Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 48: What's the point of psychotherapy, how to influence others
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 Joe dr. dr. Lyle Happy New Year hey you too Nate good to hear yeah yeah how are you how was your new year all good came at my age nothing exciting happens but it is but it's good to be here for another year you sound like my grandpa you got it well getting there yeah well so today's show we're talking about the point of psychotherapy and psychology and and the really you know one of my friends sent me a clip about psychologist I was telling him about the show and it reminded him of just this little clip it's a satire clip with Bob Newhart so let's listen in really quickly and then oh we've got a caller on the line so we're going to take a call after that too so very good doctor Switzer yes come here I'm just just washing my hands I'm Catherine big man Janet Carlisle referred me live in a box yes yes that's me should I lay down oh no no no we don't we don't do that anymore just just have a seat and let me tell you a bit about our billing I I charge $5 for the for the first five minutes and then absolutely nothing after that that sounds great you're good to be true as a matter of fact well I can I can almost guarantee you that that our session won't last a full list for five minutes now we don't do any insurance billing so you would either have to pay in in cash or by cheque Wow okay and I I don't make change all right go go till I tell me about the problem is that you wish to address oh okay uh well I have this fear of being buried alive in a box I just I start thinking about being buried alive and I begin to panic as as anyone ever ever tried to to bury you alive on the bus no no but truly thinking about it does make my life horrible I mean I can't go through tunnels or be in an elevator or in a house anything boxing so what what you're saying is you're you're claustrophobic ah yes yes that's it all right well Allah spoke Aslan I'm uh I'm going to say two words you right now I want you to listen to them very very carefully now I want you to take them out of the office with you and incorporate them in into your life so I write them down well if it makes you comfortable it's just two words most we find most people can can't remember them okay you ready yeah okay here here there stop it stop it yes spop Nord ID so what do you think you know it's funny III say two simple words and I cannot tell you the amount of people who say exactly the same thing you're saying I mean this you know this is not you - Catherine this is it stop it so I should just stop it there you go I mean you you you don't want to go through life being scared of being buried alive in a box do you a minute son right let's stop it I can't I mean it's been with me no no no no we we don't go there just just up so I should just stop being afraid of being very alive in a box you go good go well if it's only been so only been three minutes so that will be three dollars all right dr. Lao I love ya great but we'll get a comment for you in just a second about it we have a caller on line caller namely so Li welcome to the program how are you doing today good thanks um I I called several months ago as well so I don't want to be that person but is it no very good actually your voice is a bit familiar I can't remember exactly what the circumstances were but glad to have you back thank you this is a totally unrelated question sure so I wanted to kind of hear your thoughts about the science of learning and it seems like a lot of what you talked about touched on that meaningfully in a variety of different contexts so here's sort of some of my takeaways from what you have and why it's leading me to that question yeah um so I think a few weeks ago about the show about change and willpower seem to conclude that in order to make meaningful change you need to change your inputs materially change your inputs in a way that would actually change this complex mechanism we have for analyzing the choices for the statistically optimal outcomes as you put it so meaning like we need to learn and absorb new things even if there are counter and especially if they're counter to the schema that we already rely on and probably that schema is already giving us comfort or satisfaction or however you want to put that and you know a while back you also talked about the informational immune system and some of the interesting rips of that and shortcuts that we might have or mistake so we might be making in terms of speaking out useful information and even when you talked about trauma I sort of heard that in it the same way right in terms of like trauma is a way to sort of cement your learning on certain things um so then with last week's show it was kind of becoming clear that some of the existing theories out there like the sort of the behavioral model don't quite get it so how does evolutionary psychology approach this I mean it seems like this is a core question right if the key to beating your genes is understanding what's going on at this broader theoretical level applying or theory identifying and solving the problems where our genes might be leading us away from the best choices for our happiness then this is something that we need to understand so then here's my specific question how do we best get people to learn information that's accurate nuanced difficult complex traumatic or otherwise destabilizing and that requires sustained attention especially when that information is key to significantly changing values and/or actions right it seems extremely complex and like you could kind of go astray at any one of those points so I know that you know you've also talked about personality and some of the other issues and I'm sure that those things are very much related but I'd like to kind of hear more directly about that right yeah these are this is really good deep thinking and let's let me let me see if I can see if we can if we can lead you a direction that then you can ask questions along the way and make sure that how it is they you know let's see if we can if I can communicate this the what the what the nervous system is is it for all intents and purposes its a bag of tricks and what these tricks do is that they're they're little they're little computational devices and they were designed to take specific inputs and to then come up with have a pathway of information processing that would lead to the optimal solution for behavior in the environment of our ancestry so let me make it an example of how this would work so let's suppose you're young man and you are you are strolling along in the moonlight headed towards your your cabin and it's I don't know maybe it's Western Massachusetts in 1880 and you belong to this little village area and there's a girl there that you've just got to be recently sweet on and she's been there's another guy that's been sweet on her and he's been there longer in that town than you have and her he he knew her before you knew her but now there's some flirtation going back between the two of you I you and the young lady and now you're walking in the woods to your to your parents cabin and you hear a twig snap relatively large twig snap now let's look at what what's happening inside the brain so what's happening is that the first thing that's going to happen is you've been your mind has been drifting about thinking about that female and thinking about how it is that you're going to have sex with her one day so that's actually what what's been drifting through that that guy's head as he saw him that walk in the moonlight now as soon as he hears the twig snap what we notice is sometimes we looked inside of his mind we would find that his emotional his emotional experience now shifts dramatically and if the like I said it had to be a big enough twig snap if it was a tiny little twig snap it might not do this a big twig snaps only when there's been a substantial weight put on it so he his brain is sophisticated enough to infer that it's the size of an animal or the force that was put on a twig is responsible for the sound that you hear so his brain has specialized circuits that were designed by evolution in order to make accurate entrances about the size of forces that needed to cause certain sounds the saw the the amount of sound that you would get out of some kind of activity so what's going to happen is that he's going to have an emotion that we're going to call fear and because he's going to have that emotion what's going to happen is what emotions are is they're essentially they are specialized programs that are in the computer the brain is a very very sophisticated computer many many orders of magnitude more sophisticated than any computer that we can build and what this computer does is it in this case what it's going to do is it will shut down a whole bunch of other programs so right now he had some some food that he had eaten an hour ago that he's been digesting and that digestion process is being partially regulated by the brain as it contracts the stomach muscles in order for for him to break a mechanically break apart the food but as soon as he hears twit the twig snap that digestion will cease that that program will shut down the digestive program it will also shut down the program that is that is around plotting how it is that he's going to get into that females sexuality that program is now about those programs are now shut down and what's happening now he's not thinking about that he's planning on maybe trying to ask old Horace for money to go to college nearby it at Amherst that's out he's not thinking about that not thinking about his future he's not thinking about anything he what happens is his mind immediately goes to the problem of what was that sound what caused it okay now what we're going to see is that his mind is going to drift towards what I'm going to call the worst case scenario and the reason why it's going to do this is that it's been shaped by evolution to actually make certain inferences and the inferences that it makes are not designed to be the most accurate inferences they're designed to be the inferences that are the most adaptive in other words it's the animal that makes the inferences of certain types that wind up being the most beneficial in terms of resulting in the greatest amount of genes being on the planet so the mind is not designed to maximize accuracy it is designed to maximize genes survival so literally the thinking that the animal does in this case it's a human the thinking that it does is actually guided by specialized circuits so it does not so another so this is a this is in response to some of your some of what you were trying to say and that so I'm trying to like get it a little clearer for you there isn't a thing that we're going to call quote reason what there is is that there's specialized circuits that are designed by nature to make certain inferences under conditions of certain inputs so we have a now we're starting to see just how specialized the activities of the mind are they are unbelievably specialized so a certain input under certain conditions winds up with this individual making certain entrances and those certain inferences now lead to a whole host of information seeking and memory and memory devices are now invoked so now he's thinking about that this other young man and his friend actually gave him a long ugly look a couple days ago okay and he realized that when he was in town it was a little disturbing the stare that he got hey so now that's that is now in in his computations and now he's thinking about that you know it wasn't but a month ago the climbed a tree along this path somewhere very close by and and he he knows that it it was relatively easy for him to do it and he can remember how it is that he did it so he's immediately what he does is he starts categorizing his knowledge of the existing environment as he as his memory circuits are activated into different locations that are going to be called danger or safe okay so he's very rapidly searching through the memory banks looking for locations that say safe and he's looking for that with respect to his current location and he's analyzing this with respect to the direction that apparently that the sound came from okay so now it's going to turn out that we will watch him he will contract certain muscles and is in his upper body around his neck that will lead him to move his head from side to side very quickly as he's essentially trying to triangulate on the noise we're also going to find that that different auditory systems will will actually increase their sensitivity so he's much more to hear sounds even of the same decibel level then he would have had he not had this twig snap and invoking all of this machinery so this is this is now this is typical so this is actually what's going on in human life all the time that in an animal life in other words extraordinary sophistication of circuitry is is essentially coordinating behavior in a way that seems miraculous and it is of course unbelievably sophisticated so you have this is the equivalent of something that we can't really build with a dam now this is a parallel computer this is a computer that's designed by nature to use parallel computers that are all hooked up together in a network and all of them they have decision rules that guide these activations and that will lead ultimately to behavior that over the course of the natural history of the species in some is the most successful behavior that we can get given the conditions that have been presented to the nervous system now the so what is learning okay so what learning is is an updating of information in memory so the so as we see if had he'd never been on this path before he wouldn't know about that tree that he might be able to climb and had he never climbed the tree he wouldn't be thinking about this you wouldn't think about it as easily so the fact that he's been on this path before and he has climbed this tree actually improve his accuracy about the nature of his relationship between himself and the environment so if he did not have that in his head if he didn't have that knowledge in his head then this is what I would call a distortion so he might be thinking there's nowhere to run or to hide you can't see how he would do it but if he can but if he has that information in his head about that tree then he his mind is is less distorted than it is without that information so obviously all animal Minds at all times are operating under distortion the only question is how much distortion do they have and distortions are ultimately the cause of unnecessary unpleasantness in the life of any animal so there are lives and animals there are situations that there that we are not distorted and there is unnecessary unpleasantness so if a great white shark is is grasping your your legs as you fell off your surfboard you are you're having an incredibly unpleasant situation and there's nothing distorted about it okay but the real issue is if you're all in a knot and upset about the fact that your boss just passed you over for promotion the the question is whether or not any of the neural circuits that are being activated in your head or actually distortions or they're based on that they're having you're having a distorted reaction that is unnecessary and whether more information about the situation will actually reduce your suffering or for example reduce the errors that you might make in your subsequent behavior so the the let me see about where we are now so what we're going to do is we're going to recognize when we clinically when I see an individual that is suffering they are usually not suffering this isn't the first moment that they had this emotional response about this condition in other words they've had many many emotional responses about the same situational setup in their life maybe it's for example relationship between me and potential mates so it turns out that they're repetitively frustrated and they are with respected that problem and they are then depressed and you're intermittently depressed and angry and hopeless okay so I hear about what those emotional responses are and I recognize that those are those are hallmarks of an individual who has some distortions that are very likely to be present in their in their reasoning about these situations and my job is to figure out how to remove the distortions now in and so what learning is is it's going to be the removal of distortion so if you are learning for example about addition and you make mistakes then and you think the two plus three equals six then that's a distortion and you will make mistakes behind that with respect to real-life things how many clams are in the basket I had two in that basket and three in that basket so when I got home how come I don't see six I only see five so you're you can see that that distortions lead to potentially two errors that may result in unnecessary unpleasantness ie biological failure with respect to to something so our job as psychologists and psychotherapy is actually to remove distortions because in the removal of distortions we make the behavior of the individual relatively more successful we can't remove all the sources that's impossible in principle but what we can do is we can remove distortions to the point where the individual is more successful and therefore suffering less so does that is that making sense so far yeah I have sort of two questions or talks based on that two areas I see potential issues one is it sounds like basically the all of the calculation all the memory triggering and sort of evaluation of the risk and all of that is done in service of the emotion bleh bleh-bleh let's slow down when you say in service of I'm not sure what you mean so by that I mean you started out you're sort of hypothetical by saying that you've got this person who is sort of walking them along kind of occupied by one problem and then another problem may cross his mind and then everything gets sort of subsumed under this fear that's triggered by the branch right so that was sort of top one yeah let's let's let's just be just for the sake just to keep clear the the it isn't that all other systems in the brain are shut down it's that the way this is going to work is that it's going to work that that there's going to be the thing is smart enough to know that there are priorities and that it actually can inherently know what those priorities are so it immediately shuts down cognitive processing about a whole bunch of other things that could that are part of this individuals life and it and it focuses its attention on those things that are essentially the most important variables with respect to its genes survival okay so like sorry okay good so hopefully that makes sense in other words it's clever enough to assign priorities so it sounds like if you are hoping to persuade someone or explain something to someone that's complex or difficult your first task is basically becoming their priority wait a second slow down if I'm going to try to convince somebody as something complex or difficult the the thing is is the first thing that we're trying to do is to help them see a connection between what it is that they're about to learn and what they benefit it is it is for them right and that has to be competing with the other things that are sort of vying for their attention there we are going to processing of absolutely so okay so it sounds like that sort of your first task and I think that there are certain types of information that have importance but are more abstract and just by nature are going to be you know a disadvantage in terms of grabbing that kind of attention I mean no question in other words there's certain types of human beings are built to to mem essentially be able to use their imaginations and to to think about things that they use images that are that are essentially replays of existing sensory events that they've had and so if you can speak to and give them pictures in their mind about sensory events that they've had or that they could easily imagine and that you can explain why it is that what it is that you're proposing may help them be more successful with respect to decision-making in that area then you're going to have their attention yeah whereas with your if you're trying to as you say if you get too abstract very very smart people can see the point of the use of correcting a mistaken principle that you have learned that is in fact wrong okay so you if you had learned for example that the the nervous system was tabula rasa and that essentially the brain was an association device and that neurons that fire together wire together okay if this is how it is that you had learned what you believe to be true about the nervous system of humans and animals and that this was the nature of the psychology of organisms and then I started explaining to you that that was not true okay now most people couldn't care less but if you are a very high level psychologist and I started explaining to you oh no actually what you're talking about is is is incorrect and let me explain to you what the evidence is that that's incorrect you can see that in principle there's something horrendously wrong with how it is you've been trying to organize the information and so a person in principle there could be fascinated and extremely motivated to learn something that seems very abstract okay but that that's going to be unusual most people it's going to need to be how are they going to get laid easier better be more attractive you know live in a nicer place get paid more money have more friends be some more secure etc lie on the beach more in Hawaii these are going to be the kinds of things that are going to get people's attention okay and by by their very nature certain sorts of concepts are going to be at a disadvantage and competing for that kind of attention yeah certain kinds of problems human beings are are already pre-wired to think think in ways that are quite accurate and certain kinds of problems are going to be very difficult and extremely counterintuitive yeah so that's where my sort of a question came from yes yeah well that's that's so helpful to kind of yeah walk that all all bad right good the other thing that that as you were talking about the distortions I would assume that there are I think you've sort of said as much in the past that there are normal things we can expect people to do that are going to be distorting you know basically like traps or mistakes that people regularly make counterintuitive facts that people use their intuition badly on ROM so given what you talked about things like the informational immune system people who maybe are less open to new ideas or status issues ego trap issues I mean how do you basically say no wait your calculation is wrong and then sort of open them up for the data dump basically I mean it sounds like well I'll tell you like one sort of thought that I have is that people seem to kind of compartmentalised like oh well learning is for school and if they're not in an environment where the culture is to learn and be open-minded to things and to really kind of persist on learning some of these things they may just be more inclined to not really take that or not happy used to kind of walking back some of their mistakes hmm well actually the truth is is that when people are are making mistakes if they're if they're costly enough they're feeling it so they feel it in things like depression anxiety hopelessness etc in other words so if they're distortions are significant enough they are they're in trouble so it could be that they're addicted so they're they're suffering behind you know they're overweight they're they're out of shape they're they're addicted to some kind of substance etc that's a whole set of traps the or they're getting rejected a lot in a romantic arena or they are getting rejected a lot in the commercial trading arena etc is for work and etc so in other words people people come to me as a psychologist when they're in trouble okay so they're they're in trouble they're they're very motivated they're looking for a solution okay and so at that point they're highly motivated to to learn and they may come in it was less common plus common nowadays but in the early days people would come in occasionally expecting a very different therapeutic style than they would get so I only had this happen a few times but I had some people coming in and saying well I am your spiritual good person I'm thinking well I'm not spiritually oh okay so I'm pleasant enough okay and I'm a good person in the sense that I'm very much out to make this a win-win situation that I want them to be successful and therefore that's in my best Centrum so so however what we may wind up doing might be an awful lot different than they thought was going to happen so they might thought thought that they were going to come in and in bitch about how it is that their parents are not being fair because they're not paying enough for their wedding that we say now this one that happened about 20 years ago not going to remember the but most of the time they come in reasonably uncertain about what this process is going to be like even though if they've been in therapy before they understand that every person therefore every therapist is going to be different and so there they're naturally socialized to a consultative situation they've sat down with people and a friend or people to talk through problems before so they're not going to be too shocked about what's going to happen but but what we're going to do though is that I'm going to simply ask people what's going on what seems to be the trouble and they're going to tell me and as they tell me what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be thinking through what distortions that I believe are driving the problem and so then what I'm going to be doing is the next thing I'll do usually in in less than 15 minutes usually 10 minutes or between 10 and 15 minutes into the first therapy session what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be drawn them a little picture of human life and so in you can see these pictures and how it is that I do this if you go to doctor MacDougall's website and I've done a series of webinars there and they're free anybody can see these and said dr. McDougall calm these webinars he has a whole slew of them they're all about health but the ones that I do are are very psychological and so there's a number of them that I did in the spring of 2016 and they I will use the same types of pictures I think one of them is called the slow fast way and another one is called probably dare to be lousy and another one may be called the continuum of evil I can't remember but if you look at these things what you're going to find is a little set of pictures and a set of pictures I I start out with a little character little person a stick figure about an inch tall in the middle of the paper and that's the individual essentially the individual that we're talking about but I'll call this individual you know Sharon or Janie or somebody like that and then what I talk about is I talk about that above them in the middle of the page and the far left and the far right there's three groups of people and the three groups of people are going to be potential mates potential friends and potential trading partners those are the three markets of human life these are the three classes of relationships that define the competitive problems of humanity there's a fourth class of people that are critical in human life we're going to call those family but you don't necessarily compete with families so if you're somebody's mother you don't have to compete to be their mother you just are so the three other classes of relationships romance friendships and trade those those comprise the the top priorities of human life and so then what we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about how inside Jamie's mind is going to be a device that we're going to call the esteem meter and this is a device that is tracking the problems of competition and advertising feedback so when you are trying to secure a mate or if you already have a mate you are always advertising and that which means that you are you are under either real competition or what we're going to call theoretical competition so even if you are in a in a solid pair bond and getting great feedback from your mate you are still in a competitive situation so you're your mate still has options and those options are very similar to you in terms of gene quality and or else they wouldn't be your mate and so as a result you know you have competitive problems which means that you are made its running cost benefit analysis on you just as your written cost-benefit analysis on him and if you don't have a mate you are much more acutely conscious of the fact the potential mates are running cost-benefit analysis on you just as you are aware that you're running cost-benefit analysis on them and so these are the competitive problems of human life and these are the three markets that define human interest and so as a result of this when people are unhappy consistently in their life if they're consistently if they're lonely that's a signalling device that tells you that you are you are are not getting as much social connection as would have been consistent with optimal genes survival in the natural history the species if you are being romantic love loneliness in the sense and also feeling depressed around this then it that it's telling me that your efforts in this arena have been met with somewhat surprising rejection the the nature of depression and certain other emotional responses embarrassment is one of these actually joyful happiness is one of these these are going to be what we call recalibration systems and the purpose of of them is to do essentially alert and reorganize expectations so that resources the time and energy of the organism is utilized more effectively so if a person is depressed that is telling me that they are experiencing failure feedback in these in one of one or more of these competitive domains and the feedback that they're getting is surprising to them at some level in other words they don't understand why it is that they're getting the feedback that they're getting and you might say well is that really true well yeah you know you got a degree from swathmore in French art history and you thought you're going to make $48,000 a year working for PBS and it turns out that nobody wants to hire you and so now you're depressed and and you might say well you know that's really bad you know this is this is an objective serious problem here well it's it I'm not exactly sure why because the truth of the matter is is that the person is still qualified to get a job at Starbucks and they could get one but they're not interested in that job and it's depressing for them to even think about that job and and the reason what it's not depressing for a seventeen year old high school student to think about that job but it's depressing for our Swarthmore graduate to think about that job and that's because she has expectations for what it is that she's going to be able to trade for so it is the failure feedback relative to expectations which will drive emotional response it will just drive what we're going to call depression and so what's happening is that the nervous system when you're depressed it's a signalling device that tells you that you have been uncompetitive that your advertisement is uncompetitive or you could be miscalibrated as to what it is that you have to trade so this means it's a problem it it means there's a suspicion that we are not understanding how to optimally allocate our time and energy okay in the same way so it's causing recalibration processes in other words it's causing information seeking to try to find out alternative ways to compete it's also causing systems to shut down and not put further energy into the into the waste that we're trying to compete now which it can cause a person to quote feel hopeless these are all mechanisms that are also associated with reducing their sense of self esteem which will actually reduce and recalibrate what targets would feel reasonable for them to approach and be excited about approaching so this is a youcan't you can imagine a screwed up little high school student guy who's a five who who has normal chips for analyzing female beauty and general attractiveness and would like to take the prom queen out but any after and she says no and then the second most attractive girl in school says no and the third one says no etc etc in other words he eventually will find out where he's calibrated at but he's going to have to have his his his his estimations of what he qualifies for go through a adaptive process where his expectations are lowered for him to be excited about Mabel who's a five okay that's the that's how that has to take place so the same thing is going to be true of many other emotions for example guilt is a is a reassessment or reorganization recalibration device that tells the individual that they may have been too self-serving with respect to conflicts of interest between them and other another person or an institution and so they have been unfair and therefore what they need to do is they need to change their behavior in the future in order to be more generous with their time or energy so so as to protect their position and not get kicked out of the coalition or to or to not have the trading relationship eliminated okay so if you've been doing a flaky flaky job at your job you are starting to feel a little bit guilty but that's a signaling device to tell you that you are risk of being fired okay and and so therefore guilt this is an adaptive emotion to try to help you recalibrate your expenditure of time and energy so that you actually make optimal decisions for gene survival the same thing is true with excited joy you know the very great excitement that is the peak experiences of the moods of happiness for us and that is that when you are extremely excited about something a new love relationship or new job that you got or were a sale at Macy's what you know a great deal on a used car the great excitement that you have is actually a recalibration signal that tells you that that you are now aware of the fact that you were you were you are not knowledgeable previously about a situation that existed as a potential for you to to make to make very very effective action that would be highly profitable for gin survival and that now that you are making that action and you are getting fantastic feedback in other words it's extremely successful feedback this is basically like you invest in a stock and it goes at 50% in a week and you're incredibly excited okay the reason you have that excitement is to tell you wow you didn't realize this but this is an exceptional deal you need to invest more time in energy and trying to make this this thing happened repetitively so that's what the beginnings of a romance is is like wow we didn't know this person existed they didn't know that we existed they are willing to mate with us this looks like a fantastic deal and therefore it energizes the system into attempting to repeat you know and and have this recurrent exchange process take place it's a signal of under investment in that potential and therefore to underscore that we should put more energy into that it's the exact opposite situation is what takes place in depression which is signaling to you that you should put less energy and investment into the same behaviors that you were doing so when I when I hear somebody so as I tell them this story and I tell them the story through the eyes of some little person who's trying to secure a mate they're trying to make friends they're trying to get a good situation with respect to their job and what they have in their mind is a little thing called the esteem meter which is keeping track of the signals that they get from these different markets and when they get good signals it creates happiness and when they get bad signals that creates sadness or depression and when they get signals that seem just reasonable but they're neither particular exciting or depressing it means that it's hitting expectation and and that when things when people are struggling when they're in trouble they're getting negative feedback they're getting negative esteem signals from some of these markets and our job is to figure out why now when I explain this people can always tell me which the market is they'll tell me it's my husband they'll tell me it's my you know it's my friends so tell me it's my job they'll tell me it's all three don't tell me it's two out of the three nobody stares at this thing and says I don't see any problems with any of these parts of my life but I feel depressed it's never happened okay so the system has sufficient intuition that it can quickly spot where its life is struggling and and then what we do is we go into the explanation that these situations are timeless problems of competition and that when I start to speak about competition in these in these markets everybody understands exactly what I'm talking about okay so everybody understands intuitively that we compete and these are these sort of words and a language and a way of looking at human problems that is very atypical for psychotherapy I don't I've never heard of a psychotherapist talking about competition and these sorts of dynamics they they actually tend to avoid this kind of discussion and people are actually riveted and they are very interested because now I'm talking to what I call their source code in other words the system actually recognizes its own architecture when you start to name it and and so when we start talking about competition and we start talking about depression as a result of esteem signals that are negative from places that we expected it to be better everybody knows exactly what I'm talking about okay and and then when we go on and we talk about the self esteem mechanism which is a little bit different a little bit more complicated it all makes sense so people are are motivated to learn to the extent that they can sniff that the learning that they're going to do may be helping them be more successful okay and if we can't if we can't couch you in those terms then then we're going to fail to get their attention and motivation to think that all makes a lot of sense and that's I mean exactly sort of what the message I was getting as you were talking was this people are motivated to learn when they have a problem and you can apply it to one of their sort of core yeah primary need yeah those and those are the core priorities sometimes there's another core priority that I will sometimes wind up addressing in the nature might work is health and so once in a while you know that's not a social psychological priority that's just between them and and the Grim Reaper and so that is that's another one that will get people's attention but almost always the core priorities are these three yeah you know what's so interesting I'll just ask you this and then drop off and just sort of listen to your answer but you know I I come to the vegan world through the animal rights ethics side and I've always been aware of the health thing and only recently gotten more interested in and listened to all your your talks and other people's sort of information on it and I understand why it's persuasive it just doesn't I'm just not that interested in it like any group it's great for like people who are and I think it's a great motivational tool but it just doesn't do it for me the way that like saying I'm going to go protect an animal who someone has really required and is torturing Rob so listening to this whole explanation which other that makes a lot of sense and I think it's exactly where some of these more difficult complex topics don't land on when you either don't have a motivated subject or you can't connect it to a problem that they're moving to solve I'm sort of thinking about this through the lens of how do you get people like how do you apply that sort of thinking to that problem of you know the animals ethics right I mean is it an issue of just having people understand that the problem really is that bad I mean your pop your point about guilt well maybe that's some way in but that seems like wow that can get really tiresome quickly if you're the voice of reminding them how guilty they are for causing all this suffering um but I think you know it makes the nature of that problem extra difficult because it's hard to really I mean evolutionarily in our path right we've always been sort of thinking about gathering as many resources as we can and protecting the tribe and all that and now we're in this world where there's these complex environmental issues and this industrial farming issue from an ethical point of view seems to not quite fit into one of those easy hooks so I'd be enjoying a sauce on that and like I said I'll I'll drop off and listen to your answer but thank you absolutely my pleasure thank you yeah Paul I think appreciate it's great a really really thoughtful there we've got with another caller on the line as well so after you finish the answer we'll take them yeah Lise Lise question I mean she's got a Jesus she's looking around for a lover and hoping to find one in evolutionary psychology because it makes sense to her that if we know if we can understand the levers of motivation maybe there's there's something there's a there's a a bet that we are missing if you're an animal rights activist for example is there is there a lever that you can hit and the answer is there probably is and when I look at when I look at human beings probably the most obvious lever is straight sensory data and so this is what John Robbins did with diet for a new America the video the shot I don't know 30 years ago that probably had more influence than just about anything else that's ever been done because we saw a real live animal suffering and it freaked out all kinds of people a lot of people saw that movie once and it changed their lives forever so I think that that that's probably if you're an animal rights person probably the the the grizzly demonstration or a variety of video demonstrations of and even for example the video bonding with particular animals or even cartoon levels of it this this is how it is that I would approach those problems that this if this were my thing I think that she's intuitive it is right on target talking about statistics talking about how woful things are trying to broaden the problem into pollution which people aren't really going to care very much about in general no I think that you have to go right into the Stone Age brain and they have to get the idea that they are that that animals that they would love that would be part of their coalition are being brutally treated and slaughtered unnecessarily so and that has to be visual and vivid and that is if I were if I were at the head of of those movements that is exactly where all my attention would go it would be in in the production of video to tell those stories alright I took our next caller and see if we got something interesting we can do yeah I was going to say dr. Lyle you're a lot better than that other psychologists we just heard at the audio clipper to start the show yeah but but at least I got more to say yeah $3 I or $3 for three Medici hours extremely likable though go ahead let's see we got all right all right we have caller caller Mike Mike welcome to the program how you doing good thank you dr. Lyle from your view of evolutionary psychology which is really just psychology but like you said you because so many silly people out there you have to say you know throw that in there but yeah where do you thoughts on this I've never had a girlfriend or female family member who's ever been interested in talking deeply about science or philosophy but males will talk about it hours upon hours what's your thoughts on the difference between the male versus the female brain in this context like why aren't there more females and female physicists is dominated by males there are some but more females are in the social sciences verse the better sciences and don't worry about with social justice warriors or feminists have to say just be honest now take me off the air thank you this this is a freaking beautiful question and and I I hate to disappoint Mike but I don't know the answer the I have I have no doubt that the answer is genetic in other words I I think that I actually think some work has been done on this topic the I think for for example some of these topics involve mathematics and we're going to find in other words deep study of some of these things require facility with mathematics and we're going to find that there's male/female differences in mathematics so at the at the highest level hypeeeeee facility of mathematics is going to be more common in males and it's going to be in females this is just because the bell curve the distributions of mental abilities are not equal females are better verbally and males are better mathematically and that doesn't mean that that an awful lot of females aren't better than an awful lot of males and vice-versa with respect to these issues but we're talking about bell curves and that overlap and so so when you start talking about who is competent to to easily deal with some very sophisticated things for example in theoretical physics you're going to find that many times more more males or capable of doing that that kind of sophisticated thinking then there will be females so however the TV what we're really talking about and his big question I don't think it has as much to do with ability as it does to do with desire it has to do with the nature of the minds and what they find inherently interesting and and so I believe that and like I said it's probably already known to some extent of there's probably already some pretty good evidence but I think females are much more sort of relational oriented subtle you know in terms of their in terms of their interest in social dynamics and keeping track of so social dynamic processes in many ways I think males are a little bit more interested in building blocks and in hand axes and and the processes and procedures of those sorts of building things and so I think that that we're going to see that this is an example of content of natural selection selecting for brands that have differences in interests in terms of content so one of the one of the more interesting things that I see is that obviously they have lifetime television and they call it Lifetime television for women and it's stories about relationships and etc and whereas men are you know I think that if we were to find who is watching ESPN I think that we're going to find that probably 80 to 90 percent or more of the iBall hours that are staring at ESPN are going to be male and these are these are not an accident and and so that's that's the best that I can do and and but but I believe the inferences that our friend is making are effectively valid these are these are natural differences in content interest and I think that those are associated with the masculinity and femininity of Brent yeah I think a few shows back in the early beginning of the show there was a question from one to listeners who asked if men are smarter than women or men are more capable than women I think I think what you had mentioned was that that men are just that they're much more motivated to display such because the reward if they do display their their characteristics as they get just with a lot more people they get more status in the village whereas yes whereas women and that's really true right absolutely now there's quit just to be clear and I could just see when I said yeah when you said men are smarter than women I said yeah let's just be clear like I could just see that voice clip put on the internet somewhere that is that that was not true no men are not smarter than women on average the brains are not the same they have there they are overlapping bell curves of capability along these different content domains have been discovered by by work in intelligence testing and so we know that the brains are configured differently and we know that the women are superior when it comes to vocabulary and we actually have a great theory of I believe it's Jeffrey Miller is probably responsible for this theory but he may not be about the notion that a much of natural IQ testing has to do with talking to people and to listening to their vocabularies and so men would have been highly motivated to show off their vocabularies to women and in doing so they're trying to get into their pants but the women have more to lose by by being had by a guy who's bluffing is vocabulary and so therefore we believe that women may have been naturally selected to make sure they've got a bigger vocabulary than the male does so that they can catch the bluffing and therefore discount the estimates of IQ that come from person who's bluffing and and believe me there's been many times when then when I've been in front of people that I was trying to impress where I was searching for a word and I thought I kind of knew what a really fancy word would be and I thought it fit but I wasn't sure and I and I really thought about using it but I didn't want to be wrong and so we've all been there and so we can we believe that women have higher verbal intelligence as a result of having more to lose by being bluffed and so and correspondingly the male probably with respect to problems of being of hunting in other words trajectories and vectors vector analysis of different sort of problems they're much further from home etc they probably have more kated mathematical engineering minds built to solve those types of problems and that translates into the modern world into engineering you know and and the female intuition problems translate more into you know the social science arena so I think that uh I think that that's what's going on yeah there was a George Lopez I don't know if you know who he is he's Canadian yeah yeah he always like arrived it was juggling too it's always struggling to find a fancy word he just basically because it just sounds really fancy it's very good very good weird I'm gonna keep it easy on here we're just gonna call it basically yeah my goodness well dr. Lau this was great you know we've played this clip before but this is how we always feel when we let you do it it's a funny kind of a thing but you know I feel better after I got all that off my chest I feel like I like a low moans off my shoulders you're good fuck thank you I didn't do it oh you did some like it did some make it alone God where is it don't know you're good nah nah you're good like it was good I'm gonna begin to touch with you or just one more thing if I talk to you you turn me into a fag I'm gonna kill you in the state it might define sag very very good as all right John and of course if anybody wants to talk to dr. Lao justice team dynamics dr. Berg is your is your website and just great consultations there are lots of good videos audio clips etcetera stuff
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist