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Episode 87: Psych of Halloween costumes, talking to yourself, modern technology
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all right good evening everybody this is an Ag along with dr. Doug Lyall dr. Lyle how are you doing today yeah good good hear your voice excellent so this is the beat Eugene's podcast and we are here every night Wednesday evenings 8:30 p.m. Pacific Standard times until 9:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time maybe sometimes a little bit early right but when we are here to read some questions from listeners some emails talk about different topics and this week is no different so this week we're going to be talking about the month of October and why do people love dressing up for Halloween we're going to be talking a little bit about some casual dating that one of our listeners was curious about whether talking to yourself means that you're a little bit more intelligent you know I wonder if that's going to work the way I'm hoping it does in that way I'll just keep talking myself but we'll we'll find out in just a second we've got a couple more after that and so dr. model you're ready to rock and roll sure absolutely all right question number one dear dr. Lau why do some people love dressing up for Halloween I work at a high school and all the teachers in my department like to dress up in a group theme one year it was Harry Potter another year it was Wizard of Oz they all go out order costumes have professional makeup artists come in on Halloween morning then they talk about it for months me I just get nauseous thinking about it and I think it's ridiculous and a huge waste of time and money I always opt out and say no thanks not my thing but then I feel bad because I don't feel normal and I rarely value what most of my peers value like dressing up going to shopping malls eating out at fancy restaurants my just a black sheep in life what personality type would be so excited about getting dressed up I'm at the other end of that continuum why do I get why do I feel such a harsh physical reaction before you I was all made yeah before yes to this question when doctor when I got this question from dr. Lyle I sent him a picture of me dressed up in this really bizarre fat Halloween cost yeah I didn't open it ha ha ha I was serious all right several things about this first of all there a little coalition building process going on here so they've got themselves a little group that that and that as a result of somebody being a ringleader that's pushing this issue the other ones are you know more likely to follow along and and therefore as a group they are out there to try to get status you know in as a group and so this is why one marine in a uniform is handsome but 15 Marines in uniform take over the whole bar okay so there's the this aspect there's some strength in numbers if you're all in it together then it may get marks for the world very clearly that you have been accepted by a group of people you are a well good standing a good member in standing and this is actually using the issue of what what we call computer checking or what I also call the fish trick we can talk about that in a minute if we want but the fish trick is this research that was done with these tropical fish off the coast of I think Tasmania and was found that these fish would actually imitate other fish in inmate selection and so there were certain things that you could actually cause a given fish to make a decision by making it appear that other fish made that decision so imitation is clearly a very strong process in in many animal brains that would be wise in evolution because your own brain is only one computational system but if you go and you check and you see what everybody else is doing then if everybody else thinks the guy is hot then the fact that you only think he's pretty hot probably should be modified because it turns out that if a lot of the other gals think he's hot then then you your particular brain may be under estimating his hotness relative to the gene pool so therefore you should have a certain amount of an instinct that causes to causes you to be influenced by the apparent group consensus so this is what I call the fistrick and and the fish trick is is rampant in human affairs so this is why you will see very many fashion trends and in all kinds of things cars and clothing and so on and so forth so in this case they are using the fish trick as a group on going on a theme to indicate that they have they are all acceptable to each other and therefore you you would be acceptable that you would find them acceptable as well okay so the now also there's other things about it and that is that this is a people are trying to display their personality characteristics so this is going to be a way for Halloween is a time to for people to display their creativity this is this is a great time for extroverts particularly extroverts that are somewhat open to experience so it's also a time for some some ways to signal to the community and to test market characteristics of yourself that that might increase your attractiveness so for example you'll find a lot of women dressing up like sluts at about that time and this is a way that they can do this and test their sex appeal and actually test the test what happens you know what kind of feedback they get from males in a way that it's kind of essentially saying hey I'm not really trying this is just Halloween and yet we still get to run the ad so there's a all look at October's feel free ad yeah the cost very much without their racial costs hmm and also in addition now we've got this person's irritation with it now one of the reasons that we're going to be irritated is that essentially let's suppose we've got two young men that are both trying to compete to amass resources you know in some in some village or some social context and one of them and so they're there their various agendas for what it is that they're going to be spending the resources on both trying to look as cool as possible and you've been saving your money to buy you know raccoon coat famous coming back in the 1950s you know so your but now your competitor goes and buys a Jaguar and it's like you son of a bitch we weren't competing in that arena so now now you just stole a march on me and you're competing on a dimension that I did not feel like I had an advantage and I did not want to put my time and energy in to to actually compete so as an introvert that may not be that open etc this individual is is saying hey screw this this is a bad investment of my time and energy this is not a place for me I'm not seeing the cost benefit coming up for me so essentially I want to opt out of this thing and yet it irritates me that it's going to cost me that these people are going to get some kind of traction out of this some competitive traction they must be getting some competitive traction or they wouldn't be doing it okay and so so that this is this is what's going on so this is essentially I'm not saying that this person couldn't do this but this is essentially by virtue of the either personality or ability this is essentially like saying hey you know I'm can't to be too wild about going to a dance if I don't dance and and people are up there wiggling around and displaying themselves and attracting mates and I can't use this domain to my advantage and so I'm irritated at the whole damn thing and that's that's I think what's going on very hunters are enough so hi I'm Eric 82 now I'm interested because it sounds it's almost sounds like it's a similar type of process as to the ego trap and SN you know I I don't see myself succeeding if I try you know if I put my full effort in this so therefore I'm not going to try and I'm going to make it very obvious that I'm not trying so you can't judge me fair yeah that's right and so that there that is it that is an aspect of this possible situation so to this person you know it's possible that this greater understanding of some insight comes from here and might be helpful you can also see there's some devious scheming and this insane will find if we're going to compete then you just wait and watch me compete and then I'm going to I'm going to steal March on you people and completely surprise you and ambushed you with with the with the costume from hell okay so that that there that that could be in the game or you know they probably won't they probably don't care or they're just not into it this isn't their personality and and these people her fellow his or her fellow professionals have got themselves a little clique and and you know and they've got a little mutual mutual admiration society clique that is holding together and protecting the group status in this process so you can't come in late now because you're the johnny-come-lately etc so I mean you could but you would be at lower status in that group for a while until you had paid your dues and gone up a hierarchy by coming up with some ideas in subsequent years that would be advantageous for everybody and then that's a bunch of creative talent gone to waste so now I see what yeah it just looks like a mess these are the kind of messes I've avoided as best I could madness well alright I wonder yes okay so next question oh yeah I wanted to ask you a little bit more about this question she this user also also said that they don't like as well they're not really into what her peers value which is dressing up going to shopping malls eating out at fancy restaurants sound yeah things is this more like you know status seeking behavior or what this is you're looking at dressing up going shopping malls eating out fancy restaurants these are pretty conventional extrovert did you know behavior and dressing up going shopping about this is all I mean I want to go and be seen these people field the sounds like females quite frankly and so males don't talk about dressing up and going to shopping malls so this sounds like to say it's a bunch of teachers and they're young tend to be young women teachers and there's a group of them and our girl here is the odd person out and not as extroverted not not as naturally flirtatious possibly and etc and so they're there sitting on the outside and they do not you know and they're irritated they're on the outside of this so that's that's what this looks like to me and you know it is what it is they're they're a fish out of water and with respect to that group fair enough all right well let's say a ladies go out they'd be seen and now they send us a question supposedly about - casual dating relationship - just when yes so this beautifully had the number day okay which other I made this by the way that didn't actually happen so dear Delilah I've been seeing this guy for about six months we started casually dating but I fell in love it wasn't until three months into it and being apart 37 days that I had realized that I'm starting to fall for him I stopped seeing other guys but he continued to casually date and sleep with other people I always asked for honesty and he gives that to me but he has a tendency to future fake a lot he loves and cares for me in ways that people haven't before but he isn't promising me a future and he says that he isn't going to see it with someone else until he's achieved his personal goals he tells me all the time that we are perfect for one another I'm not stupid and I know this relationship won't go far but I'm unable to walk away because of how much I've learned about myself from being in it I guess my question is how can i slowly part ways when I just fell in love boy it sounds like question I've heard before I'm not sure that you haven't recycled this question maybe you haven't maybe there was just something similar recently the but I would say that the following is true and that is that that this this girl is in a situation where she's feeling over rewarded and therefore she feels very you know she's very invested in this and I it sounds like he's continuing to see other people and he's quote honest you know he quote honest about it the I don't know if that's happening now but it sounds like that is which is just pretty amazing that she's putting up with this and so anyway what we have is a situation where this girl is like I said she's feeling over rewarded and she also feels her stone-age brain is suspecting that she's pregnant so she's been sleeping with this guy for a few months now so there's a there's a high probability that in as far as four Stone Age brain is concerned but she's pregnant and so that means that he's the the best possible resource for her incipient child and therefore quote that's what being in love is here in other words this is this is adding to that psychology probably pretty intensively that so even even if the guy is you know jerk water one the bottom line is a lot of females are in a trap about this point and this guy doesn't sound like any prints quite frankly he's basically saying look I'm sleeping with other people I'll be honest with you about it it can't promise you a future I don't not really going to think about a future and committing to anybody until I've achieved my personal goals well let me tell you what that means that let's translate that into genetic ease what that means is I think I can do better than you my personal goals mean I need to do get put myself in a position where I can compete for females with less mutations than you have and so I'm not interested in settling down or committing to anybody until I've got all my cards in my hand I've only been dealt three cards and those three cards in my hand are already enough to beat you okay because you you've got you know a two is seven and a seven and I've got I've got two kings so I've got two kings in an ace in my hand and so you're intimidated by that and you're weak and the knees behind that and your quote in love behind that and meanwhile I'm not it love yeah we're great for each other now but I've got two more cards coming and I'm not interested in the pot that I can get but I can take from you when it could be that I can play in higher league guys Sam and so here's my attitude about this my attitude about this is depends on how old you are if you're 34 years old you need to call me and I'm going to give you a dose of cold water right in the face particularly if you're thinking about having children or having children it's a very important thing in your life if you're 26 years old my attitude is hey enjoy your quote love which is a sweet and exciting and thing that you're learning and you're learning and growing and so on and so forth and and who knows what happens I don't have a crystal ball actually I do my whole winter but my crystal ball tells me that he's going to be moving on at some point and unless he experiences some tragic loss of status for some reason and so you know he playing playing weekend baseball with the cool guys and somebody throws a fastball and he doesn't see it coming and he wipes out an eye and messes up his face and then he has to have plastic surgery and this look quite as good and now he's one blind in one eye yeah now maybe he'll stick with you okay so bottom line is that that I think we can see from the cues in the situation that our girls over awarded she feels pinned down by it by her potential incipient pregnancy she quote in love this is all good now this is not it this is not a tragedy in the moderate environment because we're not pregnant and so as a result we can experience this and live through it without a bunch of hassle so just live it live it enjoy it watch it and then you will see that be watching for how much time and energy and feelings that you have as you get signals over the next several months that you don't qualify and add and just just taste those signals carefully and let's not ignore those this is a this is like eating a piece of cake it's very tasty only there's sand in it okay so you just pay attention to that sand and realize there's a little sand ruins a great cake and and you know don't don't flush too much of your life behind this unless this guy's unless your goals for this are fine with this for now and and or the thing ships and you get more secure uncomfortable so that's how I would look at this and good luck to all fantastic a speaking of cake I just tried one of Chef AJ's case somebody had made it and there's not much that can ruin that cake it's really good but I think sand would be on the top of the list to ruin it okay we have a caller on hold right now so we're going to call her we're going to take one more question I'm going to read one more question that will take your phone call so this question is related to the one we just read so dr. Lyle I'd like to know your general thoughts on open sexually only but emotionally committed relationships and likelihood of long-term happiness for relationships such as these interesting great question they're all good these are all great tonight I would I would say that let me see what they're trying to ask they're trying to ask what my what my thinking is on the long-term likelihood of long-term happiness let's let's uh I'm in a sidestep that and instead talk about the key principle that I see that's involved here people that this is an attempt for people to try to manage the conflicts of interest that exists between people your we have their relationships of various kinds that they are always inherently under conflict and that is that if I'm a if I'm a banker and I've got a customer that's paying a mortgage we're inherently have a conflict of interest because I would like them to pay more and they want to pay less hey I want that thing guaranteed so that I don't have to worry about them and there they are they don't necessarily want to guarantee this so in other words everybody relationships inherently have conflicts in them because you inherently have competitive pressures and nowhere is this more evident than in the romance department so now I'm not saying that every romance that the competitive problem is front and center of everybody's head but it's always there it's always in the background in principle you're whoever your maid is however happy you are about them if you're super happy about them like are like a girl in the previous question then the problem is is that if you're super happy they're likely to feel you're likely to feel over rewarded and therefore you very well may be over rewarded at which point your mate is looking sideways at getting an upgrade okay so that's kind of a tough situation now what if you're not that happy but your mates real happy well then you're in the other situation where essentially you're feeling like hey I think I could do better that's why you're not that happy is that you thinking that you could do better so you can see that there's dynamic principles here that are involved and at the heart of it there's competitive problems and there's conflicts of interests so the one one theoretical I mean the absurd solution is to to do what cultures have now done for 10,000 years ever since the dawn of wealth and that is to say we're going to eliminate competition we're going to give you a monopoly over your mate and we're going to say once you're married that's it we're done okay well that's all very well and good you can legislate that and you can put all kinds of you know civil penalties for transgressing that but you can't stop human nature so human nature is going to continue to see competitive pressures and it's going to continue to weigh its cost-benefit analysis on all mates all the way to your death and so the people that are are talking about having open marriages are sent you know people emotionally committed ie we're not leaving this thing we've got kids we've got houses we got a business we love each other like crazy but we some of us one or two of us would like to sleep with other people okay so there they are acknowledging the competitive problem and they're saying hey what do we think about doing it this way can we skin the cat and do it this way I would say it's going to be tough you're you're not going to get rid of some of the dynamics that are natural to these problems whether it's competitive problems involved involving sexuality and pregnancy childbirth etc ie the evolutionary history of romance involved the the notion of people the female feeling like the male is heavily committed to her ie she is safe and the resource flow from him to her and their offspring is safe because he's so crazy about her okay the male likewise has has pair-bond machinery that has evolved to say hey I got to worry about you know if I'm going to put on a lot of time and energy into this woman in the offspring to come out I need to know know it that that they are in fact that's in fact my offspring so it's not I'm not going to be wild about the fact that if I get winded the fact that she's that she's sleeping with other people that's not a good thing and so these are inherent conflicts and anybody that doesn't acknowledge that these conflicts don't exist is blind of course they're there they're a problem and now are there people that by virtue of the of the personality dynamics and the trade AMEX in their particular relationship through a period of their history they both could say hey we are both so wacky open in this way that hey maybe we can make this trade you sleep with people that you want to sleep with I sleep with people that I want to sleep with and hey can we pull this off okay maybe maybe maybe once in a while you can find a pair of people for whom that fits but I will say that that the the fairy tale notion that if we were only grown up and up and emotionally mature enough and relaxed enough not jealous enough and cool enough and Buddhist enough that somehow we could just like be cool with all this and that is we've just got hang-ups from the you know modern America nation-state and you know the church and all this kind of stuff that have lead us to not be able to just be free and easy okay that that is the notion by the way of sex at dawn written by Chris Ryan and his wife that is wrong okay that is an incorrect understanding of human evolutionary machinery and so it is rare for people in sexually open relationships to have long term happiness behind it mm-hmm they it gets problematic the conflicts arise somebody's not happy about it and it doesn't mean that there can't be exhilaration in in these things the flaunting of taboo the novelty seeking behind sexual partners etc I'm not saying that it isn't a solution that doesn't have some happiness chips on the table that it satisfies some some demands of some nervous systems but I can tell you that it is that it is fraught with trouble it is fraught it's flying in the face of some rather powerful evolutionary machinery and I would say that it often does not not work out the way one would like to draw it up I would say further that people that want to experiment with this that they should have a principle that guides this us and I would call it the intersection principle and that is relationships ideally are limited to the places where the two people intersect where their interests intersect it is when we try to push the envelope of the intersection principle that we wind up deteriorating relationships so let's suppose a young dentist meets a great great looking wonderful gal and he wants to marry her and they have a great love affair and then he says hey you know like you could really be my you could be my front office person and run my office big mistake big mistake okay me you know if that relationship can stand it and the girls sharp and and etc we may wind up with a good business and everybody says wow that was a really good move it was almost always a terrible move okay so the you don't want to be intersecting those two lives that close you now force the intersection the another example would be you've got a person that's very neat and a person who's a slob living together now we've got a problem with the intersection so how are we going to do that the answer is we hold the standard of the person who is at this point that the standard would be the slob it does not cost the slob to live neither to the slobs best interest okay so the right answer is we're going to live to the level of the neat person and the slob is going to have to adapt if we're talking about a frugal person and a spendthrift we are going to live at the level of the frugal person and the the spendthrift is going to need to adapt and we're going to try to separate these things as much as possible okay so the swab wants to go live in there you know how to have their garage where they're a slob and it's out away from the vision of the need person and fine we can carve that out if we can separate out money as much as we can in a relationship if there's conflicts between those two personalities then we need to separate it out as much as possible and therefore the frugal person does not have to be incredibly frustrated and angry and disappointed and anxious about the spendthrift ways of the spendthrift okay so we want as much as possible for the relationship the romance of the relationship to be the intersection and everything else about their relationship we want to minimize the intersection the same thing with healthy living if if the woman is going to be cooking the food and she wants to be a healthy liver and the guy doesn't want to eat healthy food it's like hey this is a problem so the food that's going to be prepared is going to be the food that's going to be healthy for both people it's not going to hurt mr. mr. would-be heart attack to eat healthy healthy food now the does that mean we're not going to compromise on all these things once in a while sure but the basic principle is that you know that that that we're going to live to the level of the highest functioning now the we're not going to push the tolerance limits of people so if we're in somebody wants a quote open relationship well guess what what if the other person doesn't then the right way we live this life is not open okay so because it depends upon what your highest value is is your highest value the love of that relationship then if it is then we wouldn't want to be threatening it now would we okay so this is this is how we do it could there be some compromises damn little depends upon the person's reactions in the same way you know just the slob have to do everything perfect in the house all the time no but that person should live to a much higher level close to where the other person is comfortable and the same thing would be true about the conflicts of interest with respect to you know swinging open relationships etc in other words if one person says look it'd be okay with me a couple times a year and the other person's like no I'd like to do it every weekend then the right compromises a couple times a year we keep the relationship where where it's it's in that space where we're not causing harm to the individual that doesn't want to go that direction we don't want to live unhealthy we don't want to live like spent thrist we don't want to live like slobs and we don't want to get psychologically pressured into sexual adventurousness that we're not really comfortable with and and also making it okay for our partner when it's not okay with us so that's my thoughts on this it's a this is not moralistic this is following the same principles of trying to keep relationships as you know as good as we can make them and that means that we don't tread over the feelings of people when there could be substantial costs okay fantastic all right we're going to take our color here so color you could let us know your name and where you're calling from hey it's not a problem of Ohio yeah you smell well condition out is your hair shine oh yeah yeah Ishmael okay very good I'm actually neutral to the call is it that we're just asked question I thought when sure just ask a question if you got something on your mind oh yeah pretty much oh I got something kind of like having some weird things going on these past few weeks again Horace all with both of my uh uh two of my daughters well actually two of my baby moms and uh I had now creepy lady yesterday was actually going for weird things and they just kind of I don't know been on my mind and religious guys he's trying to get some clarity almost one on if I have anything I need to worry about oh do I get this straight you got a couple you got some children and there's two women that you've got children with and then there's some new creepy lady that's involved well no it's not a it's not really a new creepy lady okay well I don't even think that the one probably had anything to do with it was just something that she did which is kind of weird to kind of cool me off oh just didn't make sense to me okay what was that well what it was is that I have pulled up in the parking lot over for the store and the lady was actually like it's like peak and tom is like - like 1 o'clock 2 o'clock the morning so if you you can comment through the one to other store and like taking pictures in when I had pulled up she immediately just walked to the back of my car so it's like a pictures of my license plate uh-huh why are you taking pictures of my license plate yeah so she just got really upset and very angry with me because the last I heard he was questioned and it didn't seem right so a ton of had you know got the cops involved but they were trying to say that she has like a mental illness or something but yes yes I think that's what's going on yeah we're going to go move on from this fish mail thanks for calling yeah I think that what you're seeing there is we don't know what her conflicts were with the store but given the fact that she was taking pictures of your licenses well this looks to be some kind of mental illness yeah you know very likely of a paranoid variety and so she's uh you know I I wouldn't worry about the fact that she's got your license plate and her cell phone this is she's not she's not connected she can't figure out who you are it doesn't you know it's not going to go that far she's just a she's got a paranoid streak and she's a little nutty and you're safe so no worries but you did you ran rat right into a mental illness likely that she's you know experiencing some kind of a psychotic episode at this point and but but no worries you're safe don't sweat it all right there's no pay very much for the phone call I appreciate it alright alright our next question this has to do with the pace of modern technology so dear dr. Lyle given that evolution reacts fairly slowly when compared to the pace of modern technology what do you see as the modern day humans biggest challenge in trying to keep up with that technological pace well this idea has been written a lot about the the most famous commentator on this was God I can't believe I Elvin Toffees name was dr. Doug Lyall and he wrote the book called the pleasure trap no no Alvin Toffler was a professor I think he was sociologists writing in the 1960s I believe and the book he wrote was called future shock and the interestingly enough apparently when they published this book it went nowhere so nobody was interested and then I believe the story goes is that the publisher got an idea and the idea was to to publish that book I think it in and to change to have the same book with three or four different colors of the colored jacket and nobody had ever done this before and so here you have a book called future shock and one one of the covers is green and the other one's red and other ones yellow another one's orange whatever was and so you're walking by the display and you're like whoa what is that okay and I believe that that was a major influence that turned the world attention to future shock and future shock was essentially this kind of an idea that that people are going to you know it's overwhelming the change of pace etc etc the now what do I really think about it I think it's way overblown the the in terms of now but there are some there are some issues that are important and as you just mentioned the issue that's probably the most important that's front and center is what I call the pleasure drop and the pleasure trap is what happens when when we have an animal brain is confronted with a super normal stimulus that is essentially hyper activating a pleasure pathway and therefore the the it's drowning out the normal pleasures or the normal experiences that those circuits are associated with so for example let's let's look at the circuits that would be typically particularly under assault so food so you would expect that as they figure out how to make food vastly more calorically rich and put it in combinations that it was never seen in so out there in nature you're not going to see sugar and fat on the same bush and so when we put those together and make ice cream and chocolate and desserts and so forth you're creating a super normal stimulus that's going to have an addiction like process that's going to draw people to that to that stimulus and in that in this case the stimuli is going to be way calorically dense and then people are going to get fat and they're going to get sick and then their lives are going to be cheapened their life experience is going to be compromised by this problem and it's going to be hard to get out of it so that that that pleasure trapped in food the same thing is true with addictive drugs it's the same problem exactly so you see the pleasure trap actually having quite wide range influence I have no doubt that pornography and being a super normal stimulus is probably having a substantial effect on romantic relationships at this point essentially males adapting to a world where they have 24/7 access to essentially extremely attractive casual mating strategy you know virtual partners essentially and so therefore their own relationships may may suffer considerably by comparison so we've got we've got a lot of things we have gambling now where where people can theoretically win a year's worth of wages with a roll of the dice these are these are all ways to derail and cause poor judgment that the organism is going to make mistakes and it's going to be costly differentially depending upon the nature of the mistake the nature of the individual and what their stress tolerances are and all kinds of things so I don't call alcohol evil but it's down downright evil for 5% of the people it's just horrendous if you happen to have those genes gambling isn't isn't a disaster unless you happen to have the gambling gin at which point you're in you're in real trouble and that it could be a disaster and so on and so forth down the list it's going to turn out that processed foods are not going to kill people particularly in other words people are still living a long time but they are they are vastly less attractive than they could be and should be and as a result this this is hard on people psychologically it's hard on their self-esteem and they're very very frustrated and it's it's making a big impact on their life now with the rest of I would say video games are so enticing they can feel so productive particularly for young men because they're mimicking the kinds of decisions that are involved in Stone Age environments warfare hunting all that sort of stuff and so it can feel inherently the content of the brains decision-making process feels very inherently productive but it's not obviously productive so this is again the equivalent of a candy bar which isn't a sin a glass of wine which is in the sin poke looking at some pornography which is in a sin but for a given individual their life could be drowned in a sin in video games and and God forbid they've got parents that are going to support them and don't know what to do with them and that person could spend their 20s basically pissing away their life playing video games and not not do what it is that they need to be doing to compete in the world so this is the problems that I see and in general a lot of the content a lot of the issues that people will raise about this are are different they're worried about the pace of change like Alvin Toffler oh my god you know the cars are going to change so quickly or the watches or the hairdos or you know whatever it's like oh my God how do I now use a phone that has buttons instead of a dial okay my attitude about that is you just watch people they adapt beautifully to all these technological paces changes a pace so that's not a big deal the big deal is the pleasure trap that's the big deal that's the that's the hidden force that undermines health and happiness and I think that that is that pleasure trap has been around for at least 10,000 years but but it is escalated dramatically in the last 50 and that will continue to be a worldwide phenomenon as the reach of the pleasure trap will be will be wider and more ingenious as the future comes and so we're we're headed towards you know populations that are going to be fat sick addicted in fairly substantial quantities it's going to keep therapists busy talking about the childhood it's causing it and wasting everybody's time okay all right that's move on and as to yeah all right our next question this is my favorite one dear dr. Lyle I read an article little while ago that said people who talk to themselves tend to be rather intelligent is there any merit to this claim and is there any evolutionary function for talking to oneself probably not much to this at all I don't talk to myself so right away we've got to do just kidding please they know the the hoping you yourself are talking yeah the I don't even know what they mean by talking themselves other words people have an internal dialogue how is it they think the the retirement you know I don't know who's read what article and whether it's people that are verbalizing things in other words actually moving their mouths as they talk to themselves which is a characteristic of psychos so like when I'm at the grocery store and I'm trying to remember what I need to get and I'm like I can't get zucchini right that's the psychosis oh yeah not not usually okay so no I don't think there's anything to this it's probably the case that verbal production in general is vaguely associated with IQ probably not strongly and it may not even be the case God knows we've all met people that talked a lot enough to say so the yeah I don't think so now the evolutionary function of talking to oneself let me think about this I'm sure this has been thought through by somebody like Steven Pinker who thinks about language all the time and if you talk out loud it could be that you are actually getting information into another channel so you're you're it's as if someone else is saying it and then you have a different area the brain is able to reflect on it so I think I think that that's that's a possibility so there could be some evolutionary process there that that is advantageous I certainly think that when when I'm looking at something that is complicated and I'm trying to learn something I think a lot of times I will I want want to process that verbally and you know etc yeah I think that's true but most of the time this is probably individual differences in personality quirks or just you know just a bit quirky difference I will I will think quietly for hours and I'm not I would never remove my mouth but I can be in my own head for hours at a time thinking and thinking about what I would say and nothing's moving so I think most of us it's not hooked up to those movements but there are times when that's true and I think it may be the case when I'm struggling to keep things in order that I'm learning I'm just going up a learning curve on some procedures and we may find that so I'm thinking like okay what they say it is to push the button over there and then that's supposed to work that way but I would never do that if I was thinking about an evolutionary problem so it could be that this is I could see the possibility of this being a domain-specific behavior that that is elicited and it you know it that that could be what it is so and there could be an evolutionary function for doing that for example I can imagine that if you were repeating instructions out loud someone that knows how to do it may say no you're wrong that isn't how that goes you see so it that that could be the case as well potentially so who knows interesting question and we don't at least I don't know the answer the answer may be known but it probably isn't all right all right we're gonna take one direction one that's right one more the one I'm going out and yeah now we'll do that for sale for next week okay all right so we'll end the show today and right now and then we will we're going to have a question next week a little bit more about the crammed circuit and quitting alcohol and this person would like to know where we'll talk about next week whether if there's a multiple things that people are doing like the cat coming over and pooping on your lawn and beating up your cats there's multiple things yeah is it helpful to tackle them one at a time or all at once or in a certain order so we'll go over the next week dr. Lyle has always loved here and you talk about all these topics
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