2015 Personality Lecture 15: Biology & Traits: Limbic System & Lower Order Goals

So there's there's a the paper you're supposed to read this week was Gray, a model of the lyic system in basil ganglia. It's a hard paper, but it's easy compared to the optional paper, which was Swanson. I had everybody read that last year, but you know people were basically having convulsions, and so I decided it wasn't really fair to get you to read it. However, I would very much recommend that you read it because it's a bloody brilliant paper. You'll learn so much from it that it'll be worth especially if you're interested in the scientific element of psychology. That's Swanson; he's a smart guy, and that's a great paper.

One of the things I really liked about it, and this is what I'm going to say and about Gry's paper as well, is they're describing brain physiology and the relationship between that physiology and behavior in a way that's sufficiently sophisticated so that I actually think it's psychologically revealing. It's useful and important to know these things, and I think what's happening—you know, I've been thinking more and more that that hierarchy that I've showed you guys over and over, I really think that that's basically a map of the unconscious.

It's something like that, and it's not that the hierarchy I showed you isn't obviously a fully worked-out representation of the unconscious, but it's not a bad schemata. What it's missing is that, you know, at near the bottom, where you have the actual actions, those actions are actually sequenced into what you might call motor melodies that have a perceptual frame associated with them. Then those are nested inside fundamental motivational systems, and Swanson's paper does a lovely job of detailing the physiological substrate for that.

You know, so basically what he shows is that the nervous system is built up of hierarchical modules that start in the body, that basically start with spinal reflexes—sort of quick and dirty spinal reflexes. Because your people think of their brain as in their head, it's like, "No, there's a big part of your brain in your head," but a huge part of it's distributed through your body. So I remember reading, and I hope this is correct, that there are more neurons in your autonomic nervous system than there are in your central nervous system, and the autonomic nervous system is distributed throughout the body. It's the part of the nervous system that governs all the things you're too stupid to take care of—like how your liver works, and how your heart should stay beating, and how you digest food.

These are complicated things that consciousness isn't capable of dealing with, and you don't want to downplay the complexity of those sorts of functions. They're so important that evolution doesn't let you mess around with them. And then, um, you know, the voluntary motor system and the sensory system—so the central nervous system—well, you know your spine is a fairly hefty bit of neural tissue, and then of course the neurons themselves are distributed through your body. So really your brain is distributed through your body, and there's also a tremendous number of neurons in your gut as well, and some of those seem to actually produce information that might actually even acquire consciousness.

Now, I don't necessarily mean at the gut level, but it certainly informs you. So Swanson's basic proposition is that it's a pedian proposition. You know, that you lay out these initial reflex behaviors, and then they're sequenced into more complex melodies—the lowest level of highest resolution behaviors you practice and practice until you're an expert at them. Like, you know how to grip; you don't have to figure that out. So you've got these elements of behavior that you can basically parse off to automated systems, and some of those automated systems are so automated that they're handled by very low brain areas, like spinal levels.

So for example, if you take a paraplegic person and you suspend them under the arms over a treadmill and tilt them forward, they'll walk. It's pretty remarkable because you wouldn't think that. But walking isn't that complicated—I shouldn't say that; walking can be handled by the spine figuring out where you want to walk—that's more complicated. So higher order brain systems are involved in that. But think about it as a hierarchy.

Now one of the things that Swanson really concentrates on is this: the function of the hypothalamus. I should tell you some things about the hypothalamus. It sort of sits at the top of the spinal cord, and it's not that big; it's a little bitty brain area. Although it's also not—you know, you've got to remember that when you hear a word like hypothalamus, or a word like emotion, or a word like brain, those are low resolution words, right? The phenomena itself isn't homogeneous.

So if you look at the hypothalamus, it's composed of modules, and then those modules are composed of modules, and those module modules are composed of modules, and all the way down to the cellular level. Then there's submodules there, and that goes all the way down to the molecular level, and then there are submodules at the molecular level. So it's really, really complicated, and to think about it as a homogeneous system is just a low resolution representation.

So the hypothalamus isn't an entity; it's a group of functionally related entities that are composed of groups of functionally related entities. But you know you can't start at the highest level of detail and progress forward. So we're going to use shortcuts. So anyway, the hypothalamus isn't a very big brain area, but it's an important one, and it's sufficiently sophisticated so that if you take a female cat—and there's an important reason that it's female—and you take out basically its whole brain, the lyic system that's responsible for emotions, and the whole cortical cap, so it basically has no brain except for a spinal cord and hypothalamus.

If you keep it in a relatively closed environment, you know, like a cage, it pretty much acts like a normal cat. It can do all the normal cat things; it can engage in defensive aggression, it can eat, it can drink, it can sleep. It's conscious, as you know, insofar as you can tell whether or not an animal is conscious. It's hyper exploratory, which is extraordinarily peculiar because the last thing you'd expect of a cat with no brain would be to be hyper exploratory, right? It seems to be insanely curious about everything.

What that seems to indicate is that its psychomotor exploratory system, which is, in fact, grounded in the hypothalamus, is still active, but it can't build up the memory representations that would inhibit the exploratory activity. Because basically what you're doing when you explore is you're taking something complex and then you're mapping its responses in relationship to the transformations of your body. Insofar as the transformations of your body that you're likely to manifest, say, in this place, have zero motivational relevance—which is really what you're hoping for most of the time—then you build up a representation of the place that's part of that perceptual motor hierarchy, and it shuts off your curiosity about it.

What you perceive from then on in really is your representation of the thing rather than the thing itself, and you're kind of happy about that because it's easier to see what you've already learned than it is to see the thing itself. Now, things can get re-novelized. You know, if someone acts very peculiarly right beside you, you're like the whole space around you is going to get re-novelized very rapidly and your body will go on alert because of that.

But basically what you're doing is learning in order to ignore, right? Because what you want to pay attention to is everything all the time. That's a short path to exhaustion because if everything's relevant, then your body goes on hyper alert, and you produce cortisol, and you know you're ready for anything. That's kind of exciting, but as a long-term survival strategy, it's a bad one. You just don't have the energy to maintain that for any length of time.

So part of the reason the cat is hyper exploratory is because the systems that mediate exploration are still intact, as long as it has a hypothalamus and some of the rough underlying circuitry that associates that with the motor output system. But it can't remember what it's explored, so it just stays hyper exploratory. It's also hyper-reactive, say, to cues of aggression. I would say like a hypothalamic cat is a lot like a two-year-old, you know, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Two-year-olds are extremely curious; they're hyper exploratory; they're very, very reactive to stimuli. You know, they cry easily, they laugh easily, they run around easily, they get scared easily, they experience pain easily. So it isn't until they build the higher-order structures in the perceptual motor hierarchy that all that gets integrated, and they're not so reactive. Then they're nowhere near as much fun at that point either, you know.

But the female cat can regulate its water intake, and it can also engage in sexual activity. Now, a male cat can't do that; it needs more brain than just the hypothalamus because it's more complicated to sequence male sexual behavior. So you can tell the difference between, say, a male cat with no cortex, let's say an Olympic system, and a female cat, but pretty much only in that particularity.

So you know, that's very interesting because if you study neuropsychology and you're taught by clinical neuropsychologists, say, or even neuropsychologists that have a clinical background, they're very cortico-centric. You know, and I think it's partly a hangover. We're, you know, since we got unseated from our position at the center of the universe, we've been radically running around trying to figure out what it is that makes us special in relationship to animals.

We’ve kind of cottoned on to the idea that, you know, we have this big cortical cap, and especially the prefrontal cortex, and it's very large in relationship to our body, which it is, and that, you know, somehow that distinguishes us from other animals, which it does. But that's also led us into thinking that the most recently evolved parts of the brain are the most important—like in some sense the smartest.

But there's a real error of presumption there because you might think instead that it's those parts of the brain that evolution has had the longest time to work on that are in fact the smartest. You know, and they do take care of all the heavy lifting. Your consciousness isn't entrusted with any of the heavy lifting—you can fiddle around the edges with it, but you're not going to be allowed to do anything that's really physiological profound. It's a good thing because you just don't have the intellectual capacity to manage that kind of ongoing physiological monitoring.

You know, it's like you don't understand your body. If you're lucky, the thing works, and you can ignore it, roughly speaking, you know, but if it ever goes wrong, good luck trying to figure it out consciously. I mean, we're getting somewhere with that, but it's very, very difficult to do so.

So we should think about the hypothalamus for a bit because it seems to be pretty damn important. And so I would say, you know, people have wondered sometimes and they've asked me, you know, where's the super ego and the ego and the id located in the brain? You know, it's a stupid question—and it's not a stupid question at the same time. It's actually a useful question at one level of analysis.

Because you could say, well the id from the Freudian perspective is sort of the natural force that propels motivation. You know, and when we say motivation, we're not saying much different than saying id, by the way; it's the same kind of low resolution word. It's clearly the case that we have fundamental motivational systems, and that we do share them with animals, and that they do drive our behavior in—but they also drive our perceptions in all the ways that Freud thought about.

One of the things I really like about the psychoanalysts is that they never make the mistake of assuming that a motivational system or an emotional system is a mechanical system that reacts deterministically. They say no, those things are like personalities, and that's a much more sophisticated viewpoint than the typical behaviorist or the typical cognitive psychologist.

You know, because they tend to think of the computer in either stimulus-response terms—so it's basically deterministic chains—or as if the information processing system is a computational apparatus, which it is. But it's not only that. You know, it's an embodied computational apparatus, and the body is a very sophisticated thing. You know, it's been very difficult for us to build embodied robots, and it's also the case that until you build embodied robots, the things don't really get smart.

You know, you have to have a body for the thing to actually have any intelligence, and that was actually figured out by a robotics engineer named Rodney Brooks back in the 1990s. In '92 or '93, he published a couple of papers on that saying, you know, if we were going to build artificial intelligence, we shouldn't start from the top down. We shouldn't build a world-modeling machine and then embed it in something that moves around; we should build something that sort of moves around semi-autonomously like a stupid insect. And insects aren't stupid, so I do mean a stupid insect. If we could manage that, we’d really be doing something.

You know, and I think we might have gotten beyond the stupid insect level of robots so far. And you know, it's starting to ramp up really fast, but it's in large part because the things are embodied. So because it is the case, as we've discussed, that your perceptual, your cognitive perceptual motor systems have to be embedded in an output system that can interact with the world in order for them to be doing anything that's actual or real.

So anyways, back to the hypothalamus. Roughly speaking, and I'm no expert on hypothalamic function, I had to pound my way through Swanson's paper because it's quite complex. You know, but the hypothalamus is sort of the nexus between the brain, the mind, and the body—that's one way of thinking about it. It's very good at monitoring the states of your body, and it can figure out basically when your blood sugar is too low and when you need water.

I don't exactly remember how it's associated with the regulation of breathing because I suspect that's a different system, and I don't remember that being a subcomponent of the hypothalamus, but it does also regulate things like sexual behavior and sexual attraction, temperature regulation, and excretion, and you know all the things that you would associate with the basic biological functions that come along with being a complex animal.

We share those functions way down the evolutionary chain. You know, we share a lot of the functions with everything that moves—approach and avoidance we share with pretty much everything that moves. By the time you get to the higher mammalian functions, we share those with pretty much all mammals. That's partly why we can understand mammals pretty well. You know, it's—you can kind of have a lizard as a pet, and some of them are more social than others. But, you know, to really have a pet, it has to be a mammal, and it's even better if it's a social mammal, like a dog.

Because, you know, you can understand dogs, and they can understand you because they're hierarchical animals, and they have the same roughly the same set of biological functions that do. You know their brains are organized around smell and not around vision, and almost all animals are like that except for people and maybe hunting birds. You know, so that's one thing that really distinguishes us from dogs, but we're similar enough in our embodied behavior so that we can directly relate to dogs.

You know they can even play, and play is a circuit. So there's a guy named Jaak Panksepp who I would roundly recommend that you read if you're interested in behavioral neuroscience. I think he's a genius, he's sort of on par with Gray as far as I'm concerned, and on par with Swanson. Panksepp, I believe, discovered the play circuit in mammals. And so, you know, two thumbs up for him—that's a big deal. That’s kind of like discovering a continent from the psychological perspective.

And it's a circuit that's separate from exploration, which is kind of interesting because you think about play as a form of exploratory behavior, but it's sufficiently different from standard exploratory behavior that it has a circuit that's devoted to it. And there's a lot of primary circuits, you know, and they're networked in with the rest of the brain. And obviously, a circuit is a metaphor. So I could say there's a lot of primary subpersonalities. They're like one-eyed monsters; there's only one thing they're after.

You know, and there's a whole bunch of them. And so roughly speaking, they regulate the things already mentioned that the hypothalamus regulates—defensive aggression, sexual behavior, temperature regulation, food and water intake, excretion. Well then there's one for breathing, then there's another for pain, then there's another for anxiety. Um, and there's another for exploration. And there are others; there are sensory modules as well. You know, there's a visual circuit and an auditory circuit and an olfactory circuit and a circuit that's devoted to taste.

And there's a circuit that keeps track of how your body is localized in space; that's a parietal circuit. And, um, what else is important? Oh yeah, there's a circuit that you can use to abstractly model perceptual structures and patterns of behavior before you implement them in the world, and that seems to be a higher cortical function fundamentally. And you dissociate that with the contents of your consciousness. There's a language circuit.

Um, oh yeah, there's an empathy circuit that mediates maternal behavior; there's a hunting circuit that mediates predatory behavior. There's a circuit to check dominance and subordination, um, there's a circuit that mediates creativity in human beings. There's a circuit that mediates social activity, and the positive reinforcing nature of social activity, and that's quite tightly associated with the exploratory circuit.

Um, let's see, well you know, that's not too bad for a beginning. I'm sure I've missed some, and I'll remember them. But each of those subsystems is important enough so that there's a neural architecture devoted to it. Now, some of those neural architectures are flexible enough so that if they don't develop in one brain area, they'll develop in another. So it's not exactly as if the location of these functions is specifically determined in advance before development.

So for example, if you have a baby, and it has, you know, epilepsy, and the epilepsy is really bad, sometimes they'll take out the whole left or right hemisphere. If they do that early enough, it doesn't really seem to have much consequence for the baby, you know, which is pretty weird. You think, "Well, half the brain, that's probably fairly useful," but in some sense, it's as if the cortical elements of the brain are territory that can be inhabited and colonized by the lower levels of the brain.

You could say that the lower levels of the brain, including the visual input systems, would just soon colonize what we call the visual cortex. But if there's no visual cortex because it's been removed, then they'll just go colonize part of the auditory cortex. You know, and what you see in another situation sometimes is that people have hydrocephalus, and what that means is that their cerebral spinal fluid builds up in their brain, and the ventricles get very enlarged.

So if you take an x-ray or an MRI or another sort of scan of these people, you'll find that their entire skull is full of water except for like a half inch thin slice of cortical tissue around the water, like a balloon. And one of the guys who was like that had a PhD in mathematics from Cambridge; you know, 5% of his brain tissue was intact. Now it was pretty active, that 5%, and you can also be sure that it would not have been very resilient to damage.

You know, part of the reason that we have an excess of cortical tissue, so to speak, is because, you know, we need to be resilient to assaults and trouble. And it does appear—perhaps this is the sort of discussion that got Larry Summers kicked out of Harvard—it looks like men are somewhat more differentiated in their cortical function than women. What that means is that there is a very small subset of spatial skills that men seem to have an advantage in, but the price they pay for that is that they're much more susceptible to brain malfunction and also to brain damage because they don't have redundancy built in to the same degree women do.

And that's part of the reason why there are far more boys who have learning disabilities, for example, than there are women. So now people debate about that because it's contaminated with concerns about gender. But, um, okay, so the brain's got all these specialized subcircuits, and they're variable in their expression. What that basically means is that on average across people, they're likely to be located in the same place.

Now there's some discrepancies because left-handers are different than right-handers, and people also have mixed dominance, so their brains can be organized in ways that are not exactly canonical. So we're saying roughly speaking, and it extends in some weird ways to phenomena that you wouldn't necessarily think could possibly be organized in that manner.

So for example, the part of the brain that you use for silent reading—the visual cortex is back here—then the auditory cortex is about here, and then the part of the brain that you use for silent reading is where the auditory and the visual cortex overlap. So that's pretty cool. So what it means is that you look at words and you hear them because your eyes are using the auditory cortex as a representational structure; that's pretty cool.

And so it turns out that people who silent read pretty much use the same brain area to do that, and so you might think about that as biological preparedness in some sense. But of course, people didn't learn to read silently till 5 years ago, roughly speaking. You know, even the earliest literate people, most of them read out loud; silent reading was a very, very rare phenomenon. Julius Caesar could read silently, and people thought that that was part of his magical power because it's, well, it's pretty damn weird, you know, that you can use your eyes to hear.

You know, 'cause you can all do it. You think, "Yeah, anybody can do that," but you know, it's a pretty new thing on the evolutionary horizon, and to be able to hear with your eyes, it's like, "Good work, guys!" That's not an easy thing to manage. So anyway, the brain has specialized subsystems, but it's a bi-dynamic biological system, so you can muck about with it quite a bit, and it'll set itself up in slightly different ways.

So the systems aren't necessarily localized exactly the same place in everyone, but roughly speaking, everyone has those systems, and roughly speaking, they're in the same place across people. Now there's a lot of variability, and it's one of the things that makes MRI studies extremely difficult to interpret because if you average across a lot of people, what it means is you blur things out. You know, because you can only extract out the commonalities, and although, you know, they're getting better and better at dealing with that.

So okay, so there's other ways that you can think about the brain too. These are all approaches to understanding it. You know, I would say it's a very, very complex thing. In fact, it's the most complex thing. You know there are more patterns of combinations of neuroconnections in your brain than there are subatomic particles in the universe. So you are—I know you won't believe that because it doesn't seem possible—but you can do the math, and you'll figure out that it's actually right.

So you're the most complicated thing there is, and by a lot. In some sense, there's more space inside your head than there is space outside your head. It depends on how you conceptualize space, you know, because you can conceptualize space as the number of ways that something can be configured. That's state space, and that's a magnitude measurement, you know. And the distance between things—that's another way of conceptualizing space.

But if you want to think about big, what's inside you is, I think, that it's bigger than what's outside you—certainly that way in terms of complexity unless you factor in the other brains, you know. So that's very much worth thinking about, which means that, you know, what we don't understand about the brain is going to fill many, many books.

One of the things we really don't understand is consciousness. People just don't get that, and it doesn't really look, you know—you might think that consciousness is an emergent late evolutionary function, but it doesn't really look like that. You know, I mean, when even when people become demented and you lose almost all of their higher cortical function, there's no doubt that they're still conscious. And so consciousness might be way, way, way older than we think.

In fact, I think it's highly probable. I don't think a hypothalamic cat is unconscious. It's certainly awake, you know, and distinguishing between awake and conscious is no easy thing. You might say, "Well, animals aren't conscious." It's like, "Well, you know, here's the thing." You know, what people normally think is that humans are different than other animals, and so before you anthropomorphize an animal, you should be careful. But I think that's complete rubbish.

I think it's exactly the opposite. Before you assume that humans have attributes that animals don't, you have to prove it because there's a continuity—tremendous, tremendous continuity. And so it's right to anthropomorphize animals. What's wrong is to presume a priority that humans are qualitatively different. Now there are some very bizarre things about us, obviously.

You know, we have opposable thumbs—that's a big deal. We can grip things—that's a massive deal, you know? And it turns out that your brain maps your body onto its surface, onto its motor strip and its sensory strip, which are roughly here on the brain. If you take the motor strip or the sensory strip and you make a representation of how it represents the body, which is called a homunculus—Wilder Penfield did this first at McGill University.

He, I don't know if you know this, and perhaps you'll be fortunate enough to experience it, but people who have brain surgery are conscious when it happens, and that's so that the surgeons can figure out whether this little part is doing anything important before they take it out. You know, it's a very horrific thought. But Penfield, when he did some of the early psychosurgery for epilepsy, because in intractable epilepsy, sometimes the only thing to do is radical surgery, like cut the corpus callosum, for example, so that the electrical storm, so to speak, can't transmit across the hemispheres, and the whole brain won't be affected.

So while he was doing that, he used a little electrode to map out the surface of the brain, and he mapped out the motor strip, which is just behind the prefrontal cortex. Then the sensory strip, which is just behind that, to find out how the body represented or the brain represented the body. Basically, what he showed was that on the motor strip, you know, your thumb has as much representation as your whole trunk.

So basically, your thumb is as smart, from a motoric perspective, smarter than you from here to here. You know, well try picking up something with your back, you know, and you'll figure out exactly why that is. And the thumb basically has almost as much representation as the rest of the hand, but the hands are like gigantic balloons. You know, and the arms are little skinny sticks here and here.

Feet are fairly highly represented, especially in the sensory cortex because you know you've got to be careful about what you step on. One of the things that's very interesting about the representation of the feet on the sensory strip is that it's right beside the representation of the genitalia. And so there's cross-talk. And so some of you are pretty into foot massages, and that's why.

You know, so it's a consequence of the overlap. Now why that overlap is there, I don't know exactly. You know, maybe the brain had organized itself so particularly sensitive surfaces were taking advantage of the same tissue or something like that. But you know, it's an interesting case of, it's like synesthesia in a sense—it's like sensory synesthesia.

So, as far as your brain is concerned, you're all hands. And your hands are almost all thumb, and you're quite a bit of feet, and your lips are massive, and so is your tongue, and your face is very highly represented too. So basically, as far as your brain is concerned, with regards to sensory input and motor output, you're this huge face with great big lips and tongue, and you have massive balloon-like hands.

And your feet are pretty big too, and there's a fair bit of sensory representation for the genitalia as well, and then the body is hardly there at all. So that's kind of what a human being is like, right? We're all thumbs and hands and we talk about what we do with our thumbs and hands all the time. We take things apart with them, and we put them together, and then we tell everybody else how we're doing that, and that's basically a human being.

And when you're thinking about the difference between human beings and highly intelligent dolphins and whales, because people have claimed that dolphins and whales are extraordinarily intelligent. You know, dolphins don't seem particularly simple-minded, but look at the things they're in—like they're in these test tube-shaped bodies. What are they going to do? Flip sand up into buildings? It's like they can't manage that.

So the embodied—the manner in which their nervous system is embodied turns out to be extraordinarily important when you're trying to understand something like the relationship between cortical tissue mass and intelligence. You can't just think about the mind as something that's floating like a soul in space; if it isn't stuck in something that you can use, it's not particularly good for anything or anything that human beings would regard as particularly intelligent.

Okay, so that's kind of a—I don't know, here's another way that you can think about the brain. You can also think about it as divided. This is sort of a schema that was more popular with the Russian neuropsychologists, but it's a pretty good one. You can think about the front part of the brain as being concerned with motor output.

And so there's the motor strip that allows you to sequence activities and then, you know, to make these kinetic melodies that are chains of things that you know how to do. Um, and then in front of that is the prefrontal cortex, and the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex, and that's pretty interesting, hey? Because if you think about that from an evolutionary perspective, what that implies is that thought is abstracted action, right? Because that's where it came from.

And so basically what you're doing when you're thinking is you're figuring out action sequences that you could implement and modeling their consequences and evaluating them before you implement them in behavior. That's why I think it was Alfred North Whitehead, though I might be getting that wrong, he said, "We think so that our thoughts can die instead of us." It's a lovely way of thinking about it, eh?

So it's sort of like we generate abstract avatars of ourselves acting in the world, and if the avatar does something stupid—bang—we kill it off, and we don't implement it in our own bodies. That's smart. So basically we're throwing off abstract representations of ourselves so they can perish instead of us. It's pretty cool.

It's also what you do when you're playing video games. So does anybody know where the word avatar came from, from anybody? Was it originally used to like, um, like directive? Yeah, that's exactly right. So an avatar is the embodiment of a deity on Earth. It's such a cool idea. It's so interesting that that word was used to represent your fictional self inside a video game.

You know, it's one of the mysteries about words. You never know how those things get generated or catch on, you know, but it's such a—it's such an interesting idea that you, you know, you limit yourself in a certain interesting way and toss yourself into an abstract world. You think that's really fun, you know, and then that thing dies and gets reborn or does whatever the hell it wants to do, and you think that's very entertaining, but the real you is behind that, you know, and so you can toss off all, uh, what do you call pseudo-selves in a sense and play about with them without any real cost to you and maybe with some benefit.

And that the term for that is your avatar. That's very cool. So anyways, it is an extension of what you do with your capacity to abstract, right? Because you're producing simulated worlds, and you act in a simulated way in them. And that's what you do when you're imagining things, you know? So that's what you do when you write books of fiction; that's what you do when you go to a movie—it's all avatars, one thing or another.

So some of those are archetypal avatars. Okay, so the way the Russians had a very, very long and illustrious history of producing psychologists—and I'm hoping I get this right too—Pavlov, you know about Pavlov and Pavlov's dog? Pavlov was Luria's instructor, and Luria was the instructor of Vinogradova and Soov, who discovered the orienting response, which we’re going to talk about a lot because I think it's the most important discovery that was ever made in neuroscience.

They should have gotten a Nobel Prize for that for sure. And then Soov and Vinogradova were precursors to Gray, and Gray developed the most well-thought-through theory of anxiety and incentive motivation. So it's useful to kind of know that developmental history. Luria was also influenced by Panksepp, by the way, and he was also influenced by a thinker from MIT called Norbert Weiner, which is like the perfect name for someone who goes to MIT. But anyways, he was a real genius, this guy—one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence research—and he developed cybernetic models of embodied cognition.

The cybernetic models are the models that Gray uses in his neuropsychology of anxiety, and so it's nice to know the history of the development of these ideas because you see how things connect behind the scenes in ways that you wouldn't really think possible. It took me years to figure out those intellectual connections, by the way. So if you remember them, then you won't have to spend years figuring them out yourself.

So anyways, one of the ways that Luria conceptualized the brain was as motor versus sensory. And so the motor was the motor circuit, and then the prefrontal cortex—and so that determined the range of potentials that you could manifest in time and space and also helped you implement them. And then the back of the brain—basically, roughly speaking, the back half was the sensory half. And the sensory half is a lot of it's auditory and again that's about here.

And a huge chunk of it is visual, and then there's areas that are more central to the brain that are much, much older that are associated with olfaction and taste, because those are being around for a very, very long period of time. And the smell circuits and taste circuits are extraordinarily archaic, so they're not part of the roughly speaking sensory cortex. So you can think of motor versus sensory; that’s sort of a front versus back distinction.

And then you can also think about a left versus right distinction. And people often think of the left as the linguistic hemisphere and the right as the non-linguistic hemisphere, and that's roughly accurate if you're talking about left-handed males. And it's roughly accurate for everyone else too. But it's mostly accurate for them because there's more complications in brain lateralization in people. It's not a simple thing.

One of Luria's students, a guy named Elkhonon Goldberg, came up with an alternative theory of hemispheric function, which I think is better. He thought that the right hemisphere was specialized for the initial stages of novelty analysis and detection, and that the left hemisphere was specialized for creation of the detailed responses to those things and the storage of those detailed responses, particularly in the back of the brain.

So he thought of the right hemisphere as an anomaly detection and first-stage modeling system that was primarily under limbic control, and he thought that the linguistic capacities of the left hemisphere were merely a reflection of its capacity to generate detailed representations. And I'm telling you that for a specific reason because it's relevant to Gray's model.

Okay, so I'm going to describe to you an integration, roughly speaking, between Swanson's model and Gray's model and the orienting reflex models of Soov and Vinogradova. Now, people started to get interested in the lower levels of the brain, really, I would say. Well, the animal psychologists got there first, but there was a flurry of activity around the hippocampus, particularly in the 1960s. That was begun first by the Russians who were playing around with electrical EEG analysis of brain function.

So I know your brain produces a lot of electrical activity—about 100 watt light bulbs worth something like that—when it's busily buzzing away on all the things that it does. And you can get some low-resolution insight into brain function by analyzing the different patterns of electrical activity it produces. It's been likened to listening to a symphony with a stethoscope through a six-foot concrete shell, which is approximately correct, but it's an investigative technique that has some utility.

Now, it turns out that, so imagine that I did this to you. I put you in a chair, and I strapped EEG electrodes to you, and then now and then, I have you listen to a beep beep beep beep, and then there'd be a little fraction of time, and I'd play a louder beep beep, and then that was a louder beep, by the way. Then there'd be some after that, and then if I did that to you 100 times, and then I averaged the manner in which your brain waves were manifesting themselves across all those 100 times, I could extract out a particular pattern of brain wave that was locked to that stimulus.

So then I could infer—I would first of all have the waveform, which would have a temporal element, and I could actually do some calculations if my instrumentation was sophisticated enough about exactly where that waveform was emanating. So keep that in the back of your mind. What Soov and Vinogradova started investigating was—so that was—that's an electrophysiological investigation.

What they started investigating was something a bit simpler, which was skin conductance response. So it turns out that if I take you and I put you—this is what the Scientologists use to read engrams, by the way, in case you're wondering. Engrams are memory traces that are periodically left from the time that we inhabited Venus, I think—that's their theory. Um, it's something like that.

So if I put you in a chair and I hook up electrodes to your hands, I can pass a current through the electrodes through your skin, and how well that current is transmitted is going to depend on how much you're sweating. And how much you're sweating is going to depend on how much your body is preparing to act because one of the things that happens if it starts to prepare to do something is that it sweats a little bit.

And that's, I presume, because if you start acting, you're going to get hot, and so you might as well prepare to cool yourself down. It happens very, very fast. So if I play a tone to you, you're sitting there, and all of a sudden a tone goes off. What'll happen is that your skin conductance will increase. And then if I play the tone again, it'll increase again, but less; and then it'll increase again, but less.

Soon, I can play the tone to you, and it's flat. Now then, if I take the tone and I increase the volume, or if I change the pitch, or if I even change the timing of it—any little tiny change whatsoever—and I play the tone to you, bang, the original response will be reinstated. So the Russians were thinking about this; they were thinking, "Okay, well, what does that imply?"

And they thought, "Well, it's analogous to an earlier phenomenon that was known as habituation." So if you take a snail, it'll come out of its shell, and you tap it; then it'll go into its shell, and then it'll slowly come out of its shell. You can tap it again, and if you're into teasing snails—and if you do that enough, the snail will just start to ignore you.

Now you could call that fatigue because it might be fatigue or you could call it habituation. What happens is the sensory nerves are no longer sending a signal to the motor nerves to make the thing contract, and so that's habituation—it's a form of learning; it's a form of learned irrelevance. Now, Soov and Vinogradova weren't satisfied with the sort of automaticity that was implied by the habituation models.

And so they came up with a slightly different suggestion for what was happening when the orienting response was declining across time. They suggested that what you did when you were listening to a tone was to build an interior model of the tone, and that was a representation of the tone in all of its important dimensions, as far as you were capable of doing that, you know, with your particular level of hearing acuity, and that you had inferred that the tone was irrelevant.

So you've mapped it, and the map says this is safe territory. When the tone occurs, the map inhibits your response—something like that. The model inhibits your response. And so the idea would be you're always carrying a model of the world around in your head that you've learned, and as long as the world is behaving in accordance with that model, then you stay calm.

A very, very smart idea. And so the orienting reflex is that initial response when something happens that your map does not cover. Okay? And they localized that to the hippocampus, which was very good of them with their primitive equipment back in the 1960s. These were very, very smart people. The Russians got there way before the North Americans and the Western Europeans because who were the only ones doing investigations into this sort of thing at that time?

Because the Russians had figured out very early that the brain was stuck inside the body, and so that bodily responses and emotional responses and motivational responses were valid indexes of brain activity. It took the Western neuropsychologists till the 1990s really to start figuring this out, and it was Antonio Damasio who led the way. He generated this hypothesis called the somatic marker hypothesis, which would be that part of the way that you evaluate things when they occur is by reading off the report of your body.

You know, because it's going to react in various different ways, and that's going to tell you what the thing is. And the reason he figured that out was because he was reading abstracts from Russian neuropsychologists, and he was the only one doing it in the late '80s, as far as I can tell. Though I was doing it too, but that was because I read Gray, and Gray had done it—so anyway, the Russians got there very early, and it was Soov and Vinogradova that basically identified the orienting response.

The reason I think that deserves a Nobel Prize is because it's the bloody thing that Pavlov was talking about. You know how Pavlov would say that a child will run through its schemas, right? And if the schema produces something novel, you know, so the kid is moving its arms, and bang, it whacks into a little mobile, and the child sort of startles but says, "Do it again!" You know? And so then it tries to do it again.

So it tries to replicate the emergence of the phenomena by modeling its interactions with it and constructing a psychomotor-perceptual schema. But the initial burst of awareness—that's an orienting reflex. So what Soov and Vinogradova discovered was how people reacted to the unknown, and that's a major thing, man, because everything you learn is a consequence of you interacting with the unknown.

So, you know, it's a huge discovery, and you know it's—psychology is a funny science because we never—we’ve never really figured out when we’ve discovered something that's really worth discovering. The discovery of the orienting reflex—that was like a home run. Milner and Olds discovered the reward system—the incentive reward system. When was that? I think that was in the early '70s. It's like, that was Nobel Prize stuff too. It's like, it's the whole circuit for positive emotion and exploration—it's like, that's a big deal to discover that, you know?

And then Pavlov discovered the play circuit, and that's another whopping discovery. Like, I really do think these things are equivalent to discovering continents. It's a big deal, but for some reason—I don't know what it is—it’s not modesty, I don’t think, but psychologists don't seem to be that good at figuring out when what they've discovered is a major league discovery.

So all right, so what happened with regards to Soov and Vinogradova? There was a whole flurry of ideas that their research generated. A lot of that was among artificial intelligence investigators, and what they basically concluded was that the way creatures work in the world was that they produced expectancy maps of how the world would lay itself out when they acted in a particular way, and then they would transform the model internally.

This is probably how you think. You think they transform the model internally and make a prediction about what the outcome of their behavior would be and then they would manifest that behavior. So the idea is stimulus first—of all, the idea was stimulus response, and that's actually true if you don't go much above the spine. So the behaviors—were we right about that? There are deterministic levels at which the nervous system operates, or roughly deterministic.

But as the amount of brain tissue increases, as the number of processing interfaces increases, the number of neural connections between stimulus and response increases, the idea that it's deterministic starts to fall apart. Because it's chained—complex chained networks of activity between the action or the stimulus and the action. But there are circuits that are really simple; it's just one neuron or two neurons, and those things are super fast, and you need them; you know, if you're going to jump out of the way of a snake, for example, you want to be sitting there thinking about snakes.

It's like you want your eyes to activate your spinal cord so you jump to the side, and that's not conscious. It's way too fast to be conscious. So, and we've conserved all those, you know, archaic systems because we need to be fast. And you can model the way those archaic systems work by using the standard tenants of behaviorism, and you can get quite a long way doing that. But you can't get everywhere.

So the mapping idea that I'm describing is, um, in part, it's the entrance of cognition into the—that's part of behaviorism. It's more complicated than that, but it was part of it. So, you know, in that kind of makes sense, I suspect that’s the way you think. You think, you know, you see something, you think about what it is, you figure out what you're going to do, and then you do it. And then it either works, in which case that's great for everyone, or it doesn't work, and then you have an orienting reflex.

That was their basic idea, you know? And it’s a pretty smart idea. It turns out to be wrong in many complicated ways, and I can't even tell you exactly why it's wrong, although I do know that part of the reason that it's wrong is that it turns out that it's way more complicated to produce these damn models than anybody thought. Because the behaviorists at that point—and Soov and Vinogradova were behaviorists—they kind of had this implicit idea.

You think stimulus-response, now in between that there's a black box, right? That's whatever the brain is doing. They didn't care about that because they didn't think you had to take it into consideration. But there's still two other elements of that theory. One element is there is a stimulus. Another element is there is a response. Well, we won't go into the response part yet, but we will go into the stimulus part.

It's like, let's say that you look at someone attractive, and your heart rate increases. Okay, what's the stimulus? Exactly—the person? You know, the person's eyes? The way their eyes are configured in relationship to the rest of their face? Um, odor, shape, context—what's the stimulus? And the answer is, well, who the hell knows? Because figuring out what the stimulus is turns out to be hard.

And the behaviorists, they just pretended that no, no, everything was made out of homogenous blocks, and when you looked at them, there they were. And that was the stimulus, roughly speaking. So they pretended they got rid of having to consider the complexity of the brain. Remember, half your damn cortex is devoted to seeing. It turns out that seeing is very difficult. The behaviorist just finessed that by pretending it wasn't a problem. They just assumed the stimulus was given—so it was like there's the box; there's a picture of the box on your retina.

That picture is translated into the little guy inside your head, and then he figures out how to move your arms. It's like, well, that's not right. It's not right because it's very difficult to specify the stimulus. It's extraordinarily difficult, and that's part of the reason why it's taken so long to develop artificial intelligence. You can't teach the damn things to see, and that's because there's no edges, there's no lines, there's no primary objects—all of that is something that our brain constructs for us on the fly instantaneously.

So we think it's just there, but some of you have probably played with Photoshop trying to adjust an image, eh? It's like, are there lines in that image? Are there edges? It's like not at all. You increase the resolution, it just turns into a mass of pixels that are fundamentally indistinguishable from one another.

Like if you take a photograph of someone and you try to cut them out and put them against a different background, what you find right away is that you end up with this cutout-looking thing because you're trying to make something into a manipulable object that's segregated from the world that actually isn't represented that way in the photograph at all. You might see it that way, and in fact, you do, but if you start to play with the representation, you find that it's pixels all the way down.

So it's very hard, and Photoshop is pretty damn sophisticated. It'll do edge detection for you, you know, but it's kind of rough. It's not enough to fool your eyes, so it's hard to see things. So that was one of the—that’s actually one of the places where behaviorism—which we will talk more about—started to fall apart. It was like uh-oh, turns out the problem of the stimulus is like way more complicated than we thought.

And then it also turned out that the problem of the behavior was way more complicated. So the basic—so let's say you train a rat to run down a runway. The way you do that is you take the rat and you make sure he's hungry—Skinner's rats, BF Skinner. He was like the dean of behaviorism. His rats were starved to 75% of their body weight, so a scrawny rat was a weird rat. It was really lonesome and isolated, and it was starving, and so you could kind of treat it like a one-dimensional entity, right? Because it would do anything for food, so it was an extraordinarily hungry rat.

And then it was also an isolated rat, so it was a simplified model of an actual rat. And that's a simplified model of a human being. And you know you might think that I'm not very fond of the idea that you can model human beings with rats, but I'm actually extremely fond of it because a rat is a way better model of who you are than your model of who you are is a model of who you are.

You know, a rat is a lot more like you than your thought of you is like you. And rats—like, give the guys some credit, man. Those things are smart, you know? And they are like us in many, many, many ways—many important ways. So you can get a long way with a rat. And I think I told you at the beginning of this class—it’s like part of the pharmacology that a lobster uses to determine its position in a dominance hierarchy is the same pharmacology that you use.

So you know, you're quite a bit like a lobster, but you're even more like a rat. So that's enough compliments for one day. So okay, so the behaviorist model—the simple behaviorist model—didn't work out so well, and neither did the idea that in some way you were generating an accurate model of the world and then you were comparing the actual world to that model and that that's how you planned your behavior. There's lots about that that's true, but there's lots about it that isn't.

So anyway, I'm going to treat it like it's true for the time being because we can get quite a long ways with low-resolution theories even if they're not completely right. They may still have tremendous benefits, and behaviorism had tremendous benefits because we learned all sorts of things about behavior in the brain from the behaviorists. Almost everything we know from a scientific perspective about psychology is from behaviorists.

I've learned way more from the animal researchers than from anyone else except for the clinicians—way more. They're so careful in their terminology and their scientific approach. Okay, remember that little oval that I keep showing you? Point B—point A—you're trying to get from point A to point B, and point B is a representation, and point A is a representation fundamentally.

And then you invoke actions or perceptual schemes that are necessary to translate one state into the other. Okay, now imagine for a moment that what the primary biological brain systems do is grab hold of that oval and they say, "Point A—you're hungry. Point B— you need food. Here's the behaviors and the perceptions that you've used in the past to solve that problem; let's prime them and implement them."

And so that's what's happening during your day. It's like you get hungry, and the hypothalamus grabs that little oval, and now you're under the control of the hypothalamic perceptual and motor functions. Now it's connected to the rest of the brain, so it's going to do this in a pretty sophisticated way, but it's going to call on procedures and routines that you already know in order to solve the problem.

Like you know where the fridge is, you know how to open the peanut butter, whatever it is you're going to eat; you know how to hold a knife. You know, so all those things are going to be primed. The behaviorists thought of that. They thought of the action of the fundamental biological systems as drives, and there's a deterministic element to drive.

You know, so you're hungry, the hunger makes you move your foot down the stairs in a sort of stereotyped manner—a chaining of behavioral output. Simple reflexes, and it drives you to the fridge, and that drives you to unscrew the peanut butter and to take out the knife. These are all chained reflexes. Turns out that's wrong, but it's a useful and interesting model of how it was demonstrated that that was wrong.

Okay, so now we're going to go back to rats for a minute. You've got a rat, and you put him in a maze, and you want to teach him how to get through the maze. So you put the rat there, and then you put a little food pellet in front of the rat. And so then the rat runs down the maze and eats the food pellet; maybe it's only this far. And so then you put the rat back, and you put a food pellet there again, and it runs down the runway and gets the food pellet.

Maybe you do that three or four times, and you put the rat back in the other cage, and you leave him for a day. And then the next day, you take the same rat and you put him back in and you put the food pellet about three in farther. So it runs down there, grabs the food pellet, et cetera, and then you put it another three in, and another three in, and another three in, and soon the rat is zipping through the maze.

You can see how you could conceptualize that as the simple chaining of reflex behaviors, right? 'Cause it's not that complicated. The rat has to walk reflexively, and then it just has to chain the reflexes together, and you want to have a simple model if you're a scientist, and so that was the model. But then some wise guy took a rat—I can't remember his name, unfortunately—but he was extraordinarily funny, as far as I'm concerned.

He took the rat and he tied up its back legs, and then he put its back legs on a little cart, and then he put the rat in the maze, and sure enough, the rat would go like this through the maze to get to the end. He said, "Well, obviously that's not reflex chaining because like rats don't have wheels." But if you stick wheels on a rat, it can figure it out pretty damn quick.

And so it was experiments like that that blew apart the simple reflex chaining hypothesis of behaviorism. It's very—that's such a funny experiment. I mean, they must have just cackled away when they thought that one up. It's like, "Talk about your ultimate nerd experiment," right? Let's put wheels on this rat and see what happens!

Anyways, okay, so Soov and Vinogradova and a variety of other people started believing that, you know, animals weren't simple chains of ref from sensation to behavioral output, but that they generated models of the world. And the basic model would be—this is a cybernetic model that comes from Norbert Weiner back in the 1940s when he was studying simple intelligent machines.

One of the things Weiner worked on was anti-missile systems. So, 'cause you imagine, so you get a missile, and it's zooming along, and you want to shoot another missile out it to hit it. Now that's a complicated problem. It's trying to hit a moving target. He construed that what the anti-missile missile should do is track its trajectory towards the ideal trajectory towards the missile and then correct for deviations from that.

So it, you know, so if it got a little too far to the left, then it would move to the right, and then if it got a little too far to the right, it would move to the left. It's like a thermostat, you know? It's basically the same system that's in a thermostat. It's the simplest form of intelligent behavior, and that's actually the model that Gray used. It was quite funny because when I was teaching about this in Boston, I had an engineer in one of my classes, and I went through the Gray model, which is this cybernetic model.

And he said, "You know, that's weird; that's exactly the same system that we use to design anti-missile missiles." I thought, "Jesus, that's really weird. That's a hell of a coincidence." And then the engineer went off to England, where he met Jeffrey Gray, and he said, "Isn't this an interesting coincidence?" And Gray said, "Well, it's not a coincidence because it was the anti-missile missile researcher's work that—or at least a branch of that work—that had the same intellectual history as this particular theory." So you know, that was quite cool, and that's all stemming from this guy at MIT.

So imagine what happens is your hypothalamus says, "Ah, you don't have enough sugar in your blood," and so like it pops up this perceptual, I call them motivation action maps. What is it? No, I can't even remember what I called them. Motivation—oh, it doesn't matter. They're those little ovals, and they contain a way of looking at the world—so a way of focusing in on the things that are relevant, and they contain the branching sequence of ready-made actions and perceptions that you would use to solve the problem, and they sort of prime those so they're at hand.

And I think that's what you basically experience when you get hungry, you know? And hunger isn't just the feeling in your stomach—the empty feeling—it's also this impulse to act, right? In a particular direction, and it's a heightened particular taste, um, and maybe even for a particular substance. So it turns out this is quite cool. You know, there are five or six or seven primary tastes, and part of your brain tells you what it is that you're tasting, and then another part of your brain says whether or not that is a good taste or a bad taste.

And if it's a good taste, then you'll pursue it; and if it's a bad taste or even a neutral taste, you won't pursue it. And so what happens is that as you get hungry, the goodness of the taste increases, and then when you eat, it decreases. It tastes the same though, right? Which is kind of interesting because you might think that, you know, if you were eating something salty, the way you would stop is it just wouldn't taste salty anymore, but that isn't what happens.

You have a goodness adjuster, and it works independently for the different tastes. So that's why when you eat, you still have room for dessert because that part isn't satiated; that taste isn't satiated yet. So okay, anyways, the hypothalamus, let's say, pops up this little sub-personality, and it's the eating sub-personality. And if it's like a really desperate eating sub-personality, you better not get in its way.

You know, you've never experienced that, to speak of, because North Americans are never hungry. You know, hungry is what happens after you haven't eaten for 30 days. You know, that's hungry. So you don't want to get in the way of someone like that. They're going to be occupying the hunger motivation action and perception module all the time, and in a very, very motivated way.

The hypothalamus has got massive projections reaching up into the parts of the brain that you would associate more particularly with you, and if it wants to subordinate you to it, it will. You see this all the time in binge eaters, you know? Because a binge eater will starve usually herself and starve herself and starve herself and starve herself, and then the hypothalamus will say, especially if she gets a little upset because the negative emotion will suppress her prefrontal cortical function, and then the hypothalamus will go, "Whew!"

And then the little eating module pops up, and, you know, she's in the fridge eating two quarts of ice cream in 15 seconds, and then she says, "It was like it wasn't even me." It's like, "Yeah, it wasn't." It was a fundamental biological subcircuit that is devoted to not letting you starve yourself to death, you know? And so you don't want to get into war with one of those things.

And that's really what happens in bulimia in particular. It's a war between higher cortical centers and lower subcortical centers, and that's not good, you know? So anyways, up pops the little module that says, "State A—you're—you don't have enough food, your blood sugar is too low. State B, solve that by having a peanut butter sandwich." You know, it's context-specific—solve it by eating, okay?

Now what that has done is set up the framework for satiation. Okay, now satiation is a kind of reward. Now, you might think that satiation is the kind of reward that everyone wants because that's actually what people think. You know, they think that what you want is to get to your goal, and generally we presume that getting to your goal is rewarding.

But it's a funny kind of reward because actually because it's a consumatory reward—which is a particular kind of reward—it has its own circuitry. The consumatory reward just shuts off the system that was pursuing it. That's the consequence. So the drive goes away; it's a funny reward, right? Because you stop being impelled by the drive; you're kind of happy about that. But all that happens is that system sinks, and poof, up pops another one.

So consumatory reward is a strange kind of reward because it's never really final, and all it does is shut down the part of you that wanted it. So okay, so that's consumatory reward, and that's important to remember. You'll see why after a while. Now imagine what could happen as you move towards the consumatory reward. So here's some rough things that could happen: the things that you're doing could work in the way you want them to work.

Okay, and so that's kind of the no hassle situation. You know, you go downstairs, you open the cupboard, the peanut butter's there, you make a sandwich, you eat it, and then you go back to studying. Pretty not exciting, you know? It's like, it's a boring story, and that's the kind of story you want to inhabit most of the time. You want the things that you know how to do to produce the results that you want to produce—work.

And that basically keeps your emotions regulated. So now that we understand this A to B movement and we understand how the underlying biological subsystems modulate that, now we can start to think about emotion. All right? So as you're walking towards your goal, you're evaluating what happens as you walk, and as long as the things that you want to have happen are happening, while you walk, then your dopaminergic system, which is the source of incentive reward, which is the second kind of reward—your dopamine system is going, "Good job, good job, good job, good job, good job!" And you kind of like that!

It keeps you alert; you know you're on the right track, and it reinforces that behavior because your body assumes that if the thing that you're doing is working, then the circuit that does that should get a little stronger and a little more well-developed because it's producing the desired outcome. And I think you feel good about that. And I think the reason you feel good about that is because your brain is actually like it's in a state of growth—it's producing chemicals that help your brain grow.

And I think it's the feeling of that that you have as a positive feeling. Now, how you feel that, I don't know, but why wouldn't you feel that? It's like the thing you're doing is working; it should thrive, and so you're pretty happy about that. And that's like mild-level positive emotions—“I know what I'm doing!” You know? So that's one thing that can happen that you expect or predict.

It's expect if you use a pure cognitive model; it's desire if you use a model that incorporates motivation because Soov and Vinogradova, to some degree, Gray kind of thinks about the brain as something that predicts and expects. You know, so as long as what you expect to happen is happening, then you stay calm. But there's an error in that, and the error is, well, you don't just expect things; you want them, right?

And you're always aiming at something specific, and it's the biological systems that underlie motivation that is specifying that. So you can't think of yourself as a cold, calculating expectancy machine—a cognitive expectancy machine—because you're not like that. You want things.

Okay, so you're moving along towards your target and the things that you want to have happen are happening, and the cues that you're approaching the target are appearing as they should be, and your dopamine system—which is grounded, by the way, in half of the hypothalamus—so half of the hypothalamus is devoted towards popping up these little bubbles that tell you what you should want and how to get them.

And the other half is devoted to exploring and to mostly to exploring and to paying attention, okay? So if it's ticking along just quite nicely as long as what you're doing is working, but then we'll say, well, what if what you're doing isn't working? What if you get to the cupboard, and you open it, and your little brother has eaten all the peanut butter? Well, what you get then is a mismatch.

It's like, instead of the presence of the peanut butter, you get the absence of the peanut butter, and that's actually a stimulus. So cool, the absence of a desired entity is a punishment; it's a punishment. So that's pretty abstract, right? I mean, it's pretty abstract punishment. It's like a hole where there shouldn't be a hole will produce an orienting response and frustrate you and make you aggressive and irritated, and all those sorts of things.

And so, and you're going to feel that negatively. Now, that's interesting—that's a punishment. That's a punishment. Now if you had suspicions that the peanut butter might be missing when you were opening the door, that would make you anxious because anxiety, fear—more particularly, fear—is the expectation that a punishment might occur.

You have an—this is interesting—even though it’s in relationship to a punishment, which you might think of as a primary unconditioned stimulus, right? It’s an unconditioned stimulus because you naturally respond to it. Fear, which could be considered a conditioned stimulus, actually has its own circuit.

It's so common that what we want might not be there that we've evolved a whole circuit just to deal with things that are threatening as well as things that are punishing. Punishment, pain, threat—anxiety, threat—is threat of punishment. So it's an abstract form of—it's an abstract representation of punishment. You're anxious so that you don't get hurt.

Now you might say, "I'm so damn anxious, I don't—I'd rather have the hurt." But no, you wouldn't! It's like, it's a lesser price to pay; it's a lesser pain to avoid a greater pain. That's really what anxiety is, so the next time you're anxious, you should be happy about that because at least you're not in pain, which is what the anxiety is trying to protect you from.

Okay, so you're going towards your goal, and one thing that could happen is that things that you want to have happen are happening and things that you want to have appear are appearing, and so you get a little dopamine kick from the hypothalamus, and that makes you feel like you're, you know, on the right track—which is exactly how it makes you feel—because we're trajectory-oriented animals. Just like an anti-missile missile, we're always trying to hit a moving target, and so if you're on the right trajectory, then everything about the way you've organized your brain at that moment is functional.

And so your brain pumps up a little bit of neurochemical to make those areas of the brain that are involved in that productive activity grow a little bit, and you think, "Hey, things are going pretty good for me." So that's pretty cool. Now here's another thing that could happen. So we could say, well, the peanut butter isn't there; well first, you're going to be surprised about that hypothetically, to the degree that you thought it would be there.

And so that's going to make you anxious because one of the things that can happen when you're on the way to get something you want is that something you don't expect will happen—that's novelty. That's novelty. Or anomaly. Anomaly is the mismatch between the structures that you're using to represent the world and your actions in it, and the actual world is the detection of a gap between the state of reality and your representation of the state of reality.

Now the bigger that gap, the more anxious you get. Now then you might say, well how do you calculate how anxious you should be? And Gray actually doesn't talk about that, but if you—but there's a paper in there by Carver and Scheier that you'll have to read that's related to this. So remember the hierarchy, right? You got little bitty things at the bottom, and you got great big things at the top.

You might say, you open the cupboard and the peanut butter isn't there, and you think, "This stupid family, I should go hang myself." You know, which I would say is not a particularly adaptive response, although it does solve the problem. What's happening there is that you're calibrating the threat as a threat to the integrity of the top levels of the hierarchy that you use to orient yourself in the world.

And I would say that's pretty—that's fuzzy thinking, you know? Before you hang yourself about it, you might think if there are some simpler things you could do that were lower in the hierarchy and higher in resolution that would solve the problem. Like, well, you could go to the corner store and get a jar of peanut butter, and then that problem would be solved, right? Or maybe you could just have something that wasn't peanut butter.

You know what I mean? You want to do a shift at the low levels of the hierarchy at high resolution because it's less anxiety-provoking, it's less effort, and it doesn't take you apart. And so there's a rule, and I don't know how your brain figures it out. The rule is make the least modification necessary to solve the problem. It's a really, really, really, really important rule. And if you use it when you're talking to other people, they will like you a lot better.

Because maybe you know the person that's working for you doesn’t do something they said they would do, and that puts you in trouble. I mean, one response is, "You’re a useless creep; get the hell out of here." So you fire them, and the other is, "Okay, tell me exactly what happened during the time that you were supposed to be outputting this resource." So you listen to the person detail out their psychomotor schemes, and you see where you can tweak one or two so that the next time that happens— the next time a situation like that arises—you don't get the same undesired output.

That's much better, but it takes acuity, right? Because you've got to turn the low-resolution situation, which is "I'm irritated and anxious and frustrated and hurt by your foolishness—your apparent foolishness," which is a really easy thing to conceptualize because it doesn't take any effort. It’s just an expression of my automatic response. Or I can think, "Okay, let's constrain this, differentiate it, sequence it, and try to figure out where the problem actually lies."

Now if it happens 50 times, maybe it's time not to have a relationship with that person anymore. But to begin with, at least you want to start with the smallest possible correction, and you can really remember this when you're arguing with people, you know? Especially people that you have a relationship with, it's like save the "We should get a divorce" statements for the serious occasions. If there are violations, assume that they're high-resolution low-level violations, investigate that.

And if that doesn't work, well then jump up one level, but start low. And most of the time, your brain is trying to figure out how to do that for you. It would like to assume that your stupidity is of the rectifiable kind. And I want to talk to you a little bit about how it makes that calculation because it's a very hard calculation to make, right?

It's like if you wake up and you know there’s something about you that's aching, it's like, what the hell are you supposed to think about that? Because the range is from, "Nothing; it'll go away in five minutes," to "Hey, you know, you're dead in three months!" And there's no real way of telling what level of catastrophic response you should have to the emergence of that anomaly.

It's a real big problem, and so your brain has to estimate it in all sorts of different ways. And as we differentiate out the personality traits, we'll start to talk about that. So for now, just remember that your built-in biological systems are specifying the goal and the framework within which you construe that goal—perceptions and actions.

There's a little personality, and it wants something. Okay? As that little personality is going along towards its goal, three things can happen: it can make progress, it can get stopped in a way that's easily rectifiable, you know, like maybe there's a toy on the stairs and you have to step around it. Obviously that's not going to bother you very much because it just requires a tiny transformation of your schema, right? So little things you can rectify might help.

So those are little punishments or little threats, or you can hit an anomaly, okay? And if things are going right, that's positive emotion—that's extroversion, by the way. It's the same system. So extroverts, their positive reward system, the incentive reward system is quite active in extroverts, not active in introverts. And then in terms of neuroticism, people who are high in neuroticism tend to react with more anxiety and pain to the same amount of disruption, and those are two of the first fundamental personality traits.

So we'll see you Tuesday. [Applause]