Top Neuroscientist: Anxiety Is A Predictive Error In The Brain! Heres The Proof Your Brain Is Faking Trauma! Your Whole Life Might Be A Prediction!

31:07And if you think about it, what we do in this culture when when people go into therapy for trauma, right, is we're attempting to actually reverse the narrative. So we try to teach people that it's not when something traumatic happens to them. It's and I want to be really clear what I'm saying, right. I'm not saying that when people experience trauma, it's their fault. I'm not in any way saying they're culpable for what's happened to them. But sometimes in life, you are responsible for changing something. Not because you're to blame, but because you're the only person who can. The responsibility falls to you.

31:53And so in this culture, we try to teach people who've experienced trauma that they can experience those physical events that happen to them in the past in some other way. And when they do, they no longer feel traumatized anymore. My mind's a little bit blown for a number of different reasons because it's a real paradigm shift to think that we are giving meaning to the thing that happened in our past. And sometimes that meaning is coming from watching other people give it meaning and we're inheriting that meaning that. Oh, yes, that's called cultural inheritance. It's like a cultural, it's like a contagion.

32:31So it turns out that, you know, there's there's one kind of old evolutionary theory, right. This is called the modern synthesis where inheritance is really your genes. You inherit in whatever you inherit you inherit by your genes and then natural selection, you know, chooses some gene patterns and not others. And that's really how inheritance works across generations. Both evolutionary biologists don't don't hold to that view anymore because for the most part, there are many, many ways to inherit things. And a lot of what we think of as inheritance is really more what's called epigenetic meaning it doesn't really involve DNA very much.

33:16And I would say the way I like to say it is that we have the kinds of nature that requires a nurture. We have the kind of genes that require experience before anything is wired into our brains. And most of our characteristics work that way very few characteristics work just by genes alone. What always happens in a neurotypical brain is that you're born with your brain incomplete right an adult brain has has us we say that it's wired to its world that world includes its own your own body. But a baby is not a baby's brain is not a miniature adult brain. It's a brain that's waiting for wiring instructions from the world and from its own body.

34:05So your brain is wired for you to see out of eyes that are the exact distance of your eyes from each other. If somehow you know magically we could transplant your brain into somebody else's skull, you would not be able to see out of that skull. You would not be able to see out of those eyes because they're not in the right place. You hear with ears your ability to hear comes from signals that are shaped by the shape of your ear. So your brain is wired to hear out of these ears not any ears these ears. Similarly you as a baby you are taught the meanings of physical signals. You're taught how to make sense of these things that's called cultural inheritance many things that we think of as hard wired into the brain are actually culturally inherited across generations.

35:04That's how people survive in a particular environment. You know, so like in the 1800s and 1900s when explorers would go off and they would go off to Antarctica or here or there. And they would very quickly die the in you would live there they live perfectly fine. Well, because they had culturally inherited knowledge. We're always transmitting knowledge to each other. And that knowledge becomes fodder for our own predictions. So your predictions don't just come from your personal experience. They also come from you watching television you talking to guests you reading books watching movies also your brain like most human brains can do something really fantastic which is you can take bits and pieces of past experience and put them together in a brand new way so that you can use the past to experience something new that you've never experienced before.

36:12You talk to second ago about therapists try and make you think about the past differently, but I do think there's an underlying belief in our culture and society and on social media that if something happens to you almost like this Freudian approach of if this happened to you, this is who you become. And I was reading that book the courage to be disliked over Christmas and it kind of. It changed my view on this quite profoundly in an important way because it helped me to understand I think it basically says that what happens to us doesn't create who we are we use what happened to us when you apply meaning to it, which then determines the behavior we have.

36:49And really interestingly in that it means that many of the beliefs I have about myself who I say I am my identity and therefore like the ways that I behave every day whether they're productive or unproductive are actually just choices I've made to apply meaning to the past. Does that make sense it's completely makes sense. And this is really this is such like a profound I don't know if the whoever's listening now understands what I'm saying here, but we said at the start of this conversation you go through life thinking you're a puppet and you're being controlled by what happened to you who you are your identity but actually your identity is just this this construction of meaning that you've given to the past.

37:31So to serve your purpose now as it says in the book yes, I would say it's slightly differently, but the message is the same I think. There are in the sensory present right there are sites there are sounds there are smells some stuff's going on inside your own body right and these signals are are going to your brain they have no inherent psychological meaning they have no inherent emotional meaning they have no inherent mental. So what's the mental meaning what gives them meaning is the are your memories from the past you are creating you are a meaning maker. Meaning isn't a set of features like a dictionary definition so meaning the meaning of this cup isn't that it has it's made of metal and that I mean we certainly can talk about this features but the meaning of this cup in this moment is what I do with it.

38:31So it could be a vessel for drinking it could be a weapon it could be you know a flower holder it could be a measuring cup the meaning of the vessel is what I do with it in the moment that's its meaning and so the meaning of the vessel isn't in the vessel. And it's also not only in my head the meaning is the transaction it's the relationship between this the features of this vessel this object and the signals in my brain which are creating my actions in fact even the fact that this is a solid object the property of solidity is not in the object. It's because I have a body of a certain type with certain features that makes me experience this as solid the solidity isn't in me and it's not in the object it's in the relationship between the two that means everything everything you experience is partly of your own making.

39:46You don't have a sense of agency about it because it happens really automatically it's happening automatically now as we're talking it's happening faster than you can blink your eyes. But it's still happening and that means if you are partly even if you even though you don't have a sense of agency you are partly in control and also therefore responsible for the meaning that is being made. And when I said at the outset of our conversation that my goal was to try to you know as a science communicator was to try to explain to people that they have more control over their lives they have to hold more control over who they are in any given moment.

40:42Then they think they do to give them more agency in their lives this is this is exactly what I mean you you don't have an enduring identity you are who you are in the moment of your action. And actions are a combination of the remembered past so stuff your brain is using to predict that's it's that your brain is assembling super automatically and the sensory present right so if you want to change who you are you want to change what you feel you want to change what your impact is on someone else. You have a couple of choices you can try to go back into the past and change the meaning of what's happened before so that you'll remember differently you'll predict differently in the future that's what psychotherapies that's what you know heartfelt conversations at two o 'clock in the morning are with your friends or whatever that's really hard shit doesn't doesn't always work so well.

41:48The other thing that you can do though is if you realize that whatever you experience now becomes the seeds for predictions later then you can invest in creating new experiences quite deliberately for yourself now you can expose yourself to new ideas you can expose yourself to people who are different than you you can practice cultivating particular experiences like you would practice any skill. And that will any new concepts you learn new experiences you have in the moment if you practice them they become automatic predictions in the future so let me take that and try to apply it to this example of this silver cup in my hand so psychotherapy would.

42:40And try and go back into the past and explain to me why this actually isn't something I should drink out of and that it could be other things whereas what you're saying is another approach is if I go and get some flowers right now and I put them in there i'm creating a new prediction for the future because I've created a new patent in the present of this actually being a vase for flowers and I can start to create a new patent that silver cups like this one aren't just for drinking out of they also vases for flowers. Exactly okay so I can either go back in the past and try and convince myself that the cup is in a cup or I can in the present moment create a new pattern which will mean that in the future my brain will predict next time it sees a silver cup I would just think drink out of it Steve will think pop some flowers in it right and remember it's it's actually the thinking comes after the action right so.

43:30So what will happen is the next time that you are approaching a table where a silver cup might be your brain will already be starting to prepare the actions to go get the flowers right and then you will think oh right I can use this as a oh look there's a great vase right so in your brain it's action your it first your brain is controlling it's preparing. The actions of the viscera what we call viscera motor so does your heart rate need to change do your blood vessels need to dilate you need to breathe differently it's basically. And it's really anticipating the needs of the body and attempting to meet those needs before they arise that supports your physical movements right so if you're going to.

44:12If you're walking over somewhere to pick up some flowers and cut the stems and whatever that those are all physical movements that require glucose and oxygen and shit like so all of that has to get prepared in advance milliseconds before the actions start to be prepared so it's not what you think determines what you feel it's what you prepare. Prepare to do determines your thoughts and your feelings and the sights and sounds and smells and sensations that's how it really works under the hood so meaning is in terms of what you do. And then as a consequence of that if meaning is a consequence it becomes what you feel and what you think and so on.

44:55So let me give you some specific examples then so if I'm scared of spiders how would I go about overcoming that fear of spiders using root number two that you described there. So one of the ways that you change to change predictions you can't just will yourself to change a prediction I am really afraid of bees. I had a traumatic experience when I was five I'm afraid of bees. I know a lot about bees I'm actually a gardener and I and I know a lot about the evolutionary biology of bees but when I am outside if a bee comes around my first reaction is to either run or to freeze right I'm afraid of bees.

45:43I could talk to myself until the cows come home it won't matter I can't right so what I have to do is dose myself with prediction error meaning I have to interact with bees in a way that changes my actions which will change my lived experience. And I can't just do it all at once it's not like a good idea would not be for me to say would not have been for me to go to like somebody who has be hives and you know put on a suit and go work I mean that would be like overwhelming right so instead maybe I don't run. Maybe I stand and watch maybe I get closer to a bee maybe I plant bushes and flowers that bees like a lot to bring these to me so that I can sit and just be around them while they're buzzing and doing their thing maybe I deliberately let myself get stung at some point which I did.

46:48But you know you're dosing yourself with your brain is making a set of predictions those predictions there are a set of predictions that means your brain isn't preparing one action is preparing multiple actions. So you need to prove to your brain that those predictions are wrong. Yes so exactly you need you are setting up a circumstances so you can prove to yourself that your predictions are wrong. If you're predicting well you have a few action plans. If you're predicting poorly let's say over generalizing maybe you have a hundred plans like if there's tremendous uncertainty your brain doesn't know which action plan to so there might be many of them right sensory signals are coming into your brain from the sensory system.

47:39So you need to know which one of these surfaces of your body from your retinas from your cochlea you've got sensory surfaces on your skin inside your body in your muscle cells all these signals coming to your brain they help select which prediction signal will be completed as action and lived experience. Okay so let's say you put yourself deliberately in a situation where the incoming signals will not select any prediction because there's too much unpredictable signal there it's error there's another name and psychology for taking in prediction error. Exposure therapy learning. Oh okay yeah exposure therapy which is a kind of learning all learning all learning is you taking in prediction prediction error signals you didn't predict or there's no signal that you did predict you predicted a signal it's not there.

48:43So what you do is you set up situations for yourself that you will take in signals that are novel right and this seems like an easy thing to do we people actually sometimes seek novelty right but too much novelty it is not necessarily a good thing all the time particularly if you know you're metabolically it's expensive metabolically to take in prediction error and learn something new like the biggest costs that your brain expands energy on are moving your body learning something new and dealing with persistent uncertainty those are really expensive things for us. So if you're metabolically encumbered in some way say you're depressed or you have anxiety disorder or maybe you have heart disease or diabetes or you're living under chronic stress you don't have the spoons necessarily to take in prediction error you're just going to go with your predictions you aren't going to learn you aren't going to be able to update those predictions you're going to be stuck you're going to be stuck in your head.

50:01Right every experience every action a combination of the remembered present the remembered past the predictions and the sensory present but the sensory present is there just to select which remembered past you're going to act on and sometimes under in moments of great metabolic load the brain just goes with its own predictions and ignore it. So I think that's what's out there in the world. I was thinking earlier on as you're speaking about this sort of social contagion where we can apply meaning to our lives and what happened to us and then consequently make ourselves sad because we see how other people on tick talk or Instagram are feeling and it made me think that you must you must think the world is crazy to some degree you must see social contagion in the world where suddenly everybody becomes traumatized because trauma is become almost poppy.

51:00And then you know, to think about what happened to you and create meaning to it and then suffer that meaning but there's other types of social contagion where which are spreading through society I mean young people are getting more and more anxious they're getting more and more depressed we're self diagnosing ourselves with different illnesses and different things. But now you've explained to me how the brain works I'm thinking gosh as a society we are bonkers. Well we're living out lies. Yeah I think I guess the way I do I do find it frustrating at times but but only because I think we are meaning makers as an animals are meaning maker we create meaning we create meaning by virtue of living like by virtue of interacting with with things in the world by interacting with each other.

51:50Very few meanings are given that that is that they exist independently of us. And so what I find frustrating is that there's a lot of suffering and understanding these basic operating principles of the brain will not remove all suffering. But it could ameliorate it could remove some and people don't understand that they are sometimes.

52:31Making their suffering worse than it has to be you pose on the word responsible. Well I want to be really clear that again I'm not saying people are are to blame culpability and responsibility are not the same thing culpability is blame are you blame worthy. Right you can nobody I'm not saying people are to blame for their own suffering I'm saying that people can be more responsible and by taking more responsibility they could reduce their suffering some that's not the same thing is saying you know that they that it's their cause their cause to begin with so I'll give you an example social contagion contagion is an interesting word it means that you are infected by something.

53:20Even a virus there are these experiments that were done 15 20 years ago where these are done by Sheldon Cohen who is a psycho immunologist which means he's a psychologist and he studies how immunology that is your immune system is related to your psychological state. And so what he did across a number of experiments is he took people and he sequestered them in hotel rooms. And then he took the same dosage the same concentration of virus and he put it in every person's nose. And then he controlled how much they slept how much they ate he measured their symptoms he like weighed their tissues after they blew their nose I mean like he did right just really really really careful that.

54:11And across these experiments somewhere between 20 percent to 60 % of people become symptomatic with respiratory disease that means the virus is necessary but it is not sufficient to cause illness another necessary but not to his five -sympician cause is the state of each persons immune system that is your brain and your immune system have to be at a free place this u pick tight where it's at issues in a particular state in order for you to be infected by a virus in these experiments. So the point that I'm making here is exactly the same about suffering. So let's take anxiety, for example. In a culture, we automatically make meaning of certain types of signal patterns as anxiety.

55:05When there's a lot of uncertainty, there's an increase in in Norepinephrine and some chemicals in the brain. That often goes with an increase in heart rate and so on. And we automatically make meaning of this physical state as anxiety. But exactly the same physical state could be determination. It could be just pure uncertainty. Again, meaning making is about action, right? So when you are experiencing high rousal, even if it's super unpleasant as determination, you do something different than if you experience it as anxiety or uncertainty. So here's an example. There are people who experience test anxiety, really serious test anxiety, prevents people from finishing courses or graduating from college.

56:04People who graduate from college have a lifetime trajectory of earning that is hundreds of thousands of dollars more often than somebody who drops out of college. So test anxiety over the long run, it's more than just a bit of discomfort. It has serious implications for your earning potential across your life. There are these experiments that were done where they trained people to make sense of high rousal physical states not as anxiety, but as determination. And these people learned to do this first. They practice like a skill. It's like driving at first. It's really hard. You have to give a lot of effort to it.

56:48But you practice, practice, practice, and then eventually becomes really automatic. And then what happens? They are able to take tests. They're able to pass tests. They're able to continue taking courses and so on. I watch this actually happen right in front of my eyes. My daughter when she was 12 years old, she was testing for her black belt in karate. Her sensei was a tenth degree black belt. This guy, the tenth degree black belt is the highest you could be. This guy could break a board like by looking at it. He was a scary, scary dude. And my daughter was like not even five feet tall when she was 12.

57:26And she's this tiny little thing and she's got a spar with these hulking, like 15, 16, 18 year old boys. She's got to actually spar with them. And so, you know, she's, and this is across several days. She's got to do this really. And so I'm sitting there. Her dad and me were sitting there watching her. And so her sensei, you know, saunters up to her and he says, sweetheart, get your butterflies flying in formation. And I was like, that's fucking amazing. Get your butterflies flying in formation. He's not saying calm down little girl. That would actually be bad. You don't want to become. You need that arousal.

58:11It's there for a reason. It's uncomfortable, but you need it. He's saying use it. That to me was like a perfect example of find a different meaning for that arousal. And that meaning is the action that you will engage in. No matter how hard it is, no matter how much it doesn't really look like what it's supposed to, the control is there. It's there. It's not there all the time. It's harder to get, you know, yada yada, but it's there. And it means that you have more agency. You have more control. You're never going to have as much control as you want. It's always going to be harder to get. Your options aren't always going to be the same, but you can always find a little more control over what you do and what you experience.

59:14And that's the key to living a meaningful life. Are you somewhat concerned about the world that young people are growing up in, where they're scrolling on social media and social media is telling them what certain feelings are. So they are just being programmed. Right. Yeah, they are to be anxious to be depressed, be sad. Yes, they are. And think about it too. Social media is pernicious uncertainty there. You know, you, first of all, even when we're sitting face to face, we have all of these cues. We have all these signals. I can see your face. I can hear your voice. Even when all this information is there, there's still some uncertainty, right?

1:00:01We're not reading each other. Bodily movements are not a language to be read. It's a bad metaphor, right? We're guessing. We're always guessing. And we're using a lot of signals to guess. But when you're on social media, you have very few signals. There is a lot of ambiguity. There is a lot of uncertainty. And the only thing that you can do is fill in that uncertainty with your own guesses, which could be bad. Right. So people who go on TikTok and whatever are giving up, they're like volitionally giving up their agency. And they don't know it. What do you mean by that? They're choosing to be led.

1:00:57They're choosing to be influenced.

1:01:02I'll give you an example. I've listened to podcasts about metabolism. I've listened to podcasts about, you know, skincare. I've listened to, you know, I'm curious. I'm curious about like what kind of information people put out there. I probably turn off 90 % of the, I get like 10 minutes into something and I will turn it off. That's what it means to be a consumer. You have choice. I think people are, they don't realize that by virtue of what they do and what they don't do, they are making choices about what will be retained in their heads that will then be used automatically later. Brainwashing.

1:01:50A little bit except that you're the one who's, you're choosing it. You know, I'm empathic and I'm not blaming people, but things could be better for them, you know? I mean, I had a daughter who was clinically depressed that was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had in my life in addition to being really tragic. I mean, I can talk about it now without breaking into tears. That took a long time. But at first, she was so resistant. Eventually, you know, she made the decision that she wanted to be helped and then we completely changed her life. But she had to make that decision. I couldn't force her to do it.

1:02:32And I feel like a little bit, it's the same kind of situation now where there's so much bullshit out there in the wellness industry. There's so much, you know, swirling around on TikTok and on other areas of social media and not all of it is useful. And some of it's really harmful. Do you mind if I pause this conversation for a moment? I want to talk about our show sponsor today, which is Shopify. I've always believed that the biggest cost in business isn't failure. It's the time you waste trying to make decisions. Time spent hesitating, overthinking, or waiting for the right moment. When I started my first company at 20 years old, I had no experience and no money.

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1:03:47The advantage you have as an objective on looker is you have a huge amount of information and knowledge which is guiding you to make better decisions. But a lot of people don't have that information and knowledge. In fact, they have counter information and knowledge so when I think about what it takes for someone to make a change in their life, whether it was your daughter, or whether it's someone else who feels like they're stuck and they feel like they're trapped in an algorithm or trapped in a life that they want to break out of, based on everything you know and based on the experience you had with your daughter, what is step one to being able to make that change?

1:04:22Because I'm really curious as to what it was about your daughter that made her decide that she wanted the help. Well, I think that the general answer is baby steps. It rarely works to completely change everything all at once. I'm not saying it never works, but it rarely works that way. It's so, for example, you know, you could deliberately get off social media for one day a week or do something else instead with a friend or go for a walk or just and build it into it, build it into your day as a scheduled thing. So that's the other thing is that you can't do things because you want to do them. You have to force yourself to do them.

1:05:11So for example, I had major back surgery, major back surgery, very serious. And I knew that after I had back surgery that I was going to experience sensations I had never had before. Just like, you know, if you go for a filling in your tooth, right? And then, you know, something's there that wasn't there before. And then your tongue is like constantly poking at the tooth and you're not supposed to, but you do anyways because your brain is foraging for information. It's foraging for prediction error. And then eventually it adjusts its predictions and then it ignores the sensations because they're not relevant, right?

1:05:54So that was going to happen on a massive scale for me. And I knew that I had made a plan before surgery to dose myself appropriately with prediction error so that I would not develop chronic pain. Because chronic pain is like a set of bad predictions that don't update, right? So your brain still believes that there's tissue damage in your body when there's no more tissue damage. So does that mean that pain often is just a figment of your imagination? No, that's the wrong way. That is the wrong way to think about it. The way to think about it is every experience remembered past and sensory present.

1:06:36So pain is in your head. Vision is in your head. Hearing is in your head. You don't hear in your ears. You hear in your head. In your brain. You don't see in your eyes. You need your eyes. You need your ears. But you don't see in your eyes. You see in your brain. So pain is a combination of the, just like vision is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present. Okay. Okay, so it's both. So chronic pain happens when your brain was receiving signals from the body that there was tissue damage, no susceptible signals they're called. And it was making sense of them as pain. And when you're recovering from an illness, that's metabolically taxing.

1:07:34So there's not as much metabolic, there's not as much of your metabolic budget devoted to learning. So you can be in a situation where your brain doesn't update itself. And you still experience pain, even though the tissue damage is no longer there. It's just like seeing a green apple in your mind's eye when there is no apple in front of you. It's not all in your head in the, in the, you know, insulting sense. It's just, it's a normal consequence of how brains work. The injury's gone, but the signal of the injury is still we're playing itself. Yeah, exactly. Just like that's like a phantom limb.

1:08:23It's like tinnitus is also like that. Oh gosh, yeah, I had that for an all the while. Yeah. So, so I, I tried really hard to set a schedule for myself. You know, that would allow me to sort of like optimally dose myself, but with prediction error, but that meant, you know, that I, I had to follow that schedule. And I think if you're committed to changing your habits, this is how you change any habit, really. You change the context and you, and then you practice. You practice new, new behaviors. So with my daughter, depression, we think about depression in our lab as, let me back up and say, your brain's most important job, really, is not thinking, it's not feeling, it's not even seeing, it's regulating your body, it's regulating your metabolism, basically.

1:09:26That's your brain's most important job. Your brain's most important job is anticipating the needs of your body and preparing to meet those needs before they arise. The metaphor that we use for this predictive regulation of the body, which is the formal term is called alostasis. That's the scientific concept, but the, but the metaphor is body budgeting. It's running a budget for your body. Your brain is running a budget for your body. It's not budgeting money, it's budgeting, salt and glucose and oxygen and potassium and like all of the nutrients and chemicals that are necessary to run an energetically, costly body.

1:10:11You know, you've got, all these really low level kind of processes, you can just think of them as vital parts of, to keep yourself alive. So some of your energy budget goes to that. Some of your energy budget goes to repair and growth. So if you get, if you get taller, you need more cells. When you learn something, you have to thicken up your mile in and your, your neurons, you've got to grow more receptors and stuff. That's, you know, the kind of growth and repair. And then the rest of it is all for anything effortful. What is effortful? Like what, going to the gym? Dragging your ass out of bed in the morning is effortful.

1:10:52Learning something new is effortful. Dealing with uncertainty is effortful. Everything we call stress. Stress is just really, your brain is predicting a big metabolic outlay because there's some effort involved, right? Some motivated effort involved. So those are the three things that make up your energy budget. And the really important point, you as an organism have a fixed amount of energy that you can produce in a day, meaning ATP, like these little chemicals, that these little protein things, that, you know, your cells use as literal energy that come from glucose and other things like fats and...

1:11:40So there's nothing I can do to increase it? Well, you're in a range. Okay. But there is a finite limit, upper limit for that range because you are, because you're a human organism and you've got to do these three things, these right vital functions, growth and repair and then everything else. If you've got a lot of psychosocial stress going on or you have some kind of disease that's taking up, you know, much of the budget, then you don't have a lot of budget left for other stuff that you need to do, right? So what your brain will attempt to do is to cut costs. If you look at the symptoms of depression, they are symptoms of that are related to cutting costs, distress, fatigue, problems concentrating, lack of sensitivity to the context that you're in.

1:12:38All of these things are indicative of reduced metabolic outlay. And then depression also has symptoms that are related to increased costs, like 70 % of people who are depressed have inflammatory problems. So they have enhanced inflammatory, a systemic inflammation. And your immune system is a very expensive system to run. So if you have persistent and systemic inflammation, that's like a persistent tax on your budget. You're, you know, meaning things are costing more than they necessarily need to. And even, you know, like there are these really interesting studies, I think they're interesting as a scientist as a person, I find them like slightly horrifying.

1:13:36But, you know, like if you within two hours of eating a meal, if you encounter stress, social stress, it says if you ate a hundred and four more calories then you actually ate. So you're so inefficient in metabolizing that it's like, it's like having eaten a hundred and four more calories than you did. And the, your even good fats will be metabolized as if they're bad fats. And potentially stored is. Yeah. So if you, if you add up 104 calories at every meal for a year, that's almost 11 pounds. That means that if you are in a stressful environment and for a year and you eat exactly the same thing as you ate the year before, you would gain 11 pounds.

1:14:25In depression, we know, for example, that there's cortisol dysregulation in depression. That means there's dysregulation in metabolism because cortisol is a metabolic, you know, it's a metabolic chemical. People who take SSRIs, they take for depression, antidepressants are SSRIs usually or SNRIs. That means they are acting on serotonin to keep more serotonin in the, in the juncture between neurons. Serotonin is a metabolic regulator. Norupinephrine is a metabolic regulator. These are chemicals that are directly involved in your metabolism. So it's not a belief that depression is a metabolic, has a metabolic basis to it.

1:15:18I think the question is, what is the elixir of all these metabolic influences that would lead somebody to develop a depressive state? But the point, the simple point that I was making is, I actually came to this idea about metabolism and depression because I was doing a shitton of treating, trying to figure out how to help my kid. What were the symptoms at that time? Just if there were any parents out listening where I know that can relate or anybody that's listening that can relate? Yeah. Well, I will tell you that I've given this talk before about depression in adolescence. Adolescence is a, it's like a perfect storm of metabolic vulnerability for many, many reasons.

1:16:06You know, your brain is trapped in a dark silent box called your skull. It's receiving signals from the body and from the world. It doesn't know what the causes of those signals are. It's receiving the effects. It has to guess at the causes. What are the guesses? Predictions from the past, right? So it doesn't know about hormone surges immediately as they happen. It, you know, it takes 20 minutes or so or sometimes a little less, depending on where the hormonal changes are and what their origin is for the brain to receive the signals of those changes. And then it has to guess at what the causes are.

1:16:45The narrative that's used in psychiatry and medicine is a narrative that goes something like this. It gives back to this like your brain is a battleground, right? So the idea is that, you know, you're born, the story is that you're born with these innate emotion surges. You're not, you don't have any emotion surges. You don't have any emotion surges, actually. But the narrative is you're born with these innate emotion surges. They work, but you're not born with the ability to control them. That has to develop over time. So in adolescence, the idea is that mood disorders arise because you don't have enough cognitive control and you have too much emotion.

1:17:30So you've got this unbridled emotion and that's the problem. That's a really compelling narrative. It's just neuro bullshit. Basically, there's not a good evidence for that narrative. I had it was a chemical imbalance. Yes. Well, the sometimes people talk about that chemical imbalance in terms of serotonin being a happy chemical and dopamine being the reward chemical. And that's also that's such a simplification that it's not even wrong. Okay, dopamine is not a reward chemical and serotonin is not a happiness chemical. They're both metabolic regulators. You see increases in dopamine in some neurons during episodes of punishment.

1:18:23And serotonin does many things in your body in many places. But one of the things that it does in controlled experiments is it allows animals to spend to forage to engage in activity, physical activity and learning when there is no immediate metabolic reward at the end. There's no deposit at the end. So dopamine is seen more, I think, now by many neuroscientists as a chemical that is necessary for effort, whether that is a physical effort or learning something, a mental effort of learning something, it's not really specific to reward per se. So at first with my daughter, she went from being a really exuberant, engaged socially, very socially connected kid, who, you know, she did grade in school and it's not like she had, you know, it's not like she was a perfect kid, but she was pretty enthusiastic and pretty exuberant and had a lot of friends.

1:19:40And then, you know, by the time she was in 10th grade, she was withdrawn, she was getting D's in school, she couldn't concentrate, she wasn't sleeping, she was miserable, she was really suffering, but she was miserable to be around. And to be honest, at the beginning, we thought she was being lazy. We thought, you know, she didn't want to do anything, she wanted to spend all this time in a room, she didn't, you know, she wanted to get rid of all of her activities and we thought, come on, man, step up. Like, where are you, you know, we thought she was being lazy. I mean, really, it just never occurred to me in a million years because she had no mood symptoms as a kid, like none.

1:20:27And then all of a sudden, she just, she appeared to have no energy to do anything, but to us, it looked like she was being lazy and she didn't want to do her homework and she seemed really disengaged and, and it took me a while to realize, oh no, this is something else. She was having trouble remembering conversations that we had. And at first, I thought, oh, you're not paying attention to me, but then it seemed really clear that even in day to day conference, she couldn't tell me what was happening in her day, she just had no details. That's also a sign of depression, where you lose the episodic memory of details of the day.

1:21:08You can only talk in gists. You can't give specifics about times and places and events. You just lose, you don't retain that information long enough to be able to remember it later. There's no consolidation of that information. And when she was in 10th grade, she came home with D's and school D's in mathematics. And this is a kid who was doing fun, she was doing rudimentary algebra when she was eight. And we told her that we, she had to be, we had to have her assessed because we just didn't know what was going on. And that's when we realized that she was clinically depressed. The other thing I should say is that, she had very bad menstrual cramps.

1:21:59And so a lot of one treatment for bad menstrual cramps is to put girls on birth control pills because it evens out the hormonal fluctuations of the month and it does actually improve menstrual cramps. But it's pretty well known now. It wasn't so much known then that there is somewhere between a 40 and 70 % increase in the likelihood of major depressive episode in young women who use birth control pills. If it's a combination estrogen progesterone pill, it's more like 40%. If it's a progesterone only pill, which a lot of young women take because it has fewer side effects, you have a 70 % increase in a major depressive episode.

1:22:51And this is in the first study that I read about this was in a million women. And when I read that study, I remember exactly where it was, it was like a flesh bone moment. I read the study, I called her pediatrician, my daughter's pediatrician and I said, she's coming off pill today, today. So tell me if there's anything, are there any side effects or can we just stop it? And he's like, well, in my opinion, and I'm like, I don't give a shit about your opinion. I just read a study that is like, you know, it's a large scale epidemiological study of a million women today. She's coming off today. And this was off to old before she was experiencing depression.

1:23:32This was after it was, it was maybe a year after she was diagnosed. Much later, I read, I was reading a book by Naomi Orreska, the historian of science and she wrote a book called Why Trust Science. And it's a wonderful book. But in the book she talks about, she gives examples of places, a phenomena where the public didn't trust science and they should have. And this is one of them. But apparently it's been known for a really long time. And I just want to point out that estrogen, progesterone, testosterone evolved as metabolic regulators. I'm highlighting it because in a lot of, because in a culture that separates mental from physical, we don't think about the role of metabolism in vision or in even in mood.

1:24:32That's a really recent thing. In our lab, one of the things we study now is the role of metabolism in really basic, really, really basic psychological phenomena, like just as a fundamental building block of your mind, basically. So your daughter exhibits her symptoms. I'm really curious to hear what conventional medicine at that point told you you should do it with the daughter in that situation at that time. versus what you did. You have this wealth of information. You have a medical background. Yeah, so I should say this was, you know, this was some years ago, right? So currently there is a kind of a revolution going on where there's actually something called metabolic psychiatry now.

1:25:21Back when this was, you know, when I was reading about this, it sounded crazy. When I saw what my daughter was, which that she was suffering, like really suffering, it's really her for me to talk about this because as I'm talking to you about this, I'm thinking, I just, I wish that I, you know, I wish that I had figured this out earlier. But, but anyways, what we did was, I, we found, I found every possible route that I could think of to target her body budget. So basically target her metabolism. And then we, we, we basically came up with a, a daily routine, which she participated in making. To see if we could.

1:26:13Put her on a different trajectory, you know, and that involved everything from getting off social media. Because, because first of all, she was using like a lot of kids do, she was using her screens late at night. And at that point, and again, this was something I just happened upon, right? But it actually at an NCI me at a National Cancer Institute meeting. You know, we have retinal ganglion cells. We have cells in our retina that regulate circadian rhythm. And they're sensitive to light at the wavelengths that comes from your screen, from a screen. So if you look at those screens at night, your brain thinks it's daytime, like your circadian rhythm, you give yourself a circadian rhythm disorder, basically, and it will be harder to get into a regular sleep cycle.

1:27:14And you need that regular sleep cycle in order for toxins to clear and in order to consolidate what you've learned during the day so that you can remember it later. And there are a whole bunch of restorative things happen during deep sleep that you really need. And if you can't get enough deep sleep, that will make your budgeting problems worse, basically. So we targeted her, we got her off social media. Well, first of all, off screens after, you know, like seven o 'clock, eight o 'clock at night, no screens. Off social media to reduce social uncertainty, social stress. I got up with her at 5 .30 every morning, made her breakfast, sat with her while she ate breakfast.

1:27:57So made sure that she was eating nutritious food, not pseudo food, like, you know, pop darts and shit like that. We had to start her like exercising again. So she started to walk long distances. We started doing Pilates, like not Pilates on a map, but like Pilates with a reformer that would make anybody cry, you know. Why exercise as it relates to this budget and the metabolic functions? Because exercise basically exercise throws your, it's like your brain, it's like you're throwing yourself out of metabolic balance so that the brain can learn to get it back in. You're basically improving the resilience of your physical systems is basically the way to.

1:28:50So she's not, you know, she needed something more like interval training, which is what these Pilates classes were, as opposed to, you know, practicing to play tennis or whatever, something that would, would, where she, you know, after a certain period of time, she'd be dysregulated metabolically and then she'd drink water and, you know, eat something helpful. And, and then her system basically was learning to become more flexible. Again, not so stuck. So again, it was like dosing with prediction error or like showing the, providing the brain with opportunity to learn that it was wrong. And then omega three, so we should, we took, I can't remember the exact dose, but I, I dosed it out, high omega three's low omega sixes.

1:29:44With her doctor's permission, we also used a baby aspirin once a day with on a full stomach to reduce systemic inflammation. Before bed, I mean, before bed, we had always done, like a cuddle, you know, like when she was little, we would read a story or whatever. And in her early adolescent years, you know, she rejected that. And then we brought it back. So an hour before bed, we would either me or her dad, sometimes all three of us, we would read a book together or, you know, he would read a book to us or we would, I, she, we would sit and talk and she would tell me, you know, all the things that were happening at school that she could remember and sometimes they were really horrible.

1:30:32And I just had to empathize. That was really hard for me because I just wanted to fix it. I just wanted to fix it. And it was really, I had to really draw on my own, um, experience as a therapist to just sit with the distress and empathize. Rather than say, do this, do this, do this, do this, it took me a long time to learn that. And I'm still sometimes struggling with that. Why was that important? Because then she feels heard. And, and she feels understood. And when you, it took me a long time to learn this. When she, when she would tell me that, you know, someone had done something terribly mean, if I did anything other than empathize, she would feel like I hadn't heard her.

1:31:23And social support is a major, I mean, we are the caretakers of each other's nervous systems. Humans are social animals. It's hard to believe, I think, in a culture like ours, where we're so individualistic, right? And it seems like a political statement or something. It doesn't really matter what your political views are. We evolve the way we evolve, man. We are social animals. We affect each other metabolically. We can add savings and we can add taxes. And, you know, the best thing for a human nervous system is another human. The worst thing for a human nervous system is another human. The wrong one.

1:32:07There are so many experiments showing such, I mean, I just saw a set of experiments from one of my former postdocs that it was just amazing. Where she looked at glucose metabolism in mothers and babies. And I think she also did it in dating partners, if I'm not mistaken. And she looked at them alone. And then together, like, alone during a task and then together during a task. And mothers and babies that are attached well, they're actually, their glucose metabolism is more efficient, like literally more efficient. And I believe she also showed this with dating partners too. There are these studies, these old studies showing that, it's less calorically demanding to walk up a hill with a backpack, if you're with a friend, then with a stranger.

1:33:04And I mean, there's all these really batshit crazy findings. But if you realize that humans are literally affecting each other on a physical basis, whether they're aware of it or not, whether they intended it or not, it's completely irrelevant. Or it's unnecessary, I would say, to have that effect, to have the effects be there. Then it starts to, you start to make sense. You know, like the idea that, and again, meta -analysis show that you will live years longer, years on average, years longer, if you are, if you have a social life filled with people who you trust and who trust you. So is that why you got the family around just before bed?

1:33:50Because it was regulating how nervous system had, her body. Yeah, sometimes she, sometimes she still says this to me, actually, she'll say, can you just be my friend for a minute and not my mother? That'll be like, yes, I can. And then I actually have to do it, which is sometimes hard. Or I will say to her, this is for parents. Anybody who has an adolescent or an adult child, this is, this is like one of my, I don't know how I came up with this, but it's like golden, right? I say to her, can I, I'm having a mother moment where I feel the need to nag you about something? And if I can just nag you for a minute about it, I won't need to tell you again.

1:34:35So I'm basically asking her permission. Can I tell you this thing, which I really want to tell you? And I know you don't want to hear it, but you would be being doing me a real kindness. If you would just listen to me for a minute and I know it's me, it's all me, it's not you, it's all on me, this is me. But I just, I would be better if you could just let me. And most of the time she says, you know, with great forbearance, right? Like, sure, mama, go ahead. Sometimes she says, not today. And then I actually have to listen, you know? No, certainly. So yeah, but there were probably other things I'm not thinking of right now.

1:35:16I've written them all down because a lot of people have asked me this question. And what I like to say is, this is, I'm not a physician, this, I'm not a psychiatrist, this is not a recommendation or recipe for your children. I'm just telling you what I did as a scientist. And you wrote down what you did. You still have a copy of that. So I can link it below for anyone that does want to read what you did. Yes, but it's again, it's, I, It's what you did for your daughter at that time. Yeah, just as a person who had read the literature, it's not, it's not, it's not medical advice. It's, I'm really strongly.

1:35:55And also I should say, you can't force your adolescent to do anything. You can't even force your kids really to do anything unless you threaten them with physical harm. They have to make that choice themselves, right? And did she recover? Yes, she did. And I think one of the reasons why she is good now, it's not that she never has challenges with her mood, but she understands them in physical terms. She doesn't understand her mood as being a psychological problem. She understands it as a symptom or a barometer of her body budget. This is something I learned from your work while I was researching, which was really, really helpful to me.

1:36:43And it's pretty much exactly what you just said, which is sometimes I'm in a not so good mood. And if I'm not conscious about that, then the bad mood can wreak havoc, right? It can, I can be short with people or whatever. And when I was reading your work and thinking about bad or good moods through the context of this body budget, it makes you pause for a second and go, what am I missing? And it makes you very conscious of what you then do. It almost makes you suddenly take hold of the wheel and go, okay, so there's a problem here. It's a physical problem. I didn't get sleep last night. I haven't eaten whatever it might be.

1:37:16Be really aware of what this makes you do or feel, think. And hit and the actions you need to take are maybe cancel everything you're planning today. Go back to bed. Well, but I think that you just put your finger on the really important thing. It's that it changes what you do next. Yeah. And that changes the trajectory of what happens. And I think this is, this is really, it's not like a magic cure. But it, and again, you know, but when someone is, when, when you feel really distressed, you either look to the world like, what is wrong with the world or you look to yourself? What is wrong with me?

1:37:54And really it could be, maybe there is something wrong with the world. Maybe there is something wrong with you. But most likely it's something, there's a body budgeting problem. Even if it's the case that there's something wrong with the world, you're better equipped to deal with that thing if you are managing your body budget. You really do need to design your calendar as much as you possibly can in the confines of the profession you have around that body budget. And for me, the big, big change I made two years ago, super privileged. I get that and everyone can do it. I couldn't do it when I was working at Cool Centre's, was I implemented a rule where there's no meetings before 11 o 'clock.

1:38:31And it just means for me that I never sent alarm. So I wake up when I'm fully recharged. I should have done this way sooner, but it's had such a big impact on my life. Because you can almost guarantee that it's very, very rare for me to be under -slut, although it happens because I have to travel in stuff a lot. But that really had a profound impact on my life. Yeah, and I think you know. And as a leader in a zone. Exactly. And I think honestly, if leaders take this seriously, then the hope is that there'll be some realization that this is also important for everybody. And we have a society that is structured in a particular way, but there's no requirement that it's structured in this way.

1:39:19There's, you know, the biggest predictor of work productivity after, you know, is sleep and hydration. And after you take away sleep and hydration, I think, exercise is up there too. You know, some of us have more choices than others, right? But it's important, I think, for people who are, people who are CEOs, who are, who are leaders, who are business leaders to understand that. There's, there are good business regions. There are good economic reasons to take this shit seriously. Am I right in thinking that alcohol impacts your body budget? And it, therefore, makes it harder for you to exhibit all the other behaviors and expend energy in other areas.

1:40:09And also, therefore, it increases the probability that you'll be depressed.

1:40:17So, I should say that I am not an expert in the metabolism of alcohol. So, I'm going to extrapolate based on what I do know. And what I would say there is that sometimes people will drink alcohol like they will eat chocolate or, you know, they're doing it for the taste or for the experience of, you know, the ambiance and experience of it, right? But a lot of people end up using alcohol. They might start that way or they might start because they're doing something with friends, but then they realize that it has a mood, it affects their mood. Anything which affects your mood, like people talk a lot about emotion regulation, but it's actually mood regulation.

1:41:00Again, you know, your mood is this, these simple feelings that are with you all the time. You know, your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending signals back to your brain, which it out of which it makes mood. So, mood is a property of consciousness. It's with you always. Sometimes in moments you will make sense of the signals and the mood that goes with it in terms of the outside world, and that's when you experience emotion, right? Where your actions are relating the two together in terms of your mood. But a lot of the time we don't, we just experience mood as a property of consciousness, you know, this is a delicious drink.

1:41:48That guy is an asshole. You're very trustworthy. The mood is embedded in the perception of the world. And when people is just like actually sometimes, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, it's have this effect also. They are, they're mood altering, meaning they're, they are, if they're manipulating your mood, they are manipulating your metabolism.

1:42:12And when people get addicted, they often get addicted because they are regulating their mood, they're attempting to reduce their suffering. The problem with, or a problem, I shouldn't say that problem because I don't know exactly how mood, exactly how alcohol affects metabolism. My expectation is it's not just one, it's not just in one way. And also, I do know there are context effects actually, so you can drink exactly the same amount of alcohol and it can have different effects in different contexts. That totally blew my mind when I saw that research. So I'm thinking it's not a simple relationship, but one thing I do know is that your predictions become sloppier and you don't take in prediction error.

1:43:04You don't learn. You won't, you won't update any, you know, so there, and so in your behaviors are not necessarily well calibrated to the situation that you're in, which can have all kinds of downstream difficult problem. You know, you can make things in the downstream worse for yourself and make it harder to do budgeting later. Isn't it incredibly annoying when you're in a rush to leave your house, but you can't find your phone or your wallet? Now, because of Apple, if you have an iPhone, you can usually track it using Find My. But until recently, the same hasn't been possible if you've lost your wallet.

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1:44:26So if you're looking for an upgrade, head to extra .com and use code Stephen for an additional 10 % off their spring sale, which ends on May 19th. Head over there now and check it out. And you also get free shipping and a 100 -day trial. That's extra .com with code Stephen. I wanted to ask you about something I heard you say. And I've actually had other guests in my podcast set. And I wasn't ever sure if it was true until I heard you say it. Which is that we can change our emotions by smiling. Because if the brain is predicting, then presumably if I do a big smile, I go, yes! Then the brain is going to predict good feelings and going to cause good feelings, et cetera, et cetera.

1:45:11Going to cause me to feel nice about myself. Well, yes and no. I think people smile when they're not happy too. People smile when they're angry. People smile when they're plotting the demise of their enemy. People smile for all kind. People smile when they're afraid. But can I make myself happier technically by smiling? The meta -analytic evidence suggests that there is a slight effect. That there's a small... Yeah, yeah, crinkle your if to crinkle. There you go. It's like putting a pencil between your teeth. Are you in a gear? Now smile. Now crinkle. Okay. So it's like that. And what I would say is it's a minuscule effect size.

1:46:02Like it's very small. I do feel happier. Do you? Yeah. But that's because I made you do something silly maybe. Maybe. Okay. But anyways, the point being that it's overblown as an effect. I think there's a small... My right collection is that the last man analysis I read was that there was a small effect. But a small effect means it doesn't work for everyone and it doesn't work always. It's just really, really a very, very small effect. You must have a perspective on ADHD, which has become a huge topic of conversation in society. I was diagnosed with ADHD. I don't necessarily take it to mean anything because I've seen so many variations of ADHD in my friends.

1:46:45But there's been this big rise of ADHD. And linked to the work that you've done on the brain being a predictive tool. So my general response is the following that people... There's a rise in people self -diagnosing and in using diagnosis as an explanation for behavior or for the why people experience what they experience or whatever. Diagnoses are not explanations of anything. They're descriptions. They don't explain anything. And treat a diagnosis like it's an explanation is a form of essentializing, which is not a good thing. It means that you're assuming that there's some kind of underlying, unchanging essence, which is responsible for...

1:47:39In fact, there is something called psychological essentialism where you don't even know what the essence is. You just assume it's there and that it's the cause of all these symptoms. But a diagnosis is just a description of symptoms. And diagnoses are mostly useful for billing hours of treatment. They're not optimized for pockets describing pockets of behavior that are, you know, or collections of behavior that tend to go together. Because people sometimes think that serotonin endopaminate reason why someone has ADHD. I say one of the theories that I've... So there are multiple serotonin receptors.

1:48:19There are multiple dopamine receptors. They don't all do the same thing. Serotonin doesn't do one thing. Dopamine doesn't do one thing. Does different things in different places of the body and the brain, depending on what the receptors are. And also, every resource of resilience and every symptom of difficulty has a context to it. There are requirements the way our society is structured. There are requirements for sitting and paying attention to something for long periods of time. And that requirement is hidden in the background. It's there so frequently that we forget that that's the conditional.

1:49:04That's the condition upon which diagnoses are made. So, whatever, first of all, ADHD is not one set of symptoms. It's a variety. It's like, it's a, you know, there's a lot of variation in the way that... You can have different symptom profiles and have the same diagnosis. Because it's just descriptive and there are lots of symptoms. Some of those symptoms also occur in... They overlap with other syndromes, other diagnostic clusters. But the point is that they all... When you diagnose someone, it makes it sound like that's a property of that person. Yeah. It's not. It's a property of a person in the context that they're in.

1:49:50And social expectation by... by many respects, like, can he pay attention in school? Well, right. And the way that school is organized is, you know, you sit for long periods of time. Well, it may be that there are other circumstances in which not holding your attention on one thing for a long period of time could be advantageous. So, my point is that there are very few things that are just categorically good or categorically bad. There's always a hidden condition. There's always a hidden context. And so, I think it's really important to foreground that context. You're not broken. You're just...

1:50:31Your suitability to a certain context has been deemed to be... And, like, doesn't fit. It's not productive for that context. And that may sound like weasel words, or it may sound... You know, but it's not. Because... Because it's important that competencies are by context. And again, I would say, this is not, you know, being... me being a bleeding heart, you know, progressive or whatever. I mean, I am a bleeding heart progressive, but this is not an example of that. This is an example of me being pragmatic. You can regulate each other, something you talked about, Alira, which I found really, really interesting.

1:51:08I was really about a study where of 25 ,000 people, and they found that people having a heart attack were 14 % more likely to survive if they were married. But the other thing that I found interesting is that we can... We regulate each other with words. I think you did a study on assessing the power of words to facilitate emotion. You were co -authored as a study you co -authored. Well, we've studied the power of words in many contexts, including words as invitations to make sense of, you know, so if an instance of emotion is you making meaning of what is going on inside your body in relation to the world, then you can...

1:51:52Every time you use an emotion word, you invite people to make meaning in that way. So you've proven then that some words can calm us down? Well, yes, but I wouldn't say I've proven anything. Scientists don't... Shown demonstrated. Yeah, demonstrated in a context, right? Like, you know, scientists don't like the F word, the fat... Oh, I like the other F word, but the fact, fact. That's a tough one because it means something that holds under all circumstances in all contexts and that's very rarely the case. So, but yes, we have. So, and I mean, so if you've done it probably a million times, you text things to people.

1:52:34Do you not? Yeah. Yeah. And when you text a couple of words to your partner or your friend, you can change their heart rate. You change their breathing rate. You can change all kinds of chemicals, all kinds of protein synthesis, just with a couple of words. Again, you know, we live in a... We, you know, free speech is important. Freedoms are important, but freedoms come with responsibilities. Like it or not, we regulate each other's nervous systems in all kinds of ways, including with words. And... It's a better or for less. For better or for worse. Exactly. And so... You really made me think differently about stress as well, generally, because if I think about my life through the lens of this metabolic budget and stress is a burden to this budget, then if I don't limit my stress, I'm much more likely to go over budget.

1:53:32And if I go over budget, my immune system might be the thing that I cut the cost of or something else. Right. I mean, I mean, there's good stress. You can't be without stress. That would mean you'd be without effort. So, you know, sometimes scientists will talk about good stress and bad stress, which really just means stress that is planned and where you replenish what you spend and stress that is pernicious and you don't. Clontic stress, that... Clontic stress, or, you know, so what I would say is just, you know, if you're in a stressful meeting, a meeting where it's affecting your mood, that means if there's been some metabolic impact, take into account what that means.

1:54:17With all that you know about the brain, I wondered if you... If it's changed your view at all on religion and God and spirituality. And if there is a higher power at all, the brain is such a wonderfully complex, beautiful thing. You know, it's the objective of observing 2025 looks at a brain because this is fantastic. Many people then conclude that there must be a creator of that brain. But also we've talked so much today about meaning and the point of it all. So everything you've learnt about the brain and neuroscience and psychology, has it made you believe in a God? No. Has it made you more atheist or agnostic?

1:54:54I'm pretty firmly an atheist.

1:55:00I don't think that the wondrous complexity of nature or the brain or the nervous system requires a designer. And that logic doesn't make sense to me. So this is obviously a terrible leap. But do you therefore think that there's no inherent meaning to life outside of, you know, the like reproduction and... I'm just reading for the second time this book. It's called Open Socrates. Okay. And it's a really wonderful book. And I've learned a lot about secratic philosophy that I didn't know. And one of the things that Socrates thought was important was asking this question of what is meaning and that you shouldn't be asking this question in 15 -minute increments.

1:55:52You should be really asking this question about the expanse of your life. And so I think if anything, being a scientist who studies how a brain in in constant conversation with a body and the other brains and bodies in our world and even the physical nature of our world, how that creates lots of different kinds of minds, including our very Western mind, that makes me think more about the importance of philosophy, actually, because I think philosophy is asking the same kinds of questions that religious belief tries to answer. And for me, that's a better path. I think it's a more comfortable path.

1:56:44I've often been asking questions like this. My whole life, actually, so it makes me feel more like what's the point? Like what is the ultimate point? I think the answer for me, the ultimate point, is to leave the world a little better than I found it. It's like the Johnny Apple seed, you know, philosophy. You know, like as a scientist, scientists often, you know, a lot of us, we don't do what we do for money. Money is not bad, but we don't do what we do for money. We do it for other motivations, right, to know, to be curious, to try to discover things. And at some point, we start to think about, well, what's your legacy, right?

1:57:29Most of us are not Darwin. We're not William James. We're not, you know, Heisenberg. We're not, you know, most of us are not those people. So what's your legacy? And in the end, I realized that I've published a lot of peer review papers. When people introduce me, you know, they give some kind of like, you know, about my citation, you know, people's whatever. Dr. Lisa is one of the most influential figures in the field of emotion, neuroscience and the nature of the brain. She is among the top 0 .1 % cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research and psychology neuroscience. Yeah, that's all nice, super nice.

1:58:12But actually, my legacy is really the people who I've trained, the minds that I've had the opportunity to engage with. And if I were going to be being counting, I might be being counting the number of laboratories that now exist, that didn't exist before. So, I'm not sure, but I'm sure, several generations of scientists who I trained, or who, you know, who trained me, I mean, a long way. So that's my legacy in some ways. Really? It's the people. It's the people. And the ideas, and I would like to think just to actually to just wrap up to where we started. You know, when I, when I used to do a lot of classroom teaching, I, I would feel like, when I told myself, if I can change the trajectory, the outcomes of just one person in this class, just one, then I will have done my job.

1:59:18You know, and I kind of feel that way a little bit, sort of the same about the public, the public face of what I'm doing, right? The public, uh, education, public science education. If I can help, if something that I've learned or something I've communicated can help somebody else live a more intentional life of agents with agency where they are choosing and they're impacting their loved ones or their children, then, then that's my, then I've done my job. That's my legacy. And the hard thing about that kind of a legacy, a legacy of ideas impacting people's lives is that you don't ever know what your impact is.

2:00:18But that's part of the deal.

2:00:23We have a close -in tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question is, how to live a life without attaining anything. I have some context on this person. They are a black bell, shawl -ling monk. So they talk a lot about identity. Sure, and they, and living without, um, incumbrances and attachments and so on, right? So it's, it sounds like a very Buddhist question. Yeah, it's the problem is that I think even a Buddhist attains something. They attain enlightenment. So they don't have attachments necessarily.

2:01:00They don't have wealth. They don't have power. But they attain something. They attain enlightenment. They attain tranquility. How about then? How to live life without your identity.

2:01:15Making you unhappy. Well, I think it's important to remember that you don't really have an identity that is separate from the moment that you're in. It's not like there's an essence to you. And what I would say is that every, everything you experience, everything you do is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present. That means to change who you are, you can change what you remember or how you predict or you can change the sensory present. You can change the sensory present by literally getting up and moving somewhere else, like going for a walk or or you can change the sensory present by what you pay attention to.

2:02:06Mindfulness, for example, right? You there are, there are some sensory signals that are front and center in your attention and there are some that are in the background lurking. For example, you can right now you're not paying attention to some sensory signals, but the minute that I say them, point them out, you will be like the pressure of the chair against your back and your legs. Now they're in the forefront of your attention because I just mentioned them. So what I would say is that there is no essence to who you are. You are what you do. In the moment you are what you do and you can change what you do.

2:02:48You can change what you experience, the consequence of the lived experience, which is the consequence of what you do by what you remember and what the context is. So that's my answer. If you always remember that you will never be attached. You will never crave or strive to have things and all of these artificial things which prop up the illusion that you have an essence to you that is unchanging across situations. Yeah. We are very quick to fall into the trap of thinking we are what we did. And that's how much prefer I am what I do because that means that I have agency to make a different decision in the moment irrespective of what I did in the past.

2:03:38But that's the trap we fall into. In 10 minutes time I will be downstairs and I will be back into the trap of thinking that I am Stephen Barlett who did this thing for 32 years or did. Lisa, thank you. Thank you so much for everything that you do. I have changed my mind in a really profound way and that's quite hard because I sit here quite a lot. So I have lots of conversations about the brain and about lots of new studies that have come out, etc., etc. But you have completely changed my mind and made me think from in a completely different way which I am really grateful for. So thank you so much because that's a gift and that's not a gift that I always get doing this job.

2:04:16But it really is a gift and it's one that I think will help me to live a better life ultimately. But hopefully also for everybody that's listening and thank you for stepping into the public communication side of your life because I was going to say it's someone that knows what you know and that has done the work that you've done. It is so important to the extent that I almost consider it to be like a really critical responsibility because there's people like us that sit on these podcasts who aren't in the laboratory that are getting our information from social media TikTok or any odd person that says anything and it's really really important that people like you step out more and share what you know.

2:04:56And thank you so much for writing these books because they are absolutely brilliant. And just like you've changed my mind today, I think these books will change a lot of people's lives. I highly recommend this book, How Emotions Are Made. I'm going to link it below the secret life of the brain and also for something a little bit shorter but equally accessible. This book here seven and a half lessons about the brain. Thank you so much. We're done. Thank you so much. I'm going to let you into a little bit of a secret. You're probably going to think me and my team are a little bit weird but I can still remember to this day when Jumima from my team posted on Slack that she changed the scent in this studio and right after she posted it the entire office clapped in our Slack channel and this might sound crazy but at the Diary of ASEO this is the type of 1 % improvement we make on our show and that is why the show is the way it is.

2:05:41By understanding the power of compounding 1 % you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life. It isn't about drastic transformations or quick wins. It's about the small, consistent actions that have a lasting change in your outcomes. So two years ago we started the process of creating this beautiful diary and it's truly beautiful. Inside there's lots of pictures, lots of inspiration and motivation as well, some interact developments and the purpose of this diary is to help you identify, stay focused on, develop consistency with the 1 % that will ultimately change your life. So if you want one for yourself or for a friend or for a colleague or for your team then head to the diary .com right now.

2:06:22I'll link it below. This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53 % of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to this show. So could I ask you for a favor? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guess that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do.

2:06:50Thank you so much.

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