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Episode 106: Dreams, Meditation, Listener calls in
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all right good evening everybody it's Nate G here with dr. Doug Lyall dr. Lyle how you doing today good good how are you doing doing pretty good I got a little inspiration over the last few weeks I some friends and I went to check out an exhibit in Los Angeles called the Museum of failure ha oh my god that's beautiful tell me about that it was great it got me thinking about the ego trap that you've so so awesomely talked about here it basically it's an entire museum dedicated to famous flops there's a little blurb about each project product and why people think it failed yeah it's really cool too if for example I didn't know that there was a flavor of Oreo cookies called swedish fish oh my goodness can't imagine why that failed but yeah yeah yeah but what was interesting is a lot of these products they were failures in the marketplace but they led to the to to new inventions and to new products that were even better and so like that they were failure but only from the perspective of that day and age yes fabulous what a grand concept that is I got to go down there and see that that's terrific yeah it was interesting there was a wall there to where people who were going to the museum could write post-it notes about their own failures yeah and there was a couple I saw it took a pictures of you know there was some you know failed relationships or as one person who went to a dress and it was they went to 900th fourth street rather than 400 ninth Street and that was pretty funny got it yeah the one that was most amusing was getting a Justin Bieber haircut at age 30 okay then and then unfortunately why with the truth and the men someone had to bring up NBA Finals and they said the Golden State Warriors who blew a three to one lead and be a finals so I thought of dr. Lao it was yeah thank goodness LeBron got it done so I just made a bunch of enemies but what do I care especially wrong ride yeah but you didn't warm your heart to see Cleveland win one then then oh well too bad all right what do we got going out yeah it was a fun experience just showed me that even if I try my very best and I still elderly fail there's still a chance I might make it into an entire museum that's correct there you go there's a silver lining out there all right room today we're going to be talking about Dreams meditation question about abstract thinking a little bit about Buddhism and we've got a listener who's been listening ever since the very beginning and he will be sent dr. Lisle a note he sent me a note to read to dr. Lyle all right so dear dr. Lyle I've been listening to your podcast since the beginning and heard all the episodes and in some cases have listened to more than one at your request I also read The Selfish Gene and just like you I was captivated by the simplicity and clarity of this idea and because of you I've been experimenting with the principles of evolutionary psychology in an educational setting I teach structural engineering design courses and in the past I realize now that I was unwittingly promoting an ego trap by suggesting that certain concepts are just plain easy so if listening to you I've made it a point to let the students know just how difficult these concepts are and how even I the professor can make some mistakes now I emphasize practicing problems and learning from mistakes much more than achieving perfection dr. Lyle this has changed the entire dynamic of my classroom students are more willing to ask questions discuss what it is they don't understand and it's exciting to me to see them feel relaxed and actually focusing on learning rather than avoiding making mistakes at any cost my motto to them now is if you don't make mistakes you don't need me here enjoy making mistakes even more than getting it right because you'll learn more fantastic what a fantastic letter I'm just I'm just indebted to this man I assume if he's teaching structural engineering I'm just mix-up shit that's right I won't go to Berkeley anytime to you and they won't they won't hang me the but this is uh this is just wonderful I just did that just that's a very very heartwarming tale and I'm just delighted to hear it thank you thanks for reading that and thank you very much for writing that Michael thank you for writing that in there was a last paragraph I actually didn't read those I'm curious if you have any comments or suggestions and appreciate that you could talk about how the principles of evolutionary psychology applied to education and what else can be done in a classroom to create a better learning environment let's see the I mean I think he's got the gist of the most important issue the so he's got it and he will tinker with this thing and he'll you know and as people learn about this they're learning about this now it's starting to leak its way into indication in education through Carol Dweck's work of mindset which is a similar similar concept even though it's not she's not very clear about why but that's okay she's she's got the dynamic right or pretty much right the but there will be there will be a lot of little fiddling because there's a little bit art to this because we want to we don't want to tell people essentially that something's impossible because we don't want to actually lower their perceived self-efficacy that they could do it so we want we want them to think that maybe they can maybe they can't but maybe they there's a good chance they might not be able to but they might be able to ie this is just where he's at he's telling us this is difficult it's hard for me I make mistakes this is beautiful it it it waves a red flag of attack that I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by really trying hard and and this is what you want you want the you want the price of failure to be as low as possible and you want the price success to be as high as you can make it and that that's actually the fundamental mathematical dynamic that is actually in this equation so the only thing that I would would see in education would be the the ability to to organize things for example on a computer where where they would be highly individualized so you could you could be hitting the individual at the level of difficulty that they can handle and that then we would be challenging them and having like you could actually bottle this potentially with feedback systems where you know unfortunately people would figure it out but they might not you you could you could you could have feedback systems they would actually say well we would expect you know you have an X percent chance of doing this and ie that you might not be able to I think that would fire people's people love to be able to beat the curve and so I think that sort of thing to systematize it on an individual basis would be the next step in something that education could adopt so anyway that's that's just fabulous and that that concept goes so counter to the ways I can't tell you how many how many parents and grandparents have come up to me shaking their heads when they hear this and they're first they feel embarrassed and defensive that they have done it so differently that they've been telling their children or grandchildren that they're great they could do anything and they walk them right into this trap and so when they when they understand and see clearly for the first time that there's a completely different way of doing it it's it's disorienting and bizarre and then I I just love that this that this man this professor took this on experimented with it saw the logic and then it's had the results that he can see with his own eyes it's a thing of beauty and we want we want everybody to know that that is the potential for human excitement in joy in learning and and you know and struggling that it is a great experience to do that if we do not have the price of failure too high that's a that's a critical lesson that comes out of this fabulous fantastic all right well we are going to move on to the questions and very first question dr. Lau what's the purpose of dreaming ha well that's a that's a it's a great question there's there's been many theories about this over the decades I would say most people at this point would say that it could be could be several things going on at the same time so it might not be one thing I will I will tell you what I think is likely to be part of this part of the case and then maybe not maybe not part of it first of all it would appear that animals dream so the fact that animals dream dream will tell you that that it's very likely that this is a real basal mechanism of mine that you know there's some serious housekeeping of some kind that needs to be done so it's thought that connections in in memory systems possibly pruning out things that are worthless there could be a system in here where dreaming dreams are involved in this dreams themselves could be what we're going to call epiphenomena in other words they could be something that that happens naturally as a result of some of the housekeeping processes that are taking place in that specific type of sleep and that that dreams are or simply they're like smoke to a fire they're the result of the fire they're not they're not the cause of anything now I'm not sure about that I it wouldn't surprise me if that turns out to be true it may or may not be true the one thing though that the dream state appears to be associated with and that it appears to be associated with an increase in potential creativity so let me let me give you a let me give you an example of how this would work the during the the dream state of the the brain is getting a set of regular blasts of acetylcholine which is a neurotransmitter and this this thing appears to be disrupting brain function on a systematic basis and what what is quite possible that's happening is the following and that is that that when you are awake of course you are the purpose of your mind is ultimately to solve problems and those problems are problems of choice the the choices that you're making what you're attempting to do is you're attempting to evaluate all of the available evidence with respect to all factors in your life and your job is to run a extraordinarily complex cost-benefit analysis on which values you should be taking action and and which values you should not be taking action on in other words you're just you are designed to set priorities for effective action in service of the genetic code the you don't know this of course you're just you just do it and what you're doing is you're attempting to feel as good as you can feelings are devices both positive and negative that are incentives and disincentives for for actions that would be conducive to genes survival so the world was I so what the the brain that's the job of the brain so we wouldn't necessarily expect that the brain would stop doing that job at night but it might have to do some things it might have to do a great deal of maintenance behavior and we know that the tremendous amount of maintenance behavior for the body is taking place in sleep the and so it's also true that we would believe that there's a we actually know that there's a great deal of maintenance behavior that's taking place in the brain so the rain is effectively cleaning up there's a lot of byproducts of the neural activities during the day that build up inside the tissues of the brain and they need to be flushed out of there for the brain to work efficiently so the so that the process of sleep is involving a great deal of housekeeping of the most sophisticated computer that you know the universe as best we know has ever seen now it's a very complicated apparatus that you that sits inside your skull and its capabilities are are out breathtaking in terms of what what this thing can do now the now the next thing I have to say is this you can be you can be working on a problem when you are awake and you can be stuck there there might be a very important problem your mind can sniff that there are significant evolutionary payoffs and it's got your attention and so your mind is working on this even when it doesn't when you don't know that you're working on it there was when you're conscious of other things you're talking to somebody about you know the leak under the faucet but you're you are still working on some I don't know some physics problem if you're a physicist that brain is still working on that physics problem even though you are not consciously aware of that we know that this is true now it's going to turn out that it is a possibility that when you get stuck that the basic logical operations of the brain are hitting a wall so they can't figure it out but what we might need is a completely different way of approaching the problem or actually to scramble all the known evidence and to see if we can put it back together in a new way so it appears that this is what dreaming does so dreaming by disrupting the neuro chemistry of the brain it essentially causes all the little pieces of the puzzle to be swirled around the coffee table if this was a jigsaw puzzle and you were being stumped so if we start moving the pieces around randomly then we might suddenly have an insight because we see things now that are get juxtaposed together that were not logically related to each other before and so we were not seeing an essential connection that would allow us to see the solution to the puzzle now this all sounds very exciting and elegant and dreamlike and etc but it looks like it's true so the there's an experiment done I can't remember when it was in the early 2000s this was neuroscientist did this and they had people attempting to solve some some problem some kind of a math related problem that was that required some kind of leap of insight but it actually looked like it was boring I don't remember how this was done but what I do remember was that when they allowed people to fall asleep and then come back and try to solve the problem they solved the problem much faster so this uh I don't remember the details I can dig it out if somebody wants to write to me I'll find it somewhere the but the it was very convincing and the what was also convincing was learning about these glass of acetylcholine that that are essentially disturbing all these elements all over the brain so this looks like a a solution when you get stumped by a problem is to essentially swirl around all the existing data points all the existing evidence swirl it around and mix it up because if you do that there's a chance that the solution will arrive spontaneously and this this looks to be probably a useful component of dreaming that maybe for all we know unique to human psychology I don't know so anyway there's that so that's that's what I know maintenance activity you know the psychodynamic you know stuff forget that the this is you know we're trying to figure this out from the standpoint of Neurobiology what would be the purpose of this and I so we have to look at it as possible epi' phenomena we have to look at it is an epiphenomena related to a bunch of house clean cleaning and would he call it maintenance activities but there it may be something else it may be that this is a way to help a person who is stumped by a problem by conscious analysis to find a leap that allows them to solve a problem that they wouldn't ordinarily solve very efficiently if at all so there you have it fascinating dr. Lao do you have any recurring dreams or any dreams that you can think of that you have yourself I have I have a few I have a recurring dream that that there's a class usually Spanish that I have to take in order to get my PhD and I have I've known about the class and I started the class but I have flaked out and we are near the end of the semester and I haven't even gone and I'm not yeah I'm not going to be able to pull this thing off and the whole the whole doctor is on the line Wow yeah so that that's the the some also had similar ones I think with a math class too but mostly it's Spanish and so anyway then I then I'll wake up just this enormous relief that uh I've got I got my degree which no I've had for you know twenty five years so yeah so that that's kind of an interesting thing where there's a for some reason in there the that that that that is still related to the the you know what I actually have thought through what this could be related to I flaked out on a fight final tiny little thing that I was do for my PhD so it was so trivial you can't even imagine it it was a little exercise that they instituted my year that would have taken me about an hour to do it was ridiculous and defending your dissertation of course the major university is an enormous task and so by the time I had gone through all the trouble preparing for two years to defend this thing I then defended it at the University of Virginia and everybody shaking my hand great job la blah blah when you get to publish all this not everything and there's this one little one-hour task but I spilled and I hit it so every now and then I think that dream creeps in there too but I have a feeling that that that strange little thing about the Spanish may be somehow related to the fact that I never did that task so there you go I'll go to my grave and I I will never need would you consider that an open loop yes I think that's an I think that's an open loop and now I should have done it but I'm now glad I didn't because it enables me to to look at that curiously as a potential of the human mind to set up a standing order for something you know we can see that it could have been important because they could have come back to me a month later and said hey you know what are you doing supposed to get this done but by that time I already knew that all the paperwork had been filed and my dissertation was bound it was all bad ha ha so there you have it but it would still make sense that that it was a rather important thing to flake out on and anyway so it's still lurking in there in my memory system all right let's go onto something more interesting else we got all right dear dr. Lyle what is meditation and does it actually quote work can I use it to reduce anxiety or quote clear my mind well I don't know much about this the the you've got sort of states of consciousness you've got different states of consciousness that can be sometimes quite remarkable so if you've ever run in anybody that's sleepwalking you know that's quite entertaining the so your your mind has sort of different states that it can be in so it's not it's not just conscious and unconscious there's a there's a variety of experiences that people can have based on what's happening in the brain at that time so meditation is this thing that people do to try to get real quiet and they're trying to in theory empty the mind which is course absurd it can't be done so the mind is a is a never-ending process of neurological activity that goes on from from before you're born till the moment you die the so you can try to clear your mind but you can't do this your your mind is designed to be constantly processing sensory inputs and to be running cost-benefit analysis on alternative courses of action for genes survival so you're not going to stop that from happening now what might you do well you might find little might find little levers in there where you can you can hit things that you can you can essentially learn to alter neurotransmitter activity so the so I believe that you can go in there I'm confident that I can do this that I can go in there and activate endorphins so the I learned this by having a very severe painful condition and I actually learned something through some miracle I learned how to activate the endorphin mechanism it doesn't mean I can flood myself with heroin but I can I can definitely make a substantial impact on pain within you know within 30 to 60 seconds and I'm not the only one that does this I mean this is a this is a well known phenomenon now the so meditation meditation can can do something it's probably something similar and as a result some people that's that I have friends of mine that will meditate and they will do this because they're hyper conscientious high achieving competitive net cases that are perfectionistic and their mind is busy as a bee hive and they're always feeling the conscientiousness like it's not quite good enough it's not quite done enough they're not quite ahead they have to worry about the sanad so these are unusual people these aren't normal people and I believe that if we were to look at meditation and and its popularity in the West I think a lot of this is is derived from probably highly intelligent highly achieving highly conscientious people that are looking for some relief and so they give it a lot of cachet and I think they give it a lot of cachet because they themselves can you know can benefit now I don't think that that most people are going to benefit much of anything from this practice but if you happen to be a highly conscientious you know high anxiety human then you may benefit quite a bit my friends of mine that do this do benefit they yet essentially dials down their anxiety a little bit it gives them a relief for a period of time it you know I think some of them will claim that it will come come help them all day long which wouldn't surprise me in other words if there's an endorphin release that's taking place from doing this just in the same way that if you let's say you swim for 40 minutes in the morning you can feel the endorphins from that process for hours and it can kind of dial down your anxiety and make you feel more relaxed so in the same way meditation can get undoubtedly you know do this type of thing so for people that that experienced a lot of anxious tension and I don't hopefully they know I'm being friendly an avuncular why I call them hyper conscientious nutcases these people tell me valuable people they're usually outstanding people in because of the super high conscientiousness but they that that very conscientiousness that drives them to excellent achievement also doesn't allow them to relax very well and so as a result I think meditation is often you know helpful for these folks for the rest of us I'm Way more flaky than this so I don't experience any of this kind of a pity so the but the same similar process I believe is is what I have found with with the the pain management I don't have this the same pain now but there was a period of time a few years ago where I had a I got injured in a sports accident and I had acute pain that required me to find some solution and this was this was the this was a solution that worked which was a meditative leg state so that that's my long-winded answer to can at work the answer is yeah it can do things and if you happen to be somebody that that the needs that need something this might be something that could be useful for you fantastic all right well this leads right to the next question regarding meditation in general doctor while I recall you likening the inability to change your personality or feelings to the inability to change one's response to pain however if meditation can allow people to overcome pain and the startle response etc wouldn't this suggest that newer parts of the brain could be altered as well oh god I don't even know if I can follow this question so people gonna have to read that whole thing to me again so I can actually see if I can understand what they're trying to say do it again start from the top dear dr. Lyle I recall that more like dying okay if I go ahead all right I recall you likening the inability to change your personality and feelings to the inability to change one's response to pain slow down okay the inability to changing your personality and feelings okay well the let's be careful here your personality is your personality your feelings can change dramatically depend upon circumstances all right now so then as changing your response to pain well you can't change your response to pain in the fact that if I take out a ball-peen hammer and hit your big toe you're going to have the same responses people are going to have worldwide so we're not going to change that now so so far I'm not quite sure what they're saying keep going okay so the meditation can allow people to overcome pain okay now meditation is going to meditative like state or an altered state of consciousness or the ability to define mental and physical mechanisms basically find mechanisms to where it is that you can alter you know neural activity yes so meditation meditative like things I wouldn't call it medication per se but meditative like processes like hypnosis etc there are these altered states and gimmicks that a person can learn that can they can alter their pain experience that is true okay so go ahead clap be able to overcome pain the startle response etc wait a second I don't think you're going to overcome the startle response so now that that isn't going to happen so the startle response is a super rapid automated mechanism that you will not overcome so right I'm not sure where they got the idea that you could do that go ahead this suggests that quote newer end quote parts of the brain could be altered as well wait a second the startle response is not going to be altered the pain mechanism is not to think that it's an older part of the brain and you older and newer this doesn't make any sense so we're now leaping into a territory of new versus old parts of the brain doesn't make any sense to me so there's so I'm not sure what they're saying so keep going keep going from here that was it that was the question that was it okay yeah so I'm not even sure what they're asked so is there are there ways to I don't even read the whole are you locking the top and I'll see if I can get a question out of it okay yeah this isn't my question but but maybe maybe what they're trying to say I can kind of take a guess at this okay is if if you're if the meditation can a meditative techniques in a meditative state can allow people to overcome a feeling which is pain okay does this suggest that and they probably use completely wrong terminology but but I think it is does this suggest that someone who has for example maybe is extremely disagreeable may change the way they feel you know they don't feel angry or upset as often yeah yeah yeah good okay good good for you here's the deal that the meditative state can can temporarily change what's happening so you could be very very stressed and anxious and in a meditative state you could go in there and sort of alter these levers a little bit and change some neurotransmitter flow you could have a there's there's places you can go in imagery so your your brain can start looking for knowledge structures to say like well really how bad is it where are we really are we being attacked by lions bla bla bla bla bla so there's aren't we really safe I you know I'm now aware that I'm actually in my living room on a nice you know warm rug and everything is safe and I'm in the back of the cul-de-sac and I really don't have to do that much and it's not no disaster happening I am healthy etc yeah we might try to clear our mind but you can forget it you're not clearing anything but what can happen is is that you can start to access knowledge structures that start to the change what's going on you know which which neural circuits are being activated in the brain and you can activate neural structures that are going to result in reducing your anxiety and creating a greater sense of pleasantness okay now that is clear that's not magic and meditation you can also have that by looking at your bank account and it turns out there's five grand more in there than you thought there was okay so the information changes things and so as a result you learn to look for information inside your head that puts your life in a better perspective and reduces some of the anxiety as a result good for you and you can call that meditation you can call that cognitive therapy you can call whatever you want and if you do it real still and it's all quiet and who knows there's some nice you know rhythmic music playing in the background or not who knows what tell how this works but the bottom line is is can you access some some data analysis that actually calms the system down and if that's true you know are there are there other levels that can be hid for example that might reduce your pain yes reduce your anxiety yes okay now is that going to carry forward when you wake up and the phone rings and the IRS says hey you know we're woods you know when you want to schedule your your audit for it's like trust me that same highly conscientious individual is now back up at 100 miles an hour we didn't change their personality with us so the the injury that I had I could knock down that pain for a while but get up and move around regretted pain comes back okay so the these what we're talking about is we're talking about shifting temporarily the state of what where the brain is at that you can do that can be relieving that can be useful we're not changing anybody's personality and we're not yet so forget about it not going to happen so if somebody that like wants to meditate to to become less disagreeable good luck now I don't expect there's going to be any any huh I don't expect that there's going to be much evidence to where they get very far with that fantastic go ahead all right we got a question that we got a caller on hold as well so okay I talked a while is there and okay go ahead take a caller all right yeah just one so here dylan welcome to the program Dylan hey guys hey how you doing from Phoenix longtime listener yeah so I'm good thank you so I've got a question on I'm not going to ask my original question because now we're on this other thing okay but uh i I've never thought to ask you about this dr. Lisle but it was actually a really significant part of my growing up and it's sort of this altered state of mind thing mm-hmm but my mom told me that when I was only a few days old I would I would lay on my stomach and lift my head up and bang my forehead over and over and over slowly in the cradle man as I got older when I started actually being conscious and you will yeah I was continuing to do this all through grade school and and I was sometimes I get up on my knees this is my book my bedtime ritual yeah and I would get on my knees and I would repeatedly bang my head over and over and over sometimes rarely to the point where I would like have some soreness on my forehead even had some redness you know yeah but uh and then I'd finally fall asleep and that was the end of it and also as I was a little bit older not as a baby I would also lay on my right side and I'd roll over onto my back and then back onto my right side over and over and over until I finally fell asleep yeah and I never realized really what was going on during that time until I was a little older I was certainly not meditative because it was quite the opposite I was not calming my mind in the slightest I was deep I was deep in thought like playing out every scenario of a possible situation like halting through problems while I was rolling back and forth mm-hmm and sometimes I do it with like loud music on when I got older like when I was in college where I do it with loud music um and then finally I just stopped doing it maybe when I met my wife where I had more serious girlfriends like between college and when I met my wife I'm not sure what it was but over ten years ago I just kind of stopped doing it but and now the whole hyper conscientious saying I'm trying to meditate but I'm kind of you know kind of like a person struggles with switching to a whole food plant-based diet there's right the extinction curve and it's really hard to get into it and so I've it's always fallen off and I never got to a state where I was actually able to calm my mind which is funny because what I was always trying to do as a kid was make my mind race race race through all of these things and solve all these B problems that I was working on and now I don't have that outlet if you will and I've looked to meditations is sort of like but incorrectly because clearly I'm not searching for the same meditative state so have you ever heard of that what was that well do you like the headache go away work yeah yeah I actually yet I know that this is a this is a thing that's been observed in people so there's no you this is not a unique thing to you and there's probably something is probably known about it what strikes me about this is that this is going to be potentially something involved with a problem of competing neural circuits so your your your mind has think of it as a massive international corporation and it has little companies all over the world thousands of them and it has companies that are actually owned some other other companies so it's hierarchical some of them there are localized companies in Shanghai that over 50 companies in Shanghai and the this think about that but they all ultimately all of the the processes are ultimately you know there's balance sheets reported to the head honcho I don't know where he lives I'm going to call London okay so all over the place there there is cost-benefit analysis being run on every bit of land labor and capital that is involved in the economic problem of this company which is to optimize rate of return okay and so as a result a local company says gosh if we'd only have new tile floor in here we're pretty sure we could make more sales I think that that would really be worth it okay and some other company says we needed 12,000 square-foot warehouse because we've got a whole bunch of used tires that are coming in here and we could turn those into rubber and we could you know make spacesuits out of them I don't know so the point is is that you have a bunch of localized circuits and ultimately you've got at the top you've got a decision maker that is basically saying this is what we're going to do okay and two seconds later all the database changes a little bit and then he says this is now what we're going to do about this and the most important thing the system is designed by nature to try to get the most important thing to the attention of the organism that's how it's built it's built with hierarchical structures able to actually organize value assessment mechanisms to try to on earth to figure out what on earth is the most important thing that we should be doing with our time at this instant that is a problem of phenomenal complexity now the you can imagine that there could be there could be competition essentially between neural circuits the guys in the Philippines are screaming for new ships so are the guys in Athens they both believe they've got a case okay they believe that the next billion dollars in revenue ought to go to them because they could need a new fleet of ships the there's noise all over the system you can see how the system is trying to find its way to distribute the neural energy that it has and to make these competitions you can even see the possibility that that it would it could see you can see that it needs to distract itself away from certain things so that it can actually concentrate more effectively on others okay this is why it is that you might bang your head because you might roll from side to side that it would be a way to actually quiet down or drown out it's like white noise so that some other competing demands cannot get work their way up and steal consciousness away from what the system is suspecting is the most important problem okay conviction so that that's what I think is happening so that that's where I think that probably comes from well sometimes yeah go ahead what were you thinking I was going to say now sometimes with me not doing that yeah I wonder like I can I see myself in situations like I'll be at dinner and I'll kind of zone out of conversations more because I haven't spent down time like altering my state of consciousness into this thing that you're explaining and so like is it is it causing me to be less present because I've got because I've put in less hours at you know thinking enrolling if you will because I do it anymore yeah I don't know but you're if you're not present at dinner it's because your mind is wandering off trying to find the most important thing and it's not at the dinner yeah that's what your mind is doing it is relentless seeking the most valuable thing that it can be doing so if I start getting boring boom your brain starts drifting off because it's like wait a second you got to start trying to figure out what's the most important thing for you to be paying attention to right so this is this is how the mind works so it it isn't shocking to find that there might be some funny looking behavior that could result in actually superior focus as far as the brain can figure out in terms of its ability to actually solve problems better if we bang bang our head or crack our knuckles you know I'm saying or and or famously Aristotle would walk peripatetic okay so this is the the I think it was him hope I got that right the but that's the idea is that get get some circuits you know essentially busy and in quieting down probably some other circuits that are fighting their way to try to get conscious conscious attention so anyway that's that's my thinking on that and I think that's probably what was going on strange little thing hope you don't have too much brain damage sounds like you came out of my debt they worked out alright that's it well I can save my other question if you guys got other stuff to talk about for next time if you want don't come yeah yeah what's that what do you think Nate yeah Dylan doing go ahead with your other question that's no problem with your other question we'll make this the last thing of the night go right ahead okay so I think it's about introversion extroversion but okay there's something more going on when I go out to say like I'm volunteering at an event for example with a bunch of people that I've never met I feel really introverted and not I don't want to say hi I'm Dylan what do you do and make strike up conversation but even though if I did I do I do fine at it and you know I'm sure myself to do it once in a while right it's not my natural thing that I want to do right and if I go like out with my wife and we're around a lot of her friends that maybe I'm a little acquainted with them but they don't kind of know my whole thing so what am I thinking in my head like I don't want to have to get them up to speed I don't know but right if I'm around a group if I'm around a group where I have like I guess maybe a bunch of status or they're there to listen to me talk about something I know about oh we want to talk about a plant-based diet or about urban farming or solar power things that you know they know I know something about or I don't know something to that effect I'm super extroverted and I got like jam with you guys all night about this and we don't really like know each other per se so is it introversion extroversion or something else or how could I yeah better how can I explain to my wife why I seem so introverted in some situations without any kind of rational explanation right okay so here's the problem so we have two personality characteristics are a there's two what we're going to do to answer this is we're going to step step the camera back for a second and we're going to cleave the problem of psychology into two different halves I actually wouldn't call them a half I'd call it 25 75 but conceptually just for fun we're going to call it in half one part is we're going to call it general psychology that that is that would be equivalent to the Gray's Anatomy so that's that you know now you see why it would be 75% for general psychology it is unbelievably complicated to figure out Gray's Anatomy you have to figure out how the kidney works and how the pancreas works now they work together it's like oh my god really complicated now the second part of the equation is the individual differences between pancreases that guy has a big pancreas guy's pancreas isn't working and he's got a disease okay that's interesting the individual differences are very interesting they're actually not nearly as complicated conceptually as understanding the system in general that is the equivalent of personality so personality is the individual difference issues between people general psychology or general evolutionary psychology if you want to call it that is the massive problem of Grey's Anatomy of the mind how does the whole damn thing work and why in this particular species okay now the overarching over the top of all this is the nature of motivation which is cost-benefit analysis so if you're trying to figure out why anybody's doing anything you have to take into account two different things you have to take into account general psychological principles which are going to involve the the cost benefit analysis process of under gene survival the whole nature of motivation and then you say okay I understand that everybody's running the cost-benefit analysis on every social situation but why do some people run it differently than others and the answer is well for one reason they're just genetically different introversion extroversion but another reason is that the nature of the social situation is completely different than the one that we had last night okay the cost benefit is entirely different so the so as a result we would expect there to be a lot more energy and excitement when it turns out that there is more status to be gained and when it turns out that there isn't a lot of status to be gained then we're not going to generate much energy and excitement so the this is so when someone is reclusive there's two two options for understanding them one is maybe they're an introvert and the other is maybe they don't think anybody's really worthwhile and if they if they run into a bunch of people that their thinker with while suddenly they turn into a social animal okay so did not know so hopefully this starts making sense and let's not share this with your wife because apparently this is saying something about her friend well she's so extroverted I can turn around and she'll be holding someone baby that we've never seen before and ready that yeah why and what you we wouldn't even want to do it etc and so are these swirling around those individual differences of introversion extroversion or these sort of probably very deep subconscious possible inferences about infection and so they're just individual differences in how it's a risk/reward ratio of bang and too many elbows in too many lips with other people and so some of us are born with a more conservative chip in this regard and some of us are born with a more outgoing liberal chip or high-risk chip so your wipe is a little higher risk you're a little lower risk and that's the people are hell of interesting forget it this reminds me by the way this will be like Oh close I have a friend of mine who is OCD I have many friends for OCD but this one is kind of entertaining in the fact that he in his history is a swashbuckling lover he he had to fight his germ phobia if he was going to get nasty with ha so even kissing had a cost-benefit analysis that was had to be run through the system pretty carefully and of course the issue would be well how attractive is the female oh if the females attractive well then in that case we can manage to override all the germ phobia if the female is not so attractive then maybe we don't so there you have it introversion extroversion your wife's friends the whole nine yards that's the story right I'm just an ass at the end of the day there's stuff all right I'll call it Dylan
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