Memory/Story Editing

Like any story that relates at all to changing memories or racing memories, they will name drop that film in the lead. Well, because it was such an intriguing idea that you could, uh you could alter or completely remove a memory that had been dogging you your entire life. Yeah,

it's true. But I you know, I feel like there have been enough stories about like changing memories and and and and what memories actually are, that we don't need that film as the reference point anymore for an actual story about the science of memory and the science of altering memory. I always feel like a little bit insulted. You know. It's like someone's like, hey, so if you've seen let me tell you about space. You've seen Star Wars, right, Like, you don't have to start with Star wars. We live

in a the world. We're surrounded by space, alright, Alright, so I think, and maybe I'm projecting my own feelings on here, is that the problem is that the spotless mind idea is it's erroneous. And it takes this idea that you could like return your mind to some pristine platonic state, right where everything is completely new and fresh. But that is not the case. Our minds are the cages that we have. But it turns out that we

can actually tame them to a certain degree. We can't erase, we can't make them spotless, but we can make them a little bit more manageable. The problem is just just this inherent misunderstanding of what memory is in the first place. And I was looking at this survey that was published in two thousand eleven by PLS so one found that almost two thirds of Americans believe that memory works like a video camera and that it's like we're recording events so we can review them later. Yeah, it's not so

at all. And we've we've discussed the science of memory um a good bit in previous episodes. Off to make sure I throw some of those back up on the website and on the social media pages around the time this episode publishes. But indeed, we've talked before about the

seven Sins of memory. Uh. These of course were brought to mind by Daniel Shackter, the former chair of Harvard University Psychology Psychology Department and author of the book The Seven Sins of Memories Cohen How the Mind forgets and remembers, and he mentions, uh, these seven just seven ways that all our memories are uh untrustworthy at the very least. For instance, there's transience, So that's the weakening or loss

of memory over time. What you have for lunch eight years ago today, the side of sweet potatoes there human sprinkling on top. Okay, well that was a really good sandwich apparently, so that was stuck with you. But for the most part, these memories just fade over time. It's just how it works. And then there's absent mindedness. Uh so this involves attention in memory. We're just not paying attention to what's going on around it, so we're not

getting all the data. There's blocking, that's the failed attempt to recall tidbits of memory a face, a name, Etceterates on the tip of my tongue. But I can't remember what it is. Uh. There's misattribution. This is when we recall an authentic memory, but then aspects of it are misattributed. And this includes scenarios such as incorrect incorrect time or place identity, misattribution, or confusion over the originator of an idea.

We've all had those conversations where you're telling a story about something that you think happened to you and it turns out it's happening to the person you you're you're speaking to, or you have some very pivotal detail of the story completely backwards, like oh, that trip that wasn't a trip I took with this person, was a trip I took with this person. It wasn't this past girlfriend, it was this past girlfriend, or you know, whatever the

scenario might be. And then there's suggestibility. Our minds are and our memories entirely susceptible yes to to suggestions. So you were to say it enough times, I might either actually get a astronomy sandwich for lunch or falsely remember that I had one. There's bias, uh, and that you see this all the time in people's memories of crimes.

If they have a particular bias in mind regarding uh uh, say, the racial profiling of suspects, then that's going to have an influence on how they remember the crime that occurred. And then there's persistence, and that's the unwanted recall of information that's disturbing and that actually ties in a lot with what we're gonna talk about in this episode. So there are all these ways that our memory is pretty

much jack from the get go. And to your your point, so many people think it's just all a bunch of video information and stored in her head, which which couldn't be further from the truth. Yeah, there's that great cognitive psychology experiment that was done by Daniel Simon's and Christopher Chebery's that showed how selective attention works. You probably heard about this. There's a video of people with white shirt song and a video of people with black shirt song

and they were playing I think basketball or something like. Yeah, I watched it, but I really wasn't paying that much attention. Okay, well then you if you were, if you were doing it as as they instructed, you were probably looking at the white shirted team, right. You were told to really figure out how many passes were made between the members of this white shirted team and you probably, as participants did, did not notice the gorilla walking through the clutch of

white shirted and black short players. So this is a good example of attention and selective attention and memory. Yeah, there are a number of these type of pranks that you see carried out and that you can find them on YouTube once where they'll take say an individual will be sort of in the background for a person and then they'll like switch out the person playing that part to see if they notice. And it's it's phenomenal how

how often people do not notice. Um. There's a British television series called The Black Mirror, which we've mentioned before, and there's an episode titled The Entire History of You, and in this near future sci fi vision of reality, most people have this little electronic device called a grain implanted uh in their brain and it basically collects constant video of their life and then you can go back and replay the video, which of course ends up having

disastrous um consequences for the characters in this particular episode. But it's it's very interesting that model because they they in this episode they create a sci fi technological version of memory that is in keeping with the with the way most people think memory is right, and in fact it's not. As you said, there are seven sins of memory.

And really, if you think about it, we are the magicians of memory because we have misdirection and misp misperception, and then we try to piece together this pattern that makes sense to us, and boom, you have this manufactured reality that comes out on a plate for you. Um. And the thing is is that we continue to take this memory out and look at it all the time. In fact, every time you take out a memory, you

change it a bit. Yes, yeah, I've we mentioned before that don't think of your memory as a little stone sculpture that you keep in a drawer. It's a sculpture made out of clay. Every time you take it out, you're jabbing it, you're changing it. You're bringing new information, new interpretation into that memory. And then you put it back. And so so every time you draw it out, you're you're changing, you're getting it a little bit further removed

from the actual reality. And here's the thing. These memories are the foundation of the story of who you are, right, and so this is where emotional health and something called story editing comes in because there's this idea that you can change your memory and maybe even alter your future. And we'll get more into that, but before we do, I want to discuss a little bit about why we take these memories out in the first place and sort of obsess over them. And in order to do that,

you gotta go to Papa Freud. Yeah, and it's great because, in classic Freud's style, he goes right to your childhood, right, oh yeah, yeah. In fact, um, in beyond the pleasure principle, Freud actually documents his grandson's particular habit of taking his toys and hiding them or throwing them away. And when he does that, um, his grandson says forth, meaning gone. And then he watches his grandson um taking them back

and saying, dah, they're here. So, in this one particular instance and beyond the pleasure principle, his grandson has like I think, it's just like a real with a string tied to it, and he's in his crib and over and over again he does the dog game. He throws that spool away and then he reels it back in.

And so what Freud says is that the kid is actually um marking a cultural achievement here because the kid is equating this and just stay with me on this, uh that this fort doab has gone and back with his mom and his mom leaving him but coming back and saying that he's getting far more pleasure from the daw part the coming back part, and so he's mastering control over his emotions at his mother sometimes disappearing or

having to leave the room. And this idea that that you know, your your main caregiver might not come back or come back, that's that's pretty fascinating uh interpretation, and especially since the father of a nearly two year old who's really into that the whole casting of objects and then also playing hide and go seek with like a stuffed cat and that we have in the house. It really loves to be who go, Where's where's fat cat?

Where's fat cat go? Oh? Well, fat cats under the slide and then it's you know, tremendously um entertaining to him defined the cat that was barely hidden. Yeah, So this is a huge lesson for humans that life is ephemeral.

Things come, things go, people come, and people go, And this really ties into the idea of repetition compulsion and mastery, and maybe, just maybe that's why we continue to take out, in particular traumatic memories bother some memories, and we look at them and examine them over and over again, each time hoping to get a better understanding. But the problem is that, especially according to Freud, those memories are unconscious.

They are buried and they are hidden, and so you just kind of get these little crumbs of your unconscious. But then you have someone by the name of Timothy D. Wilson, this is a University of Virginia psychologists, who says this unconscious or unconscious as he calls it, is off limits to us. So it's really only through conscious thoughts that

we can change the mechanisms of the unconscious world for us. Mm. So he has this idea of, for instance, if you establish regular acts of kindness, that you could tease out progressive changes in behavior as determined by your unconscious. So now we're talking about changing your behavior through your story

of yourself. Yes, yes, yeah, And this is what this is where everything really gets interesting here, because essentially we are getting into that eternal sunshine of the spotless mind territory. But instead of changing your memories through the use of lasers or or a little bit of a little tiny electronic device that goes in your brain as in Black Mirror.

It's about thinking about it is that I'm using your actual mental architecture as it exists, your actual mental machinery, uh, that you have in your head, and using it to alter memory, using the weakness of memory as a strength. Really yeah, and it's really effective, as we will discuss UM.

Wilson in his two thousand eleven book Redirect, The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, looks at why programs like Scared Straight, you know, the taking the at risk youth to prisons and trying to scare them straight, why those sort of programs fail, and why story editing just having those kids change their story, their narrative maybe a far

more effective strategy. Yeah. Yeah, I've been reading a little bit about this, uh to it in regards to children, like the dangers of labeling um, particularly reading an article on biting and about how just the one thing they always advises and dealing with biting, which which is a pretty common occurrence with with children, especially as their acquiring language and learning how to better express themselves, uh than

by simply you know, fighting into something is that. But there's there's always this danger of referring to them as a bitter, because then that comes their story and they can interpret interpret that, even at a very young age, and they say, oh, I'm a buyer, So I bite in the same way that one might think, oh, well I'm you know, I'm destined to wind up in a in a prison, so I guess I will. This is the this is what I am. I guess that's what

I'm going to be. Well, you know that's interesting because this is that is exactly at This is this idea that you you put this narrative in place and then you follow it to the letter and you become it. And Wilson first discovered this power of story editing in the eighties when he found that struggling students had fallen for the same old narrative, I'm bad at school, which was driving this sort of self defeating cycle. And he gave forties students, these students who were not doing well

in school a new narrative, which was everyone fails at first. Okay, so that recast the whole idea, Wait, what I may not be bad at school? Everyone fails at first. This is a thing. So suddenly these students are being introduced to this new idea. And he had the students read accounts from other students had who had struggled with grades and then improved. There's also videotape footage of other students who relay their tales of eventual academic success. And the

results were pretty astounding. The students who received the information, compared to those who did not A were significantly less apt to leave college by the end of their sophomore year. Be they had a significantly greater increase in grade point average even one year after the study. And see they performed significantly better on sample items from the g r E or the Graduate Record Exam. And this is all from a thirty minute session, one thirty minute session which

had staying power even one year after. And this just shows you how important priming is really. And I was thinking about this University Michigan study, and this study they had students with the same abilities and perform its splinter into two groups. The first was told that men performed

better than women on math tests. The second was told that no matter what they might have heard, there was no difference and abilities among the two genders than they were given the math test, and in the first group, men outscored women by twenty points. In the second group, the one that was told no matter what they had heard, that the abilities are the same, they were outscored only

by two points. I mean, that's a huge difference. And that's just from that one priming example and indeed stressing the point of thinking for yourself and questioning authority, not questioning authority in the sense that I'm going to, you know, break a law, just because if they were questioning the established script that is handed down to us about who you are, what you are, what you're capable of achieving.

And uh, and yeah, there's just something almost endlessly powerful about being able to to sort of break free of those chains. Yeah. I mean if you think about it, like in in Um some of your most um, how shows it the delicate situations in life where you were really struggling with someone or something, if someone came and gave you as script or just even this this idea, this other narrative of hey, another perception, how could that

have changed your life? That's how powerful this is. Now another area that this becomes important again you mentioned earlier how arguably a lot of the stuff is going on into some subconscious level. There's there's say a bad memory, scarring memory, traumatic memory, even that is keeps popping up again and again, this persistent memory, and it's it's kind of like a Rubic's cube, but not a Rubics cube that you ever sit down and say, all right, I'm

gonna sit down and solve this thing. But it's one that's just always sitting on your desk or is in the drawer that you're always opening, and it's there. It's it's it's seemingly unsolvable and uh, and you may tinker with it for a minute and then put it back. You're right, So your mind is tinkering with it mostly the unconscious level, but every once in a while it surfaces. Can you become aware of this thing that's bothering you? So it just this this persistent um a bit of

annoyance or or even just nagging depression. Anytime when we we cover a topic like this, always think back to Alan Robe grulay novel Jealousy, and it's a it's an experimental novel. Um. I don't recommend picking up and reading it unless you know what you're getting into. Just style

wise because it's a it's a little unorthodox. But the entire novel is this this man who owns a banana plantation, and he's looking through Venetian blinds observing his wife and trying to figure out if she's having an affair with the guy who runs the neighboring banana plantation. And and so it's just him poring over what he knows and how little he knows, over and over again, uh, and occasionally observing a smeared centipede on the wall and trying

to decide what he should do. And the in spoiler, the entire novel passes and he doesn't decide what he's gonna do. He's just this just this endless nagging frustration over how little he knows and now and and that's kind of what happens in these cases. We have limited amount of information. It's kind of like the cock Snowflake

that we talked about Snowflake episode. There's only so much information you may know about a given situation, and unless you actually were to go outside of that bubble of knowledge, um, you're never going to solve it. So so again, these these problems, these memories, these uh, they just exist there in the in the peripheries, and and it's only through actually tackling them that we can alter them into a

shape that fits in and kind of vanishes into the background. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we get back, we're going to talk about how you can actually get outside of that bubble of knowledge, change your narrative, and perhaps change your life. All Right, we're back, Julie. Have you read The Secret, The Secret, The Secret, the one with the little like the red wax seal on the cover. Uh? No, is that is that a new novel? That's like, you know,

the self help thing? Right? Oh? Is this the thing about like if you put a positive vibe out in the world, someone will give you a million dollars? I think so. I have not read it myself, so I'm not privy to the actual secret, but I understand that that's basically the secret that if you put out that

positive intergy. I think it is. But it kind of gets into the same area that you see with a lot of self help books, and that's the idea that if you if you believe in something, you can make it real, that you can you can change yourself or even change reality through the strong sense of belief and positive vibes and uh, you know, to a certain extent, there's often a lot of kind of New age hokery going on in that. But as we're going to discuss here, there's also this core of reality as it comes to

our ability to manipulate memories. And in this case, it's not necessarily believing in your narrative, it's understanding your narrative. And again, this is why that memory keeps knocking around and saying, hey, look at me, I'm flagged because I'm important. Don't quite understand what's going on here. This is troublesome for me. Right, So there's this other approach to story editing, and it is to write and then rewrite your narrative.

James Penna Baker of the University of Texas has pioneered a really expressive writing technique that helps people recover from past traumas by helping them reframe and reinterpret those events.

And there's a link that if you just search for writing and help some practical advice, you will see this prompt for writing in the idea is that for four days in a row, fifteen minutes each you take a topic that you that's been bothering you, um, that you really want to explore more about, and you just write about it, and you write really as honestly and as fully as you can. Yeah, and now what would you

write about? Some of the examples they give would be to write about something that you're thinking or worrying about too much. So maybe you're worrying about, you know, taxes coming up and to you know, settle down and figure

those out. Or uh, you're something that you're dreaming about, Say you wanted to actually do something about that nagging dream where you forgot that you signed up for a class in school until right at the end at finals, you know, or or the the you know, the wearing underwear or nothing to your math class kind of dream.

Other possibilities to write about include something you feel is affecting your life in an unhealthy way, be it something you know, like a personal habit, or something outside yourself, or something that you have been avoiding for days, weeks, or years. Tackling at fifteen minutes a day for four

days in writing form. Okay, so it's interesting because what happens is that the first time you write, you will might write the thing that's bothering you, and you might touch on the thing that is actually the thing that's bothering you, because most often when you think that there's a topic that that's really the problem, there's an underlying issue, and so returning to that issue four days in a

row it gives you more insight. You're peeling away the layers of the onion of of that actual problem, and in the process you're creating some sort of understanding for yourself. You are reframing that narrative so that it makes sense. If something bad happened to you in your past and it keeps coming up again and again, writing about it really forces you to reflect on it and not say, oh, this was justified, it should have happened. That's not what

we're saying here. It just gives you more of an understanding of why it happened, and hopefully people suffer less as a result. That's the idea. Yeah, it's um. It's interesting because anyone who's ever engaged in your writing, you see versions of this, say, in trying to create poetry, like any kind of poetry that has like a personal um, a bit of energy to it, And I feel like

most poetry of any work does. But one of my poetry professors in college I remember them saying, and this wasn't like a across the board rule, but they tended to imply that you're generally better off removing the first four lines or so of your poem, because the first four lines are your poem. Are you trying to write what you think you're going to write about, and then after you get past those first four lines, then you

start writing about what's really going on. So so the first four lines are in this case are the thing that you think you're afraid of, and then you begin to get after that into what you're actually afraid of. I think about it is the quick and dirty way to psychoanalysis. Yeah, yeah, because and I'm not going to share with you what I wrote about, because that would be like revealing a dream and everybody would get bored.

But I can tell you that when I did this, you know, it was about this one thing that I thought it was about, but really it was about social rejection. And then it became like, well, what are my relationships like in my life? How's how has this colored this? And when did this happen? And when I was a teenager, was it like this, And we've discussed about the teenage brain, about how social rejection is processes actual physical pain, and maybe these things stay with you and so on and

so forth. And those four days I got a lot out of this one tiny little thing that I thought I was bothered by, but I couldn't figure out why I kept dreaming about this thing. And that is really a very effective strategy at trying to get at your memory and trying to re contextualized your your narrative in your life and ultimately perhaps solve this Rubik's cube or create a solved Rubik's cube out of these memories and then you can put it on the shelf and it's

not gonna bother you anymore. Uh. When we were prepping for this one, we brought up the whole situation of why does why does it bother us so much when we overhear part of a conversation. We've talked about this before. Uh. The reason supposedly is that you're not getting all the information about the scenario, and your mind desperately wants to make sense of this nugget of weirdness that you just

listen in on. And that's what some of these memories are like that were our mind wants to understand why did this happen to me? Why? Why am I afraid of this? You know, these questions linger with these troubling, persistent memories. Our brains want to figure out the puzzle. They want the extra information to make it, make it lock, to make the Rubik's Cuba clear out. Uh and uh. And what these experiments are about are about taking the time to fill them out and to and to add

the necessary information to make them whold. Yeah, And that's why these why these writing pumps are are so effective. Now, Wilson says, a third approach is the do good, be good method. And it's the principle that our attitudes and our beliefs follow from our behaviors rather than precede them.

So if you want to change your narrative, then you should change some of the things that you do so that it sort of informs your unconscious Like I'm a good person and I volunteer you here, and I'm doing this, and you know, I'm trying to cultivate the following traits

in my life and everything else should follow well. And then I mean also that, in my opinion, often has the added benefit if you are if your your problem is that you're too much inside your own mental space, if you start concerning yourself with other people, then you're getting out of that that that self inflicted cage of self a bit so, and it is the cage of self really really, uh So why does this work? There? You know, there's no definitive like it's it's doing this,

it's engaging the following part of your brain. Probably this is the best guess is that it works because again, you are completing that picture for yourself. So your brain, if you if it doesn't have to red flag and memory because it understands it in the context that you've put it into the narrative and it's happy with that. It can move along and go to the next thing that you flagged in your brain. So that's the idea

of why it works. Yeah, I guess you just need to make sure you form the correct, a helpful, finished version of that memory. So like if I was concerned about the guy about a hot dog from yesterday being grumpy, like I would want to frame that in the forum of well he was he was probably having a bad day and just took that out on me, rather than I'm a bad person, and therefore hot dog vendors are mean to me. They are generally like they I don't know if you know, but they have a little slip

that they circulate among them. That says Robert Lamb. Yeah, all right. There's a great article called Revising Your Story by Kirsten Weir and uh. She says, basically, if you you doubt the story um powers here in these story prompts, you should look at this um example by researcher Daphne

being Nicktoll at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She works with parents who are at risk for child abuse, and she added some story prompting to home visits of parents with newborns, and the prompt involved getting parents to reinterpret why their babies were cranky or difficult. So parents, for instance, might blame their babies babies and say, oh,

he's just trying to provoke me. So the home visitor would ask parents if they could think of any other reasons, prompting them to attribute their baby's behavior to situational factors were talking about like maybe you didn't burp him enough, so on and so forth, giving them a different narrative and among both a control group and those who participated

in this program about of the parents physically abused their children. Now, in the group that got the story prompt giving them these these other versions of why their babies might be acting the way they were, their percentage dropped to four. That's again how powerful it is to replace one narrative with another. Very cool, Very cool. Now this flows in nicely to this idea that Carol Dweck presents, this idea of fixed versus growth mindset. You want to lay that

out for everyone here. Yeah, we've talked about Carol Dweck before. UM. She she's a psychologist who has talked about the praise paradox um. You know this idea that empty praise can give your child this for self esteem problem. You think the opposite. You think you're saying, hey, you're doing great, that your kid's gonna have tons of self esteem, But really empty praise isn't constructive and anyway, it builds up this whole idea that your kids might be doing something wrong.

Carol Dwet kind of goes a little bit further into this idea of self esteem and um success and she talked about how some people have a fixed mindset. They believe their intelligence and traits are set in stone, and this actually gets in the way of how they see the world and they move through it. And she said that these people they typically try to to look smart um and not make any mistakes, and as a result,

they don't take any risks. And now, she says, on the other hand, you have something called a growth mindset, and this means that you're willing to change your narrative and cultivate new ideas and talent through effort and instruction. So in this way, you see obviously there's a flexibility. There's this willingness to say I don't have all of

the information and I'm going to change my story. And she says this allows people to be both more resilient and vulnerable at the same time, and able to take on more challenges and just kind of, like I said, change that narrative of what you your life to be. Yeah, I think it's a it's it's a really interesting way to look at to two types of people. You know, the idea that am I looking at myself as I am now, as the finished product, you know, or or

is it an ongoing journey? And that's kind of I mean, I guess that kind of sounds a little new a g and hippy dippy, but but really, I mean, life is a journey. We continue to change. We're always changing physically, emotionally. The person we are now is not the same person we were a month ago, a year ago. And and so if you if you try and approach your life as a fixed object, yeah, you're just going to run into increasing um frustration because you're gonna come up against challenges.

And if you if you think that this is what I am and this is all I am, then a challenge is an affront to your strength. But if you see yourself as changing, as you see yourself as perpetually evolving, then a challenge is just another opportunity to grow. Yeah. She says that some people have fixed mindsets for for some of the things in their life, and then growth

mindsets for for other things. Yeah. So it's sort of one of those self checks of well, you know, my flexible in this one area of my life and inflexible in the other. But the main thing, she says is that things do not come naturally, and that thinking that they do is a male adaptive mindset of mal adaptive mindset and that we we are looking at it entirely wrong.

And I can't help but think of the stories that we consume, that we feed feed on, you know, to to inform who we are and how we fit into the world, because there are certainly we can think of any number of movies, TV shows, stories, myths in which there's an individual with a natural talent, and then how healthy is that too? To absorb that story and then compare it to our own. Well, I mean, you know, it's the matrix, the one. Are you the one? Were

you born? The one? But then that idea is very old and has been perpetuated for for for thousands the thousands of years, and I think it's ultimately why we we want a film where where we want a story where a hero has to work for it, uh, where a hero has to has to actually go through a training montage in order to defeat the villain, because that's more in keeping with life. You're gonna have to work for the things that you achieve well and not to keep going back to Star Wars and I feel like

that's been the theme today. But Luke Skywalker, right, didn't just fall on the womb, you know, with the force. He had to work at it, and Yoda made him look a fool over there in Dagoba. Yeah, he lost a hand, he did made him a lot of the characters in his hands really dark. Did they lost hands? If you go through again my daughter's encyclopedia, you will see, you know, so and so had their hand repaired. But well, yeah, there's Luke, there's Vader. Yeah, um, some dude in the

bar and the first one Lungin. Maybe I don't know. I think you just got run through that one. I'll ask my daughter, Okay, get home, all right, Well there you go. Story editing. I think this is a great episode because it really lays out a very achievable way to uh to to do something that might otherwise seem like something out of science fiction, a way to change our memories, to change the way that we interpret the past.

Um and uh and so I challenge, you know, anyone who is is dealing with with some sort of problem in their life to consider trying this out. You know, don't see it as your only solution, but but give it a go and see what what can be done. Yeah, and if you again, you want to check out that story prompt by James Penna Baker. Just google his name and then perhaps writing and health some practical advice. All right, let's call the robot over here and do a quick

bit of listener mail. All right, we have a quick one from Alex. He says, Hello, Robert and Julie. I hope your day is going well. I've been a listener of stuff to ab All your Mind for about four months. I loved your podcast so much I even went back as far as two years ago and listen to your allowing your podcast. H First off, let me thank you for being so respectful when you talk about cultures and religions.

This personally means a lot to me. I am not religious really, but I am very aware and sensitive when talking about religion or culture. Also have a topic for you. Guys are sociopath slash psychopaths biologically and neurologically doomed. Is there any hope for these unlucky people born this way? Is a sociopath psychopath the ultimate apex predator of our species. I think this would be a really interesting study, to say the least. And Uh. Alex goes on to say,

thanks for your time, keep doing what you do. Thank you, Alex That is very interesting because we talked recently about how Luis c. K has a bit in his stand up about how we're really lucky that we got out of the food chain. We are the apex predator. Now we don't have to worry about it, but you know one another, we're sort of a problem. We know that

we tend to main and kill each other. And then there's this idea psychologically, is someone who's a sociopath who has no community ties, a lack of empathy a predator in a sense. Yeah, that's it's certainly a topic we could explore. I know they were for certain there were at least a couple of really interesting studies to come out on sociopaths uh in the in the past year that that I'd looked podcast on at some point in the future. Indeed, yes, and maybe that will show up

fairly soon. All right, So there you have it. If you have anything you would like to add on this topic on other topics, then you know where to find. It's got to stuff to blow your mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where you find all the podcast episodes, all the videos, all the blog posts, all the lists, all the galleries, and links out to our various social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler and Julie. If one wanted to get in touch with us UH in

a more old fashioned way, where would they find us? Ethan? Send your narrative to us that blow the mind at discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com