Neuroscientist Reveals Your Brain is Just “Guessing” & Doesn’t Know Anything | Lisa Feldman Barrett

You can sign up for Everybody, welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I'm here with Lisa Feldman Barrett, the neuroscientist who's written multiple books that have been really revolutionary in the way that I think about the brain. And so I'm very excited to welcome you to the show. It's my pleasure to be here, Tom. Thanks so much for having me on. Absolutely. Now, this is going to be a lot of fun. I was saying before we started rolling that um your I have a working model of how the brain works that has been tremendously useful to me in my life. Um and your books come in and just sort of knock that all around and say, you know, you're really thinking about this in the wrong way. Um and I wanted to start with a quote. Um this is This isn't from your latest book, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, but it it really gets to the heart of what I find so intriguing about the book. And this is you talking in an interview. You said, "Not all people in all cultures have emotions. Everybody has affect, assuming they have a neurotypical brain, but they don't all have emotions." And I was like, "Say what?" Uh I'd love for you to talk through the difference between an emotion and an affect and how it is humanly possible that some people don't have quote unquote emotions. Sure, I'm really happy to do that. Um So, just before I start though, I should say, you know, one of the most cherished distinctions in Western civilization is the difference between a thought and a feeling. So, um this is something that seems so it seems so obvious to us that people wouldn't even ask whether that's something that's generally experienced around the world, but actually, there are many cultures around the world that don't make that distinction at all. So, in those cultures, there's experience. But thinking and feeling are not separate experiences, and they're certainly not separate experiences that struggle for control of your behavior. That's a really Western view. Um, and so um you know, I think it's really important to ask questions like as it many do, like what is what is generally true about the human brain so that all humans are endowed, you know, with certain capabilities versus what is what is learned and this is the general nature versus nurture kind of question. I think it it's really really important understand that you know, we have the kind of nature that requires nurture. Meaning we have the kind of genes that build um that give us a general brain plan and babies are born with that brain plan. But they're basically born with brains that are under construction. And they learn the wiring instructions really come from the world and from their own bodies um and um from the social world. And so um in cultures that have don't make sense of sensations in terms of emotion versus cognition or thoughts versus feelings those people have different other experiences that we don't have and that really are hard for us to wrap our heads around just like when you listen to a language that you don't know, you you just hear noise. You don't really hear words. Um, it's sort of a a similar something similar to that. Um, but to answer your question so um I like to start with what's your brain's most important job? Your brain's most important job is not thinking it's not feeling, it's not seeing it's not hearing, it's to run your body. Um, so you have a body filled with uh systems for breathing, for you know, circulating blood, for getting rid of waste, and so on and so forth, for protecting you from from viruses. And all the cells in your body require glucose, oxygen, water, salt, lots and lots and lots of nutrients. And so, your brain's job is to run that is to run your the systems of your body in a in a metabolically efficient way. And that's true of all brains. And some scientists think that's why brains evolved, or at least one of the really important reasons why brains evolved. As bodies got bigger over evolutionary time, brains were needed and also got bigger. So, as your body and your brain so you as your brain is regulating your body, your body is sending sense data back to your brain. So, you you can think of it as a constant conversation actually between your brain and your body that's happening in the world. And you know, we're not really wired to feel those sense data very directly. So, think about it. You know, you right now, for example, you are we're talking to each other and we're looks like we're just calmly, you know, listening to each other. But actually inside your body is a whole drama going on that you are largely unaware of. And that's a really good thing because if you were aware of it, you would never pay attention to anything outside your own skin ever again. So, just think about the last time you had a stomach ache, for example, or you had constipation or something wrong with your GI tract, you know, like um Philosophers call this tragic embodiment. This um the fact that we were really largely unaware of what's going on inside our own bodies, but when we become aware, man, all our attention goes there. And we can't, you know, so think about the last time you sort of cut your finger or, you know, you just you all your attention goes to your body. So, that doesn't usually happen for us. And so, how are we supposed to keep track of whether things are generally copacetic or or or there's a problem there? Um and so, what evolution has given us is a a workaround. It's given us really simple feelings. Like feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling worked up, feeling calm, feeling comfortable, feeling uncomfortable. These really general feelings come from the brain's regulation of the body and the body's um sense data, sending sense data back to the brain. So, these general feelings come from this constant conversation between the brain and the body. And those feelings are sometimes really intense. So, when everything is pretty good, you can feel pretty great. And when everything, when you're when there's a problem with your brain's regulation of your body, or let's say your your brain is directing your body to spend a lot of energy, um you can feel pretty crappy, actually. And that signal, it's kind of like a general barometer for generally speaking, how are things going? It doesn't really tell you what to do about situation. It just tells you, are things going okay? Are things going not okay? Um you know, um and those feelings are with you always, from the moment that you're born until the moment that you die. They are not emotions. They are what people call mood or um what scientists call affect. So, mood or or affect, um is with you all the time, whether you're emotional or not. And sometimes we experience the affect as our own reactions to things. Like, um I like you, or I like that drink, or that's I really like that painting. And sometimes we experience affect as a property of the thing itself, like that guy's an That's a really beautiful painting. That's a really delicious drink. So, it's always with us, but sometimes affect is in the foreground of our attention, and sometimes it's in the background and we just treat it like it's a property of the thing itself, like the thing that we're interacting with. So, as I said, you know, you you don't affect just tells you whether things are generally okay with your the systems in your body, or whether there's your your brain is um having trouble regulating your body, or whether there's some deficit in the energy regulation in your body. And um it doesn't really give you any more specific information about what to do about that situation. Um your brain pretty much has to guess at the causes, as I'm sure we'll discuss later. Um and some of those guesses are emotions. So, basically, when your brain makes an emotion, what it's doing is it's making sense of what's going on inside your body in relation to what's going on around you in the world. Meaning that your brain is actively applying meaning to how you feel in this particular context? Exactly. So, the way to think about it is something like this. Like your brain your brain is stuck in a dark, silent box called your skull. Your whole life, right? And it's receiving sense data through your sense organs, through your eyes, through your ears, through your nose, and so on. And it's also receiving sense data from your body. These sense data, the changes in in light and in air pressure, and you know, tugs and so on from your body, aches and whatever, these are outcomes of some set of causes. They're the effects of some set of causes. So, when you hear a loud bang, what is that bang? Is it Did somebody drop something on the ground? Did a door slam? Did somebody hit your car? Is it a gunshot? You know, what is it? What was that bang? Similarly, when you have a tug in your chest, are you anxious? Are you having trouble breathing? Is that the beginning of a heart attack? Are you just feeling a a moment really poignantly? Um what what is it? What caused it? Your brain, stuck in your skull, doesn't know anything about the causes. It only is receiving the outcomes, so it has to guess at the causes. This is called fidelity Sorry. Say that and then I'll ask the question. I was going to say this is called a reverse inference problem, um or or an inverse inference problem. And so, your brain has to guess and it's and it is guessing. It's guessing using your past experience. So, it's guessing what those sensations mean in this situation by referring to past experiences that were similar in some way. So, the brain's trapped in a box. It doesn't actually know what's going on. It's not even necessarily as a device created to be objective. It's just trying to keep you alive long enough to have children that have children. And um what I'm curious about is it are the signals coming to the brain quite low fidelity in that when people think of emotion, you think of this rich emotional life where you get swept off your feet by love, you get overcome with rage where you actually feel capable of more than you did a minute prior. Like when I think about the intoxicant that is righteous indignation. When you feel this just I am right to pursue this thing, it actually makes me more bold. Like it it steps me into a mini personality that acts differently than I would without that. So, when when I first read that idea that there are cultures without emotion. And then hearing the explanation that you just gave that it's maybe um I'll be interested to get your take on whether that's semantics and it's we're sort of all going through the same thing if you get a low resolution thing pitched up to you, your brain's job is in context to say this means this. My what I am is a prediction machine and therefore based on this in this context feel this way. And now I'm stepping outside of what I've heard you say into sort of what I think of as my own experience. And now in this context you move into sort of this micro personality and you act in accordance with, you know, whether it's to be aggressive, whether it's to be demure, um to be a diplomat, you know, whatever you sort of base on historical um experiences you think is right for that moment. But my real question is about the level of fidelity of what the body is coughing up. Is it Is it giving you four or five sort of blunt instruments and everything else is context? So, there are many many many interesting things in what you just said. Um I'll answer your question, but then I want to come back to this issue of is it just semantics? Cuz that's like one of my most favorite questions in the whole world. So, um uh It So, what's the fidelity? Well, what what your brain is doing with the sense data from your body, it's doing with all the sense data it's receiving from the world. So, the sense data that it receives from the world is always ambiguous, noisy, and um partial. But even in those cases, visual information is very high fidelity. That's why you see with hot in high dimensionality. You you you know, you can see a lot of detail, you can see things very sharply um for the most part. I mean, if you if you're in your typical brain and your eyes are working properly and so on. Um auditory information, also pretty high fidelity. Touch, also pretty high fidelity actually. And um what's interesting is your distance senses, that is, things that allow you to sense at a distance, far from your body. So, that's vision, audition to some extent. Um and um touch, because touch evolved in the water and in the water, somatosensory touch is a distance sense. Interesting. Yeah, it lets you know whether something is close to you or far away from you. Um by vibration. Um all high fidelity, very high fidelity actually. And for touch, it's really interesting because certain parts of your body have much more high fidelity than others. So, um like the arm your arm, you know, you can localize you can localize pretty well when somebody when something touches you. In fact, you don't even have sensors for water in your skin at all, cuz we evolved in the water, right? So, we don't have sense we don't have senses for in our skin for water. It just wouldn't make any sense. Um but nevertheless, you can feel the tiniest drop of water on your skin when it's about to rain, right? So, um but certain parts of our brains have much I was certain parts of our body have much more high fidelity, like lips, finger hands, fingers, genitals. Um and then certain parts less, like, you know, the tip of your butt on your leg or, you know, on your arm or what have you. The data from your body um inside your body, it's debatable how high fidelity it is. And And when I say it's debatable, what I mean is that scientists are debating this actively. We're all We're trying to figure out that figure that out. It seems like the information from your gut from the internal parts of your gut. I mean, you have cells inside your intestines that signal all the way up to your brain about nutrient levels like all the time. So, those seem to be pretty high fidelity. You have um what are called um ergoreceptors, which are just like little receptors in your muscles that that indicate to the brain how much um glucose is being burned, for example. Those seem It's not clear whether they're high fidelity or not, but they seem It's not so important to know like whether glucose in a particular muscle cell is being burned. What's generally important is like, you know, in general, how much is the muscle working, right? It's not usually we don't need to know it's like specific, but maybe it's more specific for the purposes of blood flow. We just don't We just don't really know. What is known is that unlike vision and audition and touch, somatosensory touch outside your body, the information is carried up to the brain um along very neurons that have very thick axons uh and very thick dendrites. So, like these are neurons that are You can think of the information as being carried along very kind of robust axons with a very lots of myelins, so lots of so I mean I don't know if how much your audience knows about like how it what a neuron looks like or what have you. So I'm that's why I'm stopping myself. up a fair amount, so you can go relatively deep and people will have a rough idea. I I've given them sort of the layman's description, so I'm sure the things they've heard me say over and over, which are some of the things I want to get into, are wrong, uh and that yeah, a little revelatory truth will go a long way. So I'll just say that that distance senses are carried that that information's carried to the brain on axon on neurons that have axons, which are very thick and and they're very myelinated and they they fire very fast as a consequence. They're also very expensive. The information that's being sent metabolically expensive, yeah. The information that's being sent to the brain from the internal um systems of your body is being sent along really small axons that are not myelinated or are lightly myelinated. And what that means is that that actually for the unmyelinated neurons the axons can talk to each other as the information is going up to your brain. So there's actually a lot of information sharing that's going on between the between different neurons as it's reaching the brain. And scientists are still trying to figure out whether does that improve the fidelity of the information or does it dilute it? It's just not I so I I the general consensus I would say is that it's you're not the the information from your body is not not that high fidelity. But I'm I'm giving this big caveat because we don't experience it as high fidelity. You and I do not experience it. When you have an ache in your gut, you don't experience it. Like you don't know where in your intestine the problem is. I mean, think about people who have appendicitis, right? Usually what happens is your whole abdomen is very sore. And it's only right before the appendix bursts that you feel very, very specifically where the pain is. So, it's not really clear. Um And that's part of the tricky bit is to know How do you know whether some tension in your chest is anxiety or difficulty breathing or the beginnings of a heart attack? You You can't know. Your brain actually is just guessing. It's guessing based on everything it's learned from your past experiences, from what you've watched in movies, from the books you've read, from the people that you've talked to. It's making a guess, and it's always making a guess. And so, the question that you asked about um you know, well, how could it be that people don't have emotions? Is this just really semantic? I guess what I would say is the following. First of all, when people say, "Is it just semantic?" I just love that phrasing because what is semantics? It's meaning. Is it just meaning? Everything is just meaning. I mean, like I You know, that's not like that's not trivial. That's like You know, I think when people say that though, and certainly myself, what I'm getting at is know. You're saying Is it trivial? Is it just descriptive? It's like the actual process. words for the same thing essentially? Yeah, no, we're not. No, we're not. So, let me just Let me just say that um that uh when your brain is making meaning of something, when your brain has to guess at what the meaning is of something, I'm I just want to unpack what that what that what we think that looks like in the brain. And then you'll see why I'm saying it's not just seman- it's not just semantic in the way that you mean it. So, if we were to stop time right now, your brain would be have taken an accounting of what's going on in the world right now and what's going on inside your own body. And based on your past experiences, it's going to make a guess about what's going to happen next. A prediction. What is that prediction? Well, the first thing that prediction is is a plan for action. The first thing that your brain does to make a prediction, it's not like forecasting, you know, some event. It's forecasting what changes inside the body have to happen to allow certain actions to happen. So, it's actually an action plan. Immediately, your brain is into an action plan. And then based on the based on a lot of evidence actually from anatomy and from signal processing and from, you know, brain imaging and from observing, you know, single cells fire in rat brains and so on. All this evidence, what we can say is that your brain makes a a plan first for action, so changes inside the body to support actual movement. And the consequence of those are sensory predictions or what are called perceptual inferences that prepare your body to see and hear and feel something in the next moment. So, meaning differences are it's not like your brain is evaluating the meaning of something and then prepares you to act. The preparation for action is the meaning. That's the meaning of those sensory signals from the brain's point of view. And what you experience is a consequence of your actions. It's not the other way around. It's not like you experience something and then you act. It's that based on how things are now, your brain predicts how you should act, and then it predicts, well, what are you likely to experience based on that action in this situation the last time it happened. So, what does that mean? What it means is that if you live in a culture where things are, just use an example from the book, um where things are, um uncertain, you're you're not able to predict really well, and your life might be at stake because of it, you will go to sleep. And there you mentioned a culture, I forget which culture you mentioned. Bali. Bali. Where that's like the culturally encouraged response to fear. That's what you teach your children to do when they're afraid. That is what it means to be afraid. You fall asleep. And interestingly enough, if you look in the animal world, you can see that there is this um what's called bradycardia, which is a slowing of the heart. Because think now, think in the ocean, in the ocean, right? Um what do you do when there's a predator around? Like a shark who can detect your heartbeats if you're a fish. You slow your heartbeat. You slow everything down. And you just if you remain still and you slow your heart, the shark can't find you. So, you sink and you know, if you sink in down to the, you know, or you sink behind a a plant or whatever, and you just are still and silent. Not with your heart beating wildly, with it calmed and slow. The shark will pass you by, and in fact, there's a really great, um Netflix documentary right now called, um My Octopus Teacher, which I think is is everybody should watch. It's an amazing movie, but you see this little octopus. Have you seen it? Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. You see this little octopus, she does this at in certain points. She like she just she's hiding and she she looks like she's falling asleep. And that's actually what animals sometimes do. So, even though falling asleep during fear seems like bizarre to us because, you know, our our stereotype for what you do in fear is you just high tail it out of there. Or you're frozen with your heart beating, you know, And when you say our Are you talking about a Western culture? Yeah, I'm talking about I'm talking about a Western. I'm assuming we're both from Western cultures. Maybe that was an assumption, but No, no, no, you're right assumption. What what is so interesting about the book and what I want to make sure is coming across is this idea that we So, you have a chapter in the book and I might invert the title, but basically the brain creates multiple minds. And so, you maybe humans have one sort of brain architecture plan, but it the mind as the way that it manifests and the way that they see the world is actually wildly different from culture to culture to culture. Yeah, you're going exactly where I was going. So, so, we have one general brain plan, right? Um and it's and it's old. It's an old plan. But, it gives us like I said before, we have we have the kind of nature that requires nurture. So, we we have the kind of genes that require learning. So, this brain plan gives us a brain that is unfinished. It gives us um you know, a baby's brain that's born under construction. And the baby's brain has to get wiring instructions to finish itself. So, an infant brain is not a miniature adult brain. It's a brain that's looking for wiring expecting wiring instructions from the world. Those wiring instructions come from statistical regularities in the world. Things that happen in a predictable way. And then the brain learns those things. And what does it mean to learn something? It means that actually the wiring is modified. Right? The brain is either tuning up certain connections between neurons or it's getting rid of unused connections because they're metabolically expensive if you have a typical neurotypical brain. So, a baby's brain is born waiting for wiring instructions that come from the baby's the regularities in the baby's own body, in the surrounding world. You know, like a uh I talk about this, you know, um this is a really common example that if light doesn't hit a baby's retina and make it to the brain um during the first couple of months of life, the baby's visual system won't finish developing normally. Um and if a brain is doesn't receive information about a face, it won't learn to see faces. I mean, babies aren't born seeing knowing what a face is. You have to learn it. And in fact, there's really interesting evidence from people who um are born with very, very, very bad cataracts. Um so, they can't um you know, they can't um or corneal damage. So, no light is really making it to the brain. Um and then when they're adults, their um you know, corneas are replaced or or their cataracts are removed. Um It's not like they can instantly see. It take they have to learn how to see. Just in the same way that you would learn how to speak on another language. You have to learn where are the breaks in the in the sounds? What do the sounds refer to? You're learning because there are statistical regularities in the way that sounds um pair together uh in a particular language. And it turns out a face is actually a hard thing to to to see. So, um uh you know, people when they have to learn to see a face, sometimes it it can take months or even years for them to be able to recognize a face as, for example, male or female. I mean, it's just it's really really hard, but it's something that babies learn after a couple of months because um actually not even that. They really they learn probably after a couple of of weeks. Um because they're constantly being presented with faces at a very close distance. So, they can see them all over the place. They have regularities. I'm sorry. In in the book you talk about the brain's ability to categorize and that you can that it will categorize based on function. So, how's it beginning a an infant? How's it beginning so quickly to categorize between male and female? Wouldn't it lump them together as caretaker or human or something like that? Oh, what a baby is learning what a newborn is learning is what is a face. Not who is the face. Is the face male or female? It's just what is a face. What is a face? Like, they're seeing they're seeing things they're experientially blind to what they're seeing. Um they don't know what a face It's not like they recognize that a face is a face. So, for example, if I show you any sort of image that even remotely has a face-like configuration to it in a piece of toast or, you know, um in a machine or you know, something that loosely has a dot here, a dot here, and a slit here, you're going to see a face instantaneously. We see faces all over the place that are not actually faces. A baby doesn't do that cuz a baby doesn't put together that the dark thing here with the light around it and the dark thing here with the light around it and the you know, so your your eyes and the the sclera of your eyes, you know, the the iris and the sclera you know, they don't see an eye. Like newborns, they don't know what that is. You know, they don't their sound coming out of you know, sound somewhere coming from but they don't know what a mouth is. They don't know you know, babies don't know what these things are. They have to learn what those things these things are and their brains are being wired to recognize statistical regularities. And um babies I I guess the point here is that this opens the door for wiring a baby's brain with the concepts and the meaning the you know, movement related meaning of your culture which is very could be very different from another person's culture. So, for example in our culture right now in this time in this era if you lose someone if you lose a child say, you know, a child dies you feel grief. You feel grief. It's a mental feeling and you may have physical aspects to it but you feel bereft. In some cultures when you lose a child you feel sick. You you have a sickness an illness. That the feelings in your body are understood as an illness. Do you think they're the same affectation? Like is that the same and just the cultural interpretation is different? problem. You know, here's the problem. Well, when you say just the cultural interpretation, there is no just the cultural interpretation. When your brain is making a prediction about what something means, that is a very um uh sensory motor prediction. There is no culture laid on top. So, if I um So, for example if I I you to um and make keep your eyes open and imagine in your mind's eye an apple. What do you see in your mind's eye? Um I see a red apple with a little bit of a golden uh tint to some places, the little stem sticking out of it. That is quite literally what I imagine. half the time when I ask that question, people tell me they see a computer. Interesting. Um which is actually But okay, so you see an apple and um and you know, you know the apple's not there, but you can see the ghost of an apple. You can see it with the color, right? And the shape, right? Okay. So, can you imagine grabbing that apple and taking a bite out of that apple? Like um can you hear the crunch of the bite? Yes, and feel it. Absolutely. Can you sort of taste a little bit? Maybe it's a little Maybe it's a McIntosh apple, so maybe it's a little tart, but it has some sweetness to it, you know? Yeah, I would say more than I feel that one. I know intellectually that it would be there, but yes. Okay. But so, maybe not so much, but the other But the other senses you you've got those, right? Definitely. Okay. So, you just did this really amazing thing. Your brain changed the firing of its own neurons in your visual system so that you could see the ghost of an apple even though there is no apple there. And you could hear the crunch of an apple even though there actually is no bite. And if I had your head stuck in a brain scanner, I would see massive changes in in visual cortex, increases in activity in auditory cortex, even increases in activity in motor cortex, particularly around your hand and your mouth. In fact, all you have to do with someone is actually say a word. And their brains automatically will conjure some image um that is very what we call multimodal, meaning there's a lot of sensory detail to it. When your brain makes a prediction about what you are likely to see, that's what it's doing. It's actually changing the firing of your own neurons. So, when you learn a culturally overlaid meaning, it's not like there's some physical representation and then there's some culture just gets lathered on top like icing on top of an already baked cake. The cultural meaning is adding neural firing that wouldn't that wasn't there, wouldn't be there without it. So, if I show you a black and white blobby image, which I've done this I did this in my TED Talk and I do this really routinely cuz it's one of the best ways to demonstrate this. If I show you a black and white blobby image, most people when they look at that, they just see a black and white blobby image. And so, if we were looking inside your brain, we would see that you were basically seeing visual noise. Black and white blobby image though, lots of contrast but no actual object. And then I can give people an experience really briefly that then their brain can draw on that experience. And then when they're looking at the black and white blobs, all of a sudden they actually see an object there. And then when you look inside the brain, you can see that there's activity that is generally representing an object there. This is a a pretty it's a pretty great example and I saw in your talk when you did it. So, just for anybody that's um, listening or or watching really. Uh, you show the blobs, can't tell what they are, and then you show it in color and you realize it's actually a snake, the one that I saw. And then you go back to the black and white and now all of a sudden you can retain that those blobs are actually in the shape of a coiled snake. So, it's the same image just sort of with color, without color, um abstract, more realistic. And it is very interesting how all of a sudden now your brain sees something that before it couldn't grasp a hold of. Now, where where I'm going with why Yeah, but let me let me just finish the example before So, I'm sorry to cut you off, but I just want to finish the example. So, but the point is that what you're looking at is exactly the same. So, where is the additional Where is the additional imagery coming from? It's coming from your own head. What you see is a combination of what's out there and what's in here. And if what's in here is culturally is is put here by something cultural, meaning in one culture one set of knowledge is put there, in another culture another set of knowledge is put there, then that means that if there's no just cultural overlay, your actual experience of the sense data is different. It's different because the bits that you're adding are different. Yeah, to me that is and and um I I will try to be more careful with the the words that I use. Forgive me, I'm going to keep saying just, I'm sure subconsciously, uh because what I mean is I'm trying to So, my fascination, my obsession is with usability. Right? So, in reading your books, it's actually going to change the way that I approach the world and the tools that I have in my toolkit in order to move myself towards my goals. So, I can better understand my own neurophysiology, I can maybe it's, you know, de-escalate a situation, choose a better response that's more likely to move me towards my goal, whatever, if if the information that you have is more usable. Um so, when I say just culture, what I'm saying is whoa, that's super powerful if what we're talking about is the brain is giving me um an affect. It's giving me a feeling. I have a sense of I'm feeling good or something's off. I'm not sure. Maybe it's fatigue, maybe it's I need more protein, who knows? But there's something that's off. And one of the first things that I would encourage people to develop if they're struggling in their lives is self-awareness. And part of that self-awareness is a body awareness. So that hey, you're feeling something. Now, if what we're talking about is hey, there's this the the massive impact that culture has, which I will say is frame of reference or bundle of beliefs. It's It is a thing that itself is malleable. So, if I can take that affectation, lay a new cultural layer on top of it, and sort of see something I couldn't see before, and you may hackle at this, but this to me is very interesting, is is there one culture that has an approach to the affects that they feel that is more useful? Now, to get to useful, we'll have to define useful. I will define it very simply as does it move you towards your goals? And I'll say the ultimate goal is fulfillment. So, is there a culture, Balinese, Western, whatever, that is more likely to move you down a path to fulfillment? Well, what I would say is it's the wrong question. What's the right question? Because Cuz I know you're going to debunk why it's the wrong question, but I want to know what the right question is. I think that'll be very helpful. How many concepts do I are optimal to be able to make in order to achieve my goals efficiently? Meaning cultural ideas that I can use to better contextualize the feeling? Yeah, because it's really not about It's really The way to think about cultures I think as systems of practices and beliefs and values and so on is that they are variable solutions to the same problem. So, um we are social animals. We have to live in groups in order to survive. That's how we evolved as a species. We have socially dependent nervous systems. And so we have this fundamental problem that we have to deal with. And that is how do we get along with each other but also get ahead? So, how do we um um live as a group but also thrive as an individual? And you One way to think about cultures is that there are different solutions to that problem. So, what it means to be fulfilled is very different in different cultures actually. um We also populate many many many different climate and geographic locations on the earth. So, there are different solutions that are required in order to live in different places. That is in order to get along versus get ahead, that that what that looks like is different in different places. um So, the I think the answer to your question is uh really I suppose if I just took your question at face value, I would say no, there's not one culture that does it better because the actual what it means to be fulfilled actually differs in different cultures. But in a sense, a better question is is it will I be more flexible and therefore more apt to achieve my goals if I if my brain has a choice of making more concepts. So, if I if my menu if my toolkit is much bigger, will I be better off or or would that be a burden? So does that make it easier or harder? Um and the answer seems to be it makes it easier. So can we go into concepts then for a second? What do you mean exactly by a concept? Well, you what you mean by a concept when you said like knowledge from your culture, you could call that a concept, but here's what a concept is. Um so a group of things which are similar in some way is called a category. So you can think about a category, say as um a category of cats, right? And you know, cats are category. Cats have certain features they share. They're similar because they all have whiskers, they all have ears of the sort that are pointy, they they all, you know, purr and so on. Um actually it turns out I say that they purr, but it turns out that the animal sounds, the way they're described in different languages, differs. So animals purr in English, but when we describe it in English we call it a purr, but actually not all cultures describe animal sounds in the exactly same way. That's a whole other like conversation, but let's just say for the sake of argument they purr, okay? Um but they also have differences, right? That they So I should say, so they all have similar they have similarities. So people used to think, well that's the concept. The concept is the description of the category. Concept is your representation of a category. But it turns out that um cats differ. You know, some are big, some are small. They have different eye colors, they have different hair fur um thicknesses. Some don't have fur at all. Um so when I ask you, well, tell me the concept of a cat who's a good pet, you conjure something different in your mind than if I say, tell me the concept of a cat who um is good at catching mice. Right? Or if I say, "Tell me the concept of a cat um who's really cool and like like a really cool dude and you know like listens to jazz." Like those are all cats. So the point is that you can do it with birds, too. You can say, "Well, if if you know tell me the concept of a bird in the park. Tell me a concept of the bird of a bird if your goal is to have a have a meal." Tell me your concept of a bird if your goal is to have a pet. And so the idea here is that the idea here is that Go ahead. Your brain's always making concepts. So when I say your brain is like if we hold everything constant and your brain takes account of the situation and it has to So what it's doing when it's predicting is it's asking not only what's going to happen, but it's asking what's going to cause that thing. I'm predicting not only what's happening, but what's causing it. And when we when we have sense data that we need to understand its cause, we don't say, "What is it?" We say the brain, figuratively speaking, doesn't say, "What is it?" It says, "What is this like in my past experience? What is this similar to?" And then it create it it re it remembers it reinstates bits and pieces of past experience that are similar in some way to the present. So it's creating a category online to fit the situation or you might say it's creating a concept. It's creating a concept to make it's predicting what concept is going to be necessary in the immediate future to guide action and to predict and uh to anticipate sense data and and their cause. That's what your brain is doing all the time. So, it's not like there's it's not like there's affect and then you slather something on top from culture. It's actually all intertwined. What your When your brain is making a prediction, it's using regularities from experience in your past. And if you live in a particular culture, your regularities are going to be really different than somebody in a different culture. And cultures are not only geographic. Cultures can be They can be locational. Your brain can make very different concepts when you're at work and then versus when you're at home. Particularly if they're really different or if you're in the military and you know, when you're deployed versus when you're on base or when um you know, if you're if you're a Republican and a Democrat or if you're uh a you know, people from different religious um denominations or different classes um in in any society. My point is that your brain wires itself to its world. Other people partially really curate that world for you. And that is not it's not an it's not an abstract thing. People are teaching you how to see, how to hear, how to smell, and how to feel, and how to act. And sometimes they they're imparting that knowledge as um part of a they make meaning of that as an emotional episode or as illness or as an experience where thinking and feeling there is no difference between thinking and feeling. It's just an experience. Okay, so this stuff is incredibly interesting to me and you are taking us all on the very journey that I went through in reading your books of beginning to reorganize sort of how I see things. So, I want to um sort of summarize some of the key things that I think you've just walked us through and we can leverage that to continue the conversation. So, obviously if if I touch on anything that isn't accurate, let me know. Um the first thing I want to deal with is the notion of a concept, which I think this is if I understand it correctly, this seems insanely powerful. Which is um you said that I was asking the wrong question and that the right question was basically to understand that a concept is like a um a tool in your toolkit. So, if I have this low-resolution sense of hm something's not right or something is joyful, but I have a thousand different boxes that I can put that in so that my movement forward now becomes more useful to use my word towards my goal because I'm not only putting it into rage, love, laughter, punch. It's like I have a a far broader um set of things that I can find a nuance in the context or in the way that I feel to move this into a different category. Um you give a great example in the book and in your talks about how if a woman goes to the ER and she thinks um that she's maybe having a heart attack and they're going to say, "Ah, look this is just anxiety." Cuz her buckets are heart attack, anxiety. And when they say, "No, you should be putting it over here in anxiety." Okay, cool. I'll go home and there's obviously all the confusion about the way that women are looked at in terms of being a more emotional beast, more likely to be anxious. So, that all gets tangled up in it. But now given sort of the the limited boxes, they tend to go home. Once you tell me, "Ah, slot it in anxiety." Cool, I go home and then they die. And they If you're over 65 and female, you are more likely to die from being sent home from a heart attack than you are if you're male. We'll set the complications of why aside. But that once you realize, "No, no Like there are certain feelings that don't belong in the the anxiety box and I need to have another place and another place and you know, heart attack is one of them and it could be other things. Um and I heard a story once that there is a a country that lacks a certain word for a certain shade of blue and because they don't have a name for that shade of blue, they crunch it over into one of the blues that they do have a name for. So if you take people that grow up with more names for different shades of blue, they actually see different shades of blue where the other people actually don't see it because they only have a mental category, you know, that's more limited. Is all of that accurate so far? That that alone right there is is a game changer when you think about okay, cool. My job here is to develop a more a deeper toolkit so that I can begin to um apply, it's a word I'm not sure you're going to buy into, but that I can apply these tools to the uh affect that I have, the mood, the feeling that something's right or something's wrong. Absolutely. And I I think apply is a perfectly fine word because here's what's going to happen. It's going to be just like the guy who um I'm trying to remember his name, Mike something, but I can't remember his last name. Mike Michael No, I'm not going to remember because it's a long time ago now, more than 10 years, but when I interviewed him, he's one of these guys who had corneal damage and then when he was 40, he had his corneas replaced. And the way he describes it is like learning and my words are like learning a second language, but he had to consciously guess, very deliberately guess at So he's very deliberately making concepts to try to figure out what visual input means. Very deliberately, really hard at first, but then over time, he gets more practiced at it and eventually for some things he can do it pretty automatically. Like his brain just does it automatically. And um this is we're we're all familiar with this. Anytime you learn a new skill, for example, you you know, you uh or a new workout routine, you know, you have to deliberately think about it. I mean, I lift weights. I've been lifting weights for, I don't know, almost 30 years. And um I have a trainer. And you know, I get bored easily, so he has to constantly, you know, give me new programs. And at first, I have to be really deliberate about what I'm doing, cuz it's a new program, whatever. Eventually, I get really practiced at it. Why? Because my brain's predicting now really well. And so, this is why, you know, interval training is so effective, right? Because they're constantly changing it. So, you your brain can't predict. And that means you're getting a maximum workout for your effort, which is good. You're draining your body budget. I don't think we've talked about body budget yet, but you know, you're basically spending a lot of energy. You're going to replenish that energy, and you're going to be stronger for it. So, at first, you are applying. You are you're consciously guessing or consciously curating. But eventually, if you practice, just like driving, if you practice any skill, your brain eventually becomes very au- your brain will do it automatically. And that's the value of having a wide variety of experiences that your brain can now use to not just to um use them to predict those exact experiences in the future, but your brain has this capacity to take bits and pieces and combine them in new ways and to make predictions of novel things that you've never seen before or heard or smelled or what or felt and what have you. So, I think the the important thing to understand is that Every experience you have has the capacity to even a little bit change your brain's function in the future. Every experience you make for yourself that you curate or that you have has the capacity to change your wiring a little bit. And over time you can have more flexibility and therefore more control over your actions towards your goals. You might even change your goals. You know, or you might change what it means to implement your goals based on um your expe- the richness of your experience. What do you say to people that are stuck on something that are stuck on something in the past? Well, sometimes people are stuck on something. The- it depends on why they're stuck. So, it's not always some it's not always a matter of willpower, I guess is the thing. I think one of the things that you know I I let me just say that um I'll try to think of how to say this. You know, I originally when when I went to graduate school, I I was originally training to not be a neuroscientist. I was originally training to be a therapist. And one of the things I felt like I I felt that sometimes in some of the some of the psychotherapeutic treatments I I don't want to say that they were disrespectful to people, but I I felt a little bit like Interesting. you know people when someone is feeling really bad this is this is their way of being in the world, and if they could change it by snapping their fingers and doing something different, they would. So, obviously, they can't. And it's not because they're weak, and it's not because, you know, now we would say, "Oh, well, you know, that person's a snowflake." It's not because they're snowflakes. It's because they're human. So, here's what I I guess this is This is the the conclusion that I've come to after you know, I was always sort of uncomfortable with um well, you know, just change how you think, and that will change how you feel. That's actually not true, by the way. And I It's also even if it were, it would be like incredibly hard to pull off, even for the smartest, you know, person who has the most willpower in the world. Because it's really not about willpower. I guess that's the That's the thing I I I ended up coming to the conclusion. It's really not about willpower. Um it's about understanding that there's a temporal dynamic here. Your brain is using your past in order to create your present, well, your future, basically, which becomes your present. You cannot go back into your past and change it. I mean, you can try with psychotherapy, but it's really not going to work very well. You don't think you can contextualize it? Yeah, I think you can, but I think it's a struggle. But what you can do is you can change your present, which becomes your past, to predict your future. So, you you can think of it as you're always cultivating your past. And what would that process look like? You You're telling yourself a new story? You're giving yourself that new concept? Giving yourself new experiences. So, that you can learn to predict differently in the future, automatically, without willpower. But even more so, what I want to say is this. You know, you um And so, now I'm going to introduce this idea of a body budget in order to to make the point that I wanted to make about like what What you tell someone when they're stuck? You know, your brain your brain's most important job is is regulating your body and it it regulates all the systems in your body um predictively. Um that's there's a fancy word for that. It's called allostasis. Um but uh I always describe it to people as like think of it as a budget. You know, your your brain is running a budget for your body and it's not budgeting money. It's budgeting salt and glucose and water and all the things oxygen all the things that the set your cells need to function to keep you alive and well to you know, allow you to do your brain's most important job, right? Which is to pass your genes on to the next generation and have that next generation survive long enough to produce the next generation. I love that. Most people don't know that actually, but that's that's right. And so it's running this budget and so you can think of like every new thing that you learn and every movement that you make as an expense on that budget. It's an investment. And every thing you eat every you know, time you sleep every hug you get from another person or whatever support that you get those are like deposits. And so normally like when you exercise for example, you have a big out it's a big expense. So your body budget is running a deficit briefly. So you feel you know, when you're exercising I am not one of these people who like feels great when they exercise uh and you know, I usually get to a point where I'm like I hate this and I want it to be over and that's the point at which I'm really tempted to stop, but I know that not to stop. The feeling is doesn't mean I'm out of energy. It just I'm I'm just starting to really run a deficit now and now it's going to be unpleasant until I'm done. Um and then, you know, if I replenish right? If I make a deposit afterwards, I make sure that I drink enough and I eat something whatever, you know, and I get enough sleep that night and whatever, then I'm then I'm my my my body budget is balanced. But what if you don't replenish? What if you're not sleeping well? What if you don't eat healthfully? It's funny that you mentioned protein because that actually it turns out brains I think all brains except for two species on this planet eat to a protein target actually. So I always think of myself as being completely dominated by carbohydrates. My whole I mean like I just, you know, um I have to work very hard not to eat carbohydrates, but actually under the hood my brain is doing what every other organism's brain is doing and it's it's tabulating protein, protein, protein. So we can talk about that later, but that's I love that research cuz it so violates my own like in my own experience and intuitions. I just find it like completely fascinating. But okay, so, you know, but what if you what if you live in a food desert? What if um what if you don't have enough money to feed your family on a regular basis? What if you live in a sea of social ambiguity, which is very Uncertainty is very hard on a nervous system, really expensive. Um what if um you know, uh you have a metabolic problem? Like maybe you have a problem with your mitochondria, which are the little powerhouses in your cells. You know, you could be running a a body budget that and the deficit is never big. It's the tax you pay is little. It's incremental. It's like a slow drip and it just bores a hole, you know, over time. So, you're just going to feel like for a really long time. When you're in a situation like that, you can try all you want to, um, you know, change how you think. But, basically, your your body has a grip on your brain. You know, it's a conversation. Your brain is always controlling your body, and your body is sending information back to your brain. But, if you are running a body budgeting deficit, you are going to feel like And you may not be able to just think differently, in part because, remember, if we freeze the moment, your brain is representing what's in the world and what's in your body. And that's what it uses to make the next prediction, which becomes your perceptions and your thoughts. So, if you are feeling like what is your brain going to direct you direct the thought to? Something negative in the past, something that's similar to the present from the past. So, you ruminating and being stuck might be it might be freed up just by getting enough sleep that night, you know? It might be freed up by just providing people with opportunities to have different experiences, and so they direct their attention to the world and their and then they can create these different experiences for themselves. But, if you're running a body budgeting deficit, it's not a matter of willpower. It's It's It could be actually impossible. And And you won't be able to create new experiences for yourself because the two most expensive things your body can do your brain can do are move your body and learn something new. Change its own wiring, right? And what do you do when you're running a deficit in your actual bank account? What do you do, Tom? Stop. No more spending. Stop spending. And so, what does it mean for a brain to stop spending? Chill, sit. Become fatigued. You become fatigued. You feel your body feels heavy like you can't move. And you stop learning. And you might even stop paying attention to the world. So, you're just going with your internal model, the prediction that's running based on your past experience, and you're not even really adjusting to the context at all. And that, my friend, is the beginnings of depression. All right. Now, in the book, you talk about how, and you do it delicately, but you talk about how, "Hey, as we get more knowledge and we realize what's really going on, that comes with the responsibility." So, the first thing you've said just now that that I It doesn't match what I believe to be true, and I'm very open. Like you, I am drawn to things that make me rethink everything. So, if you have an insight here that I'm just missing, but that it would be impossible for somebody who's at a body budget deficit to make these changes, that does not strike me as true. So, one, what responsibility do we have? I guess let's answer that, and then we can You can show me where the error of my ways with thinking that it's never impossible if you're I'll I'll lump it and say, "At least if you're neurotypical, it's never impossible." There are certainly people that fall outside of that. I think it depends Yeah, I I think it depends on where you are, actually. So, first of all, I think you can be neurotypical Yeah, physically, like where you are. So, for example, let me just say that I think that, uh, for example, um you could be neurotypical, but you could have a mitochondrial, um you could have a mitochondrial variant that makes you body budget inefficient. Just It's inefficient. And you're you're going to be constantly struggling your whole life, actually, um with weight and probably with your mood because your body budget's it's your brain just has to work harder to keep things in in in balance and and you might it might never be able to do that because you have a mitochondrial dysfunction. Now, let's say that was your daughter. What would you whisper into her ear? You got this, you can do it, you can overcome this or hey, you just have to accept that this is too hard, it's out of your reach. Oh, I would schlepp her off to a doctor and I would have her tested and I would get her medication because that's really what she needs. But since you brought up my daughter, here is what I tell my daughter. So, my daughter is of the generation she's 21 years old and she's of the generation she's the anxiety and depression generation. You know, she everyone I mean, it's a it's a bloody epidemic, right? I don't have a friend who has a college or high school age kid who isn't anxious or depressed. This is not a weakness. This is we live in a If I had to design a culture that would bankrupt a human body budget, it would be this one. Seriously. So, Bad food? You know, but Social media? What what are the elements that are yeah. Yeah, bad food, like pseudo food, really. I mean, go into a supermarket. Around the edges is real food and everything else is really not designed for it's really designed to bankrupt your body budget, frankly. Your your brain is predicting that there's going to be, you know, nutrients there, but but there isn't but there aren't any. And actually, I I a colleague of mine does research on it. It's really fascinating stuff, but if we start talking about that, we're never going to go anywhere else. So, So, crappy food, you don't sleep enough, we sit and we stare at screens that that reflect light at a particular wavelength that is received by a ganglion cell in our retina that screws with our um circadian rhythms. Screwing with your circadian rhythm is screwing with your body budget. And when you look, for example, at clock genes, the genes that are regulate that regulate um uh your circadian rhythm, whose whose transcription is affected by these you know, light. So, you know, the environment turns genes on and off. And so, these genes are are dysregulated. Your circadian rhythm is dysregulated. If you look for example, who committed suicide from depression compared to other deaths, what you see is that the enormous dysregulation in their clock genes. They have circadian rhythm disorders, and they don't even know it. So, So, screens too long and too late, social media, lack of context, lots of social ambiguity and evaluation, lack of exercise, lack of sleep. I could go on. How about um just the casual brutality with which we speak to one another? You know? Casual brutality, tell me more. How about this? Hey, I could be saying to you, "Hey Tom, good to see you." Or I could be saying, "You're a and I'm going to I'm going to punch you in the face." Like I love it. Hey, Like what is that? And it's not just because I'm old, because I asked my nephews and nieces, I'm like, "Do you know for sure that that person is saying like, 'Hey, honey?'" And they're like, "Not really." I'm like, "Yeah, exactly. It's ambiguity. And that's a You're paying all these little taxes, all these little metabolic taxes, and you don't even know it." So, and for adolescents, their their you know, all of these things that we think of as you know, we have names for things, right? Like so, we have sex hormones, and we think that they're just for you know, the maturation of um of sex um uh characteristics. And we have dopamine, and we call that a reward transmitter, and we have serotonin, and we call that a mood transmitter neurotransmitter. They're all for regulating metabolism. That's their basic function. They all do different things. So, um what you have is you have an adolescent who's um you know, going to have be having body the body budgeting burden is just increased by variability in hormones, just right across the board. Their social environment, or what we used to call social niche, has just expanded tremendously from, you know, grade school to middle school to high school. Plus social media, that's a lot of ambiguity. That's all again a burden for the body budget. And they're probably not sleeping enough just because of how high schools organize themselves. They're definitely not getting enough sleep. You know, all these things, and I think the thing to remember is that none of there are no simple single causes for anything when it comes to biology. They're all multiple little non-linear causes that influence each other. So, there are all these little things that are kind of like piling up, piling up, piling up. And eventually, you know, something breaks. And so, I guess the point here is that if you you know, how long does it take to get to the point where something breaks and you become depressed? Like literally, you know, like like major depression. It's different for different people. In part because, you know, when it comes to people, variation is the norm. You think about a Think about any characteristic, biological or psychological, and it varies. There's just really there's no like norm. You know, there's it one of the things that Darwin um is um less famous for than he should be. You everyone thinks, oh, Darwin, you know, natural selection, evolution. Yeah, that's true. But what is natural selection about? Selecting on variation. That's what it's about. What Darwin showed, which is the really remarkable thing, is that there is no average. There is no norm. That's a myth. It's a statistical summary. That's an abstraction. What's real is the variation. So, you So, when I say, actually, can with most people can they overcome things by willpower? It depends on how um how encumbered their body budgets are. There There actually are some people who are so bankrupt body budget-wise that they have to have electrodes implanted in their brains in order to recover from depression, because even medication doesn't do it. If you were going to create the ultimate, knowing what you know, how would you pull that person out? So, one thing we haven't talked about yet is you you obviously touched on it in terms of development, but if we're as a species we're helping to regulate each other's bodies, which is a fascinating concept. I've never heard anybody but you talk about it. And you get this sense that we're all in a dance. And in the book you say that there's this friction between freedom and oh god, I forget the other word you used. Do you remember? It's like the the two Oh, dependency, you mean? Dependency, thank you. I I think what you're saying is that Yeah, I think what I was saying what I'm saying in the book is that, you know, we evolved as a social species and we evolved in such a way What that means is we are the caretakers of each other's nervous systems. We We make deposits metaphorically and withdrawals in each other's body budgets. Like the best thing for a human nervous system or a human body budget is another human. The worst thing for a human body budget is also another human, you know? And so, we we really do affect people in ways that we are largely unaware of and and other people affect our biology in in ways that we are largely unaware of sometimes, too. And that's just a fact. I mean, you know, scientists try not to use the F-word too much, fact, you know? Um it but it but I mean, it's it's close as close to a fact as as you could ever get to. Um but we live in a culture that we live in a culture, western most western cultures value individual rights and freedoms. And so, how do you balance that? How do you balance having socially dependent nervous systems with the fact that we value individual rights and freedoms? It's a conflict. And in this culture, in the United States, if you even try to have that discussion somebody's going to try to like you know, cut you off at the knees, at the head, whatever. You're you're like you know, you're doomed. And I know this from first-hand experience. I I'm ready to have it. I I won't cut you off at the knees. to have it, but I mean, and there are times when I've raised it in the past when, you know 7,000 emails and, you know, death threats later. Seriously. No, I'm not joking, actually. It's crazy. No, I laugh because I get the same thing. Yeah, I totally get it. Yeah, okay. So, so um so, my my point is that um is a is a hard conversation to have. But it is a conversation that we have to have. And, you know, my personal stance now now I'm now I'm taking off my lab coat, right? Now, I'm not being a scientist now. I'm just telling you now as a person, the way that you negotiate that is by taking responsibility not just for yourself, but more responsibility for other people's well-being. That's the way to handle it. Um not because people are snowflakes, but because they're human. They're human. And they have human nervous systems. And if you don't want to take that responsibility, that's fine, but you will pay at some point. You will pay. You will pay in higher you know, health care costs. You will pay in higher in you know, people being unable to learn you know, to compromise or to learn about each other. I mean, look at the look at the situation that we find ourselves in right now. I'm not saying that all of it is reduced reducible to you know, metabolic burden, but I think metabolic burden is kind of the unspoken sort of hidden you know, biological element that nobody's talking about and that has a huge role to play in the situation that we find ourselves in currently. Because it influences so strongly the affect that you then interpret. And so if you're always like, oh god, I just don't feel right, then you're always reaching for the negative explanation because this feeling is like that negative thing that happened. Exactly. Exactly. And so I think that's really interesting So I do I just want to say I do I I I don't I want to be really clear that I I'm not saying that we all have to be nice to everybody all the time no matter what. You know, if you talk to my daughter, she will tell you, my mother is not the kind of person who is you know, and I'm not saying that we can't disagree and I'm not saying that we can't criticize each other and I'm not even saying that we can't sometimes get really totally mad with each other. We totally can, but you can also be respectful in the way that you engage people when you totally disagree with them. And even further I would say, I'm not saying that people um can't with willpower overcome negative feeling. I'm just saying that sometimes sometimes actually it's not possible, but I think we have to have more compassion when people suffer. We have to have more compassion for people and and part of that compassion is equipping them with the knowledge that they need to have in order to help themselves. So for example, my daughter is in my class. Go ahead. This might what you're saying might answer my question. no, no, no, no, no, no. So what I was going to say is one once they have that, so you we all have that responsibility to give them compassion, um to want good things, to try to create the soil in which they can grow, we all even go into we have the obligation to make sure that they are actually aware of how the human body and mind all actually work, but then once they're armed with that information, do they have an obligation to themselves? Are they accountable? Yeah. Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, I mean, there's so much to say about that, I don't even I don't even know where to start, but you know, as a as an educator, this is what I always tell my students. Your education is your responsibility. If you it really is your responsibility. Your when you pay tuition to go to university, which is a it you know, speaking as a first generation college student who lived really on the edge of poverty until I was, you know, out of graduate school, my whole life, I have to say that I I think a university education is a privilege. It really is a privilege that should be extended to everyone, but it is a privilege. And when you pay money, you are paying money for the opportunity to learn. That's what you're paying for. And your education is your responsibility. My responsibility as an educator is to create a context where you can learn. It's my job to create that context well, so that learning is the path of least resistance for you. But it's your job and your responsibility to learn it. And when you do, it's your success, not mine. It's yours. And if you don't, it's also your responsibility. You're don't You don't go to college or high school or any educate You know, I mean, we're talking about you have you have to have a certain degree of age before you can, you know, have the understand that you have this responsibility. But, I think high school students can probably deal with it. And I I think that um you know, you are given the opportunity to learn, but the learning is your responsibility. It's no one else's responsibility but yours. If everybody else is doing their job, my job is to create a context. And so, to some extent, that's what I'm doing by writing this book and by talking to people like you and and so on. I'm I'm giving people what I understand to be the best take on what I understand to be the most up-to-date science. And I'm giving it to people and I'm saying, "This is my understanding. Use it. If you use it, it's your choice. If you your choice to use it. If you use it, you use it. If you don't use it, you don't use it. I'm You know, I can't tell you what to do, but I can tell you this is how um this is how I would do things. And so, for example, um so, my daughter is part of this generation and um you know, she came up with you know, so, she'll say you know, she would say things like, "I'm depressed." And I would be like, "Are you depressed Are you depressed?" Or she'd be like, "Oh, okay, Mom. I'm not depressed. I'm just feel my my body budget is, you know, I'm running a deficit and And then, but eventually, she came to me and she said, "I have a new concept." Okay. Emotional flu. I have the emotional flu. Interesting. Yeah. What is the emotional flu? The The flu is I feel like I'm I'm suffering. I have distress. I don't feel good. Um I know that everything in my life is okay. But I just feel bad and I want to tell you about it. I just want to tell you that I feel bad. And I want a hug and and you know, and I but I know everything is okay. And I'm not going to go and you know, I'm not going to I'm not going to ruminate. I'm not going to you know, I'm not going to do these things, but I I I do just want to communicate to you that I'm bad feeling bad and I want you to acknowledge it and give me a hug. And that's the deal, right? That's the deal. Um because she could come to me and say, "Oh, this one doesn't like me and I didn't get you know, I didn't I only got a you know, B on this paper and I and she can if you feel like and you look around to try to make sense of that by looking by that feeling and looking around at things that go wrong in your life, you're always going to find something. And then that's going to direct your behavior and then down you go on this spiral. Or take the present moment. I don't know about you, but I've been having a little bit of trouble with my mood over the last uh couple of months. It's hard. It's a situation that's really hard. COVID is hard for a number of reasons for everybody. And then on top of that, we have all this other political stuff. It's really hard and there are some and I have 25 people in my lab that I have to take care of who I can't see in person. And uh in addition to my family and um and I'm weary. I'm really weary. So some days I wake up and I think my body budget is probably running a deficit today. So I have to make sure that I, in addition to working out in the morning, I probably have to go for a walk after work and I also probably should make sure that I get enough sleep tonight. Because I can if I go for a couple of nights without getting enough sleep, things are going to feel much worse. Because sleep is just so critical, actually, to running a healthy nervous system. So, I think when you know things, you can about how your nervous system works, you and your brain and your body, you can start to intervene earlier so that you never get to the point where it feels impossible by sheer magnitude of willpower just to drag yourself forward in your life. That's um and I think there are a lot of things that you can do, little little things that you can do that add up to a really big effect um to allow you to realize your your your goals so that you don't blink your eyes and wake up and you're 70 and wonder what the hell happened to my life and what did I do with it? What are those little things? Well, get enough sleep. For example, um um when you um the minute that you start becoming furious with someone for not doing what you want them to do or for having a view that you don't like or whatever, remember that um the Buddhist, you know, Buddhist uh saying that anger is a form of ignorance. If you're angry, it probably means that there's something that you don't know and maybe you should be curious instead. And so that anger is born using your language. That anger is born of you get a feeling, an uncomfortable feeling from not not knowing, feeling on the spot. You have limited boxes to put that in. What does this look like? Looks like, "Ah, the last time I felt like this, I was angry." Boom, you shove it up into the angry box and you react. You feel angry. You and your actions are uh whatever it means for you to be angry in that situation. Now, you know, sometimes anger is useful, okay? So, um when you're playing soccer or, you know, uh you know, this feeling or when you're in a competition or that's what the data show. Like, sometimes in sports or sometimes in in a competition or in a debate or sometimes anger is a Well, why is it good? I mean, the evidence is that that when people cultivate anger instrumental sometimes it actually improves their performance. Why does it improve their improve their performance? Because probably, you know, what you do in anger anger isn't one thing. It's a whole population of different instances that you can draw on and with different actions that you take. So, um that probably because it's it's initiated at the the concept that you form has initiated an action plan to engage in a particular way. Like, maybe cutting your opponent off, not letting them talk. See, this is interesting to me. Like, when you start talking about, okay, what are the if if emotion what we're calling emotion and and I will remind everybody to put it into this context that you bring to it, which is I think quite fundamentally different from how they probably came in thinking about it, but you you've got this thing an action potential or an action plan that you're now building out and we begin to realize why this is the thing that evolution has handed to us. So, when I think about anger being useful out on the soccer field, one I'm sure you're you know the studies about people have a higher degree of pain tolerance if you allow them to express or embody anger. So, one you're just going to be able to endure running more. You're going to be more willing to get into a challenge. So, to use soccer, right? You've got to be able to get in there, get physical. Also makes you feel more aggressive. Um so, it's interesting when you see somebody click in. They've just got a new gear. They run a little faster. They've, you know, they're more aggressive. They're more focused. And so I have thought a lot about whether I should be walking a Buddhist path of you know, all of life is suffering and you just let it go and you stop desire if you know, if all of life is suffering and all of suffering is born of desire, do you just let go of the desire. And I I I was probably too young to have to say that I have given that a fair shake, but I've looked at that like pretty up close. And what I walked away from that saying is that it it made me feel less engaged and that I actually liked the game even though it had highs and lows, if I could find a way to sort of buffer those so that my low wasn't just me falling through the floor and you know, falling forever and ever and ever and I had some sort of buffer which to Go ahead. Yeah, I I I totally hear what you're saying and and I you know, I would be a hypocrite if I said that I live my whole life in a Zen Buddhist you know, um state. Nobody would ever accuse me of that. Um but what I what I want to say is that sometimes it is useful. And sometimes The Zen Buddhist state? Yeah, and sometimes it is useful and sometimes it isn't. And so again the more concepts you can make, the more flexible you are, the more you can tailor your actions to the situation to achieve your goal, whatever that goal is. And sometimes you can even change your goal. And so I would say sometimes you know, um you can feeling what you're calling anger and I would call it to me it sounds like um the Elongot emotion of um liget, which is energized aggression in a group. There's always a groupy feeling to it. It's not something you ever do by yourself, right? So when I watch soccer players or hockey players, you know, I'm from Canada. Hockey players that's liget to me. That's like that's what I'm I'm witnessing this kind of groupie sort of I don't mean groupie like fan. I mean group like with group of people um energized aggression you know, or energized um you could also have energized um grief. Like where people get together and wail, you know. So there's there are lots of versions of it, but you know, cuz again any emotion category is not one thing. It's a population of things. It's variable. Um sometimes that is really useful. I'm a very competitive person. Um I like that about you already. Um what can I say? And that it is what it is. Um I am a very competitive person, but I also think that sometimes that's not useful. And And how would you define useful? Do you buy into my idea of it if it moves you towards your goal, it's useful and if it doesn't, it doesn't or do you have a more nuanced Yeah, no. I would say that's exactly it's yeah, I would say that's exactly right. But so for example I don't think that um I think that sometimes winning is not the right goal to have. Um because you know, like just look at the political situation that we're in. Some people vote for a president merely cuz they just want to the other side. They don't actually care who they're Oh, I'm serious. No, I I agree sadly. But how is that how is that helpful or useful to anybody actually? Do you have an answer to that? not What do you mean? Like I I actually think I have a hypothesis on why people do that. But I'm super curious if you have one as well. Oh, I absolutely have one. But I But I I guess the point that I was trying to make is that um I'm not trying to deflect. I just The point that I was trying to make is I think It's okay. Um is that um um I I actually think that sometimes it's better to be curious and to listen more than you talk, which for me is hard. It's not that I'm not curious. I'm very curious. I just also, as you can see, talk a lot. But, I I I sometimes think, well, when someone really disagrees with me I I don't always actually just want to convince them that I'm right. Sometimes the right thing to do, the goal, is to um and listen um to what they have to say if they're willing to have a real conversation with me. So, just as an example, you know I published something in The New York Times a couple of years ago that was widely misunderstood cuz I actually was trying to make the point about responsibility and choice and that's not how it was taken and I got all this hate mail and it was very hard and you know, police forces had to get involved and it was just a whole mess. Yeah, there was just you wrote? Yeah. Wow, is that so? I have to read the article that you seem so even-handed to me. The article that got you needing police protection I have to read. I'm sure you're not eager to advertise what it is right now, but I I will maybe ask you offline, but tell you. I mean, I'm happy to tell you what it is, but but I I just want to make the point that I'm making and then I'll tell you what it is. And then we can go back to the other thing. We're like already we're lining up our things. So, that's This is To me, this is like the This is like the sign of an excellent conversation because there's are just so many, you know, things to follow up on, but I guess the point that I want to make is that after after um after you know, my I could calm my nervous system down and my husband my husband who I swear I could count on one hand the number of times he's ever been upset or angry in his life. He's just a really even-keeled kind of a guy was you know, really shaken by this. We were all really shaken by this. Eventually though, I started to email people back and say, "You know what? I um don't listen to insults and threats, but if you have an honest question or you want to have an honest conversation with me, I am definitely willing to have that conversation, but don't be rude. Like just don't don't threaten. Don't be you know, like just don't like you know, yeah and and what's really interesting is that I would say, you know, a handful of people actually answered me back. And I actually had conversations with them. And in one case, it went on for you know, like at least a week. Wow. And um and it was a really good conversation. And of course, I was left with the I was First of all, I was really happy to have those conversations, but I also felt like, "Well, why would you ever think that approaching someone with epithet after epithet like just all of this coming out of your mouth. Why would you think that that would be the way to connect with someone? Like it just it if you're if you're somebody who's really willing to to like have that conversation, why not just start that way? You know, I did I did some you know, I'll I'll just be really honest because if mean, you couldn't figure it out already, you know, I voted for Joe Biden and um I for the first time in my entire life called people on behalf of that campaign. I've never done this in my whole life. But I decided, I want to talk to people in swing states and I want to I really want to talk So what I would get a Republican on the phone and it then you know, people people would say, sometimes they just hang up or they'd be rude. Um I'm sure that Democrats are rude when they get a you know, when they're called by a Republican, so you know, it's not like anybody has the you know, the handle on rudeness. Um but you know, so but sometimes they'd be like, well, I'm going to I'm voting for Trump, you don't want to talk to me and I'd be like, oh no, I you are the person I want to talk to. That's why I'm doing this. And you know, some people in the end were were were not you know, they were just with me and they didn't really want to have a conversation, but a couple of people really did and I would say at least once each night I had a real conversation with someone and from my perspective, that was worth it. Because I'm not somebody who thinks that I have everything figured out about why things are the way they are, but my goal right now is not to win, it's to fix things. I I don't I just want things to be I want people to be able to debate. I don't necessarily think that everybody has to agree. I mean, I I think if there were one thing that I would want to convince people of, it's that harming children is bad and nobody should do it ever. And I don't care what they've done. I don't care what their parents have done. You just shouldn't separate children from their parents. Like if I just had one thing that I just wanted to really convince somebody of, it would be that. That it's just it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter where they come from and it doesn't matter what their parents did and it doesn't matter what you believe about immigration, you should never separate a child from from its parents, ever. Because you're harming that child. Okay. Sure, yeah, you should. But then find the child a home that's safe. I guess my my point I'm talking about immigration here. I'm talking about like all the things that inflame people. There are certainly some things I feel like I need to put my foot down about and that would be one, but that would be one based also on science, you know, I just damage that you do to a child um to a developing brain when you put children in those circumstances is I think I think a lot of people just don't realize what how harmful it is. Um No joke. But but um but I'm not saying that I don't have really strong beliefs cuz I do and I'm not saying that I don't have really strong political beliefs because I do. And I and I of course do I want those political beliefs to reign? Yeah, of course, I would like that. But but I also feel like the country's being torn apart by by really complex set of forces and one of those forces is that people aren't actually talking to each other and they're they're really vilifying each other in a way that is you know, unhelpful to the goal of having a democracy. Now, if people don't have the goal to have a democracy, there's not really much I can do about that. Like I you know, that that's my goal, right? Um that that's one of the things that's important to me and so um I think that um curbing anger in in the service of curiosity is very useful for towards that goal. So am I you know, do I think that winning is important? Yeah, I think that winning is important. But I don't always think it's the most we all have multiple goals and we all have to at any given point in time we have to negotiate which goals we're going to put first and sometimes um you know, it's not like you give up your other goals, you just sometimes shift around the um the um what's what has priority. Yeah, I think priority is probably the angle into that cuz as you're describing that I'm thinking it seems like just good sense, right? You're asking yourself, okay, I have this smaller thing here which is I want to win on this, you know, maybe it's to get your candidate elected, but then you have a bigger thing which is I want the democracy to be healthy and if the democracy is healthy and we're not tearing each other apart and we're able to openly debate ideas and you know, hopefully create a world where the best ideas are rising to the surface and so that becomes the win, right? And the ability to sort of shift between those goals cuz often times, and this is something I see people struggle with a lot, they have competing goals and they don't even recognize. And so one of the things when I'm working with people is just what's your goal? Say it in a sentence. Most people can't say in a single sentence what their goal is. And when you get that conflict, I the analogy I always run for people is I get the equivalent of people telling me all the time, I want to win a gold medal. And I'm like, amazing, at what? The Olympics? Yes, summer or winter? Summer? Fantastic. Swimming or tennis? Swimming? Amazing. Backstroke, freestyle medley? Because you've got to get specific to the point where you know what to do, right? The brain is a prediction engine. But it's trying to actually get to the point where it knows precisely what to do next. And if people never take the time to figure out, oh, I actually want two things that right now are coming into conflict, and then priority is the only way to sort it out because these two in that moment in that way cannot coexist. And so now you have to know which one is above the other. And it once you have that, then it's like, cool, I still want this thing, but this is a higher priority, so I'm going to lean on that. Right, but I think sometimes I guess what I would say though Tom is that sometimes sometimes you know, you have you have a you have a you have a hierarchy of goals and you have a priority and that priority is stable regardless of what situation you're in, right? But sometimes that's not the case like um sometimes your goals can shift around even in a given situation and that's okay. That's not a sign of weakness. That's a sign of flexibility. And um so do I you know, do I you know, do I have particular goals about you know like political things? Sure, but um but those might those might take a back a back, you know, seat to say some other goal that's really important like um I mean, I don't know cuz I'm I'm making this up as I'm going, but like I can conceive of situations where I would say, "Okay, well that's important, but I'm going to that's going to take a back seat for a minute um because I'm there's some other goal in the immediate future in the that I want to that I want to achieve that's even more important than democracy, although I don't know what that is, but I'm I'm just saying in in the abstract that that would be possible. And I think that there are people like that, right? I think that there are some people who say um yeah, democracy is important, but it's not as important as um uh you know, um lower taxes and it's not or it's not as important as immigration or it's not as important as banning abortion. And so I don't some people will say, "Yeah, I don't particularly like Trump and I know he's a cheater, but I don't care that he's cheating because his cheating actually gets me what I want and that's most important." And I think that instead of looking at someone like that, if you're if you're if you're a liberal progressive person, instead of looking at that person and and just like being okay, well, you know, you know, being judgmental, what you should do is look at that person and say, "Huh, okay. Tell How do you get to that point? Like explain to me. Like I want to understand how you how I want to understand how that works." Because I could conceive of a situation where I might feel like that one day. I don't know what it is, but I you know, every conversation you have is an opportunity to learn. So, I I can't think of a time when I think it would be okay to try to prevent people from voting because, you know, that way I I'm more likely to get what I want. But I could imagine in principle, in the abstract, that there could be some time like that that I would, you know, do that. I don't know what they would be, but I can imagine that that would happen. I think it's at least interesting I I think I do. And to me, the the idea that you're trying to understand the person is the right idea. And leading You talk about empathy in the book, and you talk about empathy as actually being a practice, something that you can do. Like when you understand the way that emotions are created, which is really, you know, the big theme, I would say, of both of the books um of yours that I've read, and when you understand the brain is the prediction engine and how it's, you know, sort of making good on what that affect is that it feels and it's trying to interpret the world, you begin to realize, "Okay, there are ways for you to project yourself into somebody else's, you know, interplay of how they feel mixed with the um the concepts that they have riding on top of that as their sort of interpretation, you know, to use language, that they have all these different words to choose from that allow them to understand and express. But the fact that you're leading with just wanting to understand people, and I said this to another neuroscientist, David Eagleman, and and he laughed, um which I think is the right answer, but I think you'll understand what I'm trying to get to, which is my whole thing is as silly as this sounds, it's directionally, I think, correct, which is you have to approach people that you disagree with, even if you disagree with them violently, you have to first fill your heart with love, which is how I'm interpreting what you're saying. You first have to want to understand like where they're coming from. You have to understand that like imagine for a second that your punchline when you read their beliefs is, "Well, they're just like IQ dumb. They just their their actual brain will never achieve the level that mine will." And yes, I'm I'm saying this tongue in cheek as but even if you think that, there's a way to go but I meet them with compassion, right? Like if had I ever met Einstein, I would hope he would have the compassion to have a conversation and, you know, and feel for my inferior intellect rather than lower his intelligence. I'm laughing though not because I don't know why David laughed. I'm not sure what his but, you know, Well, he actually had a pretty pretty powerful answer, but but go ahead. Uh oh, well, I I I I would love to hear that answer, but let me just say that's very Buddhist though, Tom. So, I just wanted to point out that, you know, you you you said that you've um Well, let's get into it. So, You know, I mean, I'm just going to say that um compassion is uh approaching people with compassion is not That's I mean, let's just say that um being uh maintaining equanimity and become and remaining detached is only one philosophical path in contemplative um practice. Another is compassion that you that you meet people where they are with compassion um and non-judgment as a way of of learning. That's a that's a very Buddhist um um practice. But so what did David say? Basically, he said you have to have strategies. So, we were talking about okay, really really if you wanted to solve this problem, what would you do? And he was talking about how in Native American tribes, they came up with this idea of clans. So, you have the tribes and the tribes might be at war, but he said the way that they would begin to broker peace would be to create like the bear clan, the coyote clan, the beaver clan, whatever. And those clans were made up of some of each group. And he said once you had people and you actually talk about this in your book, which is imagine if you brought people and there's a a real group doing this where they take Israelis and Palestinians and they make them play soccer together or whatever. And they suddenly in sharing the pitch with somebody and competing with them and not just against them and being able to talk talk openly about stuff, they they begin to bond. And Yeah, you I It was You had me concerned with clans, but then when you explained what you meant, that that that makes it that makes a lot of sense, yeah. That makes sense. And I thought that was brilliant. Go ahead. Yeah, here's what I wanted to do and I actually um this is what I what I wanted to do. I wanted to Instead of having um I never can remember Don't laugh at me when I say this, but I never can remember I think it's Tumblr. Tumblr is the dating one? There is a Tumblr. You're probably thinking of Tinder. Tin- Tumblr was not a dating app. It's Tinder and Tumblr. I just never remember. Okay, so anyways, but you have this So, you could imagine a situation where you matched people for having conversations and they pick a topic they want to have a conversation about, say it's abortion. But then they have to tell you a bunch of other things about themselves. Um like are they married? Do they have kids? You know, where you know, where did they grow up? What religion are they? I don't know, something like that. And then what you do is you like randomly match people by finding characteristics they match on but not on the thing that they want to talk about. So, what you have is you have this capacity to have a conversation where you can join with someone and find similarity with them um and on on a on a bunch of characteristics but not the characteristic that you're going to debate about. And why would you do that? You would do that because first of all we're social animals and when we like each other and we trust each other even when we're disagreeing with each other we synchronize. Our heart rates synchronize, our breathing synchronize. It actually makes body budgeting so much easier. And so subjectively or just like in terms of um you know um common sense, you'd say, "Well, of course, if I'm talking to someone who's really similar to me and we disagree on one thing, but we can find, you know, agreement on these other things, it's going to be easier to talk about that um one thing." Yeah, why is it easier? It's easier because under the hood, there's all kinds of, you know, collective body budgeting going on there that um that that you're not really aware of. Your your brains are coordinating in a way that you're not really aware of. And that may sound like airy-fairy, gauzy, mystical but it's actually real. And I think that you know so I just think that no point having these little tidbits with you it just fills your toolbox with um more tools. Um it's not just about having concepts like in everyday life. It's also about knowing how to use those concepts, right? And um I think that's what these conversations are really about. And that I think is the perfect place to wrap this up. Lisa, I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours. I hope that we get a chance to do this again. Your work is profound to me. It's shaping the way that I think about the brain and how to manage my own life and I really hope that people get out of this exactly what you're hoping they will cuz more tools in the toolkit seems like the perfect answer. Thank you so much for coming on. Guys, if you haven't read her books, read them. They are extraordinary. They will influence how you think about yourself and your own internal life. And thinking of things that will influence how you think about your internal life. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe here and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.