https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=yQ5ObVRj1go
There are experiments where people’s task is to pick up an object. They can see the object in front of them. So you’re given the task, that’s the basic story. The story is what you’re required to do is to transform yourself from the person you are now into the person who has possession of that watch. It’s just a standard laboratory experiment. But the watch is actually not there. It’s an image that’s generated by mirrors. And when you move towards the watch, you find that it’s not where it appears to be. Well, the fact of the object not being where it appears to be is an anomaly with regards to your current plan. And you’ll react to that emotion. The first thing that will happen is that, well, obviously you’re going to be surprised, right? You think, this is pretty easy. I’m going to pick that up and you find out the thing that you see is not actually there. That’s an anomaly. So you contrasted your desired future, which was your aim when you moved your arm, with the actual outcome of your actions. So part of your brain called the hippocampus that seems to be responsible for comparing what’s actually going on insofar as you can interpret that with what you want to happen. And if a mismatch occurs, that sets up a whole sequence of related events. And those events manifest themselves in emotion and in thought and in behavior, most evidently in emotion. If you’re going to do something, you’ve done it before, and it doesn’t work out the way you expected it to, the events that constitute the anomaly, the unexpected occurrence, they’re surprising. And the question then is, what does surprising mean? Well, it basically means that something threatening has occurred and something unknown has taken place. What does the unknown mean? The thing about the unknown is that you don’t know what it means. That’s a pretty straightforward statement. But you see, that immediately introduces a strange sort of paradox, because you lack infinite information. Obviously, people don’t know what they’re doing all the time. Which means that you come into contact with things that you don’t understand a lot. And that means, in a sense, that you have to know what to do when you don’t know what to do. Because you don’t know what to do a lot. And that doesn’t just bring you to a halt. What is the case that your nervous system is hardwired to move to a sort of default position when the plans, the explicit plans that you have that you’re carrying out fail? So as long as you can say, in a sense, as long as you know what you’re doing, which means that you have a representation of where you are and where you’d like to be. You’re carrying out your plans to make the move, and things are going according to plan. As long as you’re doing that, then the higher centers of your brain, the cortex, basically, it’s under control. You know what you’re doing. You feel comfortable and secure. As soon as something unexpected happens, the control shifts, and this is something that’s basically beyond your capacity to control, although you can interfere with the process. Control shifts from the cortical centers to the more fundamental areas of the brain, to the limbic system. When something unexpected happens, two things occur. You stop. You feel a little bit of anxiety. And it’s not unexpected, the occurrences. If it’s really unexpected, you’ll be very, very frightened. If it’s just minor, something minor, leak unexpected, you’ll just stop. Your sensory processing will heighten. You’ll gather more information, and you’ll explore. And as you explore, you generate information. And the information is supposed to bring you back on course, basically. So you’ll say, well, what you’ll do if you’re trying to reach for the watch, and you find out that it isn’t where you think it is, well, you’ll start making different sorts of approach sequences until you end up producing the outcome that you intended. When something unexpected occurs, two sets of circuitry are activated. One looks like it’s dominated by the right hemisphere, the other looks like it’s dominated by the left hemisphere. Unexpected things make you anxious and curious, and you can localize those emotions in the body, so to speak. Anxiety is the emotion that accompanies the cessation of your body’s plan-directed activities. That’s, you could say that anxiety is what you feel when you slip into the mode of pause, pause for further analysis. What you expected to do didn’t happen, so you have to stop. Curiosity is what you feel when it’s necessary for you to explore further, to gather new information, to update your plans. And exploration is basically governed by the interplay of the circuitry, brain circuitry that mediates anxiety and curiosity. Curiosity, by the way, that’s associated with positive emotions, and anxiety, as you all well know, is associated with a tenacious emotion. People would rather not experience it. Curiosity, or surprise, is basically a juxtaposition of those two sets of emotions, which work antagonistically. The unknown produces conflict all by itself. You have a hard-wired response to the emergence of the unexpected. You have to, because you have to know what to do with something unexpected or further. It’s instinctive. Your instinctive response to the unknown is anxiety plus curiosity, which is to say cessation of ongoing motor activity plus a drive to move forward and explore. And your exploratory activity is actually the sum total of the activation of the two sets of circuitry that mediate that response. When you explore, if you explore, something unexpected happens. You don’t have to explore. You can note it in and get the hell out of there. It’s safe, but you don’t gather any new information. It’s a good short-term strategy. It’s not a good long-term strategy. But anyways, the point is that surprise activates curiosity. And it tells you forward to generate new information. You create your plan and soon you can get to where you want it to go. The point is the mismatch between what you expect to happen and what actually happens. That dis-invites the anxiety.