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!

There are these experiments where they train people to experience anxiety, but as determining. because exactly the same physical state could be experienced completely differently. And what they discovered is that at first it's really hard, but you practice, practice, practice. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a world-leading neuroscientist.

Her groundbreaking research reveals that emotions like anxiety and trauma are built by the brain. And we have the power to control them. The story is that you're born with these innate emotion circuits, but you're not born with the ability to control them.

really what's happening is that your brain is not reacting it's predicting and every action you take every emotion you have is a combination of the remembered past including any trauma and so you don't have a sense of agency about it because it happens really automatically faster than you can blink your eyes. How does this change how we should treat trauma? Sometimes in life, you are responsible for changing something, not because you're to blame, but because you're the only person who can.

I mean, I had a daughter who was clinically depressed, was getting D's in school. sleeping. She was miserable. At first she was so resistant, but then she made the decision that she wanted to be helped. And did she recover? Yes, she did. So if you want to change who you are, what you feel, understand Understanding these basic operating principles is the key to living a meaningful life. So what is step one to being able to make a change? So...

Quick one before we get back to this episode, just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.

And if you enjoy what we do here please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, you have a really remarkable, twisting career journey.

It's almost quite difficult to encapsulate in a particular mission or a particular summary of the journey you've been on and the twists and turns you've taken. If I were to ask you now what mission you're on with the work that you're currently doing, are you able to summarize that? My goal is, as a science communicator, is to try to take really complicated science and present it in a way that people can use.

Maybe they use it to entertain their friends at a dinner party. Maybe they use it to help their kid who's struggling with depression. That was certainly, in my case, something that I had to deal with. Maybe they're using it to improve their workplace or improve the productivity of their peeps or whatever. The point being that that's ultimately, that's what science is for. you know, living a better life. And average everyday people without PhDs can do that if they have the right information.

I'm probably attempting to understand how... It is that a brain like ours that is attached to a body like ours that is pickled in a world like ours produces a mind. What is it? What is happening that allows you to have thoughts and feelings and memories and actions? And somebody from another country, another culture, also has a mental life which looks nothing like yours.

How is it that the same kind of brain plan with the same general kind of body plan can produce such different types of minds when they are... When those brains are wired, in a sense, finish wiring themselves in cultural and physical contexts that are so widely different. When you just talked about your pursuit of understanding how a brain like ours creates the mind and the reality that we have, if I'm able to understand all of it,

As many people who read your book about the brain and emotions were able to understand, what is it that it offers me in my everyday life? Oh my God, it offers you the opportunity to have more agency in your life. What does that mean? It means you have more choice. It means you have more control.

It means that you can architect your life. I mean, you can't control everything that happens to you. You can't control every moment of feeling. But you have more control than you probably think you do. Everybody has more control. over what they feel and what they do than they think they do. That control doesn't look the way we expect it to. It's much harder to harness than we would like it to be.

Some people have more opportunities for that control than other people do, but everybody has the opportunity to have more control. And of course, the flip side is also more responsibility for the way they live their lives. I think that's a really good thing, and I think it's a really good thing now when... you know, world events are swirling around you and you feel like, you know, you're just being buffeted around, even within that craziness, there are opportunities to...

To be more of an architect of your own experience and your own life, I think a lot of people find that. and helpful. Yeah, because life can feel like we are a puppet and we are just responding to what happens around us. And if it rains outside, then we're sad. If a person sends us a message, then we're annoyed.

and that we're just these sort of reactive creatures reacting to whatever happens around us. But you're telling me that if I have a greater understanding of the brain and how it works and emotions... then I can seize back some of that control and live a more intentional life. Yes, exactly. And I think for me, I mean, I started... I started my career studying the nature of emotion, but really it became a flashlight into understanding how a brain works.

Why do we even have a brain? It's a very expensive organ. That piece of meat between your ears is the most expensive, metabolically the most expensive organ you have. So what's it good for? What's its most basic function? How does it work in relation to the body? I think that certainly on your show, you've had a number of people who talk about the relationship between the brain and the body in some way, but I think scientists for a long time.

forgot or ignored the fact that the brain is attached to a body, right? Because we don't feel all the drama. Like right now, in you, in me, in all of our listeners, right? We all have this like drama going on. It's really quite intense and there's a lot of going on and none of us are aware of it, I hope. If you are aware of it, I'm really sorry. It probably means that something is, you know, you're not feeling well today, but.

It's a good thing that we're not aware of what's going on inside our own bodies most of the time because we'd never pay attention to anything outside our own skin again, right? But the problem is that... In science, it often begins with starting with your own subjective experience and then trying to formalize that. And I mean, if you look at any science, physics is like that too. You just have to go back several.

hundred years or maybe a little longer to see it. And so it turns out that a lot of what you experience as properties of the world, of the way the world is, really is very rooted in your brain's regulation of your body. I started with emotion, but it really became a much larger project to try to understand, well...

What is a brain? How is it structured? How did it evolve? How does it work? What's its most basic function? And where do thoughts and feelings and actions, perceptions, what role do they play in that function? So it's a bit flipping the question, right? Most people start with, what is an emotion? What is a thought? What is a memory? They define it, and then they go looking for its physical basis in the brain or in the body.

That's a pretty bankrupt perspective. I mean, after 100 years, there weren't really good answers. So we flipped it around and we said, OK, well, given that we have the kind of brain we do. What can it do? What does it do? And in its normal functioning, how does it produce mental events? That in our culture, our thoughts and feelings and perceptions and actions, in other cultures...

They're different conglomerations of features, right? So for us, a thought and a feeling are super distinct. We experience them as very separate. In fact... Really, since the time of Plato, we've had this kind of narrative where, you know, the mind or the brain is a battleground between your thoughts and your feelings, right? For control of your actions. If your thoughts win, you are a rational creature. You are a healthy creature. You are a moral creature.

If your instincts and your emotions win, you know, your inner beast. then you are irresponsible. You are childish. You are immoral. You are mentally ill. That's the narrative that we work in. In some cultures, thoughts and feelings are not separate. It's not that you have them at the same time. It's that they are one thing. They are features of the same mental event.

In some cultures, your body and your mind are not separate. There are no separate experiences for a physical sensation versus a mental feeling. They're really one thing. Our minds are not the human nature, it's just one human nature, and there are other human natures too, and we have to figure out how. general brain plan, a general body plan for a neurotypical human produces such wide variation depending on the cultural context in which it grows.

As it relates to neuroscience and understanding the brain and the way that we create reality, was there a eureka moment for you where you realised that most of us have it wrong? or that there's an underlying misconception about the way that our brain creates our reality. I would say, yeah, sure, there was a eureka moment, but it was a long, slow burn. When I was a graduate student, I wasn't studying emotion. I was studying...

The self. How do you think about yourself? What is your self-esteem like? How do you conceive of yourself, right? This is an important topic in psychology. And I was measuring emotion. as an outcome variable. And the measurements weren't, the measures weren't worked. And I thought, well, I need to be able to just literally objectively measure when someone is angry or when they're sad or when they're happy. I don't want to have to ask them because they could be wrong.

In that phrasing of the question, there's a presumption, right, that there is an objective state called anger, that generally most instances of anger will look the same regardless of person and context. I very quickly realized that... There are no essences that anybody's been able to discover, right? So recently, in the last couple of years... researchers did a meta-analysis, which is a big statistical summary of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of experiments. And what they discovered is that

And this is just in urban cultures, right? We're not even talking about remote cultures now. Just in urban cultures, when someone is angry, people scowl about 35% of the time when they're angry. A scowl is like a... Like a scowl, like a... Right, like, you know, you knit your eyebrows. You frown, right? Okay. But that means 65% of the time when people are angry, they're doing something else that's meaningful with their faith.

And half the time when people scowl, they're not angry. They're feeling something else. They could be concentrating really hard. You could have just told them a bad joke. They could have a bad bout of gas. You know, a scowl is not the expression of anger. It is an expression of anger in some contexts, and it's also an expression of other states in other contexts.

You know, there's no really strongly reliable expression for anger that is specific to anger. And the same is true for every other emotion that's ever been studied. It's really clear that you're in anger or sadness or pick an emotion. Your heart rate can go up, it can go down, it can stay the same. Your blood pressure can go up, it can go down, it can stay the same. The physiology that is occurring in your body is related to the...

your brain's preparation for particular behaviors. So let's start with that then. So the predictive brain is this idea that I only pretty much know from you. I'd never heard it. When we say the predictive brain, what does that mean and what does it not mean? When you are living your everyday life. Yeah.

Like right now. Like right now. So right now, I'm guessing that I'm saying things to you and you're perceiving what I'm saying and then you're reacting to it. That's how it feels to you, right? Yes. Okay. And that's how it feels to me too. So we sense and then we react. That's the way most people experience themselves in the world. That's not actually what's happening under the hood. Really what's happening is that the brain, your brain is not reacting, it's predicting.

And what that means is if we were to stop time right now, just freeze time, your brain would be in a state and it would be remembering. past experiences that are similar. as a way of predicting what to do next, like literally in the next moment. Should your eyes move? Should your heart rate go up? Should your breathing change? Should your blood vessels dilate or should they constrict?

Should you prepare to stand? Right? Movements. And these movements, the preparation for movement, literal copies of those. signals become predictions for what you will see and hear and smell and taste and think and feel. So under the hood, your brain is predicting what movements it should engage in next, and as a consequence, what you will experience because of those movements. So you act first and then you sense. You don't sense and then react. You predict action and then you sense.

So give me an example which brings this to light of how my brain is predicting and then taking action. Okay. So right now you and I are having a conversation. And I'm speaking and you're listening. And what's really happening in your brain is that based on... many gazillion repetitions of listening to language. Your brain is predicting, literally predicting every single word that will come out of my...

And how surprising would it have been if I didn't say mouth, I said some other orifice of my body that words were coming out of. That would have been pretty surprising. Because your brain is predicting. Your brain is always predicting. And it's correcting those predictions when they're incorrect. And, you know, I have this video that I often show when I'm giving a talk to scientists or to civilians. I'm giving a talk.

And it creates a situation where they can predict something and they can feel that a prediction is not just this abstract kind of thought. It's your brain is. is literally changing the firing of its own sensory neurons to anticipate. incoming sensation. So you start to feel these sensations before the signals actually arrive for you to perceive them. You start to have the experience before the world gives you those signals.

I read, I think it was in your book, but it might have been elsewhere about the example of being thirsty. Yes. So when you drink, so say you're super thirsty and you drink a big glass of water, when do you stop being thirsty? Almost immediately. But actually, it takes 20 minutes. for that water to be absorbed into your bloodstream and make its way to the brain, to tell the brain that you are no longer in need of...

Because across millions of opportunities, you have learned that certain movements now and certain sensory signals now. will result in that mental state. Or here's another. So right now, keep your eyes on me. You're looking right at me. And in your mind's eye, I want you to imagine a Macintosh Apple, like not a computer, but like an actual piece of fruit. Okay. Can you do it?

Can you see it? Yeah. What color is it? Green. Okay. Does it have any red? No. Okay. So it's a Granny Smith apple. Yeah. Okay. What does it taste like? Like, imagine grabbing it, biting into it, hearing the crunch of the apple. What does it taste like? It's like sweet.

Like a little tart, maybe? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Is it juicy? It's very juicy. Yeah, okay. So if I were imaging your brain right now, what I would see is... I would see changes in the signal that is related to neural activity in your visual cortex, even though there is no apple in front of you. And I would see a change in activity in your auditory cortex, even though you didn't really hear the crunch.

My mouth was watering as well. And your mouth is watering. And in fact, every time you sit down for a meal, your brain directs your... saliva glands to produce more saliva to prepare you to eat and digest the food. So that usually happens in advance of even sitting down to a meal. That is all prediction. That's all of that is your brain preparing itself.

for what's coming, because predicting and correcting is a much more efficient way to run a nervous system, really any system, than reacting to the world. Here's another example. Do you drink coffee? Yes. Okay. Do you drink coffee every day at the same time? Usually, yeah. Okay. And are you one of these people that if you miss having coffee at that time, you get a headache? i mean it's happened before yes well i used to be a person who drank a lot of coffee

And I love coffee, but I don't drink it anymore. But I loved it, and I drank it always at the same time every day. And if I didn't drink it, at that time of day, I would get a massive headache. And the reason why, and this is true of every medicine you take, anything which affects your physiology, if you do it on a regular basis, your brain will come to expect it. And what that means, come to expect it, is that... Coffee has chemicals in it that will constrict your blood vessels.

everywhere, but in the brain, the brain is attempting to keep the blood flow pretty. constant and even. And so if every day at eight o'clock in the morning, you're drinking something that's going to constrict your blood vessels. Then at 7.55 approximately, I don't know the exact timing, but a little bit before 8, your brain will dilate the blood.

In preparation for that constriction, so they remain constant. And if you don't drink that substance, then you have this big dilation and you get a very, very bad headache. I was just wondering then about, as you were talking, I thought you were going to talk about how sometimes when I set an alarm, I seem to wake up like five minutes before the alarm. Yeah, sure. That's an example. Here's another example. Exercise. Okay. If you want to...

If you want to play tennis better, if you want to run a faster mile, what do you do? Train. Train. And you do the same thing over and over and over and over again. And you get better and faster. And you burn fewer calories. You get more efficient. Why? Because your brain is predicting really well. That's what muscle memory is. It's not literally a memory in your muscles. It's a memory in your brain. Your brain is controlling your muscles.

And so if you practice the same set of movements over and over and over again, you just get really efficient at them because your brain is able to predict better. Now, if you're somebody who's exercising because you want to become healthier or you want to lose weight, you don't want to practice the same exercise over and over and over again because you will be...

burning fewer calories because you're being efficient. That's the goal, right? So instead you do interval training, right? If somebody's calling out to you every 30 seconds, a different set of movements and you can't predict what they are. then your brain will make a prediction. It'll be wrong. You'll have to adjust.

And so you end up burning more calories and you end up throwing yourself out of balance, which we call allostasis. So you become dysregulated and then your brain has to work to get itself back in again. And so that's a different kind of workout. These two different kinds of workouts are completely predicated on the fact that sometimes you want to be able to predict better. Sometimes you want to be able to disrupt yourself and get back into the pocket quickly, right?

So basically, you're learning how to take in prediction error, signals you didn't predict, and adjust to it. What does this say about the nature of trauma and other mental health illnesses like depression, anxiety, et cetera? Because is this a misfiring of my...

predictions. I say this because predictions reliant on something happening in the past and forming a pattern, like a pattern recognition system. So if I grew up and there were certain patterns that are now not the case so if i grew up and every time a man walked into the room he hit And now when a man walks into the room and I'm 35 years old, I'm getting that same sort of prediction in my brain. So I've got a fear of men, for example.

Does this somewhat explain childhood trauma and why it's so hard to shake and why as adults we can sometimes have dysfunctional life? I would say is a general principle, yes. There are a lot of, you know, the devil is in the details, right? But yeah, sure. So trauma is not something that happens in the world to you. Everything you experience is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present. So there could be an adverse event that occurs. You're in an earthquake.

Someone dies who's close to you. Something bad happens to you. Someone hurts you in some way. There could be an adverse event that is not traumatic. Because you're not using past experiences to make sense of it as a trauma. On the other hand, something that could be like an everyday experience to somebody else, to you. It links to a set of memories that are very traumatic. Were very traumatic. Those events were very...

So trauma is not an objective thing in the world. It's also not all in your head. Trauma is a property of the relation between what has happened to you in the past and what is occurring in the present. So here's an example. There is an anthropologist who works at Emory University, and she studies... people in a lot of different cultures, and she studies trauma in a lot of different cultures. And there was this one girl that she wrote about, a case study of a girl named Maria.

who was a young adolescent girl. And she lived in a culture where it was... more normative for men to physically, be very physical with women and girls. In our culture, we would say it's physical. But in her culture, this is just what men did. So her stepfather would slap her around, and she didn't like it, but she didn't show any sign of trauma. The way she made sense of it was that men are just assholes. It was very much a, this is not about me, this is about them.

It's not pleasant, but she slept okay. Her grades were okay in school. She had friends. She didn't have any signs of trauma at all. Then she watched Oprah. And she heard all of these women talk about having been the subject of physical abuse from their boyfriends or their fathers or, you know, their husbands. recognized the similarity in the physical circumstances of these women's descriptions and her physical circumstances. And she also observed them. experiencing symptoms of trauma.

And all of a sudden, she started to have difficulty sleeping. And her grades dropped. And she had trouble concentrating. And she became socially withdrawn. her way of making meaning. Her way of, if you think about physical movements as actions, she made different meaning of those actions and she experienced trauma. Now, if you're somebody who believes that there is an objective world out there where, you know.

Cause and effect. Yeah, that really there was some kind of latent trauma in her and she didn't experience it before, but then it was like triggered. You could tell a whole story like that. And people do tell whole stories like that. But that's not what the best scientific evidence suggests is happening. What's happening is that The psychological experience of those movements was different because experience is a combination of the sensory present, the physical present, and the remembered past.

And you need both in order to have a particular kind of experience. So the way to describe what happened to Maria's trajectory was that... She experienced something as an unfortunate aspect of physical life. about her. It became something, not this person was doing something bad, but this person was doing something bad to her because of who she is.

And she was also shown how she should be responding to that by watching Oprah's show and watching these other individuals responding in a certain way. Right. So it became about her as a person, not just about her stepfather was an asshole. And if you think about it, what we do in this culture 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.

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. 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.

And so in this culture, we try to teach people who've experienced trauma that they can experience those physical events that happened 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.

So it turns out that, you know, there's one kind of old evolutionary theory, right? This is called the modern synthesis, where inheritance is really your gene. 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. Most 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. And 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 brain. 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. An adult brain, we say that it's wired to its world. That world includes your own body. But 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. So your brain is wired for you to see out of eyes that are the exact distance of your eye.

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 sickness.

You're taught how to make sense of these things. That's called cultural inheritance. Many things that we think of as hardwired into the brain are actually culturally inherited across generations. That's how people survive in a particular... 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 Inuit lived there, they lived perfectly fine. Well, because they had culturally inherited knowledge. We're always transmitting. 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. You talked a second ago about therapists try and make you think about the past differently.

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 happens 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 and we apply meaning to it, which then determines the behavior we have. And 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 completely makes sense. This is really, this is such like a profound, I don't know if whoever's listening now understands what I'm saying here. 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 construction of...

meaning that you've given to the past to serve your purpose now, as it says in the book? Yes, I would say it slightly differently, but the message is the same. I think... There are, in the sensory present, right, there are sights, there are sounds, there are smells, some stuff's going on inside your own body, right? And these signals are going to your brain.

They have no inherent psychological meaning. They have no inherent emotional meaning. They have no inherent mental meaning. What gives them meaning are your memories from the past. You are creating, you are a meaning maker. isn't a set of features like a dictionary definition. So the meaning of this cup... isn't that it's made of metal and that, I mean, we certainly can talk about those features, but the meaning of this cup in this moment is what I do with it.

So 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 make... 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. You 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 eye. But it's still happening. And that means if you are partly, 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, as a science communicator, was to try to explain to people that... They have more control over their lives. They have more control over who they are in any given moment. than they think they do, to give them more agency in their lives. This is exactly what I mean. You don't have an enduring identity. You are who you are in the moment of your act.

And actions are a combination of the remembered past, so stuff your brain is using to predict, that your brain's 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 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 psychotherapy is.

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. It doesn't always work so. The 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... 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 and apply it to this example of this silver cup in my hand. try and go back into the past and explain to me why this actually isn't something I should drink out.

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 pattern in the present of this actually being a vase for flowers. and I can start to create a new pattern that silver cups like this one aren't just for drinking out of, they are also vases for flowers.

Exactly. Okay, so I can either go back in the past and try and convince myself that a cup isn't a cup, or I can, in the present moment, create a new path. which will mean that in the future, my brain will predict next time it sees a silver cup, it won't just think drink out of it, Steve, it'll think pop some flowers. Right. And remember, it's actually the thinking comes after the action, right? So 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. And then you will think, oh, right, I can use this as a, oh, look, there's a great vase. So in your brain, it's action. At first, your brain is controlling, it's preparing.

The actions of the viscera, what we call visceromotor. So does your heart rate need to change? Do your blood vessels need to dilate? Do you need to breathe differently? It's basically... 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...

If you're walking over somewhere to pick up some flowers and cut the stems and whatever, those are all physical movements that require glucose and oxygen and shit like that. 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 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, meaning is a consequence. It becomes what you feel and what you think. So 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 route 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 being. I had a traumatic experience when I was five. I'm afraid of it. I know a lot about bees. I'm actually a gardener. 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.

I could talk to myself until the cows come home. It won't matter, 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. 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 beehives and, you know, put on a suit and go work. I mean, that would be like overwhelming, right? So instead. 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 bees 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. But, 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, it's preparing multiple actions. So you need to prove to your brain that those predictions are... Wrong. Yes, so exactly. You are setting up circumstances so you can prove to yourself that your predictions are wrong. If you're predicting well, you have a few actions.

If you're predicting poorly, let's say overgeneralizing, 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 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 unpredicted signal there. It's error. There's another name in psychology for taking in prediction error. Exposure therapy? Learning.

Okay. Yeah, exposure therapy, which is a kind of learning. All learning. All learning is you taking in prediction error, signals you didn't predict. There's no signal that you did predict. You predicted a signal. It's not there. So what you do is you set up situations for yourself that you will take in signals that are novel, right? This seems like an easy thing to do. People actually sometimes seek novels. Too much novelty is not necessarily a good thing. all the time, particularly if

It's expensive metabolically to take in prediction error and learn something new. The biggest costs that your brain expends energy on are moving your body. learning something new, and dealing with persistent uncertainty. Those are really expensive. 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. Right? Every experience, every action, a combination of 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 in moments of great metabolic load. The brain just goes with its own predictions and ignores what's out there. 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 TikTok 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 has become almost popular. 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. Yeah, I think, I guess the way I, I do, I do find it frustrating at times, but, 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 things in the world, by interacting with each other. Very few meanings are given. That is that they exist independently of us. And so what I find frustrating is that there's a lot of suffering. 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...

making their suffering worse than it has to be. You paused on the word response. Well, I want to be really clear that, again, I'm not saying people are to blame. Culpability and responsibility are not the same thing. Culpability is blame. Are you blameworthy? You can, nobody, I'm not saying people are to blame for their own suffering. I'm saying that people. can be more responsible in, by taking more responsibility, they could reduce their suffering some.

That's not the same thing as saying, you know, that it's 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. There are these experiments that were done 15, 20 years ago where These are done by Sheldon Cohen, who is a psychoimmunologist, 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 hotels. 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 weighed their tissues after they blew their nose. I mean, he did just really, really, really, really careful metrics.

And across these experiments, somewhere between 20 to 40% of people became symptomatic with respiratory disease. That means the virus is necessary. but it is not sufficient to cause illness. Another necessary but not sufficient cause is the state of each person's immune system. That is, your brain and your immune system have to be 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. We, in a culture, we automatically make meaning of certain types of signal patterns as anxiety. When there's a lot of uncertainty. There's an increase in norepinephrine and some chemicals in the brain that often goes with an increase in heart rate and so on. 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 arousal, 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.

They 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. bit of discomfort. You know, 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 arousal. 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. But you practice, practice, practice, and then eventually it becomes really automatic. And then what happens? They're able to take tests. They're able to pass tests. They're able to continue taking courses and so on. I watched 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 10th degree black. This guy, 10th 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. And she's this tiny little thing. And she's got to spar with like 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, you know, her dad and me, we're sitting there, we're 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 be calm. You need that arousal. It'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. And 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. Constantly. Yeah, they are. To be anxious, to be depressed, to be sad. Yes, they are. And think about it too. Social media is pernicious uncertainty.

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? We'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 guess. 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. They're choosing to be influenced. I'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. A little bit, except that you're the one who's, you're choosing it. I'm empathic and I'm not blaming people, but things could be better for them.

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.

She had to make that decision. I couldn't force her to do it. And 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.

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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.

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? Because 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. So, for example, you could deliberately get off social media for one day a week. 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. So 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 anyway.

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? So that was going to happen on a massive scale for me. And I knew that.

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. So 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...

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 susceptive 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. So 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... you know, insulting sense. It's just it's a normal consequence of how brains work.

The injury is gone, but the signal of the injury is still replaying itself. Yeah, exactly. It's like a phantom limb. It's like tinnitus is also like that. Oh, gosh, yeah. I had that for a little while. Yeah. So I tried really hard to set a schedule for myself, you know, that would allow me to sort of like optimally dose myself with prediction error. But that meant...

you know, that 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 then you practice. You practice new behaviors. 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. That's your brain's most important.

Your brain's most important job is anticipating the needs of your body and preparing to meet those needs before they arrive. The metaphor that we use for this predictive regulation of the body, which is the formal term is called allostasis. Um, that's the scientific concept, but the, but the metaphor is body budget. 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.

potassium, and like all of the nutrients and chemicals that are necessary to run an energetically costly body. You've got all these really low-level kind of processes. You can just think of them as vital parts to keep yourself alive. So some of your energy budget goes... Some of your energy budget goes to repair and growth. So if you get taller, you need more cells. When you learn something, you have to thicken up your myelin and your neurons. You've got to grow more receptors and stuff.

you know, the kind of growth and repair. And then the rest of it is all for anything effortful. What is effortful? Like work or going to the gym. Dragging your ass out of bed in the morning is effortful. Learning 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. ATP, like these little chemicals, these little protein things that your cells use. as literal energy that come from glucose and other things like fats. So there's nothing I can do to increase it? Well, you're in a range. Okay. But there is a finite limit.

because you're a human organism. And you've got to do these three things, these vital functions, growth and repair, and then everything. 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 that are related to cutting costs. Distress, fatigue, problems concentrating, lack of sensitivity to the context that you're in. All 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, meaning things are costing more than they necessarily need to. 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. But, you know, like if you within two hours of eating a meal, if you encounter.

It's as if you ate 104 more calories than you actually ate. So you're so inefficient in metabolizing that it's like having eaten 104 more calories than you did. Even good fats will be metabolized as if they're bad fats. And potentially stored as... Yeah. So 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. In depression, we know, for example, that there's cortisol dysregulation in depression. That means there's dysregulation in metabolism. Because cortisol is a metabolic, 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 juncture between neurons.

Serotonin is a metabolic regulator. Norepinephrine is a metabolic regulator. These are chemicals that are directly involved in your metabolism. It's not a belief that depression has a metabolic basis to it. I think the question is... What is the elixir of all these metabolic influences that would lead somebody to develop a depressive state?

The simple point that I was making is I actually came to this idea about metabolism and depression because I was doing a shit ton of reading trying to figure out how to help my kid. What were her symptoms at that time, just if there were any parents? listening right now 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 like a perfect storm of metabolic vulnerability for many, many reasons. 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 effect. 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 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. The narrative that's used in psychiatry. And medicine is a narrative that goes something like this. It goes 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 circuits. You're not. You don't have any emotion circuits. You don't have any emotion circuits, actually. But the narrative is you're born with these innate emotion circuits. 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. So you've got this unbridled emotion and that's the problem. That's a really...

neuro bullshit. Basically, there's not a good evidence for that narrative. I heard it was a chemical imbalance. Yes. Well, sometimes people talk about that chemical imbalance in terms of... serotonin being a happy chemical and dopamine being the reward chemical. And 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. And 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. So dopamine is seen more, I think, now by many neuroscientists as a chemical that is necessary for F.

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, You know, she went from being a really exuberant engaged socially, very socially connected kid. who, you know, she did great 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. And then, you know.

In 10th grade, she was withdrawn. She was getting Ds 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 her 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. And 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 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, 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. You can only talk in jizz.

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. She came home with Ds in mathematics. This is a kid who was doing rudimentary algebra when she was eight. We told her that 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, you know, she had very bad menstrual cramps. And so a lot of one... 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 major depressive episode. And 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 I was. It was like a flashbulb moment. I read the study. I called her pediatrician, my daughter's pediatrician, and I said, she's coming off pill 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 have 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 after or before she was experiencing depression? This was after. It was... maybe a year after she was diagnosed. Much later, I read, I was reading a book by Naomi Oreskes, 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. 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 culture that separates mental from physical, we don't think about the role of metabolism in vision.

or even in mood. That'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 those symptoms. I'm really curious to hear what...

What conventional medicine at that point told you you should do 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... Currently, there is a kind of a revolution going on where...

There's actually something called metabolic psychiatry now. Back when I was reading about this, it sounded crazy. When I saw what my daughter was... what that she was suffering like really suffering it's really hard for me to talk about this because as i'm talking to you about this i'm thinking i 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 found every possible route that I could think of to target her body budget. So basically target her metabolism. And then we... we basically came up with a daily routine, which she participated in making to see if we could. put 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 actually at a NCI, at a National Cancer Institute meeting. 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. 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. And 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 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. 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 screen. 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. So made sure that she was eating nutritious food, not pseudo food, like, you know, Pop-Tarts and shit like that. We had to start her. like exercising again. So she started to walk long distances.

She 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... 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 itself back in. You're basically. Improving the resilience of your physical systems is basically the way to.

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... You know, after a certain period of time, she'd be dysregulated metabolically, and then she'd drink water and, you know, eat something healthful. 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 providing the brain with opportunity to learn that it was wrong. And then omega-3s. So we took... I can't remember the exact dose, but I dosed it out. High omega-3s, low omega-6s. With her doctor's permission, we also used a baby aspirin once a day 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. In her early adolescent years, you know, she rejected. 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. And 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 I had to really draw on my own 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 she feels understood. And when you, it took me a long time to learn this. 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.

And 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 the best thing for a human nervous system is another human. The worst thing for a human nervous system is another human. There are so many experiments showing such, I mean, I just saw a set of experiments from one of my former postdocs that 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, their glucose metabolism is more efficient, like literally more efficient. And I believe she... I believe she also showed this with dating partners too. There are these studies, these old studies showing that...

It's like less calorically demanding to walk up a hill with a backpack if you're with a friend than if you're with a stranger. 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 intend 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 make sense. You know, like the idea that, and again, meta-analyses show that you will live years longer, years on average, years longer. 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? Because it was regulating her nervous system, her body?

Yeah, sometimes she still says this to me, actually. She'll say, can you just be my friend for a minute and not my mother? I'll be like, yes, I can. And then I actually have to do it, which is sometimes hard. This is for parents. Anybody who has an adolescent or an adult child, 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. So 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 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 would be better.

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? So, yeah. There were probably other things I'm not thinking of right now. I'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. 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... It's what you did for your daughter at that time. Yeah, just as a person who had read the literature, it's not... This is not medical advice. It's I'm really strongly. And 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? 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. And it's pretty much exactly what you just said, which is sometimes I'm in a not so good mood. If I'm not conscious about that, then the bad mood can wreak havoc, right? 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.

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. be really aware of what this makes you do or feel or think.

And the actions you need to take are maybe cancel everything you were planning today and 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 now. And that changes the trajectory of what happens. And I think 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? And 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 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 in call centers.

Whereas I implemented a rule where there's no meetings before 11 o'clock. And it just means for me that I never set an alarm. So I wake up when I'm fully rich up. And it was the most profound thing. 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 underslept. Although it happens because I have to travel and stuff a lot.

But that really had a profound impact on my life. Yeah. And I think, you know. And as a leader. 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 for everybody and you know we have a society that is structured in a particular way but there's no requirement that it's structured in this way there'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 CEOs, who are leaders, who are business leaders to understand that there are good business reasons. There are good economic reasons. to take this shit seriously am i right in thinking that alcohol impacts your body by

And it therefore makes it harder for you to exhibit all the other behaviors and expend energy in other areas. And also therefore increases the probability that you'll be depressed. So 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. 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. Again, 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, out of which it makes mood. So mood is a property of consciousness. 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.

We don't. We just experience mood as a property of consciousness. You know, this is a delicious drink. That guy's an asshole. You're very trustworthy. The mood is embedded in the perception of the world. And when people, it's just like actually sometimes opioids have this effect also. They're mood altering, meaning if they're manipulating your mood, they are manipulating your metabolism.

And when people get addicted, they often get addicted because they're 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 alcohol affects...

My expectation is that 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 you you don't learn you won't you you won't update any you know so there and so And your behaviors are not necessarily well calibrated to the situation that you're in, which can have all kinds of downstream difficult problems. You know, you can make things. in the downstream worse for yourself and make it harder to do budgeting later.

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I wanted to ask you about something I heard you say, and I've actually had other guests on my podcast say it, 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 If the brain is predicting, then presumably if I do a big smile and I go, yes, then the brain is going to predict good feelings and going to cause good feelings, et cetera, et cetera, going to cause me to feel nice.

Well, yes and no. I think, you know, 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. You know, 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 ifta. Crinkle. There you go. It's like putting, put a pencil between your teeth.

Go ahead. Now smile. Now crinkle. Okay. So it's like that. And so what I would say is it's a minuscule effect size. Like it's very small. I do feel happier. Do you? Yeah. But that's because I made you do something silly maybe? Maybe, yeah. Okay. But anyways, the point being that. It's overblown as an effect. I think... There's a small, my recollection is that the last meta-analysis I read was that there was a small effect.

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. But 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 um people there's a rise in people self-diagnosing and in using diagnosis as an explanation for behavior or for why people experience what they experience or whatever. Diagnoses are not explanations of anything. They're descriptions. They don't explain anything. And to 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. In 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 and dopamine are the reason why someone has adhd So there are multiple serotonin receptors. There 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 in 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, that's the condition upon which diagnoses are made. 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. But it's not. It's a property of a person in the context that there is. by any respects like can he pay attention in school Well, right. And the way that school is organized is 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 your 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 say, you know, but it's not because. Because it's important that competencies are by context. And again, I would say this is not me being a bleeding heart progressive or whatever. I mean, I am a bleeding heart. 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 earlier on which I found really, really interesting. I was reading 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 regulate each other with words. And I think you did a study. on assessing the power of words to facilitate emotion.

Well, we've studied the power of words in many contexts, including words as invitations to make sense of... If an instance of emotion is you making meaning of what is going on inside your body in relation to the world. then you invite, every time you use an emotion word, you invite people to make meaning in that way. So you've proven then that certain words can calm us down.

Well, yes, but I wouldn't say I've proven anything. Scientists don't, you know. Shown, demonstrated. Yeah, demonstrated in a, you know, in a context, right? Like we, you know, scientists don't like the F word. 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, do you not? Yeah. Yeah. 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, you know, free speech is important. Freedoms are important, but freedoms come with responsibility.

Like it or not, we regulate each other's nervous systems in all kinds of ways, including with work. For better or for worse. For better or for worse. Exactly. 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. And if I go over budget, my immune system might be the thing that I cut the costs of. something else. Right. I mean, there's good stress. You can't be without stress. That would mean you'd be without effort. So 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. Chronic stress. Chronic stress. So what I would say is just, if you're in a stressful meeting... a meeting where it's affecting your mood. That means there's been some metabolic impact.

take into account what that means with 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 observer in 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 learned about the brain and neuroscience and psychology, has it made you believe in a God? No. Has it made you more atheist or agnostic? I'm pretty firmly an atheist. I 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.

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 Soccer. Okay. And it's a really wonderful book. And I've learned a lot about Socratic 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. you 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 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. I'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 Appleseed, 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's 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.

And at some point we start to think about, well, what's your legacy, right? Most 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. 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 in psychology and neuroscience. Yeah, that's all nice. Super nice. But actually, my legacy is really the people who I've trained, the minds. that I've had the opportunity to engage with. If I were going to be bean counting, I might be bean counting the number of laboratories that now exist, that didn't exist before, several generations of scientists who I trained.

Or who, you know, and also who trained me, I mean, along the 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 used to do a lot of classroom teaching, I would feel like what I told myself is if I can change the... the trajectory the outcomes of just one person in this class just one then i will have done my job And I kind of feel that way a little bit, sort of the same about the public face of what I'm doing, the 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're choosing and they're impacting their loved ones or their children. 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. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. Question is... how to live a life without attaining anything.

They are a black belt Shaolin monk. So they talk a lot about identity. Sure, and living without encumbrances and attachments and so on, right? It sounds like a very Buddhist question. The problem is that I think even a Buddhist attains something. They attain enlightenment. So they don't have attachments necessarily. They 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?

making 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. What I would say is that 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 you can change the sensory present by... what you pay attention to mindfulness 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 left. 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.

You can change what you do. You 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. you know, to have things and like all of these artificial things which prop up the illusion that you are and you have an essence to you that, you know, is unchanging across situations.

Yeah, we are very quick to fall into the trap of thinking we are what we did. And that's, I 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. But that's the trap we fall into. In 10 minutes time, I bet I'll be downstairs and I'll be back into the trap of thinking that I am. Stephen Bartlett who did this thing for 32 years or did, you know.

Lisa, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for everything that you do. You've 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, et cetera, et cetera. But you've completely changed my mind and made me think from... in a completely different way, which I'm 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, but 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. And 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.

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 Jemima 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 SEO, this is the type of 1% improvement we make on our show. And that is why the show is the way it is.

By 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 interactive elements and the purpose of this diary is to help you identify

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