https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=UTMsI5KfIvU
And so there are deep reasons for how you perceive things and why and so that’s what we’re going to go into so the first thing we’re going to do is talk about the basics of perception and Perception is very very tightly related to action to movement forward and to emotion and those things are very important to know They’re very they’re very tightly associated so for example You live in a in a map. Let’s say or a story and the story is Wherever I am isn’t as good as it could be and so I’m going to go somewhere That’s somewhat better, and you know that can be of different time frames Maybe you’ve got a plan for the next minute You know you’re hungry And so you want to go somewhere to eat or maybe it could be for the next hour or the next week or the next day? Or the next year or whatever? But basically what you’re trying to do is take where you are point a and make it better point B And so you’re always somewhere that isn’t quite as good as it should be and you’re always going somewhere That’s somewhat better at least that’s the hope unless things have gone wrong You know when you feel God it’s nothing but downhill from here on in and that’s not good. You don’t want that That’s a that’s a pathological condition So and it’s kind of unfortunate in some sense because it means you can’t be satisfied with what you’ve got But how the hell can you be satisfied with what you’ve got because you’ve got problems come in your way You know I mean even if everything’s okay right now Which it probably isn’t but even if it was that doesn’t mean everything’s gonna be okay tomorrow or next week or next year Five years from now right you’ve got the future to take care of and your future self And you’ve got your family to take care of and maybe you’ve got your community to take care of so you’ve got some problems And so the way things are isn’t good enough And so you’re gonna fix them a bit and so then you fix them across different levels of resolution And you do this you do this technically in this manner, so you you Identify where you are one thing you might think about is if you’re mixed up one of the problems you might have is that You don’t know Where you are lots of times people have to go to therapy or Or talk for a long time to someone to find out where they are because your experience might have scattered you Everywhere and you just and you feel that things have that you’ve come apart at the seams right the things have fallen apart around You that you’re in chaos you don’t know where you are and and and so then you’re in trouble because how the hell are you gonna? Plot a course forward into the future if you don’t know where you are and so maybe you have to bring yourself up to date I have an exercise online by the way at a place called self-authoring which is called the past authoring exercise Fittingly enough and what it asks you to do is to write an autobiography It’s a guided autobiography, and it can kind of bring you up to date And you can know if you need to be brought up to date It’s fairly straightforward if you’re obsessed by memories of the past More than 18 months old and most of those are negative so the anxiety provoking most often Then there’s a lot of you that stuck in the past and what that means is you didn’t map the territory Well enough and the parts of your brain that are alarm systems anxiety systems are saying no no There’s holes in the way you’re looking at the world There’s holes in the way that you’re looking in the world and you fell in them once and you don’t know where they are and you Don’t know how to fill them and you don’t know how to walk around them and so you can’t forget them you can’t forget them You can’t forget them you can’t forget them so you have recurring nightmares for example or a good example of that sort of thing Happening, but in any case if you have memories like that you look you remember them they make you feel anxious and negative You’re stuck back there your body is still reacting as if there’s an emergency That could happen again That you haven’t fixed and doesn’t matter if it was your fault That’s irrelevant because the alarm system doesn’t care like when your smoke detector goes off. It isn’t relevant whether it was your fault The smoke detector just says house is on fire And that’s a bad thing and your anxiety systems are like that if if they’re tagging old memories with anxiety Then you have to do something about it, or you will be tortured by those memories forever Because that’s how the alarm system works, and so maybe you need to go back there and clean things up you got to figure out Okay, well How did this happen? What sort of role did I play even if it’s a minor role that doesn’t matter because the point is is that you don’t want to Be put in the same vulnerable position again, so anything you can do to strengthen yourself is good You know and often if it’s a really old memory like maybe you were a child It’s you’re not a child now So you probably have a variety of techniques at hand that you could use to deal with the situation like that if it came up now and so you have to update that part of your brain that still thinks you’re for and Lots of people have parts of them that are still stuck in some Traumatic childhood experience and and they don’t I had a friend like that who had terrible childhood And I mean really I’ve had clients with terrible childhoods, and his was like top of the top of the Lobster hierarchy in terms of terrible childhoods and whenever he had a dream about it Which was very often he was five in his dream. He’s 58 You know he’s not five, but hadn’t been updated, and so he was still five in his dreams It was a complete bloody nightmares for him complete with physiological all sorts of terrible physiological symptoms really hurting his life He couldn’t get himself updated, and he’s much older in his dreams now by the way He’s up to about 45 so that’s a which is way better than five You know because you can’t fight back when you’re five But you can fight back when you’re 45 especially if you have some you know some some experience at your disposal So anyways you need to know where you are So let’s say where you are is well You’re on this stage, and you’re on this side of the stage, and you decide that you’re going to go over to that side of the stage Just to show that you can And you’re you’re making the decision the same decision that you know the famous chicken who is going to cross the road Why does the chicken cross the road? Well if it’s a sensible chicken it’s because it assumes that there’s something better on the other side of the road It’s like ours. Maybe it’s random curiosity, but then it just gets picked off by a dingo or a coyote So that’s not so good the other side of the road is better so away the chicken goes so that’s what you’re doing You’re going slump somewhere slightly better, and so That’s good Technically it’s good Because the way that your positive emotion systems work they run on a neurochemical called dopamine which by the way is the Neurochemical system that drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine and alcohol for some people and opiates affect Dramatically and make people feel far better than they should which is part of their danger It’s a very fundamental system the dopamine system kicks in with a kick of positive emotion if you’re going somewhere That’s worth going and so that’s worth knowing it’s really worth knowing it’s like okay You want a little bit of positivity in your life. Well. How do you get it? Well, you got to get the system. It’s almost like it’s the left hemisphere system for most people not that’s particularly relevant But it’s a it is a standalone neurochemical system rooted very very deeply in the brain’s exploratory circuitry so very ancient ancient system and It’s happy when you Have somewhere to go that’s the first thing and then it’s also happy when you’re going there And so if I’m on this side of the stage and I want to go over to that side of the stage, and I see that there’s a nice clear pathway I could just go straight down this line, then I look at that, and I’m actually a little happy I mean I mean I’m not ecstatic. I mean who the hell cares if I get to the other side of the stage, right? I mean, it’s it’s a small piece of my life, but it’s not nothing. It’s something Okay, and so I look at the pathway And I think that’s a good pathway and I feel a little positive and then if I move here And then I see that little table right in the way between me and the other side of the stage Then I feel a little negative because I don’t want an obstacle in my pathway And so that’s really how you’re looking at the world by the way. You don’t see objects It’s not the right way to think about it We don’t see objects and then think about them and then evaluate them and then decide how to act on them Or if we do we do it rarely and slowly and with a lot of thought what we see instead are Pathways with tools that will move us forward or obstacles Right and there’s no obstacles here, and there’s a nice flat road and so great Positive emotion way there. This is a task. I can undertake the sailing is clear. It’s a good day And then I’m here, and it’s like yeah Well, that’s a little annoying I get a little pang of Disappointment let’s say anxiety can I make it around that obstacle. I’m fairly confident I’ve done this sort of thing before so I can take the rough route and I can you know walk forward like this And then I can do this great trick Which is just this and then you know I’ve circumvented the obstacle now if I didn’t know how to do the little bit of Circumvention then that would be a real problem right because I couldn’t get from point a to b and that would screw up my plan But I do have that particular skill set so it’s a minor Disruption to the perceptual set that I’m using to organize the world It’s a minor bit of Chaos because that’s what happens when your perceptual set the structure that you’re using to organize the world the plan Through which you’re viewing the complexity of the world reveals an inadequacy Then that destabilizes your emotions So that’s another thing to know one thing you need to know is you need to be going somewhere And there needs to be a pathway in order for you to feel good the other thing to know is that if that plan is untenable or becomes Destabilized then what happens is you become flooded with negative emotion frustration disappointment anger Primarily anxiety, but all of those things sort of intermingled anger Maybe because you have to fight your way through the obstacle frustration because maybe you have to make a new plan Disappointment because you put a bunch of work into the damn plan, and it didn’t work out anxiety because now There’s too many choices in front of you, and so people don’t like to have their plans Disrupted they don’t like to have their plans disrupted and the reason for that is that their plans are directly associated with their emotional perception of the world and So and that that’s a good thing to know too That’s why you know what it is is you’ve decided that you’re going to go to like a Korean restaurant for dinner And that’s fine And it turns out that you can’t and maybe you have to go to a Greek restaurant And it’s like who cares right unless you hate Greek restaurants Korean restaurant, that’s pretty good Greek restaurant. That’s pretty good. You’re still going to be annoyed that your plans changed well Why well because it’s annoying to have your plans changed it? disrupts the structure that you use to destabilize to stabilize Your perceptions of the world and it throws you momentarily into a state of chaos not much Now how much chaos hmm? This is interesting We don’t know you know like let’s say you wake up one morning, and you have an ache in your side It’s like well You don’t have an ache in your side What does it mean that you have an ache in your side? Well, you don’t know like maybe it means you pulled a muscle and like who the hell cares Maybe it means you have cancer and like you’re going to be dead in six months the whole Range of possibility is there you know and some people will assume one thing It’s like that’s nothing and some people will assume the other and all of them will be right some time And so the question is how do you calibrate something like that and the answer is well? We tend to guess at it. We guess at it temperamentally so one way We guess at it is we have our set points for negative emotion So some neuroticism traits some people be a lot more nervous about a small level anomaly than others And maybe they’ll go to the hospital first And they won’t die and then or maybe they’ll be freaking out all the time, and there’ll be a hypochondriac right So there’s pros and cons about being nervous like that other person’s very emotionally stable. They don’t worry about much They think adds nothing and then you know by the time they get to the hospital. It’s too late. Hey, that’s how the dice roll That’s one way that you guess it’s determined in large part genetically not completely But in large part another part is your position in the hierarchy You know so the issue is how safe are you in life and the answer is? Who knows but one of the way you guess is well? Are you good at things you know because if you’re good at things and a problem comes up? You can probably solve it, and then you might think well How do you know if you’re good at things and one answer might be well other people think you’re good at things Because you’re really kind of comparing yourself to other people when you’re thinking about whether or not you’re good at things And so if it turns out that you’re in a hierarchy, and you’re fairly high in the hierarchy Indicating a certain degree of competence then your nervous system under the control of the serotonin system Dampens down your negative emotion it says look you know all things considered You’re probably pretty safe, and that’s nice But it also means you don’t like having your position in the dominance hierarchy challenged at all because if you get tossed down the hierarchy Let’s say you get fired what wreaks havoc with the your serotonin function It makes you defeated like the defeated lobsters that I wrote about and then all of a sudden you’re way more Susceptible to negative emotion and who wants that and so that’s why you don’t even like to lose arguments You know you lose a little argument. It’s like what down the dominance hierarchy a bit up emotions are a bit destabilized It’s no damn way. I’m right and why because I want to keep my neurochemistry in check and no wonder Well the thing is sometimes It’s better to learn than to insist upon being right because learning works better for the future, but you get the point