https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1Zp9_BZIYzM
And if you dose yourself with cocaine, you can produce a cocaine-seeking narrative that’s instantiated in your brain, and that’s actually what constitutes the addiction in some sense. It’s a cocaine-seeking personality that’s a unidimensional monster that now comes to dominate your neurophysiology in conditions of deprivation. That’s a very bad idea. You’ve generated an internal parasite that’s fed on this externally applied chemical. So if you could elaborate on the role of dopamine, I’d be more than happy to hear what you have to say about that. Yeah, absolutely. Just picking up on that nice notion of a cocaine addiction being sort of parasitic. I think that’s absolutely right. It’s sort of almost as if there’s been a short circuit, a hijacking of the normal mechanisms that we would, our brains would certainly bring to the fore to actually choose and register the choice of the right paths forward. So for me, reward just is that minimization or realization of expected surprise or uncertainty. So it is intrinsically rewarding to resolve uncertainty and to secure and seek out those novel things, or avoid those unfamiliar, uncharacteristic, obstacle-like states, states that do not characterize me. So, you know, dopamine, I think, red light, that just is the fact you have resolved uncertainty. So if I get a cue in the world, say a conditioned stimulus, that tells me, oh, I now know exactly what I’m going to do next. I’m going to, if I’m a little monkey in an experimental paradigm, I’m going to receive a drop of juice and I’m going to drink that. If I am somebody engaging with social conversation, then I know exactly where this conversation is going. That’s great, I know exactly what I want to say. So I think that’s when you get the dopamine blush, that resolution of uncertainty. Suddenly you see the path forward clearly, and it is exactly, and I’m using path in your sense of the micro story, the micro story that’s responding to the affordances. What’s special about dopamine though? Well, it’s a neuromodulator. So it plays the role in the brain as not of sending information from this neuronal structure to this neural structure or this set of neurons to this set of neurons, but greasing the pathway by setting the excitability or the game, by being the chemical mechanism by which you will switch on this set of messages or that set of messages. Another way of saying that is it sensitizes, for example, let’s come back to your sort of hierarchical structure, the micro stories are informing, or perhaps the mismatch at the lowest level, the prediction hours at the lowest level are inducing belief updates at a higher level to get to these simpler, more abstracted inferences you were talking about before. But how much does a high level listen to the low level, and how much does a low level inherit or respond to top-down constraints afforded by your simple high level abstractions, which could of course be the narrative. So chemicals like dopamine, and I wonder whether you also want to talk about things like serotonin in relation to things such as depression and learned helplessness. All of these neurochemicals have one thing in common. Their role in the brain is just to sensitize one set of neuronal representations to messages from another set of neural representations. When placed in your hierarchical context, that can have a profound effect on the balance between how much you’re attending to what’s going on out there. So the microstructure, the low level sensory constructions or categorizations that say you might think are being played out in the early visual cortex or the primary auditory cortex, relative to your coherent deeply structured narratives about me in a particular world. So I would imagine that a lot, where you might want to go with this is just thinking, well, how might that go wrong? And what would that look like if I had an abnormality of these neuromodulatory transmitter systems in the brain? And of course you’ve highlighted one of the key or a key abnormality that which is induced by drugs of abuse or misuse nowadays, such as cocaine. So that’s, I think drug addiction is a really good example of what tends to happen if you mess with these really important systems. Yeah, well, cocaine addiction prioritizes the microbehaviors associated with cocaine self-administration, prioritizes those over all other potential behavioral microstates over all other stories. And it does that neurologically. On the serotonin front, so here’s a pattern of depressive cognition and you can think about it as the collapse of a hierarchy. So let’s say you have a TIF with your wife and if you’re operating, let’s say normally, in terms of your neurological hierarchy, you might say, well, you know, I’m just having an off day or I’m having an off hour and it’s only one little upset. It’s only one little anomaly. It’s only one little surprise. I can safely ignore it. But that isn’t what a depressive person will think. A depressive person will think, oh my God, I just had another fight with my wife. I’m doing nothing but fighting with my wife lately. My marriage isn’t going very well. I’ve always fought with my wife too much in the past and I’m fighting a lot with my friends. I’m not a really good person to get along with. I mess up everything I do. I’ve always messed up everything I do. I’m gonna keep messing up everything I do in the present because that’s what I’m like and there’s no hope at all for me to change in the future. And you can see that an error that could have been bounded at a low level, which is, well, maybe I didn’t have enough to eat in the last two hours and so I’m a little irritable, has cascaded through the entire hierarchy of self-conceptualization. And so imagine that each level of the hierarchy has to be protected against the propagation of error messages from a lower level. And then imagine each level of the hierarchy has a resistance level that’s set by something like the tonic level of serotonin. So the higher the serotonin level, corresponding to higher social status, by the way, the more error has to accrue at a given level of analysis before a message will propagate up the hierarchical system. And so one of the things my wife and I have worked out in terms of modulating our reactivity to each other and to other people is, well, when should you respond to a disruption in social communication? When should you call someone on it? And our answer has been something like the rule of three that’s fairly typical of narrative descriptions of such things. If it happens once, you can ignore it. It’s just random fluctuation. If it happens twice, you could mark it, but still discount it. But if it happens three times, it establishes a pattern and then something has to be called into question. So I might say if I’m interacting with my wife and it doesn’t go well three times in a row, I might say to her, well, I tried to be friendly three times in a row and I’ve been rebuffed. What that indicates to me is something else is going on here. That’s like a Freudian slip in some sense. It’s like, I think this is what’s happening. I want this to be happening, but it’s not happening. Here’s the evidence, three instances. Thus, we have to reconfigure the narrative that we’re using to structure the space and we have to say, well, what actually is happening here? What needs to be resolved? And then maybe, and you don’t say, well, we were rude to each other three times today, therefore our marriage is over and we’re both terrible people because that would be leaping too far up in the hierarchy. You might say, well, is there something else going on in the background that’s disturbing you so that you’re more irritable in relationship to me that’s part of a different conceptual structure? And maybe the other person will say, well, I didn’t have a very good day at work. I was arguing with my boss. He’s a bit tyrannical. Then you can go off on that narrative and try to resolve it. But you can see depression as the collapse of that resistance of the hierarchy to the propagation of errors upward. And so when you give people serotonergic reuptake inhibitors, what they seem to do, arguably, is make each level of the hierarchy more resistant to the propagation of upward error. And the reason I had tied that into social status is because we know that animals that have higher social status and therefore occupy a more secure position in the social and environmental hierarchy are more resistant to anomaly, partly because they can rest comfortable in the supposition that their superordinate status actually means that they’re globally safer. They have better social relations. They have better access to necessary environmental resources. The world isn’t as dangerous a place. And so you can imagine that your brain computes how likely an error message is to propagate upward, partly by looking at your social status, which would be the value that other people have attributed to you by their distributed computation. And it does that with trait neuroticism, which is your own genetically mediated, mostly, partially at least, genetically mediated initial propensity for those error messages to propagate up the hierarchy.