https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_0xBOMWJkgM
Hello, and welcome to Psychology 230. Personality and its transformations. It’s called that because there are two things that you have to take into account when you’re thinking about personality. And one of those is how personality stays the same across time, and that’s really what gives you your identity and what allows you to identify other people, and then also how personality changes. We’re going to discuss both those things from a very large number of perspectives. To find out all the information that you need for the course, all you have to do is type my name into a browser and you’ll get to my home page, which is the page that you see here. On the left there’s a table of contents that says current courses, and then up here there’s also a table of contents that lists the courses, and this one’s this one. And then this is the introductory page here, and then you can get to the course page like this. I don’t really like Blackboard, so I’m going to use this instead. So this is easy to get to, and everything you need to know about the course should be here. So we’ll start with the very straightforward things. The first is there’s two sources for reading in this course, and one is a paperback book which is called Introduction to Personality and its Transformations. They’re chapters that I selected from a classic personality textbook that does a very good job of covering classic personality theorists, although not such a good job of covering more recent work. The book was published in 1982. Freud hasn’t changed much since 1982, but there has been an awful lot of personality research. So that brings us to the second source of readings, and the second source of readings is actually this webpage. So if you go down the webpage to Lecture, Topics, and Readings, you’ll see in the third column a whole sequence of papers. Now you have to pay attention to this Lectures and Reading table more than anything else, because it tells you what’s going on for the duration of the course. Tell you what the lectures are, so today for example it’s January 7th, and so we’re doing an introduction and overview. Maybe I can make that a little bigger. And next week, no, on Thursday, we start with this reading. It’s called Three Forms of Meaning in the Management of Complexity, and all you have to do to get that reading is click on it, and then you get that reading, which is a fairly straightforward process. You would probably like the lectures better if you do the readings beforehand. It isn’t necessary, you can do this any way you want, but you’ll get more out of the course I think if you do that. There’s two TAs for this course, they’re also listed here. One is Vanessa Goche, and the other is Victor Swift. Their availability is listed here, so Vanessa is available from 445 to 545 on Thursdays, and Victor is available from 315 to 415 Tuesdays. Their offices are listed there, as are their email addresses so that you can get in touch with them. My office hours are Wednesday from 415 to 545. The way I handle that is outside my office, which is office 4046, which is also listed there, there are a number of sign-up sheets that I’m just going to post on the wall. I’ll do that right after class because they’re printed out. There’s a number of sign-up sheets that are listed on the wall, and your best bet is just to take a 15-minute slot. Don’t take a whole bunch of them because the student to teacher ratio in this class is obviously quite high. Just take one for now, if you would, and maybe if you have a meeting with me you can check back later to see if there’s time for another one. I would like to have more time than that available, but 90 minutes is what I can spare this semester. So anyways, they’ll be up today. Now in terms of the mechanics of the course, it’s pretty straightforward, there’s no tricks. There’s two midterms. The first one is February 6th, and the second one is March 13th. And there’s also a final. And the midterm and the finals essentially make up 75% of the course. It’s actually 77.5% of the course. And then there’s two writing assignments. The first writing assignment is an essay. And the essay has a number of different due dates, so if you’re on the website you can go to writing assignments, and then you’ll see all these different topics that you can choose from. Now if you click on one of these, you get to this little sign-up sheet here, and then you can put in your name and your email address, and that signs you up for that topic. And as you can see, ten people can sign up for each topic. So if you’re in love with a particular topic, then you should sign up sooner rather than later. The due dates fall a little after the course content that’s related to that topic. So it’ll be the next class after the lectures on that topic end. And I’ve spread them out across the year so that the TAs don’t die of frustration, and so that you guys can get your essays back with a reasonable degree of promptness, hopefully within a week, although let’s say two weeks, which seems reasonable. So the second writing exercise, which is worth 7.5%, the essay’s worth 15%, is a personality self-analysis. It’s part of a suite of programs that I designed called the Self-Authoring Suite, and I can show you those. And it’s at self-authoring.com, and I’ll show you this video at some point, but for now, there’s information here on these programs, but I’ll give you codes, such as username and password, so that you can complete these. And what you’ll be asked to do is to complete an exercise that’s based on a big five model of adjective description of personality. So since about 1930, statisticians have been studying the structure of language at a sentence level and at an adjective level to determine what’s the underlying correlational structure of descriptive phrases as they apply to human beings. So for example, if you’re happy, you’re talkative, and that might not be surprising, but the fact that those two things are tightly connected was one of the things that was discovered by the factor analytic processes that led to the development of the big five. In the big five, there are roughly five traits, as the name might indicate. Extraversion, which is a positive emotion trait. Neuroticism, which is a negative emotion trait. Agreeableness, which is warmth and empathy, compassion. The other side of that is kind of a harsh coldness, I guess. Openness, which is both intelligence and creativity. And conscientiousness, which is industriousness and orderliness. Now there are virtues, so to speak, and faults associated with all of those dimensions. So you can be too extroverted, which makes you rather impulsive. And if you’re very extroverted, it’s more difficult to get good grades in university because you’re always out having fun with your friends and partying. And that might be good in that it’ll help you develop a fairly extensive social network, which is a useful thing if you’re associated with people who are useful for social networking purposes. But it can really interfere with your ability to sit by yourself and study. If you’re conscientious, that’s a good predictor of academic success because conscientious people do what they say they’re going to do, and they seem to suffer shame and self-disgust and self-contempt and guilt and so on if they don’t. If you get too conscientious though, you can get quite boxed in and orderly and narrow. And orderliness, by the way, seems to be associated with right-wing political views. When it’s extreme, it starts to get repressive. And so the point of all this is that there are five traits, and they have positive and negative aspects, especially at the extremes. And these programs are set up, first of all, so that you’ll see a series of adjectives that are universal descriptors. So it’s basically a small set of adjectives, a hundred, that kind of cover each dimension of personality with a reasonable degree of comprehensiveness. Then you’ll be asked to pick which ones you think are particularly relevant to you, and then you’ll be asked to narrow that to a final list. In one half of the exercise, a list that represents your virtues, and then in the other half of the exercise, a list that represents your faults. Then you’ll be asked to describe a time when that virtue played a positive role for you or when that fault interfered with you. And then you’ll be asked to describe how you might capitalize on that virtue in the future or perhaps bring that fault under control in the future. And it turns out that writing exercises of this sort are very practically useful. They have a variety of positive effects, one of which seems to be an increase in academic performance. And our research so far has indicated that that increase can be quite substantial among with similar programs. At McGill, we raised the academic performance of struggling university students by 25 percent, so a whole grade point. And at a business school in Holland where this is being studied in some depth, we’ve studied 2,000 people. They actually did the future authoring program and not the present authoring program, which is the one you’re going to do. And we improved their overall academic achievement by about 30 percent as well. It turns out that articulating yourself is an extraordinarily useful thing to do. You could also think about that in a more comprehensive way. As the goal of, say, psychotherapy and personality transformation, a lot of what’s happening as you mature and develop as a personality is that what you are, whatever that means, I guess it’s your behaviors and your potential, and I don’t know exactly what potential is, but your behaviors and your potential can be increasingly organized at a high level of consciousness, articulated at a high level of consciousness. And articulation is a funny word, because partly it means joint articulation. Your hands are very articulated and that’s why you can do a lot of things with them. And hands and speech are very tightly related, which is why most people’s speech centers are in the same hemisphere as their dominant hand. Anyways, articulating yourself makes you able to do many more things with yourself, and it also seems to quell your negative emotion, partly because it’s clarifying you. The more you leave things muddy in your life, the less defined things are around you, the more active your stress response systems are, because if things are murky and undefined, your stress systems basically assume that there are alligators and snakes and predators hiding in all that fog and gloom and that you’re in a very dangerous environment. But if you clarify that with careful attention and articulation, you can clear away the fog and gloom, and that only leaves you with your actual problems, which once defined carefully, you might find manageable. An example of that would be, you know, when you go into your room and you haven’t done your homework for a while and there’s piles of papers piling up, or maybe there’s piles of junk on your computer, it doesn’t really matter. And you’ll have a very powerful tendency to avoid that, not even to look at it, right? You don’t even want to look at it, and that’s chaos. It’s sort of growing in your environment, and there’s a specific part of your brain which evolved to detect snakes that deals with such little chaotic piles of undone business and the more of those that are around you, psychologically or physically, the more negative emotion you experience, the less hope you experience, and the larger your stress response chronically. And that’s not good, because if your stress response is chronically elevated, that suppresses your immunological function. It makes you overweight, it predisposes you to diabetes and cancer, it makes you age faster, it increases the probability that you’ll have anxiety disorders and depression. It’s a bad thing. So clarifying who you are and what you’re doing is a good thing unless you want all those other things to happen, which seems highly improbable, although people desire some very strange things. And that’s part of what we’ll talk about as this course progresses. Okay, so if you want to find out about the course, you can go to JordanBPeterson.com and the courses are listed there, or you can just type my name in a search engine and you’ll find the courses. This course is site 230, obviously. I mentioned that there’s a reading book which you have to buy, the rest of the readings are online. The order that you do that reading is listed on the syllabus. You also have to do two assignments, an essay, which is only 750 words by the way, but don’t let that fool you because a 750 word essay can be very difficult to write. The essay and then this personality analysis. Now the personality analysis, all you have to do is show it to the TA to show them that you completed it, because we don’t want to know what you wrote down and we want to encourage you to write down things that you’d like to write down that are likely private, unless you want to broadcast your faults on Facebook, which I suppose you could do after you completed the exercise. So the reason I want you to do that, well there’s three reasons, right? One is, well it will familiarize you more with standard models of personality because you’ll have to apply them to yourself and so then you’ll understand yourself better too, so that’s a good thing. And then it’s also a quasi-clinical intervention and some of you, because you’re in this course, are no doubt interested in clinical psychology and so this will give you a flavour of the sorts of things that a clinical psychologist might do, except a computer is doing it, which turns out to be fine. People will actually often tell computers things that they wouldn’t tell people because the computer doesn’t care what you’ve done particularly, not yet anyways. And the third reason is that, well it should be good for you and you know, education should be good for you. That’s actually the purpose of education, right? It’s supposed to make you more healthy mentally and physically, it’s supposed to make you more productive and so that’s what education is for and that’s what this class is for. So that’s what we’re aiming at. So then there’s two exams, two midterms, 25% each approximately, they’re multiple choice. I’ll post sample questions so that you’ll know what they’re like. They’re not tricky. People get worried about exams and rightly so, but these aren’t tricky exams. If you do the readings and you come to the class, the probability is quite high that you’ll do at least reasonably well. I don’t ask you to memorise dates and that sort of thing, I try to keep it at a conceptual level and so the questions on the multiple choice test are usually conceptual questions where I try to get you to take something that you’ve learned or read and to apply it to the solving of a problem, even though they’re in standard multiple choice format. There’s usually not a tremendous number of questions so you’ll be able to complete the exams in the time allowed without any trouble. So now let’s see, I should tell you guys who should take this course and who shouldn’t take it because you need to know that since it’s your first day. And so this course has two or three aspects. One aspect is scientific. That really occupies the last half of the course, I would say. In the purely scientific part of the course, or the purely research-oriented element of the course, the first part is scientific too because science is more than mere testing of hypotheses. Anyways, the second half of the course deals essentially with trait theory and with psychobiology. So what I want to do is to tell you about the basic dimensions of human variability and also how those are represented in the brain so that you can make a connection, and the body, so that you can make a connection between the theories and the biological and cognitive substrates. So that’s sort of a unifying attempt. So you’ve got to be interested in that if you want to take this course and have it go well for you. So there’s some psychometrics, that’s the science of measurement. There’s a little bit of statistics. There’s a reasonable amount of neuropsychology. And some of it’s complex, some of it isn’t. But I try to only pick things to discuss with you that are relevant at three levels of analysis. I want them to be personally relevant so that they tell you something about yourself. I want them to be intellectually relevant, but I also want them to be culturally relevant so that when you walk away from the study, not only do you know something more about you and your friends, but hopefully you’re a better functioning creature in the broader social milieu. So everything is picked to that end, including the psychobiological or neuropsychological material and the trait material. There’s a fairly heavy emphasis on clinical issues. The first half of the course deals with classic theorists of personality. And all the classic personality theorists were clinicians. Now the U of T at present doesn’t have a clinical program, although they’re starting it up in Scarborough, but down here in St. George there’s not many clinicians. I think I’m probably the only one. I don’t know why they let me in, but they did. And the emphasis on clinicians is twofold. One is, well, who is the person or what is the person, but more importantly, who could the person be or what should they be? And that’s a very strange thing about people. I mean, if you have a cat, you don’t really sit around thinking, what could this cat be? Because it’s a cat, and if it has offspring, they’re going to be cats, and in a thousand years they’re still going to be just cats. But people, well, we’re strange in ways that are virtually incomprehensible, and we’re not only what we are, but we’re also what we could be. And in many cases, especially for people of your age, you’re way more what you could be than what you are. And so focusing on what you could be is an extremely important thing to do, and in fact there’s plenty of research, and some of it’s associated with the writing exercises that I told you about earlier, that if you make efforts to define who you could be, in a way that you find interesting because you might as well shape yourself into something that you want to be, that that increases the efficiency with which you work substantially and also makes you a better person by reasonable measures of better, which sort of means happier and healthier and more acceptable, or at least less repulsive, to other people. The clinical material is very useful for that, and the clinical material is grounded in observation. So it’s kind of like ethology. Ethology is the study of animal behaviour, but not in the lab. It’s observational study. A lot of the clinical stuff has this observational quality to it. It’s heavily influenced by philosophy. If you’re not interested in ideas, this is a bad course for you because it’s a course that primarily concentrates on ideas. I want them to have practical utility because why not? You might as well put constraints on them. But the fundamental focus is ideas, and so when we discuss the clinical material, clinical personality material, we’ll discuss the philosophical background of that, and we’ll do the same thing when we get to the psychobiological material. So you’ve got to decide, if you’re not interested in philosophical ideas, then this is a bad course because you’re going to be stuck with those sorts of things half the time. And there’s some elements of the course. They’re almost straight philosophy because some of the clinical schools, especially those that were developed in the 1950s, like existential psychology, are very tightly associated with fields of philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology in that case. And so I think that sort of thing is very much worth learning because it’s part of the history of ideas and you should know something about it. It’s also very interesting, it’s very useful to know something about if you’re going to be a clinical psychologist because you should know a fair bit about a lot of things if you’re going to be a clinical psychologist. But even if you’re interested in research, science is half hypothesis testing, but the other half is hypothesis generation. That’s the most important half. You’ve got to think up an idea before you can test it. And you know, most of what you’ll learn in a methods class has nothing to do with generating research hypotheses. They just tell you to do that. First generate your research hypotheses. It’s like, yeah, that’s the big problem right there. The rest of it is just machinery, right? You just grind it through this process. And the way you generate research hypotheses is by knowing something. So you have to learn a lot in order to generate a research hypothesis that, well first, that someone hasn’t already thought of and disproved, which is highly probable. It’s actually depressing to gather more and more knowledge because what you find is that everyone’s already thought of everything and most of your ideas are stupid. So, yeah. So, anyways. Now, let’s see. Oh yes, here’s another reason not to take the course. There’s a lot of reading. And there’s less reading than there was last year. I took out one paper that was too hard. I think it was too hard for people, even though it was a great paper. But I left the rest of it in. So if you’re looking for a course with a light reading load, this isn’t that course because this has a heavy reading load. Now, on the upside, for your essays, I don’t require you to read outside the course. You can use the material that’s in the course to write the essays. So, it’s self-contained. But there’s a lot of reading. And it’s not easy reading. And partly because a lot of it is original papers. All the stuff that’s listed on the web is original papers. And then the textbook, too, it’s a tough textbook. It’s mostly text. It doesn’t have a lot of pictures in it. It has no stories at all about celebrities. I think that’s the only text left that doesn’t have stories about celebrities in it. So, if you’re taking a tough course semester and you don’t have a lot of time to read, then, well, this isn’t a course like that. It’s a course where there’s an awful lot to read. And the thing about the reading, too, is that you have to think about it. You know, like, how fast you can read something seems to be a function of how complicated the words are. That would be function one. But the second function seems to be something like how many ideas there are per paragraph, or maybe per page. There are lots of ideas per paragraph in these readings. That’s why I picked them. So, you can’t just zip through them. You have to think about them. Well, that’s a good thing, because if you do read them, you’ll know a lot more at the end of the class than you did at the beginning of the class. And you’ll find that that knowledge is extremely useful. I truly believe that this knowledge can change your life. Well, that’s what it was generated for, right? It’s generated by clinicians and personality psychologists. That’s what they’re out there to do. And they’re out there to take unrevealed potential that could be anything and to hammer it and shape it into something that’s hard and pure and solid. And you have to do a lot of reading and writing and thinking to get to a point like that. But it really beats the hell out of mucking about in the murk. And unfortunately, that’s how many people live. And I’ve seen the consequences of that. If you spend the next 30 years like that, you will be old by the time you’re 50. And so, I wouldn’t recommend that. So, it’s worth doing the work. It’s really worth it. So, let’s take a look now. Well, first I’ll ask you if there are any questions. Any questions? Yes? So you said that personality analysis would be posted soon? Oh yeah. I’ll get the username and passwords up to you pretty quick. So, I just had to make contact with the guy I designed it with to get the code. So, it won’t be long. Can you buy the book at the 50 Bukso? I hope so. That’s the plan. Some of you have purchased it, perhaps? Yes. Okay, so it appears that you can. There’s also maybe some old texts from Reichlag floating about. You can use those too if you can get a good deal on them. You can often get them secondhand on Amazon for like 20 Bucks if you look. The old text is fine, except that it has more chapters in it. But if you pay careful attention to the syllabus, that won’t be a problem because all the chapters are numbered. And all you have to do is match the number on the syllabus to the number in the book. So, other questions? Okay. So, let’s take a look at what we’re going to learn about. Lecture two. So, you can think of human knowledge in some ways as branching into two components. You can think of those two components as knowledge about the subjective world and knowledge about the objective world. That’s one way of thinking about it. The other way you can think about it is knowledge about what things are and knowledge about what to do. Now, most of what you learn in university is knowledge about what things are. But that’s only half of what you need to know because you really need to know what you should go about and do. This is a real problem for human beings because we’re always trying to think up what we should be doing next. And that’s the fundamental question of life, which is, well, what should I do next? Or what should I do tomorrow? Or what should I do next week? Or next month? Or next year? Because that’s another problem about being human is that not only do we have to figure out what to do next, but we can also see the future or multiple futures even. And then we have to determine what those futures could be and how to avoid others that we don’t want to have come into existence at all. And then how to configure our behaviour so that as we navigate through the potential futures, we land up more or less somewhere we want and not somewhere we really don’t want. And so that’s a real problem. That’s an existential problem, in fact. And what that means is that we need knowledge about the subjective and about the behavioural. It’s part of potential. How do you unravel yourself across time? Now, it’s proved very difficult for human beings to formalise that kind of knowledge. Now, we formalise scientific knowledge, which is more knowledge about what things are and about the objective world. The scientific method, especially the research method, formalises our knowledge about the objective world and about what it’s made of. But it doesn’t give us much insight into what to do about that. All it seems to do, actually, is increase our power to do things, but not necessarily to inform us as to the direction in which that power should be exerted. And you don’t really have to look any farther than the 20th century if you want historical proof of that, because as people got more and more powerful so that we could sit in this lovely classroom and all be warm and cosy while it’s terrible outside, we also learned how to kill each other with unprecedented gusto and potency. And so science has enabled us on both sides, and that’s how it is, good or bad. On the behavioural side, there’s a tradition of knowledge, and it’s an ancient tradition. And it’s grounded in forms of knowledge that are likely tens of thousands of years old, or maybe even older than that. And those are forms of knowledge that are essentially mythological or religious. And the reason that I start with those is, first of all, religious systems are in many ways theories of personality. And there’s very tight associations between certain religions and certain fields of psychology. So Judaism has been identified fairly heavily with Freud, and Christianity with Carl Jung’s work, and also with Carl Rogers’ work. Rogers was actually a seminarian. And a lot of the ideas about what a person could be, so these are ideas about the ideal, are derived from religious and mythological substrates. Because they have to be derived from somewhere. And so you think, well, how do people get their ideas about what’s possible or what should be? Part of it’s through storytelling. That’s why you go to movies, right? You go there to see what people could be, and you enact all those people on the screen with your bodies while it’s happening. And you have a little neural system that does that, so it puts you right in the action. It’s an amazing ability, an amazing human ability. And the reason we’re so attracted to that sort of thing is because we want to know what to do with ourselves. And there’s a very large body of very complex information that pertains to that. One of the things that Carl Jung said, one of the things he believed, was that that form of knowledge had developed quite explicitly up to about the time of the Renaissance, or about to the time of Bacon and Descartes, who founded and Galileo, who basically founded the scientific method. And then we sort of stopped developing that kind of knowledge, and the knowledge of the objective world just leaped ahead, like exponentially. And so that’s left us with the same moral intelligence we had in the 1700s, but with 21st century technology. Not necessarily a good thing. So part of what we’re doing, in a sense, is rescuing the past. You know, in my other class sometimes I show Pinocchio, the movie. How many of you have seen Pinocchio? A large of you, right? So yeah, it’s like the most popular animated movie ever made, second, I think, because the Lion King is more popular. There’s one scene in Pinocchio where Pinocchio rescues his father from a whale. You may remember that. You may notice that you watch that, and that was perfectly fine as far as you were concerned, right? That you could watch a puppet swim with a cricket to the bottom of the ocean and rescue his father from a whale. It’s like, okay. So the first thing you might think about is, how in the world could you sit there and swallow that? And not even notice that you were doing something as absurd and bizarre as any ritual you could possibly imagine. Well, it’s partly because we’re very attracted to narrative. And narratives have structure. Narratives are about behavior. And they have a deep structure, and they have a deep symbolic structure. So for example, the whale in Pinocchio wasn’t just any ordinary whale, right? Because if you remember, it also breathed smoke and fire. It’s very strange behavior for a whale. And not even a whale that strange. And that made it a dragon. And so partly what that meant was that Pinocchio was rescuing his father from a dragon. That’s a very old story. In fact, that story is the oldest story that we have in written form. It’s a variant of a story that was told by the Mesopotamians about 5,000 years ago. So, part of that story means, well, you should rescue your father. Well, from what? Well, from the murky chaos in which your culture is embedded. You know, you guys are all inheritors of rich cultural traditions. Those aren’t just words. Those cultural traditions orient you. They keep you sane. And if they’re desiccated and broken up and dead and archaic and lying in the bottom of the chaos, then you better get them back out of there, because without them you’re going to live shallow and difficult lives. And that’s a bad idea. So, starting with the historical perspectives, we can situate ourselves in maybe some hundreds of thousands of years of history. Maybe even longer. I can tell you, in one manner it might be longer. It turns out that part of the reason that we can see so well, which we can’t, human beings can really see well. Way better than almost any other animal, except hunting birds. Hunting birds can see better than us, but other than that, man, it’s us. And that’s especially rare among mammals, and particularly rare among primates. So you might ask yourself, well, why can we see so well? Well, it turns out that part of the reason is that we co-evolved with predatory snakes. So predatory snakes are newer than lizards, by the way, even though you wouldn’t think so. And there’s a woman at UCLA named Lynn Isbell who was thinking, why do people see so well? And so she had this snake detection theory because she’d worked with primates. She knew they could really see the sort of camouflage patterns that snakes have and the motion that they make. They’re really good at detecting that. Plus, human beings are very afraid of snakes, innately. Plus, if you take chimpanzees, who’ve never seen a snake, and you throw a rubber snake in their cage, assuming they’re in a cage, then they jump to the top of the cage because they’re not happy about that snake, but then they look at it. And then if they’re out in the jungle, juggling around, and they see a big snake, then they have a specific sort of cry they make. And they’ll stand there for like nine hours watching a big snake making this noise. And all the other chimps, depending on how afraid they are, also come and look at the snake. And so, yeah, because they want to know what that snake’s up to. And that’s what we want to know, too. They want to know what the snakes are up to. That’s for sure. And the circuit that we developed to detect snakes, the visual circuit, is partly what gives us such tremendous acuity of vision. And partly the way Isabel figured that out was by correlating primate visual acuity and its development over evolutionary time with the prevalence of predatory snakes in that geographical region. And she found that there was a very high correlation. So we can see sharply, partly because we’re always looking for snakes. You know that pile of undone homework in your room? That’s snakes, as far as the part of your brain that developed to deal with snakes is concerned. And so, you know, if you leave a lot of things undone around you, then all you’ve got is snakes. And you’re their target. And so that’s no way to live. And so that whale down there at the bottom of the ocean, that’s kind of a variant of a snake. It’s a dragon, even though it’s a whale. It breathes fire, right? So let’s call it a dragon, because that’s what it is. And the idea that you have to rescue something from the dragon is an unbelievably old story. And so that’s partly what we’re going to be doing at the beginning of this course. We’re going to be going way back into the murk and muck of prehistory, trying to understand what the hell we’ve been up to for the last 60 million years. Because that’s when our tree-dwelling ancestors first really started to deal with predatory snakes. And my suspicions are that you’re all evolved from one of those little tree-dwelling rats, the first one who figured out that if you dropped a stick on a snake, it would probably run away. So that’s what we’ve been doing for 60 million years, throwing sticks at snakes. So, that’s the first lecture. And you’ll see why, when you do the reading, why this is broadly relevant, because it also accounts at least in part for the human tendency to demonize people who aren’t like us. Because it turns out that we use the same circuit that we would use to handle predatory reptiles, let’s say. We use that circuit to first process people who are strange to us. And it makes sense, because people who are strange to us, who come from different cultures, and who represent different ideals, are unbelievably dangerous, even though they might also be unbelievably beneficial. You know, the poor Native Americans, they came out and they shook hands with the Europeans, and then 95% of them died in the next 150 years. They all died of plagues. They died of smallpox. They died of measles. Measles just wiped them out. By the time the Pilgrims came to North America, which is fairly early in North American European history, 95% of the Indians were already dead. They were welcoming the Europeans, because they didn’t have any people to get their crops off. So, meeting someone who’s strange is no trivial thing, and even if they don’t poison you with some horrible illness, they’ll come along with some cockamamie idea, like Marxism, and you’ll be Chinese, and then it’ll be the 20th century, and 100 million of you will die. It’s very useful to understand the deep mythological structures that we live inside, and the relationship to our brain and our body. It really gives you insight into how people function. It’s helpful. The next lecture is on heroic and shamanic initiations, and that brings us closer to the present than, say, 60 million years ago. It’s more like 50,000 years ago, and there are shamanic traditions all over the world, and the shaman is kind of a precursor to the man of intelligence, to the man of intellect, the man of culture. And he’s sort of a doctor and a scientist and a priest, all wrapped up into one thing, and he’s often the person who’s in charge of culture. In many shamanic societies, the shaman has a vocabulary that vastly exceeds that of his peers, and that’s because he’s been taught it in his initiatory process, so that the culture within which that particular people survives can be transmitted down the generations with very little error. People can remember things that are transmitted verbally in pre-literate cultures with unbelievable accuracy. And the shamanic initiation is very interesting, and the heroic initiations as well, are very interesting processes because they involve death and rebirth. And death and rebirth is more or less equivalent to change, so here’s something to think about. So if there’s a mosquito and it wants to make another mosquito, it basically lays 10,000 eggs, right, and then all those eggs hatch, and 9,999 of those little mosquitoes die. And then one mosquito makes it and lays another 10,000 eggs. So it’s a pretty costly reproductive strategy, right? So the way the mosquito works is that it knows that the world is chaotic and dangerous, and it has no idea how to survive in that, so it just makes a whole pile of mosquitoes, and it hopes that one of them will sneak through. And each of those mosquitoes is a tiny bit different from each other mosquito in terms of kind and place, and also genetic structure. And maybe one’s got some little advantage that allows it to survive, but it’s costly, right? It’s 9,999 to 1, otherwise we’d be covered with mosquitoes. So the way the mosquito deals with the fact that you can’t figure out what’s going on is by producing a lot of mosquitoes. But the way people figure out what’s going on is by producing lots of ideas. And ideas are the relationship of ideas to you and the external world is the same as the relationship of animals to the environment. So there’s a philosopher named Alfred North Whitehead who said, human beings evolved to let their ideas die instead of them. Now that’s a smart way of thinking, because it means that you can parse off a little sub-personality of yourself. Maybe it’s an angry sub-personality or a sad sub-personality or an irritated or a resentful. You know, those aren’t exactly ideas. They’re more like little spirits that are partly you. They’re kind of stupid because they’ve only got one direction, but there’s still variants of you. And maybe you can present one of those to someone, which you might do if you’re dating someone and you want to, assuming you still do that. If you’re dating someone and you want to impress them, maybe you spin off some little variant of yourself that you think is particularly attractive. It probably won’t work. I doubt if that will work. And if it doesn’t work, well then you can get all heartbroken and let it die and then maybe the next one you spin off will be a little more, you know, together. And so that’s how people progress. They progress by dying and coming back to life at different levels. I mean, maybe you’re just making some little ratty mistake and so you can let it go and you’re only ashamed momentarily. And it’s only a little pain when that circuit dies. Or maybe it’s your whole damn personality that has to go. You know, and that happens to people when they encounter a catastrophe of one form or another. So that might happen if someone close to you dies or if you lose a limb or if you get an illness or, you know, any of the horrible things that plague people to very deep levels, which might mean pretty much all of you has to go and maybe you’ll actually die. But if you don’t, well, you can let go of what’s holding you back and maybe that’s your old self. And then you can come back to life. And I’ll tell you, it’s a lot better to do that voluntarily before it’s necessary than involuntarily in a moment of crisis. And I would say in some ways that’s the lesson of clinical psychology. Confront the damn snakes first. Because it’s really hard to get out of their bellies once they’ve eaten you. So the shamanic initiations are death and rebirth initiations. They formalize that. They’re often, the rituals themselves are often accompanied by the use of different classes of hallucinogens, which for one reason or another seem to facilitate, at least symbolically, the process of transformation from life to death and back to life. So they’re dramatizations of the process by which people learn. You learn something to really learn it, some presupposition that you had before that has to crumble. And then the new information comes in and you can build a new self around it, but that’s a painful process. And that’s partly why people stick to their ideas or their past selves. You know what? You could stick to your past self and that would be fine, except that everything’s changing around you all the time. And so if you don’t change, then you just get more and more outdated. You’re more and more archaic. None of your presuppositions work anymore. And so you’re like this rusty machine clanking around, running into things all the time, and your life is very miserable because you don’t fit the environment anymore. And so when I talk about personality and its transformations, something that you could ask yourself, which is in some way the most fundamental question you can ask yourself, is are you the thing that stays the same or are you the thing that changes? And you know, the thing that changes can live in a lot more places. And so that’s worth thinking about. But the cost is, well, when you change, you die a little bit. And that’s painful. Or maybe you die a lot, and that’s really painful. So if you ever wonder why people don’t change, that’s part of the reason. Then the next section is on constructivism. We’re going to talk mostly about Piaget. He’s actually a developmental psychologist. I like Piaget a lot, because Piaget had an interesting question, which is, it’s not a genetic question or an environmental question. You know, you might think those are the only two kinds of questions. There are when you’re thinking about the hell, but it’s not exactly that. Here’s why. It’s not clear to what degree you’re specified by your genes. So here’s one possibility. So let’s say that encoded in your genetic structure are a whole variety of potential U’s. Like, who knows how many? All the potential U’s that the entire history of mankind has been able to weave into their genetic structure. They’re all sitting down there encoded in your genes. And then that very complex structure that’s rife with potential pops out into a particular environment. And then it interacts with that environment like a program interacts with a computer and gathers information of one form or another. It takes that information and the material that it incorporates and builds the real U out of that. And that’s what Piaget was studying. He was trying to figure out how does a child go about taking itself from, you know, this thing that just lays there and squats, basically, to something that’s, you know, You go on YouTube and you see what people can do, what human beings can do. It’s bloody unbelievable. I mean, we’re so ridiculously versatile, people can do things that are just impossible in every dimension, you know. Intellectually, physically, spiritually. They can even eat hot dogs at a rate that you can hardly imagine. We’re very variable. Piaget was very interested in trying to figure out how all of that embodied variability could come out of this little package of potential at the beginning of life. It’s very interesting. So that’s constructivism. How does the individual construct him or herself from nothing in some ways, from birth forward? And so Piaget, especially his discussion of infant development, sort of like the analysis of the unfolding of a human being. Because people do unfold, too, you know. Because babies, when they’re born, they’re all crunched up like this. And so they have to stretch themselves out and, you know, get going. And that was Piaget’s concern. So that’s good. And then we go from there to depth psychology. You might think about that more as psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis. No. People aren’t very happy, generally speaking, about psychoanalytic theory. Especially if they’re research-oriented. But there’s a variety of reasons for that. And one of them is, they don’t know anything about it. That would be the first reason. And people are often tempted to denigrate anything they don’t understand. It’s actually kind of hard to understand psychoanalytic thinking. In fact, it’s very hard. And the other thing about scientists and research scientists who are engaged in psychological work is they’re actually usually fairly mentally healthy. You know, at least they’re healthy enough to be scientists. Which, you know, you’ve got to be pretty healthy to be a scientist. You’ve got to be disciplined. You’ve got to be able to get up and go to work every day. You have to be able to think about complex things. You have to be very orderly and persistent. So there’s a lot of demand on you if you’re a scientific researcher. So the problem with scientific researchers, they hang around with other scientific researchers. And then they think that’s what human beings are like. And human beings are nothing like scientific researchers. They’re a tiny minority of the population. And they’re as bizarre as albino buffalo. And to think of them as representative of human beings is insane. First of all, most of them have IQs in the 99th percentile. So it’s like, why bother even thinking about them? Normal human beings are very weird. Especially the ones that don’t function well. And not functioning well is a bottomless pit. That’s why hell is a bottomless pit, by the way. Because not functioning well is a bottomless pit. And if you’re dealing with people who aren’t functioning well, one of the most mysterious things is how they can take a situation that’s god-awful beyond your worst imaginings and then think up three or four creative ways to make it worse. And if you’re dealing with someone like that, and you do if you’re a clinician, if you’re dealing with someone like that, good luck with your behavioural interventions. Man, that’s like throwing sticks at an elephant. You’re just not going to get anywhere. And one of the ways I want to demonstrate this to you, I’m going to show you a film called Crumb. Crumb’s a harsh film, but it’s the best documentary, by the way, of an underground comic named Robert Crumb. He’s actually quite a genius, even though he’s perverse in precisely the Freudian ways that are interesting. And his brothers are even worse. So I’ll walk you through that, because I can’t figure out any other way of giving you a taste of what Freudian psychopathology is like. It’s not pretty. And that’s the other reason that sort of clean-minded research scientists don’t like psychoanalytic thinking. Because it’s really, in many ways, it deals with the most disgusting elements of human behaviour. And so it’s not even that pleasant to think about. And then there’s Jung, who we’ll talk about after Freud. And Jung is so strange that he makes Freud look normal. And Jung believed that, as I mentioned earlier, believed that there is a universal grammar of ethics, of morality. It’s not arbitrary, it’s not relative. You know, in the universities, the theory has been, at least since the 1960s, that one person’s ethics is as good as another person, and there’s no way of distinguishing reliably between them. Well, I happen to think that’s absolute nonsense. It’s also extremely dangerous nonsense. And I also think there’s no evidence for it whatsoever, because we now know a lot about human universals, which are aspects of human behaviour that are constant across all cultures. And there are a lot of them. There are a lot of them. And the other thing is, there’s just not that many ways that half-mad primates can gather together in large groups and live productively. It’s not easy. Like you think of all the civilisation work that went into allowing all you people from all these different cultures to sit here in peace and comfort. It’s mind-boggling. If you think there’s a million ways to do that, well, think again. Maybe there’s one way to do that, you know, and we do it well enough so here we are, and no one’s being knifed. So that’s Jung, and he’s profound beyond belief. Really, beyond belief. So those guys all dealt with unconscious. Now, it’s kind of interesting to think about what the unconscious means. And so I can give you a bit of a hint. It’s partly the information that’s coded in your behaviour. So, for example, there are a lot of things that you can do with your body that you don’t know how you do. Like you don’t know how you walk, for example, or how you ride a bike, or how you talk. You can talk, but you don’t know how you talk. You just move your mouth, I know, but you get the point, right? You have no conscious apprehension whatsoever of the micro-details that are necessary to allow you to move your mouth. So there’s a lot of information encoded in you that you don’t have conscious access to. And it’s not only physiologically encoded, it’s also culturally encoded, because you’ve been targeted and shaped by the interactions of all the people you’ve ever encountered. And they, in turn, by all the people they’ve ever encountered, including their ancestors. So you’re the product of this unbelievably complex multi-generational exchange of information that in some ways is all about how to make you acceptable to the public. And there’s only certain ways you can be acceptable to the public. You know, you have to be relatively clean, for example, at least in our society. You can’t be too boring, or you won’t have any friends. You also can’t be too excited. You know, you can’t be too violent. You can’t be too empty-headed, unless you’re associating with people who like to feel superior. You know, we put a lot of demands on each other in terms of what constitutes acceptability, let alone ideal. We’re always telling each other about both of those. What’s acceptable, what’s ideal. Every interaction you have shapes you into an approximation of acceptable and ideal. And that’s all encoded in you, too. It’s encoded in your behaviour. It’s also encoded in your imagination. And that’s why you can go to a movie and you can instantly identify the hero and the villain, which is of course the first thing you do when you go to a movie because otherwise you can’t make sense out of it. And so that encoding prior to articulation, that’s all the unconscious. And that’s what the psychoanalysts were interested in analysing. Now the cognitive neuroscientists have kind of got there, too. But they’re still deluded into thinking that what’s in your head is information and that it’s ideas. And those are sort of cold and dead things. And your head is not full of ideas and information. It’s full of devils and snakes. And the psychoanalysts knew that. And by that I mean you’re alive. And so are your subcomponents. And all your little subpersonalities are not just ideas. They see, they think, they hear, they feel, they have aims. As you know, for example, when you get possessed by anger, the aim can be entirely destructive. I want to bring down the person I love half an hour later, you think. What the hell was I thinking about? It’s like, yeah, no kidding. Well, you weren’t thinking. You’re just possessed by a little subpersonality. And that’s what the psychoanalysts were interested in. Subpersonalities. Fantasies. Next we go to the humanists and the existentialists. Now they’re interesting because they come at the problem of what’s wrong with people from a kind of universalist perspective. Now for Freud, if you weren’t sick, you were healthy. And that seems obvious. Because we think you can make a clear distinction between sick and healthy. But the existentialists, they didn’t want any of that. Their hypothesis was, if you’re human, you’re sick. There’s no way out of it. And the reason you’re sick, in a sense, and unlike any other animal, is that life itself poses a paradoxical problem to you. Partly because you’re so conscious, and because you’re self-conscious, and actually a sequence of paradoxical problems. A. How do you live when you’re vulnerable and mortal? That’s a rough one, because you might say, well, why should I bother at all? Or who’s going to know anyways in a thousand years or a million years? Or why is there suffering? Or how do you go on in the face of cruelty? And those are questions that grip at people’s soul and crush it. And they’re not a consequence of mental illness. It’s like, how long should it take you to recover if your whole family is wiped out in a car accident? What’s healthy? Well, we don’t know the answer to that. It’s like, should you ever recover? Maybe if you were halfways empathic, it would just kill you. You know, a lot of times people can’t recover from their grief because they’re guilty. They think, how can I live when all those people close to me die, and they die unfairly? Well, that’s an existential problem. And then, so there’s one class, which is vulnerability and mortality. Everyone’s got that staring at them. So how do you deal with that? Hard question. Second class of problems. Well, everybody’s always evaluating you. Always. And you’re never good enough. So what that means is that you’re always in an insufficient relationship with society and history. No matter how good you get, it’s not good enough. And so history itself, as well as culture, always faces you as a judge. And so that’s the second category of existential problem. And then the third problem is, well, what to do about you yourself? You know, there’s nature you have to contend with, and there’s culture you have to contend with. And then you’ve got yourself, and your self-consciousness, and your deep knowledge of all the things about you that could really use some repair. And the thing about those problems is that everyone has them, and they always have them. And as far as we know, they always will. And so they’re built into the condition of being human. And that’s what existentialism is about. It’s like, life is a paradoxical problem. Is there any possible solution to a paradoxical problem? Well, that’s in some ways the question of the meaning of life. And one hint is that, well, what’s the meaning of life? And one answer to that is, this is the hint, is that the meaning to life is the pattern of thought and action that you take that enables you to tolerate, at least tolerate, the conditions of life. And then maybe you could move one step beyond that if you’re feeling a little optimistic and say, the meaning of life is the pattern of conception and action that enables you to welcome the conditions of life. And then you might ask yourself, well, is there such a mode of being, given the nature of the problem that you have to contend with? Is there actually a mode of being that would enable that? You could say, the vulnerability, the judgment, the insufficiency, it’s worth it under these conditions. And that’s the other existential question. And the people who posed those questions, they weren’t messing around. You’re going to read people like Frankl, Victor Frankl, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And what those two people lived through, I mean, it’s unimaginably horrible. And when they were wrestling with the questions that I just described, they weren’t academic. They weren’t academic issues. They were embodied issues of life and culture and genocide and cruelty. And so their examination of that had to be deep enough to be able to contend with questions like that. And answers that are deep enough to contend with questions like that are frightening answers. And we have reading week. It’ll be a relief. The last part of the course. This is when we switch over into the more scientific domain. And so we’re going to do two things, as I said. We’re going to take a pretty deep look at how the brain functions. As far as we know in our current state of unimaginable ignorance. We really know so little about the brain. Or maybe we know a bit about the brain, but we certainly don’t know anything yet about consciousness. Consciousness seems to be a very, well, it’s a relevant part of the brain, right? It’s sort of the part that everybody cares about. Consciousness in some sense seems to be you, even more than your brain is you. I mean, your brain is just this thing inside your skull. But your consciousness, that’s your being. Your being, we don’t have a clue about consciousness. Our scientific, we’re not even able to conceptualize it in a scientific manner. It’s a real mystery. But having said that, there’s still plenty of things that are interesting to know about the brain. One of the things we’re going to do, and this is sort of associated with the Freudian idea of the end. You know, the end for Freud was the natural self. And so that was your primordial, you could think about them as drives or temptations or values. Values is probably the most accurate. Anger, sexuality, those are the top two Freudian concerns. There’s plenty others. Eating, Freud didn’t care about that. We do now because everyone has an eating disorder, or virtually everyone. So for the Victorians it was sexuality. For us it’s food. Sex doesn’t seem to be a problem. We just can’t eat anymore. So we’re going to take a look at the low level biological systems in the brain. And those are systems, God, some of those systems are so old that even crustaceans have them. So for example, this is so cool. So if you give a lobster who’s being defeated in a dominance fight, because they fight for dominance, and they might even know it. If you give a lobster, if you take a lobster who’s being defeated in a dominance dispute, he’ll go back to his little lobster hole and pout. And when he’s pouting he gets all collapsed. And you can’t even really get him out of his hole with a stick, because he’s going to sit in there and be upset about his dominance defeat. And maybe he’ll come out as kind of a new lobster all ready to go again. And maybe not. If you take that same lobster and you give him antidepressants right after he fights, he won’t go back into his cave and hide. And he’ll fight right away again. And so you think about that. That means that the circuitry that underlies our defeat-related depression is 300 million years old. And even crustaceans have it. So that’s way down in your brain stem, man, because lobsters hardly even have brains. In fact, if the lobster’s big and tough, and he’s been a dominant lobster for a long time, and he gets defeated badly, then when he goes off to pout, he has to dissolve his whole brain. Because all it does is dominant stuff, then he grows a new subordinate brain, and he weasels around with that for a while. And that’s useful to think about the next time you really get defeated, because all that pain you’re going through, it’s like you’ve got some circuit repairs to make. And if you’ve been badly defeated, well, maybe you should just let yourself collapse, and all that stuff clear away so that you can come back. So that’s low-level stuff, brain stem stuff. It’s way down at the bottom of your being, you know. But we’re going to talk about systems that are above that too, but still low. The hypothalamus, for example, is a very cool brain area. It’s sort of responsible for all the basic drugs. Hunger, temperature regulation, sexuality, defensive aggression, predatory aggression looks like it’s something different. Everyone has those systems. You know, so they’re like these sub-beings that live inside us. But they’re also preconditions for communication. You know, because you might say to your friend, I’m angry today. And your friend doesn’t say, well, what do you mean, angry? He says, well, what happened to upset you? Because he knows what anger means, and the reason he knows that is because he’s already got it in his head. He’s like you. He gets angry, he gets sad, he gets afraid. He has the basic emotions. But not only the basic emotions, but the basic motivations. And so we’re going to look at the brain systems that underlie the basic motivations and the basic emotions. And in some sense, those systems are equivalent to the physiological incarnation of the id that Freud described at the end of the 19th century. And so that’s a nice way to look at it. You’ll go through the psychoanalytic thinking, which kind of puts flesh on these systems. Because for the psychoanalysts, and this is why they’re still relevant, those weren’t just systems. They were living personalities. Narrow, one-eyed personalities. They only want one thing. But personalities nonetheless. Ancient gods. That’s another way of looking at them. And things you have to contend with, whether you believe in them or not. We’ll discuss all five traits as well. Extraversion, as I said, that’s positive emotion. Neuroticism, that’s negative emotion. People vary on those dimensions. Agreeableness, that seems to be associated with maternal behaviour on one end. And predatory hunting on another, because human beings are hunters. And mammals, it’s a weird combination. Because if you’re a hunting mammal, you have to figure out how not to kill and eat your children. And that happens in lots of mammalian species, especially among the males, so they have to be moved away. But human beings have solved that more or less. It gets complicated in mixed families. Because if you’re the child of a stepparent, you have 100 times the likelihood of being abused. So, we’ll talk about conscientiousness, which is a great predictor of long-term life success. But also associated with fascist political predispositions. Because it turns out that the way you vote has very little to do with what you pay, and very much to do with what your temperament is. So, even for high-level cognitive functions like political belief, these underlying systems play a determining role. Last two things. We’re going to talk about performance prediction. And by that I mean, well, there’s been accruing evidence. You might say, how do you have a happy life? First of all, I would say that’s a stupid question. But we’ll go, because happiness isn’t, it’s not the right aim. It’s a way, it’s not a place to go. It’s a manner of manifestation while you’re journeying, something like that. Leaving that aside, what do you need to live a high-quality life? Well, we kind of know that already. I mean, it’s kind of obvious. You know, you need friends, you need intimate relationships, you need meaningful work. Having more money than will pay your bills doesn’t seem to help that much, etc. etc. So it’s like intelligent moderation and discipline. It’s very boring. It’s exactly what you’d expect if you were pessimistic about excitement. Performance prediction. We’re going to look very carefully at the nature of the traits that make people successful in life. You know, you might say, well, what do you mean by successful? But one of the things I mean is not in too much pain and anxiety. Because that turns out to actually be more important to people than being happy. You know, if you say to people, what do you want? They say, I want to be happy. But if you analyze what they mean by happy, they mostly mean not suffering and not terrified. You get those two things under control. Like, the worst that can happen to you is that you’ll be bored. So, and then we’ll wrap it up at the end. Okay, so that’s the course. So, I’m glad to be teaching it. It’s good to see all of you here. It looks like you kind of have a comfortable classroom, so that’s kind of nice. Decide if you want to take the course. Because I don’t want you to be disappointed at the end. So I’m really telling you seriously. You’ve got to like the ideas. If you like this lecture, you’ll like the course. And you’ve got to do the reading. And there’s a fair bit of reading. So, we’ll see if there’s anything. Applause