https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZHmklvx9oJ4
So momentarily we’re going to return to the basic story. And I want to talk to you today about how your brain organizes your perceptions and then I want to talk to you about how that’s represented in the mythology. First thing I’d like to point out is that we talked about the difference between Darwinian and Newtonian viewpoints a while back. One claim that you might make if you were Darwinian is that whatever your brain is adapted to is reality. That seems to be the central claim of Darwinian evolution is that you can’t define reality any more accurately than that which selects. Now I want to tell you about how I think the brain is organized and then I want to show you, I hope, that the way fundamental narratives work can be mapped onto that brain structure. And to me that implies that there’s something right about the fundamental narratives because otherwise why would they map onto the brain structures that have evolved to adapt us to the environment. Now you know people think about reality in objective terms and they think about it as decomposable into tiny subunits but I think that that’s a limited viewpoint, a powerful but limited viewpoint. I think it’s much more realistic to assume that whatever reality is is more like a continual interplay of very, very complex patterns. And I suppose you could make the case that those patterns are ultimately made out of particles, but even that’s not exactly true because the particles have to be arrayed in space. So that’s part of the atomic theory is that there’s not just particles, subatomic particles and atomic particles, but that they’re arrayed in space and if they’re arrayed in space that means the manner in which they’re arrayed can be informative. And if you reduce the phenomena to the particle without taking into account the patterning of the array of particles then there’s levels and levels and levels of information that you lose. And those levels of information are, they may not be relevant for our physical understanding of the makeup of atomic and subatomic particles, but they’re definitely relevant to whether or not we can walk across the street safely. And so I would say if you’re related to reality properly the kind of information that you’re processing is precisely the kind of information that allows you to cross the street properly and to do all the other things during your day and your weeks and your months that you have to in order to stay alive and fundamentally in some sense to propagate. So alright, so we’ll start with the neuropsychological argument. Now we’ve already established the idea that these little frames of reference or maps or stories or whatever you call them, I’ll call them stories I think from here on in, are little goal-directed units and they’re units of conception and emotion and perception and behaviour. They’re little sub-personalities and the sub-personality has an initial starting point and a destination point and then it can implement behaviours to transform the starting point into the destination point. And then you might say, well what forms these little sub-personalities? The answer to that is very complex but one answer is fundamental motivations. And so I arranged the fundamental motivations on this particular diagram pointing out that you can roughly consider motivations as those that maintain you and those that propagate you. Now it’s just a heuristic, it’s just a way of thinking about it. There’s self-maintenance, there’s thermal regulation, thirst, hunger and elimination, there’s all sorts of other things as well but those will do for the time being and then under self-propagation there’s affiliative desire and sexual desire. Now the thing that’s quite interesting about all this is that there are brain structures that underlie the manifestation of these fundamental sub-personalities. Now people tend to think about them either as motivations or emotions. I think that’s another useful heuristic in that you could say roughly speaking that a motivation pops up an entire frame of reference and an emotion tends to orient you within that frame of reference. But that’s only a conceptual simplification because what you see when you look at the actual brain structures is that there isn’t an emotion centre. There are a bunch of micro units in the brain and there are separable micro units for different emotions and different motivations and they don’t necessarily have that much in common in terms of their locale except that they tend to be relatively deep in the brain. So some are hypothalamic and some are in the amygdala and some are in the periaqueductal grey which seems to be responsible for pain responses. So we can classify things as motivations and emotions but that doesn’t map one to one on the underlying brain structures. So now I think what we’ll do with regards to talking about the brain is we’ll start from the bottom up and it’s appropriate to start from the bottom up because you are more dependent on your ancient brain structures than you are on your modern brain structures in that if you damage your modern brain structures, and I mean relatively modern let’s say the ones that have really evolved in great detail over the last two million years, the cortical cap, particularly the prefrontal cortex, a lot of the visual cortex, if you damage that you can pretty much go on. Now you’re going to have one impairment or another impairment but you can still stay alive. However, there are structures that are lower down that if you damage that’s the end of view. So for example, the ascending reticular activating system which is the thing that wakes you up when you’re asleep at night when a noise occurs that shouldn’t occur. It seems to be the activating centre for consciousness, whatever that means. It’s way deep down in the brain. It’s way down at the top of the spinal cord, roughly speaking. If you twist your head in a car accident a little bit too roughly and you shear off the ascending fibres then you’re in a coma permanently and nothing can wake you up. And that’s pretty interesting, you know, that consciousness, which we think of again, our tendency is to think about that as a function of the higher cortical systems, is dependent completely on something that’s unbelievably ancient. So you know, and it begs the question, well, at exactly what level of neuronal complexity do you have to be before you have some consciousness? And the answer to that is we don’t know because the relationship between consciousness and neuronal structure is insanely complex. So for example, you have very neuron heavy structures in your brain like the cerebellum, which has about as many, it has a very rough outer coating like the cortex and it has about as many neurons as the cortical sheet does and yet you can take it out of people. They don’t seem to show any impairment of consciousness but they get a taxic and they can’t control their behaviour that well. They have a hard time guiding it. But that seems to be more or less it. Now it isn’t because there are other things that cerebellum does but my point is you can have massively neuron heavy structures that seem to be related in very minimal ways to our experience of consciousness. You know, and your autonomic nervous system is sort of like that too. There’s a lot of neurons in your autonomic nervous system but I think it’s a mistake to say that we’re precisely conscious of our autonomic nervous system although now and then we’re conscious of its outputs. It governs the operation of our organs and all the things that are so complex that we aren’t allowed to mess with them as conscious beings. But it’s not conscious and then well somehow some neurons are conscious and I tell you we don’t know anything about consciousness. We really don’t. We don’t have a clue and I think it’s probably because we’re formulating the question wrong. You know, those people, there are people who are materialist reductionists and they believe that consciousness is an emergent property of the underlying neuronal function. But the problem with that philosophy is that it’s predicated on the assumption that they understand what the matter is that’s making up that neuronal substrate and I can tell you that by the time we are able to reduce consciousness to its underlying material structure, we’ll think of whatever matter is in a way that’s completely different than the way we think of it now. You know, so there might be an eventual reduction but at the same time there’s going to be a transformation of the theories. It’s clear that we don’t understand material that well, particularly because when you go down into the underlying, you know, the tiny underlying substructures at the subatomic level it behaves in a very, very peculiar manner. So anyways, all bets are off with regards to consciousness but it also does seem to be something that’s likely very ancient. And there are people who have attributed consciousness to insects. By the way, they seem to go out of their way to take hallucinogenic drugs, which is quite interesting. So the fly agaric, for example, is a mushroom. It’s the famous red and white mushroom that you always see in fairy tales and in Super Mario Brothers. Like it pops up everywhere. And flies will come and take a bite of it and then they fall unconscious beside the mushroom and they stay there for like 10 or 15 minutes and then they get up but they’ll go eat it again. And reindeer really like them too and they get blitzed out of their mind on Amanita muscaria. And so there’s evidence for the desire to transform states of consciousness way, way down in the animal kingdom, way farther than you’d think. So you know, God only knows. And then you think, well a big brain is necessary but you consider something like Irene Pepperberg’s African Grey Parrot, which died a couple of years ago, a famous animal, which could speak better than a three-year-old kid, four-year-old kid. It had a good vocabulary, more than 500 words, and it could put together meaningful phrases. It could speak better than a chimpanzee. They use sign language of course. But this was one smart bird. And if you think about a bird, I mean, it has no brain, a bird. It’s got a brain like this big and now I know a bird isn’t very big and that actually makes a difference. But the fact that that much intelligence could be packed into that small an area means, as far as I’m concerned, that we don’t really understand very much about how the brain works. But we do understand some things and most of the things we understand have actually been discovered by animal experimentalists, which is a useful thing to know because of course there’s lots of people who don’t think that animal experimentation is a good idea or that we could substitute computer models, which is of course a spectacularly idiotic theory because obviously if we had accurate computer models we wouldn’t need to do the animal experimentation. So we’re not going to build a computer model that’s better than our current understanding. At least not yet. We may in the future. So anyways, you can think of the basic elements, the basic structures that are producing these little sub-personalities as the output of fundamental biological systems, either motivations or emotions. The structure that appears to be most responsible for this sort of thing, at least initially, is the hypothalamus. And I should show you a little bit about the hypothalamus just so you kind of have a sense of what it is. It’s not very big. And you see in this diagram that it sits right on top of the spinal cord in the base part of the brain. So that’s just that little bitty area there which, you know, it looks from the diagram to be maybe 1% of the entire brain mass or something like that. And I think I mentioned to you before that if you take a cat and you take all of its brain off, except for the hypothalamus, roughly speaking, as long as it’s a female cat in a restricted environment, it can pretty much live a cat life except that it’s hyper-exploratory, which I do think is quite remarkable. Because you’d think it would just lay there passively, right, since it doesn’t have a brain. But the hypothalamus, and I’ll show you some more pictures here about the hypothalamus. So this is a rat hypothalamus, and this is a diagram from Larry Swanson, who’s a real genius and well worth reading, although very complicated. He’s a developmental neuroanatomist, if I remember correctly, and he’s interested in how the brain unfolds across the course of fetal development in all sorts of different animals. Assuming that by doing that, in part, you can track the evolution, but you can also understand the relationship between one brain part and another. Now what you see here, you see all those little sub-units of the hypothalamus. They’re indicated in orange, green, and black. And so the first thing that you can see is that the hypothalamus is not one thing. It’s a bunch of, what do you call those, ganglia. I think it’s the correct name for the hypothalamic sub-organs. And so it’s called a hypothalamus for convenience sake. You can identify it anatomically, and it might be a good shorthand for a rough description of the macrostructure of the brain. But of course the problem with the brain is that it’s pattern one at this level, and it’s pattern two at this level, and it’s pattern three at this level. You can go a long ways down before you run out of complexity. A cell is an unbelievably complicated thing, and you have God only knows how many of those things in your brain. I think, I don’t remember exactly what the latest estimates are, but it’s in the hundreds of billions, and each of those cells is as complex as a factory, like a really complex factory, and they’re full of these little molecular machines that are doing things that are so complicated and amazing. You just can’t believe it when you, I’ve seen computer animations of some of these structures in operation, and the complexity of what they do to take the DNA molecule apart and then to rebuild it little bit by little bit, and to do error correction at the same time. It just boggles the mind. I cannot see how you can possibly account for that using a straight sort of Newtonian deterministic model of clockwork behaviour. The stuff is so sophisticated. It looks more like advanced robotics than it does the interaction of tiny little molecules. There are molecules that work with the DNA that can walk, and as they walk they carry other molecules, and not only can things walk, they can walk over obstacles. And they’re made out of ten molecules. It’s like, what’s going on? It’s just beyond belief. All of these little nuclei, or I think that’s what they’re called actually, nuclei in the hypothalamus, they’re all doing slightly different things, so they’re subserving, well, they’re radically different things, although they have a commonality of function. And so roughly what you could say is that one half of the hypothalamus is devoted to popping up these little sub-personalities that are devoted to the satiation, the satisfaction of fundamental biological requirements. And so it’s not obvious what a fundamental biological requirement is, because again that’s a heuristic, it’s not a category, but we can agree, it’s a fuzzy category, but we can agree on some of its contents. And so of course thirst and hunger and the need to breathe would be in there, and then we might also add pain and sexual desire and the need for play, although that’s a separate circuit and it’s not mediated by hypothalamic structures, there’s a different circuit for play, play slash affiliation. So but roughly speaking, what an animal basically chases and requires on a day to day and week to week basis is mediated in large part by the hypothalamus. And the hypothalamus is also a crucial nexus in the brain for identifying what’s going on in the body and then telling the brain what to do about it. So for example, the hypothalamus is the thing that makes you hungry and the thing that makes you thirsty and it does that because it monitors levels of substances such as sugar in your bloodstream and also the degree to which you’re hydrated. You can sustain tiny little bits of damage to the hypothalamus with unbelievably extreme consequences. So for example, if you get unlucky, you can develop hyperphagia or I don’t remember the technical term for it, but uncontrollable thirst. And so if that part of your hypothalamus is damaged, people just can’t keep you away from water supplies. You’ll just drink and drink and drink and drink and drink and drink and drink until you drown and you can’t control it. So the hypothalamus is no joke and hyperphagia is the same thing except in relationship to food. So there have been reports of people who’ve developed, oh I knew a guy in Montreal who used to work at Harvard, his name was Frank Irvin, and he did some of the earliest studies in the world on the physiology of violent crime. Frank had identified the role of epilepsy as a progenitor to violent crimes. So the defensive rage circuit is part of the hypothalamus and if you’re unlucky you can have a particular form of epilepsy that will activate the defensive rage system. I knew someone who had a seizure condition like that and then they get uncontrollably aggressive. Now this guy, it’s quite an interesting story. So it first happened to him when he was about 18 and he was out drinking in a bar and alcohol lowers your seizure threshold. He was out drinking in a bar and all of a sudden he got up and tore his shirt off and then his friends were coming, like he was in an aggressive stance and backed into the corner and his friends were coming close to him and he told them, go away or I’ll hit you. Now he was a very well socialized person so I think what happened is that he went into this defensive rage state but because he was so well socialized he could tell people to stay away from him but he couldn’t stop himself from hitting them and attacking them if they got close enough. So anyways, I believe at that point he slapped a police officer who came to rescue him and they took him to the hospital and on the way there he hit his fingers against the hood of the car and put dents in it and then when he got to the hospital, now I don’t remember the particulars of this, but he picked up a kidney ball which is like an enamel covered steel ball and twisted it in a figure eight. It’s like, try that, it’s not so easy. So the next time it happened, he was in another bar and so what the hypothesis was then was that someone had spiked his alcohol with some sort of drug and that was never demonstrated but he got off of all that because he had no record, he was a perfectly peaceful person and then the next time it happened he was in another bar and he did the same thing, he backed into the corner, ripped off his shirt and then he told me that when he was he looked down the hallway and all he could see was fire and then a policewoman came to get him because the bar phoned the police and he hit her and then after that he had EEG testing which showed that he was susceptible to seizures and so he swore off alcohol and never had another drink and he’s like 35 now and never had another drink in his life and it never happened again but it’s just a good example of, there was a kid at the University of Texas at Austin about 30 years ago who seemed to have a perfectly reasonable family life and so forth, reasonable upbringing and he started to become increasingly violent in his fantasies and he climbed up onto a tower because it was a high tower at the University of Texas at Austin and he took a high powered rifle and I think he shot 16 people before they finally got him and when they did an autopsy he had a fast growing tumour that was pressing on the hypothalamus so the hypothalamus is no joke. For those of you whose introduction to neuropsychology has made you assume that the cortex is in control, let me tell you, the cortex is only in control when all of your other basic requirements are satiated and since you’re a modern person and you live in luxury that’s unparalleled in the history of the world, all of your fundamental biological sub-personalities are always satiated and so that’s what you think you’re like but you’re only like that because you’ve never been anywhere where you weren’t like that. So anyways, now here’s one of the things that’s cool about the hypothalamus. So the first thing is you have these different subsystems, say these different nuclei that are responsible for these different sub-personalities oriented towards sexuality, oriented towards hunger, oriented towards thirst, oriented towards temperature regulation, etc. I think of them as sub-personalities because they have a viewpoint, they want something, they want to go somewhere, they want to accomplish it efficiently, and they have emotions that go along with it so that if you’re going for some water and you drop the glass or somebody gets in your way or the tap isn’t working you’re going to feel frustration and anxiety and irritation so they come fully equipped with emotions. They have their own motor outputs which they basically prime and those would be the motor outputs that are aggregations of habits that you have been able to learn that have aided you previously in your water searching behaviour so for us that would be getting a glass out of the cupboard, that’s a gripping issue, and then a transport issue and then you have to turn on the tap and so Luria who’s a famous Russian neuropsychologist called those things kinetic melodies and so if you think about it from a Piagetian perspective and a Lurian perspective at the same time and think that Piaget talked about how children put together basic motor, they’re not reflexes exactly, they’re complex sequences of what started as reflexes and then those can be linked together in the sort of dance that you’re always doing with your body and each of those little dances, we think water seeking, you’re going to have a set of water relevant dances that you can do that your experience has taught you to become expert at and when you get thirsty then those are likely disinhibited, that’s my guess, they’re disinhibited and prepared for execution and then the specifics of the circumstance that you’re in determine which ones are disinhibited enough to actually run. It’s like you’re full of little machines and they’re all on, they’re ready to go, but they’re all held in stasis in some sense by cortical inhibition. It’s like I like to think of the brain sort of like a nuclear reactor, you know, the core is really active, it’s on, but then you have all these rods going into the core to keep it from going critical and the cortex is sort of like that in relationship to the lower parts of the brain. Those parts of the brain, man, they’re alive, they’re like the titans of mythology, they’re sitting down there, these fundamental forces and they’re ready to leap into action at a moment’s notice, but the cortex basically keeps them inhibited and it seems to do that. So imagine that you have a vision of your desired future, okay, and then a vision of the transformation stages that you’re going to undertake to move from where you are to that desired future, okay, so then what you’re doing is you’re comparing your interpretation of the present to your interpretation of the desired future and then as long as those two things match, which the hippocampus is the thing that’s determining that, it’s the thing that’s computing the match between your fantasy of what you want to happen with your fantasy about what is happening. As long as that matches, then the hippocampus basically and we don’t know exactly how this works, although it seems to work to some degree through modulation of the reticular activating system, the match, if the hippocampus matches what you want with what’s happening, then all these other little subsystems are basically shut off and if the hippocampus detects a mismatch, which is when novelty occurs, right, it’s like something went wrong, then you get disinhibition of the reticular activating system, it’s like you wake up and then everything’s primed for action and that solves the problem of what you should do when you don’t know what to do and the answer is you should get ready to do everything. You should be on alert and ready to implement whatever actions, whatever, it’s not even whatever actions, it’s more like you should be ready to implement whatever sub-personalities the situation seems to call for as soon as you’re able to identify what they are, but otherwise it’s sort of like an army that’s all of a sudden gone on alert. You don’t know who’s going to be called on, but everybody should be ready. That’s a high stress situation. So part of the hypothalamus is, let’s say for the sake of argument, it’s popping up all these little sub-personalities that have to do with basic instincts. The words are all wrong because they’re not, like an instinct sounds like a drive and people aren’t driven. We’re not that simple. We’re much more flexible than that. Even rats aren’t driven. There’s a very seminal experiment that was done at the height of behaviorism. The idea with the behaviorist, perfectly smart idea, was that the way a rat learned was it would start with a reflex, sort of in the Piagetian sense, and then you could teach it a new routine, which was an aggregation of little tiny reflexes. You could teach it a new routine by rewarding it. So let’s say here’s what you do with a rat. You want to teach the rat to climb a ladder and go across it, a little ladder. So the rat’s sniffing around in the little rat cage, and then it gets close to the ladder, so you give it a food pallet and then it hangs around close to the ladder. It’s because you’ve reinforced the manifestation of those micro-behaviors that are associated with the ladder. Then maybe at some point the rat puts one little paw up on the first rung. You give it a food pallet, and then pretty soon the rat’s going like this fairly frequently. Then the next thing that happens is it puts two paws up there. You know, if you’re patient using reward, you can get that damn rat to do damn near anything. Skinner taught pigeons to navigate guided missiles by maps in the Second World War, by pecking. They never did use them, but really it’s pretty impressive. You think pigeons are stupid. They’re not stupid. They can read maps, which is pretty damn amazing. So the idea was that what the animal is doing is chaining together deterministic reflexes. The thing about a deterministic reflex is that it’s not flexible. If it’s a deterministic reflex, it really is a drive. Action A initiates action B, that initiates action C, and it’s a fixed action pattern. Some animals do seem to learn that way. So there’s these little animals. I think they’re moles that do this, or shrews. It’s shrews. Let’s say you teach a shrew to go from point A to B by a very inefficient maze-like route. But the shrew could just walk straight there. But once he learns to do this, he can’t figure out that he’s going from here to here. Whereas if you train a rat to do this, the rat will figure out, to hell with all this circuitousness, it’s just going to go straight from point A to point B. That finding was part of what indicated to early neuropsychological researchers that animals produced a map of the environment. In some sense, partly what we’re talking about when we’re talking about these structures, the A to B structure, is a map. That’s another way you can look at it. So anyways, you’ve got this rat and its behaviours are all chained together. I already told you, I spoiled the story in some sense, because I told you that the rat could learn to take a shortcut. But one of the earlier demonstrations of the independence of rat learning from the reflexive conditioning was that, so let’s say you’ve trained a rat to run down a maze. Hypothetically, it’s using its front legs and its back legs and it’s learned to chain all that together. Front leg, back leg movement, turn left. Front leg, back leg movement, turn right, etc. So then, what if you put the little rat, you tie up his back legs and you put him in a little rat, like wheelbarrow, so he’s got wheels instead of legs. It’s like the rat zooms through the maze. Well, so much for the reflex theory, right? Because obviously you didn’t train the rat to use a cart with its rear end stuck in it, it figured that out all by itself. So anyways, there is a system in you that allows you to chain reflexes together. It’s a very primordial learning system and the behaviourist got that right. It’s fast, very very fast because it requires few neural connections. So there’s some advantages to simple learning, but once you get up into the higher, even the moderately higher cortical and subcortical functions, you’re past the point of mere reflex chaining. Okay, so let’s say for the sake of simplicity, the hypothalamus says you need water, so your current state is you’re thirsty and your desired state is you get to go to the tap. You can feel your mouth dry and so forth, and then some fantasies about drinking some water start to come into your mind and then all of a sudden you’re kind of possessed by that. So it’s starting to interfere with your conscious goal-directed behaviour at that point, and finally it’s insistent enough, like something knocking on the door, so you think, man, I’m thirsty. Maybe you even think I’ll work better if I have something to drink. So you go off to the fountain, and then what your hippocampus is doing is you’ve got this little idea, which is your desired future, about how this trip is supposed to go, and then you’re watching to see how the trip is actually going, but that’s an interpretation too. And then if there’s a match between the two, the hippocampus just leaves you the hell alone, you don’t get anxious, you don’t get knocked off the track. You go there, you have the water, that satiates that system, that’s a form of reward, satiation, it’s called consumatory reward, and then that system disappears. It goes back to the dungeons from which it emerged, and then in all likelihood another one pops up. Now, it’s an oversimplification of human behaviour to assume that you just go from one hypothalamically mediated state to another, although I would say that’s what two-year-olds do. And in some sense that’s what animals do. And the two-year-old’s doing it because that little creature hasn’t got any more organised than hypothalamic. And you can see this if you watch two-year-olds, it’s like they’re laughing and then they’re crying and then they’re hungry and then they’re hot, and then they need to go to the bathroom and then they want to play. It’s just one pure motivated or emotional state after another. It’s quite fun to watch. And they’re also relatively hyper-exploratory as long as, and playful, you know, but they’re cycling through those things all the time. So you can’t say that that’s really what an adult human does. And the reason for that is that the problem with the pure, the reason that you need a cortex and the other subcortical structures that aren’t hypothalamic is because the world is too complex for those primordial systems to solve the problems they’re supposed to solve, A, in every possible situation, B, across multiple timeframes, and C, in an environment that consists of the interactions between other very complex beings. So, you know, it’s almost like an arms race of complexity in some sense that’s driven our evolution. The smarter you get in some sense, the more variable you get. And that’s a problem because as I got smarter, say over the course of evolution, all you people got smarter too. And so we’re all competing and cooperating with each other, but the whole damn system is getting more and more and more and more complex. So you have to grow a brain in order to manage that, or you keep it simple. Well, we didn’t keep it simple. So we decided to grow a brain instead. I don’t know if you know this, but you’ve looked at a chimpanzee. They don’t look a lot like human beings. I mean, there’s obviously some things in common. Their hands are quite human and their ears are quite human, but their forehead comes down to about here. And they’re kind of shaped like this. They’ve got a huge round body, whereas a human being is sort of like a stick with two sticks coming out of it and two more sticks were really, really thin, hardly any gut. Whereas a chimpanzee, its intestinal structures are way, way, way, way longer than ours. And so it has to pack that into this huge gut. The damn chimpanzee sits around eight hours a day chewing. And the reason for that is it eats leaves. It’s like you go out in the forest and eat leaves and see how damn many leaves you have to eat before you feel full. It’s like all the chimp does is sit there and chew leaves. And then it has this huge gut so that it can extract some nourishment out of it. We figured out how to solve that problem once we discovered fire and hunting, because then we could cook things. And then that enabled us, at least in principle, to trade gut for brain, which I think was a pretty useful trade, all things considered, although it still might get us in trouble. Because the brain’s a very energy-hungry organ. But we eat very, very efficient food. And it turns out that cooked food is much more nutritious from a caloric perspective than raw food. And so you can afford to sit around and develop a brain if you’ve got high-quality food. Otherwise you’re out there in the jungle chewing on leaves like an idiot for like, they’re just about as bad as pandas. You know why those things are damn near extinct? They used to be carnivores. All they eat is bamboo shoots now. That’s it. Nothing else. Bamboo shoots. And they have no nutrition, so they have to eat bamboo shoots all day. And now and then the bamboo crop fails and there aren’t any shoots. It’s like, well, so much for the pandas. It’s like, if an animal ever deserved to go extinct, it was definitely the panda. It’s like, hunt something, you lazy bastards. Anyways. All right, so. Now this, I discovered this about the hypothalamus when I was reading Larry Swanson. This just bloody well blew me away, because, well, you’ll see why, at least in part. So half of the hypothalamus, roughly speaking, is sort of devoted to popping up these basic primal sub-personalities, the sorts of things that you share with animals. But then you might say, ah, what happens when one of those doesn’t work? And the answer is, well, you get an anxiety response. Now the anxiety response is not mediated by the hypothalamus and neither is pain. So look, if you’re an idiot, your body tells you, hurts you, or scares you, basically. But what’s interesting about that is that the pain systems and the anxiety systems are not in the hypothalamus. They’re separate systems. Now the pain system is old, old, old. Maybe it’s as old as the hypothalamus. It’s way down there in your brain. But the anxiety system is a lot newer. And that kind of makes sense, because you can imagine, primordial organisms really didn’t stop until they ran into something that was hurting them. They couldn’t think, oh no, I might run into something that will hurt Well, you can’t think that until roughly you have an amygdala, let’s say. Because the amygdala seems to be at least responsible for lots of things, and all these areas are interconnected. But one of the things it seems to be responsible for, at least in part, is anxiety. And so when your hippocampus detects a mismatch between what you want to have happen and what is happening, it disinhibits the reticular activating system. And one of the things it activates is the anxiety system. The anxiety system says, stop, you idiot, you don’t know where you are or what you’re doing, and so you should quit before you get into trouble. We don’t like that feeling very much. That freezes us. But it’s better than pain. So you feel anxiety so you don’t have to feel pain. Now pain seems to occur when you encounter a stimulus, let’s say a situation, where the sensory, the stimulus magnitude is sufficient to damage those parts of you that are encountering it. So too bright a light, too hot a flame, too cold a piece of metal, too hot food, whatever. If it’s of sufficient magnitude to damage you, you get a pain response out of that. And the pain response is supposed to teach the part of you that moves forward not to do that again. The anxiety system responds to cues of pain. Now the pain system is pretty complicated as well because frustration is a pain-like stimulus. Disappointment is a pain-like stimulus. Grief and loneliness are pain-like stimuli. Depression is probably a pain condition. So even though the pain system is quite primordial, it’s grown up like a complex tree and it subsumes many different functions. But it’s still a very ancient system, whereas the amygdala system, which is newer, you’ve developed over time to tell you what might hurt you so that you can avoid contacting it. So you’ve got your hypothalamus and it’s telling you, it’s laying out these little sub-personalities that are helping you deal with the fundamental necessities of the world. The pain system is there to tell you when you have encountered a situation that’s harmful. The anxiety system is there to tell you when you might be going to encounter something harmful. And that’s the thing that’s activated when there’s a mismatch, right? Because the mismatch says you don’t know where you are, where you’re going, and so you might get hurt. Now the other thing that happens, roughly speaking, is that when the hippocampus disinhibits the reticular activating system, that turns the other half of the hypothalamus on. And this is quite cool because the other half of the hypothalamus is the place where the ventral tegmental area is located. And the ventral tegmental area is the part of the brain from which the dopaminergic tracts emerge, and those are the tracts that you use A, to explore, and B, to respond to cues of consumatory reward. So what that means in non-technical language is that when you encounter mismatch, you get anxious, which is what you should do, you should stop. Something’s wrong. And then as long as nothing else happens that’s painful or threatening, then that system starts to acclimatize, partly because you’re looking around and thinking, right? People often talk about this as habituation. That’s a stupid idea. It’s habituation if you’re a sea slug. It’s not habituation if you’re a person, except that very, very primordial reflex-like levels of the nervous system. At the higher order levels that we’re talking about, it’s learning. And so if you stop and you’re anxious, what happens? Well, generally speaking, you start thinking, what the hell might be going on? And you’re running through all these different theories, and part of the way that works is that it’s partly a consequence of state-dependent learning. So if you’re anxious, you’re going to be primed to remember situations that you were anxious in before, and why should you do that? And the reason for that is anxious, things that make you anxious is a category. It’s actually a category. Now, we tend to think of categories as something that exists in the objective world, but that is not how your brain categorizes things. You have to learn that really painfully to make objective categorizations. As far as your natural nervous system is concerned, all things that go bump in the night are the same thing. And what is that? Well, it’s some bloody horrible predatory, crocodilian, dragon-like monster that hides under your bed and comes out and bites you when you’re three. I just read a little paper today about this kind of cat that lived back when we were still figuring out how to use spears, and this was a particularly nasty kind of cat, and it preyed on us, roughly speaking. And we didn’t get eaten by too many cats because cats really can’t bite through the skull, so they could go for your neck, but they didn’t necessarily kill you. But this cat had a mouth that fit right around your skull, and it had two teeth that went in here and two teeth that went in here, and it was a silent killer. There is evidence that even children are capable of recognizing the motion pattern of a predatory cat, and one of the hypotheses is that we still have, you know, all of our primate ancestors that didn’t get eaten by that particular cat were pretty damn good at detecting cats, at least of that type, and we seem to have, what would you say, conserved that ability at least to some degree. So you think about a category. It’s like, you know, you might think, well, there’s fish and there’s birds and there’s mammals and there’s reptiles, and you know, those are Linnaean classifications. They’re based in some sense on evolutionary divergence, and where they’re not, on morphology, on the way the animals are put together. Who cares about that? Things that eat you, that’s a category, and you need that category. And the other category is also things that might eat you. So things that eat you, you know, those are things that can hurt you, and things that might eat you are things you haven’t classified yet but might be dangerous. And so that’s your natural, your brain’s natural category, one of them. And then you might think, well, if that’s the natural category, See that’s the sort of thing that the guy who wrote an ecological approach to visual perception, he talked about as an affordance. That was the word I couldn’t remember last week. So an affordance is something whose meaning you instantly perceive. And so you might say, well, no, no, no, you see a cat and then you infer that it might eat you. It’s like, no, no, no, no. You see something that might eat you and then you might be able to figure out that it’s a cat. But it’s the might eat you that you see first, not the damn cat. And so this is a fascinating phenomena because it suggests, like the Heideggerians have proposed, that what you perceive first in the world is meanings, and out of the meanings you extract objects. It’s not the other way around. And so if you look at the way your brain is organized, that’s how it works, folks. Because the more primordial your brain system is, which means the more ancient it is, the more tied it is into your survival, the more its perception is action predicated. So for example, if you hear a loud noise behind you and you startle, that’s your response. Well, you’re going into a crouch that would make it difficult for a tiger to bite the front of your neck. And you do that. Man, that’s way before your thinking. It’s before your perceiving consciously. You’re not getting images or sounds at that point. It’s so quick. And that’s a category. Things that make you go like this. And that’s a good category. Now, the reason I’m making such a case about that category is that’s one of the mythological categories, is things that go bump in the night. And then one of the things that primordial people were trying to figure out is, you know, you could think of any old animal as thinking, as figuring out how to escape from a predator. That isn’t what human beings wanted to figure out. Not once we were able to abstract. What we wanted to do instead was to figure out how to escape from the class of all things that could eat you. Not just any particular old thing, but all of them at once. That’s the advantage to categorization. Can we arrange things so that nothing can eat us? Well, how do you go about doing that? Well, believe me, we’ve been working on that problem for a very, very, very long time. And one of the answers we came up with, we’ll get into this later, is the idea of sacrifice. And sacrifice is a very, very ancient idea, but I’ll just give you a bit of a preview. It took me like years to figure this out. Human beings discovered sacrifice a long time ago, and they acted it out before they understood it. Okay, because we act out all sorts of things before we understand it. And the idea is sort of, well you can make a bargain with God. You might say, well what’s God? Well, we’ll approach that problem later. It’s a very complicated problem. But one thing you could think of God as is God is the anthropomorphic representation of the entire social structure across time. So you might say, well God will reward you if you behave properly. Well, what does that mean? Well, imagine that you could conceive of everyone who wasn’t you as one meta-person. Okay, imagine that that meta-person is God, and you can make a deal with that thing. You can say, well if I behave properly, that meta-being will respond properly to me in the future. It’s like it’s true, right? You know that. If you make a promise to someone, and you keep it, then something good is likely to happen to you in the future. So that was one way that God, that’s God the Father derivation. It’s far more complicated than that, but that’s not a bad point. And we kind of figured out that we could bargain with it across time, and that that would work. So I read a really interesting paper by someone who’s actually a former student of mine, Azeem Sharif, and he analyzed the relationship between criminal behaviour and belief in hell across a whole set of countries. I don’t know if it was an exhaustive analysis, correlational analysis. It’s way more peaceful in countries where people believe in hell. And you think, well should you believe in hell? It’s like, okay, well yes and no. Atheist arguments aside, we’re not even going to bother with them because they’re kind of moronic. The idea here is that there are certain action patterns that if you undertake, you will be viciously punished in the future. It’s like, yeah, that’s going to happen. You try lying to everyone that you meet, and you just see how well you do over a twenty year period, man. You’re going to be in such trouble by the end of that twenty year period that hell will be the only accurate way to describe where you’re situated. So it’s no joke. These are real things, and people came up with these ideas for a reason. Now hell is not only where other people put you if you’re bad. It’s a lot more profound a concept than that. But that’s not a bad start. So anyways, the sacrificial notion was something like, we cannot do what we want to do right now and do something else, and that’ll make things better in the future. I mean, think about that, people. That’s the most brilliant idea human beings ever came up with. There’s this old story, which is probably not true, So you get this jar that’s got a pretty thin neck, just big enough for a monkey to put his hand in, and then you fill it with things monkeys like to eat, let’s say hard candy just for the sake of argument. So you put that out there, and then the monkey goes in and sticks his hand in and grabs a bunch of candy. He can’t get his damn hand out because it’s only big enough for him to put his hand in, so then you can just go pick up the monkey. It’s like, well, what’s the problem with the monkey? It can’t sacrifice. It won’t sacrifice its grip on the damn candy for its future existence. That’s what your parents have been teaching you ever since you were little kids. Let go of the candy so that you can live. And that’s delay of gratification, right? That’s conscientiousness, man. That’s the discovery of time and its relationship to the social environment. It’s so brilliant. And part of what people were trying to figure out when they were developing these rituals of sacrifices. Okay, so you think about society as a meta-person. It’s usually represented as male, by the way, but not always. It depends on the circumstances. So what does this meta-person want? Well, you’ve got to kind of figure that out. Partly what it wants is don’t eat all the damn grain today. Save some for next year, right? Plan, act as if the future exists as part of the social contract. God, that’s such a discovery, man. It’s only people who figure that out. I mean, squirrels have kind of got it in some sense because they store up nuts. And squirrels are smart. They just kind of got the inkling of it. I think what squirrels do is they eat all the nuts they can possibly eat right now and then they store the rest of them. They wouldn’t go hungry to store nuts for the future, but human beings will do that. Don’t eat the seed grain, right? Because then you’re going to die next year. Okay, so back to the hypothalamus. Now, you’re doing something you want to do and you’re tracking how that’s going. Both of those are hypotheses, by the way. And all of a sudden something happens that you don’t want to have happen. Like you live in Flint, Michigan, for example, and so you decide to go have some water and it turns out it’s not water at all. It’s lead. I don’t know if you guys know about but it’s quite, you know, it’s just the sort of thing that makes your jaw drop so you know the state is in big trouble, Michigan. And so they appointed an auditor to control finances, I believe at the state level. It might have only been at a city level, but doesn’t matter. Let’s say the state level. So the auditor was looking for ways to save money and one way they decided to save money was to hook up Flint, Michigan’s water supply to a river instead of to the Great Lake, which is what it’s right beside. Turns out, since Flint was an industrial centre forever, that the water is just plumb full of lead. So now they have like 50,000 lead poisoned people living in Flint, Michigan. That is not a good thing. Lead lowers your IQ rapidly and it makes you violent. So for the $10,000 they saved, they probably cost themselves half a million dollars per person. It wasn’t actually that there was lead in the water, it’s that the water was more acidic. Oh it took the lead out of the pipes. Yeah, okay, okay. Right, right. Good point, good point. Well, I’m not here to complain about Michigan politicians, but the point is that just because you think you’re out for a drink of water, that does not necessarily mean that’s what’s going on. And that’s why I said that you’re comparing your vision of the future to what you think is going on right now. Now if you read the neuropsychologists like Vinogradova and Sokolov and Jeffrey Gray, they’re basically behaviourists. And so what they tell you is this, and this is different. What they tell you is that you have this little expectancy map that’s like the map the rat has of his surroundings. It’s a spatiotemporal map. And so when you’re doing something, you expect a certain outcome, okay. And then what you compare that to is reality as it unfolds, okay. So you could say you’ve got this map and then stimuli appear to you and those are objectively real. It’s like no, that’s wrong. It’s wrong. It’s interpretation everywhere. You think you know what’s going on right now and you think you know what you want. And the reason I’m making such a big deal out of this is because look, if you’re a rat and you’re going about your business and something you don’t want happens, according to the Gray behaviourist model, you have to revamp your map, your expectancy map. But according to the model that I’m proposing, it’s way worse than that because you don’t know where the damn error is. It might be in your map of what you want, not what you expect. That’s a different thing. But it also might be in the map you have that’s of the present. So it’s not just the map that you have that’s a prediction of your actions that’s at fault. It could easily be the way that you’re construing the world right now. And it could be error at any level of behaviour. And so what it means is that when an anomaly occurs, it spreads doubt through the entire hierarchy that we were describing, including the future and the present and even the past. And you know this. You know this perfectly well. You can see it when you encounter a complex anomaly. So a complex anomaly would be you have a long term relationship and you get betrayed. Okay, and so betrayed means you’ve trusted someone and they’ve enticed you to do so and then they exploit that trust and hurt you. For Dante, the betrayers were in the lowest circle of hell. So it’s a particularly nasty thing to do to people because if you think about trust as the precondition for interpersonal relationships, which it is, then if someone acts towards you in a way that violates your trust in trust, they’ve done you the worst disservice that someone can possibly be done. Okay, so you get betrayed. Alright, so bang, that’s an anomaly. What does it imply? Well, that’s the wrong question. The right question is what doesn’t it imply? It implies that you just don’t have the foggiest notion of what you’re doing or what human beings are like. Especially if it’s a particularly vicious betrayal. Maybe you’ve been suckered by a psychopath. It’s like, okay, update your model and account for that. Good luck. Especially if you’re naive because the probability that you’ll be able to reach down into the depths far enough to come up with a coherent explanation for why someone would do that is very, very low. What I’ve discovered in my clinical practice is that if you get betrayed badly enough, the only language that you can use to describe it is fundamentally religious. At some points of betrayal, it’s good versus evil. It’s malevolence. It’s the malevolence that really traumatizes people. It’s the fact that that person was out to hurt you. It’s like, oh, well, what’s a human being like when they’re capable of that? It’s an age-old question. Now, I’ll tell you something weird and interesting. There’s this old idea in Genesis. One of the first ideas in Genesis is that God made people a paradise to live in. Let’s just be wild about this for a moment and assume that your little model, when it’s going well, is a little paradise. It’s like the world’s turning out the way you want it to. There’s a snake in there somewhere. That means, well, why is there a snake? Well, because there’s a bunch of things you’re not paying attention to while you’re going about your business. In fact, there’s almost an infinite number of things that you’re not paying attention to. The problem is, one of those infinite number of things that you’re not paying attention to can shift on you all of a sudden. There’s always a snake in the garden, and then you have to figure out what to do with it. The thing is, if you interact with the snake, you get more conscious. But the problem with that is you lose your little paradise. Okay, well, it’s worse than that because that story’s really old. We have no idea how old it is. It’s disseminated all over the world, or it emerged independently in different places. We don’t really know. But in any case, it doesn’t matter. It’s a fundamental enough story, tree plus snake plus people, that no matter where you go, some people have tree-snake stories. I think that’s because we lived in trees for like 30 million years, and we got eaten by an awful lot of snakes. It’s a story that really appeals to us. Every bloody science fiction movie you go to most of the time, if the aliens are bad, they’re always reptilian. You don’t get furry little koala aliens that are chasing you around. It’s like the ones in Alien. They’re a reptile inside a reptile. They’re nasty beasts, and they come out inside of you even, which is another symbolic idea. So you’ve always got the damn snake, and it’s popping out all the time, and there’s nothing you can do about it except get ready to deal with snakes. No getting rid of them. So that’s the first lesson. You’re not getting rid of the damn snakes. You better learn to deal with them. Then the next question is, what is the worst possible snake? Now one of the things that happened in Christianity, and this was influenced in part by Zoroastrianism, was the idea of almost an independent evil arose. In fact, there was a branch of Christianity called Manichaeism that construed the world as a battle between good and evil, where good and evil had equal reality, and they were in this eternal battle. Now that got wiped out by the standard Christian theory that evil is actually just the absence of good, which anyways, you can have a big debate about that, and people have for thousands of years. But as Christianity developed, there’s this weird mythology that grew up around the weird myth in Genesis, and the weird mythology was that the snake in the Garden of Eden was also Satan, and that he’s the king of all evil. It’s like, okay, what does that mean? It’s pretty straightforward. What’s the worst predator? Well, that’s easy. The worst predator is a human being. And so the worst of all possible snakes is the most malevolent possible being, and that’s exactly right. And that’s why that association was made. And it’s so interesting because it took people thousands of years to make that association, and it wasn’t really put together well until Milton formalized it in Paradise Lost. And so it’s like, we kind of observed this in action, that there were bad people. Okay, so bad is a category. Well what does bad entail? Well, mythologies of evil center in on the central features of what constitutes bad. And carnivorous might be one of the things. Malevolent, out to hurt. Betrayal, lying, all the cardinal, you could think of the cardinal great sins. That’s the worst snake. Well, it’s a psychologization of the idea of the predator. And you know, it’s even more sophisticated than that because one branch of that theory is that the worst predator is the evil force outside of you, but the next branch of that is that the worst predator is the evil force within you. Yeah, well that’s when it gets really psychologized. You think, well that’s, you know, is that superstition? It’s like, hey, that’s not superstition boys and girls. It’s a lot more intelligent than that. It’s the most sophisticated theory of the way things work that we have, and it’s correct. Now what that means from a metaphysical perspective, we’re not going to talk about that because we can’t, but we can certainly talk about what it means in practical Darwinian terms. You better know what’s after you. And the worst thing that can possibly be after you is a fully motivated and completely malevolent human being. It’s like, you know, skull-crushing cats be damned. You know, all they want to do is eat you. They’re not going to torture you. Whereas if you fall into the hands of the wrong human being, man, you could be in excruciating pain for the next 20 years. So people are very imaginative when they figure out how to hurt someone, and they can keep it up for a long time. And they’re fully motivated to do so under some conditions. And so you really got to watch out for that. So back to the hypothalamus. So when you have a mismatch between what you desire and what you’re after, then the hippocampus says, oh, we don’t know where we are. That’s what it says. You no longer know where you are. Okay, what should you do when you don’t know where you are? You should stop moving. And then you should… well then what? You should prepare to do a lot of things. Okay, then what? Then you should explore. Well, that’s where the other half of the hypothalamus comes in. That dopaminergic circuit that mediates positive emotion, right? Almost all the positive emotion that you experience in your life, the kind you like, which is hope and curiosity and expectation and surprise. And that’s all mediated by the dopaminergic systems. It’s a majorly contributor to the totality of your being, especially in a positive direction. That’s rooted in the hypothalamus. And so what that means is that it’s quite cool. You’ve got your fundamental motivations, you know, your basic biological motivations. Bang, they fail. What happens? Anxiety. That’s a newer system. And exploration. That’s an older system. That damn exploratory system has been there forever. Now, if you look at classic hero mythology, which we’re going to do in great detail, what you see is that the typical myth of humanity is we live in a place, we’ll say. We have to live in a place. And the place is doing quite nicely. Thank you very much. It’s like the hobbits and Frodo, right? The first one. The Lord… what was it called? The Hobbit. Yeah, yeah. The Hobbit. Okay, so you’ve got a little shyer there, right? It’s all peaceful. It’s full of these little people who are a little on the arrogant side. They’re kind of dopey. They have no idea what the hell is going on in the outside world. But they think that’s okay. They think, you know, just peculiar people are concerned about that sort of thing. They’ve got their little happy paradise going. They live a long time. They eat a lot. They party a lot. Unbeknownst to them, which is a very interesting feature of the story, the only reason they have any peace at all is because they are descendants of old kings continually patrolling the borders, right? Those are the Striders. Aragorn. He’s the member of the race of old kings who patrols the borders. Well, those are ancestral figures. It’s like you can all sit here in your little happy paradise, but the only reason you can do it is because the sons of great kings have put borders around your kingdom. And you can think… it’s funny because in the Hobbit, the hobbits basically despise Strider. They’re very, very suspicious of him. He’s kind of dirty and dusty and he looks like he’s been banged around all over the world. He’s sort of like a tramp. It’s like they don’t know he’s the son of a great king. Good thing for them that he is, however. Okay, so then you’ve got the little Shire and what happens? Evil things are stirring. And what is it? Well, fundamentally, it’s a great dragon. Well, that’s a snake, except it’s like Meta-Snake, you know? It’s snake with fire. And you can be sure that fire was not only one of our greatest allies, but one of our greatest enemies, especially when we lived on the Velt in Africa, because that thing would burn now and then. And so, get the hell away from that. So, anyway, one hobbit who’s woken up by a wizard, right? The wizard is a symbol of the self from the Union perspective. So there’s one hobbit who’s a little bit more creative and exploratory than the rest, and everybody has a little respect for him, but they think he’s pretty damn peculiar. He decides that he’s going to, under the tutelage of the wizard, he’s going to go check out this dragon. So he leaves the borders and he goes out into the unknown. And then the rest of it is an adventure. And one of the things that’s very interesting, again from a Union perspective, is that what does the hobbit have to become in order to conquer the dragon? A thief. Now that’s pretty weird, eh? Because you think, hey man, this guy’s out to be a hero, so he should be a hero. It’s like, he turns into a thief. Why? Well, it’s because if you’re going to conquer a dragon, you better be a hell of a lot tougher than you are naive. And so, partly what happens is that for the hobbit to muster up the forces that are necessary for him to confront something that is that fundamental, he has to transcend his coward, what would you call it, the cowardice that he describes as morality. Okay, so Nietzsche, for example, Nietzsche’s often viewed as a critic of morality. It’s like, that’s not true. Because Nietzsche identifies morality with cowardice. But that’s not what he does. What Nietzsche says is this. If you’re too afraid to do something, so you won’t do it, then you’ll say that the reason that you don’t do it is because you’re moral. That’s not the reason. The reason is that you’re too damn afraid to do it. You might want to, but you’re too afraid. That doesn’t make you moral. So what happens to the hobbit, for example, is once he gets outside the kingdom, he has to develop a whole array of potentials that he never developed before because they were either not necessary in his civilized place or because they were forbidden as immoral by the cultural situation that he grew up in. You have to be touched by the snake in order to defeat the snake. Where else have you seen that motif? It’s Harry Potter, right? I mean, Harry Potter’s a strange character because he’s not obedient. Not at all. In fact, he’s quite disobedient. But he breaks the rules in the service of higher morality. And the higher morality is that he faces down the dragon that paralyzes you, and he frees the virgin. That’s what happens with Ginny. Virginia. Virgin. It’s the retelling of St. George and the Dragon. And interestingly enough, the reason that Harry Potter revivifies is because the Dumbledore’s phoenix comes by and cries in his wounds. Well, the phoenix is something that dies and is reborn. And so the meta myth underlying the second volume of the Harry Potter series is that the part of you that sustains you through an encounter with the dragon that paralyzes is the part of you that can die and be reborn. And what that means in a sense is if you’re wrong about something and you fall into a pit, then you should let go of what you’re wrong about so that something new can arise. And so it’s better to be the thing that transforms in response to catastrophe than it is the thing that’s static. Yeah. And that’s another big discovery of people. We’re agents of transformation, which is of course why kids are so bloody obsessed with magicians and wizards who are agents of transformation. And that’s all embedded in the mythology. It’s all acted out. Nobody understands this sort of thing to speak of. Certainly the kids don’t. It just hits them, you know, because they can recognize the pattern. They know that there’s something magic about them, even though they’re living in a cupboard in a London suburb where everything is boring and flat and under control. That’s not the real world. And it’s true. It’s not. Is that why we have more patience for people, including criminals, who say they’ve met their crime and do their punishment in the name of themselves? Oh, not only more patience, we often have admiration for them. Oh yeah, I mean, like How many movies feature an attractive bad guy? Well, or for that matter, an attractive bad woman. You know, it’s like, it’s because of the Nietzschean observation. The people who are good aren’t good. They’re just cowards. Whereas the guy who’s bad, well, at least he’s not a coward. Well, then you might say, well, you know, yeah, he could stop being a coward and also become a good guy. But, I mean, that’s often, often but not always the actual plot of the movie, because that’s the redemption of the bad guy. You know, it’s also what women fantasize about in relationship to the Beauty and Beast mythology. They don’t want the coward. He’s the guy that wants to be the friend. It’s complete bullshit. The bad guy’s an advance over that, but not a big enough advance because he’s a bad guy. The best thing you want is a civilized bad guy. It’s like, that’s what you want. Well, no wonder, because it’s only a civilized bad guy that’s going to be capable of dealing with the dragons. It’s right. Lloyd Axworthy, when he was the Minister of Foreign Affairs for Canada, when all the massacres were going on in Yugoslavia, it was front page news at one point. It was during the ethnic cleansing. He said, I don’t have the imagination for that kind of evil. It’s like, oh, well, that’s really impressive, Minister of Foreign Affairs. Did you ever read about the Holocaust? It’s like, it’s time to wake up a little bit. These things But he said it as a moral claim. I just couldn’t imagine that sort of thing happening. It’s like, well, you’re a little on the naive side, aren’t you? And parading that around his morality is not a reasonable thing to do when you also happen to be Minister of Foreign Affairs. It’s like, you should be looking out for the snakes all the time because they’re definitely out there. And Milosevic was definitely one of them. And so, if a naive person meets someone like that, the naive person loses. And that’s not good because there are lots of people like that and it would be better if they didn’t win. So anyways, the fact that the exploratory circuitry is actually embedded right into the hypothalamus, way down there with lust and thirst and hunger, it’s so great because it shows you how the mythology works. It basically says, okay, here’s a bunch of things you’re doing, now and then something will go wrong. Okay, you need a system to deal with things when they go wrong. What’s the system? Well, it might kill you. Bang. Better have some pain and anxiety to protect you. Well, you better figure out what it is. Okay, better have an exploratory system so that you can go out there and gather some more information. Well, that’s the human story. Gather information in the face of danger. That’s the human story. That’s what we do. So that’s the hero myth. And the hero myth is redemptive and that’s because it is redemptive. That is what works or at least that’s what we’ve staked our being on. I mean, who knows? Maybe all this exploration will just get us in trouble. I mean, that’s another part of Genesis, right? Poke around and see what happens. Well, you know, you’re doing that all the time. You’re in your little paradise, beadling away all happily and then you just can’t stop yourself from pulling on a thread somewhere. And then you find out, oh my god, you know, maybe that’s when you get suspicious about your partner cheating on you. I think maybe this person’s cheating on me. And you can’t leave it alone. You can’t leave it alone. You’ve got to go look at the snake. It’s like bang, turns out it’s there. Down you go into the underworld. Right. And you might think, well, maybe ignorance, you know, maybe the bliss of ignorance would have been better. Well, it’s not like psychologists don’t tell you that. All those positive illusion people, that’s their whole schtick. It’s right. It’s better to be a little bit dumb about how things work because otherwise there’s no way you can be happy. It’s like, that’s an idiotic theory on two accounts. A, happy isn’t the point and B, dumb is not the goal. So, you know, it’s so ignorant that it’s actually corrupt, which is really saying something because you have to be pretty damn ignorant before you get to corrupt. So, it’s a hell of a thing to teach people. You know, you have to delude yourself in a minor way otherwise you can’t stand being alive. Oh my god, that’s awful. That’s really awful. It’s like, here’s a different story. Maybe you’re tough enough to open your eyes. That’d be a much better story. And it’s possible too because people are really, really, really tough. It’s just they live in these little protected places, you know, and they never get out there and hammer themselves out against the world so they never discover that they’re tough. But, you know, you might think, well, that’s your opinion. It’s like, no, it’s not my damn opinion. We know that if you take someone who’s naive and paralyzed by anxiety and you put them in psychotherapy and you expose them to the things that they’re afraid of or disgusted by and avoiding, that it isn’t that they get less afraid. They get more confident. And that’s what generalizes, you know. So, you know, if you bring someone who’s got a mouse phobia and you treat them mouse phobia, then they’re not afraid of a bunch of other things. Why does that happen? Well, they weren’t afraid of the damn mouse. They’re afraid of their own inadequacy. And then you teach them that they don’t have to be afraid and they think, hey, I don’t have to be afraid. And then they’re not afraid of a whole bunch of things. And so you get generalization from behavioral exposure. And so it isn’t… there’s no question about whether or not exposure to the things that you avoid is curative. It’s the fundamental axiom of psychotherapy. You know, that and figuring out what you’re going to do with your future. But even in psychoanalysis, it’s face what threatens you, right? It’s just that the psychoanalysts tend to go after past traumas. It doesn’t matter. As far as your brain is concerned, a dangerous thing in the past is exactly the same thing as a dangerous thing in the present. And it seems to be partly because the amygdala doesn’t have any sense of time. And you know, it’s interesting because one of the things Jung observed was that there’s no time in the collective unconscious. It’s like everything is an eternal now. So let’s say you got traumatized when you were a kid. Your amygdala grows. Maybe you got bit by a spider or some damn thing. It’s like you’re afraid of that spider then and now and in the future. It’s the same. It’s outside of time. The hippocampus is the thing that’s dealing with time. So you know, if you really learn a lesson, it’s supposed to be timeless. Well, you know, you can still help people overcome their phobias, but you can’t get their damn amygdala to shrink again. So you can just get it back under control. Okay. So that’s pretty cool. And then we could say, let’s go up a level or two. Let’s look at the amygdala for a minute. So things about the amygdala have probably changed since I updated my knowledge, but it doesn’t really matter because the fundamental systems I’m telling you about exist and they keep moving around in the brain because we don’t know exactly how they work. But at a system level of description, you know, and with the, at a system level of description and using slightly vague neuropsychology, we can localize these sorts of things in the brain. Okay. So the amygdala gets inputs from everywhere. And basically what it’s looking for is things that might threaten you. And I would say, you could say in a sense that the amygdala has an inbuilt sense of the monstrous. And This is a good time to show you a little comic. This is a great comic. Someone stoned came up with this comic. They really did because it’s a head comic, underground cartoon comic, but I really like this comic because it just shows you what’s going on perfectly. Okay. So there’s these hippies. They’re all friends of this guy named Fat Freddy and you know, they’re basically useless hippies and they don’t pay rent and all they do is smoke pot and they’re, you know. And so anyways, at one point they make a bunch of money on some cocaine deal and they buy this home out in the country and they think they’re going to go out there and live in paradise. And so they bring their cat along, which is Fat Freddy’s cat, who has his own adventures with cockroaches and so on. Anyways, if you’ve ever had a cat, one thing you know about cats is they don’t like to move. It makes them very upset and nervous. And if you put them in a new house, they’re not happy about it. And the reason for that is you’ve blown their map, right? It’s like the cat will slink around in a new territory and map every single place and every hiding place, you know, obsessively until it knows what the hell’s going on and then it’ll finally relax. So a cat in a new place is not a calm cat. A cat in a new place is a nervous cat, okay, which is also an indication that you don’t have to learn to be afraid. What you have to learn is how to be calm. And that reverses the way that psychologists generally talk about anxiety, because they’re all hobbits and they think that life is safe. And so they think that because life is safe, you have to learn to be afraid. It’s like, that’s dopey. The natural condition is terror and curiosity. And if you’re really lucky now and then, you’re somewhere safe enough so that you don’t have to be afraid. And that’s tenuous and delicate. And so what you have to learn is how not to be afraid, not how to be afraid. So anyways, they got the cat. So he’s in his box and they take him out of the box and the cat thinks, so this is the country. And then the cat goes real low and starts sniffing. And that is what animals do when they first start exploring. Both of those things, they crouch down and that makes them less visible to predators. And they sniff. And the reason they sniff is because, like most animals, they’re all nose. You can tell that with dogs for example. Their whole brains are built around their sense of smell, unlike us, which most of our brain is built around vision. But anyways, so the cat’s slinking around there and then it smells something that it doesn’t know and it thinks, God only knows what this thing that I don’t know is. And so it would freeze first and then it would beat a hasty retreat. Okay, so now it’s underneath the porch. One hippie says, where did the cat disappear now? The other one says, under the house. And then the cat’s down there shaking, which is what cats do after they’re freaked out like that. And it’s got this little fantasy going, you’d hide too if you’d smell what I did. And then it imagines up this monster. And a monster technically is the amalgamation of unrelated parts. So what’s the monster? Well, it’s got duck feet and it’s got like bear arms and it’s got a skunk tail and it’s got kind of a wolf head and it’s got antlers. And you think, well that thing doesn’t exist. It’s like, that’s wrong. That thing exists. In fact, it’s a really accurate representation of what’s out in the forest. Now any one animal wouldn’t look like that, but the set of all possible animals looks exactly like that. And then you might think, well, what do you want first when you’re analyzing something? Do you want quick and dirty representation of what to be afraid of? Or do you want to hang around trying to figure out whether that thing has hooves and teeth? It’s like, no, you want a quick and dirty representation of just what might be lurking out there. Because that’s intelligent hypothesizing, right? It’s the kind of hypothesizing that would be evolutionary driven. You ever see the far side cartoon Monster Snorkel? I love that cartoon. So there’s this little kid in his bed. It’s dark. And he’s under the covers. He’s one of those ugly little kids that Gary Larson always drew. And he’s got this snorkel that you use for scuba diving. And what do you call that? Snorkeling, not scuba diving. And all that’s sticking out from under the covers is the snorkel so that he can breathe. And then of course in his imagination there’s some reptilian dinosaur-like thing sitting beside his bed. And it’s like, well, why? Because that’s what he’s hypothesizing. Why? Because that’s what’s in the dark. And you think, well, you tell your kid, well, there’s no monsters in the dark. Yeah, right. And then you say, never talk to a stranger. It’s like, get your story straight, people. Really? You know, it’s so dopey. It’s like, yeah, there’s monsters in the dark. So what do you tell your kids? No, there’s no such thing as monsters. First of all, they’re driven half crazy because they think, well, what am I afraid of then? And second, you tell them all the time that there are monsters in the dark. In fact, you’re probably more paranoid about the damn things than your kid is. So what do you tell them? There are monsters in the dark, but you can probably handle them, especially with our help. Okay, so now I’ll tell you a story. So my nephew, he was six. He had night terrors. And night terrors are this strange phenomena where all of a sudden you wake up screaming. It’s quite unpleasant. And then you might say, well, why was this happening? And the answer is, well, we really don’t know. But there was some instability in his household at that point. A, he was just going off to kindergarten. So that’s a big transition, right? It’s out of paradise, out into the world. And B, his parents were in the throes of approaching divorce. So there was that sort of undercurrent in the house, right? And you know what that’s like. You walk into a house like that, it’s like you know something’s up. It’s like the air is frozen. And it’s probably something that you can smell, I think. But whatever. It doesn’t matter. But you can certainly tell. And so anyways, he’s waking up at night screaming away. And so during the day, he’s a very verbal kid. During the day he’s running around. I guess he was about four, not six. He’s got this little night hat that he wears. It’s a plastic night hat. So he zooms around with that all the time, and he’s got this plastic sword. And he’s zooming around with that too. And so you think, well what’s he up to? Well, he’s playing night. It’s kind of weird, eh? Because you think, why would being a knight be attractive to a kid? You know, we weren’t knights for that long. But whatever, it doesn’t really matter. He’s running around playing night. And he goes to sleep and he puts his knight hat and his sword right beside his bed. So fine. I watch that. I’m watching what’s going on with him. I’m figuring out what’s going on in the house. And you know, his mom is worried because he’s having night terrors. It’s like, yeah, it’s horrible. He wakes up screaming. So okay. Night time comes. He wakes up screaming. We’re all sitting at the breakfast table the next day. And I said, did you dream about anything? And he went, yeah! And he got right into this dream. And he said, okay, well this is what happened. I was out in a field and all of these little dwarfs were around me. They only came up to my knees, but they had big beaks. They didn’t have any arms. They had big beaks on them. And they were covered with hair and grease. So they were all greased down. And there was a cross shaped at the top of their head. Wherever I went, these beat dwarfs would jump at me with their feet and bite me. So it’s like a horrible image, right? He said, they’re everywhere. And so everyone stops eating breakfast. And we’re like watching this kid thinking, wow, that’s no wonder you’re screaming, man. And then he said, yeah, it was worse than that because there was smoke and at the back of the little dwarfs there was this dragon. And the dragon was breathing out smoke and fire and the smoke and fire would turn into the dwarfs. It’s like, oh my god, what do you do about that? Wiping out some dwarfs, it’s like, who cares? The dragon will just breathe up some more. It’s like, that’s life, man. I’ve got this excellent picture. Let me show it to you because it’s worth finding even though I’m going to interrupt my story a little bit. Well, I’m not going to find it because it will take too long. But I’ll tell you what it is anyway. So it’s a Greek amphora. You know how amphora, there’s like a vase sort of, and they used to keep wine in them. And it’s painted on like a cartoon. It’s sort of black and white. And it’s got this hero who I believe is Hercules. And anyways, Hercules is facing this snake. It’s a really cool snake. So first of all, its tail is curled in a perfect circle. And if you look at dragons and snakes in mythology, their tails are often curled in a circle. It means something like infinity. But anyways. And then there’s all these snakes. It’s a hydra. So it’s a snake with like eight heads, eh? And so then there’s Hercules with his sword. It’s like, well, what’s the problem with the hydra? Cut off one head, what happens? Eight more heads grow. It’s like, hmm, quit cutting off heads. Yeah, it’s a good piece of foreign policy advice for the Middle East. So the hydras keep growing. Okay, so cutting off heads isn’t going to be of any utility. And so here’s what the story is saying. It’s like no matter how many problems you solve, there’s going to be a bunch more problems. And it’s even worse than that. If you have a problem and you solve it, that’s going to lead to more problems. So even the solution is a problem, right? And that’s the law of unexpected consequences, right? That’s why automobiles have destroyed the atmosphere. Everybody thought an automobile is for getting from point A to point B. Turns out it’s not. It’s for transforming the world into, the world’s holes into jungles. We didn’t know that. So that’s an unexpected consequence. So anyways, the kid is faced with this horrible conundrum. Like, what am I going to do? I’ve got these dwarfs and they’re biting me and then there’s this stupid dragon. So I said, what could you do about that? Now that’s called a loaded question. It would be inadmissible in a court of law in a sense because it’s a question. But no it isn’t, right? I’m telling him something. You could do something about that. Well that’s a hell of a theory. It’s like, well yeah, I should just lay down and let the dwarfs eat me, you know? No, no, you could do something about it. I said, what could you do? And then he said, I’d put my hat on, I’d get my sword, then I’d go get my dad. And we’d go up to the dragon and I’d jump on his head and then I’d poke both his eyes out with my sword and then I’d go right down his stomach to the point, place where the fire comes out and I’d cut a piece off of that and I’d use it as a shield. And I thought, right on kid, you got it. But it was so cool because he had the whole thing, eh? And that’s why he was running around playing knight. He’d almost got it. And all I had to do was drop, there’s this chemical phenomena called a super saturated solution. It’s kind of cool. So if you take, you know, water can only dissolve so much sugar until the sugar starts to crystallize out, right? But if you’re careful, you heat up the water, you can dissolve a bunch of sugar in it, and then if you really slowly cool down the water and you don’t tap it and there’s no impurities, you can get this sugar, you can get this solution super saturated, which means, weirdly enough, it holds more sugar than it can. It’s like it forgets to crystallize or maybe it needs a little impurity or a shock or something to get it going, but it’s like it forgets to crystallize. So then if you take a little crystal of sugar and you drop it in, it’s like it goes, and instantly it’s all crystals. So that’s what happened to this kid. He was there, he was ready, he had to answer, and all I had to do was say, you could do something about this and poof, instant hero myth. And the cool thing is, no more knight terrors. So you get the picture. It’s very, very cool. Alright, so back to our discussion. So you’ve got the brain here. So this is the brain as conceptualized by Alexander Luria, who was Russia’s most famous neuropsychologist and who got the big picture right, man. So basically, he said, there’s a bunch of different ways you can divide up the brain. It depends on what you want, which is an interesting way of thinking about it because you might say, well how should you divide up the world? And the answer is, well it depends on what you want. It depends to some degree on the features of the world, but it depends even more on what you want. So one of the things Luria said is, okay, if you go from the back to the front of the brain, the front’s the grey part here, what you see is roughly speaking, the back half of the brain does sensory processing, especially visual processing, and the front half of the brain does motor processing. Okay, and so if you look at the back of the brain, the sensory unit there, you see that there’s an auditory area and a visual area. And what’s cool is those overlap to some degree. So there’s some hypothesis that the places where the sensory systems overlap are the parts that are responsible for your experience of a unified perceptual field. So here’s an example. Imagine the visual cortex and the auditory cortex overlap in one place. Okay, so it would sort of be maybe here, about there. Let’s say on the left side. Yeah, there. That’s the part used for silent reading. Isn’t that cool? It means you’re using your eyes as ears. And the way you do that is you use the overlap between the visual and the auditory cortex. It’s so cool. You can use your eyes as ears. So the senses aren’t as separate as people think. I used to wear glasses and I couldn’t hear what people were saying when I wasn’t wearing them. And the reason for that is I wasn’t watching their lips, eh? And so a lot of what I was hearing in language processing was the expression on their face and the movement of their lips. So take off my glasses, I’m deaf. So anyway, so that’s the sensory unit, half the brain, most of its visual cortex because we’re insanely visual creatures, and the front half is the motor unit. Okay, why? Well, because we perceive and act. So it’s the part of the brain that’s responsible for zipping you around. You’ve got voluntary action, right? You inhabit a nervous system that enables you to navigate your way throughout the world. We’re navigators, we really are navigators. And you know ants can navigate by the stars? Think about that. How the hell can an ant navigate by the stars? They figured that out by watching ants figure out how to get back and then covering up the sky and then the ants would wander around not knowing where they were going. It’s like, yeah, there’s lots of things we don’t understand, I can tell you that. So anyways, the motor unit. You’ve got the motor strip. Now if you touch that with an electrode during brain surgery, then people will either move or have the impulse to move and you can map out how the body is represented in the brain by touching that strip with an electrode. And that was done by Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute. It was a major move forward in the understanding of the brain and he did that on epileptics before surgery because he didn’t want to take out parts of the brain that were necessary so he was trying to figure out what they were doing. So that’s the part that enables you to act voluntarily. And in front of that there’s the premotor strip and then in front of that there’s the prefrontal cortex. Now what’s cool is that the premotor strip and the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor strip over the course of evolution. So then you might say, well why do we think? And the answer isn’t so that we can come up with accurate objective representations of the world. The answer is so that we can plan what to do. And what you see fundamentally is that as you move forward in the brain, you go from action to planning action. And so by the time you get to the prefrontal cortex, let’s say the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that you use for abstract thinking, what you’re basically doing is conjuring up avatars of yourself in an imaginary world, running them as simulations in your imagination, in the collective imagination, that’s what stories are, and then running the simulation to the end to see if you live or die. And if you die then you don’t implement the simulation. And if you live and thrive then you do implement the simulation. And so, who was it? Karl Popper, philosopher of science, said, the reason we think is so that we can let our thoughts die instead of us. Right. That’s smart. Well that also ties into the death and rebirth idea, right? It’s like, are you going to die or are you going to let your avatars die? And one way of thinking about that is that your current self is just an avatar. Now if you understand that, that means you also understand the relationship between the Jungian self and the ego. The ego is an avatar. The self is the thing. Now I don’t know if you know this, but the word avatar is actually a theological term. It’s from Sanskrit. And an avatar is the form that a god takes on earth. It’s pretty cool that that turned into the word for the thing that you use in a video game, right? That’s your little disposable self, you throw it out there in a world and it can live or die and it’s like, you’re back there like God just being eternal all along the way. So that’s a very, very weird thing. But anyways, even before we had video games we were doing that, right? Because we had fiction, we had stories, we had imagination, and it’s decoupled from our motor systems and so we can implement these hypothetical instances of ourselves before we implement them. And you know, that’s kind of how we fight hydras. It’s like, okay, you got eight snakes, what do you do about that? You have eight potential selves, so you multiply potential selves just as fast as the world can multiply snakes. You know, and that’s what evolution does, right? So, you know, let’s say you’ve got a mongoose. Mongoose, mongoose, mongooses, they like to eat snakes, they’re really good at it. They can eat cobras. It’s like, go mongooses. So you think, well, a mongoose gets killed by a cobra. It’s like, well, it’s not a very good mongoose, but that doesn’t matter because the mongooses are generating all sorts of mongooses and one of them is going to be able to kill the snake. That’s all that really matters. So there’s a very funny mouse that lives in the desert in Arizona. I like this mouse a lot. And it jumps. And it’s so cool, this mouse. It feeds on scorpions. It’s like, how the hell did it learn to do that? Anyways, it has to teach its young to eat scorpions and it’s quite immune from scorpion venom, which is quite helpful. But still, you know, it goes out and it’s like you going out to wrestle a Nile crocodile. It’s like a scorpion is a big thing compared to a mouse. The mouse will hop on the scorpion, they have this terrible fight, and finally the mouse tears it apart. And then it brings it back and feeds its little mice, babies, pups. And you know what it does then? It goes outside and howls at the moon like a wolf. So it sounds like a mouse, so it’s really squeaking at the moon. But if you slow it down, you know, which is what you have to do, for example, if you want to hear mouse vocalizations, because they’re often super, super, what, what, above your threshold for hearing. Panksepp did that to hear rats laugh when you tickled them. You had to slow down their vocalizations because they laugh at ultrasonic frequencies. So you had to slow down their vocalizations to hear them laugh when you tickled them. But anyways, these damn mice go out in the desert at night after eating a scorpion and they howl at the moon, which is like, go mice. So anyways, back to the brain here. So there’s all these terrible monsters being generated, and you generate avatars of yourself to cope with them. And generally you used to have to evolve to do that, but human beings being the smart creatures we are, generated up an environment in the imagination and then populated it with imaginary representations of ourselves and then tried those out, and then we implement the ones that we think are great. And then you might think, well, we’ve been doing that for a very, very, very long time. And then you might think, well, maybe we’ve figured out exactly what thing we should implement. And then we might say, well, that’s the savior figures in mythology. That’s what they are. So what else would they be? You know, people have been trying to figure out what the hell we are for forever. And the fundamental question isn’t what is reality made of. Not the fundamental question. The fundamental question is how do you act in the world? And that’s a whole different way of thinking about the world. But I think, given that I’m a Darwinian, I think it’s the fundamental question. And you know, obviously, given what I’ve described you so far, you can’t fall in love too much with your current self. Because what if it’s wrong? Well, you should let that sucker die. And so then you might think, well, what part of you is it that doesn’t die when your avatars die? Well, that’s what Jung called the self. So let’s say you undergo a personality transformation. There’s the old you. You’re all naive, eh? And something comes along and just wallops you, bang, into the underworld. You fall apart, eh? And then bang, there’s a new you. Maybe a little, you know, battle weary but wiser. Fine. But then, you know, that one gets walloped out and bang into the underworld and up you come again. It’s like, fine. What’s constant across all those transformations? That’s the core element of the person. That’s what Jung called the self. Brilliant. It’s brilliant. It’s so smart. Okay. Fifteen minutes and then we’ll go on.