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Episode 201: Accessing the subconscious, Depression from illness, Brain maturity
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is it true that there are parts of the mind that we don't have access to like a quote subconscious put another way is there any information in our mind that we cannot reach down and consider with our conscious thinking some neuroscientists talk about thoughts as if they are served up to our awareness but it seems like we can direct our thoughts but can we access all of the information and ideas that are in the darker corners of our brains file cabinets I'm not sure what they mean by darker corners if that that goes to directions there's a concept that there's you know naughty or bad or traumatic things or hidden the way that you can't get access to that's a Freudian notion which is incorrect the if we buy darker we mean that you can't see it you know there's no light on it there's no way to get light on it that is true okay and it isn't that the system isn't designed by nature to avoid information that's quote uncomfortable that would make no sense biologically although it's the core Freudian and neo Freudian and modern trauma thinking so that isn't how that works the way it does work though is that you have limited access to the minds machinery so let's think about your I know you're a computer guy Nathan and probably a lot of our listeners are but the so when you deal with computer languages for example there's there's what we're going to call high level language and then you get down to what I believe is known as machine language isn't that correct I think so I wasn't doing a lot of pro computer program kind of electrical engineering all right all right so the ultimately you're down at the level of ones and zeros that's how a computer is actually functioning so patterns of ones or zeros can be you know decreed that that means you know I don't know picnic table but the but the bottom line is is that down there's some basic computational level that's fundamentally ones and zeros and this is going to be the nature of information itself so the nature of information itself is 1 and 0 so a neuron is either firing or not firing so this is so the brain just like the computer is a digital computer it's uh it's you know you are either firing or not firing and if the thing counts it up and you know a neurotransmitter hits a hits a sensor or it doesn't hit a sensor and this is this is the nature of information processing now the so the point is is that there's a tremendous amount of computational dynamics that are taking place for you to ever have a word pop into your head ok so or to have a feeling pop into your your awareness so you're you are not aware of all of the things that are going on to cause that to happen it's a it's essentially you're kind of like the CEO who reads the quarterly report you have no idea what what is taking place down at the level of you know the Togo's place in San Fernando Valley and how many chicken sandwiches they sold you don't know what that is you just know that the orders for chicken you know went up by 1.2 percent this quarter because you're looking at the sheet and it's like oh that's kind of interesting I wonder why that took place so that's what your that's what the mind is the mind is a is is aware of quite a bit of things that are going on inside of it but it's very much unaware of the vast majority of what is happening inside and so the it's going to turn out that that as you learn about how the mind is constructed you can sometimes see it in operation and you can see you can you can become an expert observer once you know what to look for this is very much akin to for example an expert observer of a golf swing or a basketball shot or swimming stroke you know if I was to lies swimming strokes you could show me five really good swimmers and I would say I don't know they all look great to me but a national level expert in swimming strokes or quite frankly even high school swimming coach would know so much more than I would know and they could say that person has a significant flaw in their stroke and it's costing them they would be able to do that because they're an expert observer in that same way human beings can become experts observers of the action in their own mind okay but it helps dramatically to know what's there to actually understand the minds architecture this is this is kind of an interesting historical story that that in the last hundred years or so Allah from the late late eighteen hundreds you actually had two branches to to or through then turns into three branches major branches of thought in human self exploration they all go different directions so the greatest insight in the history of human self analysis was Darwin so Darwin is the original evolutionary psychologist he was actually incredibly sophisticated and insightful he was so far ahead of his time that he was quickly ignored and and relegated to to history for more than a hundred years he wouldn't be resurrected until until people like Dawkins and Hamilton and tooby and cosmides and buss and Pinker come along so it would be a long time before the fact that Darwin had actually blazed a trail he blazed the trail and every you know they went down and they stopped and he turned around and the world turned around and then headed towards Freud and and then it also headed towards half of the academic world got so frustrated with Freudian claims that they could introspect and know the depths of the mind that there was essentially a rebellion against that way of trying to do things and basically saying you know what you can't even look at the mind you you can't even tell what's going on inside the mind it's a black box you can't see inside of it and so what we're gonna have to do is ignore what what it seems is going on inside the mind and we're gonna instead what we're gonna do is just look at actual behavior that we can objectively agree that we just saw okay that's behaviorism so so now you can see that there's going to be different directions that the world is gone all of them kind of interesting historically about why they went the way they went the and it turns out that today in the clinical arena pretty much Freudian thinking is very dominant as well as learning theory thinking so those two things dominate the the zeitgeist of the average clinical psychologist out there trying to talk to people they're both just horrendously and almost completely mistaken in other words the entire edifice is built on quicksand and it's not right the correct view is Darwin which was lost okay yeah you've got resurrected so the evolutionary psychologists do actually understand the minds architecture Freud had no idea if you actually looked at Freud's old sketches about how we thought that might work it's laughable got a guy like drawing on us on a skeleton little like X's on the thing showing that okay well you know if the if the electricity gets blocked here then the leaks over there and then the person becomes an obsessive-compulsive disorder so I keep he basically thought he could sketch out the human nervous system with a with a schematic that's about as complicated as your kids tinker toy project okay so he had he had no understanding on how the mind worked and yet this becomes the way that people look at trauma and the inability to see inside and find out where the trauma took place and then what how all hell broke loose in the mind after that and why the person you know has all these difficulties so that they do now as a result of essentially the you know the damage that was done as a result of some traumatic event this is total Freudian and the fact they talk in slightly different language they're all coming to basically the same conclusions they and they're ignorant of the fact that they're just swallowing up a completely dead theory that was it was generated in the in the 19th century okay so anyway as we go on from there we recover the truth and the retreat was in Darwin okay with with the theory of evolution being the the seminal achievement of humans self understanding as Richard Dawkins has stated if we ever meet a another intelligent species and they they asked us you know what will be the watershed understanding of your species what will be the seminal achievement of your intellectual capabilities it will be the moment when you discover why it is that you exist okay it would be the discovery of the theory of evolution and so there's been many fine achievements many startling and brilliant achievements in human history but that is the apex okay so the that is the moment when after three thousand five hundred million years of life on the planet not a single entity knew why it was even here until the answer dawned on one of them and that happened and you know the the mid I think a relief nineteen eighty eighteen thirties so anyway so the point is is that can you now with a correct understanding of the architecture of the nervous system can you get better at shedding light on the unconscious processes that are actually driving your behavior and the answer is yes you can and and so this is the the great value of the work that has been now done since you know beginning in the 1980s with with leda cosmides his dissertation and Don's Simon's extraordinary book on the theory of human sexuality in nineteen in 1979 that inspired young David buss to do his extraordinary career and research in human mating behavior it goes all over the place and it finally today now culminates and 2018 Robert Plomin writing blueprint explaining one of the greatest achievements in human history and in the history of science and that achievement is we now understand why there are individual differences in people I can't it's a little hard to capture and to explain how what an amazing moment in history we sit on and that is that the greatest questions of human you know self analysis of self questioning of which this this question is a scratch to the surface of it why am I the way I am and why do I do what I do why do I think what I think why do I feel what I feel and what motivates me to do what it is that I do and what motivates other people to do what they do these are the great questions of human life and mmm extraordinarily they've been answered okay the answers are becoming increasingly clear and precise but there has been a literal revolution in human self understanding now since about 1992 with the publication of the adapted mind so we're not even 30 years post-publication of that thing and we get blue print 26 years later basically saying okay the problem the personality has now been solved now he can imagine how bizarre it is for me as a psychologist to have lived through this and to seen it and to recognize the the the magnitude and the importance and the implications of these extraordinary discoveries and realize that my almost my entire field not only is unaware of these discoveries but when they hear about them they actively run away from them that they don't want to hear it and then they make blackguards as fast as they can out of anybody that explicate say this is incredible state of affairs okay so now on and you might look at this and you're like god it's incredible it's like somebody figures out how to cured cancer nobody wants to know what what it is and so so anyway which brings us to dr. Jim Hawk which is that I'm sitting here pushing 60 you know and I'm thinking why like you know I don't really care that much I know it's about status and I know some other things but it's also about ignorant some lack of intellectual courage and but I'm just disgusted with this quietly while I go about my business and and continue to try to put together in interesting and useful ways the Tinkertoys that have been strewn around the room by the buses and the Pinker's and the Millers and the tooby and cosmides and Dawkins and Hamilton that as I try to put these things together in ways that are useful for people you know just like a fumbling engineer that has come across a textbook in Newtonian mechanics the that I'm sort of like getting it together and I'm sure as some other people are too and but can't understand why everybody else says I don't want any part of those tinker toys I think they're evil or bad or Nazi yes or I don't know what they think and I'm like why isn't the entire field beating a path to the door of these people why aren't there on their knees to lead a cosmides okay and Gen Hawk comes along and it says well I could take so people are going to be hearing more the world's gonna be hearing more from Jen's brilliant analysis of this problem but she doesn't know why and so that's why that's why I am you just thrilled to have her with us in this in this journey from here because I feel relieved to understand so now that I understand what's going on better in the minds of other people who are avoiding this information and I also understand I can I have more peace with the whole thing but so today to answer the question er you know do we have access and how does it work and can we direct our minds mmm this is a this is an entertaining question for a guy like sam harris what do you mean you can direct your mind who is you the your mind will direct itself towards what it believes to be the most useful cost-benefit ratio of where to spend its time and energy in any kind of analytic force it so I'm not sure that quote you direct anything your your mind is a you know other people would spin their head around that and try to try to make sense of of what we're gonna say or what everyone would say about that but I would send them to Sam Harris's book on freewill and that's a nice little tumble through the through the labyrinth of the question of free well you are I will I will say that your mind directs its attention and it directs its time and energy towards way it believes to be the highest cost benefit efficiency that's and that's what it does it seeks the truth to the extent that the truth would appear to be a profitable endeavor to seek when it turns out that the truth does not appear to be a profitable endeavor to seek it puts it it tucks its head and in its in the sand okay and and and gathers around the other lemmings and make sure that it it does what's in its personal best interest which is to not question and not not seek the truth honestly and instead be morally outraged at the people that seek truths that are uncomfortable and so that is the state of affairs of psychology specifically self in science social science in general and and a great deal of the sociological processes that are going on the world more broadly and so so anyway that's that's what I have to say about human self insight and its limitations as well as its capacities for the future we do have the capacity to get better at this just like any observer of any complex situation or any complex section if the more you know the more the better you are and the better you are the more valuable your insights can become so this is the the quiet tragedy of the modern world that social science is that there's been a revolution that if there was a hundred thousand people like me with PhDs in clinical psychology out there working at this instead of a few okay there would be an awful lot more insightfulness and intelligent experimentation about how to help people through the kinds of decision making problems that they face and how and more innovation okay so believe me there's a tremendous amount of innovation that can be done and just working with gen gen has come up with all kinds of creative clinical solutions to problems that I wouldn't have thought of just because she's got a different personality different background and quite frankly she's smarter so the point is is what a what a way we could move forward in this area in order to help people in clinical challenges is if we had a lot more people that understood this so that's what that's what a bunch of us are up to is to try to get a lot more people excited and interested that's absolutely fascinating dr. Lyle mmm I know I know there's a lot of people myself included that are looking forward to this new book that you guys are writing to come out but we will try not to put anybody in ego traps and so we don't know if it's ever gonna but hopefully it does maybe at least 2030 yeah who knows well we might be able to beat that by a little bit ya know it's so interesting because I remember one of the videos I watched of you explaining the two whole food plant-based people in the war in the plant-based world mmm when they're talking to their friends and family about you know health and wellness and whatnot in trying to tell them oh yeah this is the best way to reverse diabetes high blood pressure all these other things and I think you made the point saying that that your competition as far as information is the drug companies and everybody else saying hey you don't have to eat shit you don't have to change any part of your life you just take this pill you just do this you do this and it's way easier and then here's somebody here here you are telling them oh yeah I've got the solution but it's gonna you know uproot your entire life it's gonna make you a social pariah in many ways it's gonna get you to get all these things that are way more difficult it's like no wonder they don't want to listen of course of course yeah and that was similar parallel as we'll see the Jensen site in in understanding the the modern deference to trauma why is that being an extremely similar and parallel story which she will in foal for us fantastic well we're looking forward to it hmm all right our next question this is going way back to episode 2 don't know Wow so dear dr. Lau you mentioned in episode 2 that people can also get depressed about their personal survival like in the case of discovering that they have cancer but you didn't elaborate on what purpose that might serve evolutionarily people in the Stone Age wouldn't have known they had terminal cancer but they might have a good sense that a disease or a wound was almost certainly going to fester and kill them what are the genes telling this person to do and why is this tendency to get depressed in the face of near certain death a sign of the genes wanting the person to give up on life for the sake of not drawing valuable resources from their village anymore as a follow up once a person can accept their impending death with certainty should the depressive feelings decrease or end do people who embrace their mortality and relief find relief and the ability to enjoy their remaining time relatively stress-free interesting question here except that we apt as we have to get a little bit of clarity and that is that that as they say no one in the Stone Age would ever get a lab report that would tell them that they've got terminal cancer so if you get a laboratory port that says that you've got terminal cancer now you're depressed because you've experienced a loss and the loss is that you thought you were going to live 30 more years and it turns out you're going to live 3 ok so your your depression is a is a reaction to loss that's what depression is it's a signalling system to tell you when you have lost you've lost the competitive process and romance you've lost a competitive process and friendship you've lost the competitive process and trade or you have lost your you know or somebody close to you has lost so by implication there's been a loss to you or in the case of your own life you've lost function or you've lost life itself so good feelings come with gains bad feelings come with losses so we don't have to we don't have to look for some convoluted evolutionary engineering for the loss of life itself and its acceptance or anything else under the Sun it's real simple bad news is bad news because it's new information that says the circumstances are worse than we thought or that we had hoped and that's that's why it is that you would have negative feelings so depression can can come from all kinds of different angles it is not a disease it's not an imbalance of the brain it's a signaling system it's the activation of a single signaling system no different in principle than the signaling system that tells you that you're too hot too cold hungry tired thirsty or that you've got too much salt in your mouth it's just a feeling that is telling you that depression is a feeling that huh the expectations were higher than what reality turned out to be so that's what a loss is you'll you'll feel depressed if you spend a bunch of money on a fancy vacation and you took your sweetheart there and you thought it was going to be really cool and you saw the photography and then you walk out there and there's trash on the beach and some homeless people and it's not private and nice and it's not even quiet there's a noisy rock band you know next door it's like whoa okay you got a whole bunch of feelings depression embarrassment frustration anger all kinds of negative feelings about what a loss and what was that loss a discrepancy between youth what you thought was going to happen and what did happen so yeah that's that's the way to sort of understand feelings because feelings are essentially a feedback system is what it is that they are so good bad or indifferent that's the explanation for why it is that we feel what we feel interesting okay yeah it when I was reading this question it the the image that flashed into my head was was an action movie where the hero of the movie is you know mortally wounded and his friends are like no we're not gonna leave you and he says no go leave me mm-hmm so so he's displaying his conscious as he's dying right you know and and mmm so I guess yeah so if people do get cancer and they I guess will they be it get depressed if once they kind of accept this I may be oh they're gonna get depressed I'm sure when they get the news but then now the question is quote when they reach acceptance today just the depression left well just like anything after you've absorbed and integrated the loss into your and into your life's big master spreadsheet so that you know if you have a if you have a business loss and it turns out that you know you're gonna have to cut the cable bill and your can okay get the new car so you go through a depressive process while you have to reorganize your cost benefit across all of your life options and a bunch of work has to be done to reshuffle priorities okay so that's going to happen if you thought you were going to live 30 years and now you're gonna live three it's like oh okay so you're gonna get depressed but after you go through that process the depression is just there to signal to you that you've experienced a loss and it's there to then analyze why'd loss happen and to see what needs to be done to mitigate that's that's the whole orientation towards that process once that takes place very often the depression is not nearly so severe it will come it will come back and forth and waves but it but it won't doesn't need to dominate the person's existence for the rest of their life because they can be feeling like okay well that's that so you know if I was ever gonna go you know mm-hmm go to visit Hawaii now's the time okay because I may not be here a year from now and so it starts changing priorities and starts you know moving things around and potentially very meaningful ways and therefore there is there's once again profits to seek in the life experience and to the extent that those are achieved the person experiences moods of happiness so there's nothing there's nothing about death and it's inevitability that's depressing if that were true we'd all be depressed because like sooner or later it's coming to an end okay so no it's about it's about the experience of losses that activates those feelings and then once those losses have been essentially engineered through the system and the the matrix of cost-benefit essentially the values matrix the universal values matrix that sits inside of you has been sort of reoriented to the new data then you're okay then it's back to making the most of it which is what it always is fabulous all right our next question why do human brains take so long to mature to competence yes we are born relatively early to accommodate the size of the head but it's not a matter of a few more months no other animal is so helpful it's so helpless for so many years our human brains slow to mature because they are so adaptable so they hold off on forming synapses right away or is it because they simply have so many neurons to wire up in more complex ways compared to other animals it truly takes that long if the former what is it about human intelligence that is so much slower to wire up if it's all hard coded by the DNA anyway and what advantage is there in postponing the ability to walk etc for so long several things first of all obviously we're running into engineering constraints because in ideally you would have that brain completely up and functioning a day one so what you're running into is it's it's just like saying well gee wouldn't be good if you could just fly from you know LA to New York in half an hour I mean wouldn't that be a lot better then in six hours would be like kind it'd be so much better you know wouldn't be any big deal to go to New York or Europe no big she'd be nice to go to Italy just you know like have it be an hour it's like well you can't just have it be an hour because there's engineering constraints at this time and so throughout the course of evolution in order to to deal with the engineering constraints this thing did is best it could it made the brain as big as it could possibly make it and still get the birth through the birth canal it compromised women's efficiency at walking that turns out to have them wiggle in a way that men find attractive because it it enhances their our knowledge that they're female the but but the bottom line is it's less efficient and the and so also then it turned out to be a very dicey trade to to make the brain in such a way that it could absorb a tremendous amount of information and and integrate that information in a useful way but it was gonna pull in a great deal of information about the environment it's essentially going to build a very complex environmental map and so it's going to take years to load in reliable data to actually understand you know what it's dealing with before it starts making mating decisions so this is this is what it is it would be if you were a surveyor trying to figure out you know which flavor of coffee Starbucks really be offering you wouldn't serve a ten people that wouldn't be enough if you were gonna build a major corporation you would say we need a lot of data before we understand how much of our you know what should be on the menu and how much of what of the workspace should be directed of what kind of coffee so how much how much of it should be standard coffee how much of it should be mocha Java you know bling or whatever it is in other words so if you're gonna try to figure this out if you're going to dedicate space like how much of the square footage should be dedicated a little baked goods versus how much should be like chips and sandwiches stuff like that so if you can imagine that the right way to do things if you the more data you had about what people are going to buy and what the profit margins are going to be on each of those items it would the the better data you had the more effectively you can dedicate your space to the situation therefore less likely to be beaten by a competitor so the so you can see that it's not going to be just a little bit of data a company that says oh we're just gonna follow so-and-so's vision okay my Uncle Louie thinks people like you know chicken wings that are dipped in I don't know steak sauce so we're gonna build a company and we're gonna raise venture capital and we're gonna blow ten million dollars on you know uncle uncle Louie's you know steak wings that's a mistake okay that's a mistake you just left off the cliff and invested a tremendous amount of energy into a thing that is very very unlikely to fly now it might fly but it's not very likely so a better thing would be to run little experiments and to gather more data about what the actual underlying demand structure is of the market that would be a far superior way to go about doing things that's what human development is it's a way to to as people are watching and learning all kinds of things about their environment they are then going to be able to make far more complex decisions than a chimpanzee makes in its environment because its environment is relatively socially simple for example and therefore there aren't going to be complex convoluted political Machiavellian personality variances all kinds of freaking scheming deception coalition formation betrayal you know heroism no that doesn't exist in a chimpanzee troupe okay but all of those things will be part of a human life and whether or not you make good decisions or poor decisions with respect to some of those dramatic opportunities will have a large influence on the outcome of your life that would have been true in the Stone Age so therefore it takes time it takes time to do to let that data flow its way into the Machine and what we're seeing is is that as the person says well if it's all hardwired why isn't it just hardwired and the answer is it's not hardwired what's hardwired is the value system behind survival reproductive success and the subroutines that are associated flirting screwing hunting you know the mean getting warm looking looking essentially worried at the the sky with the with the lightning there's all kinds of things that are you know inside of human beings naturally and that human beings will naturally know or good/bad into what degree etc and will have action tendencies that are already associated with them but so much will need to be learned so much data will need to be put into the head before reliable calculations can start to be made and so that cannot be put in the system cannot be essentially loaded in early it's basically what can be loaded in for example is a is a is a knowledge that one needs to get warm but you might say well then why don't you just get warm and the answer is because it's already 90 degrees outside so we don't have to go do anything to get warm but the neural circuit is in there to actually learn that that oh it turns out that it can get colder later in the year so when it starts to get cold that gets colder and colder and colder you don't know that innately because you don't necessarily live away from the equator but if you do live away from the equator you can learn that and that becomes an important thing to be putting into your calculus and to be modifying your behavior when the leaves start to turn red okay so this is why a chimpanzee doesn't doesn't face that as those kinds of variances and doesn't make these kind of computations so this is why the human brain you know had engineering constraints on its development but it also had constraints on how much information could flow into the system in any given short period of time that would be a reliable sample of what actually would happen in in its long term and so that's why that's why it is the way it is is that is that it has engineering constraints and it also has essentially stability of information flow and you don't want it to get fooled by something that happens early and then biases the system late okay this was a these are all sort of important in interesting ideas in developmental embryology of the brain years ago thinking from an evolutionary perspective I think this was in 1980s maybe before I don't think so I think it was 1980s there was a Belski and Draper Jay Bell see I believe in Holly Draper I believe these were developmental psychologists somewhere fairly prominent had an evolutionary hypothesis I think became known as the bielski Draper hypothesis which is the notion that if females were were born into a household where there was no father around then they picked up that cue from the environment that fathers in this environment have low investment and therefore would then bias them towards short-term casual mating behavior in their sexual development later that they would pick up these cues and then it would shunt their behavior very interesting hypothesis turns out to not be supported by the evidence so it doesn't actually work that way but I we look back fondly on that hypothesis as a very interesting one and and and a useful example of how to think about possible ways that that that the brain would work and how it we develop and and yet we wouldn't necessarily know until we investigate so probably things like the breaker the bielski Draper hypothesis may in fact take place in human nature but we don't we we can't they may not have large effect sizes and they may be difficult to see but they may be in there and maybe be part of the process of a slow brain development slowly bringing in data and also then essentially attempting to idealize the computations that the brain makes for long term decision-making in its particular environment
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