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There are these experiments where they trained people to experience anxiety but as determination because exactly the
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same physical state could be experienced completely different. And what they discovered is that at first it's really
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hard but you practice practice practice and then eventually becomes really automatic. So the first thing to understand is that Dr. Lisa Feldman
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Barrett is a worldleading neuroscientist. Her groundbreaking research reveals that emotions like anxiety and trauma are built by the
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brain and we have the power to control them. The story is that you're born with these innate emotion circuits, but
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you're not born with the ability to control them. That's false. Really, what's happening is that your brain is
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not reacting. It's predicting. And every action you take, every emotion you have is a combination of the remembered past,
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including any trauma. And so, you don't have a sense of agency about it because it happens really automatically, faster
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than you can blink your eyes. How does this change how we should treat trauma? Sometimes in life, you are responsible
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for changing something. Not because you're to blame, but because you're the only person who can. I mean, I had a
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daughter who was clinically depressed, was getting D's in school, she wasn't sleeping, she was miserable. At first,
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she was so resistant, but then she made the decision that she wanted to be helped. And did she recover? Yes, she
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did. So, if you want to change who you are, what you feel, understanding these basic operating principles is the key to
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living a meaningful life. So, what is step one to being able to make that change? So,
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this has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribe to the
00:01:37
show. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way
00:01:43
that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do
00:01:48
everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guest
00:01:55
that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, you have a really remarkable twisting career
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journey. It's almost quite difficult to uh encapsulate in a particular mission or a particular uh summary of the
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journey you've been on and the the twists and turns you've taken. But if if I were to ask you now what mission
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you're on with the work that you're currently doing, are you able to summarize that? My goal is as a science
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communicator is to try to take really complicated science and present it in a way that people can use. You know, maybe
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they use it to entertain their friends at a dinner party. Maybe they use it to um help their kid who's, you know,
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struggling with depression. That was certainly in my case something that I had to deal with. Maybe they're using it
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to improve their workplace or improve the productivity of their of their peeps or whatever. The point being that that's ultimately that's what science is for.
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It's for, you know, living a better life. And average everyday people without PhDs can do that if they have the right information.
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I'm probably attempting to understand how it is that a brain like ours that is attached to a body like ours that is pickled in a world like ours produces a
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mind. What is it? What is happening that allows you to have thoughts and feelings
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and memories um and and actions and somebody from another country, another culture also has a mental life which looks nothing like
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yours. How is it that the same kind of brain plan with the same general kind of body plan can produce such different types of minds when they are when those
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brains are wired in a sense finish wiring themselves in cultural and physical contexts that are so widely different. when you just talked about your pursuit
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of understanding how a brain like ours creates the mind and the reality that we have. If I'm able to understand all of that as many people who read your book about the brain and emotions were able
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to understand, what is it that it offers me in my everyday life? Oh my god. It offers you the opportunity to have more
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agency in your life. And what does that mean? It means you have more choice. It means you have more control. It means
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that you can architect your life. I mean, you can't control everything that happens to you. You can't control every
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moment of feeling. Um, but you have more control than you probably think you do.
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Everybody has more control over what they feel and what they do than they think they do. That control doesn't look
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the way we expect it to. It's much harder to harness than we would like it to be. Some people have more opportunities for that control than
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other people do, but everybody has the opportunity to have more control. And of course, the flip side is also more responsibility um for the way they live their lives.
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And I think that's a really good thing. And I think it's a really good thing now
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when you know world events are swirling around you and you feel like, you know, you're just being buffeted around. Even
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within that craziness, there is there are opportunities to to be more of an architect of your own experience and your own life. I
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think a lot of people find that um optimistic and helpful. Yeah. Because life can feel like we are a puppet and we are just responding to what happens around us. And if it rains outside then
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we're sad. If person sends us a message, then we're annoyed and that we're just these sort of reactive creatures
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reacting to whatever happens around us. But you're telling me that if I have a greater understanding of the brain and how it works and emotions, then I can
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seize back some of that control and live a more intentional life. Yes, exactly. And I think for me, I mean, I started
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um I started my career studying the nature of emotion, but really it became a flashlight into understanding how a brain works. Why do we even have a brain? It's a very
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expensive organ. That piece of meat between your ears is the most expensive metabolically the most expensive organ
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you have. Um, so what's it good for? What's its most basic function? How does it work in relation to the body? I think that certainly on your show, you've had a number of people who talk about the
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relationship between the brain and the body in some way, but I think scientists for a long time forgot or ignored the fact that the
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brain is attached to a body, right? Because we don't feel all the drama like right now in each in you, in me, in all
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of our listeners, right? We all have this like drama going on. It's really quite intense and there's a lot of going
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on and none of us are aware of it. I hope if you are aware of it, I'm really sorry. It probably means that something
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is, you know, you're not feeling well today. But it's a good thing that we're not aware of what's going on inside our
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own bodies most of the time because we'd never pay attention to anything outside our own skin again, right? But the
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problem is that in science, it often begins with starting with your own subjective experience and then trying to
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formalize that. And I mean, if you look at any science, physics is like that, too. You just have to go back several
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hundred years or maybe a little longer to to see it. And so, it turns out that a lot of what you experience as
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properties of the world, of the way the world is, really is very rooted in your brain's regulation of your body. Um, and so I guess I'm I started with emotion,
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but it really became a much larger project to try to understand, well, what is a brain? How is it structured? How
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did it evolve? How does it work? What's its most basic function? And where do thoughts and feelings and actions, perceptions, what role do they play in
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that function? So, it's a bit flipping the question, right? Most people start with what is an emotion? What is a
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thought? What is a memory? They define it and then they go looking for its physical basis in the brain or in the
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body. That's a pretty bankrupt perspective from I mean after a hundred years there weren't really good answers. So we flipped it around and we said okay
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well given that we have the kind of brain we do what can it do? What does it do? And
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in its normal functioning, how does it produce mental events that in our culture our thoughts and feelings and
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perceptions and actions? In other cultures, they're different conglomerations of features. Right? So
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for us, a thought and a feeling are super distinct. We experience them as very separate. In fact, really since the time of Plato, we've had this kind of
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narrative where, you know, the mind or the brain is a battleground between your thoughts and your feelings, right? In
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for control of your action. If your thoughts win, you are a rational creature. You are a healthy creature.
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You are a moral creature. If your instincts and your emotions win, you know, your inner beast, then you are irresponsible. You are childish. You are
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immoral. You are mentally ill. That's the narrative that we work in. In some cultures, thoughts and feelings are not separate. They are
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really, it's not that you have them at the same time. It's that they are one thing. They are features of the same
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mental event. In some cultures, your body and your mind are not separate. There are no separate experiences for a physical sensation versus a mental
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feeling. They're really one thing. So our minds are not the human nature. It's just one human nature. And there are other human natures too. And we have to figure out how general brain plan, a general body
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plan for a neurotypical human produces such wide variation um depending on the cultural context in which it grows. as it relates to neuroscience and understanding the brain
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and the way that we create reality. Was there a Eureka moment for you where you realize that most of us have it wrong or
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that there's an underlying misconception about the way that our brain creates our reality? I would say yeah sure there was
00:11:06
a Eureka moment but it was a long slow burn. When I was a graduate student, I wasn't studying emotion. I was studying the self. How do you think
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about yourself? What is your self-esteem like? How do you conceive of yourself? Right? This is a an important topic in psychology. And I was measuring
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emotion as an outcome variable. And the measurements weren't weren't the measures weren't working. And I thought, well, I need to be able to just literally objectively measure when
00:11:43
someone is angry or when they're sad or when they're happy. I don't want to have to ask them because they could be wrong.
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And in that phrasing of the question, there's a presumption, right, that there is an objective state called anger. That generally most instances of anger will
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look the same regardless of person and context. And I very quickly realized that there are no essences that anybody's been able to discover. Right?
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So recently in the last couple of years um researchers did a metaanalysis which is a big statistical summary of of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of experiments. And what they discovered is
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that and this is just in urban cultures, right? We're not even talking about remote cultures now. Just in urban
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cultures, when someone is angry, they people scowl about 35% of the time when they're angry. A scowl is like a like a
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scowl like a right like you know you knit your eyebrows, you you frown, right? So it's okay. But that means 65% of the time when people are angry they're doing something else that's
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meaningful with their face. And half the time when people scowl, they're not angry. They're
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feeling something else. They could be concentrating really hard. You could have just told them a bad joke. They
00:13:06
could have a bad bout of gas. You know, a scowl is not the expression of anger. It is an expression of anger in some contexts and it's also an expression of
00:13:19
other states in other contexts. So what this means is that you know there's no really strongly reliable expression for anger that is specific to
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anger. And the same is true for every other emotion that's ever been studied. It's really clear that you're in anger or sadness or pick an emotion. You know your heart rate can go up, it can go
00:13:42
down. It can stay the same. Your blood pressure can go up. It can go down. It can stay the same. the physiology that
00:13:49
is occurring in your body is related to the your your brain's preparation for particular behaviors. So let's start with that then. So the the predictive brain is this idea that I only pretty
00:14:00
much know from you. I'd never heard it before. When we say the predictive brain, what does that mean and what does
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it not mean? So when you are living your everyday life? Yeah. Like right now? Like right now. So, right now, I'm
00:14:16
guessing that I'm saying things to you and um you're perceiving what I'm saying and then you're reacting to it. That's how it feels to you, right? Yes. Okay. And that's how it feels to me, too. So,
00:14:28
we sense and then we react. That's the way most people experience themselves in the world. That's not actually what's happening under the hood. Really what's happening is that the brain, your brain
00:14:43
is not reacting, it's predicting. And what that means is if we were to stop time right now, just freeze time, your brain would be in a state and
00:14:56
it would be remembering past experiences that are similar to this state as a way of predicting what to do next. Like
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literally in the next moment, should your eyes move? Should your heart rate go up? Should your breathing change?
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Should your blood vessels dilate or should they constrict? Should you prepare to stand? Right? Movements. And
00:15:26
these movements, the preparation for movement, literal copies of those signals become predictions for what you will see and hear and smell and taste
00:15:39
and think and feel. So under the hood, your brain is predicting what movements it should engage in next and as a consequence what
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you will experience because of those movements. So you act first and then you sense. You don't sense and then react. You predict action and then you sense.
00:16:08
So give me a example which brings this to light of how my brain is predicting and then taking action. Okay. So right now you and I are having a
00:16:19
conversation and I'm speaking and you're listening and you're what what what's really happening in your brain is that based
00:16:31
on many gazillion repetitions of listening to language. Your brain is predicting, literally predicting every single word
00:16:45
that will come out of my Yeah. Okay. And how surprising would it have been if I didn't say mouth, I said
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some other orifice of my body that words were coming out of. That would have been pretty
00:17:02
surprising because your brain is predicting that. your brain is always predicting
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and it's correcting those predictions when they're incorrect. And you know, I I have this
00:17:16
um video that I often show when I'm giving a talk to scientists or to civilians, giving a talk and I I it
00:17:26
creates a situation where they can predict something and they can they can feel that a prediction is not just this abstract kind of thought. It's your
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brain is is literally changing the firing of its own sensory neurons to anticipate incoming sensation. So you start to feel these sensations before
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the signals actually arrive for you to perceive them. You start to have the experience before the world gives you
00:17:57
those signals. I read I think it was in your book but it might have been elsewhere about the example of being
00:18:03
thirsty. Yes. So, um, when you, um, drink, so say you're super thirsty and you drink a big glass of water, when do you stop being
00:18:15
thirsty? Almost immediately. But actually, it takes 20 minutes for that water to be absorbed
00:18:22
into your bloodstream and make its way to the brain to tell the brain that you are no longer in need of fluid. Because across millions of opportunities, you
00:18:35
have learned that certain movements now and certain um sensory signals now will result in that mental state. Or here's another example. So right now, keep your eyes on
00:18:51
me. You're looking right at me. And in your mind's eye, I want you to imagine um a Macintosh apple. Like a not a
00:18:59
computer, but like an actual piece of fruit. Okay. Can you do it? Yeah. Can you see it? Yeah. Um what color is it?
00:19:07
Green. Okay. Does it have any red? No. Okay. So, it's a Granny Smith apple. Yeah. Okay. What does it taste like? Like, imagine imagine grabbing it. Yeah.
00:19:19
biting into it, hearing the crunch of the apple. What does it taste like? It's like sweet. Like a little tart, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is it juicy? It's very juicy. Yeah. Okay. So, if I were imaging
00:19:32
your brain right now, what I would see is I would see changes in the signal that is um related to neural activity in your visual cortex even though there is no apple in front of you. And I would
00:19:45
see a change in activity in your um auditory cortex even though you didn't really hear the crunch. My mouth is watering as well. And your mouth is watering. And in fact, every time you
00:19:57
sit down for a meal, your um brain directs your saliva glands to produce more saliva to prepare you to eat and um digest the food. So that usually happens
00:20:11
in advance of even sitting down to a meal. That is all prediction. That's all of that is your brain preparing itself for what's coming. Um because predicting
00:20:24
and correcting is a much more efficient way to run a nervous system, really any system, than reacting to the world. Here's another example. Do you drink coffee? Yes. Okay. Do you drink coffee
00:20:36
every day at the same time? Usually. Yeah. Okay. And are you one of these people that if you miss having coffee at
00:20:44
that time, you get a headache? I mean, it's happened before. Yes. Well, I used to be a person who drank a lot of coffee. And um and I love coffee, but I
00:20:55
don't drink it anymore. But I loved it. And I drank it always at the same time every day. And if I didn't drink it, I
00:21:02
would get a at that time of day, I would get a massive headache. And the reason why, and this
00:21:08
is true really of every medicine you take, every everything which anything which affects your physiology, if you do
00:21:14
it on a regular basis, your brain will come to expect it. And what that means, come to expect it, is that coffee has chemicals in it that will constrict your
00:21:26
blood vessels um everywhere. But in the brain, the brain is attempting to keep its to keep the blood flow pretty constant and even. And so if every day
00:21:40
at 8:00 in the morning, you're drinking something that's going to constrict your blood vessels, then at 7:55
00:21:48
approximately, I don't know the exact timing, but a little bit before uh you know, 8, your brain will dilate the
00:21:55
blood vessels in preparation for that constriction. So they remain constant and if you don't drink that substance then you have this big dilation and you
00:22:06
get a very very bad headache. I was just wondering then about as you were talking I thought you were going to
00:22:12
talk about how sometimes when I set an alarm I seem to wake up like 5 minutes before the alarm. Yeah, sure. That's an
00:22:18
example. Here's another example. Exercise. Okay. If you wanna if you want to play tennis better, if you want to run a a faster mile, what do you do?
00:22:30
Train. Train. And you do the same thing over and over and over and over again. And you get better and faster and you
00:22:36
burn fewer calories. You get more efficient. Why? Because your brain is predicting really well. That's what
00:22:43
muscle memory is. It's not literally a memory in your muscles. It's a memory in your brain. Your brain is controlling
00:22:49
your muscles. And so if you practice the same set of movements over and over and
00:22:56
over again, you just get really efficient at them because your brain is able to predict better. Now, if you're
00:23:02
somebody who's exercising because you want to become healthier or you want to lose weight or you right, you don't want
00:23:09
to practice the same exercise over and over and over again because you will be burning fewer calories because you're being efficient. That's the goal, right? So instead, you do interval training,
00:23:22
right? If somebody's calling out to you every 30 seconds a different set of movements and you can't predict what
00:23:28
they are, then your your brain will make a prediction. It'll be wrong. You'll have to adjust and so you end up burning more calories and you end up throwing yourself out of balance um which we call
00:23:41
alostasis. So you become disregulated and then you your brain has to work to get itself back in again. And so that's
00:23:47
a different kind of workout. These two different kinds of workouts are completely predicated on the fact that
00:23:54
sometimes you want to be able to predict better. Sometimes you want to be able to disrupt yourself and get back into the
00:24:00
pocket quickly. Right? So basically you're learning how to um take in prediction error things signals you didn't predict and adjust to them.
00:24:13
What does this say about the nature of trauma and other mental health illnesses like depression, anxiety, etc. Because is this a misfiring of my predictions? I
00:24:25
say this because predictions reliant on something happening in the past and forming a pattern like a pattern
00:24:30
recognition system. So if I grew up and there were certain patterns that are now
00:24:36
not the case, so if I grew up and every time a man walked into the room, he hit me. And now when a man walks into the
00:24:41
room and I'm 35 years old, I'm getting that same sort of prediction in my brain. So I've got a fear of men, for
00:24:47
example. Is this does this somewhat explain childhood trauma and why it's so hard to shake and why as adults we can sometimes have dysfunctional lives?
00:24:58
I would say as a general principle, yes. Um there are a lot of you know the devil
00:25:05
is in the details, right? But yeah, sure. Um, so trauma is not something that happens in the world to you. Everything you experience is a
00:25:16
combination of the remembered past and the sensory present. So there could be an adverse event that occurs. You're in
00:25:22
an earthquake. Someone dies who's close to you. Something bad happens to you. Someone hurts you in some way. Um, there could be an adverse event that is not
00:25:34
traumatic to you because you're not you're not using past experiences to make sense of it as a trauma. On the other hand, something
00:25:46
that is could be like an everyday experience to somebody else to you, it links to a a set of memories that are very traumatic. We're very
00:25:59
traumatic. those events were very traumatic. Um, and so to you it is a trauma. So trauma is not an objective
00:26:06
thing in the world. It's also not all in your head. It's a rel trauma is a property of the relation between what has happened to you in the past and what is occurring in the present. So here's
00:26:17
an example. There is an anthropologist who works at Emory University and she studies um people um in in a lot of different cultures and she studies
00:26:28
trauma in a lot of different cultures. And there was this one girl that she she wrote about, a case study of a girl named Maria um who was a young adolescent
00:26:39
girl and she lived in a culture where it was more normative for men to physically be very physical with women
00:26:54
and and girls. So in our culture, we would we would say it's physical abuse, but in her culture, this is just what men did. She didn't
00:27:06
exper would slap her around and she didn't like it, but she didn't show any sign of trauma. The way she made sense of it was that men are just [ __ ] It
00:27:18
was very much a this is not about me, this is about them. It's not pleasant. But she slept okay. Her grades were okay in school. She had friends. She didn't
00:27:31
have any signs of trauma at all. Then she watched Oprah and she heard all of these women talk about having been the subject of
00:27:45
physical abuse from their boyfriends or their fathers or, you know, their husbands. And she recognized the similarity in the
00:28:00
physical circumstances of these women's descriptions and and her physical circumstances. And she also observed them
00:28:10
experiencing traum traum like you know symptoms of trauma. And all of a sudden she started to um have difficulty sleeping and she her grades dropped and
00:28:23
she had trouble concentrating and she became socially withdrawn. her way of making meaning, her way of, if you think about
00:28:36
physical movements as actions, she made different meaning of those actions and she experienced trauma where she didn't before. Now, if
00:28:49
you're somebody who believes that there is an objective world out there where, you know, cause and effect, Yeah. that that really there was some kind of latent trauma in her and she didn't
00:29:01
experience it before but then it was like triggered and then she be you could tell a whole story like that and people
00:29:08
do tell whole stories like that but that's not what the best scientific evidence suggests is happening. What's
00:29:14
happening is that the physical movements were the same. The psychological experience of those movements was different because experience is a combination of the
00:29:30
sensory present, the physical present and the remembered past. And the you need both in order to have a particular kind of experience. So the way to
00:29:42
describe what happened to Maria's trajectory was that she experienced something as an unfortunate aspect of like physical life
00:29:55
and then it became about her. It became something not not this person was doing something bad but this person was doing something bad to her because of who she
00:30:07
is. And she was also shown how she should be responding to that by watching Oprah's show and watching these other
00:30:12
individuals responding in a certain way. Right? So it became about her as a person, not just about, you know, her stepfather was an [ __ ] And if you
00:30:23
think about it, what we do in this culture when when people go into therapy for trauma, right, is we're attempting
00:30:29
to to actually reverse the narrative. So, we try to teach people that it's not when something traumatic happens to them. It's, and I want to be really clear what I'm saying, right? I'm not
00:30:43
saying that when people experience trauma, it's their fault. I'm not in any way saying they're culpable for what's happened to them. But sometimes in
00:30:55
life, you are responsible for changing something, not because you're to blame, but because you're the only person who can. The responsibility falls to
00:31:08
you. And so in this culture, we try to teach people who've experienced trauma that they can experience those physical events that happened to them in the past in some other way.
00:31:22
And when they do, they no longer feel traumatized anymore. My mind's a little bit blown for a number of different reasons because it's a real paradigm shift to think that we are giving
00:31:34
meaning to the thing that happened in our past and sometimes that meaning is coming from watching other people give it meaning and we're inheriting that
00:31:40
meaning that oh yes, that's called cultural inheritance. It's like a cultural it's like a contagion.
00:31:47
So it turns out that you know there's there's one kind of old evolutionary theory right this is called the modern synthesis where inheritance is really
00:31:58
your genes you inherit in you whatever you inherit you inherit by your genes and then natural selection you know
00:32:05
chooses some gene patterns and not others and and that's really how inheritance works across
00:32:13
generations. Most evolutionary biologists don't don't hold to that view anymore because for the most part there are many many ways to inherit things and
00:32:23
a lot of what we think of as inheritance is really more what's called epigenetic
00:32:29
meaning it doesn't really involve DNA very much and I would say the way I like to say it is that we have the kinds of nature that requires a nurture we have
00:32:39
the kind of genes that require experience before anything is wired into our brains. And most of our characteristics work that way. Very few characteristics
00:32:51
work just by genes alone. What always happens in a neurotypical uh brain is that you're born with your brain incomplete. Right? An adult brain has
00:33:03
has this we we say that it's wired to its world. That world includes its own your own body. Um, but a baby um is not a baby's brain is not a miniature adult
00:33:14
brain. It's a brain that's waiting for wiring instructions from the world and from its own body. So your brain is
00:33:22
wired for you to see out of eyes that are the exact distance of your eyes from each other. If somehow, you know, magically we could transplant your brain into somebody else's skull, you would
00:33:35
not be able to see out of that skull. You would not be able to see out of those eyes because they're not in the
00:33:40
right place. You hear with ears. You your ability to hear comes from signals that are shaped by the shape of your ear. So your brain is wired to hear out
00:33:54
of these ears. Not any ears, these ears. Similarly, you as a baby, you are taught
00:34:02
the meanings of physical signals. You're taught how to make sense of these things. That's called cultural inheritance. Many things that we think of as hardwired into the brain are
00:34:15
actually culturally inherited across generations. That's how people survive in a particular environment. You know, so like in the 1800s and 1900s when
00:34:28
explorers would go off and they would go off to Antarctica or here or there and they would very quickly die. The Inuit
00:34:35
live there, they live perfectly fine. How? Well, because they had culturally inherited knowledge. We're
00:34:41
always transmitting um knowledge to each other and that knowledge becomes fodder for our own predictions. So your
00:34:54
predictions don't just come from your personal experience. They also come from you watching television, you talking to guests, you reading books, watching
00:35:05
movies. Um also your brain like most um human brains can do something really fantastic which is you can take bits and
00:35:15
pieces of past experience and put them together in a brand new way so that you can use the past to experience something new that you've never experienced
00:35:26
before. You talked a second ago about therapists try and make you think about the past
00:35:32
differently, but I do think there's an underlying belief in our culture and society and on social media that if
00:35:40
something happened to you, almost like this Freudian approach of if this happens to you, this is who you become.
00:35:45
And I was reading that book, The Courage to be Disliked over Christmas. And it kind of it changed my view on this quite
00:35:53
profoundly and in an important way because it helped me to understand. And I think it basically says that what
00:35:58
happens to us doesn't create who we are. We use what happened to us and we apply meaning to it which then determines the
00:36:04
behavior we have. And really interestingly in that it means that many of the beliefs I have about myself, who
00:36:09
I say I am, my identity and therefore like the ways that I behave every day, whether they're productive or
00:36:15
unproductive are actually just choices I've made to apply meaning to the past. Does that make sense? It's completely makes sense. And this is
00:36:26
really this is such like a profound I don't know if the whoever's listening now understands what I'm saying here but
00:36:32
we said at the start of this conversation you go through life thinking you're a puppet and you're being controlled by what happened to you
00:36:37
who you are your identity but actually your identity is just this this construction
00:36:44
of meaning that you've given to the past so to serve your purpose now as it says
00:36:49
in the book. Yes, I would say it slightly differently, but the message is the same. I think
00:36:56
um there are in the sensory present, right? There are sightes, there are sounds, there are smells, some stuff's going on inside your own body, right? And these signals are are going to your
00:37:10
brain. They have no inherent psychological meaning. They have no inherent emotional meaning. They have no
00:37:16
inherent mental meaning. What gives them meaning is the are your memories from the past. You are creating you are a meaning maker. Meaning isn't a set of features
00:37:32
like a dictionary definition. So meaning the meaning of this cup isn't that it it's made of metal and that I mean we certainly can talk about those features, but the meaning of this cup in this
00:37:45
moment is what I do with it. So it could be a vessel for drinking. It could be a
00:37:50
weapon. It could be, you know, a flower holder. It could be uh a measuring cup. It the meaning of the vessel is what I do with it in the moment. That's its
00:38:05
meaning. And so the meaning of the vessel isn't in the vessel. And it's also not only in my head. The meaning is the transaction.
00:38:18
It's the relationship between this the features of this vessel, this object and the signals in my brain which are creating my actions. In fact, even the
00:38:30
fact that this is a solid object, the property of solidity is not in the object. It's because I have a body of a certain type
00:38:43
with certain features that makes me experience this as solid. The solidity isn't in me and it's not in the object. It's in the relationship between the
00:38:54
two. That means everything everything you experience is partly of your own making. You don't have a sense of agency about it because it happens really automatically. It's happening
00:39:08
automatically now as we're talking. It's happening faster than you can blink your
00:39:13
eyes, but it's still happening. And that means if you are partly even if you even though you don't have a sense of agency you are
00:39:28
partly in control and also therefore responsible for the meaning that is being made. And when I said at the outset of
00:39:40
our conversation that my goal was to try to, you know, as a science communicator was to try to explain to people
00:39:49
that they have more control over their lives. They have more control over who they are in any given moment than they think they do to give them more agency
00:40:01
in their lives. This is this is exactly what I mean. You you don't have an enduring identity. You are who you are in the
00:40:13
moment of your action. And actions are a combination of the remembered past, so stuff your brain
00:40:21
is using to predict that's how it's that your brain's assembling super automatically and the sensory present. Right? So if you want to change who you
00:40:32
are, you want to change what you feel, you want to change what your impact is on someone
00:40:38
else, you have a couple of choices. You can try to go back into the past and change the meaning of what's happened before so that you'll remember differently. You'll predict differently
00:40:51
in the future. That's what psychotherapy is. That's what you know, heartfelt conversations at two o'clock in the morning or with your friends or whatever. That's really hard [ __ ]
00:41:02
Doesn't doesn't always work so well. The other thing that you can do though is if you realize that whatever you experience
00:41:10
now becomes the seeds for predictions later, then you can invest in creating new experiences quite deliberately for yourself. Now you can expose yourself to
00:41:23
new ideas. You can expose yourself to people who are different than you. You can practice cultivating particular experiences like you would practice any
00:41:33
skill. And that will any new concepts you learn, new experiences you have in the moment, if you practice them, they become automatic predictions
00:41:47
in the future. So let me take that and try and apply it to this example of this silver cup in my hand. So psychotherapy
00:41:56
would try and go back into the past and explain to me why this actually isn't something I should drink out of and that it could be other things. Whereas what you're saying is another approach is if
00:42:07
I go and get some flowers right now and I put them in there, I'm creating a new prediction for the future because I've
00:42:13
created a new pattern in the present of this actually being a vase for flowers. And I can start to create a new pattern
00:42:19
that silver cups like this one aren't just for drinking out of. They are also vasees for flowers. Exactly. Okay. So, I
00:42:27
can either go back in the past and try and convince myself that the cup isn't a cup. Or I can in the present moment
00:42:32
create a new pattern which will mean that in the future my brain will predict next time it sees a silver cup. It won't
00:42:38
just think drink out of it Steve. It will think pop some flowers in it. Right? And remember it's it's actually
00:42:43
the thinking comes after the action. Right? So what will happen is the next time that you are approaching a table
00:42:49
where a silver cup might be your brain will already be starting to prepare the actions to go get the flowers and then
00:42:56
you will think oh right I can use this as a oh look there's a great vase right so in your brain it's action your first your brain is controlling it's
00:43:08
preparing the actions of the visca what we call visceral motor so does your heart rate need to change do your blood
00:43:15
vessels muscles need to dilate? Do you need to breathe differently? It's basically anticipating the needs of the
00:43:20
body and attempting to meet those needs before they arise. That supports your physical movements, right? So, if you're
00:43:27
going to if you're walking over somewhere to pick up some flowers and cut the stems and whatever that those are all physical movements that require glucose and oxygen and [ __ ] like so all
00:43:38
of that has to get prepared in advance, milliseconds before the actions start to be prepared. So it's not what you think
00:43:45
determines what you feel. It's what you prepare to do determines your thoughts and your
00:43:52
feelings and the sights and sounds and smells and sensations. That's how it really works under the hood. So meaning
00:43:59
is in terms of what you do and then as a consequence of that it meaning is a a consequence it becomes what you feel and what you think and so on. So let me give you some specific
00:44:12
examples then. So if I'm scared of spiders, how would I go about overcoming that fear of spiders using route number two that you described there?
00:44:24
So one of the ways that you change to change predictions, you can't just will yourself to change a prediction. I am really afraid of bees. I I had a traumatic experience
00:44:37
when I was five. I'm afraid of bees. I know a lot about bees. I'm actually a gardener and I I and I know a lot about the evolutionary biology of bees. But
00:44:50
when I am outside, if a bee comes around, my first reaction is to either run or to freeze. Right? I'm afraid of bees. I could talk to myself until the
00:45:02
cows come home. It won't matter. I can't. Right? So, what I have to do is dose myself with prediction error.
00:45:09
Meaning I have to interact with bees in a way that changes my actions which will change my lived experience. And I can't just do it all
00:45:21
at once. It's not like a good idea would not be for me to say would not have been for me to um go to like um somebody who
00:45:29
has beehives and you know put on a suit and go work. I mean that would be like overwhelming, right? So
00:45:36
instead, maybe I don't run. Maybe I stand and watch. Maybe I get closer to a bee. Maybe I plant bushes and flowers that bees like a lot
00:45:50
to bring bees to me so that I can sit and just be around them while they're buzzing and doing their thing. Maybe I deliberately let myself get
00:46:01
stung at some point, which I did. But you know you're dosing yourself with your brain is making a set of predictions. Those predictions there are a set of
00:46:14
predictions. That means your brain isn't preparing one action. It's preparing multiple actions. So you need to prove
00:46:21
to your brain that those predictions are wrong. Yes. So exactly you need you are setting up circumstances so you can prove to yourself that your predictions are wrong. If you're predicting well you
00:46:35
have a few action plans. If you're predicting poorly let's say overgeneralizing maybe
00:46:42
you have a hundred plans. It's like if there's tremendous uncertainty your brain doesn't know which action plan to
00:46:48
so there might be many of them right sensory signals are coming into your brain from the sensory surfaces of your body from your retinas from your cookia you've got sensory surfaces on your skin
00:47:01
inside your body in your muscle cells all these signals coming to your brain they help
00:47:06
select which prediction signal will be completed as action and lived experience. Okay. So let's say you put
00:47:19
yourself deliberately in in a situation where the incoming signals will not select any prediction because there's too much unpredicted signal
00:47:31
there. It's error. There's another name in psychology for taking in prediction error. Exposure therapy learning. Oh okay. Yeah. Exposure therapy which is a
00:47:43
kind of learning. All learning all learning is you taking in prediction sign prediction error signals you didn't predict or there's no signal that you
00:47:56
did predict. You predicted a signal it's not there. So what you do is you set up situations for yourself that you will
00:48:05
take in signals that are novel. Right? And this seems like an easy thing to do. We people actually sometimes seek novelty. All right. But too much
00:48:20
novelty, it it is not necessarily a good thing all the time. Particularly if you
00:48:27
know you're metabolically it's expensive metabolically to take in prediction error and learn something new. Like the biggest costs that your brain expends energy on are moving your body, learning
00:48:41
something new, and dealing with persistent uncertainty. Those are really expensive
00:48:47
things for us. So, if you're metabolically encumbered in some way, say you're depressed or you have anxiety
00:48:55
disorder or maybe you have heart disease or diabetes or you're living under chronic stress, you don't have the spoons necessarily to take in prediction error. You're just going to go with your
00:49:08
predictions. You aren't going to learn. You aren't going to be able to update those predictions. You're going to be
00:49:13
stuck. You're going to be stuck in your head, right? every experience, every action a combination of the remembered present, the remembered past, the predictions and
00:49:24
the sensory present. But the sensory present is there just to select which remembered past you're going to act on. And
00:49:36
sometimes under in moments of great metabolic load, the brain just goes with its own predictions and ignores what's out there in the world. I was thinking earlier on
00:49:48
as you were speaking about this sort of social contagion where we can apply meaning to our lives and what happened to us and then consequently make ourselves sad because we see how other
00:50:01
people on Tik Tok or Instagram are feeling. And it made me think that you must you must think the world is crazy
00:50:08
to some degree. You must see social contagion in the world where suddenly everybody becomes traumatized because
00:50:14
trauma's become almost popular, you know, to think about what happened to you and create meaning to it and then
00:50:19
suffer that meaning. But there's other types of social contagion where which are spreading through society. I mean,
00:50:26
young people are getting more and more anxious. They're getting more and more depressed. We're self diagnosing ourselves with different illnesses and
00:50:32
different things. But now you've explained to me how the brain works, I'm thinking, gosh, as a
00:50:38
society, we are bonkers. Well, well, we're living out lies. Yeah. I think I guess the way I I I do I do find it frustrating at times, but but
00:50:50
but only because I think we are meaning makers as an animals are meaning maker. We create meaning. We create meaning by virtue of living like by virtue of interacting with with things in the
00:51:04
world by interacting with each other. Very few meanings are given that that is that they exist independently of us. And so what I find
00:51:16
frustrating is that there's a lot of suffering and understanding these basic operating principles of the brain will not remove
00:51:31
all suffering but it it could ameliate it could remove some. And people don't understand that they are
00:51:46
sometimes making their suffering worse than it has to be. You pulled on the word responsible. Well, I want to be
00:51:54
really clear that again I'm not saying people are are to blame. Culpability and responsibility are not the same thing. Culpability is blame. Are you blamew
00:52:05
worthy? Right? You can nobody I'm not saying people are to blame for their own suffering. I'm saying that people can be more responsible in by taking more
00:52:18
responsibility they could reduce their suffering some. That's not the same thing as saying you know that they that
00:52:26
it's their cause their cause to begin with. So I'll give you an example. Social contagion. Contagion is an
00:52:32
interesting word. It means that you are infected by something even a virus. There are these
00:52:39
experiments that were done 15 20 years ago where um these are done by Sheldon Cohen who is a psychoimmunologist which means he's a psychologist and he studies how immunology
00:52:51
um that is your immune system is related to your psychological state. And so what
00:52:56
he did across a number of experiments is he took people and he sequestered them in hotel
00:53:02
rooms. And then he took the same dosage, the same concentration of virus and he put it in every person's nose. And then
00:53:13
he controlled how much they slept, how much they ate. He measured their symptoms. He like weighed their tissues
00:53:20
after they blew their nose. I mean like he did right just really really really really careful metrics and across these
00:53:27
experiments somewhere between 20 to 40% of people became symptomatic with respiratory disease. That means the virus is
00:53:40
necessary but it is not sufficient to cause illness. Another necessary but not sufficient cause is the state of each person's immune system. That is your
00:53:53
brain and your immune system have to be in a particular state in order for you to be infected by a virus in these experiments. So the point that I'm
00:54:03
making here is exactly the same about suffering. Al so let's take anxiety for example. You know, we in a as this in a culture,
00:54:15
we automatically make meaning of certain types of signal patterns as anxiety. When there's a lot of uncertainty, um there's an increase in in norepinephrine and some chemicals in the
00:54:27
brain. Um that often goes with an increase in um heart rate and so on. And we automatically make meaning of this physical state as anxiety.
00:54:40
But exactly the same physical state could be determination. It could be just pure
00:54:47
uncertainty. Again, meaning making is about action. Right? So when you are un when you are experiencing high arousal, even if it's super unpleasant as as
00:54:59
determination, you do something different than if you experience it as anxiety or uncertainty. So here is an example. There are people who experience
00:55:10
test anxiety. Really serious test anxiety prevents people from finishing courses or graduating from college. People who graduate from college have a
00:55:22
lifetime trajectory of earning that is hundreds of thousands of dollars more often than somebody who drops out of
00:55:29
college. So test anxiety over the long run, it's more than just a bit of discomfort. you know it has serious implications for o your earning potential across your life. There are
00:55:41
these experiments that were done where they trained people to make sense of high arousal
00:55:49
uh physical states not as anxiety but as determination. And these people learned to do this first they practice like a
00:55:59
skill. It's like driving. At first it's really hard. you have to give a lot of effort to it, but you practice, practice, practice, and then eventually
00:56:05
becomes really automatic. And then what happens? They are able to take tests. They're able to pass tests. They're able to continue taking courses and so on. I watched this actually happen right in
00:56:16
front of my eyes. My daughter, when she was 12 years old, she was testing for her black belt in
00:56:22
karate. Her her sensei was a 10th degree black belt. This guy, a 10th degree black belt is the highest you could be. Mhm. This guy could break a board like by looking at it. He was a scary scary
00:56:36
dude. And my daughter was like not even 5t tall when she was 12. And she's she's
00:56:43
this tiny little thing. And she's got to spar with like these hulking like 15, 16, 18 year old boys. She's got to actually spar with them. And so, you
00:56:55
know, she's and this is across several days. She's got to do this really. And so I'm sitting there, her, you know, I'm
00:57:00
her dad and me were sitting there. We're watching her. And so her sensei, you know, saunters up to her and he says,
00:57:08
"Sweetheart, get your butterflies flying in formation." And I was like, "That's [ __ ] amazing. Get your butterflies flying in formation." He's not saying, "Calm down, little girl. That would
00:57:22
actually be bad. You don't want to be calm. You need that arousal. It's there for a reason. It's uncomfortable, but
00:57:30
you need it. He's saying, "Use it." That to me was like a perfect example of find
00:57:37
a different meaning for that arousal. And that meaning is the action that you will engage in. No matter how hard it is, no matter how much it doesn't really
00:57:50
look like what it's supposed to, the control is there. It's there. It's not there all the time. It's harder to get all, you know, yada yada, but it's there. And it means
00:58:03
that you have more agency. You have more control. You're never going to have as much control as you want. It's always going to be harder to get.
00:58:16
Your options aren't always going to be the same, but you can always find a little
00:58:21
more control over what you do and what you experience and that's the key to living a meaningful life. Are you somewhat concerned about the world
00:58:35
that young people are growing up in where they're scrolling on social media and social media is telling them what
00:58:41
certain feelings are? So they are just being programmed constantly. Yeah, they are to be anxious, to be depressed, to be sad.
00:58:51
They are. Yes, they are. And think about it too. Social media is pernitious uncertainty there. You know you first of all even when we're sitting face to
00:59:04
face we have all of these cues we have all these signals I can see your face I can hear your voice even when all this information is there's still some
00:59:16
uncertainty right we're not reading each other bodily movements are not a language to be read it's a bad metaphor right we're guessing we're
00:59:28
always guessing And we're using a lot of signals to guess. But when you're on social
00:59:35
media, you have have very few signals. There is a lot of ambiguity. There is a lot of uncertainty and the only thing that you can do is fill in that uncertainty with
00:59:49
your own guesses which could be bad. Right? So people who go on Tik Tok and whatever are giving up, they're
01:00:03
like volitionally giving up their agency and they don't know it. What do you mean
01:00:09
by that? They're choosing to be led. They're choosing to be influenced. I I'll give you an example. I've listened to podcasts
01:00:22
about metabolism. I've listened to podcasts about, you know, skin care. I've listened to, you know, I'm curious. I'm curious about like what kind of information people put out there. I
01:00:34
probably turn off 90% of the I get like 10 minutes into something and I will turn it off. That's what it means to be a consumer. You have choice. I think
01:00:47
people are they don't realize that by virtue of what they do and what they don't do, they are making choices about
01:00:56
what will be retained in their heads that will then be used automatically later. Brainwashing a little bit except that you're you're the
01:01:09
one who's you're you're choosing it. You know, I'm empathic and I'm not blaming people, but they could things could be better for them. You know, I mean, I had a an a daughter who
01:01:22
was clinically depressed. That was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had in my life in addition to being
01:01:28
really tragic. I mean, I can talk about it now without breaking into tears. That took a long time. But at first, she was
01:01:36
so resistant. Eventually, you know, she made the decision that she wanted to be helped and then we completely changed her life. But she had to make that decision. I couldn't force her to do it.
01:01:48
And I feel like a little bit it's the same kind of situation now where there's so much [ __ ] out there in the wellness industry. There's so much, you know, um, swirling around on Tik Tok and
01:02:01
on other areas of social media and not all of it is useful and some of it's really harmful. Do you mind if I pause this conversation for a moment? I want to talk about our show sponsor today,
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01:03:06
have a huge amount of information and knowledge, which is guiding you to make better decisions. But a lot of people
01:03:12
don't have that information and knowledge. In fact, they have counter information and knowledge. So, when I think about what it takes for someone to
01:03:19
make a change in their life, um whether it was your daughter or whether it's someone else who feels like they're
01:03:24
stuck and they feel like they're trapped in an algorithm or trapped in a life that they want to break out of based on
01:03:30
everything you know and based on the experience you had with your daughter. What is step one to being able to make
01:03:37
that change? Because I'm really curious as to what it was about your daughter that made her decide that she wanted the help.
01:03:44
Well, I think that the the general answer is baby steps. It rarely works to completely change everything all at once. I'm not saying it never works, but it rarely works that way. Um it so for
01:04:00
example, you know, you could deliberately get off social media for one day a week or do something else instead with a friend or go for a walk
01:04:15
or just and build it into it. Build it into your day as a scheduled thing. So that's the other thing is that you can't
01:04:22
do things because you want to do them. You have to force yourself to do them. So for example, I had major back
01:04:29
surgery, major back surgery, very serious. And um I knew that um after I had back surgery that I was going to experience sensations I had never had before. Just like you know if you go for
01:04:43
a filling in your tooth, right? And then you know something's there that wasn't there before and then your tongue is
01:04:49
like constantly poking at the tooth and you're not supposed to but you do anyways because your brain is foraging
01:04:56
for information. It's foraging for prediction error. Mhm. And then eventually it adjusts its predictions
01:05:04
and then it ignores the sensations because they're not relevant. Right. So that was going to happen on a massive
01:05:11
scale for me and I knew that I had made a plan before surgery to dose myself appropriately with prediction error so that I would not develop chronic pain because chronic pain is like a set of
01:05:26
bad predictions that that don't update. Right? So your brain still believes that there's um tissue damage in your body
01:05:34
when there's no more tissue damage. So does that mean that pain often is just a figment of your imagination? No, that's the wrong way. That is the wrong way to think about it. The way to think about
01:05:45
it is every experience remembered past and sensory present. So pain is in your head, vision is in your head,
01:05:58
hearing is in your head. You don't hear in your ears, you hear in your head in your brain. You don't see in your eyes.
01:06:05
You need your eyes. You need your ears. But you don't see in your eyes. You see in your brain. So pain is a combination of the just like vision is a combination
01:06:21
of the remembered past and the sensory present. Okay. Okay. So it's both. So chronic pain happens when your brain was receiving signals
01:06:34
from the body that there was tissue damage, no susceptive signals they're called, and it was making sense of them as pain. And when you're recovering from an
01:06:46
illness, that's metabolically taxing. So there's not as much metabolic re there's
01:06:53
not as much of your metabolic budget devoted to learning. So you can be in a situation
01:07:00
where your brain doesn't update itself and you still experience pain even though the the um the tissue damage is no longer there.
01:07:13
It's just like seeing a a green apple in your mind's eye when there is no apple in front of you. It's not all in it's not all in your head in the in the you
01:07:25
know insulting sense. It's just it's a normal consequence of how brains work. The injury is gone though but the signal of the injury is still replaying itself. Yeah. Exactly. Just like um it's like a
01:07:38
phantom limb. It's like tinidis is also like that. Oh gosh. Yeah. I had that for a little while. Yeah. So, um, so I I
01:07:45
tried really hard to set a schedule for myself, um, you know, um, that would allow me to
01:07:54
sort of like optimally dose myself, but with prediction error, but that meant, you know, that I I had to follow
01:08:01
that schedule. And I think if you're committed to changing your habits, this is how you change any habit really. you
01:08:09
change the context and you um and then you practice you practice new um new behaviors. So with my daughter, depression, we think about
01:08:25
depression in our lab um as um let me back up and say your brain's most important job really is not thinking. It's not feeling. It's not even seeing. It's regulating your body. It's
01:08:39
regulating your metabolism. Basically, that's your brain's most important job. Your brain's most important job is anticipating the needs of your body and preparing to meet those needs before
01:08:49
they arise. The metaphor that we use for this predictive regulation of the body,
01:08:56
which is the formal term is calledasis. Um that's the scientific concept, but the but the metaphor is body budgeting. It's running a budget
01:09:06
for your body. Your brain is running a budget for your body. It's not budgeting money. It's budgeting salt and glucose
01:09:12
and oxygen and um potassium and like all of the nutrients and chemicals that are
01:09:19
necessary um to um run an energetically costly body. You know, you've got all these really low-level kind of processes. You can just think of them as vital parts of
01:09:32
to keep yourself alive. Mhm. So, some of your energy budget goes to that. Some of your energy budget goes to
01:09:40
repair and growth. So, you get if you get taller, you need more cells. When you learn something, you have to thicken up your myelin and your your neurons.
01:09:51
You've got to grow more receptors and stuff. That's, you know, the kind of growth and and repair. And then the rest
01:09:58
of it is all for anything effortful. What is effortful? like work or going to the gym, dragging your ass out of bed in the morning is effortful. Yeah, learning something new is effortful. Dealing with
01:10:12
uncertainty is effortful. Everything we call stress. Stress is just really your brain is predicting a big metabolic outlay because there's some effort involved, right? Some motivated effort
01:10:26
involved. So those are the three things that make up your energy budget. And the
01:10:32
really important point, you as an organism have a fixed amount of energy that you can produce in a day. Meaning ATP, like these little chemicals
01:10:46
that these little protein things that you know your cells use as literal energy that come from glucose and and
01:10:53
other things like fats and so there's nothing I can do to increase it. Well, you're in a range. Okay. But there is a
01:11:01
finite limit upper limit for that range because you are a because you're a human
01:11:09
organism and you've got to do these three things these right vital functions growth and repair and then everything else. If you got a lot of psychosocial stress going on or you have
01:11:22
some kind of disease that's taking up, you know, much of the budget, then you don't have a lot of budget left for other stuff that you need to do, right? So, what your brain will attempt to do
01:11:34
is to cut costs. If you look at the symptoms of depression, they are um symptoms of um that are related to cutting costs. distress, fatigue,
01:11:48
problems concentrating, um lack of sensitivity to the context that you're in. All of these things are
01:11:56
indicative of um reduced um metabolic outlay. And then depression also has symptoms that are related to increased costs like 70% of people who are
01:12:11
depressed have uh inflammatory problems. So they have enhanced inflammatory um systemic inflammation and and your your immune system is a very expensive
01:12:24
system to run. So if you have persistent and um systemic inflammation, you're that's like a persistent tax on your budget. you're,
01:12:37
you know, meaning things are costing more than they necessarily need to. And even, you know, like there are these really interesting studies. I think they're interesting as a scientist, as a
01:12:49
person, I find them like slightly horrifying, but you know, like if you within two hours of eating a meal, if
01:12:56
you encounter stress, social stress, it's as if you ate 104 more calories than you actually ate. So you're so inefficient in metabolizing that it's
01:13:08
like it's like having eaten 104 more calories than you did. And the your even good fats will be metabolized as if they're bad fats and
01:13:20
potentially stored as Yeah. So if you if you add up 104 calories at every meal for a year, that's almost 11 pounds. That means that if you are in a stressful
01:13:33
environment and um for a year and you ate exactly the same thing as you ate the year before, you would gain 11 pounds. In depression, we know for example that um there's cortisol
01:13:45
dysregulation in depression. That means there's dysregulation in um metabolism because cortisol is a metabolic, you know, it's it's a metabolic chemical. Um
01:13:56
people who take uh SSRIs they take for depression anti-depressants are SSRIs usually or SNRIs that means they are acting on serotonin to keep more
01:14:09
serotonin in the in the juncture uh between neurons. Serotonin is a metabolic regulator. Norepinephrine is a metabolic regulator. These are um
01:14:21
chemicals that are directly involved in your metabolism. So it's not an a belief that
01:14:30
depression is a metabolic has a metabolic basis to it. I think the question is what is the elixir of all
01:14:38
these metabolic influences that would lead somebody to um develop a depressive state. Um, but the point, the simple point that I
01:14:50
was making is I actually came to this idea about metabolism and depression because I was doing a [ __ ] ton of
01:14:56
reading trying to figure out how to help my kid. What were her symptoms at that time? Just if there are any parents that
01:15:02
listening right now that can relate or anybody that's listening that could relate. Yeah. Well, I will tell you that
01:15:07
I've given this talk before um about depression in adolescence. Adolescence is a um it's like a it's like a perfect
01:15:16
storm of metabolic u vulnerability for many many reasons. You know your brain is trapped in a dark silent box called your skull. It's receiving signals from the
01:15:28
body and from the world. It doesn't know what the causes of those signals are. It's receiving the effects. It has to
01:15:35
guess at the causes. What are the guesses? Predictions from the past. Right? So it doesn't know about hormone
01:15:43
surges immediately as they happen. It, you know, it takes 20 minutes or so or sometimes a little less depending on where the hormonal changes are and what their origin is for the brain to receive
01:15:56
the signals of those changes and then it has to guess at what the causes are. The narrative that's used in
01:16:04
psychiatry and medicine is a narrative that goes something like this. It goes back to this like your brain is a battleground, right? So the idea is that you know you're born the the story is
01:16:16
that you're born with these innate emotion circuits. You're not you don't have innate emotion circuits. You don't
01:16:23
have any emotion circuits actually, but the narrative is you're born with these innate emotion circuits. They work, but
01:16:28
you're not born with the ability to control them. That has to develop over time.
01:16:34
So in adolescence, the idea is that um mood disorders arise because you're you don't have enough cognitive control and you have too much emotion. So you've got this unbridled emotion and that's
01:16:48
the problem. That's a really compelling narrative. It's just neurobullshit basically. There's not a good evidence for that narrative.
01:17:01
I I heard it was a chemical imbalance. Yes. Well, the sometimes people talk about that chemical imbalance in terms of serotonin being a happy chemical and
01:17:13
dopamine being the reward chemical. And that's also uh that's such a simplification that it's not even wrong. Okay? Dopamine is not a reward chemical
01:17:24
and serotonin is not a happiness chemical. They're both metabolic regulators. You see increases in dopamine in some uh neurons during episodes of
01:17:37
punishment. And serotonins does many things in your body in many places. But one of the things that it does in controlled experiments
01:17:49
is it allows animals to spend to forage to engage in activity physical activity and learning when there is no immediate metabolic uh
01:18:04
reward at the end. There's no there's no deposit at the end. Mhm. Um so dopamine is seen more I think now
01:18:14
by many neuroscientists as a a chemical that is necessary for effort whether that is a physical effort or learning something a mental effort of
01:18:26
learning something it's not really specific to reward per se. So, at first with with my daughter, you know, she went from being a a really
01:18:38
exuberant, engaged, socially, very socially connected kid, um, who, you know, she did great in school. And it's not like she had, you know, it's not like she was a perfect kid, but she was pretty in enthusiastic and pretty
01:18:52
exuberant and had a lot of friends. And and then, you know, by the time she was in 10th grade, she was withdrawn. She was getting D's
01:19:05
in school. She couldn't concentrate. She wasn't sleeping. She um she was miserable. She was really suffering, but she was miserable to be around. And and to be honest, at the beginning, we
01:19:18
thought she was being lazy. We thought, you know, she didn't want to do anything. She wanted to spend
01:19:23
all this time in her room. She didn't, you know, she wanted to get rid of all of her activities. And we thought, come
01:19:29
on, man. Step up. Like, why are you, you know, we thought she was being lazy. I mean, really, it just never occurred to me in a million years because she had no mood symptoms as a kid. Like, none. And
01:19:43
then all of a sudden, she just she appeared to have no energy to do anything. But it to us it looked like she was being lazy and she didn't want
01:19:50
to do her homework and she seemed really disengaged and and and it it took me a while to realize, oh
01:19:58
no, this is something else. She was having trouble remembering conversations that we had. And at first I thought, oh, you're not paying attention to me. But then it seemed really clear that even in
01:20:13
day-to-day conver she couldn't tell me what was happening in her day. She just had no details. That's also a sign of
01:20:19
depression where you lose the episodic memory of details of the day. You can only talk in gists. You can't give
01:20:27
specifics about times and places and events. You just lose, you don't retain that information long enough to be able to remember it later. There's no consolidation of that information. And
01:20:39
um when she was in 10th grade, you know, she came home with D's in school, D's in mathematics. And this is a kid who was doing fun, you know, she was doing rudimentary algebra when
01:20:52
she was eight. And um we told her that we she had to be we had to have her assessed because we just didn't know what was going on. And that's when we realized
01:21:06
that she was clinically depressed. The other thing I I should say is that, you know, she had very bad menstrual cramps. And so a lot of one
01:21:18
um one treatment for bad menstrual cramps is to put girls on birth control pills because it it evens out the um hormonal fluctuations of the month and
01:21:31
it does actually improve menstrual cramps. But it's pretty well known now. It wasn't so much known then that um
01:21:40
there is somewhere between a 40 and 70% increase in the likelihood of major depressive episode in young women who
01:21:48
use birth control pills. If it's a combination estrogen progesterone pill, it's more like 40%. If it's a progesterone only pill, which a lot of young women take because it has fewer
01:22:01
side effects, you have a 70% increase in in a ma in major depressive episode. And
01:22:06
this is in the first study that I read about this was in a million women. And when I read that study, I remember exactly where I was. It was like a flashbulb moment. I read
01:22:18
the study. I called her pediatrician, my daughter's pediatrician, and I said, "She's coming off pill
01:22:24
today, today. So, tell me if there's anything. Are there any side effects or can we just stop it?" And he's like,
01:22:30
"Well, in my opinion," and I'm like, "I don't give a [ __ ] about your opinion. I have just read a study that is like, you
01:22:37
know, it's a large-scale epidemiological study of a million women today. She's coming off today." And this was after or before she was experiencing depression. This was after it was it was um
01:22:53
maybe a year after she was diagnosed. Much later I read um I was reading a book by uh Naomi Orescus the historian of science and she wrote a book called Why Trust Science? And it's a wonderful
01:23:08
book. But in the book she talks about she gives examples of places of phenomena where the public didn't trust science and they should have and this is one of them. Apparently it's been known
01:23:20
for a really long time. And I just want to point out that estrogen, progesterone, testosterone evolved as metabolic
01:23:32
regulators. I'm highlighting it because in a lot of because in a culture that separates mental from physical, we don't think about the role of metabolism in
01:23:44
vision or in even in mood. That's a really recent thing. In our lab, we one of the things we study now is the role of metabolism in in really basic really
01:23:57
really basic psychological phenomena. um like just as a fundamental building block of your mind basically. So your daughter exhibits those symptoms. I'm really curious to hear
01:24:11
what conventional medicine at that point told you you should do with a daughter in that situation at that time versus
01:24:17
what you did. You have this wealth of information. You you have a medical background. Yeah. So I should say this was you know this was um some years ago,
01:24:26
right? So currently there is a kind of a revolution going on where um there's actually something called metabolic psychiatry. Now back when this was when
01:24:38
you know when I was reading about this it sounded crazy when I saw what my daughter was what that she was suffering like really suffering. It's really hard for
01:24:49
me to talk about this because as I'm talking to you about this, I'm thinking I I just I wish that I, you know, I wish
01:24:57
that I had figured this out earlier. But, um, but anyways, what we did was I we found I found every possible route that I could think of to target her um
01:25:12
her body budget. So, basically target her metabolism. And then we we we basically came up with a a daily routine which she participated in making um to
01:25:25
see if we could put her on a different trajectory, you know, and that involved everything from getting off social media
01:25:38
because first of all, she was using like a lot of kids do, she was using um her screens late at night and at that
01:25:49
point and again this was something I just happened upon right but it actually at an at a NCI at a national inst cancer
01:25:56
institute meeting um you know we have retinal ganglen cells we have cells in our retina that um regulate circadian rhythm and they're sensitive to light at
01:26:10
the wavelengths that comes from your screen from a screen. So if you look at those screens at night, your brain
01:26:18
thinks it's daytime, like your circadian rhythm. You give yourself a circadian rhythm disorder basically. And it will
01:26:25
be harder to get um into a regular sleep cycle. And you need that regular sleep cycle in order for toxins to clear and in order to consolidate um what you've
01:26:36
learned during the day so that you can remember it later. And there a whole bunch of restorative things happen
01:26:42
during deep sleep that you really need. And if you can't get enough deep sleep, that will make your budgeting problems
01:26:49
worse basically. So we targeted her. We got her off social media. Well, first of
01:26:55
all, off screens after, you know, like 7:00, 8:00 at night, no screens. Um, off social media to reduce social uncertainty, social stress. I got up with her at 5:30 every morning. made her
01:27:09
breakfast, sat with her while she ate breakfast. So, made sure that she was eating nutritious food, not pseudo food
01:27:17
like, you know, Pop-Tarts and [ __ ] like that. We had to start her like exercising again. So, she
01:27:25
started to walk long distances. We she started doing Pilates like not not Pilates on a map, but like Pilates with a reformer that would make anybody cry, you know. Why exercise as it relates to
01:27:37
this budget and the metabolic functions? Because exercise um basically um exercise throws your throws your it's like your brain it's like you're you're
01:27:51
throwing yourself out of uh metabolic balance so that the brain can learn to get itself back in. you're basically improving the resilience of your of your
01:28:02
physical systems is is basically the way to so she's not you know she needed something more like interval training which is what these Pilates classes were as opposed to you know practicing to
01:28:17
play tennis or whatever something that would would where she you know after a certain period of time she'd be disregulated metabolically and then she'd drink water and you know eat
01:28:30
something healthful and um and then her system basically was learning to become more flexible again not so stuck. Mhm. So again it it was like dosing with
01:28:42
prediction error or like showing the providing the brain with opportunity to learn that it was wrong. And then um
01:28:50
omega-3s. So we we took I can't remember the exact dose, but I I do it out high omega-3s, low omega sixs. With her doctor's permission, we also used a baby
01:29:03
aspirin once a day with on a full stomach to reduce systemic inflammation. um before bed. I mean, before bed, we had always done um like a cuddle, you
01:29:16
know, like when she was little, we would read a story or whatever. And in her early adolescent years, you know, she
01:29:23
rejected that and then we brought it back. So an hour before bed, we would either me or her dad, sometimes all three of us, we would read a book together or, you know, he would read a
01:29:36
book to us or we would I I she we would sit and talk and she would tell me, you know, all the things that were happening at school that she could remember and sometimes they were really
01:29:47
horrible and I just had to empathize. That was really hard for me because I just wanted to fix it. I just wanted to
01:29:53
fix it. And it was really I had to really draw on my own um experience as a therapist to just sit with the distress and empathize rather than say do this,
01:30:09
do this, do this, do this. It took me a long time to learn that and I'm still sometimes struggling with that. Why was that important? because then she feels heard and and she feels understood. And
01:30:23
when you It took me a long time to learn this. When she when she would tell me that, you know, someone had done
01:30:28
something terribly mean. If I did anything other than empathize, she would feel like I hadn't
01:30:36
heard her. And social support is a major I mean, we are the caretakers of each other's nervous systems. Humans are social animals. It's hard to
01:30:49
believe. Uh I think in a culture like ours where we're so individualistic, right? And it seems like a political
01:30:56
statement or something. It doesn't really matter what your political views are. We evolve the way we evolve, man.
01:31:03
We are social animals. We affect each other metabolically. We can add savings and we can add taxes. And you know the best thing for a human nervous system is
01:31:15
another human. The worst thing for a human nervous system is another human. The wrong one. There are so many experiments showing such I mean I just saw a set of
01:31:28
experiments from one of my former postocs that was just amazing. um where she looked at glucose
01:31:35
metabolism in mothers and babies and I think she also did it in dating partners if I'm not mistaken and she looked at them alone and like and then together
01:31:46
like alone during a task and then together during a task and mothers and babies that are attached well they're
01:31:53
actually their glucose metabolism is more efficient like literally more efficient and I believe she I I believe
01:32:02
she also showed this with dating partners too. You know there are these studies these old studies showing that
01:32:08
um that you know it's like less calorically demanding to walk up a hill with a backpack if you're with a friend than if with you're with a stranger. And I mean there's all these really batshit
01:32:22
crazy findings that if but if you realize that humans are literally affecting each other on a physical basis
01:32:28
whether they're aware of it or not whether they intend it or not it's completely irrelevant or it's
01:32:34
unnecessary I would say to have that effect um to have the effects be there um then it starts to it starts to make
01:32:42
sense you know like the idea that and again meta analyses show that you will live years longer years on average years
01:32:50
longer if you are in if you have a a social um life filled with people who you trust and who trust you. So is that why you got the family around
01:33:05
just before bed because it was regulating her nervous system, her her body? Yeah. Sometimes she she sometimes
01:33:13
she still says this to me actually. She'll say, "Can you just be my friend for a minute and not my mother?
01:33:19
I'll be like, "Yes, I can." And then I actually have to do it, which is sometimes hard. Or I will say to
01:33:26
her, this is for parents, anybody who has an adolescent or an adult um child, this is this is like one of my I I don't know how I came up with this, but it's like golden, right? I say to
01:33:38
her, "Can I I'm having a mother moment where I feel the need to nag you about something, and if I can just nag you for a minute about it, I I won't need to tell you again." So, I'm basically
01:33:52
asking her permission. Can I tell you this thing, which I really want to tell you, and I know you don't want to hear
01:33:59
it, but you would be being doing me a real kindness if you would just listen to me for a minute. And I know it's me.
01:34:04
It's all me. It's not you. It's all on me. this is me, but I just I would be better if you could just let me. And most of the time she says, you know,
01:34:16
with great forbearance, right? Like, sure, mama, go ahead. Sometimes she says, "Not today." And then I actually have to listen, you know? So, yeah. But there
01:34:29
were probably other things I'm not thinking of right now. I've written them all down because a lot of people have asked me this question. And what I like
01:34:35
to say is this is I'm not a physician. This I'm not a psychiatrist. This is not a recommendation or recipe for your children. I'm just telling you what I did as a scientist. And you wrote down
01:34:48
what you did. You still have a copy of that. So I can link it below for anyone that does want to read what you did.
01:34:54
Yes. But it's again it's I it's what you did for your daughter at that time. Yeah. just as a person who had read the literature I it's not a it's not
01:35:05
um this is not medical advice it's I'm really strongly and also I should say I you
01:35:13
can't force your adolescent to do anything you can't even force your kids really to do anything unless you
01:35:20
threaten them with physical harm they have to make that choice themselves right and did she recover
01:35:28
yes she And I think one of the reasons why she is good now, it's not that she never has
01:35:36
challenges with her mood, but she understands them in physical terms. She doesn't understand her mood as being a psychological problem. She understands
01:35:47
it as a symptom or a barometer of her body budget. This is something I learned from your work while I was researching which was really really helpful to me. And it's pretty much exactly what you just
01:36:00
said, which is sometimes I'm in a not so good mood. And if I'm not conscious about that,
01:36:07
then the bad mood can wreak havoc, right? It can I can be short with people or whatever. And when I was reading your
01:36:12
work and thinking about bad or good moods through the context of this body budget, it makes you pause for a second
01:36:19
and go, what am I missing? And it makes you very conscious of what you then do. It almost makes you suddenly take hold
01:36:25
of the wheel and go, "Okay, so there's a problem here. It's a physical problem. I didn't get sleep last night. I haven't eaten." Whatever it might be. Be really
01:36:32
aware of what this makes you do or feel or think and hit and the actions you need to take are maybe cancel everything you were planning today and go back to bed. Well, but I think that you just put
01:36:45
your finger on the really important thing. It's that it changes what you do next. Yeah. And that changes the
01:36:52
trajectory of what happens. And I think this is this is really it's not like a magic cure. But it and again, you know, but when someone is when when you feel
01:37:03
really distressed, you either look to the world like what is wrong with the world or you look to yourself. What is
01:37:09
wrong with me? And really it could be maybe there is something wrong with the world. Maybe there is something wrong
01:37:14
with you. But most likely it's something there's a body budgeting problem. Even if it's the case that there's something wrong with the world, you're better equipped to deal with that
01:37:26
thing. If you are managing your body budget, you really do need to design your calendar
01:37:32
as much as you possibly can in the confines of the profession you have around that body budget. And for me, the
01:37:37
big a big change I made two years ago, super privileged that I get that everyone can do it. I couldn't do it when I was working in call centers was I
01:37:44
implemented a rule where there's no meetings before 11:00. And it just means for me that I never set an alarm. So I
01:37:50
wake up when I'm fully recharged. And it was like the most profound thing. I should have done this way sooner. But
01:37:56
it's had such a big impact on my life because you can almost guarantee that it's very very rare for me to be underslept. Although it happens because
01:38:02
I have to travel and stuff a lot. But that really had a profound impact on my life. Yeah. And I think you know and as
01:38:08
a leader and as a Exactly. And I think honestly if leaders take this seriously then the hope is that there'll
01:38:20
be some realization that this is also important for for everybody and you know we have a society that is structured in a particular way but there's no requirement that it's structured in this
01:38:33
way. There's, you know, the biggest predictor of work productivity after, you know, is sleep and hydration. And after you take away sleep and hydration, I think exercise is up there, too. You
01:38:47
know, some of us have more choices than others, right? But it's important I think for people who are people who are CEOs, who are who are leaders, who are
01:39:00
business leaders to understand that um there's there are good business reasons, there are good economic reasons to take this [ __ ] seriously. Am I right in
01:39:12
thinking that alcohol impacts your body budget and it therefore makes it harder for you to exhibit all the other behaviors and expend energy in other areas and also therefore increases the
01:39:27
probability that you'll be depressed. So um I should say that I am not an expert in the metabolism of alcohol.
01:39:38
So I'm going to extrapolate based on what I do know. And what I would say there is that sometimes people will drink alcohol like they will eat
01:39:48
chocolate or um you know they doing it for the taste or for the experience of you know the ambiance and experience of it, right? But a lot of people end up using alcohol. They might start that way
01:40:02
or they might start because they're doing something with friends but then they realize that it has a mood um it
01:40:08
affects their mood. Anything which affects your mood like people talk a lot about emotion regulation but it's
01:40:14
actually mood regulation. Again you know your mood is this these simple feelings
01:40:20
that are with you all the time. You know your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending
01:40:26
signals back to your brain which it out of which it makes mood. So mood is a property of consciousness. It's with you always. Sometimes in moments you will
01:40:40
make sense of the signals and the mood that goes with it in terms of the outside world and that's when you
01:40:47
experience emotion, right? Where your actions are relating the two together in terms of your mood. But a lot of the time we don't we we just experience mood
01:40:59
as a property of consciousness. You know, this is a delicious drink. That guy is an [ __ ] You're very
01:41:05
trustworthy. The mood is embedded in the perception of the world. And when people, it's just like actually sometimes o opioids have this effect also. They are they're mood altering,
01:41:18
meaning they're they are if they're manipulating your mood, they are manipulating your
01:41:26
metabolism. And when people get addicted, they often get addicted because they're regulating their mood. They're attempting to reduce their
01:41:37
suffering. the problem with or a problem I shouldn't say the problem because I don't know exactly how mood h exactly how alcohol affects
01:41:49
metabolism my my expectation is that it's not just one it's not just in one way and also I do know there are context
01:41:56
effects actually so you can drink exactly the same amount of alcohol and it can have different effects in different contexts that totally blew my
01:42:03
mind when I saw that research so I'm thinking it's not a simple relationship but one thing I do know is that your
01:42:10
predictions become um sloppier and you don't take in prediction error. you you don't learn.
01:42:22
You you won't you you won't update any, you know, so there and so and your behaviors are not necessarily well calibrated to the situation that you're in, which can have all kinds of
01:42:36
downstream difficult problem. You know, you can make things uh in the downstream worse for yourself um and make it harder
01:42:43
to do budgeting later. Isn't it incredibly annoying when you're in a rush to leave your house, but you can't
01:42:48
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free shipping and a 100day trial. That's extra.com with code Steven. I wanted to
01:44:00
um ask you about something I heard you say and I've I've actually had other guests on my podcast say it and I wasn't ever sure if it was true until I heard
01:44:07
you say it which is that we can change our emotions by smiling because if if the brain is predicting then presumably if I do a big
01:44:19
smile and I go yes then the brain is going to predict good feelings and going to cause good feelings etc etc and going to cause me to feel nice about self.
01:44:30
Well, yes and no. I think um you know people smile when they're not happy too. People smile when they're angry. People smile when they're plotting the demise of their enemy. You know, people smile
01:44:43
for all kind. People smile when they're when they're afraid. But can I make myself happier technically by smiling?
01:44:49
The metaanalytic evidence suggests that there is a slight effect that it's that there's um that there's a small Yeah. Yeah. Crinkle your You have
01:45:02
to crinkle. There you go. It's like putting put a pencil between your teeth. Go. Go ahead. Yeah. Now smile.
01:45:09
Now crinkle. Okay. So, it's like that. And I And the the the So, what I would say is it's a it's a minuscule effect size. It's like it's very small. I do feel happier. Do you? Yeah. But that's
01:45:21
because I made you do something silly. Maybe. Maybe. Okay. But anyways, the point being that it's overblown as a as
01:45:28
an effect. Um I think um there's a small my recollection is that the meta the last meta analysis I read was that there was a small effect, but a small effect means it doesn't work
01:45:43
for everyone and it doesn't work always. it it's just really really a very very small effect. You must have a
01:45:49
perspective on ADHD which has become a huge topic of conversation in society. I I was diagnosed with ADHD. I don't
01:45:56
necessarily take it to mean anything because I've seen so many variations of ADHD my friends but there's been this
01:46:02
big rise of ADHD and linked to the work that you've done on the brain being a predictive tool. So my general response is the following that um people there's
01:46:16
a rise in people self- diagnosing and in using diagnosis as an explanation for behavior or for their why people experience what they experience or whatever. Diagnoses are not explanations
01:46:31
of anything. They're descriptions. They don't explain anything. And to treat a diagnosis like
01:46:39
it's an explanation is a form of essententralizing which is not a good thing. Okay? It means that you're assuming that there's some kind of
01:46:50
underlying unchanging essence which is responsible for in fact there is something called psychological essentialism where you don't even know what the essence is. You just assume it's there and that it's the cause of
01:47:02
all these symptoms. But a diagnosis is just a description of symptoms. And diagnosis are mostly useful for billing hours of treatment. They're not
01:47:15
optimized for pockets describing pockets of behavior that are, you know, or collections of behavior that tend to go together because people sometimes think that serotonin and dopamine are the
01:47:27
reason why someone has ADHD. That's like one of the theories that I've So, there are multiple serotonin receptors. There
01:47:34
are multiple dopamine receptors. They don't all do the same thing. Serotonin doesn't do one thing. Dopamine doesn't
01:47:41
do one thing. Does different things in different places of the bo in the body and the brain depending on what the
01:47:46
receptors are. And also, every resource of resilience and every symptom of difficulty has a context to it. There
01:47:58
are requirements the way our society is structured. There are requirements for sitting and paying attention to something for long periods of time. Mhm.
01:48:11
And that requirement is hidden in the background. It's there so frequently that we forget that that's the conditional that's the condition upon
01:48:22
which diagnoses are made. So whatever first of all ADHD is not one set of symptoms. It's a variety. It's
01:48:33
like it's a you know there's a lot of variation in the way that in you can have different symptom profiles and have the same diagnosis because it's just descriptive and there are lots of
01:48:45
symptoms. Some of those symptoms also occur in they overlap with other syndromes, other diagnostic clusters. But the point is that they all when you
01:48:56
diagnose someone it makes it sound like that's a property of that person. Yeah. But it's not. It's a property of a
01:49:02
person in the context that they're in and social expectation by by many respects like can he pay attention in school? Well, right. And the way that school is organized is, you know, you
01:49:16
sit for long periods of time. Well, it it may be that um there are other circumstances in which not holding your attention on one thing for a long period
01:49:28
of time could be advantageous. So my point is that there are very few things that are just categorically good or
01:49:35
categorically bad. There's always a hidden condition. There's always a hidden context. And so I think it's
01:49:41
really important to foreground that context. You're not broken. you're just your suitability to a certain context has been deemed to be un like doesn't
01:49:52
fit. It's not productive for that context and that may sound like weasel words or it may you know but it's not
01:49:58
because because it's important that competencies are by context and the and again I would say this is not you know being me being a bleeding heart you know
01:50:10
progressive or whatever. I mean I am a bleeding heart progressive but this is not an example of that. This is an
01:50:16
example of me being pragmatic. You can regulate each other. Something you talked about earlier on which I found really really interesting. Um I was reading about a study where of 25,000 people and they found that people
01:50:28
having a heart attack were 14% more likely to survive if they were married. Um, but the other thing that I found
01:50:34
interesting is that we can we regulate each other with words and I think you did a study on assessing the power of words to
01:50:41
facilitate emotion. You were co it was a study you co-authored. Well, we've studied the
01:50:48
power of words in many contexts, including words as invitations to make sense of, you know, so if if a an instance of emotion is you making
01:51:00
meaning of what is going on inside your body in relation to the world, then you can you invite pe every
01:51:08
time you use an emotion word, you invite people to make meaning in that way. So you've proven then that certain words
01:51:15
can calm us down. Well, yes, but I wouldn't say I've proven anything. Scientists don't, you know, shown,
01:51:22
demonstrated. Yeah. Demonstrated in a, you know, in a context, right? Like we, you know, scientists don't like the f
01:51:29
word, the fa fact. I like the other f word, but that fact. Fact. That's a tough one because it means something that holds under all circumstances in all contexts and that's very rarely the
01:51:41
case. So, but yes, we have. So, and I mean so if you've done it probably a million times, you text things to
01:51:50
people, do you not? Yeah. Yeah. And when you text a couple of words to your partner or your friend, you can change their heart rate, you change their breathing rate, you can change all kinds
01:52:03
of chemicals, all kinds of protein synthesis just with a couple of words. Again, you know, we live in a we, you
01:52:10
know, free, you know, free speech is important, freedoms are important, but freedoms come with responsibilities.
01:52:18
Like it or not, we regulate each other's nervous systems in all kinds of ways, including with words. And um for better or for worse. For better or for worse. Exactly. So you
01:52:31
you really made me think differently about stress as well generally because if I think about my life through the
01:52:36
lens of this metabolic budget and stress is a burden to this budget then if I don't limit my stress I'm much more likely to go over budget and if I go over budget my immune system might be
01:52:50
the thing that I cut the costs of or uh something else right I mean I mean there's good st you can't be without stress that would mean you'd be without effort. So you know sometimes scientists
01:53:03
will talk about good stress and bad stress which really just means stress that is planned and where you replenish
01:53:10
what you spend and stress that is pernitious and you don't chronic stress then chronic stress or you know so what
01:53:18
I would say is just you know if you're in a stressful meeting a meeting where it's affecting
01:53:26
your mood that means you've there's been some metabolic impact take into account what that means. With all that you know about the brain, I wondered if you if it's changed your
01:53:37
view at all on religion and God and spirituality and if there is a higher power at all. The
01:53:44
brain is such a wonderfully complex beautiful thing. You know, as the objective observer in 2025 looks at a brain goes this is fantastic. Many
01:53:51
people then conclude that there must be a creator of that brain. But also we've talked so much today about meaning and
01:53:57
the point of it all. So, everything you've learned about the brain and neuroscience and psychology, has it made you believe in a god? No.
01:54:06
Has it made you more atheist or agnostic? I'm pretty firmly an atheist. Um, I don't think that the wondrous
01:54:19
complexity of nature or or the brain or the nervous system requires a designer. And that logic doesn't make sense to me. So this is obviously a terrible leap, but do you therefore think that there's
01:54:34
no inherent meaning to life outside of, you know, the like reproduction? And I'm just reading for the second time this book. It's called Open Socrates.
01:54:46
Okay. And it's a really wonderful book and I've learned a lot about Socratic philosophy that I didn't know. And one of the things that Socrates thought was
01:54:59
important was asking this question of what is meaning and that you shouldn't be asking this question in 15minute increments. You should be really asking
01:55:10
this question about the expanse of your life. And so I think if anything being a scientist who studies how a brain in in constant
01:55:25
conversation with a body and the other brains and bodies in our world and even the physical nature of our world. How that creates lots of different kinds of
01:55:38
minds including our very western mind. that makes me um think uh more about the importance of philosophy actually because I think philosophy is asking the same kinds of questions that
01:55:52
religious belief tries to answer and for me that's a better path. I think it's a
01:55:59
more comfortable path. I've often been asking questions like this my whole life actually. So it makes me feel more like
01:56:06
what's the point? Like what is the ultimate point? I think the answer for me, the ultimate point is to leave the
01:56:15
world a little better than I found it. It's like the Johnny Apple Seed, uh, you know, philosophy. Um, you know, like as a scientist, scientists often, you know, a
01:56:27
lot of us, we don't do what we do for money. Money is not bad, but we don't do what we do for money. We do it for other
01:56:33
motivations, right? To know, to be, to be curious, to try to discover things. And at some point we start to think about well what's your like what's your legacy right most of us are not Darwin
01:56:47
um we're not William James we're not you know Heisenberg we're not you know most
01:56:53
of us are not those people so what's your legacy and in the end I realized that I've published a lot of peerreview papers when people introduce me you know
01:57:06
they give some kind of like you know about my citation you know people whatever Dr. Lisa is one of the most
01:57:12
influential figures in the field of emotion, neuroscience, and the nature of the brain. She is among the top 0.1%
01:57:20
cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. Yeah, that's all nice,
01:57:26
super nice. Um, but actually my legacy is really the people who I've trained, the minds that I've had the opportunity to engage with. And if I
01:57:42
were going to be bean counting, I might be bean counting the number of laboratories that now exist that didn't
01:57:50
exist before. um gener several generations of scientists who I trained or who who you know and also who trained me I mean along the way. So
01:58:02
that's my legacy in some ways really. It's the people. It's the people and the ideas. And I would like to think just to actually to just wrap up to where we
01:58:13
started. Um, you know, when I when I used to do a lot of classroom teaching, I I would
01:58:20
feel like what I told myself is if I can change the the trajectory, the outcomes
01:58:27
of just one person in this class, just one, then I will have done my job, you know. And I kind of feel that way a little bit sort of the same about the public the public face of what I'm
01:58:42
doing, right? public uh educa public science education. If I can help, if something that I've learned or something I've communicated can help
01:58:54
somebody else live a more intentional life of agent with agency where they're choosing and they're
01:59:09
impacting their loved ones or their children, then then That's my then I've done my job. That's my legacy. And the hard thing about that kind of a legacy,
01:59:24
a legacy of ideas impacting people's lives, is that you don't ever know what your impact is. But that's part of the
01:59:38
deal. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for.
01:59:44
question is how to live a life without attaining anything. I have some context on this person. They are a black belt shaoling
01:59:56
monk. So they talk a lot about identity being sure and they and living without um encumbrances and attachments and so on. Right. It's it's it's it sounds like a very Buddhist question. Yeah. The the
02:00:08
problem is that I think even a Buddhist attains something. They attain enlightenment. So they don't have
02:00:14
attachments necessarily. They don't have wealth. They don't have power. They don't But they attain something. They
02:00:19
attain enlightenment. They attain tranquility. How about then how to live life without your
02:00:30
identity making you unhappy? Well, I think it's important to remember that you don't really have an identity that is separate from the
02:00:43
moment that you're in. It's not like there's an essence to you. And what I would say is that every everything you experience, everything
02:00:55
you do is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present. That means to change who you are, you can change what you remember or how you
02:01:08
predict or you can change the sensory present. You can change the sensory present by literally getting up and
02:01:14
moving somewhere else like going for a walk or or you can change the sensory present by what you pay attention to.
02:01:21
Mindfulness for example, right? you there are there are some sensory signals that are front and center in your
02:01:27
attention and there are some that are in the background lurking for example you can right now you're not paying attention to some sensory signals but the minute that I say them point them
02:01:38
out you will be like the pressure um of the chair against your back and your legs now they're in the forefront of your attention because I just mentioned them so what I would say is that there
02:01:51
is no essence to who you are you are what you do in the moment. You are what you do
02:02:01
and you can change what you do. You can change what you experience the consequence of the lived experience which is the consequence of what you do by what you
02:02:12
remember and what the context is. So that's my answer. If you always remember that you will never be attached, you will never crave or
02:02:26
strive, you know, to have things and like all of these artificial things which prop up the illusion that you are
02:02:32
and you have an essence to you that you c that you know is unchanging across situations. Yeah, we um I we um are very
02:02:41
quick to fall into the trap of thinking we are what we did and that's um I much prefer I am what I do because that means
02:02:49
that I have agency to make a different decision in the moment irrespective of what I did in the past. But it but
02:02:54
that's the trap we fall into. In 10 minutes time I bet I'll be downstairs and I'll be back into the trap of thinking that I am Steven Barllet who
02:03:01
did this thing for 32 years or did you know Lisa thank you. Thank you so much for um thank you for everything that you do. I've I've you've changed my mind in a really profound way and that's quite hard because I sit here quite a lot so
02:03:14
have lots of conversations about the brain and about lots of lots of new studies that have come out etc etc but
02:03:20
you've completely changed my my mind and made me think from in a completely different way which I'm really grateful
02:03:26
for. So, thank you so much because that's a gift and that's not a gift that I always get doing this job, but um it
02:03:32
really is a gift and it's one that I think will help me to live a better life ultimately. But hopefully also for everybody that's listening and thank you
02:03:38
for stepping into the uh public communication side of your life because I was going to say it's um someone that knows what you know and that has done the work that you've done.
02:03:53
It is so important to the to the extent that I almost consider it to be like a really critical responsibility because
02:03:59
there's people like us that sit on these podcasts who aren't in the laboratory that are getting our information from
02:04:04
social media, Tik Tok or any any odd person that says anything and it's really really important that people like you step out more and share what you
02:04:11
know. Um and thank you so much for writing these books because they are absolutely brilliant and just like
02:04:17
you've changed my mind today. I think these books will change a lot of people's lives. I highly recommend this book. how emotions are made. I'm going
02:04:23
to link it below. The secret life of the brain and also for something a little bit shorter but equally accessible. Um
02:04:29
this book here, seven and a half lessons about the brain. Thank you so much. We're done. Thank you
02:04:35
so much. I'm going to let you into a little bit of a secret. You're probably going to think me and my team are a little bit weird, but I can still
02:04:40
remember to this day when Jamaima from my team posted on Slack that she changed the scent in this studio. And right
02:04:46
after she posted it, the entire office clapped in our Slack channel. And this might sound crazy, but at the Diary of
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SEO, this is the type of 1% improvement we make on our show. And that is why the show is the way it is. By understanding
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the power of compounding 1%s, you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life. It isn't about drastic
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transformations or quick wins. It's about the small consistent actions that have a lasting change in your outcomes. So, two years ago, we started the process of creating this beautiful
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diary, and it's truly beautiful. Inside there's lots of pictures, lots of inspiration and motivation as well. Some
02:05:21
interactive elements. And the purpose of this diary is to help you identify, stay focused on, develop consistency with the
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1% that will ultimately change your life. So if you want one for yourself or for a friend or for a colleague or for
02:05:34
your team, then head to the diary.com right now. I'll link it below. This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53%
02:05:42
of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So, could I ask you for a favor?
02:05:47
If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button.
02:05:53
And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single
02:06:00
week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so
02:06:08
[Music] much. Heat. Heat. N. [Music] [Music]