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March 5, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:31
1605 Dr Greg Siegle Interview - Empathy and Vengeance
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So, yeah, so this is, I mean, I've been talking to some joyfully smart people in the field recently, and I'll send you a link if you'd like to see some of the interviews.
It's been really, really interesting.
I'm in hot pursuit of two topics that I was wondering if either you have expertise or if you could point me to somebody who does.
The first is the experiments that show that we have impulses in the amygdala which then...
So yeah, I've been reading that there seems to be some very good experiments that have been done around we get these impulses often in the amygdala which are translated into physiological symptoms which cause us to act and then we kind of invent reasons for that action after the fact.
Does that strike you as something you're familiar with?
There is some data to that extent.
It's not just the amygdala.
The most striking examples that I've seen are with neurosurgery, where I can stimulate the area that makes you laugh.
You laugh, and then I ask why you're laughing, and you make up stories, like, oh, you people are so funny.
Right, so it's ex post factor reasoning, in a sense, to explain away the internal stimuli that has occurred.
Is that right? Yes, exactly.
And here I'm using stimulating electrodes, so I know you've had no real experience.
Right, right. Fascinating.
And I was reading one study that talked about that people who are Republicans, who are, you know, death penalty people, to sort of really broadly generalize, death penalty, aggressive foreign policy, pro-military, and so on, that they experienced the world.
And I think this was, again, I'm sorry to use these terms vaguely incorrectly, but at the amygdala level, they were talking about how they would experience...
I think that's David Amodio's story.
Story, that doesn't sound like you're fully on board.
His work. It was a fascinating article, actually.
Right, right. I say story only because he's the first one who thought to tell it.
Oh, right, right. Okay, because it's a pretty gripping narrative and is really fascinating for people who are interested in changing other people's minds, you know, because certainly, you know, as a philosopher, I for many years worked at the level of reason and evidence, which only works if people's beliefs are derived from reason and evidence, whereas if they're derived really in reaction to more base stimuli, internal stimuli, then reason and evidence has, I think, much less of a chance of working, if that makes any sense.
Yes, yes. It makes sense to the extent that it's important to know what the stimuli are that are going into the reasoning process.
If you think of something like cognitive therapy, this is an intervention devoted to helping people reason and use evidence With respect to internal stimuli.
So I have an irrational belief.
Now let me challenge it and use all my facilities of logic and evidence-based reasoning to understand how much I want to believe this internally generated stimulus.
Right, but you could sort of say, in the absence of that kind of introspection, reason and evidence has less of a chance, because the belief is not coming from...
Like, you know, a lot of philosophers or thinkers think that people start kind of looking at the world like a blank slate, and then they look at the reason and evidence, and it may be selective, and it may be incorrect, and so on, but they get their beliefs from that reason and evidence.
But some of the evidence that I've been reading seems to be that that's not really the case, that we have these sort of internal cues, which for many people, if not most people...
Result in a worldview that they then, you know, with confirmation bias and sort of circular evidence, they continue to reinforce.
But it's not something that starts from a dispassionate look at the world, if that makes sense.
Yes. So, the place I would go with what you're saying is to consider the work of Joe Ledoux, who talks about the high road and the low road in neuroscience.
And how do you spell that? L-E-D-O-U-X. He suggests that when information is processed in the brain, it's processed in parallel by low level structures that react very automatically to that information, especially if it's emotional.
These structures like the amygdala are the ones that make you jump back if you see a snake before you've even realized that you saw a snake.
Right. And then the high road are prefrontal regions that are your reason and evidence regions.
They actually take a much more considered approach, and they take much longer.
So the first thing to react is the amygdala, and it gives you your initial fight-or-flight response.
And then the prefrontal regions come on, and they temper that, and ideally will be involved in emotion regulation and bringing something more than just...
Automatic, intuitive reasoning to the picture.
Right, right. Okay, okay, good.
There's a suggestion that people who have psychopathologies, like we talked about last time, may have a lack of recruitment of the high road mechanisms and too much recruitment of just the low road mechanisms.
So they are effectively very emotionally driven.
Whereas, ideally, people who are more functional have both.
And it is important to have both because emotions are information.
Right, right.
That feeling will help you to react even before you know why a lot of the time.
Thank you.
Right, right. I mean, if you touch something hot, the sensation travels to your spine and moves your hand away before you're even aware that you've touched something hot.
You definitely need that stuff.
And also, what I've been reading as well is that the amygdala has these amazing pathways going up to the neofrontal cortex, but in the absence of sort of self-regulation and self-training, they remain kind of entirely one way or very largely one way.
In other words, the emotions sort of go and swamp in a sense the neofrontal cortex and you have to sort of train yourself to have that more of a two-way passage between the two systems.
So I would suggest there always is that two-way to some extent, but yes, the ascending pathways are stronger.
Right, right. And again, this is important not just for moving your hand, but for the idea that sometimes maybe you feel like you're being watched or followed in a dark alley, and it turns out you actually are.
Your emotions can...
Integrate a whole lot of information long before you can bring all your cognitive facilities to do the same computation.
Right, right. No, I agree with you.
I mean, I've been reading these studies.
I'll send you, if you like, a link.
I've been reading these studies from a Yale psychologist who are talking about the new respect that a lot of neuroscience is giving to the unconscious in terms of its ability to Directly perceived, it's not sort of lost in time or lost in history, it directly perceives, acts on information in the present, has access to the information that's available in consciousness, which is often not the case in reverse, and has this amazing parallel processing system so it can do many things at once, whereas consciousness is more like a single sprinter.
This is more like an energized crowd, so to speak.
And that stuff is really, I think the more respect we can give to the unconscious, the better off we'll be in the long run.
Yeah.
So there's a beautiful little paper that did a very simple experiment.
If you put a bunch of letters on the screen, like F's and T and a whole bunch of F's and there's one T hidden among them, and you say, find the T, the amount of time it takes you to find that T is linear with the number of elements on the screen. the amount of time it takes you to find that On the other hand, if you put a whole bunch of neutral faces on the screen and one of them is scowling and you say, find the scowling face, that's very quick.
You can do that much more quickly than a linear operation because your emotion mechanisms, as you say, do have this fast parallel integration.
Right. This sort of reminds me of an old thing in databases is a table scan where you just go through every row versus using an index which gets you there much quicker.
Right, right. And we have some filtering mechanisms that use effectively hash indices for finding these emotional bits of information in our universe or threat-relevant, anyway, information in our universe.
And just for those who are non-technical, if this goes out as a podcast, Dr.
Siegel is not recommending hash when he talks about this as a way of training your brain.
Oh, I must also say that it was great to see your video because it was fantastic to see somebody's response to my attempts at humor.
It was almost like somebody had slapped you with a wet, invisible fish across the face.
Ouch! I hope I don't miss...
It was an honest and I actually think quite accurate response, having heard the jokes for the second time.
I was like, yeah, I can see how he could react that way.
Now, there's something else that I've been reading about.
I'm finding it really hard to get good literature on, which is these mirror neurons.
And from what I've read, they give me at least, you know, with an amateur's courage, some fascinating things to think about, which is they seem to be these areas in the brain that whether you were doing a particular action or you see someone doing a particular action, they appear to fire in the same way.
Is that your understanding of it as well?
Yeah, especially with mirror neurons for motor actions.
So if you see someone raising their arm, the mirror neurons that are associated with your arm raising may activate.
Right, right. So it's almost, I mean, it has this kind of creepy collective one organism kind of thing that somebody else's actions actually cause your own physiology to respond in a similar way.
It's almost like there's a connection between the two of you.
And of course, there isn't a real one, but it's fascinating to think that it is actions are infectious in a kind of way.
And at some level, we're all puppets.
If I want to make you all, I have to do is move myself.
Right, right. Yeah, it is fascinating.
Now, I've heard these talks...
Sorry, go ahead. That's cute.
I never thought of it in that context.
And from what I've read, and this stuff really starts to get sketchy because I just don't have the expertise to know where to look, but it seems that people are talking about these things in more than physical ways.
In other words, that this is, in a sense, how we empathize with the feelings of others is through these mirror neurons.
Do you know if any work has been done in that area?
Yeah, yeah. Let me give you two answers to this question.
One is that there is a big theory of simulation, especially in little children.
The way we think that they understand their environment is by simulating it.
So the way they understand you crying is by bringing on their own mechanisms of crying.
And what I can tell you is that even at a few weeks old, if you smile at a baby, it may smile back, and that could be all simulation or mirror phenomenon.
So they know what a smile means by doing it themselves?
Like they know that a smile means happy, not sad, because when they smile, they feel happy?
Is it something like that? Something like that, exactly.
That said, The mirror neuron literature, per se, is much, much stronger for motor than it is for emotional information processing.
Well, it's more objective, right? I mean, you can actually see the muscles firing versus saying to somebody, how do you feel, kind of thing.
Well, to some extent, that's true.
I think more emotions may just be much more complicated processes, and When you talk about an emotion in all its glory, it means having more than just a couple of neurons in, you know, one little strip firing.
It's all of your personal associations and the perspective taking and, you know, the social reasoning, et cetera, et cetera, that's going to qualify how we understand what somebody else is going through.
And is there been any examination of the Efficiency, or I guess lack of efficiency of mirror neurons when it comes to people who seem to lack empathy?
Yeah, so again, I don't think that work has been done in the way we would like it to, just because finding mirror neurons for emotions hasn't really panned out as easily as we might think it should.
Right, right, right.
So it works on the physical level, but they can't find the same activation when it comes to an emotional level.
Well, so let me give you an example.
And this example is work from my student Kyung-Hwa Lee.
So, turns out that when you are very sad, you activate many of the same brain areas as when you watch a movie about somebody who's very sad.
The initial interpretation of this was that it's motor neurons.
Your sadness neurons are activating because you see this person being sad.
So then what Kyunghwa suggested is this could be true or it could be you see them being sad and you have a lot of empathy so you also become sad and your sadness neurons activate.
So Kyunghwa did a very clever experiment and she Took a video of a person abusing their child.
Just a really horrific video.
And she blanked out the face in this video to protect the innocent.
And she said, I'm going to show you a picture of a person abusing their child with the face smudged out.
And then she showed another video of a person helping an autistic child.
So we've got one good and one bad person, okay?
Right. Now, the face was blanked out in each of these videos.
She's now going to show you a new video of a person crying and experiencing some sadness.
And she'll say, this person has just been diagnosed with cancer.
If she says it was the person who was helping the autistic child, you have a lot of these sadness neurons activate.
On the other hand, if it was the person who was abusing their child, we do not get the same neural activity to seeing them sad.
Right, because people feel like, you know, good riddance kind of thing, right?
Good riddance, exactly.
Schadenfreude. I'm happy about their misfortune.
As such, it's probably not just mirror neurons, because if it were mirror neurons, I wouldn't have to feel what they're feeling.
I would just be sympathetically activating.
Or reflexively activating.
Okay, sorry. I just want to make sure I understood that last part.
If you could just take another run at it.
I just lost a little bit there.
I'm sorry? I just lost my understanding, so if you could just try it again.
Right. So...
If you activate differently to seeing a good person crying and a bad person crying, that means that your activation in that area is not just mirror neurons.
It's value dependent, right?
In a way that a physiological response wouldn't be.
That's correct. Right, right.
Okay, okay. So, and you could almost theorize that if somebody themselves were a child abuser, that they would feel more sympathy for the child abuser who, quote, got cancer or whatever, right?
Perhaps. Yeah, again, that's all theory, but there's some value intervention in the response.
Yes. And if there's value intervention in it, it's not simple mirror neurons that are activating.
So Kyunghwa's theory is that a lot of what we consider to be mirror neurons may not be.
Right, right, because they're not sort of based physiological responses.
Mirror neurons are almost like you tap the knee and the foot comes up, right?
That's correct. But these would be more value dependent because the same stimuli gives different responses based on the perceived ethics of the situation.
Right. Oh, fascinating.
Just fascinating. Maybe I'll pester her for an interview, too.
The stuff that I've been talking about with experts like yourself just brought a huge geyser of interest in this show.
So, I mean, I certainly do appreciate that.
And people are really fascinated in the degree to which values and self-knowledge, you know, the original goal of philosophy was to know yourself, and you can't really do that without looking at the science.
So, yeah, this is really great stuff.
And is there anything new that has popped up recently that you find to be particularly striking that the general audience might be interested in pursuing further?
Well, so I guess what I can tell you is that just a few years ago, if you had talked to most self-respecting neuroscientists about things like the self, we would have laughed the interviewer out of the room.
This has changed a lot in the last two years really and there's a huge amount of interest now in the neuroscience of the self writ large.
We've got some brain areas that seem to activate very reliably in response to self-relevant stimuli.
We've got I think you're absolutely onto something.
Sorry, I just had one other question.
I know you're time pressed, so we'll keep it short.
But I talked to Dr.
Dr. Richard Schwartz, who's the author of Internal Family Systems Therapy, who has, to my mind, a very fascinating approach to the personality, where he says that the personality is composed of another, a number of alters or alter egos and so on.
And we shouldn't think of the personality or the self as a single entity, but rather as an aggregation of sub personalities and stuff like that.
Do you know if anything like that has been pursued from a scientific standpoint?
Yeah, yeah.
So...
There's...
A very old literature in databases on compartmentalizing, effectively, where it would say you can't hold two contradictions, or you can't hold contradictory facts in a database at the same time without invalidating the whole database.
Because you...
Anything, you know, if A, then you can get to some things.
If not A, you can get to other things.
And if both of them are true at the same time, you could resolve anything in the database.
So the database effectively becomes useless as a reasoning engine.
Yet, somehow, people hold contradictory information in their head all the time.
We believe that we are good people and we believe that we are bad people at the same time.
Ambivalence, right? So ambivalence would be if you believe it's probabilistic.
Sometimes I think it's good.
Sometimes I think I'm bad.
That's ambivalent. But if I believe I am both good and bad, perhaps...
Or a love object, right? Like you really desire someone at the same time you feel resistance to that desire.
You may feel love-hate or that kind of stuff, right?
Right. So there's a psychological literature that grew out of this to say, well, maybe what's happened is we've actually fractionated ourselves.
We have a self that really believes one piece of the puzzle fervently and another self that believes the other part of the piece of the puzzle fervently.
And there the twain shall meet.
If we could only get it down to twain, that would be great.
Yes. Right.
It's always struck me that we have to live in an empirical world, an objective empirical world, to be, you know, even farmers or hunters.
But at the same time, throughout most of human history, we had to live in this crazy, insane, cultural, you know, superstitious world, which is the complete opposite of that.
Yet we had to kind of hold both of those simultaneously.
Exactly. And so if you want to say that this is one very complicated self that's good at timesharing different belief systems, that's fine.
Or you could say you effectively have multiple selves and you bring them out as relevant.
Right. Yeah, so what used to be considered this sort of Billy Mulligan, three faces of Eve pathology is, at least according to Dr.
Schwartz, is actually an accurate model of the human mind and not something that is innately pathological.
Yeah, yeah. And so this notion of good compartmentalization, the line between that and something like multiple personality disorder, I'm sure is very striking.
I don't want to say that everybody is a Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation, but I could go as far as to say that...
When your girlfriend breaks up with you, you may be acting very differently than you do on a normal day at work.
And you might even say, I wasn't myself at that time.
Right. And who were you?
Right. And so we've got different pieces of us in there.
If I could just take one moment to integrate the first part of our conversation with this last part.
Oh, please. If you want to suggest that when the amygdala is doing its bottom-up thing and inhibiting the prefrontal cortex, we might act in a much more irrational and much more Very base, emotion-driven way than when we have our full presence of mind without a whole lot of bottom-up input from the amygdala.
Right. You could suggest that this is the basis for two very different kinds of action tendencies with respect to the same stimulus.
Right. And go as far as to say that this person might look very different on days they're more limbically driven versus more prefrontally driven.
Right. Right.
And you could also, I guess, say that if we absorb or to some degree are infected both positively and negatively by the personalities of our caregivers and other people we grew up with, and if those things remain in the unconscious, then we do have these different patterns, like our mother and our father, grandparents, siblings, and so on. We have these different patterns which may get activated in different situations.
Yes. And there's a beautiful literature to substantiate that on priming, where Based on what I remind you of, your next action will be different.
So, for example, if I give you a whole bunch of information that primes your representation of your racist beliefs, and then I say, would you like to associate with this person whose skin color is different from yours, you may say no.
Whereas if I give you a whole bunch of information that primes your associations with fairness and equality, and I give you that same situation, you may say yes without consciously thinking about why.
Right, right.
And I was I also I was wondering, and that's the last question I'll ask you because again, sensitive to your time.
I was wondering if any work has been done, I'm really quite fascinated when you see somebody do a role play of their own parent, let's say you see somebody do a role play of their dad, whether or not, if you did a brain scan of the dad, and you did a brain scan of the guy role playing the dad, whether there would be any similarities?
Oh, I mean, to me, it would seem that there must be, but that to me would be quite a fascinating thing to explore.
Right. I've never seen it.
Interesting. It's really interesting.
So... We joke around my lab about someday bringing method actors in and seeing what happens.
No, I mean, I started as an actor and a playwright and a novelist.
So for me, multiplicity of voices, I mean, that's the tools of the trade.
You can't say no to that or you've got to find another line of work.
So for me, the idea that you could see the replication of personality almost transferred from parent to child would be absolutely fascinating to mark up.
So what I do have...
The closest I've got is a situation where one of my students is bringing in people and having them read a script that's very relevant to their life and a script that's very relevant to somebody else's life.
Then she brings in the other person and has them read the same two scripts.
And she's going to be looking at, when you're reading your own script, how much does that look like when the other person is reading your script?
Right, right, right.
And that would be looking at, in a sense, how the art is reproduced in the brain.
Yes, yes. Well, if you ever do have a student who's interested, I mean, I think it would be fascinating to see the degree to which role-playing lights up the same parts of the brain as the person you're role-playing, particularly if you've had long exposure to them like a parent.
I think that would be marvelous.
That would be just a terrific study that I would love to see done, Stefan.
And in fact, what I can tell you is for the small price of probably $50,000 or $60,000, we could do that work for you.
Haha! Well, that's something to think about.
I'll put out a donation request and see if, for the low, low price, there's your salesman side coming out.
Listen, I know you've only got a half an hour.
I don't want to push your time too much, but thank you so much.
I will send you the link, and I'm sorry that it got lost.
I'll send you the link to the video, and I will also send you links to the other interviews I've done, which may be of interest to you.
Marvelous, and I'd love to see the comments as well.
Thanks a lot, Stefan. Thanks, Greg.
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