533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal

This is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Watch Parenting. Available exclusively on Daily Wire Plus. We're dealing with misbehaviors with our son. Our 13-year-old throws tantrums. Our son turned to some substance abuse. Go to dailywireplus.com today. So we look at the brain as something that's malleable and not fixed. It's a dynamic object.

So the parietal lobes and the superior parietal lobulin is specifically involved in creating a subjective sense of a self, the feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body, right? Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration.

For the remapping of anomaly. This is very weird too, everyone. So you have this REM paralysis, obviously. You're paralyzed from head to toe during REM sleep. You're dreaming away. Are you familiar with sleep paralysis? Something was happening to me and I was frozen and unable to speak and I...

I knew I had to wake myself up, like I'd try to throw myself off the bed. Sometimes I could yell to my wife, she'd have to come and shake me and then I'd wake up. So I was sleeping in my room and then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me. until it was on my chest strangling me. What did the monster look like? Well, I'll tell you. Okay.

Hi, everybody. I had the opportunity today to speak to Dr. Balan Jalal. He's a neuroscientist and author. at Harvard and previously a visiting researcher at Cambridge University Medical School. He's been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other such publications. The Telegraph and the BBC described him as one of the world's leading experts on sleep paralysis and the terrors and opportunities of dream fantasy.

and adaptation that accompany that condition. What did we discuss? Dr. Jalal's Intro to Neuroscience course at Peterson Academy. The relationship between neuroanatomy, brain function, perception. emotion and behavior, the function of the dream state, the role of culture and conception in dealing with emotion, particularly fear, and the changing landscape of the modern university. It's quite a trip. Join us. Well, thanks for coming in. Well, thank you, Jordan, Dr. Peterson. I'd love to be here.

Let's talk about Peterson Academy first. We just released a course of yours, Introduction to Neuroscience. Right, right. So I'd like to know, I think it would be useful to talk a little bit about the course, but I'd also like to know about your experience. doing the filming and your reflections on the process and the project itself. Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, it was a lovely process. Let me start there. So I flew in to Miami.

Great reception overall. Nice people around. Ben, Nancy, Vincent, everybody on the team, lovely. The shooting was great. So yeah, top professional, really liked that. And then the course itself, it's an eight-hour course on the brain and sort of going through...

Initially starting from sort of the basics of the brain, the different structures of the brain, then going all the way to sort of higher abstract things like human nature and sort of the nature of how art emanates in the brain and things like that.

It kind of has the nitty-gritty of an introductory neuroscience course, but then also taking in some more sort of poetic aspects of the brain. So it's kind of all that mixed. Right, so it's an approach to the cultural from the bottom up, from the biological up.

Right, right. How much anatomy, functional anatomy and so forth is in the course. I make sure that the basics are there. So for a basics neuroscience course, as an introduction, you've got to have the basics there, all the brain structures. the cortex, the brainstem, all the different names. But I try to keep it simple so people don't fall asleep. I used to, when I did my first biopsychology neuroscience course, that was incredibly boring.

I had all these names thrown at me. And you just had to force memorize them. It made no sense. So what's the cerebellum doing? You know, what's this doing? You just had all these names. You had to memorize them. That was it. But I really make sure to describe the function and have an overall context for each. Yeah, I found that I got extremely interested in neuroanatomy even at a detailed level when I was reading scientists who associated the area with the function.

It's very important. Yeah, well, and it was also extremely useful philosophically. One of the advantages, if you're a conceptual thinker, to studying neuroanatomy and neurobiology is that it puts limits on what... philosophical propositions are plausible and possible. I really like that.

Like, it's like you have to play a game with two different sets of rules then, right? It has to make sense conceptually, so that would be philosophically. But then it can't violate the principles of neuroanatomy and neuroscience that are already established.

It's a very good way of initial triangulation. Yeah, the way that I like to do is that I know that in this course I'll cover this, right? But then I kind of see and explore how I can sort of weave this into sort of a narrative and a story and then kind of... put things in as we go along. And I feel like this makes sense to put this aspect here and put that aspect here so it doesn't come in this sort of, you know, very ABC kind of dry way. So that's my approach and see how I can.

Let things unfold in a natural way. And so you said that...

when you went to do the recording that the process worked well. Very well. What about it worked well? I was very impressed. So I was very impressed by the whole process, the way... Things were arranged. Obviously, we were put in a very nice hotel. We felt pampered, honestly. Good. You feel pampered. You feel everything is just on point. And yeah, and then the shooting itself, people around you, they take care of you, bring you food. You know, it's just...

It's just where you feel pampered. So it's great. Yeah, well, you know, I think we realized the importance of that, really.

When I did the first Exodus seminar for The Daily Wire, we brought nine thinkers in and we spent a fair bit of time. on the hospitality side. And one of the things I realized, and I knew this in part from working at a university, was that a lot of the professors that we pulled in for that seminar I wouldn't say they're exactly well treated at their institutions. And that's foolish because I invited the people who I did invite to the Exodus seminar because...

I thought they were great, and I wanted to hear what they had to say. And there's every reason to make that obvious in every... in every detail of treatment yeah and so you know one of the things i offer people who we offer at peterson academy people who come and lecture because people ask me well you know what lecture do you need And that's not the right approach. My sense is that I find people whose views I want to know and share, and then...

I want them to do what they think would be best because I wouldn't bloody well invite them if I didn't think they knew what they were doing. And I don't want to put constraints on them. And then if we find the right people, we can sort out the curriculum rather than... sorting out their curriculum and then forcing the participants.

the professors into it. That makes no sense at all to me. Absolutely. And that was my approach too, right? So I would talk about my own research, some of the nicest experiments that I love about my work and sort of weave into that neuroscience curriculum in that way, right? So we talk about, for example, OCD, and then maybe you might mention the orbitofrontal cortex, which is overactive in OCD. What's the function of the orbitofrontal cortex?

the structure in the brain or the striatum and the basal ganglia in the context of Parkinson's. But again, taking in some work, some experiments that are fascinating. So it's kind of taking that.

natural approach that sort of my own research or works of colleagues and just weaving it in in a more more natural way I think okay so I'm curious everybody who studies the brain in some depth right has their own approach it's like exploring a continent let's say they have their own approach and so when you're when you lay out the architecture of the brain let's say the basic anatomy right tell me how you do that like

I would like to hear how you conceptualize the brain. So do that, if you would. Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I think... The way that I, my view of the brain was inspired by my mentor, V.S. Romachandran. Oh, yeah, right. You worked with, yes. He's a stunningly... effective public speaker. He's extremely stunningly effective, charismatic. And when I went to California in my early days as an undergraduate, I ended up in his course. So I took his course. So let me take you there. When was that?

That was in 2010, 11, around 11, 2011. So I started there, became a research scholar in his lab eventually. And I think... You know, becoming very good friends with him, ending up in his laboratory. going on long walks on the beach all the time and just spending time with him and getting his view on the brain and sort of adapting that as my own view was something that, you know.

influenced me. And his approach, obviously, and the approach that I've adopted is one where you sort of look at the brain holistically. You acknowledge that the brain is hyperplastic. So there's all these modules that are highly dynamic and the brain... is extremely malleable. And so we look at the brain as something that extremely, as a fluid process that's malleable and not fixed and set in its own ways. It has this.

fluidity to it. So that's kind of my view of the brain overall, that it's a dynamic object. But beyond that, let me also explain some of our experiments. So the way that we approach... science and probing the human brain is through experiments where we look at conceptual experiments in neuroscience. So for example, there's the rubber hand illusion.

You probably know that. Lay it out and explain it to people. So the rubber hand illusion is this illusion where you have a chap, he puts his hand right here, and then you have his right hand underneath the table. And so me, Balan, the experimenter, will stroke and tap the hand of the experimental subject. I'll go stroke, stroke, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, stroke, stroke underneath the table. And I'll stroke and tap the table in front of...

Joe, the subject, I'll go tap, tap, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, tap, tap. And in about two minutes of me doing this, he will feel touch sensations arising from the table. And I don't mean this in kind of an abstract metaphorical sense. I mean this literally. He will have...

touch sensations, somatosensory regions of his brain becoming active from this process. element of human perception, right? It must be strongly associated not only with our ability to map sensation onto our bodies, but also with our ability to use tools. So I know, for example, we're very good.

at it like if i pick up a screwdriver right it takes me virtually no time to use the tip of the screwdriver in a manner that very much approximates the tip of my finger right right and then when we go in a car essentially what we're doing especially we're expert drivers, is that we expand the dimensions of our kinesthetic...

perception or bodily perception to include the car, right? So you're feeling with the tires, you're feeling with the brake, right? And that's, well, part of my understanding of that is that that's very tightly associated with our tool using. tool using proclivity, because a tool is a bodily extension. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. It's an embodiment, right? So in two minutes, I turn this subject into a table, right? And then more than that, if I, me, you know, Balland was to...

Take a hammer and go like this. on the table, he'll feel pain sensations, right? So the pain regions of his brain will light up if I was to look in a scanner and look at the neurons there. So it shows you that in that way you can take... something you can, first of all, you can create a sensation of this table belonging to you, but then... Being part of you. Big part of you, right? It becomes an embodied part of you. But then beyond that, you afflict pain now to the table, in fact.

And then you will feel- Yeah, well, that would also be part of social perception, I presume. I read a paper not long ago. If I remember the details carefully, they were looking at the difference. I think the dimension was agreeableness, but it might have been psychopathy, which would be the opposite of agreeableness, let's say. That more agreeable people, so less psychopathic people.

feel, have more pain activation to the perception of other people's pain. So you can imagine that part of the utility in being able to morph your pain sensitivity, even to represent something. objective like a table, that's also a variant of my ability to map my own body, let's say, onto your body so that the empathy that I feel for you isn't conceptual.

and i've really been i've really been thinking about this in terms of how we understand each other because it looks to me like what we do to understand each other is i notice what your aim is partly by watching your eyes I infer your aim. Once I infer your aim, I can inhabit your perceptual space because if I know your aim, I know the objects that surround you. But I also know how your emotions are configured because they're configured in relationship to the aim.

can adopt that aim then i can embody those emotions and perceptions right i can read off that embodiment and then i that's So the understanding is actually my simulating you on my own neural architecture and then drawing the appropriate inferences from that. And it looks to me like children probably develop that ability. Some of it's nascent, I would say. Some of it's there.

It's very interesting. So we actually, we were the first group to show that people with OCD, who has a very fixed sense of self, right? So they wash their hands all the time, washing and scrubbing. When they do this illusion, they have a much more sensitivity to it to the extent that there's a control condition for this illusion. So for the illusion to occur, you have to stroke and tap, tap, tap, stroke, and stroke, and tap in a synchronized manner. That's important, right?

So that's key. Great. So you're linking the visual perception to the kinesthetic perception? Absolutely. Absolutely, right? But in people with, oh, so the control for this, by the way, is if you do it in a random sequence, like tap, tap, stroke, stroke, but everything is just random, right? And you do, again, the touching and stroking is random, then the illusion will not occur or it will be slightly. So you'll have a slight.

illusion there or most of the time no illusion that's so this is the key control for the for the illusion right so let's just walk through this so everybody understands Clearly. So you have someone with their arm on a table, let's say, their left arm. Their right arm is under the table. So they can no longer see it. Now, what you're doing then is you're interacting with their hidden arm physically. Physically, yep.

But they can't see that. They can feel it. At the same time, you interact with the table where they can see it. Absolutely. So you're syncing their visual perception with their kinesthetic perception. Absolutely. But it's not.

but their kinesis or their visual perception isn't focused on their own hand right now they start to react to the table like it's a hand correct okay now you're extending this to the ocd situation yes okay so elaborate on that absolutely and i just want to just one point here is that

I mentioned a table, so the original experiment was done with a rubber hand, right? Right, right. But I'm using table because it illustrates the experiment better, I think, and you can have a table as well. People would start responding to a rubber hand as if it was...

their own. So instead of a table, you just have a rubber hand that looks like your own hand, and then you stroke and tap the rubber hand right in front of the person. Right, with their other hand hidden. Correct. They start to respond to the rubber hand as if it's theirs. Right, right, exactly. And then flinch if there's a... threat to it. They have flinch if there's a threat to it, right? Yeah, okay.

And that can be extended to something as inanimate as a table. Correct. Or in fact, in fact, you can do it in air. So you do know Rich Magnale? Yes. Yes. A common friend, right? Yeah. So one day Magnale and I did it in the air. So I did it in... on Rich, call him Rich, so stroke, stroke, tap, tap, in the air, and he felt the rubber, like his own hand was floating in the air. It was kind of spooky. Wow. My God, what's happening? I feel my hand is floating in the air.

You know, that must also be associated with a really profound, with our sense of what constitutes ownership. Right. You know, because...

The idea that something is yours or that something is mine, there's no reason to assume that that isn't an extension of something like embodiment. It's certainly the case that, you know, if people's... cars are attacked let's say or kicked right they respond to that very much as if it's a bodily assault right right and i so it it begs the question how much of our

embodied concept of ownership, like that concept on which we platform the philosophical and philosophy and conception of ownership is actually the underlying scaffold.

for that is the our ability to extend our embodiment to even inanimate objects right right because then they start to become part of us right right and part of what you're pointing to with your emphasis on brain plasticity and then is that identity itself, even in terms of perception and pain sensitivity is fluid and dynamic to a degree that you wouldn't. you wouldn't immediately presume. And I do want to differentiate between plasticity and then the dynamic nature of the...

function of the modules of the brain. So, for example, you have, in terms of the rubber hand illusion, it shows that, for example, we have a structure called the TPJ right here, temporal parietal junction is the fancy name for that. That structure is important for taking all the sensory modalities, touch, hearing, feeling, right? So smelling and sort of...

and unifying that into a whole and... That's a cortical area? It's a cortical area. Where is it located? It's called a TPJ, so it's temporal parietal junction, so it's kind of... strategically located between the different sort of occipital, somatosensory region and the temporal. Right, so it's a religion that...

overlaps physiologically between the different sensory integration systems? It does, exactly. It's like a crossroad, so to speak. Right. Is it the same area that's used for silent reading? Silent reading, I'm not sure. Okay, well... The reason I'm asking about that from what I remember is that the region that we use for silent reading is the space, is the overlap between the auditory and visual cortex. Right. Which makes perfect sense, right? Because we're basically, when we read silently.

we're using our eyes as ears right right right so and those overlapping areas okay so this area is a place between many of this between a variety of the different sensory... Between different sensory integration. It's a hub for integration. And interestingly, actually, it's also involved in the self-other distinction. So we have a distinction of...

The land here, Dr. Peterson over there. And then- That's why we can't tickle ourselves. That's why we can't tickle ourselves, right? But that part of the brain, if you zap that, sometimes the self-other distinction can break down. So you feel like you're merging into another person. So that's very interesting.

that function it also has connections to the frontal lobes which is involved in obviously in empathy and and and seeing the perspective of somebody else so feel like like theory of mind, what is Dr. Peterson thinking right now? What is his agenda right now? What is his motive? So that... Ability is also involved. And this comes to a psychopathy point, actually, because if you have the temporal parietal junction being involved in body construction, so it's involved in self...

and constructing a body image, which is expanded in the rubber hand illusion, but also involved in seeing your perspective as well. So it's very dynamic. Experiencing your perspective. Experiencing somebody else's perspective. When a woman faces an unexpected pregnancy she often feels overwhelmed and alone. Many initially consider abortion their only option

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theories of autism, that autistic people lack theory of mind. But I've never really liked that theory because autism is a really fundamental disorder. Like, autistic people generally don't like people and they don't like to be touched. That's not conceptual. Mammals like to be touched. If you don't like to be touched, then something's gone wrong at a level that's like under mammal. It's really deep and profound.

what would you say, alteration in philosophy. But one of the things that is characteristic of autistic people often is that they don't look at people's faces. They don't look at eyes. Right? So then you could imagine it's not exactly. a lack of theory of mind is that if i don't watch your eyes yeah i can't infer your aim right if i can't infer your aim i can't mimic you on my own platform right so i'm i wonder

To what degree? I don't know if these experiments have ever been done. I mean, it isn't obvious to me exactly why autistic people don't watch the face. It's very mobile and changing. is something that seems to upset autistic people, like they often do, like furniture moved in a room that they're familiar with. But I wonder what would happen to their ability to experience empathy if they were-

focally trained to attend to eyes, to learn to perceive the face properly. It probably could be trained. So I know Richard Davidson. He's done some studies looking at amygdala activation in autistic children. And they do have an amygdala that's dancing with activity whenever they look at eyes. So they have that.

But it's not entirely known why. It probably has to do with the fusiform face area. So there's a region of the brain specialized for recognizing faces. Right, right. And so it has to do with that. Properly oriented faces only. If they're upside down, it doesn't work. It doesn't matter. And to be frank, this area of the brain is also involved in dry classification of objects. So not only faces. Musical instruments.

Probably. I think so. It's more dry, so it goes like a guitar from a piano or something like that. It doesn't have that specification. To have specificity, you have to go... higher up in the system so it has this more banal quality to it and so obviously in visual processing you have a hierarchy of where it becomes more complex with each step of envision. And then the highest, so then it goes to a point where you start classifying objects in the world. That's the fusiform phase area. And then...

After that, you go to Wernica, which is more sort of meaning and purpose. And then you go to things like the hippocampus, which is involved in things like memory. So it goes from more simple stages of visual processing to... Dry classification, faces. Dr. Peterson's from Alex, from Kim, knowing different people. So that's that part. And then going to higher centers.

So that's kind of that process. So let's go back to Ramachandran. I was really interested in his work for a long while, especially on hemispheric lateralization and neglect. Fascinating. Some of the experiments that you described emerged because of Ramachandran's investigations into neglect, right, originally.

So neglect, for those of you who are watching and listening, is a very strange phenomenon. So if you have a stroke and you have, correct me if I get any of this wrong because it's been like 20 years since I thought about it, right parietal damage? Yeah, right parietal damage, yeah. you'll lose your perception of the left side of your body. But more than that, this is where it gets very weird. You lose the perception of left itself. And I've tried to imagine it sort of like, you know how...

everything that's behind you when you're looking forward, it isn't like it's missing. It's just simply not there at a level that's even more profound than missing. And I suspect what happens to people with right parietal damage is that The absence that characterizes your lack of perception of what's behind you. extends so that now it's three quarters of the world instead of half. Anyways, weirdly enough, you lose your ability to perceive the left side of everything.

And I have no idea how to conceptualize that. But one of the consequences of that is that people with profound neglect will wake up and they'll become aware of their left arm or their left leg after they've had a stroke and they'll try to throw it out of bed because they think it's someone else's. And if you get them to draw a clock, for example, they'll draw half a clock and crack.

all the numbers into the right-hand side. And if you give them a plate, they'll eat half the food. I still can't figure this out because how do you think that works? It's like if I pick up my phone. Now, I look at the phone, so now the phone is foregrounded, but I'm not aware of the left side. Now, if I'm looking at the room now, do I miss the left side of the room? And in the room,

Do I miss the left side of all the objects? Like, I just don't understand how the hell that works perceptually. Right, exactly. They somehow don't attend to it, right? Yeah. They can draw a flower the whole day, but they only draw half of the flower.

and you keep telling them and they say, well, I did my best, I'm drawing it, but they can't attend to that part of the brain. Mind you, the parietal lobes is involved in spatial orientation, knowing not only the body where it is in space, but also the spatial layout of the... right so it has that component so so that's it's a really strange disorder and in order to understand how they are

you know, experiencing this at a subjective level is really critical. It's a mystery of sorts. Rabbi Chandran also did experiments with Irrigation, didn't it? Irrigation. But before we go there, I just want to... So the parietal lobes and the superior parietal lobule, another fancy name there, right? So just above the temporal parietal junction is specifically involved in creating a...

body image as well. So the TPJ we talked about taking information from various sensory modalities and then whispering information to the superior parietal lobule, this area just above it, its neighbor, right? It's involved in creating a subjective sense of a self, the feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body, right? So when people have a stroke to that part of the brain...

As you mentioned, they will sometimes throw their hands out and say, this arm doesn't belong to me, it belongs to you, or it belongs to my dad, or it belongs to... you know, this person or that person. So literally they will become delusional. You can play chess with them, you can have conversation, nothing, nothing is wrong. And otherwise they're not delusional, they're not psychotic or anything like that.

But after they have the stroke affect this region of the brain, they will just say that this arm doesn't belong to me. Or sometimes they might even say, you might ask them, you say, well... They might deny the paralysis. So that's anosognosia, right? So you say, Joe, your arm is paralyzed. They'll say, no, it's not paralyzed. Well, then touch my nose, Joe. And they'll say, okay.

And they will take the lifeless arm and lift it like this and say, I'm touching it, doctor. I'm touching it. Literally taking it up like that. Yeah, well, I wonder too if that's an... Is it a lack of capacity to update as well? Like, it seems to me that what must be happening is they're using a pre-stroke representation of their body. Right. And the tissue that's been destroyed.

normally would update that. Because I remember, too, with Ramachandran's experiments, when he irrigated, this is very weird, too, everyone, Ramachandran would irrigate the ears, so pour cold water in the ears of... Left ear, if I remember correctly, left ear, of the people who had neglect. And it would make them shudder. Now, that disturbed their vestibular system, which is involved with bodily orientation. And it would shock them into the realization that they had.

a paralyzed left side and they would break down emotionally, catastrophically with the realization that they'd been so badly damaged. But then- the effects of the irrigation would wear off and they'd snap back into this. And that's why I think it's not exactly a delusional state. I think they're stuck with the body representation that existed before the stroke and what's been.

eradicated the systems that could update that the right hemisphere systems they don't exist right so there's no way of fix there's no straightforward way of fixing it so one way to approach this or sort of think about this is that

You know, the left side of the brain, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere have different functions. I just want to make it clear as to the two. To the listeners, I know you know this, right? So they have different functions. So intriguingly, it's only in the right side, if you have the stroke in the left, they will not have this delusion. That's the funny part, right? So it's only in the right. So this tells you there's something going on about self in the right.

that's obviously different. Or alteration of self. Alteration of self, right? Interestingly, if you have a stroke to the prefrontal on the left side, you will develop catastrophic reactions to anything. So you might have a conversation and start crying in the middle of the conversation without any obvious reason. If you get a stroke in the right prefrontal, you will have become delusionally optimistic. So you'll go out and buy a Rolex if you can't, you know, and get...

you know, become manic effectively. So it shows us that the left hemisphere is involved in positive emotion and the right is involved in negative emotion. And in fact, today, when you use things like TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, you might zap. the left hemisphere and people with depression and make it more active and you end up with less depression. So the brain has these functions that are very lateralized and highly unique to each side of the brain.

I really liked his model of brain lateralization. Novelty versus routinization. And I know Ramachandran developed a theory that was either parallel or influenced by Goldberg. I can't remember. you What that would imply, if the right hemisphere is associated with novelty recognition, so it recognizes anomaly, it makes sense that it would signal negative emotion because the first thing that should happen when something you don't expect occurs.

because that means the routine you're running doesn't map the territory well, right? Because what I'm trying to do is whenever I run a perceptual routine, I have a goal in mind, and I'm presuming that my... perception is adequate to the task. Right.

If something anomalous occurs, like if I tell you a joke and you don't find it funny, or maybe I tell you a joke and you get offended by it, then obviously the way I've mapped you is wrong. The way I've mapped the joke is wrong. God only knows how much error I've made. that's going to be signaled by the right hemisphere. Anomaly, negative emotion. Okay, then you're going to attend to that. Now, the problem with depressed people is they attend to it catastrophically.

if i make a say if i'm depressed and i make a mistake like that with you we're sitting here talking yeah i make a little joke yeah and you either don't find it funny or you act offended even if that only took A brief amount of time. A depressed person would think, well, that didn't go over very well. Obviously, I'm not very funny. Obviously.

I don't understand this person very well. Oh, that's because I really don't understand anyone very well. I didn't understand people very well in the past, and I don't understand them well, and I'm very unlikely. to learn how to do that in the future. People who are unable to learn like that socially, they're not very useful people.

Some people are so useless that it would be better if they weren't around at all. I'm one of them. Yeah. Right. And so I'm wondering if the so you can imagine the right hemisphere when it's analyzing something novel opens up that entire space of.

potential consideration right my suspicions are that the left prefrontal cortex probably puts a box around that continually yeah you know because the right level of analysis if i make a joke With you and it falls flat. I should note that But I shouldn't leap to catastrophic conclusions to begin with I should just note it like it should now become a

what would you say, an object of potential future significance. And I've noticed in my clinical practice that people who are well regulated emotionally won't undergo a detailed investigation into an anomaly. until it repeats let's say three times until there's a pattern whereas depressed people they'll leap to the worst possible conclusion almost immediately and that does look like something like

Like that left hemisphere, left prefrontal hemispheric dysfunction that you described. So you can imagine that the right hemisphere notes the novelty. elicits negative emotion, then opens up the search space, which could be indefinite. Like the reason your joke didn't go over might be because you are the kind of unpopular loser who...

wreaks havoc wherever they go, but that shouldn't be your first conclusion, right? So you lose the left hemisphere system and that whole cataclysmic reaction is dysregulated. I like that. I mean, it makes sense, right? So the right hemisphere.

is more emotional, big picture oriented, as you say. And it could be that it goes into this infinite loop of possibilities in this big space land where there's no way it can really get fixed. There's no anchoring, right? So that's correct. Okay, so I would say... I'd like to know your thoughts about... So, I'm very interested in archetypal psychology. Right. And...

Jung had a very specific, Carl Jung had a very specific hypothesis about dreams, which I really like. And this is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today because you're interested in dreams and you've talked about them as simulations.

His idea about dreams, which is a brilliant idea, is that it wasn't hemispherically localized for him because he didn't have the neuroanatomical knowledge. So imagine that you encounter an anomaly. Okay, that's- the place you could say that that exploration that we just described right which is you know is there something wrong with me socially is it generalizable am i a cataclysmic person all of those are fantasies of a sort right

And you could think of the fantasies as attempts to remap the anomalous situation. Right. Right. And then like a shallow remapping would require. just a tiny alteration of fantasy, but a large remapping would mean a whole reconfiguration of character. Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration for the remapping of anomaly and that it could be.

undertaken safely because you could explore different perceptual configurations in the safety of dreams without exposing yourself to any danger yeah so you could imagine that So the right hemisphere detects anomaly, and it begins this exploration process. But it's using the landscape of fantasy, which would be simulation, to start to-

to start to explore. And you could imagine too that one of the ways that that might be triangulated would be, imagine that your right hemisphere has aggregated a couple of different anomalies. Not enough to be cataclysmic about them, but to have them sort of there as mysteries. Right. Okay, now you search through the fantasy space. Yep. And one of the new fantasies explains like several.

anomaly simultaneously my guess is that's something like fantasy related insight yeah because you'd see that in therapy you know where someone will lay out a couple of different problematic scenarios

and then contemplate the commonalities, and sometimes they'll stumble across something that, oh, I see, I'm looking at this whole thing wrong. It's a... restructuring of the theory and then those three anomalies are all accounted for and that's going to give you a sense of conviction right because now you have a theory that accounts for the new the new information and the dream is part of that process it's the birthplace of that

the birthplace of that re-novelization of conception. Yeah, yeah. No, that's interesting. So I think definitely- In terms of using the right hemisphere in dreams, there's got to be something there. So I'm not sure how much this has been explored in terms of the right hemisphere only. But there's definitely because... Dreams is so much about emotional updating and emotional creating a sense of

making sense of an emotional landscape, right? So in dreams, for example, it's heavily populated by people, right? REM dreams, for example. So each night you cycle through different stages of sleep.

Stage one, two, three, and then you... have deep sleep, and then you have REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, where your eyes go from side to side. During this stage of sleep, you're paralyzed from head to toe, so you have structures in the brain called the pons and the medulla in the lower part of the brain that paralyzes.

your entire body so you won't act out your dreams and hurt yourself, right? So this is, so I want to lay the foundation before I get to your point, right? And that sets up the stage for exploration without risk. Right, so now you can engage in this laboratory, you know, of testing.

a testing space without any fatal consequences, right? You can do whatever you want and you don't hurt your sleeping partner or yourself. So you have that paralysis, first of all. You're in a physiological straitjacket, so to speak, right? Yeah, and you can explore deeply enough so that you could actually reach. shape not just your conceptions, but your perceptions. And that idea accounts for some of the bizarreness of dreams. If you're...

In exploring at the level of perception, it's going to seem bizarre, obviously. So I just want to sort of go through this. So first of all, you're paralyzed in REM sleep, right? From head to toe, you can't move. Your eyelids can move because of a different circuit, by the way. I just want to add that. So this is a different circuit for the eyelids. Now, interestingly, the emotional part of the brain, the limbic centers behind, tucked behind your ears, become high.

Hyperactive. So you have that. Your prefrontal lobes, and the CEO of the brain, becomes less active for some reason, so that part of the brain dials down, right? Is it restriction of inhibition? restriction of inhibition. And so everything in the world becomes...

less focused, right? So you can- Less constrained? Less constrained, right? So you don't think in a logical, straightforward, ABC-like manner, right? So if I wake somebody up from REM sleep and say, well, the word, and tell them the word son. he will think of chair instead of moon. So he doesn't think in a logical, serial manner. He will think in an unrelated manner. In fact, he will be more likely to say sun and chair versus when somebody's awake and I ask him, well, what do you think of?

Now, when I say sun, they might say moon. So they are more likely to relate unrelated words. Which is what you'd expect if it was an exploratory process. Exploratory process, right? So the prefrontal lobes turn down. The emotional part of the brain dial up. So you have that. You're paralyzed from head to toe. Now, this is a perfect cocktail for strange things. Not only that, but also...

The chemicals in your brain that have to do with logical and linear thinking, no adrenaline. You have adrenaline in your body when you're anxious or you're excited. You have adrenaline. You have no adrenaline in the brain, but also in the body. But no adrenaline is... is the cousin chemical of adrenaline. Now this chemical

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Ceruleus. Ceruleus, yes, exactly. Your pronunciation is brilliant. 32,000 cells pitch black in the brainstem. They will stop, you know, secreting noradrenaline during REM sleep. So that means... your way of thinking about the world is unfocused. It's like spacey, it's creative, right? Yeah, unconstrained. Unconstrained by prior conviction. Absolutely. Prior learning. Right.

So this is a perfect cocktail now for craziness. The vestibular part of your brain become hyperactive. You know, the central motor region of the brain that has to do with automatic... sort of behavior become hyperactive. Even though they're paralyzed. Even though you're paralyzed. So that's why dreams, you can sometimes feel like you're running, but you can't control your legs. You feel like some monster is chasing you, but you can't move or you feel like you're...

you're controlled like a puppet on a string. And that's because the parts of the brain that have to do with automatic movements, sporadically, the neurons, they're fire, so you cannot control your movement. So you have all that. And then you have the emotions and it seems like then it's just perfect for what you're saying then that the right hemisphere type of thinking of exploration and emotion is just... it's hyperactive. Right, so it's a safe place for simulation.

for exploratory simulation that can be so extreme that it converge on the bizarre yeah but why not why not explore the outer limits under safe conditions well i've also i remember that If you wake people up from REM sleep, the most common emotion they report is anxiety. And that makes sense too if you think about this as part of the, what would you say? The. reconfiguration in the face of novelty process. Because the most appropriate first response to something anomalous is anxiety. It's too.

Because technically what anxiety does is stop the operation. It stops current operation. So that's like a prey. It's like a prey animal response. Freeze. Why? Because what you're doing has either not worked or exposed you to danger. So now you're not where... you're not where you thought you were and what you're doing isn't doing what you thought it was. Okay, now what? Stop. That's anxiety. Then what? Then explore. So like if you throw a rat into a...

A new cage. The first thing it does is freeze. Then what it starts to do is to look around. I guess to begin with, it doesn't even want to move its eyes, right? Because it doesn't want to attract the attention of a... Predator. So it freezes and crouches down. And then if nothing.

additionally terrible happens it starts to thaw it starts to look and starts to sniff yeah right and then it'll start to explore and remap the territory yeah but that seems to be What's happening at the dream level conceptually is you imagine that...

You're encountering a landscape of anomaly or novelty. That's signified by the right hemisphere. The emotion that's elicited is anxiety with a subtext of curiosity. Right, right. Because both of those two things would be a play. And then... The fantasy landscape can be elaborated so that even perception itself can be reconfigured because of the error. If you're betrayed by someone, you could say something like.

I can't even look at you the same way. Right, and that means that the betrayal has forced a reconception so profound that perception itself has been altered. Like, you could find someone attractive. This happens often when people are dating. You could find someone attractive or unattractive on first meeting. And then as you get to know them.

maybe you thought they were attractive to begin with and that just goes away. Or you felt that they weren't that attractive to begin with, but as you get to know their character, let's say, then the perception itself shifts. It's not merely... The theory of mind or the conception you have of them right you literally look at them differently Maybe it's because in part you you actually see I don't know if you reconfigure the What would be the patterns of interaction in their face?

You know, like someone graceful, for example, you're obviously perceiving something like a gestalt. And there's something charming and beautiful about that. My guess is if you see a person of high character across time, you can see their integration and that that would make them.

That would allow you to perceive their attractiveness in a way that you might not have been able to do superficially. Absolutely. That's very interesting. Well, to go on back to the whole dream thing, right? So one of the things is that it's populated by a lot of people.

And that's, again, right hemisphere is actually involved in decoding social, like facial expressions, for example. So that's one thing that... obviously, autistic people have problems with. But for some reason, there's a lot of people and a lot of interactions in dreams. So you interact a lot with a lot of people. And usually, actually, these interactions are negative.

And this shows us that for some reason, it's advantageous to treat you of negative things because you're more likely to train your circuits in your brain to be able to... To put it shortly, like if I have an encounter with a serial killer in my dream and I sort of overcome that, I'm not killed by it, right? By that serial killer. I can navigate that situation in a... appropriate manner, I'm more likely to survive in real life. So it shows you that dreams has a lot to do with survival.

and training the circuits in the brain, making them solidify the ones that can help me survive more. So that's a huge part of- Right, well, and it would make sense too that what you should- Look, the more sophisticated you are-

in your social perception, the less likely even encounters with dangerous people are to go wrong. I'll tell you a story about that. So I had this landlord when I lived in Montreal, and he was an ex-president of Hell's Angels in Montreal. And he'd been in prison, and he was a rough guy. We couldn't communicate that easily because he spoke Jewel French, which is very hard to understand, even if you're French. And I spoke English.

There was quite a big class difference between us and I was from Western Canada and she was from Eastern Canada and so, but we got along, you know, he lived right beside me and to the degree we could communicate. We did. And he did some artwork. He worked in neon, as it turned out. And I bought some of his pieces. And we kind of got to know each other insofar as we could. Now, the problem, his name was Paulo.

The problem was that now and then he would go on a bender and he could drink, well, like an unlimited amount of alcohol over a three-day period, like 90 beer. And he would drink himself.

to a point where it was not even obvious how conscious he was but he was still upright right and then he'd drink up all his money and then he developed a habit of coming to my door at like three in the morning to sell me like a toaster or a microwave because he needed money because he wanted to keep drinking and so i did that a couple of times he showed up at like three in the morning now he's a big guy and he's tough and i went out once with a to a bar with him

He put me on the back of his motorcycle, which is a 750 Honda, if I remember correctly. He put his wife's helmet on my head, which is his little tiny helmet, and away we went. He said, if the cops come after me, I'm not stopping, just so you know. It's like, well, that was the beginning of a very...

interesting evening and he got into all sorts of fights at the bars because people would come up and like challenge him essentially stupid people and that didn't go well for them so he was touchy let's put it that way Well, I talked to my wife about this because she didn't like the fact that I was giving Paulo money for his like toasters and so forth because she knew that he was trying to quit drinking. Yeah. So.

And then it also scared her that he would come over like at three in the morning. So one day he came over at three in the morning and he was standing there sort of swaying and looking at me. And I had to tell him that. I wasn't going to give him any more money starting then. And I had to tell him why. And so I said, look, we know you're trying to quit drinking. And when you come over and...

I buy your toaster, then you go and drink. And I can't do that anymore because it's not good. And he looked at me for like 10 seconds. And I know why he was looking at me. He was looking at me to see if I was playing moral... superiority games yeah yeah in which case the interaction wouldn't have gone very well yeah right and so the reason i'm bringing that up is because as your social perception becomes more sophisticated

the probability that you can navigate well in a complex and potentially dangerous situation increases radically. So if you can practice that in a dream, now that should mean that you should concentrate on...

elements of social behavior that didn't go your way that you don't understand. And that would take you into a landscape of Well, hard to tell, but possibly into a landscape of malevolence. That would explain, for example, why people go and watch horror movies and movies about serial killers and so forth. It's like you want to sharpen yourself up.

And that's a good point. So the fact is that, you know, when you dream, your brain takes you on this exploration, right? And it looks at various social scenarios, for example, that evoke emotions in you. So it takes, you know, Dr. Peterson and put him... in a room with Kim and Joe and see how he reacts. If the reaction is not an emotionally evocative one.

it will literally take you and show you another scenario until it hits on a scene that evokes your emotion, that gets you riled up, and then it explores that. So it has to be, okay. It has to have that element, and then it will go down that path more and explore. Explore it more. It'll say, this is interesting. I see. So it presents scenarios. Exactly. Until one evokes a limbic reaction. Absolutely. Now, but is it also searching for... emotional reactions that are primarily negative? Or is it-

Is it intensity? Not necessarily. So there's a huge dopaminergic aspect to dreams. So it's been shown that if you have a lesion to a part of the brain, the inferior parietal lobule, again, it's a region just below the superior parietal lobule. It's involved in creating...

images but also it's so if you have a stroke there for example you won't dream or the the mesolimbic dopamine centers is a fancy name for the part of the brain where you have dopamine going to the prefrontal cortex. If you have a lesion there, you won't dream as well. So bliss and dopamine...

as well as images is involved deeply in. Okay, so it's emotional intensity and valence. Intensity valence, yeah. Right, but it's tilted somewhat towards the negative. Tilted somewhat towards the negative. We are generally as human beings tilted somewhat toward the negative. Absolutely, yeah. So, okay. Okay, so your brain is playing with various scenarios. Absolutely. And if one evokes an emotional response.

So you see, the thing is, if it evokes a negative emotional response, that would indicate that your adaptation is weak at that point, right? Because you're much more likely to be anxious about a situation that you haven't mastered. So you could imagine that the evocation of

Negative emotion is indication of weakness in conceptual structure. Okay, so now the dream is playing with various scenarios around that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Evocation point. Yeah. It's very interesting. So one thing that I want to make...

clear as well, it's that, you know, obviously, as you know, there's a corpus callosum that there's a bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing the two hemispheres to communicate, right? So you have the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. So these hemispheres, if you literally cut it...

you'll have two consciousness in one person, right? So it seems like dreams is also right hemispheric dominance for another reason, because the things you will see in your dreams are like...

poetry, right? It's visual metaphors that you can't explain in language, right? It's like going through an art museum and looking at things, but in a very poetically, beautifully non-language way, right? So you can't describe... it necessarily and obviously the left hemisphere the regions of the Wernicke and stuff like that is involved in language and understanding language but it seems like the poetic aspect of dreams is very much a right hemispheric

You know thing as well that that should be associated with Both the novelty routinization dichotomy. So the question is well, how do you approach something that's novel? Well, if it's novel, if it produces anomaly, if you don't understand it, you haven't encapsulated it in language. It's not routinized enough so that you have a propositional description of it. So you can imagine that...

During the day when you're conscious, you're running well-routinized, propositionalized routines. Right. But some of them... Don't work out as well as others, right? Okay. So now imagine the right hemisphere is sitting in the background mapping the failures. Okay. So now you have like a collection of failures. It's something like that. Now it's nighttime. You shut down the propositional side and you open up the metaphoric side and it's starting to explore that land.

It's exploring, I think it's exploring unexplored territory fundamentally. That's the best way to conceptualize it. But it's also like the, it's the same as the landscape of insufficient adaptation, right? And so, and that should be associated with.

Negative emotion. Right, right. And now the question would be, what would be the utility of those metaphoric fantasies? Well, part of that's... Okay, so imagine that... Around any perception, there's a cloud of connotations, right, that are first order. We already talked about that.

Like a first order connotation for you, if I saw you, would obviously be male, right? So, and then imagine that outside of that, there's second order connotations and third order and finally things that are so distinct that. They don't seem to bear any conceptual relationship. Well, as you open up the metaphoric landscape, that connotation width should expand. Right. And then you could imagine that what you're trying to do is to explore.

a new network of connotations that would map the territory more effectively, right? Yeah, and I think what is also interesting about dreams and that whole thing is that it seems to tap into a circuitry that's... more mystical than the circuitry that we normally tap into. By mystical I mean it seems like some of the

receptors involved in mystical experiences when you take psilocybin and things like mescaline and DMT and stuff like that, the serotonin 2A receptors. So one theory actually talks about how... So obviously serotonin is another neurochemical in the brain. The part of the brain that produces that, the dorsal raffin nucleus, also shuts down its production of serotonin. So you don't have serotonin in your dreams either in REM sleep.

And so you end up in this space without no adrenaline and without serotonin. But it seems like for some reason that the serotonin 2A receptors become dialed up. So that part of the serotonin 2 receptors become tickled for some reasons. And that is also happening in a psilocybin experience. It also happened in psilocybin experiences. Right, so that accounts in part for the overlap between the mystical experience and the dream experience.

mystical experiences and the dream experiences. So there's something there that is that's hyper cosmic in dreams that you can't, it's ineffable, you can't describe it in language and even, and it's highly personal and it has salience for you. So one thing that I noticed about dream is a lot of people come and talk to me about their dreams all the time. They'll go to the land.

I had this dream, I saw this and that, and they're very emotional about it, and it's highly personal and cosmic, right? But... you know, I kind of go, oh, that's interesting, but it's not really that interesting. But it has that significance for you as a person. And that's kind of about the dream thing. It has personal salience.

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What do you think account? Okay, so you said something paradoxical about that, right? That it's a weird combination of intensely personal and cosmic, which means intensely universal. It brings those two things together. That's a strange... conjunction because those two things are actually quite far apart yeah right the more personal something is in some ways the less cosmic the less universal it is yeah but the dream unites those it kind of unites them yeah so i wonder see an archetype

in some ways bridges the gap between the personal and the cosmic so well here's an example of something you can do with a dream that that's very effective yep so imagine that you have A client who's chased by something awful in a dream and that repeats. Yep. and then you ask them what they do and they say well i run away or i try to hide yeah okay so then you say to them

Well, here's what we're gonna do instead. I want you to sit there, close your eyes, then make them relax so that they get into a state where they can visualize, right? Say, now, bring that dream to mind. Yeah. Okay, now, close your eyes, bring the dream to mind. Now-

Tell me what's happening. So they'll replay the dream and say, now, okay, now at the end, instead of running, tell me what happens if you turn around and ask the... criminal or the sadist or the monster, what it's up to, or what happens if you approach it instead of running. right well and then the dream will continue in their imagination most of the time and

Generally, what occurs in a consequence of that is that dream goes away. Now, I think the reason for that, and I think this is akin to this bridging of the gap between the personal and the cosmic, is because... Their personal response to being chased is to run and hide. So they're prey animals. Now, if you transform that into... voluntary explorers, then what you're doing is you're inculcating an element of the hero myth into the dream landscape. It's like, no.

The right strategy when you're threatened isn't to run. The right strategy is to turn voluntarily and to commence the process of exploration. That is what a hero myth is, by the way. That's very interesting. So let's go on that whole thing, right?

The monster in your dream represents your hyperactive amygdala and the limbic centers of the brain being hyperactive, up to 30% more active in the dream landscape, right? Okay, so that's that overplay of emotion. That's the overplay of the emotion. And by the way, the hippocampus is also...

It turns out the memory part of the brain is also hyperactive in the dream REM world. So you have the memory spilling in into this narrative about a monster chasing you. So you give it identity, you give it name, you give it all this. all these negative features. Okay, so you're contextualizing the emotion. You contextualize it based on the hyperactive hippocampus. Then it's chasing you and you can't run away because we said the central motor generator of your brainstem is making it.

very hard for you to move. So you don't have the... So movement normally occurs in the motor cortex of your brain that gives you voluntary movement. But because that part of the brain can compete with the central motor, automatic part of the brain firing and making your...

behavior is all sporadic and automatic, so you can't get away. Now, what you said was interesting. You said if you turn around and approach the monster, the monster will be... it will become diminished in strength. And that's interesting because we know in the real world, if you... Walk, simply by walking, you will turn down the activity of the amygdala because you're telling your brain or yourself that you are approaching, you're engaging in approach behavior instead of withdrawal behavior.

See, that shifts your identity in relationship to the thing that's chasing you. You're changing. You're saying, now I'm no longer the prey here. I'm the predator. I am the one that is being... that is doing the haunting, you know? And so in that sense, it would make sense that the monster would vanish.

So that's very interesting. But I also want to touch on monsters since we're on the topic of monsters. So there's a condition called sleep paralysis and I talk about it in my... my Peterson Academy course, there's a whole lecture on sleep paralysis. So are you familiar with sleep paralysis?

I experienced sleep paralysis repeatedly for years, especially if I slept on my back. That doesn't happen anymore, but I'm very familiar with sleep paralysis. Do you see any monsters? Can you explain? I'm curious. Most of my experience... experience was being unable to move and no I know what sleep paralysis was so even when it happened to be in my dreams usually my experience was that

Something was happening to me and I was frozen and unable to speak. And I knew I had to wake myself up. Like I tried to throw myself off the bed. Sometimes I could yell to my wife. I mean, literally in my life. I would yell and she'd have to come and shake me and then I'd wake up. But no, I didn't have the monster element to it. Okay.

I had clients who did in sleep paralysis. I think the reason that didn't happen is because I knew what was happening. The monster too, just out of curiosity, so you could imagine that.

with this interplay between the hippocampus and the amygdala, if the emotional systems are more active, okay, so now there's lots of emotions being triggered. Now the memory systems are interacting with those emotions. They're going to flesh them out. yeah right so here's the emotion here's the thing that would be most likely to manifest that so if it's a panoply of emotions it would be an amalgam of emotion evoking stimuli and there's no difference between an amalgam

of emotion, eliciting stimuli, and a monster. Those are the same thing. That's what a monster is. So a monster is your worst nightmare coming to life. It's your worst nightmare, right? It's whatever you dread, whatever is lurking in your unconscious mind, that's coming to the fore, right? And so during sleep paralysis, interestingly, you didn't have any of the monsters. But it turns out about 40% of people will see monsters.

Sleep paralysis is a terrifying experience. So you have this REM paralysis, obviously. You're paralyzed from head to toe during REM sleep. You're dreaming away. Occasionally, for some people, they might start feeling like they can, you know. They can see their surroundings, so they might open their eyes. And then they realize, my God, I'm paralyzed. I can't move. I can't speak. And it's terrifying at this point. And then they look around.

And I had one of these experiences. So let me tell you about my own experience. So I was sleeping in my room as a teenager in Copenhagen. And I grew up in a ghetto-like neighborhood in Copenhagen. And I was lying there sleeping. And then I woke up. paralyzed, unable to move or speak. And then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me. And it came closer and closer until it was on my chest, strangling me. And I saw my legs flying up and down.

And mind you, at this point, I was like, is this real? It was as crisp as this conversation you and I are having. What did the monster look like? Well, I'll tell you. Okay. So at this point, I just saw my legs flying up and down. And it was choking me and I couldn't, you know, do anything. It was literally trying to kill me. Now on this occasion, I didn't see a monster. I didn't see a monster on this occasion, but I've had sleep paralysis since then on many occasions. And I've had...

Various monsters. So I've seen, like one was Colonel Gaddafi, you know him, eccentric figure. He was hovering over me when I was in Egypt. I was living in Egypt for a period of time in my early undergraduate years. I was a little bit out there. And I saw during the Libyan revolution. Of all people, Gaddafi was in my bedroom hovering over me, you know, attacking me.

So that can happen during sleep paralysis. So he's the monster of the oppressive patriarchy. Yes, absolutely. My wife had a dream like that about Richard Nixon dressed in a general's outfit. He was another figure. You could think about him as the monstrous form of the patriarchy. My wife kissed him. Okay. Right, right. So that was how she reconciled that conflict. Oh, yeah. Well, you can think about it. It's a funny move, right? Because...

The monstrous element of the patriarchy is the negative side of the social order. It's something everyone has to contend with. That's a class of monster, right? Like giant. It's the same thing as giant. in hero mythology of course one of the categories of monster that the hero fights is giant yeah there's dragon there's very and dragon is a different

That's more like a representation of the terrible aspect of nature. That's a good way to think about a dragon. Okay, so you said you were in Libya? Well, I was in Egypt. Egypt, yeah. What was happening around you? Around that time, there was a spring, the Arab Spring and the Libya.

revolution, all that was going on and going on and I was watching CNN all the time, you know. Oh yeah, you should never do that. That I should never do, right? So I was doing that. I was sort of watching the news and, you know, I was influenced in some way. So that's really interesting. So our research now in about seven countries has shown that, you know, whenever you have a cultural narrative for it, like stories of witches, of space aliens or whatever, you will have those lurking into your...

you're unconscious and you will see that manifest. So those are categories of the monstrous. Those are your Carl Jung archetype figures appearing. So for example, In Egypt, we showed that the evil genius of Aladdin, you know Aladdin, the cartoon? You will have that appear in front of you. So they will have bloody fangs and everything will be creepy, very scary monsters you will see in Egypt. In Italy, for example, in the Pandafika...

region of Italy, you will see these giant cats or witches. So that's very common. And in the US space alien abduction is- Right. It's very common in the US, so you might see that. Okay, so what that would imply is that you could imagine that the cultural, okay, so let's say the core of the revelation is diffuse emotional activation.

much of it negative emotion. Okay, now the question is, what's the most basic form in which that could take perceptual shape? Okay, so the cultural narrative would be- Like a first order elaboration of the core of that fear. So then it's not surprising at all that that's what your mind would latch on to when it was trying to clothe that emotion in.

perceptual reality. It's very interesting. Actually, so it turns out if you go first order and the basic level, most people will just see shapes and shadows. So they won't even see the monster clothed and have all these details. So it turns out. Right, that's the truly unknowable monster. That's the V1. You know, the occipital lobes in the visual cortex responds to lines and basic shapes. Oh, I see. Oh, that's so cool. the first order

It's a first order. It's simply the brain says, look, I don't even care about the details. I feel fear right now. I just want to hallucinate the basic. Just the sketch. The sketch, right? So you have the sketch. Okay, so then as you explore, does it move up the...

Then it moves off the visual hierarchy, right? So we know then that you have a part of the brain called the MT, the motor part of the brain, has to do with movement. So that's the next in the hierarchy. Then you have a part of the brain... that has to do with, as we said, putting faces and depth and color. And so that comes as we move along the visual hierarchy. And then finally you reach the vernica and the meaning part of the brain, the hippocampus, and you go, my God, this is...

Freddy Krueger from Elm Street. He's attacking me right now. And he has this agenda and intentions. So, but most of the time, people will see these shadows and shapes. And that's it. And that's it. Are they most terrified at that level? It's very terrifying. The one reason for this is that...

Usually when you don't have an identity, it's even more scary. Yes, because you don't know what to do. Exactly. So, okay. So then you imagine that, oh, that's so cool. So then you imagine that adaptation would proceed in this manner. So when it's only.

shapeless form, you have no idea what to do because there's no concrete action you can take against a shapeless form. Okay, so now you... You can imagine using this in behavior therapy to deal with fears. It's like, okay, first of all, Because you're trying to get it to take form. Well, why? Because the more form it takes, the more delineated the strategy can be for dealing with it. So you're saying, okay, so first of all, you're doing a walkthrough.

the visual hierarchy yeah you got just the shadows in the basic and then you get the basic motion and then what's the next level you get depth for example you get color v4 area in the brain with color so you might add color that could be another okay and then it takes a face yeah

And an identity. It takes a face identity and then you hook up the emotional part of the brain so it gets emotions. Okay, the next thing you need above that would be... a behavioral strategy yeah so if this named and faced figure now makes itself manifest what do you need to do it so see this is partly what you do if you're trying to treat someone for post-traumatic stress disorder

is you help them specify very clearly, so give form to, the nature of the fear, but that's not enough. It isn't enough to know your enemy, right? That's better than not knowing your enemy because that's even more terrifying but you want to lay out a behavioral strategy in relationship to that enemy that either Quells the threat So how do you deal with a criminal, let's say? Or like the optimal strategy would be to take the

Enemy and to transform him into an ally, right? That's like that's the highest possible level of adaptation Absolutely, because who needs an enemy and partly what you're doing like in therapy You can go through someone's history and you can see where they might have had a repeated traumatic experience like in a relationship Then you have to find out

What is it that's absent in their representation of relationship that's exposing them time and time again to that threat? Because it means there's something in their perception and their strategy. Because imagine this. Imagine that you were... selectively blind for only for white vans that were approaching you from the... Can you believe that Good Friday and Easter are just around the corner?

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Recurring experience would be once every two years you get run over by a white fan and you have no idea why right? Okay, so That's the account of the lack of your perception and the repeat experience. Okay, so now you have someone who has a repetitive trauma. You think, well, you've got a hole in your adaptive structure. Okay, now you want to characterize that. So give it form and you want to.

It's a perceptual and behavioral strategy to it. And that's what will make the nightmare go away. And it's really remarkable. My experience clinically was that it took very few. repetitions of a repeating dream, where you inverted the strategy, the dream would almost, my experience was that if you did that once, the person wouldn't have the recurring dream anymore. Right.

Right, and it's because you might say at some very deep level, they had conceptualized themselves in that situation as nothing but a prey animal. You do the same thing with exposure therapy, with agoraphobia, right? As you get people to... Imagine what upsets them and then begin to confront it. Yeah. Right. And the generalization element isn't.

the specific strategy of confrontation it's the idea that they could be the one that confronts yeah yeah it's very interesting there's two points on that i want to i want to go into that's really very fascinating so first of all

We have shown that when you have a specific cultural narrative for it and a name for it, right? the more terrifying and salient it becomes. So, for example, if you live in Egypt and you say it's these evil genies, they come at night, they choke you, they strangle you, they kill you, then you will, first of all, have this experience much more frequently.

So up to one third of more frequency to the experience. That's the first thing. If there's a cultural narrative. If there's a cultural narrative. So we compared Egypt to Denmark, my home country. So we compared these two countries. And it turns out when in Denmark, by the way, people say most of the time it's.

It's the brain, it's stress. It's nothing terrifying. There's no higher explanation for it, right? So it's just physiology. In Egypt, you have the opposite, right? The complete opposite. More frequent. More fearful, so 50% of Danish people will say, I think for Egyptians will say, I will die from this. This is fatal. So this is Egyptians. Okay, so they have that. They say the paralysis lasts much longer.

So they will say the paralysis is intense, it lasts much longer. So it seems like through their cultural beliefs, the experience becomes much more salient. much more profound and impactful. It's got elements of psychogenic epidemic to it. Absolutely. And we said, is this true? Is this actually the case? And we went to Italy and we looked at the Egyptians, the Italians with these terrified...

explanations of sleep paralysis, and we saw the same pattern. The Italians would also have these long episodes. They would have them frequently, and they would be extremely fearful. So it's like a contagious maladaptive... conceptualization absolutely right and so it turns out we have a theory for why that occurs okay so imagine little lisa living on this fictitious island in simbuktu for example and she has this conversation with her grandmother over

you know, dinner, let's say the grandmother says, at night, you will have this monster. It comes and attacks you, chokes you. It looks like this and that. It has all these features. She now goes to bed, right? And she has never had, by the way, she's never had sleep paralysis before. For the first time, she will have sleep paralysis now. She will wake up the next day and she will have sleep paralysis again. A few days later, she'll have it again. And then...

A month later, it's become chronic at this point, and she'll go tell other people about it, and they will have it too. And then you might be asking, why is this the case? What's going on? And this is the idea. We think that, first of all... The grandmother implanted these ideas into her brain about what sleep paralysis is. When she's now sleeping in her bed, she will have nocturnal arousal, meaning the emotional part of the brain will be hyperactive during the REM stage.

And she will engage in this hyper-conformatory behavior where she will monitor any paralysis sensation saying, is something holding me down? Is something choking you? Now she's got a scary explanation for it. She's looking for an explanation for this now. And then whenever, and because of her emotional centers being hyperactive, whenever she feels something, she'll go, my God, this is it.

This is it. And she will open her eyes. And then the emotional, the hippocampus and all the narrative part of the brain will spill over into the experience. And she will literally see whatever her grandmother was telling her. Now, you might say, why then does it happen a few days later? Well, that created profound fear. And so a few days later, she will have anxiety and stress, which will predispose her. We've shown that.

Anxiety and stress predisposes you. So she will have it again two days later and three days later. And at this point, she'll go, my God, I'm possessed. It's no longer just one episode. This monster is chronically... possessing me, and it's coming after me. And the funny thing is, too, it is a kind of possession. It is kind of a possession. The grandmother...

transmitted the spirit to her. It's like a virus, right? Yeah, a meme. It's a monstrous meme. It's a meme, right? But at this point, what's interesting is that we've shown that people who have this episode, they will have more anxiety and more PTSD-like symptoms. this, right? So at this point, she might have these

small tease of trauma of the monster coming and attacking you and then creating an overall trauma. So it becomes almost a traumatic experience. Well, you can imagine how that would increase the probability that it would spread too, because... She might tell a friend, for example. That's what I'm saying, right? So she goes around and tells her friends about it. And it turns out then that if you live in a culture where this, you know, like Egypt, it's twice as common.

versus Denmark. So we said that for an individual person, you will have it three times more than the person who has sleep paralysis. But beyond this, it's generally twice as common.

in cultures like Egypt and Italy and so forth. So there's this element to it that's very, very interesting. And I want to take you to an experiment that your colleague Rich did, Rich McNally, that sort of encapsulates all this. So he showed... that people who think that sleep paralysis is a space alien abduction. So these guys will say, well, I was sleeping in my bed and this gray came down in a spaceship. It attacked me. It choked me. It took out my semen. It was a lot of sexuality going on.

on and obviously we know from REM sleep the hypothalamus and these parts of the brain are hyperactive the sexual parts of the brain are hyperactive so you have sexual arousal doing sleep paralysis right so you have the monster coming down taking their semen and all that then they will have... Like a succubus from the Middle Ages. Like a succubus, right? Yeah, yeah.

But then at this point, what's interesting is that these guys, when they listen to the audio script of their encounters of themselves narrating, so they'll listen to themselves saying, oh, I had this experience and this happened and that happened. Their physiological reactions to that, their DSR, their sweating and their heart rate and blood pressure will be as profound as somebody who went to war.

So somebody with actual PTSD who went to a war situation, the physiological reactions they have is comparable to somebody who was sleeping. in their beds and having sleep paralysis. So for me, this shows me this might be one of the most interesting phenomenon in the time of science. Well, you can see, well, look, you know from psychotherapy that...

the simulations that produce the most psychophysiological response are the most curative. So, for example, when Edna Foa was treating people with PTSD, and I think she did this as well as anybody's ever done it. She would have people, this is counterintuitive in some ways, so imagine that the trauma was rape instituted. She'd have them bring the rape incident to mind in as much detail as possible.

Voluntarily. That's the critical element. Voluntarily. And then she did psychophysiological measurements. And the participants who were... showed the highest levels of psychophysiological response to the reenactment were the ones that got better faster right now that was it was still damn hard on them while they were doing it but it makes perfect sense that

The more hyperrealist simulation, the more learning would be associated with it, obviously. And you could see how that could be pathologized. So then the question would be... This would be the tricky question for a therapist. It's like...

Well, what do you do with a client that has a repetitive alien abduction experience? Because now that's a person who needs a strategy. Right. Right. Well, so I developed a therapy for sleep paralysis. I don't know. Maybe you're interested in that. I can tell you about that. All right. So it's a four-step. solution that i came up with so i from my work around the world i thought i gotta have some you know some some method to help these people right so

How could I help them? This was my thought. How can I help these guys, right? And so one thing is that I noticed that, for example, prayer and meditation and prayer and thinking about positive things was helpful. In a lot of instances, people would lay down and think about, you know, whatever God they're believing, and that would actually help them.

So that got me thinking about the attention system and the emotional parts of the brain and how I can bring that into the experience, given that you have limited attentional capacities. And so if you're lying there and thinking about ghosts because your emotional part of your brain, the amygdala... is hyperactive and you know the amygdala has a lot of projections to the visual parts of the brain so it can tell you what to see in the world. So we know this. So it can spill over and...

penetrate the visual scene. So we don't want that. So I thought, how can I bring in the positive affect to the experience and make it more benign? So it has four components. It goes, the first component is... cognitive reappraisal, you know these terms, meaning simply you say, look, this is not a monster. This is just the brain. It's not terrifying. Let me change my thoughts about it. So that's the first point. You do that when the experience strikes and you close your eyes to just to

filter any visual inputs. So you're doing that with people when they're bringing the experience to mind? When they have the sleep paralysis episode. So these are the four steps. You apply directly during sleep paralysis. Obviously, you learn them when you are awake. And I train you. And you practice.

You practice, right? Yeah, yeah, okay. Great, you made that point. So you have that first thing, you do the cognitive reappraisal, saying, well, this is just your mind and brain playing tricks on you. Next step. is emotional and psychological distancing. You go, since it's just a brain, simply, given that it's common all around the world, there's no reason for me to be scared of this. So you kind of...

distance yourself from the event. So that's the second part, right? Thirdly, this is where prayer and meditation and affect comes in. You put all your attention on a positive... emotional object in your mind. So you bring to mind, could be God, somebody who believes in God. It could be your mother's face. It could be anything emotionally salient. And you focus. hyperattentively on that because then... That's why Mary is an antidote to the demonic.

You bring the notion of mother and maternal care as the antithesis. Good point. So in that way, given the limited attentional abilities of the brain and the frontal parietal regions and all that, so you focus intensely. on this object, let's say God. And then fourthly, you meditate. And meditate meaning you do a mindfulness kind of detachment. You say...

I feel spasmy and pain in my legs and I feel heavy, but I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm just going to let it fly. I'm just going to just... leave it alone. And this turns out, these four steps, if you apply it during sleep paralysis, we did a pilot study, a small study that showed it reduced sleep paralysis about 50%. So that's a significant amount, but obviously we have to do more sleep paralysis.

studies. It's a very small study, but it's a first step. It's the first empirical study on this. on this as a treatment for sleep paralysis. So I was very excited about that, but we need to do more research. But I think, what do you think? I walked the Via Dolorosa with Jonathan Paggio. And we were talking about its significance.

So you could imagine that one of the things that you have to do in life is to, what do you say, reconcile yourself to the monstrous. Yeah. While walking the road of the crucifixion does that because it enables you to voluntarily simulate intense suffering in the face of malevolence. Yeah. Right now, you can imagine that because it's voluntary rather than something that's imposed on you, you're switching your framework from victim to accept.

It's very strange, accepting participant. It's like turning around to confront the monster. It's the same thing. So you could imagine, we talked already about the figure of Mary, let's say, as, or briefly, as the maternal, as an- As the antithesis of the monstrous, that's pretty obvious. But you can also imagine that practicing your ability to accept the reality of malevolence and suffering. Yeah.

That's a meta strategy for dealing with the monstrous itself. It's something like that. That's a good point. That'd be my guess.

That's a very, very interesting point. But you brought something to mind right now that I wanted to ask you about. So obviously I've seen your latest work on we wrestle with God and all this. So do you have any thoughts about prophetic dreams? The kind of metaphors, do you have any?

Have you written about this, for example? I wrote a little bit about it in the story of Noah. Yeah. Right, well, so Noah is an archetypally good man. Yeah. But in the... in the culturally and personally limited sense in a way noah's as good a man as you could expect some to be for the conditions of his time and place yeah okay we know from the anthropological literature on elders that

people who are singled out as elders in, let's say, traditional communities are people who other people are motivated to go to for advice when things aren't going well. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so now you might imagine what what sort of person would you have to be to be the sort of person?

who people would go to for advice when things aren't going well. Well, you'd have to establish a reputation of either having had things go well for you so you could avoid the catastrophes or- having withstood a variety of catastrophes and still be highly functional okay so then that would make you a certain kind of person well the insistence in the story of noah is that if you're

orientation is upward, your intuition is valid. If your intuition is valid, you're a prophet because you can see things coming when blind people won't see them. Right, so why wouldn't, like. there's no difference between forethought and prophecy except time span yeah okay so you might say well a mature person is capable of forethought yeah okay now if you are mature and

maximally, optimally configured in your moral aim, your capacity for forethought would extend. You'd be able to see things coming long before other people. And maybe some of that would reveal itself. Like visions, those are fantasies. They could be prophetic visions. They could come in dreams. Imagine that your dream, imagine now you're the sort of person who's dispensed with the first order monsters.

Well, your dreams are still going to be doing something. They're going to be concentrating on more sophisticated forms of anomaly. Then maybe you master those. Well, then now you're up another level. Those are the sort of people that would be prophetic. Look, one of the ways of being a prophet is just by looking at things that other people won't look at, right? Because even in the landscape of media, if a story comes out about what's monstrous, most people will just...

They won't look into it. They'll deny it. Well, imagine instead you delve into it, like you delve into the character of the monster in the dream. Well, are you less prepared or more? Well, obviously. Far more. And I don't know. I don't think there's a limit to that. There's also an insistence in hero mythology that you go to the heart of darkness. Right, right. No, it's very interesting. One reason that I bring this up is I used to live in Egypt, as I told you.

And I was much inspired by the prophetic dreams of Joseph. I thought they were very striking, the sun and the moon bowing down and all these kind of things. So I think there's something very interesting about the whole... that realm of explanation and how that sort of spills and trickles into narratives in religious scripture. So I thought that was- Well, like one of the, you might say that one of the-

strong functions of the religious is, the religious is a meta strategy for dealing with the monstrous. That's not all it is. But that's one of the things that it is. Like how do we contend with not. You can imagine, how do I contend with my neighbor who's being a pain? Well, then how do I contend with the class of neighbors who are being troublesome? Well, then how do I contend with the fact that people can be malevolent? Yeah.

then how do I contend with the existence of malevolence itself? You're getting deeper into the question with each of those iterations. By the time you get to the point. where your question is, how do I deal with the existence of malevolence itself? You're in the religious realm. I would say that by definition. It was weirdly the case when I was working as a clinician. When I was dealing with people who were profoundly traumatized. So they had their reasons. The language.

always became religious when we were talking about, you can't escape it. Because if you've really been hurt by someone who really wanted to hurt you. you've been touched by something like the spirit of malevolence. And when you're having a discussion about the nature of the spirit of malevolence, the language takes on religious connotations and depth of its own accord.

It's quite interesting. So there's a phenomenon I'm sure you know of. It's temporal lobe epilepsy. So these guys will have epileptic seizures. So they will have that selectively in the temporal lobes. So they will, and this is the emotional part of the brain, become hyperactive. And so they will see everything in the world as almost like they're living in a dream. Everything is poetic. Everything is highly salient. When I look at it.

This pen right here, it's highly salient. It's emotional. It's godly. Yeah, yeah. It's quite an interesting... Dostoevsky had temper a little bit left. Yes, yes. So it's just quite... And also... Ramachandran and I wanted to study it more. We didn't get into it. We focused on some of the OCD work instead. But it's interesting. So these guys will become hyper-religious as well. They will have hypergraphies. They will write all the time.

So they will develop this tendency to write and just become hyper-poetic. And it's quite an interesting phenomenon. And some people have argued that in the temporal lobe you have the... god center of the brain so to speak in that region that's where it all emanates in terms of the emotional um landscape that that that that where where um that

belief well one of the things you know if we have a further conversation at some point i'd like to talk about the like neurological conceptualization of of the religious by definition like because I think we're at a point in our understanding of neuroscience where we could have a conversation like that. So like one of the hypotheses, for example, would be imagine.

I think that perceptions are the axioms of thought. Yeah. Okay, now, and so an axiom is a very deep presupposition. Yeah. You can imagine in any... conceptual structure that there are shallow elements of the conception yeah and then layers kind of like the visual system layers and that there are axiomatic elements of the conceptual system okay if

An axiomatic element is accidentally shifted, you're traumatized. If it's voluntarily shifted, you're a hero. Right. As the level of depth of the inquiry. maximizes the inquiry becomes more religious in its nature right that's a definition yeah yeah and so then you could imagine that the salience of the investigation magnifies in proportion to its depth yeah and so that would account for the experiential element of awe for example and and yeah so that

That's something that would be very entertaining to discuss technically. Technically, yeah. So it's very interesting. And I think with the whole temporal lobe epilepsy, right? So the whole landscape becomes hyper... You know, so the regions... We talked about the fusiform face area before. The regions...

from the cluster of cells in the fusiform and the emotional part of the brain become hyper-connected and hyperactive. So there's kind of a kindling going on. So that's why when you look at a dry object like a pen, it becomes hyper-cosmic and emotional.

and spiritual, right? But that's interesting. There's also the opposite in a way. So if you have what's called Cotard syndrome, everything in the world is dead. Everything in the world is... It's almost like depression, in fact. But everything is in the world. And you look at yourself in the mirror and you go, my God, I am dead. I'm a dead person. And the doctor will say, what do you mean you are dead? They'll say, I'm dead.

And then they say, what about if I take a needle and poke you and, well, are you dead? And they will say, well, yeah. And then the doctor might go like this and they bleed and they say, well, how come you're dead? You're bleeding. Dead people bleed. They say, yes.

Apparently. Since I'm dead. Since I'm dead, right? So it shows you that, you know, something intriguing is going on in the brain. When these centers are hyperactive, everything becomes salient. If they're underactive, you know, you are dead. In fact, if that part of the brain, the face area in the brain and the emotional part of the brain is hyperactive, there's another syndrome called Fregoli syndrome, where you go around and you see everybody in the landscape.

Looks like my Uncle Joe, for example. So you go around and say, well, this looks like my Uncle Joe, and this looks like my Uncle Joe. And the reason is that you have hyper-emotionality. You are hyper-emotional, right? Because of that emotion part of the brain. face part of the brain are hyperactive

And they're hyperconnective. The connectivity is in overdrive. And then you feel like, I shouldn't have emotions. That's how your brain concludes. I shouldn't have emotions when I go around in the landscape and looking at people. But I do.

But I do. Therefore, your brain jumps to these absurd conclusions and go, you know, these are all my Uncle Joe. Yeah, well, you see the same. We should close with this and we'll move to the Daily Wear section. But you see the same thing with the onset of paranoid schizophrenia. is that, say someone is watching television, and part of the speech becomes hyper-emotionally significant. So now it stands out.

The more intelligent schizophrenics are more likely to become paranoid, by the way, because they build up the conceptual structures around the perceptual anomaly. But it's the perceptual emotional anomaly that's the core of the pathology. It's like.

Well, why is that so significant? Well, because you get this emotional hyper-response. It's like it evokes anxiety and wonder. It's awe-inspiring. It's like, well, it's like this is... it's particularly significant to me it's a message to me it's a message what is a message from the television station is it a message from the satellites

Is it a message from the Pope? There's no denying the reality of the experience, right? So then the paranoid conspiracy, let's say, is overlaid on top of that as an explanation for something that can't be challenged because it's so visceral. It is dreamlike in the sense that you just described. And one of the things you also alluded to was that we actually base our sense of reality on that valence. So it's hyper real if everything's over valence and it's dead if...

Nothing has significance. Significance is the marker of the real. Right. Right. That's very different than objective reality. Okay, we should stop. Here's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side. You're at Harvard. Correct. And you're working really in the same.

area in the Harvard Department of Psychology that I was in the 90s. And so one of the things I'd like to talk to you about is- your experience there and your thoughts on the university system in general. So let's do that for half an hour on the Daily Wire site. So all of you who are watching and listening, you can...

Well, you can continue your investigation into exactly the topics that we described today. Obviously, at Peterson Academy, because I'm lecturing there and my guest is lecturing there. It's Introduction to Neuroscience. So that's one of the newer courses in our offerings. And so if you're fascinated by this sort of thing.

It's so useful to know the anatomy and the neuroscience, as I said, because it gives you much deeper insights into, well, the nature of the problems that you might encounter and also into the nature of their... Of what? The universe of potentially viable solutions. That's a good way of thinking about it. And we're putting it. Tremendous amount together right now on the scientific and cultural front in relationship to the overlap between brain function, neurochemistry, physiology, and behavior.

profound philosophical conceptions. It's great to work at that interface. And so the courses that, well, this introduction to neuroscience course is one that focuses exactly at that nexus. We have several like that. In any case, join us on the Daily Wire side for another half an hour. We'll talk about the state of the modern university, focusing in this case on Harvard and the Department of Psychology there. Although you've been at other universities too, and we can bring them into the mix.

us on The Daily Wire side. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Yeah, really good to talk to you. Thanks to the film crew here today in Scottsdale and to The Daily Wire for making this possible. And finally, to all of you for your time and attention. you