Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 46: Listener emails and questions
an auto-generated transcript


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


all right good evening everybody good evening dr. Lyle how are you doing today good good good to be here Nate good to hear your voice excellent happy winter solstice Merry Christmas Happy New Year happy Kwanzaa did I miss any other holidays Happy Hanukkah what are the holidays that we miss in here close enough close it up all right they show we're going to try to pack in a lot of material and we we may have a caller or two that calls in so I've got a few if you want to call and you got a question the number is six five seven three eight three zero seven five one go ahead and call in and and then we'll take the question but we also have a bunch of callers or listeners that emailed me and want to get their questions on the air so we've got a lot of questions so we're going to get to as many as we can today and then all the rest that we don't get to we'll get to another show but before we begin I wanted to start off talking about a quote that I saw on Facebook now of course I read it on the internet so it must be true and this quote is supposedly by Sigmund Freud and it talks a little the quote is is this before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem first make sure you are not in fact surrounded by assholes now it makes sense I doubt he said this right but but it's it it was interesting I wanted to bring it up on the show today because in a couple of the past shows you've talked about this internal audience and how people get their internal audience from the external audience from the actual people that they are surrounding themselves with and so it seems to me that if you've got the wrong audience around you for a number of reasons or for whatever reason that it can be it can predispose you to kind of not feel completely calibrated about yourself so what do you think about this quote doctor well what do you think well first of all that I love that people are doing things like this the ledge let's just take a look at this for a second so they talked about how before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem well first of all notice the connection between depression and low self-esteem so somebody somebody is paying attention and it turns out that if you actually research these things you will find that the experience of low self-esteem and depression will correlate about 0.8 in other words they are very highly correlated there they're almost exactly the same thing they are not they are not quite the same thing but they're essentially there's a huge causal relationship now between the reports of low self-esteem and depression now the now so this is where of course psychologists are confused and that is that that some and this is what what makes this quote both entertaining and and interesting so if you have a bunch of bad feedback from other people that may make you depressed but that doesn't necessarily do anything to cause your self-esteem to be low it means your esteem is low okay so you have a you have real live negative feedback from other people your self-esteem may be very high your self-esteem is your is your internal audience and what your internal audience thinks of you so you may be thinking that you're doing a great thing and you may be doing some honorable difficult etcetera saying there was a movie Tom Hanks did recently in the last two or three years where he I can't remember the story but he went to Europe or he he was defending he was a attorney and I think he was defending somebody he was defending some Russian defector I can't remember with the rest of spies yeah which was something I think he was I think he was defending a Russian spy and so he was under tremendous he got tremendous negative feedback from other people but it was going to be potentially death to his career however he knew he was doing the right thing and so so he might have been down fat about the fact or depressed partially about the fact that it was very he was getting a lot of unpleasant feedback from from all kinds of people however his internal audience was convinced that he was doing the right thing so his self-esteem was not low whereas his steam was low and so the your depression can come from both low esteem and it could also come from low self-esteem so often the esteem signals from other people are mimicking the signals that you get from yourself so let's let me give you another example this is one that infuriates me off repetitively and when it when a great athlete comes up a little bit short and they are second or third or fourth or whatever it is and they were expected to win the gold or win the title etc and they are then and they and they produce a magnificent performance but it is not quite good enough to win and so it was only ninety-nine point eight percent and enough and it just wasn't quite enough and so then some stupid jock with a microphone in their hand says well how does it feel this is a big disappointment what went wrong and etc and then there's all kinds of criticism in the press about this athlete or this team in their performance the truth is is that their esteem has taken a big hit but very often their self-esteem has not sometimes it has but sometimes it hasn't so the internal audience can understand that that that individual did everything they possibly could prepared brilliantly perform brilliantly but was beaten at which point they can their internal audience can be proud of their effort and even their of their performance while the the esteem signals from the outside are you know lousy so this is the distinction between self-esteem and esteem and so it is true I mean this does is a entertaining quote because if you are getting a bunch of negative esteem signals from people it may be it may be for legitimate reasons that you are doing such a good job and your internal audience will check and think about what it how well you're doing and you aren't doing very well and you're getting negative feedback and you're depressed and your self-esteem is low and you are depressed however you could also be getting negative feedback from a boss at work who's an idiot a jerk egomaniac nutcase etc and you are in fact doing just fine and so your your self-esteem can be at at in tact that you are in fact depressed or entrap we're just irritated so the yes it makes sense to make sure when you are down and depressed about anything make sure that this is not just an environmental issue where we're getting some negative feedback and let's make sure that we are doing what we can to mitigate the situation as well as possible and in check whether or not you know what if there's a difference between the self-esteem and the esteem mm-hmm well I always love these brilliant quotes for Sigmund Freud yeah yeah yeah yeah I just we could have just stopped it out for a couple of minutes because that was really fun all right what though that was a great because because it makes it make sense you've got to figure out which is which right it's not always everybody else it might just be you right it might be might be that you're not doing enough to get the right steam signals from people right yes and and in fact it gets obviously the nervous system is pretty sophisticated in the sense that it tends to be the case when you get negative feedback from the world what it does is that not only the negative esteem signals makes you depressed but it also lowers your self-esteem so the self-esteem mechanism goes through a goes through a recalibration often time we're essentially what happens is that you lower your expectations for yourself and it is not a pleasant thing to lower your expectations for yourself but it is in fact necessary the the nervous system is designed by nature to have you optimally set goals and utilize your talents in pursuit of survival and reproductive games that's what it does so let me give you an example let's suppose that you are we're going to dream up a really clueless guy that is 17 years old and he's a senior in high school and he's just kind of a little bit socially out of it were we're going to mythically make this guy somebody that is not calibrated let's suppose that he's average attractive so of course following a non sophisticated non socially sensitive instinctual program he goes and hits on you know the homecoming queen that's who he wants to take to the prom well she says no okay so then he goes to on the first princess one notch down she says no then he goes to the next one then he goes to the next one and he goes oh four five on homecoming court and then he goes to the next most attractive girl etcetera he keeps getting no now in principle what what we might expect is that the nervous system would become depressed with repeated failure and so what it's going to do then is it's going to lower the self-esteem which is the internal audiences expectations for performance so it's going to start saying listen chief maybe you better quit trying to hit on the top one percent of this high school class and maybe out ahead down 20% I'll head down into the 80th percentile range and give it a shot there and see what happens and so prior to this he would not have found that acceptable because he was was not calibrated there but by starting at the top I use mr. clueless then he starts to work his way down and the self-esteem mechanism although it feels disappointing to find out that you don't have the chops to play there it is a necessary recalibration in order to lower your own standards so that when you make efforts that are appropriate in an in the arena where it's appropriate even if you fail the self-esteem mechanism will support you and it will encourage you to continue so obviously in this case the way it's going to work is it's going to be much more sensitive which is that let's suppose our boy is about seven and let's suppose he's not so stood but he begins by hitting on a nine and he goes nowhere and he tries one more nine and he goes nowhere now he's getting depressed and a little down on himself so now he sets his sights to an eight he hits on an eight he loses there he hits on another eight he loses there now he feels a little bit further down on himself so now he hits on a seven who says yes and now he's excited okay so now what the system does is it gives him exciting feedback for a goal that he attains now where it would not have given him an excitement for a goal that he until he had been recalibrated you see this is how this works so so that the movement of the self-esteem mechanism together with depression that will come from negative feedback either from outside or from inside these are essential components to how the esteem mechanisms and mood regulating systems work mm-hmm very interesting it's kind of like I'm back in high school well you never really leave that's our thought actually here all right well you mentioned the like the situation with the boss and potentially a bad boss good boss here and there so this leads right into our first question from our from our listeners okay okay so dear doctor I love the way you explained left and right wing of politics the left has more uncertainty about income and good supply while the right has more and this got me thinking conflict sounds similar employees think that they are underpaid and overworked while the owner thinks he's overpaying them and they are lazy unlike an entrepreneur a wage worker has very little motivation to increase productivity since he's essentially earning the same wage are we talking about the same kind of circuits here our humans made - made to work for other people and can you talk about this yes the the listener is is ferreting their way into the critical issue so yes there's there's a similar theme that's involved here and what the theme is is the the calibration of fairness in exchanges and so it's going to turn out that human beings are are they may not they didn't quote work for other people per se but they sort of always did in the sense that they were always trading and sometimes they weren't trading there would have been circumstances where they were a direct returned hunter-gatherer that literally went out got his own food but even within even within very small villages there was constant trading processes going on between humans and so the we know this from from looking at hunter-gatherer societies today that that so as a result it's going to turn out that trades is where the action is at and trade is where is what these things that we're talking about are happening so in the case of left-right politics coming from essentially the social welfare processes that go on in a Stone Age village the the exchanges that are taking place there are that the the more competent are essentially paying more for for lesser insurance but it's the only insurance that they can get if you're the most competent hunter in the village you are you are providing more for the village than somebody who's the least competent and in fact if he goes down and he's in trouble you are insuring him and you are more competent than he is and if you go down he is insuring you and he's less competent than you are and so of course there was a frustration and a dynamic tension there where there's criticism that goes back and forth between the most competent and the least competent and those sort of those are the dynamics and fundamentally what's going to happen is the more confident people are going to be stingy and irritated about this and they're going to be trying to reduce their output and but least competent people are going to feel like there gets those but the more competent are going to be more to stingy and also very critical etc so what's the criticism is is anger which is being directed from the more confident people to the least competent people in order to cause guilt reactions because that anger is effectively a threat that we're going to kick you out of the village and so that those are those are threats in order to activate guilt which is going to activate concessions which is to put out more energy and earn the insurance and material support that you get so this is what this is so at the bottom line what's happening here is that they are trading and so they're negotiating and they're threatening each other etc and that's exactly what's going on between employer and employee they are in an exchange process and exchange processes take place because it's in both people's best interest however that doesn't the analysis does not stop there so we're going to we're going to break this down to a very simple example so that people can can understand the fundamental process that's taking place here and it's an important one not just for employee employee relationships but this is also standard in all relationships and in particularly in men women dynamics so this is a very important principle so what's going to happen is is that exchanges take place because both parties are better off but the question is how much better off are that so let's suppose that you know I have a hill full of bananas and you have a hill full of oranges and we meet at the river in between and I bring I bring down ten bananas for your ten oranges and we swap at the bottom of the river every week the the problem is is that I recognize that you are happy to do so and you recognize that I'm happy to do so which means that I'm motivated to possibly next week bring down nine bananas and hope that you bring ten oranges and so that's in this way I am chiseling into what's called the consumer surplus and the exchange so the reason why these people are exchanging is because both of these animals are our running cost benefit analysis on what they get for the energy that they put out and they've determined that the exchange is in their best interest so the question is how much in your best interest is it and the answer to that is what will is sort of a mysterious computation that's taking place along you know some very complicated and subtle neural circuits trying to figure out whether this is worth doing now if it's worth doing the odds are that it's not just barely worth doing the odds are that it's quite considerably worth doing so this is useful to understand in the modern environment with respect to pricing so essentially everything you buy and moderate environment is is underpriced and sometimes it is substantially under priced in other words you would pay an awful lot more for it if you had to it's a tremendous deal there's great consumer surplus in what it is that people are purchasing the now in the Stone Age the same thing was taking place so those those oranges for the bananas both of us are better off so the question is if you've got ten oranges over there and you're looking at my ten bananas how many oranges how many of those oranges to those ten oranges would you be willing to part for how many bananas let's suppose it's five okay in that in that case five for ten is still worth you doing it for you but five or ten is way more worth it to me so there's tremendous surplus in this kin this exchange and from the same same angle let's suppose that I would trade ten of my bananas for five of your oranges so neither one of us knows what the other ones map is except that we do know that ten for ten is acceptable therefore nine for 10 is probably also acceptable so this means that both of us are motivated to chisel the other one by by bluffing that we are we are right on the edge and actually that we don't need the deal at 10 out of 10 but we will will now be willing to do the deal for nine of my bananas for 10 of your oranges now you on the other side are designed by nature to try to make sure that you don't get taken advantage of in exchanges so you are going to be just as as determined to chisel me and to see where the contours of my motivation are with respect to the consumer surplus and so they could be at different locations so for example it may be worth it for me to trade eight bananas for ten oranges but it's but it's not worth it for me to take trade eight bananas for for eight or for seven oranges so 10 for 10 is right on the line and you better not try to push me one inch you wouldn't have any idea where my line is I might be willing to give you ten bananas for one orange for all you know so all you know is that you've got a sense of where your consumer surplus line is you know where what you're willing to go to and you're watching me and so human beings are very good at sort of reading each other's excitement in exchanges and so this happens in man-woman dynamics if you're too excited that that girl said yes she's going to go out with you she's instantly recomputing whether or not this was a very good deal for her okay so this is so people are naturally designed to be picking up on these excitement cues and to try to figure out how much consumer surplus there is in the middle of this exchange and where the where the trade-off points cross for both players and essentially you know where it is that it's an even deal now so this means that people are designed to chisel they're designed to test and chisel and roll back a few percent of their goods or their effort and see whether they can still get the ten oranges so I'm going to come down there with nine bananas and see if I can still get ten oranges and when you come down there with nine oranges I'm like oh no I can't give you that I've only got eight bananas and so we go back and forth it we jockey and we test to see when the other person is willing to walk away now this is very typical in romantic relationships and this is what I call the chiseling chip so you've got a chip in your head that recognizes there's consumer surplus in the middle of these exchanges and you are motivated to see whether or not you can still get everything that you want but you can put out ten percent less energy so and so this is what couples will very often do so it begins with essentially both people are typically over signaling in order to they're over signaling their value and understood signaling their deficiencies in order to entice a good bargain into a into a relationship this is nothing other than sales so this is just about this is just exactly what all all sales and marketing does is that they over promise and under deliver this is just standard operating procedure so this is what typically what's happening in human romance this is why both parties are really quite excited then they know intuitively that they are over selling their assets and under selling their liabilities but at the same time they can't see it on the other side of the equation and so they are they're biting at the bit and they're wanting to make this exchange and that is that's what we call falling in love now I love these I love I love this we're covering everything here so the so then what we're going to expect to see is we're going to expect to see some chiseling and so we in you know we're not sure who's going to chisel first and what it's going to look like but as they go through this process if one person starts chiseling pretty hard and the other one keeps conceding then that's a signal to the person who's doing the chiseling that they are in a position of power in this relationship and the other person may not be that great and therefore this may not be that great a deal for them and that would reinforce continued chiseling the you could see how that can work so this is these are just animals negotiating and if I snarl at another animal and take his lunch and he doesn't do anything back then I'm going to take the whole thing and that's that's exactly what we would expect to be taking place here so so yes the question is a very good one this so it goes much deeper than then just left ring and white ring politics it goes through the entire exchange process of humans generally and Italy goes through employer employee relationships it's exactly what this is is the chiseling chip is operating alive and well in all parties to those transactions so we would expect that the employer would feel like they're overpaying their employees and that they're that they're getting a lousy work ethic out of them and we would expect that the employees feel like they're being overworked and underpaid and this is the way that ship is built it's built to make sure that you are essentially greedy and irritable and defensive and aggressive about bluffing your position to make sure that you get your share of the consumer surplus if you're too much of a nice guy and too eager to make the exchange then they then the person on the other side is very likely to get the lion's share of the consumer surplus that sits inside of this potential transaction and you will be exploited so as a result what has happened is that the average human has evolved a mechanism that makes them not fair in the way that they analyze their own contribution to a trade they overestimate what they are bringing to the party and they underestimate their liabilities and this sets them up to be moderately disagreeable in other words they're not they are not fair the average person is is actually not a fair analyzer of what it is that they what they bring to the table the they are reasonably fair but they not share and this you can obviously see this in any sports fan who consistently feels like their team when they lose got the short end of the stick of the refereeing but never thinks that their team won because they got a better than even break on the referee so this is uh this is clearly a ubiquitous characteristic of human nature and this is the the chiseling chips roots come in the in with respect to the problem of consumer surplus and making sure that you don't get out negotiated out of it so all humans have triangulated on what we're going to call an evolutionarily stable strategy which is to be mildly disagreeable in exchanges and to test the weakness on the other side in the exchange in order to see if you can improve the cost-benefit for yourself in that process yeah it reminds me I was I was visiting Israel on us on a trip and it was a hot day and I cuz I was with my friends and we're walking around and it's hot and so I wanted something to drink so I stopped by at one of the little carts and some of it one of the cities and she pours me like it was like a sweet tea or some something like that some sort of lemonade and she gives me the price I was like okay thanks and I pay her and I come back in the tour gathers what this he goes congratulations you just paid eight dollars for something took her one minute to make yeah and I don't even think to negotiate about it you know I didn't even think yes it's actually interesting that the what has taken place in the United States and some other places is the the elimination of the price negotiation and so that's a that's a an interesting and interesting and very positive cultural evolution with respect to small transactions that in then other countries have not gotten there yet and so it's it's startling and annoying to realize that in many places you actually have to you have to spend the time to fuss and fiddle to fight over a few dollars otherwise that they will they will fleece you behind this issue so there you go yeah that's that's the ship all right next question okay this has to do with man women dynamics and languages of love so dear dr. Lila I used to think that I understood the concept of esteem dynamics as explained by you I thought that positive esteem is easy to distinguish but recently I became aware of a book called the five languages of love by Gary Chapman the book describes five ways of sending positive esteem signals and the premise is that there can be a miscommunication in the kind of esteem signaling that takes place my question is do people indeed have different preferences as to the kind of esteem they are susceptible to for instance if a man craves physical touch but his partner census teams via kind language the man may perceive shortage of esteem signals and may appear needy as he is supposedly missing the cues he is think seeking is this kind of miscommunication a real one or can it be explained from an evolutionary standpoint as a woman simply not desiring the man physically this is a great question and I am going to say that I believe that I don't want to give a hundred percent answer here my answer is going to be ninety seven percent that this is bogus and three percent where a three percent wiggle room for a little bit of it now I want you to imagine that let's let's take away let's take away explicit conceptual speech and we're going to get this down to the the there's actually five methods of communication for humans that we know of we don't believe they communicate by smell so five methods are words voice tone body posture facial expression and touch so those are those are going to be the five methods that human beings use to communicate so if we were to take words out of it which words didn't used to be in it before we evolved language so then we've got voice tone body posture facial expression and touch pretty good pretty good really good communication so these are the same communication signals that my cat gives me now the truth is is that I almost never miss read what that cat you know what their emotional tone is and sort of what it is that they want and what is it they're up to so I would not expect that human beings having evolved nonverbal communication to the nth degree and have it be a critically important function of mating dynamics that we would miss the cues I think we get them okay now I think that so I think the notion I think of what is being sold in this book is the notion that oh my god you're really more in love than you think but the point of the two of you poor you you know you're not using the right love language so you don't really get to know just how secure and wonderful and how happy your partner is about you I think that's totally bogus okay so the truth of the matter is people people are extremely effective at communicating how much they value their partners and they calibrate those signals beautifully and there's a great deal of research that actually indicates this I'm not going to cite a chapter in verse but I I can I can certainly give you a couple of examples that come off the top of my head example number one is that in research on whether or not people are having affairs it turns out that when one partner suspects that the other partner is having an affair they are essentially almost always right the in other words if it if it turns out they're not literally having an affair they are very very likely considering that having an affair they're very close okay so right away we start the research is backing up the fact people are picking up the correct signals even when their partners are attempting to mask them okay so that's very interesting so the notion that we could have a wonderful fabulous relationship that is actually being choked to death by the fact that moron over there doesn't know how to say I love you with his hands or is because you know cooing or his voice or you know buying flowers or whatever the hell it is that these people think is going to help the situation is essentially almost always wrong now is it always wrong probably not okay so there's going to be people that are essentially 17% of a of an autistic you know what I mean that are a little clumsy that that essentially are bull in china shop etc and miss some cues now and then and that can be frustrating and etc so do I think that there's absolutely nothing to the idea of miscommunication no I don't think that there's absolutely nothing to it but I think there's almost nothing to it I think people communicate their esteem through multiple channels they do so extremely well they calibrate the messages with with extraordinary precision and those messages are picked up okay and people feel them and it may not not be what a person wants to feel because they may be in a marriage seven years in and a couple of kids and it turns out that the signals that they're getting are not that great and then they're going to go to therapy and they're going to work on their love language and they're not going to improve the situation very often by that kind of strategy yeah that's really interesting that you say that we pick up on all kinds of cues that are non-verbal because I was playing poker with with with with a couple weeks ago or so and I was at the table where there was a very good poker player and the hand went down where he was in a in a hand with an inferior player who was just a novice well the hand went down all the way the last card and the inferior player bet really big and of course the very experienced guy called and and and of course the guy was bluffing and he end up the experienced one end up winning the the pot and the inexperienced player said well how could you call me there I bet so big it was clearly a bluff and the guy said well it wasn't just that he named off there was like six other things the guy the guy was doing that guy probably noticed like twenty things but he only named six of them that indicated that the guy who was was bluffing and so yeah it kind of it was like holy-moly this guy really paid attention to a lot of other things rather than just by what the guy said which is hey I've got a big hand right exactly so that that's a beautiful example of of the fact that there was there was a whole bunch of stuff that the the novice player was attempting to mask and couldn't mask it and so you can attempt to mask that you're not that into your spouse and you're interested in the girl at the office but you're not going to mask it she's not going to get it I mean she's going to pick up on it and if you're a girl you can you can try to mask and misdirect your your spouse and to not have him thinking that you're not that into him but he'll know he will know and he will he will feel it right down to into his bone marrow so no I think five love languages is a my understanding of it I haven't read the book I think I read a few paragraphs which is all I felt like I needed to read and uh you know in a hint you don't have you only have so much time in this world and this is obviously pop psychology the and so this is a this is hopeful opiate for the masses in mediocre relationships yeah there you go all right next question okay next question is dear dr. Lisle I'm a 19 year old male I struggle to find energy and the ability to concentrate in the morning and I sleep in whenever I can I'm often wide awake and full of energy when the Sun Goes Down until about midnight when I finally get tired and get to sleep but I've been told that this is standard for males of my age do you believe that my alertness at night is partly due to the fact that in the Stone Age adolescent males were adapted to switch on in the evening as routine time for mating with the darkness providing privacy from the rest of the village therefore males as the initiators of sex would have had to be alert to secure a mate and fend off other males from their women maybe like the modern-day equivalent of night clubbing did humans typically stay up a little longer after sunset around the campfire you know nice question nice question I just loved that this is a 19 year old that's it's listening and thinking and learning about evolutionary psychology you know at that age and trying to put this together the now and there's little elements of truth probably in a lot of the things that he's thinking here but the main thing that you're thinking or the main thing that your your hypothesizing is incorrect so the let me tell you the all you have to do to find out if this is true is go out into the woods so go out into the woods go camping somewhere in the High Sierras or some other place and bring yourself a flashlight with limited batteries and that's it that's that's the light that you have and you've got the ability to light a fire because you've got some matches and you're going to cook cook food out there you got your little Coleman stove maybe and we're just going to find out how late you stay up and we're going to find out that you're going to stay up that late after dark you'll stay up for a while but you're not going to stay up that late and so what's happening here is that and we're going to add something to the equation we're going to have you backpack for about Oh 12 miles a day and then we're going to see what that feels like at the end of that day and whether or not you're up till midnight and sleep until till 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning that's not what we're going to find two things are involved here number one pee full many people in our society do not work very hard at all so they they do essentially almost no physical labor and they do very modest amounts of exercise and so as a result they are not physically exhausted at the end of the day the way that very many animals are and that our ancestors would have been in in their natural history you need more sleep to recover from a day where there's been hard labor so that's one thing that's not happening with these 19 year olds and these young people they're in college and they're staying up till all hours of the night etc second of all they they have the electric light and so the electric lights are keeping people up if you shut them all down their behavior would be very much different so we know from from worldwide studies where the electric light is not prominent that people are sleeping many more hours and they're going to better a lot earlier than they are where we have the lights so good question interesting question problem certainly I don't doubt that people certainly would stay up a little bit past dark with their fires and talk a little bit and some romancing going on there obviously but no the answer is nobody staying up till midnight and so your your quote problem with this is completely and utterly artificial and all you have to do is go do a shift do shifts work starting at a 7 a.m. at a quarry and work at that quarry until about 5:00 p.m. in the afternoon and I will expect that you will be home Abed and asleep by 7:30 and you'll be happy to get that sleep and you will miraculously discover a sleep cycle that will that will look like darkness and night I mean darkness and light that's what's going to happen very interesting love it yeah yeah he had a follow-up question that that looks like you answered but he was basically asking he's a Caucasian living in Australia which is a significantly warmer climate with longer days depending on location time year and so so he said could one's intuitive sleep patterns be in sync with the day/night cycles of where their genes evolved I doubt that in other words the it's going to turn out that that it's going to be the light of the area that is going to be that's going to be dictating this and so we're going to be sensitive we are very sensitive our skin is photosensitive so as a result no I don't think so that that is a great question and it's a very interesting one and it is he could be right in other words it's possible that that could be true and that would I would have to say that at this moment you know some sleep researcher probably knows but my gut instinct is to what it is that I sleep research and I know about humans in the setting the circadian rhythm and how it works my answer would be it's a it's exceedingly unlikely that that's the case okay yeah this guy really ought really seems like he's been thinking about this because he followed up saying that he's heard that hermit crabs can intuitively tell exactly what time the tide is going to rise even when there are hundreds of miles from so he's thinking maybe humans have a similar mechanism for sleep but yes great question yeah very good question and and it for all I know there could be a little bit of truth in it I've never seen anybody even addressed that question or hypothesize it and I don't my answer is I don't believe so I think that that's very unlikely mm-hmm great oh okay our next question dear dr. Lyle I'm a bi-racial male aged thirty my mother is a white American my father's from Africa however I'm almost completely culturally quote white because I've been surrounded by white people growing up I have mostly dated white women because I'm culturally more compatible with them but and having a different ethnic appearance from them makes me feel uncomfortable as if we do not match do you have any advice for biracial people looking to date for pair-bonding but have a hard time they do not belong to any particular tribe boy that's a very interesting question and so clearly we've got we've got someone who is you know got some got a lot of natural empathy and sensitivity so this is this is not some jerk that is not sensitive to cues that he's picking up so he's he's picking up some subtle cues and it's a little disturbing and and he's a little uncomfortable etc thirty years old well I'm not sure what to tell you except that that we're all out here we're all essentially niche marketers trying to find in the case of pair-bonding we're trying to find a needle in the haystack and however that marketing is taking place the lot of different ways to do that certainly everybody that's in repeated exposure environments that is that is hitting on people is going through a process of flirtation and that's a very feedback rich process so we we don't have to worry that that we're offending anybody because we are a little you know biracial and therefore a little bit off they will in terms of what they might normally get hit on by because for example women are getting hit on by a whole variety of people and so we are just another variant whoever it is that you are the and certainly if you're using online methods like a match.com or such things you've got photography and so the photography is is helping you self-select for a market that has no problem at all with your looks so this is you know we all essentially bring unusual characteristics relative to the bell curve to the table so this is this is just one more I do I believe that III don't think that if this individual or any other such individual is in a situation with a partner that is giving them very feedback and they want to be with that partner that they're attracted to that partner I don't think that that would stand up for very long that sort of feeling and discomfort perhaps it would but I would expect that in it in a relationship with security and positive feedback I think those problems are probably going to fade away that's what I think okay great okay next question dr. la I love the show incidentally incidentally I want to point out that this is this is a little bit we're sort of catching something in midstream here and that is that you know 50 years ago a black person and a white person together was scandalous and cause for grave concern and upset etcetera etcetera by the 1980s much less so still uncomfortable okay bye-bye 2017 it is still caused for for sort of comment and it's not like people don't notice but it is much much reduced the level of social disturbances you know 15 percent of what it would have been 50 years ago and so I understand and have empathy for the situation this person being biracial is one whole notch over in terms of he looks then even closer to to one tribe or the other so as a result of this I think this is quite small potatoes not enough to stop a person and not enough to to get gun-shy at all but I do understand the situation and it's and of course there's going to be some mild discomfort there but fortunately the future is going to be continued to just get better ten years from now it's going to go from a 15 percent issue down to an 11 percent issue in 20 years from now it will be a 6% issue so this is this is fading fast as the world transports more people there's more sort of interbreeding of different racial groups and the world starts to have hybrids all over the place and we observe them on a daily basis increasingly with without comment all right next question dear dr. Lyle I'm wondering if learning disabilities specifically dyslexia and differences in the way kids learn could develop due to a stressful childhood since the diagnosis of dyslexia is based on neuropsych testing could a lack of nurture and attentive parenting create these results patterns or are the neuro psych tests able to evaluate the brain independent of nurture and something like dyslexia being gene predetermined and then by stressful I mean basic needs were met but parents were having difficulties in the marriage generally caring but distracted and stressed parents I have a few generations of dyslexics in our family and I've read that it's genetic but my therapist suggests that it is because we each did not get what we needed as children you know sorry I mean the therapist is just totally uneducated and this is an example of a therapist that it comes from the sort of hybrid ignorance of dynamic and learning theory that believes that early childhood experiences are shaping the tree how it grows know the answer to the question is that this is this is a brain you know problem or actually abnormality is the way I would say it the it isn't necessarily a problem it's a problem in the modern environment and these are these are going to be genetic I'm not going to rule out that some kind of neurotoxin could potentially cause brain damage in utero but it certainly has nothing to do with with emotional feedback systems in development and has nothing to do with the nurturing process at all so no that's just a UH Turley ludicrous and that therapist is what can I tell you way behind the times irresponsible this always seems to be such a safe place for therapists to go to blame things on and it seems kind and wise and deep but really it's not kind and it's and it's moronic and it's irresponsible and no the answer is that these things have nothing to do with whether or not the parents were stressed or anything else under the Sun this is not a process that takes place in that way the dyslexia by the way is unlikely to be associated with with any other any really functioning problem of the way the mind is built if you can think again realized that six thousand years ago there wasn't any language didn't exist so the notion of having troubles with the written language and is simply it first of all very few people did any reading two hundred years ago almost nobody so the general public does didn't know how to read you know until very very very recently so the fact that the human mind has the ability to read you know most most normal humans have the ability to pick this up and not screw things up and not read letters backwards and just essentially struggle with this with this process does not mean that if you do struggle with the process that there's anything in principle wrong with your brain it just means that this magnificent trick of written language is is only bestowed cleanly on you know 98 or 99 percent of people and there's a couple of percent of people that that the chip doesn't work perfectly in the way that it does with everybody else so irrespective of intelligence you can obviously low intelligence people have limited ability to use written language but there can be but dyslexia covers the board you can be exceedingly intelligent and be dyslexic and and as a result you can you can do not very well in school not nearly as well as your intelligence would dictate and you're going to be shut out of a lot of professions that you would not normally be shut out of this has course nothing to do with your childhood development this is just straight brain wiring it turns out that dyslexics very bright dyslexics will usually wind up in some kind of sales or entrepreneurial activity that's because of their intelligence would generally shunt them toward professions and yet there's most of the professions require as a bar to get into the profession they require high performance on different kinds of testing and performance in school which may have nothing to do with the ability to do the job but they create a barrier to entry for a lot of things and so as a result dyslexics are then forced into sort of more more free-flowing creative entrepreneurial types of activity and there they are actually in in sales and marketing they are vastly over-represented relative to other professions when when it's lexico say high intelligence yeah it yeah and then they suffer from dyslexia so anyway hopefully that answers that story fantastic well I think we will end there and we will get to the last couple of questions the next show we do with literate emails so doctor well thank you very much have a wonderful holiday absolutely pleasure and I'll talk to Yeltsin
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist