Lectern Live Q&A with Mark Miller (02.28.26)

40:27We have an incredible but also quite nasty ability to imbibe and embed belief systems that diverge critically from reality. And of course, that makes us sick. Okay, so map and train divergence is going to be critical to what we're talking about with well-being, because we want a model that better fits with reality. Now, isn't it wonderful that coming right out of neuroscience is something like, you want to be well know yourself yeah comes right out of the neuroscience now okay being well is knowing who you are who other people are and what the world is like you're never going to get a perfect fit but you want to trend towards truth that's why that's why dishonesty hurts us it's why basically every tradition around the world has a place for honesty as one of the virtues because we're epistemic agents first and foremost that comes right out of the science too pretty amazing we see the brain register food water and information in the same networks information is registered by the brain same as food and water we're epistemic agents that makes sense because what matters getting food or learning about how you get food teach a man yeah yeah give a fish are actually different things and in fact we get sometimes we often get a higher reward activation for information gathering we're epistemic agents we are trying to figure it out which is why we're taking a course like this.

41:52We're literally driven to figure out who we are. And the degree to which we can come closer to who we are, closer to the world, is the degree to which we get better. That might be a little bit overgeneralized, but there is a tendency that where your model and the world pull apart, we get sick. When they get closer together, we get well. That's not always the case, but it's mostly the case. Tell me. Well, can you speak a little bit to kind of like how, So when we come up with, say, models like what I've made, just like conceptual metaphors, so Paul Lechkov and Johnson, right? But if we come up with a metaphor like that, and we internalize that as a way of sort of looking at the world and understanding our experience, it becomes part of our knowing system, part of our epistemology, right?

42:38And it helps us answer a knowing-doing question. How do I be happy? It's a knowing-doing question. what is the impact of um you know you use flat earth as an example but what is the impact of digesting inaccurate systems to uh view the world so i'll give you an example we have a we just had chinese new year right this past year and every mall in the country will put up the 12 zodiac signs with predictions of the future and so i went to the mall nearest my house and it went i'm born the year of the goat and it goes like goats have the best year you're the first out of all the 12 and I was like, oh great, I read that, I feel happy, right, it's like hedonic pleasure, then I go to a different mall and it says I'm fifth and I went, oh shit, I'm going to the other, I'm going to the other mall, right, but that system of like the 12 animals and where we rank in them in the race, right, doesn't line up and that might be easy to dismiss as like a cultural belief or like a cultural system or a tradition that belongs to the Chinese but now we have like a secular understanding, you know, sort of pop psych, stuff like that, which means that we try to also, with good intention, right, come up with ways in which we can help each other to understand the principles and process by which we operate, but those have error too.

44:00So what's the impact of that on our lived experience in the world from a PP standpoint? Yeah. So when you say PP, just for people at home, if you're not in the know, it's predictive processing. That's going be the computational framework that we're exploring these through um these topics um and that's where we're going to do we'll do some work so don't be scared it's not too it's not too heavy duty it'll be just heavy duty enough to to make some change um two things out of that and then i want to come back to lucas's other two points too yeah um one um in this cognitive science framework self-fulfilling prophecy is everywhere for better or for worse so once you have uh once you have a belief about how the world is and not not necessarily you the agent but the system has a belief it will go out and selectively sample from the evidence that's available to confirm its belief and of course that stabilizes the belief which then gets you looking for that evidence which stabilizes the belief which gets you looking for that evidence and um under most in most conditions that kind of feedback is valuable because as you develop good predictions about your environment um having a healthy amount of confirmation where you're checking in to see what is it like that and getting confirmation and then updating that belief or stabilizing that belief ends up being adaptive but there's lots of ways especially for metacognitive social highly intelligent sentient animals like us where that can again run afoul.

45:36And so you said, well, what are the implications of imbibing a bad structure? Context is king. There are going to be some ways that like imbibing a strange, fantastical substructure of beliefs ends up being valuable locally. An example of that is some of the stuff that we're seeing in controlled optimism. um that idea of like being able to say to yourself over and over again every day in every way i'm getting better and better it actually produces positive effects is a kind of controlled optimism that makes a lot of sense from this cognitive science framework because the world that you're living in this is the technical bit that we haven't really exposed here but the world that you're living is generated from these belief networks you can augment those belief networks through practices like gratitude.

46:31That's a very powerful one. But also just self-affirmation can change your experience of the world. So you self-affirm, changes your experience of the world. That then acts as evidence for the fact that you can do it. That's how ACT fits into this, Lucas. You asked about acceptance and commitment therapy. If you're in a depressed system, one of the characterizations of a depressed system is the system no longer expects itself to be able to manage the uncertainty in the environment. Now, the fact is you might be able to do now. So like, let's say, let's say you're a soldier and you're in a war zone.

47:06And that's where these depressive symptoms turned on. Because really, in that war zone, you couldn't, you couldn't, you know, learned helplessness was actually a real thing. Maybe there was nothing you could do about the extreme danger that you were in. But then you come back to another environment now there's all sorts of ways that you could manage uncertainty here that you could um uh affect change but the system is still capped it still thinks no it's not going to work so acceptance and commitment therapy is really powerful there because what you're doing is you're accepting the biofeedback that says there's nothing you can do here and then you're just committing in a sort of top-down way to just go out and get counter evidence like i just want you to do these five things on this list and then call me that might be what your therapist is so you do those five things when you call them they say look you can do things you told me i can't do anything well let's let's push against that a little bit okay and you can that's like a controlled optimism in a way what you're doing is you're you're um in you're you're activating a new way of seeing that will eventually catch on it's actually why gratitude is one of the most powerful practices because just think like okay like if you if you every day pick three reasons you're grateful and you never overlap and like the first month is a piece of cake but you know you get up near six months eight months you have hundreds of reasons that you're grateful to be alive by now and the very interesting that happens when you do that is you've now gotten all of this evidence into your system that actually things are working out okay and it will start self-evidencing for that which means the reasons that things are okay start showing up a little bit more to you which then act as their own evidence for the maintenance of that belief that's a positive that's a positive upward spiral it's sort of the opposite of depression which is a which is a negative downward spiral you know um and we can enact that change all the time okay i just want to loop one back up to lucas just your point about about control disrupting the system predictive control disrupting the system i would need to see i would need to see who said that and why they said that because it might be that you're citing like um an idea that comes out of physics or something for a complex system moving through time i'd have to see exactly what you mean because according to this framework that doesn't fit very well because actually all control is anticipatory according to this framework and it doesn't disrupt the action it facilitates good adaptive action that's at the very heart of this theory is that predicting the future is what drives our perceptions and our actions.

49:45And actually, that's the only way that a complex system like ours can choose and enact adaptive, good adaptive, skillful perceiving and behaving. So it's far from disrupting, it's completely facilitating. Now, of course, predictions are of various kinds. There's more beneficial and less beneficial predictions of course we'll get into that in the course some of those of course are going to be disruptive but just the idea that prediction always disrupts um behavioral outputs that that just can't be right so i think you must be citing you must be citing some particular um well you're you're citing something that's targeted at something very very particular that's not that's not um one-to-one with what we're saying here so i wouldn't worry about that too much.

50:33Great. How's that so far? Oh, fire. I think if, Lucas, you want to follow that up with something, if you happen to be watching this right now, by all means you can call in. Please. And so as we sort of like transition, we're going to kind of move to this point where if you guys are watching on Riverside, this is available for people who come in on the Alpha tier subscription, which is$10 per month on the lectern. You should have a little button at the bottom that says request call in. So you can hit that in a few moments. In the meantime, what I would encourage you to do if you intend on doing that is to just sort of sit down and maybe write some notes around your question just so you can come in and you'll be able to deliver it clearly if you want.

51:20If not, you can also put it into the studio chat. I'm more than happy to read it for you. And then while you're doing that, we'll just take a question from the YouTube chat so that we can get some time for these people to collect their thoughts as they're watching. So Brian asked a question. From a clinical perspective, we think of depression and anxiety as being two sides of the same coin, sharing many common attributes. Pharmacologically, they are treated with similar drugs. If depression is this midline selfing rigidity that reflects a lack of adaptive fit, how would you describe anxiety from a neurobiological and Darwinian standpoint yeah great great great great great great great no it's awesome it's awesome but like um i hope you come to the course because that's we're going to do that we'll do that and we'll do that in full color we'll do that in high definition but you're right computationally speaking they share a lot of they share a lot of similar characteristics um some of the recent research on this like using this computational model i can i'm just going to eschew the neurobiology point here for a second and just talk computationally.

52:27But anxiety is something like expectations for volatility. So you expect the world to be volatile. And the expectation for volatility is being registered by the body. Yeah, like we were saying, feelings are one way that the system informs the rest of the system about its adaptability. So if you expect, rather than rather than expecting things to like for you to have an increase in adaptability over time if you expect to be losing adaptability over time then your system is informing you this isn't working right the fit that you have with your environment is not going well and it's not going to go well into the future that feeling in the system is going to be anxiety so then you might think that pathological anxiety is something like the system either can't get over signaling that there's going to be an increase in volatility.

53:24That can happen for a couple of different reasons. But one of them can be that the system now is confident that there's only going to be volatility. And so it keeps trying to signal to you. It keeps finding evidence for this lack of fit. And I think that fits well with the phenomenology of anxiety, which is you become hypervigilant for the issue because the system is trying to regain good adaptive fit. And it's getting these signals that you don't have a good adaptive fit, whether you do or not, actually. And so the system has to be hypervigilant to try to find opportunities to increase its fit.

54:01That actually shares a lot with some of the computational dynamics that we think underlie depression the thing that you might add to the depression story that is in addition to that anxiety story is something like um the sickness behaviors that emerge when you've been under duress for a long for a long period of time so not only do you expect things to go bad um but you start to one you start having the sickness behaviors um and you know hpa access tipped and adrenal fatigue and inflammation and all of the issues that you see when you've been under duress for a long time plus and this is the nasty bit that we're going to focus on in the course is a higher order belief might get installed that says um that you're you're completely unable to act in ways that are going to change this situation so learned helplessness ends up being a deep level powerful belief that you're just unable to model the world well enough to be able to select the behaviors and perceptions that are going to get you out of this mess um and when you get that installed in a predictive system like ours um you see lots of the characteristics that we see in long-term serious depression um they fall right out of that kind of a model like for instance phenomenological flatness the world stops calling you to act it loses its depth and its significance and that's because the system no longer expects to be able to select behaviors that are going to improve your situation and so nothing affords those behaviors anymore it's a bit of a nuanced point but we'll um we'll be reading papers and discussing that in depth in course.

55:48Mark, can I ask you a question? Great question. It's really, really good questions coming in today. I'm really happy with them. I want to toss more your way, but just before we do that, just a point of clarification. Across the conversation, and also in the last conversation we had, you've named a set of entities or nouns. So you talk about the agent, the system, This time around, we've talked about metacognition as well. We introduced that, which I imagine is more of a function. But I'm wondering, what do you mean by a system? Because there's a way in which... I want to be as explicit and transparent as I can about how I'm afraid it gets taken up.

56:36So the way I'm afraid it gets taken up is in a way that is disembodied where my system is just this abstract thing. right so no no no good good good good good yeah so this is lovely um most of the computational dynamics we're talking about are sub-personal and it doesn't mean disembodied so they're at the level of the system system is you as the wonderful miraculous unbelievably complex ecosystem of layered cognitive behavioral emotional perceptual embodied processes that you are. And you'll know, I worked with Andy Clark closely for 10 years. I'm definitely, I definitely lean towards embodied and acted, extended cognitive science.

57:24And that fits like bric-a-brac with this. As you know, Andy Clark is also driving the show here with predictive processing, active inference in the web. So think, think about yourself as an ecosystem. I think that's a nice starting place. And it's a very, very complex ecosystem with layers of life sustaining cognitive dynamics and what you take to be you the fruit of this incredibly complex system is like the little peak of the iceberg uh fruiting out of this massive ecosystem that's you and it's a very important fruit because like the mushroom that grows out of the massive mycelium network. It has a really important role.

58:09It has all this downward causal influence, the agent, what the agent selects to look at, to think about, to ponder, to attend to. That all has massive downward flowing impact on the shape of the ecosystem. That might even be why we became conscious because it improved our capability to self-direct the shape and the self-organizing dynamics of the system, right? So you have the system producing singular experiences, and then the experience or the agent can then have this downward power on the shape of the rest of the system. So it's deeply embodied, deeply emotional, deeply behavioral. And yet it's meaningful to talk about the difference between agent and system, not only for getting clear about who and what you are, but to see the impacts of these things.

59:04Because then you can say, for instance, the agent says, I know my life is good. And yet I just keep self-evidencing for how the world is a shitty place filled with dangers. And you say, well, don't you know the world? This is why talking to somebody about depression in a ho-hum way, being like, hey, it's great. Why can't you see that? It doesn't do much. And that's because at that sense, it doesn't matter what the agent believes. If the system has a very powerful belief that the world works one way, actually the agent level stuff might be a bit impotent. This is one of the dangers with social media, doom scrolling, for instance.

59:42If this theory is right, and we're increasingly confident that it is, it's now the predominant computational theory in neuroscience. um if it's right then your experience of the world is being generated from your belief networks so we don't see the world we see our best guess about the world that's going to be where we're going to start so perception that is a kind of controlled hallucination we're seeing the world we expect to be there that's imminently important when you're talking about well-being i think we already know that i don't even have to i don't think i have to preach that i have to pitch that right um if if the world is what you expect it to be then your expectations really matter Just think about how important that makes something like doom scrolling.

1:00:24So if you have the metaphysics in mind, and this is why I think this course is actually going to have an impact on people's well-being. If you have the metaphysics in mind that, oh, well, I'm just Mark and there's just the world out there. and who gives a shit who cares if i'm doom scrolling eight hours a day it feels good it's like a little bit adaptive i'm ignoring some other problems i have it's like sexy in a way that like makes me come back to it it's punchy and interesting who cares i'm mark and there's the world who okay it makes me a little bit anxious who cares who cares it's not such a big deal but what and you say i don't believe any of it i don't believe the garbage that's on here That's just Trump toadies or whoever's doing whatever they do.

1:01:07That's fine. Who cares? Who cares? That's not how it works. Because it doesn't matter what the agent knows. It's what the system believes mostly matters. And you're inundating yourself with information. Perceptual system is garbage at knowing the difference between what's real and what's not real in the perceptual system. It's all running on the same wetware. So yes, the agent might have some like, oh, I know that's not real. um but the system doesn't know that and lots of parts of the system don't speak to each other so lots of parts of your system that's why you like horror movies by the way i do research on horror movies go to a horror movie and if you're ever scared and you go like this just check in why are you doing that it's on a screen you're at a theater why are you having any why are you having any adverse effect and the reason is because the system doesn't know the difference it's like you're getting chased run and it's the it's the it's the confluence of the system being like oh shit oh no and the agent being like no it's cool it's cool and the system's like it's not cool it's not cool the agent's like oh it's cool it's cool it's that confluence that makes it punchy and interesting for us right okay now you're doom scrolling and you're feeding your generative model information it doesn't know the difference it doesn't know anything you're your brain and nervous system don't know anything about the world all they know is all they know is the information they get in through the senses and that's coming in through the senses more time than you're looking at anything else in a day it's going to augment the shape of the system add to that that the fast fast scrolling just a little side note in case you guys are geeky like i am about the neuroscience i hope you are and fast scrolling it looks like the research just came out looks like it makes the brain misattribute where that information is coming from the brain thinks that it's endogenously created not exogenously created let me just kick it back to you okay let's do that again in simple language yeah so if you scroll fast your brain thinks it's making that not receiving okay why why why would your brain misattribute the fast topic changes as something it's making rather than something it's perceiving.

1:03:27Why do you think? Can you guess? I mean, I do like, sorry, this is blowing my mind. Like, so my immediate association is that, okay, it comes from, it comes from like five motor movement. The five motor movement piece is something like nothing moves. It's almost overwhelming. ourselves that's it yeah it's like nothing moves that fast unless we are making it do that no no no half half right half wrong nothing moves that fast in the environment you never get a dog politics a politics a party a joke a comedian a car that doesn't exist anywhere but in here nature never gives you snippets of things quick in quick succession but the your neural system your cognitive system can give you snippets of things as it's parallel playing okay that has the same signature they think as this and so the brain goes well if it's moving fast like that then that's medulla stuff that's that's being self-generated which means the tyrannical ai that's feeding you this it's going your system is thinking i'm thinking this these are beliefs that i have so if you're getting i don't know neo-nazi shorts all the time it's just that's just going to sneak right around that's going to sneak right around the guards and into the shape of the generative model and that's why you start being very weird at thanksgiving if you've had anybody at thanksgiving show up and be a bit weird um this is probably part of the mechanic where you're like oh weird i didn't know you had those radical radical opinions about this group of people like what a weird thing to think and they may not have ever rationally come to it it just comes in insidiously into the into the shape of the generative model oh my oh my oh yeah okay let's let's let's leave the doom and gloom for a second here's the benefit though here's the benefit leave the bad one let's look at the good one what if you're inundating yourself with wisdom, with wise teachings, with beautiful poetry, then the counter is true as well.

1:05:40You're starting to open the cognitive, perceptual, behavioral, emotional system up to those tendencies, capabilities, and patterns that are in the environment. So you end up being, your reality ends up being a reflection of the kinds of things that you spend time with, which I think is revelatory in neuroscience, but we all know it in folk psychology. You must know that the things you spend time on is the thing you become. We've known that for a long time. So I don't want to hang out with turkeys. You're supposed to hang out with people that push you and love you and support you so that you can be everything you can be.

1:06:13It's just that we have a first principle computational explanation for why that's the case now. Isn't that amazing? So you are what you do. On that note, let me show you something. oh my okay so and he's i've ditched my smartphone for a dumb phone i'm on light this is the light three wow this is the new sexy oled screen dumb phone it just it just calls text it does no streaming i put albums on it i listen to albums again because it's slow consumption of music uh download um audiobooks on here but you only have so many that you can have has a great camera. Awesome. Awesome. We're not sponsored by this.

1:06:56That's just, uh, that's just Mark's excitement and proving a very, very clear argument that this, this thing of like, you know, you are what you eat also applies to your content diet. Um, is what I'm understanding. So I'm going to sit a little bit, uh, with how much of my brain has splattered onto the wall behind me. And I'm hoping that someone will call in and ask a question. Um, please. so I have time to breathe. This is... I love talking to you, Mark, because every time... I know. Well, we care. We care about ourselves and we care about the science and we care about people. It makes us a great team.

1:07:34Yeah. So is there anybody who wants to call in or give us a minute of silence at which point I can notice my breathing?

1:07:48All right. If you want to, you can drop your question in the Riverside chat. In the meantime, we'll take another one. I'm just going to pick one. Oh, there are two here which actually I think dovetail very nicely. This is coming from Mike Garrigan. And my partner, Ellie, is watching live. Hi, Bao Bao. And this has to do, they come together as well because on what we just talked about. So Mike asks, how do we change our relationship with dopamine? And this has to do with kind of like, you know, dopamination and the idea of like, all the reward drug and the reward chemical in our brain. And Ellie asked a question here, which she says, apologies, this has already been addressed, but are there different processes that happen for us when experiencing pleasure versus experiencing joy?

1:08:39And I would add to that, is there a signature, a thumbprint that you can point us to? Yeah, just sort of giving you three things coalesce oh nice what's up nice nice okay changing relationship with dopamine that's good that comes right out of our research too um so okay well here's here's one way i could tackle it um we we've written a series of papers on self-transcendence um using contemplative technologies like meditation different facets of meditation to um to improve uh adaptability to improve our our state and sense of flourishing and one of the things that's coming out of that research is um a complex discussion about how reward systems impact well-being and how they're augmented and understood in contemplative traditions one of the very interesting um things that has been noted in a recent publication of ours, is it out now?

1:09:44Oh, it might be in review. Is that if you're an outsider to Buddhist contemplative practices, you might think that the aim is to radically alter how dopamine impacts the system. Like as if maybe what you want to do is get out of pleasure and pain altogether. But actually it's very clear in the Buddha's Dharma, that Vedana, which is valence, which is pleasure and pain, is like healthy and well and active in Buddhas. So there's a sutta where the Buddha says the well-trained noble disciple, which is an enlightened practitioner, when something good happens for them, they feel pleasure and when that pleasurable thing passes they feel the pain of the pleasurable thing passing now isn't isn't that an interesting thing to remember that even a buddha is going to feel good when good things happen and it's going to feel good when good things pass but he goes on to say but the difference is is that when the good thing happens they don't go crazy to recreate the good thing and when the bad thing happens when the good thing ends and they feel bad they don't gnash their teeth and go into sorrow and suffering they don't go into like a horrible depression they just uh they just uh you know you'd imagine that they mourn for the appropriate whatever that amount is the emote the appropriate amount of time and then it passes like all things pass so vedan is still working fine the reason why i brought that up mike and i know that's not dopamine structures, you might think that the right way to pitch that question is something like dopamine is critical for our flourishing.

1:11:36We want it functioning well. You don't want to disrupt ordinary pleasure and pain dynamics, including dopamine dynamics. You would never want to disrupt those. If anybody's practicing meditation, so I'm a long-term contemplative coach too, and one of the things we make sure that like we base it all on this science one thing that we make sure to make clear is you don't want to be disrupting ordinary pleasure and pain stuff you want to look at craving true but craving is a second order thing you don't want to disrupt the first the primary one you know where we see um basic affective dynamics being disrupted depersonalization and derealization are disruptions of basic affective dynamics you don't want to do that which is one of the reasons why people can get sick meditating if they don't know what the target is.

1:12:25If you're targeting disrupting pleasure and pain, you can actually reproduce depersonalization, derealization effects. You want to target craving, not pleasure and pain. So you don't want to mess with the dopamine activations. You want to mess with the interpretation of the dopamine activations. And now maybe that's just already what you were onto, Mike, but I thought it was an interesting bit of science that's coming out of our research program. So following up on that, you don't want to change the reward process in itself, but your relationship with reward processing. And that has everything to do with neurobiologically speaking, you want to get the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to come into close relationship with the striatum and dopamine systems.

1:13:06What that basically does is adds like a bunch of top-down contextualization for where and when and how the system should behave relative to dopamine activation. So rather than dopamine just driving behaviors through the striatum, and we can actually see that in the brain for instance long-term addicts you it it looks like brain damage but it's not but we can see a gap between the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and the striatum stratum is like that the habit center not to oversimplify it but you can see a little gap and we thought that was brain damage originally but it's not brain damage it's actually your brain working optimally it's just that you're so confident in the drug seeking and taking behavior now that you don't want any contextualization over it you want the contextualization to let go why is that because if you're very very confident that something always works like every time you take heroin it indicates to your brain and nervous system that everything you've ever cared about you've just done better at doing it than you have in the rest of your life so drug seeking and taking behaviors are massively are matt you're massively confident that those are the right ones to be perceiving now not you the agent the system the agent and just look at like any of these videos about people suffering these long-term addictions you'll hear the agent say i know this is bad for me and then at the end of the interview they said now i'm gonna go get high and the interviewer i just saw this on um soft white underbelly interviewer was like you've just talked to us for 15 minutes about the dangers of this thing and he's like yeah but like that doesn't at all change the fact that i'm gonna go get high now even though i've just said like i need to get off this nobody should do this these are all the places that you can go to get help now i'm gonna go get high we can actually see that as a separation between that contextualization cortex stuff and habit performing dopamine stuff and you can bring those back together again um and one of the ways you can do that is you can look really closely uh you can you can keep setting your attention on the program itself, the dopamine program itself.

1:15:14That has a number of effects, metacognitive effects that allow the system to better model that information. One of the effects is that it becomes information in the system rather than being identical to the system. Okay, that's a bit technical. We're going to do it in HD in the course. But the sort of take home is don't change the dopamine, change the relationship to the dopamine. And one last thing, Judson Brewer on addiction, mindfulness and addiction is excellent here. I think it's, I think it's accredited now to being the most impactful resource for overcoming addiction. I think there's some meta studies that show that now.

1:15:55And it's a really interesting mechanism that he suggests, which is, for instance, let's take smoking. He says, don't stop smoking. That's the first thing about how to get out of smoking. So interesting. He says, don't stop smoking. But you have to be maximally mindful every time you smoke now. You have to think about what the craving feels like. You have to watch it drive you to the thing. You have to feel the suffering in that thing. You have to see the habit. You have to actually taste the smoke. You have to feel it in your lungs. You have to smell it. You have to put it out. You have to be with the whole cycle, then the slight nausea.

1:16:29You have to get all that information into the system about what it's actually like. And then the system optimizes you out of the addiction all by itself. because if you just get enough good information about the problem the system lets go of it the agent doesn't have to do anything pretty cool what's his name again what's what's what's his judson brewer is the researcher and teacher and um he's the big mindfulness and craving guy and the program really works for anything for anything i mean just think like well i've been teaching a little bit on internet porn addiction i mean it's so valuable there like the only reason people get hooked into that and stay hooked in is because you're really overlooking the pain and suffering that that's actually producing and you lock right into the pain and suffering that's that's imminent in that world and for those for those people um and for yourself and for the for the nasty feedback cycle that you're contributing to i mean you just the system itself goes up the hook just comes out in a way how do you spell his name again J-U-D-S-O-N Brewer.

1:17:39B-R-E-W-E-R. Great. Thanks, Sebastian. I needed it too. Yeah, check it out. It's awesome. We have time for like one last one, which is coming in from Luke. He says, Mark, can you speak a little bit more about physical activity and how work, play, exercise can be utilized for wise living related to dopamine? that's good um i don't know do you have do you have the course structure online ethan have people been able to see the course structure right so we have a whole week on flow play and adaptive uncertainty that john's going to be co-teaching with me so john's going to co-teach um the depression despair and crisis of meaning with me and he's going to co-teach flow play and adaptive uncertainty with me he's going to co-teach wisdom insight and the plasticity of the predictive mind with me, which is so nice.

1:18:32I can't wait. Um, cause a lot of it's based on, um, work that John and I do together. Um, so play is something I'm really, um, I'm really interested in, um, especially risky play. Um, uh, I'm, uh, this is a little bit orthogonal, but I'm a new dad. I'm a newish dad. And, um, uh, we try to like, we try to like inject lots of risky play into my daughter's life, and it really does have awesome effects, all the effects that you'd expect given the science, which is you're sort of flirting with your edge of capability. What can I say right now about dopamine in action, though?

1:19:26Actions at the edge. yeah we talk a little bit about flow zone of proximal development yeah disruptive strategies yeah exactly I don't know I don't know if there's anything so interesting I know like there are of course there's lots of research out there about the way that that sports and walking and high intensity training and slow methodical movements like in Tai Chi are going to augment sort of the healthy dynamics in the brain, including dopamine. That's really not that interesting for this topic, though, and it's not really dead center for what I do. Maybe an interesting thing is to...

1:20:22So, if the framework... so I'll say this and hopefully this scratches the itch for now. Is this Luke? Yeah. Yes. Hopefully this scratches the itch for now. So if this framework is right, then the brain can be thought of as a prediction engine. That's what it, that's what it trades in. So the brain and nervous system evolved in order to track the regularities in yourself and in others and in the environment so that it can generate for itself expectations about what's likely to happen next. And then it uses those expectations to construct its perception and to select its behaviors. Okay. So you could say the brain is a prediction engine.

1:20:59More aptly though, you could say the brain is a prediction error minimizing system. Okay. So it's generating a model of the world and yourself. It uses that model to make predictions. It checks the world then to see how good is the fit. If the fit isn't perfect, then you're getting an error signal into the system. and then that error is resolved the whole the modus operandi of the brain and nervous system is to reduce uncertainty to resolve that prediction error by increasing its aptness of its predictions or by impacting the world in ways that get the world to better fit with the model that's already on tap okay yeah so you can either update the model to better fit the world or you can update the world to better fit the model in either exactly in either case you're reducing the prediction error so you say the brain and nervous system are prediction error minimizing engines okay but as soon as we say that we have to nuance it and then here we're going to go into something in action maybe i hope i hope it lands there you can go next month yeah exactly so if that's right though let's nuance it because it's not that the prediction system wants no errors that would be like getting into a dark room that you might think well why doesn't a predictive system like to just be in a maximally confident space why don't we just why don't we just get into a pod get intravenous food and water be in the perfect dark now there's no errors to contend with so there's no uncertainty there's no stress there's no anxiety isn't shouldn't that be a heaven for us um and i joke with my graduate students that it does feel like heaven if you're overworked because like there's something in me that's like oh that would be so nice just hook me in man just turn off the lights for a couple of years um but it would eventually be uh like uh hell realm that's not good for us to be locked in one place so it's not a prediction error minimizing system doesn't want there to be no error no it is a prediction error minimizing system where it feels good is when it's minimizing error so what's implied in that is that to feel good, to be adaptive, to do the thing that you were built to do, you have to come into contact with good, what we call digestible uncertainty.

1:23:23Not so uncertain that it moves into volatility, not uncertain uncertainty where you just don't know what you don't know. That's a bummer for us. And not all the way back here in the boredom stuff either, but rather dopamine systems are evolved to keep us apprised to the very edge of our capabilities. And when they're not being waylaid and hijacked, augmented by sort of nefarious, super stimulating systems, then the job of those systems is to keep the world showing up to us as opportunities for getting into just the right amount of trouble. And we get into tolerance here, right? So flow is getting into the right amount of trouble over and over and over again, given your expertise in the environment.

1:24:08I love that, okay? You wanna be in a moderate amount of trouble. That's good for us. Now, why is it good for us? Because if we select, if we keep getting, and this is one of the meta skills that we're gonna talk about cultivating, is sensitivity to where the right amount of error is found and the cognitive flexibility to adjust your view in order to come into contact with the right amounts of uncertainty. That's what makes us feel really good, is that we know how to find and reduce good uncertainty in our environment. If everything's working right, then dopamine should get the world to keep showing up as that place where you're like, oh, that's the right amount.

1:24:45Oh, that's the right amount. Oh, that's the right amount. And that keeps us right at the edge of our capability. Now, why is that valuable for us? The answer is because as a predictive system, you're not trying to reduce, you're not trying to manage volatility right now alone. Now, that can produce good and bad feelings. I do better at this right now. I do worse at this right now. Actually, that's less important than managing uncertainty over a lifetime. And to manage uncertainty over a lifetime requires that we continually grow in our predictive and prediction error minimizing skill set and abilities, which requires that we keep bumping into all sorts of hostile error and uncertainty and learn how to manage it.

1:25:28So why does joy and sorrow have to fit together? Because actually, if you're going to manage uncertainty over a lifetime, you have to be willing to lose where you are over and over again and re-find it. Pema Chodron says that enlightenment is not the final establishment of some heavenly state, but is rather the perpetually being thrown is perpetually being thrown out of the nest again and again and again and being comfortable with that constant uncertainty and the resolution of uncertainty is what long-term flourishing actually looks like and that's going to be filled with all sorts of stuff so you can get local pleasure dynamics but what we really want is global pleasure dynamics which are tracking how well you're managing uncertainty over a lifetime So coming back just to one of our earlier questions about the difference between pleasure and joy, what we're going to pitch is that they have to do with depth.

1:26:28Pleasure is a more shallow activation that has to do with local temporal dynamics. And joy is a deeper expression of the affective system, which is tracking global changes and volatility. so you might feel bad locally like if you go to the gym and you work hard on legs day that feels real bad but it's contextualized by a global um by a global model that's saying actually that pain is going to lead to us being swole in uh six months from now so keep it up right right and that's everywhere in this is it's the global concern and local concerns and uh wisdom wisdom real true joy human flourishing is going to be of course an integration of local and global dynamics but it's definitely going to stress global dynamics over only local dynamics we see in long-term addiction a stress on local dynamics at the expense of global dynamics what matters is getting high now what doesn't matter is how i'm going to be 10 years from now how are my family things going how's my job going so this like movement from local up to global is going to be a big part of our discussion.

1:27:42This is fantastic. This is fantastic. And I think like what I'm hearing in sort of what you're talking about is the trade-off relationship between your ambiguity tolerance, right? Including seeking it out and cognitive flexibility. Huge. Those are the two principal players. That's right. Tolerance of uncertainty and cognitive flexibility and adaptability. Yeah, because only one, like two cognitive flexible and then you're just like, well, no, No, then your brain falls right out of your ear. You can't be so open-minded your brain falls out of your ear. You can't be that open-minded. Yeah, and too much ambiguity tolerance on the outside just like paralyzed.

1:28:21No, but then also you can get stuck in suboptimal loops. You can stay in a bad relationship because you're like, I can tolerate. I can tolerate how bad this feels. I'm fine. I'm fine. But you shouldn't be fine. You should be more sensitive to the uncertainty there because there may be a better local minima to rest at. so here's something that i wanted to um like sort of foreshadow for i think our next q a which is why i bring up ambiguity tolerance uh one of the key kind of pillars around uh seeing god again for the first time and john's argument around the kind of science of religion is that um we are we are spiritually immature but also that um spirituality is fundamentally ambiguous And so there is a deep kind of experiential, phenomenological, but existential kind of reckoning that is occurring, which is our relationship to ambiguity has massive ramifications on our experience of spiritual transformation, of self-correction.

1:29:19And so what I'd be interested in to talk about with you is how all of this work impacts, in a philosophical aspect, right? The ramifications of spirituality and religion. Here, that's an amazing topic. We don't have time for it today, unfortunately. I have another meeting. But let me just close by saying that that's 100 % right. And this is why my work and John's dovetail. Because this is the cognitive computational neuroscience of ambiguity. That's what we're doing. This is the neuroscience of ambiguity. It's the neuroscience of uncertainty and uncertainty management. And so if religion, spiritual training, spiritual experiences is laden with this ambiguity and resolution of ambiguity, this may be just the right scientific model, mathematical suite to express the dynamics that underlie it.

1:30:18And that's exactly what I think. And John and I, John and I are of one mind when it comes to neurotheology. And this is this can be a computational backbone, which is why we're going to start this year, getting to terms with that computational backbone. so if anybody here is taking all of the courses over the year the way that the lectern people have structured is perfect because we're going to start by putting on some computational backbone stuff that's then going to be relevant for the whole year because really the whole year is about ambiguity it's all about coming into the unknown and be and being transformed by the unknown and we're going to start by figuring out well what is it what kind of a system are you that's entering and resolving this unknowingness.

1:30:57Amazing. Bless you, Mark. I always feel so much joy. When I talk to you once, I see your face. It just like, in a global way, not just like local pleasure. So I hope, I hope lots of the people who ask questions are coming to the course. These were awesome questions. I mean, that'll just make the course banging. Yes. And if you want to, I mean, Mark, obviously you've had a taste of, is his genius right now. Like, please go to the lectern, check out Generations of Joy. The course is now open for registration and we begin on March 13th. So, thank you everybody. See you all next month where we'll talk about the predictive ramifications of religion.

1:31:34I suppose. Ciao.

1:31:53you