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Episode 167: Epigenetics, Stress and health, egocentric bias while dating
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there's no data dr. Lisle it just starts out saying Doug talks about genes and behavior but he makes some fundamental mistakes first genes are not distributed over architecture of the body in the brain that's utter utter nonsense this is Colette what this is completely it's misspelled so it's this is completely ignorant about developmental biology and molecular biology cells differentiate by activating and deactivating genes and certain developmental stages which means all cells all over the body use most genes along their development let's talk about genes completely ignores epigenetics it's obvious he is not educated in molecular biology this is the main problem in evolutionary psychology it so often is ignorant about biology I completely support the notion that our behavior our strategies to survive and reproduce and that evolution is a strong force but I don't accept his over simplistic explanations about evolutionary biology and psychology this is a thing of beauty alright let's let's I can't remember it all but let's uh what's first of all let's talk about saying that the main problem in evolutionary psychology is so often ignorant about biology evolutionary psychology can't be ignorant about biology evolutionary psychologists might be ignorant about biology but evolutionary psychologists the the foundation of evolutionary psychology comes from the most brilliant biologists in the 20th century and the 19th century so evolutionary psychology was born in the mind of Charles Darwin who is the obviously the greatest mind in biology in the nineteenth century then evolutionary psychology was reborn Andrea understood as a result of of the work in evolutionary biology particularly people like Sir Ronald Fisher and then William Hamilton George Williams Richard Dawkins editor Wilson Robert rivers then finally we get to the first psychologist that that actually graph this and publishes in the area is going to be leading cosmides so to think that evolutionary psychology or evolutionary psychologists are theorizing ignorantly about biology is utterly absurd ok so we could just defer say it's a completely absurd it's a completely absurd alright so now let's let's try to see what this this listener is trying to say because it is true that a given evolutionary psychologist may not know much about biology and that that it would be true if you were talking about me I know almost nothing about biology now the that being said you don't know need to know anything about biology or excuse me you don't need to know anything about string theory in physics to be the best bridge builder in the world ok it's a different level of analysis so you know I couldn't if you gave me a microscope and said you know tell me what the cytoplasm is versus the mitochondria versus the nuclear DNA I Ike you know I might be a guess on a multiple-choice exam but I wouldn't know but neither do I care so when we when we when I discuss things like the epigenetics or the non epigenetic factors with respect to the development embryology of human I am NOT ignorant about this and so even even the talk of epigenetics gets me riled up because I know there's a vast ignorant and essentially a BS program this is coming behind that which is that you can turn your kid into anything cluding an alligator ok so the notion is that your average child can be above average you're above average Kyle it can be brilliant your brilliant kid can be a genius this is not true okay you can't even you can't even do something simple like you might want to turn your kid from straight to gay sorry can't do it can't be done so the and you can't even turn a shy kid into an average kid when it comes to their sociability so the notion of epigenetics bristles me because it sticks its head into the sand with respect to the extraordinary evidence that's been collected with respect to behavior genetics now the behavior genetics I dunno I don't know a damn thing about how the genes work on a technical level and I don't need to all I need to know to be able to compute a correlation coefficient between identical twins raised together raised apart separated at birth not separated at birth etc that's all that is okay I don't have to know anything about the details so I can build the Eiffel Tower without before Einsteins ever born and we don't know anything about Bohr's atom or anything else so that's why this kind of criticism is just nonsense so I the I probably figure out what else our guys said so now do I completely ignore and am i simplistic about the quote factors of epigenetics let's quickly cover what we mean by epigenetics what we're really talking about here folks is the reaction range what what kinds of impacts can environmental inputs have on the genetic code such that it changes the nature of the organism so for example the and the reaction range is all important here so for example if you are a light skinned person from I don't know Scandinavia the question is how dark can your skin get in other words how how if we we subject your skin to a whole bunch of sunlight how dark can it get what if we measure that and then how light would get if we take the Sun away there's a range of the skin tone that's going to be called your reaction wrench the same thing is true with respect to all kinds of things so for example house long can an individual get well there's a reaction wrench so one individual starts lifting weights and they can become much stronger than they are another individual starts lifting weights and they cannot become much stronger the reason is is that they have differences in their genes and the differences in their genes will constrain the effects okay so I think we can see clearly how fast the reaction ranges are for example with respect to well I don't know take any physical parameter take a pair of identical twins and find out what they look like when they're 20 and you're going to find that they're extremely similar in whether they look doesn't matter where they were raised they're almost exactly the same height okay they're almost exactly the same weight they're exactly the same body structure they have extraordinary similar intelligence have extraordinarily similar personalities now are there some differences yes are those differences due to quote epigenetic factors that took place interacting on the genetic code throughout the development of the organism perhaps but probably most of that variance took place early and it might even be in the genetic code itself so the the notion that I've got a simplistic view of this is is not a fair criticism the fact that I do not know a great deal about molecular biology is a fair criticism but it's not a fair criticism of evolutionary psychology or a theoretician in evolutionary psychology like myself okay I don't need to know the how the clock works in order to tell time and that's that's the objection that that this you know person who's probably knows vastly more than I know obviously does about about Stowell mitochondria and a messenger RNA and all kinds of stuff but it's not relevant okay what's relevant is can I read a graph the correlation coefficient on studies of monozygotic twins raised apart yes I can okay and so can anybody else have moderate level intelligence it doesn't take a lot of brands to follow the data when it comes to what it is that I'm talking about it took a lot of brains to figure crowd that that's what we needed to do and it took brilliant brands like Sir Ronald Fisher's to figure out and Karl Pearson's how to figure out how to calculate these things in statistics okay but no from the theorizing that I'm doing here is actually fairly status quo with respect to evolutionary psychology which sits on is extraordinary bed of concealing it information in the theory of evolution all right that's my case time for us to move on all right fared up yeah and I wanted to ask you if you know the have you heard what are some of the most fair criticisms of evolutionary psychology um I don't know that I've ever heard of fair criticism of evolutionary psychology now the UK you could take a given theory in evolutionary psychology and you know and give an idea and say okay I don't think that fits I don't think it's right and you could say okay well now now we're going to have to go through a process of looking at alternative explanations and the person who did most to try to help scientists learn how to think clearly about evolutionary psychology was the evolutionary biologist George Williams and he liked to leave was at Stony Brook and and so Williams was coming along right along a little bit after Hamilton and these guys were the big dogs in terms of trying to help everybody understand how to properly formulate their theories and try to maneuver themselves into a place where they could have testable hypotheses so the so any given idea certainly can can be looked at and said well now wait a second just because that's a good story doesn't mean it's true that's correct and so TV and cosmides come along later and explain a lot Williams that what you have to find is you have to find evidence of design so you have to you have to find evidence that there has clearly been a selection pressure that has led to the selection of genes building a specific circuit that's going to behave in a certain way under certain conditions that look like there it is highly plausible that is subject to you know to increasing the likelihood of gene survival that's so there's a there's a fairly sophisticated way of learning and thinking about this and so and in it's correct this is this individual and they're saying that there's criticisms of evolutionary thinkers of course there are and and even sophisticated evolutionary thinkers can sometimes you know make leaps and hopefully they know when they're making leaps I think they usually do people that are not well educated of evolutionary biology if they haven't read for example and mastered the materials in the blind watchmaker by Dawkins for example then they can make leaps about what they think looks plausible and it's not plausible okay so that's ok that's fair and I make leaps often where I I know that I'm on thin ice but it's plausible and that doesn't mean that that I proven that there's evidence of a design that it's actually part of human nature but I believe that it is so so let me give you let me give you an example of a speculation of of mine and that was I was actually pointed out to me by a good friend of mine that was picking up her kids from school and she she noted how much screaming there was on the playground and it got her to thinking and we started talking about it and the curiosity was why are kids freaking screaming on the playground and it turns out that junior high school students won't do that the young kids well and then I went and listened on a playground and what was interesting was to hear the shrieks and then quickly turn into laughter and when you look at that and it's happening over and over again and it wasn't just the grade school that I sat outside listened it's every grade school they all sound like that so that's what a seven-year-old does and that isn't an accident the fact that it's you know that it's happening at those ages and then it doesn't happen anymore or this looks like a pardon the expression developmental biological process this is developmental embryology of the human I have no idea what's taking place at the microbiological level to make this happen but it's clearly happening and so this thing settles down as it gets to be older and doesn't make those kinds of you know shrieks why would it do it then you would seem that it would be very vulnerable to be making shrieks and other predators but the truth is it's not that far from its mother and so if it's mother when it's seven years old its mom better not be very far away from it and so as the moms are picking berries and the kids are shrieking that shrieking sends a false alarm so the mom has to glance over and check and make sure it's not a predator that one second later the kid erupts in laughter and the mom can relax so you can see that that the mom and the kid have a have a conflict of interest over the moms attention the moms wanting to pick berries and gossip with their friends about what's going on in the village sexual dynamics whereas the kid wants mom to actually have the eyes of the mom on the kid all time that's in the kids best interest that would be maximum protection for the kid so what the kid will do is is run around with its friends and make periodic shrieks that will draw the moms constant attention continually pulling attention away from her other matters and and and there and thereby increasing the safety of that organism so we would expect that this that what would happen is that there would be an evolutionary algorithm for the mom to have to the false alarms are making her actually draw attention away from things that might be in her personal genetic best interests but the expense is too high to not go ahead and check so false alarm after false alarm after false alarm it's too bad mom is stuck without as a problem and the kid has the upper hand in that problem because the kid represents such a phenomenal and investment that the mom can't afford to lose it so even though only half of her genes in there to the kid a hundred percent of its genes is located inside of itself so it doesn't matter how much how much effort and enter she draws away from mom as long as it's directed towards itself and not some other figuring out who to sleep with in the village and thereby get a little brother or sister that's not necessarily in our in our kids best interest so this makes sense now to the best of my knowledge nobody has made this analysis so this is an example of a sophisticated theoretical analysis of the evolution of a specific neural circuit for him ins I believe that that is exactly how this works and this is precisely how it took place in evolution now some doctoral students at the University of Michigan someday may prove it okay they maybe prove it through specific design developmental stage analysis risk analysis of predators likelihood of being eaten to different stages and development as soon as they get to be as big and strong and athletic as mom they quit doing it because it's no longer in their best interest to draw attention to predators and they're too far away from mom and everything else under the Sun and mom is not that valuable so there's going to be a CD that is sifting through Hamilton's role as it finds its way into the genetic code of a human and therefore it's behavioral propensity so that's that's how that's going to work is it correct I don't know I think it I think it it looks really good to me and I would be willing to bet on it there's other things that we're going to come up with that aren't nearly as compelling and our and our flakier and more speculative and may wind up being partially correct and wind up having to be modified by a more sophisticated and more complete analysis that's how we that's how we get more knowledgeable is through this kind of essentially guided investigation the advantage of evolutionary psychology over every other perspective in psychology all of which have been fundamentally wrong is because evolutionary psychology is conciliate with biology in other words it's using the principles of biology to guide it's it's thinking a guide it's theoretical advances and so this better theory leads you to this is like in the famous scene in Raiders of the last Lost Ark you know they're looking in the wrong place okay evolutionary psychology is looking in the right place and therefore it has been extraordinarily successful as a lens from which to view human nature and to use in empirical investigations this is why you have books like the books you'll see by David buss that are full of data and full of spectacular cohesive analyses of problems that that don't look anything like the psych 101 texts of 30 years ago because they march through both a theoretical with a with a beautiful theoretical and empirical integration that has never been seen before in social science yeah and this is all right you know I love your approach so much because not only do you have all the information but you're combining all your clinical experience so it's a yeah one of these days we'll be able to read in a parenting magazine what you just described about kids freaking at the playground and I can just imagine what the what the editors of that magazine are going to think and it would be a really good little article for psych psychology today um you know that that would that you should publish that thing and but who knows it'll it'll twenty-five years from now that if people will shrug their shoulders and they'll say you know of course and maybe it might be 50 or sunos Nate will see I can just imagine ride your toddler preventing you from having an extramarital or some other time that's right that is the title yeah all right our next question I think yeah I think we've got got that question under control okay so our next question is about stress and anxiety mm-hmm dr. Lyle you mentioned that if stress and anxiety haven't have a deleterious effect on health they are very small I hope so but it honestly doesn't feel like it I go to university and I get the biggest bouts of anxiety doing a group project or presentation essentially when I'm the center of attention I have trouble sleeping the day before and then I urinate and defecate all morning and after the actual event my bowels often seriously hurt and feel like they're tied in a knot even if I didn't feel at all bad during during the presentation I have tried to quote drain the adrenaline as you've said by running in place but it seems to return too quickly should I just repeat and repeat and can I get better sleep if I do it before bed um yeah you're not doing yourself any damage you could put up with adrenaline upon adrenaline upon adrenaline aprende rebel and it's not going to do any damage the the the fact that you just doubt rather died and give a presentation doesn't mean it's doing any damage it's just telling you that the status loss that you face could be considerable so if you make a fool of yourself in front of the village you could damage your mating prospects forever because there's only 30 people in the village anyway so if you get part of that village and you're supposed to be intelligent have something clever or interesting to say and you don't do it then it's going to turn out that that could that could knock you down from being 6th most attractive human in your gender to the seventh and that could be a very big deal so as a result of that your anxiety is warning you you better stay up late be thinking about this thing over and over and over and over and over again because we want you to be as prepared as possible otherwise you're going to lose status now beyond what do you do about this well hopefully you don't make a living doing it the because this person has tremendous performance anxiety and you know they may get over it or they may not and certainly with practice you have to this is what Toastmasters is for and that sort of thing so that you can make many presentations and you can start to habituate to the stress that's involved here you need to find out that you don't lose that much status if you don't do that good of a job but if you only do it four times in your lifetime you never learn that lesson the now in terms of draining off the adrenaline yes yeah the idea is to repeat and repeat and repeat just constantly be flexing your muscles essentially tiring them out this will drain the adrenaline off or maybe just a few seconds so when you walk up to do your presentation you're likely to be you know somewhat less stressed or potentially significantly less incapacitated than you were if you did not do this now so that's kind of how it's going to work so you're going to defecate you're going to urinate and you're going to sweat and you're going to stay up late and that's what it's going to happen when you have a great deal on the line and you've got a hyper conscientious nervous system that has not yet had enough experience at doing these things and finding out that you're overestimating the worst case scenario so yeah people don't like these things and most people over ate the overestimate the worst case scenario but some people by virtue of their genetics they overestimate the worst case scenario a great deal more as a result this is very hard on them and I don't think that I don't think that this is fair I don't think that this should be part of college I knew I had a good friend of mine who had to finally face a speech class because it was quote necessary to graduate from our University and she kept dropping the class keep dragging the class because she essentially had a panic disorder developing as a result of this and had big-time speech anxiety eventually she took a beta blocker in order to get through her one one or two speeches she also took a beta blocker on the day she was married in order to to reduce her anxiety so the use of some medication like that for someone who's only going to do this a few times in a lifetime it's a perfectly responsible use of something like that inderal or some of some other beta blocker like that all right you know one of my favorite comedians Mitch Hedberg actually had this type of anxiety and so he used to actually wear darker glasses when he'd get up a stage and close his eyes well hello my abit Lynette so that he couldn't see the audience oh my dad that's that's amazing that's amazing fortunately the gurgler did causing the overdose in him to dying but um that was yeah Oh welcome Utley but yeah all right so all I yeah so dr. blood this was a little different than the previous question maybe a few few episodes ago where where you said if you're that nervous why why are you there this was I guess a question about drinking alcohol when you're around friends or around certain social situations so in this place you have to do it so so yeah you know you really don't have a choice it yeah like exactly that's the so we Mickey Mouse our way around it as best we can come yeah all right so our next question is about dating now there's a this is a multi-part question so we're going to take in dr. Lyle just interrupt me as you need to if if if the questions get to two great they're all right doc dear dr. Lyle I'm blah I'm a below average height male but above the average height of females a few days ago I decided to do an informal experiment and count how many women that walk past me are above or below my height and I was shocked to discover that most girls at my college stood taller my confusion was replaced by outrage and shame as I realized that they were all wearing either high heeled shoes or shoes with massive gel padding and I began to compare it to my pathetically thin soles I've heard of some research that while women preferred taller men because as a sign of gene quality men prefer shorter women because the sign of youthfulness if that's true why are they wearing shoes that make them appear taller if it makes them less attractive could it be that they do it so they have a better vantage point to see which male is taller I've also read somewhere that the practice that the more practice one does at some skill the less their IQ matters given that a lot of male behavior is a signal of intelligence such as fashion humor art etc could it be that females are more interested in them in order to better judge males and the final question want to be okay let's take these one at a time so I can't the wall will circle back so I can remember things okay so let's look at the let's look at the short thing first the first of all men do not prefer shorter women so whoever wherever they read this they they either read something that was incorrect or they misread what they read so men prefer women to be shorter than themselves they do not prefer short women ok so men would prefer women to be I believe 4 inches to 5 inches shorter than they are women would prefer men to be 6 inches taller than they are I think it winds up being an evolutionary compromise I think it's men would prefer what there would be a 4 inch difference women would prefer a 6 inch difference and you wind up at 5 okay so those are those are the national averages at least in the United States the now the fact that women are wearing heels is interesting now there's there's different reasons for this so one of the reasons for this is because if you wear heels it changes your gait it causes a lordosis like posture as for the female and as a result it it makes her movement more effeminate and the more feminine movement is judged by men to be more attractive so so we know this from pointlight experiments that were done probably 15 years ago so the it could also be the case that it could be the case that that some women if they are shorter for example if they're 5 2 and they and they put on a three-inch heel now they're 5 5 now they're more attractive than it would be at 5 2 so that that's a possibility but the the so the typical male I think it's around 5 9 or 510 and that individual is most attracted to a female who on average is 5 4 that's the five or six inch Delta that appears to be consistent with the way the species works so the five 10 male 5 10 male is actually not more attracted to a 5 a 5 foot 4 female who's got a 4 inch heel and it's 5/8 damn-near looking them in the eye that is not something he's interested in but he would be interested in that if it if it increases the sachet of her walk and and makes that more sexually attractive now the now one of the thing that this person is bringing up is a notion of an egocentric bias which is that is it possible that that the female is thinking that if she's taller that makes her more attractive because males who are taller or more attractive that's a very interesting idea and it has possible merit I have I have certainly run into females who are a little bit intimidated by females who are taller than they are and it makes them feel like they are sort of outclassed which is interesting and and it is in it's incorrect so the so I don't know maybe it's also the case that if you're a 5 foot 4 inch female and you put on a 3 inch heel and it makes you 5/7 it now makes you more marketable to a male who instead of being 510 is 6 1 okay so it closes the Delta and you might actually be more attracted to somebody who's even more attractive than a 6 inch Delta and so as a result that could be a marketing strategy because the taller the male is on average just all things being equal the more attractive they are so male females typically are aiming at the 80th plus percentile or so for male height so the average female would actually prefer a male who's at the 80th percentile for height so that that actually makes sense I never quite thought that through before so that's probably another deal so we've got a possible you go centered bias we also have a possible market structure for the female gets her to stretch into the the taller rescue lines of males and it also improves their walk sexier so there's a lot of a lot of reasons why that might be taking place but the male does not prefer shorter women that is all things being equal that's that's not how that works okay dr. levo mentioned idea how they find out found out that women have a sexier walk when they have high heels he said this is the point light something can you go over that light in more detail right what that is is if you put a little put a little light on on like a like a band a little thing that's like a wrist band and you stick a light on it and you put it on the joints of a person so for example if you if you were to put a like a like a you know like a sweat band and you stick a light on it so a light on there a little point of a little light little white light you stick it on somebody's elbow and then you put put it on their knees and you put it on their ankles and then you have have it where where a little thing around their hips so you got a couple of lights on both sides of the hips and the shoulders etc so then what you do is you have that person walk towards a camera in the dark so then so what you're watching is you're watching the movement of the skeleton and if you watch the movement of the skeleton if the female is in high heels the movement is judged by men who are doing nothing other than watching lights move the men will judge it as significantly sexier why that's how that works so so that's because it's changing the posture it's it's accentuating the female sway in her hips and the female swing or hips is a is an indicator of fitness of fertility for a human female so males are built by nature to pick up that movement from 500 yards away so they can see way across the African savanna they look over there and it's like aha that's a female okay and she's not pregnant because when females are pregnant they lose that sway because of the excess weight it changes their their gait considerably so even a little bit of excess weight actually will can can change a female's gait so even you know five or ten pounds can make a difference in that gate so the so that's but that's how this was discovered these were the pointlight experiments they were done I think in the early 2000s maybe even before but yeah that that's where they figured this out that's why they figured out why I heels were sexy there's all the dual shifts like XF about how high made a female off balance and it made her vulnerable therefore she could be taken sexually this is all complete bullshit okay has nothing to do with it has to do with postural changes gait changes and accentuating fitness indicators essentially turning the female gait into a super normal stimulus that gets picked up by the male and just considered sexy so that's what it is absolutely fascinating so and dr. Lila I often wonder too if the reason if the the type of women who would wear high heels are those who are on the higher end of the bell curve meaning that they may prefer men who are maybe six or seven or eight inches higher than they are so they're trying to attract them who does that's that's now that is an example that's a perfect example of what we were just talking about earlier tonight that that is good evolutionary speculation that in fact females that would be interest facing the harrowing problem of wearing a high-heeled it could be a female who who because she is above above the mean for sexual attractiveness wants to you know feels like she can compete for super high-end males and the super high-end males are going to tend to be significantly taller than their peers she may only be 5 foot 4 but by god she may be able to land a six foot three inch Amazon if she sticks some heels on that that is a totally legitimate speculation and how one would go about ferreting make that thing out and making the point I can't I can't figure it out right now but it's a that's a fine doctoral dissertation Nathan good job cool some day right okay so I well I learned it all and finish this question and then and then we've got a caller on hold who's been patiently waiting so we're going to take this last couple of questions in this in this actual question so so dr. Lau my final question would be do males and females confuse themselves by imagining that the opposite sex has attracted to qualities in them that they seek in their partners so what you were saying earlier for example a male that goes to the gym to become really buff might believe that physical fitness is all that matters because that's mostly what he cares about are they intuitively in touch with opposite sex psychology and only rationally confused um this is again this person is aiming around some interesting questions and that is I believe the answer to this question is going to be twofold I believe that we naturally have embedded intuition to some degree about what the opposite sex is interested in and we I believe that we are also sometimes we do not have such intuition and we're left to our own devices to figure it out and sometimes then the egocentric bias which is in other words all we have to go on is what we are thinking and when that is true it can lead us astray so let me let me give you an example the there there are females that that may work very hard at getting themselves muscular and fit and they may believe that males find this attractive and males do not okay so this is a this is an interesting potential egocentric bias that's driving this so they they may be very attracted to males that are very muscular and fit and yet they're so they're thinking that this is something that they need to do so I believe that there there can be a a lack of intuition there about that in other words you're born with a chip inside your head if you're a female to be attracted to muscles but when it comes to you speculating on how to get yourself more competitive you may make a mistake here okay so I think one of the interesting things that you'll see in the world in the last twenty or thirty years has been this fascination with female hyper fitness competitors where they'll where essentially you have to be showing a six-pack set of ABS in order to be competitive this is insanity I it is it is you know people can compete do whatever they want they can play chess play hockey play basketball I don't know argue about how many angels are dancing on the head of the pen but to to to be judged as more fit because your body fat content is so low that you can see your abs as you strut around in a bikini this is not attracted to males and the fact is that if some nails may find AB attractive but some males find women that are 400 pounds attractive so this is this is the the bizarre ends of the bell curve here the the truth is is that males when they see females that are extremely lean and showing their muscles because there's no fat to cover over the the definitions then it turns out that most males are very much turned off by this and the reason why they're turned off by this is because it is in negative that the female is not fertile and virtually in all cases the female that looks like that is in fact not fertile okay that that's evidence of the female at the edge of starvation and there's no way that she could bring a child to term she is clearly struggling with respect or health and she's in a position where the body is fighting for its own survival just to get enough calories and in no in no fashion is this worth you know an orgasm so the however but but a female could think because she so finds the male's that look like that so appealing with large muscles and large definitions that she pit she could be tripped by her egocentric bias into thinking that she's doing something marvelously competitive when in fact she's not okay I had another case that came up I had a fairly assertive female businesswoman that that had there was was taken a few too many risks and called called me and we sort of talked it through and and she was on the verge of taking some significant risks and I queried her as to why she was taking these risks and as we move down through the thinking she was actually thinking that it would make her more sexually attractive because she found it sexually attractive if men were successful and they had taken risks and I told her big thing men will not find you more sexually attractive if you are successful and you have taken a bunch of risks that's the last thing they're interested in and so we actually caught her you know on the verge of making a significant investment and a significant life change for all the wrong reasons because she was using an egocentric ly biased view of what it was going to take to make her more competitive so that so the question here you know is pointing something out now we do have a lot of intuition in you know that is embedded into our genetic code and all probability about what the other what the opposite sex finds attractive yep I believe that we do so for example how women know to sort of play with their hair is amazing like who the hell taught them and if it's cultural how come it's everywhere on earth in every culture that hasn't even been talking to each other and has no common ancestor for sixty thousand years the answer is genetic okay so a great you so you have some intuition about what the opposite sex would find attractive and you didn't need to learn it it's in the system on the other hand there are limitations to those insights and one of those limitations when you start to hit limitations and you don't have an automated intuition you'll people will sometimes then default to their own vision their own egocentric bias and they will sometimes make mistakes behind the egocentric bias because that's what the you of eccentric bias does it essentially says look I don't know what's in the other person's head but my first approximation my first guess is what's inside my head and so sometimes if you use that and you cross over on the gender you make a mistake so that's how that works okay all right so we have had a caller waiting here patiently so we're going to take a call okay all right anonymous welcome to the show thanks for calling hi thank you so much hi there absolutely my question for you could my question for you is on weight loss and health and I've been following the diet and the suggestions from you and dr. Goldhamer dr. mcdougal etc yeah I've lost quite a bit but I think I'm already I'm kind of slipping into some bad circuits or patters or something I think I would fall in that hypertension is just nutcase category that you described and I've reached a point where it's like I'm I can't help but think about losing weight everything like I'm so hyper focused on it even to the point where now as I'm taking healthy things and probably making them unhealthy by can i cram in as much exercise as possible can I restrict my calories even though I know in every lecture you say you don't need to but can i restrict more and more and more on how do you if you don't have that moderation gene which I clearly don't how do you keep this from getting into back into unhealthy patterns well let's let's let's we're going to back up for just a second and we're going to we're going to try to understand this and then I'll give you the general direction of how it is that we deal with the problem so all behavior is is emanating from cost-benefit analysis so you're running a cost-benefit analysis on you know whether or not you should measure your Apple and whether or not you should go out and run around the block again to burn off a few more calories so everything you're doing is coming behind cost-benefit analysis and the cost-benefit analysis that it's at the end of it is it sounds like there's a great deal of consternation about having excess fat stores on you okay so you're worried about this and you're worried about its impact and sort of what other people will think of you at cetera etc etc so the this is this is sort of this is where the hyper conscientious psychology meets the 20th the 21st century with respect to the pleasure trap and then people wind up you know with excess weight on them it is socially costly which means it's very costly with respect to any kind of evolutionary analysis that your brain is doing and therefore this becomes pretty important so first of all what's your age I'm 33 33 okay uh any married any kids anything like that married one child and I've already got below my initial goal weight so now just some of the unhealthier thought patterns didn't even I'm thinner now that I've been since high school but I still don't focus on this more than ever right so hold on a second let's just let's just do a little bit so when you when you were in high school what was your sort of height and weight five six and I probably was somewhere the 160s now I'm I went from 209 about a year and a half ago down to 151 right now okay so now you're down to 151 okay yeah now so we can see that at 209 there was very significant social costs okay III don't think that we could possibly see it otherwise in other words there there's a that's a that's a pretty significant burden to be carrying not not in terms of the fat if you're young and spry and athletic enough that's not the problem but the problem is is that you are aware what it costs you socially in other words people are calculating this and you know you look like normal America but the truth is is that you're a long ways from looking and being as fit as you could be so now in the last year or two you've lost a great deal of that weight okay so you're now much more fit and it's been a major success however your your mind is well aware that that we're not that far away that our that our behavior isn't that far away and we've got the propensity to easily be back at 2:09 so you're you're living with the worst case scenario peeking over your shoulder whispering in your ear saying watch out watch out watch out watch out okay so I'm not really surprised that that you're pretty anxious about this and pretty vigilant so I would or and so you say you can't help but think about losing weight and that you're still thinking about you know doing a lot of exercise and restricting calories this makes sense that you're still in the middle of this trying to figure out the parameters and try to get a sense of just how vigilant you need to be this is like a person who has was a C student and has become an A student and they don't know how hard they need to work to maintain an A they really don't have a feel for it and so you're you're kind of in it yeah I'm not I'm not going to give you any sort of magic sauce tonight because the truth is is that you're in a process now your your mind has to learn through through its through its process just how good you need to be and you will be experimenting at different levels of vigilance say over the next year and you'll get a feel for what it is that you're up against so unbeknownst to you what's happening is is in the deep recesses of your brain you're running a cost-benefit analysis on all these options and so has it felt for example has it felt worth it to you to get down to 151 pounds absolutely but I as I did I wanted to lose more got it okay and the truth is it sort of 5/6 and 151 what you do do you still see excess fat stores on your body that would be make you more more fit if you were to lose it yeah mostly practically no post pregnancy related kind of tummy stuff right okay so you can still see this and it's still it's still rattling around in your skull you're not yet down to where Stone Age female would be okay so I'm not surprised that you're still that the mind is still working on these problems and it also knows how difficult it is and that you have to resist what your natural instincts would want you to do which Steve the richest food in the environment so you're fighting the pleasure trap and you just don't know how hard the fight is yet so you know everything that I'm hearing from you is completely and utterly rational and makes complete sense yeah and really the only people who wind up having any long-term success with fighting the pleasure trap are people that are the hyper conscientious nutcases that's pretty much who lines up with success so the good news is is that you've got the wackadoodle personality to make this possible the if the bad news is is that I can't wipe it away and nor would we necessarily want us to okay now what will happen is is that with continued success here you're you don't know kind of it's kind of like if you're winning in a race you know if you're if you're if you're a jockey on a horse and you're in a hell of a race and let's suppose you're so darn focused and there's so much mud and it's you know to mess out there you don't even dare look to the left or right to find out whether or not anybody's close you just keep going as hard as you can that's all you can do okay and that's a little bit where you are right now you're you're going kind of as hard as you can in one direction because you're not sure you know what the competitor looks like the competitor is pleasure trap that's out there to get you and it you know it's it's an omnipresent force and you are a newbie with respect to its mastery so you're not comfortable yet about whether or not you can loosen the screws on this whole thing and wind up being fine okay so it could be that we can that what it took to dive the way down to the level that you have it now may not be what it takes to maintain it you may not have to be nearly this strict there's a different process with respect to losing as opposed to stabilizing so you may you may continue to lose for a while and then somewhere out there you may decide you know what maybe I don't want to be this vigilant and when you stop that vigilance we may find you drift up a little bit and then you sit at same equilibrium that seems like a reasonable compromise at 1:43 or whatever the heck it is or 148 or who knows but the point is is that it where you are now is you are in the middle of an odyssey that you are you have now learned that you do not need to live your life as a 200 plus pound woman you don't need to do it you wouldn't have been sure of this and you wouldn't have been sure how reasonably comfortable it could be to get there okay if you're a conventional leader the only way they're going to get there is through crash dieting some ketogenic crazy crap and just you know basically making your life a chaos so you don't need to do that if you're eating a diet of low caloric density with a lot of whole natural plant food so if you so you've found the right direction and now it's just going to be a matter of discovering what the parameters are for you and finding for yourself something that fits well okay so the fact that you're still tied and twisted up about this doesn't bother me this is part of the nature of the Odyssey that you're in so talk to me talk to me in a few months if it turns out that you're that you're rut you know that that you're not finding any any inner peace and that you that you don't know how to to let go of something that that is you know keeping you in a spin but right now the spin that you're in makes sense to me so we just let it spend for a while that's really really helpful thank you so much for the answer and the feedback very good my pleasure good luck with all say hi anytime thank you
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