https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ux6TVYqdN-E
Okay, so the last time we talked I talked to you about how the knowledge structures that we inhabit might be built from the bottom up. And so I’m showing you this diagram because it might help clarify that a little bit. So what you see at the top of this, this is a hierarchy, a partially built hierarchy. And so one way of thinking of an attribute like good when you apply it to a person, or bad or evil or wonderful or whatever, is to think about it as a description of an object. But it’s not really. It’s a shorthand for a set of, well I think of them as micro-personalities, but you could also think about them as behavioural patterns. Now one of the things I mentioned to you about, I talked to you a little bit about words at one point and what words signify. And this is a very complicated problem and so most of you are probably Augustinians without really knowing it because St. Augustine originally proposed that a word was a label for a thing. And of course that’s how people naturally think. I mean I’m sure most of you would regard that definition as perfectly suitable. But it’s by no means the only definition. And it’s by no means necessarily the correct definition. So there was a famous philosopher named Wittgenstein who proposed instead that a word was like a piece in a chess game, which meant that it was something that you did something with or you might think about it actually as a tool. And when you think about how you use words then you can see that you’re using them tools to interact with other people. So that for a purpose, the words have a purpose and so the word is a tool. And what I like about the tool idea, the tool idea is a very, very evolutionarily sophisticated concept partly because we’re tool using creatures probably beyond our other capacities except for possibly imitation and language, which set us so far apart from other animals. But the thing about a tool is that the difference between tool and an object is an object doesn’t have a user. The word object doesn’t imply user, but the word tool implies user. And it’s not obvious that we ever interact with anything in the world without interacting with it in some motivated way. And so what we’re doing is using words to get through the world, to interact properly within the world and to move to where we want to go. And so okay, so that’s the second way of thinking about a word. Here’s another way of thinking about a word. A word is like a box of things. And so imagine that you’ve cleaned out your basement and there’s a bunch of boxes downstairs and one box is labeled books. Well inside that box there can be any manner of books. Books is a very, very diverse set of phenomena. If you’re moving, books are kind of condensed into one thing which is heavy objects that are made out of paper. And you can also imagine another box that says things. And in the thing box I’m sure you have a thing drawer at home where you put all the things that you don’t know what to do with. And so it’s like the category of all things that you don’t know what to do with. Things. Okay, so a word can also represent a relatively heterogenous set of tools or entities. And that’s very, very, very useful to know. One of the things that happens often when people are arguing is that they use the same word but each word contains a set of different objects. So you might say for example, is fear real? The questions like that are very strange. They’re not really answerable in some sense because it depends on exactly what you mean by fear because fear can contain a lot of heterogenous entities, roughly speaking. And then it also depends on what you mean by real. And so you can define fear and you can define real so that fear is a subcategory of real. Or you can define fear and you can define real so that fear isn’t a subset of real. So the idea that fear is a box that only contains a certain set of entities or a certain set of tools and that reality is the same is wrong. And people argue about those sorts of things all the time. And they make these binary questions like is X a Y? X and Y are generally not well enough defined so that you can easily come up with an answer to a binary question like that. Okay, so words can also represent a relatively heterogenous set of attributes or objects or tools. When you say that someone’s a good person, for example, you don’t mean that they’re a good person all the time or that everything they’ve ever done in their entire life is good because they wouldn’t be a good person and they’d be a saint or some other fictional character like that. So when you’re applying the label, we call it a label for the purposes of this argument, it’s a descriptive tool actually. When you’re applying a term like that to someone, it’s a shorthand for a variety of states that this person could exist in, the majority of which you would regard as positive. You know, and you might say, well he’s a better person than she is. And then you’d say, well the proportion of attributes that she has, I think I said she, whatever, exceeds the proportion of positive attributes that this other person has. So the other way that you can think about a word is, this is more complicated, it involves a little bit of visualization. So imagine that you have a child’s train on a track, it’s going around and around the track, and it’s got cars on it that you can put things in and all the cars are full of things. And then on the track there’s a box with cutouts in it so that the train can pass through, and on top of the box is a word. And the word is things, and the train is going through the box. In some sense what that would mean, imagine the train was long enough, is that at any given second the box of things would contain different things, but it would still be a box of things. And a lot of words we use are like that. Not only do they represent a heterogenous set of entities, but the set changes depending on the context that we use the word in. So the reason I’m telling you that is because a word… here’s another way of thinking about a word. This will be good for you computer… well you’re all computer people now of course. A word is a low resolution image. So you know, when you think about it, a word is a good enough approximation of the thing that it’s representing, sort of like a thumbnail. Now obviously one of the differences between a thumbnail and the real thing is that the real thing exists at a much higher level of resolution. It exists at many, many more layers. But you can use the thumbnail to represent it, and the advantage to doing that is that it doesn’t take up much processing time, and it doesn’t take up much memory. So lots of times you want to use the shorthand for the thing rather than the thing because it’s just too complicated otherwise. Then you might say, well how do you know that your shorthand representation is a good representation of the thing that you’re trying to represent? And the pragmatist would say, well it depends on what you want to do with it. That’s the tool-like aspect. It’s like if you’re using word X to represent potentially heterogeneous class Y, and when you use it you get to where you want or you get close enough to where you want, then it’s good enough. So it’s like it’s how you know a joke is good enough. Well someone laughs. It’s like, okay, the joke is good enough. And so one of the things that’s quite interesting about the way that you interact with the world, and this is something that pragmatists really discovered in some sense, was that you’re always aiming at some bounded set of events that’s somewhat different from the current set of events because otherwise you could just sit there, and then you put your conceptions to work and your actions to work to manage the transformation, and if you manage the transformation, then it’s good enough. And you don’t have to go any farther than that. So that explains partly how you can maneuver in the world with limited knowledge. Use low resolution representations to partially hit vague goals. And that generally gets you there. That process was called satisficing by, now what’s his name? He’s an extraordinarily famous economist and psychologist. Do you remember who coined the word satisficing? Well, economist psychologist would be Herb Simon. That’s right, it’s Simon. Thank you, that’s exactly right. It was Herb Simon. So you know, and he said, well, you’re often not out to optimize, let’s say, in a search for a partner. Well, to optimize it, you’d have to search through several billion people. Well, you’re not going to do that because you don’t have the time. And so then you might say, well, you don’t know exactly how you do it, but it’s something like this. You have five attributes that you’re looking for, and maybe two that you don’t know you’re looking for, but you are looking for. And the first person that comes along that matches those well enough, you pick. And so it’s not an optimization issue. But given that you have a limited amount of time, you can’t wait around for optimized solutions. You have to go ahead with sufficient and then move to the next issue. Okay, so all that’s a conceptual precursor for taking a look at this diagram. So we’re calling someone a good person, and so what does it mean? Well, we’re going to do a bit of a microanalysis. We’ll assume that it’s a shorthand, low-resolution representation of the person, and that you can decompose it. So if someone says Henry is a good person, and maybe he’s 45, you might say, does he have children? And then you say yes. And then you might say, well, is he a good parent? Because you might assume that if he’s a good person, he would be a good parent. Now it’s conceivable that he could be a good parent, a good person without being a good if he was good at like five other important things. But let’s assume that as a good person, he’s also a good parent. I think it’s reasonable to assume that good parent would be a subset of good person, right, because it’s more specific. More specific means it covers less time and space in some sense, because good person is a description of a person that covers how the person interacts with the world across the broadest possible amount of time and location. And then good parent is, well, you find that out when they’re interacting with children, let’s say, for the sake of argument. There’s other issues. And then you might say, well, if he’s a good parent, well, what does he have to do to be a good parent? You might say, well, he has to feed his children, so he probably needs a job, and it would be better if it was a good job. So he’s got a good job, and that’s part of being a good person. And then maybe he can care for his family. And so care might be regarded as a more specific subset of good parent. And so you can decompose care into, let’s say, play with baby. And then you can decompose play into, well, I decomposed it into peak, tickle, and clean. And then what’s interesting about this is that those are all abstractions. But once you get down to a high enough level of resolution, they’re no longer abstractions, in that they’re actually actions that you undertake in the world. Moving your hand is not an abstraction. So at some point, and this is a nice, elegant solution to the mind-body problem to some degree, at some level of resolution, high resolution, it stops being conceptual and starts being action. And that’s where the mind hits the world. And then if you go into an even higher level of resolution than that, like what do you have to do in order to move your hand, the answer to that is you don’t know. You just do it. And so your consciousness bottoms out, in some sense, at the level of voluntary motor activity. So there’s a level above which you can’t perceive, which are the networks that you’re involved in, and there’s a level below which you can’t perceive, which is, under normal circumstances, perceive or control, which is whatever enables you to actually move. So all right, so then you might say, well, what are all of these things? How would you conceptualize, I decomposed good person. And you might say, well, what are all these things made out of? In a sense, what are their constituent elements? Good person, good parent, family care, play with baby. They’re sort of like games, they’re sort of like stories, they’re sort of like rituals. I think about them in these terms. So if you look at, that’s where we get to this particular diagram, which we’re going to concentrate on quite a bit. So let me shift to it, and then we’ll talk about that. Now I don’t exactly know what to call this thing. I think the best way of thinking about it is that it’s a sub-personality. And that the reason I call it a sub-personality is because only a personality has all the attributes that this thing has. So the attributes are, it’s something, I talked to you last week about the fact that the Russian neuropsychologist, for example, felt that people had to build models of the world. And so you could call this a model of the world. And so the reason they suspected that was because if you brought someone, I think I ran through this, if you bring someone into a laboratory and you play them a tone, when they first hear the tone they manifest an orienting reflex, which is a change in skin conductance, and that’s actually a consequence of neurological activity. And then if you play the tone a bunch, they stop having that reaction. And then if you vary the tone on any perceptible dimension, the orienting reflex returns. So the inference from that was, well obviously the person must be constructing a model of the tone, because otherwise how would they know if something deviated from it? Especially on all those dimensions. So not only is it a model, it’s a multi-dimensional model. Okay, now the upshot of that was that for a long time people tried to figure out how in the world we modeled the world. And then they also tried to make smart machines that modeled the world that could then plan their actions in the modeled world and then could act in the world as a consequence. And they got nowhere with that, because it turned out that the world is so damn complex that if you’re going to model it, you’re going to spend all your time modeling it, you’re not going to spend any time acting it, and you’re not going to get anywhere. It’s partly because the world is almost infinitely complex. And so if you’re trying to get a computer to look at the world, you might say, well what is the computer supposed to look at? Everything. Well, no. I mean, you look at a lot in some ways and not very much in others, and half your brain is dedicated, roughly speaking, to visual processing. And then you’ve got your other senses to help you figure out what’s going on. But you don’t build a model of the whole world. You don’t build any model at all of the parts of the world that aren’t relevant to you. So for example, your model of this floor is very low resolution. If I took you guys out in the hallway, assuming the hallway floor isn’t the same color, and I said, what was the color of this floor? You would not be able to tell me. And the reason for that is, who cares? It could be shifting color all the time while you’re sitting here, you know, subtly, and you’re not going to care. And the reason for that is you’re not falling through it, and it isn’t moving. And so it’s like an invisible presupposition of your current knowledge structure. And there’s all sorts of things going on around you that are like that. You don’t pay attention to the walls. You really don’t pay attention to the people that are around you. You know, they could sort themselves in a different way. You wouldn’t notice unless you know the person. There’s all sorts of things that you don’t model. Now you’ve all seen the invisible gorilla video, I presume. Everyone’s seen that. Is there anyone here who hasn’t seen that video? Okay, good. So that’s something, eh? I mean it’s really something that there’s a psychology experiment that’s so well known you can talk to a crowd now and almost everyone’s seen it. It’s so shocking. It’s like, of course I would see a gorilla if one was dancing around on a basketball court. It’s like, ha! No you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. Now the reason for that is, fundamentally speaking, is that you’re given a task when you watch that video. And the task is to count the number of times the ball is thrown by the team in black. And so all of a sudden your perceptual systems reorient themselves and you’re actually not really looking at people. You’re looking at something that might be like animated stick figures who are engaged momentarily in moving the object of perceptual importance around. And so you can blur them out, which you do, because obviously you can’t tell the difference between a gorilla and the person dressed in black. And the reason you can’t is you don’t need to. In order to fulfill the task, you can treat all the people like vaguely moving black objects. And as long as that doesn’t interfere with your counting, then it’s irrelevant. And so actually you don’t build a model of the whole world. And you build a model of only the parts of the world that are relevant to your ongoing microaction. Now the problem that brings up is how do you know what’s relevant? And well, that’s a tough question. And I would say the reason that you know what’s relevant is because some things don’t change over time, and you’ve been evolving through three and a half billion years. So you’ve built yourself, if we go back to that other diagram, you imagine the levels there from the micro activities to the abstractions. You think about how much building had to go in before you could undertake those microactions. So like here you can move your hand. Well that’s great. How do you get the hand? Well you know, it took a long time. It took almost all of the three and a half billion years before you managed to come up with a hand. So even underneath the microactions, there’s this massive evolutionary history that’s been built up partly as a consequence of some of the unchanging features of the environment, or at least in consequence of some of the slower changing features of the environment, that has given you this incredibly complex body that’s really good at doing some things and not very good at doing other things at all. And so that’s how you solve the relevance problem. And I actually think it’s one of the most powerful arguments for the necessity of evolutionary theory. It’s like this problem is so complex because it’s not only do you have to adapt to the environment across times. You have to build a body that adapts to the environment. It’s worse than that. It’s like the train passing through the box. The environment’s not stable. It keeps shifting and turning and moving and twisting, and so not only do you have to adapt to the environment, you have to adapt flexibly to the environment while it transforms itself at different levels of totality. Sometimes there’s minor changes in the environment. Sometimes a meteor hits the earth and we’re plunged into darkness for four years, or there’s an ice age or something like that. So the levels of transformation in the environment can be radical, and the evolutionary process has to keep up with that. The way it works, apparently, like I don’t believe this is the whole story, although Darwinian story, is that something more or less works and it makes a million copies of itself, and there’s tiny variations in those copies, often at least in principle, because of copying error, which is where I think the theory’s weak. Then they all die except like two. Why didn’t those die? The answer is, well, they happened by chance to vary in the direction that the environment varied, and so they get to continue. The reason evolution works is because everything dies. Everything fails. Because you think, well, keeping up with a randomly changing environment is impossible. Well, so how do you do it? Well, you do a million things. Most of them don’t work, but you only have to succeed enough to propagate yourself once. Now I think that that’s not exactly right, because I don’t believe that our understanding of evolution is complete. There’s a bunch of reasons I don’t believe it. One is, DNA is pretty damn complex. It’s not obvious how it could have evolved. Even the people who discovered DNA were very, very perplexed by the fact that it existed. One of them, and I told you this, thought that it came from outer space and it evolved somewhere else. You might think about that as a crazy theory, but cosmic winds, like solar winds and that sort of thing, can propel tiny things vast distances relatively rapidly. For 13.5 billion years, you can really get around. I think the estimates, even if you used transportation methods that are about the speed that we have, you could colonize the whole galaxy in some 20 million years, something like that, because it’s exponential. 20 million years is a tiny, tiny subset of 3.5 billion years. So it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. The problem is it doesn’t address the problem, which is, yeah, okay, it came from somewhere else, but how did it get there? It just pushes the problem back. But there’s this other issue too, which is called epigenesis. That’s really put a whole spoke in the scientific wheels in the last 20 years, because the theory was 20 years ago that all evolution proceeded through random mutation, and it was random. But it turns out that’s not exactly right, because there have been a number of demonstrations that if something happens to generation A, that will produce a transformation in the genetic information that’s transferred to generation B. And the transformation often seems not merely a consequence of damage, but actually a form of adaptation to the new environment. So now that’s a tough one, because 20 years ago when I was studying evolutionary psychology if someone would have said, well you can transmit acquired characteristics, it would have been like, you’re over there with the creationists, because that was no go, that was against the rules. But it does happen, and the fact that epigenesis happens at all means that there’s a lot of things about how DNA works that we don’t know. And I actually think what’s happening is that the DNA is a very, very complex microcomputer, and I don’t know exactly how it operates, but maybe it’s a quantum computer. It’s very complex. Remember, it’s had three and a half billion years to figure out what’s going on, and it’s pretty good at surviving. So you don’t want to underestimate it. And the structures it builds at the molecular level are so complex, there’s some great animations of those things going on at molecular level on the net. They’re so complex that you can’t help but think of them as computational when you watch them. I mean, it’s a random process, man. I watched a little molecule that checks for error in a DNA replication string. I mean, it checks for errors in a DNA replication string, man. To figure out how it does something like that without some form of computation strikes me as impossible. Anyways, I think what happens is that over time the DNA plays. It can manifest itself in many different forms, and it also capitalizes on mutation. I think that’s how it works. Now there’s other, I’d say, kind of weak evidence for that. Maybe it’s only evidence by analogy, but if I take one of you and I put you in a radically new environment, new genes will turn on in your brain and code for new proteins. And so it’s like you’re sitting there, but in some sense there’s a whole set of potential yous that are sitting there. And a lot of that potential is actually locked in the genetic code. I mean, it’s dependent on the information that’s in the environment around it, because it’s not all in the code, but it’s enough to get the process started. So if I take you out of situation A and put you in situation B, you build new brain structures at the micro level. So you’re actually a different person. And you know, that’s a very interesting way of thinking about the consequences of something like exposure in psychotherapy. It’s like, okay, you’re all timid and there’s 18 things you’re terrified of. And so you go out and you master one of them. It’s like, poof, your brain is not the same. So maybe now you’re a little braver, and then you go master another one, and a bunch more of you turns on. Now I don’t know if when one thing turns on, something else turns off. You know what I mean, is that there’s only so much of you that can be turned on at any one time. But maybe a lot more of you could be turned on than is turned on. So I think it looks like that, because people who really challenge themselves across the span of their life, they develop talents in multiple directions. People can really be amazingly good at a ridiculous number of things. Okay, so Sokolov and Vinogradova showed that you model the world right down to the finest detail. But then Dan Simon and his crew showed that, no you don’t. You’re so blind that you can’t even believe it. It’s like, okay, those are not the same set of facts. So how do we reconcile that? Okay, well here’s one way of getting a bit of a sense of it. Look straight ahead. Okay now, concentrate not on what you see in the middle of your vision, but at the sides. It’s probably better if you look at a person to do that. It doesn’t really matter though. So look straight ahead, but pay attention to what you see in the periphery. Okay so I can tell you what you’ll see, because some of it is very difficult to detect. Way out in the periphery, it’s black and white. You can’t tell that though. But we know that because if we change colours way out in the periphery on you, you can’t detect the change. And then out to about here, if something isn’t moving, it’s almost impossible to see it. But as soon as it moves, you can see that there’s something moving. Sort of like dinosaur vision. You remember Jurassic Park? Don’t move because the dinosaur can see you. It’s like, well you have dinosaur movement detectors still built into your nervous system. And the question is why, and the answer is, well if you can’t afford to have a lot of your brain wired up to the periphery of your vision, because your head is only so big, then you have to concentrate on detecting only those things that are most likely to be relevant. And moving things are more likely to be relevant because they can eat you. Moving things are more likely to be relevant than stationary things, especially if you’ve been in an environment for a while. Because if you’re in here, it’s like the stationary things are going to stay stationary, so you can ignore them. You don’t even have to see them. But the moving things, well they’re transforming at a time rate that’s relevant to you, and so it’s good to be able to detect those. Now the periphery of your vision is actually wired in more directly to the lower levels of your nervous system. So it can trigger off things like startle reflexes, which are very rapid. And it also triggers an orienting response, which is the movement of your sensory systems in the direction of the stimulus. So if something over here moves, then you go like that. And then what you’re doing is you’re nailing it with your central vision. Now out in your peripheral vision, if you follow the optical track back to your brain, you’ll see that the peripheral retinal nerves don’t attach to a tremendous number of visual cortex neurons. But the central ones do. So each of the central neurons in your central vision, the fovea, each one of those is connected to 10,000 neurons at the first level of elaboration. And then each neuron is connected to about 10,000 other neurons. So it’s 10,000 to the 10,000th two neurons in. And so a lot of your brain is focusing on that tiny little pinpoint that you use that’s foveal vision. And this seems to be about big enough so that you can bring a face into high resolution in the center, and you can track the movements of the various elements of the faces. If you look at someone and you look about 18 inches to their left or to their right, you’ll see that you can’t see their nose anymore. You see kind of a vague outline of their face. You can still see the color. You can detect their eyebrows, and you can detect their mouth, especially if their mouth moves or their eyes move. You just zero in on that right away. And again, so what’s happening is that way out here, your vision is incredibly low resolution, and then the resolution increases to the center where it’s very, very high. And then there’s some tweaks like, okay, you can’t really see out here, but you can see motion. And that’s good enough because as soon as something moves, you can turn your head, because you can turn your head and your eyes, and then you can focus that little pinpoint on it and dance around because that’s what you do with the pinpoint. It moves around very rapidly. And then you can scan that central area with high resolution. And so it’s an efficient use of limited resources. So partly the way that you manage in the world, which is very, very complicated, is that even your senses simplify it for you. You can’t see the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. You can only see the visual light spectrum. It’s very narrow. There’s a whole range of sounds you can’t hear. There’s things you can’t smell. So you’re in a box and some things get through, but not everything. So that simplifies things for you right off the bat. And hypothetically, those things you do detect were those things that it was necessary for you to detect for you to be here over this vast span of time. No doubt there were variants all the way through that tried to parse it up differently, slightly differently, and that didn’t work out as well. So they aren’t around. So you’re around because of death and replication. So it’s an interesting take on death, because you’re the product of an unbelievable number of deaths. Because all of those experiments had to take place in some sense for you to be here at all. So anyways, okay. So you can see with your central vision that you focus in on one point and then you reduce the others to low resolution representations, maybe even cartoons. And then I also think, although I don’t know this for sure and someone has undoubtedly done the work, my suspicions are that in the periphery you don’t update. You know how your screen updates at 60 cycles a second, something like that? You update your vision at about 60 cycles per second. And we know that because if the screen resolution, if the screen update decreases below 60 cycles a second, people can start to see it flicker. So we have a refresh rate. It’s around 60 hertz. Some people can see flicker at higher hertz than that, but most people can’t. 60 is about right. So that’s another way that you deal with the fact that there’s way too much for you to deal with. Your temporal resolution isn’t very high. So the smallest meaningful event for you is about a tenth of a second long. Now if you’re in a car accident or you’re in some situation where it’s an emergency and you get a massive burst of dopamine, you might be able to speed that processing up by a hundred fold. Who knows? But you’re going to be absolutely exhausted instantly when you do that. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced that in a car accident or something like that, but people often report that time slows down dramatically, but then afterwards they’re just, they’re done. So the reason you don’t see a thousand times as fast as you do is because you’d have to be eating like a hummingbird, right? You need a big vat of nectar attached to you and you’d be just sipping on it or gulping it down non-stop. So you’re also kind of restricted in terms of your temporal resolution. Okay, well then what else do you do to simplify the world? Well, this is where the tool concept of concept, the tool concept of concept starts to become useful because you’re actually aiming at things all the time. And I really like the aim metaphor because if you understand the metaphor well, it really sheds some light on what human beings are like. Chimps are hunters, but they’re not hunters like human beings are hunters. We’re really, really good hunters. Chimps they have to kind of mob an animal and then they’ll tear it apart and they like meat, so they’ll definitely do it. But human beings have been hunting in an unbelievably sophisticated way for a tremendous amount of time. And there’s a bunch of things about us that aren’t like chimps. So one is we can throw, and our bodies are built for throwing. Now you might think, well that’s not that relevant, but if something is chasing you through the bush and you can throw a rock at it, it becomes relevant very quickly. And so we’re really good at taking projectiles, specifying targets, and hurling the projectiles at targets. And we can do that with rocks and we can do it with bows and we can do it with rifles and we can do it with nuclear weapons. And so there’s something about us that’s obsessed with hitting the middle of the target. Now there’s an interesting side note for that, which is that the word sin is derived from the Greek word hamartia. And hamartia is an archery term that means to miss the center of the target. So now that’s something very much worth thinking about. It’s a very lovely concordance. And so we’re built on this hunting platform. We can track moving things extraordinarily well. We have amazing eyesight. Our eyesight’s better than any primate by a huge amount and better than any other creature except for hawks and other birds of prey. So we have this amazing capacity to zero in. And here’s some cool things about your eyes. So if you look at a gorilla, you’ll see that a gorilla doesn’t really have whites in their eyes. You might think, well that’s kind of weird because we do. And so what’s the hypothesis? Well if I’m looking at somebody at the back of the room, I can tell if they’re looking at my eyes. If they’re looking at my nose, it’s almost as if their face just gets a little bit vaguer. Like we’re not communicating. It’s eye to eye contact. And so our ability to specify the direction in which another person’s eyes are pointing is phenomenal. And you might say, well why? First of all, there’s a lot of expression around the eyes. So you can imagine a coevolution. The coevolution is sharper and sharper vision, vision associated with detecting eyes, and then also more and more evolution for emotional expression around the eyes. So there’s that. But then the other thing that I wanted, the reason that I would be interested in that is because I want to know what the hell you’re up to. Because maybe you’re a friend and maybe you’re a foe. Or maybe you’re interested in something that I should be interested in. And so we know what people are like in that regard. So you go stand out on the corner and you look up. And soon there are ten people gathered around you looking up. And why is that? It’s because when they see where your eyes are pointed and embody you, they think, well that person, they don’t think this, it’s the equivalent of thinking. They think, well that person must be looking at something interesting because that’s what people look at. And if it’s interesting to them, then it’s probably going to be interesting to me. Especially if it’s in the sky. It’s like, what the hell? That’s not supposed to be happening. So you’re looking at people’s eyes because you want to know what they’re up to in their facial display, which is your face is unbelievably innervated and controllable, both by conscious and unconscious means. That tells you what they’re up to, which is why you want to see someone’s face. You don’t talk to the back of their head. You want to talk to their face. And you don’t like it when they’re looking like this or looking like that or failing to make eye contact, although too much eye contact is a predatory stare. So you know, well, you’ve got to get the balance right. So now, what about the whites of the eyes? Well the theory is that the reason we developed whites is because it was easier to see where someone’s eyes were pointed if there was a dark circle in a white space. And what that basically meant was that all your ancestors who were a little less fortunate on the eye-white side either didn’t mate or got killed, probably in misunderstandings. So our eyes stand out against this bright white background because that helps other people detect what we’re up to, and that means we can trust each other more easily. Even something as simple as eye contact in a situation where there’s a possibility of finding a sexual partner is a very important component of that because eye contact indicates interest and it also indicates, at least in principle, the possibility of approach. And so approach is dopaminergically mediated and it’s a positive emotional state. And that’s also why, interestingly enough, if you go into a pharmacy and there’s a rack of magazines and they’re – what’s on the cover? Always, almost always. Beautiful woman. On 50% of the men’s magazines there’s a beautiful woman and on like 100% of the women’s magazines, which is really interesting, you know, because you might think, well, why is that? Well, and the woman’s eyes are always looking out in a way that they’re looking at you. So there was some – so it’s an invocation of interest. And so, you know, magazines evolve. All the ones that don’t get bought fail. And so what’s happened is they all converge to the same point, and the same point is the thing that’s maximally interesting to a magazine purchaser is a beautiful female face, whether it’s male or female. Now on the male side there’s also gadgets of all sorts. And that may be because men are more gadget-oriented than women. So anyways, and we also know that, for example, with men, if you show them – this is a funny little study – so you show them the face of a beautiful woman and her eyes are looking that way, or this way, or they’re looking right at him. You can check the activity in the dopaminergic centre in a place called the nucleus accumbens, which is the same place that cocaine hits. Face on eye contact, that thing lights up. It lights up even more if she’s wearing a red dress. Right, and you can get the same kind of lighting up with a red curvy sports car. So it’s, you know, my thought when I read that was the perfect situation is like a beautiful girl dressed in red, perched on a sports car with some cocaine. Why red? Why red? That’s a good question. I’m not exactly sure why – oh, that’s wrong, I do know why red. Ripe fruit. Women have co-evolved with ripe fruit. It’s very sneaky of you, by the way. So that’s why you know that. You just have to leave through a women’s magazine. The lipstick is always associated with apples that are glistening in some way, or a peach or something like that. We were primarily fruit eaters, and the reason we have colour vision is to detect fruit, ripe fruit. Also, part of the reason that fruit turns red or coloured when it ripens is because the fruit that was successfully eaten by creatures that distributed the cisc seeds was the fruit that was ripe when it was eaten. So as the colour vision evolved, maybe there was a red tint for god only knows what reason, then a positive feedback loop developed, and fruit got redder and redder. At the same time, women capitalised on that. So that’s partly, I think, what explains the association between Eve and the apple in Genesis. Because Genesis is also a story about gaining sight. So yeah, so that’s why red. That’s pretty funny. I really think that’s pretty funny. You know, evolved sensory significance is absolutely everywhere. It’s so deep inside of us. I have to wonder about blood too. Oh yeah, red’s a significant colour. But I think, and it’s funny too because say there’s a flushed face. That means it’s infused with blood. It’s also a sign of health. It’s also a sign of sexual arousal. But it is a sign of health. And so you see, in old coke ads from the 1930s, the girl’s cheeks are so red that it looks like she has a fever. So it’s often a form of sexual signalling that indicates health. So that’s another part. I mean these are multiply determined, right? Anything as complex as vision. Yeah and blood means hey maybe don’t go there. Or maybe it means there’s something to eat. Right, right. Yeah? Oh definitely. Yeah well you can see that those things would loop together, right? Once the colour vision starts to adapt, the colour vision for fruit is way older I would suspect because when we developed it we had fur. Once the ability is there and we lose our facial fur then it’s possible to capitalize on the ability to detect the signalling. You know and we’re talking about a transformation over about, we were living in trees about 60 million years ago. So the transition between us and them is 60 million years. The separation from chimps is about seven. And you know chimps’ skin is so dark that you’re not going to get a lot of signalling. So, alright. So okay, so back to this little diagram. Now here’s the idea. And this is also deeply informed, although I didn’t know it when I developed, when I was working on these ideas. This is deeply informed by a guy named Norbert Weiner who was one of the 20th century’s massive geniuses and a force behind the development of computation. And so this is a cybernetic model. He invented cybernetics. Now I didn’t learn this from Norbert Weiner because I learned it from Geoffrey Gray. But Geoffrey Gray’s sources learned it from Norbert Weiner way back in the 1940s. In fact there was a convention back in the 1940s that Weiner presented many of his ideas at that many psychologists attended, including Jean Piaget. And so Piaget’s theory is very much influenced by cybernetics as well. And many, many of the standard psychology cognitive models are cybernetic. So they’re grounded in thinking that’s actually engineering thinking and not psychological thinking at all. Yep. No, Dianetics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so how might you conceptualize the fundamental elements of a personality? This is what it looks like to me. The first thing is you’re a moving creature. So here’s a funny story. There’s this little animal whose name I forget. And it’s an ocean animal and in its juvenile state it swims around. Okay, so in its juvenile state it has to coordinate its movements and interact with the changing environment. So it has a brain. But then when it turns into an adult it attaches itself to a rock and turns into something that’s sort of like a piece of coral. It promptly digests its own brain. So the issue is you don’t really need a brain if you’re not going to go anywhere, right? So a brain is a going places thing. And we have a very big brain and so it’s like we’re always zooming around doing things. And we’ve got these hands that enable us to manipulate things and transform things. And so the brain is for doing things. It’s not just for perceiving. Roughly speaking, the back half of your brain is for perception, the cortical part, mostly visual perception, but some auditory and touch, a lot of visual. And the front part is for output, motor action. And as you proceed, imagine the front part starts halfway here, as you proceed from the midline forward the action becomes more and more abstract until when you’re dealing with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex you’re thinking abstractly. Now people think that when they’re thinking abstractly they’re thinking about representations of the world. You know, because we think we think about objects. But that isn’t what we’re doing. What we’re doing is rehearsing potential schemas of action. So we have this abstract space which you might think about as a duplicate world. You have an idea, you test the idea like you would test it if you were acting it out in the world, and if the consequence of the imaginary testing is you encounter grief, then you don’t implement the idea in the world. Now you know that doesn’t always work because there’s trade-offs between short-term pleasure and long-term punishment that makes it complicated. But what seems to have happened is that as we’ve evolved, we’re very sneaky creatures. You know, for billions of years the only way that you could figure out whether you were right or wrong was to go out and do something, and if you died you were wrong. But now you can think about doing something, and if the consequence of running the simulation in your head is that you die, then you don’t do it. And so what you’re basically doing is spinning off multiple potential use in multiple potential universes and running them as simulations. And now we really do that now because we’ve externalized it onto the computer, which is what we’re doing with really, really complex video games. So it’s so smart. It’s an amazing evolutionary advance. Now it doesn’t work that well because sometimes you run the simulation and you think, you know, this is a stupid idea and then you promptly have eight beers so that you can go do it. But, you know, all things considered, that’s still what this abstract space is for. I should tell you something about this too because you’re going to hear from neuropsychologists that a lot of what the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex does, the prefrontal cortex in general, is impulse control. And that’s wrong. That is not what it does. And part of the reason I know this is because the correlation between prefrontal cortical cognitive ability, which is very tightly associated with IQ by the way, like the correlation is like 0.9, so you could even argue it’s the same thing, fluid IQ in particular. The correlation between dorsolateral prefrontal cognitive capacity and conscientiousness, which is like long-term goal-directed, future-oriented, planned activity, is 0. Okay, 0 is a very bad correlation when you’re trying… you know the old idea, correlation doesn’t imply causality? Well, wrong. It does strongly imply causality. It doesn’t demonstrate it because with every causal relationship there’s a correlation. So 100% of causally related items have a correlation, right? 100% correlation, so well not necessarily, but it implies correlation. It does not prove it. Right. But 0, that’s bad. That means that those things aren’t related. Now, if you think about it, you can understand why. They have to be unrelated because if you embodied your abstractions, then you wouldn’t be able to experiment with them. You’d just act them out and then bang, you’d be dead. So you have to separate the cognitive activity from the embodiment completely so that you can choose which of your potential selves to incarnate, so to speak. Now the prefrontal cortex is a complex place and the lower parts of it seem to be more related to the relationship between cognitive activity and the control of behaviour, but We have tried 50 tasks, I bet, trying to get a correlation with conscientiousness and we haven’t found one. We cannot, the reason I’m telling you this is because conscientiousness is a very good predictor of long term life success, right? You guys get your grades for two reasons. One you’re smart, assuming you are, and two that you work hard, assuming that you do. That eats up almost all the variance in your grades. Creativity is zero correlation with grades at U of T, by the way, which I think is extraordinarily comical and completely unsurprising. So it’s hard for an institution to grade creativity because it’s an institution. And the problem with being creative is that you force people to come up with a new grading scheme. It’s like, no, they’re not going to do that. So right, because you come up with something creative, it’s different. Well, what do you do with that? You say, don’t do that. That’s not what I want. Even if it’s a great thing, it’s like, yeah, yeah, take your great thing and go somewhere else with it. I’ve got five minutes to mark your damn paper. So anyways, this capacity for abstraction is divorced almost completely from embodiment. And that’s a good thing because that allows us to experiment. But it’s a bad thing because actually doing the embodiment turns out to be very difficult. It’s like your body’s got all these habits built into it that you’ve been working on for a long time. Here’s another piece of advice. things that you don’t want to become. Because one of the things that happens, let’s say you take Danish speakers and you play Danish backwards to them, and you do a scan of brain activity. It’s like their brain’s lighting up like mad because they don’t know how to listen to Danish backwards. So you get a whole bunch of brain involved in a new task. But then as you practice the task and routinize it, less and less brain is involved. So what happens is the activation. This is in your standard right-hand male. And the reason I’m using that as an example is because that’s the kind of simplest default brain in a sense. Women are more diffusely organized, so it’s harder to exactly talk about their neurological structure in a simple way. But in a right-handed male, what happens is the activity starts to shift to the left and then it shifts backwards. And as it does so, the amount of tissue that’s activated gets smaller and smaller and smaller until you’ve built a little machine that takes care of that sort of thing. But the thing about that machine is that it’s a little machine. It’s a habit. And it’s actually there. It’s built into you. So be careful what you practice because if you practice it enough, then it becomes… it’s like it’s you. It’s the default you. And then if you want to change it, you can’t just undo that stupid machine. It’s there permanently. What you have to do is you have to build another little machine that shuts it off. And then another machine that does the other thing. And then if you get stressed, the little machine that shuts the first machine off will stop working and back your stupid habit will come. So people used to talk about the development of character. And there was something about that that was absolutely right because character is how you build yourself across time. And it really, really matters. Only practice what you want to become. If you practice other things, well then you’ll become them. That’s not so good. Okay, so back to this. Now, Gray and Sokolov and Vinogradov, we’re going to talk about them for a minute. Now they used to talk about animals. They were mostly thinking about animals, rats mostly, as having an expectancy model. And so you take a rat, you throw him in a new environment. What does he do? Well the first thing he does is freeze because God only knows what’s out there. And so he’s like a paralyzed rat. He’s just seen the medusa. He’s paralyzed. And then if nothing attacks him, he starts to calm down a bit and then he’ll start sniffing because rats are all smell. And he sniffs around and he’s trying to detect cats, say. Now rats have such a good sense of smell. If a rat eats something that makes it sick, it will never eat it again. But if a rat smells the breath of a rat that ate something that made him sick, he won’t eat that either. Right, so rats, eh? Man, they can smell things. And animals are built around the smell brain, so they’re a lot different than us. We have… did I tell you about the t-shirt study of symmetrical men? Oh, that’s a funny one. Yeah, so we know that one of the things that signifies physical beauty is symmetry. And the reason for that is that all things considered, symmetrical people are more healthy than asymmetrical people. Asymmetry indicates that something’s gone wrong somewhere in the process of development. So we like symmetry and beauty. And that’s fine. And that’s all the way across the animal kingdom. So butterflies, there are butterflies that won’t mate with another butterfly if it deviates from symmetry some absurdly tiny amount. Like really, it’s micro measurement deviation. I guess they have a butterfly template, and if the potential mating butterfly doesn’t match, it’s like, flitter off. You’re not getting anywhere. So that’s fine, but symmetry. So this researcher, God only knows what possessed him. He took a bunch of men ranging from symmetrical to asymmetrical, judged by a panel, and then he had them shower, and then he had them wear a t-shirt for like four hours. And then all of them. And then he gave these t-shirts to women and said, okay, rate the scent of the t-shirt from positive to negative. Like well, the women overwhelmingly preferred the symmetrical guys. So yeah, no kidding. So you just bloody well never know what’s behind that attraction. We know something. Symmetry’s a big one. But there’s a bunch of other ones too. Yeah? I was just wondering how that would correlate with, I know, the attraction to smells also have to do with your optimal mate from a new perspective. Oh yeah, there’s a bunch of things. Yeah, so here’s another study. This is a cool one. So this is one of the few psychological facts. We don’t have many psychological facts. We have a lot of hypotheses about things, but this is as close to a fact as we’ve ever got. So back decades ago, the Israeli’s children were raised in kibbutzim. And those were basically daycare for kids, group daycare. But the kids were more separated from their parents than they might be in the regular daycare. Anyways, all the Israeli kids were in these kibbutzis. And so then we have detailed marriage records of the kids. And so you know that people very seldom marry their siblings. And they’re very seldomly in a sexual relationship with their siblings. And you might say, well why is that? It’s the case across cultures with very specific exceptions. Like often high ranking nobility can, you know, they have an option. But generally speaking, there’s a powerful incest taboo as well as between parents and children. So some researcher decided, well how do you know who your sibling is? So roughly speaking, what exactly is it that’s not turning you on, let’s say? Well so they checked out the kibbutzim records and they found that Israeli children who were raised in the same kibbutz never married each other. Whatever happened seemed to, you know, it was as if that close, close contact in the very early years triggered whatever the sibling anti-response is, and that was that. It’s probably smell. That would be my guess. Now there’s also another study. One of the things they found with mice, I hope it’s mice, is that mice will not mate – is that right? Okay, I’m going to garble this up, but it doesn’t matter because the point, the underlying point is valid even though I’m going to mess up the details. Animal studies indicated, if I remember correctly, that mice will not mate with other mice who have an RH factor that would increase the probability of a miscarriage, and neither will women. So women – well not with mice obviously – but women do not like the smell of men who have RH factors that in combination with theirs would produce suboptimal offspring. And when you ask them why they don’t like the smell, they say, it smells like my brother. Something like that. So anyways, that’s quite remarkable. Now back to the rats and the expectancy model. Okay, so we already know that you can get an orienting response out of a human being if something deviates from expectancy. Now people started studying this in rats, and the original conceptualization was expectation. So you have an expectation of how the world is going to lay itself out, that’s your model, and then if the world deviates from that, then you have an orienting reflex, and what the orienting reflex does is protect you from predation. That’s the first level of the orienting response. It’s really, really primitive. It’s mediated only by a few neuronal connections, so it’s unbelievably rapid. And then after that, there’s anxiety and the proclivity to explore. That both gets activated. So it’s first protective. Then you orient towards the… imagine you’re walking down the street and hear a really loud noise behind you. It’s like really loud, so it startles you. You go into a crouch so that if a tiger had jumped on your back, it would be hard for it to get your neck. And then, you know, tenths of a second later, you’ll turn, assuming you don’t get attacked by a tiger, you’ll swivel and turn and orient all your senses towards the locale that was specified by the sound, because you have a stereo auditory system and you can localize events in space using that. So you orient towards it. That’s part of the orienting reflex. It’s a reflex. It’s not voluntary. And then, once you’ve got your eyes trained on it and your ears, then you start to explore it and then you might freeze. You might get out of there, which is a panic response. That’s another thing that can be triggered by the orienting reflex, a different circuit. Or you might think, wow, what’s going on over there? It looks interesting. And then you go approach it. Now those two… the exploratory part is mediated in part by the hypothalamus, which is a very, very old system, and it has a whole section, about half of it is devoted to the circuitry that you would use to figure out what was going on if something that you didn’t understand happened. You have a whole other circuit that’s hippocampal and amygdalaic that regulates the exploratory circuit that says be careful because while you’re gathering information you might get killed. And the anxiety circuit takes primacy, generally speaking, over the exploratory circuit. And the reason for that is you don’t want to get information and be dead. So caution is the watchword. Now the other thing that you might think about, which is an extremely useful thing to think about… Okay let’s go back to that diagram I showed you with the hierarchy. Right? So you’ve got the motor actions at the bottom and you’ve got the high level abstractions at the top. Okay, so you’re tickling the baby and somebody comes home and says, if you tickle the baby this way then the baby has more fun. And so how do you respond to that? Well maybe you’re a little peeved because you’re doing perfectly fine with this baby and you know someone’s coming and altering your tickling micro-personality. And if you’re irritable you’ll say, well why don’t you just go off and find a baby of your own to play with. And if you’re not that irritable you might say, well okay, show me what to do. There’ll be a tinge of negative emotion there, generally speaking, depending on how the person has approached it. But your self-concept can probably handle a micro-change to your tickling routine. So that’s going to produce only a little bit of anxiety and irritation. And the reason for that is that the threat to you is proportionate to the magnitude of the system that’s being modified by the challenge. Now this is really useful to know, okay, practically, and this is why. So let’s say you’re having an argument with your partner and you say, you’re a stupid person. You’ve always been a stupid person and as far as I can tell, as far into the future as I can see, you’re going to remain a stupid person. So what are they supposed to do? What are they going to do when you say that? They’re going to cry, like if you mean it. They’re going to get angry, if you mean it. And they’re not going to like you very much. And why is that? Well it’s like, it’s assault, basically. The only way, really, the only thing that you can do in a situation like that is walk away, ignore it, respond in kind, or it degenerates into violence. That’s it. Because there’s no discussion. You haven’t left the person anywhere to go. You’ve gone right to the top of their hierarchy and said everything about you is wrong, and worse than that, all the mechanisms that we could use to correct it won’t work. So those are fighting words. So don’t do that unless you want to have a fight. So then you might say, well what would you do instead? And the answer is, deliver the least amount of information you possibly can. And so let’s say you come home and your person is watching TV, and you’re kind of hoping they greet you at the door. You shouldn’t break down into tears and say you’re a stupid person, you’ve always been a stupid person, and you’re going to be a stupid person in the future. You should say, I have this peculiarity, and that is that when I come home, I don’t have enough confidence to just be happy. I would like you to come and say, just shut the TV off for two minutes, come to the front door and say hello. Then you can go back and watch your TV. Would it be okay if you did that? And they’ll think, well you’ll have to pay for it somehow. But then they’ll probably do it. And so the thing is, you’ve got to specify the routine that you want transformed at the highest possible level of resolution. And you want to recommend the minimal necessary change that will satisfy you. So you can’t say, if you love me you know how to greet me at the door. Not helpful, because they’re stupid. Right? And so are you. So you have to spell it out. It’s like, what do you want? Exactly, what would make you satisfied? And then you have to have your person grudgingly practice that a few times, and you have to let them do it very badly, and also in a bad temper. And then you have to reward them for it, and then maybe three months later they’ll do it properly. So you need to know that, because that’s what people are like. It’s very hard for them to learn new things, and they’re very resistant to it, but they’re very responsive to reward. So another thing, this is partly what B.F. Skinner figured out. So when he was training rats, and he wanted a rat to do something, one of the things he would do is he put, maybe he was going to train the rat to climb a little ladder. I mean he could get rats to climb ladders and then climb across the little monkey bars and then spin around three times and then whack a ball and then eat something. He got incredibly complex behaviour out of rats. And the way he did that was patience. So he put the ladder in the cage and the rat would just run around doing rat things, and then it would put its hand on the first round. Skinner would give it a pellet. And so he did it, you know, even once, the rat’s going to be like standing in the immediate vicinity of the ladder, and then the frequency with which it’s going to go like this is just increased. So then he does it again, bang, pellet. Well soon the rat is just going like this, right? So then you wait until the rat tries the other hand. So you give it a pellet then, well then it’s going like this. And then because it’s going to get bored it’ll go like this, it’ll hit the next stair, bang, you give it a pellet. Soon the rat’s climbing and doing all the little things you want it to do. Now the problem with that is you have to be patient. You have to wait until the rat does what you want. Okay, that’s more relationship advice. Wait until the rat does what you want and then reward it. And it’s unbelievably useful. It’s also extraordinarily positive. I mean I’m being, you know, comical insofar as I can manage that about this situation. But people love reward and they love attention. People love attention more than anything else. And so if you watch through the day and when your partner does something that’s good, say bam that was good, or something like that, you can be inventive and then they’ll do it more. And if you do that a whole bunch, like for a year, they’ll be doing things that are good for you just all the time. But you have to be patient, which is very annoying, and you have to suppress your response to only respond to negative things. You know, because what we know about the expectancy models is that a deviation from expectation produces a burst of negative emotions. So you come home and the whole house is clean, but there’s like, I don’t know, the dog has shed on the rug or something and the person overlooked that. It’s like you’re not going to see the clean house, you’re going to see the rug with the dog fur on it. You’re going to say, why didn’t you clean up the rug with the dog fur? And they’re going to say, good luck getting me to clean up the house again. And you know, because the thing is, is the exception stands out. And what’s done doesn’t. And the reason for that is you can just ignore what’s done. Because it’s done. It doesn’t get in your way. So it gets invisible really quickly. So you really got to watch that tendency. One of the things Nietzsche said was that if you really want to punish someone, you don’t punish them when they do something wrong. Because they expect that. That’s not a punishment. They expect that. They might even be relieved by it. You want to punish them when they do something right. Because then you’ll really hurt them. And so that’s something to think about. And if you’re in a relationship, man, if someone’s done something right, do not punish them. You do that two or three times and that’s it. And you’re not going to get them to do that anymore. So judiciousness. Watch what they’re doing. If something happens that’s good, notice it. And if they’ve done a bunch of things, don’t concentrate on the things they did wrong. That’s not smart. It’s really hard on them too. In some sense this sounds manipulative and selfish. Because I’m teaching you how to train your partner. But you should also teach them how to train you. Because it would be really nice if you could come home and the person would say, well what did you do today? And you say, here’s a bunch of things I did. And they say, well this looks really good and that was great. Why don’t you do some more of that? And you’re like, oh boy, it was a great day. And so you can train them to train you properly. And that’s a really helpful thing. Especially if you do it over a few years. That’s how you have a good relationship. Because you’re both clueless as hell to begin with. You don’t know even what would make you happy, much less what would make the other person happy. And so you’ve got to figure these things out bit by bit. And then you have to inform each other. And then you have to be patient enough to let your partner do these things really badly. I’ll give you another example. Sometimes I see couples sporadically in my clinical practice. I’m not a couples counsellor. But sometimes when I’m working with someone, there’s an issue that needs to be discussed with both people, because otherwise it’s just stupid. And one of the things I often recommend to people, especially once they have kids, is that they set aside, to use an anachronistic phrase, date nights. Well everyone hates that idea. It’s like they say, well, you know, they’ll just say, I’m not doing that. That would be one objection. We’re just not doing that. You know, that’s what we did before we got married. They’ll say, well, my partner would never go for that. They’ve got a bunch of excuses why that isn’t going to work. And so I’ve heard all those excuses. I know all of them. And then maybe I convince them, yeah, yeah, sure, I know, this is stupid, it’s awkward, it’s artificial. That’s okay, just try it once. So then they go and try it. And then they come back and they say, we had an absolutely miserable time. Really, we had a miserable time. We couldn’t agree on what movie to go to. And then, you know, she took me to her movie and I really didn’t like it. So we fought all the way home. We’re never doing that again. And I say, well really, you’ve got 30 years, 400 days, that’s 12,000 days. Okay, so you’re not going to do that. You’re going to spend the next 12,000 days without having any real romantic evenings and interactions with your spouse. That’s your plan. And I like doing arithmetic with my clients. Hey, they hate that. They hate arithmetic. They hate arithmetic. It’s like, well no, that sounds like a bad idea. I said, okay, well, would you like some romance in your life, or are you just done with that? Well really, like, you know, people can go for a long time with no romance at all. I say, well no, maybe we’d like some of that. Well how much? Once a year? Well no. Once a month? Well no. Once every two weeks? Well sometimes people are really busy. It’s like, okay, that beats the hell out of zero. Once a week? Twice a week? Okay, whatever. We’re going to start with a range. What would a good evening look like? Like if you could both get exactly what you wanted, what would it look like? Well then they have to think about that. Because the previous theory was, my stupid partner should know what I like, and that’s what the partner is thinking too. It’s like, good luck with that, because no, they don’t have a clue, especially if they’re men, they don’t have a clue. So you have to tell them what you want and how they could deliver it, and vice versa, which is very awkward and horrible. And then you have to practice it for six months. Because you know, it takes a lot of practice to do something sophisticated really well. And then if you do that, it’s like poof, you got it for the rest of your life. So it’s worth the aggravation. You know, the first time the rat puts its paw on the ladder, it’s just sort of doing it accidentally. You can’t expect it to do it well. And that’s exactly how to view your own progress and the progress of your partner. Because let them do it badly for a while. At least they’re doing it. So if you think they should do it faster, well look real hard and see how easy it is to change your own behaviour. Because it’s really hard to change your own behaviour. Everybody says, I’m going to exercise three times a week, New Year’s, and it’s like no one does. They buy the memberships, and then they feel guilty for having them, but they don’t actually go to the gym. And that’s a perfect example of how difficult it is to transform behaviour. Okay. So, back to the diagram here. Expectation. So, the early models of expectation were cognitive models. And the idea was that the rat makes a little model of the world, and then he operates in that world according to what he expects. Now there’s a problem with that model. There’s a bunch of them. The first is, now we know that animals don’t make comprehensive models of the world. And that’s a huge problem. The problem is, what do they get rid of and how? But the way you get rid of that problem is that you introduce motivation into the equation. And it’s interesting because the behaviourists always thought of animals as blank slates, and so they never really took motivation seriously as a contributor to cognitive modelling. And, it’s also the case that probably ever since the Enlightenment, people have thought about emotion and motivation as forces opposed to rationality. So you were rational insofar as you didn’t let your emotions and your motivations influence you. But that’s a foolish theory. There are times when it’s inappropriate for certain purposes to let certain motivations interfere with your observations. But generally speaking, you never think about anything without being motivated. Because why would you? Like there’s a trillion things you could think of, and you’re not going to think of most of them. You have to have a reason to think of them. The reason is that all the time you’re operating in some sort of motivational structure. And you can sort of model them using the same kind of hierarchy that we used to model the personality as such. So I’ll give you an example. So let’s think of some basic motivations and emotions. Those aren’t good categories by the way, because there’s no such thing as motivations and there’s no such thing as emotions. The things we loosely categorize into motivations and emotions each have their own brain circuitry. And so there are similarities between them and there are differences. They’re not clean categories. But we’re going to use the terminology anyways because we don’t have a better one. For my purposes, you can roughly define a motivation as opposed to emotion as a motivation is really something that establishes, you could say a goal, but it doesn’t. It establishes one of these. It doesn’t establish a goal and it doesn’t drive behavior. So what it does, let’s say you’re hungry and it’s nighttime and you want to have a peanut butter sandwich. So imagine you’re sitting there typing away and all of a sudden this little image of having something to eat creeps into your head. It’s usually quite specific. There’s something that you would like to eat. So you think, well I could really use some popcorn, let’s say. So you’re typing away and the stupid popcorn thing keeps popping up and finally your whole body’s starting to get into the popcorn and you think, oh to hell with it, I’ll go make some popcorn. And so what’s happened is that your hypothalamus, roughly speaking, is monitoring your internal body state and it thinks that you need some, maybe you need some salt, but maybe you need some food. And so it’s going to start popping up. Not a drive. It’s not like all of a sudden you’re a robot, like a popcorn seeking robot, and you’re your chained together conditioned popcorn making and eating routines. That isn’t what happens. What happens instead is that you start to envision a new state of being. And that state of being has a goal, which is you eating some popcorn, and it has you where you are, which is in an insufficient state of popcorn. And then what’s happening as well is that the motor processes that you would use to implement that are also disinhibited. They’re there. You already know how to do it. They get disinhibited. Or you could think of them as getting primed. They’re not. They’re getting disinhibited. But you can think of it as being primed. And at some point that becomes overwhelming enough, say pressure from the hypothalamus, which is really what’s bloody well in control, says yeah, yeah, enough internet surfing. Off to the popcorn. And so you leap up and then what do you do? You reorient the way you’re looking at the world. Everything in the world becomes low resolution or even zero, except those few things that are relevant to your new quest. Down the stairs you go, you find the right pan, you find the popcorn, getting irritated if you can’t find it, right? Because now, you see, it’s interesting because your emotions align along your goals. As long as you’re pursuing a beeline to your goal and everything’s laying itself out, Not as you expect, but as you want, then your emotions stay positive. But as soon as something deviates, then you’re irritated. And the reason for that is that, like let’s say you can’t find the popcorn pan. Well, your brain is computing, well, something like this. This is obviously not how it works. But it’s an X amount of energy and matter from popcorn means it has X value. If you expend a whole bunch of energy running around in your clueless state trying to acquire popcorn, you can easily get to the point where you’ve expended more energy and time than the popcorn delivers. And if you do that for a month, then you die. So it’s perfectly reasonable for you to get irritated when the path length to your destination increases radically. And you might get even more irritated if you can’t find any popcorn. And then it’s like, oh no, I have to dispense with the popcorn micro-personality, and it’s all irritated because it’s sort of alive. It’s irritated that you have to squash it. And then you have to come up with, well, maybe I could have a peanut butter sandwich. You know, and pop, up comes a new little micro-personality that orients itself towards the goal. And so all the time you’re doing that, you’re always in a motivated state. Now it’s not a drive because it’s not deterministic. But it does have a behavioural element. You have all these Piagetian sub-routines that are stored in your body, you know, all your body capacity, all your skills. And you know which set of those you’re likely to use if you’re going to do X thing, and so those get prepared. And then your perceptions orient towards the new goal. It’s like a hunting goal. You’re fixated on it. Then your emotions orient along that. So as long as things are going well, you’re happy, you’re hopeful, things are proceeding, that’s positive emotion, that’s dopaminergically mediated. And if things aren’t going well, then it’s either, well, it’s any amount of negative emotion from mild irritation to like full-blown temper tantrum. So that’s, and you’re, okay, now that’s the simple story. The complex story is, okay, you’re hungry, you’re thirsty, you’re tired, you’re hot, you’re cold, you’re lonely. You need to play. Okay, so let’s say you’ve got, for the sake of argument, let’s say you have eight fundamental motivational systems. Now who cares how many? It’s a finite set. It’s under twenty. It depends on whether you include anger. Is anger motivation or emotion? Is pain motivation or emotion? We don’t care because they’re not formal categories. So anyways, there’s a set number of them. And then, so they have to run to satiation. And so what satiation means is they set up an end state, you perform the routines, you achieve the end state, the system shuts down. It’s satiated. Now you’ll experience that as satisfaction, not as pleasure. Now you think, well, what’s the difference? It’s tight. It’s complicated. But it’s important. The kind of positive emotion that people really like is associated with the search and the hope, not with the acquiring. Because what happens when you acquire is, well, you’re no longer in this state, which has an impulse to action in it, but that’s exciting. That’s fun. You’re on the track of something. It’s like you’re alive while you’re searching for something. Well then you find it. It’s like, good, you need to find it. But then the whole thing disappears and you’re sitting there thinking, well I’ve just graduated. Now what? Right? Because that’s what will happen when you graduate. It’s like, hey, you’re a student. You’ve got status. You’ve got a hierarchy of values. You’ve got a way of orienting yourself in the world and you have an identity. So you’re in there and everybody’s happy about it. So then one day you graduate. It’s like success. Well, really. It’s like poof, that’s gone. And the next thing you know you’re handing out coffee at the local Starbucks. So you get the point. You’ve experienced this all the time in your life. You hit a pinnacle. You’ve attained something. But the problem is that now what? You have to conjure up a whole new you. So some of it is satisfying. You’ve accomplished the goal. But some of it’s just a big pain in the neck. It’s like, uh oh, student me has disappeared and now it’s frantically searching for employment me. And that me doesn’t have the status and is in a space of much more radical uncertainty. So don’t be thinking that getting to where you want to go is what you want. What you want is to bloody well make sure that the voyage is worth it. Now it’s very interesting because people are really, really wired up this way. And I think it’s because we’re so radically exploratory. So when you’re proceeding towards a valued goal, let’s call that a cue that goal attainment is about to occur. It’s going to occur in some chain. A leads to B, B leads to C, C leads to D and so on. You’re like a hound on a trail. It’s positive. It’s like, yeah, this is working. Yeah, this is working. Yeah, this is working. That’s positive. It’s moving you ahead. And that’s really where you experience a lot of your positive emotion. That’s dopaminergicly mediated. That’s the system you’ll kick with cocaine or any of the other drugs of abuse that people use that don’t quell anxiety. It’s a very, very desirable motivational state. I read a while back somebody who said, you can buy anything but you can’t buy wanting anything. And that’s a staggeringly interesting comment because you think, well, is wanting a positive state? Well, you don’t have it. So that’s kind of annoying. And you think, well, no, I don’t want to want things. I want to have them. It’s like, yeah, don’t be so sure about that. So one of the things, one of the ways people have figured out how to deal with that is that they decide to want something that they can’t get. And that’s actually extraordinarily smart. And it’s a deep archetypal idea. So here’s an example. You’ve seen Pinocchio, right? Okay, so Pinocchio is about a puppet, a marionette. That means someone else is pulling his strings, right? We don’t know who. Sometimes it’s virtually Satan himself. You remember the Stromboli? There’s another character just after him. He’s the coachman. The coachman. He’s like king of the thieves. And he ends up pulling Pinocchio’s strings. So there’s one scene in the Disney movie where the coachman reveals himself and he’s completely red. He has really big teeth. He’s a satanic figure. And he scares the fox and the cat who are like low-level criminals who think they’re bad but have never really met bad. He just scares them right into the corner. So all of a sudden this person opens up and reveals the archetype behind and then closes back down, pulling Pinocchio’s strings. Okay now, he’s a marionette. Well the first question that arises is who’s pulling your strings? And that’s a really good question. One of the things Jung said was people don’t have ideas. Ideas have people. And you can think about that for about three months and it should make you afraid the whole time. Because as soon as you get that, you think uh-oh. Like let’s say you’re an ideologue of some sort, because some of you probably are. Socialist, fascist, environmentalist, something that has ist on the end. It’s like you think those are your ideas. They’re not. You’re their tools. And that’s fine. If you want to be a tool of those ideas, you go right ahead. But you don’t know where those ideas are leading. And they could well be leading somewhere you do not want to go. Now the plus side is you don’t have to take any responsibility for it because you’re just drifting in an ocean of thought. But one of the things that I learned from Jung was you should figure out just exactly which ideas are possessing you and then you should decide if those are your ideas. And the probability that they are is zero. They’re not your ideas. It’s hard to have your own ideas. You have to derive them from your own experience. And especially when you’re not very old, you don’t have that much experience. And so you can grab books full of ideas and claim them for your own, which is not acceptable. You can use those ideas to inform your ideas, but they’re not your ideas. You’re just a puppet. You know, and the Pinocchio movie is very interesting that way because he’s a puppet of forces that are really not on his side. Seriously not on his side. So okay, anyways, back to the Pinocchio movie. Give me one sec. So Geppetto doesn’t have a son. Now Geppetto’s a good guy, right? He’s a toy maker. He’s got this little warm cabin. It’s cozy. He’s a good guy. He’s friendly. He has a little cat. He pays attention to his little fish. He takes care of that. So we know Geppetto’s a good guy. And he makes this puppet and he thinks, man, I’ve got a puppet, but maybe I’d rather have something real. That’s a good question for parents. You want a puppet or do you want something real? And the answer is generally, often, I’ll just have a puppet as long as it does exactly what it does. Maybe it’ll be a medical school puppet. Because that’s certainly one good form of puppet. So okay, so Geppetto decides because he’s a good guy. He thinks, no, no, I don’t want this thing to have strings. I want it to be its own thing. I want it to be autonomous, individual, real. Okay, so what does he do? He wishes, right? What does he wish on? A star. Why do people wish on stars of all the crazy things? Well, it’s a divine thing, right? It’s a divine thing. It’s like there’s heaven. It’s all… It’s the infinite. You go out at night and you see the stars, which you can’t in the city, but you go out somewhere dark and you see the stars and it’s like it’s you and the infinite. And it really is. It’s a perfect representation of your relationship with the infinite because the universe is about as infinite as you need. And it’s going to give you a sense of awe and that’s partly why archaic people thought that God was in the sky. It’s like it’s not… they weren’t stupid, these people. They thought God is what fills you with awe. So you look at the sky and you think, wow, you know, that’s something. It’s an instinct. It’s not a cognitive construction. So anyways, you aim at a star. It’s this twinkling thing in the darkness, right? It’s the light in the darkness. And it’s above the worldly environment. It’s something transcendent. And so that’s what you better wish is on. It’s like, aim high. That’s what he says. Aim high. And he thinks, well, it’s not very likely, but I might as well aim high. That’s a very good piece of advice. You want to aim so high you can’t attain it. Because then you’ve got something worth… you might think, that’s such perverse. That’s such a perverse piece of advice. Why would you chase something you can’t have? Well the answer might be because the chasing is worth it. And then you might think, well, what’s worth it? Well I can give you a hint about that too. It’s like, develop your character. Because what you’ve got is what you carry with you wherever you go. And it’s way better to be able to do things than to be rich. Because if you’re rich, well, then that disappears. Poof, you’re poor. But if you can do things, short of being demolished, and even then people are unbelievable at overcoming those things. It’s like, you’re on the way. Here’s an interesting experiment we did with undergraduate women. So there’s this idea in evolutionary psychology. It’s called hypergamy. And hypergamy is the tendency of women to choose mates who are slightly older than them. It’s about four years on average, cross-culturally, and who are higher in the status hierarchy than they are. Okay, it’s a very well-documented tendency. And people who are cynical about that think women want wealth. And I thought, well it’s not a bad theory because it kind of evens the scales. It’s like you’re going to have a family. You’re basically a chimpanzee baby clings to its mother’s fur for 5,000 miles in the three or four years that it’s doing the clinging. It’s like it’s a major league impediment. You know, and if you’re a new mother, your life is so much more complicated than it is when you’re single that it’s not even the same conceptual universe. It’s a major league responsibility. And it slows you down. So then you might think, well the logical thing to do would be to balance the scales a little bit, and that’s perfectly reasonable. But I thought, no, I bet your women are smarter than that. I bet you can fool them. And the pick-up artists do that all the time because they mimic status. So you can fool them, but they’re smart. So what we did – I never published this for a bunch of reasons – okay, so what we did was we took pictures of the same guy, you know, just kind of an average-looking guy, he’s all right. And we had four stories about him. And one story was, poor useless guy. That’s an easy story, right? You know, sits on his couch, plays video games, eats Cheetos, covered with dust.