And I think having a relatively richer understanding of emotions, how they work, feelings, moral emotions, moral psychology has helped in my conversations with kids and with the staff who work with them, teachers, counselors, clinicians, doctors.
So it's informed how I speak to the individual I work with, which includes the kids.
In one of the podcasts I was on, it was kind of reframed as second chances.
All the kids I work with are second chance kids.
I love this. Today it's my great pleasure to introduce Mark Hauser to the podcast. Mark is a researcher, educator, consultant, former Harvard professor, and author of the recent book Vulnerable Minds, The Harm of Childhood Trauma and the Hope of Resilience. Doctor Hauser's scientific research includes over three hundred published papers and seven books focusing on how the brain evolves, develops,
and is altered by damage and neurodevelopment disorder. In this rich and important discussion, we talked about adverse child experiences or aces, and why it's important to distinguish them from trauma. We also discussed Mark's new framework for thinking about the dimensions of childhood adversity and the challenges and promises of
implementing the kind of approach he advocates for. This was an ultimately uplifting and hopeful discussion and I'm really glad to see the work Mark is doing to help all kinds of vulnerable minds. So, without further ado, I bring you Mark Hauser. Mark Hauser, Wow, welcome to the Psychology Podcast.
Lovely to be here.
Oh, it's so good to see you, Sane. What incredible new book that you've written here that covers a lot of themes that are very prominent in our culture today, such as adversity, challenge, trauma, and then you focus on you know where it sometimes matters the most in our childhood, right, yes, yes, So how many years now have you been working on the issue of childhood adversity?
So it kind of depends on how you answer the question of work on because in many ways my kind of research history has been heavily influenced by developmental ideas, you know, going back to collaborations with Nolam Chomsky and Steve Pinker, which are of course developmental issues, but evolutionary
issues too. But in terms of the practical side of it, which is really kind of the new piece about fourteen years now working in schools, and of course not all of it has been really on children with trauma histories, but children with different kinds of disabilities.
Well that's right, Maale. You know, yes, very nice in neurodiversity. Yes, and to what extent do you think neurodiversity? I wouldn't expect to start off with this question, but yeah, you have me thinking, now, can neudiversity be an outcome of adversity? So? I think so.
I think in a sense that is often used today, the neurodiversity kind of movement or idea really has to do with how we think about disability in some ways. I think that's how I at least would frame it, and that we have a diversity of options that our genomes in some ways create, affected by heather.
Interact with the environment.
So traumatic experiences can certainly shape how we respond. And you know, soon we'll get into these ideas. But sometimes the traumatic experience can lead to what the psychologist Bruce Ellis talks about as hidden talents that which I really like as well, and sometimes, of course it can really undermine real functioning.
Sure, yeah, I'm glad that you brought the Bruce Ellis work on that because he actually draws a little bit on my advisor's work, Robert Sternberg. Yes, I'm talking about how some of these kids can develop practical intelligence. Yes, they can go underlooked in our schools. So I'm sure you've seen that.
Too, absolutely, And I think what's come out of that work as a sort of a side effect, in some sense, there's been.
Some beautiful work on.
Autism where a lot of the cognitive biases that non autistic individuals succumb to autistic individuals do not, and.
That paints is very interesting.
For example, some of the rational biases, like the famous bat and ball experiment of you know, a dollar and ten cents, you get much fewer individuals.
Or autistic you know falling.
And that, I mean, that's you know, that's fascinating. It paints an interesting picture about just, you know, diversity of ways of viewing the world.
Yeah. I often think I might be a bit on the spectrum. I can't stand pretense. I'm allergic to pretense, you know, but some people seem to love the pretense. It seems like most of the world. When scroll through Instagram, I feel like I'm scrolling through a screen of pretense. What's going on? Why is that so? Why is pretense so awarring to humans?
I don't know the seductive nature of that, And I don't know if it's because the social media world has just sucked people into that universe so much. I think it's interesting that you say that you kind of have an allergy to it. You know, it's interesting in the schools I work in, where there are some schools that have a very high proportion of individuals on the spectrum, it's funny. You'll you'll see these kinds of kids kind of posing and doing all these things.
And the autistic kids are just like, look, let's get out of here. Don't want anything to do with it.
We're not big in a small talk. No small talk. Well, let's talk about aces because it's a it's a controversial topic within within our field. It's nice to sit with a with a with a colleague, you know, you know, someone who's in the same field as me. We can talk shop. You know. Some people have criticized the ACE research as too simplistic and and and some said, well,
some stuff that's replicated. Can you kind of give me the latest if there is any consensus at all in the field what what do you see as the as the most as the guts consensus about the ACE research and the extent to which particularly it causes long lasting extent to what This is the key question, right, The extent to which ace's early in childhood call cause long lasting changes in the brain that make it very very hard to change in adulthood.
Yeah.
Good.
So, I think where I like to start is that I think the work that was in some sense published and brought to the four in nineteen ninety eight by doctor Vincent Felidi and his colleagues put on the map the importance of adverse childhood experiences. It wasn't that people were not aware of the fact that adversity can shape development.
I mean, this is an old topic.
But the fact that it was brought to the four in some sense for the medical community, who to this day not necessarily asking about someone's childhood experiences, that was in some sense the shock to fully experience that he had never bothered to ask in his obesity clinic whether adversity was an issue, and it was brought up to the fore by a patient who said, I had been
sexually abused as a child. And so then he finds of course that eighty percent of the population and morbially abse people in his population were sexually abused incredibly, and that was a shock to.
Assist that, I'm shocked right now. That's not the general population.
No, not general population.
This but but, and this is important is he then goes and presents this work and this is not in the eighties.
He goes and presents this work.
To a group of medical people who are in the eating disorder area, so they're professionals, right, And he's effectively laughed off the stage. He said, come on, these people are making stories up because they're overweight.
That's you. Don't believe that to you.
And then that night at dinner, a man from the CDC is say next to him says, look, I don't know if you're right or wrong.
Why would overly people logically be more likely to make up stories than non overly That.
Was the impression of the doctors that if they're coming up with an excuse rather than they got an eighty year and excuse it.
They're trying to excuse it away.
See I see.
And so the CDC guy says, look, I don't know if you're right or wrong, but if you're right, we've got a real medical problem on our hands, and we need to find out. This is how the Ace's study was initially born. So they you know, test seventeen thousand people, not just the obese population obviously, and they find lo and behold that aces are common, and they find that there's a strong correlation with some of the biggest health risks known to mankind.
Right.
That then quickly moves into the hands of the World Health Organization, which sort of spreads out this questionnaire globally and fast forward let's say till twenty ten, twenty twenty or so, and we find that the following stats.
The World Health.
Organization reports about a year ago that globally, annually one billion.
Children are mal treated every.
Year in where global across the world, we have eight billion people one eighth of those children, there's more children of it. That's a mind numbing stat, okay, And that and for me, you know, that's the kind of crushing status that when we get these things please contribute to something we want to hear about individuals. And for me, of course, I experienced individuals who are like this daily. So that's kind of the replication issue at some level.
That these are not part of dictatorships or democracies, or heavily religious or non religious, or educated or not.
These are global phenomenon.
Okay, where I think things have gotten into trouble. And this brings into the four is there's been a blending of aces with its effects. But aces, as the acronum says, adverse childhood experience. It's not the response to the experience. So it's often confused with trauma. But trauma is the response.
I love that you said that, and I would even go one step further and say something a bit controversial. It's the story that you created based on the response to a real experience that happen to you.
A story, and what I would add to it.
And this is a distinction I make in the book is that from adverse child experiences, some respond with trauma and some resond resiliently.
People I think George Bonano has found most people are resilient and some even dare we say, have post traumatic growth.
Completely, So there can be strength of growing out it.
And we need to understand both what are the past that leads some to be more vulnerable and others to be more resilient. And part of What the book does is it pulls from the science is to try to understand better what the sciences is telling us about that spectrum from vulnerable to resilience, which you can move across, everybody can, but our biology is going to hand us some piece that's going to put us somewhere in that spectacle.
Said that, and then we're gonna move.
So the dirty word the G word, you know, In my new book I'm working on, I have a section called the dirty G word, Yes, because it's amazing to me the extend to which the trait neuroticism colors your world and even makes it more likely that you'll you'll label things as traumas that someone who scores low neuroticism is,
like I wasn't traumatizing. You can have two people in the same family, right, one who scores high scores low, have the same experiences in childhood being treated the same by the parent, and then you you can find gross differences in one person's interpretation of their childhood is traumatic. And that's interesting, isn't it. Talking about it. I'm even talking about like fraternal twins. Oh completely, yeah.
That's right. And I think.
Different experiences can also shape how we respond. I mean, there's a lovely kind of strategy that's often used in schools, but it should be actually used by anybody, which is it's goes by the name the size of the problem. So the idea is, imagine three boxes of different sizes, a tiny one.
A middle size one, and a big one.
Okay, So when you're in a calm state, what would you consider to be a small problem, right, And so you might model it and say, well, you know, I bang my toe against the wall.
It hurts, but you know it's temporary. Tiny problem. Big problem.
My mom's got cancer and is unlikely to survive, okay for me, painful experience.
That's so.
And then the middle is I've got a deadline.
I'm going to go to a podcast with Scott and the traffic is killing me and I'm stressing out. I'm not gonna make it on time. It's kind of middling sized problems. I have no control over it, which is also stressful. The thing is that as you experience different kinds of things in the world, those boxes can get reshaped, as you see as for example, for me working in Kenya, where there's three million orphans in the world, and I
see their experience. I go, my problems are never in kind of the big box relative to.
Those kids you've worked with.
So for the last three years we haven't. We actually have a nonprofit called International.
Do they actually look like what the commercials will make them look like?
Yeah?
No, okay, talk to me.
So we'll talked about that.
So sub Saharan Africa, so you know, the last third of the continent has fifty four million orphans, some of the biggest populations orphans in the world. Kenya itself, a country of about fifty million people, has three million.
They put them all.
So these are so they're.
Almost about a thousand orphanages at Kenya, not the government, right, okay, okay. And so one of the things that we're doing is trying to bring resources to these places. Because I'm sure we'll get back to this. Part of the story about neglect and deprivation grows out of the incredible scientific work out of Romania with the Romanian orphanages, and and part as a result of that work, virtually all the orphanages in Eastern Europe were shut down because they were basically institutions.
There were incredibly deprived children. As the nineteen nineties Shame of Nation documentary pointed out they're like Nazi concentration camps for little kids. The difference is, it's important, is that in many low to middle income countries, these orphanages, which in canadayre called children's.
Homes, are very different.
You don't see kids who are gaunt and unhealthy and look like they're not going to be able to walk two steps. And in part it's because you find these long lived staff who stay with these kids, who become the nurturing parents effectively and enable those kids to grow up.
But the funding is.
Coming from churches, from donors. It's really shoe string kind of budget.
Well, thank you, you're hallucinating me so much right now. I don't think most of US Americans know any of this shit. They don't and we're blind to it. And maybe a lot more people that have about more compassion if they we could take a trip over there.
I think that's right.
And I think you know, part of the angle of the book, which I know you're aware of the psychologist, is that you know, psych cology has had this experience that our population of study tends to be this weird, distorted population in some sense, and part of the angle of my book, which I think is quite different from most books on therapeutic traumatic issues, is it has a very strong cross cultural lens that I'm talking about our species.
At some level.
And I think that's important because strategies to help children have to be cross culturally sensitive.
Well, that was actually gonna be my next question with I love the extent to which you really your book is different from a lot of other books in trauma by taking this cross cultural lens. But you know, American culture, let's talk about America's obsession with trauma. Yes, because there's TikTok trauma, which I think might be different than how psychologists define trauma. But now you have you know, every back pain, every back pain, every just just every neurotic
thought is now a trauma. First of all, do you agree, like, do you see it kind of getting a little bit out of control and far outside the realm of what we would call trauma.
I do.
I think the word has become part of the coloquial language. It's become part of the common use of words, and I think it's interesting.
I began to get your insights into this too. As a psychologist.
I think a lot of times in the science is when words that have a technical definition become part of the language, science tends to retreat and become almost more technical, so that the layperson can't access the information. In some ways, my book is an attempt to kind of address that, because the gap in terms of what we understand the sciences and what practitioners understand is monumental.
So sadly, I think you're right that in.
This country, especially, the word trauma has become part of the common lore.
People use it.
I think I described in the book. I had a friend of mine who I saw downtown living in California. He looked really out of sorts, and I said, hey, you know what's going on.
He goes, it's the worst day of my life. I said, well, what happened?
He goes, my son's soccer urnmost canceled. I'm like, if that's your worst day, I want your life.
So that's yeah, none zero.
Right.
So, so of.
Course the term trauma in some ways, well it's Greek origin, but PTSD grew out of kind of the early sixties and the war veterans who were initially called just crazy, and then of course it becomes part of the DSM in terms of PTSD, and it has this technical term. And what's interesting there and thing especially for you as a psychologist, is there's been some push of late, even of the DSM terminology and for the reason of thinking about children.
So let me give you an example.
If you fall under the classifications of mental health issues in the that then licenses you to insurance coverage.
If you don't, it doesn't, so it's now out of pocket.
There are now many, many cases of children who have significant traumatic responses. You can see it physiologically, neurobiologically, but they don't fall under the criteria of PTSD. There are several psychiatrists and psychologists, Besil Vanderkoke being one, who have argued for a new diagnosis, which is called developmental trauma disorder.
Which is in particular for children.
And here's the reason why I think it's important. I discussed this in the book. PTSD in the traditional sense is due to exposure to violence. Oh, a lot of traumatic responses are not necessarily due to violence. Children who have been severely deprived are heavily traumatized, and yet they don't count. Neglect is neglectsidered out, attachment issues, right, abandonments, right, But they're not in necessarily violent.
And so they've been trying now for probably ten.
Years to get DTD developmental trauma disorder into the CM, but the powers that be have rejected it, even though they've followed the guilence for what counts as getting something in.
So there's been a lot of controversies. I'm sure you're aware.
Of that the DSM either puts in too many things or not enough.
Oh. I got a lot of issues with the d also that it treats everything binary. Yes, you either have the disorder or not. And you know, I'm friends with the task force trying to show the continuum that all these things are on. But you know, I'm glad you brought up Bessel. Bessel who was author of The Body Keeps the Score. You know, I of course have a great respect for his long career, and he's done a lot the field, but I kind of see the ideas in his book, or even just the notion that the
body keeps the score. Let's double click on that a second. It's run a muck in our society and and people don't realize that that's not actually how it works. So the brain, you like, like trauma's not like let's talk about memory for a second. Memory is not stored in the body. His memory comes from the brain, and we can have I prefer the term survival stress. And I wanted to see your thoughts because I do like to give it in a nuanced a way. I'm not, like,
you know, trying to tear down. I'm trying to have more nuance around the idea, because it's too simplistic to have this notion that, like the collective memory, the memory of our trauma is stored in our body and we can't our brain can't access it, and we're doomed forever. To me, that's a disempowering message. I think the truth is actually more empowering. Thext into which top down processes, you know, really can help influence our physiology and ours.
There are a lot of techniques, you know. I'm a big fan of psychodrama, for instance, you know good my friend Dan Thomasulo is a leader in that he's here in New York City, So shout out to Dantell. But so, I just think there's a kind of a disempowering message going around about trauma that it's like it's there's unseen force within your body that is causing everything you do, and you really there's really not that much hope in being able to act sin, you know, because it's in
your body, not your mind. But as you know, George Bonano told me over coffee once. I don't know a lot to repeat everything he said to me over coffee, but he's like, if you've had trauma, you remember it like it's in your brain. It's not it's not hit. If you've experienced trauma, it's not hidden. I mean, we're over that whole, you know, Elizabeth loftis you know, Craze in the I mean, I don't want to go back there, you know, you know what I'm saying.
I do know. So so let's let's pull apart some of these pieces because I think they're they're interesting in themselves. So I think it's a kind of a strong version of the Body keeps the Score, which I think many have interpreted as I think there's a weaker version, which is the more interesting version. The strong version is what you've painted, which is that there's a memory my kneecap for you know, seeing my mom.
Get hit hit by a car.
Well, that's clearly false because there is no memory system in my recap.
But there's a more interesting version, which is that there's a body.
Response survival stress.
Survival stress which includes the autonomic and the immune system. And I think why I think that is critically important is because of two reasons. One, sometimes what we see operationally in an individual cognitively suggests no trauma, but the body is hammered.
So here's a perfect example.
This was This is a case that Felidi himself, you know, talked about. Several years after he had published the original paper, a woman contacted him and said, look, I'm.
So glad to see this report.
You know, I am today a Seventh Court Circuit judge. So clearly on every cognitive level, she has made it right.
She's in her fifties, she was.
Pimped out by her father a kid sexually year after year after year.
So this is one ace. Now let's keep that in mind too, because.
We'll come back to that face out should count.
Well.
Let's yeah, let's come back to that, right, because because the A score is about a number of different types, pretty intense, intense, so we'll.
Come back to that.
Let's let's remember to come back to that she was sitting on four different types of cancer. Her immune system was completely destroyed, even though she was cognitively top of her class.
Judge, I mean, you know, you name it well.
So I think the reason why I think that's important is because her body has kept the score of the traus stress in terms of the immune system, in the same way we see epigenetic tracking of things, right.
I was just gonna say that.
So I think that's that's the it's the weaker but the more interesting part.
I agree, And that's where I.
Think Besil vonakokes and if you you know, I've been to many of the conferences he has in Boston.
And the group.
The heavy focus is on things like you know, emdr you know I I things and yoga and breathing. It's all body work because there is a sense in which there's a scarring.
To the body.
Of course, there is scarring to the brain too, and that's what the memory is held. But I think we've not given enough attention to what's happening the body. And men and the children I work with directly, they have no body awareness. They're talking to you, and what's happening is I can see their fiscally like and they have no somatic awareness.
Yeah, I get it. I get it, I really do. I wonder how how necessary it is for you know the word to think of it in terms of it's because of that one thing, you know, that that that trauma, as opposed to well, this is the way my body is right now, and let's change it, let's work on it. But I feel like there's this people, there's something in human nature that wants to understand why am I the
way I am? And I always get a little I don't know, I wary when people want to reduce everything to that one event, to that one thing that happens, the one thing. You know, the reason why I'm an asshole to everyone around me is because of that one thing. Yes, I get I get a little worry about that, you know, because we're so we're so multi determined for systems.
So okay, So that that's a nice segue into this kind of one ACE idea. So you raised the question at the beginning of controversial pieces of the Ace's story.
So the first one we've kind of tackled, which is that there's been a confusion about the.
Experience versus the response. So we've kind of we'll come back to that, but that's a key one.
The second is that the ACE score.
Is somehow indicative of the individual's potential problems. And there's two problems with that. The first is the originators of the ACE questionnaire, which was ten questions about different types of adverse childhood experiences. That was never intended as a questionnaire about the individual.
It's populating.
That was supposed to be about population into different populations and get a pulse on correct.
Oh, I didn't know that, Okay, And that's really important because in California, for example, it's been used by insurance to coverage.
If you have an ACE.
Score of four or more, you get a coverage which is different than less than four. Has nothing to do with the individual though.
That just blew my mind, yepow.
And we know from the science that the individual score is not predictive of what's going to happen to them.
Well, and that's the key thing that's a seeing criticized. I've seen very weak correlations.
Oh, it's really week and it's weaking two interesting ways. One is the ASS questionnaire is a retrospective questionnaire. What happened to you Scott as a child?
Yeah, And that's so problematic and we know that's problematic, so we know just how memory, how valuable memory is completely.
So that's problem number one. The second problem is it assumes that the number of types is an accurate lens on health risks as opposed to what I bring up in my book, which is different dimensions of adversities.
Let's take apart some of these.
The first is that they operationally define childhood as birth to eighteen.
That's a pretty big swath of time. As a psychologist, you're well aware.
That there are these different sensitive and critical periods for different things, and they're happening at different ages within that span. Just to give one example of something that's recent that we all experience, COVID hits.
Who does it hit hardest teenagers? Why?
Because the teenage years are a critical period for social interactions.
They were deprived for two years.
Of social interactions. Social interactions to teenagers who are like milk to a baby, They're needed and this has been well documented scientifically. So you have globally this massive response by teenagers to that deprivation. The mental health crisis, and I know you've had guests that have talked about this has been pushed higher because of what COVID did to that teenage group. This is irrespective of cell phone, social media and all the rest. It just bumped it up.
We are seeing kids in school now who, let's say, are chronologically fourteen, who are actually developmentally like nine.
Hold on, so my brain goes to, like the intelligence quot and how it was originally scored. What would we call this quotient? Yeah, it's an interesting question.
I mean, it's probably close to the EQ, but it's probably like seq social emotional question question right.
Where you are emotionally developed? How mostly developed are you?
Yeah?
I mean I mean think think about you know, theory of mind, you know, or related to Interrelli's beliefs, you know, intentions, desires, and so forth.
These kids were deprived of those critical periods.
This is explain the crybabies on campus right now.
Yes, an over exaggeration at babies. Oh wait, well well that's that's.
Actually it's funny and it's also really potentially poignant because the Adverse Childhood Experiences questionnaire stops at eighteen, but we know developmentally that that frontel is continuing twenty five exactly. And the other piece of it that I'm going to add in today is that pre natally, we know that
stress to the mother directly affects the developing fetus. And there was a study that was published last year, actually fascinating study that was done with moms who were exposed to Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey, and they compared it with mothers who had their babies kind of before versus mothers kind of well afterwards.
But here's what they found.
They followed those babies up the age of five. Girls who were in the womb during Hurricane Sandy had five to six times higher rates of anxiety and depression and boys had six times higher ADHD in opposition of defiance because of the stress of the mom.
Well that's super interesting, right. I wanted to actually double cook on their gender differences. So I'm glad you kind of brought them up, because in the beginning you brought PTSD, and you brought up numbers like one billion have been but I actually want to break it down by gender a little bit. Yeah, I continually amazed when I look at the striking gender differences in peak SD. It's women really do disproportionately report higher levels of PTSD than men.
Men have their own issues, Don't get me wrong. You know, like there are things with ADHD, we can autism, you know, we can bring up we all got issues. But but what do you think what do you think is going on there? Though? Like why why? Why is that the case?
So yeah, as a general cut, when you look at the kind of the mental health landscape, the broad again, sex differences a lot of variation. But as a broad cut, girls women tend to be more internalizers, boys men externalizers, and we certainly see that a lot.
But what cross cuts some of that.
Is also the type of adversity. For example, it's certainly not the case that boys are immune sexual abuse, as we know from the church scandals. That's important, right, But a lot of the understanding of sexual abuse has come primarily or more often from.
The female side, right.
So for example, this is an incredible study that was done out of Germany. They showed that women who were abused as children before the age of puberty as opposed to after, there's an area in the brain in the somatosensory cortex that maps to the genitals glitteris and females that area is smaller in girls who were sexually abused before puberty.
What's the implication of that for their own lived experience growing up.
As so as adults sexually averse painful experiences during sex pleasures pleasure see.
Which has been documented.
But now you've got this neuroanatomical landmark. And as you I'm sure no, the amount of stensity cortex in some ways is a map of kind of the body and the extent to which it's innervated. So for example, our lips and our fingers have a massive space, and that's the area our kneecaps do not right, and so the clitorist, obviously a heavily innervated area, is basically shrunk in girls who are before puberty. Again pointing to that timing issue. It's not just adversity and type, but the timing.
Yeah, so I transcend I write about you know, Titra's research t I c HS and some other research showing so clearly how depending on what kind of way you're maltreated, the brain has very specific ways it organizes itself to protect you from the emotional pain of it. But I went down a list of things, so you mentioned one, but we can we can mention other things, many types emotional abuse exactly, And the migdala does correct. Yeah.
Yeah. So the lens that I use in the book as a framework is what I called the adverse ts T for letter T, because there are five different dimensions of adversity. One we've already talked about the type of adversity, The second is timing. The third is tenure how long it lasts.
To be confused with academic.
Tenure, which.
The fourth, uh is what I call turbulence, which is the predictability or controllability.
Of the adversity.
And the fifth is toxicity.
Oh boy, what would non toxic abuse be.
Well, there's not, so there's not there's no toxicity, but sever and And you know, one of the things I bring up in the book, which is kind of maybe topical today a little bit, is during the Me Too movement, Matt Damn is coming, you know, don't we want to distinguish between you know, a poorly time sexual joke and rape. And he got taken the town for that. But of course we do, because it makes a difference in terms
of how the body responds. Body and brain respond totally differently to a poor sexually time joke, which can be certainly aversive, versus being raped.
Yeah, I mean, I think that like in a lot of ways, trauma is in the eye of the beholder. I mean someone who you could imagine someone's experience, lived experience being who has been raped and who is at a comedy club and here's a rape joke, and to that person in their unit, like everyone else around him like ah, but in her or his universe, like they're feeling an panic. And I guess in some ways, a lot of it does come down to just like honoring
someone's experience of something. And maybe that makes me sound really woke to say such a thing, but I am a big believer in you know that kind of Let there be a little subjectivity here where like I don't know what it's like for someone else to experience. I wouldn't even downplay or make fun of someone who has a visceral reaction to a joke that I find fun. Yes, I would probably still honor that person has that experience. Yes, I guess I would want them to also honor that
I don't have that experience. So maybe it works both ways, is my point. It does.
No, that's a very nice point, and it brings up something that's both a practical issue and then kind of an empirical experimental issue on the practical level, of course, and this is this is the comedy about the woke piece is that you know everything's got a trigger warning. Now everything does right, And that's a course problematic in
and of itself. That said, as someone who works with children with significant traumatic experiences, one of my first experiences this actually happened the first year I started doing this work.
I walk into a middle.
School and this little boy both side of the classroom as like, I don't think I did anything, and the teacher comes up, a lovely teacher and puts her on my shoulder and says, look, I'm sorry, it's not you.
You haven't just looked like his father, who beats him almost every night.
Eat.
So I was the trigger.
Okay, next time I can in the classroom, I sat down on the ground and looked away from him. So I was smaller than him and I wasn't paying attention to him. And then he comes up to me and goes, what's matter. You're not gonna talk to me. But now I kind of calm the unsafe environment down, okay, which is he needs to learn not to generalize that all men are not going to be abusive. So it's kind of the reversal typical psychology where we want generalization for learning.
With him, it's taking generalization away so he can feel safe.
Well, that's wonderful, patients, you had there to do that. You know, fear learning and fear unlearning are different, operating in different parts of the brain, different and so we have to learn.
So let me, let me just give me just let me just then the second piece, because I think it's critical what you asked.
The toxicity level.
Of course, at some level it is subjective. But here's where I think we've made progress. You know what you and I might consider to be neglect of a parent, and then you look at what's happening to these orphans.
It's night and day, right.
However, one of the things that's come out of, for example, the word comparing the Romanian orphan children, which was really severe toxic at the highest level deprivation. They had nothing, no stable staff, poorly nutritious food, constrain, living quarters, I mean, you name it.
It was the worst on a spectrum.
But we know that socioeconomic scales mean something, and you can map people onto those and you can see the effects on grades and attendance and all these other things. So there's an important piece that dimension and experimental work on animals, for example, has been able to experimentally tightrate that to see what's kind of the minimal experience that one would need. And of course, the now thought of as horrible experiments by.
Harry Harlow were those experiments.
I mean, we may not like them ethically, which I certainly point out in the book, but they did try to tight trate what's needed for developing monkey to have functional social relationships. That's what the experiment was up tight trading deprivation.
I mean, that was that was the part of your career was studying, right, monkeys. You were a professor at Harvard and you studied. You were a big name in the stud morality. Right, you studied morality. You stayed monkeys. What happened? Something happened at Harvard? What happened, What happened? What happened to you?
What happened? What happened?
Yeah, So you know, this is something that I really haven't talked about.
And you know, my motivation for not talking about.
The misconduct cakes, which I do mention at the front of the book, was designed really in some ways by my part to protect my students.
I had a very, very large lab. I wanted to make sure that what was ever.
Happening to me went on for five years while I was at Harvard, that it didn't hurt them. And you know, I'm glad to say that all those students went on to have tremendous careers.
So it is the implicit assumption there. So you're saying you didn't forge data yourself.
So what I own as the head of a lab was that I was trying to do too much. I was not as careful as I should have been.
Okay, So it's unintentional, is what you're saying.
Unintentional?
That's my direct question. Was it into unintentional?
Intentional?
She didn't sit down one day and you're like, let me see how I can finance the state and finances and finesse finesse the data that.
You didn't do that I did not.
That's that's a big difference.
It is a big difference.
And you know, I I want to just note that when I think of the potential damage that misconduct Kennon has done.
I think of two things.
One, it causes researchers to invest time in looking at things that are false, and it, in course, it wastes taxpayer money grants. In my case, the case ended and I had to retract to one paper. Several years after that paper was retracted, two independent labs replicated the actual result.
So I wasn't involved in those.
They did them themselves, and so the you know, the the result that we had was wrong because of the experimental design was wrong and it led to a false conclusion. But the actual result was actually replicated by two and.
So that's just like a human to human question. Do you feel like the punishment was too harsh for the quote crime? Because because your career, right took a big hit. I mean, this must be emotional for you, right, because I mean, you're a human who went through this. You're not just some sort of abstract entity. They were like, oh, look at Marca, I mean, what what was it? What has it been like for you? Like I really care?
Yeah, no, thank you for the question. I appreciate it.
So I guess the first thing to say is that I resigned.
You weren't actually fired at the end of.
At the end of the at the end of the investigation, the dean at the time said, you know, this has not been your most shining moment, but you are still member of our faculty. And then, for a variety of reasons, it just became not a place where I could really work, and for my own emotional sanity and for my family and my students.
Did you have like colleagues and friends who kind of turned on you? Or yes, he just lost who I lost? Friends?
Who I lost his friends. However, as you probably know, and you know the back of the book, some of my closest friends and colleagues, Steve Pinker and Susan Carey, stat as friends and they've blurbed the book, and I,
you know, and I maintain friendships. And since that time happened, some colleagues asked me to come back to academia, and I decided I did not want to, in part because I had found this second chapter, which to me, to be totally honest, I probably wouldn't have found it because I simply I had plans of being an old part professor at Harvard rest of my life.
You know what you had, postraumatic growth? Would you would you agree that that's what?
Yes, I do.
I do, and I certainly feel that in interesting ways, I didn't think I'd find something that I.
Could do meaningfully that could use some of my skills.
Yeah.
Yeah, but it turned out that almost all of my skills have paid off in this whole new area.
How did the morality work you did, then, How does that play a role in the work you do today at all? Or is it? Are they really complete separate chapters of your life.
They're not.
They're not completely separate because and I'll just give you a couple of examples. One of the consequences of certain kinds of traumatic experience, in particular things like sexual abuse and physical abuse, is that it brings very strong moral emotions to the victims shame.
Oh, that's true. That's true.
And I think having a relatively richer understanding of emotions, how they work, feelings, moral emotions, moral psychology has helped in my conversations with kids and with and with the staff who work with them, teachers, counselors, clinicians, doctors. So it's informed how I speak to the individual I work with, which includes the kids.
And maybe it's had a height level of compassion for others. I think, you know.
In one of the podcasts I was on, it was kind of reframed as second chances.
All the kids I work with are second chance kids.
I love this. Well, this is personal to you too. You're a second chance. I'm giving you a second chance right now completely by having you on the second of So let's talk about hope. Let's let's spend the rest of this interview today talking about this toolkit that you've developed and and and have you really seen examples firsthand of huge transformations and some of these kids in the way that they there their their sort of prospects in their head for their future.
Yes, let me illustrate one. I'll give you two.
This was a charming story in many ways.
So I'm in this class. I'm teaching a class.
So I've in a lot of the programs I work and I teach a class on critical thinking because to me, as kids, we need this.
They need this. They act too impulsively.
They don't stop before they think, you know, and think that they do. So I'm in his class and we're talking about similarities different between humans and other animals. And we've talked about the similarities and we and then the question that gets posted this class about ten or so middle school aged kids about ten to twelve years old, is what's uniquely human? And this one boy leaps out of his chair.
And says sentience.
And I'm like, so, I say to him, did you say sentience or sentence?
He says, what the fuck? Mark? Why would I say sentence? Not even an answer to the question, Like, okaya, my bad, I'm old, I'm old. I can't hear that.
Well that's incredible.
Okay, so it gets better.
That's a future Steven Pinker right there.
So I say, okay, so, my bad, I said, does anybody here know what what sentience means.
In their crickets? I said, Charlie, can you uh tell us what sentience?
Music goes rolls his eyes, Well, okay, you know, well, it's like kind of the experience of what it's like to experience, Like I can't really know what it's like to experience what you're experiencing sort of, really, I really can't know what it's like to experience what other.
Animals are experiencing. But yeah, it's the feeling of experience that's really good. I said, where did you learn about it?
He goes, you know, YouTube, those guys, I think, I don't if they're philosophers or scientists, but like, you know, Pinker Dennett Chalmers.
I'm like, and my jaw drops. He's like, what haven't you read them?
This is a kid complete deprivation, neglect at home, parents, with mental health issues.
But through this program.
Of people believing in him, now he had the biology of an incredible brain, but deprived and neglected.
Comes in filthy, doesn't wash. School does as best they can, but the school is there day after day. I could give him books.
He has grown over the last three years. He's now fourteen, thirteen, fourteen, he's taking the high school class I'm giving on human rights and civics, and he's just blossoming because his trust in the kids. So there are many many cases like that. Similarly in Kenya where we're doing the work. Three years ago I went to an orphanage. A little boy had literally just been dropped off the doorstep, emaciated.
Almost no clothes, mute. Of course, know the history was about four and a half years of age.
We came back this year to the same orphanage to put in a library. Little boy is bright eyed, talking, reading.
Playing, incredible.
So those transformations happen, they're slow, they're hard. But for me, where the next steps are is that a lot of the ideas evidence that I cover in the book is not in the hands of practitioners, and that's what's said, Well.
What is the toolkit it consists of.
Okay, so the.
Toolkit is really, for me a broad swath of things for a couple of reasons.
One is that, like.
Almost in anything in life, there's not one shoe fits all. But the reason to really take that seriously is because these five different dimensions of adversity create what I call traumatic signatures. So in the same way that neuropsychologists have uncovered ways in which when certain parts of the brain are damaged, you get these signatures which indicate the cognitive deficit,
the ephasia's right prosobagnosia, faced deficit, and so forth. Traumatic experiences can create other signatures that if we understand them, we can better respond with specific traumatic toolkits.
Okay, So that's the key idea. Well, just as a.
Simple cut, there's many more dimensions. What abuse typically does is it creates and you mentioned the term before, it creates this hypervigiline amygdala.
You are on high alert. The world is unsafe. Okay. So, for example, that little boy who bolted when he saw me.
He is like a gazelle on the savann who sees a lion attack the group. The gazelle doesn't conclude that lion's bad. They conclude all lions are bad, and that's the right conclusion. Highly adaptive. Yeah, okay, so they've overgeneralized adaptively. And what schools, therapists, parents, communities have to do is help tamp down that amygdala so that the world doesn't feel unsafe.
So part of that.
Work can be breathing methods, getting control over the breathing system, the size of the problem, types of stuff, other kinds of therapeutic work, so a whole variety of things to help tamp.
Down so they don't generalize. Compare that with what.
Happens with the lovely little child I mentioned before sentience.
He's deprived.
He does not have a hyperactive emiglo. Deprivation undermines the development of the funnel lobe and therefore the executive system, so the systems for learning, attention, short term working memory, self regulations. Yeah, that's right exactly. So he had a system that was designed to learn the cortex active working absolutely, but for him, the association of actions and consequences were undermined. He wasn't getting the kind of feedback because the whole reward system was not really wired.
I see.
So for them, it's developing those systems of self regulation. He flipped when I say sentence right, completely emotionally justsregulated in that sense, right. And attention wasn't great constantly looking around, right, So very different systems. So how do we design these systems so that we can nurture the pieces that need nurturing. So part of it are the sort of these social emotional breathing, meditative attentional work, sometimes medication, depending.
On that extreme the case.
Maybe.
But one of the things I cover towards the end of the book is what I call the neuroengineering approaches.
And many of these are.
Not yet ready for prime time for kids yet, but they hold out hopes.
Let me mention two.
One of the techniques which has now been approved by the FDA for depression is transcranial magnetic stimulation. So this is kind of the magnet apply to the cortex exactly and.
Exactly.
Yes, And here's a result which I just love because it shows how understanding brain function with new technology can really begin to be moved.
In these applied areas.
So consider populations of individuals that have had visually overwhelming traumatic experiences. So many traumatic experiences are necessarily visual, but car accident war veterans where the visual input just floods the memories night mirrors, and they're constantly flooded and distracted.
To no end by these visuals.
So there's an area in the kind of the back of the brain that my ex colleague Steve Costlin spent decades uncovering, which is the visual imagery area.
So you invite individuals with.
These kind of visually traumatic experiences to come in, and you invite them to bring back those images, and while they're doing it, you are stimulating the visual imagery area incredible, And what you find is you basically fade the visual imagery component without losing the memory of the experience, so that now when it comes back, they're just not flooded as much by those images.
That's like a top. Now that's what I was talking about earlier, exactly right. It seems more hopeful to me, It's much more hopeful.
So you also don't get the galvanic skin response because it's not causing that response. So in sometimes yes, the body keeps the score, but it's coming out. The memory keeps the score, but the body is showing some of the outputs.
Well that's what. Yeah. In another way, Lisa Feldman Barrett says, the body is the scorecard. Yes, the brain keeps the score and the bodies of the.
Score card exactly right.
The ledger CONTs similar TOIL, very similar.
So that's one.
The second, of course, which is, you know, become part of the popular press. But I think it's I cover a lot more of the science in the book. Is the sort of psychedelics revolution. Oh yeah, And I think the key thing that kind of note here for your listeners, of course, is that it's not let's just go have an LSD trip. It's therapy assisted psychedelic use.
It's not microdosing.
It's therapy assisted of a particular kind of therapy. And to me, what I love about the science is that it's beautiful science. And it's beautiful to me in the following way. So what they do are they called doubly blind experiments, So neither the patient nor the therapists know.
Who got the placebo and who got the psychedelic nice. Okay.
The second reason why it's beautiful science is because we're beginning to really understand the mechanism of how the psychedelics.
Are affecting the brain.
Yes, okay, so in the case of major depression, it's psilocybin mountic mushrooms. In the case of PTSD, often complex PTSD, it's MDMA. So let me talk about the MDMA one because I think I really like this hopefulness of this result in both the depression case and the in the PTSD case, they're picking individual populations that are what are called treatment resistant, meaning they've gone for at least a decade where neither medication nor therapy has had any impact.
Let's be really frustrating, really frustrating.
So these are people at their end their rope right there.
Of course, they're just suffering all the horrible, horrible.
People like that. Let's get them some help.
Let's get themselves.
Eight weeks of md M A and therapy knocks the PTSD diagnosis by down by seventy percent. That's why they're very close now to FDA approval, because they've gone through the key kind of criteria for getting FDA prod.
This is super interesting. MDMA obviously operates in a different mechanism. It's a different system than than psilocybin, for instance, and so they both have their own mechanisms of action. Correct. Do you think what the it's like It has to do with serotonin sort of situation going on there.
Yeah, serotonin and potentially oxytocin, and this comes.
From animal work.
So this is a really really cool result. So this is a guy named Roman Nardeau who's a kind of neuroscientist who's actually used MDMA with mice.
This is no therapy.
Do they start hugging each other and dancing?
Yes, here's the really cool thing. You reopen the critical period for social interactions in mice with MDMA and oxytocin.
That's incredible.
So this is.
Where the combination of work with animals and humans is really beginning to shine the light on what's going on mechanistically, and that opening of the critical period is the key part. Is of course, people who take MDMA ecstasy parties.
It's because of the social.
Stuff and that's what's it's opening up as sociality, which of course and critically is opening it up to therapy in the same way that silos in depression major depression, the default network which is kind of the autobiographical piece is taking the first position in our thinking. For depressed people, that's why I can't get out of their own way. It's like, why am I always so sorry? Why am I always so sad?
Right?
What psilocybin does is it quiets that system down and opens up other networks, like the salience network, making the individual more open to therapy.
It self is such a source of our suffering, isn't it.
You'd rather be an Apleasia. I'd rather be an Apleasia, no self.
Self, That's yeah. I mean when you think of the you know, just our self narratives and how that kind of creates wars, I'm not just internal strife, but it explains a lot of strife around the world. But I also think the default network is really good for creativity though, so I've done. I've published studies showing it's not all bad. It's all I call it the imagination network totally. That's right. Hey, this was such an elucidating conversation and so important. I
can tell that you are. I'm glad I met you. You know you're not the villain that you've been made out to be. At a certain point in my life when you were made out to be. It's such a I'm glad I met you. You are, You're obviously so compassionate, and you you get authentically emotional when you talk about helping these kids. I am sitting right next to you, and I see it and it's so authentic, and it's just it's beautiful. Thank you, so thank you for everything you're doing.
Yeah, thank you for the conversation. It's been awesome.
Yeah,