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Episode 239: Down arrow, Education policy, Epigenetics, Trauma induced behavioral change
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a few months ago we we uh we decided not to go live anymore and we uh changed our live call and phone number to a voicemail that people can call in and leave a voicemail and so we've gotten a number of voicemails that we really appreciate we just haven't had time to put them on into the show partly for technical reasons but we figured it out and so we have one of our listeners who gave us a really really fun question really interesting question i'd like to hear the answer to so dr lau doctor hawk we're gonna hit play and then the listeners will listen to the question and then we'll get your take on it okay okay sounds good all right big fan of the show just have a question or two here i thought i'd leave a voicemail so it's easier so i've i've noticed that dr lyla and dr hawk instead of trying to directly calm someone down about something that they're anxious about what you tend to do is get them good information so that they can become informed and remove distortions themselves rather than to try to just face the problem and try to be okay with it or use some sort of bogus calming technique um this shows that you know you take your own theory to heart and that the only real thing you can change that can change your thoughts or feelings is information we can acquire in process so my question is um are there situations where you actually avoid using the down arrow technique with people to attempt to reach your position of power by coming to terms with the worst case scenario is there is that sometimes not the right move like when the worst case scenario is actually pretty bad like they're worrying about a potential life sentence in prison or looming possible bad cancer prognosis or whatever um you know they imagine the potential suffering of others they'll leave behind after they die early i don't know but is that is that when the only thing left becomes full-on grieving and acceptance seems like even the grief over death causes us to come out in that position of power i know that personally when i've stopped when i stopped believing in an afterlife for example i had to grieve that but it doesn't really bother me anymore i can imagine it being basically the same process no matter what you just resolve those open loops by confronting the problem so you can feel confident in what could happen and what you're going to do or not do about it so do you sometimes choose to not quite go there with people who are facing the real possibility of those tougher worst case scenarios and unless it becomes a more sure thing thanks that's a uh it's a great question uh yeah a really thoughtful question very thoughtful and obviously a very bright listener who has who has integrated our way of thinking about things um so i think i'll respond to this um jen feel free to chime in but um i would i would say that i can't recall uh a time when when i was not uh willing to use down arrow the uh there's time oh that's interesting there's times there's times when you there's times when you wouldn't because it may not be being called for so i can remember having a session with a man who had a terminal diagnosis and we were talking through sort of how he was going to spend the next you know six months or however much time he had so we weren't we weren't down arrowing because down arrow is really a technique that you are utilizing for anxiety uh when people clearly are are ruminating about the worst case scenario in this case he wasn't ruminating about the worst care scenario it it already happened and we were then simply uh having a session talking through about how to uh how to smartest to most intelligently use the time he had left so it that that's what we were dealing with at that time uh but if someone was facing a a um a possible uh big cancer diagnosis um i i might i might and they might be spinning spinning on what that would all mean and look like um probably what i would do i probably wouldn't grind my way down through the uh the the down arrow but it would certainly be part of the the uh the dialogue that i would be having with them and so uh what i would be signaling is uh i would be signaling essentially that i had processed the down arrow and i i would say things like well it may turn out that this is that it's it's the worst case scenario and it may turn out that we have a terminal diagnosis that's a possibility okay uh but you know there's nothing for us to be doing between now and then uh when we find that out so what we're gonna do is we're going to proceed uh with you know essentially by learning all we can about the situation that's in front of us and make the best decisions that we can so i i would um what i do is i am willing to name the worst case scenario and to talk about it uh basically and fearlessly and the reason that i'm doing that is because they they are afraid of it or they very well may be afraid of it or they may be afraid of the social interaction where that's discussed and so they may want to talk about it but they don't want to overwhelm the other person because they've got enough empathy that they don't want to put the other person in this terrible position of having to reassure them or just be overwhelmed by by what it is that they're facing so as a clinician what i do is i signal to them that i'm not overwhelmed by whatever it is that they're facing and so and and the way that i get to that position of power is i mean i i get there obviously i get there genetically by by a great deal of natural stability in my personality um but i also get there i mean but i didn't have that much stability uh in those situations when i was 25 and i was a grad student okay but uh now that i'm 60 i do have that kind of stability and i've had it for a long time and part of it came from uh cycling through down arrows with people you know a thousand times for all the trials and tribulations of human life that every permutation that you could think of that causes people a lot of anxiety you can use down arrow and and basically come to the uh watch the position of power re-emerge and so as a result of that um that that is what i feel i don't i don't like to be be facing possibly very very negative outcomes nobody does but at the same time i'm not going to hide from them or stick my head in the sand clinically about it and so if it's uh if it's indicated and the person needs to process or is spinning i very well might use the the uh the down arrow technique because we may need to get them to move through what would their decisions be if it turned out that it was the worst case scenario you know where would their kids go you know where what would the finances be and they they they may be spending a lot of mental energy cycling through those worst case scenarios but not getting to completion because they aren't actually talking them out or thinking them through carefully because their their mind is so busy hopping from one perspective to the next under the tremendous uncertainties that are involved so uh yeah so i ha i i don't uh in answer and answer the question i i don't i can't think of a time where i would say to myself no don't use down arrow under situation x it would it's much more of an issue of where the client is at uh with their with their particular situation uh where they are at that at that moment in time what seems to be the thing that's troubling them most and if it's a bunch of open loops and anxiety and and spinning etc i would never hesitate to to calmly and unapologetically walk through down arrow explain to them why it is that i was going to do that and be be willing to face what is probably at most a a 10 or 15 minute you know emotional acute event probably five minutes uh while it is that that we that we sort of unapologetically look at that worst case and then start talking about matter of factly about well what would we do then okay and so yeah i actually think that uh i think that that's that that's probably one of the greatest strengths there is to down arrow is that as a clinician you you realize we're not magic people we're not here to sprinkle fairy dust on it and we're not trying to make you feel better for three minutes or 15 minutes what we're here to do is we are here to essentially you know clean out the closet of the confusion and anxiety that's inside there and uh give you a a a basically a better informed shift in perspective uh that you can walk out of the office or in the session and be in better shape now to deal with whatever it is you're confronting wonderful now for listeners who may not have heard what the down arrow technique is listen i encourage you to listen some of them some of the previous episodes where dr lyle goes over it but there's also a really good resource that dr lyle and dr hawk have created called the the living wisdom library so you can go ahead and visit that at esteemdynamics.com join become a member and there's a lot of there's right now there's a three and a half hour 24 video module that explains you know general psychology personality and esteem processes and i'm sure there'll be a down arrow technique uh talk sometime in the future someday but um but yeah anyway so dr hoch what um what say you yeah no i think he's covered everything that i would want to say i i think that we are very unusual because we're not um this is not typical psychology this is not psychodynamic tell me about your childhood and i'm just here to be an audience for complaining for some amount of time which a lot of therapy is and so we are very solutions oriented by by definition of what we're doing and most of the people who are seeking consults with us are receptive to down arrow because they are trying to solve a problem you know they're trying to manage their anxiety around something that seems unmanageable they're trying to get to a solution to improve their life and to to fix some kind of dilemma that said there have been times when i've when i've talked to somebody who is not interested in that they they are just interested in spinning and they don't actually they're trying to avoid the problem they're not ready to confront it um and that that usually is pretty clear and they they're signaling it really clearly to me that they don't want to confront it they're not interested in it um the the down arrowing it is is really just going to create more stress for them because it's not something that they they really want to think about that's not why they booked the consult um so in those kinds of cases i will just i'll let them kind of just process and we'll talk about it and we'll i'll walk through that avoidance with them i'll be their companion in their avoidance rather than stress them out by pushing them into a situation that they're not ready to confront but but when people are sort of aware that there is something out there that is that is scary and that they want to solve then it's almost always a good thing to do there you go excellent doctor yeah thank you yeah all good actually that's a good idea for that's a good idea for a little uh a video i just wrote that down to add to the living wisdom library would be you know half an hour on down arrow just explaining the logic i think that's i hadn't thought about that but uh that this question brings that up and i think all i think we'll do that one of these days yeah i think so often what happens with people who come to us is that they've they've already they've already gotten halfway there they're good you know we get a lot of very conscientious people who are they just kind of have that innate worst case scenario chip in them already but they haven't thought through all of the parameters and all of the possibilities and that's what that's what we're very helpful for because you can't always see the whole context that you're swimming in and so we we're able to point that out to somebody who is you know has the personality and the and the willingness to do that kind of work but that's not always everybody all good well speaking of willingness to do work uh here we have a question about education in the united states so dear doctors i'd love to hear both of your takes on this question imagine that you are magically made emperor of the k-12 education system in the u.s essentially you have complete authoritarian control over the entire system and can expect 100 compliance on your vision and your mandates so how would you design the system and how does the big five and evolutionary psychology affect this design well i'll take a swipe at this and then we'll let jen find find where i was too ham handed let that emperor flag fly the um i have not given this any thought at all uh or virtually no thought at all the uh the evidence as i understand it is going to basically explain that uh the the educational process is not gonna it's not gonna it's not to be influencing anybody's uh intelligence that's for sure uh it's it's more it's more a babysitting service i mean this is how how it is that you have mothers that can go to work and parents that can go to work and know that their kids are are safe and halfway productively engaged and let's face it most of what school is about it's a social process where you know people flirt and they test you know they learn about where it is that they stand with respect to a bunch of dimensions uh so it's growing up is what it is and so i don't i don't take the educational system seriously at all the uh the uh no there's exactly zero evidence that anything that you do in the educational system makes any difference at all so if you're it doesn't matter if you send your kids to the fanciest school that has you know i don't know that there's some loot there's a i think it's called the steiner method or something like that there's just some ludicrous concepts uh rudolph steiner i've had people spending you know thirty thousand dollars a year sending their kids to uh to private schools so from the time they're six or seven years old as if this was going to make some difference it will make absolutely zero difference other than drain your bank account so if you make me czar okay then what it is that we would do well the only thing that i see that that a governmental intervention should be looking at would really be your people at the very bottom of the curve that that's who the educational system should be incredibly sensitive to and be looking to help so remember even in the the worst economies in the united states 90 plus percent of people have been employed so real typical in the united states these days is you know it's a bad economy when you have six percent unemployment for god's sakes it's a good economy when it's four to five okay so this is so basically 19 out of 20 people that are looking for work you know can find it so the we're not worried particularly about the upper 90 percent of the distribution we should be very worried if we're a government about the bottom 10 percent of the distribution so to have the bottom 10 percent of the distribution to to be basically um to carry the blanks slate everybody was born equal concept into the educational system is a total fiasco and it's a it's a grand waste of of resources and it does a serious uh really uh probably a very uh major injustice to to the people that need to help the most so if i was tsar i would be looking to determine what could be done uh for those people at the bottom and it's not uh getting them up in reading writing and arithmetic so that they pass some score to do that because they're never going to be able to do that well and if they do it well it doesn't do them any good so what what could be useful would be actual skills that would be valuable in the marketplace something where they could learn procedures uh to do jobs that you know that an unskilled person can't do and that people with more native ability don't want to do and so that's what i would be looking for and so i don't i don't know that there there is such training that could be done i.e trade school uh i don't i don't know that uh like in principle a government in in theory could be nimble enough to respond to changing marketplace demands uh fairly reasonably if if uh specific skills that were useful in the marketplace could be identified uh but what's going on now is is is you know a tragedy basically that these these young people are are being uh basically frog marched through 12 years of failure as they have an inability to uh to process the sort of verbal intellectual information that's required to pass school so they can't do it they never will do it it's not part of their capacity and even if you could fake their way through it it doesn't do them any good what could do them some good is learning about how to you know be an assistant plumber that could be super useful okay what could be useful is learning to be an assistant about replacing transmissions that could be super useful so if you make me czar obviously those were two typically male things i'm not thinking from the female end of things but you know there there would be other there would be things like that and i don't know i don't i'm not even going to say it because i'll get into trouble but the bottom line is is that there's probably 30 or 40 or 15 or 50 sorts of skills out there for which it would raise the person from an unskilled laborer who is really not worth the minimum wage or they would be hired okay and so we changed that individual to an individual whose worth instead of being worth five dollars an hour because of their low low abilities in an environment where the minimum wage is 10 and therefore they've been legislated out of a job instead if we can educate them so that they we've got years in there that they could develop really quite a lot of skill uh and if they could develop such skill they could be worth 11 an hour as a skilled person or semi-skilled person and now they are employable and so and they may be you know just give them a great deal more effect flexibility and opportunity in their life so that's that's what i would uh do and like i said the details of it i'm not exactly sure how you do it i would do it scientifically and experimentally to get the best possible effects so i'd be uh smart about you know i would get some smart people to help me figure out how to how to accomplish that but that would definitely be the direction that i would go fabulous unfortunately we lost doctor hawks so we just wanted to get your answer your audio so let me connect dr hawk again okay all good yeah that's probably in protest is probably why all right here we go go ahead let's see uh let's go ahead and hook her up hello all right here we go okay you good i'm good it's doug good okay doug you still there yes i'm still here okay so dr hawk do you want to respond to the stuff you didn't hear about what dr lyles said but uh if if i understand this did you guys even notice i'd gotten kicked off just to see if i understood it right um dr lyle your point uh which i i it's it makes perfect sense to me but you know i'm just a lowly chiropractor so yeah um for me what you were saying essentially is that we focus on the very bottom of the belt distributions of the bell curves of the people who have the low stability and therefore are not served memorizing a whole bunch of facts and figures that everybody else is memorizing because they'll never be able to put it to use and instead to put them into uh is to to develop skills like maybe trade school or something like that and if there was a government system that was nimble enough to adapt quickly to the market and the necessity for those skills to essentially change with the times depending on which skills are needed and that would put those people in a better position to compete for resources when they have those skills yeah that's a basic idea don't try to fix the iq try to try to put more ability inside the person through through rehearsal and and education that's uh that's what i would do so dr hawk are you still on yeah i'm still on yeah the connection is okay yeah the connection's okay with doug although i'm still having a lot of trouble making your words out it's very choppy so your summary of what doug said was also difficult to hear so but i think i've got the gist of it um which is that yeah that totally makes sense makes sense to me i um i i do yeah i think there is a little uh place for there to be some policy around that because i think if you leave that entirely to the free market you do you really um you're eliminating an important safety net where those skills might not otherwise be acquired unfortunately the rest of dr hawk's answer got cut off due to technical difficulties but we're going to pick up where we left off and start with the next question as we get reconnected all right all right let's see what what else we have now all right our next question uh dear doctors i want to make sure i understand beating your genes if people are told no punished held back negative reinforcement over and over again it will affect the genes is this a true statement well the genes like epigenetically is that i think that's what they're asking about here is that how you take that yeah i think that's what they're trying to say yeah yeah there's there's sort of this idea um that is out there in the world and it comes um it has a couple of different forms but the general idea is that you know you're in your environmental experiences including how you're disciplined as a child or um you know sort of patterns patterns of certain types of abuse in your early life that they can affect the expression of your genes or that they can change the brain or there's all these different ways that people talk about this and think about this including you know there's this vast literature that i had to contend with when i was writing my dissertation about historical trauma and epigenetic in in ancestral trauma and how you know these these sort of suggestive studies that populations that live through a famine that the the the eggs it inside the the the female that then the the is your grandmother somehow that this trauma that she goes through is passed on for many many many generations including including your own so your current food issues in this in this lifetime are because your grandmother lived through a famine so there's this kind of whole idea and it even goes as deep as this questioner seems to be suggesting that you know even if you're you're over disciplined as a child that that's going to somehow affect your genetic expression later in life and this is just there's just really no evidence for that um so the quick answer to epigenetics questions like this is that yeah this is not a true statement to just summarily answer your question yeah the um yeah this is just uh jen being more academical than i am and you know just slicker with her words it's just bs people [Laughter] the uh yeah this is directly contradicted by massive amounts of evidence that indicate that the uh environment early on in life is actually more responsible for the variance in in things that you see in behavior and then it becomes less and less and less and less part of the variance so for example and let me explain how this would work so early in life let's suppose a couple of people a kid with a hundred iq genetically is born into a family uh or is not born into a family but is raised by a family with a couple of parents that have 130 iqs and so those parents are hovering all over this kid giving them flash cards to try to get his vocabulary up doing half their homework and essentially pushing the daylights out of everything and it looks like you know what they're about as 80th percentile uh student and that's what it looks like looks like wow we're having a big environmental effect and it is okay so that that person's twin brother being raised by people of a 100 iq is is right dead in the middle of the bell curve at the 50th percentile right where he belongs and by the by the sixth grade but our person that was raised by these superstar people that person's at the 70th or 8th percentile except we have to check out what happens by their freshman year of college freshman year of college those two twins are right dead on 100 iq exactly what we would expect out of them in terms of grades and functioning so in other words the genes become vastly more determinative of where it is that we see people's life histories go as you watch them over longer periods of time anybody that's ever watched an nba game can understand this well uh one team goes up by seven points at the end of the first quarter is the other team worried i think not okay you'd rather be a head seven than below seven but the truth is is that if you if you look for example of who scores first in an nba game that has exactly zero predictive ability to determine who's going to win that game and if there's the score is within 10 points at the end of the first quarter it also is going to remain basically zero okay so if you have a nine point lead at the end of the first quarter there's almost no advantage you're almost not more likely to win that game than lose it so the uh so the point of the matter is is that the genes as you let the game go on you see the evidence of the genes starting to overwhelm the the short-term variances that you see from you know unstable characteristics of environmental opportunity or distress so the the the notion that there's this is the this whole this whole bs story is all about a twisted attempt to keep alive the concept of the blank slate your child is not limited because epigenetics they can turn into einstein after all doesn't matter that they're flunking seventh grade you know pre-algebra don't worry about it there's epigenetics is there to save you okay no it's not that isn't how it works so it's going to turn out that the the genes will tell the uh uh basically tell the story better and better as time goes on uh the notion that uh the whole concept of epigenetics by the way is a is a you know fairly interesting concept in biology it's not it's not a illegitimate concept the concept of epigenetics is that there's a there's a reaction range to how the genes determine uh what happens to what's known as the phenotype so your skin the genes inside your skin will will make your skin darker or lighter depending upon how much sun exposure you get that's at what epigenetics is it's the reaction range what the genes do to the environmental cues that are out there okay it is not epigenetics is not about how the genes change as a result of the environment okay the gene action changes in other words little protein codes that they do different but so they so you can get a tan and then you lose your tan okay so if you're traumatized what happens is you go through a set of appropriate reactions to that trauma uh in order to basically it's encoding a new knowledge about the threats of the environment and then you your functioning will return to baseline you haven't permanently changed the deep genetic structure uh that it's determining the the neurobiology of your nervous system not even close people not even remotely close i i don't know that uh actually we can tell by the the long-term stability of personality and and and the uh the increasing determination of genes uh as you as you follow through the environment follow through the lifespan that we know that nothing of the kind that is being hypothesized by uh by people that are that whose writings and thoughts gave rise to this question none of that is legitimate wonderful dr lyle thank you dr hawk what say you yeah exactly that that was taking the little seed of the epigenetics question and spitting it out into i mean this is we just we we are always dealing with this set of topics i just um i just published an excerpt on the website and on medium.com that sort of really really gets deep into you know what does what do these environmental effects actually look like when we really break them down so what doug was just talking about about the genes having a bigger role to play as you go through your life i think that that is not a very intuitive notion for a lot of people to really understand what that means and that's what we're talking about when we talk about heritability so heritability is talking about how the role that your genetic profile is playing as you get out of your childhood environment you actually as doug is saying you become more of who you genetically are as you age so you're the events early of your early life have less and less and less of an effect so he used the example of the hovering um hovering parents you know doing your homework for you uh another one that comes up a lot is is your weight and your your your physical size and your health if you're growing up if you're a a child that's been adopted into a home with incredibly healthy food and you know their fitness freaks and they go and they go biking every weekend and all of these things that is going to be that child is more likely to have a healthy weight than its twin who's being raised in a family that you know orders pizza every day and never leaves the house to do anything and is is living a very standard american diet lifestyle but if you take both of those people and both of those twins you get them out of that home environment and you let them make their own choices in the college dining hall they converge their genes start to actually demonstrate who who it is that they are actually encoded to be by by that genetic profile and that becomes more and more true as people age so most traits become you know they start off at 40 heritable when you're looking at you know people who are age 10 and then by age 80 it's up to 70 or 80 percent of the variances is explained by the genetics so this is this comes up all the time because people uh are looking for so many other explanations of why they're having trouble solving the key problems in their life and they they are looking back at these environmental experiences these childhood problems um these very intuitive places that they're going to look for where things went wrong uh and so we are always trying to steer people around and to to actually empower them with the real information which is uh that your your genes are really really driving the show here and that these these childhood events these early you know how you were disciplined whether you had baby einstein all of these things really do not amount to anything what what kind of school you go to i propose the last question um really that stuff does not amount to much in the long in the long haul now do we know um that makes that makes a lot of sense thank you dr hoch for for your answer um do you know if uh how long say a traumatic event may alter someone's behavior is that kind of i know it's individual but you know obviously it's not 50 years but but do we know yet does does is my question too broad i mean no let me explain so uh the issue is is that experiences previous experiences will alter the behavior as long as they have legitimate uh best as long as they're the best data to inform the current cost-benefit analysis that the person is running okay so if you let's suppose that you were beat up by the bully next door three days ago and you're a ten-year-old kid now the bullet bladex door still lives next door and you saw that you know his mother chewed him out and spanked him but he didn't cry and when he was walking in he just gave you a smirk okay and your dad told you hey well you're just gonna have to deal with tough people like that so you know be you know toughen up buck up now now where you are now is the your assessment that you've still got a big problem is still there now let's fast forward now 12 years from now you're not 10 anymore now you're 22. is that having an influence on you no it's not it's not influencing anything so you're do you you already know at that by that point that there are big strong stupid you know disagreeable dangerous people in the world so you are not highly sensitized as a result of the bully next door you're just running a cb in all situations so the the notion the psychodynamic notion is oh well i know have a new boss and it really reminds me of the guy next door because they both have red hair and they were both kind of kind of overweight so as a result i feel like all traumatized no nothing of the kind takes place your uh your boss if he's a friendly jovial guy and gives you good feedback it doesn't matter if he's looks even superficially remotely like that guy in fact it probably doesn't matter if it is that guy okay the circumstances have changed the new cb about the entire situation is now different so the your question nathan is how long could an environmental effect last the answer is well it could be for a lifetime it could be like for example jen's now been bet bit by a centipede so i used that example in a in a session today i was just answering this question in a session and i used the centipede example because it's like yeah now i have this strong correlation where it's like under these circumstances this couch as far as i know is full of centipedes and so if i if i within some amount of time i and we took the couch apart and we investigated it and there were no centipedes but still like if i if i go to hug mellie again and i have a similar experience that could be a very rare weird event that that would happen again sequentially so soon after this this last time but let's say that that happens tonight if that happens tonight i'm done with that couch forever even though that would be an incorrect assumption to make because it would be a freakishly probab probabilistically freakish event for that to happen twice in a row but it could happen twice in a row and i i am a correlation machine and if it happened again my correlation would go as close to 100 as it's gonna get and i'd feel like no way i am not taking that risk again and i would basically my my openness would would close down around getting any more information to take a different track of inferring what that environment had in store for me and if that was the case then yes that trauma would permanently affect me for life but as long as i remain open to overwriting the information that i have with subsequent experiences that have a different outcome then i can then i can have a different experience and make a different inference and you know not expect centipedes to bite me all the time correct yes so that's that is exactly how this is going to work it's a beautiful explanation so the that that is so in environmental quote trauma or opportunity good things bad things doesn't make any difference if it if it stands as the most important data point good or bad in a data set associated with environmental contingencies then it will influence behavior all the way to the grave okay most of the time that doesn't happen so uh most of the time we don't have some bizarre outlying situation that is so great or so devastating that it dominates the person's equipment okay just not how it works so uh the person is smart enough like uh i've had people that for example have lost loved ones in auto accidents where the person's been in the car okay they they they didn't get rid of the car they didn't stop driving they didn't even become paranoid when they came near the place where the accident happened before now for a period of time any or all of those things might you know there might be an influence for a short period of time but the brain is is not meant to be a trauma psycho that's not what it's meant to be the brain is meant to be a cost-benefit analytic engine and so therefore it's constantly working on attempting to get to the truth now the truth is complicated enough that once in a while in the situation that jen just mentioned that if she was bit twice on that couch in a short length of time then essentially what you can do is you can manufacture a completely uh adaptive superstition okay so at that point it's like hey listen i don't know what the story is with this couch but it's out of here okay actually probably more intelligent would be we're leaving this house that actually but the thing is is that because of the stimulus characteristics are inferred that hey it's something about the couch seems to be the issue then the nervous system would probably be more worried about that than the general environment so that's that's it that's the nervous system attempting to hone in on the critical variables and attempting to sign cbs uh as accurately as possible so that's actually a great question nathan and it it helps us try to explain the entire structure of psychology the whole nature of motivation is uh and the nature of how it is that quote people change can change and cannot change so our big thing that we attempt to explain is that your personality cannot change but your cost-benefit analysis about a given set of environmental contingencies can change dramatically with new information in fact that's the only way that your reactions are going to change so that uh whether as jen says you think of yourself as a potted plant trying to move to the most benign circumstances that or also we are a uh thought differently were a cat that is now instructed because it has surveyed the landscape uh it came into the landscape very afraid but now it actually knows all the hiding places and it's mapped it out in its mind it now has a better understanding of the environment and now feels much safer and much more in control of the of the trauma of trauma threats that are out there because it it now knows what the structure of the environment is better the cat's personality did not change its understanding of the environment changed and with it its thoughts appealing and behavior you
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