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Episode 269: Epiphanies, Acting different around diff people, Self destructive behavior
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um all right so yeah any uh i guess you know there's not any current events to share other than i just need to sneak it in there that the cdc just quietly released the fact that half of americans essentially have been infected with covet and already have natural immunity but you know that's a for a different show i guess yeah the uh i mean there's a lot there's so much to say about covid and and we've been such a long time since we ever talked that much about it that it seems kind of uh coming out of left field to talk about it but you know they're one one very interesting thing that is happening is a obviously a showdown in the courts uh with the vax mandate so the uh i like any reasonable person doesn't have any problem with people taking the vaccine or not taking the vaccine i do have a problem with the government forcing people to take the vaccine for their children to go to school or for them to keep their job that an employer would could reasonably uh require anything of an employee but it is it's not it's not fair when the government basically uh intimidates businesses so that businesses do this and it does their bidding so this is a this very very nasty behavior on the part of our government uh obviously it's worse than other governments as this week us austria is now the unvaccinated people are now locked down um so you're watching unbelievably unprecedented aggressive behavior worldwide on the part of basically totalitarian actions on the part of governments the united states hasn't done anything like that but the the vax mandate is on its way to that in other words but it looks like from all appearances uh are are magnificently inherently conservative and i don't mean that in a political sense i mean in a sense of very very slow moving changes to the law is the way our system is designed in other words it's a very careful very slow nitpicking around legal issues and that's that's how our country is designed legally and uh this uh vax mandate looks like it's completely dead on arrival that it it violates uh numerous clauses in the constitution and it doesn't look like it's gonna fly so the uh still i feel very bad for all the people that got intimidated into taking a shot that they didn't want to take uh let's hope that the the shots are reasonably benign physically so that that people don't didn't have damages done to them from doing something that they didn't want to do but they felt like they had to so i'm sure that will happen i'm sure there will be bad things that will happen and uh all we can hope is that on balance that the the entire thing isn't a isn't a major public health fiasco as we learn more about the vaccines and their costs and benefits but as of right now i'm i'm cheered by the fifth circuit court of appeals uh that took one look at this thing and wrote extensive opinion basically saying that that it's not that this is even close legally that the federal government isn't isn't on even remotely solid ground when it comes to demanding this of its citizens uh and a beautiful statement uh that uh uh in writing the opinion one of the justices wrote something i i won't quote it accurately nathan but it said something to the effect of the fact that politicians are frustrated with individual citizens is actually this is the entire point of having a free society in other words i the to the judges justice's uh opinion that is not that that is precisely why we have the bill of rights is when the government is frustrated with citizens because the citizens aren't doing what the government wants this uh society was predicated on the notion that the government governs at the consent of the governed that we are in charge not you okay and so this is a very interesting legal showdown and i believe uh the president administration is going to get creamed on this whole thing but they will have pushed people and they will have gotten their way a long ways but they're not going to capture the flag and i'm glad to see that all right as uh this is a this is a a very direct libertarian argument that is in fact the libertarian argumentation is or the philosophy is really at the root of the american revolution um the the whole point of government is to free men from men and to and to have people free from governmental edicts and this is absolutely an absurd concept uh that they're that they're attempting to enforce and it needs to be you know a free society would shoot it down and the very first legitimate shot that gets fired uh the the the justices hit the center of the target uh they didn't apologize and and meanly mouth anything about it they they aimed dead center at this thing and said it is fatally flawed and so that is uh uh i don't the the the odds in in my estimation that uh any appeal to the supreme court if the supreme court even bothers to take this piece of [ __ ] case but if they do i believe that the supreme court will will overwhelmingly uh deny this appeal so that's where we are and you know if you don't want the shot put your hand over your shoulder which can't over your bicep because you're not going to have to do it unless you've got an employer that unfortunately uh uh is buying into this and bowing their heads which hopefully now fewer and fewer employers will all right that's my little statement on that nathan and uh yeah it came out yeah i i know i i brought it up out of left field but yeah it's okay yeah just had been on my mind no all good yeah that's that's that turned out you were right i mean a year and a half ago you were right about about the uh about the uh how deadly this thing might have been looked like well you know certainly i made plenty of mistakes there's been a lot of mistakes made there's a lot of uncertainty that remains and um and there's there's a lot of territory ahead of us that's uh that we have not yet yet traversed so there's a lot to do but one thing that shouldn't happen is we shouldn't turn this into a totalitarian dictatorship behind this um i was i was moved by listening to robert f kennedy jr and i i had not ever seen him and uh it hearkened back to my childhood because i could see his father in him and his father was uh actually kind of a boyhood hero of mine and so um and to see rfk uh saying basically hey listen it's a deadly virus but but it's not that deadly and you know there is uh there's there's treatment there's personal responsibility and there's overwhelmingly likelihood that the overwhelming majority of citizens would survive and he said thank god that you know in 1776 a bunch of people got together that said you know what there are things that are worse than death and that we are we are not going to be enslaved not gonna happen okay so there are freedoms that we are going to protect even if it means we die trying and to uh for for us to roll over and hand over those freedoms uh behind this this is ridiculous and it was a uh it was a very moving uh uh sequence that that he was uh sharing and so i was uh i was proud of him i said there's a there's a you know there's there's a great thinker all right all right that's enough for one day on that let's move on to something that anybody wants to hear about all right sounds good all right um okay so our first question uh this is uh this is uh dear doctors why do i often get small epiphanies about various things in my life when i'm half asleep there's a trope that epiphanies often come to people in the middle of a restless night or when they've just woken up i used to think this was just an invention of the media to make their content more entertaining but i started believing that it might be a real occurrence now that i've been experiencing it for the past two years what are your thoughts on this um yeah let me explain what's happening so your there's there's a lot to explain there and obviously a lot of what i'm going to be saying is somewhat speculative but there's actually quite a lot of science around it and a lot of thinking about this has been sort of coalesced quite well over the last decade or so so it's going to turn out that there's sort of uh two ways to solve problems so i'm sure i've talked about this before but but we will we'll answer this very good question you know if probably answered it four years ago but everybody forgot so there's going to be two basic processes by which the mind is going to solve problems one of them is going to be what we're going to call analytic and the other one's going to be what we call holistic and so um there there's they're different mental processes so let me explain what this looks like so let's suppose that you're trying to solve a problem i don't know in chemistry and so you are you are uh you're looking at you know every little piece of every little molecule and how it would fit and you need all of these little disparate facts in order to solve it and so the uh and so what you do is that you you try to look at the inner relationships uh between the little disparate facts and you look for the pattern about how it works and and your brain as you are working and maneuvering around in your mind's eye how things would fit you you know you'll see little solutions and in fact oftentimes uh like let's suppose that you're a geometry student and you know your geometry quite well you look at a you look quickly look at a at the the need for a proof on something and you're thinking okay well let me let me look at what element that is okay so we've got you know side angle side and then angle side angle and then we've got parallel parallelogram and therefore the angles are the same etc etc and so you know little pieces of the rules of geometry and you can very quickly maneuver them around and then put them in a sequence and then you know got it okay that is analytic now um the a a holistic problem uh the the holistic problems are going to have all kinds of little elements a lot of which you don't see how they tie together and so you can run into a problem where for example you're working you're working in the little elements inside of an analytic problem and let's say i don't know it's the double helix okay so you're trying to figure out how this thing works and then you're you look across the room and some gal starts walking out uh starts walking out of the room and but she puts her jacket on and zips up the zipper you can imagine that in another universe on a different day and time a francis crick or or uh john watson would take a look at that mr james watson james watson would have looked at that and said god that's it it's a zipper okay so in other words the a something else in the universe is applied to that problem and essentially a neural circuit far out away from the tight analytic thing that you were looking at actually holds the solution very different part of your brain somewhere now when you are working on the analytic side working down in the immediate details that you think are responsible for the action that you need to understand how things interrelate when you're doing that it turns out that your brain is searching all over its vast library it's vast knowledge that of memories inside of you about looking for anything that is relevant to this problem okay it's looking for conversations you had with your uncle ben you know when you poked the fireplace it's looking for you know the fact that you had a a you know a train a christmas train track that you built in your room and you built a figure eight okay it's looking all over the place you can't see it because the neural circuits that are being activated don't arrive a rise in consciousness they don't arise in consciousness because the the mystery of how it is that these values are all held together and activated it can't it it it's not exciting enough the system doesn't see that it's a solution but somewhere in its meanderings it may it may trip over something the thing is it may trip over a hint of it but if it's got a hint of something and it starts to trip but you are dead absolutely full focused on the analytic parts of what you're looking at it may not arise consciousness and you miss it okay now however later on when you go three hours later you go i don't know bicycling around your neighborhood you come back in you take a shower and you're and you're just in the shower fiddling around just relaxing and then boom suddenly it arrives in consciousness why did that happen because the analytic part of the mind was kind of put to sleep it's dominating the action all over the whole system it's like uh it's like you got two different kinds of music going on in the room but one of them is is five times as loud you can barely hear the other music it's there but you you know you might not be able to hear it at all okay when you shut the big music down suddenly you can hear the other music and that's what happens with very far away um essentially recognite pattern recognition because that's what that's what all information is is it's it's the recognition of pattern so somewhere out there in the faint reaches of your memory system that there has been a pattern recognition event that the the circuits amazingly can tell hey wait a second that could be relevant okay and uh and then when it is it's tripping around it and those neural circuits are lighting up and they're getting they're getting more activation around them as it's it's moving the little pieces and imagination all this outside of your awareness suddenly in a flash that the original neural circuits that were working on the original problem under the analytic process that are all very hot and sitting there waiting and they're tapping their feet and they're looking to actually close the loop of their frustrated lack of understanding it's an interesting characteristic of problem solving is that it's frustrating to have a problem half solved or not completely solved the mind recognizes probably the cost benefit you wouldn't even be working on the problem if it didn't seem like it had a worthwhile enough prize and so when you get close you get pieces you have a sense that this is solvable but you're missing something that you that that you know you're just missing one little piece of this or there's there's an element that you're not identifying but there is a pattern if we could actually recognize and understand this thing that it's going to be significant it's going to be significantly useful it's going to be a leap forward in our understanding so problem is that when you have worked on something you have activated standing orders in the nervous system to look for little relational memories but when you are directly working on the problem you can't access a lot of those little faint circuits that go off that are thinking well what about this okay what about cassiopeia up in the sky and that you know thing what that has something to do with this okay so your your brain's like searching all over the place when you shut down the analytic mind as it's now long not glaring at this problem and you go away then the adaptive unconscious can start to wander around looking for things and if they start to get active it starts to see a possible pattern a solution to the open loop then then it can start to get hotter okay and it buzzes around and buzzes around and more of those neural circuits fire um it's like a detective in there and then suddenly it can go kabam got it and that is when you you you bolt up out of bed and you're like got it that's what it is in a flash it arrives you know just really you're not even thinking about it it just comes like a lightning bolt uh that will happen in dreams so this is uh exactly we believe dreams facilitate uh a lot of creative problem solving uh probably from moving pieces around uh actually forcing them around with little blasts of acetylcholine at certain times of the sleep cycle which cause you to essentially jumble up the elements that you have identified when you are conscious in an analytic process and essentially making it so that so disparate parts of the problem may bang into each other when you're asleep this is very much akin to if you're working on a jigsaw puzzle and you get stumped because you actually don't know what the puzzle is but you've done a lot of the puzzle and you're just going on little correlational elements of the pieces you know these have a little black spot here and that maybe that has to go with those you don't even know what you're looking at yet it would be super useful to know what you're looking at but you don't know what you're looking at and so what will happen is uh if you're working on a jigsaw puzzle people that work on these a lot they know that if you get stumped one of the best things you can do is just back away come back and mix up all the existing pieces that are loose just swirl them around for a minute just change up where they are because when you do that when you stop and look you may see something you may see possibilities and connections that you didn't see before okay that that looks to be uh what sleep actually mechanically engineers in in in certain stages of sleep now the um and it's going to turn out that uh surprisingly often people will have had major creative insights in their sleep so the the question is is a really good one uh i i would say i think most of most of my really surprising insights have almost always come when under two conditions number one i'm working on the problem so i've been spending some time on the problem uh so i i may have spent you know two hours today or six hours this week or something in other words i've been working on the problem and my brain has open loops all over the place and it's got dissatisfaction with the fact that those loops are open and then i have to back away from it so i back away from it go shoot a few hoops talk to alan god forbid not too long okay and uh pet the cat you know go get an acai bowl and go place a basketball come home later take a shower and then suddenly it's like got it and it arrives with frustrating unpredictability but almost you know it's a humility of how you cannot drive a many creative processes or great ideas you can't force them through through what i call the left brain or i call the left brain and right brain this is metaphorical left brain is what i call an analytic process the right brain is what i call holistic process we know that that isn't really how it is very well uh it's not really built that way but from the intuitive notion of the right brain being more antici artistic intuitive holistic essentially an integrative mechanism looking for oftentimes very subtle connections the feeling of a blast of insight actually appears to be the juxtaposition of two sets of neurons simultaneously firing and that that's when you say got it i see how the connection works you get that all the time so if you're you know if you're doing your bank balance and you can't figure out what's wrong and then you're like oh there it is boom suddenly it's like oh i see how the mistake happened i see why that worked that way and i see that i'm i'm i haven't completely added up the numbers right now but i'm almost positive as i'm looking right now that's about to write the amount and the last two digits you know the the the nine and the eight add up to seven and i i knew there was seven at the end so kaboom suddenly the the everything is activated at once uh different neural circuits searching for the pattern looking for the misunderstanding of causality that has now been identified so that happens uh in in uh all kinds of things so so uh but the creative processes arts uh et cetera that that's super a super big important tool of the mind able to see extraordinary and bizarre connections uh that you would be very difficult to arrive those connections through um through an analytic process so the brain uses both uh both kinds of processes and when the analytic gets too loud then the intuitive gets too quiet and a lot of times we can't hear it but when we shut down the analytics suddenly the intuitive can rise and we can hear it and that's exactly what uh the questioner was talking about and it is absolutely real oh my god that's amazing so be right back dr lowell i'm going to go take a hot shower yeah i think jonathan schooler uh has talked about this and uh he's uh he's a professor of psychology somewhere i think in santa barbara and he um he says you know every single one of his best ideas always came from he go drive out by the beach and park his car and you just take a stroll and just strolling by the beach and just sort of you know his mind would wander away from whatever it is that he was thinking about he's just strolling along just taking in the senses and and just getting you know a little quiet inner peace and then kaboom something happens so uh yeah for me it's sometimes frustrating and i'm sure it is for for most people that ever work hard on anything that when you're working hard on something you you want so badly to have the great creative leap you want so you you want to do this you're like i've got the time i'm working really hard it's important god you might even be under a deadline for god's sake which is terrible notice jen and i don't have any deadlines we just have to change the little things i wasn't going to say anything yeah i'm sure you haven't been asked about it at all oh no that means jen guards me from that you know she's been asked a bunch of times but people people are quiet with me i think they assume i'm going to be mean the uh we're actually going to uh we're going to uh release a little bit of uh of this we're going to let oh gosh i'm telling to beat your jeans people this is actually only going to be for our shucks it's only for living with some library but we will as we get as we get closer we're going to let we're going to let people get peaks of what it is that we've been up to um but at any rate let's i need to wander back you were saying that that uh that uh god forbid you're under a deadline uh but you got to major under a deadline yeah right and that now you're forcing the left brain to make the most interesting connections that it can make you know that's how you wind up with the barbara cartland romance novel like the woman you know wrote 22 of them in a year like when we know what those look like there's no creativity at all the uh formula so yeah just formulaic i mean just ridiculous so if you're going to do something uh outstanding and creative outstanding for you at the limits of whatever your abilities are you might be a super creative person that can write something pretty damn good and just force it through the left brain because you just have incredible chops but if you're going to do your best work then it's going to require an oscillation between analytic and holistic process there is no other way to do it and so uh i'm just amazed at the process i i've been now writing uh this book since 2014 and uh so it's been seven year process i could have forced the action through the left brain and had a pretty damn good book at this point i mean it could have been done four years ago uh but i am i'm trying to write instead of write a good book i'm trying to write the best book that i can possibly write and as a result of that that requires periods of oscillation between intense focus and then back off and let the right brain take over for a while and see what it comes up with and i have to tell you i'm super super glad that i did it that way and that i did not have a publisher and be under a publisher's deadline and uh i can't wait to see some of the work that jen hawk is not only doing but that she's going to be doing in the future we both have the same spirit about that and uh and we will we're but that's how we're going about it is an oscillating process um you know that may not be true if you're in silicon valley silicon valley will poo poo that they'll put seven electrical engineers in a room and say go at it let's come up with a circuit board for xyz okay but that is not the same thing as bob dylan coming up with blowing in the wind it's not the same thing okay so the how how on earth that guy came up with all the things that he came up with uh it it he didn't sit down and do it linearly he did it absolutely holistically that brain was looking at problems that were troubling him and looking at all kinds of things going on in the world and it just swirled around and swirled around and swirled around and then boom there it comes what a thing okay uh it's it's a beautiful thing to observe that human beings are capable of that and so we're all capable of that that at different levels we we can't just be quote a creative genius you have must have elements of analysis in whatever it is that you're doing the uh that's that's part of the game uh as part of what makes the human mind work you know in its most exquisite fashion is an integration between the analytic and the holistic and so anyway but that's we had like six questions we're going to answer no that's all right this is great it's a good time to remind our listeners that if you have not gone to esteemdynamics.com and become a living wisdom library member this is a good time to do so because uh there's there's a lot of good stuff dr lyle and dr hawk have q a sessions there uh where they're where they talk about you know even more topics than we talk about here uh in in on video as well so you get to watch those so it's a really really good membership to have like i for like i was not trying to show this thing it just happened by actually oh yeah i forgot no not where i was perfect i know that's all right but uh but anyway so that yeah that's the story of that and there's a couple of good books on this that i found super helpful um in in helping my understanding one of them is by a guy named steven johnson who's one hell of a writer and he wrote his book is called where good ideas come from and uh the other book was i think i can't remember jonathan something i can't remember his last name but it's called imagine and uh those two books amazingly enough they came out right about the same time and they are both on the creative process and amazingly they cover i thought oh brother i already read a super comprehensive you know brilliant discussion of creative process what am i going to get out of the second book and the answer was a whole hell of a lot that wasn't in the first book in other words it was amazing looking at exactly the same topic two very fine minds um had done different research and come about it you know and and basically synthesized information and come up with ideas about uh the the about neural function that were quite different and i'm and all of it looked true to me it just looked like they had amazingly not covered exactly the same territory so uh fabulous i recommend both of those books and they're so confusing to me i have gone back uh in the last several years looking to to read snippets sure that an idea that was in book one is was in book one and it turned out no was never even discussed in book one it was in book two so my head is all i could not tell you what's in what book all that i can tell you is that both of them are exceptional books on the creative process and the question that was asked well thank you very much dr loud shall we do um maybe one or two more questions but do a couple more just for fun sure let's do it all right dear doctors i've noticed that many people act differently around close friends and family than they do around co-workers and strangers so how do we know what our true personalities are for example i'm the life of the party around people i know very well but i'm totally shy and quiet around strangers and at work i'm also quite disagreeable with close friends and family but highly agreeable with everyone else is it my high conscientiousness that causes me to be such a chameleon um yeah this person sounds like my my first cousin is very much like me okay so i'm not the life of any party but uh i'm i'm super quiet and then avoid uh social just get togethers like the plague generally dr lal you're the life of our party sure that's why i've never invited you know so uh but anyway the deal is is that all you're watching folks is you're watching shifts of cost benefit analysis so you're not a chameleon and there isn't quote a real personality there is a a real personality that never alters but it puts itself under different circumstances so remember what the ultimate design of the organism really is the the proximal design of the organism is to um maximize its esteem holdings in in the stone age village that's when i say proximal in other words that's what you are aware of and that's clearly what it is that you're up to what you don't know is that by doing so in the stone age by following those orders from the adaptive unconscious you will optimize gene survival okay so that's what you're up to so so why would i be different with some group of people another group of people for the same reason i'm different from with one person than i am with a second person okay that my personality can be you know i mean my behavior my personality is my personality but that includes the fact that the personality is in fact in other words behavior is dynamic personality is not so the personality is is intractable but that doesn't mean that human behavior isn't flexible so the uh uh as i've said many times a mafia chieftain with a gun to his head suddenly gets friendly and humble okay why because it's the the only reasonable move to save your life and he can run the cost-benefit analysis he'll get back at the guy later okay so the so that means with your with your uh literally i'm different uh with allen than i am with jen quite a bit it's not that i'm a chameleon it's that i find myself in very different circumstances uh with respect to esteemed currency and so you know what what i can talk about what we're interested in so let's suppose i was talking with alan yeah i have talked down i've tried to talk to alan about you know freedom and covet and the world and he couldn't give a rat's ass he doesn't care allen's like well so if they lock us all down we're in sonoma county that's fine i don't need to leave sonoma county it's great yeah his other thing was when it was like i was like yeah you're you wait till you can't go out to a restaurant without a back spouse he's like why would i want to go out to a restaurant food's just great at true north [Laughter] you talk to jen hawk about the world being closed down and all this kind of stuff and she's like ready to cry she she has such a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of freedom and and wanting to go and see the world and meet new people and see and do everything and it's like whoa the governments of the world are going to come in and put a wet blanket over the freedom of her life it's like she just feels like she just recently freaking got left school and now he's growing some wings and gets to go and play you've been waiting to play for a long time sort of unfettered by that horrible awful rite of passage called a phd dissertation okay so you know and now she's looking around like wait a minute just when i just when i'm get getting going here look what these people they're wrecking my party no so so of course the conversations i have with those two people are very different one of them is like it's going to be all right jen uh and we're like i'm like without i'm like hey listen dum-dum let me hit you over the head and tell you we're an emergency dude get some emotion going you know what we could be in trouble [Laughter] so this is all uh so you whoever's that you're talking to you are looking at a very different cd about the nature of the interaction the interchanges and what is valuable in those transactions so you know if i'm talking to colin campbell at some something and i'm chatting with him and then some attractive lady comes up and says oh dr lyle can you know can i ask you something it's like hey colin see you later nice talking to you colin maybe i'll circle circle back around say hi later okay i.e cost benefit all right cost benefit that's that's all you're actually watching there so you you are not a chameleon uh you are uh you have a a personality that evaluates things in a certain way and those things themselves are highly variable uh they're a swirling cauldron of of different people and different situations some of them social and some of them not social okay so uh you're you can be feeling calm and pleasant uh and then then somebody's uh dog is barking and now you're like all irritated okay so there there wasn't even people around to observe this but your feelings now shift and you may even say well you know the neighbor's got to write debbie's dog back there but i'm really pissed at that dog because i would really like some peace and quiet so this is not performative this is your this is just your your inherent nature somebody else would hear that dog bark might have a really you know phlegmatic easygoing personality be like huh not that big a deal yeah so uh so that's anyway that's the story your personality isn't changing your circumstances are changing and of course changing circumstances should will lead to different cbs and those different cbs will lead to different feelings and different behavior that's the end of the mystery wonderful dr law thank you so much all right our final one all right okay one more dear doctors do other animals besides humans show self-destructive behavior why are humans so self-destructive okay um that's great question and there's probably several angles to be considered there but human beings i mean animals don't show self-destructive behavior um they they can make mistakes so they can they can do things obviously they can turn left when they should turn right they can also have self-destructive quote altruistic behavior that is uh that is in the benefit of their genes so that was the great insight of william hamilton so animals can do self-sacrificial behavior which would be self-destructive but it's not self-destructive for their genetic code it's the right answer a mom defending her cubs could get injured and get killed but it was worth a shot a bee stinging you know an invader kills itself and they save its dna producing queen and the drones and hive so um so from the standpoint of uh what is in your best interest from evolutionary design the answer is animals uh writ large systematically no species engages in self-destructive behavior uh the individuals don't do that they may make mistakes and they miscalculate they may have bad luck but it is not self-destructive behavior now humans don't either okay so inside of human beings when you're watching self-destructive behavior you're watching some elegant calculus which may be erroneous but you're still watching the activation of gene optimization instincts so the ultimate of self-destructive behavior would be suicide and you would say well how the hell could suicide possibly not be self-destructive it is the epitome of self-destructive but let's uh let's look at who commits suicides most often it's elderly people that are penniless and in pain so that means they are burdens to their family which means their adult children have less money and time and energy to devote to their children which is the elderly person's grandchildren which is their dna so they look at this thing and it it may seem like too too complicated and too deep of a reach you may just say hey they're in a hell of a lot of pain okay and and the cost benefit just may say hey it's it's not worth it there's too much suffering okay that that would make sense because the chronic pain that never heals could be basically telling the organism you are never going to recover and you are so sufficiently disabled that you are not going to be useful to the tribe therefore you are more cost than you are benefit okay i think that this is uh very often the case with obviously elderly people oftentimes towards the end of their life oftentimes hurting and oftentimes without assets and that this is going to be essentially a calculation that results in self-destructive impulses this makes sense it also makes sense when people have possibly suffered a tremendous humiliation so uh bernie madoff's son for god's sakes committed suicide okay so the uh there that that would make sense in other words you're you're thinking your group or you did something terrible to the tribe and the only way you can atone for it is to kill yourself and therefore you may give some honor to the remaining gene uh devices that are left to you your sons your daughters your cousins etc you may in fact um uh bolster up or return a little bit of their genetic cachet that was taken from them when you got when you were shamed okay so that's a that that you could see how the nervous system could run that calculus human beings are going to have some of the more extraordinary twists and turns of self-destructive behavior chief part of that is going to be things that we see in the ego trap it's because the other animals are are dealing largely with big variables in their survival and reproductive success don't have to do with the opinions that other animals have of them so their environment the survival and reproductive variance variables are largely not related to their reputations when human beings live their survival and reproductive uh probabilities are heavily related to what other people think of us that is why esteem is the chief calculus it's the chief architect of human motivation and it is the chief calculus of how happiness is is sought so that's why basically almost all depression not all of it almost all depression is the frustration of assault esteem that was not what was not achieved so when we are puzzled depressed frustrated miserable rejected those feelings are feelings that we have competed for esteem and we have fallen short in what is we've achieved the um uh anyway most of anxiety a lot of it some of it's uh straight survival anxiety a great deal of anxiety though is social anxiety which has to do with the possibility that we may do something to lose esteem somebody may call on us or ask us a question a little social group at a cocktail party and we're going to be all frozen up and anxious because we don't want to be a fool and you know and therefore say something stupid and not out look articulate okay and so people have uh i.e what do they fear losing esteem uh because that's true you're going to find the ego trap being a very interesting process by which people will often do self-destructive behavior but it's self-destructive in an extremely clever and deceptive way in order to show that we are not trying because if we try and they are observe us and then we fall short of their expectations then we will lose esteem or status so i don't believe that the ego trap exists in the animal kingdom the ego trap is a unique um a unique puzzle and problem and it's an opportunity the ego trap is an adaptive strategy that says conditions now exist where i am better off not trying at all than i am trying and coming up about where i think i'm going to so um uh i don't know if anybody's come to the party and written about it and and actually analyzed anything comparable to this analysis with simone biles okay but that's obviously what happened with simone biles is that that uh she was given too much status and therefore realized she was too likely to lose uh even though she might have had a 50 50 shot at the gold in that event that's a hell of a lot worse than the 99 one that is was being inferred by the world and so uh so she ran the calculus and opted out and so that uh that was a a a great example of how that would work the um got a lot of sympathy and all that but you can imagine circumstances where you wouldn't got sympathy you would have got a lot of frustration irritation criticism etc but uh but at the same time that individual might realize i'm better off with that than with the chance that i had actually wind up not even meddling and then then completely trashing my reputation as quote greatest uh uh the greatest gymnast of all time so that's uh the ego trap winds up being a unique lever inside of human motivational possibility that leads to self-destructive behavior that that is in fact engineered at optimizing gene survival but we can look at it from another perspective and say whoa that's really expensive and brutal which it is you
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