Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 115: Depression, Psychedelics
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


all right good evening everybody it's Neji here along with dr. Doug Lyall dr. Lisle how you doing today it good how you doing I'm not too bad it's getting to be april showers bring in May flowers weather is kind of starting to change in a little bit chilly today but it makes me think of what happens with a lot of people that I've seen who get diagnosed with something called seasonal affective disorder which is I guess it's a fancy name for depression due to lack of sunshine yeah of course there's more to it than that I'm sure you know but but essentially that's what that is so it got me thinking about depression and and how you know sunshine is obviously not the only answer but but one of our listeners sent in a question recently to ask you saying why do we get depressed and want to stay in bed all day long and what is it that we can do about it well we get depressed because depression is is going to be it's designed as failure feedback okay so just in the same way that happiness is the result of is is positive feedback and the feedback systems are designed to signal increases or decreases in statistical likelihood of genes survival so that essentially it's signal of value so the you are animal nervous systems are not cold machines that simply that simply maneuver in a way to with some kind of a digital computer that's computing probabilities of survival and reproductive success that's what we mean by gene survival so for people that don't that aren't aware of or relatively new listeners and not sure what the terminology is referring to genes survival specifically is referring to the likelihood that the genes in that organism are going to be on the planet you know several generations out that's that's what it is so the that means that anything that increases the individuals likelihood of survival will increase their likelihood of genes survival because odd the longer you live the more opportunity you have to reproduce the however there are also other things that will increase the likelihood of gene survival other than your own survival for example if you do things that improve the probability of your children being sexually successful then that will also increase the likelihood of your gene survival or if things happen that will increase your children's likelihood of survival so your children your child has some disease that's going to cause them to die early and then some genius figures out the solution for it then we would expect that you would be very happy because that would be increasing the likelihood of your genes surviving so that is the the reason why I'm talking about this and some at some length is to understand feelings we have to understand that feelings are evolutions engineering design that tells the organism to what degree some event some event of significance to the organism ie an event that has influenced any value has either influenced that that value is either a positive value or a negative value in other words if something does not matter to your genes survival then it doesn't matter to your psychology you just simply don't care the so whether or not you know oh you know all kinds of stimuli that hit your nervous system are effectively neutral in other words you don't really have any emotional or affective response to these things at all because you simply couldn't care less like right now I'm putting my hand down on on a table and nothing just just for the act of doing it and as I do this the table feels slightly cool relative to my hand but other than that it feels neither pleasurable nor painful and so therefore I'm not apt to do this because it's it's not there's this really no reason for me to seek to put my hand on this table because there's no particular value that is being achieved by this I am NOT increasing my likelihood of genes survival by doing it so you're feeling these are the translation of your of your minds ability to essentially take in sensory events and to to compute whether what is transpiring is it is likely to result in an increased likelihood of your gene survival or a decreased likelihood of your gene survival and when it's an increase you feel better and when it's decreased you feel worse so what we call depression is actually a mood state that you know when people say well you've been here but how long have been depressed for well the answer is the person may have been depressed for an hour and a half but then they had a six minute respite when they're eating some Cheerios and then they were depressed before that for an hour in other words the notion that you are sitting in a depressive funk without without any respite is absurd the I've talked to many depressed people and been able to say something humorous to them and watch them laugh and for that two seconds or three seconds they're not depressed okay so the the depression is a is a state that is telling the organism of the of the circumstances of which I am in cata I am cognizant I am the situation as I see it is not good for my gene survival so this is why depression is the result of what we're going to call failure feedback so the what the the way this the nervous system of the human is organized is that it has what we're going to call it self and that self is a set of of self calibrations about its competitive standing with respect to targets of evolutionarily important actions and those evolutionary important actions are specifically the esteem that they try to earn from mates potential mates friends and potential friends and trading partners people whom you have commercial transactions with so those you are forced into competition with other people in order to secure those relationships you only pursue the relationships that you believe that you have the opportunity to secure so if you are the 99 pound weakling at your school without any brains or wet you don't try to hit on the prom queen that isn't that isn't what you do and you're not particularly depressed about that you're depressed about the fact that there was Mabel over there who you thought would go to the prom with you and because you didn't figure anybody else would ask her out and when you asked her out she said now okay and so now you're depressed because now your expectations have been violated and depression is the is the device the nervous system uses to signal to you that a goal that you put out energy in pursuit of has has resulted in a lack of success that was not expected that's what will cause depression and so depression is a signalling device that has several functions one of which is to get the organism to stop putting out energy in approach of that goal because the system is designed by nature as a whole what a life-form is is a device for essentially transforming energy into the genetic code so if you're if what your efforts have been up to have been unsuccessful in its securing this esteem then you are going to want to shut down that energy expenditure so depression is a method for saying hey don't do it so that's why people will slow down sleep more and do less now it also has a host of facial characteristics and other communication characteristics posture body posture facial expression even touch and somebody's handshake the the the sound of their voice the paralleling cick use the words that they choose all kinds of communication signals indicate to the village that the person is depressed this is not an accident so this is a this is a method for attempting to marshal up resources from the village to to actually help the person get inputs that may help help them and be more successful so by signaling that you are depressed and miserable some other individual might see this and it they see this as an opportunity in order to win a great deal of credit with you okay so if you are depressed and miserable and you know looking like you've been crying or whatever vo or just look like you're defeated then the quote Good Samaritan is designed by nature to observe this and inquire this is an advertisement that makes them look as if they are altruistic and compassion and all the sort of jazz and what they're doing what they don't know that they're doing is that they're actually profit seeking because if one unit of their energy could aid and abet you significantly then let's suppose that one unit of their energy aids and abets your survival and reproductive prospects by a factor of 50 which is very likely could in some circumstances if that were the case then you would feel heavily indebted to them and they would have picked up you would have easily been willing to put up ten ten chips in exchange for the one chip that they spent because they profited you fifty chips by the actions that they took okay and so you can you can imagine for example how useful it would be for a high status person to go over and spend a few minutes with the low status person and give you know I don't know Elvis gives some little depressed guy his autograph well now that guy can tell us friends what Elvis said to him Elvis told me that I really had some talent and that I really ought to work on this and you know I've got something here well that could have a huge impact on that individual in their life and as a result they owe Alvis and so they will now sing Elvis's praises forever so by being depressed and signaling that depression with our communication channels which are you know facial expression voice words body posture touch these are mechanisms by which we signal to profit-seeking quote all turists that it's a way to get help now finally we also are stumped so we are surprised by the feedback and these competitive demands and we don't know what to do and so the frustration that you have the unpleasant feelings that you have Drive creativity so the the brain starts searching up down and sideways for some way out of this you know try to figure out why we're having the problem there are multitudes of reasons as several of them there they're a limited scope of reasons why we do have the problem one of the reasons is that we could be over calibrated in other words we may simply have a somewhat narcissistic view of ourselves and so our for various and sundry reasons to see their genetic or could be as a result of historical accident in our lives that we've simply overestimated ourselves and as a result the depression we're now getting is a is an inevitable recalibration process that is taking place that's not pleasant but what it will do is it will lower our targets of action back to a more realistic level so the example I give repeatedly to explain this in other words the lowering of a sense of self confidence is a necessary and useful function of the brain so that the organism doesn't continue to waste energy and pursuits of things that it's not competitive for 85% of eighth-grade boys believe that they will be professional athletes okay so you can imagine that there's an extremely high percentage of eighth-grade boys that are going to be disappointed in the feedback they get from the world about their competitiveness with respect to athletics so both Alan Goldhamer and I playing basketball in our young years we both expected to be playing for the Lakers one day though the turn didn't quite turn out that way so all of those ends 65 year old rookie so point is is that both of us at our various junctures he he he found out sooner than I did that he had no chance because he wasn't glad to good but but both of us ultimately discovered that we were not going to be professional athletes so was it by sense of challenge it like booming in the future that's right so so did we was this a miserable horrible terrible thing to find out that we didn't have the chops of course not and and so there is no there is no permanent psychological crime in not being able to reach a goal that one the one one's had at all and there's no there's no terrible thing in this this is a it is necessary the system cannot be born and then be so ingenious there throughout its entire existence that it calibrates itself accurately to exactly what people and situations that it can compete effectively in that would be impossible the system has to generate hypotheses about what it may be able to do and it then attempts to do those things and then finds out when it gets stopped and when it gets stopped the necessarily lowering of self-confidence is necessary to reduce the the magnitude of the competitive advantage or competitive display that the person was seeking and then they settle back down in and realize that they're just going to be a boring doctor and make living that way instead of slam dunking and you know throwing behind the back passes good enough okay now so what we're going to see is that the solution to depression is going to be to first identify the domain in which the person is competitively frustrated so it's very very likely to either be in romance in friendships or in in trade ie business business and employment process then what we want to do is identify the fundamentals where the competition is beating you over the head so you what you are getting negative feedback and we need to figure out what is it that people are doing that are similar to you that is better than you are doing why is it this is happening so I talked to a person recently with a sales job and this person was getting negative feedback and might have been let go from the company and essentially told me hey this is really not fair I'm doing I'm really doing a crack crackerjack job and and what what I discovered was that they were not actually documenting what they were doing and I can't remember exactly how I described this but my two two things came to mind for me two or three think aims to mine and that is that my sister was in a profession where they actually documented what they were doing every 10 minutes so they work every 10 minutes and then they document in my own profession we work for an hour and then we document but physicians depending upon how many patients are seeing how often they might be seeing seven patients an hour they are might be saying that patient for three minutes and then they're documenting for three or four minutes so the in this case sales person was not spending nearly enough time documenting all the things they were doing and I said that that's the most important hour that you're going to spend at the end of your day by God as you document the living daylights out of what it is that you're doing so that they can see what you're doing and this is how you wind up being seen more competitively so it isn't that you weren't doing the job as you were not doing a critical part of the job which is to make sure that you earn the people's respect so there are fundamentals that your competitors may be doing better than you which is causing you to have the negative feedback that you have the surprising negative feedback that you're getting that is causing your depression so finally get busy because your competitors you know once you identify some fundamentals don't whine about it the truth is that you have not done as well as they've done maybe they've been in the weight room more maybe maybe they've been you know doing the diet better I just saw one of the more pathetic movies I've ever seen last night it's called I feel pretty by the with the comics lead comics Amy Schumer the this is an amazing movie I mean I don't recommend that anybody see it but if you did see it you would see a 2-hour diatribe of a very self pitying individual that that basically is not doing what it takes to be as competitive as possible and basically whining about it and so this is your competitors don't care you know nobody's going to save you so our job you know if you're truly stumped you need you maybe to get help you may need to get some direction you may need to find some people that have knowledge of the fundamentals of whatever whatever this competitive domain is it's got you frustrated and then you need to start working on those fundamentals and improving your performance there the now person also talked about sort of lack of energy and exercise the truth is is that in the Stone Age you could not just sit and do nothing and lay in bed you had to get up and move and be as effective as you could possibly be I do believe that there's a problem in the modern environment that if you are depressed you're very depressed and stumped and demoralized there are people that can essentially just lay in bed and not do much behind the energy conservation imperative that comes with being depressed and this is a problem and so I literally think neurochemical e this is a bad situation that it essentially sets up an exacerbation cycle on a number of fronts and keeps the person possibly in a state of depression that was meant to last for a few days or a week or two and might last for much much longer because the person doesn't have to actually get up and start hunting or digging for potatoes in other words they don't have to put out many hours a day of the physical labor that is naturally necessary for a human being to not to not die by starvation and so in the Stone Age this depression is about is about issues where you are essentially socially in trouble where you don't know what to do and you it will reduce your efforts at continuing to do things that the way you did them before and you may feel demoralized but you still have to get up every morning and hit the ball just as hard as you ever did with respect to your survival issues so have a feeling that that's a problem in the modern environment that that extends depression out much longer and much rougher than its naturally designed to so that's a long discussion on depression if you don't know where to go to help write to me call me I'll tell you what to do that's what I do there's always a place to start okay there's always there's there we identify the competitive domain we hear what the situation is we then figure out what on earth it is that the person should reasonably be attempting to do first to to address the competitive deficit and we attack okay we attack and with the attitude of we're going to learn something like we're not sure that we can identify exactly what it is that will turn the screw towards more success but we can have at least a reasonable set of hypotheses about what will do this and that is where we begin fantastic I really love your saying of rolling up our shirt sleeves because you know anytime I feel down I just think to myself alright gotta roll up our sleeves and figure out something to work on and you know every time it's done the trick so yeah the great basketball coach John Wooden had you know a hundred Maxim's that were beautiful and one of them is don't let what you can't do get in the way of what you can do so if you feel stopped and depressed you need to do something that you know advances your ball down the field if you don't yet have figured out the biggest part of the competitive problem and you're not sure what you're going to do about it that's okay we're going to now do some research find some people that may have the solution to that etc bet in the main time between now and next Tuesday when you're going to talk to that person do what you can do do what you know is going to be useful get your get your house more in order get things more organized in other words let's don't let what you can't do get in the way of what you can do and then remember your competitors are not stopping they are continuing to advance their their cause and so we need to get busy and get with it and get up and moving in an intelligent fashion and and if we can get the help that you need to give you confidence that the direction that you're going in has some logic to it fantastic so dr. Larry where do families fit into this we've got mates friends and potential trading partners what about families are they included in the friendship arena yes families are friends hopefully they're just a friend there are friendships that have an additional evolutionary kicker and that is that we're we are related to them genetically so they are friends that have our genes located in them so much so that they can be pretty contentious and pretty lousy and still worth it because of the fact that if you if you if they suck some of your energy that energy isn't going off into into the evolutionary either where you don't get any benefit from it it's actually going to your genes that are sitting inside their bodies this is why there's so much more likely to be altruistic behavior within families than anywhere else and that is also the reason for the phrase that blood is thicker than water and that is the notion that when it gets right down to it people are going to hang with family under conflicts because this is where the genes are sitting so yeah all family is it's a special case of friendship and so it means that the relationships can be more conflicted and less pleasant and still more worth it because of the genetic commonality of interests that doesn't mean that that that's going to trump blood is not ultimately thicker than self-interest in other words you are the most important thing in the universe as far as I'm concerned you your life it's the most important thing that there is and so even even in family situations it's possible just remember most people don't qualify to be your friends and most people don't qualify to be your mates and so the truth is your family has an enormous up leg on qualifying to be your friend just because all the people first-degree relatives all share 50% of their genes for goodness sakes it's like half of yous sitting in that individual and so as a result we are psychologically built to weave a closed net of a commonality of interests that that brings the cohesiveness to particularly first-degree relative situations first-degree relatives would be sisters sisters and brothers children and parents those are what first-degree relatives are second-degree relative is one thing over that would be a niece or nephew notice how much vastly less psychological closeness there is between a niece and nephew relative to your own children it's it's a it's a vast divide and what we've done is we've gone from from 50% of your jeans to 25% and so suddenly we see that in the conflict of interest between between a couple of cousins is going to be much greater than the conflict of interest between a pair of brothers over sum over how altruistic one of them might feel so families are are essentially a special friendship category but ultimately that's what they are actually are you there you're breaking up mm-hmm I cannot hear Nate so I do not know what it is that I'm not even sure that I'm still on I'm going to assume that I am on and you know what folks if you're listening I think what we're going to do is I'm going to call back in case I'm now offline and I'm going to see if we can reconnect and reestablish the podcast okay so I'm hanging up now and I'll be right back if I can bye looks like we have technical difficulties I got kicked out of the stream this is a doctor model but we've got yes I'm here can you hear me hello Nate buddy there I don't know are you there dr. Lyle oh good I'm back okay so I what about everybody we just got kicked off the stream for some reason internet connection but we are now ready to welcome a from Minnesota where try that again see if that Amy welcome to the show thank you are there when you when you were just talking you you made me think of mothers-in-law my question with my question is about how women can sometimes be so mean to each other and these are worst enemies and I was thinking about like there's a lot of support groups for women to try to help women in the corporate world and and if you could help help like if you were to say something to some of the in those organizations what would you how would you have them sort of structure the order organization or what sort of information would you give women on so that it just seems that sometimes women are either incredibly cooperative and sometimes fiercely mean to each other and sometimes to the same people at different times and and I also think about how my dad when I have three older sisters and he was kind of leaning towards narcissism but he played us against each other and and we it was almost like the more we fought and ripped each other down or rooted against each other the more of a thrill he got out of it and and we've never been able to really have normal relationships ever since we can see each other maybe once a year and that's about before we get weird again and back into those old patterns and then we kind of wait jellineck's Christmas but I wondered what your thoughts are on that well those are two kind of different things but they but they're they're sort of swirling around some similar principles so let's just talk about this so one of the things that essentially a mistake that people make in the world is they they they they under they let me try to spit this out of I can people oversimplify the notion of the the nature of coalition's so people will believe that for example there's an old boys network and therefore you can't get in it's the women against the men etc etc this is not true there there are times in places where there are elements of this but the we have to understand that that that is really not how nature configures this organism we are self-interested and so we will join coalition's to the extent that those coalition's may further our personal interests but we have conflict of interest with everybody in that coalition to varying degrees the every creature on earth every animal on earth essentially has a as a sentence stamped on their forehead it says my DNA is the most important thing on earth right out of the moral animal buy rubber right I mean this is this is the ultimate conflict of interest so of course I'm not surprised that if you have some we the women group you're going to walk out of there pretty confused ultimately because there's going to be tremendous infighting there's got a Gen dissol over the place now that doesn't mean that there might not be some other coalition out there that also is organized because remember you've got sort of hierarchy levels of conflict so there's it's the Democrats against the Republicans but within the Democratic Party there's going to be phenomenal infighting as each of each of those individuals is leveraging for their own personal best interest okay and they come together only because they need to be together in a large enough organization in order to battle the enemy and we're battling over resources is what this is so the the you make a point that people what you as you say women can be incredibly cooperative let's let's broaden that human beings can be incredibly cooperative just in general nothing special about women ðï so human beings are unbelievably cooperative they are they are stunning species and their ability to be cooperative this is this is a result of their ability to form delayed reciprocal altruism type of agreements where if I help you today you're going to help me tomorrow and it's also true that many of the competitive pursuits that they need to do involve for example hunting so ten guys can be unbelievably cooperative as their collective ability to survive depends upon all of them doing their part in an extremely dangerous process of hunting big game okay so the so you're going to see that cooperation as a potential runs deep in the species but don't think that when those guys get back to camp they don't have total conflicts of interest about who gets credit because everybody is trying to get laid and so as a result now the stories start about who really gets credit and you're going to see you all this in this is the big deal in the modern reporting of athletics is you know with all the excitement is all about the insults that you know who insulted whom that's a big deal you know this those'll those will create fissures in human relationships that will last for the rest of their lives at times so people can be very cooperative but let's not let's not mask what back but the purpose of the cooperation is for the purpose of me cooperating with anybody about anything is because it's going to advance my personal best interests I couldn't give a damn about anybody else ultimately okay so does that mean in other words essentially what I'm after is do I want them to I would justice in other people be successful as well that would be fine I have no no agenda against them but ultimately the reason why I'm part of the group is for my own best interests not the group's best interest okay so the so there's a rather simplistic you know I'm always like I I don't want to diss the entire process because there's a time and place for four essential you know groups to who have may been walked over as groups to stand up collectively and to to essentially find a way to impose costs on other groups that may be dominant over those resources and hold those feet to the fire and threaten them unless we have what Fairplay okay so that's that's where it is that I see that that this is potentially valuable but yeah so hopefully this hand answers your question that that if you're trying to understand anything about anybody's behavior at any time the correct level of analysis is to think to yourself what how is it you know what the what they are doing they are doing in order to win stouts that's why they're doing what they're doing and so there's only for so long that that can go where things are going to be cooperative and then sooner or later there's going to be a conflict okay so two guys you know build I don't know an architecture company together and it's I don't know it's Smith & Wesson fastest architects of the West I don't know so the point is is that sooner or later lessons going to be pissed off because his name's second and there's going to be conflicts over it who gets the bigger office or who meets the president you know etc so I think this was you know accept semi quite you know semi embarrassing and ridiculous when 30 or 40 years later you know Paul McCartney once the love of his life Linda died then he remarried the scowl and then this gal was raising a squawk about what why it is that the the songs had to be Lennon and McCartney why don't they why don't we reverse it and like there was a big action about this it's like there you go everybody's fighting for status you know conflicts of the spectacular success now we look later and some some new new chick is not happy about it and so this is this is why it is that the cooperation is going to have limits it can be useful but if I were trying to if I were trying to talk to a corporation about how to have things run as well as possible it would not be about empowering women or empowering minorities for empowering anybody it would be about having standards as objective as possible Fairplay across the board that's what it would be and whatever decisions were being made with respect to advancement or anything else it would be efforts would be made to try to have objective parameters for performance on which to decide those things that's how you want it okay if you can good luck because there's nepotistic nepotism and and essentially little group actions of our our faction against your faction all over the place so but I think men versus women is a in general probably relatively absurd place for anybody to try to be seeking fairness alright now if we move on to the issues of your sisters with respect to your father I think that what you're not seeing is entrench dishes that were sown by your father into the relationships of you and your sisters today I think that what you're seeing is natural personality conflicts that are probably there are probably individuals in this group that are inherently more disagreeable than others and that there are that the that that the that I think this is what it is that's actually transpiring so whether or not you had the history of a parent you know with these psychological characteristics that was essentially distributing their parental investment depending upon you sort of capriciously and therefore disturbing everybody's psychology around this and somehow you know feeling that he was keeping everybody's attention directed towards him like a narcissist very well might I don't think that that actually has anything to do with the conflicts of interest that you're seeing in adulthood I think the conflicts you're seeing in adulthood are are far more a derivative of the personalities that are involved than the history okay that's really good news there you go so that me asks you you spend your time wisely investing in those relationships to the extent that they're valuable and we avoid those relationships and we do not over our lap our lives that much with them to the extent that they're contentious the fact that they're sisters you have Hamilton's rule voting for them in other words they are in principle more valuable than the average person on the street but at the same time if it turns out that let's face it you don't choose your family okay and you don't choose your parents and so it can easily be the case that parents and family might be far away from qualifying to be your friend and the only reason that they're even remotely in the equation is because of Hamiltonian evolutionary logic and so the so very often you know I will tell people from the sound of it these people are basically not a good investment of your time and energy in my particular case my my nuclear family was was I was lucky both parents and my sister I only have three people that mean anything and those three individuals we were all very tight as we got whiter than that there wasn't anybody worth anything not taught to us not not worth any time or energy to speak of so it isn't that we disliked them just the cost benefit of maintaining relationships of any significance just simply wasn't worth it what they weren't bad people but they weren't as good as as the cost benefit we could get by making friends so Alan Goldhamer and I have known each other for 50 years I am way closer to him than I would be with any cousin just because of it because of the nature of the cost/benefit so if families not that great then they're not that great we don't worry about it make sense I think it's me helpful yes that's extremely helpful and okay would you mind commenting on the dynamic of mother-in-law because you would think that she'd be she'd like her daughter-in-law because you're passing on her genes but they're always just you know a third typical mother-in-law who so mean what what's going on if she was not baddest with her son is is she threatened by the youths yeah yeah actually that's that's really good good question the probably you know I haven't thought too much about this it one of the things that's remarkable in humans is that one of the a host of extraordinary characteristics psychologically of humans is that parents could give a damn about who their children are mating with I don't believe that there's any influence anywhere in the animal kingdom of a parent attempting to influence the mating behavior of an offspring and yet in humans this is this is huge it's a major issue this speaks to the the huge brain that a human being has as it runs computations and maps out its best interest in the most complex of ways you know much more very subtle complex political maneuvering that takes place in humans that you know I don't care what they say about chimpanzee politics they're not even remotely in the same class as human politics you know a seven-year-old swimmin would run circles around any chimpanzee politically and so in the same way that one of the things that we see in human mating behavior that makes it remarkable is that human beings are incredibly fussy because they're these are high investing species so very low reproductive reproduction species and as a result every child is pretty damn valuable and therefore and is requiring a lot of input from males so it's a is a heavily pair-bonded species so you're going to find that in this what we're going to see is very high you're going to see a striking narcissism that that paints human mating behavior where people are thinking that there were 10% more than they are and so this is why you've got 90 million single people despite the fact that you've got tinder and match calm that the people are like no not good enough not good enough not good enough not good enough not good enough not good enough now it's going to turn out that that very same vision is sitting in the head of your mother-in-law okay so even though you may have qualified for your husband you didn't qualify for your mother-in-law so your mother-in-law can be thinking now not good enough okay she's really not good enough you could have done better okay and if you can imagine this characteristic that if you think of people on how agreeable or disagreeable they are and I am going to assume that if you've got a tough mother-in-law that your mother-in-law isn't just disagreeable with you she's probably disagreeable with everybody so she's a disagreeable mother-in-law is not just a disagreeable mother-in-law it's a disagreeable human there's a lot of wonderful mother of laws in the world happened to be sweet people but if you think of a mother-in-law that is sitting at the save a 70th percentile for disagree ability and then you tack onto the fact that she's your mother-in-law so now what is she thinking you weren't nearly good enough for my husband ever excuse me for my son so now she might as well be essentially encouraging that relationship to break apart okay she would just assume he MoveOn she would just assume he inseminate some other female who's fancier the more deserving of him in her eyes okay so I don't doubt the that evolutionary process is embedded you know not only embedded naturally I don't I had a friend of mine a childhood friend of mine finally got married she was like 48 so she finally got married and her parents who were people that were friends of mine you know when I was growing up they they were amazingly gracious at the wedding and they were there their attitude I said well looks like you know she's done she just did great this guy seems like a nice guy and both of the parents reaction was yeah he is but he didn't have to be we would have taken anything okay so I have no idea no doubt that that lady is a wonderful mother-in-law you know I'm saying the so that that but that's going to be rare most of the time parents are grumbling and feel like their genetic team got a little bit of the worst end of the deal and so in your particular case I think that's it's probably a little bit accentuated by the underlying disagree ability of your mother-in-law that makes sense yeah thank you yeah my distance and defend your relationship against that kind of toxic waste all right I thank dr. Kyle my pleasure Amy thank you very much for the phone call I really appreciate great questions so can we take one more question before we end the show one more go ahead okay so a couple years ago this was kind of similar to the question that we had earlier about depression but a couple years ago I read a really funny article about a young man who he was so depressed that he decided that his last act of life would be to go to Mexico he lived in somewhere in Texas or California you drive down to Mexico he would buy a drug that I think it was uh it was a barbiturate and that he wanted to kill himself because he was just so sick of living things had gone so bad and he decided he was going to die anyway he might as well hire prostitute in Mexico which he did and the cab driver on the way to the place offered to give him cocaine in the end up spending the entire weekend with prostitutes and cocaine and decided that that life really wasn't as bad as he thought it was and decided not to commit suicide he come back and you know ended up bringing his life back into balance for some reason yeah so of course not that that's recommended at all but this is true let's go I was reminded of this because of the next question yeah our listeners which is what do you think about the quote revelations that people claim to have under the influence of certain drugs like psychedelics and otherwise people feeling like they're quote one with the universe can these experiences really help and change people or are they just similar to those brilliant drunk ideas that we that we seem so stupid once we wake up in the morning and follow-up question is can LSD or similar substances be useful in psychotherapy interesting question I would I wouldn't have considered an interesting question but somewhere along the line in the last six months I read that Sam Harris thought that he had been greatly aided by I don't know his use of ecstasy or whatever the hell it was which really surprised me for from a guy that that to me seems like incredibly sharpened and extremely logical so the generally I would also say that that let me let me think about how I would formulate this the it would be possible in the same way if we were to take a hot Cotter and to drive it into your abdomen it's exceedingly unlikely that it's going to do any good and it may kill you from internal injuries however it could also be the case that if you're bleeding to death and we go in there and hit that with a hot Cotter that we save your life so extraordinary things might occasionally happen as a result of damage to the brain so you can see in principle that someone you would suppose someone had some really debilitating OCD and they get in a car accident they get a concussion and then it turns out it's gone it's like could that happen absolutely it could happen it's not going to happen very often actually a movie was made on this theme thirty years ago a beautiful movie was called regarding Henry with Harrison Ford and and whoever the gal was that wound up marrying Warren Beatty and Annette Bening I think and anyway it was beautiful it was a story of a guy who had been obviously a very cold disagreeable you know very successful attorney that gets I think shot in the head survives and it turns out he turns into this wonderful guy even though he's disabled but he's wonderful and ice personally essentially as a personality change now how often could such a thing happen not very often almost always it's going to go the other way so if you do if you damage the brain things are going to get worse the so almost all and the idea of say LSD to be helping something I'm going to be thinking really I already know that psychotropic medications that have gone through considerable effort to try to find a use for them I believe are basically almost a total loser they're there to a loser as far as I can tell systematically they would not be you can't write them off as an unsolicited it might be true that someday they identify a drug that if you take it accidentally and completely unpredictably it happens to help you okay so do I believe that something like LSD is going to be helpful psycho therapeutically no I don't do I rule out the possibility that somebody might have some for key circuit like they're just freaking terrified of spiders and one day they snort some LSD and then it turns out there and they're never fridge spiders again do I think that that's possible yes I think it's possible but I don't think it's going to be systemic so that's how I look at it so I think in general any any attempt to mess with the neuro chemistry of the brain is likely it's probably exceedingly likely to be a step backwards this would be the equivalent of you know is there damage that we can do to a system to improve it if I have my need it's working as well as my knee can work you know can I go in there and doing surgery and improve it not likely now if there's damage already done in there is there surgery that I can do to help it maybe and so the the future holds theoretical promise for psychotropic disturbance of brain chemistry and possibly electromagnetic disturbance of brain chemistry etc I don't think at this time there is much promise and I think by far the greatest promise is in in realizing that the brains the the emotional trials and tribulations that people have are related to their struggles with the competitive processes of genes survival and the overwhelming majority of success is going to be had in doing two things number one either helping that pursuit or to the extent that people have individual quirky problems to try to make their environments work in such a way that they are that they're a better fit for those people's personalities so we don't send our ducks to Eagle school we don't put introverts in a in a New York Deli working behind the counter and we we don't put OCD people in situations that that you know have their brains go crazy and in essence what we try to do we try to be as successful at living as we can and I don't think that we should should it would be in rare instances that I think that we would ever reach for a method of damaging the brain or its function in order to try to improve outcomes fantastic again and the concept of intervention overconfidence is yeah as humans we're always trying to do something right very I remember reading a political commentator who said that Congress is in the same way they said don't just sit there spend something and why when we're trying to do very for human perfect perfect you got it
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist