2014 Personality Lecture 01: Introduction and Overview

Hello and welcome to Psychology 230: Personality and its Transformations. It's called that because there are two things that you have to take into account when you're thinking about personality. One of those is how personality stays the same across time, and that's really what gives you your identity and what allows you to identify other people. Then also, how personality changes. We're going to discuss both those things from a very large number of perspectives to find out all the information that you need for the course.

All you have to do is type my name into a browser, and you'll get my homepage, which is the page that you see here. On the left, there's a table of contents that says current courses, and then up here there's also a table of contents that lists the courses, and this one is this one. This is the introductory page here, and then you can get to the course page like this. I don't really like Blackboard, so I'm going to use this instead. This is easy to get to, and everything you need to know about the course should be here.

We'll start with the very straightforward things. The first is there's two sources for reading in this course. One is a paperback book, which is called "Introduction to Personality and its Transformations." There are chapters that I selected from a classic personality textbook that does a very good job of covering classic personality theorists, although not such a good job of covering more recent work. The book was published in 1982. Freud hasn't changed much since 1982, but there has been an awful lot of personality research, and so that brings us to the second source of readings. The second source of readings is actually this web page, so if you go down the web page to lecture topics and readings, you'll see in the third column a whole sequence of papers.

Now, you have to pay attention to this lectures and reading table more than anything else because it tells you what's going on for the duration of the course and tells you what the lectures are. So today, for example, it's January 7th, and so we're doing an introduction and overview. Maybe I can make that a little bigger, and next week—no, on Thursday—we start with this reading. It's called "Three Forms of Meaning in the Management of Complexity," and all you have to do to get that reading is click on it, and then you get that reading, which is a fairly straightforward process.

You would probably like the lectures better if you do the readings beforehand. That isn't necessary; you can do this any way you want, but you'll get more out of the course, I think, if you do that. There's two TAs for this course; they're also listed here. One is Vanessa Go, and the other is Victor Swift. Their availability is listed here. Vanessa is available from 4:45 to 5:45 on Thursdays, and Victor is available from 3:15 to 4:15 on Tuesdays. Their offices are listed there as are their email addresses so that you can get in touch with them. My office hours are Wednesday from 4:15 to 5:45. Now, the way I handle that is outside my office, which is Office 446, which is also listed there.

There are a number of signup sheets that I'm just going to post on the wall. I'll do that right after class because they're printed out. There's a number of signup sheets that are listed on the wall, and your best bet is just to take a 15-minute slot. Don't take a whole bunch of them because the student-to-teacher ratio in class is obviously quite high, so just take one for now if you would. Maybe if you have a meeting with me, you can check back later to see if there's time for another one. I would like to have more time than that available, but 90 minutes is what I can spare this semester, so anyways they'll be up today.

Now, in terms of the mechanics of the course, it's pretty straightforward; there's no tricks. There are two midterms: the first one is February 6th, and the second one is March 13th. There's also a final, and the midterm and the finals essentially make up 75% of the course. It's actually 77.5% of the course. Then there's two writing assignments. The first writing assignment is an essay, and the essay has a number of different due dates. So if you're on the website, you can go to writing assignments, and then you'll see all these different topics that you can choose from.

Now, if you click on one of these, you get to this little signup sheet here. Then you can put in your name and your email address, and that signs you up for that topic. As you can see, 10 people can sign up for each topic, so if you're in love with a particular topic, then you should sign up sooner rather than later. The due dates fall a little after the course content that's related to that topic, so it'll be the next class after the lectures on that topic end. I've spread them out across the year so that the TAs don't die of frustration and so that you guys can get your essays back with a reasonable degree of promptness, hopefully within a week, although let's say two weeks, which seems reasonable.

The second writing exercise, which is worth 7.5%, the essay is worth 15%, is a personality self-analysis. It's part of a suite of programs that I designed called the self-authoring suite, and I can show you those, and it's at selfauthoring.com. I'll show you this video at some point. But for now, there's information here on these programs, but I'll give you code, such as username and password so that you can complete these. What you'll be asked to do is to complete an exercise that's based on a big five model of adjective description of personality.

Since about 1930, statisticians have been studying the structure of language at a sentence level and at an adjective level to determine what the underlying correlational structure of descriptive phrases as they apply to human beings. For example, if you're happy, you're talkative, and that might not be surprising, but the fact that those two things are tightly connected was one of the things that was discovered by the factor analytic processes that led to the development of the Big Five. In the Big Five, there are roughly five traits, as the name might indicate: extraversion, which is a positive emotion trait; neuroticism, which is a negative emotion trait; agreeableness, which is warmth and empathy compassion; the other side of that is kind of a harsh coldness, I guess; openness, which is both intelligence and creativity; and conscientiousness, which is industriousness and orderliness.

Now, there are virtues, so to speak, and faults associated with all of those dimensions. You can be too extroverted, which makes you rather impulsive, and if you're very extroverted, it's more difficult to get good grades in university because you're always out having fun with your friends and partying. That might be good in that it'll help you develop a fairly extensive social network, which is a useful thing if you're associated with people who are useful for social networking purposes. But it can really interfere with your ability to sit by yourself and study. If you're conscientious, that's a good predictor of academic success because conscientious people do what they say they're going to do, and they seem to suffer shame and self-disgust and self-contempt and guilt and so on if they don't.

If you get too conscientious, though, you can get quite boxed in and orderly and narrow, and orderliness, by the way, seems to be associated with right-wing political views. When it's extreme, it starts to get repressive. The point of all this is that there are five traits, and they have positive and negative aspects, especially at the extremes. These programs are set up first of all so that you'll see a series of adjectives that are universal descriptors. It's basically a small set of adjectives, 100, that kind of cover each dimension of personality with a reasonable degree of comprehensiveness. Then you'll be asked to pick which ones you think are particularly relevant to you, and then you'll be asked to narrow that to a final list in one half of the exercise, a list that represents your virtues, and then in the other half of the exercise a list that represents your faults.

Then you'll be asked to describe a time when that virtue played a positive role for you or when that fault interfered with you. Then you'll be asked to describe how you might capitalize on that virtue in the future or perhaps bring that fault under control in the future. It turns out that writing exercises of this sort are very practically useful; they have a variety of positive effects, one of which seems to be an increase in academic performance. Our research so far has indicated that that increase can be quite substantial. Among similar programs at McGill, we raised the academic performance of struggling university students by 25%, so a whole grade point.

At a business school in Holland, where this is being studied in some depth, we've studied 2,000 people. They did the future authoring program, not the present authoring program, which is the one you're going to do, and we improved their overall academic achievement by about 30%. It turns out that articulating yourself is an extraordinarily useful thing to do. You could also think about that in a more comprehensive way as the goal of, say, psychotherapy and personality transformation. A lot of what's happening as you mature and develop as a personality is that what you are, whatever that means, I guess, it's your behaviors and your potential—I don't know exactly what potential is—but your behaviors and your potential can be increasingly organized at a high level of consciousness, articulated at a high level of consciousness.

Articulation is a funny word because partly it means joint articulation. You know, your hands are very articulated, and that's why you can do a lot of things with them. Hands and speech are very tightly related, which is why most people's speech centers are in the same hemisphere as their dominant hand. Anyway, articulating yourself makes you able to do many more things with yourself, and it also seems to quell your negative emotions, partly because it's clarifying. You know, the more you leave things muddy in your life, the less defined things are around you, the more active your stress response systems are because if things are murky and undefined, your stress systems basically assume that there are alligators and snakes and predators hiding in all that fog and gloom, and that you're in a very dangerous environment.

But if you clarify that with careful attention and articulation, you can clear away the fog and the gloom, and that only leaves you with your actual problems, which, once defined carefully, you might find manageable. An example that would be, you know, when you go into your room and you haven't done your homework for a while, and there's piles of papers piling up, or maybe there's piles of junk on your computer—it doesn't really matter—and you'll have a very powerful tendency to avoid that, not even to look at it, right? You don't even want to look at it because that's chaos; it's sort of growing in your environment, and there's a specific part of your brain which evolved to detect snakes that deals with such little chaotic piles of undone business.

The more of those that are around you, psychologically or physically, the more negative emotion you experience, the less hope you experience, and the larger your stress response chronically, and that's not good because if your stress response is chronically elevated, that suppresses your immunological function, it makes you overweight, it predisposes you to diabetes and cancer, it makes you age faster, it increases the probability that you'll have anxiety disorders and depression. It's a bad thing. So clarifying who you are and what you're doing is a good thing unless you want all those other things to happen, which seems highly improbable, although people desire some very strange things, and that's part of what we'll talk about as this course progresses.

Okay, so if you want to find out about the course, you can go to jordanbpeterson.com, and the courses are listed there, or you can just type my name in a search engine, and you'll find the courses. This course is PY 230. Obviously, I mentioned that there's a reading book which you have to buy; the rest of the readings are online. The order that you do that reading is listed on the syllabus. You also have to do two assignments: an essay, which is only 750 words by the way, but don't let that fool you because a 750-word essay can be very difficult to write. The essay and then this personality analysis—now, the personality analysis, all you have to do is show it to the TA to show them that you completed it because we don't want to know what you wrote down.

We want to encourage you to write down things that you know that you'd like to write down that are likely private, unless you want to broadcast your faults on Facebook, which I suppose you could do after you complete the exercise. So the reason I want you to do that—well, there's three reasons, right? One is, well, it'll familiarize you more with standard models of personality because you'll have to apply them to yourself, and so then you'll understand yourself better too. So that's a good thing. Then, it's also a quasi-clinical intervention, and some of you, because you're in this course, are no doubt interested in clinical psychology, and so this will give you a flavor of the sorts of things that a clinical psychologist might do, except a computer is doing it. That turns out to be fine.

People will actually often tell computers things that they wouldn't tell people because the computer doesn't care what you've done, particularly not yet anyways. The third reason is that, well, it should be good for you, and, you know, education should be good for you. That's actually the purpose of education, right? It's supposed to make you more healthy mentally and physically; that's supposed to make you more productive, and so that's what education is for, and that's what this class is for, so that's what we're aiming at.

So then there's two exams, two midterms, 25% each approximately. They're multiple choice. I'll post sample questions so that you'll know what they're like. They're not tricky; people get worried about exams and rightly so, but these aren't tricky exams. If you do the readings and you come to the class, the probability is quite high that you'll do at least reasonably well. I don't ask you to memorize dates and that sort of thing; I try to keep it at a conceptual level. The questions on the multiple-choice test are usually conceptual questions where I try to get you to take something that you've learned or read and to apply it to the solving of a problem. Even though they're in standard multiple-choice format, there's usually not a tremendous number of questions, so you'll be able to complete the exam in the time allowed without any trouble.

Now, let's see, I should tell you guys who should take this course and who shouldn't take it because you need to know that since it's your first day. This course has two or three aspects. One aspect is scientific. That really occupies the last half of the course, I would say, and in the purely scientific part of the course, or the purely research-oriented element of the course, the first part is scientific too because science has more—science is more than mere testing of hypotheses, anyways. The second half of the course deals essentially with trait theory and with psychobiology.

What I want to do is to tell you about the basic dimensions of human variability and also how those are represented in the brain so that you can make a connection between the theories and the biological and cognitive substrates, and so that's sort of a unifying attempt. You've got to be interested in that if you want to take this course and have it go well for you. So there's some psychometrics; that's the science of measurement. There's a little bit of statistics. There's a reasonable amount of neuropsychology, and some of it's complex; some of it isn't, but I try to only pick things to discuss with you that are relevant at three levels of analysis. I want them to be personally relevant so that they tell you something about yourself. I want them to be intellectually relevant, but I also want them to be culturally relevant so that not only do you know something more about you and your friends, but hopefully you're a better functioning creature in the broader social milieu.

So everything is picked to that, including the psychobiological or neuropsychological material and the trait material. There's a fairly heavy emphasis on clinical issues. The first half of the course deals with classic theorists of personality, and all the classic personality theorists were clinicians. Now, the UV at present doesn't have a clinical program, although they're starting it up in Scarborough, but down here at St. George, there aren't many clinicians. I think I'm probably the only one. I don't know why they let me in, but they did. The emphasis on clinicians is twofold. One is—well, who is the person, or what is the person? But more importantly, who could the person be, or what should they be?

That's a very strange thing about people, right? I mean, if you have a cat, you don't really sit around thinking, "What could this cat be?" because it's a cat, and you know if it has spring, they're going to be cats, and in a thousand years, they're still going to be just cats. But people—well, we're strange in ways that are virtually incomprehensible. We're not only what we are, but we're also what we could be. In many cases, especially for people of your age, you're way more what you could be than what you are. Focusing on what you could be is an extremely important thing to do, and in fact, there's plenty of research, and some of it's associated with the writing exercises that I told you about earlier, that if you make efforts to define who you could be in a way that you find interesting, because you might as well shape yourself into something that you want to be, that increases the efficiency with which you work substantially and also makes you a better person by reasonable measures of better, which sort of means happier and healthier and, you know, more acceptable or at least less repulsive to other people.

So the clinical material is very useful for that, and the clinical material is grounded in observation. It's kind of like ethology: ethology is the study of animal behavior, but not in the lab; it's observational study. A lot of the clinical stuff has this observational quality to it. It's heavily influenced by philosophy. If you're not interested in ideas, this is a bad course for you because it's a course that primarily concentrates on ideas. I want them to have practical utility because why not? You might as well put constraints on them, but the fundamental focus is ideas.

When we discuss the clinical material, clinical personality material, we'll discuss the philosophical background of that, and we'll do the same thing when we get to the psychobiological material. So you've got to decide if you're not interested in philosophical ideas; then this is a bad course because you're going to be stuck with those sorts of things half the time. There are some elements of the course that are almost straight philosophy because some of the clinical schools, especially those that were developed in the 1950s like existential psychology, are very tightly associated with fields of philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology in that case.

I think that sort of thing is very much worth learning because it's part of the history of ideas, and you should know something about it. It's also very interesting and very useful to know something about if you're going to be a clinical psychologist because you should know a fair bit about a lot of things if you're going to be a clinical psychologist. Even if you're interested in research, science is half hypothesis testing, but the other half is hypothesis generation; that's the most important half. You got to think up an idea before you can test it, and most of what you'll learn in a methods class has nothing to do with generating research hypotheses. They just tell you to do that first: generate your research hypothesis. It's like, "Yeah, that's the big problem right there." The rest of it is just machinery; we just grind it through this process.

The way you generate research hypotheses is by knowing something, and so you have to learn a lot in order to generate a research hypothesis that, well, first, that someone hasn't already thought of and disproved, which is highly probable. It's actually depressing to gather more and more knowledge because what you find is that everyone's already thought of everything, and most of your ideas are stupid.

So, yeah, let's see. Oh yes, here's another reason not to take the course. There's a lot of reading, and there's less reading than there was last year. I took out one paper that was too hard; I think it was too hard for people even though it was a great paper. But I left the rest of it in, and so if you're looking for a course with a light reading load, this isn't that course because this has a heavy reading load. Now, on the upside for your essays, I don't require you to read outside the course—we can use the material that's in the course to write the essay, so it's self-contained.

But there's a lot of reading, and it's not easy reading, and partly because a lot of it is original papers—all the stuff that's listed on the web is original papers, and then the textbook too. It's a tough textbook; it's mostly text. It doesn't have a lot of pictures in it. It has no stories at all about celebrities. I think that's the only text left that doesn't have stories about celebrities in it. So if you're taking a tough course semester and you don't have a lot of time to read, then, well, this isn't a course like that. It's a course where there's an awful lot to read, and the thing about the reading too is that you have to think about it.

You know, how fast you can read something seems to be a function of how complicated the words are; that would be function one. But the second function seems to be something like how many ideas there are per paragraph or maybe per page. There are lots of ideas per paragraph in these readings; that's why I picked them. So you can't just zip through them. You have to think about them. Well, that's a good thing because if you do read them, you'll know a lot more at the end of the class than you did at the beginning of the class, and you'll find that that knowledge is extremely useful.

I truly believe that this knowledge can change your life; well, that's what it was generated for, right? It's generated by clinicians and personality psychologists. That's what they're out there to do, and they're out there to take unrevealed potential—that could be anything—and to hammer it and shape it into something that's hard and pure and solid. You have to do a lot of reading and writing and thinking to get to a point like that, but it really beats the hell out of mucking about in the MC. Unfortunately, that's how many people live, and I've seen the consequences of that. If you spend the next 30 years like that, you will be old by the time you're 50, and so I wouldn't recommend that.

So it's worth doing the work; it's really worth it. Let's take a look now. Well, first I'll ask you if there are any questions. Any questions? Yes? So you said the personality analysis will be posted soon? Oh yeah, I'll get the username and passwords up to you pretty quick. I just had to make contact with the guy who designed it to get the code, so it won't be long.

Can you buy the—at? I hope so—that's the plan. Some of you have purchased it, perhaps? Okay, so it appears that you can. There's also maybe some old texts from RLock floating about; you can use those too. You can get a good deal on them. You can often get them secondhand on Amazon for like 20 bucks if you look. The old text is fine, except that it has more chapters in it, but if you pay careful attention to the syllabus, that won't be a problem because all the chapters are numbered, and all you have to do is match the number on the syllabus to the number in the book.

So, other questions? Okay, so let's take a look at what we're going to learn about lecture two. You can think of human knowledge in some ways as branching into two components. You can think of those two components as having knowledge about the subjective world and knowledge about the objective world—that's one way of thinking about it. The other way you could think about it is knowledge about what things are and knowledge about what to do.

Now, most of what you learn in university is knowledge about what things are, but that's only half of what you need to know because you really need to know, well, what should you go about and do? This is a real problem for human beings because we're always trying to think, having to think of what we should be doing next. That's the fundamental question of life: well, you know, what should I do next, or what should I do tomorrow, or what should I do next week, or next month, or next year? Because that's another problem about being human is that not only do we have to figure out what to do next, but we can also see the future or multiple futures even, and then we have to determine what those futures could be and how to avoid others that we don't want to have come into existence at all.

How to configure our behavior so that as we navigate through the potential futures, we land up more or less somewhere we want and not somewhere we really don't want? That's a real problem, and that's an existential problem, in fact. What that means is that we need knowledge about the subjective and about the behavioral. It's part of our potential. How do you unravel yourself across time?

Now, it's proved very difficult for human beings to formalize that kind of knowledge. Now, we formalize scientific knowledge, which is more knowledge about what things are and about the objective world. The scientific method, especially the research method, formalizes our knowledge about the objective world and about what it's made of, but it doesn't give us much insight into what to do about that. All it seems to do, actually, is increase our power to do things but not necessarily to inform us as to the direction in which that power should be exerted.

You don't really have to look any farther than the 20th century if you want historical proof of that because as people got more and more powerful, so that we could sit in this lovely classroom and all be warm and cozy while it's terrible outside, we also learned how to kill each other with unprecedented gusto and potency. Science has enabled us on both sides, and that's how it is: good or bad. On the behavioral side, there's a tradition of knowledge, and it's an ancient tradition, and it's grounded in forms of knowledge that are likely tens of thousands of years old or maybe even older than that.

Those are forms of knowledge that are essentially mythological or religious. The reason that I start with those is, first of all, religious systems are, in many ways, theories of personality, and there's very tight associations between certain religions and certain fields of psychology. Judaism has been identified fairly heavily with Freud and Christianity with Carl Jung's work and also with Carl Rogers' work. Rogers was actually a seminarian, and a lot of the ideas about what a person could be—so these are ideas about the ideal—are derived from religious and mythological substrates because they have to be derived from somewhere, right?

You think, well, how do people get their ideas about what's possible or what should be part of it? It's through storytelling. That's why you go to movies, right? You go there to see what people could be, and you enact all those people on the screen with your bodies. Well, it's happening, and you have a little neural system that does that, so it puts you right in the action. It's an amazing ability—an amazing human ability—and the reason we're so attracted to that sort of thing is because we want to know what to do with ourselves, and there's a very large body of very complex information that pertains to that.

One of the things that Carl Jung said was that one of the things he believed was that that form of knowledge had developed quite explicitly up to about the time of the Renaissance or about to the time of Bacon and Descartes, who founded and Galileo, who basically founded the scientific method, and then we sort of stopped developing that kind of knowledge. The knowledge of the objective world just leaped ahead, exponentially, and so that's left us with the same moral intelligence we had in the 1700s but with 21st-century technology—not necessarily a good thing.

So part of what we're doing, in a sense, is rescuing the past. You know, in my other class, sometimes I show "Pinocchio," the movie. How many of you have seen "Pinocchio"? A lot of you! It's like the most popular animated movie ever made—second, I think, because "The Lion King" is more popular. There's one scene in "Pinocchio" where Pinocchio rescues his father from a whale. You may remember that—you may notice that you watched that, and that was perfectly fine as far as you were concerned, right? That you could watch a puppet swim with a cricket to the bottom of the ocean and rescue his father from a—it’s like, okay.

So the first thing you might think about is how in the world could you sit there and swallow that and not even notice that you were doing something as absurd and bizarre as any ritual you could possibly imagine? Well, it's partly because we're very attracted to narrative, and narratives have structure. Narratives are about behavior, and they have a deep structure, and they have a deep symbolic structure. For example, the whale in "Pinocchio" wasn't just any ordinary whale, right? Because if you remember, it also breathed smoke and fire.

It's very strange behavior for a whale—not even a whale that strange—and that made it a dragon. And so partly what that meant was that Pinocchio was rescuing his father from a dragon. That's a very old story. In fact, that story is the oldest story that we have in written form. It's a variant of a story that was told by the Mesopotamians about 5,000 years ago. So part of that story means, well, you should rescue your father. Well, from what? Well, from the murky chaos in which your culture is embedded. You know, you guys are all inheritors of rich cultural traditions. You know, those aren't just words. Those cultural traditions orient you; they keep you sane. If they're desiccated and broken up and dead and archaic and lying in the bottom of the chaos, then you better get them back out of there because without them, you're going to live shallow and difficult lives—and that's a bad idea.

So starting with the historical perspectives, we can situate ourselves in maybe some hundreds of thousands of years of history—maybe even longer. I can tell you in one manner it might be longer. It turns out that part of the reason that we can see so well—which we can; human beings can really see well, way better than almost any other animal except hunting birds—birds can see better than us, but other than that, man, it's us. That's especially rare among mammals and particularly rare among primates.

You might ask yourself, well, why can we see so well? It turns out that part of the reason is that we co-evolved with predatory snakes. Predatory snakes are newer than lizards, by the way, even though you wouldn't think so. There's a woman at UCLA named Lynn Isbell who was thinking, why do people see so well? She had this snake detection theory because she'd worked with primates. She knew they could really see the camouflage patterns that snakes have and the motion that they make. They're really good at detecting that. Plus, human beings are very afraid of snakes innately.

Plus, if you take chimpanzees who've never seen a snake and you throw a rubber snake in their cage (assuming they're in a cage), then they jump to the top of the cage because they're not happy about that snake. Then they look at it, and then if they're out in the jungle jungling around and they see a big snake, then they have a specific sort of cry they make, and they'll stand there for like nine hours watching a big snake, making this noise. All the other chimps, depending on how afraid they are, will also come and look at the snake, and so yeah, because they want to know what that snake's up to, and that's what we want to know too. We want to know what the snakes are up to, that's for sure.

The circuit that we developed to detect snakes, the visual circuit, is partly what gives us such tremendous acuity of vision. Partly the way Isbell figured that out was by correlating primate visual acuity with the prevalence of predatory snakes in that geographical region, and she found that there was a very high correlation. So we can see sharply partly because we're always looking for snakes, and you know that pile of undone homework in your room—that's snakes as far as the part of your brain that developed to deal with snakes is concerned.

If you leave a lot of things undone around you, then all you've got is snakes, and you're their target, and so that's no way to live. That whale down there at the bottom of the ocean—that's kind of a variant of a snake; it's a dragon, even though it's a whale. It breathes fire, right? So let's call it a dragon because that's what it is. The idea that you have to rescue something from the dragon is an unbelievably old story. That's partly what we're going to be doing at the beginning of this course.

We're going to be going way back into the murky muck of prehistory, trying to understand what the hell we've been up to for the last 60 million years, because that's when our tree-dwelling ancestors first really started to deal with predatory snakes. My suspicions are that you're all evolved from one of those little tree-dwelling rats, the first one who figured out that if you dropped a stick on a snake, it would probably run away. That's what we've been doing for 60 million years—throwing sticks at snakes.

That's the first lecture, and you'll see why, when you do the reading, why this is broadly relevant because it also accounts, at least in part, for the human tendency to demonize people who aren't like us. It turns out that we use the same circuit that we would use to handle predatory reptiles, let's say—we use that circuit to first process people who are strange to us. It makes sense because people who are strange to us, who come from different cultures and who represent different ideals, are unbelievably dangerous, even though they might also be unbelievably beneficial. You know, the poor Native Americans—they came out and they shook hands with the Europeans, and then 95% of them died in the next 150 years. Right?

They all died of plagues; they died of smallpox, they died of measles. Measles just wiped them out. By the time the Pilgrims came to North America, which is, you know, fairly early in North American European history, 95% of the Indians were already dead. They were welcoming the Europeans because they didn't have many people to get their crops off. So meeting someone who's strange is no trivial thing. Even if they don't poison you with some horrible illness, they'll come along with some cockamamie idea like Marxism, and you'll be Chinese, and then it'll be the 20th century, and 100 million of you will die.

It's very useful to understand the deep mythological structures that we live inside, and the relationship to our brain and our body really gives you insight into how people function. It's helpful. The next lecture is on heroic and shamanic initiations, and that brings us closer to the present than, say, 60 million years ago. It's more like 50,000 years ago; there are shamanic traditions all over the world.

The shaman is kind of the precursor to the—the man of intelligence, to the man of intellect, the man of culture, and he's sort of a doctor and a scientist and a priest all wrapped up into one thing. He's often the person who's in charge of the culture. Many—in many shamanic societies, the shaman has a vocabulary that vastly exceeds that of his peers, and that's because he's been taught it in his initiatory process so that the culture within which that particular people survives can be transmitted down the generations with very little error.

People can remember things that are transmitted verbally in pre-literate cultures with unbelievable accuracy, and the shamanic initiation is a very—and the heroic initiations as well—are very interesting processes because they involve death and rebirth, and death and rebirth is more or less equivalent to change. So here's something to think about: if there's a mosquito and it wants to make another mosquito, it basically lays 10,000 eggs, right? Then all those eggs hatch, and 99,999 of those little mosquitoes die, and then one mosquito makes it and lays another 10,000 eggs.

So it's a pretty costly reproductive strategy, right? But so the way the mosquito works is that it knows that the world is chaotic and dangerous, and it has no idea how to survive in that, so it just makes a whole pile of mosquitoes, and it hopes that one of them will sneak through. Each of those mosquitoes is a tiny bit different from each other mosquito in terms of time and place and also genetic structure, and maybe one's got some little advantage that allows it to survive, but it's costly—it's 9,999 to 1; otherwise, we'd be covered with mosquitoes.

So the way the mosquito deals with the fact that you can't figure out what's going on is by producing lots of mosquitoes, but the way people figure out what's going on is by producing lots of ideas. The relationship of ideas to you and the external world is the same as the relationship of animals to the environment. There's a philosopher named Alfred North Whitehead who said human beings evolved to let their ideas die instead of them.

That's a smart way of thinking. It means that you can parse off a little subpersonality of yourself—maybe it's an angry sub-personality or a sad sub-personality or an irritated or resentful, or, you know, those aren't exactly ideas; they're more like little spirits that are partly you. They're kind of stupid because they've only got one direction, but they're still variants of you, and maybe you can present one of those to someone, which you might do if you're dating someone, and you want to—for assuming you still do that—if you're dating someone and you want to impress them.

Maybe you spin off some little variant of yourself that you think is particularly attractive. It probably won't work; I doubt if that works. If it doesn't, well, then you can get all heartbroken and let it die, and then maybe the next one you spin off will be a little more, you know, together. That's how people progress—they progress by dying and coming back to life at different levels, say. I mean maybe you're just making some little ratty mistake, and so you can let it go, and you're only ashamed momentarily, and it's only a little pain when that circuit dies.

Or maybe it's your whole damn personality that has to go, you know, and that happens to people when they encounter a catastrophe of one form or another. So that might happen if someone close to you dies or if you lose a limb, or if you get an illness, or, you know, any of the horrible things that plague people to very deep levels, which might mean pretty much all of you has to go.

Maybe you'll actually die, but if you don't, well, you can let go of what's holding you back, and maybe that's your old self, and then you can come back to life. I'll tell you, it's a lot better to do that voluntarily before it's necessary than involuntarily in a moment of crisis. In some ways, that's the lesson of clinical psychology—confront the damn snakes first because it's really hard to get out of their bellies once they've eaten you.

The shaman—the shamanic initiations are death and rebirth initiations; they formalize that. They're often—the rituals themselves are often accompanied by the use of different classes of hallucinogens, which, for one reason or another, seem to facilitate, at least symbolically, the process of transformation from life to death and back to life. They're dramatizations of the process by which people learn. You learn something; to really learn it, some presupposition that you had before has to crumble, and then the new information comes in, and you can build a new self around it.

But it's a painful process, and that's partly why people stick to their ideas or their past selves. When you could stick to your past self and that would be fine, except that everything's changing around you all the time, and so if you don't change, then you just get more and more outdated. You're more and more archaic; none of your presuppositions work anymore. You're like this rusty machine clanking around, running into things all the time, and your life is very miserable because you don't fit the environment anymore.

So when I talk about personality and its transformations, something that you could ask yourself, which is in some way the most fundamental question you can ask yourself, is: are you the thing that stays the same, or are you the thing that changes? The thing that changes can live in a lot more places, and so that's worth thinking about. But the cost is, well, when you change, you die a little bit, and that's painful—or maybe you die a lot, and that's really painful.

So if you ever wonder why people don't change, that's part of the reason. Then the next section is on constructivism. We're going to talk mostly about Piaget. He's actually a developmental psychologist. I like Piaget a lot because Piaget had an interesting question, which is—it's not a genetic question or an environmental question. You know, you might think those are the only two kinds of questions there are when you're thinking about development, but it's not exactly that.

Here's why it's not clear to what degree you're specified by your genes. So here's one possibility: let's say that encoded in your genetic structure are a whole variety of potentials—like who knows how many? All the potential you that the entire history of mankind has been able to weave into their genetic structure are all sitting down there encoded in your genes. That very complex structure that is you, with potential, pops out into a particular environment, and then it interacts with that environment like a program interacts with a computer and gathers information of one form or another.

It takes that information and the material that it incorporates and builds the real you out of that. That's what Piaget was studying; he was trying to figure out how does a child go about taking itself from, you know, this thing that just lays there, squats basically, to something that, you know, you go on YouTube and you see what people can do—what human beings can do. It's bloody unbelievable; I mean, we're so ridiculously versatile. People can do things that are just impossible in every dimension: you know, intellectually, physically, spiritually.

They can even eat hot dogs at a rate that you can hardly imagine. You know, we're very variable, and Piaget was very interested in trying to figure out how all of that embodied variability could come out of this little package of potential at the beginning of life. It's very interesting, so that's constructivism: how does the individual construct him or herself from nothing? In some ways, from birth forward.

So Piaget, especially his discussion of infant development, is sort of like the analysis of the unfolding of a human being because people do unfold too. I mean, because babies, when they're born, they're all crunched up like this, and so they have to stretch themselves out and, you know, get going, and that was Piaget's concern. So that's good. And then we go from there to depth psychology. You might think about that more as psychoanalysis.

Now, people aren’t very happy, generally speaking, about analytic theory, especially if they're research-oriented, but there are a variety of reasons for that, and one of them is they don't know anything about it. That would be the first reason, and people are often tempted to denigrate anything they don't understand. It's actually kind of hard to understand psychoanalytic thinking. In fact, it's very hard.

Another thing about scientific researchers who are engaged in psychological work is they're actually usually fairly mentally healthy. You know, at least they're healthy enough to be scientists, which, you know, you got to be pretty healthy to be a scientist. You got to be disciplined; you got to be able to get up and go to work every day. You have to be able to think about complex things. You have to be very orderly and persistent, you know, and so there's a lot of demand on you if you're a scientific researcher.

So the problem with scientific researchers, they hang around with other scientific researchers, then they think that's what human beings are like, and human beings are nothing like scientific researchers. They're a tiny minority of the population, and they're as bizarre as, like, albino buffalo. To think of them as representative of human beings is insane. First of all, most of them have IQs in the 99th percentile, so it's like, why bother even thinking about them?

Normal human beings are very weird, especially the ones that don't function well, and not functioning well is a bottomless pit. That's why hell is a bottomless pit—because not functioning well is a bottomless pit. If you're dealing with people who aren't functioning well, one of the most mysterious things is how they can take a situation that's god-awful beyond your worst imaginings and then think up three or four creative ways to make it worse. If you're dealing with someone like that—and you do if you're a clinician—if you're dealing with someone like that, good luck with your behavioral interventions, man.

That's like throwing sticks at an elephant; you're just not going to get anywhere. One of the ways I want to demonstrate this to you, I'm going to show you a film called "Crumb." "Crumb" is a harsh film, but it's the best documentary, by the way, of an underground comic named Robert Crum, who's actually quite a genius, even though he's perverse in precisely the Freudian ways that are interesting. His brothers are even worse. So I'll walk you through that because I can't figure out any other way of giving you a taste of what Freudian psychopathology is like.

It's not pretty. That's the other reason that sort of clean-minded research scientists don't like psychoanalytic thinking because it's really, in many ways, it deals with the most disgusting elements of human behavior, and so it's not even that pleasant to think about. Then there's Jung, who we'll talk about after Freud, and Jung is so strange that he makes Freud look normal. Jung believed that, as I mentioned earlier, there is a universal grammar of ethics of morality. It's not arbitrary; it's not relative.

You know, in the universities, the theory has been at least since the 1960s that one person's ethics is as good as another person's and there's no way of distinguishing reliably between them. Well, I happen to think that's absolute nonsense. It's also extremely dangerous nonsense, and I also think there's no evidence for it whatsoever because we now know a lot about human universals, which are aspects of human behavior that are constant across all cultures, and there are a lot of them. There are a lot of them.

The other thing is there's just not that many ways that half-mad primates can gather together in large groups and live productively. It's not easy. Like you think of all the civilization work that went into allowing all you people from all these different cultures to sit here in peace and comfort—it's mind-boggling if you think there’s a million ways to do that. Well, think again—maybe there's one way to do that, and we do it well enough.

So here we are, and no one's being knifed. So that's Jung, and he's profound beyond belief—really beyond belief. So those guys all dealt with the unconscious. Now, it's kind of interesting to think about what the unconscious means, and so I can give you a bit of a hint. It's partly the information that's coded in your behavior.

So for example, there are a lot of things that you can do with your body that you don't know how you do, like you don't know how you walk, for example, or how you ride a bike or how you talk. You can talk, but you don't know how you talk. You just move your mouth. I know, but you get the point, right? You have no conscious apprehension whatsoever of the micro-details that are necessary to allow you to move your mouth.

There's a lot of information encoded in you that you don't have conscious access to. It's not only physiologically encoded; it's also culturally encoded because you've been targeted and shaped by the interactions of all the people you've ever encountered, and they, in turn, by all the people they've ever encountered, including their ancestors. So you're the product of this unbelievably complex multigenerational exchange of information that, in some ways, is all about how to make you acceptable to the public.

There are only certain ways you can be acceptable to the public. You know, you have to be relatively clean, for example, at least in our society. You can't be too boring or you won't have any friends. You also can't be too exciting; you can't be too violent; you can't be too empty-headed, unless you're associating with people who like to feel superior. You know, we put a lot of demands on each other in terms of what constitutes acceptability, let alone ideal.

We're always telling each other about both of those—what's acceptable, what's ideal. Every interaction you have shapes you into an approximation of acceptable and ideal, and that's all encoded in you too. It's encoded in your behavior; it's also encoded in your imagination. That's why you can go to a movie, and you can instantly identify the hero and the villain, which is, of course, the first thing you do when you go to a movie because otherwise, it can't make sense out of it.

That encoding prior to articulation—that's all the unconscious, and that's what the psychoanalysts were interested in analyzing. Now, the cognitive neuroscientists have kind of got there too, but they're sort of diluted into thinking that what's in your head is information, and then it's ideas, and those are sort of cold and dead things. Your head is not full of ideas and information; it's full of devils and snakes, and the psychoanalyst knew that.

By that, I mean you're alive, and so are your subcomponents and all your little sub-personalities. Not just ideas—they see, they think, they hear, they feel. They have aims. For example, when you get possessed by anger, the aim can be entirely destructive: I want to bring down the person I love. Half an hour later, you think, "What the hell was I thinking about?" It's like, yeah, no kidding—well, you weren't thinking; you were just possessed by a little sub-personality. That's what the psychoanalysts were interested in—sub-personalities, fantasies.

Next, we go to the humanists and the existentialists. Now, they're interesting because they come at the problem of what's wrong with people from a kind of universalist perspective. Now, for Freud, if you weren't sick, you were healthy, and that seems obvious because we think you can make a clear distinction between sick and healthy. But the existentialists—they didn't want any of that. Their hypothesis was, if you're human, you're sick. There's no way out of it.

The reason you're sick, in a sense, and unlike any other animal, is that life itself poses a paradoxical problem to you, partly because you're so conscious and because you're self-conscious. A sequence of paradoxical problems—how do you live when you're vulnerable and mortal? That's a rough one because you might say, well, why should I bother at all? Or who's going to know anyways, in a thousand years or a million years? Or why is there suffering? Or how do you go on in the face of cruelty? Those are questions that grip at people's souls and crush them. They're not a consequence of mental illness.

It's like, what—how long should it take you to recover if your whole family is wiped out in a car accident? What's healthy? Well, we don't know the answer to that. It's like, should you ever recover? Maybe if you were halfway empathic, it would just kill you. You know, a lot of times people can't recover from their grief because they're guilty. They think, how can I live when all those people close to me died, and they died unfairly? Well, that's an existential problem.

Then there's one class which is vulnerability and mortality. Everyone's got that staring at them. So how do you deal with that hard question? The second class of problems: well, everybody's always evaluating you, always, and you're never good enough. What that means is that you're always in an insufficient relationship with society and history. No matter how good you get, it's not good enough. So history itself, as well as culture, always faces you as a judge.

That's the second category of existential problem. Then the third problem is, well, what to do about you? You know, there's nature you have to contend with and there's culture you have to contend with. Then you've got yourself and your self-consciousness and your deep knowledge of all the things about you that could really use some repair. The thing about those problems is that everyone has them, and they've always had them, and as far as we know, they always will.

They're built into the condition of being human, and that's what existentialism is about. It's like, life is a paradoxical problem. Is there any possible solution to a paradoxical problem? That's, in some ways, the question of the meaning of life. One hint is that, well, what's the meaning of life? One answer to that is—the hint is that the meaning to life is the pattern of thought and action that you take that enables you to tolerate at least tolerate the conditions of life.

Then maybe you could move one step beyond that, if you're feeling a little optimistic, and say the meaning of life is the pattern of conception and action that enables you to welcome the conditions of life. Then you might ask yourself, well, is there such a mode of being? Given the nature of the problem that you have to contend with, is there actually a mode of being that would enable—you could say the vulnerability, the judgment, the insufficiency. It's worth it under these conditions. That's the other existential question, and the people who posed those questions they weren't messing around.

You're going to read people like Frankl Victor Frankl and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. What those two people lived through—I mean, it's unimaginably horrible. When they were wrestling with the questions that I just described, they weren't academic; they weren't academic issues. They were embodied issues of life and culture and genocide and cruelty, and so their examination of that had to be deep enough to be able to contend with questions like that.

Answers that are deep enough to contend with questions like that are frightening answers, and we have reading week—it'll be a relief. The last part of the course—this is when we switch over into the more scientific domain. So we're going to do two things, as I said; we're going to take a pretty deep look at how the brain functions as far as we know in our current state of unimaginable ignorance. Like, we really know so little about the brain, or maybe we know a bit—a bit about the brain, but we certainly don't know anything yet about consciousness, and consciousness seems to be a very—well, it's a relevant part of the brain, right?

It's sort of the part that everybody cares about since consciousness, in some sense, seems to be you even more than your brain is you. I mean, your brain is just this thing inside your skull, but your consciousness—you know, that's your being. We don't have a clue about consciousness. In science, we're not even able to conceptualize it in a scientific manner. It's a real mystery.

So, having said that, there's still plenty of things that are interesting to know about the brain, and one of the things we're going to do—and this is sort of associated with the Freudian idea of the id. You know, the id for Freud was the natural self, and so that was your primordial—you could think about them as drives or temptations or values. Values is probably the most accurate. Anger, sexuality—those are the top two Freudian concerns; there's plenty others. Eating, Freud didn't care about that; we do now because everyone has an eating disorder, or virtually everyone.

So for the Victorians, it was sexuality; for us, it's food. Sex doesn't seem to be a problem, but we just can't eat anymore. So we're going to take a look at the low-level biological systems in the brain, and those are systems—God, some of those systems are so old that even crustaceans have them.

For example, this is so cool. If you give a lobster who's been defeated in a dominance fight—because they fight for dominance; they might even know it—if you give the lobster, if you take a lobster who's been defeated in a dominance dispute, he'll go back to his little lobster hole and pout. When he's pouting, he gets all collapsed, and you can't even really get him out of his hole with a stick because he's going to sit in there and, you know, be upset about his dominance defeat.

Maybe he'll come out as kind of a new lobster, all ready to go again, and maybe not. If you take that same lobster and you give him antidepressants right after he fights, he won't go back into his cave and hide, and he'll fight right away again. You think about that—that means that the circuitry that underlies our defeat-related depression is 300 million years old, and even crustaceans have it. So that's way down in your brain stem, man, because lobsters hardly even have brains.

In fact, if the lobster is big and tough and he's been a dominant lobster for a long time, and he gets defeated badly, then when he goes off to pout, he has to dissolve his whole brain because all it does is dominant stuff. Then he grows a new subordinate brain, and he weasels around with that for a while. So, and that's useful to think about the next time you really get defeated because all that pain you're going through—it's like you got some circuit repairs to make, and if you've been badly defeated, well, maybe you should just let yourself collapse and all that stuff clear away so that you could come back.

So that's low-level stuff—brain stem stuff—it's way down at the bottom of your being. But we're going to talk about systems that are above that too, but still low. The hypothalamus, for example, is a very cool brain area. It's sort of responsible for all the basic drives: hunger, temperature regulation, sexuality, defensive aggression, predatory aggression—looks like it's something different. Everyone has those systems, you know, so they're like these sub-beings that live inside us, but they're also preconditions for communication—because you might say to your friend, "I'm angry today," and your friend doesn't say, "Well, what do you mean angry?" He says, "Well, what happened to upset you?"

Because he knows what anger means, and the reason he knows that is because he's already got it in his head. He's like you; he gets angry; he gets sad; he gets afraid; he has the basic emotions. Not only the basic emotions, but the basic motivations. So we're going to look at the brain systems that underlie the basic motivations and the basic emotions, and in some sense, those systems are equivalent to the physiological incarnation of the id that Freud described at the end of the 19th century.

So that's a nice way to look at it. You'll go through the psychoanalytic thinking, which kind of puts flesh on these systems because for the psychoanalysts—and this is why they're still relevant—those weren't just systems; they were living personalities. Narrow, one-eyed personalities, they only want one thing, but personalities nonetheless—ancient gods—that's another way of looking at them, and things you have to contend with, whether you believe in them or not.

We'll discuss all five traits as well: extraversion, as I said, that's positive emotion; neuroticism, that's negative emotion. People vary on those dimensions: agreeableness, that seems to be associated with maternal behavior on one end and predatory hunting on another because human beings are hunters and mammals. It's a weird combination, right? Because if you're hunting mammal, you have to figure out how not to kill and eat your children, right?

That happens in lots of mammalian species, especially among the males, so they have to be moved away. But human beings have solved that more or less, you know—it gets complicated in mixed families because if you're the child of a stepparent, you have 100 times the likelihood of being abused. So we'll talk about conscientiousness, which is a great predictor of long-term life success but also associated with fascist political predispositions because it turns out that the way you vote has very little to do with what you think and very much to do with what your temperament is.

So even for high-level cognitive functions like political belief, these underlying systems play a determining role. The last two things we're going to talk about are performance prediction, and by that I mean, well, there's been accruing evidence—you might say, well, what do you have a happy life? First of all, I would say that's a stupid question, but we'll go—because happiness isn't, it's not the right aim—it's a way; it's not a place to go; it's a manner of manifestation while you're journeying. It's something like that.

Leaving that aside, what do you need to live a high-quality life? Well, we kind of know that already. I mean, it's kind of obvious: you need friends; you need intimate relationships; you need meaningful work. You know, having more money than will pay your bills doesn't seem to help that much, etc., etc. So it's like, you know, it's like intelligent moderation and discipline—it's very boring. It's exactly what you'd expect if you were pessimistic about excitement.

Performance prediction— we're going to look very carefully at the nature of the traits that make people successful in life. You might say, well, what do you mean by successful? One of the things I mean is not in too much pain and anxiety because that turns out to actually be more important to people than being happy. You know, if you say to people, what do you want? They say, “I want to be happy.” But if you analyze what they mean by happy, they mostly mean not suffering and not terrified.

You get those two things under control, like the worst that can happen to you is that you'll be bored. So, and then we'll wrap it up at the end. Okay, so that's the course. I'm glad to be teaching it. It's good to see all of you here. It looks like you kind of have a comfortable classroom, so that's kind of nice. Decide if you want to take the course because I don't want you to be disappointed at the end.

So I'm really—I'm really telling you seriously—you got to like ideas. If you like this lecture, you'll like the course, and you got to do the reading. There's a fair bit of reading, so we'll see you Thursday.