2016 Personality Lecture 11: The Psychobiology of Traits, Continued

The last time we talked, I started to walk you through the nervous system a little bit and we started with the monkey business illusion. One of the things that’s really remarkable about the monkey business illusion is that— and change blindness illusions in general— is that they demonstrate to you just to what degree you could either describe yourself as blind or focused. And I think focused is actually better than blind. You know, a laser beam doesn’t cover much area, but it really illuminates what it strikes.

People are sort of like that; we’re really beamed into a single point, and there’s something metaphysically spectacular about that, I think, because that single point that we’re narrowed down to is, in some sense, the thing that writes the world. You know, because as we interact with the world, we’re able to turn it one way or another in all sorts of complicated ways. I mean, I know our powers of doing so are obviously constrained to a substantial degree, but by the same token, that focal point of concentration enables us to interact with the world and then, at least seemingly, to change it according to our will.

It’s like we take a future that’s potential, we interact with it at a focal point, and then it transforms itself into a past that’s, in some sense, fixed and real. So that’s pretty strange. So I guess you don’t want to underestimate the utility of a point. I want to talk to you a little bit first more about what you’re blind to and then what the consequences of that are.

So, this here is a little diagram of a computer, believe it or not— a conceptual diagram of a computer— and it’s predicated on... I’ll tell you a quick story. If I’ve told you this story please stop me, but I don’t think I’ve told you guys this story.

So one day back in about 1987, I was working on my computer and I was typing some long essay in DOS, and you really had to back up in those days because the programs didn’t do any backup for you. If the program shut off and you hadn’t been super careful, you were just going to lose all of it. And so that’s what happened— I was typing when the computer went off, and so I had an emotional reaction to that.

Right, now an emotional reaction to that is kind of an interesting event because I would say that you’re not even working with the computer until it quits. The reason I would say that is because if you think about it, when the computer is functioning, the fact that it’s an extraordinarily complicated device is basically irrelevant to you. What you’re working with, roughly speaking, is the screen but not really, not even the screen. You’re working with maybe a phrase or even the word that’s presented on the screen.

You know, you’re typing the word/phrase/sentence/paragraph/essay, and only out past that domain of consideration do you start thinking about the hardware technology that underlies what you’re doing. You don’t want to think about that at all. When something’s working, you don’t have to see it. And so that gives you a clue as to consciousness.

Consciousness is an error detecting and correcting phenomena, and you’re not conscious of things that are going well. You know, which might explain to some degree why a lot of our life seems to be made up of suffering. If things are going well, it isn’t exactly like you’re happy if things are going well, you just don’t notice when they’re going well. Sometimes if they unexpectedly go well, then that makes you happy. But otherwise it’s just the same old thing, even if it’s amazing.

I was— yesterday— I was eating breakfast with my son and I was complaining about the fact that I had to eat canned-smoked tuna because I don’t really like fish, but I have to eat fish for a variety of different reasons. And I thought, Jesus, what’re you complaining about? I mean, really, do you know what a tuna is like? Those things are like small whales, right; they weigh like 600 pounds, they’re impossible to catch.

So there’s some poor characters out there hauling in tuna, which is impossible— and then they have to clean them and freeze them and smoke them and can them— and all I have to do is go to the store and pick up this can of tuna and then I can complain about it for breakfast. It’s really quite staggering; the fact that I can ever eat tuna is a complete bloody miracle. But it’s not the sort of thing that makes me happy because I just expect that.

Which is very pathetic, but that’s how it goes. So anyway, back to the computer. So, it stops working— well, and that’s what I would say I notice the computer. And there’s nothing more annoying than noticing a computer when you’re in the middle of writing an essay because, what the hell do you know about computers? Nothing. What’re you going to do? Turn it on and off?

Well that’s like problem solving process number 1. It usually works— thank God— but if it doesn’t work you’re into either the software or the hardware. So anyways, I turned it on and off, and that didn’t work, and so then I turned on a light to see if I could see if something had happened at the back of it. But the light didn’t go on so I thought, aha, the power probably went out or I blew a fuse, so I went out to see if the fuse was burnt out, but it wasn’t.

And then I noticed that all the power in the house was off, and then I noticed that— I went outside to go to the corner store to get something, I don’t remember what, and when I went outside I noticed that all the streetlights were off. And then the entire power grid in Montreal was out. And then the entire power grid for like half of Quebec was out. And a big chunk of Eastern North America.

And do you know why? Have I told you this story? Good. Because there was a solar flare. And so the sun is a big hydrogen bomb, right. So I don’t know if you guys know this— a cheerful piece of information for you if you need to be cheered up— but if you happened to have a hydrogen bomb and you exploded it— you know a hydrogen bomb has an atom bomb for its trigger, did you guys know that? You need to know that because it’s important.

Because an atom bomb is a big thing, but it’s just a trigger for a hydrogen bomb, so a hydrogen bomb is unimaginably bigger than an atom bomb. Anyways, if you blew a hydrogen bomb in the atmosphere over Central North America, you could probably wipe out maybe all of the electronic equipment in the entire continent permanently.

Because what happens is when a hydrogen bomb goes off, there’s an electromagnetic burst, and as it propagates it’ll hit your electronic equipment and propagate across the wires and produce a big spike in current, voltage I think, and it’ll just blow it. So your cars won’t work, your tractors won’t work, your subways won’t work, your cars won’t work, your computers won’t work, your satellites won’t work. It's like, done.

And also, just to cheer you up even more, back in the late 1800s, I think it was the 1860s, there was this— oh let’s go back to the sun. So the sun’s a big hydrogen bomb and now and then it freaks out and emits a big solar flare, which is something that’s gone wrong on the sun. And maybe it blows out this solar flare almost to the orbit of Mercury, and then that burst of radiation comes zooming towards earth and then 9 minutes later it hits, and if it’s a decent electromagnetic pulse it’ll wipe out the power grid in Quebec.

And that’s what happened. So the reason my computer didn’t work is because the sun was misbehaving. And so, I like that. It was very illuminating to me because it just shows you how many things need to be stacked on top of each other, working perfectly for something that you’re doing to actually function.

So anyways, back in the late 1800s in the 1860s, there was a massive solar flare and it produced a burst of power on telegraph lines and it lit some telegraph operators on fire. And so this does happen— it happens about once a century, and we just missed one last year. So while you’re worrying about global warming you can be considering the much higher probability that a solar flare will knock out all of our electronics and send us back to like 1860.

So the point is that, first of all, there’s a lot of things going on to make up an object that you don’t detect with your vision. You never think that the reason the computer works is because the sun is acting properly. But it is of course the case that an endless number of things have to be stabilized that you don’t see.

And you might say, well the sun isn’t part of the computer but well, that’s wrong. It’s not part of the computer in some sense when it’s behaving, but as soon as it stops behaving, it’s instantly part of the computer. So here we’ve got— you might say, well let’s say the power hadn’t gone out and the computer stopped working. Well then you might think, well I’ll never buy that brand again.

And maybe the brand is associated with operation in some country where corruption is rife and things are made improperly and the parts don’t work very well. So you might think, well I made a stupid purchase decision. And of course, that’s connected to the political system of that place and the economy. And then weird little things can happen down at the micro level as well as the macro level.

So, computer chips have now got so small— you know they have little wires in them right, the chips— the wires are now so small that because of quantum uncertainty. So quantum uncertainty basically tells you that you can’t really tell where an electron is if you want to know how fast it’s going. And you can’t tell how fast it’s going if you want to know where it is.

But more than that, it says you can’t really know where the thing is, and so what that means is that once you get your wire short enough, some of the electrons might not be in the wires where they’re supposed to be, and they actually cause short circuits. So that’s another issue. There are other levels of reality that are micro levels that you can’t detect at all.

So there are macro levels that are way beyond you. You know, political systems, economic systems, biological systems, physical systems outside of that. And then there are these Microsystems layered all the way down, and things can go wrong at any one of those levels and a lot of that is invisible to us.

The same thing happens when something goes wrong with you. It’s like, what’s wrong with you? Maybe you’re malfunctioning at the molecular level. Your DNA isn’t working properly so you get cancer. Or maybe some virus which is even smaller than the DNA comes in and takes up residence and that’s really not so good.

Or maybe you’re eating something wrong and you have an organ malfunction. Or maybe your family’s screwed up and you’re stressed half to death and the reason they’re screwed up is because you live in, let’s say a society that’s not friendly to your particular immigrant type, and so the real reason that you’re sick is because of people’s inability to get along with one another. And so on and so forth and so on.

And so God only knows where you’re supposed to focus. But focus we do. And one of the things that motivation allows you to do is to figure out what you’re going to focus on. Now you think, god, there’s all these things to focus on. There’s an infinite number of things to focus on. How in the world do you ever figure out how to focus on anything?

Well the answer to that is evolution, fundamentally. You can view evolution in the following way. You can kind of think about the background of reality— I think the best way to think about it is as this interplay of patterns, complex patterns, sort of like music. And those patterns are always changing in a sort of dynamic way, and they exist at multiple levels, just like complex music does.

So then imagine that what you’re trying to do is to dance to the music, to align yourself to the music. And it keeps changing on you so, well, what do you do? Well if you can change then you can change the music. But if you can’t change then that’s it. You’re not dancing anymore.

Okay, so let’s assume that there are two ways of solving that problem. One way is just sheer number. You’re a single-celled organism or a mosquito and you don’t have that much neurocapacity for transformation and so you don’t know what the melody is going to be when you lay your eggs if you’re a mosquito.

And so you produce like a million eggs and some of them can dance to the current beat and the others can’t, and so they all die. And so that’s what happens over the course of evolution for a very, very long time. The melody keeps changing and then what creatures do is propagate a whole variety of variants of themselves.

And in the case of small animals or fish even or crayfish or that sort of thing, they just overproduce offspring like mad in hope that one of them can dance to the current tune. And then you know, we get three and a half billion years later, roughly speaking, here we all are and what we’ve got is this dynamic nervous system.

And it enables us to take an external pattern and map it to a neurological pattern or multiple neurological patterns— because we can interpret things, right— and then to output that to multiple behavioural patterns. And so in some sense, what we’ve done is we’ve internalized the process of evolutionary variation into ourselves.

And the more complex, roughly speaking, the more layers your nervous system has— imagine there’s a pattern on your skin, and then that’s interpreted by a pattern of nerves, and then those nerves have an output, they’re sensory nerves we’ll say, and then those have an output to motor nerves, and then those have an output to muscles. That’s you, roughly. You’re maybe a four-layer thing in that regard.

But then you grow all these extra layers of neural tissue, so that the layers are hundreds of cells thick. Hundreds of layers thick. And then you can map a whole bunch of patterns in the external world onto a whole bunch of patterns in the neural world and then onto a whole bunch of patterns in the motor world, and so that makes you dynamically adaptable.

But you learned all that through this incredibly painful process of evolution which basically consisted of the death of like 99.999 percent of everything that ever lived. Species and individuals alike. Now, why is that relevant?

Well, how do you figure out how to focus in on something? Well, a big part of that is actually—let's see how we do it. Well first of all, what are you focusing in on here? Well not poisonous snakes, and rampaging lions and chimpanzees. Because they’re not in here. And the reason they’re not in here, roughly speaking, is because you live in a culture that’s very, very highly advanced and it’s got walls like mad.

This is a— Carcassonne I think, a French city, medieval city. It still exists. Beautiful city. You see how the medieval people solved this problem. It’s like, well you can’t deal with much. Well what do you do? Build some walls, keep a bunch of stuff out. You don’t have to worry about the rampaging barbarians then because they just can’t get in.

And so a lot of the reason that you can handle the insane complexity of the world is because it’s not even neurological. It has virtually nothing to do with your physiology. It’s just that you’re in a university. And the university is protected by the city and the city is protected by the province and the province is protected by the country and the country is protected by all of its multiple entanglements.

You’re inside walls inside walls inside walls inside walls and so on. Your world’s pretty simple. You can just sit there in relative warmth and comfort and not have to worry about anything. And so there’s one solution: there’s a cultural solution.

Then inside the cultural solution, obviously there are architectural solutions of various sorts. And then there are political and economic institutions that are pretty stable, and they keep you from having to deal with chaos. I mean you can see that chaos breaking out a little bit in the previous weeks, in the American election.

Because the Trump people and the left-wingers are going at it at the Trump rallies. And you can see that’s just tinder that could just blow up at any point and all of that protection that’s there because all of these very complex games that we’ve agreed to play— like the democracy game— that just all flies by the wayside. And all of a sudden you have to contend with what people are like, and that is not something you want to do.

There’s people, man— they’re capable of anything. Which is good, but also really bad. Well then the next thing is, you’ve got a body. Now that’s where the evolutionary process really kicks in. And so the reason your body is the way it is, roughly speaking, is because it’s mimicked the external environment.

Just like Piaget talks about children using their bodies to mimic the external environment voluntarily, your body is set up through this evolutionary process so that you can focus on precisely that subset of things that seems to keep something like you going for long enough for you to make another one of something that’s more or less like you. And it only really works for about a hundred years. That’s pretty much where it tops out.

And so you don’t solve the problem very well. You don’t solve the problem of radical complexity very well. But you solve it well enough so that you live long enough to reproduce, speaking strictly biologically. And that appears to be good enough.

And part of the reason why you seem to expire, because you might think, well if I— why don’t people just live for like 500 years instead of 100 years? Because you’d think that someone who could continue to reproduce for 200 years instead of 100 years would have it all over for someone who could only manage it for 50 years, say. Turns out that your genes have a better time of it if you just put them into a new body and shuffle off this mortal coil so you’re not using up too many resources while your children and grandchildren are trying to survive.

And so that’s an evolutionary solution. Death is not technically inevitable. There are creatures that are roughly immortal. Goldfish, for example, which is really annoying. It’s like, really? Goldfish? Because they’re a carp and carp basically just keep growing. It isn’t obvious that they senesce or age— they get killed because they get diseases and these sorts of thing, but there are 300 or 400 year old carp.

And some turtles seem to not age really. And then of course your DNA has been there ever since life started, so it doesn’t really age either. And it corrects itself. So things can last a very, very long time. But not us.

Anyways, we’re put inside this body that frames things for us and starts narrowing things down. And our psychophysiological selves have a limited range of interests and desires and needs— however you want to construe that— and then that gets instantiated more into the nervous system.

It’s a mistake to think— people always think your brain is in your head, and that’s really not a very bright way of thinking about it. I don’t know exactly why we think that way because, well there’s the nervous system— you can see it right there. There’s a lot of your nervous system that’s not in your head.

The motor and sensory systems are distributed throughout your body. Your spine is smart enough so that if it gets severed and we put you over top of a treadmill— suspend you— you can walk. You don’t know you’re walking and you can’t control it, but your legs will do a perfectly good job of walking without you being involved at all.

So your spine is brain tissue for all intents and purposes. Your brain is distributed through your body. And so, it’s evolved so that it’s pretty good at going around specifying what it needs. And so we talked about the hypothalamus the other day and how it accounts for what I called sub-personalities that are motivated towards particular ends.

And those ends are obviously the things that we would identify as fundamental biological necessities. But then they transform themselves as we interact socially into more and more complex fundamental biological necessities. It’s a tricky thing because people talk about needs as if they’re biologically instantiated, like they’re the fundamental building elements of motivation.

But it’s not really that obvious, because you might say, well being hungry is a biological need but being a doctor isn’t. Well, not really because if you do end up being a physician you pretty much solve the food acquisition problem permanently, right. So it’s just a higher order manifestation of the same thing.

And it’s higher order because instead of just eating once you eat every day for the next 40 years. And instead of just feeding you, you feed you and your family and maybe some other people too. So, thinking of that as something that isn’t rooted in biologically is not accurate. It’s kind of a continuous complexification.

From the simple local time-bound immature subpersonalities that can only fulfill themselves in this moment and with help, to the development of those circuits— which I would say is your personality— that are capable of providing you with what you need in order to live and to be attracted to other people across very large spans of time. It’s like a tree, you know. It’s like a tree expanding upward. It’s a good metaphor.

Alright, so that’s fine. Motivation sets up your perceptual frame. And so people often talk about motivation as if it’s a drive or a need— not as if those terms are particularly well-defined. A drive I suppose is a deterministic sequence of motor outputs, something like that. But it’s not accurate because the motivation actually specifies what you look at. It specifies right what you see.

And then it specifies as well what you’re going to respond to emotionally. So just imagine this, say I’d offered a 10,000 dollar prize to the person who counts the number of basketballs correctly. And then you’re doing your best to count the number of basketballs in the monkey illusion and then somebody stands up in front of you like this and blocks your view.

Well what emotion are you going to feel? It’s a negative emotion, right? In all likelihood. And so that might be anxiety, because you’re not going to win. It might be fear— it’s like anxiety because you’re not going to win, but also like— fear because what the hell is this crazy person doing? Anger. Right, that’s another negative emotion, although there’s a positive attack element to it. Frustration, disappointment, maybe some grief— a whole undifferentiated mess of negative emotions.

Well why? Well, in some sense the motivational system specifies the map and the goal. It’s a little more complicated than that because it also specifies where you are. But you can think about it as a map with a destination. That’s why stories are like that, because we inhabit them. A map’s like that all the time. And then what emotions do, roughly speaking, is tell you whether or not things are going the way you want them to as you’re on that path.

And so the emotions in some sense have to have a motivational specification before they’re properly functional. Like, what should you get angry at? Well generally you get angry at things that either interfere with your progression towards a valued goal or upset the entire sub-personality that contains the goal itself.

That’s a more— what could you call it— that’s a more serious failure. It’s one to fail when you’re trying to do something, it’s another thing to fail so hard you have to give up the whole project. We would rather just fail at some sub-element than have to give up the whole project, right. It’s one thing to fail an exam, it’s another thing to fail at university.

And I think the reason for that— I thought about that for a long time— why is it worse to fail out of university, assuming you want to be in university, than it is to fail an exam? How does your brain compute that? Because you can’t tell all the consequences, right, so it’s not self evident. But it seems to me that it’s something like you think about these functional sub-personalities as having a temporal and spatial range of application.

So if you’re a university student, you’re sort of stabilized for four years. Wherever you go, people say “what do you do?” and you can say “I’m a university student.” And everybody’s happy about that. From an economic perspective, it’s probably worse than being unemployed, in some sense, but you can’t just go tell people that you’re unemployed and then you have a nice little high-status slot in society. It doesn’t work that way.

But you can do that as a university student, you know, so it fulfills your social obligations and it makes you feel like you’re doing something at least vaguely useful— I mean apart from the learning and all the other things that are positive about it. So what happens is that that map basically covers that space and time— the time is four years and the space is everywhere you go during those four years.

Then if that map burns up it’s like you’re exposed on all fronts for that entire four-year period. And that might even be the two years previously. For example— strange to think that, but if you bail out of university halfway through your third year, you’ve also destructured the map that you used to organize your memories, in some sense, of the previous two and a half years.

Because first of all they were the memories of someone who was doing just fine and going through university, and now all of a sudden they’re the memories of someone who failed. Those aren’t the same memories. And so it’s weird that an error can alter the past, but it can and often does.

I mean any relationship breakup that’s of any significance will do exactly the same thing, especially if you were betrayed, right. It’s like, it’s not just the present and the future that dissolve into chaos and take you on a little trip to the underworld. It’s also your revision— the necessity of revising your past.

So anyways, so then I would say well— failing a class— well the class restructures you in some sense and focuses you for a certain subset of the general going-to-university map. So it’s going to be less traumatizing to do poorly on a class than it is to fail out of university because the amount of space and time that those respective maps cover differs.

So what you’re trying to do always is to lay out a functional game— that’s a good way of thinking about it— on the space-time territory that you inhabit. And if you understand that then you can start to understand a little bit about emotions.

Now, okay, I have to put a little coda in there and that’s: motivations and emotions are not technical terms. They’re sort of like id and ego. They’re terms that you can use to structure a debate. I showed you the hypothalamus and you see it’s made out of all those little nuclei— they’re not the same, so you can’t say that every part of the hypothalamus is doing something that you can fit into a class: motivation.

And motivations and emotions overlap, so, I would say hunger— some of them oversee more purely motivation. If you have an unsettling altercation with someone, it tends not to make you hungry. Whereas it might make you angry, it might make you happy, it might make you sad. So hunger is something that seems to pop up one of these maps and then emotions guide your way through it or tell you where you are on it.

But then you have complex motivation-emotions like pain, and also anger. Because pain has a goal in it, right— get away. Or stop, or get away— it’s usually get away— but it also has an emotional feeling, right. It feels bad. So it feels like an emotion, pain. Grief is like pain. Disappointment is like pain. Loneliness is like pain. And I mean this technically— all of those things can be addressed rather successfully with opiates, by the way. So technically they’re the same.

But pain— is being hurt an emotion? Well people will say that, “well I feel hurt.” Whatever. And anger is another one of those that’s sort of ambivalent because anger has a goal, right: remove obstacle. Remove or destroy obstacle. In a sense, that’s the goal of anger. But people talk about it as an emotion.

So we’re oversimplifying. But it doesn’t matter because it’s a useful oversimplification and that’s sort of what a theory is: a useful oversimplification. Alright, so I kind of laid out what I think are the basic motivations there. Hunger, thirst, pain, anger, thermoregulation— you don’t want to be too hot or too cold— panic or escape, affiliation or care, sexual desire, exploration, play.

And you can kind of divide those into self-maintenance motivations and self-propagation motivations, roughly speaking. Sort of just a way to keep track of them. And then emotions— so the hypothalamus is involved in a lot of that. It’s not the only thing, but it’s involved in a lot of that.

And so here’s sort of how I’ve conceptualized one of these maps. And we’ve seen this thing before. You’re at point A because if you’re using a map, or if you’re in a game, there’s a starting point or you’re a player— either way there’s you there— and then you’re going somewhere and you have to do something to get there.

Okay, so that’s the little map, and maybe you have to go make a peanut butter sandwich or you have to go turn the thermostat down or you need to call your friend or whatever. But it’s the same kind of structure that you’re using in all those different situations. And they switch, you know. Now you’re finished being hungry. Now you’re thirsty. Then you’re lonesome. It’s like Sisyphus.

It’s one damn thing after another, roughly speaking. And so that’s what keeps you alive. And you have to be chasing things all the time because your natural tendency is to run out of fuel and decay. That’s entropy— you have to fight that.

And so that’s a continual battle because you’re pretty organized and it’s really hard for something that organized to just stay organized. It’s a lot easier— there’s a million ways to mess up your room. There’s like one way to clean it. Or maybe 10, you get the point. And it’s the same with anything that’s extraordinarily complex.

There’s not that many ways it can stay in order and there’s a lot of ways it can fall apart. That’s why you’re running all the time on a treadmill. You’re fighting the second— is it the second law of thermodynamics? Is entropy the second law of thermodynamics? I think so. That’s a major one, so good luck in your scrap. Because you’re going to need it.

So these little underlying biological systems pop up the primary maps and then those are elaborated upwards into maps that are more and more complicated. And the more and more complicated maps maybe solve two problems at the same time for a week. Or they solve 10 problems at the same time for 20 years.

That’s why you want a job or a career: a whole bunch of problems are solved immediately as soon as you’re employed. I mean, you have some other problems, but that’s inescapable anyways. Okay, so you’re inside one of these so you’re always motivated. You’re always running around after something.

And that’s another thing to know too because the basic state of human beings is not quiescence, you know. You’re not napping in front of a fireplace. If you’re not pursuing something that you’re motivated to pursue, then generally what you’re doing if figuring out how to pursue other things that you’re motivated to pursue.

And that’s exploration. And so if you’re not actively motivated by biological necessity, we’ll say for the sake of simplicity, then the next motivation kicks in, which is well, prepare for the next time that you are so motivated. And that really accounts for our capacity to explore.

We’re always zooming around the world trying to figure out what to do with it next, you know. Acquiring more information or— even when we’re entertaining ourselves because we’re almost always looking at stories when we entertain ourselves. We’re still acquiring information that has functional significance and so attractive to us that we find it innately rewarding just to observe that sort of thing.

It’s even in strange situations, like people will go to horror movies. What’s wrong with them? Why do you want to go and get scared? Or disgusted? Because that’s horror, right— fear and disgust. Plain uncertainty horror movies like The Blair Witch Project, that’s pretty much all fear. And then the slasher movies and that sort of thing, that’s pretty much all disgust.

And you might say, well why bother exposing yourself to that. And part of it is: to get over it. You know, it’s exposure. Because life has terrifying elements and it has disgusting elements, and you’re going to have to learn to maintain yourself in the face of that. Certainly illness is going to challenge your capacity to deal with disgust.

There’s any number of reasons to be terrified so, you go to movies and you practice facing it. And you observe that you can. I mean there are other motivations too, but those are sort of the healthy ones that go along with people wanting to expose themselves to dangerous situations.

So even in that you see exploration and preparation for what’s going to happen next. And the exploratory circuit is a very, very fundamental circuit. It’s also hypothalamically mediated. So, the way the hypothalamus works— it’s quite cool— is that, on one hand it pops up all these little maps that you can occupy that have their core in, we’ll say, biological necessity— so roughly Freud’s id— but when those things all shut down because they’re satiated, that’s a technical term, by the way— satiated, it means satisfied— it’s a form of reward.

So it’s sort of how you feel after you’ve eaten a good meal and you’re in a warm room and your friends are around you and maybe you go to sleep if it’s your family. Because— I’m thinking of Thanksgiving or something like that— everything is just taken care of and so you fall asleep. That’s satiation.

You can see that in animals all the time because they spend a lot of time satiated. Dogs: they sleep a lot. Cats: they sleep a lot. Because they’ve already attacked their cat food and so that’s pretty much it for the day. Human beings, we tend not so much to enter into states of satiation.

Now what happens when you’re in one of those little units— one of those little motivated things— there’s a couple of things that can happen. [Muttering]. Okay so we talked about motivations as sort of setting up this little frame. And then we can talk about emotions.

So, there you are going somewhere. And there’s this little straight line that’ll take you there, this nice efficient way to get there. Now why do you want to do it efficiently? Well, because you use up the least amount of resources like that so you can maintain some resources for doing the next thing you need to do. So you care about efficiency and simplicity.

So you want to go like the crow flies to the destination. So then, what happens along the way? Well, let’s say you just get to go straight. Well basically what happens is that you’re motivated by your perception of the goal or intermediary goals because the goal can be linked together, and then as long as things are going according to plan, as you move towards the goal in an untrammelled way you’re going to feel mild positive emotion.

And the reason for that is that you’re turning the environment— the environment almost never has... most of it (the environment) is irrelevant. The rest of it has a positive or negative valence. And if things are going according to plan it has a mild positive valence, right. You think things are okay, and really what you’re doing is you’re observing two things. You’re observing that the things that should be happening, if you know what you’re doing while you’re acting, are happening.

And so each step forward is an indication that you’re getting closer to your goal. That’s incentive reward. And that’s the sort of reward that you actually think of as fun. An incentive reward is produced by activation of the exploratory system that’s in the hypothalamus— it has its roots in the hypothalamus— and that’s the dopaminergic system.

And that’s the system that cocaine and amphetamines and all those drugs that people really like to take hyperactivate, making them feel like they’re doing something important and useful. Even though, in all likelihood, they’re not. So the dopaminergic drugs in some sense hijack your incentive reward systems. And it’s incentive reward because you’re incentivized to continue moving forward.

Anything that you look at that makes you want to touch it or move forward to it basically activates the dopaminergic system. Now, so you say, well what happens when you’re on your way to somewhere? Well, roughly what happens is neutral things, which is okay. You can ignore them. Positive things or negative things.

Positive things happen when things are going according to plan or even better than according to plan. You’re walking to school, it’s raining, somebody you know stops and offers you a lift. It’s like, well you’re doing okay getting to school and that was fine, but all of a sudden you’re getting there a little faster and you’re not getting wet. So that cheers you up.

It’s an indication that you’re able to save resources while you’re moving towards a goal— dopaminergically mediated. You know, and then we can imagine a different scenario where you’re walking to school in the rain and someone drives by you. Maybe it’s even the same friend and they don’t see you and there’s a puddle right beside you and not only do they not stop but they completely cover you with oily and frigid water, and so that’s not so good.

You’re angry about that and upset. Why? Well, you might say, “my day is ruined.” What does that mean exactly? Well it means that you had a little map on top of your day and you were hoping that the day and the map would correspond and then all of a sudden the map burned up and God only knows what’s going to happen to the day.

And so it’s like the bottom has dropped out of your map. And so then you have to worry about your clothes and catching cold and all those things. And turning around and going home and what it’ll mean if you miss class and so on and so forth.

So basically that’s the domain of chaos that we talked about. So that’s a negative thing, but it’s also— the thing about negative things is they’re sort of hard to disentangle from unexpected things. You know, because most of the things that happen to you that are negative are also unexpected because you don’t go around trying to make negative things happen.

So well, what happens when something negative happens? Well, you get a negative emotion. Pain, anxiety, disgust. Those seem to be the big three. And they’re mediated by different systems. We don’t understand the disgust system very well. It doesn’t load with neuroticism because all the other negative emotions load with trait neuroticism.

Pain— pain seems to be what you experience if your receptive surfaces are— you know if your physiological self is subject to stimulation of an intensity that’s sufficient either to damage it or to damage the receptors. You know, but pain is complicated. It’s not just physical pain from physical damage.

It depends on how you define physical damage. If someone dies, that’s pain. If you’re alone and isolated, that’s pain. If you’re depressed, that’s pain. If you’re frustrated or disappointed, that’s pain. Frustrated might mean something gets in the way of you moving towards a goal, and disappointment might mean the whole damn structure just collapsed on you. Either way, that’s pain.

Now the behaviourists would have called that an unconditioned— like a painful stimulus— they would’ve called that an unconditioned stimulus. You don’t have to learn for it to be bad. It’s sort of built in bad. And they would think about anxiety in response to the unexpected as learned.

The behaviourists would think that you need to learn what predicts something painful. And if you learn that something predicts something painful then you get anxious to it or afraid of it. But it turns out that it’s more complicated than that.

So what the behaviourists would think is that pain in some sense is the fundamental negative emotion. And then maybe you’re a kid and you stand up underneath a table and you whack your head on it when you’re learning to walk. And then when you go under the table now you get anxious because you’ve learned that if you stand up under the table, you bang your head and that hurts.

So anxiety under those circumstances is a learned behaviour. Got it? Okay, but it’s more complicated than that because anxiety can also be an unlearned response. So if you just encounter something you’ve never seen before, it’s going to make you anxious.

There’s actually a circuit that mediates anxiety. It’s not just a secondary derivation of the pain circuitry. It’s its own little unit. And it’s sort of like you’ve figured out over time— evolutionary time— not to get hurt because you don’t want to be damaged. But then, you’ve learned how to detect the probability that you will get hurt for so long that you’ve also evolved a system just to respond to that.

And so some of that responds to things that you have learned are dangerous. Some of it responds to things that are generally just dangerous. Blood, spiders, insects of various sorts, facial expressions that indicate fear or disgust or anger, broken limbs, bodies— especially mutilated ones. You know what’s in horror movies, that’s all sort of primary fear stimuli, right. And it’s built right into you.

Now psychologists debate about whether it’s built in or whether you can just learn it really easily. But I would say that there’s sort of a continuum. Some of it seems pretty damn built-in. Snake-fear, for example. Chimps who’ve never seen snakes, you bring one into their cage— if it’s a rubber snake— poof, they hit the roof. And then they look at it.

And snakes in the wild, a chimp will go up to a big snake in the wild and hoot at it. They have a special snake— they call it a snake [rah?]— and they’ll look at the thing, and some of them will just look at the snake for like 24 hours. So, partly they’re afraid of it. Partly they want to explore it.

So what they do, they get close to it and the fear increases, and then they back up and the fear decreases and the curiosity increases. And so what happens is that they move back and forth until they’re right on the line where they’re afraid, but they’re curious.

So then they’re stuck, and they’re looking at it. And you experience that all the time actually, because when you are engaged in something that’s meaningful, that’s where you are. And that’s like the line between order and chaos. You know because you want to solve it— it’s important.

Maybe you’re reading papers about some illness that you hope to work on or study. It’s like, well you’re worried about the damn illness, you know. All you’re doing is confronting it through the papers. So, you know, you’re fairly well sheltered from it. But you don’t want it to exist and you’d rather it wasn’t around, but you’re curious so you’re going to get engrossed in it.

And most of you, to the degree that you’re immersed in anything, are partly immersed because you perceive it as a problem. So that’s like existential anxiety in a sense. It’s just part of being. There are problems that have to be solved. They produce anxiety, they’re complicated.

You find this— you find a way of approaching them so that the anxiety doesn’t overwhelm you and so the curiosity is optimized— that’s an incentive reward activation— and then you’re awake. Because the anxiety keeps you awake and so does the curiosity. And you think, yeah, this is a good place to be.

And it is a good place to be because you’re optimally protected right there and you’re optimally learning. So yes, that’s a good place to be. You can think about that as an answer to the Nietzschean problem of how you create value. You don’t exactly create it— you find it.

There are problems that need to be solved; they automatically engage your emotions— both positively and negatively— you’ve got to find the right balance. And it’s something like contending, you know. It seems to me like human beings have to have something to contend with, or they can’t tolerate themselves.

Because life seems like a stupid joke if you don’t have something worthwhile to do. But you can have something worthwhile to do. And so then maybe it’s not so stupid and absurd and tragic. And that’s at least a good way to think about it.