https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ewU7Vb9ToXg
Music So, okay, so we talked a little bit about motivation last time, or quite a bit about motivation, and what I told you that I was basically teaching you a personality neuroscience approach to personality, and part of the reason that I have to go into the biology is to give you the kind of foundation that you need in order to understand, I would say what’s essentially the cutting edge in personality research, you know, I mean, I know that what we covered last lecture and what we’re going to cover today are relatively complicated, but if you get them right, then you’re right at the forefront of our ideas about brain function and emotion and about personality, so you get all that at the same time, and today you’ll get a little bit of learning theory thrown in as well, so learning theory is basically what’s alternatively described as behaviorism, and I used to teach behaviorism in this class, but I’ve subsumed it underneath the biology, because a lot of the old behavior of presuppositions, although they were extremely useful, were not right, which is exactly what you’d expect, they were formulated in the 1950s, and it’s actually the sign of the progress of a science that theories that are 60 years old are no longer right, so we’ll also cover a little bit of behavioral theory today too, so, okay, so the hypothesis we’ve been working on so far, or we’ll call it the working theory, is that motivations set goals, or more accurately, that they define a conceptual space within which you perceive the world, and within which you act towards some goal, or to some endpoint, and the endpoint in some sense is specified by the motivational system, it’s a hypothalamic system often, but not always, but not only is the goal specified, but the underlying motivational systems also tune your perception, so you’re only looking at the things that you know to be relevant to the pursuit of that goal, and they also either disinhibit or activate the behavioral schemes that you would normally use to pursue the goal, and sometimes those, or let’s say the motor schemes, because that would be more accurate, when you think about behavior, you tend to think about voluntary behavior, but a motivational state will disinhibit or activate, depending on the situation, autonomic responses, so for example, when you are food deprived, and you start to think about food, and start to organize your behavior towards food as an end, and to perceive the world that way, your body also prepares for food, and so the motivational state is an all-encompassing psychophysiological phenomena, it’s not something as simple as chain behavior, which was an early behavioral theory, or as simple as something that’s merely setting a goal, it’s much more complicated than that, it’s useful to think about, as we’ve already talked about with regards to psychodynamic theory, it’s useful to think about a motivated state as a micro-personality, I mean, it’s got one aim in mind fundamentally, so it’s not particularly sophisticated, but it has all the other elements of a personality, so motivation establishes the framework within which goals are pursued, and the goal itself, and then roughly speaking, emotions, or at least many of the emotions, track progress towards goals, and so they kind of tell you whether you’re on the right track or not, so that’s a reasonable way of distinguishing them, even though there is no single motivation system, or single emotion system, there are some basic motivations, these are the sorts of things that Freud would have associated fundamentally with the id, and he thought of those as primordial, and that’s exactly right, because pretty much all of these motivational systems we share, certainly with other people, also with other mammals, and then of course with animals that are farther down the evolutionary chain than mammals, so some of these systems are extraordinarily old, in fact all of them are extraordinarily old, hunger, consequence of food deprivation obviously, thirst, obviously, people are very dependent on water, pain, pain’s complicated, there’s physical pain, and then there’s, it’s mental equivalence, and the mental equivalence of pain are grief, disappointment, frustration, roughly speaking, and so the way you can think about that is, you saw the picture of the nervous system that I showed you last time with the branches going up into the brain, obviously, but with all the branches, or the roots say, going down into the body, so we discussed the central nervous system as a sort of all-encompassing system distributed throughout the body, imagine that part of that network throughout your body is associated with pain reception, and that would be roughly equivalent to systems registering levels of input that are high enough to potentially damage them, that’s where pain seems to come in, and the different pieces of that can be activated at different times, so if it’s psychological pain, as I said, grief, frustration, disappointment, seems to fall into that category, loneliness is another one, then maybe it’s primarily the cortical circuitry for pain that’s activated, and although people who are depressed, for example, or who are grieving, often have somatic pain as well, and depression really looks like it’s a pain state, we know loneliness is because if you take like little chicks or little kittens, and you make them lonesome and they’ll cry, you know, which is a, or peep, if they’re chicks, and you can stop them from doing that by using opiates, and it’s not because it stops them from vocalizing, because that would be a possibility, just get them so stoned on morphine that they can’t peep, and you think, well, now they’re not lonesome anymore, so the experiments have been done carefully enough to factor out the effect of the opiates on the vocalization, and that’s also led to some suspicion that people who have had a history of extraordinarily painful personal relationships might be those who are more prone to opiate use, and so opiates, analgesics, they basically dampen out pain, and frustration, and disappointment, and grief, and loneliness, so there’s an anger and aggression system, it’s complicated, there’s probably two of them, one is defensive aggression, that’s probably more associated with neuroticism, technically, the other is probably predatory aggression, and you know, human beings are definitely predators, we’re meat eaters, and you know, our closest relatives, chimpanzees, for example, they’re pretty good hunters, they’ll pack, gather together in packs, and bring down 30 pound colobus monkeys, and the meat is very popular among the chimps, so predatory aggression seems to be a separate circuit, and as we’ll discuss further along, I think the predatory aggression circuit and the maternal solicitude circuit, because there’s also a care circuit, have evolved to be at opposite ends of the same distribution, I think that’s the agreeableness distribution in the big five, so on one end there’s maternal solicitude, and the other end there’s predatory aggression, and you can imagine how those things have to inhibit one another, because, well, with many mammals, bears for example, the males are so predatory that you have to keep them away from the cubs, because they’ll kill them, the human beings, I mean, there’s some aggression towards children, especially if the children aren’t biological relatives, but men are pretty caring for male mammals, and women are actually quite predatory for male mammals, so thermoregulation, your hypothalamus takes care of whether you’re hot or cold, panic and escape, those are circuits that also seem to be associated with pain fundamentally, although threat can maybe trigger them as well, and the panic escape system doesn’t exactly seem to be the same system as the anxiety and fear system, even though they sound roughly equivalent, right, you might think of panic as just the extreme level of fear, and I think fear can trigger panic, but panic seems to be a more primordial circuit, and if you’re panicking, there’s an immense impetus to escape, so that’s a different circuit, affiliation to care, we covered sexual desire, exploration and play, both of those seem to be separate circuits, so Jack Panksepp, Yaak Panksepp actually, who wrote a great book called Affective Neuroscience, by the way, if any of you are interested in the psychobiology of behavior and motivation, Yaak Panksepp’s book is one of the best, I don’t have a paper by him in our collection, but he’s a very smart guy, he wrote this book called Affective Neuroscience, and it’s actually, given its title and the relative complexity of its thoughts, it’s actually quite readable, even though it’s a text, it’s a little more personal than your typical text might be, and Panksepp is also very interested in psychodynamic and personality ideas, so he’s a very broad thinker, so if you’re interested in an approach to psychology that sort of crosses the threshold from personality into emotion and biology, Panksepp as well as Gray, there’s a Gray paper that you’re reading, Panksepp’s a very, very good source, he discovered the play circuit, for example, and he also discovered that rats laugh, so if you tickle a rat, it laughs, you can’t hear it though, because it laughs ultrasonically like a bat, but if you record the rat giggling and then slow down the tape, then you can tell that the rat laughs, and rats need to play, and most mammals need to play in order to socialize them, so one of the things, you can think about this when you’re parents too, and this is probably especially relevant for the men, because one of the things you might ask is what role do men play in the socialization of children, and one thing that men really do seem to do with kids is to engage in rough and tumble play, especially once they’re a little older than two, say two to five or something, and kids love that, they absolutely love rough and tumble play, gets them so excited that they get out of control fundamentally, but rough and tumble play is an excellent mode of socialization, because it teaches the child the distinction between aggression and too much aggression, right, because if you’re wrestling with a kid, the kid has to keep their behavioral output under a fair degree of control to keep the game going, to make it rough enough to be exciting, but not so rough that they get hurt, or that they stick their thumb in their dad’s eye or something like that, and you can think of that from a Piagetian sense too, because it’s a game, but imagine that if you’re trying to figure out how to configure yourself around other people, if you haven’t had that rough and tumble play, you don’t really know where the boundaries of your body are, and you don’t know how much you can take and how much you can be stretched and how much you can be thrown around, and when something actually hurts rather than is frightening, so all of that intense sort of play that boys in particular are likely to engage in, although girls also like it, seems to be very useful for teaching children about how to engage with the world and with other people in a physical way, and that’s one of the physiological foundations for higher order socialization, so it’s very useful. I mean, I’ve often noted that children who haven’t had the opportunity to engage in physical play, they’re kind of awkward, they’re not seated well in their body, and it’s like they’re kind of vague physically, whereas the ones who’ve been twisted around and bent and thrown up in the air and wrestled in general, they’re a lot more conscious of their limits and their abilities in their body, and they’re also much more able to invite other kids to play. You can think about this with regards to dogs. If you have a dog, you can tell when the dog wants to play, right? What does the dog do? It jumps around, and it puts its rear end in the air often, and its head down, and it looks up, which is a little bit submissive and a little bit friendly, and it wags its tail, and it might bark, and it moves back and forth, and like little kids that want to play do, well, they don’t put their tails in the air obviously, but they engage in play invitation behaviors like that, you know, a little bit of teasing sometimes, and they’re trying to get some play initiated. It’s also practice for later dominance. When chimps play, the males in particular, as they approach adolescence, the play behavior, because they’ll throw sticks at the old chimps who are laying down and sleeping, or come up and poke them or tease them, and then as they become more and more powerful and more and more adolescent, say, into adulthood, then that play will become full-blown dominance challenges. As you don’t no doubt notice if you were in junior high school, because that’s exactly what happens to teachers, right? The little elementary school kids, they’re kind of cute when they misbehave, they’re sort of playful, but by the time grade eight or grade nine comes around, the pushing on the teacher is a lot harder, and so you can see how play shades into dominance dispute. But it is a separate circuit. Exploration, that’s a separate circuit, and one of the things that we’ll talk about today is Swanson’s elaboration of the fact that half of the hypothalamus is fundamentally devoted towards exploration, which is quite cool. It means exploration is a really, really, really old system, and it’s sort of like if you haven’t got anything else to do, so you don’t want to play, you’re not hungry, you’re not thirsty, you’re not angry, you’re not too warm or too cold, etc., etc., your default isn’t sort of quiescent sleep, right? You don’t just run out of batteries and lie on the floor, unless you’re, of course, obviously, unless you’re very tired. What will generally happen is if the other fundamental motivational states have been satiated, then you’ll engage in exploration, and some different people at different rates. If you’re extroverted, you’ll engage in exploration in the social environment, and if you’re open, then you’ll engage in exploration at a more cognitive level, so that would be with regards to artistic creativity or to fiction or the expression of some sort of intellectual or philosophical pursuit, and the reason that you’re wired up that way is because if you have a little extra energy, you might as well use that to map out more of the environment so that when push comes to shove somewhere down the road, you’ll be in possession of more information and more flexible and more knowledgeable in your conceptual and perceptual structures and also in your actions, so people have a pretty strong tendency to default to exploration, but there’s variability in that. You can also sort of divide up these motivations as ingestive or defensive, that’s not a bad way of looking at it, and then there’s reproductive motivations as well. That’s unlikely to be a full map. It kind of depends on where you put the emotions, because we know, for example, that there’s a separate disgust circuit, and that doesn’t seem to load with anxiety or with pain. It’s its own biological system, and it seems to be associated with trait conscientiousness, maybe, and also with political conservatism and orderliness, so those things are all quite interesting. They all kind of clump together, but whether that’s an emotion or motivations, not exactly clear, but we’ll talk about it a little bit more. So there’s the hypothalamus, and as you can see, it’s not one thing. Of course, nothing at the macro level in the brain is one thing, obviously. It’s this layered thing, just like everything else in the world, except even more so because the brain is so incredibly complicated, and you can see by looking at that, there’s all those little things that are colored there, basically. Hypothalamic modules, I guess, would be a reasonable way of putting it, and you can tell they’re even anatomically distinct, so obviously they’re not doing exactly the same thing. So you might think of brain anatomy as sort of a fixed, what would you call, something that we’ve already managed quite well, and we have all the category systems down, and the structure of the brain is quite well known, and that’s really not true at all. The brain is truly terra incognita, and it isn’t even… Our naming rituals, let’s say, our conventions, are not necessarily appropriate for one-to-one mapping of, say, structure onto function. So they’re sort of anatomical, they’re markers for anatomical convenience in some ways. Okay, so here’s a way of thinking about it. So you have your frame, which specifies your lack, say, I’m hungry, and then a goal pops up, which is, well, I should have something to eat, and the hypothalamus is modulating perceptual and cognitive circuits so that you think that, and so that you start to parse up the world into a place where a hungry person like you could become satisfied, and then the behaviors kick in that are relevant to that pursuit. And so you can think of yourself as popping through these sorts of frames on a fairly cyclic basis throughout the day. You know, obviously, you get hungry, you get thirsty, you get tired, and so your consciousness is being modulated by subcortical circuitry that is basically charged with your self-preservation, and in some ways you come along for the ride. I mean, your consciousness is mostly there, in some sense, to detect deviations from not so much expectation, but from desire, right? Because you lay out one of these little maps on the world, and then you want something to happen. What your consciousness does, more or less, is monitor, and if something that you don’t want to happen happens, then consciousness will take a look, in some sense, you remember that hierarchy of goals that I showed you from, you know, motor output up to high-order goals? Your consciousness kind of moves up and down that thing if you’ve made an error, trying to figure out at which level of abstraction that error should be rectified, which is sort of what you do when you think. And so that process is going to kick in whenever you’re moving towards your desired end, and something that you don’t want to have happen happens, right? You usually stop that sort of an anxiety response, the stopping, and then if nothing else happens that’s too bad, well, then you’ll start to explore. Animals often do that by moving around, but people will do that just with equal facility, just by running simulations in their mind and trying to calculate what went wrong, right? Trying to think about it. That’s a form of exploratory behavior as well that would be more associated with trait openness and with intelligence. So there’s how Swanson divides up the hypothalamus. See the little pink things there on the left are part of the defensive circuits, and then the red things on the left are part of the reproductive circuits. And, you know, obviously the fact that those circuits exist lays onto Darwinian theory quite nicely. The defensive circuits obviously protect you from dying, and the reproductive circuits facilitate your reproduction. It’s not much of a, what, fairly obvious conclusion. And so those are all located in this essential part of the brain, the hypothalamus. Now, this is something that’s a little more complex, so I’ll go through it a little bit more carefully. So if you look on the right, this is where Swanson maps perfectly onto Piaget. And I put the Swanson paper in as an optional reading, but if you’re interested in the sorts of things that we’re covering in this class, that’s a great paper to hack your way through, even though it’s very hard, because you learn a lot about the underlying biology of some of these more complex clinical and developmental theories that we’ve covered. So basically, what Swanson is pointing out is that at the lowest level, at the highest resolution level of your central nervous system, you have motor output circuits that are enabling you to move, and those are communicating in large part with your spine, but also with lower parts of your brain stem. So those are fundamental movements of the sorts that Piaget would call reflexive. And then the locomotor pattern generator. I think the best way to think about this from an analogical perspective, and actually Alexander Luria used this analogy. He called behavioral patterns kinetic melodies. It’s a lovely phrase, because you know how obviously a song is made out of notes, and then the notes combine into phrases, and the phrases combine, say, into passages, and then, well, even more so, interestingly, if it’s an orchestral piece of music, multiple instruments are playing at the same time, so it sort of extends right into the social domain. But your actions are sort of like that. They’re made out of micro-routines, and then those are chained together, and those are chained together in higher order abstractions and so on, all the way up to the cortex. And so Swanson points out that the motor system has three sets of inputs. So the cognitive system, that sort of way up, that sort of level of abstraction that’s way up in the brain. So the cognitive system is where, you know, you might do a voluntary action. So you look at something, you say, well, I’m going to pick up this piece of paper. And so that’s top-down cortical control. And then the state system input to the motor system, the state system is your body monitoring what’s going on inside of itself. And the autonomic nervous system is part of the motor output system, and so the state monitoring system takes a careful look, and the hypothalamus does a fair bit of this, takes a careful look at what’s going on inside you, and then activates different parts of your digestive and, you know, the gut system fundamentally that you have no conscious control over. And then obviously there’s sensory system inputs too. So those are the three main inputs into the motor system, and that acts on the environment. And then the motor system has this hierarchical control of the body, and that’s what’s going on inside of itself. And the motor system has this hierarchical nature that’s built from the spine upwards. And so you can think of, like, the brain as a collection of ever-expanding control systems that allow you to learn and undertake ever more complex motor schemes of action. You know, one of the things that people think about human beings is that we’re very good at thinking, right? But we’re not just good at thinking. Like, we’re crazy, crazily adaptable in terms of our motor output. I mean, if you watch the Olympics, you know, and you see human beings can do things that no other animal could even think of doing. I mean, we’re completely crazy when it comes to the sorts of things we can do with our body, like we’re good on ice, we’re good in the water, we can ski, people are really good at jumping, they can climb across buildings. People who train themselves can climb like mad. I mean, human beings are unbelievably variable in terms of their motor output. So that’s another part of our intelligence that’s not just abstract. And so in part that’s because we have this very well-developed cortical area that enables us to chain ever more complex patterns of behavior together, and also to develop patterns of behavior that are sort of outside instinctual specifications. So imagine with an animal that has a less complex brain, a lot of its behavior is going to be limited to those quasi-instinctual patterns of behavior that are devoted directly towards the solution of basic biological problems. But, you know, we can kind of solve those without too much effort, and then we have all this spare motor capacity left over, and people do the weirdest things with it, you know, and really remarkable, absolutely remarkable things. So that’s pretty cool. We’re pretty cool that way. We don’t get enough credit for it, I don’t think, because human beings, think about human beings as the animal, which people are kind of loathe to do. We are definitely the most interesting animal. I mean, if you saw like a pygmy hippopotamus skateboarding, you’d think that was pretty remarkable, you know, but people, they do those sorts of things all the time, and we just take it as a matter of course. The lowest, somatomotor neuron tools. The lowest level of the locomotor system, its locomotion and action, is formed by a subset of motor neuron tools. That’s wrong. Motor neurons in the spinal cord, ventral horn, that innervates the limb muscles responsible for locomotor behavior. I dictated this with Dragon Dictate, and now and then it does weird things, hey, so tools, god only knows where that came from. So, a set of motor neurons in the spinal cord ventral horn, so it’s way down in the spine that innervate the limb muscles responsible for locomotor behavior. When you start to think about the brain as something that moves your body, it’s a lot easier to conceptualize the brain as something that’s distributed through the body, you know, and your spine is actually quite smart. So even though in some sense you don’t think with it, it’s capable of very complex sensory detection and also motor mapping, and so mostly relatively automated and relatively reflexive. One level up. The existence of a spinal locomotor pattern generator, so this shows that the spine isn’t responsible just for the most basic of motor outputs or sensory inputs, it can actually generate patterns, is demonstrated by the fact that whereas a spinal animal displays no spontaneous locomotor activity. So, if you sever an animal, its nervous system, so it only has a spine, it’ll just lay there. You know, you’d think it’s paralyzed, that’s what you would think. But. Coordinated limb movements characteristic of locomotion may be elicited when the limbs of such an animal are placed on a moving treadmill, that’s providing somatic sensory input to the pattern generator. And so they’ve done this with people who are paraplegic. If you take someone who’s paraplegic, and so they can’t obviously walk, and you hoist them up, and you pull them out, and you pull them out, and you pull them out. And so they’ve done this with people who are paraplegic if you take someone who’s paraplegic And so they can’t obviously walk and you hoist them up and you put them on a Treadmill and you lean them forward their legs will walk and that’s spinal controlled So that’s what you’re doing with your spine. You know because you’re not thinking when you walk or you’re not thinking about walking unless you know Unless you’re one of those people who can’t chew gum and walk at the same time so Anyway, so it just shows you how complex you are even at the you know the sort of the base levels of your of your intelligence hierarchy Level up locomotor pattern controller, so it’s controlling the Locomotor pattern generator In contrast undisturbed chronic Hypothalamic animals okay, so now one of the ways people figured out how the brain works was by sectioning animals nervous systems when they’re alive At different levels of complexity so a spinal animal is one that’s basically paralyzed its brain is separated from its spinal cord But then you can separate the hypothalamus with the intact spinal cord So it’s one unit from the cortex and even from the memory systems and even from most of the emotion systems And so the animal in some sense hardly has a brain at all you know I mean the hypothalamus is you saw it’s a little tiny thing and everything that’s on top of that can be separated from it and the animal can still act spontaneously so so here’s an example if this has been done with cats and If you have a female cat and it’s in a cage And it’s only a hypothalamic animal it can basically manage like it can’t learn new things very well, and it can’t remember anything like It doesn’t have episodic memory and so but it can it can maintain its temperature It can eat it can engage in sexual activity It’s got defensive aggression like most of the animal in some sense is still there from an from an input-output perspective It’s also hyper exploratory Which is quite interesting hey because you wouldn’t think well animal with no brain is the most exploratory kind of animal Well it happens to be the case as long as it has a hypothalamus So that shows you a how old exploration is but it also kind of gives you some clue about what the rest of the brain Is doing I mean You you explore new things We’ll say so what that means is you have to be able to tell the difference between what’s new and what isn’t and so what? You need to tell the difference between what’s new and what isn’t is memory And so a lot of what the higher order parts of the brain are doing is basically keeping track of where you’ve been and So if you’ve been somewhere before Then the exploratory circuit is basically shut off as long as everything that you’re doing there is working And you need the whole brain basically to shut off the hypothalamus in some sense. That’s how the thing works It’s like you’re kind of a default on system You know your motor systems are ready to go and you’re kind of you’re alive, and you’re ready to go like a wild animal But the cortex dampens that down and it does that by only allowing the activities that are relevant to that area That might be none of them to function at any one time so you take off the cortex Well the animal can still do a lot of things But you know its ability to match its behavior to novel situations and to learn new behaviors is very very limited so it becomes Hyper-exploratory, but it can’t remember anything and it becomes very limited in the flexibility of its behavior and so as you move farther up the hierarchy of Complexity then you’re able to do more and more novel and more and more complex and more and more situation specific things so In the sense of providing a certain level of endogenous activity which means self-generated activity So the hypothalamic animal will move by itself without being stimulated The hypothalamic locomotor region can be thought of as a locomotor pattern controller Which generates spontaneous inputs ultimately to the spinal locomotor pattern generator, so there’s hierarchy I already talked about behavioral state inputs. There’s another picture of the nervous system just to remind you of how it looks Now it’s distributed through the body oh This is very interesting too. I Didn’t learn this till I read this paper by Swanson. I thought that’s so dumb. How could I’ve not learned that like 30 years ago? Swanson said that Let’s go back one did I yeah? Raymond Kayle was like the world’s greatest neuroanatomist He was the guy who really established the field so did a tremendous amount of investigation into the fine structure of the brain Like a hundred and ten years ago a long time ago And he pointed out that sensory systems have a dual projection within the central nervous system I told you guys about blindsight already You know and I fact that your eyes map on to different levels of the hierarchy say of sensory input and motor control Kayle basically outlined the circuitry for that one branch goes directly to the motor system So it’s that’s for I to output mapping so that’s fast because there’s not a lot of thinking in between And you might think that’s bad because you want to think but it’s good because Sometimes you know what to do and you don’t want to think you just want to execute it as fast as you possibly can So these lower order simpler inputs are good for that sort of thing one goes directly to the motor system And the other goes more or less directly to the cerebral cortex where sensations and perceptions are elaborated and voluntary motor impulses are generated So this sort of explains for a long time Experimental psychology was dominated by behaviorists who thought of the animal as a stimulus response machine and and never paid much attention to the function of things like thought or emotion or Complex internal states and you know the behaviorists got an awful long way with their idea of the Animal as a sort of simple stimulus response machine, and that’s partly because of this hierarchy that we’re describing You know because you you can treat an animal as if it’s a pretty simple machine because it has all that simple machinery in it It’s just that on top of that simple machinery There’s a lot more complex machinery and so but the simple machinery does a lot more than people generally think and can do more than people think and so The fact that there are these at least two projections they branch more than that Gives you right away a sense of why the behaviors could have been right and the cognitive Psychologists could have been right and even the psycho dynamic thinkers can be right because they’re analyzing the system at different levels of hierarchical Complexity and extracting out slightly different What would you call? Observations and some of these things are even the like the simpler systems can have quite complex outputs So so one of the things that the simpler sensory motor system does is detect snakes because primates don’t like snakes in fact There’s a woman named Lynn Isbell wrote a nice book on primate vision and snakes, and she was very curious about why human beings could see so well and She also noticed that we’re very good at detecting the sort of camouflage patterns that snakes use especially in the lower half of our visual field and she did this cross-cultural survey around the world and found out that Where there’s more predatory snakes the primates have better vision So we sort of co-evolved with snakes and snakes gave us vision just like it says in Genesis Which is pretty damn funny as far as I’m concerned and it was snakes in trees even so and fruit of course gave us color vision so the whole Genesis story nailed it pretty well, but You know snakes have been around long enough and have been our enemy or say predatory reptiles You know if you don’t really want to go with the whole snake thing that are we’ve evolved we’ve co-evolved with them It’s like 60 million years. It’s a very very long period of time so Darwin used to amuse himself in a Darwinian way he’d go to the there is a zoo or a Rep place that shows reptiles. I remember what they’re called, but they had one glass cage where there was some kind of poisonous snake I think it was a Cobra and Darwin would put his face right up against the glass and the Cobra would go whack and he jumped back and he He did that many times because he was curious about whether or not he could actually bring the snake avoidance Reflex under conscious control and he couldn’t every time the snake jumped he jumped backwards He couldn’t control it and so that’s because all the primates that could control it when there were snakes biting them are dead so It was Darwin was the beneficiary of the Darwinian process in that in that sense so So the point is your body’s conserved all these low-level fast operating circuits And so you’re a simple machine and a sort of complex machine and an extremely complex machine And then something that’s so complex that you can’t even think about it as a machine and you’re all those things at the same time And there’s Swanson’s take on how the motor system and the hypothalamus are Integrated so it’s quite nice. He shows that the hypothalamic controller So that’s one of the circuits that we’ve been talking about that are responsible for a basic motivated state get sensory input Behavioral state input that’s about the body and the input from the cerebral hemispheres hypothetically that’s thought or or voluntary action plan something like that and then it has output to the motor pattern initiator the Generators and the motor neuron pools and then you act Lovely, it’s a beautiful beautiful model And so you can see that it maps very nicely onto that with the sort of higher order levels of the of the hierarchy of sensory motor framing associated with cognitive abstractions in the lowest levels associated with the sorts of things that you do with your spine and This I flipped this upside down here because it’s I I’ve been very interested in how people get traumatized and it’s easier to think of trauma when you flip the thing because Once you develop the higher order abstractions cortically, you know, you say well, I’m a good person Let’s say then that’s sort of the the fact that you’re a good person or what? Constitutes good starts to become a box the box within which all the things that are associated with it are put it’s one of the dangers of abstraction right and Categorization because if you couldn’t think of yourself as a good or bad person Let’s say you didn’t have that capacity for that level of abstraction, which is like a binary abstraction, right? Good is you know? One and and bad is zero. So it’s a really it’s a really Simple abstraction and so if someone if you do something that a good person wouldn’t do Well, clearly you don’t fit into the one category because a good person wouldn’t do that So maybe you fit into the zero category and that’s that capacity for abstraction is also precisely the sort of thing that allows human beings to undermine themselves with thought Because once you have that capacity for abstraction you can make these ridiculous overgeneralizations. In fact, they’re really simple I’m not a good person. I’m a horrible person It’s like that’s what how someone who’s really depressed thinks whenever whenever anything goes wrong And so it’s the danger the powerful danger of abstraction is that you can make a terrible mistake in overgeneralization this is partly because Well, let’s say I don’t know you’re out with your Girlfriend and you flirt with someone else So what does that say about your character Well, she might think that puts you in the zero category like now right? You’re not a good person It’s like well, it’s complicated is that art is that true? Do you do belong in that zero category? She might treat you like that for a week or two I mean should you be taking yourself apart completely because you’ve made that error or should you seek farther down the Chain of abstractions for a more specific mistake and or should she help you do that? It’s like well, you’re not a complete zero. You’re more like a you know point one She could help you figure out exactly where in your personality hierarchy you have this fault assuming that it’s a fault You know, maybe it’s an indication that the relationship is over who knows so Anyways, I wanted to show you that because then you can develop a sense of how this hierarchical system can also lead to cataclysmic Overgeneralization and that’s associated with lots of different mental illnesses, especially depression because depressed people Generally go from a small mistake well a mistake Hard to parameterize right to the highest level of abstraction say well. I’ve made error a therefore. I’m useless You know or therefore. I’m bad. It’s not good. It’s too undifferentiated I Put that in there to remind you that all these little things are Informed by The underlying Hypothalamic circuits so you know that whole hierarchy has to be imagine how it’s conditioned that whole hierarchy of motor output part of it is Conditioned by and then this is sort of like an output or an input system that Swanson didn’t talk about sort of sensory that whole motor Sensory sensory motor hierarchy sensory motor perception action hierarchy will say Has to be constructed so that your basic motivational state stay Satiated right because otherwise you get thirsty enough, and you die or you get hungry enough, and you die. It’s like you have to Organize your behavior so that those basic motivations stay fulfilled so each of the little Ovals that make up that hierarchy have to be organized and laid out with that set of limitations in mind But then of course there’s a higher order Limitation which is more the one that piaget talked about which is that not only do you have to organize your internal? Hierarchies to take care of all of your basic motivations, but you have to do that well everyone else is doing the same thing And so in some sense the hypothalamic system That’s generating the impetus for these layers and layers of motor output also has to do so in a social context Because otherwise you know you fight to the death over a stick of bread which seems like a very counterproductive thing to do so I’m trying to point out to you how many parameters those that hierarchical organization has to meet simultaneously Also that one of the implications of that is that it’s not an arbitrary system This is one of the problems. I have with the radical moral relativist stats It’s like wait a minute Wait a minute for you to set up your perceptual and behavioral system It has to solve a whole bunch of problems like in the really complex problems And they’re and they’re kind of arbitrary in some sense like you get hungry, and you need to eat it’s arbitrary So what that means is you can’t fill that hierarchy with just any old thing you know not only does it have to work To keep all the complex parts of you functioning Here and now but it has to keep them functioning here and now in a way that doesn’t disturb them functioning tomorrow or the next day Or the next week or the next month so that’s integration across time spans That’s a killer right because you can’t just go out tonight and drink 40 ounces of vodka And then you know write the test on Thursday, so there’s a probably not so some of you might try so But then you also have to Organize your behavior in the here and now with your behavior spread across time frames in the presence of other people who are also Organizing their behavior across time frames It’s like once you put that many parameters on the organization of a personality You can see right away that it can hardly be arbitrary. You know it’s tightly constrained Okay, so here’s some basic emotions. We talked about basic motivations, and so What we’re going to do in a simple way is we’re going to divide them into two Positive emotions and negative emotions okay, and that basically gives you extroversion and neuroticism so Positive emotions they kind of fall into two classes the one class is the positive emotion you feel when you When you run a motivational frame to its limit, so you’re hungry you go have a peanut butter sandwich And then you’re no longer hungry okay, so what’s the state? How do you define the state after you’ve eaten your peanut butter sandwich, and you’re no longer hungry Well, you know you’re not jumping up and down and cheering like someone who just made a touchdown right so it’s it’s not that kind of Enthusiastic positive emotion that you see when people are celebrating you know it’s more like Satisfaction and that’s actually technically what it’s known as satiation and so when a motivational routine runs Successfully what happens is it eliminates its it eliminates the necessity for it to exist temporarily So basically what happens is you run a framework to its logical conclusion poof it disappears Because it’s done, and you know you might be satisfied about that, but the next thing that happens is another Motivational framework pops up, and you’re you know you’re in the same game. It’s Sisyphus fundamentally so anyways It’s satiation that Is that the term satiation is technically used to describe the state of being that’s characteristic of the successful execution of a motivated? Frame it’s also known as consumatory reward Consumation consume and that’s associated with Unconditioned That’s an unconditioned response It which means you don’t have to learn it, so it’s a it’s an unconditioned positive response So and that means that? satiating Stimuli when delivered to a creature in the proper motivational frame have the properties of unconditioned rewards So you get three things there? You know the satiation brings the motive frame motivated frame to an end the satiation is also known as consumatory reward Consumatory reward is very similar to what the behaviors described as unconditioned reward Unlearned so you can you can stack each of those things to know on top of each other, and then you’ve got them The other kind of positive emotion is the positive emotion that you feel when it looks like you might get a consumatory reward Right right hope curiosity anticipation Excitement enthusiasm all of the positive emotions that we think of as really like happy happy usually has to do with Evidence that your pursuit of a valued consumatory reward is going well Okay, now that this that’s incentive reward and the reason it’s called incentive reward is because you’re incentivized to move forward to the reward and The moving forward the impulse to move forward towards a desired goal That’s what your positive emotion systems the dopaminergic systems that are nestled have the roots in the hypothalamus That’s what they motivate you to do. That’s what positive emotion is fundamentally positive emotion is there’s something good I’m going to go get it. It’s the I’m going to go get it part. That’s associated with Excitement and positive emotion. It’s what you feel maybe you’re an extrovert you want to go to a party And so you’re probably more excited about going to the party than you will be when you get there You know because it’s the it’s the apprehension of the reward that’s with human beings because we’re such weird creatures So often the apprehension of the consumatory ward is a more powerful emotion than the emotion that’s actually felt as a consequence of gaining the reward itself and That’s partly and this is where it gets a little more complicated. That’s partly because we’re so bloody exploratory. You know so There’s things that you can learn about that are associated with the consumatory reward Those are conditioned rewards So an incentive reward and a conditioned reward are in the same category although Not all incentive rewards are learned This is where the behaviors went wrong because the behaviors thought there are consumatory rewards those are unconditioned rewards to get a conditioned to if you condition a stimulus to an Unconditioned reward you get a conditioned stimulus with a conditioned reward as a response The problem with that line of thinking is that there’s actually incentive reward circuitry It’s not just secondary learning. It’s like incentive rewards have been around so long So those are things that indicate that a consumatory reward is coming They’ve been around so long that your brain has developed its own circuit for that and that’s the one that produces positive emotion And so that’s also produced by the way if you when you’re taking a drug of some sort that you really like That’s because it’s activating the brain That’s because it’s activating this dopaminergic incentive reward system if you take a drug that Activates consumatory reward you just like lay in front of the fire like a sleeping dog. You know it’s it’s not exciting It’s cocaine amphetamines alcohol for lots of people nail the incentive reward system And that’s the dopaminergic exploratory system that emerges out of the hypothalamus And it’s also the thing that learns what to associate with consumatory rewards So I know that’s a lot to take in but well it doesn’t matter that’s how it is so so the approach systems respond to cues of consumatory reward and they also they also respond to a large set of biologically prepared stimuli smells for example, so Now you should approach good things, but if a bad thing happens what should you do well one thing You should do is stop another thing you should do is get the hell out of there, so There’s a constellation of negative emotions that are associated with defense and avoidance And we kind of ran through those already pain grief frustration disappointment and then Fear which is sort of what you learn You learn that things to be feared signal primary pain stimulus You know so a child’s going to be afraid of a needle especially if a child’s got a needle before Most children are smart enough to figure out they should be afraid of the needle even when they haven’t had it But the thing is is that if you come into contact with something that’s already caused you pain And now there’s something that only signals that that’s likely to happen. That’s when you experience fear Okay, and fear is its own circuit again Which is where the behaviorists in some sense went a little bit wrong too because they thought of unconditioned punishment Which produces pain as the primary motivational system, so it would be unconditioned punishment Unconditioned reward then there were things you learned about those that produced conditioned punishment conditioned reward Okay, but all of those have circuits independent circuits So the defense and avoidance negative emotions seem to be roughly pain Anxiety and fear, but then there’s disgust and people have been looking at disgust a lot lately And it doesn’t load on neuroticism. It doesn’t seem to load on neuroticism, so it’s its own circuit, so Okay, so here’s another one other Complexity that you need to grapple with which is There are things that hurt that cause you pain there are things that are satiating and that are Consumatory reward then there are things that signal each of those But there’s one class of stimuli so to speak or things that you’re going to encounter that are paradoxical And that’s the class of things that you don’t Understand that’s novelty and novelty It’s it’s it’s novelty itself that sort of associated with what the phenomenologists are primarily concerned about the idea of the revelation of meaning because the revelation of meaning is mostly associated with You encountering something that you haven’t already understood right you explore that new information comes out of it a new you comes out Of it okay, so you’re going from point a to point B What might happen? well Things might happen that it that appear to demonstrate that you’re on the right track so That makes you happy. That’s the yellow box positive emotion. You know Your your pathway is being facilitated So that’s why tools are sort of in that category or you can be moving towards point B And you get something gets in your way, and that might be something that hurts you that’d be And that hurt would be pain or disappointment or frustration or grief or something that signals that you might get hurt Which is threat that produces fear and so the positive emotion is moving you towards the desired goal and the negative emotion is protecting you and so if a negative things happens you’ll stop and then you’ll reconfigure the behavior that you’re using or the framework in order to get around the obstacle and to continue or if it’s a bad enough obstacle you’ll You might say well. I’m not I’m too tired to eat, and I’m too hungry to sleep that happens to people right it’s a conflict of motivations And so if you get up and you go into the cupboard, and you find out there’s nothing to eat You might say oh to hell with it, then I’ll just go to sleep You know so sometimes the way you solve a problem is by flipping the problem It’s like we’re not going to solve that problem right now. We’ll turn to another problem some and that’s an exploit That’s an exploratory move sometimes you operate within the frame You know you go to the cupboard the cupboard is bare But you’re hungry, so you walk down to the corner store And you get something to eat and so that way you’ve sort of stayed within the frame and altered You know you’ve altered your behavior to to You’ve thought up another path and altered your behavior so that that motivated state can run to completion Here’s another way of looking at it you can be moving from point a to b and What you predict or want is happening? That’s a good thing that keeps your mood straight and you happy and that makes you hope That’s a promise with the promises you’re going to get what you want and that fills you with hope that’s positive emotion Or you can have an unpredicted outcome when you’re you know you I don’t know you’re supposed to be going out with your friend you go to The door you knock and there’s nobody there, so it’s like what’s up with that? And so it’s in a sense when that happens. There’s like a hole in your framework You know because your framework was predicated on the presence of your friend Right it was a presupposition and so now and then you’ll run out a behavioral routine and one of your presuppositions is wrong It’s sort of like there’s a hole in your theory and the hole you sort of drop into it And when you drop into that hole you get a little bit of a shock And then you drop into it and when you drop into that hole you get anxious Because you don’t know exactly what this unexpected thing means and behind that you get exploratory So with most people they’re going to get afraid first they’re going to have negative emotion first when their little plan is blown And then if nothing additionally awful happens and if they don’t drive themselves crazy with some hypothesis about He doesn’t like me anymore and so no one likes me anymore so I’m a terrible person You know then the ex Once they calm down a little bit the exploration circuit will come up And maybe they’ll walk somewhere else go to a bar or maybe they’ll stand there and think well you know this didn’t work out So what else could I do? An emotionally stable person say a non-neurotic person they’ll flip to that really fast especially if they’re extroverted and open Whereas someone who’s heavy in negative emotion You know the fact that their friend wasn’t there when they told them they would be That might just produce a hole that they fall into and it’s you know so deep and painful they just go home and cry So so the neuroticism And the extroversion are in some sense they vary with the degree to which the negative emotion system Is strong or the positive emotion system is strong and they’re two different systems and so you can think of them in some sense you can think of them as Units of positive emotion per unit of promise I mean, it’s a weird thing to try to quantify or units of negative emotion per unit of threat So, you know if someone maybe someone there’s a rumor going around that you’re going to lose your job Well, how much should you worry about that? Well god, you don’t know So how do you decide? Well, you don’t you’re Your wiring decides so if you’re high negative emotion, you’re going to get all anxious and freak out about it Which might be the right thing to do. Maybe you will lose your job and if you’re emotionally stable You’re going to think ah, I probably won’t lose my job But even if I can’t even if I do i’m i’m not going to worry about it. It’s innate or a lot of it’s innate so Okay, so to recapitulate learning theory behaviorism there are unconditioned rewards Those are rewards. You don’t have to learn Those are the things that bring a motivated state to its closure roughly speaking And that makes you satisfied satiation that by the way is associated with serotonin Serotonin is a satiating neurochemical So if your levels of serotonin are high you’re kind of satisfied which means you don’t experience A lot of positive emotion or a lot of negative emotion. You’re just kind of satisfied. It’s a high dominance thing It’s like all the consummatory rewards are there when you need them. You don’t have to worry and you don’t have to get too excited Conditioned rewards or incentive rewards Indicate progress towards a consumer Consumatory reward they can be learned or conditioned But they can also be innate and they’re associated with dopaminergic activation and that’s the exploration circuit that comes out of the hypothalamus half the hypothalamus does goal specification And the other half does exploration and so Again, if you’re pursuing something that’s an identifiable goal and you fail Well, then you’re going to back off that’s negative emotion, then you’re going to start to explore and that’s that dopaminergic circuit What’s associated with dopaminergic activation Exploration extroversion happiness play enthusiasm assertiveness and the positive element of novelty Okay, so that makes sense Anybody have any questions? I know that’s a lot of information But I kind of designed this part of the course so that at this point the levels of analysis would stack up so that you could understand them simultaneously so the hypothalamus Sets up your frames of motivation Running one of those to the to its positive conclusion that’s satisfying That’s innate. It’s it’s consummatory reward. You’ll work for that Anything that indicates that that might happen? That’s incentive reward. You can learn that but some of it’s also innate Which is where the the behaviors didn’t know that because they thought of all the all the secondary stuff the conditioned stuff has learned It’s not all learned some of it’s already prepared. You see a snake. That’s a threat. You don’t have to learn that So fire is sort of like that as well Blood is like that teeth are like that staring eyes are like that predatory postures are like that Loud loud vocalizations, especially if they’re like low low in Frequency they indicate a large animal all those things are things you don’t have to learn to be afraid of because They’ve been so consistently dangerous in the past that you’ve built up a circuit that responds automatically to the question the extraversion and neuroticism like it seems like they’re well at least in the example that you gave that Yeah, it’s complicated, you know because they do play a bit of an inhibitory role, but they’re separate circuits You know, so you can be very extroverted and very high negative emotion so And you can be very Emotionally stable and very low in extroversion too. So but they are definitely separate things now. It’s hard You know, you can flip from laughing to crying very rapidly You know, so people are very much capable of experiencing mixed states of positive and negative emotion Plus there are forms of manic depressive disorder where people are manic and depressed at the same time, which I would recommend The people I know that have had that they they seem to think that is certainly not fun so Agitation Tremendous agitation So it’s a very difficult thing to deal with Agitation Tremendous agitation So you’re probably sort of like that when you’re deeply confused and you’re really bothered by it Because then the threat circuits are going but you’re also sort of wandering around going. Oh, what am I going to do? That’s all that’s all like approach behavior approach motivation isn’t always positive I mean most of the time it is but intensity matters and controllability matters, too so Okay Unconditioned punishments Fundamentally they produce pain. They also tend to Ha if you run a behavioral routine or a motivated Framework that results in punishment. You’re less likely to run it again in the future. That’s learning If you run a motivated frame and it works, you’re more likely to run it in the future. That’s learning, too so Unconditioned punishments decrease the probability that you’re going to run a given motivational frame because it failed right you ran it and you got hurt It’s like don’t do that again That’s part of the purpose of memory and the pain like emotions just to say it again are pain Frustration disappointment grief sadness is in there as well. So those are pain like states of emotion Conditioned punishments Those are things that indicate that a punishment is likely Some of them you can learn some of them you don’t have to because they’re already built into you The negative emotions are dampened by serotonin That’s the fundamental brain system fundamentally the serotonergic system is like a conductor of the orchestra. It keeps everything in in balance and gaba Gaba is a Anxiolytic makes people less anxious. It’s endogenous your brain produces it if you take valium or barbiturates They act on the gaba system and so does alcohol That’s part of the reason why people like alcohol because it dampens anxiety now for some people alcohol also produces dopaminergic activation So they really like alcohol because it calms them down like they’re not anxious anymore and it It also feels it produces incentive reward activation like cocaine so for some people alcohol is an absolutely deadly drug You can probably find out if you’re susceptible To alcoholism quite straightforwardly if you want to find out sit in a bar take your pulse Down five shots Four shots if you’re little You got to get your you got to get your blood alcohol level above legal intoxication or you won’t be able to tell And then take your pulse again 10 minutes later if your pulse has gone up eight beats or more Watch it Because you’re probably producing an opiate response to alcohol secondary consequence of the opiate response is a dopaminergic response Reasonable probability that you’ll like alcohol enough to find it difficult to stop drinking once you start Some of you are probably like that right you have a few drinks. It’s like yeehaw That’s how we do it in alberta anyways, so So part of that’s queuing the incentive reward system and because it’s an approach system And it’s being queued by the alcohol you just continue to hit it and The dopamine kicks only occur as your blood alcohol level is rising So you have to keep nailing it nailing yourself with alcohol because otherwise your blood alcohol level won’t keep rising and you won’t get that nice Enthusiasm and assertiveness that goes along with the positive element of alcohol Neuroticism so this is the neuroticism dimension There’s a gender difference in neuroticism Women are about half a standard deviation higher negative emotion than men It seems like a cross-cultural universal the difference is more enhanced in egalitarian states like scandinavia Which is exactly the opposite of what you’d presume right if you were a say us a radical Can’t remember the name if you’re someone who believes that everything occurs as a consequence of socialization As you equalize a society the gender differences in personality become larger rather than smaller So which is you know not what anybody expected, but that’s what happened So boys and girls seem to have about the same level of negative emotion But as soon as puberty hits women become higher negative emotion than men on average There’s still a lot of overlap between the genders and it never goes away again Across the life course once it kicks in in puberty and the reasons for that Women are smaller their their upper bodies are weaker so they’re more physical They’re they’re at a physical disadvantage if they’re in a dominance dispute. They’re sexually vulnerable plus They have to take care of infants So I think those four things are probably enough to tilt the nervous system of women more towards negative negative emotion I’ve often thought maybe that women’s name Emotional systems the negative ones in particular are actually not tuned to the woman I think they’re tuned to the woman infant combination So, you know if you think about it from an if you think about it for a bit It almost has to be that way because an infant has to be carried around for like a year and a half And so at that point when you have an infant and maybe you’re going to have ten You know you guys won’t but in the evolutionary past that would have been the case You’d have an infant for a much of your life, and then you’d be a grandmother and have an infant It’s like Why wouldn’t your nervous system be tuned at puberty for the two of you instead of one of you? So how how could it be any other way anyways? So you’ve got your hypothalamus and then on top of that you’ve got some circuits that deal with memory and emotion So i’m going to run you through the hippocampus and the amygdala relatively quickly So this is a theory that was basically put together by sokolov who’s a russian neuropsychologist back in the 80s So here’s the idea You wander through the world and you if you’re in a place that you know Your memory systems The hippocampus looks inside your memory systems To see what it is that you want to have happen based on your understanding of the world Okay, so you’re going to have a very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very As you turn your head and you see this So this is your mind And this is the vision that you have of the world of the world Okay, so You’re in a motivated state, but you have certain expectations that make sense within that state So the hippocampus is watching what you think is going to happen But remember that’s motivated it’s not just expectation and then the hippocampus is also looking at the world And then it’s seeing if what’s happening inside and what’s happening outside are the same which means You know what you’re doing, and you know where you are and if they’re the same so if it detects a match then the hippocampus inhibits the amygdala and The hypothalamus roughly speaking now what it actually seems to do There’s a little circuit in your brain stem called the reticular activating circuit And it’s the thing that turns your brain on at night if you’re sleeping and you hear a noise that you shouldn’t hear It’s like bang you’re awake. It’s the reticular activating system way down in your brain stem puts your cortex into a High arousal state poof you’re conscious now the hippocampus tells the reticular activating system to basically remain calm as well as as long as What it’s what you’re expecting and desiring and what’s happening are the same thing so it’s sort of like it’s saying I know you could jump up and freak out and run about but you don’t have to right now Because everything’s going according to plan, but as soon as there’s a deviation that’s anomaly say then the hippocampus says whoa Something’s wrong here, and it disinhibits the reticular activating system that turns on your emotions Especially your negative emotion, but it primes your positive emotion And it primes some of the hypothalamic circuits to or disinhibits them because one way of solving the fact that something isn’t going well Is to switch to something else so it’s sort of like There’s a bunch of circuits on underneath you, but they’re being held back like horses in a racehorse and then Something that you don’t expect happens and the gates come up a little bit because then you’re prepared now a lot of that’s negative Emotion oh, oh you don’t know where you are But a lot of a lot of the rest of it is be prepared to do whatever the hell you might need to do next and so Anomaly the hippocampus Detects anomaly that’s something unexpected Expected and then it disinhibits your lower circuitry and it gets you ready to go now the problem is How worried should you be when something that you don’t expect happens An answer to that is you don’t know that’s a big problem with life because now something went wrong. Here’s the possibilities You’re not looking at the world right so it’s actually a perceptual problem right? Like gray for example believes that you just see the world just like it is because he’s sort of a behaviorist It’s full of stimuli. You don’t have to interpret them. That’s wrong. You have to interpret them So if something goes wrong it might be that you’re looking at things wrong your perceptual systems are out. It’s unlikely but sometimes It’s the case But forget that let’s say that you’re looking at the world correctly and you know your inferences about what went wrong What went wrong isn’t the consequence of you? Misperceiving it’s a consequence of some Stupid problem with your stupid plan the problem is you don’t know where the error is located, and that’s why I think there’s temperament Sometimes if something unexpected happens you should really freak out Other times you should ignore it, but you can’t tell which of those is true right away So what happens is there’s a distribution? When a little thing happens some people really get upset about it and other people hardly care at all and Sometimes the people who get really upset about it are right and sometimes the people who don’t care at all are right And that’s why there’s variability in neuroticism Okay now what you do when you’re exploring is you start to decompose your plan right if you’re if you if you can manage It if you’re not so like gripped by anxiety that you’re paralyzed Then you go into your plan and you think well am I a complete like loser or is it some micro thing that’s gone wrong? And then you can start to decompose it and reconstruct your plan, okay, so Yeah, the other the other thing that this Little diagram helps you understand It’s like look what happens is when you’re laying out a plan a motivated plan and a hole appears in it You have to figure out why you fell in the hole and then what you have to do is you have to take that motivated Plan that’s kind of running on automatic And you have to remember what it’s made out of and so what opens up underneath you when you’ve made a mistake is the Complexity of the plan and then also potentially the complexity of the world on the off chance that you misperceived it right You’re just someone might say you’re not understanding me properly You know maybe there’s something wrong with you that’s interfering with the perception And then you have to do this massive search to try to figure out where the error lies now Part of the reason I believe that people stick to their beliefs So hard is because people don’t like it when the hole appears in one of their big Abstractions right so they’ve got these high-order representations of the world that are shorthand ways of representing something they’re sort of like axioms of faith and If they if a hole appears in one of their axioms of faith then all this complexity comes rushing up And it’s overwhelming and so people hate it when you undermine One of their high-order abstractions, and so I think I told you this before don’t do that in relationships, right? It’s best not to do it to yourself as well I’ll stop with this these are Medusa’s and What what happens when you see the Medusa? Okay, so what might that mean? You bet it’s the it’s a prey response, and so that’s a sort of that’s the sort of thing that occurs when You’re moving towards your goal in your frame and the bottom drops out. It’s like oh, what’s there? You don’t know So what’s the logical first response? Well if you’re high in eroticism it’s going to be this in a freeze and then and only then If nothing else terrible happens to you you’ll start to relax a bit And then maybe you’ll start to investigate the structure of your planet Maybe you’ll start to investigate the structure of the world and then from a constructivist perspective say once you’re in a structure You can start to do that You gather information from the world and then you remake your plan and you remake your conception of the world and then you can move on So you do that under the guidance of the positive and the negative emotions. Okay, that’s good We’ll see you Tuesday