https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=e9pTz2_utU4
Then there’s the example of rats, which I love, this is Jak Panksepp’s work, and he wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience, which I would highly, highly recommend. I have a list of recommended readings on my website. It’s a brilliant book, and he’s a brilliant psychologist, really. One of the top, top psychologists as far as I’m concerned, both theoretically and experimentally. A real genius, huh? He’s the guy who discovered that rats laugh when you tickle them. They laugh ultrasonically, so you can’t actually hear them, but if you record it and slow it down, then you can hear them giggling away when you tickle them with an eraser, which is sort of like their mother’s tongue. It’s often what lab people use as a substitute for the licking of the little rat by the mother. So, and he discovered the play circuit in mammals, which is like a major deal, right? He should get a Nobel Prize for that. That’s a big deal, to discover an entire motivational circuit whose existence no one had really predicted. Apart from the fact that obviously mammals play. And even lizards, maybe. Some of the more social lizards seem to play. So, anyhow, what Panksepp observed, and I think this is a brilliant piece of science, is that, first of all, juvenile male rats in particular like to rough and tumble play. They like to wrestle, and they actually pin each other, just like little kids do, or like adult wrestlers do. They pin their shoulders down, and that basically means you win. And so, okay, so that’s pretty cool, but what’s even cooler, I think, well there’s three things. One is, the rats will work for an opportunity to get into an arena where they know that play might occur. And so that’s one of the scientific ways of testing an animal’s motivation, right? So imagine you have a starving rat, and it knows that it’s got food down the end of a corridor. You can put a little spring on its tail, and measure how hard it pulls, and that gives you an indication of its motivational force. Now, imagine the starving rat that’s trying to get to some food, and you have a little spring on its tail, and you wafting some cat odor. So now that rat is starving, and wants to get out of there. He’s going to try to pull even farther towards the food. So getting away, plus getting forward, are separate motivational systems, and if you can add them together, it’s real potent. And part of the reason why, in the future authoring exercise that you guys are going to do as the class progresses, you’re asked to outline the place you’d like to end up, which is your desired future, and also the place that you could end up if you let everything fall apart, is so that your anxiety chases you, and your approach systems pull you forward. You’re maximally motivated then. And it’s important, because otherwise you can be afraid of pursuing the things that you want to pursue. Right? And that’s very common. And so then, the fear inhibits you as the promise pulls you forward, but it makes you weak because you’re afraid. You want to get your fear behind you, pushing you. And so what you want to be is more afraid of not pursuing your goals than you are of pursuing them. It’s very, very helpful. And lots of times in life, and this is something really worth knowing, and this is one of the advantages to being an autonomous adult, is you don’t get to pick the best thing. You get to pick your poison. You have two bad choices, and you get to pick which one you’re willing to suffer through. And every choice has a bit of that element in it. And so, if you know that, it’s really freeing. Because otherwise you torture yourself by thinking, well, maybe there’s a good solution to this, compared to the bad solution. It’s like, no, no, sometimes there’s just risky solution one, and risky solution two. And sometimes both of them are really bad. But you at least get to pick which one you’re willing to suffer through. And that actually makes quite a bit of difference, because you’re also facing it voluntarily then, instead of it chasing you. And that is an entirely different psychophysiological response. Challenge versus threat, it’s not the same, even if the magnitude of the problem is the same. And so putting yourself in a challenging, let’s call it mind frame, you can’t just do that by magic. Putting yourself in a challenging mind frame is much easier on you psychophysiologically, because you don’t go into the generalized stress response to the same degree. And you’re activating your exploratory and seeking systems, which are dopaminergically mediated, and that involve positive emotion. So, if you can face something voluntarily, rather than having it chase you, it’s way better for you psychophysiologically. So, that’s partly why, well, it’s worthwhile to go find the dragon in its lair, instead of waiting for it to come and eat you. So, and especially when you also add the idea that if you go find the dragon in its lair, you might find it when it’s a baby, instead of a full-fledged bloody monster that is definitely going to take you down.