that if you talk to human neuropsychologists, you'll find that they're biased towards the cerebral cortex.
And there's sort of, I think, there's sort of an anthropomorphic pride that goes along with that.
It's like, well, how are we different from animals?
Well, you know, we've got thumbs, and that's great.
Hooray for the thumbs, and we stand upright.
But if you look at us neurologically, the big difference is that we have this tremendously expanded cerebral cortex, especially the prefrontal cortex, and so then people think, Well, because, you know, that's one of the things that differentiates from animals, and it's relatively evolutionarily modern, because the human brain really, really developed rapidly over the last two million years, that it's like king of the brain in some sense.
And it's the place where all the complicated things happen.
And that's just not right, because, like, breathing, that's complicated.
That's why you don't get to control it voluntarily.
And keeping your heart going, that's complicated too, and so you don't get to have a decision about that.
Your brain has made that automatic, like, millions of years ago, because there's just no way you're going to get voluntary control over something that's that vital.
You know, so, Assuming that newer brain areas do more complex things is, in some ways, I think that's actually precisely backwards.
It's the old brain areas that have been around for, you know, a hundred million years, those damn things are smart.
And that's why they've survived for so long and why they're distributed into so many different species.
You know, like, your brain is somewhat like a lobster's brain.
It's a lot like a mouse brain.
And it's a lot like a rat brain.
And you might think, well, a rat brain isn't a very good model of a human brain because, after all, they're rats.
But one thing I can tell you is that a rat brain is a way better model of a human brain than your model of a human brain is a model of the human brain.
You know what I mean?
It's like people think of the brain while they have a dopey model.
Use a rat as an example.
Of course, it's off in some ways because rats can't talk, for example.
There are so many levels of analysis where you might as well be a rat, you know, technically speaking.
The neuropharmacology, for example, is very, very similar.
The function of the neurotransmitters, the basic anatomy of the structures, like, there's a tremendous amount of overlap.
And so, you might as well go for the commonalities among brains before you focus in on the differences, because in some sense that way you get the basic architecture right.
Now, one of the things that's really interesting about Swanson—and this makes him—and he's not a neuropsychologist, and he's not really even a psychologist.
He's a developmental neuroanatomist.
And so, there's lots of ways of chopping up the brain, you know, to look at it, because it's a really complicated thing.
It's like saying, well, how many ways can you divide up a city to analyze it?
There's endless numbers of ways that you can divide up a city to look at.
And it's the same with the brain, you know, because it's infinitely subdividable in some sense, certainly all the way down to the molecular structures.
And then even at higher order levels, you know, because it's so complex and it's hierarchically structured, you can just divide it up in all sorts of different ways.
And so, at higher levels of resolution there isn't even that much agreement on how to name the parts.
Now, what the developmental neuroanatomists do is that they look at how the brain develops in utero over time, because it's a developing thing that sort of unfolds like a flower unfolds, you know?
And you can track how the, you know, which part of the early brain turns into the later brain, and so you can get some sense of the Like, it's like an evolutionary tree, you know?
If these three parts grew out of this part, then you can assume that there's some commonality between them.
And that can also help you figure out how to divide up the brain.
And so that's one of the things that Swanson does.
But the other thing he does, which I really like, is that instead of looking at the brain from the top down, which is what human neuropsychologists tend to do because they concentrate on, say, language and, you know, higher order cognitive functions, which we think of as complex, but you think they're not that damn complex, you know?
Like a computer can do mathematics so much better than you that there's not even any comparison, you know?
And it won't be very long before A lot of the things that we think of as abstract cognition are things that computers are going to be able to do, right?
They just won a go tournament, for example, and that computers are now better Even your PC is better at playing chess than probably anyone in this room, and the really high-end computers are better at playing chess than anyone who lives.
And so computers are catching up damn fast, but you'll notice that they don't do things like bus tables in restaurants, because it turns out that's really hard.
You know, well, and you think about it, it's hard, you know, you're carrying different sized loads all the time.
You have to interact socially with people properly.
You have to stay the hell out of the way.
You have to exactly time when you're going to come to the table.
You know, you have to move extraordinarily efficiently, especially as the place gets busy.
You know, there's a lot of demands on you to do that job effectively.
And, you know, we think about it as a low-end job, but it's not automated.
The low-end jobs are the ones that are going to be automated first, and it's not obvious that they're going to be the things that we associated with low-end labor, you know.
It's just that, well.
Now, what Swanson did with the nervous system, I was so happy when I found this paper, because he did exactly with the nervous system what Piaget did with children.
He showed how the nervous system builds itself from the bottom up.
And so, Swanson lays right on top of Piaget.
It's lovely.
And then, the other thing that Swanson does very, very nicely is he elucidates a lot of the Freudian presuppositions.
You know, so, Freud of course talked about the id, and the id is this, sort of like the archaic brain in some sense.
You know, it's where all your primal impulses lurk.
And, you know, he called that one thing, the id.
Well, you might say, well, is there an id in the brain?
And the answer is, well, vaguely.
Vaguely.
The brain does differ in terms of the age of its subcomponents.
And as you go deeper into the brain and closer to the spine, the brain areas get phylogenetically older.
And the more phylogenetically older areas of the brain, which are underneath the cortex, they have their own little circuits.
You know, and there's some commonality between them, and they do govern primal—I think of them as primal sub-personalities.
And we've talked about that before.
It's better than thinking about them as drives or goals or anything like that, because not only do they They're like sets of associated behaviors, but they're not just that.
They're also ways of looking at the world and ways of thinking about the world.
So, you know, if you're angry, it's not like you're being driven to use your fists.
That's not how it works.
What happens is that the angry subpersonality comes out.
You know, and it does a whole bunch of things.
You know, it's got its own state of arousal.
It's characterized both by positive and negative emotion, which is something that's quite peculiar about anger, because it's both a defensive reaction and an aggressive, forward-moving behavior.
And it has a viewpoint.
Like, it's a biased viewpoint.
If you're angry with someone, all you can see about them is how damn irritating they are and how much they need to be defeated, you know, roughly speaking.
And so, it's a whole personality.
Now, it's a one-dimensional personality, because all it's really got is anger.
And that's not enough to solve, you know, every problem.
But you can't think about it as a drive, exactly, also because it's not deterministic.
You know, even when you're angry, you have a range of choices to make.
Now, they're circumscribed by the fact that you're angry, you know, but it's best to think about it as a subpersonality.
I think you just get a lot farther that way.
You know how Piaget talked about children, infants, they start out with a few fundamental reflexes, right, that they're sort of born with, including the ability to use their mouth and their tongue as an exploratory device.
And then they have certain reflexes that they can manifest right away, and then they have the ability to modify those reflexes.
And so, as far as Piaget was concerned, that was enough to get the ball rolling.
It was sort of like the child was booting up across time.
It's got some, you know, outside of the operating system you've got some bare processes in your computer that get it started enough so the operating system can turn on.
It sort of unfolds up into something complex.
Well, that's sort of what human beings do across time.
They start out with these basic reflexes, That are simple movements, and then they learn how to modify the movements, and then they learn how to chain the movements together, and then they learn how to use the chain movements as tools, in some sense, as embodied tools, to allow these biologically determined sub-personalities to operate in the world with some chance of success.
Okay, now you can layer that onto the nervous system, so partly what's happening when you get these basic movements down, the ones that are now automatic, like your ability to grip, your ability to, you know, do this with your hands, and all the basic subroutines you have with your body, those are automatized.
They're made into little machines, and a lot of them run spinally.
So, you know, because what you think in some sense is that if you're walking, you're thinking about walking in some way, that's how you walk.
It's like, that's not right.
What happens is you orient yourself to a goal, and in some sense you just disinhibit the system that knows how to walk.
And then it more or less does it automatically, and you know, you direct it, and you can modify what it's doing if there's an error.
But you kind of know that, right?
You drive to school or you drive somewhere you're familiar to, You don't even necessarily remember the drive if you've done it fifty times.
It's because you're basically, in some sense, you're just sequencing automated behaviors.
And a good thing, too, because if you didn't have those automated expert behaviors at hand, you wouldn't know how to drive.
Because you're just not smart, you know.
The time when you drive most consciously is when you first learn how to drive.
Well, you don't want a conscious driver.
You want an unconscious expert driver whose consciousness is monitoring the world for anything unexpected.
That's what you want.
And that's the case for almost everything you do.
If you have to become conscious of what you're doing, the probability that you don't do it very well is really high.
And you know that because maybe you're talking to someone Happens when I'm lecturing sometimes.
You know, if I'm not really on top of things, I'll get self-conscious.
And that's a terrible thing to have happen when you lecture.
You know, it just makes you stumble.
If it's going well, I know where I'm going and I have all these little routines, you know, that are stories and things that I know that they just automatically sequence.
All I have to do is point the lecture in the right direction and, you know, the things that are logically associated with the With the direction of the lecture, they'll come up.
They're primed in some sense.
And so, Swanson helped me understand the functions of the lower part of the brain quite well and then to map that onto Piaget.
And one of the things he helped me understand was just exactly how sophisticated the lower parts of the brain are, the more automatic parts.
The behaviorists used to believe that, or did believe, and still believe to some degree, that a lot of your behavior is reflexive.
And the radical behaviorists, the guys from the 50s, more or less made the case that even complex behavior among animals is nothing but the chaining together of automatic reflexes.
So it was a deterministic chain of reflexes.
Well, you do have reflex actions, you know, so if you touch a hot stove you'll jerk your hand away, and your brain isn't involved in that.
It's just your spinal cord that's involved in that.
Now, your brain's involved when the pain hits, and maybe that's so that you stop doing it in the future, but the conscious part of your brain is too slow to get your hand away from the You know, from the stove in time.
And so, what's happening in your body in some sense is that you have these multiple layers of neurological organization, and some of them are quite fixed.
They're automatic deterministic systems, and those are things you've really, really practiced, and that you can just run as a routine.
And then above that are those things that you've chained together, but they could be chained together in different ways.
So they're less automatized, and then if you keep going up, they get more and more complex and less automatized, until at the top, which is where your consciousness is, roughly speaking, you have to program what you're doing.
You know, you have to pay very careful attention to how to go about doing this, because you don't have the systems built into you.
So, you know what that's like if you're trying to learn something new.
It takes a lot of energy, and you really have to pay attention.
And then once you start to get it, you know, well, there's things—what really happens is there's things you don't have to think about anymore.
And thank God for that, because, you know, first of all, you can't think that much, because you're a pretty limited capacity processor.
And second, the programming is quite difficult.
Okay.
So, let's see here what I've got that I can...
Yeah, we'll do that in a minute.
Yeah, that's a good one.
Okay, so if you look on the right there, there's a little diagram that's a hierarchical, or a little table really, and it's talking about the motor system.
Now, the motor system is what allows you to output action.
And, like, you're outputting action at all sorts of levels that you don't even realize because, you know, you might think that sight is a sensory activity.
For example, but there's a very tight relationship between sensory activity and motor activity.
So, for example, when you're looking at a scene, even though you don't know it, your eyes are going like this.
And the reason they're going like that is because if you held your eyes absolutely still, and you can actually learn to do this, if you hold your eyes absolutely still, your vision will fade right out and you won't be able to see anything.
And it's because the little retinal cells that are picking up the light get exhausted.
And so then they stop transmitting.
And so part of the reason you're zipping your eyes back and forth is so that, you know, different parts of your eye can process the scene and it doesn't get exhausted.
And plus, you're also looking around, you know, and you're looking at when things move You know, you direct your attention to that, or if someone makes a gesture.
So, you're actually kind of using your eyes like tentacles, you know, to check out the information that's coded in the light.
And even when you hear, and that sort of thing, there's a fair bit of motor activity associated with it.
You turn your head unconsciously, and there's all sorts of little motor actions in your ear that also help you tune in, and so those things are tightly associated.
But, roughly speaking, the motor output is action.
And then Swanson shows that there are these layers in the nervous system that go from the spinal cord upward.
The first ones are the somatomotor neuron pools, and the second are locomotor pattern generators, and the third are locomotor pattern initiators, and then the fourth are locomotor pattern controllers.
It's a hierarchy.
So the way to kind of lay Piaget on it in some sense is to think of the somatomotor neuron pools as simple actions that can be implemented automatically.
And then the locomotor pattern generator has taken those simple actions and chained them into relatively more complex melodies of action, so kinetic melodies, and then The locomotor pattern initiator more or less decides when those kinetic melodies should be implemented.
And even that can be unconscious.
So it's still at that level of brain organization, it's still more or less automatic.
Even stimulus response is a way to think about it.
And then you go one level higher and that's where you get the ability to voluntarily use these automated things.
So I can show you an example of how this works.
This is called a ballistic movement.
So, I'm going to take my hand and I'm going to bring it down really fast right towards that edge.
Okay, so.
Alright, now, so that's very fast movement.
Now, one of the things that's cool about that movement is that I don't have time.
Once that action starts, it happens so fast that it's done by the time the information about the action actually gets to my brain.
So I actually, once I let that go, I can't control it.
What I basically am doing is disinhibiting the motor control systems that I already have established in my psychophysiological being.
I'm disinhibiting one of those and then it runs automatically.
And so that's what you're doing all the time when you're acting in life.
And it's kind of a neat—I wrote a paper a while back with an undergraduate student of mine who's He was a pretty bright character and we got invited to do a paper, I got invited to do a paper on free will.
And so we were thinking about free will, you know.
And it's very interesting to think about free will in relationship to these hierarchies because it sort of goes like this, is that out there in the future you've got free will.
But as the future moves towards the present, you don't.
Like, once it gets close enough to the present, you have to have initiated something automatic that will happen.
And so I can give you an example.
People who play the piano very well, they look ahead of where they're playing.
In the music.
Because they know how to do this.
They don't have to think about it.
What they have to do is look ahead so that the part of them that knows how to do this gets ready to do it.
And all of you are experts in that way likely—all of those of you who drive, you're also experts that way.
Because when you're driving, where do you look?
If you're a good driver on the highway, you look like at least half a second or a second ahead.
Why?
Well, because fifty feet ahead has already happened.
It's too close in time for you to do anything about it.
So basically what you're doing is you're looking at the road And then you're disinhibiting sequences of action that are the ones that are going to correspond to what you want to do with the road most adequately.
And as, you know, the closer you get to executing one of those motor behaviors, the more automated it is.
So by the time you manifest the action, there's no free will there at all.
But you set it up to be released in some sense.
So I could say, well, there's no free will in that.
But there was in deciding to do it at that point.
And so that's sort of how your automaticity meets your freedom.
You've got to think about it as something extending across time.
So, okay, so, having established that, then we're going to get into the The neurological localization a little bit.
So, you might say, well, you collect all these patterns of behavior and then you automate them into routines.
I could give you an example.
So, for a child, you know, when a child is first born, if you tap on its cheek it'll go like this.
It's called a rooting reflex, and it'll move its mouth and tongue.
Well, what it's doing, roughly speaking, is searching for a nipple.
And if you just put your finger there, it'll clamp onto that and start to suck.
And so the child comes out with that ability.
And that's a reflex.
It's sort of built into the neurology.
But then, when the child starts to interact with the mother to actually breastfeed, well then that initial reflex has to be modified quite substantially in the context of the relationship with the mother, because the bare reflex, it's enough to get the thing going, but it's not enough to make it work.
And so often, mothers take a fair bit of time to learn how to breastfeed, but it's also because the baby is taking a fair bit of time to learn how to do it, so they have to establish The dance that goes with that.
And one of the things that's quite cool about that dance, so to speak, is there's been studies done of depressed and non-depressed mothers interacting with their infants.
And so if you take a non-depressed mother interacting with their infant, And you just film them.
And then you speed up the film, you can see, like, the mother's, the baby reacts, and the mother reacts, and the baby reacts, and the mother reacts.
And it's like a dance, you know, there's this continual flow of information between the two of them.
And if the baby's with a depressed mother, that doesn't happen.
It's jerky and discontinuous.
And so, if you think about that, you can see how the dialectical interaction between the mother and child is building up the child's repertoire of complex abilities within a social context, you know?
I mean, I know I told you guys before, roughly speaking, that, you know, kids really get socialized to play with each other You know, between two and four.
But that's not exactly true, because even the lower-level, more automated and more primordial reflex behaviors, you know, like the ones that are associated with breastfeeding, even those develop under the constraints of social guidelines.
So, society's always there, right from the reflex level up.
But, you know, what happens when kids are between two and four is they have to learn to actually play—they have to learn how to play complex games with other children.
And so that's a whole—that involves, you know, communication and negotiation at a verbal level, and also with people their own age.
So, you know, it's continuous in some sense and discontinuous in another sense.
Okay, so anyways, you might say, well, why do you bother streaming all these things together?
And, well, you think about the breastfeeding issues.
Well, why does a baby bother to learn how to breastfeed?
Well, that's pretty obvious, isn't it?
I mean, first of all, if it doesn't, then it doesn't live.
You know, and there's a bunch of reasons for that.
It's like, one is, obviously, it's not going to be nourished properly, although, you know, there are things you can do to substitute for that, although, still, breastfeeding still seems to be the best thing you can do for your baby.
Although you can work around it, but fundamentally it seems to be the best thing that you can do.
But then the baby's also learning all sorts of other things, like it's got skin-to-skin contact, and it's snuggling, and it's being comforted, and it's doing eye gaze to eye gaze, and it's cooing, and the mother's imitating it, and it's like there's just a lot of things going on there.
And so, The child is organizing all that partly to fulfill a basic biological need, which is both two needs, both thirst and hunger, but it's also fulfilling its need for play, for example, because children have a circuit for play.
So you could say play is part of the inn.
It's a fundamental biological need.
Yacht Panksepp was one of the people who either discovered that or who worked on it.
And that work was extended by Tiffany Fields in a hospital in Florida.
Some really brilliant work.
She was looking at Panksepp's work on the necessity of tactile stimulation.
And she thought, hey, I bet we could try that with premature babies.
Because, you know, if a baby's premature, a couple of things are problems.
I mean, first of all, at the end of the term, pregnancy term, that's when babies lay on fat.
You know, so they come out and they're sort of—they've got some storage there in case things don't get going very well, you know.
And they're gaining a lot of weight in that last period of pregnancy, so if they come out premature, Then they're really skinny, and then what happens often is they start to lose weight, and that's not good because they should be ramping up the weight gain really quickly.
A newborn baby will all grow its clothes in one week.
You know, those things are—they're gaining weight quickly.
The premature babies lose weight, and you know, it's hard to keep them going.
They put them in an incubator, they feed them, but what Tiffany Field did was she had the nurses go in there You know, with gloves, and massaged the babies for ten minutes three times a day, and those babies gained weight as fast as babies that were still in utero, and you could still detect the differences in their development six months later, which in baby terms is like forever, right?
I mean, you change as much from zero months to six months as you probably do from six months to twenty years old.
It's such a radical transformation.
Okay, the reason I'm telling you all this is because you lay out these hierarchies of behavior that are well practiced and automatized and brought under the control of social conditioning, but you really do them in the service of Well, that's the question.
In the service of, we'll say, biological necessity, for the sake of argument.
Well, you have to eat, and you have to drink, and so one of the reasons you lay out the hierarchy that's associated with breastfeeding is so you can do that directly, but also so that you can establish a relationship so that not only are you doing it directly this day, but you're also going to do it, you know, tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.
The hunger system is integrated with these other systems of biological constraint in some sense, and they're trying to come up with an answer to the continual problem.
So, you have dedicated biological systems that help you address problems that are associated with your biological nature that are universal.
And those would be the things that Freud would describe as the id.
So you can think of these hierarchies of motor behavior, which sort of develop up into sub-personalities, as nested in some sense inside motivational states.
So, there's the motor behavior hierarchy that you use when you're angry.
There's a motor behavior hierarchy you use when you're distressed.
And kids get very good at that, you know.
So, they'll cry, which is a reflex.
But by the time they're about two, they're pretty damn good at crying.
You know, they've got a cry that sounds like they're sad and upset when they're really angry.
And so, if you really listen, you can hear the difference.
Because a baby, angry baby, sounds different than a sad baby.
But, if you don't listen, the baby will have you thinking it's sad, no problem, then you'll feel sorry for it and go, you know, help it out, and really it's just thinking, up yours, you know?
So, we know this partly because So let's say you've got a baby and it's under nine months, six months old, and it's crying in its crib.
You think, well, what should you do?
You go in there and you pick up the baby and you comfort it.
You probably do that pretty much non-stop when the baby's that young.
You know, because they're so young, they should really still be in utero.
They're really young.
But by nine months, that baby's starting to get smart.
And so, it's about nine months when it can visually recognize people it knows, and people he or she doesn't know.
And so then, the baby's in there, and it's, you know, squawking a bit, and so wants some attention, and then someone walks in, and it's not the mother.
And the baby bursts into tears, and people think, well, that baby's all sad because its mother didn't show up.
It's like, it's not sad.
It's really irritated that the wrong person showed up.
And you can tell that because people have done facial coding of the baby's expression.
And also its skin tone and an angry baby looks angry first of all and it turns all red.
It's like it's really angry.
And you see that behavior later too in temper tantrums.
Like a two-year-old that's having a temper tantrum is just having a fit of rage.
You know, the rage system, because there is a rage system, is just completely out of control.
It's just absolutely dominating their behavior.
And you don't really want to encourage that because the rage system should start to be modulated by other systems and other higher order control systems.
Not so much suppressed or repressed, which is sort of how the Freudians would think, but integrated into more complex and sophisticated modes of action so the child can use its anger, which is an extraordinarily useful Capacity, you know, because it allows you to defend yourself, so the child can learn to use that in a sophisticated way so that it can solve the problems that would lead to a rage attack without ever getting to the point where it has to be enraged.
Like, that's a functional child.
It's not like it's learned to repress its anger.
It's just that it gets along with people and never has to get angry.
So, now, some kids learn to repress their anger because, you know, they're in a household where Any manifestation of anger is dealt with very, very harshly.
You know, and maybe there's a rule that everyone has to be nice to each other all of the time.
You know, or else.
Sort of a paradoxical rule.
But anyways, you can imagine.
Now, there's a lot of these biological systems, and so I want to show you some of their instantiation here.
So let's look at this one.
So, when you get up above the spinal cord, there's a little brain area.
I'll show you about how big it is.
There it is.
So there's your brain.
The top on part, the part on top, that's the cerebral cortex.
That's the part that people are really proud of.
It's like, oh wow, look at our cerebral cortex, you know?
Doesn't it have a lot of neurons?
And then in the middle there, there are older brain areas, phylogenetically old.
And then as you go down towards the spinal cord, they basically get older and older and older and older.
So, and more and more Critical to your development.
So the serotonin system, we talked about a little bit in lobsters, right?
The serotonin system is the thing that sort of determines where a lobster is in the dominance hierarchy, determines whether it stands like this or whether it stands like this.
That's an old system.
And when your brain is developing in utero, it's the serotonin system that guides its development.
So that's how important it is.
It's sort of like the conductor of the orchestra, but it's also the thing that controls the entire unfolding of the brain, and it comes from, you know, really, really, it's a really, really archaic system, so in some sense your being is controlled by these things that are ancient, beyond comprehension, you know.
Anyways, you look at the hypothalamus, you think, wow, that's not very big, and yeah, it's not, but if you take a cat, So a cat brain looks something like that.
If you take off all the stuff that's in light orange and most of the top of the stuff above the hypothalamus that's in white, just take all that out, it's a female cat and it's in a cage, you really can't tell the difference between it and a cat that has all the rest of that brain.
Now, there's some things it can't do.
It doesn't do very well if you take it into a new situation because it can't learn.
More importantly, in some sense, it can't remember So, it's in a perpetual state of everything happening for the very first time.
But it's still capable of a lot of the reactions that would be necessary in order for you to stay alive.
So it can regulate its liquid intake, it can regulate its food intake, it can react sexually, it's capable of defensive aggression, although it'll really fly into a rage, so it's kind of like a disinhibited two-year-old in some sense, you know.
And, you know, as long as you keep it in the cage and provide it with food and water, it's like the way it lives.
And it's hyper-exploratory, which I think is just weird beyond belief.
It's like you take the brain off a cat and then all it wants to do is explore, which is not what you think at all.
It's like a cat with no brain is really curious.
It just doesn't make sense.
But it does actually, because the systems that drive your exploratory urge are rooted in the hypothalamus and they're actually the same systems.
It's individual differences in the function and sensitivity of those systems that are in part associated with individual differences in extroversion.
So extroverts are sort of hyper-exploratory in social situations.
Whereas introverts aren't.
And the exploratory circuit that has its origins in the hypothalamus runs on dopamine, roughly speaking.
And then it runs through the base of your brain and then up into your prefrontal cortex in particular.
And it's also the system that responds to cocaine and amphetamines and other drugs that people like to take because they heighten positive emotion.
So it's variability at a very, very low level in the brain that That determines things like the differences in extroverts and introverts.
So, anyways, it's this tiny little part of the brain, and yet, you know, if that's all you have, you can get along not too bad.
But that's also because it's tiny from one level of analysis, but it's really big from another.
You know, I mean, You can increase your resolution when you're doing brain analysis all the way down to the molecular level, and still be looking at the brain.
You know, below the molecular level, at the atomic level, it's sort of, well, everything's made out of atoms.
But the brain is already there at a molecular level and it's insanely complicated at a molecular level.
And the hypothalamus is way bigger than a molecule.
And so, even though it's small compared to the rest of our brain, it's still a whopping big structure by atomic standards.
And so there's a hell of a lot going on down there.
And you notice the hypothalamus—you might say, well, is there such a—you said, is there such a thing as the id?
Well, yes and no.
Is it in the brain?
Yes and no.
Really low-resolution representation of what's in the brain.
That's one way of thinking about it.
But then you might say, well, is there a hypothalamus?
And the answer to that is, well, yes and no, because there's the hypothalamic structure, and you see it's made out of a bunch of things that are different.
And so you could say, well, should you even group those things together?
Well, the answer to that is, it depends on why you're grouping them together.
You know, if it's useful for some purpose of understanding or control to group them together, I mean, they're similar in the way that they emerge in the course of brain development, and they're roughly of the same phylogenetic age.
But there's lots of reasons to treat them as the same, and there's lots of reasons to treat them as different.
It depends on what you're trying to do.
Anyways, the hypothalamus has all these little sub… what?
What do you call them?
Sub-structures that are really in some sense at the core of the sub-personalities that we talked about.
So, for example, Okay, so this is Swanson again, and he's showing you, this is a rat's brain from the bottom, and he's showing you the layout of the hypothalamus.
You see, it's got all those different nuclei.
It doesn't look like one thing, it looks like a bunch of things.
And so here, he says, the descending paraventricular nucleus is involved in the control of eating and drinking, and that's shown in green.
So that's the thing that, when you get hungry or thirsty, that's the thing that sort of turns on your hungry and thirsty subpersonality.
And then, the rest of the cell groups play a major role in controlling two classes of social behaviors, that is, behaviors involving interactions between animals.
Reproductive, that's the red areas, and defensive, the purplish areas.
So, now what you can think is you have all those little subroutines that we already talked about, you know, that are sort of at hand and ready to go, and then they're organized underneath these major classes of motivation.
So that you have to do something, like eat, and so it's like there's an eating robot in you.
That's one way of thinking about it, except it's smarter than that, and it's alive and conscious, you know?
These things are alive.
They're not machines, and they're not deterministic.
They're just sub—they're partial—you can think of them as low-resolution personalities, or unidimensional personalities, because the only thing the eating system really cares about is whether or not you eat.
And the drinking system is the same thing.
You know, you see malfunctions sometimes in people of these singular systems.
So you can develop a condition if you have hypothalamic damage.
Where you'll drink water until you die, and no one can stop you.
You know, they could lock you in a room away from sinks and that would stop you, but you'd be raging away inside trying to claw through the door to get to the damn water because you're so hyper-thirsty that it's all that there is left of you in some sense, and if you're allowed access to a tap, you'll just drink and drink and drink and drink and drink and drink until you drown.
And, you know, people can say, hey, you've had enough water.
It's like, forget that.
The hypothalamus is a major league system.
And when push comes to shove, it's the thing that's in control.
And one of the ways of thinking about the way that you organize your life is that The hypothalamus controls the major motivational systems.
We just talked about those, and so those are the things that people would think about as drives.
Although they're not drives, they're too complicated to be drives.
And then there's other systems that come up later that we'll also talk about that govern emotion, like anxiety and a different system that governs pain.
Partly what you're trying to do as you organize your life is to make sure those systems stay shut off.
And then you think, well, I'm in control.
It's like, well, no you're not.
You just satisfied all the things that could take control from you, and so now you have a modicum of choice.
And basically what you're doing, when all these things have had what they need, is you're running around exploring.
You know, and that's also another one of these circuits, because the hypothalamus, as I already said, governs exploration.
So, a lot of—see, Psychologists often get things backwards, and they ask silly questions, like, why are people anxious?
That's a stupid question.
It's how people—why are people ever calm?
That's a question.
Because, like, why are you anxious?
Well, hmm.
Think of all the terrible things that can happen to you.
And they will happen to you, even worse.
And there isn't anything you can do about it.
It's like, why aren't you quaking in your boots, just sitting there?
Well, that's a mystery.
You know, and then, well, You know, here you are in your normal state.
It's like, well no, this is not a normal state.
People have been trying for Seven million years, like, as people, to create a situation so complex and comfortable that a couple hundred of you can sit here, you know, without having your hypothalamus driving you towards something and actually just listen to something for a few hours.
That's not normal.
That's so staggeringly abnormal that, you know, it's a miracle that the typical person, like, and for most of human history, it's like, you are hungry, man.
And that's not the same, like you people—well, some of you have probably been hungry in your life, but, I mean, what's the longest—is there someone here who's gone without food for more than one day?
Okay, has anybody here gone without food for more than a week?
Okay, okay.
How about three days?
Okay, so, like, are you hungry?
No.
You know, you're hungry when you haven't had anything to eat for twenty days.
Then you're hungry, you know, so.
And the same goes for thirst and cold and all the things that we're just never exposed to.
So, you know, we think civilized people are all calm and nice and easy to get along with.
It's like, yeah, well, you know, you have absolutely everything you need all the time.
And that makes you as easy to get along with as any completely insane primate ever gets.
Okay, so, you might say, well, God, if you can survive with just the hypothalamus, what good is the rest of the brain?
And the answer is, well, if you're thirsty, let's say you're angry.
The hunger system isn't going to be able to take care of that, right?
So, you're hungry, okay, that works.
You're angry, that works.
But then you have another problem, which is, you're hungry now and you're angry now, perhaps.
You can move through those states.
You watch that, you'll see that in two-year-olds.
It's partly why they're so fun to be around.
It's like, first of all, they're really excited and they're running around playing and then, you know, they trip and then they're crying like mad and then you poke them and they laugh and then they want something to eat and then they fall asleep and You know, they're just run by their hypothalamus, and it's really fun to see because they're so alive and so enthusiastic and spontaneous.
But they're completely clueless.
It's like you take one of those creatures to the mall and leave it there, and it's like it's just not happy at all.
And the reason for that is Well, it doesn't know how to sequence any of its actions, right?
It runs through these states of need, but it isn't complicated enough to figure out how to address those needs in any consistent sense across multiple environments in a social world.
You need the rest of your brain for that.
And so, and that again fits in with the Piagetian ideas, that what you're doing is you're taking these micro-personalities that are basically instantiated within the hypothalamus And then you're organizing those into more and more complex games.
And you need the cortex to do that, because the cortex is partly what enables you to think about time.
You know?
Because the hypothalamus, it's a here-and-now thing.
Like, the hypothalamic cat lives in the present.
There's the present, and that's it.
You know?
You probably get some sense of that.
Like, one of the things that happens to people if they take amphetamines or if they take psychedelic drugs is that some of the inhibitory control Some of the more complex control systems that are cortical shut down.
And so then they enter a state where it's all now.
And, you know, the now just comes at people in that state.
It's a transcendent experience, but of course, you know, despite that, you're not functional.
And so in some sense you trade that transcendent relationship with reality for a narrow functionality.
And that's too bad, and that's life, but, you know, it's a trade-off.
So anyways, you're organizing these sub-personalities, and you're using your cortex to do that because, you know, you don't just have to think about eating, you have to think about How am I going to get the food?
When is the food going to come?
How am I going to cook the food?
What about all the other people that want to eat?
How do we regulate that in our family?
And then how do we regulate that with the fact that we also need to sleep, and we need to work, and we need to get along with other people, and we need to have something interesting to do, and like, it's ridiculously complicated.
And it really doesn't be—there's no end to the complication, because You know, maybe you're just solving the problem for you, and then you're two.
Or maybe you're trying to work it out within your family.
Well, then that's sort of like the Crumb brothers.
They never get out of their family because they just never come to an arrangement that works well enough so that they can, you know, in some sense move into the broader world.
Then you solve the family problem, but then you've got, like, the tribe problem.
You know, maybe you can solve that to some degree, but then you have the broader political problem.
It's like, you know, there's an infinite number of problems that crop up for you to solve, so there's plenty for you to do with your big cortex.
You know, and we paid a big price for that thing, because once we discovered time, you know, We could make a bargain with the future, which is basically what you do when you regulate your behavior.
You're making a bargain with the future.
You say to yourself, if I forgo so-and-so now, then later, it'll pay off.
And that's real useful.
You can conceptualize the future, and you can conceptualize the future as something you can bargain with.
But there's a lot of cost to that.
One is you don't get to do just what you want right now, and of course that sucks.
It's partly why people drink alcohol.
You know, because alcohol is disinhibiting, it actually doesn't stop you from thinking about the future, by the way.
It stops you from caring about what you think about the future.
And that's just as good.
And so then you can go out and have fun, because fun is, you know, impulsive and often extremely dangerous, because the long-term consequences, you know, can be really devastating.
It's a real pain to keep yourself controlled all the time, you know, because you're foregoing direct reward constantly.
You know, I think it's part of the reason why people in heavily industrialized complex countries aren't necessarily happy.
It's like, you know, it takes a lot of grinding away to keep all the machinery that keeps all of this in place going.
You know, so you're not getting typhoid and, you know, tigers aren't tearing you apart, but by the same token, You have to be unbelievably disciplined and ready to act constantly to keep everything that's so complex around you working.
And that's not necessarily fun.
So, okay.
Now, let's look at something else.
Now you can tell me if I showed you this.
I hope I didn't show you this You see that?
Okay, good.
Now, some of you know this, and so you just don't say anything.
Although you probably don't know this specific version.
So, if you've seen this sort of thing before, you're going to think you're smart while you're watching it, but it'll probably still trip you up, I hope.
So give me a sec here and I'll see if we can actually get some sound out of this thing The monkey business solution Count how many times the players wearing white pass the ball
*sad* *sad* " аб
" The correct answer is 16 passes.
Did you spot the gorilla?
For people who haven't seen or heard about a video like this before, about half missed the gorilla.
If you knew about the gorilla, you probably saw it, but did you notice the curtain changing color or the player on the black team leading the game?
Here comes the gorilla, and there goes a player, and the curtain is changing from red to and the curtain is changing from red to gold.
When you're looking for a gorilla, you often get scared.
And that's the Monkey Business Illusion.
Learn more about this illusion in the original gorilla experiment at TheInvisibleGorilla.com.
Yeah, so that's quite the illustration.
So, one of the questions you might ask is, well, okay, first of all, how many of you didn't see the gorilla?
Okay, how many of you have seen this sort of video before?
Okay, so you knew about the damn gorilla.
Of the people who didn't know about the gorilla, how many people didn't see the gorilla?
Well, some.
Okay, fine.
How many of you got the other things?
Both of them.
Okay, well.
So, you get the point.
The point is, and it's a brilliant experiment.
It's an insanely brilliant experiment.
You're blind to a ridiculous degree.
And your visual system and your brain are constantly coping with the fact that you're blind, you know?
And you can kind of detect it to some degree, like if you look at someone.
But you pay attention to the things that surround them.
You'll see that, like, so I'm looking at you.
I can't see your nose for sure.
It's gone.
I can't even see your face.
I can see your glasses.
I can't see any features in your face at all.
Can you smile?
No, the one behind.
So, well, one of the things I've noticed when doing this is that, like, if you look here, look at my finger.
But pay attention to my face.
It's really hard, because normally when you pay attention, you move your eyes to what you're paying attention to.
Okay, so here's what you might see.
The first thing you might see is that you can't see my nose.
The second thing you might see is that you can really see my eyes, especially if they move.
Weird, eh?
Isn't that weird?
God, it's so weird.
It's like all of a sudden these eyes pop up.
They're going back and forth like this.
Yeah, so I'll try this too, okay?
So look at my finger again.
So, you can also see teeth.
Well, why?
Well, if you're looking here and there's something there with eyes and teeth, you should probably be able to see it, right?
So what that basically means is you've got this tiny little fovea, which is right in the center of your retina, it's just densely packed with cells, and then those cells transmit information along the optic nerve, And they're just connected like mad to cells in the visual cortex.
But you don't have that much room, so you can't connect all the cells in your retina to 10,000 cells, like at the first level of connection.
You'd have to have a brain this big, you know, and you don't.
So you get by.
And part of the way you get by is you're always moving your eyes around.
And so it looks like you can see everything, but you can't.
In fact, out here, like if I'm looking at you, now I can tell my hands are there, although if I didn't know they were hands, I probably couldn't figure it out.
They're kind of blurry, I would say.
And they're in black and white, but I can't tell that, you know.
So, out here, it's like, who cares what color it is?
So you just don't see the color.
But you don't know that you don't see the color.
And then, of course, I can have my hands here, and then I put them here, I can hardly see them, and then, oh, they're gone.
They're so gone it's like they don't even exist.
It's not even—you know, because you think in some sense that what was behind your head would be black, like when you close your eyes.
That's nothing.
But no, no, what you can't see behind your head is so not there that it isn't, you know, it's literally—it isn't even not there.
That's how gone it is.
So, okay, so part of the way that your eyes work is that the periphery is attached to Devices, in some sense, and some of them detect lines, and some of them detect movement.
You remember Jurassic Park?
Don't move!
The dinosaur can't see you unless you move.
It's like, yeah, frogs are like that.
And cats are like that, to some degree.
They can really see things move this way, partly because their eyes are slitted.
It makes it easier for them to see things moving like this.
They're not so good at things moving like this.
Well, it's because they chase mice, right?
And mice move—most mice.
You know, except like ones that hop.
They move this way.
And so cats are specialized for that.
And so you're also specialized to see teeth and eyes because you want to know if something's looking at you and you want to know if it has teeth.
And so what that means in part is that the surrounding tissue in your eyes reports to some degree to your visual cortex, which is what you use to actually have conscious vision with, but a lot of it just dumps down into some of the brain areas we haven't talked about.
Not necessarily directly down to the hypothalamus, although I suspect it has inputs there.
I just don't know.
But your eyes talk to your spinal cord directly so that you can see something snake-like, for example, and jump just like you jump if your hand touches a hot stove.
You don't even see the snake.
It's like, snake jump!
And the reason for that is, you wait around to see the snake, it's like it's bitten you fifteen times and you're dead.
So you can't wait around and see this, oh look!
A snake!
And you jump.
It's like, no.
That doesn't work.
So, your body has conserved all these layers of reflex and movement all the way up to, you know, higher order voluntary movement because otherwise you just wouldn't be fast enough when something super fast happens.
And then the way your eyes are built, so your eyes can tell your body to jump.
With no vision, right?
It's just pattern.
Snake pattern, jump pattern.
Snake pattern, retinal pattern, optic nerve pattern, brain pattern, muscle pattern.
No vision.
No seeing.
Because you don't need the seeing.
You just have to do pattern matching.
Right?
It's a weird way of thinking about it, but it's not much different than touching, you know?
You can feel the pattern.
You can build a three-dimensional representation of it.
You can really see well with your eyes.
It's like the idea that blind people can't see is a really dopey idea.
They can't see color.
And they're not very good at detecting things in the distance.
But they have a visual world, it's just built out of things that don't have color, you know.
You know perfectly well that that's the case, because I could hand you an object and you could fiddle around with it behind your back, and after some fiddling around, you'd know exactly what it looked like.
And, you know, you might pull it out here and say, well, I didn't know it was blue.
It's like, yeah, okay, fair enough.
You didn't know it was blue, but you still saw it.
And you can get pretty goddamn good vision with your ears.
So there are kids who are blind who've learned to echolocate.
So they go click, click, click.
They don't make that noise exactly, but they do click.
And they can detect the clicks bouncing off of things, and they can do that well enough not only to walk, but some of them can actually ride bikes.
It's like, hey, that's impressive, man.
So, what's that?
Yeah, there's one kid, I saw a kid on YouTube who was blind who could shoot baskets, yeah, which is, hey, that's impressive, man.
But, you know, my point is that, you know, a lot of the neural tissue is, it'll take whatever input it gets, and so if you're born blind, you're Your auditory systems will invade your visual system, and then you have twice as much brain devoted to your hearing.
So, and then, you know, you can use that quite effectively, so.
Alright, so I think we're probably pretty much out of time.
One thing I want to tell you before we go on to the next part, though, is that, so now we've sort of built up the idea of these underlying motivational systems.
And now you can kind of see how they work.
So you might say to yourself, why Didn't you see the gorilla and the curtain and the person leaving?
It's really complicated.
It's really complicated.
Well, the first answer is, you did what I asked.
And then you might ask, well, why?
Why did you do what I asked?
I mean, you missed the damn gorilla, right?
It's like, obviously, that wasn't a very good decision.
So you think, well, why did you do what I asked?
And the answer would be, Well, it's sort of like the Milgram obedience experiment, except, you know, at a way lower level.
It's like, we've got an agreement going on here.
You guys are all very sophisticated and complex game players, you know, otherwise you couldn't sit here peacefully for an hour and a half, so you're very well socialized, all of you, and so that means that you've organized all your motivations into a hierarchy, and that hierarchy is guiding your behavior here.
It might be something like, well, we need to learn something, and hypothetically, You come here and you learn something, and so you're playing that out.
And then because that's the motivational state that you're in, When I ask you to do something, you're just going to do it.
Well, then what's so cool is that as soon as you decide to point your attention at something, what happens is, what you see in the world radically transforms, you know?
So, I say, well, count the basketballs, and all of a sudden all you can see are basketballs.
And you think, no, no, I see, you know, I'm not blind.
It's like, well, you're pretty damn blind.
And so, That's partly how you can understand how motivation is a subpersonality.
Like, it has its whole sets of perceptions and values.
It's like, all of a sudden, I set you up in a little motivated state.
It was a complicated one, you know, but it was just like, here's a task!
And so you're all motivated, you're going to do the task properly, for God only knows how many reasons, and then all of a sudden all that exists in the world are basketballs.
Right?
And so, It's as if your goal-directed attention has transformed the phenomenology of the world.
And that's something that's really cool, because one of the things it implies is that what you see of the world depends on what you're aiming at.
And in a real sense, this isn't some trivial sense, it means like literally what you're aiming at.
I'm going to count the basketballs.
It means, well, you're not noticing the gorillas.
So one of the things that you might ask yourself, and this is partly what the phenomenologists were on about, is what are you aiming at?
What is it that what you're aiming at allows you to see, and what is it that what you're aiming at blinds you to?
And it blinds you to a lot more than it allows you to see.
And so another thing that you could think about is, like, if everything you see makes you angry and bitter and resentful, then you might think, well, hmm, what exactly am I aiming at that's making the world organize itself around me in that manner?
And that's, you know, that would be a complex from a union perspective.
A complex would do that.
So it's a set of values.
They're sort of autonomous.
They inhabit you.
It's a subpersonality.
It's quite complex.
It's got something it's aiming at.
You might not know even what that is because you're acting it out instead of understanding it.
And because you're inside of it, it lays the world out for you in a particular way, and it makes the world look like it's showing you that what you think is right.
But it's just, you know, if you're, what do they say, the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right?
And that's one of the things that's so damn cool about that experiment.
It's like, really?
I'm really that blind?
I can miss something that radical?
Just when I'm involved in some dopey task like counting basketballs, it makes me so blind that it's almost beyond comprehension.
Well, so in some ways, you know, you skip between different states of blindness.
A lot of them are biologically motivated.
Then you turn those into a hierarchy, and that's sort of your higher value system.
And then that thing points you at something, and the whole world lays itself out around that.
And the way it does it is it divides the world into irrelevant things.
And so those would have been the curtains in this particular example or the gorilla or even the player in black who left the game irrelevant because it didn't interfere with you counting.
So what you look at makes most of the world irrelevant.
It makes some things things that serve you, and that makes you feel positive emotion, and it makes other things things that get in your way.
And that's what makes negative emotion.
And so you've got the hypothalamic systems that point you in biological directions, you organize those, and then it's like as you're approaching the thing you're aiming at, the positive emotion systems tell you when you're on track, and the negative emotion systems tell you when something's interfering.
And those are actually different neurological systems.
So, they're not in the hypothalamus.
The positive emotion system is to some degree.
But the negative emotion system, that evolved later.
And there's a couple of them.
There's one that produces pain, and we'll talk about it more, and there's another one that produces anxiety.
And so, now you kind of understand roughly the relationship between motivation, perception, and emotion.
You know, they all act together.
And they're all dependent in this weird way on what you're after.
So that, you can think about that for 50 years and you won't get to the bottom of it.
You know, the Buddhists say that everything is illusion.
Maya, right?
People live in illusion.
Why?
Because what you're aiming at determines what you see.
So, anyways.
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