Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is part of the best of series, where we highlight some of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from the archives of the Psychology Podcast.
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In this episode, I talk to renowned neuroscientists Lisa Feldman Barrett about emotions in the brain. Doctor Barrett is among the top one percent most cited scientists in the world and has been called the most important affect of scientists of our time. In this episode, doctor Barrett reveals what the true function of the brain is and it's not just for thinking. We also discuss the impact of past experiences on our cognition and what we can do to
overcome our own detrimental patterns. Further into our discussion, doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett challenges the traditionally held view that emotions are universal in her own theory of constructed emotion. She argues that variability in emotional expression exists due to socialization and language differences. We also touch on the topics of hallucinogens, culture, education,
relation ships, and authoritarianism. This was a really stimulating conversation and while we don't see eye to eye on everything, She really broadened my mind and had me thinking of new ways of thinking about emotions and the brain. There's no doubt that she's a legend in this field and it was a real honor chatting with her. So now I bring you doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett. Doctor Barrett, so great to chat with you today on the Psychology Podcast.
It's really great to be on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me.
I've wanted to talk to you for a really long time.
Uh.
You know, you're real leader in this field, and the way that you think about it is quite quite unique and different from some of the things. You know that a lot of people are even still being taught in introductory psychology textbooks, right, true, So yeah, we got we got to update this.
We got up.
We started your career as a clinical psychologist, Is that right? So that was your dream of.
Going to clinical I don't know what I would say that was my dream. That was just where I ended up certainly. Uh. Yeah, you know, I had the choice to take the more academic route in cognitive psychology or the more academic route in a actually or potentially practice based route in clinical psychology, and I, for a number of reasons chose clinical psychology. But you know, my advisor
was a social psychologist. I had one clinical and one social advisor, So I would say I I always had like one foot out the door, you know, even when I was training to be a clinician. Yeah, I'm glad that I have clinical training. I think it's actually served me really well in my research career. But but early on it became clear to me that I just really loved research, and I really loved the science end of things.
Yeah, and I mean you're curious about everything because you've you've really you've started adding on other fields that you've started to integrate into your work. But you see that even early in your in your career, you know where you're you spend a decade training in psychophysiology and neuroanatomy, right, and neuroscience.
And yeah, actually after I was a professor, so you know, and eventually I made my way back to cognitive and
and other even adding on other fields. So I think that's one, you know, maybe one thing that marks my work is different or the work that I do with my colleagues and my in the lab that I that I developed so all my peeps over the years, is that you know, we read broadly and we draw broadly from a number of different disciplines within psychology and and also outside psychology, and that just gives you a really different perspective on psychological questions, psychological mechanisms, and and the
underlying biological basis of those mechanisms.
Yeah, I completely agree, and I was really excited to see you get into evolutionary developmental neuroscience and cultural evolution,
systems engineering. All these kind of perspectives give you a system's view of the brain, which is I mean, it's so clear how that links to your theory of emotions, because if you take very discrete view of emotions or a very modular view, I should say, right, you could see how that's in some ways antithetical from a broader systems or network perspective or could be.
Yeah, exactly. In the nineteenth century, physiologists and neurologists and philosophers realized that there was the possibility of using the mechanisms and the labs, the lab procedures and so on of neurology and physiology to search for the physical basis of mental categories that have existed. Really in mental philosophy,
going all the way back to ancient Greece. And when you take that approach, it sort of suggests to you a very modular approach where a word like episodic memory or semantic memory, or anger or sadness or fear refers to some specific set of psychological processes or a process which you know can be found in some modular part
of the brain. But when you start with the brain and the nervous system and how it develops and how it evolved, and then you ask yourself, well, if you've given you know, we're a certain type of creature with a certain type of nervous system and a certain type of brain, how is it that that you know, nervous system in the context of other brains and nervous system of other people, how does that produce the thoughts and feelings and mental events that we have that we experience
in this culture, but that are not general to all cultures in the world. Right, So you have really a single kind of nervous system architecture that can create many different types of minds, And so how does that work exactly? And it's not denying the fact that we feel anger and said this in fear, but it doesn't presume that there are ancient circuits for these emotions embedded somewhere in some you know, ancient beast lurking in your brain somewhere.
It's a very different approach to start with the biology and then ask start asking questions about the psychology than doing it the other way around.
Yeah, I mean, I know that a question, the big question you're interested in is why do we have a brain? Why? Why does a brain exist? It's so metabolically expensive, and and and you've you've given answers such as it for regulation of our senses and for prediction. I know that prediction is a big one, and I've described the brain as a prediction, you know. But I want to take the question one step further because even more intriguing to me is why do we have a neocortex?
Like?
Why?
Why not just a brain? But but why do like me, when I say we, I mean me and you humans, why do we have a prefont Like why do we have a lateral prefontal cortex?
Yeah, So let me just say that there's really debate amongst evolutionary by evolutionary neuroscientists as to whether the neocortex is actually new. Right, So there's some Uh, there's one way of looking at evolution brain evolution, which suggests that the neurons that create the so called neocortex the more neutral term is isocortex, actually are are present in all vertebrates, and are even present in animals that don't have a cortex,
a ceriabral cortex, like birds for example. That there are homologous neurons there, and so what we think of as new may not be new at all. It's the organization that's new, you know. The evolutionary neuroscientist George Streeter has this great saying that as brains get bigger, they reorganize
like companies. So it's not necessarily that new things emerge, but more that you know Barb Finley's work the neuroscientists Barb Finley suggests that all the vertebrates who've ever been studied, it looks like their brains go through exactly the same developmental stages you know, from embryos forward. But what changes
is the duration of each stage. So some parts get some neurons grow for longer periods of time than others, and that produces these architectural differences, these anatomical differences in brains. And one answer to your question, or a partial answer to your question, is that we have a large cerebral cortex because we have what looks like a big neo cortex, because we live long lives, and the size of the brain is really tends to be very, very related to
the longevity of the animal's life. Not perfectly, but they're not a perfect relationship there. But you know, we live long lives and we our brains function best when we can draw on past experience in order to predict the future, which becomes the present. And in order to do that, we need to have a lot of you know, a lot of storage space, as it were, although you know, brains don't store anything. They just reassemble past the past.
They don't store it in any kind of way, any kind of biological way.
I'll quote you. You said, you've said in another interview, remembering is reassembling the past and the present for the purpose of making sense of sense data and doing this predictively. I thought that was beautiful.
So, yeah, for it's well, really for the purposes of regulating the body. And you know, so we make sense of sense data for the purposes of regulating the body. That's you know, we don't see and hear and smell because it's fun or because it's interesting. You know, sense is evolved when when the forebrain evolved, and because bodies got really complicated and animals had to have more awareness of their surroundings.
Yeah, so that that does link to I was going to ask you about the evolution of consciousness and we needed to have greater awareness of our surroundings. I mean, it seems like a good partial explanation for why the lights turned on at some point in human evolution.
Yeah. Yeah, although you know that's I wouldn't say they turned on in human evolution. I mean, the evidence suggests that, you know, the cortex isn't really necessary for consciousness. So if you look at Bjorn Merker's work, it looks like, you know, really what you need is a mid brain, so you need the superior curriculus, and you need the things that's connected to including the hypothalamus, but that you don't need necessarily a cerebral cortex for for consciousness. And so have you read.
Any Daniel Boor's work The Ravenous Brain? I have not, because us Daniel Boori's a neuse scientist at Camp University
of Cambridge, He has a very interesting argument. He does link it very much to the the prefrontal cortex, the lateral prefun cortex, and nourbility for chunking and patterns that consciousness really is this ability to take lots and lots of sources of information and be able to perceive it in our in our field of view, and and and and he includes chunking is an important part of that. But but.
Well, I would just say, I'm not it's not an I mean this. There's a very seminal paper in published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in two thousand and seven where beyond Mrcer reviews the literature on people who basically, because of hydrocephaly and and other kinds of problems, have no cerebral cortex to speak of, and they're really quite conscious.
So there's no question that what the cerebral cortex does is because of its architecture, it certainly allows us to compress information and abstract what you call chunking, I would call abstraction or you know, conceptualizing. It doesn't happen in the prefrontal cortex. It's not it's not the lateral prefrontal cortex.
That's a misnomer, I would say, and doesn't actually, I mean, certainly that part of the brain is involved, but there's a whole architecture along the you know, the cortical sheet, which is basically compressing information in and reducing dimensionality of that information so that you can summarize a lot of details with features that are more abstract. It's just kind of like compressing an MP three or you know, like what Netflix uses when it streams movies to you over the internet.
So I hope those things aren't conscious yet though, well.
You know, actually there is a theory of consciousness which suggests that a certain degree of complexity is what produces consciousness and can produce consciousness in other agents that are not human or not living. I'm not going to get into that big because I don't really know. Yeah exactly, Yeah, it's not gonna Yeah it may be hot, but you know, just because something is interesting and comfortable intuitive doesn't make
it you know, real or true. But in any case, uh, you know, it is interesting, but it's not something I know well enough to discuss. But what I do know is that it's important to make a distinction between experiencing something and being self Reflectively aware that you're experiencing it and the experience of the world that is, experiencing light, experiencing sound, experiencing smell doesn't require a cerebral cortex, but being aware of that, being self reflexively aware of it
may in bulble cortex. I don't know that that could be true.
Yeah.
A particular brain network that has fascinated me in my career is the default mode network or impoper radiant call it the imagine nation network. But it obviously does more than the social imagination. But social imagination is a big part of it in your ability to project yourself in
the future. But it's a very self related network, very you know, right, and so, but it's always fascinating to me when that network, you know, people take like hallucigens or psychedelics and things that that alter that brain network. So the self, you know, is somehow altered in some way. What that experience is like, and then the experience of consciousness in those moments, it's very it's a very different
state of consciousness. It's not it's not it's not most people's everyday state of consciousness being on LSD, at least not for me. Not my everyday experience. So anyway, I was just wondering your own career, have you made much contact with the default mode network in your own research, and what are your thoughts on it's on its evolutionary function.
What is conventionally called the default mode network, which is a network that's been identified in the intrinsic you know, connectivity in the brain has many names, right, it has it has more aliases I think than Sherlock Holmes. Right.
So it's been called the mental lin the imagination network, and the self network, and it's the memory network, and it's the context network, and it's the you know, okay, and so you know, scientists have a tendency to look at circuitry and then name it on behalf of whatever phenomenon they're interested in. But I guess I look at that network and I think, okay, it contains half of the circuitry in the brain that is responsible for regulating
your body. So whatever else it's doing, whatever else it's doing psychologically speaking, it's also regulating your autonomic nervous system, your immune system, your endecrine system, and the other systems
of your body. And so so this is just a hypothesis, you know, I don't study hallucinogens at the moment, but you know, one way to think about what's happening with psilocybin and other hallucinogens catamine even is that you know, even when your brain is at rest, it's still attached to your body and it's still regulate your Your body and your brain are still talking to each other when you're asleep, when you're at rest, you know, even when
you're daydreaming, your brain is never detached from your body. So your body is always in training your brain, always in training your brain, except maybe when you take these hallucinogens. So maybe what's happening with hallucinogens and the reason why you can have these like completely wild experiences and the reason why you need a guide lest you go off the rails is that the normal constraints your brain is
basically associating from one moment to the next. That's what predictions are, That's what imagination is, that's what daydreaming is. That's what you know, perceptual inferences, simulation, all these words we have. That's how you know something is important. You know in the science is that there are many names for it. But your brain is constrained by your body,
and it's often constrained by the world. But when you go to sleep and the control networks in your brain, including the de doorsilateral prefroma cortex, you know, your brain is less constrained to associate, less constrained by the world because uh, information from the world sense data from the world is not processed as much. But there's still this anchoring in the body. And so sure, you know, crazy things can happen in your dreams, but some things don't
happen because they're probably you know, weed it out. But when you relax that constraint, then you really do have more like a brain and a vat right, And and so maybe that's what's happened. I mean, I have no idea, but uh, you know, that's one thought that I've had often.
And that's why people have this sense of they're disconnected from the self because many scientists, including Antonio Dimacio but others as well, have talked about a fundamental sense of self being rooted in the brain's modeling of the body. We don't experience it that way, but but there's some reasonable evidence to suggest that that that's really how it's working.
Yeah, yeah, it's so it's so it's such a new frontier. You know a lot of people, you know, good researchers that Johns Hopkins for instance, are looking into this issue. I mean, so much to be discovered. I'm not going to claim that I and that I have figured out.
Oh no, but I mean I think it's really cool frontier. Actually, everybody, like all of these centers for studying psychedelics are popping up. There's one at mass General, there's one at Berkeley. Now there's like they're all you know, they're they're all popping.
In London, London, Yeah, yeah, Now you know in your book seven and a half Lessons about the Brain, one of them is your brain is not for thinking? Can you tell my neurotic brain that fact? Can you?
You know?
Like I mean, like you know, because I overthink everything. I have a shirt that says too busy, overthinking and.
Overfeeling I need to get I need to get one of those shirts too. Well. The way I think of it is our brains are like the masters of deception. You know, they create our experience and they guide our actions, but they do it in ways that don't reveal how they're doing it. You know, they just and so your own experience is not a really great guide for what
your brain is actually doing under the hood. And so so the way that I think about it is that based on evolutionary considerations is that you know, brains, not all animals have brains, and as you said, brains are really expensive metabolically. I mean that three pound blob of meat between your ears is the most metabolically expensive exactly organ that you have. And it's not frugal. So what's it?
You know, its main job really is to keep your body alive, and to keep you alive and well and and thinking and feeling and seeing and so on are in the service of that task. Now, we don't live our lives that way, and we don't experience every feeling that we have in every you know, insult that we bear, in every hug that we give, and every you know jog that we take, and every argument that we have.
You know, we don't experience our lives that way. But that does seem to be from my perspective, the best explanation for how to think about thinking and feeling and so on in the dynamics of the brain. And when you start thinking about it that way, it suggests it opens up all kinds of new avenues of thought for things like why we have an opioid epidemic, why do we have record levels of depression, you know in this country and around the world. Why does authoritarian thinking seem
to emerge, you know during economic hardship. Mean there are psychological explanations that people give that are incomplete, I would say, because they don't consider what's happening at the biological level. And when you start to think about those factors, a lot of hypotheses sort of emerge. So it's very fruitful way to you know, think about what psychological functions are for exactly.
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Go to sacoaching dot oorg. That's sacaching dot org. I look forward to welcoming you in December. Well, let's pick one and double click on it. Can I pick the authoritarian during economic hardship one? Because that's super interesting to me and I'm trying to figure that one out myself, and the same with populism. You know, you see during certain environmental conditions, these environmental conditions, how is it interacting with the brain? You know, how can the biological perspective
help explain this? Particularly from maybe even a prediction, because I could see where you're going. But I'd love to hear I'd love to hear what your your thoughts are.
Sure. Sure. So the first thing, though, you know, that I would say is I want to make it really clear that what I'm offering here is is this hypothesis. I'm not claiming anything is true, and I'm also not reducing everything to biology. That this is not a reductionist explanation of anything. It's actually what I'm suggesting is that
there are that this is a complex matter. And when I say complex, I don't I don't just mean like, wow, this is super complicated, although it is super complicated, but I mean, really in terms of the causation is complex, meaning there are multiple factors which are interacting with each other. And I think one of the factors that that's interacting with other with other, one of the one of the causal factors are one of the causal forces amongst many
that are interacting is the state of your metabolism. So you know, the best way for me to describe it is to say, to use a to use a metaphor that I use in seven a half Lessons, which is that you know, your brain is running a budget for your body, and it's not budgeting money, it's budgeting salt and glucose and water and oxygen and all the nutrients that you know, you need to keep yourself alive and well because you have gazillions of cells in your body
and they all need oxygen, and they all have to have waste removed and you know, and so there's a need to sort of make sure that nutrients get where they need to go before they're needed. If you wait until after they're needed, there's a tax that you pay little metabol attacks. So there's this body budgeting function that your brain is performing. And you know, when your brain is well, what do you do when your budget When your financial budgets in running a deficit, you stop spending.
What does that mean for a brain? Well, the two most expensive things that your brain can do is move your body or learn something new. And so what happens when people are running a deficit in their body budget, when their metabolism metabolically they're just not it's not just it's not as efficient as it should be. Maybe they're not getting enough maybe they're not getting enough sleep, Maybe they're not eating healthfully, maybe they're not drinking enough water.
Maybe they're economically burdened, maybe they're socially isolated. Or lonely. Maybe all of these things actually translate pretty direct into body budgeting burdens. I could go on and on and on, but what happens is you might feel fatigued, and you might you know, stop moving around as much. You might feel I should also say, there's a real feeling of unpleasantness that comes with body budgeting deficits, and then your brain's going to be looking for a cause for that unpleasantness.
And if somebody conveniently points to an immigrant, or somebody who doesn't look like you, or somebody who is different from you in some way, that's an easy explanation for your feeling of unpleasantness. But more importantly, I think even more importantly than that, is that, you know, what's hard to deal with when you're running a deficit is complexity. Like you, people look for simple, single causes, They look for simplicity, and they look for no you know, things
that certainty with no ambiguity. And so if you look at populism or authoritarianism or or totalitarian thinking, and you look at the analysis of that from a political standpoint, political science or historical standpoint, what you see scholars saying is these things tend to arise, people start looking for simple single causes, and they start looking for you know, certainty and aversion to ambiguity and uncertainty and so on.
These things start happening when you know, people are stressed in some way, and what is stress stress is just literally your brain is preparing your body for a big metabolic outlay and it may or may not come. So you're starts squandering your resources, driving your body budget into deficit.
So it's not only economic concerns that can cause this case. Right, So when you have a president or a leader of your country who just plunges the country into chaos where you can't predict, that is extremely metabolically costly for you. You won't feel it as a metabolic cost. You'll just feel like shit basically, you know, and it results in you know, over the long term, there there are consequences. So that's actually what I think is in part happening.
I think that when you look at regimes that are like dictators and so on, you know, usually what precedes that is a period of chaos where the country is being thrown into chaos and uncertainty is really hard for a nerv human nervous system. It's really metabolically expensive. And what your brain attempts to do in uncertainty is learn. But if you don't have the spoons to learn, you're just going to avoid that uncertainty and that beuty and
choose certainty instead. And you know what history tells us is that sometimes people will give away their freedom to get certainty in the moment because it's preferable to the
pain and suffering and distress that comes with uncertainty. And I think that, you know, so, I think that actually adding not replacing social and psychological levels of explanation with biology, but I think adding the biology the layer actually helps knit together some things that you know, we didn't necessarily think of as being related before.
Yeah, this is perfectly in line with a framework that I've been using to try and understand some of the framework of psychological entropy. You know, like Jacob Parsh and Raymond Mahr and Jordan Peterson propos. Did you read their paper Psychological Entropy, A Framework for Understanding and Certainty Related Anxiety?
I did. Yeah, awesome.
I assume you're very well read in the literature. I was wondering what you thought of it sort of applying some of these free energy principles and things that are used in any self organizing system. But to the brain level of analysis and human psychology.
Yeah, so I think the idea of psychological entropy is a good metaphor, like body budgeting is a good metaphor for the biological process of allostasis. I don't know that, Carl Fristen, And there's like a whole you know, a whole generation people talking about free energy, and to be honest, I don't. I got to see in high school physics, you know, I couldn't even pass high you know, college level physics. It was just not for me. So I really prefer to deal with things at the biological level.
I can't get down to the to the to the fit level of physics, to be honest. So I'm kind of joking there, but I'm also kind of not joking. I don't know enough, really, and I don't understand the math. Even with my engineering colleagues to help me, they often don't understand the math that they read in these papers. So you know, I'm not saying the entropy the psychological entrepater, but the I'm talking about the you know, predictive coding paper.
So I don't know at that level, but I do know that that I think psychological entropy is a good it's a good metaphor for what's happening at the level of the brain, which is that why do we even predict? Why do brains even predict in the first place. And the answer is to reduce uncertainty. It's to reduce ambiguity because you can't you're there. The whole point of a nervous system is to figure out what to do next.
And if you can't figure that out, it's really expensive metabolically and you might die, so, you know, because you might not protect your or you might miss you know, uh, getting food or whatever. So so I would say, I don't know about the details of the mechanistic analysis, but I like the metaphoric quite a bit.
Yeah, me too, And I wouldn't. Yeah, claim to have fully understand and have comprehension over how free energy principle works in thermodynamics systems. Don't ask me at all.
I don't. I'm not, you know, I'm like, I believe, I believe you know the second law of thermodynamics or whatever. I don't know exactly.
I take it for granted.
That's true.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, you know, and I mean it's sort of the same thing as you know, like quantum mechanics, you know, like I love Carlo Ravelli's writing because it makes sense to me. It describes, you know, quantum mechanics as this relate in relational terms, so nothing has a meaning except in relation to something else, and that to me makes a lot of sense. Actually, it's really consistent
with the constructionist approach that we take. But don't ask me to read the math, man, I just you know that I'm not at that level really of being able to do that. But the ideas make a lot of sense to me totally.
And one level of analysis that it really interests me when we talk about how the brain is a prediction machine, is the effect of early childhood trauma on brain wiring, especially during vulnerable periods, critical periods of brain development. Metaphor
that really struck me as ringing true. Is this idea that our brain does a weather forecast to a certain degree if we are raised in very unstable and unpredictable and harsh and partially unpredictable environments growing up, that that does have certain effects on brain development that can cause us to sort of expect that the world will be unfair or unsafe in the future, and that that process has to be actively unlearned through through therapy, lots of therapy.
That's why we're all in therapy as adults, you know, especially people who've gone through trauma, to actively unwarn that because fear learning and fear unlearning operate in different systems of the brain. So I just want to just get some of your thoughts on some of what I just said. Do you like that metaphor of kind of the weather forecast metaphor of early childhood trauma? And yeah, just where are your thoughts on that?
Well? I think all brain function can be described as weather forecast, And in fact, a number of years ago I actually wrote an opinion piece that talked about maps of the brain and made analogies to weather maps versus too, you know, geographic maps and so on and so forth. But I guess it makes sense. But the way that I talk about it actually is to use the idea from psychology of an internal model. Human brains are not born complete, they're born under construction. So a little infant
brain is not a miniature adult brain. It's a brain that's waiting for wiring instructions from the world, and it gets those wiring instructions through the sensory surfaces of your body. So some of the like your brain is wired to the ear shape that you have and the wideness of your eyes, and you know, it's wired by the sense data that it receives. It's also wired by the you know, variations in temperature and in light and in you know, warmth,
and also by social interactions. So how much does a person make eye contact with the infant, how much does the person how much does a caregiver speak to the infant, Like, all of these things actually influence wiring of the brain. And basically what the brain is doing is it's bootstrapping into itself a model of its body in the world.
And so if a child experiences adversity over a prolonged period of time or even it could just be one really intense instance of adversity, that becomes part of the child's model, by the brain's model, and that's what the brain uses to predict the future, which becomes the present. Your predictions, in a sense, you know, are always the result of past experience in some way. Oftentimes it's your
own personal experience. But it could be you know, the stories that you hear from other people, or the things that you see on TV, or the books that you read, or the movies that you see, or the stuff you look at on YouTube or whatever. You know. Because humans, we don't have to experience everything ourselves. We also can learn from other people adversity, if it's prolonged or profound, will that brains wire themselves to function in those circumstances.
And that's the that's the model of the world, of the body in the world that the brain takes forward into new environments. And so yeah, but the only thing I want to say was I don't think you you don't really ever unlearn anything. You just learn new things. And so the I mean, the evidence you know, suggests that old learning never goes away. It just becomes contextual you know, it's just becomes contextualized, so you learn new things.
It doesn't replace the old learning, it just exists alongside it. And this sort of gets back to your point about like why do we have a big neo cortex, And the answer is because we don't unlearn things. I mean, that's why we have a big neocortex, so that we have lifetime memories that we can use to predict the future.
Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's so fascinating when you really think about it really concretely, the fact that our brain is stuck in this dark encasement it doesn't have like it's not and it's like trying to you know, through how many years of human well not just human evolution, but of organism evolution. It's taking everything, it's it's learned throughout the whole, you know, to try to predict and
figure out like, okay, well that's happening. Well we know that, like there's a probability that this is, you know, and that's why we might jump at something that's actually not Once we process it, we're like, okay, well that wasn't actually scary. You know, we'll see something like run across the fore, you know, be like oh, you know it's like the brain predicting that, right that we should be scared by that. But it's just it's just so it's so immed I mean, it's such a it's all Isn't
it all inspiring? You know to think about, you know, just like how much is built in that actually does allow us to function reasonably well, you know some it depends on my day, but you know well enough to be able to to take in all this information and have you know such quick you know reactions.
You know. I have to say that as I was writing seven and a half lessons about the brain, I am it really changed how I look at little infants like you look at these little, helpless, little creatures, and there's a it's remarkable what's happening inside that skull? You know? And yeah, I mean I've certainly used the phrasing that you know, your brain is stuck in a dark, silent box and it's receiving sense data from your body and
from the world. So you know, there's a change in air pressure which you experience as a sound of like you know, like a loud bang. So what is that loud bang? What caused that loud bang? Is it a car door slamming? Is it thunder? Is it a gunshot? You know, whatever the cause is will will lead you know, that's what's going to dictate what you do next. But you don't have access to the cause. You only have
access to the consequence to the outcome. So your brain has to guess at the cause and what does it use to guess. It uses past experience, so you can't escape using past experience. If you do, you are experientially blind to to what you're presented with. But what you can do is you can cultivate new experiences for yourself that essentially seed your brain to predict differently in the future. So you're by doing this, you're basically cultivating your past.
You can't reach back into your past and change it. I mean, you can go with the therapy and you can try to remodel, do a little remodel, you know, but you can't really re architect your past. What you can do, though, is cultivate experiences for yourself in the future that are novel, that are instructive, that are essentially like cultivating a new past, because once you've experienced it, it's learned and it's there and it's available to be used in the future. So oftentimes, the way I think
of it as it's kind of like exercise. You know, cultivating a new experience for yourself can be scary, painful, uncomfortable. It can also be joyful, but you know, it's energetically costly, so is exercise. You're kind of making an investment in in who you'll be in the future.
That's poetic.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So yeah, well this is this is a major theme of your book, is that there are a lot of things we can you know, that we can do to influence our our mind, you know, and the patterns you know, and which does change you know,
there's a reciprocal thing there. Well, okay, I only get too implicit dualism here, but I've wrote something on Twitter, like I wrote something like a seemingly innocuous comment like, it's very interesting to me that, how you know, it's not just as though the brain produces one a mind, it produces multiple minds. And it's really interesting me how through the course of human evolution, you know, some of these minds evolve for different purposes.
It's amazing.
How do we make any decisions? You know, like when we have all these things, and people will wrote things like, well, how do you know it's the brain producing the mind? How do you know it's not the mind producing the brain? And I'm like well, and I'm like, well, you know, look, as a cognitive scientist, I assume a couple of things, you know, or else I what is the purpose of my job if I don't assume them. One thing I assume is that the mind and brain are intricably connected.
That and that the former that the mind depends on the I mean, isn't that a reasonable assumption?
Well, of course, at disk is we're scientists. I think. The way I think about it is that, well, let me first just say that this idea of does the mind influence the brain in philosophy is called you probably know, it's called the downward causation problem. So the way I think about it is that the mind is what the brain is doing in a particular moment in time, and the mind is constituted as a set of mental features.
It's like the psychological features the experiential features in a given brain state or where the brain is in its state space to be technical. So it's not like you have a mind and you have a brain, and you somehow have to figure out how these two realms relate to each other. You have a brain and your brain conjures constructs mental features, and those mental features are your
mind at that moment, and that's it. There's really nothing and you know so, but what you do in the moment, So for example, if I smile at you or I scowl at you or you know, whatever I do or actually it's what your brain predicts I'll do influences what you do next, so and that influences me. So this is you know you, so you're so. Mental features can influence brain wiring. There is downward causation in that sense.
In fact, one of the post docs in our lab, a brilliant guy named Jordan Terry o uh, He published a paper about a sense of should, like why do people, you know, why do people feel moral obligation? Why do they follow social rules? Like what's the value of that? Why do that? And the answer is, and it's all laid out with math, and you know, is that if I make myself predictable to you, then you are more predictable to me, and you being predictable to me is metabolically,
you know, beneficial to me. Again, coming back to uncertainty versus predictability.
Wouldn't be good if like the growth trajectory of most human relationships was, oh, we're starting to really understand each other's being.
You know. Well, I mean that's a really complicated question, but I partly what I would say is that in I say, this is a clinician but probably also as a person. You know, it's hard, it sounds, it's going to sound really pop psyche, but actually think it's true. You know, you can't really get to know somebody else really well, and if you don't know yourself really well. And in my experience, people lie to each other less than they lie to themselves. So, you know, oftentimes in coversations,
I'm sure you've had this experience. You know, it's like you're a platform for the person to perform who they believe they are. They're not really having a conversation with you, they're just you know, like I often feel like when I'm in a situation like that where I want to say, who are you saying this for? Like are you saying this for me? Are you saying this for yourself? Like, I you know, who's this for? Who is this? You know? What's this for?
It?
So, I think when there's discord in relationships, it's often because you know, people are unaware they're that they're you know, they're unaware of their own Yeah.
I love it.
Well, you do say in your book your brain secretly works with other brains. I think this really this principle relates to some of the things we're throwing around right now in concepts. My friend Andy Murphy Paul the journalist, wrote a really brilliant book that just came out called The Extended Mind, which drew on the work of Dave Chalmers Andy Clark.
Did you have you had?
Do you see that book?
I've seen the book, and it's on my pile of books to read at the beach. So I allow myself when I go to the beach for two weeks every year and I only read novels, and I allow myself one science book one, just one, and I'm reading science all the rest of the year, you know, So that's a contender. Yeah, on my pile right right there.
But you're but you're obviously familiar with the you know, the extended mind hypothesis.
And oh absolutely, yeah, absolutely, But you know, I mean, you're you're probably really familiar with lots of scientific work. But it's really fun two and sometimes inferiating, but mostly fun to see how people see what they do with
it when they're communicating to the public. So I love reading popular So I mean, I I before I wrote How Emotions Are Made, I probably read fifty pop with science books just to see kind of like how people did it and yeah, you know what I wanted to do and what I didn't want to do and try to figure that out. But it's it's fun to see how people handle these really complicated topics. It's fun to see the metaphors that they use and to think about them and play with them a little bit.
Well, I do think you know, you're a book seven and a half. Your most recent book is can be likened to Hawkins's Seminal Guide to the Universe. You know, I do think it is the equivalent for the brain. No, I think you did it. So congratulations.
That's that's very high praise. I'm very grateful for that comment. Thank you.
Yeah, yeah, you're very welcome.
Yeah, and I think that it's also very There is a practical element to this book. I mean, you are making the case that the brain, our brains can create our reality to a certain degree. You know, you're not going all postmodern there, and let's say that to one hundred percent, you know, one hundred percent. We all have live in our own realities. We don't want to live
in that world. We want to have some we do want to have some shared collective reality, but that we can modify, you know, our our predictive valiances, our probabilities, you know, and to get really nerdy about phrasing it.
Yeah, for sure, absolutely yep.
I would now at this point like to move into the emotions part and you know, kind of end on that discussion because I find your theory so provocative. And I find it provocative because it does challenge even my own standard ways of thinking about emotions, even ways I still think about emotion. It's I can't just get rid of it overnight. And and so let me tell you some ways I think about emotions. Do you tell me why I'm wrong, or maybe tell me why it's not
a more nuanced tell me why it's incomplete. That's really how scientists talk. We don't say you're wrong. But you know, for instance, I'm interested in like emotional intelligence and that field of research and it's correlation with general intelligence and IQ. But there is a basic assumption in the emotional intelligence literature that people differ. There's individual differences in people's ability to identify emotions. There's even a whole test, you know,
reading the emotions in the eyes test. You know, people with autism have greater difficulty with it. You know, like Simon Baron Cohen's research, et cetera, other people's research on that that there is kind of there are some implicit assumptions here that there there are, you know, universally evolutionary, evolved emotions that people differ in their ability to label,
you know, across culture. Now, the more I read your research and really dig into it and understand the nuances of it, because I do think I do understand it finally, I've really it took me a couple of years to finally really wrap my head around what you were saying, just because it's a very complex there. Correct me if I'm wrong, But I think it does present a little bit of a different view on that, Am I right?
Yes? It does that a lot different, a lot different. Yeah, So let me let me say that. Let's take the mind in the eyes test. Okay, So here's how the mind and the eyes test works. You show a set of eye, like two eyes from a photograph, just the eyes, and then you have four words that you give the subject or the respondent or this patient, and then they have to pick the word that matches the eyes and best.
And when you do this, you see what looks like universal agreement That looks like something that innate, because how else could it be universal?
And not only that, but there's only one correct answer on the test. I mean, like the whole sub sort of test is like see is fear right?
But I would, but I'm not even at that point yet. I haven't even gotten okay, but I will get there in a minute. And that is what happens when you take those words away and you just get people to free label what is this person experiencing? Do you know what you get?
I think people APPROXI me what the psychologist deemed the correct answer. But you're saying, no, no, they don't.
I published a paper on this actually a couple of years ago. Well good, absolutely not.
We need science, absolutely not.
No. And in fact, it's the same thing with emotion perception studies. If you give a scowling face or a smiling face or whatever, and you give a set of words and the subject has to choose, the respondent has to choose the word to match the face, you get what looks like universal agreement as long as you're testing people from urban cultures. When you test people from remote cultures, the whole, the whole ballgame changes. You don't get anything
like anything universal. But you do get something that looks like universality when you're testing people in large urban cultures around the world. But what happens when you test a Americans just Americans? When you take the words away, you don't see anything that looks like universality.
Do you see in terms of semantic distance, like do you see like if someone's like that, like people say they're happy, do you know.
What I mean?
See valance? What you see is valance that people are basically around the world, and even even in remote cultures, people seem to distinguish valance and sometimes arousal. I'm not saying valence and arousal are universal. I'm just saying that's what you see, Okay. And when you look at patients, for example, we have semantic dementia, they can do They can sort faces on the basis you know, so you give them a bunch of faces and you ask them to sort them. They can sort on valance and arousal,
but they can't sort on anger. Said for your disgust, Like if you can't access words and the meanings of words, you can't recognize fear or anger or sadness, recognize and then the point that you were getting at, which is, well, it's accurate. How is accuracy assessed? I mean within emotion research, these are post faces. These are not naturalistic expressions that people make. These are postpaces. They're all post faces. And in fact, when you do research with naturalistic faces, what
you don't see anything like what looks like universality. And the reason why is that research suggests again in urban cultures, that people scowl when they're angry about thirty percent of the time. Now that's not chance, that's better than chance, but it means that's seventy percent of the time they're doing something else it's meaningful with their face to express anger, and that's low reliability from a scientific standpoint. And people
also scowl when they're not angry. They scowl when they're confused, they scowl when they're concentrating really hard, they scowl when they have gas. That's low specificity. So the point here is that when it comes to you know, the expression of emotion variability is the norm, and most of the time when you see universe evidence of universality, it's constructed by these really constrained tests that actually are using artificial stimuli.
So how does Simon Baron Cohen know that the person in the photograph with the eyes was you know, thoughtful or was sad? Or how does he know? Where's the criterion? As far as I know, there's no scientifically objective criterion for any of those words that anybody has ever been able to produce reliable across samples, so that they're a whole scaffold of assumptions, which once you start poking at those assumptions, you you know, the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards.
Really well, well, that's very, very revolutionary because Paul Eckman's you know, studies are taught in almost every introductor psychology textbook. You know, very aware you're aware of this. I mean, look, Paul, I mean Paul Lackmann argue, there's six universal basic emotions anger, surprise, discussed, enjoyment, fear, and status. I'm not teaching you this, but this is from my audience. I'm teaching my audience this.
Uh.
And he's you know, argued universal. You know, he's gone to every you know, every culture in the world.
No he hasn't, he hasn't.
But he hasn't. But it's taught. That's how it's taught.
Yeah, no, yeah, exactly. So this is sort of the problem of textbooks, right. The problem of textbooks is that they they distill information, and they often errors that are made are often carried forward. And you know, like, if you go we did a little study of how is William James like I I learned when I was an intro psych and even later that William James proposed that each emotion like anger, said, fear, and so on, has
its own physical pattern associated with it. If you go back and you read William James, like read read the Principles of Psychology, he says the opposite of that. So I'm like, how how did that happen? Like how how can you say? One? You write one thing over and over again, like in his book and in a couple of papers, and it gets morphed somehow into the James Lang theory. That's like a Frankenstein. I mean, Lang actually believed that there was one vasomotor, one physical pattern for anger,
said to spear. But James believed that there were multiple feelings of anger, and every feeling of anger, every variation of anger, had its own physical comportment. So he's saying there is no essence of physical, essence of anger. It's a variety, you know, he's and so how does that happen? Right? And part of what we did was we went and we looked at intro site textbooks. And you know, I'm saying this for my lovely friends who write intro syite textbooks.
You know, they try possible. It's a profitable business, and they try really hard. They try hard to keep updating, but you know, it takes a couple of years for information to make its way into the textbooks. And in the case of emotion, I'll say all I can say is that the evidence. I mean, Paul Eckman's work was revolutionary for its time, and he and his colleagues did
fantastic work for their time. But they and so I don't want to you know, all of us, whether we agree with with someone or disagree, we stand on the shoulders of those giants, okay, And so that's not to be diminished. But Paul Eckman went to a couple of
couple of remote cultures. He didn't go all over the world, and in fact, he didn't go to many of the places that and it's not a criticism, it's just he you know, maybe it was impossible to do that then, but you know, they were all in in and around Papua New Guinea, you know, for the most part, you know, in Southeast Asia. They weren't in Africa and in all of these other you know, parts of the world. And one of my former students actually published a review of
all of the studies on remote cultures, including our own. Right, So we've been to two remote cultures, including studying the Hadza hunter gatherer is in Tanzania. And what you can see is that all of the studies that have been published in the last i want to say, maybe less than ten years all replicate each other, but they swamp the evidence from those early studies. So those early studies relied on very specific methods that didn't allow for certain
discoveries to be made. And when you use a variety of methods in a variety of cultures with a variety of different constraints, you don't find universality. You just don't.
I mean, it's revolutionary. Have you talked to have you ever talked to Acumen? Have you like, what do you think of my constructed theory of emotions?
Yeah, so that's a really interesting question. So you know, when I was writing How Emotions Are Made the there's a chapter in there about, you know, emotional expression and emotion perception, and it's called constructing Universal constructing Universal emotions. And but you know, I was thinking, like, if I were him, I would be worrying about what is this person going to say, you know, because he's been attacked so many times, and that's not Michael.
Fascist you know anthropologists.
Yeah, exactly. So I thought to myself, well, if I were him, I'd be pretty worried. And so I wrote him an email and I said, listen, I just you know, I just want to tell you. And he knew that I was writing the book because I asked to use some of the photographs of his photographs of faces. I had to get permission to use them in the book, right, And so I basically sent him a personal email and I said, listen, maybe you're worried. Maybe you're not, but
maybe you are. And if you are, I'm going to tell you exactly what I'm going to say, you know, and maybe you're worried that I'm going to say. You know, this guy's an idiot. He's totally you know, off his rocker or he's you know, you know, his science is bullshit, you know, But I'm not going to say that. I just want it to be really clear with you. That's actually not what I'm going to say. Here's what I'm
going to say. I'm going to say that you discovered something important, but it's not what you think you discovered. I think you discovered something else. I think you discovered the power of words actually to teach people emotion categories really quickly. That's what those studies actually show, because you know, if you give people, even in remote cultures, it's a little fuzzier, but in urban cultures, you give people emotion
words and they can use them. They're learning how to use them in the task, and they can learn really fast words. And you can see this even in infants. Words are invitations to learn abstract categories. And that's what I think he showed inadvertent by the methods that he was using. But anyways, my point is that, you know, I just reached out to him, and you know, we had a nice chat over emails.
He responded, He responded, He did.
He responded really positively and warmly and said, you know, thank you so much, and I'm really grateful, and you know, maybe we should have a chat and you know maybe and I so I said, yeah, I would love to have a chat. Why don't we You know, James Gross and I a few years before that his studies of emotion regulation at Stanford, and you know, he and I do not hold exactly the same views on emotion and but we founded the Society for Affective Science together with
some of our colleagues. And so I said, why don't we have a chat at SASS at the conference and we can have Bob Levinson, who is a very close colleague of Paul's, and I consider him a very good friend of mine. He's been very supportive, and I don't you know, he and I don't necessarily see eye to eye on the way that we interpret the evidence, but we can we have perfectly reasonable conversations about it, and we learn from each other and so on. You know, why don't we have it? Why don't we have a
conversation there? And you know he thought that that was a great idea, but it never came to pass unfortunately.
So well, if I could do anything to uh, if you ever want to have like a discussion on the Psychology podcast, I bring like three people together or something, you know, for like thousands of people to be able to listen to let me know, I.
You know, I would love that. But I will tell you that for the most part, we've done debates before. I had a debate with dak Or Keltner at one meeting I had. We had a panel debate with a number of pick can't even remember all the people who were there. We've done these things before, and in general people are not comfortable. As a general rule, my colleagues are not comfortable with that kind of format. We we
at the Society for effect of Science. The conference still goes on, and I mean James and I are not at the helm anymore. You know, we gave it away to our to our colleagues. But you know, we introduced lots of different mechanisms for people to have these conversations.
Like we we invented salons, which are you know, you stick a first a scientist in a room with cookies and coffee and anyone can come for an hour and ask them anything they want, you know, like Ralph Adolphs and I did a salon together recently where you know he he very much is on the side of you know, basic emotions, so to speak, and that's what it's called in the field. And you know, he and I have
debated each other twice in public. We wrote a paper together actually on facial expressions, where he agreed, I mean THEO for science to five. It was, I guess five of us from very different theoretical backgrounds decided to write a paper. Invited really to write a paper on our emotional expressions universal And so for two and a half years we we met over zoom. This was before COVID.
We read over a thousand papers. We summarized the evidence from adults across cultures, from children across cultures, from I mean just you know, lots and lots and lots of evidence. Three of my colleagues believed in universality before we started the process, and at the end of the process, we were so concerned that we wouldn't be able to come to consensus that we came up with contingency plans just
in case what we would do. Because we were invited to write a single paper, so we were like, well, can we write two papers, or can we write one paper and a dialogue, or can we you know, like we were sort of anticipating that we would not be able to come to consensus, but we did come to consensus, so that there is no universality and that you know,
and that paper is freely available. It was written for you know, it's called in a journal called Psychological Science in the Public Interest, so it's, uh, it's available freely from the Association for Psychological Science, or you can just go to my academic website. It's there for free. But my point is that, you know, Ralph and I disagree on some things, but we agree on other things because Ralph is somebody who responds to the data, you know,
and we've even written uh, you know, pieces together. But that's rare, you know, that's rare in general. So if somebody wants to have that discussion on your podcast, that I think that would be fantastic. But I will tell you that, I mean, I'm sure Ralph would do it. But we've we talked to each other. We've talked to.
Each other in you.
I gotta get Eckmann in you.
Well, he's very you know, he's he's he's I don't know him, uh personally, but my understanding is he's not well and he's you know, he's aged.
So I don't know. I mean, I don't know that he would want to do it, but certainly if he wanted to do it, I'd be delighted to do it.
There's so many implications of your research for so many swaths of the field that I work in now, almost to the degree that it's like if I go full in, and I'm not full in on your theory, but if if let's say, I've become like a full disciple of your theory, that means that the way I need, like I talk to my colleagues like I need, I had to tell a lot of people to stop to change the way they think about So let's take two fields,
evolutionary psychology and positive psychology, two fields that I work in. Okay, Now, in the field of evolutionary psychology, it's just everywhere evolutionary of the evolutionary of old function of sadness, you know, the modularity of the meeting motive, you know the emotion
we feel when you know love. But then you know, in positive psychology there's the whole class of emotions called positive emotions, and that's like, you know, as though like that's they're absolutely these are the positive emotions and then then these other ones are not the positive emotions. So everywhere I look, you know, once I look through the lens of your theory, I start to see things very,
very differently. So can you explain a little bit what you mean when you say emotions are learned and the difference between emotions and affect, And then can you talk all about, you know, the implications for a lot of these ideas in positive psychology and evolutionary psychology. I know these are big questions I'm asking you do you do you mind?
You know? I just want people to pay attention to the evidence. That's it. Just pay attention to the evidence, and pay attention to what your experiments, the way they're designed, allow you to discover and what they preclude you from discovering by virtue of how you've designed them and the assumptions that you've made. Here's what I would say. Your brain is always regulating your body, and your body is
always sending sense data back to your brain. You don't experience the sense data that's coming from your body to your brain in a high dimensional detail, because if you did, you would never pay attention to anything outside your skin ever. Again, you experience the interceptive environment of your body, the sense data from your body to your brain. Your brain's modeling
of the state of your body as affect. So affect is kind of feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling worked up, feeling calm, feeling like you have energy, feeling like really fatigued. Affect is you can think of it as like a barometer for your body budget for Allostasis is the technical term. So your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending sense data back to your brain. Your brain's always modeling the state of your body. And so
affect is a property of consciousness. It's always with you. Sometimes it's in the foreground, you're experiencing it, you know, front and center because it's very intense. Sometimes it's in
the background, but it's always there. Your brain is constantly striving to make sense, constantly making sense of sense data always, whether it's emotion or anything else, it's just you know, you are receiving sense data constantly through the sensory services of your body, your eyes, your ears, your nose, and inside your body. There are sensory services all sending information to the brain. These are the causes. These are sorry the consequences or the outcomes of some set of causes.
Your brain doesn't know the causes. That's an inverse problem. And the way the brain solves the inverse problem is by drawing on past experience to make a guess at the cause, and it's doing it predictively. So when you're gaining, your brain guesses that the cause of a tug in your chest is anxiety because in the past, in this context, in this situation, that's what it was. Then your brain's constructing anxiety. You experience it as anxiety, it's not a
fable or whatever. That's how you experience that tug in your chest. But you can deconstruct that tug in your chest. But you can deconstruct the feeling of anxiety into just a mere tug in your chest. That's what mindfulness meditation
teaches you to do. Right. So the analogy that I give often is that if I want to paint this glass, which is a three dimensional object, and I want to render it on a two dimensional surface, one thing I could do is I could just see the glass in its three dimensional glory and try to draw it on a two dimensional surface, and what you'll get is a
pretty shitty looking two dimensional drawing. But if I take this glass and I try to parse it apart into little piece of light, So I'm deconstructing it into pieces of light, and then I so I can see a little bit of blue and a little bit of green, and a little bit of silver and a little bit of white, and you know, and I take these pieces, like this long strip of green here, and I render these pieces individually on the page. Then you get a
pretty decent looking three dimensional object. Except if you're me because I can't paint, then it still looks crappy. But the point is that you can teach yourself to deconstruct into data that's closer to the sense, data that's not as constructed. And you can do that even with your emotions. And I have to tell you, I just had spot.
I'm recovering from spinal surgery. You can do it with pain, and in fact, Eric Garlands a scientists who has these fabulous studies showing that chronic pain can be deconstructed into discomfort and distress, so you can get rid of the distress and just experience the discomfort, and that alone reduces
your opioid dependence. If you're suffering from chronic pain. So emotions are constructed the way every other perception is constructed, the way objects are constructed, the way thoughts are constructed. Everything you experience is constructed in part by what's going on outside your head and what's going on inside your head. And emotions are no different and the mechanisms are no different. So okay, where does the learning from? Where does the
learning come from? Like, where do these past experiences of emotion come from? Well, they come from other people labeling your labeling events for you as sad or angry or as geigle or as you know, ligot or whatever the emotion categories are that are relevant to your cultural context.
I get it.
Thank you so much for that explanation. And I look, this is what I'm thinking, what's might be going on in the literature. It's a different way of thinking about the the mind in the eyes test. But you know, I'm really interested individual differences and and and it's undeniable that some of those tests are predictive of well, less social awkwardness for sure, you know. But also it can predict lots of things, can predict psychopathology, It can predict why psychopathy, No that's.
Where I'm going with why Yeah, this is.
What I'm about to say. This is what I'm about to say. So I think that based on your theory and I could see it, I think it makes it makes sense. Is that probably the individual difference is variable. There is your ability to to understand the socialization processeds, the norm rule structure, you know, like like have you been able to learn in your society that that that's like when someone someone's like that, you don't say, why are you happy today? You know that that's like, so
that's cool. That's like a taboo, a social taboo, and that people like on the auto the spectrum. Because I have studied that topic. I study or versity and I am very interested in autism in particular. Is that you know a lot of them have a bias where they don't look people in the eyes, you know, and and that and that seems to be a source of information. But but the question is maybe with your theory, it's a source of information that allows you to negotiate with
the cultural norms that have set forth. So we associate certain eye information with what we've been taught about. What that means is that what you would.
Say something like what I would say. What I would say is that that gays is very important in humans because that's how we regulate each other's attention. So if I look away and then I look back to you, you know, you're you're likely to look where I looked. And so part of part of what we do with gays is we regulate. We we sort of gesture to each other what is important and what is not important. What can you agnore or as noise, and what do you have to pay attention to a signal? So it's
partly directing learning in this very social way. But also there are other problems, you know, in autism people on the spectrum, they also their brains are not wired in a way to allow them to do abstraction very well. And if they can't do abstraction very well, they're very concrete. Not a criticism, it's just observation. Then they can't use words as invitations to form abstract concepts. So they're going to have trouble using words. Oh wow, way, and so
that's why they can't. That's why they can't do they the mind and the eyes task. You know, if you take a problem a deficit, Yeah, if you take I mean languages. It's not magic, okay. But if you take a three month old, a three month old and you say to that three month old, look, honey, this is a blurg. And then you put it down and the blurg, you know, the pencil you know, makes it noise like a beep. And then you say, look, honey, this is a blurg. You put it down, it makes a beep.
And then you take this and you say, look, honey, this is a blurg. So what happens the baby expects this to beep. All these things they look different, they sound different, but they're functionally the same, because that's what the word is telling the baby. There's a function there
that's the same. It beeps. And that is a very very simple illustration of how words are really powerful for learning abstractions that are in our big brains that can do all that compression that some non neurotypical brains have challenges with. So what I would say is that many of our treatments for psychopathology and many of our tests work predictively to some degree, but I don't work for the reasons that people think and why does that matter?
That's so interesting?
That matters because we really need if we really want to prevent illness and we want to enhance thriving and so on, then we need to understand the mechanisms better. And that's what motivates me to do the work that I do. I'm just really data driven, actually so, and if you just follow the scientific method and you try to prove, you try to find places where you're wrong. Like you know, when I first started doing work on emotion, I would say to people, tell me what you think
the best evidence is. Tell me what you think the best evidence is that there are innate circuits in the brain for emotion. And then I would go and I would read every single thing that they told me. In fact, we even invited Yakpang Scept for a month to come to Boston College where I worked. He came and we for a month. Every day we met every day for a month, we ran a seminar and we went through
every piece of evidence that he had. So I think all you have to do is be as skeptical about your own ideas as other people's ideas, and be open to every shred of data that's available, and look outside your own comfort zone to other fields which make other assumptions that you don't make and if your hypotheses are robust, they will be sustained, and if they're not, they won't. And science, I mean, I don't know. I don't I'm sure you agree. I mean, I just feel like science
is not about being right. It's about figuring out how things work. And it's okay to be wrong, but you know, if you're going to be wrong, I want to know if I'm wrong. You know, I really want to know if I'm wrong, because it matters. You don't You can't help people if you don't you know, if you're if you don't know the veracity of what you're saying.
Yeah, I love I love everything that you're saying. It just this debate seems to be so reminiscent of so many debates and cognitive science that get to the level of is it a general learning mechanism or is it a domain specific system in the brain. It could be likened to the great language debate, you know, between Chomsky and and I actually take more on Arthur Reeber point
of view, which that was my whole dissertation. My whole cognitive science dissertation was on implicit learning, and I tried to show that some of these domain general learning mechanisms could explain some of the intelligence that had been explained by more to mean specific views. It just seems to me like we keep repeating these to these debeats in the field of cognitis science all over and over, and you know, and and I see this as another one.
You know, yeah, you you are one hundred and fifty percent correct. And what I so, what I think is really interesting is so, what is it about the human mind, right of the human brain that leads us always to these you know, like you know, so for example, if you look at Buddhist philosophy, right and yeah, people say, oh, it's very non essentialist. No, well, actually no it isn't. It's very non essentialist about the self. But the Abi
Dharma states that this is you know what. The Dali Lama follows that there are there are dharmas, and those dharmas are essences, and they are indivisible like they're they're the they are the essences of consciousness. And then along comes, you know, a couple of centuries later, this guy named Dharma kirty. He says, oh, no, no, no, dharmas are
constructed by the human mind with human concepts. That's like the whole debate right there, just summed up and like you know, and but look, it's like a different culture, it's a different time. So this idea of domain general versus domain specific, or systems versus modules, or you know, essences or I guess essences versus whatever. You know, you
get my point. There's a there's I do. There's something. Yeah, it's it comes up again and again and again, which leads you to think, like in a metascience kind of way, what is it about human explanation? You know, causal explanations that lead us always in the end to these two choices. And so I think it must reveal something about the way that we think, and and maybe even something universal, because it keeps. It comes up in many domains, It comes up in many cultures, in many time you know,
historical times. You know, there's something about the way that our brain processes information that leads us to these different ways of thinking about the world. Even physics, you see it in physics. I mean it's just you know Newtonian physics versus you know, quantum mechanics. It's just there's something really interesting there.
Well, I'll bring.
This whole full circle, and then I'll end the interview because I want to be respectful of your time. But to bring it all full circle, I think what it is is it goes back to your whole idea that the brain is a prediction machine. And I think it's a need for order. It's a need, you know, when you can systematize things, when you can break things down in a do mean specific sort of ways, in discreet things. It actually reduces our psychological entropy. And scientists are humans too.
Yeah, oh for sure. And in fact, there's actually a chapter about this, and I wrote about this actually and how motions are made, where I didn't use the phrase psychological entropy because I don't think the paper have been published at that point. But I took a quote from I think it was Alan Lightman maybe, or there's some really great quote. I think it's Alan Lightman, the physicist Alan Lightman, who said scientists love to put things into boxes and tidy little boxes with little names, and it
really makes us feel better. It makes us feel like we've learned something about the world. And you know, and again I would say it's the reduction of uncertainty. You would say psychological entropy, but I would say it's the reduction of uncertainty or ambiguity. But you know, so to me that makes ontologies and concepts and categories like super interesting to study how people do it because the same
foibles keep coming up again and again and again. And actually it's so funny that you bring this up, because I think this is what I'm going to write about when I retire finally, you know, like when I'm done, I'm going to write maybe some philosophy of psychology or history of psychology, sure where I'm going to address this issue directly, because I think this is well, I wouldn't say it's the issue, but I think it's a fascinating issue that and it's better to think of it as
fascinating than depressing. It's like, geez, we've been having the same arguments for like four hundred years, you know, or like two thousand years. I mean, so I'd rather be fascinated than demoralize.
Yeah, I'm still in the fascinated stage.
Well, I found this a fascinating discussion today, doctor Barrett. Thank you for your revolution You're truly revolutionary research in our field, and for talking to me today on the Psychology Podcast.
It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for the wonderful discussion.
Enjuli Pitt, Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology Podcast. We're on our YouTube page the Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.