How Your Brain Rewires, Makes Decisions, and Shapes Your Reality | Dr. David Eagleman | EP 523

the conscious brain is a broom closet in the Mansion of the brain with very little access to what's going on there may be free will but it's it's going to be a small player if it's there well every Drive wants to philosophize in its Spirit exactly okay so let's unpack that if you understand that aim constrains entropy then you get some sense almost immediately why people cling so desperately to their Frameworks this doesn't answer the Free Will question though I thought we could walk through perception because it doesn't work the way people think it does

you know when it comes to this question of of Truth there is no singular truth because you've got a completely different set of experiences of War your brain my brain everyone's brain we're all going to perceive different things and seek different things from the world you said something else too that I don't think I've thought about exactly before [Music] hello everybody I had the opportunity to speak to David Eagleman today David is a Adjunct professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University um he doesn't run a lab there anymore because he runs two companies neosensory and Brain

Check David recently did a course for Peterson Academy called brain plasticity and in in the largest sense that's what we talked about today plasticity to some degree is an archaic term and based in an archaic metaphor but it's been well adopted thoroughly adopted in the Neuroscience literature and it means something like adaptive flexibility and human beings are unique in their degree of adaptive flexibility now the advantage to that is that we can change our environment and we can change our perceptions and we can adapt each generation to a radically new environment and the price we

pay for that is an intensely long period of socialization and so so we talked about brain architecture we talked about brain chemistry we talked about the role of aim and intent um the role that aim and intent plays in determining perception which is a very interesting philosophical issue because what would you say the enlightenment view of the world the empiricist view was that we create our structures of Reality by aggregating something like objective data but the science of perception casts a dim light on that presumption because we prioritize our perceptions and we do that using

our aim and so we don't have perceptions that are devoid of value and so we talked about that a lot as well and so if you're interested in a walk through brain science from the structural perspective the philosophical perspective the neurochemical perspective to some degree if you're interested in perception and emotion and motivation and drive and the competition of personalities and motivational states in the psyche then this is the podcast for you so you just recorded a course for Peterson Academy I did yep so on brain plasticity which is really my favorite topic it's about

how brains absorb the world around them and uh and adapt to them and you know the interesting part about this is that we are the only species that is as plastic as we are so you know you see a zebra get born and in 45 minutes it's running around or a dolphin is swimming after a few minutes of being born but if you see a homo sapian get born they're not doing it as quickly and the reason is Mother Nature essentially came up with a different trick with us where she drops us into the world

half-baked and we absorb the world around us our language our culture all you know we we take everything that's happened before us and we springboard off the top of that and this is the reason why Homo sapiens is taken over the planet and been so successful because we unlike a horse that's essentially living the same life that horses have for you know for Generations we are living different lives every time so that's what brain plasticity is about and um I actually I actually don't use the word plasticity as much anymore because that was a term

originally coined by William James uh because he was impressed by plastic manufacturing you could um you know m something into shape and it would hold that shape and and he said that's kind of what brains do you know you learn the name of your fourth grade teacher and that gets written down and retained so he called that plasticity but what we're looking at is a system of such complexity we've got 86 billion neurons we've got you know 200 trillion synaptic connections and every moment of your life this this Forest of neurons is reconfiguring and changing

and so I tend to call this live wiring instead of plastic it only because I think the days of being impressed by plastic manufacturing are past us now we're um what we're looking at is a system that you know every second of your life from Cradle to grave is reconfiguring to represent the world around you and and all of your experiences and all of your memories let's talk about perception I was reading let me just the secret Incognito The Secret Lives of the brain and you spend a fair bit of time in that book talking

about perception and so I thought we could walk through perception because it's it doesn't work the way people think it does and the fact that it doesn't work the way people think it does has I think profound philosophical implications so I want to walk through some ideas that I've been developing with you and see what what you think about them so one of the things you pointed out for example in the book was that if you get people to look at a painting which you might think of as a process akin to What a camera

does when it takes a photograph but you ask them different questions about the people in the photograph so if I remember correctly the example you used was picture of a family um in a domestic scene in a house and you could ask them people who are watching who are looking at the painting what those people were doing just before the painting image was fabricated or you could ask them how wealthy they are or you could ask them how old they are and while you're doing that you can track the movements of the viewer's eyes and

what you see is that the pattern of visual movement so of eye movement is similar across people depending on the question that's asked but different in consequence of the question so for example if you ask PE people how rich the people in the photograph are they'll look at the clothing and the material objects in the painting and if you ask them how old they are they'll gaze at their faces and a painting isn't when you're looking at a painting it isn't necessarily that big an object but there's still pinpoint perceptions that have a pattern that

are and the pattern reveals the relationship between the goal of the perception and the perception I've got that have I got that right that's exactly right and so the key is if you ask these people uh you know if they did anything different while ask while answering the question they won't have any idea but their eyes are like you know on a covert operation doing the thing so as you know of course you know eyes jump around about three times a second those are called cods and then in between there's little micro cods but the

point is we're not aware of that at all so when your brain is going out to seek the answer to a question it it's running its Mission and it's looking at all the points and pieces that it needs to to gather the information but we consciously are totally unaware of that and this of course is representative of of most of perception um we don't know how we're Gathering the data but this is what we do in fact so what my book Incognito was about of course was that almost everything in the brain is happening unconsciously

you just don't have any access to it and really no awareness or acquaintance with it either um and this is just a good example of that yeah used a couple of words that were interesting in that description you talked about um being you you said something approximating being on a mission to answer a question and then you talked about data and so I want to take those two two things apart so one of the sub elements of the word question is Quest right and a quest is a journey and a journey is a mission now

there's a big difference between being on a mission and Gathering data you know like the empirical view of the world I think we'll stick with the empiricists particularly the empiricist believe that we gathered data about the world and that we could do that in an objective Manner and that we built the world out of that data Gathering process but that's not the same it's really seriously not the same as answering a question or being on a quest taking a journey or being on a mission because a mission is goal directed and I I've been trying

to work out a paradox in recent years that emerges because of those the difference in those two viewpoints data and you and you use both those metaphors in your in your analysis of the eye movement patterns data implies something directly that's value-free but Mission implies value right it's definitely a mission so yeah so in this case you're asking a question about the painting and the subject is trying to answer that but this is true for all of us in all cases let's imagine you're on a a hike with friends here in uh in Phoenix and

you guys are walking along and one of your friends is a myologist so he notices the mushrooms that you don't notice and your other friend is a climatologist and so he's noticing the the the tree line and and where things have changed and you've got a friend who's a podiatrist and she's noticing the angle of your feet and so on the point is that all the data is hitting all of your eyes but you guys are seeing different things you're seeing you're having different experiences of the world predicated on what questions you're asking and that

of course is predicated on you know who you are all of your experiences and what is relevant to you and and all your various aims yeah well so this is the reason I focused in on the philosophical implications of this is because the empiricists the philosophical implication of the idea of data as reality is that reality itself is value free and value is added to the data but but mission is a whole different way of conceptualizing things because if the basis of data is perception and perception is Mission driven then in so far as perception

is reality reality is not value free and that's at the level of perception right so this is this is why the difference is so crucial because the empirical presumption is the data is there you add value to it it's like no the value is built into the perception right and there's no place in the perception where the value isn't built in you talked about those micro so when your eyes move how many different levels of cods are there there's there's the big ones about three times a second and then there's the micro scods which are

always moving that's for a slightly different reason right and then you can also move your eyes voluntarily right so there's lots of patterns of eye movement there's smooth eye P exactly smooth Pursuit eye movements when you're following something right yeah exactly right and then the fact that I can do this and then I can do this sure and then also one of the things that's interesting about you could say the perception of perception is that we're very much inclined to watch other people's eyes like generally when we're conversing with people when we're interacting with them

we see their eyes we can see their face although somewhat less their whole head but at least their face which is an emotional display system around the eyes and the reason that we want to watch someone's eyes is because we can see what they're looking at and the reason we want to do that is because we can infer their mission right exct we can INF further motivations which is crucially important well if it's a defense if you're in a defensive situation or a sexual situation or well any situation for that matter and so by watching

someone's eyes you can further Mission but one of the corollaries of all of that on the philosophical side is that this is such a bizarre thing to understand is that our aims structure our perceptions right so this so I've been separating that I I want you tell me what you think about this so I I came up with a hypothesis when I was writing my last book which is that a story is a description you could say a story is a description of the value hierarchy that structures perception that's actually what a story is and

so part of the reason that we're so interested in stories is because as you pointed out when you look at the world there's many many ways you could look at any scene many an infinite number of ways in fact so you have to navigate your way through every glance and the structure of navigation you use determines the purpose of the perception but it's also a strategy and so if I know your story and I can see that you're successful then I can adopt your mode of perception right it's not your mode of adding value to

the world it's way more fundamental than that is that and does that yeah tell me what you mean by adding value to the world well you could think of the world as a place of dead facts that they're all equally perceivable it's like well no because perceptions value based like because we've always thought in some ways folk psychology is perception first right and then it's motivation or emotion after that let's say and then it's cognition and that and and sort of in a linear chain and that turns out to be like it's staggering it's not

just wrong it's staggeringly wrong because the values inform the perception so deeply that in many ways they determine the content of the perception as as we were talking about with regards to the painting hello everybody I want to tell you about Peterson Academy so so as I watch the universities deteriorate and become inexcusably ideologically rigid over the years I started thinking about what might be done to address that we have the technology at hand now to film the best lectures On Any Given Topic at every university around the world and to bring the results of

that filming and distribution to a wide audience at a very low cost and we also have the ability to do that with the best possible production quality and so I started working with my daughter and her team on Peterson Academy a number of years ago and we launched in August we have about 40 courses on our platform now we're producing for a month and I think I can say without hesitation that they are the best courses that you can obtain on topics associated with higher education anywhere and they're beautifully filmed and produced there's a very

inviting and welcoming social media element to Peterson Academy and it's all available at an eminently reasonable price we set out to produce the best education platform in the world and I think we managed that go to Peterson Academy and gain access to the kind of education that was once reserved at the best institutions for the most elite and privileged of students and change your life in consequence yes yeah that's absolutely right and the fascinating part is that all this is happening unconsciously we're going and we're seeking out answers from the world but um you know

and and it's a matter of what's your attention is drawn to also so you know if I say hey what's the feeling of your shoe on your left foot right now you can become aware of that all you've got all the all the data if we want to call it that available to you but you're only seeking little parts and this all depends on your internal model of the world in terms of you know who you are what is relevant to you and that's the filter through which we interpret everything and um so you know

when it comes to this question of of Truth um there is no there is no singular truth because you've got a completely different set of experiences of wired your brain my brain everyone's brain um we're all going to perceive different things and seek different things from the world something we might get into later that I'm very interested in I know you to is this collection of neural networks or personalities that we have inside and n's view on this was that they each have their own truth they're they're each perceiving so yeah we could talk way

okay okay so um you I know you and I are both fans of nii and the um every Drive wants to philosophize in its Spirit exactly okay so let's unpack that so it's you know you've got all these neural networks that have different drives and want different things and each what each meant by that just for the listener of course is you know that each of those drives puts together a story or its truth about why it's seeing the world that way so the the the information that you would go out into the world to

seek the mission that you run depends on who's ascendant at that moment that's for sure okay fine so let's let's delve into that okay so when psychologists first started talking about drives um who was that can't remember the name of the psychologist he was an early behaviorist but a sophisticated one um the name will come to me later they were working at building a model of the nervous system really from The Reflex up okay right and so the behavioral hypothesis was don't explain anything using any more complex terminology if you can explain it in terms

of reflex and you can get very basic neural systems that are reflexive that are basically spinal and they really run in an automatic way and so then you could imagine chains of those reflexes um you could imagine those reflexes chained together so that more and more complex behaviors could come about and there's some truth in that but the problem with the drive metaphor is that it it's kind of like a wind up doll right a drive implies first of all that it's motoric that it's movement oriented and second second that it's algorithmic or deterministic now

and N offered a more sophisticated view than that when he said when he Associated drive with philosophizing because a mechan a mechanistic and deterministic motoric algorithm doesn't philosophize and if you can piece this together from n's work and it's really clear in Yung that it's much better to conceptualize what we think of as drives as personalities and then the the huge advantage to that is that it brings in perception because and you already you already pointed this out at least implicitly when we were discussing the painting if I'm angry with you okay so now I'm

you could say I'm under the grip of a drive but it's much more sophisticated and accurate to say it's no that the personality of defensive or predatory aggression now has me in its grip it's dominant from a neurological perspective it's it's suppressing all other personalities and so then what that's going to mean is that when you talk to me any word that you say that I could interpret as irritating is going to be much more obvious and anything that you say that would be peacemaking I would regard cynically let's say and I would be looking

in my interaction with you for Pathways to Victory and it wouldn't only be that I would see that but also if you asked me to justify my actions while we were arguing even if I became cruel that drive that's a personality would have all those arguments at hand too so it's a full-fledged personality it also has its own emotional systems because if I'm gripped by rage I could easily be happy to see you suffer right and if I'm gripped by compassion say well seeing you suffer is going to put me in pain and so I

think it it would be very helpful if the psychological field in general updated its model of drive so to speak or even motivation for that matter to concentrate more on this personality like model now and you talked as well in in in the book about the diverse range of I don't know I think you used the word personality as well the diverse I I called it Team of Rivals Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah by which I mean you've got all these you know all these let's call them personalities under the hood um you know it's

interesting because I think I maybe I dial it back one step for personality you've got different neural networks that want different things and we can measure the just give an example which is you know when you're making a financial decision about what you're going to buy um you have certain networks that care about valuation they care about the price point and they're thinking about okay how much is that worth how how much is that worth why so on you have completely separate networks in the front lob that care about the predicted emotional experience for you

know let's say you're looking at two restaurants that you're trying to choose between so you know you're making a simulation of what you see oh that's going to be delicious and good and that one's not going to be so good you've got other networks that care about the social context as in what do my friends think of this is this cool or not so cool all these things you've got this and more they're all battling out under the hood yeah and they're all trying to steer the ship of state and when you make a decision

um it's because of how it's because of the vote of the neural Parliament so it's what's interesting this I do want to get at this because your view of a collection of personalities where one of them is dominant and my view of a Team of Rivals is slightly different in this way which is that um you know there's this battle going on and and you reach these sort of consensus things just like in a parliament where different groups will will collaborate and coordinate say okay look you know two out of three think this and so

we're going to go for that restaurant well that would be calculated my suspicions are is enough of those Rivals aggregate together they can inhibit everything else that's exactly right so they'll join forces and then their Rivals will sink into silence because they've gripped the they likely grip the neuro pharmacological circuits that can inhibit the rivals yeah I think now some of that would be calculated unconscious L right but then maybe we could maybe we could hash this out a little bit so imagine it's something like this so you're making a decision a lot of these

you make pretty quickly and so what I would presume that would mean is that the Rival systems that are doing the computations already have a behavioral pathway specified and practiced that's in keeping with their Aim so nothing new has to be instantiated but imagine imagine that there are situations where a novel situation arises and Rivals emerge but there isn't a clear pathway even if one system obtains dominance I suspect that's when you have to become conscious and you have to think because one of the Mysteries in your book and it's it's a it's a mystery

period is given that we can compute so much unconsciously what's and given how narrow the focus of Consciousness is and even how limited its ability to control let's say What's it good for at all now we do know where we do tend to become conscious at least in sometimes of things that are novel so novelty seems to have something to do with it but so I'm I'm curious about what you think about that yeah great I mean the thing is when you look uh across the animal kingdom you find these rivaling networks everywhere so just

as an example you take a mouse you put it in a maze and you put cheese at the end and you can put a little harness on the mouse and measure how how much he's pulling towards cheese yeah then what you can do is switch it where instead of a piece of cheese you have an electrical shock at the end and you can put the harness on and measure how hard he pulls away from the electrical shock okay now what you do is you put a piece of cheese and an electrical shock at the end

of the thing and the poor little mouse gets stuck halfway and turns and turns and turns at exactly the place where the two vectors cancel out which is to say he's running both networks you get the cheese and avoid the shock and and he gets stuck there in the middle um you see this across animals uh this approid conflict yeah exactly it's the conflict part okay uh take another example the stickleback is a bird that will attack things that are red and if you give something what's that fish fish oh fish right right yeah no

no uh wait stickle back stickleback Gull wait what's the it's it's a it's a bird it's a bird yeah okay CU there's a okay there's a stickleback fish too okay yeah yeah this is a bird I think I'm I'm 99% sure I got the name right okay it'll attack things that are red it will sit on anything that's egg shaped sit on it so if you put a red dot on an egg it'll both sit on it and attack it at the same time okay what these represent are rivaling networks right okay here's where I

think the role of Consciousness is is in mediating this and this is what we've gotten better and better at and so we have rivaling networks in a new in a novel context well well that would be a novel context right where where you have a system that's automated another system that that's automated but the conjunction produces a paradox okay so we could think of the re okay so we can think of the reason for the emergence of the cortex in that regard because so I read a series of brilliant papers on hypothalamic cats right so

these are cats whose entire cortex has decerebrate cats their entire cortex has been taken out in most of the lyic system and these are mostly female cats for various reasons um female cats are more functional with only a hypothalmus as it turns out and if you keep them in a simple environment like a cage they can pretty much do what cats do now they're hyper exploratory which is pretty damn weird for an animal with almost no brain cuz that's not what you predict and by the way they can also walk on a treadmill right right

right well they can mate they can eat they can regulate their temperature they can defend themselves okay so now imagine this so now you have all these automated systems that you described but they can produce conflicts and they can produce conflicts in the moment and they can produce conflicts across time and they can con produce social conflicts yeah okay so now you need another part of the brain that emerges as you said to mediate those conflicts and that's what cortex does and that's that so that would imply that some of that lengthy socialization that you

described actually what that socialization is at least in part is the environment specific means in which those conflicts that will arise in consequence of built-in motivation will be mediated right so right and here's the thing rats and cats have cortex yeah but what we have that they are not so good at is the ability to mediate well such that we don't get stuck in the middle of the maze but we can make a decision about we can actually weigh in and say okay you know what I'm not going to get stuck with these two networks

I'm gon to I'm going to decide on something this is what I think Consciousness is about it's the higher level abstraction that allows you to say okay look this isn't something that's automated this is you know this is a a new situation I'm in I don't know what to do here and then the the CEO you know gets called up and yeah there's like a large you take a large company the CEO can't possibly know what's happening in the company there's you know 100,000 employees right the CEO's job fundamentally is to wait for the phone

to ring and say hey there's trouble here there's something going on that we don't know what to do the CEO makes a decision that's and also of course to do future planning Consciousness is essentially about that did you know that mult companies are keeping a living profile of everything that you do online these data Brokers are making billions selling your private information to Big tech companies advertisers and even our own government it's concerning just how many people have given up on their privacy rights but now you can take back control of yours by using expressvpn

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look at the way that animals resolve conflict or don't like the poor rat that gets stuck in the middle and and we can use that as at least a rough metric for the degree of Consciousness that an animal has because the assertion there is that you know Consciousness allows you to to mediate these things and figure out a path forward there would you okay so so a couple of things so you could imagine a mechanism that would allow that to to okay so here's two potential mechanisms so like system a has a goal and system

B has a goal and now they're locked together okay so now you need a superordinate goal that's higher than both of those that can be used as a reference point to rectify the conflict right you can imagine chains of those superordinate goals right so we get stuck in a conflict here we're going to do this we get stuck in a conflict here we're going to do this and so forth like at infinum okay so the cortex is going to produce those melding goals then that would that might be something like sequencing I'm hungry and tired

so what I'm going to do is I'm going to eat now and then sleep or I'm going to sleep now and eat and that way the conflict between those two things is reconciled in a higher order frame that would that would take the future into account yeah right and so but then the physial maybe the physiological mechanism is that you know so let's say you could turn left in the Maze or you could turn right in the Maze and you're spinning because you're in this conflict the mechanism for resolution could be that the inhibitory capacity

of the free cortex so it's not Bound By Any Given motivational state is shifted in favor of one of the systems right so because focus of attention seems like that if I'm yeah so if I'm angry for example and I really focus my attention well I could I could inhibit The Rage or replace it with something but I could also amplify it like there does seem to be a voluntary attention seems to be something like the capacity to amplify it you think that would be something like the the Turning of spare multi-purpose neural tissue to

one side of a particular operation so yeah the difficulty with conscious question of course as we know is there's no single spot in the brain that is you know Consciousness and so when I think about rivaling networks I tend to think about them rivaling directly with one another you're of course totally correct that you know for example visual attention can amplify certain things right say coming from visual cortex you can pay auditory ATT men something or something like that but right so you're Gathering more resources for that that phenomena exactly but I you know I

have to confess that we just don't know what what Consciousness is where does Consciousness live in that I mean we can talk about visual attention auditory attention and so on but uh where's this it's not like an extra bit that just pays attention consciously so that that's still a bit of a mystery uh yeah yeah it's well it's a it's a major mystery because nobody can figure out what the awareness element is for right especially since it's so it's so limited yeah well what it's for of course is what you said at the beginning which

is the way that we go on missions into the world you know if I'm looking for the red object then I find the red object if I'm looking for the thing that looks like a broom that I find that in the crowded space and so on um so visual attention is uh is what allows us to parse the world in in a way that's aligned with our mission that what we're trying to answer in that moment well that's it it's in the moment right it's it's got to be something like that CU you could imagine

that there would be quests that are automatized so completely that that the circuitry is completely there yeah right but then there are new Quest so to speak that well because they're new the circuit circuitry isn't there now Goldberg pointed out when he was looking at this El Conan Goldberg he was L's student he pointed out that when we are learning something new much broader areas of the cortex are activated it's much more energy demanding and then as we learn something and automate it this is in the typical right-handed male so first of all it's the

patterns of cortical activation are very widespread and there's a lot of energy that's being what used probably because perceptions aren't well specified and there's many potential Pathways of action exactly and then the activation pattern shrinks away from the right hemisphere into the left and then it moves from the left front to the back and as it moves it becomes smaller and smaller area until little machine is built essentially that's automated and once that's built well you don't need Consciousness and it's hyper efficient that that's ex that's exactly right so the unconscious brain which is most

of what's happening is all about speed and efficiency so if you look at you for example this study has been done with playing Tetris so you take a bunch of people male and female of course left hand right-handed and you teach them to play Tetris so when they're first learning their amateurs their brain is on fire with activity as measured functional magnetic resonance imaging um so you're measuring their brains after they become good at it the activity shrinks and shrinks right H it's less and less um I I did this I competed against the this

10-year-old world champion cup stacker so he takes these cups and stacks them it's this routine that you do as quickly as you can I had never done before so we both wore highdensity EEG caps electrography and we looked at what was going on of course my brain was on fire with activities I was trying to figure out what the heck to do but he practicing four hours a day on this his brain is essentially quiet while he does this incredibly rapid routine so so it's exactly right the job of the brain is to take novel

things and say hey if this is relevant and I need this I'm G to burn it down into the circuitry so I never have to think about it again like bicycle riding you know the when first learning you're paying attention to your torso and your legs and your you don't know what you're doing when you get good at it then you can text on your phone you can talk to someone while you're biking because it's now part of the Machinery of the brain right right so you could think about Consciousness as something that's continually climbing

up a ladder of automated processes right so you think and practice and that all automates and you become hyper efficient in your perceptions and your actions and that disappears in some ways from Consciousness it becomes some of the becomes part of the substructure of Consciousness but then Consciousness itself climbs on top of that so it's like Consciousness is like the bleeding edge of adaptation oh nice oh I like it yeah yeah yeah yeah that that's exactly right and what's interesting by the way I talked about this in the brain plasticity course um and in my

book live wir what's interesting is that given who you are and what you've already packed down into your Machinery that determines what is relevant to you for the next thing such that the only you know there's a million things you could learn or could pay attention to at every moment but you're only going to take on those things that are relevant to you and push them down into the unconscious brain as a result and we know for example the acetal Co energic systems are involved in this process which is to say they they tag relevance

they say hey this is something that means something to you for whatever reason who knows but you really care about you know stamp collecting or genealogy or artwork or whatever it is that you care about and so then you you you go on these missions from the world you take stuff in and you start burning that stuff down and it means something to you whereas the rest of the stuff just goes help me distinguish between the dopaminergic and the AET coleric function so yeah if my understanding is that if I and this is part of

the structuring of perception if I pause it an aim my perception is first going to specify a pathway to that Aim so that's how the world or orig organizes itself and then things in the world are going to stand out for me as things that will facilitate my movement forward and things that will interfere everything else is irrelevant virtually and there's a social equivalent so people who will facilitate my movement forward are friends and people who won't are foes right and so you have tools and friends and obstacles and foes and you can also perceive

things that'll transform your aim I think those are magical things by the way that's that category and narrative that's magic it transforms your aim and puts you into a new game okay the dopaminergic system will tag progress towards a goal and it'll reinforce the systems neural systems that were active just before that progress was made to make them more dominant now that's partly an indication of relevance because what's positive towards a goal is relevant I don't understand how that differs from the colonic marking of relevance so yeah so you've got these acetal coleric systems that

say Hey this is important I want you to initiate plasticity here and by the way these systems just like dopam actually broadcast all around the entire brain so the dopamine system is involved in saying hey that was better than expected I I wasn't expecting that to happen you get a burst positive burst of dopamine if in contrast uh you're expecting reward and you don't get it you a of dopamine have a little Baseline going on absence of an expected reward is technically a punishment exactly right yep and so that's what the doine system is for

saying oh better than expected worse than expected but acetal acetylcholine is what happens when you're saying I want to make plastic changes to the system here let me just give you an example an experiment with mice and they have to learn how to reach through a narrow slot to grab pellets and whatever um and they get better and better at it and the parts of their brain that are involved in this task actually grow in their real estate okay now you take an equivalent Center rats you give them an acetal choline blocker they do exactly

the same number of trials they doing the things but they don't get better and their brain doesn't change they don't ever get better at the task they're not faster at doing it because um the because they don't have the plasticity available to them anymore uh because you need the AC by the way something that of course we know is all the neurom modulators and neurotransmitter systems these are all working together in a very complicated dance so you know dopamine is involved in saying like hey that was you know good bad better or worse than expected

but acetal colon is the thing that says hey um let's make plasticity available here so so it's a broader marker of relevance yeah is it like potential relevance is it something like that and is there a is there an emotional experience that's associated with that what I mean if you block dopaminergic receptors people lose posit of emotion yeah but what do they lose what what do they lose if if if if a cetal coleric transmission is blocked you know they sub don't answer that in humans that's partly why I can't figure out how that damn

I can't get a handle on on to understand that how that system functions yeah it's interesting because there's so many acline blockers that are used in animals for things but I I don't know what the emotional experience is for a human on that my guess if I were just pulling something out of a hat would be that they just feel like they don't care about this particular thing so for example let's say you take that's a major that's a major function caring oh and that is that's a weird that's a weird emotional condition because it's

it doesn't exactly have a veilance it's more like like does the feeling of this matters could you characterize that as positive or negative because it could matter in a negative way right it could matter in a positive way so it seems like that would be something like the broad category of potential sign significance what happens what happens to I to to pupilary diameter if acetal quality increases does it does do do eyes dilate I don't know I don't know good question but but just you know I'm trying to think through what it would feel like

imagine that you were trying to learn a new sport that you haven't played um you know pickle ball let's say um so you're we're both we're both learning the sport at the same time and for some reason it's really relevant to us but if one of us got a caline blockers my assumption would be that we feel like I just don't care about this thing you know I'm more interested in what's going on over there or something we wouldn't we wouldn't particularly care so it sounds like it's a broader marker of relevance okay well I'm

going to have to look that up and see if I can specify it more particularly okay so you talked about we had a bit sorry let me just give another example of that um you know okay so when somebody gets a stroke and let's say they get a stroke and they lose the function of their left arm their left arm is mostly paralyzed uh and they can do things with their right hand well so the way that you need to operate to get the left hand working again uh do you know the you know what

they do clinically to so what they do is what's called constraint therapy this is the single best move you take the right hand which is working well and you pin it down you strap some so that they're forced to use their left hand neity yeah exactly necessity that's relevant so now I want to get the sandwich to my mouth I use the left I need to get my zipper down to go to the restroom I have to use my left hand these are the sorts of that matter this is what causes brain plasticity relevance okay

and and if you strap down the functional hand and you used a coleric suppressor would that stop the person from that's exactly right and that seems to be would they still try or would they just stop trying ah I don't know I don't know what it is in humans uh when we use the right because you could imagine the acetal calling might mediate trying or intensity of effort duration or rate but you could also imagine that it would mediate capacity to learn if the practice was occurring you know what I think it wouldn't it wouldn't

directly be mediating the trying because I think what would happen is you would try it but you wouldn't have the plasticity that says hey something useful happened here so let's make changes to the motor cortex over here you just wouldn't have that so the system would stop trying that lent is approaching those meaningful 40 days leading up to Easter this year hallow has launched an incredible prayer challenge to help you embrace the core principles of this sacred time prayer fasting and almsgiving by joining Jesus in the wilderness through fasting and sacrifice you open yourself to

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and suffering Jesus's sacrifice on the cross opens the door to his love peace and eternal life join over a million others in prayer this Lent get three months free covering the entire lent and season when you visit hall.com / Jordan download the app and join the lent prayer 40 challenge [Music] today okay okay so back we had a bit of a I wouldn't call it a dispute but a slight difference of agreement in relationship to this model of personality and you talked about Rivals I mean rival is a narrative like metaphor right to to have

a rivalry is a rivalry between beings generally speaking wear but but I think there's something worth taking apart is cuz maybe you could say well if the Rivalry is primarily played out at an unconscious level then the metaphor of personality is not quite accurate and so I'm just trying to think through if that's true because if the systems are automated completely I wonder if they're automated I don't know if they would come replete with perceptions and thoughts exactly I have a suspicion that it's not as nii said that that each or he didn't say he

he implied it maybe that each one is coming with a personality or something but my my suspicion is that each one is reaching out to other spots like visual cortex like your lmic system like your frontal cortex when a network is dominant it's sort of pulling information and sort of constructing a personality well that's a good idea that's a good idea well that okay so that would account for the archaic the archaic conception of possession it's something like that right well obviously if if a drive comes to dominate your behavior it's taken possession of your

personality like clearly okay so that's so then you could imagine that there's okay so maybe it's something like this so maybe imagine in a motivated state that there's an automated core and that automated core isn't going to be accompanied by a tremendous amount of Consciousness but the more additional neural system it Aggregates around it yeah the more Consciousness it acrs right and that would partly be because it's actually building something like a novel structure it's got this automated core which we would consider the drive but then it's pulling in different elements of the to of

the totality of what's available and that would make it more and more personality like yeah that's right right in terms of deciding what to say next for example you know it's looking at the you know at your whole speech system wores and brokas and all these areas and saying am I going to say something cruel or kind or whatever but it's still using those basic mechanisms it's uh taking advantage of the machinery that's there and it just has uh the ability to draw on it differently than a different so I've been trying to in keeping

with this model of like superordinate aims that executive function could refer to to mediate conflict I've been trying to understand if there are principles by which those superordinate aims are constructed so that they're valid so what do you mean by valid well that's a good question um not likely to produce Conflict for example so for example here's an here's an idea so so you and I we could think of each other as a loose aggregation of potential motivated States but we can come to an agreement okay now then we could judge the quality of the

agreement I think by there's a variety of Standards we could say it's a higher quality agreement if it can sustain itself across a broader range of contexts so if we have a friendship which is a kind of contract or agreement and we can get along many different places and under many different situations then we'd think of that as a deep friendship so it's well-constituted friendship and then we could also imagine that if the Friendship maintained itself across time then it would be that's another indication of its validity right and then we could imagine a third

dimension would be if it was stable across cont text and stable across time and it improved well we implemented it that would be a third criteria that would be like that would be a good evaluation strategy for a good marriage it works everywhere it works for a long time and as you play it out it improves okay so then I've been trying to think through if there's a set of rules that obtains like there they'd be like principles of Ethics that bind those kinds of agreements so I'll give you an example so psj spent a

lot of time analyzing how children learned to play games with others and made friends okay so so the first rule of a game is something like both people have to want to play it okay then the next rule is something like you get a turn in the game and then I get a turn right so I have to sacrifice my turn to you but vice versa and that's a stable Arrangement now the reason we're willing to do that instead of me fighting to have the turn all the time is because it's a better game if

I get to play it with you so I'm okay so then you could imagine now if if we come to a voluntary agreement about the aim we unite our perceptions we unite our emotions and then we reciprocate okay now if we can do that once then we've established a precedent and if we can repeat that we have a friendship okay but then that implies that the Friendship is based like there's rules the aim has to be shared has the aim has to be voluntary the participation has to be reciprocal now PP showed this with rats

when they were playing because PP first of all took a kind of dominance approach to play he showed that if you took two juvenile rats and you paired them in an arena they'd work to play but that the rat that was 10% bigger across rats could reliably pin the smaller rat so then that sort of provided proof evidence for a dominance theory of play but then PPP realized that rats don't play once they're communal so then he paired them repeatedly and he found that if the big rat didn't let the little rat win at least

30% of the time the little rat wouldn't play anymore so you can see there that there's an ethos that's emerging that's B now the reason I'm I'm mentioning this is because you're thinking about neural networks as being the the rats and the the the kind of collaboration that neural networks work out through time that and across people right okay yeah so because you so I'm trying to figure out the preconditions for something like a stable social Community what works across time to mediate conflict and then what works across people and that's like a bounded world

so here's what here's what I think I think um so you have all these different tribes uh some of which are very primitive you know uh you know hunger and thirst and sexuality and so you've got all these different tries but you have more sophisticated drives too including various forms of short-term thinking versus long-term thinking you have these different Financial drives I was talking about with valuation or predicted emotional experience or social context you got all these different things going on um the way that they form these agreements through time they form these friendships let's

say I think that makes an integrated personality that's what that's what makes you you and me me is the way that we let these things win or lose in different circumstances in other W all unconsciously these networks have worked out ways of saying okay look here I'm going to let you in here and I'm going to do this and maybe maybe there's an advantage to letting anger win out in this moment you know I find that that works sometimes but in this other moment I know that letting compassion uh win out is going to be

the optimal thing for my marriage or whatever okay so there are these things but what what interests me is that no matter how integrated a personality we think we have we're constantly in Conflict I mean every moment of Our Lives we think oh I should you this or that or we're making decisions right this is what decision-making is about and um so there's a sense in which there's there's never a a stable scenario where we say okay look these these guys have figured out how to get along um what I find interesting is ways that

we can put ideas into place like the Ulisses contract um so are you fam with ulys so so okay um just as a you remember ulyses odys was coming home from the Trojan War and realized he was going to pass the island of the sirens and he wanted to hear the song of the sirens but he knew that like any mortal man uh he'd crash into the rocks and die so you remember what he did he filled his men's ears with beeswax he had them lash him to the Mast and he said no matter what

I do just keep on sailing okay what was happening here was that the Ulisses of sound mind way back here knew that the future Ulisses would behave badly when he passed the island yes he knew that there was no way he wasn't going to behave badly there so what he did is he made a contract with himself he said I'm going lash myself to the master that I can't do the wrong thing okay so this is what philosophers call 's contract and I'm fascinated by these because we use these in all kinds of ways in

our lives um and I actually one of my next books is about this because I think it's the most practical way when you're in a moment of sober reflection to think about okay who do I want to be and how can I establish ulys contract with myself yes yes that I can't break it's an unbreakable kind of contract yeah um and so I'll just I'll just give you an example of this um why were you driven why were you attracted to the terminology contract because it's not something you can break because it's not that Ulisses

said okay time me thing but leave a little string here that I can pull and let the ropes down or something it's that he was bound to that mased he was he was attached to it and could not get off the mased okay that's the important part so it's like a marriage contract yeah exactly but even more you know marriage contract you can break also but the key with uls's contracts is you really want to make them unbreakable here's just a couple examples um for example in um uh Alcoholics Anonymous the first thing they have

you do is clear all the alcohol out of your house because even if somebody feels like hey look I'm I'm done I'm not going to drink but I'll leave those things in case I have a party or whatever ever they know that on some you know festive Friday night or a lonely Sunday night or something you might okay so you get rid of it so that the Temptation can't be there or or with drug addiction programs first thing they tell you is look don't ever walk around with more than 20 bucks in your pocket because

even if you think you're over it at some point someone's going to offer you drugs and if you've got the money you might spend it so there's a million ways that we can make these kinds of contracts with ourselves and the reason it's important is because what we're doing is setting up some kind of higher order yeah ideal yeah and I know you think about this in terms of uh religion uh I think religion is this religious the religious Enterprise is the what would you say it's the establishment and Analysis and experience of those higher

order contracts I think that's a way of defining it so you can think of the higher order the contract the more religious like it is that's another way this is a definition by the way I don't know that I agree with the definition but um because let me think because all the UL contracts that I try to always set up in my life I don't think about them as being religious although they are I mean they're that's why it's a matter of definition right okay well so so so let me ask you a couple of

questions based on what you just said okay because there were I couldn't there were two ways you went as far as I could tell and I can't reconcile them so we started talking about games and you started talking about the manner in which these teams of Rivals interact and there was a suggest question there for a moment that there is something gamik about it that so that rival systems might be integrated into a higher order agreement which is essentially what a game is right I mean when two teams are competing on a playing field you

could say they're competing but they're also cooperating in that they're playing the same game like if the game degenerates into a fist fight a basketball game fist fight and a hockey fist fight are the same thing yeah right they're not basketball or hockey they're a fight okay so you can imagine a higher order agreement that has a okay so then the question would be is the mediation between Rivals best conceptualized as a game and and you point in that direction for a minute but then you switch to the UL the Ulisses contract so I'm wondering

like how would you contrast a game with a contract I think the contract is part of the game which is to say which is to say gosh I know I can behave badly in that situation so as one Twist on this game as a play in this game I'm G to put something in place so that I can't do it it forbids it it forbids it exactly it's a way of saying look I know I've got all these rivaling networks and I'm not going to get through this I like I know that right now I

feel like I'm not gonna drink or smoke or whatever somebody's trying to get or or okay so I I I've never had a drink or smoking problem but but one thing I uh do try to prevent is um you know I'm in a restaurant and let's say it's a a predefined meal they put a dessert down I want to have a taste of dessert but I don't want to eat the whole thing okay and what happens is as I'm sitting there talking to everyone I end up beating the whole thing like an idiot so what

I do is I take a bite or two and then I take the table salt and I cover the thing in Salt the chocolate cake um so that that's my ulys contract because I know that the Mei of three minutes from now is going to keep sticking my fork in it so I'm making a contract with myself that I can't break because now the cake is ruined um and so this is just one play in the game of dealing with these Bibles it seems to me that there's a deep analogy between that Ulisses contract and

and something like the rule of a game I mean if you if you set up a basketball game there are moves that are forbidden right and so you can think of games as enabling principles here's things you can do in the game but there's there's rules that are forbidding as well yeah is it with the ulyses con contract concept that you're looking at the rules of the game that are that forbid is that is that the fundamental concentration on the ulys contract side their limitations rather than enabling conditions because you have both in a game

right right things you can do and things you can't do every game's like that right success in business isn't just about offering an amazing product or service though that's certainly essential what truly sets thriving companies apart is having powerful Reliable Tools working behind the scenes to streamline every aspect of the selling process these are the systems that turn the complex challenge of reaching customers and processing sales into something that feels effortless and natural that's exactly where Shopify enters the picture transforming The Way businesses operate in the digital age nobody does selling better than Shopify they're

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I guess I think about it in terms of long-term versus shortterm networks in the brain and so how do I get those networks because you know we can image this in fmri we see these areas that are involved in long and short-term thinking so how do I get these guys to play together in the same game but in a way that aligns with who I want to be with my longterm well let's take that example because I think it provides a very concrete representation of the relationship between super ordinate and subordinate goals and future and

present yes okay so you already outlined the reasons to eat the chocolate cake right it's delicious and it's delicious because it is a source of energy and a high impact source of energy so there's reason to eat it and the reason is immediate and it's tied to immediate gratification but now you're so that's one game the game of immediate gratification and energy um acquisition but you're putting that underneath a large a higher order game okay so one of the questions we might ask is well why what game are you playing when you forbid yourself the

cake right what are you what's your aim then that game has to do with health has to do with you know uh keeping slim has to do with um you know all of the thing you know vanity all of the things that I want to make sure the kind of person I am who doesn't gulp down the entire chocolate cake right self-control discipline attractiveness Health right and so now now one of the things we might ask ourselves see this is what I was trying to get at you know two discussions ago trying to lay out

the preconditions for what constitutes a higher order game because one of the things we could ask is why prioritize the constraint over the eating like there's a reason for that because you value the constraint more now but but why why is the health you know you you you alluded to that you said well part of it future there's more future for example this is just part of the passage into maturity right we realize that it's a long game and so we get to we get to know that uh you know as kids we eat the

cake every time maybe we get sick for it uh and what we realize is that the things that we want for our lives are are a different category of things yeah and so these are part of the networks that are okay so you brought in maturity okay so that's well that that's that's an extremely interesting move and it seems to me to be precise and accurate because we could think of cortical development as maturation we could think of socialization as maturation okay so here here's some principles for socialization those are the same in a sense

you I take turns right so that means that I regulate my lower order immediate motivations communally right right but then there's another axis which is I regulate them in relation ship to the Future and the more mature you are this is a definition again you can tell me what you think about it the more mature you are the better you get at regulating the immediate in relationship to the future but also the local in relationship to the communal so if I'm really mature I'm going to sacrifice the present for the future and the communal and

and that's better that's a definition of better right so we're we're starting to lay out a taxonomy of value right in terms of conduct and in terms of perception I totally agree and and by the way you introduced this idea of you know thinking about the future and thinking about Community but I think we'd agree those are not orthogonal act at all exactly they point the same direction or similar directions I don't think there's any difference between your future self and a stranger I think they're the same thing because so here's here's an example of

that this is so cool I figured this out a long 30 years ago Psychopaths have no compassion but they don't learn from experience either and so that means that not only does the psychopath have no compassion for you he has absolutely no compassion for himself tomorrow and then you think oh well those are the same thing right there's no difference between those two things that's the because both why why well you're not feeling what your future self is feeling now anymore than you're feeling what someone else is feeling now like a normal person can a

mature person you might say can think of their future self and they can think of the experience of that self and it matters just like they can think of the experience of someone else and it matters the psychopath either can't or won't do that right but it's the same mechanism you said well there's there isn't a conflict between future orientation and communal orientation I don't think there is I think they're the same thing you know I I I I agree I think they're very similar thinking about a stranger and thinking about yourself for some reason

we have this we have this special attachment to our future selves so we do things like put money into an IRA uh we do all kinds of things that we're doing for our future future self our future self will be you know happy we imagine even though our future self will be unrecognizable to us you don't know who that future person is um and you're making all kinds of decisions in deference to yeah well that's so one of the that begs the question right which is what are the preconditions for people to form an alliance

with their future self and it is and you know it could easily be you tell me what you think about this I there was a psychiatrist very famous psychiatrist he used to be taught personality theory all the time and I can't even remember his name now but one of the reasons that he was taught personality classes is because he studied the development of childhood friendships like P but one of his hypothesis was that essentially that the close friendships that children develop in early childhood like a best friend a best friend was something like first of

all a practice trial for a long-term marriage but also the way that you learn to take care of your future self so that it was through taking care of someone who wasn't you that you developed the capability of making a relationship with something that was abstract and that that would transfer to your fut that's interesting yeah I'm not sure I'm not sure I would think you would need that piece I well that's the question I'll think about that further but here's what I would say it's the experience of time that children have that allow them

to think about time in other words in other words if you and I talk about about ancient Rome we're at an age where we can kind of think about 2,000 years and think about what that means an eighth grader learning about that in school really can't imagine 2,000 years much less imagine 50 years what that what that time or even next week exactly but but as you mature in the world you're able to think about time scales that you simply weren't able to before right so some of it some of it's directly experiential exact do

learn that if you do X today two days from now isn't so good and and you can make that connection and that wouldn't be intermediated by some other person right right so well there's no reason to assume that there aren't multiple sources of of of information that would mature you agreed agreed okay great so where we get then is maturation leads to an ability to think long term it's this this capacity to think about who do I want to be is something that requires experience and some amount of wisdom um and this is I know

that we share an interest in stories and and how this can set this can help us set an idea in our heads for hey that's that's who I want to be I hadn't thought about this because I you know my short-term networks have been having fun and I've been you know in elementary school and middle school and so on but now I'm really starting to think about this and what what impact I want to make in the world um anyway when you have that idea in mind even let's say let's imagine a person is religious

and really has established hey I want to be like this deity or you know this this role model of any sort there's always conflict though right because then you've got Temptations in front of you all around you and so there's always this rivalry I I only mentioned this going back 10 minutes because the issue of you know do these systems work out some sort of nice gameplay sort of but there's also the fact that they're always in Conflict you're just always dealing with this uh even when you have well that's that's also well maybe I

would say that even if you work out a harmonious game which is probably not a bad model for a well- integrated psyche yeah right it's a well- integrated game because you're not across purposes to yourself let's say there's enough novelty that's constantly being infused that conflict's going to emerge I mean even imagine you have a stable marriage y right but a new problem emerges with a child well that doesn't exactly mean that the marriage contract has been violated but it does mean that now you have a new complex situation to deal with where you might

say that not only is conflict inevitable in that situation you might say that it's desirable because now now imagine that you know your child is hit puberty or something and so like new problems emerge the truth of the matter is you actually don't know how to deal with those problems and so conflict would be useful there in so far as it's identical with diversity of opinion you know and then you can imagine your wife has a temperamental take on the problem and classically that would be she would be more compassionate and more upset and you

would be le more judgmental and less upset that's the classic male female dichotomy in terms of temperament but you can imagine that those are useful stances to begin the problem solving process too because it's a completely open question of whether or not the child would say needs a more stringent future oriented disciplinary structure let's say and to have that imposed or whether they need more careful understanding so that you can understand what the problem is there's no way of mediating that without conflict and so the fact of the conflict also wouldn't necessarily indicate that the

initial contract was faulty it's just that there you're never going to have a contract that'll deal with all possible novel situations hence possibly the reason for Consciousness that's right right and this allows us to go back and tie two pieces together which is that you know the the brains is really to burn things into the unconscious when it says oh I've got this I've got that this is a routine I've seen before right but the reason we're always conscious the reason the brain's always burning a lot of energy is because the world throws lots of

novelty at us and so despite all our best efforts every day is full of the unexpected and and and therefore we're always in these novel conflicts okay now you you you said something else too that I don't think I've thought about exactly before we we're talking about the different functions of Consciousness we would never presume that there's a single function although dancing on the edge of chaos is is not a bad yeah you know comprehensive shorthand Consciousness also seems to be the place where these visions of variant future play themselves out right so that's like

like that that's the theater of the mind and so you could imagine that if a new opportunity or crisis emerged you could Envision a variety of different Futures which would be a variety of different contracts or Solutions or people that you wanted to be and you play out those in the theater of the imagination that seems to be conscious and it's logical that it would be Consciousness if it's associated with novelty because these new response patterns to this new emergent reality they're not automatized they can't be that's right although I suspect that a lot of

our future simulation is unconscious because some amount of our future Sim is you know is something that we it's using the machine it's using the machine exactly yeah yeah definitely um and so we certainly can pull things up into Consciousness and think okay I really want to I really want to understand what it would be like if I did this and if I move to this other city and got this other job but much of the time we're just slamming things forward well then you you could make a rule with that or principle for that

which is the the deeper the crisis the less Auto automated circuitries at hand to deal with it that's a def definition of deep crisis right so well so for example like moving houses in the same city is not as complex as moving to a house in a new city yeah right and it's because more of your sub routines can be maintained if it's just moving within a neighborhood that's right right so and that's that see Carl friston the neuroscientist he's he's derived a pretty decent model of anxiety as an index of entropy and so right

right cool right right and so that would be anxiety as ropy and entropy as disruption of automized Auto automated sub let me make sure I can unpack that it's that if you're looking at a high entropy state where there's lots of possibilities then you have higher anxiety anxiety actually indexes that that's what it's for what well then but then the the the higher the degree of possibility the less reliable the automated systems that's almost by definition and by the way this goes back to what we were saying also about you know for example the tetris

player or let's just say I don't know let's say when you you play soccer as a kid did you play okay so when you first were learning how to play soccer again your brain if we could have measured it while you were running around on the field it's on fire because you're you're trying to figure out wait where's the ball where's everyone else you know it's all knees and elbows and you don't know what's going on okay a professional soccer player is a hundred times better than you but his brain isn't burning nearly as much

energy as the child trying to figure this out and so that's right he's in a much lower entropy state State exactly he's in a lower entropy State and so that's CU his movements more efficient and oh sorry but the reason the reason is because the child is trying to simulate all the possibilities the professional has sort of seen everything play out before yeah that's the key he's got the patterns but the the child has the high enty State because you know what if I try this what if I try that yeah and so on yeah

yeah and it's very localized too because when the child is starting to play soccer his field of attention is going to be like this big right he's going to be thinking how many different ways can I move my foot and that makes him a pretty spectacularly horrible soccer player because he's not paying attention to anything that's going on in Gretzky for example the hockey player one of the things he was renowned for and you could imagine this as a consequence of level layered expertise was that he had he was paying attention to what was happening

everywhere on the ice well why well because he didn't have to pay attention to skating he didn't have to pay attention to how he was holding his stick he didn't even have to pay attention to where the puck was on his stick because that was all automated so he can move up to higher and higher levels of exraction what he famously said is I I'm not thinking about where the puck is I'm thinking about where the puck is going to be right right well and you do that when you learn to drive for like as

you get to be a better and better driver you look farther and farther down the road it's also the case too they they've studied this with expert piano players who are playing with sheet music they look ahead of where they're playing yes right and so what they're doing in some sense I think probably what they're doing neurologically is disinhibiting automated subsystems and that's essentially so I can give you an example of that it it it it's an example that sort of reconciles the Free Will deterministic conundrum so if you do this this is a ballistic

movement you wrote about these in your book right so if I do this the lag time for neural transmission from here to here and back is longer than the duration of that movement so then the question is how do I control that movement and the answer is well I've automated this routine that which is why I can stop my hand because I can't stop it voluntarily right so what happens is I I have the routine at hand I disinhibit it and it runs runs automated now I have no free will during that ballistic movement yeah

and so what seems to happen with free free will so to speak is that as the hor as the Horizon of the future approaches Free Will dis disappears we we we devolve into automation as the present makes itself oh that's very interesting so here so okay um so a lot of what I've studied my career has to do with time our perception of time and uh the bottom line of course is that we live slightly in the past why because it takes time for singals to get you know uh processed and integrated right so when

signals hit my for example I used to play baseball and you know when you're swinging at a fast pitch um this all happens unconsciously the the best you can do as this ball is traveling from the mound to the plate is to adjust your swing up or down as you're already swinging but all this is happening unconsciously my experience has always been when I hit the ball I'm I become aware that I have just hit the ball and I say to myself throw down the bat and run right right um because it's already flying um

the reason being of course because it takes at least half a second before you get conscious awareness of anything the signals have to move around in your brain as you know signals very slowly in the brain about a meter per second on unmated axons maybe you know 10 times faster than on melinated axons and 10 it's 10 times faster yeah okay that's okay and what's interesting you know we've got big bodies right so you know if I touch your toe the Cal have to travel all the way up you know up your leg and up

your spinal cord to your brain um but here's the weird part you know if I touch your toe and your nose at the same time you'll feel those simultaneous and weird because how does your you know does your brain feel the signal from the nose and then say okay I'm just going to wait and see if anything coming up your eyes are closed yeah yeah that's weird yeah so here's the thing yeah yeah that's weird this by the way led me to a hypothesis some years ago that taller people live further in the past than

shorter people because your brain has to wait for all the signals to come together your vision your hearing your touch touch from your toes all this stuff to come together it puts together your conscious perception of what's happening right now and then slightly longer lag time slightly longer lag time if you're taller yeah it's a very funny hypo by the way so um yeah so we live a little bit in the past and during that time I totally concur we there can't be free will involved in any of the processing or or you know certainly

reflexes but also ballistic movements that we're doing there's just there's no possibility for free will to operate there if we do have free will the argument I made at the end of incognito is that you know there may be free will it's very difficult Neuroscience wise to to nail this question of if there is or not but if there is it's a bit player in a much larger system and so um you know you've got all this unconscious processing most of what's happening in the brain I think of the conscious brain is a broom closet

in the Mansion of the brain um I should say the conscious mind is a broom closet in the Mansion of the brain um with very little access to what's going on there may be free will but it's it's going to be a small player well well but I mean we could reconcile what we could we could integrate what we discussed earlier with a free will view because you could say and tell me what you think about this I mean obviously our choice isn't unconstrained we're not omniscient there's lots of things we can't do so even

if we're free will absolutists we're still playing within a confined domain but you can't you say given what we discussed like throughout this entire conversation that you choose what to automate I mean like you have like imagine this so you have a novel situation you you envision these variety of different Futures and there's some volunteerism in that but then you can direct your attention towards what you determin to practice right this doesn't answer the Free Will question though because if I choose this particular future we can still question whether I had free will to choose

that or if I rewound history a thousand times would I always choose but I guess the question then would be if that's the case why would it be useful to have the multiplicitous Futures make themselves manifest like what if there's no choice between them why have an array one argument for this is that when you simulate a future you then feel emotionally what that future feels like and you compare that to the next future the next future there obviously truth in that yeah and maybe you need to simulate each one in order to make your

evaluation but but the question is you know I say oh that future feels the best to me that's who I want to be in Long term but was it a free choice I I don't know just for the record I don't come down one way or the other on the free will cuz I don't I don't know well I think it probably we probably have the question formulated wrong in some fundamental way which is why it can't be resolved but it's also there's also likely such a constant play of indeterminacy and determinacy at every level

of decision that you actually can't parse them apart right because I think your argument that we lay out these different simulations and then we EV valuate them well that's obviously what you do when you go see a movie is like you're evaluating the decisions that different characters are making and you're feeling that and that is informative and you could think about that as deterministic but then with that argument you have the problem well the reason those simulations feel the way they do was because you chose the aim that you were using to inhabit while you

were doing the evaluation and so it just flips you into the problem right away again yeah that's right that's right and you said you were writing a new book yeah we're running out of time on this side so tell us I'd like to know where your interests are going and what your new book is about great okay well I I'm I'm running a couple of new books and um so one of them is called Empire of the invisible and this is about all the stuff that we don't see in other words I've always been fascinated

by this question of why do each of us think we know the truth and if we could just shout it on X and all capital letters enough everyone would come to agree with this everyone would see the wisdom of our point I seen firsthand that that isn't true exactly so everybody on social media knows the truth and on any side of the spectrum whether you're you know Dennison of wokan or Magan or whatever everyone feels like it's clear and my question is why do we all have such limited internal models where we think we know

the truth I'm saying this in a in a a way that's free of any political opinion I'm I'm speaking metap politically now um and so this is what Empire the invisible is about is how do we come to our internal models and and why do we take them so seriously when we well this is why friston's work by the way is so helpful well well if you if you understand at least in part that aim constrains entropy then you get some sense almost immediately why people cling so desperately to their Frameworks right it isn't just

that the framework lays out the pathway or specifies the perceptions yeah it restricts entropy and and well then let me just unpack that for the listener it's that when you say okay like this is my view I've got this then the uncertainty is reduced and yeah you've got yeah to almost nothing well and then there's actual physiological consequences of that because what happens if you especially involuntarily enter a high entropy State you start burning up future resources at at you you burn up resources that could be conserved in the future in the present and what

that actually does is age you right so that's that's an elevate a chronically elevated stress response in response to additional uncertainty that's right exactly one of the main goals of the brain always is to reduce energy expenditure of course on the on the immediate time scale yeah of course y of course so that's the other thing that happens too is that and this is I think the other side of the emotional um uh landscape so a a specified and constrained aim reduces entropy that's that's very that's like I think that's the crucial issue issue but

it also sets up the framework within which hope is possible because to the degree that hope is dopaminergically mediated right it's a consequence see friston actually had a unified theory I he told me about this when I interviewed him because I had worked out the anxiety entropy Theory with my lab in a separate paper but he said something that I didn't know at all dopaminergic pleasure is also an entropy reduction phenomenon and this is why it's so cool so imagine that you have your aim your goal and now you can compute the energy required to

get there okay now that the the farther you away from their goal the more uncertainty there is in in the pursuit now if you take one step toward your goal and you do that successfully you get a mark of positive emotion from that that's a dopam energic kick but that does indicate an entropy reduction yeah so both positive and negative emotion regulation are associated with entropy reduction oh lovely no kid well that's a key thing to know when you're thinking why are people so glued to their World Views it's like well because their positive emotion

is dependent on and the regulation of their negative emotion it's like oh okay and it's a positive feedback loop because once you have your point of view on something then of course we know about confirmation bias in other ways where you seek data that that merely validates and you ignore the data that speaks against it you you can see that given what we talked about with regard to perception you can see why that's the case once I spend specify an aim what I'm going to see are things that move me towards the aim that means

the contradictory information not only is irrelevant should be irrelevant like if I'm trying to walk across the room I shouldn't be attending to every potential obstacle that could conceivably exist yeah right I've already simplified things so the obstacles aren't even there right exactly by the way which makes me want to come back to a point that you mentioned about socially seeing people as friends or foes in fact the way we see most people in the world are strangers we don't need to worry about exactly irrelevant most things are irrel exctly most things are irrelevant yeah

yeah and thank God for that yeah exactly so that's analogous here um so um hallucinogens seem to blow that into pieces by the way that's what they do is they theya pay attention yeah exactly right yeah yeah yeah you pay attention everything becomes relevant so that's that's the on inspiring element of the experience but it's also very very very high entropy yeah right right and you know what I was going to say that this also ties it back to another thing about maturation maturation as who is it I think it was Fitzgerald who said is

the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind at the same time so so what we're trying to do always is get our our aim to reduce the entropy our world view but you know as we mature we say okay look it could be this on the other hand could be that and the ability to hold that and not have that to have a slightly higher entropy and not have that be stress to us um I don't know that I have kind a bad that's not a bad definition of a kind of a true confidence

right yeah right and well but and it it's also the it is the model of sophisticated thinking because one of the one of the things you do when you think is voluntary enter into a higher entropy State because to really think something through is to allow internal conflict to manifest itself everything the different ideas you have are different manifestations of of different aims yeah and so when you think this is what we're trying to train people in University it's like be resilient in the face of voluntarily confronted entropy at least on the cognitive side that's

great and maybe instead of think we could call it something like reconsider because it's I mean there's a I only say this because thinking is sort of a a term that might have too much semantic weight on it but but reconsider meaning okay I've already considered this I know exactly how to think about it low but now I'm going to reconsider this I'm going to think about what if I what if I'm wrong about this what if it's a totally other bottle yeah well so there's also evidence this is very cool too there's evidence that

if you do that involuntarily the entropy state is higher than if you do it voluntarily and the evidence is very profound it's very profound and so if you take a stance of voluntary confrontation with conflict the stress consequence is much minimized if over when it happens voluntarily that's partly why exposure Works in in behavior therapy so if you have someone who's traumatized and they're involuntarily exposed to a trigger they get worse but if they voluntarily expose themselves they get better right even though the you know the stimulus so to speak is the same the the

and I think it's it has something to do with a high order meta narrative like the highest order Mar meta narrative should be something like I can contend successfully with maybe with entropy it's certainly with chaos that's the sort of creature that I want to be that I should be yeah right right because then when it comes up you don't don't have a reaction to it yeah exactly oh that's interesting and I imagine this comes up a lot because people are involuntarily confronted with their let's say their political views often there's a whole social component

to that which is I'm getting challenged by this person maybe in front of other people that sort of thing and so there's all this other stuff that comes into play but if you get to sit your the piece of your own home and think you know what if I'm wrong what if the other Pary point on this bill is what would that look like what would that look like yeah that's a much calmer situation yeah well the the social element of that is is also an entropy issue as far as I can tell because imagine

that this took me a long time to parse through so the higher you are in a hierarchy social hierarchy the lower entropy your state your connection networks are better your shelter's better your security is better like that's all part of being higher in a hierarchy okay now the question is what gives you the right to that position and the answer to that is something like the accuracy and your accuracy in View and your competence right if it's a functional hierarchy okay so now I come along and challenge you okay so part of that I'm going

to turn cause internal distress in the manner that we described but I'm also questioning the validity of your grip on the position in that hierarchy so imagine a faculty meeting where you make a presentation or a professor makes a presentation and a firste graduate student stands up and issues a successful challenge now some of that's ID ideational and you might say well maybe he's got a better Theory but some of it is a challenge to the validity of the fact that you're higher in the hierarchy than he is absolutely right and that you know that's

played out right yes right so yeah yeah so that's also an entropy issue even the sociological element of it yeah yeah I'm always interested in these old uh you know the physicist the early 20th century you know Einstein was giving a presentation and I'm afraid I forgot if it was I think it was Heisenberg who Challen a young kid challenged him and Einstein said you know I think you're right he went home and worked on the problem for five days and came back but I'm just you know these stories of that kind of Challenge and

and Einstein had you know a very mature reaction right right well that I think a fair bit of the uh what would you say the the the fundamental psychological necessity of something like hero mythology is the inculcation of the attitude that you just described as characteristic of Einstein it's like here's a challenge it's like I can handle that yeah I don't have to get defensive it's not going to throw me off maybe there's opportunity that's the dragon and the Treasure by the way maybe there's opportunity here in this challenge right that's a very high order

mat it takes very high order maturation to realize that in every challenge there's opportunity right right right and that's something you can practice it's an attitude that you can practice yes okay we should stop this we're going to move to the Daily wires side what are we going to talk about on The Daily wire side I think we should delve more into your book and you have some ideas yeah my brain plasticity we didn't talk about that at all but I've got all kinds of cool stuff to talk about there okay so everybody who's watching

if you want to join us on the daily wire side for an additional half an hour please feel free to do that part from that thank you very much for your time and attention thank you very much for coming here to Scottdale today much appreciated for teaching our course on the Peterson Academy which is is got a a lovely trailer which I think we're going to incorporate into this podcast actually and um uh I know that the reaction to your course has been very positive so far and so we're thrilled about that you can catch

that on Peterson academy by the way thanks for your time and attention everybody [Music]