2015 Maps of Meaning 04b: Narrative, Neuropsychology & Mythology II / Part 2 (Jordan Peterson)

Okay, that's running. Okay, all right. So, let's talk about your brain. So, there's lots of different ways of dividing up the brain, and believe me, people are still arguing about how to do that. So, um, I don't remember if I've um assigned the Swanson paper to you as a reading. Do any of you remember that? Yes, it's there. It's a very hard paper, very, very, very hard. What I want you to do is to familiarize yourself with it. I mean, it's someone's whole life work, and he's really smart, so you're just not going to be able to, you know, digest the entire paper. But it's a brilliant paper, and Swanson is a developmental neuroanatomist, and he basically envisions the brain using a conceptual schema that's based on how it transforms itself. I think I turned it on across time, so—

What I really love about Swanson is that he builds the brain from the bottom up, from the body upwards. Okay, so, and that's incredibly useful because there's a real dualism that still saturates almost all of the conceptions that you hear about the brain. In most areas in psychology, certainly being one of those, we kind of treat the brain as if it's the place of the mind, and the mind is something separate from the body. You could just sort of take your brain out of your body and you'd still have a mind, and it's like—no, wrong.

One of the things the AI people discovered after many decades of trying to make things intelligent was that until they put them in a body, things weren't intelligent. So, intelligence seems integrally linked to the ability to maneuver yourself through space in a physically embodied and limited form and to manipulate the world. So, your body is your brain. First of all, your brain isn't in your head anyways; it's distributed throughout your body. All you have to do is look at the nervous system to figure that out. Second, there are more neurons in your autonomic nervous system than there are in your central nervous system. I mean, you know, your brain is not only in your head; it's a really foolish way of thinking about it.

So, all right, having said that, there are multiple ways of conceptualizing the brain, and a lot of whether or not the conceptual structure is accurate is whether or not it's useful. So, I'm going to go through a couple because they're useful in different ways. This is one that's basically based on the model that Russian neuropsychologists produced, led by Luria, who was the greatest Russian neuropsychologist and who had amazing students. Many of them laid down the groundwork for the models that we're going to describe, and they were heavily influenced by cybernetic thinking, by the way. So, the two fields played like this over from the 1920s till now, really.

So, from the Lurian perspective, your brain is basically something that acts; it acts in the world and perceives the world. The back half of the brain, roughly speaking, is for perceiving, and the front half is for acting. Now, here's something to think about; you know, I'm sure you've been taught the prefrontal cortex is the seat of abstract thought, you know, the seat of executive decision-making, for example. It's like, I'm not so convinced about that theory for a variety of reasons. But one of the things that is true about the prefrontal cortex is that during the course of evolution, it grew out of the motor cortex.

So, if you look at this representation, the top one, there's the primary zone, which is the motor strip, and then the secondary zone, which is the premotor strip, and the tertiary zone, which is the prefrontal cortex. And basically what happened was that first animals learned how to act, and then they learned how to represent actions before they implemented them. So, the purpose of thinking is to represent actions before you implement them. But it's not only actions because there aren't only actions, right? Because to act, you also have to perceive. And so really what the prefrontal cortex does is run simulations of how an embodied personality might operate in a fictional world.

And that's what you're doing when you're thinking. It's also what you're doing when you're watching movies or reading fiction or any of those sorts of things, right? Instead of having to act something out and potentially dying as a consequence of it, you can watch something being simulated and see what happens. And then if the outcome is good, you can implement it. And if the outcome isn't good, then you can let it die.

And so, I think it was Alfred North Whitehead that said, um, the purpose of thought is so that we can let our hypotheses die instead of us. That's smart, that's a very smart thing. And so, what's happened in some senses is that human beings have gone from evolution to meta-evolution, right? Instead of evolving, we can model evolution and then implement the ideas, the personality, so to speak, that we think are most functional. We let our fantasy do the selection instead of the actual world, and it's a brilliant solution, it's a brilliant solution.

So, in some sense, the sensory unit, which is the back half of the brain, is setting up your frameworks of perception and integrating them, and then the front half is determining how to sequence activities and modes of perception in order to act successfully in the world, right? And so there's the actual implementation of the action, and then there's the modeling of the implementation, which is what gives rise to thinking.

And I do think that it's very useful to think of thinking as a simulated personality. Fundamentally, you're running avatars of yourself, in some sense, in your imagination and trying to determine which ones are going to be successful. Now, you may have noticed, given that I used the word avatar, that we've also now figured out how to externalize the process of fantasy back into the actual world so that we can run simulations in fantasy on machinery and we can play out potentials that way instead of only having to do it in our brain. You know, and that's very, very smart, that's extraordinarily smart, and it's really going to change things. God only knows for how.

So, one of the things about Luria's model— you see that there are primary, secondary, and tertiary zones. The tertiary zones are zones of integration. The primary zones are zones where, especially in the sensory systems, where each sense is elaborated in its highest resolution sense before it becomes integrated with the other senses. And so the tertiary zones are actually areas of overlap between the senses.

So, for example, when you read silently, my experience of reading silently is I hear the words in my head, so to speak. Well, you might think, well, how? You know, you look at a word and you hear it in your head. How in the world is that possible? And the answer is your eyes are using your auditory system. So there's overlap between the visual and the auditory system in the tertiary zones. And so basically what you're doing is hearing with your eyes. And you know, your consciousness has this property of unification, right? It’s sort of like a unified experience. Luria believed that it was the tertiary zones that gave rise to that phenomena of unified experience. He's a very smart character.

So the point is that the motor unit is basically utilized. The part of us that does planning, forward planning and forward thinking, is utilized to lay out simulated personalities in the world. That's a good way of thinking about it. So, okay, so that's one kind of neurological model. Um, now let's see. I want to go to more of the neurology here first.

All right, so if you look at the motor strip, this is called a homunculus. And when Wilder Penfield was initially doing open brain surgery on people with epilepsy, you know, you're generally conscious during brain surgery, which is a rather horrifying thing to contemplate because, you know, they don't want to cut out a part that you might need. And so they poke around in there, often with electrodes, and you know, you can report what's happening to you. Well, what Penfield did was do electrode mapping of the manner in which your body was represented in the primary motor area that was responsible for sequencing action. And what he found was this. Now, usually you don't see it like that because the way your body is laid out on your brain, it's sort of torn apart and stretched out over the motor strip.

And there are weird places where the parts come together. So, for example, there's a motor homunculus and there's a sensory homunculus. And one of the weird characteristics of the sensory homunculus is that the genital region is right beside the region for the feet. And one of the things that you can infer from that is that's why people take such delight in such things as foot massages and why feet fetishes, for example, are quite common, because the areas do bleed into one another. So, that's pretty amusing.

So anyways, there's the homunculus, and you might say, well, that's how your brain thinks of your body in terms of what you can do with your body. And so that's like a human being. That's, in fact, that might be more what a human being is like than the human being you see when you just look at a human being. And what you see is, well, we're pretty handy and we're pretty damn mouthy. And so one of the ways you can think about that—and I think it's right—is that human beings run around taking things apart and putting them back together with their hands, and then they talk about that all the time. And we have a tremendous amount of control over our tongue; that's wired up right at birth, by the way. And lips as well.

So that's a primary investigative organ, you know, and it's used for multiple purposes. So, you know, children really explore the world with their lips and tongue, and of course, it's a primary area for sexual exploration. But it's also, um, it's also the part of our body that we use to transform the things that we can do with our hands into patterns of communication so that we can speak about what we do with our hands, so that other people can learn how to do that with their hands. And if you look at your hands, what you'll see is you're mostly thumbs, right? And you know, one of the things that you always learn from scientists is that it's an opposable thumb that makes us human.

And certainly the thumb, especially on the right hand, is—like you see, you've got more motor cortex devoted to your damn thumb than you do to your whole body. And that's because, well, try picking up a wrench with your back; you know you're just not going to get very far. And so it's really useful to think about the brain body in this homuncular fashion because it also helps you understand other things. Because you'll hear people say, well, dolphins are superhuman in their intelligence because their eniz quotient is higher than ours.

And the enolization quotient is the ratio of brain tissue to body weight—fundamentally brain weight to body weight. Yeah, yeah, that's a measure of intelligence. But the thing is, is that imagine a dolphin homunculus. It's like, what the hell are they going to do with all that intelligence? Like nose up some dirt on the bottom of the ocean? That's about it. They can't build anything, they can't take things apart and put them back together. And so whatever their brain is being used for, it has very little relationship to what our brain is being used for. Our bodies are articulated, whereas a dolphin is sort of like a test tube, you know? And they can swim like mad, and they're obviously extremely playful, which is one of the attributes of intelligent creatures.

But they're not taking things apart and putting them back together like we are, and that's what we're doing all the time. We do that with our speeches, in fact. The essence of taking things apart and putting them back together—you know, and the hypotheses are with regards to speech development—that we developed our capacity for articulated movement before we developed our capacity for language. And that the only reason we ever developed a capacity for language was because it sort of developed as a secondary consequence of our ability to produce articulated action.

Now, the two things probably spiraled across time, so I don't think you can— you know, it's not a chicken came first and then the egg issue. It's that chickens have eggs and eggs have chickens and that just keeps going. But the point is that our ability to represent things in an articulated manner is directly related to our ability to use our joints in an articulated manner. And so that's what we're like in the world. We're out there doing things to it and then talking about it.

We're very handy, and we're very mouthy. So that's useful to know because that's sort of how the brain pictures the body. And the fact that the brain pictures the body that way means that that's how the brain conceptualizes the body as an entity for use in the environment. And so you say, well, how do human beings adapt? Well, we run around taking things apart and putting them back together with our hands and talking about it, and we're very good at that.

And so you could say, well, in some sense, that's our primary—I think that that's—it’s a reflection of the same processes that gave rise to the idea of the hero because there are two ways of adapting to the world, in some sense. One way is just to do what everyone else has done that's always worked. All animals do that; that's what they do. Like bears now and bears a thousand years ago—it's like they're the same bear. Even though they're very complicated; same with chimps.

You know, people say chimps have culture and can make tools. It's like that's wrong. And here's why it's wrong: if a chimp could increase its domain of cultural expertise by a tenth of a percent a generation, which is like nothing—well, run that for seven million years at compound interest, and what happens? Well, you get Toronto, right? I mean, I don't know how much we transform our culture with each generation, but it doesn't have to be very damn much for there to be cities after two million years of iteration. Well, chimps are still living in the jungle.

Now, they do use tools, but what seems to happen is that the environment suggests the tools to them. So they have a certain level of intelligence and they can figure out how to use what's at hand. And what's at hand is different in different places, so they use different tools. But that doesn't mean they're thinking up different tools. They're not, clearly, because there's no accumulation. There's no accumulation of culture.

So, I don't see how you can escape from that mathematical argument. And you can make the same argument to pretty much any other creature, you know— even ants. It's like they're making the same damn anthills they were making, God only knows how long ago. I mean, they're very successful at it, but there's no innovation. And so being the same as the things that lived before you is a pretty good strategy, but that isn't the human strategy.

Or it's actually half the human strategy because half our strategy is to do what everyone else has always done, and the other half is to fix that where it's not working very well—or at least to try to fix it. And I think this is an excellent representation of the abilities we have embodied to do precisely that.

So here's another way of thinking about the brain. This is mostly partly from Luria again in the Russians. This is from one of his students whose name is Elkhonon Goldberg, who's a practicing neuroscientist in New York, and I think he's a very bright guy. And I like his theory because, you know, you've heard classic theories about linguistic versus non-linguistic hemispheres.

So the left hemisphere usually is regarded as the linguistic hemisphere because in right-handed males in particular, language tends to be pretty located in the left hemisphere. Now, what I would say instead of that is that there are linguistic and non-linguistic systems in the brain, and most of the time, they segregate out so that the linguistic system is in the left hemisphere and the non-linguistic system is in the right hemisphere.

But it doesn't have to happen that way. It can be reversed with people who are left-handed; it's more distributed in women. And if you lose your whole right hemisphere when you're like 18 months old, so you don't even have a right hemisphere, your left hemisphere will specialize so that it has a linguistic system and a non-linguistic system.

Partly the way to think about that is that, you know, your top part of your brain, the cortical cap, you can kind of think about that as, uh, plural vent territory. Lots of things could happen to it. And what happens is that as you develop the underlying systems, the more biologically archaic systems colonize the cortex. They fight, basically.

So, you know, your ears and your eyes fight over which part of the back of the brain they're going to have access to, and usually the eyes win at the back part of the brain and the ears win more here. But you know, if you don't have any eyes, the ears are going to colonize the visual systems. And that's partly why if you can't see, you can hear better.

And even if you lose your hand—if you lose your thumb when you're an adult, what'll happen is the part of the motor cortex that represents your fingers will grow— it will grow into that area so that you have more brain now devoted towards these fingers. And if you're born without hands and use your feet, then the feet will start to develop a map that looks like the map of the hand.

And there's some flexibility in that, even in adulthood. So, there are these underlying systems that grow up, and you know they expand their capacity for differentiation and synthesis by occupying the cortex. And that can happen in a variety of ways even though it tends to happen in a standard way during normal development.

So you could say it's better for your eyes to invade the visual cortex because it's sort of set up for that. But if they can't invade the visual cortex and it invades the auditory cortex, that works like 90% as well. It's something like that. So the top cortical cap is somewhat specialized, but it's not specialized to the degree that it's lost its plasticity for the first stages of development.

It's why child neuropsychology tends to be such a mess, is because the child's brain is so plastic that you can't really say with any certainty what any given part of it happens to be doing, except down in the, you know, in the ancient areas where some stability has been attained. So, here's a way of conceptualizing the difference between the left and the right hemisphere.

Although, again, I wouldn't think about it that way. Now, the classic distinction is linguistic versus non-linguistic. Now, Goldberg puts that on its head. He says, "No, no. Linguistic non-linguistic is an emergent property of a more fundamental division." The more fundamental division is between novelty and routine and anomaly, and that maps onto the sorts of discussions that we've been having.

What do you have to deal with in the world? Things that work the way you think they will and that you want them to, and then things that don't. So you have a system that works with the things that work the way you want them to, and you have another system that deals with the things that don't.

And, rough speaking, in the standard human brain, the right hemisphere seems to be wired for novelty detection, emotional response, and provisional processing, whereas the left hemisphere seems to be specialized for routinized activities, and that would include representation in language. Now, what happens, for example, if you practice a novel task is that when you first do it, it's very computationally demanding. And so you set out a lot of energy, and a lot of your brain is at work, especially in the right hemisphere.

And as you practice it, the right hemisphere stops working, and the left hemisphere works more and more, and then a big part of the left hemisphere works. And then as you keep practicing it, that moves back until there's a little tiny part of your brain that's really active when you're doing it and you're good at it. And so, partly what happens is, imagine it this way: is your brain, when you're first trying to do something complex, maybe you're trying a new piano piece or maybe you're doing some improvisation—it's like you're trying out all sorts of things, right?

A lot of it's error and error correction. It's a bloody mess; it's exhausting. You're doing all this, and you're getting rid of that thing that doesn't work and that thing, and you practice this part that's awkward. And as you do that, there are fewer and fewer errors, less variability, and more and more routinization.

And as you're doing that, you're building a little machine at the back of your head that does this perfectly, but that machine can't do anything else. Now, that's really an interesting thing to think about because what it implies is whatever you practice, you build into your implicit processing systems. So be careful what you practice because once you get one of those little machines back there and it really knows what to do, it's there.

Now, you could build another little machine that stops it from doing what it's doing, but it's pretty damn hard to get rid of that machine once you've built it. And so if you build a cocaine-consuming and desiring machine in your head, that machine might end up being more powerful than you are, in which case you're basically ruined.

And that's really what happens to people who are addicted because they build expertise in cocaine-seeking, preparation, and ingestion. And it's really a powerful system because it gets hit by dopamine every time it's successful, so it grows into this monstrous sub-personality. And all that you need to activate that sub-personality, even if it's been dormant for a long time and, you know, you're out of the addiction, is the sight of something associated with cocaine.

It's like, "Up it comes," and you're under—that’s the monkey on your back, so to speak. And so what happens when you're trying to get people unaddicted is that you can take them to a treatment center and let them go through all the minor league horrors of withdrawal, which are nowhere near as bad as people generally claim.

So, like, heroin withdrawal is like a very bad flu for about four days. It's not exactly pleasant, but it's not like alcohol withdrawal, which just, like, kills you often. So you let the person get through all that; they're no longer dependent on the chemical, and they're fine as long as they're in the treatment center.

But as soon as you put them back in their environment and they see, like, their friend Joe, who's like, you know, their drinking and cocaine partner, it's like "poof," up comes the monster and they're gone. It's very, very difficult to treat addictions, and that's because an addiction is not a psychological thing—it's like you built a real monster in your head.

And the problem is you're going to have to, like, bore it to death over years before it goes away. And then if you're stressed, well, that's going to make it even more difficult for you to inhibit it. And, well, it's a bloody mess. It's a mess. Or if you get money, which is like the worst thing that can happen to you if you're an addict. You know, it's like I've had addicts as clients, and the worst thing that ever happens to them is payday.

It's like they're gone on payday for like three days. They're gone, then they come back and they're all beat to death because they've, you know, screwed up horribly, and they're broke. And so then they're safe till the next time they get some money. So, these are the sorts of associations that go along with the novelty versus routinization model of the brain.

So it is right, right versus left, roughly, but it's better to think of it the other way: novelty versus routinization. And so the novelty processing part of the brain is responsible for the production of negative emotion. Why? Well, when you run into something that you don't expect, you should immediately be cautious because something that you don't want might happen to you.

Now, you can be excited because maybe something new will happen, but the prudent thing to do is to be on alert first because God only knows where you are. So negative affect is part of it; the thing you don't understand is a threat. That's the initial presumption, and it's prudent.

And then the other thing the right hemisphere does is it stops your ongoing behavior. I would think about it as doing low-resolution hypothesis generation. So, for example, if you're alone at night, say, and, uh, I don't know, maybe you've watched a horror movie, so you've got yourself nice and primed, and it's like one in the morning, and you're tired, and you haven't eaten anything for a while, and you hear some weird noise in a room upstairs; images are going to flash through your head, and they're basically hypotheses about what might be up there.

And you know they can take bizarre form, like especially if you've been watching a horror movie. You know, God only knows what—some serial killer with a hockey mask up there or something. You know, but what your right hemisphere is doing is a very rapid quick and dirty processing of what the horrible thing might be, and that you're on alert, and you need to kind of know what might be there.

And so, you over— you know, you overestimate might be the worst thing you can imagine, and that'll freeze you like a rat. And if nothing else happens, then, well, maybe you'll hide under the bed, which, you know, might be a useful solution, or probably you'll like walk upstairs and see what happens as you walk.

And if nothing comes leaping out and killing you, then you'll think, well, it's at least not the sort of monster that leaps out and kills you when you're walking up the stairs in the dark. And so you're narrowing it—you’re developing a higher and higher resolution model of the thing. Then, you know, you go upstairs and you find that, I don't know, maybe your cat knocked a stuffed animal onto the floor or something. You know, it narrows it down to irrelevancy.

But your right hemisphere is going to be doing the initial quick and dirty processing. And those are low-resolution representations. They're often archetypal. You know, it's like: things that go bump in the night. Well, that's a big category, and you might think, well, is that a reasonable category? It's like it's a reasonable category: things in the night that might hurt you. It's the category of monsters, fundamentally.

So, and you know, you might say, well, there's no such thing as monsters. Well, we already went through that with the little book, didn't we? So, of course, there are, it's just a low-resolution category, you know? So, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful.

Larger motor actions are associated with the part of the brain that does novelty processing, and again that's kind of low resolution, right? Because when you really figure something out, you can fiddle around with it in detail, but if you're reacting in a quick and dirty manner, you're using your whole body.

So, and on the routinization side of the equation, you've got positive emotion moving forward because it's much more appropriate to move forward in fully articulated territory because you know what you're doing. And so if you understand the territory and you've articulated it, then the probability that you're going to get what you want when you're there is going to be very high.

Word processing, linear thinking, detail recognition, detail generation, fine motor action—the actual physiological structure of the left hemisphere is more differentiated than the physiological structure of the right hemisphere as well. And one other way to think about it, I think, is that the novelty processing unit, which is non-linguistic, is actually under the control of the underlying limbic and hypothalamic systems.

So it's bottom-up; it's sort of the part of your brain that still acts like an animal acts, whereas the linguistic part, that's sort of the you that you think of yourself as, that's where the roughly speaking the ego that's talking to itself resides. And I think it is capable of top-down control to a larger degree than the novelty processing unit, which is still working as a quick and dirty defense system and is highly motivated by more primordial systems.

So, okay, so that's another way of thinking about it. Um, we can zero it in a little bit more. There's been a lot of work on a brain area called the hippocampus, and the hippocampus is the part of the brain that moves information from short-term attention to long-term storage. It seems to do that across time. So, for example, if you suffer maybe impact-induced amnesia, a little bit of oxygen deprivation, the hippocampus is a very active part of the brain, and so it doesn’t like being deprived of oxygen.

And so if you have brain trauma and you get oxygen deprived, it'll damage the hippocampus. And then what often happens is you can't remember the accident; you can't remember what happened for six months before the accident. Your memory of the last 18 months is pretty hazy, but the farther back you go in time, the more likely you are to have access to the memories. So what seems to happen is the hippocampus seems to—it does a bunch of things. It moves it; it probably organizes your autobiographical information initially and then, as it's elaborated in memory, it moves up into cortical representations and becomes more permanent.

And maybe articulation has something to do with that, that like I have a suspicion that partly what you're doing when you're doing the writing that you already did is you're moving information more and more permanently into cortical representation—cortical semantic representation. You're detaching it from its underlying emotional substrate, so the hippocampus seems to be responsible for that.

So if you take people whose hippocampi—because there's two of them—have been destroyed, there are a few clinical case reports of people like that. They can't develop any new autobiographical memory. So the most famous of those patients was a guy named H.M., who had bilateral hippocampal damage partly from surgery and partly from epilepsy, and he was stuck in like 1957 for 40 years. He couldn't even really recognize himself in a mirror because it was like the old him. And although he could learn new procedures quite well, as well as a normal person, so he could learn a new procedure by practicing it day after day, but if you showed him the thing he'd learned, he'd say, "I never saw that before," even though he got much better at it.

And so he was one of the first cases that showed that memory systems were dissociable. So anyways, the hippocampus is a big deal. Now, the Russian neuropsychologists Solakov and Vinogradov, followed by Jeffrey Gray, followed up on this cybernetic model via Luria and they came up with the hypothesis that what the hippocampus was doing was comparing what you expected to happen in the world with what was happening.

Okay, so it's an expectation-based model. The idea was, because they were behaviorists— the idea was there are stimuli in the world that are actually there, you're monitoring them, you have a sense of what's going to happen, which is a cognitive expectation, and as long as the two things are co-occurring, then your emotions, particularly your threat response, are inhibited. So the threat system is sort of always on, but as long as everything is happening the way you expect it to happen, then it's inhibited.

Now, the way it's inhibited, it seems to be something like this—there's a part of the brain that's very deep called the reticular activating system, and the reticular activating system is an ascending stream of neuronal connections. And if you're in a car accident, you twist your head and you snap that tract, because it's actually fairly fragile, then you're unconscious forever, and that's that. So it's a very, very important tract, and it seems to be governing arousal. It's what governs your emergence into consciousness and your descent into unconsciousness at night—very, very old brain system.

And what it seems to happen is if the hippocampus detects a mismatch, it’s tonically inhibiting the reticular activating system. So as long as everything is going according to expectation, the reticular activating system isn’t sending a message to the amygdala and other systems that are primarily associated with emotion. It’s not sending a signal to them saying "wake the hell up," but as soon as there's a mismatch, then the hippocampal inhibition of the reticular activating system declines, and the amygdala and other emotional systems—motivational systems as well—turn on, or are no longer inhibited, which is a better way of thinking about it.

Okay, so now when Gray, who is also one of the cybernetic theorists, talks about what happens when you hit something that's unexpected, he basically says you have to revamp your motor programs and your expectations of the future in order to reconcile the error. And that—that's a complex process, and it requires exploration.

But the problem with that theory is you don't have access to the present. You have a model of the present, and you don't expect things to happen—you want them to happen. And so what that means is if they don't happen the way you want them to, you have a bigger problem than the cognitive cybernetic theorists originally envisioned.

And the problem is the place where the error might be is way bigger; it might be in what you want, it might be in how you put together what you want with the other things you want, it might be how you put together all those things with what other people want, it might be something wrong with your conception of your abilities at the present time, it might be a skill deficit, and it might be something that's gone astray with your conceptualization of the future. That's a big search space.

And so, that's part of the reason so you might say, well, what should you do when you hit something you don't expect? And the answer to that is you default to emergency preparation. Now, how much do you default? Well, we don't quite understand the representation yet because it's associated with this hierarchical problem we already described.

So, I think it's got to be something like this: your brain must be able to tell somehow how much of its structure is dependent on a given, on the viability of a given node. So, imagine that you have a representation, and hardly anything depends on that representation, and then that representation is disrupted. It's like, yeah, that's no big deal because it's only knocking out a part of what you're using to orient yourself in the world.

But if it's a fundamental presupposition—maybe like the presence, the continued presence of a loved one, on which all your other plans are predicated—because you can imagine that sort of as a neural structure if it's way down at the bottom and the neural structure is branching off from that and that gets disrupted, it looks like that the hippocampal system has some ability to sense the degree to which a given conceptualization is fundamental.

And maybe that has something to do with how early in life it was laid down, you know, because you know that once you make a presupposition in childhood to orient yourself, then other more finely grained presuppositions are going to emerge from that. So maybe it has something to do with depth of representation in the brain or the branching or the count of the branches that come off that. I don't know, and I don't think anybody does, but there has to be an association of that sort.

Yep. Well, I can tell you one thing that's been done about that. So this is the kind of science that people hate. You may or may not know that Ashkenazi Jews, European Jews on average, have an IQ that's about 15 points higher than the rest of the Caucasian population, and that's a lot. And that's part of the reason why they're massively overrepresented, for example, among, well, among people in most high-level occupations, but among Nobel Prize winners, and so on.

They're also much more prone to neural diseases that are associated with hypergrowth. So the fact that their brains are more plastic in some sense comes along with susceptibility to a variety of diseases of the nervous system. So there’s an intelligence and proliferation problem there. So your brain can be so plastic that it starts to become abnormal.

So we also know with regards to openness per se that, here's one of the best tests for openness: we could do this right now; I don't think we will. But if I say, "Okay, take out a piece of paper and a pen and write down as many words as you can that begin with the letter S in three minutes," there's going to be a lot of variation in this group. I would think it would be from 50 to 200. The people who can write down more words, they're higher in openness; they're more creative as well. It's a pretty good predictor.

So that isn't so much, I think, an indication necessarily of the complexity of the branches, but it's certainly an indication of how rapidly you can access the information that's in those branches. So, okay, so that's how you maintain emotional stability. The way you maintain emotional stability is something like you have a conception of how the world should lay itself out when you act.

As long as that conception and your model of what's happening match, then your hippocampus tells your reticular activation—reticular activating system—to leave your motivational and emotional systems dormant. And then, if there's a mismatch, it's like it's time to wake the hell up.

In your paper, you were talking about the map system, hypothalamus—we haven't talked about that yet—but that's a perfectly reasonable question. That's actually why—um, you said that was the most stable psychological marker as well. What was it you mentioned that said that motivation provides the most stable of the psychological strategies?

Oh yeah, okay, so fine, I—okay, so you can conceptualize the brain like this. You know you hear about emotions and motivations, and I would say, well, those are low-resolution boxes because it actually turns out that if you look at each of the major motivational systems—and you know, you can argue about what they are, but we can kind of lay them out—pain is one, that's for sure, that's an old one. Thirst, hunger, sexual drive, defensive aggression, predatory aggression, play, love, pair bonding. Um, what else? And then there's basic emotions, you know, there's like hope and surprise and joy and fear and, um, disgust, and that's good enough. You get the picture, you know? And you can expand that and contract it depending on how you conceptualize it, and you can say, well, some of those are motivational systems and some of those are emotional systems.

And the actual answer to that is, well, not exactly, because that's only a low-resolution categorization system. It might be useful to distinguish them from cognitive systems, but the truth of the matter is that each of those systems has its own neurological substrate, and those neurological substrates are not identical. Like, there's some similarities between them, but there's lots of differences.

And so some things are more emotion-like, and some things are sort of half like emotions and half like motivations. Anger is sort of like that, and then some things are more pure motivations because hunger—people don't generally think of that as an emotion. And I think it has to do mostly with the propensity of the underlying system to establish an entire framework of reference. So, hunger will do that. Anger will do that. Thirst will do that. Sexual drives will do that. Like they come up—they're like a personality associated with them; it wants something, it sees the world in that manner, it primes a certain class of behaviors that are associated with that, and it runs like a partial personality.

But then something like fear seems to be more something that exists and operates within a framework rather than producing its own framework. So it doesn't matter: the point is there's a lot of these underlying systems, and they have the capacity to set up these frameworks of reference that we're talking about and to run them as processes.

Yeah, and the reason I said they're stable is because the deeper you go down into the brain, the older the brain part is. And the hypothalamus—it's really, really old, and it's so powerful that if you take your whole brain off except for the hypothalamus and the spinal cord, which leaves you with like no brain at all if you're a cat, which is a pretty complicated thing—and you're female, you can still pretty much exist.

So if you put a female cat in a box and you take its brain off, including even the emotional sectors, and you just leave it with the hypothalamus, if you watch the cat, it can't handle novel environments, obviously, because it can't really learn. But it can do cat things, no problem. It can feed itself, it can engage in defensive aggression, it can mate—it can generally interact with its kittens.

And one of the weird things is—this is so funny—a cat with no brain is hyper-exploratory. It's like you think, what the hell? It's like you think it'd be the brain that's doing the exploring; it's like, no, it's the hypothalamus that's motivating the exploring. The brain stores the results of the exploring and shuts the exploration off.

So, if you take the brain off, then the cat just runs around trying to learn things, but it can't because it doesn't remember anything. So, but it's quite fascinating because, you know, we tend to think of the top part of the brain as so bloody important. It's like, uh, no. What, do we take the whole cortical cap off and almost all the emotional system? It's like 85% of the brain— visual cortex? No, no. Motor cortex? It's running on reflex.

If you're interested, I actually have some diagrams of it, but look up decorticate cat. You can—there's lots of—don't go under images. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, people did—a lot of people have done a lot of experiments on animals and their neurological function. And one of the things they were interested in is, well, how much brain can you remove and still have a functioning animal? And the answer is pretty much all of it. And that’s like, well, who the hell would possibly—and if you're interested in that, I would read Swanson again, uh, and I'm sure that paper's on the website. That Swanson paper, man, that's a work of genius, that thing.

Oh, because their male sexual behavior is harder to organize. And so decorticate males can't mate. So if you ever meet a male who can't mate, then you know—anyways, sorry, but that's the reason is that there are certain elements of male sexual behavior that require more complex organization. So that's one thing; a decorticate male can't do. So it's easier to distinguish them from females, from the female cats—that's the only reason.

So, okay, so you get the idea. So like at the bottom of the brain, there's all these systems that are really alive and sort of on fire, and they're all generating up these motivational frames of reference. And they do that—that's instinct, so to speak, you know? And then all of that's elaborated up by the cortex, and the cortex is saying, "Okay, well, these things are like a pack of fighting two-year-olds."

So, by the way, and I mean that because if you take children and you put them in ag-matched groups, and you have a group of 18-month-olds and two-year-olds and three-year-olds and four-year-olds all the way up to 16-year-olds, say, and then you count violent interactions—kicking, hitting, biting, stealing—the two-year-olds are like—they're just all over that. You know, but it's not actually quite right because some of the two-year-olds are peaceful and passive, but there's a subset of the two-year-old that are like chaotic motivational machines, right? They're just running around being as impulsive as they can possibly be, and you can think about them as under almost complete hypothalamic control.

They're just cycling from one intense motivational state to another. That makes two-year-olds a blast; like they're really fun to be around, except they're kind of a pain in the neck. But they're really fun because they're really on fire. They're into this and into that, into this—and then they fall down because they're too tired, and then they wake up and they're starving to death, and you know they're really alive.

But then what has to happen is that those behaviors, those motivational states—which are sort of working in isolation—they start to conflict with one another, you know, so that the child can't really organize any medium to long-term behavioral strategies being that impulsive.

So what the cortex is there for is to start sequencing those motivational systems in higher-order structures that allow each of them to get what they need in order to function across long periods of time in increasingly complex social environments. That's what the cortex is for.

So it's a complex regulatory mechanism, and what it's doing is keeping—it's like a nuclear reactor; the core is really hot and fiery and you need to sink rods into it to keep it under control. And that's really—it's a good analogy for how your brain works because the underlying systems, they're on fire. They're alive, and the cortex is saying, "Well, a little bit of you now and a little bit of you, and then some of you, and wait your turn," and so on.

And it sequences over long stretches of time. That's really socialization, and that's quite a different view than the Freudian view of repression. You know, I would say you only have to repress a motivational system if you're not very successful, because if you're a successful and well-socialized person, you don't have to suppress them or repress them; you just have to sequence them, that's all.

Because they're all going to get what they want, right? And that means that you're a good player of complex social games, and that has very little to do with repression or inhibition—it's just sequencing. It's important—it's important. What time do we have?

Okay, okay, good, good, good. Oh, so here's kind of an interesting way of looking at the amygdala. This is from Joseph LeDoux, who wrote a lovely book on the amygdala, and it also kind of shows you how your body is structured. And so, you know, I don't know if you've ever heard of the phenomena of blindsight—do you know what blindsight is? Did I tell you about blindsight or did you learn it somewhere else? Okay, well, anyways, one way of being blind is to go like this—then you can't see. And another way is to have your retina destroyed and maybe the optic nerve could go, and another way of being blind is to have your visual cortex destroyed.

The thing about—that's weird about having your visual cortex destroyed is that you think you can't see, but you still can. You just can't see the same way you saw before, and you can't see objects consciously. But if someone says, "I've got one hand up; which one is it?" And they say, "Well, I can't see it." And you say, "Guess!" Then they can guess.

And so, you might say, well, how can that be? And the answer to that is, is that—okay, imagine for a minute that the world isn't made out of objects. Imagine that it's made out of patterns because it is made out of patterns. Music is—that's why music is so intensely interesting, because it's a representation of the world as a place of patterns.

And a pattern is something that repeats because otherwise, it wouldn't be a pattern. And the only thing you really need to keep track of of things that repeat is because there's no such—there's no point knowing anything about things that don't repeat. Because what the hell good is your knowledge? So, the world's full of patterns. What happens is that that pattern is transformed into a pattern on your retina—it's a pattern of neural activation.

And then there's multiple branches from your retina; it doesn't just go one place. It goes lots of places, and each of those places it goes produces its own implementation of that pattern. And one of those implementations allows you to see the world consciously, but other implementations have other functions. So for example, if you show someone with blindsight an angry face, and you record their psychophysiological responses, and you show them a neutral or smiling face, you can distinguish their physiological responses to the angry or fearful face from the happy or neutral face.

And the reason for that is that one of the patterns that your retina is picking up is the facial configurations of human beings, specifically because that's really important to us. And that's delivered to a specific part of your brain. It seems to be at least in part the amygdala, and what the amygdala does, basically, is say this—I don't know, that's not very good, this means this. So it maps that pattern onto this pattern. You don't need to see anything for that to happen, right? You just have to translate the pattern into motor action.

Lots of animals see that way. So, like when a fly flies by a frog, the frog doesn't see the fly and think, "Well, there's a fly," and then like nails it with its tongue. It's like the fly flying by pattern activates the tongue sticking out pattern, and it does it in like a hundredth of a second, as obviously—because, like, have you ever tried to catch a fly with your tongue? It's like, it's not easy, but a frog can really do it.

And the fact that the frog's visual system is so simple and specialized means that there's hardly any neural connections between the perception of the pattern of the fly and the motor response. Like maybe there's two neurons intermediating, and so that frog can nail that fly right now whereas you, you're going to like wait around till you see the fly, and then, you know, you're going to swat it. And the fly sees this; it's like, it's gone—it's gone in a week of fly time.

By the time you hit the, you know, the table with your—fce water. You don't want to rely on your conscious vision to do extraordinarily fast things because it takes, under normal conditions, it takes maybe a quarter to half a second to become consciously aware of a phenomenological entity. It's like for snakes or things like that, man, they've bitten you by the time you see them.

So what LeDoux pointed out is that to the underlying motivational areas, there are lots of sensory inputs that bypass the representational processing that's characteristic of the cortex. And so, if you're walking down a path, and like a little snake-like movement occurs here, you're going to catch that with the periphery of your vision.

Now try this: so look at this finger. Okay, now look at the finger, but concentrate on my face. Okay, don't look at my face. Okay, you ready for that? Okay, okay. So, what do you see? What do you see? Teeth? Yeah, you see teeth and eyes. And if like—look again—if you pay careful attention, you'll be able to see that you cannot see my nose because who cares what my nose is doing? You don't care. Your amygdala certainly doesn't care.

So why bother seeing it? Your amygdala cares about what the hell your eyes are pointing at and whether or not your teeth are there. And it cares about that with other creatures too. And so your peripheral vision, which is low resolution, is wired up to detect movement and threat. And what does the detection is super fast because, well, it better be, or you're going to get bit.

Okay, so one day I was in California, and I was walking down this pathway on a cliff facing the ocean in L.A., and it was, I think it was March or something. And there was this guy in front of me who was like 6'2", and right in front of him was his four-year-old daughter. So we're walking along, and all of a sudden she goes “ping” and jumps right onto his shoulders. It was like, you know what a cat's like when you startle it? It just poof and runs. It's a very funny thing to do to cats.

Um, there was a rattlesnake right beside the path. Now it was kind of slow because it was cold, but obviously what had happened to her is her periphery caught the rattlesnake, and she was up on her father's shoulders before she saw the snake. And it's a good thing because if it was a stick, well who cares? She's expended a little energy, you know?

So the amygdala can be kind of low resolution, and it's still useful, but if it was a snake and it was going to strike, the fact that she had jumped onto his shoulders before she even saw it was going to save her. And so one of the things that, in principle, the underlying motivational systems are wired up to detect are primary fear stimuli.

And so those would be—you can kind of list them off now—for a long time, people thought you learn to be afraid, which I told you is rubbish. You learn not to be afraid! Then they thought that you could learn to be afraid to some things more easily than others, but you still had to be exposed to those things.

And then they figured out, no, no, there's just things you're afraid of. And one of those things is snakes. And chimpanzees, for example, they don't like snakes. And even if you raise chimps and monkeys so they never see a snake, and you show them a snake, they're not happy about the snake. So, the snake's like an uber-predator, you know? I found now that mammals—I should have known this—have been around for about 220 million years, so we've been battling with reptiles for a very long period of time, right back when there were dinosaurs.

Anyway, so the idea that predatory reptiles are a bad thing, that's way deep down inside of us. And so we have systems that we've conserved as we've evolved, not because they're accurate, but because they're really damn fast. And so one of the things your retinal patterns do is map themselves right onto your spinal cord, and that's super fast, super low resolution.

So it means your eyes can make your body move; there's almost no mediation of thinking. And so the old behavioral idea is that you were a stimulus-response machine. We're right—except that you're a stimulus-response machine with a bunch of more complex processors built on top of that. But the stimulus-response machine is still there, and the reason it's there is because it's super fast.

And so there are these multiple levels of the nervous system, and as you go down into more and more fundamental systems, they're faster and more stereotyped, and as you move up, they're more complex and slower. And the sensory systems have input more or less at each level. And so partly what your brain is trying to figure out is when should you use the quick and dirty systems and when should you use the slow and contemplative systems?

And the answer is if it's a primary fear stimuli, which would be fire, teeth, skeletons, blood, um, genitalia generally speaking. Um—[pauses] well, and then there's all sorts of noises. Baby cries, for example. We just did an experiment; I told you guys about latent inhibition, do you remember that? Maybe not.

If I—if you listen to a bunch of numbers and in the background, you hear a white noise burst. So maybe I get you to listen to that for three minutes, and I tell you to count your number, okay? Then I play the same soundtrack, and I show you a bunch of lights, and the lights go on one by one, and I try to get you to predict what's turning those lights on. If I make it the white noise burst and you've already heard that for three minutes when it didn't signify anything, it's going to be very difficult for you to learn that the white noise bursts are now what turns on the lights.

So the way you determine that is you play people before exposing them to the lights one tape that has the white noise bursts and another tape that doesn't. And then you play both of them: the both groups, the white noise burst and the numbers, and turn on the lights. And the people who weren't pre-exposed to the white noise learn it faster by a substantial amount. That's called latent inhibition, and that's what makes things invisible for you. You see things; nothing happens—you learn to ignore them, they're irrelevant.

So you're using latent inhibition to eradicate their relevance. We did it with baby cries—people don't develop latent inhibition to baby cries, so if you put little baby cries in the back instead of white noise, it doesn't matter how many times you expose the person to it—they learn that the baby cry turns on the lights right away.

And so what I'm thinking is that the way your brain makes things relevant is it makes everything irrelevant except for certain categories of things that you can't learn to habituate to no matter what you do. And those would be the categories I just described, you know? And the fact that genitalia are part of that, especially for men, if it’s pictorial representations, accounts for the absolutely addictive nature of pornography. So you cannot habituate to the images, although men do to some degree, but it's very difficult to habituate to those images.

So okay—your brain assumes that everything is relevant and important until you learn that it isn't. And once you learn that it isn't, you don't even pay any attention to it, and then your brain basically removes the blocking from things dependent on your state of motivation, and that's what makes it relevant.

So, for example, if you get hungry, if you're not hungry, food's irrelevant. If you are hungry, then the latent inhibition gets stripped off the food, and so all of a sudden, it's all meaningful and interesting again, just like it was before you learned that it was irrelevant.

Um, here's a list of amygdala outputs. Same idea basically applies. So the sensory systems put input into multiple levels of the nervous system, but the emotional systems and the motivational systems also have multiple levels of output with regard to the brain hierarchy. So, um, LeDoux has identified—this is partly associated with anxiety—tachycardia, increased heart rate, galvanic skin response, paleness, pupil dilation, blood pressure elevation, ulcers. This is more chronic: urination, defecation, again, bradycardia, panting, respiratory distress, behavioral and EEG arousal, increased vigilance, increased attention, heightened startle, freezing, hypoalgesia—so you can't feel pain as much, facial expressions of fear, and cortical steroid release.

So you see that when you say, well, what's fear? It's like, well, it's a multi-level phenomenon. It manifests itself across different hierarchies of the nervous system, and so—and those systems differ in complexity, and they differ in speed— you know? And the other thing for humans, what's happening if you encounter something anxiety-producing is it sends a signal up to the right hemisphere, and it says, provide a quick and dirty model of this. And then it tells the left hemisphere, and if you can explore a bunch to gather new information so that we can improve the model.

And so that's basically how you're responding to novelty. Now, the next thing I'm going to tell you, not today, is two things: one is how these hierarchical systems emerge across time and how they're interrelated; but then—and this is where we can really move in another direction quickly—I want to show you how these domains, because we've outlined some domains, right? The domains are things that turn out the way you want them to and things that don't turn out the way you want them to, structures of representation and modes of updating that structure of representation.

So you can think about those as their constants: some things you can predict and understand, some things you can't that you can explore. You can be conventional, and there's a characteristic nature of the domain that consists of things that you do not expect or desire. So the next hypothesis is that those are the things that are represented in mythology.

And the reason they're represented is because they're constants; they're always there. And so what mythology does, it isn't doing this—this is just what happens—is it lays out these domains, it attributes to them certain characteristics, and then it says, on average, here's how you should conceptualize them and deal with them. And that's what stories are.

So what I'll do next is I'll show you the symbolic realms, and then we can walk through how those are manifested in stories, and you'll see that the stories all of a sudden become alive. And that's really cool because the stories are really useful, and not only are they useful, they're accurate—they actually tell you what to do.

So us coordinating things, chaos and order, okay? Those two of them: order is where things that you want happen, and chaos is where things you don't want to happen. And then the next thing, broadly speaking, is the thing that mediates between those. And that would be your consciousness.

And then there's a fourth category, which is a really weird category, and it's the category from which all those things emerge. So that's a really rough one to get your head around, but it's sort of something like this: there's unknown things that you can more or less conceptualize and categorize because they're not completely outside of your experience. And then there's the unknown as such. It's sort of like raw potential.

And that potential—the mythology conceptualizes that potential as the fundamental bedrock of being, and it assumes that all those other phenomena emerge out of it. So you emerge out of potential; that's a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about the mythological representation.

So we are going to lay those out in detail. I'm going to tell you a bunch of stories using those categories and walk you through it. I'm going to tell you how those mythological categories are constituted and what they mean, and then we're going to figure out how they need to relate to one another.

And so good stories tell you how they relate to one another. That's what makes them good. So, and you know that because otherwise, you wouldn't know the difference between a good story and a bad story. So that's what's coming up. And so hopefully I won't have to go over what we went over today again, but I really need you to get this first part clear, because otherwise when we go to the next stage, it won't make any sense at all.

So, okay, good.