2017 Personality 15: Biology/Traits: The Limbic System

[Music] I started to talk to you about trade Theory and now I'm going to make a jump to biology and that that's a strange jump in some sense because the two levels of analysis are relatively disconnected but what's happening right now at at the sort of outer echelons of personality research is that the workers at the Forefront of the field are trying to integrate what's being established at the statistical level of analysis with what's known at the psychobiological level and so this emerging science is known as personality neuroscience and um it's developed in a rather

strange way because the traits that were identified that I discussed with you on Tuesday the big five traits all emerged as a consequence of the statistical analysis of of descriptors characteristic mostly of the English language although it's been duplicated in other languages so in some sense it was an a theoretical model right it just came out of the linguistic data so there was no real initial inferences about brain area or neurological activity or or anything like that to drive the formulation of the big five model in instead the big five model came first and then

people started thinking okay can this be put into alignment with what we know about the brain and so people have been hitting that pretty hard I would say over about the last it's probably 30 years something like that because H Zink and and his student Jeffrey gray were pretty far along on this kind of thinking by say 1982 when gray published his book The neuros pychology of anxiety which the paper you're reading now a model of the limic system and basil ganglia basil ganglia applications to anxiety and schizophrenia that's a very short summary of the

book that gray published in 1982 which has been incredibly influential um if you're interested in going on in Psychology especially on the scientific end but I would say pretty much regardless if you're interested in going on in Psychology that's a that's a very useful book to tackle there's a newer version it was published by gray and MCN and I think 2000 something like that it's Hardo like and you may F have found the paper that way too gray was a very very unfortunately he died a few years ago he was a very very smart person

and he knew the animal literature on Behavior neuro neuroanatomy and neuropsychopharmacology inside out and backwards and so whenever he defined a term he always made sure that the term was intelligible at a behavioral level and at an anatomical level and at a pharmacological level it had to you know the the the the ideas that he were developing had to make sense at these multiple levels of analysis before he would accept them as as genuine and gray did a remarkable job of extending our knowledge of the biological and evolutionary basis of at least the first two

personality traits say extroversion and neuroticism roughly corresponding to positive and negative em so um so that's partly why you're reading gray and and Gray's theory is also cybernetic Theory um cybernetic theory is a is a variation of a theory developed by an MIT cognitive scientist named Norbert Wier who who was an early AI artificial intelligence researcher and he proposed that that that intelligent entities were go directed and that they organized their behavior around reducing deviations from a goal while they were approaching it once they had decided what it would be and that that's also proved

to be incredibly influential um we'll talk a fair bit about cybernetic models as we progress um so gray is sort of a combination of artificial intelligence cybernetic theorizing and then an incredible amount of data that's come in from animal behavioral research and as far as I'm concerned most of the things that we know about the brain have been derived from animal research um the animal researchers tended to be extraordinarily careful scientists they were influenced by um um BF Skinner who established the sort of the initial theoretical basis for understanding how animals learn we'll talk about

that a little bit next class so anyways that's the that's the context within which gray is working Leo these are all papers you're going to read except the third one which is optional Leo is also an an emotional he's an affective neuroscientist so he's someone who studies emotions mostly again animals and Leo has done a lot to sort of add some of the pieces that were're missing in in gray gray probably concentrated a little bit too much on a brain area called the hippocampus which is the brain area that sort of lets you know if

it's reasonable to be calm where you're currently situated and so what the hippocampus does in some senses compare what it is that you want to have happen with what is happening and if the two things are the same then you're calm so it's a match mismatch detector and it has access not only to memory but also to formulations of say the desired future um Swanson I had people read the Swanson paper last year I put it in your reading list as optional um it's worth hacking through if you can man manage it it's very hard

paper though which is why I took it out of the you know required reading list the reason I like Swanson we're going to talk a fair bit about him today is Swanson's not a psychologist he's actually a developmental neuro I can never say this properly an he studies developmental Anatomy we we'll do that um and so he's very interested in how the brain unfolds across time during embryonic development and then up into maturity and so he understands the brain differently than a psychologist would because a psychologist tends to analyze the brain you know as a

sort of mature thing usually in adulthood but but for Swanson it's a much more living and transforming system and he's trying to set forth a schema for understanding brain anatomy and also associating that with function you know and you might think that that's a well Advanced science already that we know how to segment up the brain and we know you know roughly what the pieces do but we haven't even really managed to establish the terminology prop properly yet it's very neuro real Neuroscience is a very new field and and there's no limit to the number

of things that we don't know about it including even the basic classification structure now Swanson has put forth a very intelligent basic classification structure and part of the reason that I think it's so relevant to a personality class is because it maps in a beautiful way way onto some of the things that we've already talked about especially P so there's a nice direct mapping of PJ's developmental Theory onto Swanson's theory of neural development and then of neural function and and that's completely accidental because Swanson never cites P so they're non-overlapping literatures and I kind of

like that because you know if if something pops up in one place with one method and pops up another place with a completely different method especially if those two places are distinct in terms of their historical development you might start thinking there's actually something there you know it's sort of like seeing something and hearing it at the same time you got two independent sources of data it's like triangulation in a sense and so it was very exciting to me to come across this paper by Swanson um I think he's one of only two scientists I

ever wrote a fan letter to I mean really it's a brilliant paper and then uh there's there's other reasons why it maps on to what we're going to talk about too because Swanson also points out quite clearly the function of the he kind of roughly separates the hypothalamus into two halves and uh he points out that they have quite distinct functions and the functions also map on to some of the things that we've been talking about in a very lovely way and so there's a lot of reasons to to go through Swanson's paper carefully you

know it's like 50 pages long but the guy put it in some sense his whole life's work is in those 50 pages so you know even if it takes you 12 hours or 20 hours to read it it's like that's not too bad if you're going to extract out like 30 years of solid research Gray's Book is the same like if you read that book you you've got if you read it and understand it you've basically got a fair chunk of neuroanatomy a lot of animal behavioral uh analysis so um behaviorism in general a lot

of psychopharmacology and a lot of understanding of the functional signific of the brain's major neurotransmitter systems you can get all that from Gray's Book that's that's a killer book you know if you can extract all that out so anyways Carver and Shire also take a cybernetic perspective fundamentally they're more cognitive scientists you're going to find their paper a little bit farther down the road but they're also very interested in how creatures human beings in particular select goals and then align themselves with those goals and for our purposes we're going to talk a fair bit about

motivation today and the distinction between motivation and emotion is not clear they're both words that sort of function within a linguistic context but for the sake of argument and of course all the emotions aren't the same it's not like there's one circuit that subsumes emotion there's multiple circuits that subsume emotion and they're not identical circuits you know so it isn't like every emotion is a variant of the same thing it's not and it's the same with the motivations so they're very loose groupings motiv and emotion but for the purposes of our argument we're going to

make this case roughly motivations set goals and roughly emotions Orient you in relationship to those goals now like I said those categories overlap anger is usually considered an emotion and it often has a goal right the goal is to hit something or hurt something that's that's one possible goal so emotions can segue quite easily into motivational States but whatever you got to use a category system of some sort to clear clarify things and so that's what we're going to we're going to uh pursue motivation set goals it's actually more complicated than that you know I

showed you that little oval diagram with uh you know desired future and unbearable present so to speak motivations actually don't just set goals they also Prime behavior and they also set up the perceptual frame within which you interpret the world so for example if you're hungry it isn't just that you're driven to eat first of all eating is a very complex Behavior especially if it's associated with food preparation say you're the the systems that you've used in the past to procure food and then to ingest it are sort of disinhibited by the motivational state so

they're at the ready and then your sensory system is tuned so that it's going to focus on those things that are relevant to eating and tune out everything else so the motivational State also does perceptual tuning and then there's a felt component of it as well so it's not it's it's not reasonable to only say that motivation sets goals or that it drives Behavior it it does three things goal setting behavioral driving plus it provides a perceptual schema within which those other two things make sense and so a motivated state in some sense is like

a little micro personality it's it's only got one aim it's sort of a oneeyed micro personality you know so it's only aiming at one thing but it still has all the other aspects of personality so sort of you know for me that that aligns nicely with the psychoanalytic idea that you know you're you're you're a you're a loose aggregation of multiple fragmented personalities you know they're sort of coherently tied together at the highest level of analysis but they can go off and do their own thing you see that in situations for example like eating disorders

where the hunger system itself starts to become almost a spun-off part of the personality and the rest of the personality then Wars with that and that's sort of in some sense that's like cortex versus hypothalamus and you never win cortex does not win over hypothalamus the hypothalamus is what keeps you alive so it's one of the things that keeps you alive you could do without your cortex but you cannot do without your hypothalamus and the connections stretching upwards from the hypothalamus which is a very old brain area are much more powerful than the connections coming

down from the cortex to modulate the hypothalamus and that's another indication of just exactly who's in charge when the chips are down you know and that's why it's so hard for you to override your basic emotions or motivational States it's like the system evolved to keep you alive and it's not particularly willing to give up control in a sense given that your survival is staked on its function so it's useful to know that because you know if you if you if you if you pursue Psy ology and you stay within the human side of psychology

say instead of wandering off into the animal behavioral research you'll see that most human psychologists and neuropsychologists are very cortico Centric they really like to think that it's the newly evolved parts of the brain that are in charge and that's just not right the newly evolved parts of the brain are in charge only when nothing is bothering you like if you're not hungry you're not thirsty you're not too excited you're not too curious you're not too terrified you know you're not too cold you're not too warm any of those then the cortex is in charge

but if you deviate substantially across any of those Dimensions the probability that control over your behavioral output and your perceptions is going to devolve Down The evolutionary hierarchy to more primordial brain areas is extremely likely you know and you see the same thing happens you know maybe you're having a discussion with someone right and they exhaust the limits of your rational knowledge which means basically they out argue you well what happens well usually what happens is that people cry or they get angry it's like they're out of Cortex it's bang right down to the more

the lower and more primary evolutionarily determined systems so okay now we're going to we're going to take a look at how the brain functions in general and so we're going to start pretty General and then we're going to go narrow and the first thing that you might want to think about is what problem exactly is the brain wrestling with and the major problem is that reality is so complicated it has so many layers and so many interconnected causal links that it's complex beyond comprehension and that's a big problem I mean you think about all the

subatomic complexity that's that's a horrible thing then there's the complexity at the atomic level and that's you know pretty overwhelming and then there's the molecular level which makes the atomic level look simple and then there's the comp exceedingly complex structures that emerge out of the molecular level especially in living organisms so that would be roughly at the organ level of existence you know and then there's you as a totality with your brain which is and the brain is so much more complex than everything else in the universe that it's not even in the same category

so there are estimates for example by Gerard Adelman that there are more Connections in your brain more patterns of Connections in your brain than there are subatomic particles in the universe so you know that's one major league complex thing and there's lots of them around and you know they're all integrated into families and then uh you know roughly tribal groupings some of which get large enough to be Nations and then that's all embedded inside of some biological system and so on and so forth all the way out to the limits of the cosmos I mean

this is one complicated place and you know your job in in large part is to understand it but also not to become overwhelmed by it because you have to simplify it down to the point where you can sort of think about one thing and do one thing and so you have to screen all of that out so that the complexity complexity doesn't overwhelm you when you're attempting to do anything anything simple even to look at yourself in the mirror which is also a very complicated thing to do part of the problem your brain is is

always facing is what can I ignore and the answer to that is well you need to ignore almost everything and and that's that's a problem because of course it's not always obvious what it's okay what's okay for you to ignore you know and that changes on you suddenly too because you know because you have imperfect knowledge you might think something's irrelevant and it turns out to be of critical importance it's a deadly it's a deadly deadly difficult problem and so one of the ways that we solve this is we're actually pretty blind to to to

to almost everything you know our sensory input is limited by our physiological limitations certainly so there's like in terms of vision there's we only see a very small uh Little slice of the whole electromagnetic spectrum and it's the same with sounds and you know we can only touch things that are basically within our reach and so that limits things substantially and then there are also things we can't detect like we're not very good at detecting um like we don't have the same ability that say is it platypuses and some fish can detect electromagnetic disturbances around

them on their skin and like there's senses that we don't have so we're we're narrowed a fair bit by what it is that we're able to perceive um and we're actually narrowed in what we can perceive far more than anybody ever guessed so I'm going to show you a little video here the Monkey Business illusion count how many times the players wearing white pass the ball e the correct answer is 16 passes did you spot the gorilla for people who haven't seen or heard about a video like this before about half missed the gorilla if

you knew about the gorilla you probably saw it but did you notice the curtain changing color or the player on the black team leaving the game let's rewind and watch it [Music] again here comes the gorilla and there goes a player and the curtain is changing from red to Gold when you're looking for a gorilla you often miss other unexpected events and that's the Monkey Business illusion learn more about this illusion and the original gorilla experiment at the invisible gorilla.com so how many of you saw the gorilla no let's let's do the see the gorilla

okay how many of you had no known about this video beforehand yeah the gorilla part of it yeah so you guys don't count now and then you know I get someone who's seen it before and they still miss the damn gorilla so that's pretty funny so but but of course Simon Dan Simon set this up because his original video got so popular you know viral popular that everybody has seen The Invisible Gorilla and so you know now he's showing you that well you think you're smart you've been clued into how blind you are and it

turns out you're not any smarter than you were to begin with right so how many people saw all three things that changed I saw the oh you've seen it before so okay and how many didn't yeah okay so the vast majority of you missed one or more of the things that changed you know and they're not really trivial things like The Disappearance of a person from six people that's fairly major and you know the whole background changed color and you might think you'd clue into that and so so the weird thing is even when you're

primed to notice what you're supposed to notice which is to say count the balls and you know that something weird is going to happen you're not that still doesn't Prime you enough so that you can keep track of all the weird things that are happening and like this was an absolutely staggering experiment when when it was first shown people the psychologists were just like knocked over by it because the hypothesis up to that point had been always that you know you could concentrate on what you were concentrating on but if something anomalous or unexpected happened

your attention would be automatically devoted towards it and of course that's what people would think right you'd think that if you're watching people play basketball and a gorilla walks into the you know area and it's not small that of course you'd be surprised and you'd see it and it turns out that that's just wrong and you know it it tells you a lot about how your nervous system is set up so you're focusing on Counting the balls and so for some reason getting the correct answer to the question how many times are the is the

ball thrown back and forth turns out to be motivationally significant why like why why did you you know you got the instructions fair enough but why did you listen to them does it narrow your attention to the Target oh sure it does but the question is why did you even comply with the instructions you wanted to the answer right yeah said that because you wanted to get the answer right why did you care if you got the answer right well think about it for a minute like guess that means you're smart means you're yeah that's

right so that's one possibility it's like instantly you sort of interpret it as a little cognitive test maybe and then you want to see if you can do it and you know so that Taps into your hierarchy of values part of your value is I want to be maybe a smart and competent person or I want to be at least as smart and competent as everyone else's playing this game and so you know the instruction Taps into a pre-existent value structure and then it's motivating okay so yeah what compliance as well yes that's another thing

it's like that you know the room in some ways is set up to ensure a degree of compliance right because there's an there's an implicit story in the room which is if I'm at the front of it and so that sort of makes me at the top of the dominance hierarchy and the fact that you're here means you've already bought into that presupposition and so it's a logical thing to do to to play along with the game so yes also that true that that's more like the playing a game issue right is that well maybe

something interesting will happen okay right right right okay so there's a variety of reasons why you might listen to the instructions but the point is the instructions actually tap into your motivation in your intrinsic motivation enough so that you will in fact attempt to play the game and then as soon as you play the game what happens well you focus your very limited attentional resources precisely on what it is that you're supposed to do now we could talk a little bit about how the visual field is set up so you know you you notice that

like if I'm looking around the room if I want to see you all of you I can't just stand here and look straight ahead because all you people over here you're like I can't see if I'm looking straight ahead I I can't see the faces of anyone past here and I can only see them sort of as blurs and unless they move and if they move up something then I can see the movement but I can't it's not clear to me what's moving and it's the same for the people over here the only person I

can really see right now is the is the woman who's sitting there in the white sweater all the rest of you are like and the and the person to the right I can more or less as long as I look at her I can more or less see that he's dressed in Gray but I can't see his face at all now he nodded his head and I could pick that up so what's very strange about your visual system and your sensory systems are like this in in in uh you know all your sensory systems are

like this is that you have a tiny little point of focus where the information is Rich and that's partly because so the center of your eye is the fobia and it's most densely uh it's most densely packed with cells but more importantly each of the cells in your fobia which is the very center of your vision you can tell when someone's pointing their fob fobia at you cuz then you you know you have the sense that they're looking at you and human beings are unbelievably good at figuring out when someone is pointing their phobia at

you like we can we can detect eye um what would you call it deviation from direct gaze with an accuracy that's absolutely remarkable now each of those little cells in the fobia is connected each of the one cells is connected to like 20,000 cells at the first level of the hierarchy of the visual system and so the reason that your whole eye isn't phobus because your head would have to be this big to manage it so you know what's evolved is sort of a compromise is that in the center of your vision it's the center

of your vision is very very detailed and and then what you do is you zip that center around like snap snap snap snap snap snap and your brain sort of makes a Amalgamated picture out of all those little snapshots and you know then it weaves it together so it seems to you like it's a continuous what a continuous movie of Consciousness even though it's really not and then the sides of your eyes the periphery of your eyes well they don't have the same potency as the fobia and so they they kind of play a triage

game it's like okay I can't see if I'm looking straight ahead I can't see everything what might I use as an indication that I should move my gaze from where I'm looking to somewhere else and one answer to that is movement so the perip is pretty good at picking up movement and so often if you see movement in the periphery then you'll move your fial vision to where the movement was and then you know then you can keep track of what's changing so what your brain sort of assumes is that when you're looking at something

everything else is irrelevant and it's also it also sort of Fades into the background and so that's what's happening with the Gorilla video and so the part of the reason you can't see the damn gorilla is cuz he's dressed in black like the players and so when you're focusing on the basketball all the black moving things look the same you know there's no distinction between them at all and then the background of the curtain it's like well first of all why would you be primed to see the curtain change color like things just don't do

that in real life right I mean big objects don't suddenly change color very very seldomly so and but and more importantly the fact that the gorilla shows up the fact that one player leaves and the fact that the curtains change color has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you can complete the task right so it doesn't matter if you ignore the information and that's because it's irrelevant in terms of the interpretive frame the motivated interpretive frame that you're applying to the scene and so the rule for perception is don't pay attention to anything that

isn't directly relevant to the desired outcome now exactly how you calculate what you can pay attention to and what you can't that's very complicated it's I mean you build that knowledge bit by bit over time and and you can be wrong about it too but um so so the old idea was you know well first of all that you were very much conscious of the environment period which you're not and then the second idea was well while you're being conscious of the environment if any changes radically you will definitely Focus your attention on it and

then and what turned out to be the case is well you're not very conscious of the environment and radical things can happen and you won't notice them unless they interfere with what you're doing so something that emerges that interferes what with what you're doing that you don't expect you will in instantly Orient towards and concentrate on so it isn't anomaly or novelty that attracts your attention it's the unexpected disruption of the relationship between your behaviors and the desired outcome of those behaviors and that's a much narrower claim only pay attention to things that make you

fail it's something like that or at least additionally pay attention to things that make you fail and you know generally speaking that's also associated with an emotional response you know so if you're doing something and and you know you think you know how to do it and so you're doing it and then all of a sudden something unexpected happens you're going to have an emotional reaction and we'll talk more about the emotional reactions in the next class but the emotional reaction partly prepares you for the worst in case this unexpected thing is bigger than you

think it is and sort of also primes you to be curious and to start to explore to figure out what it is so that you can reconstruct your expectations and Desires in accordance with the transforming world so this slide is an elaboration in some sense of what I was telling you a little bit earlier about the multiple levels of reality you know so the idea is that the thing that you see which in this particular schema would be the computer H is nested inside all of these systems or has other systems nested inside of it

and that's part of an indication of the complexity of things now you know one of the things that you might think about for example if you're using your computer one of the things you might ask yourself is like why is your computer a black rectangle or a like a silver rectangle it's all smooth and shiny why is that you know like it's not clear first it's not transparent okay and and then it's got this smooth cover and it wouldn't necessarily have to why why do you think that's appealing to you it's familiar for like a

book okay so it's familiar yeah and that that's good so it's familiar what what else is it's simple yeah you know want to you don't want to in interact with the computer at all you want to interact with little pictures on the screen and then you don't even really want to interact with those you want to interact with some subset of what that picture is doing on the screen and so you're very very rarely using the computer right you're just paying attention to well let's say the screen and the keyboard so the computer is whatever

is underneath that and then what what that is is a collection of parts that are so bloody complicated that you don't want to have anything to do with them that are nested inside a whole network of things that are so complex you don't want to have anything to do with them and so so you know what happens when you're using a computer is all of a sudden it stops working well then it's a computer as soon as it stops working it's a computer before that it was whatever it was you were doing and as soon

as it turns into a computer what do you do with it well you know you stupidly hit the on and off button maybe you plug it in and you know and out or something maybe you check your switches to make sure that a fuse didn't burn out or a breaker go and that's pretty much the end of you in terms of your ability to deal with the actual entity you know and then you curse with your primate brain and then you send it out to be fixed and so one of the things that's that's that's

worth considering because this will also help us understand what happens in terms of brain function as we go along is that as long as things are going according to how you want them to go you can really pretend that the world is unbelievably simple all the world consists of is those few things that you're doing in your little bounded perceptual frame and everything else is zero and then unfortunately now and then the hypothesis that everything else is zero is radically wrong like when your computer crashes and then you actually actually for a while have to

deal with at least some of the complexity that's actually there and that's usually extremely anxiety-provoking so you know you can imagine the same situation is while you're in your nice smooth car and you're on the highway and all of a sudden you know you hear a horrible grinding noise and smoke comes out of the back and you're you're off pulled over to the side well what was merely a means of getting from point A to B and comfort like two seconds ago is now a collection of extremely Troublesome Parts none of which you know anything

about plus it's disrupted your day plus it's disrupted your pocketbook Plus plus you have to now deal with a bunch of people who are going to tell you what's wrong with your vehicle and maybe fix it for some completely unknown amount of money and with dubious utility and so poof the car turns into that and so it's it's almost impossible to overestimate the degree to which we live within a world that's bounded by our expectations and desires and how much time we spend keeping everything that's complex away from us so that we don't have to

deal with it okay so now we might want to think about how we do that I'm going to show you this is a little schema that might be helpful so like I made this little diagram of dots because I wanted to make an ambiguous figure so I'm hoping that when you look at that figure what do you see when you look at it the center what what what shape is the center across okay so you can see across what else can you see it's a rectangle yeah what else can you see four S it's four

squares yeah exactly so and what else can you see that's a good one I haven't seen that one I'll take your word for it though what else can you see I'll show you some of the things you can see okay you can see that right you see that see that you could see that you could see that okay so the first thing that you might note is that the thing in the beginning the thing in itself let's say you can see M multiple ways it's not exactly that you have an opinion about what it is

you know it's that you can actually see those different things you can see it manifesting those different perceptual objects and that that's a strange thing because you know how people always think that arguments are about opinions there's some facts and you have one set of opinions about them and you have another and then you argue about the opinions till you get to the fact facts unfortunately it's a lot worse than that because the facts themselves are often reasonably subject to debate so so you might ask for example which of the five ways that you could

see that initial thing is the right way to see it and the answer to that and this is a pragmatic answer is it depends on what you want to do with your perception you know so if you want uh if you want the highest resolution that captures as much detail as possible then you want something as close to the thing in itself as possible so that' probably be object five there you know if you want to know the rough area let's say that's a map of an orchard you might think about object one if it's

an orchard from the top right and you want it to walk from north to south you might want to think about it in terms of object three you know so those are different ways you can perceive that object and then I would say that what happens at the next level of abstraction and that's where you've got the numbers and words down here is that you have the thing in itself which is complex and can be seen many ways then you have the things you see which are partial sort of low resolution representations of the thing

itself and then there are words which are at least in part references to the image of the thing and so by the time you get to the word it's pretty compressed and I I really like the the metaphor of compression you know so CU a lot of the things you see are sort of like thumbnails and why are thumbnails useful you guys have done some you know image processing say like a obviously a thumbnail lacks some things that a 16 megabyte is that about right now how big are cameras 16 megabytes for a single photo

what's that yeah well I think the new cameras are up I think they're up to 16 the newest iteration okay so why have thumbnail if you have a 16 megabyte picture okay but why not use the picture because right that's exactly it is that there's a tradeoff between detailed representation and time utilization time and and resource utilization and you know like like a computer you guys have limited time and resources and so you don't actually want to see anym than you need to see in order to get what you're supposed to get done done because

otherwise it's just a waste of energy and so what that means is that your brain is always trying to figure out in some sense what's the simplest way I can represent this so that I can undertake whatever it is that I'm planning to undertake next and that's sort of again from a philosophical perspective that's actually something pragmatic okay so then you might ask yourself you organize your perceptions in relationship to your goals and then you might ask yourself well where do those goals come from you know and we've we've heard from thinkers like say Freud

who talked about the ID functions and the ID is sort of the seat of primordial impulses right and so you might might think about the ID as the producer of primary goals or drives and fory did think about them as drives so they were things that led to you know a relatively rigid behavioral algorithm once the the state had Arisen now as I mentioned before I think that that's a flawed Viewpoint because the motivational state is more than merely a drive because a drive is something that say triggers a a pre-programmed sequence of behaviors and

a lot of the early behaviors thought about animal behavior in that way right they'd say the animal would encounter a stimulus and the stimulus would produce a response and then the responses would get chained together and then when the animal encountered the stimulus again then just those chained responses would automatically run and one of the famous experiments that showed that that was wrong was a rat was trained to run through a maze you can sort of train a route pretty quickly if you know you you put him in the Maze and there's like he can

go this way or this way and you put some cheese over here you do that three or four times the rat learns to turn right and then you add another piece to the Maze and you know then the rat learns to turn left and so you can get it turning you know extremely in an extremely complicated way to walk through the maze but then what they did was they took a rat and they wrapped up its hind legs you know like with tape so it couldn't use them and then they put its little rare end

on a cart and then they had the little rat scoot through the maze on the cart and it's obvious that a scooting and a running rat don't use the same motor output not even close and the rat could still get through the maze so the idea that all the rat had done was chain together learned automatic responses turned out to be wrong rats it's more like rats learn what's going on and can generalize from it just like you do so so anyway so so the notion that the drive just instantiates a sequence of pre-programmed behaviors

in most cases in many cases especially with complex Behavior turns out to be wrong there's some limited circumstances under which it's right okay so the first hypothesis we're going to entertain is the idea that you have to frame the world in order to interact with it this is sort of a little mythological diagram that I whipped up a long time ago and the bottom thing that's auroboros by the way which is a dragon that eats its own tail it's an ancient symbol of chaos and chaos is what you see when you don't know what you're

looking at and so you could say in some sense chaos is all the complexity that surrounds you that could possibly intrude on your little safe world and then to grasp that chaos or to operate within it you have to put it within a framework and so that's the great father there that's actually God you see and God's got the sun behind him because God is like the son he's you know reliable and he's associated with Consciousness and then he's sort of ruling over this city and so for me that was a good symbol of culture

and in part culture is what's outside of you but in part culture is also the Frameworks that you've learned to use by being with other people the Frameworks that you've learned to use to narrow and specify the world and in my mode of thinking the framing is associated with security on the one hand because it tells you what you can do and you know makes things safe for you and tyranny on the other hand because it can get out of control and you know it can start to get too rigid whatever regardless of the pros

and cons of framing if you see something one way then you can't see it another it's harder to see it another so that's the con side of framing the pro side of framing is well then you get to do something if it's unframed you're in chaos it's existential anxiety you're not going to move ahead at all so you have to frame things you have to simplify them and really in some sense you even have to oversimplify them depends on what you mean by that but what you're really trying to do is to never make your

perceptual task any more complex than it has to be in order to get done what you need to get done so how do you frame things well the first thing we should point out is that a lot of framing doesn't even happen psychologically right so here you are sitting in this classroom and you're not overwhelmed by chaos well why well first of all you're in a city that's helpful there's electricity here and there's natural gas and there's people to fix all the plumbing and so the fact that you're in a City makes life much simpler

right off the bat there's not nothing trying to eat you you don't have to contend with the fact that it's like minus 20 for 3 months and you know so that's a whole bunch of complexity that the world the Civilized world is just taken care of for you and then you know now you're in the university in the city and that eliminates a whole bunch of other hassles you know there's some things you have to do but there's a bunch of things you don't have to do and then you're inside this building and wow look

at that there's electric light here and you know and the chairs work and there's not going to be an earthquake and probably the whole building isn't going to fall down so you know by the time you're sitting in your chair here also with your clothing on you've screened a lot of complexity out already and so you can sit there fairly calmly and so that's all external now part of the reason and this is this is worth thinking about because this isn't only psychological you guys will hear a fair bit about Terror management theories as you

progress through your education and so Terror management theories are theories that attempt to account for why people are uh say patriotic in their beliefs why they adopt belief systems and the idea is that a belief system protects you from death anxiety and so Freud s sort of said that about religious systems that was his critique of religion people are afraid of death and so they they have this infantile desire to have that fear go away so they turn to religion and religion says well death isn't permanent and that's why people are religious and and the

extension of that is well that's also why they have belief systems in general they're trying to protect protect themselves against this deep shaking anxiety and to some degree I suspect that's true but you should also remember that when you're protecting your culture say if you identify with it you're patriotic or whatever it is or you think that your culture is worth defending you're not just defending something psychological it's like the culture the function the functioning culture Keeps the Lights On you know so it doesn't just protect you from death anxiety it also protects you from

death and that's even more important most of the time than being protected from Death anxiety now there's a psychological component to it too but you don't ever want to underestimate just the Practical utility of being nested inside you know what PJ would consider a relatively functional game it's like your world's a lot simpler you know you have to work to maintain it and everything and that's kind of a drag maybe that's the tyrannical element of it but you know the payoffs pretty big okay so if you look at Medieval cities this is a well-preserved medieval

city in France there's a lot of medieval cities that still exist in Europe and you see this is a typical sort of human habitation it's like inside there's order and outside there's chaos and barbarians and then there's a couple of walls to keep the chaos and The Barbarians out and then inside you know there's a dominant Hier and everybody can live their relatively productive and relatively peaceful lives inside of that it's all framing getting rid of complexity unnecessary complexity same thing with how they do the same thing for you and then social institutions do the

same thing too it's like okay this is uh is it Kennedy there and and Obama I think so this is part of the transition in power from George Bush to Obama and you know that's a pretty scary thing to have your the leader of your dominance hierarchy replaced by another leader and you know among chimpanzees for example that's often the occasion for a fair Bit Of Mayhem and it's also the case often for for people that that's you know that that occurs and you know we still have that in the form of political corruption and

so on but all things considered you know the power transition from Obama or from Bush to Obama was far more peaceful than such power transitions generally are if you look across the history of mankind and so that means you're also protected by your social institutions they screen out a lot of potential complexity as well as long as they're functional and and also I think as long as they follow some of the pedian rules and so one of the pedian rules for a for a playable game is there's some reciprocity you know you regard the system

roughly speaking as either fair or fairer than any other system you can think up you know it boils down to the same thing because if it's not fair but you can't come up with a better fantasy well it's as good as it can be so so the the sociological or sociopolitical structures that keep complexity away from us can only operate under a certain limited number of constraints but still they perform their function you know and and very admirably it's it's amazing I think because I see people in my clinical practice all the time you know

and most people that I see and I think this is true of most people in the world have at least one serious problem you know and it might be they have an illness that's just God awful or or if they don't have an illness one of their immediate family has an illness that's god- awful or their you know they're really old and they're and and they need to be taken care of or they're suffering from some insane economic problem or they've just been unemployed or whatever you know there's there's something in the their immediate circle

that's really really difficult to Grapple with and yet people still go out and maintain their place in the world and the whole thing roughly works and to me that's just a continual source of Amazement that people can pull that off you know so anyway so a lot of the screening that you do to get rid of that complexity is external and part of that is a consequence of good well functioning sociological um organization then the next thing that sort of Screams things out for you is your body right now look you kind of naturally see

things at a particular level of resolution right there's no obvious reason why that should be so you know you see the front of people you can't see the back of them you see their external covering their skin and their clothes you can't see inside them when you look closely at them you can't see their cellular structure or their molecular structure or their atomic structure you can't really see the social situations that they're embedded in so if I look at you I can't see your family I I you know I presume you have one I can't

really see the political situation that surrounds you either I have to know that abstractly and then the ecological level is almost completely imperceptible to me and so part of the way that complexity is screened out is that your body just doesn't doesn't allow you to pick a lot of it up you're just blind to it so you see at one level of resolution and that's the human level you see things of approximately our size you see things that are approximately the size that we can grip those are sort of the things that you're likely to

can to think of as objects like clearly a mountain isn't exactly an object you know so usability is part of what defines perceptibility and so that also screens things out and so then you're left with well what it is that you have to deal with once everything's been screened out and then you might ask well there's still a lot of complexity left there like there say there's plenty of complexity within the average family and there's plenty of complexity in The Mating domain you know to find a partner and to establish a reasonable long-term relationship and

to have children and to raise them there's plenty of complexity left and then the question is how did biology how did biology come to solve those problems given that they're almost infinite in complexity how can you do it and the answer to that is fundamentally a darwinian answer you start simple so that's back in the days of the one-celled organisms we have no idea how those things got their start right I mean the actual beginning of Life is a serious mystery and I'll tell you it's such a serious mystery this is completely unbelievable but one

of the people who discovered DNA I think it was Francis crick in fact I'm virtually certain it was he actually believed that DNA came from an alien civilization he wrote a whole book about that it's called panspermia and so he believes that believed posited that it's possible for DNA to drift through space for millions of years and to land on planets and to start living and that God only knows how old DNA is cuz he just couldn't figure out at all how it could have possibly evolved so scientists are a lot weirder than you think

when you start to read you know about what the scientists who discovered things really thought they're completely you know out of their mind but whatever we'll assume that DNA got there somehow and then Evolution took over after that so what does evolution do it basically says well here's a terribly complex problem that we've sort of partially solved and partially solved means we've lived long enough to produce another copy of ourselves that constitutes the solution that's it so we've live lived long enough so that we could conceivably duplicate ourselves how should we do that well a

variety of different ways that's the answer we should produce variants so that might be multiple Offspring or it might be it might also be facilitated by random mutation hypothetically the mutations are random although there's increasing evidence by the way that organisms are much more complex at the genetic level than anyone ever ever assumed and bacteria for example swap DNA back and forth with other bacteria all the time and there are experiences that you can have that will change your genetic structure sufficiently so that you will transmit that to your children so you know the idea

that everything's purely darwinian and it's only mutation that drives Randomness that's clearly likely but not not complete these other mechanisms are clearly there but the the the issue is is that what you do is you you start with something that kind of works and then you produce microvariants of it and then the world around you changes a little bit and hopefully one of those microvariants manages to do the same thing and then it produces a bunch of microvariants and then they manage to do the same thing and so what's happening is there's an arms race

between the environment which is always changing and the organisms that are trying to keep up with it and that arms race just goes on forever and you know different life forms proliferate as that as that occurs it's sort of like life is always playing catchup and you never get it right you cannot get it right the best you can do is get it right long enough to live long enough to reproduce that constitutes the sum total of your knowledge so and so what that means at least in part is that you guys are all the

beneficiary let's say of a evolutionary process that's basically been going on since the beginning of life and that's about 3.5 billion years ago and so so your body your psychophysiology has been in an arms race with the transforming environment for 3 and A2 billion years trying to keep up and poof you're the Stellar consequence of three and a half billion years of like effort and death so you know you might thank the cosmos about that you think about this every single one of your female ancestors successfully reproduced like it's mindboggling it's mind bogling you're so

unlikely that you would be here that that it's that it's almost incalculable so good for us here we are you know how successful can you get so my my point is that part of the way that complexity is dealt with is is haphazard it isn't ever really dealt with that's why you die you can only manage it to a limited degree and for us that's like three kids in 100 years if you're lucky and that's what that's hard knowledge after 3 and A2 billion years so the complexity problem is a rough one okay so that's

your body now let's look inside your body now you might think that you know we have this sort of idea that's kind of leftover cartisian that there's a u and there's a your body and the U is in your brain and so just out of curiosity how many of you have the subjective sense that the U is in your head how many of you would locate you like for me like I can locate me somewhere seems to be about there I feel like that's where I am what and so how many of people think have

like the center of their sense of subjectivity in their head how many people are like that okay how many people are different than that okay so oh good okay so where like where do you feel the center of your subjectivity where would it be that's hard to conceptualize like I have like religious views so I believe and I oh I was thinking more about how about how it feels fair fair enough fair enough you know that that's perfectly reasonable I'm thinking of it more as a subjective experience though my bra okay for me the heart

so you're kind of located here how many people would would agree with that oh yeah so qu quite a few of you he so that's the same same for you here I don't know more like here oh h h h and any other places any other places you can talk about so yeah yeah yeah sorry any other places outside of my body I don't know it's not like oh that's not good no I'm kidding I'm kidding I'm kidding okay okay so okay so we kind of got head and heart and you know that's really kind

of historically standard the Greeks seem to Lo have located the themselves sort of in their heart you know and there's some theory that as people became more intellectualized that that feeling sort of went up to their head and maybe before the heart there was the stomach you know and you know you might think that you're your stomach if you were hungry all the time right I mean you're just not ever hungry so like why the hell would you think you were your stomach but you know that's another way that culture sort of keeps complexity at

Bay you don't even that's that's almost like a motivational state that modern people don't even have to contend with cuz you're never really hungry I mean how many of you have gone without food for more than 24 hours oh that's pretty good how many of you involuntarily went without food for more than 24 hours oh yeah well that's that's rough okay how about a week nobody how about 3 days okay well so you know there's a couple of people who've gone for reasonable periods of time without eating but fundamentally you can tell we've we kind

of got that problem under control so you don't have to worry too much about your about you being your stomach but I'll tell you if you were starving at some point that's probably where you'd locate yourself okay so now you're inside the body and so let's take a look at how the Body Works inside so you kind of feel that you're in your brain most of you anyways but and you know you kind of think your brain is in your head but really that's not right I don't really understand ever why we kind of decided

that our brains were in our head because well look at it there's there's the nervous system it's like it's not in your head it's distributed through your whole body there's a lot of it up in your head but there's the whole spinal cord that's an important thing and then it has all these branching nerves that allow you to move your hands and to feel things and it's like your nervous system is distributed all the way through your body so it's it's not reasonable to think about the way that you operate as you see things with

your brain and then you do things now if that's sort of true but there's important ways that it's not true at all and it's important to know the ways that it's not true it helps you understand phenomena that you couldn't otherwise understand so I can give you an example there are people who experience blindness so but it isn't because their eyes get damaged it's because they have brain damage and so it it damages the visual cortex and so that's the higher order higher order part of the brain that's responsible for conscious Vision okay so maybe

they get I don't know they get a tumor or they get hit in the head or they get shot or something and then poof they're blind and so then um they tell you they can't see anything and then you say to them okay well that's fine you can't see anything but let's play a game okay I'm going to hold up my left hand or my right hand and you're going to guess about which I'm holding up and so you do this and they go right and you do this and they go left and left left

right right and they're right and you tell them you're right and they say well I can't be because I don't see anything so that's one that's blind sight okay so here's another kind of blind sight so you take the same person and you set them in front of a screen and you say well look at the screen and they tell you I told you already I can't see anything and then you flash faces at them and you you you check for changes in the conductivity of their skin because when people react emotionally they sweat a

little more a little less and that changes how electricity passes through their skin and so you show them a smiling face and there's not much of a change and you know you show them a um neutral face and there's not much of a change and then you show them like a really aggressive or really afraid face and poof spikes and you do that a number of times and you show them well as soon as I show you a face of someone who's afraid or face of someone who's angry you react to it psychophysiologically you think

well how the hell can that happen if they can't see and the answer to that is you don't just see with your vision you see with your body and so one of the things that you'll find for example if you go through Swanson's paper I'll read you a little bit about this later is that most of your sense map onto multiple levels of your nervous system so some of them map right onto your spine and that's good because now and then your eyes should tell your spine to do something before you think because thinking's too

slow and so you know you got to understand like way back when we were frogs roughly speaking we had eyes we didn't have much of a brain so like what the hell were the eyes doing it's not like the Frog exactly sees and you might think well how could eyes inform you about the world if you don't exactly see and then you got to kind of think of it in a pedian sense it's like here here's an example you might take an animal like a sponge pretty simple animal and it can open and close pores

on the outside of its surface according to different changes in the ocean that surrounds it and so its perception is sort of like the ocean has three states whatever those might be maybe it has 10 I don't know but for the sake of Simplicity we'll say three the ocean manifests itself in three pattern States in pattern State one I do this in pattern state two I do this in pattern state three I do this and so it's direct pattern onto action mapping and so animals can use their eyes just to react with they don't have

to see the thing you know because you think you see and then you act but why do that you can just react and you know this already because in a simple way if you put your hand on a hot stove you'll go like this and then you'll feel the pain and what that means is that your body has conserved the relationship between your Sensory neurons and your motor neurons at a spinal level so that you will your perception of the heat is this it's not of the heat it's just mapping a bodily pattern onto a

sensory pattern and so a lot of really primitive sensory input is exactly that it's just the sense detects a pattern and with no intermediary of interpretation that pattern is translated into a behavioral output and so there's actually generally the first the simplest cells are sensory motor cells so they do both they map the pattern and they react and then the sensory and the motor cells differentiate and then neural tissue grows inside them and so then what happens is that instead of an outside pattern being mapped immediately onto a behavioral pattern the neural inter mediary says

okay this pattern could mean any of these three things and then that neural layer grows and grows and grows until in creatures like us it's like a whopping layer and so we see a pattern and we go that could be this this this this this this this this and then all of those things could be mapped on to this or this or this or this or this so you know it makes us more slower but more flexible and slow can be a problem so like when you're walking down a pathway and a snake appears you

don't want to be thinking you know snake rubber hose stick whatever you know because then you're dead because the snake bites you what you want to do is catch the snake out of the corner of your eye and jump up into the air before you even know that you saw a snake and you can do that because your eyes can map right onto your spine and they don't just map right onto your spine they map onto your nervous system at all sorts of levels so for example with the blind sight person who's looking at the

face so it's an angry face the eyes are still mapping information onto the amydala and so the AMD changes the psychophysiology you know it says prepare for threat and so the person might feel uneasy but that's a it's weird but that's a form of sight to feel uneasy can be a form of sight so and that that's to say even more clearly that your brain just isn't in your head it's like it's all the way up it's all the way from and this is a nice pan Viewpoint because you know in some sense what P

says about children is they sort of organize themselves from the spinal level upwards you know they learn these little sub routines first of all they have a few sub routines those are like built right into the spine and then they start playing with those and chaining them together in flexible ways and they keep doing that you know in more and more complex ways until they're capable of the abstract representation of thought and you can see how this will work as we go through the the nervous system so your brain's in your body in fact there's

some evidence and there's more than one kind of nerve system too right there's the central nervous system that allows you to move voluntarily and that you know provides you with sensory feedback some of which you're conscious of there's also the autonomic nervous system that runs your all the complex Machinery that you're too stupid to attend to you know because your Consciousness gets little jobs it doesn't get to run your liver for example you imagine what your life would be like if you were in charge of your liver it's like you'd have been dead years ago

cuz what do you know about livers so you have a whole system like the autonomic nervous system which has more neurons than the central nervous system that just runs all that stuff for you which is you know a good thing you then you don't have to pay attention to it so so anyways there's a lot of distribution of neural tissue throughout your body and there's even some evidence that you have a like a second brain of sorts in your solar plexus where you know that's perhaps part of the reason why you really don't like to

get hit there but there's a tremendous number of serotonergic neurons for example in your in your midsection and there's increasing evidence that those are associated with things like emotion and mood and so the idea that the brain is here it's like no not not really it's it's a Continuum you know your body is a psychophysiological entity and to separate it into body and mind is like it's not right the other thing that seems to be increasingly clear among say the robotics guys is you can't even be smart unless you have a body and so that's

why the advanced advanced intelligence guys are building robots from the bottom up they're doing it just like PJ would have suggested it's like well build some things that can move and then chain those things that can move together so that they can move in more complex ways and then chain them together so they can work in more complex ways and once you've got this thing that can do things then stick a brain on it and that'll then it'll have things it can do with its brain and if you don't do it that way you get

something that can't function intelligently it's close to that so so there is the brain and the major one way of dividing it into its major subcomponents is represented there's a variety of ways you can do this you can divide it into hemispheres because it's sort of split down the middle the right hemisphere seems to be kind of specialized for the processing of unknown information and the left seems to be more comfortable working where you know what's going to happen and that left is most generally the linguistic part of the brain although not always it's it's

a rough you know what would you call it it's a rough truth there's lots of exceptions the the linguistic system tends to specialize in the left and the left sort of insists that it knows what's going on and the right is always looking out for things that don't fit and sort of convincing the left slowly and sort of under the table to change its viewpoints and that seem a lot of that seems to happen when you're asleep and you're dreaming so the right maybe what's happening when you're dreaming is that during the day your cognitive

processes are pretty tight and defined and they better be right because you don't want to be dreaming your schizophrenic dreams in the daytime that's a bad idea so you got to stay kind of focused and and narrow in a way during the day but the problem with that narrowed narrow focus is that you're not paying attention to a lot of things and so it kind of looks like your right hemisphere keeps track of the potentially important things that you're not keeping track of and sort of and then at night your your category system sort of

broadens and loosens you can tell that in dreams because they're so weird and that's maybe when the right hemisphere is sort of tapping some new information into the left and playing with how it might be recategorized without completely overwhelming the left because you don't want to just because you learn something new doesn't mean you want to upset yourself totally right so it's a real it's a real complex dynamic between stability and learning and it's conceivable that's why you have two hemispheres so who knows it's a good theory though and and the guy who came up

with it fundamentally his name is Goldberg um El Conan Goldberg he was a student of Alexander luras who was a great neuropsychologist so you know it's a credible it's credible idea so here's some rough divisions you've got your cerebellum that cerebellum we don't know what the hell that thing does if you don't have one you get all wobbly but there's more neurons in the cerebellum than there are in the rest of the brain so like is it just making you not wobbly seems like a tremendous devotion of resources to something that's relatively simple so uh

alcohol when you're a new Drinker alcohol is really hard on the cerebellum which is why you're you know totally useless in a motor way and you fall down and all those things happen but so that's the cerebellum and we don't know what it does even though it's very complexly branched it kind of looks like a cauliflower and it's just packed full of neurons and then there's the occipital lobe and that kind of use that to see with more or less and then the pride lobe kind of keeps helps you keep track of who who you

are from a bodily perspective and sort of where your body's located in space and sort of who you are as an embodied person so for example if you lose the right parietal lobe because you have a stroke then you lose the left side of your body and even more weirdly you lose the left side of every so all of a sudden you can't see the left side of anything and no one can figure out what that's like because say I'm looking at this room and I have this parietal damage if I'm looking at the room

do I not see the left side of the room and then if I look at you all of a sudden I don't see your left side like we can't figure that out like the left is gone but then the left is relative to where you happen to be looking I think one of the ways of understanding it is sort of like you know how you clearly can't see anything behind your head head and it's not black where you can't see right it's black if you close your eyes but there's a difference between what you can't

see behind your head and the block you see when you close your eyes because the block sort of seems like nothing but compared to what's behind your head it's it's not nothing at all so I think what happens with people who have neglect paranal damage is that that like back part just goes like this and so instead of you know you seeing this much of the world and this being just not there at all as far as vision is concerned it goes like this so then you've only got like a quarter of the world that

you're and so people like that sometimes they'll throw their own legs out of bed so they wake up and they think oh my God because they can kind of detect the left but not very well and they're quite freaked out because you know like do you really want to wake up with a leg in bed with you no so they grab it and throw it out and that's not so good because they're attached to it or so they'll eat they'll eat and they only eat half the food on their plate but if you turn the

plate then they'll eat half of the half that's left so anyways that's the prial lobe temporal lobe that enables you to hear roughly speaking there's a lot of um memory there too and the frontal lobe well first of all the frontal lobe seems to allow you to make voluntary movements sort of at the at the highest level of abstraction and then the prefrontal cortex which would be right at the front of the yellow there it's sort of like the back part of the of the frontal lobe enables you to make volunt movements but the prefrontal

cortex enables you to represent the potential motor movements that you might make before you implement them and so it evolved out of the motor strip during the course of evolution it's sort of like well first you learned how to act voluntarily and then as that grew and it's particularly big in human beings that part was able to divorce actions from your body represent them in an abstract space run them as simulations calculate the outcome and then Implement them or not and you know it's a it's a it's a hit and miss business because lots of

you people undoubtedly simulate catastrophic outcomes and then go do whatever it is you were going to do anyways like you know that happens to people all the time say when they're trying to stop drinking or to stop using cocaine or not to Bing eat or so you know your prefrontal cortex can whip up these simulations but other parts of your body can override them quite quite badly so that's sort of roughly the brain at least from you know looking at it from the side and then this is it split down the middle and you can

see that it's not precisely two hemispheres all the way down in the middle it's one thing and then it grows these two things like little hat and uh as far as I'm concerned all the important parts of the brain are low down Central old you know because people like to think that well if it evolved a long time ago it's primitive it's like no if it evolved a long time ago it's been around a long time it's really smart that's why you don't run your liver the autonomic nervous system runs it because it's been around

for an awful long time and it knows exactly how to do it and so it's really in some sense the new parts of the brains are the brain in many ways are the parts that are primitive so and the the old parts are extremely necessary and sophisticated and so the areas we're going to concentrate on most particularly are well the cortex we've already talked about the cortex is probably responsible people like to think of it as responsible for Consciousness and there there's something about that that's right but it's quite clear that human beings can remain

conscious even if they have a substantial amount of damage to the cerebral cortex so Consciousness is a really weird thing we're we're not very good at figuring out it's localized at all cerebral cortex Thalamus the thalamus is the place where all your sensory information comes together so you know when you look at the world it's kind of like a Continuum of experience despite the fact that you have these five different sensory inputs and the thalamus seems to sort of unite all that and then it sends the messages that it amalgamates up to the cortex and

the cortex sends them back and the thelus sends them back and there's like this Loop between the thomus and the cortex and maybe that's part of what Consciousness is you know rather than being localized in an area it could easily be a process and you know the fact that Consciousness sort of turns on in the morning which is a very weird thing seems to indicate to me that it it's probably something like that it's a loop it's the looping interaction between brain areas and you know if something's looping like that it gets really weird properties

so that's a positive feedback system you know and I don't know if you've ever turned a vid hooked a video camera to a TV and then turned the video camera on the TV you know it starts doing extremely weird things you can get all sorts of unbelievably complex designs and weird phenomena because the TV is recycling its own signal you know so there's this circuit in there that's looping and I suspect Consciousness is something like that the hippocampus the hippocampus is responsible for the movement of short-term information into long-term storage it's a very important part

of the brain we'll talk about that more next time the amydala is responsible for a lot of emotional responses and the hypothalamus is responsible for a lot of primordial motivational States and so we'll stop and we'll start with the hypothalamus on Tuesday see you soon [Applause]