Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 52: Listener questions, emails, and comments
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 today on beat your jeans we are going to be going over some emails some questions and listener questions and comments we are joined by dr. Doug Lyall as always dr. Lisle how are you doing today good how you doing I'm doing pretty good how is the audio in our om tear it's it's good on your your end so far so far so good so far so good hopefully and get it for a couple of minutes so yeah well over the last couple of weeks we have had a great number of emails for listeners here and there and I always love listening reading these emails because I just want to thank you listeners here this is our one-year anniversary so 52 weeks ago we did the show we started the show and so far we are just powering through having a good time I'm having a great time listening to you dr. Lau so are all the listeners so we really want to thank listeners for joining us absolutely it's a pleasure to do this it's always good time and so with our listeners I will I get your I get all your questions I read all the emails and I do my best to categorize them and just kind of get a list and we just get to the ones that we get to as soon as we can and if anybody wants you know has a burning questions you really want to get to it feel free to call us during during the show and we can go over it right then and there so without too much delay let's just get right to we've got a few questions here today hmm excellent ready dr. Lyle I am ready this is the deep one so I might not understand your answer here but some listening totally will okay here we go dear dr. Lyle I hear you talk about the various neural networks in the brain such as the Sochi ometer the esteem meter as well as circuits relating to measuring attractiveness and expressing emotions like anger modern brain imaging suggests that there are about 200 specialized brain regions can you outline how many of these circuits related to social interactions exist in the human brain and what their functions are I'm looking for a high level of understanding of the number and function of such circuits circuits thank you I think I'm I think we're talking to an electrical engineer I Pro so where's my question ha that's right I forgot you were an electrical engineer the yes let's this is a very good question in a lot of ways and yet first of all the answer is nobody really has any idea how many specialized neural circuits there are in in the brain the its I did not know that brain imaging studies suggest that there's about 200 specialized brain regions I think that I'm not even sure what that means so if you go into simply the hypothalamus all by itself you will find that the hypothalamus is regulating sleep it's regulating food intake it's regulating water it's regulating temperature it's rate that that thing alone is is regulating all kinds of different things so there may be 200 regions that somehow show up on a on a brain imaging that suggests clusters of interrelated neural circuits but the amount of neural circuits that are specialized and built into the human mind yeah undoubtedly reaches the many many thousands of specialized circuits it's kind of now I've never studied much physiology but but I am aware that that if you're a hand surgeon for example and you start going into the hand there's this tendon and a bat tendon and there's a little tendon that attaches to the other tendon etcetera in other words there's a there's an architecture even though there's you know a significant amount of individual variation in the various pieces and their size and their their angles of origin and insertion and so forth but the truth is is that if you if you get in there even though you're going to see some individual variation there's a tremendous amount of essentially identical architecture and so this is really what the court did what the questioner is asking like essentially how many different specialized neural circuits make up the the arc the psychological architecture of a human and that's a very good question and I I wouldn't even well I would hazard a guess my guess is oh maybe 10,000 and I only say that not because that it's possible there's less it's possible it's 3,000 I don't think so I think there's at least 10,000 specialized circuits and and then a lot of behavior can be so the behavior of this organism is essentially the combination of the timing and the firing of 10,000 different circuits could could potentially give rise to as complicated a being as a human maybe not I mean along with those circuits you have additional circuits that involve holding information or learning that it's that essentially feed data into the existing circuits so it gets you can get tremendously complicated but I think I think the answer is going not not going to I don't know that we're even going to have a fairly decent guess about the answer to this question for at least a hundred years so don't hold your breath yeah maybe if there's a you think a neurosurgeon might be cool like yeah I was wondering if any of our testers might be a neurologist neurosis and you're a neurosurgeon wouldn't have a clue the neurosurgeon they're just trained in you know go get that tumor right there and do as little damage as possible they don't they don't really know anything about what we're talking about here the know what what we're talking about here is the the there is a neural architecture that gives rise to what you're going to call human psychology no somewhere in this brain there is a way to activate for example a humor reflex and it's going to be complicated as hell because there's probably going to be more than one set type of stimuli that can activate it I believe that all essentially all humor I believe is going to be activated through the the mechanisms of the reduction of status on the part of somebody so it may be you yourself it may be someone else in other words but when you listen to a comic what you're listening to is you're listening to them essentially talk through a situation that you imagine or one that they are acting out right in front of you where somebody is losing status and and so III don't believe now in the thirty years that I've been thinking about this I don't believe I've ever come across something funny where somebody wasn't theoretically losing status somewhere that might have been a cat or dog losing status I mean bid but somewhere you know somebody is actually being made made fun of and so that that circuit what you can imagine how sophisticated and extraordinary it would take to and it's incidentally this is a great example of how you don't learn to be a human you you have you you just are in the same way they don't you don't learn to be an aardvark and you don't learn to be a shark part of being a human is that you are born with neural circuits that when certain social processes take place of which you are unbelievably attend to and you are very much attuned to the processes by which people lose and gain status and you are aware that when people that you don't like lose status that's legitimately funny and satisfying but it's also true that when people that you like lose status but they don't lose real status they are actually losing what I call phos status so you don't it's not really hurting their status then that's also enjoyable okay so the it is it is not so enjoyable when someone that you don't like loses foes status that's not particularly great what's great is when they lose real status and so so we this clearly was a set of neural circuits that was designed to both enjoy the process of having our or competitors lose status as well as generate generate commentary by which that could happen and so by being able to you need to be able to enjoy it to be able to generate it and so we are we're going to be designed to be scheming to try to figure out how to make fun of competitors and to have them lose some status in order to elevate our own meeting prospects and so so this is a very interesting and important set of circuits inside of human nature but just as I talked about this I think you could start to imagine what a sophisticated set of circuits that would have to be because then you know from Mendut them yeah go ahead oh I was I was saying speaking of humor and status and losing status we had an email from one of the listeners a couple of days ago who was trying to ask how how to be more funny for a business presentation so yeah she's actually on hold right now Franco she called out okay a minute ago so I thought there's a great segue to talk about this so Holly just let's bring her on let's put her on okay mmm Lola welcome to the show how are you doing yes great thank you very much for having me back - absolutely we're so impressed by your by your understanding about humor and psychology I love listening to you you such an interesting person is an interesting word haha are you doing a lot of insight so I really appreciate you taking the time and being on the on the show I also listened to your our episode on the humor and psychology and I have a question and I'll ask my question and now listen the offline so yeah okay my question is I do work with boards and I'm trying to help them to be more effective one of the things that I find interesting is when they get all emotionally charged they lose the effectiveness and so I'm trying to talk to them how it is important to understand and tune into your emotions and as I was listening and I was thinking how to make this more funny because you know it's very difficult for them to take it so I was hoping maybe you can shed some light on how to do that more effectively on using emotions and maybe making some fun about emotions in the board room and I'll take I'll take you answer offline thank you so much very good okay so is I as I get this question what she's asking is she actually does some consulting with apparently board of directors of companies and so they bring her in to try to help them be more effective and it turns out that when they get emotionally charged they lose their effectiveness in principle so so that's sort of the notion so the there's some supposition there that that when you get emotional you're potentially less effective and we could ask sort of why why we think so because that wouldn't necessarily be the case but the I would say that maybe perhaps the board if they get emotionally charged it would sound like probably the board it wouldn't get so much charged against outside members attacking it it would probably be become less effective as there are squabbles within the board and the emotions that we're talking about are probably anger is probably what's happening so I'm I wish you were still here with us but I'm going to assume that that's probably the case I can't imagine other other emotions winding up being particularly destructive so for example the board doesn't get all lusty and start having an orgy and wasting time that way the board doesn't wind up getting all excited and just start cheering and the board you're making me sad where but I can like Portland or something or Berkeley so I'm thinking that the problematic motion that she's dealing with is when the board experiences disagreements between members of the board and their winds up being strife and so it becomes difficult and so so what she's going to try to do is help them be more effective at their disagreements when that's happening and so this is now comes under the the issues of conflict resolution and how it is that we go about doing conflict resolution the and there are strategies that I would I would suggest I think I've actually done shows on these strategies these are things that I do with couples a whole strategy that I call crystal clear that we also we do some flooding of the circuit before we confront people and we also understand that anger is a mechanism that that is activated naturally in people when they feel like they're being treated unfairly so it's important that we keep circling around to the concept that we want to be fair and that that winds up being a central concept that that takes place it's also true that I don't know that I don't I haven't seen this discussed elsewhere but it's been my observation that when people get into arguments that well first of all when they get into arguments they are it is no longer a discussion it's an argument and what makes it an argument is that people one or more people feels like they are not getting enough status and and so this is now they start the esteem dynamic shifts to one where we are attacking the other person's status because they're attacking our status and it and it develops what I call a vicious cycle and that's a problem the another aspect of the vicious cycle is that that that I believe that the argument instincts of humans are designed by nature to be super rapid the human being was designed with specialized circuits to look for weaknesses in the other person's argument and to essentially attack them as aggressively as possible and as quickly as possible even in a distorted manner in terms of what their argument is in order to quickly gain favor of listeners because I believe that in the Stone Age the listeners were not that interested in your disputes and they were only vaguely interested in and so if you were able to win their favor the ballast of the argument would go against the losing party and so you would then gain the advantage in in the disagreement so I believe that there's actually quite a bit about human nature that makes arguments contentious in other words makes disagreements contentious and as they move into arguments we wind up generating vicious cycles we wind up with argumentative instincts activated and the desire is to win and to get dominance rather than to actually listen to what the other person has to say and figure out just how far apart our positions really differ and whether or not the other person has anything interesting or a merit you know of Merit that we that I need to add to my position people really aren't designed to do that very well and so I'm sure that a lot of boards of directors essentially follow their instincts right into all of these traps and and then wind up in in you know inevitable messes so that being the backdrop I would probably what I would do is I would use my standard technique for coaching human beings about human beings is to use cartoon-like kinds of scenarios and often I will use them with animals so I will if you so I might have pictures of you know Peter Rabbit and somebody else and you know Daffy Duck and I'm going to have kind of situations I'll draw these things myself and extremely poorly by design not that I could draw them any better if I wanted to but the point is is I draw out my little pictures when I when I do presentations and if you haven't seen phenomenal and it's worth yeah it's worth going online and seeing how I do this and copying it everybody's free to use the same technique the the point is is that when we use a third party even another species that were anthropomorphizing and it's better to use than other species than it is ourselves the the reason why that's true is that it gives a significant distance to the dynamics and so people feel like we can't we're not pointing at anybody in the room whereas if you used a real live person you said well Bill's the kind of guy but does such as such as such as such and they argue about this and you know what a ridiculous thing bill said and he's the kind of person that you know you could potentially make those things funny but it's a lot easier to do it if you do it with with animals so so when I talk about weight loss I talk my weight loss talk called losing weight without losing your mind I am essentially talking through the issues that human beings have weight loss but I talk about chickens and I talk about my cats in other words I'm out there talking about other other creatures and so I'm doing that in a way then that people can absorb the lesson but it's way muted in terms of its how personal it gets to them so these are the kinds of things I would do and I would look for you know absurd situations of any kind yeah I would certainly be looking for ways to make some of these lessons funny I'm always on the lookout for funny situations and and I I'll write them down I've got a list of them somewhere where I will use them in my discussions because there's you know often something interesting in in an important tale to be told with respect to something that is funny that happens to you or actually anytime I get embarrassed I'm all I'm actually got I'm happy about it because it means it's a story I'm going to tell and and so the more embarrassed I am the better it is so something goofy happens to me that I make a fool out of myself by accident I believe me you're going to hear that in my in my lectures for the next 10 years and so this uh anything that also yes so obviously Lola or anybody else listening another thing that you want to do is you want to think back on any ways where you have done these things badly wrong and we're not going to say oh and then now I'm so smart I do it differently okay now we're going to actually just leave it right there about how you did it like an idiot and then we're going to talk about you know you know I don't know dick the duck that's not a good name which is somebody else as oh there you go you can remember the story for the next ten years ah yeah I have talkative thousand people in live listening and is what I come up with so anyway so don't don't try to do it off the cuff you're gonna hang yourself that's a good lesson so so anyway the bottom line is we we come up with these things we draw our funny little pictures we tell our little stories and this is probably the best way and what we can do is we can weave in and out between the stories and what I do what I do is I weave in and out between entertaining little animal stories and then I weave right into something that's core to human nature and so that this way they can tolerate a direct lecture for a few minutes about something important and then we weave our way out of it so we we don't try to overwhelm them we move in and out of this sort of thing and we try to get to so these points across but the main points it's important that the core message be talking right to the source code and the source code here that I would I would share with you it's important is argumentative instincts natural desire to win the quick the quick nature of trying to get on top of a dominance hierarchy and defeat the the other party who is who is not seeing the merit in what it is that you have to say and in fact that the best solution comes with plenty of patience hearing people out feeding back to them what it is that you think that they said to the point where it's crystal clear okay this is how we do it so we cannot be under time pressure when we are trying to resolve something and unfortunately if you've got some blowhard on a board who you can't shut up then you've got a dysfunctional board and that's the problem all right let's move on okay okay okay so our next question okay dear dr. Lyle I recently found your show and loved it I've been binge listening oh that's nice okay she's good on Netflix yeah okay I have a couple questions if a potentially miscalibrated man is dating down but enjoying the relationship is it common for him to lower himself to the level of the female in terms of ambition and motivation to try and find an equilibrium within the pair bond if so how common is it for the female to try and prevent a male from regaining any lost ambition motivation in such a scenario yeah that's actually sort of very clever it's very interesting and the there's a lot of sub positions there that walk us down that road for example potentially miscalibrated male is dating down well if he's miscalibrated he doesn't know he's dating down okay so there we go so right away the some of the sub positions that follow are not going to follow so the but here so here's what it is that we find there there are men that say I really like I just get straight to the heart of the issue God knows all the dumb questions I've asked you and it's just like you know right to the right to the core it's actually there's a lot in this question that's excellent so let's let's walk down through something that we know that I think it's interesting if people haven't heard it before and that is that usually it's very unlikely for people to be miscalibrated on the low side almost everybody is miscalibrated on the high side the that that is human nature in other words so human nature is built with enough narcissus a minute that that it is built that way for a reason and the reason is it would it's no good to leave genetic chips on the table so people are ferocious negotiators when it comes to their genetic chips and their their love mechanisms are just not going to fire up unless it feels like it's one hell of a deal that's just how it works now the sitting next to this is the fact that males levels of commitment in a relationship run a gamut that that it's actually a continuum but we think of it or when we speak of it we think of it in categorical terms as what I'm going to call pair bond or casual mating strategy so we can vary we can see clear evidences of these two things where some guys crazy about a girl wants to marry or sticks with her for years and years and years and just thinks she's the greatest thing okay well that's clearly what we're going to call pair bond and causal mating is you know guys had a couple of beers and it's getting late near closing time and there's sort of that's halfway interesting that seems to be sideling up to him and he doesn't remember her name but he's willing to knock it over you know and and then lose the phone number quickly and get lost the next morning all right that's casual mating strategy and of course there are things relationships in between but it's going to turn out that that pretty quickly relationships start to reveal themselves as to whether or not they are para bond oriented or casual mating strategy oriented so in this in this scenario this guy is suggesting that this guy feels essentially he's in a pair bond situation he's not he's not planning to go anywhere that means that that he's not thinking that he is that he's trading down now I can tell you this that we do have evidence that there are men who do who are willing to trade down into pair bonds it's not typical but it does happen and when it does happen when men know that they are more sexually attractive than their mates we find something astonishing taking place and that is that what we find if you put a clock on the amount of direct child care that takes place in in relationships it turns out that men typically in a standard pair bond situation that where the men are equal or not as attractive as the female is by objective observers which is quite typical then it's it's going to turn out that men do ten percent of the direct child care now that doesn't mean they're doing ten percent of the the lifting of the family they're working more hours at work etc etc and they may be doing other things as well but the point is is that when it comes to the actual changing the diapers and the actual you know wiping of the muck off the kids face that the that is what the average male does is ten percent of the direct time it's going to turn out that when those males are objectively more attractive than their than their spouses the the amount of direct child care is 1% which is absolutely incredible so there's a factor of 10 difference in the amount of time that this guy will spend now I have to tell you I have seen situations like this in my in my practice and the only situations that have ever come to mind not only do they fit this pattern but the male's of which there's probably been about five where this was very clear to me and clear to everybody else where the male was considerably more attractive than the female in every case these males were lazy as hell okay the females worked very hard they had jobs they hustled they often made more money than the guy and the guy was just not willing to push very hard about anything and and so this is this is telling us that they are in fact calibrated they do know what's going on and they are inherently lazy so this is there's nothing wrong with this situation the females are are happy to be in the situation probably somewhat anxious etc the they if a male is is only parking they're in that relationship for a short while and he actually has some hustle and he's going to he's going to hustle then the female absolutely knows that he's planning on leaving in all probability so the I have seen that situation clinically as well and so that a relationship was under a tremendous amount of strife where an eight male was with a five female and and that relationship was in trouble because the male had parked there for a little while because it was convenient and then he was actually moving on and he was not in fact lay as he was going to go out and and do some major things in the world to get resources to make himself more competitive and she could see the handwriting on the wall you know 100 miles away so these are these are the sorts of dynamics that that go on and it shouldn't shouldn't surprise us at all but there's nothing there's nothing in principle wrong with a guy that is happy does you know feels like everybody's happy in this situation he doesn't have a lot of ambition he's relaxed and he doesn't feel a lot of anxiety about losing his mate and it's because he's he's quasi consciously aware that his mate feels like that she killed the bear in the looks department and so I would not is it is it possible that there could be dynamics on her part to have him you know to cap his ambition possibly but the truth is he doesn't have a lot of ambition or he wouldn't be there hmm all right let's move on all right next one dear dr. Lyle I'm 68 years old but most of the time I feel like I'm 35 occasionally 17 and once in a great while I feel like I'm five looking in the mirror can be shocking or more like a gentle reality check is this a function of personality maybe falling somewhere on one of the big five bell curves or is it a universal something hardwired in our brain I'm not exactly sure what he's asking but I'm going to take a shot at it the yeah I'm getting up there so I know the feeling so so here's the deal that when we see older people the their faces actually look tired the wrinkles look tired etc so yet some of the things that happen to the face as we age are are similar to the effects of what happens when we're younger but we are in fact badly fatigued okay so as a result of this when we look at older people it's not uncommon for us to make the inference that they are in fact really tired okay won't tired tired and worn out and so however this is not true so I mean they might be tired worn out maybe they got sleep apnea or or maybe the dog keeps them up all night who knows but in but there's nothing about the mind of a human when it's you know seventy years old if it's well rested that it isn't just absolutely alert and spry and happy and joyous and there's no quote feeling seventy okay there isn't you you don't feel any different it just is you know I'm in my 50s I don't feel any different than I did last twenty doesn't nothing has changed in terms of the how it is that my nervous system feels now what you will feel is you'll feel some things like you will you might feel some aches and pains I'm a little stiffer when I get up in the morning and walk than I was when I was twenty I'm sure and it's also true that your energy when it comes to certain issues is not as great and it's probably true mentally I have no doubt that they haven't actually looked at that I'm sure they have looked at it but I don't recall anything interesting about that but what is very true is we know that's true physically so we know that the the organ reserve capacity of your cardiopulmonary system is substantially being reduced as well as everything else does overtime endothelial cells inside your your cardiovascular system are shrinking in terms of their total size they start out you know the size of two tennis courts when you're a young adult these are the cells that are going to help you know help the entire cardiovascular system work properly by the time you're seventy you've lost half of that surface area and so there's just no way that you can be the endurance athlete that you could have been earlier so if you if you look at decay function on every single physical variable involved in athletics you will see a decay function overage that is undeniable and cannot be stopped so the world's records on all different kinds of activities go through a very predictable graph and slope as human being sort of go down down through the time but they lose organ reserve capacity and other things so did we look tired yeah we look tired are we no so the point is is that you could look tired worn out and when you look in the mirror can be a shock because you can be seeing the face of someone who looks tired and wiped out but they're not tired or wiped out at all and so that's a that that I think it's a fairly universal experience of a lot of people as they age when they look in the mirror the now there was their second part of that question I forgot the second part was that is those a magnet is a part of the personality or is it something hardwired to like look to it yeah I think it's hardwired to look to look at a face and make assumptions about whether it's fatigue and so if it happens to be your own face you you you have this you know you're not supposed to be looking in a mirror for god sakes so that's a completely unnatural act so you can look in the mirror and see that you look old and tired and the truth is you don't feel old or tired and I think that's a little bit of a shock so I don't think that's any kind of bizarre personality characteristic I think that's going to be a universal experience of humans mmm-hmm yeah I was just someone sent me a picture there's a hundred and four year old guy running a marathon or you know running some sort of track meet and the caption is he's hundred and four years old what's your Excuse and of course somebody commented on this picture saying he had more time to train that that's very good I don't even want to analyze where the status loss is there but it's great it's just beautiful all right all right so this is another question from actually one of the people whose called in before okay okay dear dr. Lyle do they elderly come up against the same casual mating versus pair-bond strategies at the young folks face the reason I that reason she asks this is that pregnancy is no longer an issue but attaining or preserving resources can be a factor since we didn't live nearly this long in the Stone Age do our unconscious motivations stay in tune with a younger age in other words is an elderly woman still protecting her non-existent eggs that's a really good question and I'm going to answer it in the following way that that and nobody I don't believe anybody has a theory about this so that that holds any water this this question will have to be settled scientifically in other words the only way to answer her question is to actually go get data the the reason why it's I actually believe that it's the answer exactly as she's supposing which is that that the the neural circuits do not change so now I know that some of them change in and in the sense that that people are aware of the possibility of a thing called grandchildren and this is a unique characteristic of our species so no other species is is nosing around in its chilled adult children sexual life and then watching for kin that may come as a result of that and then then provisioning those those grandchildren an and being attached and delighted to that process so this is clearly a human characteristic that is bizarre and that being the case if you can have that you could all also in principle have a situation where it could be smart enough to be to be to have some shifts that would take place post menopause with respect to with respect to their their sexual dynamics now I don't think so so I think that men and women are playing exactly the same strategies that are etched in stone I don't think that there was any evolutionary process to disturb those strategies once they were in place so I think that in other words I just don't think that there is any profit from somehow using sexuality in some way you know in a causal mating strategy that would somehow be useful for the organism survival and reproduction bluffing the males into thinking we still have eggs and then getting resources out of and then giving them to our grandchildren and doing them in a in a opportunistic and flirtatious fashion like god knows what you would come up with and the answer is it doesn't make any sense so what makes sense is that the the that we are endowed with sexuality that will last in females case past their reproductive years it makes sense that it would last somewhat past the reproductive years because she should be attempting to bluff a male that for example was the father of her last child let's suppose she had her last child at 43 we would expect her to be essentially bluffing him into thinking that she would still be able to have children four or five years later so he should still be trying to essentially farm that field for a while and hopefully to pop out another kid that's what his his neural circuits should be designed by nature to be to be lured into that potential trap and she she would be designed by nature to not suddenly know that she doesn't have any eggs left and therefore get out of this game because the truth is she's got a one-year-old infant and that one-year-old infant could really use paternal support for a heck of a long time okay so as a result you would expect the female to be engineered to bluff the male into continuing to pour resources into her and and you would expect the male would have countervailing evolutionary pressures that would make him increasingly sensitive about aging cues now we know that this is true we know that males are actually twice as sensitive to aging cues in the face than our females in terms of their sensitivity to aging cues and males so males in the same way that females have are twice as sensitive in terms of their sense of smell there would be many reasons for that and one of those reasons would be that because they more heavily invest in offspring they need to smell males to actually determine the nature of their immune chemistry in order to pick mates more accurately in terms of immune chemistry that matches their own so there's so the children wind up with good immune systems so there's probably other reasons as well why the female knows probably much more involved in cooking and therefore they need to be much more sensitive the possibility of bacterial contamination etc so I'm not sure all of the reasons why females might have a much such a much better nose but males have much better acuity and sensitivity to wrinkles on the female face we see the worldwide panic and fascination on the part of females with keep getting wrinkles off their face the cosmetics industry plastic surgery etc etc this is massive business this is a trillion dollar industry and there's a damn good reason for it okay because the females know that the males are watching those characteristics like hawks and that their cachet is dropping dramatically with every tiny little wrinkle that happens I mean it's a hell of a thing to say but it is exactly what's transpiring and so this is so what the female would be designed to do would be to be silly youthful have youthful movements toss her head and and etc in other words to exude youthful coos even into her middle years and later years this could potentially Bluff males into sticking around and thinking that there's still some eggs to harvest and so once you have that situation the there would be no no reason to sort of temper that machinery once it's been selected by evolution and so a what point do you stop bluffing at 52 at 62 the answer would be if you're going to bluff you just keep bluffing it all the way up and so so I believe that this is this is a hardwired and constant feature of human nature and I believe that elderly women will quote be guarding the eggs and not wanting to quote give it up early and quote not be disrespected and the males will be pushing for for casual for quicker sexual access as far as much as they can and we will have the very same dynamics that we see in 20 year olds it'll just be slower that's that's how it goes it's not quite as noisy yeah I just saw noise oh oh yeah I'll burn that bridge when I get to it you got it alright okay next question dear dr. Lyle I have a question about racism with regards to genetics well I was going to be an interesting all right so if this is the topic you already covered I apologize but I'm curious to know whether being racist is part of our genetic code as humans if I think about it in relation to caveman times I can see how thinking you're superior to someone else may have a benefit to your genetic survival on the other hand when I think of young kids it seems pretty clear that they really don't see differences in people with regard to race that race ethnicity disability etc they truly seen colorblind so my question is are we born racist or do we learn it very good question first of all if we were to look back on human natural history there would be no point in any kind of anything that would remotely resemble the racial puzzles that people are posed with today and the reason is is that everybody looks just like you so people never would have encountered people that looked substantially different than them the typical human being would would live their whole lives within a 25-mile roaming range and and so they would never run into anybody that looked that looked at all different than them so maybe maybe slightly different given gene pool on the other side of the mountain that you've been relatively secluded from for 75 years three or four generations you you might be seeing obviously slight differences in facial configurations very very slight so you sort of know that that's one of the Joneses from the other Valley and and so when you meet somebody on the road you're like oh well you're one of the Joneses I sort of tell okay the nose is a little wide or the ears are a little cupped or whatever the hell it is it happens to be going on over there so the butt races no way yes oh so racism as we know it and we see it and we're confronted with it today is is a totally modern unnatural phenomenon that would never have taken place so now we look at a different question so what do we see in racism we see the elements of racism that are that are interesting and important for us to to recognize our the this issue as this individuals talking about of superiority and fear or ''tis is one dimension and another dimension though and the most fundamental dimension to this is going to be what we're going to call in-group out-group so the the question is two human beings have natural neural circuits that delineates human beings as in-group out-group and then delineates their in-group as better and the out-group as worse and the answer to that is yes we do have such instincts they were first and most clearly discovered by a social psychologist by the name of Henry topple ta J fel he was in England I don't know what university he was at this was this we're going back a long ways now in my in my education work I think this would topple was writing in the 1960s it might have been the 1970s but I have a feeling it was the 1960s so anyway he did a series of experiments that became known as minimal groups and so and the question was how much data did you have to give a group of people that you were assigning them to to different groups how much data did you have to give to them before they started acting in a way where they favored their group and disfavored the out group and the answer was very interesting he found that it was the minimal amount of information that was necessary to delineate two groups was enough to start demonstrating an in-group out-group effect so let me give you an example I actually forget how it is that awful did his work but let me give you an example of how this could transpire so suppose that you and I were in a room Nate and there was like about 18 people in the room and we were going to do we were going to do people were going to draw pictures of I don't know the you know a bunch of flowers okay so this is what they were going to do and we're going to do this over the next 20 minutes and everybody's going to draw their little flowers and everybody's got their little pastels out there in their chalk and what we do is when we walk in the room is if you're the teacher you say okay well we're going to be drawing these things and you know let's see now the people here and if you took your hand in that room and you sort of drew an imaginary line down down the middle of the room and you say okay well people on this half of the room and you wave your hand at the half of the nine people on that side and then that's all you did say now now forget it we're not going to do that and you completely ignore it but what has happened in the mind of every single person in that room is that you have divided the room into two groups okay so it's in their minds oh I'm kind of a member of the peas or the people that are on that side of line I'm in that group and the people on the other side are like no were in that group that was the minimal amount of information necessary to indicate that there was a delineation then we have everybody draw their little paintings and then we have then what we have is people go up one by one and put their painting on the on the board and then everybody rates that painting from one to ten quietly and privately when we turn those scores in we will find an absolute in-group out-group effect the people on the left side of the room will rate the left that there they're artists better than they will rate the artists on the right and vice-versa okay so top will showed this over and again as I recall and in a variety of context and so this tells us that there's a deep automatic neural circuit designed in people to say which group of my in what is our group and our people need to be treated better than the other people and if you're going to treat the other people if you're going to treat your people better than the other people then you're going to need neural mechanisms that are going to be needing to somehow justify it or you wouldn't have to but you you could it would be a easy trick to have neural circuits that would justify this and so you would justify it that there's somehow objectively superior okay so I think that this I think Henry Topol and his work essentially outlines a discovery of the quote racist and it's not racist it's in-group out-group superior inferior circuit race just happens to be a way that we could do it we could we could in the minimal amount of information is necessary to fire this up and in so racism is a racism has other things going on because there are objective differences between races and and so those those things are are also fueling some of the way that people think and feel about things but even if there weren't if they were they have the race if all all races of man were actually identical except for some arbitrary differences like skintone if they were otherwise identical you we would still likely see quote racist action in the human mind behind the fact that the minimal group mechanisms existed for Stone Age hunter gatherers that we're looking for any indication of what is who is in and who is out and then treating people accordingly hmm yeah interesting mm interesting so alright it was a very charged question and I'm glad glad you were able to answer it without you know well yeah without all hell breaking was okay alright well I think we're going to call it a show and get to the other questions thank you guys for all the questions we will get to the rest of the questions on another day we've got some really interesting questions from a guy named Dave from a couple a couple of other listeners so we'll get to them next time maybe a couple of shows from now and coming up dr. Lao we have you had an on-air stress session with one of our listeners that we're gonna we're going to be showing in a couple of weeks so keep us stay tuned for that where you talk a little bit more this listener as she had an issue with her father they were constantly arguing so you helped her through that so I really appreciate that that's going to be coming up in a couple of weeks terrific excellent well dr. Lao a wonderful night well we'll talk to you next week
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist