Dr. Immordino-Yang: How Emotions & Social Factors Impact Learning

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.880 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.280 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.240 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.160 | Today, my guest is Dr. Mary Helen Imordino-Yang.

00:00:18.720 | Dr. Imordino-Yang is a professor of education,

00:00:21.280 | psychology, and neuroscience

00:00:23.060 | at the University of Southern California.

00:00:25.640 | Her laboratory focuses on emotions

00:00:28.200 | and the role of emotions in learning,

00:00:30.360 | as well as how social interactions impact how we learn.

00:00:33.900 | Today's discussion is one

00:00:35.040 | that I found absolutely fascinating

00:00:37.460 | because it will reveal to you, in fact, to all of us,

00:00:40.440 | how our temperament, that is our emotionality,

00:00:43.600 | combined with our home environment

00:00:45.600 | and the school environments that we were raised in

00:00:48.320 | shape what we know about the world

00:00:50.040 | and our concepts of self.

00:00:52.360 | In thinking about that,

00:00:53.220 | we also discuss the education system

00:00:55.640 | and how different aspects of rules

00:00:58.060 | and how we are told to behave

00:00:59.560 | and what actually constitutes good behavior or bad behavior

00:01:02.500 | shape how we learn information

00:01:04.480 | and develop a sense of meaning in life.

00:01:06.780 | If any of that sounds abstract,

00:01:08.400 | I promise you that today's discussion

00:01:10.240 | is incredibly practical.

00:01:11.860 | You will learn, for instance,

00:01:12.860 | how different styles of learning

00:01:14.800 | are going to favor different people

00:01:16.520 | from children into adulthood

00:01:18.760 | and how we ought to think about learning

00:01:20.960 | in terms of our emotional systems being our guide

00:01:24.440 | for what we learn and the information that we retain

00:01:26.920 | and how we apply that information throughout life.

00:01:29.600 | For those of you that are parents

00:01:31.040 | or who are thinking of becoming parents

00:01:33.640 | or who were once children,

00:01:35.200 | so I believe that encompasses everybody out there,

00:01:37.880 | today's discussion will arm you

00:01:39.340 | with an intellectual understanding

00:01:41.280 | of psychology and neuroscience as it relates to learning,

00:01:44.560 | but also practical tools that you can apply

00:01:47.240 | in order to be able to learn more effectively.

00:01:49.800 | What I like so much about Dr. Imordino-Yang's research

00:01:52.840 | and the discussion today is that she frames up beautifully

00:01:56.840 | how those who best learn from traditional forms

00:01:59.320 | of classroom learning,

00:02:00.360 | as well as those who learn from non-traditional forms

00:02:03.880 | of learning either in or out of the classroom

00:02:06.460 | can best use that understanding of self

00:02:08.700 | in order to learn in the way that is best for them.

00:02:11.880 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:02:14.400 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:17.200 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:02:19.160 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:02:21.040 | about science and science-related tools

00:02:23.000 | to the general public.

00:02:24.320 | In keeping with that theme,

00:02:25.380 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:02:28.060 | Our first sponsor is Eight Sleep.

00:02:30.080 | Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers

00:02:31.720 | with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.

00:02:34.480 | I've talked many times before on this podcast

00:02:36.820 | about the fact that sleep is the foundation

00:02:39.080 | of mental health, physical health,

00:02:40.460 | and performance of all kinds.

00:02:41.940 | One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep

00:02:44.480 | is the temperature of your sleeping environment,

00:02:46.660 | and that's because your core body temperature

00:02:48.900 | actually has to drop by about one to three degrees

00:02:51.180 | in order for you to get into and stay deeply asleep.

00:02:54.380 | And conversely, your core body temperature

00:02:56.660 | increases by about one to three degrees

00:02:58.580 | in order for you to wake up and feel refreshed.

00:03:01.240 | With Eight Sleep, you can control the temperature

00:03:03.220 | of your sleeping environment very easily

00:03:05.320 | because of the way that the mattress cover

00:03:07.140 | communicates with an app where you can dial in

00:03:09.180 | the temperature of your sleeping environment

00:03:10.740 | at the beginning, middle, and end of your night

00:03:13.300 | as you arrive toward morning.

00:03:15.260 | Sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover

00:03:16.800 | has greatly enhanced the quality of my sleep.

00:03:19.080 | I know that because it also includes a sleep tracker,

00:03:21.440 | which will tell you how much slow wave sleep

00:03:22.780 | and rapid eye movement sleep you're getting,

00:03:24.340 | and it gives you a sleep score.

00:03:25.800 | If you'd like to try Eight Sleep,

00:03:27.060 | go to eightsleep.com/huberman and get up to $150 off.

00:03:32.060 | Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK,

00:03:34.920 | select countries in the EU, and Australia.

00:03:37.200 | Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman.

00:03:40.600 | Today's episode is also brought to us by HVMN Keytone IQ.

00:03:44.680 | Keytone IQ is a ketone supplement

00:03:46.400 | that increases blood ketones.

00:03:48.460 | I know most people are familiar with,

00:03:49.800 | or at least have heard of the so-called ketogenic diet.

00:03:52.740 | It's used for weight loss, it's used to control epilepsy,

00:03:55.040 | it's used for mental health reasons.

00:03:56.560 | However, most people, including myself,

00:03:58.640 | do not follow a ketogenic diet.

00:04:00.380 | Nonetheless, increasing your blood ketones

00:04:02.580 | can improve the function of your brain

00:04:04.680 | and the function of your body.

00:04:06.160 | And that's because ketones are preferred use of fuel

00:04:08.820 | for the brain and body.

00:04:10.360 | So even though I follow an omnivore diet,

00:04:12.240 | that is I'm not in the ketogenic state,

00:04:14.560 | I use ketone IQ to increase my blood ketones

00:04:17.040 | prior to doing preparation for podcasts,

00:04:19.360 | or writing grants, or doing research,

00:04:21.360 | as well as prior to workouts,

00:04:22.700 | especially if I want to work out fasted,

00:04:25.060 | I'll take some ketone IQ to increase my blood ketones,

00:04:28.160 | which gives me a lot of energy during workouts

00:04:30.080 | or during bouts of cognitive work,

00:04:32.080 | even if I haven't eaten in the preceding hours.

00:04:34.520 | It really increases my focus and my energy levels.

00:04:37.360 | If you'd like to try ketone IQ,

00:04:38.920 | you can go to hvmn.com/huberman to save 20% off.

00:04:43.320 | Again, that's hvmn.com/huberman to save 20%.

00:04:48.320 | Today's episode is also brought to us by Roka.

00:04:51.000 | Roka makes eyeglasses and sunglasses

00:04:53.140 | that are the absolute highest quality.

00:04:55.080 | The company was founded by two all-American swimmers

00:04:57.160 | from Stanford, and everything about Roka eyeglasses

00:04:59.760 | and sunglasses were designed with performance in mind.

00:05:02.720 | I've spent a lifetime working on the biology,

00:05:04.540 | the visual system, and I can tell you

00:05:06.120 | that your visual system has to contend

00:05:07.600 | with an enormous number of different challenges

00:05:09.580 | in order for you to be able to see clearly.

00:05:11.600 | Roka understands those challenges

00:05:13.240 | and has designed their eyeglasses and sunglasses accordingly

00:05:16.000 | so that you always see with perfect clarity.

00:05:18.320 | Their eyeglasses and sunglasses were initially designed

00:05:20.540 | for sports performance, and as a consequence,

00:05:22.640 | they are very lightweight, which is great.

00:05:24.560 | They also won't slip off your face if you get sweaty.

00:05:27.100 | However, even though they were designed

00:05:28.680 | for sports performance, they now also include

00:05:30.760 | a lot of styles that are designed to be worn to work,

00:05:33.480 | out to dinner, essentially recreationally,

00:05:35.800 | so that you could wear anywhere.

00:05:37.220 | If you'd like to try Roka eyeglasses or sunglasses,

00:05:39.780 | go to Roka, that's R-O-K-A, .com,

00:05:42.180 | and enter the code Huberman to save 20% off your order.

00:05:45.300 | Again, that's Roka, R-O-K-A, .com,

00:05:47.940 | and enter the code Huberman at checkout.

00:05:50.260 | And now for my discussion

00:05:51.620 | with Dr. Mary Helen Immordino Yang.

00:05:54.140 | Dr. Immordino Yang.

00:05:56.500 | - Good to be here.

00:05:57.340 | - Great to have you.

00:05:58.480 | I'd like to start off talking about something

00:06:01.260 | that to me seems a little bit high level,

00:06:04.720 | but I think is the perfect jumping off point.

00:06:07.780 | I've heard you talk before about inspiration and awe.

00:06:11.620 | And as somebody who's interested in the brain,

00:06:15.820 | and as somebody who's interested in the role of emotions

00:06:18.780 | and learning and life experience,

00:06:22.780 | inspiration and awe seem to me

00:06:24.700 | rather high level emotional experiences

00:06:28.500 | compared to say fear or happiness.

00:06:31.040 | And yet inspiration and awe just seem so fundamental

00:06:36.180 | to how we learn and navigate life.

00:06:39.220 | And before we started recording,

00:06:40.500 | we were talking about David Goggins of all people,

00:06:43.280 | and we'll get back to that.

00:06:45.960 | But if you could just share with us,

00:06:48.980 | what is the role of inspiration and awe and story

00:06:53.980 | in how we learn and experience life starting at a young age?

00:06:59.060 | And then maybe we can transition to older ages.

00:07:01.580 | - Yeah, I mean, I think what you've noticed

00:07:03.580 | is actually fundamental to the conundrum of being a human

00:07:07.380 | is that our most high level complex brain states,

00:07:11.600 | mind states are also fundamentally hooking themselves

00:07:16.600 | into the most basic biological machinery

00:07:19.260 | that literally we share with alligators

00:07:22.220 | that keeps us alive.

00:07:23.540 | And that is both the power and the potential

00:07:28.540 | of being a human and the danger of it.

00:07:31.220 | So our beliefs, our experiences,

00:07:34.940 | our interpretations of the meaning of things,

00:07:38.100 | which that's where the story comes in,

00:07:39.860 | the stories that we conjure about,

00:07:42.880 | collectively with other people,

00:07:44.420 | culturally in spaces inside our own selves also,

00:07:47.720 | those stories become kind of the through line

00:07:50.940 | that organizes the way in which we construct

00:07:53.700 | our own experience, consciousness even, I would say.

00:07:57.220 | So when we hook into those very basic survival systems

00:08:02.220 | by recruiting them into these narratives

00:08:06.300 | about the nature of reality,

00:08:08.660 | the power of the meaning we make,

00:08:11.500 | what happens is we get this amazingly both fundamental

00:08:14.900 | and high level state simultaneously where we feel expansive,

00:08:19.680 | we feel like it's all so incredibly beautiful.

00:08:25.020 | And we are, I would argue, actually ramping into

00:08:30.020 | or catching into the very basic survival mechanisms

00:08:34.460 | that make us conscious, that make us alive.

00:08:36.940 | And that's, in essence, the power of being a human.

00:08:40.060 | That's the power of our intelligence

00:08:41.660 | at this late stage in our evolution.

00:08:44.240 | - So when I was a kid, I loved stories of all kinds.

00:08:48.100 | I think like most kids.

00:08:49.620 | I loved my Curious George books.

00:08:51.680 | I'm told I liked the Babar books,

00:08:54.380 | but then quickly didn't like the Babar books.

00:08:56.700 | I liked the book, "Where the Red Fern Grows."

00:09:00.540 | I liked books and stories about,

00:09:03.860 | it generally was boys for me, for whatever reason,

00:09:07.380 | that had some idea in mind or some ongoing challenge.

00:09:12.220 | And that played out over time

00:09:13.940 | and the character evolves across the story.

00:09:16.260 | And of course, many, many, many excellent stories

00:09:19.660 | have all those features.

00:09:22.560 | I can recall specific passages in those books to this day

00:09:26.220 | that made me feel something in my body.

00:09:30.520 | I actually am very familiar with the sensation

00:09:33.920 | of having chills go up my spine as opposed to down my spine.

00:09:37.780 | Early on, I realized, oh, there's sort of a difference.

00:09:40.040 | Sometimes it travels up my spine, sometimes not.

00:09:42.000 | I still haven't distinguished what that orients me to

00:09:44.120 | or away from, but it's a very salient memory

00:09:49.080 | and experience for me to this day.

00:09:51.060 | So much so that as I'm describing the book,

00:09:53.400 | "Where the Red Fern Grows" right now,

00:09:55.160 | I can kind of feel it starting.

00:09:57.160 | Yeah.

00:09:58.000 | I've heard you say before, and I love this quote,

00:10:01.580 | and I want to make sure that you get attribution for this,

00:10:04.700 | not me, that we basically have a brain to control our body.

00:10:08.940 | What is the role of the brain in controlling the body?

00:10:14.100 | And do you think that there are an infinite number of ways

00:10:18.320 | in which our brain does that?

00:10:19.460 | Or are we really talking about a language

00:10:21.480 | between brain and body of, you know,

00:10:23.880 | tingles on the back of our neck that go up,

00:10:25.920 | tingles on the back of our neck that go down,

00:10:27.700 | stomach feeling kind of tight and making us cringe away

00:10:31.920 | or kind of warm and wanting to approach?

00:10:33.880 | In other words, do you think that the conversation

00:10:36.320 | between the brain and body is primitive, sophisticated?

00:10:40.940 | How nuanced is it?

00:10:41.960 | Because language is very nuanced.

00:10:43.820 | We could probably come up with 50 words just in English

00:10:46.120 | for the state of being happy.

00:10:49.040 | But the feeling of being happy,

00:10:50.680 | I experience along a continuum

00:10:53.040 | of a little bit happy to elated,

00:10:55.140 | but it's kind of one thing, really.

00:10:58.480 | So if you would, could you comment on this notion

00:11:01.480 | of the brain being the organ that's responsible

00:11:05.180 | for controlling the body and what that dialogue is like,

00:11:08.000 | what the syllables and consonants of it are like,

00:11:10.440 | perhaps not at the level of biology,

00:11:12.100 | but at the level of psychology

00:11:14.900 | and how we subjectively experience that.

00:11:17.680 | - Sure, so the first thing I'll say

00:11:19.200 | is that I learned that idea

00:11:21.440 | from working with Antonio Damasio.

00:11:23.780 | So he was my postdoctoral mentor and he taught me first

00:11:28.360 | that this notion that it's the feeling of the body,

00:11:32.560 | it's an organism's ability to represent or map

00:11:37.100 | the state of the interior and exterior of the body

00:11:40.360 | that becomes the substrate for consciousness

00:11:43.320 | and for the mind.

00:11:45.440 | So I would just wanna give him credit

00:11:46.800 | because I didn't think of that first,

00:11:49.440 | but the work that I've been doing

00:11:52.080 | is an elaboration of that.

00:11:53.760 | It's basically addressing exactly the question

00:11:56.120 | that you're asking, which is how is it

00:11:58.660 | that we construct a narrative, construct a conscious feeling,

00:12:03.660 | which that word I take from Antonio and Hannah, right,

00:12:06.800 | Damasio, how is it that we construct a feeling

00:12:09.600 | and sort of narratize that feeling,

00:12:11.800 | elaborate that feeling into something

00:12:13.920 | that feels like a narrative, that feels like a belief state

00:12:17.260 | or an emotion state or an experience,

00:12:19.800 | I mean that in a very verb-like way.

00:12:22.080 | And what is the role of embodiment in that?

00:12:25.520 | What is the role of the brain in that?

00:12:27.840 | And what also is the role of the culture

00:12:31.640 | and the cultural context and other people in that?

00:12:33.800 | Because what we're really learning

00:12:36.200 | across the sciences right now

00:12:37.720 | is just how incredibly social

00:12:40.280 | and interdependent our species is.

00:12:42.320 | I mean, our biology is inherently a social one.

00:12:45.520 | We are directly dependent on other people

00:12:48.780 | for the formulation of our own sense of self.

00:12:51.560 | And we interact with one another

00:12:53.200 | and construct and co-construct a sense of self

00:12:56.880 | and a sense of meaning via those cultural spaces

00:13:00.040 | and those sort of nuanced ways of accommodating each other

00:13:04.720 | mentally and physically that lead to the feeling of us.

00:13:09.440 | So back to your original question,

00:13:13.140 | there's a lot we don't know there,

00:13:15.720 | but I think what's very clear

00:13:18.640 | is that the kind of background sense of the body,

00:13:23.400 | the mapping and the regulation of the body

00:13:27.000 | is a basic substrate, a kind of trampoline for the mind.

00:13:32.000 | And so we are managing our survival.

00:13:36.400 | We now have lots of evidence

00:13:38.080 | from across many kinds of science

00:13:39.960 | about the interdependence of our stress

00:13:42.360 | and social relationships and our immunity

00:13:44.240 | and our ability to digest food.

00:13:47.480 | And it's even now very clear that it's not even just us.

00:13:51.000 | There's a whole microbiome

00:13:53.520 | and all kinds of other organisms

00:13:55.280 | that are assisting us in that

00:13:56.500 | and that are collaborating with us in that.

00:13:58.960 | And then the brain is a specialized organ of the body.

00:14:03.240 | In fact, it's not a separate thing.

00:14:05.800 | It's an outgrowth or an elaboration of that process.

00:14:09.760 | It's a specialization of that process,

00:14:12.140 | a localization of it

00:14:14.320 | in a way that provides enough processing power

00:14:17.400 | to be able to really construct all kinds of feelings

00:14:22.140 | and mental states and beliefs and imaginings

00:14:25.720 | out of basically just the feeling of being here.

00:14:32.780 | And then the amazing part is that our brain

00:14:36.720 | is also imposing those back down onto our body.

00:14:40.000 | So the way in which our body reacts

00:14:42.500 | and is modulated in response to mental states

00:14:46.240 | is also very real.

00:14:47.680 | So we have a kind of like a dynamic conversation happening

00:14:52.680 | that's happening in very raw and direct ways,

00:14:57.340 | neurochemically and others,

00:14:58.340 | and also in broader, longer term, slower fluctuating patterns

00:15:03.160 | around other kinds of hormonal changes and things like that.

00:15:06.440 | So along multiple timescales simultaneously,

00:15:09.680 | we have a kind of whole, right?

00:15:12.720 | A humanistic whole of brain and body and mind

00:15:16.280 | that are kind of co-conjuring one another in real time.

00:15:19.160 | And that leads to all kinds of dynamic possibility spaces

00:15:23.000 | for how we are and how we feel as we grow through time.

00:15:27.080 | And I think as humans, the legacy of our intelligence

00:15:30.760 | is to tap into those possibility spaces

00:15:34.260 | and start to construct them into meaningful sort of chains

00:15:38.880 | of ideas, chains of experiences over time that we call story.

00:15:42.460 | And that I think is what you were tapping into

00:15:44.480 | as a little boy.

00:15:45.320 | You were hungry for fodder for a kind of structure

00:15:49.680 | for those feelings that you could start to help them evolve

00:15:53.400 | from one into the other and chain them together

00:15:56.080 | in ways that produce meaning.

00:15:57.740 | - Yeah, I'm fascinated by the idea that early in life,

00:16:02.760 | we experience some interaction with the world.

00:16:06.560 | It could be with other people,

00:16:07.760 | it could be with an object in the world,

00:16:09.620 | and it makes us feel something powerful.

00:16:12.040 | - Yeah.

00:16:12.880 | - And that lays a template of recognition,

00:16:16.480 | meaning that later in life and perhaps throughout life,

00:16:19.840 | we're always consciously or subconsciously going back

00:16:22.560 | to trying to experience that same kind of awe or inspiration.

00:16:27.560 | Because again, the circumstances almost certainly vary

00:16:33.440 | from being a five-year-old to being an adolescent

00:16:37.140 | and into adulthood and into the, I guess,

00:16:40.280 | the geriatric years, do they still call it that?

00:16:43.280 | Probably, I probably used a politically incorrect term,

00:16:45.520 | but forgive me.

00:16:46.360 | - It's okay.

00:16:47.360 | - 75 to 125.

00:16:52.240 | And yet the feeling is the same, right?

00:16:55.400 | The feeling, and so it's as if a word

00:16:58.180 | can mean the same thing, but be used 50 different ways,

00:17:02.720 | maybe 5,000 different ways.

00:17:04.760 | - To represent.

00:17:05.600 | - In this analogy, I'm saying that the word

00:17:07.520 | is the feeling and it's used so many different ways

00:17:11.560 | because occasionally I'll read a scientific manuscript

00:17:15.680 | and I'm like, that is so cool.

00:17:17.440 | It's the same way that I feel when I was nine years old

00:17:20.640 | and I spent all my time in the pet store

00:17:22.720 | looking at tropical fish and tropical birds and thinking,

00:17:25.360 | oh my God, that freshwater discus fish

00:17:27.460 | is the coolest thing I've ever seen.

00:17:29.680 | And again, I think I must have a strong memory

00:17:31.840 | for these kinds of things

00:17:33.120 | because I feel it right now in my body.

00:17:35.820 | So it's as if the same thing maps

00:17:39.360 | to so many different circumstances.

00:17:40.960 | So is what we're learning across the lifespan

00:17:43.920 | a recognition of feelings in our body as,

00:17:47.180 | ah, this is something I like

00:17:49.320 | because of the way it makes my body feel

00:17:51.860 | or is it cognitive or both?

00:17:54.400 | From your answer a moment ago,

00:17:55.920 | it seems like it's so interconnected and bi-directional

00:17:58.900 | and fast that it's impossible to really say

00:18:02.240 | that feelings are in the body or in the brain.

00:18:04.520 | It's really happening simultaneously.

00:18:06.800 | - Yeah, it's a dynamic emergency.

00:18:08.520 | Let me give you an example that I use sometimes

00:18:10.920 | to help myself understand the notion.

00:18:12.680 | So my little daughter, Nora,

00:18:17.760 | when she was two, two and some months,

00:18:21.080 | two and four months, she's a very verbal kid.

00:18:23.640 | And I was sitting in the kitchen one day

00:18:26.700 | drinking a cup of tea.

00:18:27.800 | I was sad about something that happened in my life,

00:18:30.040 | but I wasn't weeping or anything.

00:18:31.560 | I was just sitting there.

00:18:32.400 | I must've looked kind of lost in my own thoughts.

00:18:34.520 | She's playing around on the floor.

00:18:36.080 | She came over to me.

00:18:38.000 | I'll never forget it, this tiny little person.

00:18:40.220 | She comes over to me and noticed

00:18:41.320 | I wasn't really there with her, you know what I mean?

00:18:43.440 | And my arm was hanging down.

00:18:44.920 | She picked up my arm and she held it against her face

00:18:48.240 | like that and she said, I won't say in baby talk

00:18:51.080 | 'cause you won't understand, but she said,

00:18:52.080 | "Don't worry, mama, I'll take care of you."

00:18:55.640 | And I said, "Yeah."

00:18:56.480 | And I said, "Oh, Nora, that's so sweet, sweetie.

00:18:58.660 | "I'll take care of you too."

00:18:59.760 | And she said, "And mama, I really love you.

00:19:02.640 | "I really love you."

00:19:04.080 | And then she said, "I mean, I really love your arm.

00:19:08.160 | "I really love your arm," right?

00:19:10.900 | Fast forward two years later, almost exactly two years,

00:19:14.440 | she's four in a couple months and she was in bed one night

00:19:17.640 | laying in her bed in the dark and I walked by

00:19:19.240 | and I listened at the door to see if she was sleeping there

00:19:21.400 | and I hear this little whisper comes out and she says,

00:19:24.440 | "Mama, I love you more than I'm glad that there's daytime."

00:19:29.080 | What's changed developmentally from her at age two

00:19:35.920 | to her at age four, right?

00:19:38.040 | I would argue that the physiological substrate

00:19:40.320 | of her attachment to her mother is probably quite similar.

00:19:44.220 | She had this sort of visceral, automatic, biological,

00:19:48.480 | you might say, attachment, connection to me emotionally

00:19:53.480 | that she was trying to leverage in the service

00:19:57.480 | of making sense of being active in that world

00:20:00.240 | and adapting herself to the situation,

00:20:01.960 | helping me in the first case, right?

00:20:04.520 | But what's changed remarkably is not the substrate

00:20:08.140 | of that attachment, it's her ability to conceptualize it.

00:20:11.680 | When she's two, her love is experienced

00:20:14.640 | as this incredibly concrete, embodied, real, physical thing.

00:20:19.640 | Like, I love you, I mean, I really love the body part

00:20:23.220 | I am currently smooshing against my face, right?

00:20:26.480 | Whereas two years later, she can conceptualize that love

00:20:30.500 | in terms of an idea, which is, wouldn't it be awful

00:20:34.900 | if there was nighttime all the time

00:20:36.980 | and there was no sunshine and daylight

00:20:38.860 | and I couldn't go out to play and I couldn't, right?

00:20:41.060 | - You're describing my biggest fear.

00:20:43.120 | Listeners of this podcast will know

00:20:44.420 | that I'm gonna go into the grave,

00:20:46.280 | hopefully a long time from now,

00:20:47.700 | telling people to get morning sunlight in their eyes.

00:20:49.860 | - I know, I still do it because of you, yeah.

00:20:51.920 | - But please continue.

00:20:53.500 | - No, but that's right.

00:20:54.460 | So she's thinking about how much she is grateful

00:20:56.960 | for there to be sunlight and in her little mind,

00:20:59.560 | she connected that to the feeling of being attached to me

00:21:03.980 | and used one to explain the other, right?

00:21:06.860 | So that both things now have meaning.

00:21:08.740 | And that is the way I think that we start to elaborate

00:21:13.740 | these very basic physiological attachment states,

00:21:18.060 | aversion states, right?

00:21:19.320 | Motivational states of various sorts into mental states,

00:21:24.320 | beliefs, poems, you know, love songs,

00:21:27.860 | all the things that she does, right?

00:21:30.620 | Even between age two and age four,

00:21:33.060 | that really are mental elaborations,

00:21:36.660 | meaning-making of that very physiologically basic sensation.

00:21:41.660 | Does that answer your question?

00:21:44.360 | - It answers it incredibly clearly and so much so

00:21:48.060 | that I'd like to continue to build on that example

00:21:50.980 | because I think it's very relatable for people

00:21:54.540 | and it's the first time that I've ever heard

00:21:57.520 | the embodiment of emotions described

00:22:00.760 | in a developmental framework that truly makes sense.

00:22:05.320 | - Oh, good.

00:22:06.160 | So thank you.

00:22:07.080 | So the contact with your arm or your arm or both

00:22:12.560 | was the life example that she was using it

00:22:18.340 | as a two-year-old that maps to an internal feeling.

00:22:22.000 | And we're going to assume she's not here,

00:22:24.000 | we don't have her in a brain scanner, we can't ask her,

00:22:26.640 | but we're going to assume that her experience

00:22:29.540 | of being put to bed at night and feeling so much love

00:22:34.240 | from and for you map to her then growing understanding

00:22:39.240 | of the world around her and the fact that there's day

00:22:43.040 | and night and sunshine.

00:22:44.280 | So as her knowledge base grows,

00:22:46.200 | she can add examples to the feeling.

00:22:48.560 | And I'm assuming that, it doesn't matter how old she is now,

00:22:51.720 | but I'm assuming that as a 14-year-old,

00:22:53.540 | the knowledge base is going to be different

00:22:55.480 | and is going to map to that feeling again and again.

00:22:58.460 | So the question is, is what we are doing across the lifespan

00:23:03.580 | is recognizing sort of, I don't want to call them primitives,

00:23:08.280 | but basic emotional states, which are not infinite,

00:23:13.280 | but can be along each one along a continuum.

00:23:17.680 | So a little bit of love, completely in love,

00:23:22.320 | along a continuum and everything in between,

00:23:24.520 | a little angry and annoyed to completely furious.

00:23:29.120 | Are we talking about maybe 10 to 30 core emotions

00:23:33.880 | that then we are just simply binning our experiences

00:23:37.620 | into and onto and mapping onto,

00:23:39.480 | and then that's our life story?

00:23:41.540 | And I'm not trying to oversimplify things,

00:23:43.360 | but that seems to me like a pretty great way

00:23:48.360 | for a nervous system to navigate a world

00:23:51.740 | that is infinitely complex and has a lot of surprise,

00:23:56.320 | both positive and negative,

00:23:57.840 | and in which, like every organism,

00:23:59.960 | our main goal is to survive as long as possible,

00:24:02.880 | and not for everybody, but in many cases,

00:24:06.040 | to try and make more of ourselves

00:24:08.280 | in those things to be the basic drive,

00:24:09.660 | survive and make more of oneself,

00:24:11.360 | as seems to be the two basic functions of every species.

00:24:13.120 | - In some way, it could be more of your ideas

00:24:14.700 | or more of your work or more of your art, right?

00:24:17.120 | - Exactly.

00:24:17.960 | So is that an overly simplistic way to think about it,

00:24:23.020 | or does it work, even if there's more

00:24:25.880 | that needs to be added, does that work?

00:24:27.800 | As a 20-year-old, I learned things in college,

00:24:30.040 | and I'm like, this is awesome.

00:24:31.860 | The first time I learned about the hypothalamus,

00:24:33.720 | this little marble-sized structure,

00:24:34.960 | and the fact that different neurons

00:24:36.440 | sitting right next to each other can put us into a rage,

00:24:39.040 | or will make us want to mate,

00:24:40.240 | or will make us thirsty or hungry or tired,

00:24:42.640 | I was like, wow.

00:24:44.680 | I mean, it just, it blew me away.

00:24:47.120 | It still blows me away.

00:24:48.920 | But the feeling is the same as looking at the discus fish

00:24:51.840 | in Monet's Pet Shop on California Avenue

00:24:54.680 | when I'm nine years old.

00:24:55.560 | So is that the way to think about it?

00:24:57.400 | - I think, yes, I think there's an awful lot

00:25:01.320 | of basic physiological mechanisms

00:25:03.840 | that become motivational mechanisms, right,

00:25:06.920 | in all the senses, adaptive mechanisms

00:25:10.520 | that we share with all life forms,

00:25:13.160 | not even just all animals, but all life forms,

00:25:15.360 | but they look different, and different life forms for sure,

00:25:17.480 | because the adaptive functions, the time scales,

00:25:19.840 | and everything are different.

00:25:21.160 | If you're a tree, then if you're a fish,

00:25:22.720 | then if you're a slime mold, or you're me, right?

00:25:25.560 | But I think you're right,

00:25:27.040 | that what we basically are doing

00:25:28.720 | is taking these very primitive

00:25:31.380 | physiological regulatory capacities

00:25:33.600 | that are essentially there to keep you alive,

00:25:36.740 | and that's a very dynamic thing, to keep you alive.

00:25:38.800 | You have to constantly adjust

00:25:39.960 | for the needs of the internal organism,

00:25:42.200 | the needs of the external,

00:25:44.240 | the demands of the external environment on that organism,

00:25:46.900 | and being able to manage in that space over time

00:25:49.900 | is a very complex, dynamic, kind of iterative process.

00:25:55.880 | And we take those processes,

00:25:58.920 | and we conjure out of them a form of consciousness,

00:26:03.440 | an awareness of those processes

00:26:05.620 | that becomes something that feels mentally powerful to us.

00:26:10.620 | And I think one of the ways

00:26:12.920 | that we can know that what you're saying is right

00:26:15.560 | is that, this was just our first experiment on this,

00:26:18.520 | but I think it's really poignant.

00:26:20.600 | We first started to study

00:26:24.680 | the ways people would react to social stimuli, right?

00:26:28.080 | To have emotions like compassion

00:26:30.560 | or admiration in the MRI scanner

00:26:34.640 | by telling people stories of true people situations

00:26:38.680 | that invoked these emotions in all kinds of piloting.

00:26:41.880 | And then we asked people, how does it make you feel?

00:26:43.800 | And then we can see whether they actually feel that way.

00:26:46.120 | And then we move them into the MRI scanner

00:26:47.720 | and ask them again to watch the story and feel it.

00:26:49.480 | And what we expected, we had some very basic hypotheses

00:26:53.920 | that things like watching somebody else endure physical pain

00:26:58.080 | would activate the same systems in your brain

00:27:00.600 | that allow you to feel physical pain.

00:27:03.160 | And the same with pleasure around admiration for skill,

00:27:07.080 | watching somebody do flips on their bike on a railroad tie

00:27:09.360 | or whatever it is, right?

00:27:11.160 | Or virtue, right?

00:27:12.200 | Watching a civil rights leader

00:27:13.720 | or somebody who does something

00:27:14.660 | that's incredibly virtuously powerful,

00:27:17.180 | but not physically skilled.

00:27:18.880 | And we had a real surprise in those findings,

00:27:23.320 | which I think really went against the prevailing notion

00:27:26.520 | of how emotion works and which is still something

00:27:28.760 | which I wrestle with trying to understand.

00:27:31.120 | So we hypothesized that feeling emotions

00:27:34.820 | about very physical direct things

00:27:36.760 | and feeling emotions about,

00:27:38.520 | I'm like drawing them in space,

00:27:39.520 | but feeling emotions about complex elaborated things

00:27:42.040 | like compassion for someone having lost a spouse

00:27:44.520 | or something where you don't see any real physical pain,

00:27:47.180 | but you can imagine how they're feeling

00:27:49.360 | based on your shared experience of loss, right?

00:27:52.960 | Or admiration for virtue,

00:27:54.920 | that those things would build neurobiologically

00:28:00.020 | the way that they build developmentally,

00:28:01.640 | the way that they build evolutionarily.

00:28:03.680 | And we did find that to be the case

00:28:05.440 | and many other groups and experiments have found that too.

00:28:08.000 | But what was a real surprise to us

00:28:10.500 | is that emotions based in pain

00:28:13.560 | and emotions based in something rewarding or pleasurable

00:28:17.280 | like virtue, which is really inspiring as people describe it

00:28:22.120 | were actually recruiting the same brain systems

00:28:24.720 | including the hypothalamus, right?

00:28:26.360 | And other systems like the anterior insula

00:28:29.160 | which is basically visceral somatomotor cortex.

00:28:31.880 | It's cortex that feels the state

00:28:33.640 | of how you're digesting your lunch,

00:28:35.040 | whether your heart's pounding, all these kinds of things.

00:28:38.000 | What we found is that these emotions,

00:28:40.880 | when they get complex, when they're about stories,

00:28:44.340 | the valence is no longer the defining feature.

00:28:48.160 | The valence doesn't even matter that much.

00:28:51.160 | Instead what matters is does the emotion pertain

00:28:55.800 | to a story that is conjured in our minds

00:28:59.020 | or does it mainly pertain to what you can directly witness

00:29:02.200 | by looking at the person?

00:29:03.280 | So they step off a curb, they break their ankle

00:29:05.240 | and you go, oh, that looks like it really hurt, right?

00:29:08.040 | Versus they're eating dinner alone in a restaurant

00:29:11.840 | and somebody tells you his spouse died just a month ago,

00:29:15.360 | right, where you have to tell yourself an entire story

00:29:19.140 | about how he must be feeling in that situation

00:29:22.200 | as compared to just looking at him and seeing the ankle

00:29:24.300 | and going, ooh, you know?

00:29:26.400 | And it was that leap, which is really uniquely human,

00:29:31.080 | which is fully developed really

00:29:34.640 | throughout a very protracted period, right?

00:29:38.160 | Little children do not fully appreciate

00:29:40.440 | those kinds of mental states yet, right?

00:29:42.880 | And in adolescence, kids are all about trying to conjure

00:29:45.980 | and simulate these things and they do it very,

00:29:48.440 | you know, they overdo it and they do it

00:29:50.020 | in these very sort of awkward ways that adults recognize

00:29:52.780 | as not likely to correspond fully to reality many times.

00:29:57.780 | And then we start to build more and more facility,

00:30:01.980 | more and more sort of wisdom around conjuring the story

00:30:06.560 | that makes the most direct parsimonious sense

00:30:09.300 | out of the things that you imagine somebody else

00:30:12.020 | may have experienced given the complexities of the context

00:30:15.400 | in which they find themselves.

00:30:16.600 | It becomes more and more dynamic,

00:30:18.680 | more and more sort of inferential.

00:30:21.740 | And so this also goes back

00:30:23.680 | to what you were saying about development.

00:30:25.800 | This is actually how I see development across the lifespan.

00:30:28.880 | My little two-year-old loves the arm.

00:30:31.640 | Then she loves me as much as something else

00:30:34.500 | that she really appreciates like daylight.

00:30:36.360 | And then she goes on from there.

00:30:38.960 | And when she's 80, God willing someday, right?

00:30:42.120 | She'll be making a different kind of story,

00:30:44.460 | picking out things that matter in more subtle ways

00:30:47.640 | that other people may not notice

00:30:49.280 | because of the historical context,

00:30:50.980 | because of her more lived experience

00:30:53.740 | that she brings to that story, right?

00:30:56.220 | So the things that become salient,

00:30:57.960 | the things you learn how to notice

00:30:59.860 | and build a story out of are developmental.

00:31:02.740 | And they're learned across time.

00:31:05.760 | But the basic fundamental processes around the emotions

00:31:10.160 | are always driving the need to make the story.

00:31:14.000 | And so just to come back answering what you said before,

00:31:17.680 | I think we have this incredibly complex dynamic set

00:31:20.520 | of basic emotions or whatever you wanna call them,

00:31:23.460 | physiological states that we share with other organisms

00:31:26.300 | that are basically action programs that teach you

00:31:29.500 | run away from this, right?

00:31:31.120 | Move toward that, eat this, don't eat that, right?

00:31:35.880 | But those things in humans

00:31:38.220 | and to a lesser degree in other animals

00:31:41.800 | become the fodder for not just action programs in the moment,

00:31:46.480 | but ideas that transcend time,

00:31:48.840 | ideas that become the narratives of the stuff of beliefs,

00:31:53.520 | of values, of identities.

00:31:57.840 | Those more ethereal, you know,

00:32:00.640 | essences of us that are conjured entirely by us

00:32:05.400 | in cultural spaces are fundamentally grounded

00:32:08.960 | into our ability to experience the world in a real

00:32:11.960 | physical embodied sense, but elaborated far beyond that.

00:32:16.040 | - I'd like to take a quick break

00:32:17.560 | and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Athletic Greens.

00:32:20.460 | Athletic Greens now called AG1

00:32:22.920 | is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink

00:32:25.280 | that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.

00:32:28.180 | I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012.

00:32:30.860 | So I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.

00:32:33.080 | The reason I started taking Athletic Greens

00:32:34.680 | and the reason I still take Athletic Greens

00:32:36.760 | once or usually twice a day

00:32:38.740 | is that it gets to be the probiotics

00:32:40.660 | that I need for gut health.

00:32:42.340 | Our gut is very important.

00:32:43.440 | It's populated by gut microbiota

00:32:46.000 | that communicate with the brain, the immune system,

00:32:47.760 | and basically all the biological systems of our body

00:32:50.160 | to strongly impact our immediate and long-term health.

00:32:53.800 | And those probiotics in Athletic Greens

00:32:55.660 | are optimal and vital for microbiota health.

00:32:59.480 | In addition, Athletic Greens contains

00:33:01.040 | a number of adaptogens, vitamins, and minerals

00:33:02.960 | that make sure that all of my foundational

00:33:04.840 | nutritional needs are met and it tastes great.

00:33:08.300 | If you'd like to try Athletic Greens,

00:33:09.760 | you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman,

00:33:13.160 | and they'll give you five free travel packs

00:33:15.120 | that make it really easy to mix up Athletic Greens

00:33:17.440 | while you're on the road, in the car,

00:33:18.720 | on the plane, et cetera.

00:33:20.000 | And they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin D3K2.

00:33:23.420 | Again, that's athleticgreens.com/huberman

00:33:26.100 | to get the five free travel packs

00:33:27.480 | and the year's supply of vitamin D3K2.

00:33:30.320 | I started off studying the visual system,

00:33:33.300 | and I don't want this to turn into a discussion

00:33:35.160 | about the visual system,

00:33:36.060 | but in the visual system,

00:33:38.880 | we know that there's a,

00:33:40.080 | what's called a hierarchical organization

00:33:42.600 | where the eye encodes and can respond to edges

00:33:46.680 | and light versus dark and red, green, blue.

00:33:50.260 | And from that very basic set of building blocks,

00:33:54.000 | there's an elaboration or a buildup

00:33:56.300 | of what's really called the iceberg model

00:33:58.360 | that was developed by my scientific great grandparents,

00:34:01.140 | David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel,

00:34:02.360 | who won the Nobel Prize for that work,

00:34:04.860 | where you can look at somebody's face and recognize it,

00:34:09.060 | or see a profile moving at a particular direction

00:34:12.600 | and still recognize that person,

00:34:14.680 | or see a word written and conceptualize in your mind's eye

00:34:19.680 | what that word like bird actually looks like,

00:34:22.520 | like parakeet, blue parakeet.

00:34:24.340 | In other words, there's a hierarchical buildup.

00:34:26.220 | And what you're describing sounds somewhat similar

00:34:29.280 | that there's a hierarchical organization whereby

00:34:32.920 | through development, we first learn,

00:34:34.900 | I guess earlier I called them primitives,

00:34:36.340 | but basic building blocks of,

00:34:37.900 | you know, when someone steps on my foot, it hurts.

00:34:40.200 | It can hurt a lot or a little bit,

00:34:41.500 | depending on who stepped on my foot.

00:34:43.300 | Whether I have a shoe on, so you start learning context,

00:34:46.620 | but there's a buildup on top of the basic somatic experience

00:34:51.340 | of different examples that map to pain,

00:34:53.400 | including emotional pain and physical pain,

00:34:55.300 | because we know those are interdigitated somewhat.

00:34:57.860 | And that over time, this builds up

00:35:01.880 | so that we have countless examples,

00:35:04.080 | but you said something else that goes beyond

00:35:07.880 | the hierarchical organization

00:35:09.880 | that we see in the visual system,

00:35:11.420 | which is that when there's a narrative or a story

00:35:14.800 | that we have to add, it changes something

00:35:18.480 | about the representation of emotion.

00:35:20.580 | I'm so struck by this comparison

00:35:23.560 | between seeing somebody step off a curb

00:35:26.000 | and break their ankle.

00:35:27.160 | Like even as I'm describing, just like a folding ankle,

00:35:30.080 | like, ouch, God, that really hurts.

00:35:31.880 | - And just look at what you're doing with your face

00:35:33.080 | as you do that in your body, right?

00:35:34.620 | - Yeah, I mean, I've broken my left foot five times

00:35:38.840 | growing up doing the same sport,

00:35:40.880 | and it just, I can still hear and feel the thing going,

00:35:44.140 | and that means six months in a cast or whatever it is,

00:35:47.040 | versus a story, you know,

00:35:50.240 | seeing somebody sitting alone in a cafe,

00:35:52.540 | writing in their journal,

00:35:54.160 | and then you learning that they just lost their spouse

00:35:57.800 | of 75 years.

00:36:00.000 | Two fundamentally different visual images.

00:36:02.820 | The emotion could perhaps be the same,

00:36:05.520 | like, oh, that is rough.

00:36:08.280 | And yet the need to impose story changes it.

00:36:14.260 | Do I understand that correctly?

00:36:15.220 | That there's something not just more developmentally mature

00:36:19.720 | about adding in story and adding context,

00:36:23.280 | but that when we have to do that,

00:36:25.120 | that there's something that's fundamentally different

00:36:27.400 | about how the emotions are mapped in the brain.

00:36:30.280 | I guess perhaps the answer I'm looking for is,

00:36:33.040 | what did you see in brain scanning experiments

00:36:37.680 | where somebody views simply a physical break

00:36:42.200 | of somebody's limb versus somebody has to add story?

00:36:45.720 | Is there something that comes out in the subtraction

00:36:48.680 | of one from the other that tells us,

00:36:50.080 | oh, there's a whole set of brain networks

00:36:51.880 | that are not just about saying ouch,

00:36:54.800 | but that have to do with the need to conjure up story?

00:36:57.680 | And what are those brain areas?

00:36:59.020 | And then perhaps we can digest those a little bit.

00:37:02.520 | - Yes, and actually that is exactly what we found,

00:37:04.680 | a whole system of brain areas that did this,

00:37:07.520 | which now many people have described.

00:37:09.880 | And we're still trying to understand the full role

00:37:12.400 | of these networks,

00:37:13.280 | but these regions together are called in the literature,

00:37:17.120 | the so-called default mode network, right?

00:37:20.640 | Because the co-activation of these characteristic regions

00:37:25.600 | of the brain, which are in the back middle of the head

00:37:28.780 | and some characteristic regions on the lateral parietal,

00:37:31.480 | and those were first described in neuroimaging experiments

00:37:36.480 | where people were asked to just rest, right?

00:37:40.980 | Rest and relax, don't think about anything,

00:37:43.440 | just clear your mind for a few minutes, right?

00:37:45.400 | This is Marcus Raichel and his colleagues back in 2001.

00:37:49.000 | And then contrasting that with tasks

00:37:54.000 | where people have to do something very attention focus

00:37:57.920 | requiring where you really have to work hard and think.

00:37:59.880 | And they found that these highly metabolic

00:38:03.200 | characteristic regions of the brain were coming online

00:38:06.520 | and activating themselves when the person was resting

00:38:10.840 | and deactivating and decoupling from one another,

00:38:14.640 | not talking back and forth and exchanging signal very much.

00:38:19.320 | When someone was doing a really effortful mental task,

00:38:22.120 | and that was a real conundrum for a long time.

00:38:26.280 | And what we now know is,

00:38:29.320 | when you ask somebody to think about nothing or rest,

00:38:32.240 | for a few minutes, you're laying in the skin and thinking,

00:38:33.760 | I'm thinking about nothing, I'm thinking about nothing.

00:38:35.000 | And then you start daydreaming about all manner of stories.

00:38:38.360 | You start to imagine yourself into the future.

00:38:40.440 | Here I am winning the Olympics, ta-da,

00:38:42.400 | or hey, it's my grandma's birthday next week.

00:38:44.400 | I wonder if she'd like to go to lunch

00:38:45.560 | or if she'd rather have flowers.

00:38:47.080 | You're imagining other people's mind states.

00:38:49.080 | You're thinking, is that guy mad at me at work?

00:38:51.560 | I wonder if I should change jobs.

00:38:55.000 | You're thinking about all kinds of possible spaces

00:38:58.480 | that don't actually physically exist

00:39:00.320 | in the real here and now.

00:39:01.760 | And so what we found is that our findings were,

00:39:05.720 | I think some of the first, if not the first,

00:39:09.160 | to actively demonstrate an increase in activation

00:39:16.560 | in these default mode systems, not a decoupling of them,

00:39:21.280 | but an activation of them when we ask somebody

00:39:24.560 | to do an effortful mental task.

00:39:28.080 | And what was the task?

00:39:29.880 | Asking people, how do you feel about this story,

00:39:34.880 | which involves a lot of imposing of cultural

00:39:39.240 | and social and contextual knowledge

00:39:41.080 | to be able to appreciate.

00:39:42.320 | So the story of the guy sitting in the cafe

00:39:44.880 | writing in his journal, who lost his spouse of 75 years,

00:39:48.760 | you have to know a lot to be able to appreciate

00:39:53.120 | how he must be feeling.

00:39:54.400 | How does it make you feel?

00:39:55.840 | Let me pull up a lot of relevant knowledge,

00:39:58.440 | personal experiences and memories,

00:40:00.120 | and then hypothesize, generate some kind of narrative,

00:40:05.040 | some kind of storyline that would accommodate his situation

00:40:08.880 | and allow me to infer.

00:40:10.920 | Those kinds of stories, which are very different

00:40:14.760 | from here's somebody stepping off the curb,

00:40:17.000 | ow, look at that ankle, right?

00:40:18.360 | It's very obvious how that makes the person feel

00:40:20.880 | and how you should feel about that.

00:40:22.280 | You don't really need to bring a whole lot

00:40:24.120 | of cultural knowledge about their personal history

00:40:27.160 | with their spouse to be able to understand

00:40:28.560 | that's breaking your ankle hurts, right?

00:40:30.680 | And what we found is that it was those kinds of stories

00:40:35.280 | where people had to bring a lot of contextual knowledge

00:40:38.920 | to fully appreciate that activated

00:40:41.720 | these default mode systems.

00:40:43.120 | - The losing of the spouse.

00:40:44.480 | - The losing of the spouse.

00:40:45.560 | So what we later showed in a series of experiments,

00:40:49.680 | contrasting true stories that are meant

00:40:53.760 | to induce admiration for skill, right?

00:40:56.760 | Like something physically skillful,

00:40:59.760 | or cognitively skillful and memorize a Rubik's cube

00:41:02.560 | and solve it with your eyes closed, right?

00:41:04.640 | Or do flips on your bicycle and land on a railroad tie,

00:41:08.160 | right, like these incredibly skillful things

00:41:11.200 | as compared to the same kind of basic emotion

00:41:16.200 | in the sense of feeling like inspired,

00:41:20.400 | like attracted to it, like it's pleasurable,

00:41:22.480 | like it's really cool, like you wish you could do that too.

00:41:24.960 | But now it's about a state of that person's mind

00:41:28.080 | or quality of character or disposition of self.

00:41:31.160 | So talking about the incredibly brave actions

00:41:36.160 | of Malala in Pakistan, standing up to the Taliban, right?

00:41:41.400 | Where it's not about how well she walks down the street

00:41:44.720 | holding her school book.

00:41:45.640 | There's nothing really physically skillful to see there.

00:41:49.160 | It's about the conditions under which she's doing it

00:41:52.120 | and what you can infer about her state of mind

00:41:55.280 | and her quality of character

00:41:57.960 | to be engaging in these actions under those conditions.

00:42:00.960 | And those complex kinds of inferences we found

00:42:04.120 | activate these default mode systems uniquely.

00:42:08.480 | And in fact, we can in trial by trial experiments,

00:42:12.080 | so literally depending on what you say about a story,

00:42:15.400 | whether it inspires you that particular story out of 50,

00:42:19.280 | right, in a two hour interview beforehand,

00:42:22.000 | if you are inspired by a particular story

00:42:24.480 | as compared to another one,

00:42:25.320 | which may not resonate with you, right,

00:42:27.760 | then when we put you in the MRI scanner,

00:42:30.760 | we can predict that you will actually activate

00:42:34.320 | these neural systems differentially

00:42:36.200 | based on your psychological reaction in the interview.

00:42:39.800 | So we can actually show that there are systematic ways

00:42:43.960 | in which these large scale networks of the brain,

00:42:47.040 | so the way in which the brain's kind of balancing

00:42:49.560 | its activity and its crosstalk around the different parts

00:42:52.880 | that are contributing different kinds of processing,

00:42:55.160 | those dynamic balances are different

00:43:00.040 | when someone is what we're doing,

00:43:01.760 | what we're calling now transcending the situation

00:43:04.640 | of that person, right,

00:43:07.440 | and starting to learn something bigger

00:43:09.760 | about what it all means or what the story is

00:43:12.240 | or the broader reason why this inspires me

00:43:16.240 | and not just is about her, right?

00:43:19.720 | So you can look at Malala and you can say,

00:43:22.520 | you know, oh, I hope she makes it,

00:43:25.560 | that's really unfair and like, right?

00:43:28.880 | Or you can look at her and say, and kids say this to us

00:43:31.320 | on experiments with teenagers, but wait a minute,

00:43:34.880 | and they actually wait, they cover their face,

00:43:36.760 | they close their eyes, they look away

00:43:38.520 | from the Malala video and they look at the plain ceiling

00:43:42.320 | and we can actually get coders with the volume off

00:43:45.000 | to identify these periods of time

00:43:47.400 | and say that when they come back from that pause,

00:43:50.800 | their speech slows, their posture closes, right?

00:43:54.040 | They put their hands down, that kind of thing,

00:43:55.480 | they don't gesture, right?

00:43:57.360 | And when they come back from that,

00:43:59.160 | they are talking about two things,

00:44:01.280 | they're talking about the broader inferential narrative

00:44:06.240 | around what all this means.

00:44:07.760 | Wait, I didn't know not everybody in the world

00:44:10.280 | doesn't get to go to, you know, gets to go to school.

00:44:13.560 | You know, that's not right, right?

00:44:15.120 | And these ethical interpretations, that's not right.

00:44:19.240 | And the third thing that comes up is a feeling of self

00:44:22.640 | and what it means for you,

00:44:23.880 | because you're using your own self and consciousness

00:44:26.440 | as a kind of springboard, like a trampoline,

00:44:28.280 | like we said before, to try to appreciate

00:44:30.560 | what it must be like to be her.

00:44:32.040 | So the next thing people say to us,

00:44:33.520 | or kids say to us especially,

00:44:34.640 | is it makes me realize that I go to school all the time

00:44:37.680 | and I kind of take it for granted

00:44:38.920 | and maybe I should work harder

00:44:40.160 | to try to do something about that for other people.

00:44:42.320 | You know, so we have this incredible confluence

00:44:45.240 | in the brain and mind,

00:44:47.360 | this layering of real physical actions

00:44:52.360 | and things that happen that you can directly observe

00:44:55.160 | with the visual system, right, in the world,

00:44:58.040 | and then you impose upon those

00:45:00.760 | a desire to construct a story or meaning

00:45:04.000 | and you elaborate that meaning,

00:45:06.640 | and in doing so, you also ramp up

00:45:10.760 | the internal sense of self-awareness of me being me,

00:45:15.640 | of conscious systems,

00:45:17.280 | systems that support consciousness

00:45:18.640 | in the brain and brainstem,

00:45:19.800 | very basic things we share with alligators, right,

00:45:23.120 | that become that kind of inspired state

00:45:26.720 | of, you know, like, wait,

00:45:28.840 | it makes me want to do more for the world,

00:45:30.680 | or it makes me inspired to know there are people like her,

00:45:33.920 | she gives me hope for humanity, one kid told me, right?

00:45:37.320 | So we've got this incredible dynamic layering

00:45:40.200 | of the feeling of the body, the real physical body,

00:45:43.760 | the observation and sensation,

00:45:46.280 | perception of the world around us

00:45:48.840 | in a physical real or social real sense,

00:45:51.360 | and then the elaboration of that

00:45:53.160 | into these cultural narratives that become feeling states

00:45:55.760 | and where valence kind of disappears, right?

00:45:58.240 | It doesn't matter so much anymore,

00:45:59.600 | whether it's painful or pleasurable,

00:46:02.560 | it's more about, does it mean something?

00:46:04.720 | I'm suffering because it's helping someone else, right?

00:46:07.400 | And so it becomes something desirable,

00:46:10.160 | even though it hurts me, right?

00:46:11.680 | Otherwise none of us would go through childbirth, right?

00:46:14.280 | And so it's that meaning process

00:46:17.520 | that makes us really uniquely human,

00:46:19.360 | and that is the development of these emotions

00:46:21.880 | over time, I think.

00:46:23.680 | - Incredible.

00:46:25.680 | If I'm understanding correctly,

00:46:27.360 | there's a feeling state in our body

00:46:31.080 | when we experience or observe somebody

00:46:34.560 | in their own feeling state or experience.

00:46:38.840 | It may be the same as theirs, might be different,

00:46:41.200 | and frankly, as a neuroscientist,

00:46:42.960 | I'm going to say we'll never know exactly.

00:46:45.880 | We won't know.

00:46:46.720 | - That's the angel of philosophical debate.

00:46:47.960 | - We won't know.

00:46:48.800 | - If I see blue and you see blue,

00:46:49.640 | is it the same experience, right?

00:46:51.360 | - It's probably not, based on,

00:46:53.760 | from my knowledge of color vision

00:46:55.200 | and the distribution of cones,

00:46:57.080 | to explain why I'm saying that,

00:46:59.280 | the distribution of cone photo pigments

00:47:01.160 | in your eye and my eye are extremely different,

00:47:04.760 | to the point where we're not working with the same palette.

00:47:07.160 | - Cool.

00:47:08.100 | - And I think that makes life interesting.

00:47:09.480 | - That makes life interesting, exactly.

00:47:11.080 | - But assuming that neither of us is colorblind,

00:47:13.320 | red is similar enough to both of us

00:47:15.680 | that we would both look at it and say, "That's red."

00:47:18.160 | But one in 80 males is red-green colorblind,

00:47:20.960 | would look at it and would see what you and I call red

00:47:24.360 | and call it orange.

00:47:25.360 | In any event,

00:47:27.180 | when we, let's say, listen to or watch

00:47:32.080 | and listen to Martin Luther King's classic,

00:47:35.000 | "I Have a Dream" speech,

00:47:36.360 | or when I hear certain music

00:47:41.120 | that I first heard when I was 14,

00:47:43.600 | it was a particularly interesting, for me, time in my life,

00:47:47.360 | in part 'cause I was 14, and we'll get back to that,

00:47:49.880 | and what I mean by that. - 14's a thing.

00:47:50.720 | - No, we're talking about adolescence, right.

00:47:52.960 | I'll just say, I'll go on record by saying

00:47:55.240 | that I think that the music that we listen to

00:47:58.320 | in our adolescence and teen years

00:48:00.880 | is one of the main ways in which we come to recognize

00:48:05.600 | the extremes of these feeling state templates

00:48:08.040 | that you're describing.

00:48:09.240 | One of the ways I prepare for podcasts is to walk,

00:48:14.800 | and for my solo podcast is to walk

00:48:16.900 | and go through some of the narrative.

00:48:18.060 | My neighbors think I'm crazy, but that's okay.

00:48:21.240 | I think they're crazy too.

00:48:23.480 | - Maybe they're both right.

00:48:24.920 | - That's right, exactly.

00:48:27.380 | But I always know what music to listen to

00:48:30.900 | before I do a solo podcast,

00:48:32.340 | depending on the state that I happen to be in,

00:48:34.860 | driving into the studio versus the one I need to be in

00:48:37.160 | in order to deliver that particular material.

00:48:39.680 | And I know because it's almost like knowing

00:48:42.020 | what palette of colors, of emotional colors

00:48:44.520 | I have in me at the moment,

00:48:45.640 | and which ones are going to be required

00:48:47.440 | to deliver that material because it's different

00:48:50.320 | depending on the topic matter for that episode.

00:48:53.260 | What I'm referring to here is this idea

00:48:57.620 | that we come to understand emotions

00:49:02.620 | through our own experience and how observing other people

00:49:06.020 | and listening to certain music can influence that.

00:49:08.600 | And I realize that some people probably have more of a buffer

00:49:11.800 | between their experience of the outside world,

00:49:14.680 | so-called exteroception, seeing things outside us,

00:49:18.160 | and their internal landscape.

00:49:20.440 | Some people, I realize,

00:49:22.160 | have very little narrative distancing.

00:49:24.560 | In fact, I live with someone

00:49:26.160 | who has very little narrative distancing.

00:49:28.300 | When she watches a movie, if the person gets punched-

00:49:31.400 | - Yeah, she ducks.

00:49:32.640 | - She flinches.

00:49:33.720 | If it's a happy movie, she gets happy.

00:49:36.760 | If somebody in a movie is sad, she really feels it.

00:49:39.160 | And for a while, I thought, "Oh, goodness,

00:49:40.500 | "this really seems a little extreme."

00:49:42.880 | But I've talked to professionals about this,

00:49:45.440 | and it's something called lack of narrative distancing.

00:49:48.720 | - Transportation is another way to say it,

00:49:51.240 | being transported by story.

00:49:52.880 | - Right, and I think that it has its adaptive utility.

00:49:55.860 | I'm not being critical.

00:49:56.740 | I think that's an incredibly interesting aspect to ourselves.

00:49:59.320 | Some of us, I have a lot more narrative distancing,

00:50:01.920 | especially with violence.

00:50:03.000 | And I think that's because I grew up

00:50:05.000 | around a lot more violence than she did.

00:50:06.880 | And so I see somebody get beheaded in a film,

00:50:11.200 | unless it's something where I've really been built

00:50:13.240 | into the story of that person,

00:50:14.880 | and it was a real world thing that I knew actually happened,

00:50:17.920 | then I just kind of go, "Okay, well, it's a movie."

00:50:22.080 | You know, this is a movie.

00:50:22.920 | It's not real.

00:50:23.740 | Even if it's a movie about something that was real,

00:50:25.160 | that might be a little bit more of an emotional impact.

00:50:27.320 | And of course, if it's a documentary and it's real footage,

00:50:30.120 | it's pretty rough.

00:50:31.560 | But I'm not horrified in the way that she's horrified.

00:50:36.560 | I'm horrified, but not to the same extent.

00:50:41.600 | So obviously, some of us have more of a buffer than others.

00:50:46.360 | And you can see this in a movie

00:50:47.960 | or in a classroom full of kids watching a speech,

00:50:51.740 | like the "I Have a Dream" speech,

00:50:53.520 | or hearing the Rosa Parks story, for instance,

00:50:56.840 | or listening to and watching a David Goggins

00:51:00.840 | social media post, which I met David earlier

00:51:02.620 | because your son had a question for me about David Goggins.

00:51:05.180 | I happen to have the good fortune of having met

00:51:08.240 | and know a little bit.

00:51:09.240 | I don't know him very well,

00:51:10.080 | but I know him from some in-person interactions

00:51:13.720 | and he is every bit as intense

00:51:14.980 | and every bit as serious about his ongoing progression

00:51:18.960 | as he appears to be.

00:51:19.960 | There's no falsehood there.

00:51:22.000 | It is 100% data fact.

00:51:25.280 | He does what he claims to do and more

00:51:28.280 | that we don't hear about.

00:51:31.120 | Super impressive human being.

00:51:32.880 | So when we see something like a David Goggins post,

00:51:37.060 | or we watch and listen to the "I Have a Dream" speech

00:51:40.540 | and we start to feel something like,

00:51:43.240 | "Whoa, we're feeling inspired," to use the basic language.

00:51:47.200 | Are we mapping to some subconscious awareness

00:51:52.200 | of that in ourselves?

00:51:55.320 | Meaning, are we mapping to some time

00:51:57.420 | when we felt inspired in another circumstance?

00:52:00.320 | Or are we really, you know,

00:52:03.060 | is this merely a kind of a return to a feeling state

00:52:06.420 | that we have to recognize?

00:52:07.720 | I don't know if experiments have ever been done on this,

00:52:09.400 | but is there any way to determine whether or not

00:52:12.060 | we can truly have novel emotions past age 15?

00:52:17.060 | Or are we really just returning,

00:52:18.960 | or are we really just doing a sort of template matching

00:52:22.020 | of, "Wow, I'm feeling this again

00:52:24.000 | and this makes me feel capable.

00:52:25.500 | Like I can go out and run today,

00:52:26.680 | even though I was going to basically not run today."

00:52:29.940 | Or, you know, it's possible to have a fantasy view

00:52:34.160 | about how the world could be in terms of equality

00:52:38.280 | that an opportunity, and you know what?

00:52:41.400 | Like that's subconsciously is my brain saying,

00:52:44.920 | "Yeah, I remember when I was six

00:52:46.400 | and I didn't know the difference

00:52:47.520 | between some people having opportunity

00:52:49.200 | and other people not having opportunity."

00:52:51.600 | Is that what's happening?

00:52:52.600 | Or do you think that we are more sophisticated than that?

00:52:55.440 | And we are actually really responding

00:52:59.300 | to what we think we're responding to.

00:53:02.240 | - Okay, wow, there's a lot in there.

00:53:04.400 | A couple of things to start.

00:53:07.360 | So the first thing I was thinking before

00:53:09.500 | when you were talking about the visual system,

00:53:10.760 | which I think is relevant now,

00:53:12.280 | is that as humans, the more developed we get,

00:53:17.000 | the more experience we have,

00:53:18.520 | the more we've adapted to the contexts in which we live,

00:53:23.220 | you know, the real physical context,

00:53:24.880 | in this case, the visual context included,

00:53:27.460 | but also the cultural values of that context,

00:53:29.960 | the things we've noticed other people notice, right?

00:53:33.320 | How do you learn when you're living in the jungle

00:53:35.040 | that when you see eyeballs, you should, you know,

00:53:37.640 | go stand next to your mommy, right?

00:53:40.120 | So you learn what to notice,

00:53:42.080 | you learn what you need to attend to in the world.

00:53:46.120 | So when we are perceiving things,

00:53:49.240 | either very basic things like a visual scene

00:53:51.560 | or hugely complex elaborate things

00:53:54.540 | like Martin Luther King's speech,

00:53:57.480 | we are as much imposing onto the world

00:54:01.400 | our own expectations of what is there

00:54:06.000 | as we are perceiving what's actually there, right?

00:54:09.480 | So as we impose onto the world,

00:54:11.800 | we bring what you might call

00:54:14.380 | our cultural ways of seeing and knowing,

00:54:16.560 | our values and beliefs,

00:54:17.820 | and we push them onto the experience of what we notice.

00:54:22.820 | So even in very basic ways,

00:54:26.700 | things like cultural values change the way

00:54:30.040 | in which people observe and remember scenes, right?

00:54:33.280 | So, you know, there's classic work by Shinobu Kiriyama

00:54:36.440 | and other people showing that in Japan versus in the US,

00:54:41.140 | when you show people a scene of, you know,

00:54:44.360 | like an underwater scene with like all the beautiful things

00:54:47.060 | that are underwater, rocks and plants and things,

00:54:48.840 | and a little fish swimming by,

00:54:50.020 | and then one big fish swimming by, right?

00:54:51.700 | And you ask a Japanese person, what's this a picture of?

00:54:54.780 | They tend to talk about it's a scene of rocks and plants

00:54:58.200 | and little fish, and then a big fish swims by.

00:55:01.260 | If you ask an American Western educated person,

00:55:05.100 | what is this a picture of?

00:55:05.940 | They say, oh, it's a fish swimming through a scene, right?

00:55:09.840 | We tend to notice first, and you can,

00:55:12.680 | he's shown that this is, you know,

00:55:15.040 | is very, very automatic.

00:55:16.720 | It's very low level.

00:55:17.720 | It's perceptual, not just conceptual.

00:55:20.560 | And it actually changes what people actually notice

00:55:22.820 | in the scene and what they remember later

00:55:24.440 | and all that kind of stuff, right?

00:55:26.140 | We learn how to sort of filter input.

00:55:30.840 | We're not little, you know, robots or little video cameras

00:55:35.760 | walking around observing the world.

00:55:37.440 | And so when we see something as complex as a social story,

00:55:41.480 | we impose onto that all kinds of personal experiences.

00:55:45.960 | So you said, are we ever able to experience new emotions

00:55:48.800 | after age 15?

00:55:49.920 | I think no, but we are very well able

00:55:52.320 | to experience new feelings, right?

00:55:54.560 | Which are the complex elaborations

00:55:56.620 | of these physiological states

00:55:58.360 | and the stories we tell ourselves

00:56:00.400 | about the meaning behind them.

00:56:02.440 | That is developing all the time.

00:56:04.880 | And it's developing through all kinds of quote unquote,

00:56:07.980 | cognitive media.

00:56:09.200 | We do it through our science, right?

00:56:11.160 | By being inspired and interested in something,

00:56:13.440 | by being in awe of something.

00:56:14.840 | We do it through art, through trying to express an emotion

00:56:18.300 | or a feeling or a value state

00:56:20.520 | through the way in which we portray something

00:56:23.360 | to other people, right?

00:56:24.680 | As humans, we are driven.

00:56:26.640 | I mean, even as cave people,

00:56:28.120 | we were driven to say, I was here, here's my handprint.

00:56:31.720 | I'm gonna spit it onto a rock.

00:56:33.280 | So forevermore, anybody else who comes in here

00:56:35.240 | is gonna see that it was me who was here.

00:56:37.580 | And I have a me, right?

00:56:39.240 | And so what we're really doing is moving through the world,

00:56:44.240 | not in this kind of receptive passive way,

00:56:48.140 | but we are actively imposing ourselves onto the world.

00:56:51.980 | We're actively bringing our interpretive power

00:56:56.200 | and adapting what we do next

00:56:58.980 | relative to the way in which we accommodate, right?

00:57:02.920 | Piaget talked about this a hundred years ago,

00:57:05.020 | accommodate or assimilate those things into us

00:57:07.360 | that may disagree with our schema,

00:57:10.160 | that may align and accord and reinforce them.

00:57:13.600 | So this matters a lot for the ways

00:57:16.740 | that humans experience the world more broadly,

00:57:18.880 | because think about, for example,

00:57:22.280 | a terrible topic like genocide or the Holocaust, right?

00:57:26.320 | How does something like that happen, right?

00:57:28.400 | How is it that people who have empathy,

00:57:31.200 | who love their family, who love their neighbors

00:57:34.540 | can suddenly turn on each other, right?

00:57:37.000 | What's happened is they've shifted

00:57:40.480 | the way in which they narratize the context of those events,

00:57:44.960 | the way in which they impose interpretation

00:57:47.740 | on somebody else's pain has been fundamentally shifted

00:57:51.500 | from that's another human suffering to that's not a human,

00:57:55.060 | that's a rat, a pig, a bug, or whatever it is, right?

00:57:59.260 | And that dehumanization process

00:58:01.580 | allows us to shift our story set

00:58:04.140 | so that we bring another set of values and beliefs

00:58:07.860 | into the space.

00:58:09.580 | - Can I just say,

00:58:11.780 | I'm glad that you brought up that dark example,

00:58:14.580 | because my understanding from my psychology courses

00:58:18.500 | in university were that as much as we would all like

00:58:21.960 | to think that we are incapable

00:58:23.460 | of being the committers of genocide,

00:58:25.700 | that there are studies that were done in the '50s,

00:58:29.340 | but then have been repeated over many decades

00:58:31.600 | showing that in certain contexts,

00:58:34.360 | essentially everybody and anybody

00:58:37.880 | would respond to an authoritarian figure

00:58:40.740 | and torture somebody else.

00:58:42.100 | And I'm sure as people are listening to us,

00:58:44.120 | this they're thinking,

00:58:45.300 | "No, I would absolutely not do that."

00:58:47.240 | But all the data points to the fact

00:58:49.060 | that if the conditions were set in a particular way,

00:58:52.100 | you and I and everybody else most certainly would.

00:58:54.860 | A very eerie idea that goes back to,

00:58:58.060 | I think Jung's idea that we have all things inside of us.

00:59:01.060 | And we certainly have all the neural circuitry components

00:59:03.060 | inside of us for rage and contempt

00:59:06.180 | and horrible mistreatment of others,

00:59:08.980 | as well as all the good stuff.

00:59:10.480 | But I'm just glad that you brought up this example

00:59:13.740 | because I think that for a lot of people it's inconceivable,

00:59:18.740 | but I've never heard it framed

00:59:20.580 | the way that you're describing it,

00:59:21.580 | which is that if the story becomes

00:59:23.220 | not about the other person's suffering,

00:59:25.560 | but primarily about one's own story of suffering

00:59:29.220 | and that can suppress or literally inhibit

00:59:32.380 | the neural circuits that invoke empathy,

00:59:34.820 | then it makes perfectly good neurobiological sense

00:59:39.940 | as to why that would at least be possible.

00:59:42.300 | And of course, I don't think it's a good thing.

00:59:44.540 | It's just like many aspects of our biology and psychology,

00:59:47.820 | it just happens to be the way things are.

00:59:50.340 | - It is.

00:59:51.180 | And I think it really, I think,

00:59:53.620 | I mean, I'm ever the optimist.

00:59:56.300 | I'm also ever the educator, right?

00:59:58.780 | I'm a teacher.

00:59:59.620 | I'm also very interested in the ways

01:00:01.780 | that we design educational experiences for young people.

01:00:04.880 | I think the only hope we have to protect ourselves

01:00:09.200 | against these possibilities is to systematically

01:00:14.200 | develop dispositions in ourselves,

01:00:16.560 | proclivities within ourselves to question our own motives

01:00:20.200 | and to deconstruct our own assumptions about situations

01:00:24.280 | and to engage with other people's perspectives

01:00:27.960 | systematically.

01:00:29.600 | And when we develop those dispositions,

01:00:32.120 | the hope is that we are developing within ourselves

01:00:36.680 | a kind of a veto system, right?

01:00:41.220 | A system for checking our own motivations

01:00:44.820 | against other people's experiences of those motivations.

01:00:49.460 | And so much of what's leading, I think,

01:00:54.460 | though now we're going in another direction

01:00:56.220 | and kind of a political direction,

01:00:57.480 | but so much what's leading us

01:00:59.540 | into these very divisive political types, for example,

01:01:02.340 | not just, and the rise of authoritarianism,

01:01:04.840 | not just in the U.S. or the threat of it,

01:01:07.320 | not just in the U.S., but around many places in the world,

01:01:10.600 | all of which by the way are Western educated,

01:01:12.800 | is that we are taught that to know something

01:01:17.820 | means you own something in yourself

01:01:19.780 | and then you take that with you

01:01:21.220 | and you impose it on the world forevermore.

01:01:22.680 | I know how to do algebra two and I can do it

01:01:24.640 | whenever you ask me kind of thing.

01:01:26.140 | And that's what a good student is.

01:01:27.600 | Where when people learn to engage

01:01:31.360 | with their own knowledge states

01:01:33.080 | in more curious, open-minded, flexible ways,

01:01:37.600 | then we dispositionally teach ourselves

01:01:40.640 | to check our assumptions, to rethink what we think we know,

01:01:45.640 | and, and this is key, developmentally,

01:01:48.120 | to notice when we need to do that

01:01:50.540 | and when we should just plow ahead and it's totally fine.

01:01:53.480 | And so what we're doing, I think, right now to ourselves,

01:01:57.920 | both in the education system

01:01:59.080 | and in things like social media,

01:02:00.400 | is we're reinforcing our own biases

01:02:02.760 | by diving down rabbit holes

01:02:04.200 | where you rehear the same thing over and over again

01:02:06.760 | that reinforces your own belief systems.

01:02:08.880 | And then you come to believe those things

01:02:10.880 | and those put you on a train toward a particular kind

01:02:15.060 | of action or belief system that never becomes deconstructed.

01:02:17.640 | And it's very comfortable and it's easy to do.

01:02:20.320 | But the responsibility I think we have as individuals

01:02:24.400 | and as groups, as humans,

01:02:26.400 | given the amazing intelligence we have,

01:02:28.560 | is to rise above that and actually look back

01:02:31.200 | on our own selves reflectively

01:02:32.760 | and deconstruct our preferences,

01:02:35.240 | deconstruct our values and our beliefs

01:02:37.480 | and systematically query them specifically

01:02:42.000 | around how they impact or influence

01:02:44.760 | or change the situations of those around us or don't, right?

01:02:49.760 | The situations and sustainability of the world

01:02:53.400 | that supports us or don't.

01:02:55.160 | And so it all comes back to the emotions

01:02:59.480 | that drive our thinking.

01:03:01.440 | So we have these very basic primitive physiological states

01:03:05.200 | which vary across individuals,

01:03:06.720 | the degree to which they are incredibly powerful,

01:03:09.920 | easily evoked versus not.

01:03:11.800 | There's a lot of range in that.

01:03:12.960 | Now, all of that variation makes things interesting, right?

01:03:17.200 | But it's our ability to learn to experience those

01:03:21.200 | and to develop wisdom around when we need

01:03:24.580 | to query our own emotions

01:03:27.240 | and deconstruct the narratives that we're using

01:03:30.720 | to validate or substantiate those kinds of emotions

01:03:34.520 | in order to assess whether we actually are right,

01:03:40.400 | whether we should continue

01:03:43.480 | or whether we should step back and reframe, right?

01:03:48.480 | And so that kind of mental flexibility

01:03:52.800 | really comes out of an emotional disposition.

01:03:55.360 | It is our ability.

01:03:56.960 | So it takes it back to what you were asking

01:03:58.460 | at the very beginning.

01:03:59.800 | It is our ability to not just drive

01:04:02.240 | from what feels like the bottom up,

01:04:03.960 | which of course is always starting in the top down

01:04:05.740 | because you've got some interpretation of the world

01:04:07.920 | that makes you feel fear,

01:04:08.840 | that makes your body do this, that makes you, right?

01:04:11.560 | But also to be able to rise above, to transcend

01:04:16.560 | and think about what are the broader systemic, historical,

01:04:21.200 | ethical, civic implications of this narrative

01:04:26.880 | on telling myself which feels default like the truth

01:04:30.720 | and how might I deconstruct those systematically

01:04:33.360 | and how might I invite others to give me their version

01:04:37.160 | of those events and engage with those systematically

01:04:39.880 | in order to be able to really appreciate

01:04:42.440 | the implications of my beliefs.

01:04:43.920 | And so the bottom line is that the emotions

01:04:48.840 | that we're talking about today

01:04:50.480 | are actually the fundamental drivers

01:04:53.880 | of all of our thinking, decision-making, relationship

01:04:57.000 | building, right?

01:04:58.480 | Our community lives and our personal wellbeing

01:05:03.040 | all in one mix, but that doesn't kind of excuse us

01:05:07.320 | for acting on their bequest.

01:05:10.400 | It actually imbues us with a responsibility

01:05:13.880 | to then develop dispositions to systematically query those

01:05:17.400 | and reframe them when they are not serving us

01:05:21.140 | or the world well.

01:05:22.840 | - Exactly what you said, so much so that I'm a big believer

01:05:27.840 | in following lots of different types

01:05:32.000 | of social media accounts.

01:05:33.600 | I've taken some heat here and there

01:05:35.360 | because people automatically assume

01:05:37.160 | that if you follow an account

01:05:38.680 | that you subscribe to that ideology.

01:05:40.980 | But I follow many accounts to my disagree

01:05:43.520 | with what they say specifically

01:05:45.320 | so that I can learn different perspectives.

01:05:48.220 | As far as I know, we're the same species,

01:05:51.240 | me and these other people.

01:05:53.280 | - As far as we are, yes.

01:05:54.120 | - And sometimes I wonder,

01:05:55.240 | but they probably wonder the same about me.

01:05:57.440 | They wonder too.

01:05:58.280 | And there's enormous range in those accounts that I follow.

01:06:04.260 | And I follow different accounts for different reasons,

01:06:08.440 | some for entertainment, some for information,

01:06:10.160 | some for challenging myself,

01:06:12.200 | some for my desire to be baffled every now and again,

01:06:15.840 | but to always return to this idea

01:06:17.200 | that we are all basically working

01:06:19.040 | with the same building blocks of neurons and neurochemistry.

01:06:22.880 | Some people's dopamine,

01:06:24.040 | which whether or not you're into Bitcoin

01:06:26.720 | or traditional currency,

01:06:29.100 | the one true currency that's universal is dopamine.

01:06:32.820 | Everyone's working for dopamine

01:06:34.560 | and exchanging their own dopamine with world experiences.

01:06:37.800 | But this is one of the reasons why I think it's important

01:06:39.880 | to not be siloed in one's thinking or exposure

01:06:44.720 | to different things on social media.

01:06:47.140 | A somewhat controversial statement actually,

01:06:48.880 | because I think a lot of people assume

01:06:50.240 | that if you follow somebody

01:06:52.040 | from a particular political party,

01:06:54.040 | then that means that you vote that political party, et cetera.

01:06:58.140 | But that to me always seemed crazy.

01:07:00.300 | I'm fortunate to have a good friend who was on this podcast,

01:07:02.900 | Rick Rubin, who's an extremely accomplished music producer.

01:07:06.080 | And he's producing music

01:07:07.400 | from essentially every genre of music.

01:07:09.700 | Punk rock, which is sort of,

01:07:10.900 | I got my start and still love punk rock music so much,

01:07:13.160 | but classical and hip hop and everything in between.

01:07:15.700 | And Rick is somebody who forages so broadly.

01:07:18.640 | And I've really learned to try and forage broadly

01:07:21.040 | in terms of ideas and ideologies.

01:07:23.080 | And it's, I think a lot of people were just scared

01:07:24.880 | to be exposed to something that they hate so much

01:07:26.660 | because they don't like that feeling

01:07:27.720 | in their body of disagreement.

01:07:29.720 | - Yeah, dissonance is very,

01:07:33.040 | that kind of cognitive dissonance,

01:07:34.600 | we call it as very difficult.

01:07:35.840 | It takes work to resolve it.

01:07:37.480 | - Yeah, I guess is there,

01:07:39.360 | I like to think there's a way to step back from that

01:07:41.240 | and observe it, not from a disconnected stance,

01:07:43.360 | but from a place of curiosity

01:07:45.300 | about what's driving those mechanisms in people

01:07:48.980 | and maybe where we need to adjust our thinking,

01:07:51.140 | maybe not to adopt their mode of thinking 100%,

01:07:54.360 | but maybe 10% or 2%.

01:07:56.920 | I think one of the reasons things are so divisive right now

01:07:59.740 | is because of social media and the siloing

01:08:02.500 | or very divergent trajectories of people only following

01:08:07.740 | and listening to and obeying certain kinds of information

01:08:09.900 | and other people the other.

01:08:10.900 | And I think the pandemic is the place

01:08:12.840 | where all that really clashed very heavily

01:08:15.320 | and continues to clash in other areas too.

01:08:18.660 | Certainly not something that's going to be solved

01:08:21.640 | inside of this conversation.

01:08:22.920 | And yet I do have a question that grows

01:08:27.480 | from this aspect of our discussion,

01:08:29.700 | which is what do you think can be done at a concrete level

01:08:34.700 | in terms of education of younger people,

01:08:38.520 | as well as education of people who are out of high school

01:08:42.000 | and beyond to try and adopt these more encompassing modes

01:08:47.000 | of learning and experiencing the world?

01:08:51.120 | I mean, it's one thing to say,

01:08:52.880 | expose yourself to lots of different ideas.

01:08:55.800 | It's another to understand how to do that

01:08:59.940 | in a way that is adaptive.

01:09:02.340 | And any ideas you have, I think would,

01:09:05.520 | I know I and the audience would really appreciate

01:09:07.980 | and feel free to make this an editorial or map back to data.

01:09:12.980 | I mean, obviously this is your wheelhouse.

01:09:16.100 | This is your expertise.

01:09:17.820 | So I'm curious, what should we do?

01:09:20.640 | Should I send my family members

01:09:22.500 | who have very divergent political beliefs from me

01:09:25.260 | information to the contrary of their thinking,

01:09:28.980 | or what do I do?

01:09:30.540 | And what do I do for me?

01:09:31.860 | What should we all be doing

01:09:33.340 | with our 10 year olds and ourselves?

01:09:37.100 | - Well, I won't comment on,

01:09:39.220 | should you send your family members,

01:09:41.520 | there's other people that do that.

01:09:43.380 | They do that work and they know how to-

01:09:45.100 | - We're always frustrating each other over text messages.

01:09:47.220 | It's okay.

01:09:48.060 | - It's okay.

01:09:48.880 | - It can't get any worse.

01:09:49.720 | - Yeah, no.

01:09:50.700 | - We all love each other anyway.

01:09:52.940 | - But one thing I really do think a lot about in this

01:09:55.740 | is the way in which we educate our young people

01:09:58.500 | and what do we do with our 10 year olds, right?

01:09:59.940 | And like the first thing I'll say about your 10 year old,

01:10:02.720 | I don't know if you actually have a 10 year old,

01:10:03.860 | but is query them about their beliefs.

01:10:07.060 | When they follow something,

01:10:08.760 | when they think something's impressive or bad,

01:10:11.540 | or ask them why.

01:10:13.540 | Teach them to unpack their own beliefs.

01:10:16.960 | That doesn't mean that you don't

01:10:19.380 | still hold them necessarily.

01:10:21.040 | It doesn't mean that you adopt the opposite belief, right?

01:10:24.140 | If I talk to someone who has a very different value system

01:10:26.360 | than I do and I disagree with them, that's legitimate.

01:10:29.020 | But in deciding that I disagree,

01:10:33.620 | I have sort of revisited my own belief and queried it.

01:10:38.080 | I've externalized it a little bit,

01:10:40.220 | made that thinking visible.

01:10:41.540 | It's why we talk about it in education.

01:10:43.360 | That's David Perkins at Harvard talks about it that way.

01:10:46.460 | Making your thinking visible

01:10:47.780 | and then examining that thinking.

01:10:49.700 | And so I think one really important step

01:10:54.700 | that a society will have to take or we won't make it.

01:11:00.700 | And I know that sounds a little dramatic,

01:11:03.400 | but I actually think it's true, sadly.

01:11:06.440 | And I'm starting to think it's more and more true,

01:11:08.620 | is that we need to really get brave

01:11:11.500 | about how we think about the process

01:11:14.660 | of educating our young people.

01:11:16.300 | And what it actually means to expose young people

01:11:20.340 | to developmentally appropriate, age appropriate,

01:11:25.340 | opportunities to grow themselves as thinkers,

01:11:29.760 | as individuals and as civic agents and community members.

01:11:33.500 | I think that our Western designed education system

01:11:38.500 | has in it some very basic beliefs about what counts

01:11:45.420 | as knowing and what is worth thinking about

01:11:50.340 | and knowing about and how do I know that?

01:11:53.760 | How do I test you on that?

01:11:56.260 | That I think they are deeply problematic and lead us.

01:12:01.260 | I mean, I know this is a strong statement,

01:12:03.520 | but they lead us to a place where we are actively punished,

01:12:08.520 | not just not encouraged,

01:12:10.800 | but I would say actively discouraged

01:12:13.680 | from really playing with ideas,

01:12:17.840 | engaging systematically with our own beliefs,

01:12:20.580 | deconstructing those beliefs

01:12:22.240 | and engaging with complex perspectives on topics and ideas.

01:12:25.400 | That is just not what school is about.

01:12:29.300 | And it needs to be, we need to shift.

01:12:32.940 | So right now, the way in which we think about school

01:12:37.700 | is about, is basically judged by quote unquote,

01:12:40.880 | learning outcomes, right?

01:12:42.720 | What have you learned and how do we know that?

01:12:44.840 | We make you demonstrated by yourself under time pressure

01:12:48.320 | in a particular setting, right?

01:12:50.180 | Or you're gonna come back

01:12:51.020 | and I'm gonna give you a question

01:12:52.700 | and you're gonna give me the answer I had in mind.

01:12:54.820 | And if you do that in time, then I'll say you learned it.

01:12:57.080 | And now we're done, check, right?

01:12:58.960 | As compared to a system,

01:13:03.800 | and there are educational systems like this.

01:13:05.720 | This is not, there are people,

01:13:08.220 | for example, the performance assessment consortium

01:13:10.960 | in New York City is a consortium of public schools,

01:13:14.040 | some of which do this extraordinarily well.

01:13:16.920 | They have a dispensation from the New York state government

01:13:20.860 | not to give the Regents exam

01:13:22.980 | as their graduation requirements

01:13:24.840 | and their benchmarks of learning,

01:13:28.160 | but instead to have alternative ways of assessing kids

01:13:31.000 | where kids work for months to years,

01:13:34.160 | depending on the project on these in depth,

01:13:37.680 | intellectual multidisciplinary projects

01:13:40.080 | where they explore a topic

01:13:42.280 | and they engage with their own process

01:13:44.480 | of learning about that topic.

01:13:46.040 | And they bring in teachers and community experts

01:13:49.480 | and other people and they present their work

01:13:51.200 | and then they query the work

01:13:52.520 | and they talk about their own learning process

01:13:55.780 | and what could happen next and what decisions they made

01:13:58.260 | and all these kinds of things. - It's like a graduate thesis.

01:13:59.860 | - Exactly.

01:14:01.020 | You have to invent not just the work, but the question.

01:14:05.320 | You need to look at the world

01:14:07.040 | and notice what it is we're not understanding

01:14:09.700 | that we would benefit from understanding

01:14:11.960 | and find a way to isolate and systematically query that.

01:14:16.960 | Why don't we build education systems

01:14:21.160 | from preschool all the way up

01:14:24.240 | that engage people systematically

01:14:28.280 | in that kind of intellectual curiosity?

01:14:31.520 | We don't do that.

01:14:32.600 | So we know that little kids education, preschool education,

01:14:36.220 | if you don't have the water table and the sand table

01:14:38.820 | and the cool stuff and the choices

01:14:40.220 | and the ways to engage with each other

01:14:41.960 | and all the stuff being really age appropriate

01:14:45.360 | for three-year-olds to touch and smush

01:14:47.360 | and try to taste and whatever else,

01:14:49.480 | they're gonna be a mess on the floor.

01:14:51.000 | They're just not gonna come.

01:14:51.880 | They're gonna refuse to come to school, right?

01:14:54.280 | And they're gonna be laying in the doorway

01:14:56.120 | throwing temper tantrums, right?

01:14:57.760 | But as, so we know how to do little kid education well,

01:15:00.740 | it doesn't mean we always do it,

01:15:01.800 | but we know that they need to be intrigued.

01:15:04.240 | They need to be invited to think

01:15:06.960 | and they bring their natural curiosity

01:15:08.980 | and then you expand the range of ways

01:15:11.920 | they can leverage that curiosity

01:15:14.040 | to discover new things they hadn't known

01:15:15.760 | to think about before, right?

01:15:18.720 | Then we get to the standard quote unquote educational system

01:15:23.640 | and we somehow think that that natural human proclivity

01:15:28.120 | to engage curiously and meaningfully

01:15:31.080 | with deep thinking about ideas and the world

01:15:35.080 | is like inefficient and inappropriate and frightening

01:15:39.240 | and we teach kids, no, no, no, no, no, turn that off.

01:15:43.300 | It's dangerous.

01:15:45.500 | If you do it, it's considered insubordinate, right?

01:15:48.520 | And what we want you instead to do

01:15:50.160 | is just let me give you

01:15:52.300 | what I've already figured out for you.

01:15:54.580 | I'm going to give it to you

01:15:56.240 | and you are going to give it back to me.

01:15:58.240 | - So it seems to me that in the way

01:15:59.880 | that things actually happen in school,

01:16:02.700 | what is created is a kind of desire

01:16:06.600 | for the kid to be a computer, not a human.

01:16:09.280 | And they do have a dopamine system, however.

01:16:12.200 | And so what becomes the buzz,

01:16:14.480 | the emotional buzz is performance.

01:16:17.580 | If it becomes a buzz at all.

01:16:19.640 | So for the kids that don't get that buzz from performance

01:16:22.420 | or they don't intrinsically love the math or the English

01:16:25.780 | or the books that they're being presented with

01:16:27.340 | or whatever the subject happens to be,

01:16:31.060 | or maybe they only like one or two things,

01:16:33.360 | then they emotionally dissociate

01:16:36.320 | from the rest of the material.

01:16:38.360 | I'm actually describing a bit of myself in high school.

01:16:40.940 | I was not, I barely finished high school.

01:16:43.800 | - I dropped out of sixth grade for a few months.

01:16:46.180 | Yeah, it didn't work for me.

01:16:47.320 | - Yeah, I eventually got back to it.

01:16:49.500 | And as I imagine you did too,

01:16:52.320 | 'cause we ended up as academics.

01:16:53.960 | But I think what you're describing is so key.

01:16:57.300 | And I never thought about it from the perspective of,

01:16:59.640 | oh yeah, as young kids,

01:17:00.720 | we're given all the things that are going to drive

01:17:02.380 | our sensory world in the appropriate ways,

01:17:05.040 | touch and sound and-

01:17:07.080 | - And our minds, right?

01:17:08.580 | We're trying to build meaning in our mind.

01:17:11.000 | - And that we get to, as students, very young learners,

01:17:15.300 | impose some of our own intrinsic motivation

01:17:18.440 | to do certain things and not others.

01:17:19.780 | And that isn't supported as we're adults.

01:17:22.460 | - I'd like to take a quick break

01:17:23.660 | and thank our sponsor, InsideTracker.

01:17:26.360 | InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform

01:17:28.620 | that analyzes data from your blood and DNA

01:17:31.260 | to help you better understand your body

01:17:32.760 | and help you reach your health goals.

01:17:34.620 | I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done

01:17:37.380 | for the simple reason that many of the factors

01:17:39.540 | that impact your immediate and long-term health

01:17:41.540 | can only be assessed with a quality blood test.

01:17:44.180 | The problem with a lot of blood and DNA tests out there,

01:17:46.140 | however, is that they'll give you information

01:17:48.580 | about certain lipid markers or hormone markers,

01:17:51.740 | but no information about what to do with all of that data.

01:17:54.780 | InsideTracker makes it very easy to look at your levels

01:17:56.900 | of hormones, metabolic factors, lipids, et cetera,

01:17:59.820 | and then to assess what sorts of behavioral, nutritional,

01:18:02.900 | supplementation, or perhaps other interventions

01:18:04.820 | you might want to use in order to bring those numbers

01:18:07.240 | into the ranges that are optimal for your health.

01:18:09.520 | InsideTracker's ultimate plan now includes

01:18:11.540 | three new hormone markers that are critical to measure

01:18:14.100 | during a woman's reproductive and menopausal years.

01:18:16.620 | These are estradiol, progesterone,

01:18:18.500 | and thyroid stimulating hormone.

01:18:20.420 | If you'd like to try InsideTracker,

01:18:21.820 | you can go to insidetracker.com/huberman

01:18:24.740 | to get 20% off any of InsideTracker's plans.

01:18:27.380 | Again, that's insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off.

01:18:31.620 | What you're describing is so vital.

01:18:34.760 | What age do you think this cliffs off?

01:18:38.540 | So, okay, so in preschool, kids are allowed to do this.

01:18:41.660 | In kindergarten, they're allowed to do it.

01:18:42.900 | First grade, they're allowed to do it in most schools.

01:18:45.060 | But at what point is the expectation imposed on kids

01:18:48.900 | to become little rote learning computer machines

01:18:53.900 | and to get their dopamine from performance

01:18:57.300 | rather from intrinsic pleasure in what they're learning?

01:19:00.260 | - In thinking about, yeah.

01:19:01.260 | - And also, how do we address this issue

01:19:03.140 | that there are certain basic skills

01:19:05.220 | that not everyone is going to perform well at?

01:19:07.100 | And so for the kid that says, "I don't like math."

01:19:09.460 | - Well, you still have to learn it.

01:19:10.900 | You need to appreciate it.

01:19:12.020 | So how do you conjure up a joy

01:19:15.460 | or an appreciation in that kid?

01:19:17.700 | I mean, it seems like a hard thing.

01:19:20.020 | I mean, I eventually set myself

01:19:21.880 | along an academic trajectory that worked out,

01:19:26.320 | but that was initially just out of pure fear

01:19:29.660 | because my life was really bad.

01:19:32.040 | Circumstances in myself made it bad.

01:19:35.460 | And I was rescuing myself

01:19:37.780 | from basically becoming more of a loser.

01:19:40.740 | So I was like, "Okay, school's the thing."

01:19:42.260 | And I did school.

01:19:43.140 | And that was the turn hard right into academics for me.

01:19:47.260 | But what do you do for the person

01:19:48.720 | who really doesn't like math

01:19:51.660 | because they're struggling with it

01:19:53.280 | or doesn't like biology or psychology?

01:19:55.500 | I mean, how do we evoke at least an appreciation for that?

01:20:00.500 | It sounds like the emotion system

01:20:03.100 | is the key system to leverage in order to learn.

01:20:07.380 | And so could you talk about the relationship

01:20:09.100 | between emotion and learning?

01:20:11.340 | 'Cause I realize this is really the center of what you do.

01:20:15.420 | - So, I mean, you could say it this way, right?

01:20:17.420 | So whatever you're having emotion about

01:20:20.020 | is what you're thinking about, right?

01:20:23.020 | And whatever you're thinking about,

01:20:24.500 | you could hope to learn about.

01:20:26.540 | Remember something from, right?

01:20:28.020 | Understand differently.

01:20:29.700 | So the key question for educators

01:20:31.900 | is everybody's always having some kind of emotions

01:20:35.080 | all the time unless you're dead or unconscious.

01:20:38.360 | What are people's emotions about in this space?

01:20:42.540 | If the emotions, because whatever those emotions are about,

01:20:44.800 | that is what you're learning about.

01:20:45.860 | So if the emotions are about the outcomes,

01:20:47.600 | did I get it right?

01:20:48.440 | Am I gonna flunk?

01:20:49.260 | Did I get an A plus?

01:20:50.100 | I'm so smart, I'm so stupid.

01:20:50.940 | Any one of those, right?

01:20:52.640 | If those are the main drivers,

01:20:55.520 | then that is what you're learning about.

01:20:57.640 | If the emotions are about the actual ideas in play,

01:21:02.640 | the math, the physics,

01:21:04.440 | the why does the ball roll down the ramp?

01:21:06.520 | Wait a minute, that's the same as why

01:21:07.800 | the moon goes around.

01:21:08.640 | You know what I mean?

01:21:09.460 | Like there are, right?

01:21:11.020 | When the emotions are about ideas,

01:21:13.640 | then what you're engaging with is learning about ideas.

01:21:17.100 | And so what I would argue is that in setting up

01:21:20.520 | the kind of accountability system we have,

01:21:23.900 | we have taught people that their emotion

01:21:28.900 | should be about these high stakes accountability measures,

01:21:31.860 | which means that's what we're learning how to think about.

01:21:35.360 | - Perform.

01:21:36.200 | - Perform, not how to think about the ideas,

01:21:39.900 | not the intrinsic power of using math

01:21:43.820 | to understand the world in a different way.

01:21:47.040 | So how do you engage kids, right?

01:21:50.120 | You engage kids by setting out rich problem spaces

01:21:55.120 | that in problems that invite them to try to engage

01:22:01.620 | with something that peaks your curiosity,

01:22:03.540 | that's meaningful to them, or have them bring in,

01:22:06.820 | where the kid who really hates it,

01:22:07.980 | like what is it that you do find interesting kid, right?

01:22:10.980 | Start there, start there and start using

01:22:14.540 | your academic skills in a way that will give you power

01:22:18.280 | to do what it is you're interested in doing.

01:22:20.280 | That's the way in, use your writing, use your math,

01:22:23.780 | use your persuasive argument skills,

01:22:26.240 | use your filmmaking skills, whatever it is,

01:22:28.740 | to tell the story of something that you find

01:22:32.300 | deeply, meaningfully powerful to understand.

01:22:35.600 | And all of a sudden you need the math.

01:22:37.800 | Kids actually say things like,

01:22:39.700 | like there's this lovely long quote

01:22:44.700 | from a Sudanese immigrant kid in one of these New York schools

01:22:49.500 | with the performance assessments in an article I wrote

01:22:54.060 | with a colleague named Doug Connect.

01:22:56.060 | The article is called Building Meaning Builds Teens' Brains.

01:22:58.660 | You can find it in Educational Leadership.

01:23:00.740 | There's a big long quote from this kid at the end,

01:23:02.460 | and he's basically explaining what math class meant to him,

01:23:05.060 | which he had never passed a math class before.

01:23:06.900 | And he says he got this problem called walking to the door,

01:23:10.980 | which is basically Zeno's paradox, right?

01:23:12.580 | You get halfway to the door, halfway to the door,

01:23:14.140 | halfway to the door.

01:23:14.980 | Do you ever get to the door?

01:23:15.800 | Why or why not, right?

01:23:16.740 | And they spent months learning the math

01:23:19.980 | that would help them get at that problem.

01:23:21.740 | And he talks about how I had a problem, he says,

01:23:26.140 | and I had to learn fractions.

01:23:28.540 | I had to in order to be able to solve the problem I had.

01:23:32.860 | And as I engaged with fractions and that problem,

01:23:37.220 | I got fascinated, he says, by finite and infinite.

01:23:41.180 | And these ideas were driving my need

01:23:45.520 | to learn to do fractions, right?

01:23:48.160 | So we've got the cart before the horse.

01:23:50.800 | I'm not saying you don't have to learn math

01:23:52.600 | or you don't have to learn to read or write

01:23:54.040 | or do all these other kinds of skills,

01:23:56.360 | but we make those, which is in the horse's cart,

01:24:01.200 | what's in the cart, we call that the metric

01:24:04.260 | of the education system and the aim of it,

01:24:05.960 | when in fact it's the quality of the horse.

01:24:08.400 | Can that horse pull the thing, right?

01:24:10.720 | That's the development of the person

01:24:13.240 | and what they put in their cart

01:24:14.800 | then serves that development.

01:24:17.360 | It's the toolkit of ways of knowing and understanding

01:24:20.320 | that come with you as you move into the world.

01:24:23.260 | But this takes real, real developmental skill

01:24:26.540 | on the part of educators, right?

01:24:27.740 | Who are not supported or resourced or trained

01:24:32.540 | to think about development in these ways.

01:24:34.660 | I mean, so you asked, when does this fall off?

01:24:36.520 | It really depends in what school system you are

01:24:38.460 | and in what demographic you are when it falls off.

01:24:41.220 | But for almost everybody, except for the privileged few

01:24:44.940 | who are in very progressive alternative schools,

01:24:47.600 | it falls off by adolescence,

01:24:49.760 | which is when school gets serious

01:24:52.500 | and it's also ironically when developmentally,

01:24:56.160 | kids are developing the neural capacity

01:25:00.140 | and the psychosocial capacity and the drive

01:25:03.920 | to infer complex narrative meaning

01:25:07.100 | from the things they are doing.

01:25:09.000 | You know, these aren't just my shoes.

01:25:10.820 | These are a statement about, you know,

01:25:13.200 | what I believe about sustainability and about sports

01:25:17.100 | and about adults and counterculture, right?

01:25:20.000 | And as we grow into a space where we're driven

01:25:24.000 | to try to, you know, challenge and think about big meanings

01:25:27.700 | and engage with perspectives and emotions and social issues

01:25:30.560 | and broad, important existential questions,

01:25:33.600 | be they in physics or be they in art

01:25:35.840 | or be they in the social civic domain, right?

01:25:40.140 | What do we do?

01:25:41.840 | We double down on controlling the input and the output

01:25:47.100 | transactional mechanisms that count as quote, unquote,

01:25:50.340 | academic rigor and achievement, right?

01:25:53.340 | We start to ask kids, you know,

01:25:55.020 | what's the name of the servant who shows up in the scene

01:25:59.040 | and great expectations, right?

01:26:01.380 | Is it Molly or is it Maria, right?

01:26:03.620 | And it's, you know, like who the heck knows?

01:26:05.540 | And that is not the point of leading great expectations,

01:26:08.640 | right?

01:26:09.480 | We take away because we're afraid.

01:26:13.260 | As educators, as society, we've got this narrative

01:26:16.300 | around young peoples in particular,

01:26:19.540 | but everyone's propensity to build and construct

01:26:24.220 | meaning in these spaces and self in these spaces,

01:26:27.380 | that agency frightens us because we're worried

01:26:30.300 | they're gonna take risks,

01:26:31.220 | they're gonna do something stupid,

01:26:32.300 | they're gonna, they're going to fall off the track,

01:26:34.860 | they're gonna not make it in the traditional system.

01:26:38.620 | And in trying to protect them and shield them

01:26:42.900 | from their own curiosities, their own dispositions

01:26:46.460 | for meaning-making, we, I would argue,

01:26:48.940 | actually stunt their ability to grow themselves

01:26:52.820 | to the point where we have mental health crises,

01:26:55.020 | literally crises in mental health right now in adolescence

01:26:58.860 | across demographic groups to the point--

01:27:01.020 | - Especially bad in young girls, as I understand.

01:27:03.620 | - Yes, that's right.

01:27:04.700 | - But bad across-- - But it's bad in everybody

01:27:06.660 | and it's worse in girls.

01:27:08.120 | Yes, we don't fully understand why that is.

01:27:11.660 | I'll get some suggestions.

01:27:13.740 | What we're really doing is actually producing people

01:27:20.500 | who are gutted of their own inner drive

01:27:25.220 | to become someone who thinks powerfully

01:27:29.780 | in the space of the world.

01:27:31.420 | We are frightened to let our young people have that power,

01:27:35.700 | which is the role of adults is to wrap around young people

01:27:39.700 | and help them learn to be reflective,

01:27:44.700 | to be systematic, to be rigorous with themselves

01:27:48.460 | as they develop the capacities and dispositions

01:27:53.160 | to deconstruct their own beliefs,

01:27:55.020 | to deconstruct their own aims and goals

01:27:57.160 | and the ways they understand the world

01:27:58.660 | and to rebuild them iteratively over and over

01:28:01.660 | in this sort of intellectually humble, curious way

01:28:06.420 | where we're constantly querying ourselves,

01:28:08.820 | constantly querying other people,

01:28:10.620 | where we're willing to sit with uncertainty

01:28:12.840 | in complex problem spaces and think through

01:28:16.300 | the possibilities rather than settle quickly

01:28:18.460 | onto one solution.

01:28:19.600 | What does school expect you to do?

01:28:21.580 | Settle immediately onto one solution,

01:28:23.380 | which by the way is the solution I already had in mind

01:28:25.620 | when I gave you the question, right?

01:28:27.700 | As compared to sitting with young people

01:28:30.700 | and allowing them in safe and appropriate ways

01:28:34.660 | the space in which to actually grapple

01:28:37.260 | with complex, powerful questions.

01:28:39.620 | When kids develop the proclivities to do that,

01:28:42.900 | they learn how to manage those very human capacities

01:28:47.740 | that we've been talking about the whole time

01:28:49.460 | that can lead to terrible evil

01:28:52.100 | as well as amazing virtuousness.

01:28:54.620 | They learn to appreciate and manage those capacities

01:28:58.840 | within their own selves.

01:29:00.380 | - I think so much of what we see in terms of these

01:29:02.740 | quote unquote failure to launch examples are,

01:29:06.260 | 'cause I know some of these, the children of friends,

01:29:09.380 | really, really smart kids that didn't map well to the system

01:29:14.120 | and therefore are not doing well, really struggling

01:29:18.100 | and clearly have the intellectual power.

01:29:21.140 | It just wasn't served up to them

01:29:23.100 | and school wasn't served up to them in a way that were-

01:29:25.620 | - Yeah, that just says as much about the system

01:29:27.540 | as it does about the kid, right?

01:29:28.980 | - Yeah, I teach a course at Stanford

01:29:32.060 | to the medical students that every first year

01:29:34.020 | medical student takes about neuroscience.

01:29:36.120 | It's team taught.

01:29:36.960 | It's a phenomenal course because of the range of expertise

01:29:41.960 | in the teaching that comes through.

01:29:44.120 | And one thing I've noticed is that

01:29:46.700 | they're all phenomenal teachers,

01:29:50.260 | but the best instructors do two things simultaneously

01:29:54.580 | when they teach.

01:29:55.960 | First of all, they come to the table

01:29:57.500 | with incredible expertise, obviously.

01:29:59.940 | - Yes, you have to deeply understand

01:30:01.780 | what you're trying to get at

01:30:02.700 | if you want people to engage with ideas.

01:30:04.380 | - Yeah, they are true luminaries in their respective fields,

01:30:06.980 | addiction, pain, memory.

01:30:09.540 | Every system of the body and brain

01:30:12.680 | that relates to the nervous system

01:30:14.700 | is taught in this course.

01:30:16.180 | But that I've noticed every once in a while

01:30:18.460 | that there's a subset of them

01:30:20.680 | that as they teach from that position of expertise,

01:30:23.520 | not only are they clear, not only are they engaging,

01:30:26.000 | not only are their slides sparse enough to understand,

01:30:30.660 | but rich enough to include all the relevant detail,

01:30:33.440 | but they also flip back and forth

01:30:36.220 | from the position of expert

01:30:39.120 | to the position of novice learning it for the first time.

01:30:42.140 | - That's that intellectual curiosity

01:30:44.160 | that they're keeping alive.

01:30:45.360 | They have this disposition we're talking about cultivating.

01:30:48.340 | Sorry to cut you off, but that's right.

01:30:49.180 | - No, please do.

01:30:51.180 | As academics, we're familiar with that, right?

01:30:53.600 | Interrupting in the landscape of academics,

01:30:56.740 | interrupting is a sign of interest.

01:30:58.800 | I think Carol Dweck was the one who told me that.

01:31:01.280 | - Did she?

01:31:02.120 | Okay, she's right.

01:31:02.940 | - She's right.

01:31:03.780 | - Carol says she's right.

01:31:04.940 | The great Carol Dweck.

01:31:06.040 | And so, but I've seen this, especially,

01:31:08.860 | so there are some topics that I like to think

01:31:13.580 | that I might do this reflexively for,

01:31:16.060 | because for instance, I started off in neural development

01:31:18.400 | and I adore the topic.

01:31:20.600 | So I can't teach neural development

01:31:22.240 | without being completely blown away in the positive sense

01:31:27.240 | of how a brain develops.

01:31:29.000 | I've still never taught this or done a podcast on it

01:31:31.740 | because it tends to require visuals.

01:31:34.560 | And we don't use those because the podcast,

01:31:36.960 | most people listen to the podcast,

01:31:39.000 | but maybe I'll do something just for YouTube at some point.

01:31:41.120 | But I think it's the same experience occurs

01:31:45.600 | when I see somebody like Dr. Sean Mackey,

01:31:49.480 | who runs our pain clinic at Stanford,

01:31:51.960 | teach about pain and the systems of the body

01:31:54.000 | that relate to pain and emotion

01:31:55.380 | and how to cure certain forms of pain, et cetera,

01:31:58.860 | treat pain.

01:31:59.860 | It's like he's clearly the world expert,

01:32:03.360 | but the way he describes the system,

01:32:05.280 | you can tell he's learning it again for the first time

01:32:08.400 | in parallel to all of that.

01:32:09.720 | And I feel like that ignites the emotional systems

01:32:13.620 | of the learner's brain in such a powerful way

01:32:17.480 | that is distinct from just hearing an expert

01:32:19.400 | talk about something.

01:32:20.440 | - He's not relaying, he's not a squirrel with nuts

01:32:22.920 | and giving all the nuts to the kids.

01:32:24.320 | He's inventing the knowledge in front of them, right?

01:32:27.320 | - That's a great way to put it.

01:32:28.920 | As usual, others are more succinct in collecting my ideas

01:32:33.200 | and expressing them than I am.

01:32:34.660 | So I think that's a powerful thing.

01:32:37.920 | I went to a high school that has a kind of

01:32:41.460 | a split reputation.

01:32:42.680 | It's known as being one of the best public high schools

01:32:44.620 | in the country.

01:32:45.460 | It's also the high school that at least for a while

01:32:47.820 | had one of the highest suicide rates in the country.

01:32:50.060 | It's written up in various newspapers and so on.

01:32:55.160 | And so much so that nowadays they forbid the kids there

01:32:58.960 | from meeting more than an hour before school

01:33:02.580 | to practice for the standardized tests.

01:33:04.480 | By the way, when I was at school,

01:33:05.480 | the only thing that school represented for me in high school

01:33:07.680 | was something that came between breakfast and skateboarding.

01:33:10.440 | And frankly, I wasn't in school a lot.

01:33:12.120 | And I don't recommend that kids go to school,

01:33:13.960 | stay in school.

01:33:14.800 | I missed a lot of school.

01:33:16.220 | - I traveled all over the place

01:33:17.560 | and did all kinds of weird things.

01:33:19.360 | - I had a lot of making up to do in college as a consequence.

01:33:23.200 | So stay in school, get the basics.

01:33:25.120 | But this is actually where I'd like to go.

01:33:27.600 | You have a very interesting trajectory.

01:33:30.560 | Here you are, you're a university professor,

01:33:32.280 | you study emotion and learning and many other things

01:33:35.280 | across cultures and adolescence

01:33:37.960 | and so many other important topics.

01:33:40.760 | But you are not a story of like growing up

01:33:45.760 | in an academic family, you grew up on a farm.

01:33:48.480 | - Sort of gentleman's farm.

01:33:50.920 | My dad was a surgeon, but we had animals in a farm

01:33:54.120 | and my parents tried to have us growing the things we ate.

01:33:58.040 | - You've had a number of different experiences

01:34:00.160 | that we were talking about before we started recording.

01:34:02.160 | But one of the things that you mentioned

01:34:04.480 | was getting involved in education

01:34:08.000 | where you were exposed to students

01:34:12.120 | who had very different backgrounds than you.

01:34:14.680 | Maybe you could just talk a little bit about

01:34:16.720 | sort of the nodes of your experience.

01:34:18.040 | So you grew up on this farm

01:34:19.680 | and then maybe just hit some of the other nodes.

01:34:21.680 | And then let's take a foray into

01:34:24.200 | when you first got exposed to educating others.

01:34:28.320 | And because I think that's an important backdrop

01:34:30.400 | for what we've been talking about here

01:34:32.680 | and serves as a jumping off point

01:34:34.000 | for where I'd like to go next.

01:34:35.880 | - I'll just jump in.

01:34:36.720 | I mean, it's always hard to talk about yourself.

01:34:37.840 | I don't know what's interesting and what's not.

01:34:39.440 | You don't mean it to me, it's just me.

01:34:41.200 | - I think what's interesting is knowing

01:34:43.720 | where you've been and the things that marked,

01:34:47.440 | that mapped back to your emotional networks

01:34:51.560 | in a way that for you feel like that mattered

01:34:54.560 | in terms of what you're doing now.

01:34:56.440 | - As a little kid, I remember,

01:34:58.360 | even as a little kid, not liking school.

01:35:03.520 | I was a very good kid.

01:35:04.360 | I was a very well-behaved kid.

01:35:05.880 | I went to a decent public school.

01:35:08.840 | But just the whole idea of it,

01:35:11.160 | I just always felt like I had two left feet.

01:35:13.360 | It never felt like it was really me there.

01:35:15.320 | I was always trying to escape a little bit.

01:35:18.160 | Thinking about when I first started educating others,

01:35:20.280 | and my first memory of educating others specifically

01:35:24.000 | that comes to mind is I was six

01:35:26.440 | and I went on a little vacation in the summer

01:35:28.920 | to stay with my cousins in Petoskey, Michigan,

01:35:32.280 | which is a place on Lake Michigan

01:35:33.800 | where there are these stones where there's,

01:35:37.240 | my understanding from when I was six

01:35:38.680 | is that there are these 200 million year old

01:35:40.880 | fossilized worms in these stones.

01:35:43.080 | And you can see 'em when you look at this.

01:35:44.120 | There's like little worms and you can see 'em, yeah.

01:35:46.400 | So I just was fascinated by these stones,

01:35:50.480 | that these are actual fossilized 200 million year old worms.

01:35:54.000 | And I don't know if that number's correct.

01:35:55.120 | That's what I remember from age six.

01:35:56.240 | So some paleontologists out there can correct me.

01:35:59.160 | But I collected these stones

01:36:00.640 | and I went to the little local exhibit they had

01:36:03.440 | at the library or whatever,

01:36:04.560 | and I learned about these stones,

01:36:05.600 | and I brought some back and somehow,

01:36:07.560 | somebody thought to ask me to teach my second grade class

01:36:11.000 | when I started school about these stones.

01:36:13.240 | And I just remember,

01:36:14.800 | I don't know how I got asked to do this,

01:36:15.760 | but I remember standing in front of my class

01:36:18.600 | and talking about these stones

01:36:20.880 | and just looking around the room and suddenly noticing,

01:36:23.000 | you know that feeling when you're lecturing

01:36:24.400 | and you think, oh my God,

01:36:25.720 | they're fascinated by what I'm saying.

01:36:27.000 | Like every kid is looking at me and like, holy crap.

01:36:30.440 | You know, like, and I was, so I'm like, all right,

01:36:33.200 | I'll keep going.

01:36:34.040 | I'll tell you some more about these stones.

01:36:35.240 | And I passed them around and whatever.

01:36:36.680 | And it must have been okay

01:36:37.960 | because I was then asked to give that talk

01:36:39.840 | all the way up to the fifth graders

01:36:41.120 | who were way older than me.

01:36:42.080 | - You were a professor, you were a professor.

01:36:43.560 | - So I was already fascinated by the natural world

01:36:46.840 | and able to like make meaning out of something

01:36:49.880 | in a way that inspired other people,

01:36:51.520 | if I can be so blunt as to say that.

01:36:53.440 | And yet I was constantly in trouble at school

01:36:56.160 | for not having my homework.

01:36:57.600 | Like I was just, you know,

01:36:59.520 | the feeling of release on the Friday afternoon

01:37:02.120 | and the feeling of dread on Sunday evening

01:37:04.960 | is hard to like describe, you know?

01:37:07.720 | And I went to a reasonably well-resourced school, you know?

01:37:12.320 | Anyway, fast forward up to when I was older.

01:37:16.280 | I mean, I was just always fascinated by,

01:37:19.800 | and I think some of this comes from my mom too,

01:37:22.120 | trying to, you know, speak different languages,

01:37:24.520 | engage with people who are different than myself,

01:37:26.120 | just have conversations.

01:37:27.120 | So from the time I was old enough

01:37:29.120 | to barely qualify to do these programs,

01:37:31.280 | my parents had the resources luckily

01:37:34.240 | to be able to let me to do these things.

01:37:35.760 | But I, you know, I went off to France

01:37:38.320 | and stayed on a farm there for a summer

01:37:40.280 | and went to, you know, Ireland.

01:37:42.680 | I went to Russia.

01:37:44.120 | By the time I was 18,

01:37:44.960 | I was working with these little kids off the street

01:37:46.800 | and camping with them in Southern Siberia

01:37:49.600 | and all these kinds of things.

01:37:51.400 | When I went-

01:37:52.240 | - Was it as cold as they say in Siberia?

01:37:53.080 | - It was gloomy and rainy and muddy and cold.

01:37:57.360 | Yes, yeah.

01:37:58.800 | - Siberia always sounds so bleak.

01:38:00.400 | My parents threatened many times to send me there.

01:38:03.280 | - Yeah, no, that's a real threat.

01:38:05.560 | I mean, it's beautiful in many ways,

01:38:07.160 | but yeah, it was sad, it was a sad, sad story.

01:38:10.280 | Anyway, you know, I think what I was trying to do

01:38:15.720 | was actually learn by doing, by being,

01:38:19.840 | by engaging with other people who knew things I didn't,

01:38:22.200 | learning how to, you know, build things.

01:38:25.000 | I was always really interested in woodworking

01:38:27.320 | and boat building.

01:38:28.160 | I went to Kenya and spent eight months there

01:38:30.280 | as an undergraduate, right?

01:38:31.520 | Documenting this traditional Dow construction

01:38:34.240 | in a Northern coast of Kenya.

01:38:35.960 | The Dow, which are sailboats, sailboat construction,

01:38:40.920 | where they have no electricity and everything.

01:38:42.840 | - Cabinetry?

01:38:43.680 | - Yeah, cabinetry.

01:38:44.760 | You know what I mean?

01:38:45.600 | - You can actually build furniture.

01:38:46.920 | So when people say they built furniture,

01:38:48.640 | but they basically assembled a key of furniture,

01:38:50.520 | we're not talking about that.

01:38:51.360 | - I have built cabinets and built-in bookshelves

01:38:55.760 | and furniture.

01:38:56.600 | Some of my friends have pieces I've made for them.

01:38:58.320 | I never made anything for myself, so I don't have anything.

01:39:01.360 | But yeah, I mean, I think I was really torn

01:39:04.680 | between trying to build things

01:39:06.600 | and learn by engaging with other people

01:39:08.680 | and in these different cultural spaces.

01:39:10.320 | You know, being a woman in a cabinet shop in Connecticut

01:39:14.920 | is really not a cultural space that I had grown up in

01:39:17.920 | and then gone, you know what I mean?

01:39:19.000 | And yet, right, moving myself and changing myself

01:39:23.560 | to adapt to these different situations

01:39:25.200 | somehow felt like learning to me, I think.

01:39:28.840 | And I ended up in a strange situation

01:39:31.160 | where I cut my hand opening a window at a job site

01:39:34.840 | and I needed to, I was on workers' comp,

01:39:37.280 | and I had to take some time to let it heal

01:39:39.480 | and I couldn't run machinery.

01:39:41.240 | So I had to figure out what to do with myself.

01:39:42.920 | I was 23 years old and I was not gonna go back to my parents

01:39:45.320 | for more money, right?

01:39:46.840 | So I thought I have to support myself.

01:39:48.080 | So I thought, okay, I went to college

01:39:52.320 | at a high-level Ivy League school

01:39:54.440 | and I majored in French because I could.

01:39:59.200 | That's basically why.

01:40:00.040 | I was like, I don't know, I better finish.

01:40:01.280 | I better not flunk.

01:40:02.120 | I can do French.

01:40:02.960 | I know, I speak French fluently.

01:40:04.520 | I'll do a French literature major and done with it quickly.

01:40:06.880 | Then I'm like, what am I gonna do with myself?

01:40:08.680 | I never thought I could be a scientist, but I loved science.

01:40:12.080 | So I just went around taking like a year of every science.

01:40:15.320 | I took a year of astronomy and a year of biology

01:40:17.720 | and a year of physics and a year of human anthropology,

01:40:21.960 | paleoanthropology, like all these things, psychology,

01:40:25.120 | and realized, holy crap, this is super interesting.

01:40:28.760 | You can study how babies think and the natural world

01:40:33.160 | and then also be bringing sort of a scientific lens to bear

01:40:39.520 | that helps you understand things in a new way.

01:40:42.040 | So here I was as a 23-year-old with a cut hand

01:40:46.920 | and I thought, what am I gonna do with myself?

01:40:48.720 | I convinced the Massachusetts Board of Education

01:40:51.440 | that I had the background knowledge

01:40:55.120 | to be able to teach some sections of AP biology and physics

01:41:00.120 | that they had in their high school.

01:41:02.560 | So when I got to, I finally got an interview

01:41:07.080 | with this public school district in South Boston

01:41:09.920 | where they were desperate for a teacher.

01:41:11.480 | Like I'm noticing in the Boston Globe,

01:41:12.840 | we're two weeks into the school year

01:41:13.920 | and you still don't have a teacher, you know what I mean?

01:41:16.320 | Why don't you take me?

01:41:17.720 | And managed to convince the Massachusetts Board of Education

01:41:21.520 | to give me provisional teacher certification

01:41:23.280 | based on the coursework I'd done

01:41:25.160 | and how well I did in that coursework

01:41:26.560 | 'cause I was really super motivated.

01:41:28.440 | I did extremely well in all of it.

01:41:30.440 | And when I got there, they basically said

01:41:33.400 | when I showed up for the interview,

01:41:34.880 | the high school teacher wants to take those AP classes.

01:41:39.100 | Can you just teach full-time seventh grade?

01:41:41.320 | So I was like, okay.

01:41:43.000 | So I had my full contingent of 130 kids, right?

01:41:48.000 | Seventh graders coming through my classroom

01:41:50.640 | and the middle school had just been shut down

01:41:53.420 | because there wasn't sufficient funding in the town for it.

01:41:55.500 | So they had taken the middle school kids

01:41:56.700 | and pushed them into the high school space.

01:41:59.520 | What that basically meant is I suddenly found myself

01:42:01.860 | in a fully equipped high school classroom

01:42:05.080 | with microscopes and all kinds of scientific equipment

01:42:08.440 | that would be used to teach later courses

01:42:11.000 | with my seventh graders.

01:42:12.720 | And it also happened that the Massachusetts Board

01:42:15.920 | of Education had changed the requirements

01:42:20.920 | for the way they organize science instruction

01:42:24.080 | and curriculum from seventh grade life science,

01:42:26.600 | eighth grade physical science, whatever it was,

01:42:28.420 | different sciences each year.

01:42:29.680 | They wanted an integrated interdisciplinary science

01:42:32.500 | all the way across.

01:42:33.480 | And of course that was very difficult

01:42:35.040 | for the traditional science teachers to do

01:42:36.560 | because they'd been teaching only biology

01:42:38.120 | or only earth science or only physical science

01:42:41.040 | for their whole career.

01:42:41.980 | And they didn't know how to teach the other subjects.

01:42:43.920 | And here comes me with like one intensive year of study

01:42:48.920 | in each of these domains,

01:42:51.120 | I was perfectly situated to like try to pull it together.

01:42:54.280 | So some of the high school teachers helped me,

01:42:56.040 | thank you to them.

01:42:57.520 | And I built out a new curriculum for seventh grade

01:43:00.920 | for that district around this interdisciplinary approach

01:43:03.760 | to science together with other teachers.

01:43:06.880 | - It was very hands-on.

01:43:08.140 | - Very, and it was very much like a web of concepts.

01:43:12.560 | We'd study nuclear fission and atoms and reactions

01:43:15.640 | and then the sun and astronomy and the solar system.

01:43:17.780 | And then how the energy is being shined

01:43:22.160 | over onto the planets and then the earth.

01:43:24.880 | And then these organisms called plants

01:43:26.600 | are actually using those photons to do something chemical.

01:43:29.640 | Let's talk about photosynthesis.

01:43:31.200 | And then we can talk about chemical reactions

01:43:33.720 | and breaking down sugars and molecules.

01:43:35.800 | So we built this whole web like curriculum

01:43:38.420 | that I was trying to help the kids appreciate

01:43:40.480 | the sort of dynamic complexity of the natural world.

01:43:44.000 | And some of my professors from Cornell also sent me

01:43:46.960 | materials and all kinds of cool stuff

01:43:49.640 | from the Cornell Museum that they didn't really need.

01:43:52.560 | And then I gave it back when I was done

01:43:54.000 | with all these instructions,

01:43:54.960 | what all this stuff is on hominid evolution

01:43:57.040 | and Ashley and hand axes and all kinds of stuff.

01:43:59.840 | So I built out a curriculum around all this stuff.

01:44:02.360 | And I realized for the first time

01:44:04.900 | that I was in this amazingly fascinating space

01:44:07.960 | because it just so happened that the school I was working in

01:44:11.120 | was one of the most diverse culturally

01:44:13.640 | in the nation at that time.

01:44:15.160 | I think we had something like 81 languages

01:44:17.440 | spoken out of 1100 kids.

01:44:19.400 | That's a lot of first languages.

01:44:21.280 | And kids were arriving from all over the world.

01:44:25.000 | This was right after the Rwandan genocide.

01:44:27.600 | So kids were coming in from East Africa.

01:44:29.480 | There were refugees from Kosovo and Eastern Europe.

01:44:32.600 | There were kids coming in from Jamaica.

01:44:34.720 | There were kids coming in from Haiti.

01:44:36.980 | There were kids from Malaysia and Myanmar.

01:44:40.400 | Like there were kids landing in that class

01:44:45.400 | like deer in headlights from very, very broad ranges

01:44:50.320 | of cultural backgrounds.

01:44:51.660 | And they're landing in my science class.

01:44:53.880 | And what I quickly realized is they were using

01:44:57.720 | these scientific ways of exploring the world

01:45:00.060 | and thinking about questions and trying to make sense

01:45:04.520 | of what they had witnessed to try to understand

01:45:08.600 | their own sort of selves, their own origin story,

01:45:12.220 | their own place in the world.

01:45:14.400 | Why different people in this class

01:45:15.880 | look and eat differently than me,

01:45:17.880 | dress differently than me.

01:45:19.040 | Like, how is it that you look like that

01:45:20.980 | and I look like this?

01:45:21.860 | And there was all this crazy, you know,

01:45:25.780 | adolescent turmoil layered into this space

01:45:30.700 | where kids were grabbing onto the scientific ways of knowing

01:45:35.060 | as a handle to try to make sense of who they are.

01:45:37.700 | And those kids started asking questions of me.

01:45:40.920 | I'll never forget this one girl, black girl,

01:45:44.980 | raised her hand and all the other kids were looking at her

01:45:47.220 | like, yeah, yeah, yeah, ask it, ask it, right?

01:45:49.980 | And like, you know, she was being brave.

01:45:51.460 | Like she talked about it before school.

01:45:52.580 | Like, I can't say that.

01:45:53.420 | No, I can't say it, say it.

01:45:54.420 | And she said, Ms. Imordino, why is it

01:45:57.780 | that when we're studying hominid evolution

01:46:00.420 | and you show us this NOVA episode with early hominids

01:46:04.540 | in Africa, why do they always show those creatures looking

01:46:09.580 | like they have dark skin?

01:46:10.820 | Why do they always look like black people?

01:46:13.720 | And I was like, well, because they're on the equator

01:46:16.860 | and you need that level of melanin in your skin

01:46:18.860 | to be able to adapt and live without getting

01:46:21.420 | skin cancer in that space, right?

01:46:23.860 | And it opened up this amazing class discussion

01:46:27.120 | that actually went on for months.

01:46:28.580 | Like it evolved into a whole curriculum that was biology,

01:46:32.660 | it was culture, it was sociality,

01:46:34.300 | where we started to really unpack the ways

01:46:38.460 | that we as humans are natural beings in the world

01:46:42.420 | and the ways in which our cultural experiences

01:46:44.540 | are extensions of our natural ways of adapting.

01:46:48.540 | And that had me hooked.

01:46:50.880 | I realized then that I could bring science, right?

01:46:55.380 | The science of adolescent development and of learning

01:46:58.100 | and of emotion and of culture to this very pressing real world

01:47:03.380 | problem of how do we help our kids actually figure out

01:47:08.420 | who they are, invent themselves in this crazy multicultural

01:47:12.980 | space, and become scholars and intellectuals

01:47:16.340 | who engage systematically with the ideas along the way.

01:47:20.340 | And so I took those ideas and I started

01:47:23.340 | going to night school at Harvard Extension School

01:47:25.380 | to study cognitive neuroscience and to study

01:47:28.900 | language and cognition and all these kinds of topics

01:47:32.740 | and quickly realized like I really

01:47:35.980 | needed this developmental perspective infused, right?

01:47:38.900 | I wanted to understand not just how these things work,

01:47:41.260 | but how they got that way.

01:47:43.180 | And so I took that back to grad school at Harvard

01:47:45.820 | and began to study social and cultural and emotional

01:47:51.380 | and cognitive development in kids.

01:47:54.220 | And quickly there also kind of hit a wall

01:47:57.580 | where I went back to the school district in which I worked.

01:48:00.060 | And I went back to the teachers who were my colleagues.

01:48:02.300 | And I worked with them and I observed their classes

01:48:05.460 | and I interviewed their students and we

01:48:07.220 | did all kinds of work around how kids were building

01:48:10.060 | scientific concepts in ways that reflected

01:48:12.660 | their cultural concepts and ways of approaching the world.

01:48:16.180 | And I quickly realized it seems to me

01:48:19.300 | that kids are doing all this meaning making

01:48:21.580 | and we as adults are doing all this supportive meaning making.

01:48:27.100 | We're also engaging and growing and learning

01:48:30.140 | in ways that reflect not just knowledge

01:48:32.780 | bits like little computers, but also

01:48:34.380 | that reflect the biological substrate on which

01:48:37.860 | the learning and the thinking are happening.

01:48:39.940 | And I wanted very much to understand

01:48:42.620 | how we could use and leverage developmental biology

01:48:46.900 | as a kind of constraint from which to appreciate

01:48:52.860 | the kinds of theoretical frames we were inventing

01:48:56.300 | in the real world sort of anthropological educational

01:49:00.300 | space, the developmental psychological space.

01:49:03.140 | How could these two systems act as a Venn diagram

01:49:07.340 | and how could the inner section between them,

01:49:10.420 | the places where the theorizing about the natural behaviors

01:49:13.660 | and the way kids were making meaning and learning

01:49:16.140 | and describing their knowledge and engaging

01:49:18.300 | with each other on the one hand and the ways in which

01:49:21.980 | the brain and the biology are engaging in or supporting

01:49:26.020 | those processes on the other hand,

01:49:27.820 | the places where those two circles would overlap,

01:49:30.700 | it seemed to me that was where we could most directly target

01:49:35.100 | to start to deeply understand the nature

01:49:37.580 | of our developmental psycho biological growth and selves.

01:49:41.940 | And so I set out to try to study about the ways in which

01:49:45.820 | culture and sociality shape the brain and physiology

01:49:50.020 | and survival mechanisms and development.

01:49:52.420 | And at that time, which wasn't even that long ago,

01:49:55.260 | it's like two decades ago, quickly realized very, very

01:49:59.140 | little was known about the way in which emotions

01:50:03.820 | beyond things like fear--

01:50:05.380 | you flash a snake in your face and your amygdala lights up.

01:50:09.780 | I was thinking of something a little more nuanced.

01:50:11.900 | You know what I mean?

01:50:12.780 | Like what I'm seeing happening in science class among a kid

01:50:15.460 | from Kosovo and a kid from Rwanda

01:50:16.940 | as they're trying to figure out why they understand

01:50:19.020 | how they look different.

01:50:21.020 | Those deeply emotional conversations they're having,

01:50:24.700 | but they're not so cut and dry as the things

01:50:27.420 | we had been studying.

01:50:28.300 | And so that's what really drove me

01:50:30.300 | to try to start to understand in an integrated way

01:50:34.140 | the way in which our biological development

01:50:38.180 | and our psychological development

01:50:39.900 | are actually sort of two sides of who we are

01:50:43.780 | and of how we're organizing ourselves

01:50:46.300 | to build capacity, mental capacity,

01:50:49.220 | as well as sort of physical health and capacity

01:50:52.060 | over the course of our lives as we're engaging with living.

01:50:56.660 | Incredible story and foray into what

01:51:00.660 | sounds to me like really your ability

01:51:04.300 | to identify how the universals among us,

01:51:09.300 | like the universal biological features,

01:51:11.420 | the universal psychological features

01:51:14.900 | can really strongly inform specifically

01:51:18.660 | what's happening now in a classroom interaction

01:51:21.660 | in the mind of you or somebody else or of any of us,

01:51:26.020 | but to approach it from the other direction.

01:51:29.140 | In other words, to take what's happening now and say,

01:51:32.060 | why is what's happening now happening?

01:51:34.340 | - Yeah, and how is it happening?

01:51:35.740 | What is actually happening

01:51:36.820 | underneath the surface of the behavior?

01:51:39.060 | - Right, as opposed to saying,

01:51:40.100 | okay, this is the psychology of character structure,

01:51:43.540 | this is the biology of the hypothalamus,

01:51:45.420 | but rather say, is anyone else really shocked

01:51:49.740 | about the school shooting in Nashville

01:51:52.900 | and go through the feeling of shock

01:51:56.140 | and go from there to the biology as a route of learning?

01:52:00.980 | And of course, I don't want to take away

01:52:02.140 | anything from the real world seriousness of that,

01:52:06.780 | but it sounds to me like you saw

01:52:10.740 | that there's a different portal

01:52:12.100 | through which to teach and understand experience

01:52:14.620 | in that we are all, but especially young people

01:52:18.580 | are really tied to our emotional states

01:52:20.500 | as the main filters for which we like that, just like that,

01:52:25.500 | and therefore make decisions and move through life.

01:52:28.380 | I mean, I think it's so key that early on,

01:52:30.180 | I mean, if we like a teacher,

01:52:31.580 | oftentimes we like the subject.

01:52:34.020 | If we happen to fall in love with figure four B in a paper,

01:52:39.020 | great, but that's not how I went through graduate school.

01:52:42.740 | I just was blown away by the fact that sperm meets egg,

01:52:47.040 | you get a bunch of cell duplications,

01:52:48.580 | and then you get a brain. - You get a brain.

01:52:50.540 | - And then you get a brain. - You're like, crud,

01:52:51.660 | how does that happen, right, that's crazy.

01:52:53.660 | - Amazing, and I was blessed with a graduate advisor

01:52:56.080 | who literally told me, this is how it works in my lab,

01:52:58.800 | is what she said.

01:53:00.460 | She said, "We have everything you need here,

01:53:04.540 | I'll help you if you need help,

01:53:06.360 | but basically you're gonna mess around with stuff,

01:53:08.140 | you're not gonna burn down the lab,

01:53:09.460 | you're not gonna kill yourself

01:53:10.720 | with any of the poisonous stuff,

01:53:12.740 | but then you're gonna like mess some stuff up

01:53:15.100 | and do some stuff and you're gonna figure some stuff out."

01:53:18.060 | This was literally the description,

01:53:19.580 | and I liked her lab because they had green countertops

01:53:22.660 | and she had pictures of interesting animals on the wall,

01:53:24.980 | and then she said, "And I'm gonna have two kids

01:53:26.580 | while you're in graduate school,

01:53:28.400 | so I'm not gonna be around very much,

01:53:29.460 | you're gonna have to figure it out on your own."

01:53:31.140 | And I said, "Well, can I play the music I want?"

01:53:33.120 | She said, "Sure."

01:53:34.420 | And I said, "Can I put tinfoil on the windows

01:53:36.280 | 'cause I don't wanna be bothered?"

01:53:37.580 | And she said, "Sure," and I was like,

01:53:38.720 | "Okay, this is the place for me."

01:53:40.820 | In other words, she gave me a room to explore,

01:53:44.540 | and of course she gave me a lot of guidance along the way,

01:53:46.300 | she was an amazing, amazing graduate advisor,

01:53:48.820 | I'm extremely blessed.

01:53:51.180 | But it sounds to me like that identifying

01:53:55.640 | what's really going on now is key,

01:53:58.860 | and that the other thing that's key is an openness to ideas.

01:54:01.420 | I mean, earlier you talked about,

01:54:03.020 | let's just admit where we're at right now,

01:54:07.100 | we're in a culture war right now.

01:54:09.980 | - We're in a weird space right now.

01:54:11.340 | - It's very divisive, and one of the major problems

01:54:14.460 | is that we can't really talk about things.

01:54:17.140 | I mean, I think fear of getting canceled,

01:54:20.340 | fear of exploring ideas is real.

01:54:24.660 | It's very real, not just for academics, it's just real.

01:54:27.420 | People are so, it's important to be sensitive

01:54:30.220 | to the experiences of others, absolutely,

01:54:32.620 | but if we can't actually explore ideas

01:54:34.600 | and feel like we can walk out of the room safely,

01:54:37.660 | then we can't really explore ideas.

01:54:40.180 | And so I think right now it's not just social media,

01:54:43.780 | I think it's the fear of offending anybody,

01:54:46.700 | and probably the fear of voicing how upset certain people are

01:54:52.540 | about their experiences or the experiences of others,

01:54:54.800 | whatever it is, I don't see a landscape right now

01:54:57.980 | where there is true open exploration of ideas anywhere,

01:55:02.320 | anywhere, at least in this country.

01:55:06.660 | So what do we do if at least two of the requirements

01:55:11.660 | are an emotional gripping of something around the learning,

01:55:17.680 | plus an openness to thinking about things

01:55:22.000 | that maybe don't feel right to us as a way to learn

01:55:24.940 | how to think something, and I think we both agree,

01:55:27.540 | if I may, that is really critical,

01:55:29.660 | and that the world will be a far better place

01:55:32.300 | if people could do that.

01:55:33.560 | And how do we navigate this landscape?

01:55:38.220 | I mean, is what has to come first a demonstration

01:55:41.420 | of the value of openness of ideas?

01:55:44.020 | And here, I'll just state my stance,

01:55:46.780 | I feel like any idea should be open to at least discussion.

01:55:52.680 | Any idea, but then it needs to be systematically dissected

01:55:56.440 | with some rigor so that people can't just assume

01:55:59.520 | any idea is true, just because it's true for them,

01:56:03.240 | just 'cause it's true for them.

01:56:05.360 | And this I actually learned from my graduate advisor,

01:56:07.800 | she used to say, "Tolerance has to go both ways."

01:56:10.920 | Like when it comes to thinking about ideas and criticizing,

01:56:13.320 | it can't just be I'm right, they're wrong,

01:56:15.020 | or I don't tolerate that, it has to be tolerance

01:56:17.880 | for all ideas, and then you arrive at hopefully,

01:56:22.340 | eventually core truths, or at least core trajectories.

01:56:26.380 | What do you think could support this?

01:56:30.300 | How early should this start?

01:56:31.660 | I mean, should kids in elementary school be discussing

01:56:34.460 | the current landscape of politics and what they see

01:56:38.980 | from a place of, like we talk about safe spaces,

01:56:41.940 | but is a safe space one in which no one gets offended,

01:56:44.940 | whereas a safe space one in which any idea can be discussed?

01:56:48.320 | I think that's never really been defined for me.

01:56:50.160 | - Yeah, ooh, that's a really fraught issue.

01:56:53.720 | I mean, first, let me go back to something you said,

01:56:55.880 | which I would have said it differently.

01:56:57.560 | So you said our emotions are a filter, right?

01:57:02.400 | And they do act like a filter,

01:57:04.840 | but I actually don't think emotions are really filter-like

01:57:09.060 | so much as they are the drives

01:57:12.020 | that are undergirding the impetus to think, right?

01:57:15.580 | They're pushing us to think about particular things.

01:57:19.140 | And I think, I mean, as a scientist,

01:57:22.380 | my disposition is always that to understand something

01:57:27.380 | is good, and the more complexly, the more thoroughly

01:57:32.500 | you can interrogate and understand something, the better.

01:57:41.840 | So there's nothing I'm afraid of knowing, right?

01:57:46.400 | And what you're really talking about there

01:57:48.560 | is the fear of knowing.

01:57:50.080 | Why are people so afraid to engage with each other,

01:57:56.080 | basically, because it's deeply threatening

01:58:01.160 | to reveal things about your own experience

01:58:10.380 | that are not gonna land in a space

01:58:14.120 | where we can kind of collectively engage with them

01:58:17.840 | as legitimate experience.

01:58:20.120 | That's sort of the opposite of canceling people, right?

01:58:22.540 | It's the opposite of dismissing people.

01:58:24.240 | It's actually developing spaces of trust

01:58:28.980 | where we can engage with ideas

01:58:32.820 | and take them from ourselves, right?

01:58:36.620 | So that they're no longer personal value judgments.

01:58:41.160 | They become cultural memes or models or schemas

01:58:46.160 | that we can dissect together,

01:58:50.400 | that we can engage with together

01:58:53.280 | and construct understanding around, right?

01:58:56.800 | And I don't really understand my own position

01:59:00.320 | unless I also understand your opposition to my position,

01:59:04.960 | even if I still disagree with you.

01:59:06.880 | I think there are really important conversations

01:59:10.500 | going on right now.

01:59:11.340 | I'll take it back to the education system

01:59:12.640 | because that's what I know most about.

01:59:15.200 | There are really important conversations going on right now

01:59:18.680 | around reframing the experience and outcomes

01:59:23.680 | and aims of schooling around civic discourse and reasoning.

01:59:28.640 | So there was just a major report that was produced

01:59:31.980 | by the National Academy of Education

01:59:33.740 | and another academies collaborating with it,

01:59:37.300 | for example, around this topic.

01:59:39.680 | And helping us to move as a society toward a space

01:59:44.300 | where we learn to kind of lay ideas out

01:59:49.300 | and develop skills for reasoning around those ideas,

01:59:55.380 | including bringing ethical, experiential, emotional,

01:59:59.560 | cultural values to bear,

02:00:02.240 | but then being willing to deconstruct

02:00:05.200 | and engage with those ideas,

02:00:06.760 | whether they're the ones that are commensurate

02:00:08.340 | and fluid with our experience,

02:00:09.960 | or that appear to be conflicting

02:00:13.480 | or disfluent with our experience.

02:00:16.140 | We need to develop spaces for young people,

02:00:20.540 | especially, but for everyone,

02:00:22.100 | to engage with the deconstruction of our own assumptions,

02:00:27.620 | like I said before,

02:00:28.460 | and to engage with the deconstruction of others' assumptions

02:00:33.460 | and to try to reconcile the building blocks.

02:00:35.640 | And that's where we can build some common ground,

02:00:37.420 | but we can also disagree.

02:00:39.140 | But we don't really understand our own position

02:00:41.220 | unless we appreciate someone else's disagreement

02:00:44.060 | with our position.

02:00:44.900 | Unless we can actually articulate and appreciate

02:00:48.320 | how it is that person's opinion is opposed to mine,

02:00:52.820 | I don't really understand mine.

02:00:54.820 | - It's such a key point.

02:00:56.060 | One of the reasons why I do read all the comments

02:00:59.460 | on podcasts, on YouTube,

02:01:00.980 | it takes me some time, but I do it,

02:01:02.940 | or on social media is that oftentimes I'll get a comment

02:01:07.000 | or a criticism that makes it very clear

02:01:09.220 | that I wasn't clear about something.

02:01:11.460 | Other times I'll get a comment or a criticism

02:01:13.100 | that makes it clear that I and the other person

02:01:16.260 | fundamentally disagree about something,

02:01:18.380 | both of which are great.

02:01:20.100 | And for a scientist is a delight, so keep it coming.

02:01:23.980 | And of course, when people agree and they agree

02:01:28.160 | and make it clear that they agree

02:01:30.580 | from a stance of understanding,

02:01:32.160 | that of course is also gratifying.

02:01:33.860 | So it's exactly what you're saying.

02:01:37.100 | And it's one of the upsides, I think, of social media,

02:01:40.380 | which is that unless people block their comment section,

02:01:43.960 | and I do occasionally block people

02:01:45.220 | if they're being offensive to other people.

02:01:46.980 | - Yeah, yeah, that's alienating people.

02:01:49.860 | That's not inviting people into a conversation.

02:01:51.740 | That's not constructive.

02:01:52.820 | - I actually have a rule,

02:01:54.020 | which is I call it classroom rules.

02:01:55.940 | I've never announced it, but I allow for classroom rules.

02:01:59.660 | You can swear, but you can't swear at people.

02:02:02.220 | That's what I was taught in graduate school.

02:02:03.980 | [laughs]

02:02:04.820 | - That's nice, I like that.

02:02:05.640 | - Swear, but you can't swear at people.

02:02:06.860 | It's also a rule at home, although we try not to swear.

02:02:10.020 | You can swear, but swearing at people is not okay.

02:02:12.460 | And that a certain decorum is required

02:02:18.580 | in order to have open discourse.

02:02:22.560 | So that works for me.

02:02:24.960 | I think that it's been a while since I've been in school,

02:02:27.720 | but I work at a school.

02:02:28.780 | And I think that the ability to not just reinforce,

02:02:33.660 | but challenge one's own stances,

02:02:35.800 | which sometimes leads to reinforcing our own stances.

02:02:38.020 | - It may, it very well may, and that's legitimate.

02:02:40.460 | - I mean, I have to assume that in high schools,

02:02:42.020 | they still do debates and things of that sort.

02:02:44.600 | I mean, do they allow that?

02:02:46.300 | I mean, could you throw kids in a class and say,

02:02:48.840 | "Let's debate something really controversial."

02:02:52.380 | And then, but you have to debate it from the other side.

02:02:54.880 | I mean, just as a experiment of forcing the brain

02:02:58.420 | to try to be effective for sake of winning,

02:03:03.160 | but from the other perspective or stance,

02:03:06.580 | it seems like a great exercise.

02:03:08.540 | If I were a high school teacher,

02:03:09.740 | that's the first thing I'd do.

02:03:10.760 | We pick the most controversial topic,

02:03:13.140 | and then I'd ask people to divide along that topic,

02:03:16.220 | and then I'd swap them into the other one

02:03:17.800 | and have them argue from the other one's stance.

02:03:19.580 | - Yep, learning to appreciate perspectives

02:03:21.160 | is very, is very-

02:03:22.820 | - And we'd use 14 ounce gloves.

02:03:24.320 | No, I'm kidding.

02:03:25.160 | It wouldn't be physical.

02:03:25.980 | It would be purely intellectual.

02:03:27.280 | - Yeah, I mean, let's take it.

02:03:28.740 | Can we take it back to the brain for a moment?

02:03:30.700 | To the conversation that we were having earlier, right?

02:03:33.020 | So we were talking about that in our experiments

02:03:37.400 | and now in whole, you know,

02:03:39.140 | whole bodies of neuroscientific knowledge,

02:03:42.020 | we know that there is this very interesting neurobiological

02:03:45.500 | sort of processing difference between emotions

02:03:50.020 | and the thoughts that are part of those emotions

02:03:52.360 | that are, you know, the result of those emotions

02:03:54.280 | that are also insipidating those emotions, right?

02:03:56.580 | Like that whole process,

02:03:58.820 | when it pertains to the direct actions,

02:04:03.060 | observable characteristics, behaviors, you know,

02:04:07.260 | of another person or situation

02:04:09.020 | that you can actually directly,

02:04:10.320 | pretty much directly learn or infer,

02:04:12.420 | as compared to when you have to bring a whole lot

02:04:17.260 | of conceptual content knowledge to bear,

02:04:20.300 | experiential knowledge, simulation capacity to bear,

02:04:25.260 | to be able to fully appreciate the nature of a situation.

02:04:28.020 | And we talked about how that second kind of processing

02:04:31.500 | that I called transcendent is in essence

02:04:34.140 | about distancing yourself

02:04:36.500 | from the immediate physical, you know, situation,

02:04:40.060 | the observable perceivable situation in a direct sense,

02:04:43.220 | and instead constructing a narrative in your mind

02:04:46.220 | that's built from that,

02:04:47.580 | but that then brings to bear all these other kinds

02:04:49.620 | of information that allow you to elaborate this

02:04:53.660 | into a narrative that takes on emotional meaning

02:04:55.700 | and psychological power as a narrative

02:04:58.460 | that becomes part of identity, beliefs,

02:05:00.060 | all that kind of stuff.

02:05:00.900 | And we talked about that kind of thinking being associated

02:05:03.660 | with the so-called default mode,

02:05:05.580 | which is deactivated systematically

02:05:10.580 | and decoupled from itself, right?

02:05:12.340 | The different regions aren't talking to each other.

02:05:14.740 | When you are in the world acting, doing a task,

02:05:18.260 | paying attention, inferring the direct things

02:05:21.020 | that you need to notice around you,

02:05:22.540 | you know, you're in the middle of playing a soccer game,

02:05:24.020 | the ball's coming at your head.

02:05:24.940 | That's not a time to stop and muse about, you know,

02:05:27.460 | Title IX and girls' access to sports, right?

02:05:29.540 | You're gonna trip and fall,

02:05:31.060 | or you're gonna miss your shot at the goal,

02:05:32.500 | or you're gonna get hit with the ball, right?

02:05:34.580 | So we need to sort of manage that space

02:05:37.820 | in order to have these conversations.

02:05:39.260 | And I think what's important here is to remember

02:05:42.500 | that the default mode network, that is the substrate

02:05:46.020 | that is playing out your own sense of self

02:05:49.780 | and inner consciousness and self-awareness,

02:05:52.420 | and is also the basis on which we construct

02:05:54.660 | these broader inferential narratives

02:05:56.980 | that are the elaborative stuff of stories and beliefs,

02:06:00.180 | are fundamentally incompatible.

02:06:02.780 | The activation of those systems

02:06:04.660 | is fundamentally incompatible with needing to be vigilant

02:06:09.780 | into the immediate physical or social situation around you.

02:06:12.860 | So if you feel physically, emotionally, culturally,

02:06:16.620 | socially unsafe, and you feel that you need to watch

02:06:21.620 | your back, either literally or metaphorically,

02:06:25.580 | as you're thinking about things, neurobiologically,

02:06:29.260 | that situation is inconducive.

02:06:32.380 | It is not conducive to being able to actually conjure

02:06:37.340 | an alternative perspective in which you construct

02:06:41.580 | a meaningful narrative with alternate ethical implications,

02:06:46.580 | with alternate prospective possible future outcomes,

02:06:50.860 | with alternate views of historical precedent or context.

02:06:54.820 | Being able to sort of mentally time travel

02:06:57.420 | into the space of those ideas is only really possible

02:07:02.420 | when people feel safe to think together.

02:07:06.020 | - So it sounds like it's anti-creative.

02:07:09.380 | - Yes, creativity is also associated

02:07:12.700 | with the activations of these networks, yeah.

02:07:15.180 | Causally so in some recent work.

02:07:17.500 | - I had the good fortune of having dinner last year

02:07:21.220 | with somebody, I won't reveal who it is,

02:07:23.300 | but he runs a major social media platform.

02:07:28.180 | And he told me that in Japan, it's common for people

02:07:33.660 | to have two or three or even as many

02:07:36.460 | as seven different social media handles.

02:07:38.840 | And that they do this in order to embody

02:07:42.940 | different versions of themselves safely.

02:07:45.780 | So these are not troll accounts.

02:07:48.100 | These are not the accounts, and by the way,

02:07:49.620 | I see you troll accounts, that say whatever

02:07:52.740 | and then you go to their accounts

02:07:53.820 | at some private account where they hide.

02:07:55.460 | Rather, these are individuals who have multiple accounts.

02:08:00.220 | In one account, they might be a bit aggressive,

02:08:03.340 | maybe even a bully online, dare I say.

02:08:05.500 | In another account, they might be very fawning

02:08:07.980 | and show up as the person that everyone knows them

02:08:10.760 | to be in the real world.

02:08:11.660 | In another account, they might be a university professor.

02:08:14.420 | In another, they're an athlete.

02:08:15.620 | And it's fabricated in the sense that the posts

02:08:19.700 | that they put up often don't accurately represent

02:08:22.540 | who they are in the real world.

02:08:24.220 | But it's accurate in the sense that it represents

02:08:27.100 | the different dimensions of their persona

02:08:29.660 | that are driving their real world decision-making

02:08:32.020 | at some level.

02:08:32.860 | - It's kind of like pretend play for little kids.

02:08:34.700 | - It's pretend play, but it's not pretend

02:08:37.340 | because it's in cyberspace.

02:08:39.000 | I'll just go back to Rick Rubin, who,

02:08:42.780 | in addition to being this incredible music producer,

02:08:46.340 | is an enormous fan of professional wrestling for many years.

02:08:49.900 | And I asked him, you know, from a perplexity,

02:08:52.540 | I was like, "Why professional wrestling?

02:08:54.340 | "Is it the athleticism?"

02:08:55.420 | And he says, "It's the only thing that's real

02:08:58.660 | "because everyone agrees it's not real."

02:09:01.300 | And so these are characters, right?

02:09:03.140 | So you're agreeing for it to not be real,

02:09:06.020 | and yet it allows these characters to fully embody

02:09:08.780 | these different personas.

02:09:10.100 | And I had the experience years ago,

02:09:13.740 | I was at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory summer camp

02:09:15.560 | for scientists, where I attended and taught.

02:09:18.620 | And I was in a cab driving out to Cold Spring Harbor

02:09:21.540 | from the train station, Syosset.

02:09:23.840 | And I got into a discussion with the cab driver,

02:09:25.940 | and he said, "Okay, you're from California."

02:09:28.260 | He said with a New York accent,

02:09:29.420 | "I sure won't try and imitate you."

02:09:30.260 | He said, "You're from California."

02:09:31.860 | And he said, "You know, your governor,"

02:09:33.620 | who at the time was Schwarzenegger,

02:09:35.180 | he said, "He's great."

02:09:36.480 | And I said, "Tell me more."

02:09:38.100 | I happened to like Schwarzenegger for a number of reasons.

02:09:41.460 | He actually signed my PhD 'cause he was governor,

02:09:43.860 | and I went to a UC, so. - Oh, yes, good, yes.

02:09:46.220 | - And he said, "Well, because if terrorists show up

02:09:50.480 | "in California, he's gonna go out there

02:09:53.940 | "with a machine gun and take them down."

02:09:56.540 | So in his adult mind- - He's thinking

02:09:58.380 | of the Terminator.

02:09:59.220 | - He's the Terminator.

02:10:00.860 | He's the Terminator.

02:10:02.260 | And I realized in that moment, this was a smart guy,

02:10:05.100 | this cab driver was a smart guy,

02:10:06.520 | that it wasn't a lack of narrative distancing.

02:10:09.220 | He had conflated the actor with the roles he played.

02:10:13.140 | And I realized in that moment that this was not a reflection

02:10:16.580 | of him being unintelligent.

02:10:19.000 | It was a reflection of the fact

02:10:20.100 | that the brain often collapses identities of others

02:10:24.700 | and makes these, I think it's just an efficient way-

02:10:27.660 | - The testimony is sufficient. - It's an efficient way

02:10:29.660 | to parse the world.

02:10:31.180 | - Yeah, we decide, and then that's that kind of this person,

02:10:33.220 | and we put them over there on a shelf, yeah.

02:10:35.340 | - So to return to the discussion that we're having,

02:10:37.780 | I think that the ability to embody different aspects of self

02:10:42.780 | but also the ability to transiently embody the personas

02:10:47.520 | of other people, and to do that in a way that allows

02:10:49.680 | for really thorough exploration of idea space,

02:10:53.460 | I feel like can only be a good thing,

02:10:56.220 | provided it doesn't get physically violent or something.

02:10:59.160 | But that to me seems like the exact opposite

02:11:03.060 | of what's happening now,

02:11:04.100 | which is that people are siloing off into their camps

02:11:08.740 | where specific language and specific ideas are accepted

02:11:12.340 | and others are not.

02:11:13.540 | I mean, it's so interesting and perplexing

02:11:18.500 | and disturbing to me that the way that certain things

02:11:22.340 | that have nothing to do with politics get lumped

02:11:25.060 | with one group or the other.

02:11:26.620 | It's so crazy to me on the one hand,

02:11:30.780 | and yet I think what you're describing seems to me

02:11:34.300 | the route out of all of this.

02:11:35.740 | I really mean that.

02:11:36.580 | I feel like the education system, starting young,

02:11:40.840 | and getting people emotionally engaged,

02:11:43.100 | learning what they like, what they don't like,

02:11:45.300 | but then also teaching them about their emotional systems

02:11:48.220 | and how it helps them parse the world is really the solution

02:11:51.720 | so that when we're upset, we can realize like,

02:11:55.380 | yeah, I'm upset, it makes sense why I'm upset,

02:11:58.340 | but let me explore it from the other side.

02:12:00.020 | It also makes sense why they're upset.

02:12:02.920 | And that seems to be what humans have done somewhat

02:12:05.820 | throughout history, never perfectly well,

02:12:08.520 | but it seems like it ought to be possible.

02:12:10.440 | I mean, the forebrain is there for a reason.

02:12:13.080 | So could you, in wanting to go back

02:12:17.100 | to a little bit of the biology and the research,

02:12:19.260 | what have you seen in terms of cross-cultural consistency

02:12:22.920 | about the role of emotions in our ability to parse and learn?

02:12:28.840 | And because obviously we're not gonna solve

02:12:32.800 | these problems today, but although I think you shine light

02:12:35.480 | on some potential solutions, what do we know for sure

02:12:39.480 | about human beings and their capacity

02:12:41.220 | to do what you're describing, to really learn differently?

02:12:48.000 | It worked in the classroom where you were teaching,

02:12:50.540 | but how could each and every one of us do this?

02:12:53.200 | I mean, how would we approach this?

02:12:54.540 | I guess I want to take this to the practical.

02:12:57.580 | What can we do when we read a newspaper article?

02:13:00.260 | What can we do when we were on social media?

02:13:02.200 | What can we do when our kid is like refusing

02:13:06.680 | to do something because they simply don't like it

02:13:10.100 | or the teacher, they don't like the teacher?

02:13:12.920 | Are there paths through that that you've identified

02:13:17.300 | or that you can sense work?

02:13:19.580 | - I can give funny examples of my own kids

02:13:21.340 | when they didn't like things at school, right?

02:13:23.180 | This isn't licensed- - What tools do you use?

02:13:26.100 | - License to not, yeah, so my son,

02:13:29.420 | when he was in third grade, he was very upset

02:13:31.800 | about the behavior chart that his teacher had at school.

02:13:36.080 | So he had a behavior chart, they had a behavior chart

02:13:38.380 | at the back of the room, but the principal didn't agree

02:13:39.920 | with this, but that teacher was there for a year.

02:13:42.260 | Okay, so there was this behavior chart and you have green,

02:13:45.380 | you start on green with your little clip

02:13:47.040 | and then there's yellow and then there's red,

02:13:48.700 | which is like call your parents,

02:13:49.860 | which I never understood why they don't put

02:13:51.340 | call your parents on the green, but anyway, right?

02:13:53.820 | So you start on the green and then you get down

02:13:56.940 | to the yellow and then you get down to red

02:13:58.420 | and Ted's little friend is always getting on the red

02:14:01.980 | by 9 a.m., it's like, can we just get it over with?

02:14:04.340 | And he tried to talk with his teacher

02:14:06.620 | about why this behavior chart made him so uncomfortable

02:14:09.180 | because, and she could not understand his perspective

02:14:12.160 | because she kept saying, but you're always on green.

02:14:15.120 | You're always doing what you're supposed to be doing

02:14:17.220 | and you're respectful and you're well behaved,

02:14:18.820 | so why is it a problem?

02:14:20.180 | And what he was trying to say was that somehow

02:14:24.180 | it just made him uncomfortable to have that there.

02:14:29.740 | So he was constantly bothering me with this.

02:14:32.540 | I finally told him I was trying to work one day

02:14:34.420 | and he was home from school 'cause I would let him work

02:14:36.740 | from home some days because we needed to

02:14:38.780 | to kind of buffer a little bit.

02:14:40.340 | And he'd bring all his work home and he'd do it himself.

02:14:42.560 | I'd be working, he'd be working, right?

02:14:43.860 | It's fine, he had all kinds of projects going on.

02:14:46.380 | And this is a kid who, this is a little side story.

02:14:49.560 | He's a kid who went to first grade

02:14:50.960 | and about two weeks into first grade,

02:14:52.540 | good first grade class, he was crying on a Sunday night

02:14:55.740 | to me like, "I gotta go to school, I don't wanna go to school."

02:14:57.820 | I'm like, "Well, what's wrong at school?"

02:14:59.540 | I'm thinking he's getting bullied, something's wrong.

02:15:00.980 | He's like, "I know."

02:15:02.100 | He finally looks at me and he goes,

02:15:03.680 | "I have so much work to do.

02:15:06.180 | "How do you expect me to get my work done

02:15:07.820 | "if I'm sitting in school all day?"

02:15:09.660 | (laughing)

02:15:11.500 | - I can relate, I can relate.

02:15:13.180 | - Can you relate?

02:15:14.020 | Because you're actually a motivated, right?

02:15:16.180 | We take kids' motivations and the things they're interested

02:15:19.340 | in and we sideline them and try to structure them

02:15:21.660 | into something.

02:15:22.500 | So back to this-

02:15:23.320 | - There are Legos to be built.

02:15:24.620 | - Yeah, oh, he was way into building armor at that time.

02:15:27.380 | He would, yeah, I know, we're probably terrible parents,

02:15:29.660 | but we gave him some safety glasses

02:15:31.340 | and we taught him how to use it

02:15:32.780 | and we explained how metal's sharp

02:15:34.140 | and we gave him some sheet metal.

02:15:34.980 | - Yeah, that is super cool.

02:15:35.820 | - And some tin snips and he made a whole suit of armor

02:15:38.680 | in the backyard, you know, in second grade.

02:15:40.820 | Anyway, it took him months and months.

02:15:42.600 | I mean, chain mail, the whole bit, he was super into it.

02:15:45.460 | - Amazing.

02:15:46.300 | - I know.

02:15:47.140 | Anyway, and he made airplanes, he did all kinds of things.

02:15:50.100 | But, so here's this kid and he's bugging me

02:15:53.240 | about his teacher and this behavior chart.

02:15:54.660 | I said, "Ted, go write a letter to your teacher.

02:15:56.940 | "If it bothers you that much, you go write a letter

02:15:58.500 | "about why it bothers you," right?

02:16:00.220 | Because in doing so, he's, first of all,

02:16:02.860 | helping to solve the problem.

02:16:03.900 | Secondly, he was formulating his understanding

02:16:07.640 | of what this behavior chart is

02:16:09.340 | and why specifically it bothers him

02:16:11.760 | and in so doing, it helps him not be so bothered by it,

02:16:14.780 | right, so that's an example of something you could do, right?

02:16:17.540 | So he wrote this letter to his teacher,

02:16:19.620 | which ended up being published

02:16:21.780 | in the National Academy of Science, Engineering,

02:16:23.980 | and Maths book, How People Learn, Volume Two,

02:16:27.220 | because I was on the committee of people that wrote it

02:16:29.160 | and we needed an example of kids making sense

02:16:31.800 | out of motivational things and actually took his name

02:16:34.140 | and the teacher's name off and put the letter in the book.

02:16:36.700 | It basically is a little kid saying,

02:16:38.560 | "Listen, teacher, when you put up this behavior chart,"

02:16:42.500 | he called it a bad behavior chart, which it wasn't,

02:16:44.980 | it was just a behavior chart,

02:16:45.940 | but he interprets it as a bad behavior chart.

02:16:47.880 | When you put that up, it's as if you're daring me

02:16:51.200 | to do something bad.

02:16:52.320 | You're basically, he doesn't say it like this,

02:16:54.340 | he says, "You're basically making me uncomfortable

02:16:56.680 | "because you are laying out a perspective on me,

02:17:00.940 | "a possibility space for me that you're now bringing

02:17:05.600 | "into the conversation that I could be like that.

02:17:09.040 | "And let's see if you're going to be, oh, not today,

02:17:11.300 | "oh, we're still on green," right?

02:17:13.000 | And so where does this go?

02:17:14.700 | It goes back to the idea that kids are, and all of us are,

02:17:19.300 | interpreting the interactions and the structures around us,

02:17:22.480 | not only for what they are, but for what they represent

02:17:26.040 | as somebody else's interpretation of what we are

02:17:30.840 | or are not capable of.

02:17:32.800 | And he saw that behavior chart as a marker

02:17:37.240 | that his teacher assumed that all kids in that class

02:17:41.080 | are capable of being badly behaved,

02:17:44.000 | and that their main aim of being in school

02:17:46.420 | is to be well-behaved, right?

02:17:48.260 | And so he writes all about saying,

02:17:50.200 | "Dear teacher, every day I come to school,

02:17:52.600 | "every single day, and every single day is new,"

02:17:55.240 | that's what he says, "and I could learn something new,

02:17:58.140 | "except then I see dot, dot, dot,

02:18:00.700 | "the bad behavior chart," right?

02:18:02.660 | He's saying school is supposed to be about learning

02:18:05.920 | and us engaging, and you're making it about

02:18:09.040 | something so low-level and basic

02:18:12.200 | as are you going to behave yourself today?

02:18:14.720 | We are insulting him by the way we frame the context.

02:18:19.720 | So take it back to the bigger issues of civic discourse

02:18:23.080 | and all these things, I think so much of the way

02:18:25.020 | that we're organizing our lives, our social relationships,

02:18:29.120 | our community, our civic structures right now,

02:18:32.440 | is mirroring that teacher's behavior chart, right?

02:18:37.260 | - Did she take the chart down?

02:18:38.860 | - I don't, no, I don't think so.

02:18:41.060 | - And I ask because I'm not sure that it matters.

02:18:43.920 | I think what probably matters is that he had the chance

02:18:46.100 | to voice his understanding of it.

02:18:48.600 | - Yeah, his understanding of the chart.

02:18:50.080 | Yeah, that's right.

02:18:50.920 | And now anybody can read his understanding of the chart

02:18:53.320 | 'cause it's published in the most widely read textbook

02:18:57.300 | I'm learning, right, and motivation.

02:18:59.820 | I mean, there's a couple points.

02:19:01.840 | First is that we're structuring,

02:19:03.240 | the way we structure our environment can unwittingly impose

02:19:08.240 | our mental models of other people's possibility spaces

02:19:12.440 | onto them and people find that inherently abhorrent, right?

02:19:16.200 | So think about how we're doing that in many contexts,

02:19:19.360 | not simply in schools.

02:19:21.600 | And then the second thing is from the kid's perspective,

02:19:26.600 | deconstructing exactly why something bothers you

02:19:31.120 | by understanding how it is

02:19:33.960 | that you are interpreting that thing,

02:19:36.860 | then opens you up to be able to manage those spaces

02:19:41.440 | in a new way and to engage in them in a new way.

02:19:43.540 | So if we take the conversation back to the idea

02:19:46.520 | of civic discourse, of civic reasoning,

02:19:48.340 | of engaging with any idea, right?

02:19:51.480 | There are ideas that are deeply problematic.

02:19:54.280 | There are ideas that are deeply hurtful,

02:19:56.320 | that have long histories of trauma associated with them,

02:20:00.420 | of long histories of power dynamics

02:20:03.960 | and oppression associated with them.

02:20:06.620 | The way in which I think we deconstruct those ideas

02:20:11.620 | is going to be critical to how those ideas live on

02:20:14.640 | implicitly in our social relationships and our society.

02:20:18.180 | If we cancel them, if we negate them

02:20:21.280 | and pretend they don't exist,

02:20:23.480 | all we're doing is burying them

02:20:26.200 | in a place where they can't be deconstructed.

02:20:29.000 | And only by actually taking them apart

02:20:33.440 | and appreciating the pain, the relationship structures,

02:20:38.240 | the limitations, the resource allocations,

02:20:40.840 | the inequities that are implicit in those concepts,

02:20:45.020 | only by deconstructing and deeply understanding those,

02:20:49.220 | can we rebuild them in a different way.

02:20:52.660 | So it's very difficult because on the one hand,

02:20:57.140 | we have a space created for ourselves right now in society

02:21:01.480 | that is deeply unsafe for many people.

02:21:04.960 | And when you're in an unsafe space,

02:21:06.840 | you are not in a space that is conducive

02:21:09.840 | to constructing and deconstructing,

02:21:11.800 | meaning using those default mode systems

02:21:14.200 | and other systems just to be crass about the brain, right?

02:21:16.360 | And kind of oversimplify it,

02:21:17.960 | that are the substrate of autobiographical self,

02:21:21.340 | of possibility spaces, of ethics,

02:21:23.360 | of deep moral and ethical emotions.

02:21:26.440 | So on the one hand, we have a space that is deeply unsafe

02:21:30.180 | for individuals to think together.

02:21:31.740 | And genuinely so, there are real implications for people

02:21:35.460 | to reveal certain kinds of identities,

02:21:37.560 | to engage with certain kinds of ideas

02:21:39.960 | in culturally formulated spaces, right?

02:21:43.960 | That we've constructed together.

02:21:48.360 | And the irony is that we can only fix that

02:21:51.500 | and create a different way of interacting with one another

02:21:54.460 | by actually boldly going in there together.

02:21:57.920 | So it's a very nuanced line where we need to develop skills.

02:22:02.760 | And this is where I think, and many people think now,

02:22:05.340 | that schools should be focused across disciplinary domains,

02:22:08.780 | whether it's math, science, social studies,

02:22:10.380 | history, art, the arts, right?

02:22:12.300 | Sports should be focused on helping young people

02:22:16.220 | and teachers develop capacities and dispositions

02:22:20.740 | for deconstructing and constructing again,

02:22:23.620 | safe cultural spaces to think together

02:22:28.620 | about interpretations, about narratives,

02:22:33.580 | about stories, about assumptions, about ideas.

02:22:36.180 | Because as we engage in those thoughts together,

02:22:39.700 | we call that civic discourse, right?

02:22:41.660 | We learn kind of rules for not triggering

02:22:46.660 | and sensibilities for not endangering another person's

02:22:51.060 | ability to engage on equal footing with us.

02:22:53.340 | Because if we trigger those unsafe, right,

02:22:57.180 | dangerous places for people,

02:22:58.980 | they can't neurobiologically then engage with us deeply

02:23:02.360 | around sharing their perspective

02:23:04.220 | and deconstructing ours together to build something

02:23:07.940 | where we have a shared understanding in the middle.

02:23:09.980 | We have to trust one another.

02:23:11.800 | And trusting one another really means

02:23:14.960 | we have to have a space established

02:23:18.580 | in which we can feel safe to deconstruct our own beliefs

02:23:23.580 | and to allow others to do the same

02:23:27.720 | and to assure them that we can engage with those beliefs

02:23:32.140 | no matter what they are,

02:23:33.780 | and then actually exteriorize them

02:23:38.780 | and evaluate them together

02:23:41.780 | and think about them around core values

02:23:43.900 | we probably both hold like wellbeing,

02:23:46.380 | like sustainability of society and of cultures

02:23:49.460 | and of groups, right?

02:23:51.040 | These things are core.

02:23:52.060 | Everyone wants to be well.

02:23:53.360 | Everyone wants to have a sustainable life

02:23:56.220 | and a life future and a cultural set of values.

02:23:58.340 | And so when we all appreciate that we're bringing

02:24:01.220 | those things to the table,

02:24:02.200 | but then are systematic about constructing a space

02:24:06.460 | for civic discourse in which we are supporting one another

02:24:11.380 | in deconstructing our own beliefs

02:24:13.720 | rather than each other's beliefs, right?

02:24:15.980 | Then we are at a space where we can start to construct

02:24:19.400 | some kind of understanding, some kind of nuanced,

02:24:23.020 | more adaptive, more pro-social

02:24:27.500 | and the true sense way of engaging with one another

02:24:31.460 | with not necessarily a way of agreeing with one another,

02:24:33.960 | but way of engaging and constructing

02:24:36.020 | and deconstructing meaning together

02:24:37.280 | so that we can be adaptive,

02:24:38.700 | so that we can build a society where everyone can flourish,

02:24:41.420 | so that we can build a society where everyone can belong

02:24:44.300 | and can actually have the resources they need.

02:24:48.420 | - I would argue as long as free speech

02:24:50.340 | is not possible for everybody,

02:24:52.660 | that nobody is safe. - Yes, that's right.

02:24:54.180 | - That nobody is safe. - Nobody is safe.

02:24:55.620 | - And that there's an illusion of safety around the idea

02:24:58.420 | that people who have voice are gonna get what they want

02:25:03.420 | simply because they are the ones who are allowed to talk

02:25:08.540 | and other people aren't.

02:25:09.500 | I mean, I think you said it perfectly

02:25:10.780 | when you said that anytime ideas get buried,

02:25:12.940 | there's no way they can be solved.

02:25:14.460 | We know this from the scientific literature,

02:25:16.220 | for instance, there are results within social science

02:25:18.620 | and biological science that are deeply troubling.

02:25:21.600 | I can think of experiments that were done

02:25:25.980 | in the realm of neurosurgery on humans in the 1960s,

02:25:29.820 | people stimulating different brain areas

02:25:31.580 | and seeing rage or seeing very politically controversial

02:25:35.420 | ideas emerge from the person's mouth in real time

02:25:38.640 | as a function of stimulating that brain area.

02:25:40.620 | And then you say, well, did they really believe that

02:25:42.860 | and they just never were saying it?

02:25:44.200 | And the person doesn't even recall that happening

02:25:45.980 | during the surgery.

02:25:47.300 | I mean, this idea that Jung had that we have all things

02:25:50.140 | inside of us, I think can be seen as a very dangerous notion

02:25:54.420 | and territory that we have all these shadows.

02:25:56.500 | But I'm also an optimist and I feel that the optimistic view

02:26:01.060 | of it is that by knowing that we have all things

02:26:04.060 | inside of us potentially and by embracing that fact

02:26:09.020 | that we can manage that to steal what you just said,

02:26:12.500 | we can manage that and that we can function so much better

02:26:15.680 | when we see something in the world that we think,

02:26:17.900 | that's not me, I'm not that and I hate that.

02:26:21.280 | When if we understand that that also lives inside of us,

02:26:24.620 | but that we just don't realize it.

02:26:27.860 | And I realize some people will hear this and they'll go,

02:26:29.380 | that's not true.

02:26:30.660 | I have my stances and I disagree with other things.

02:26:33.260 | I would say absolutely yes.

02:26:34.760 | But the difference between one person's stance

02:26:38.480 | and another person's stance

02:26:39.940 | is could be purely developmental wiring.

02:26:43.340 | It could be difference of having read different childhood

02:26:48.140 | books and oriented towards one book versus another.

02:26:50.760 | I mean, I think that we are very similar at the level

02:26:54.500 | of core wiring and core algorithms that we run,

02:26:57.540 | but somehow these days we have the perception

02:27:00.500 | that we've diverged so much.

02:27:02.420 | I think the only thing that's really missing

02:27:04.100 | is what you're describing is a place where any and all ideas

02:27:07.220 | can be explored freely, not to establish consensus.

02:27:12.220 | - Or validity of certain kinds of ideas,

02:27:14.460 | but to actually exteriorize them and deconstruct them

02:27:18.340 | for what they actually are.

02:27:20.860 | - Absolutely.

02:27:21.740 | Thank you for working through that space

02:27:25.140 | 'cause it's a tricky one I realized.

02:27:27.020 | - It's very fraught.

02:27:28.260 | - It's very fraught, but so very important.

02:27:32.220 | I have a question that's very basic,

02:27:35.340 | but I've never gotten a good answer on.

02:27:38.400 | I was raised thinking that mirror neurons were a real thing,

02:27:42.060 | that there are these neurons that exist in the brains of us

02:27:45.260 | and other old world primates like macaque monkeys,

02:27:50.120 | but especially in humans, the so-called mirror neurons

02:27:54.140 | that are activated when we see somebody

02:27:56.660 | experience something and it evokes a sort of empathic

02:28:00.540 | understanding in us.

02:28:02.780 | I've also seen some reviews written recently

02:28:05.660 | in some popular press saying that mirror neurons

02:28:08.760 | are perhaps not playing the critical role

02:28:10.820 | that we thought they were.

02:28:12.320 | What's the story on mirror neurons?

02:28:15.140 | And we're not going after anybody's work in particular.

02:28:18.860 | I just want to know whether or not there's real validity

02:28:21.500 | to this notion of mirror neurons.

02:28:24.600 | - I'm not an expert on it, but I can tell you

02:28:26.620 | what I know about it and the way that I think about it.

02:28:31.000 | So, I mean, I think it's pretty clear now

02:28:33.760 | that there are no such things as mirror neurons,

02:28:37.420 | like some special kind of cell type that's in the brain,

02:28:41.000 | that they have not been found.

02:28:42.320 | They were predicted, but they were not found.

02:28:44.560 | But something else was also predicted

02:28:47.360 | back in the late 1980s by Antonio Damasio,

02:28:52.360 | where he talked about the brain in terms of,

02:29:00.880 | being organized in terms of what he called

02:29:02.920 | convergent and divergent zones.

02:29:05.360 | So he talked about the brain being organized

02:29:09.780 | as networks converging and then diverging again back out.

02:29:13.920 | So you have places where processing is kind of

02:29:17.140 | coming together and then what happens in there

02:29:20.620 | then determines how things get spread back out.

02:29:23.160 | And you've got these sort of loops happening in the brain.

02:29:26.800 | And his thinking on that was very much commensurate

02:29:31.800 | with others thinking about the notion

02:29:36.040 | of goal-directed action and perception.

02:29:40.440 | So if you think back to developmental scholars

02:29:42.740 | who had knew nothing about the brain very much,

02:29:44.800 | like Jean Piaget, right, back in the early 20th century,

02:29:49.800 | where he was observing young children

02:29:53.600 | and noticing that they were interacting with the world

02:29:57.960 | and they expected certain things.

02:29:59.920 | And they were, he thought, imposing theories

02:30:02.480 | or schemas onto the world and then accommodating,

02:30:07.200 | was the word he used, the world with their actions

02:30:11.240 | when it didn't act the way they expected

02:30:13.480 | and then assimilating that back, right,

02:30:16.720 | to change what they expected next time.

02:30:18.720 | So that he had this model that he built

02:30:21.160 | from systematically observing children,

02:30:25.440 | three in particular, right, where he,

02:30:28.100 | what he realized is that kids are not just flailing around

02:30:31.340 | sort of discovering things haphazardly,

02:30:33.800 | they're imposing a certain logic onto the world

02:30:36.760 | and then they're systematically testing that logic.

02:30:38.760 | - So they're hypothesis testing.

02:30:40.240 | - Basically, yes, right, they're expecting things

02:30:43.360 | and then when the world does what they want,

02:30:44.880 | that reinforces and when it does something different,

02:30:47.760 | that's surprising and then they have to accommodate

02:30:50.120 | and make sense and then they have to expect differently

02:30:52.000 | in the future.

02:30:53.320 | So what does this have to do with mirror neurons?

02:30:55.720 | I think when you bring these different ideas together,

02:30:58.480 | the psychological observational ideas

02:31:00.540 | and then the neurobiological ideas,

02:31:03.140 | what we basically have, and I wrote about this a little bit

02:31:06.560 | in like, I think 2008, I have a paper called something like

02:31:09.040 | The Smoke Around Mirror Neurons,

02:31:11.000 | and I forget the second half of the title,

02:31:12.260 | but it has the word goals and directed actions and things,

02:31:17.200 | right, the idea I think is it's not that there are

02:31:21.440 | special neurons that are firing when we see another person

02:31:24.820 | do the thing right, but that we are,

02:31:28.200 | it goes back to the notion of us imposing our expectations

02:31:30.960 | onto the world, you have to share and understand intuitively

02:31:34.200 | the goal of the other one's action

02:31:35.960 | in order to activate these mirror regions, right,

02:31:39.060 | where, and what are those mirror regions?

02:31:43.160 | They are basically regions that are deeply interconnected

02:31:46.720 | with each other, right, they're thoroughly interconnected

02:31:48.880 | with each other in terms of white matter fiber tracks,

02:31:50.720 | and they are regions involved in action planning,

02:31:55.720 | you know, goal-oriented actions,

02:31:58.320 | and perceiving the outcomes of those actions.

02:32:01.960 | So it's a kind of a loop between acting and perceiving

02:32:06.480 | and acting and perceiving, and I argued at the time, right,

02:32:10.360 | that goals are emergent, like high-level goals,

02:32:14.440 | are emergent from the dynamic feedback loops

02:32:19.040 | of acting and perceiving, right,

02:32:20.880 | so I was really taking a very Piagetian view,

02:32:22.980 | but imposing that on the neuroscience.

02:32:24.960 | So I think you take what I'm saying together

02:32:28.040 | with like a Piagetian constructivist view,

02:32:30.440 | there are many other constructivist neuroscientists,

02:32:32.520 | constructivist psychologists also,

02:32:33.960 | and then also the neural data, what we see is that

02:32:37.640 | we don't have these special neurons built into our head,

02:32:40.500 | what we have is a natural proclivity,

02:32:43.040 | and I don't know where that comes from, right,

02:32:44.680 | but we have a natural proclivity to try to appreciate

02:32:48.680 | another person's actions, feelings, experiences,

02:32:53.680 | by leveraging our own similar actions, feelings, experiences,

02:32:59.780 | and so when we can share goals or experiences,

02:33:05.000 | that becomes more facile, right,

02:33:07.360 | and that's been shown over and over

02:33:08.420 | in these mirror-type papers, right,

02:33:10.820 | and when you distance yourself from those goals and actions

02:33:15.820 | or don't have an intuitive sense of them,

02:33:17.740 | then you don't get these mirroring activations,

02:33:20.060 | you don't get these kind of ramped up sharing of goals,

02:33:25.060 | or of experience, so I think it really comes back to

02:33:32.020 | the way the nervous system is wired to be inherently social.

02:33:36.820 | We are cultural learners, we are situated

02:33:39.820 | in social spaces from the moment we're conceived,

02:33:43.540 | and certainly from the moment we're born,

02:33:46.780 | and that social space, observing others,

02:33:49.960 | interacting with others, co-regulating

02:33:52.180 | each other's physiology, each other's attention,

02:33:54.660 | each other's emotion, right, as we do those things,

02:33:59.180 | we accommodate to each other and we wire ourselves

02:34:02.960 | to expect certain kinds of feelings,

02:34:05.660 | and then to recognize those same things in other people,

02:34:09.260 | and so as we share constructed experience together,

02:34:13.620 | we start to appreciate the sameness, right,

02:34:16.660 | the parallels between other people's and our own emotions,

02:34:20.380 | thoughts, goals, and we can also dehumanize them,

02:34:25.380 | make the other person not share our thoughts, emotions,

02:34:31.360 | goals, and then we are capable of all kinds

02:34:33.560 | of horrible things we've talked about before, right,

02:34:36.460 | where you've actually distanced yourself.

02:34:41.020 | So what's the scope on mirror neurons?

02:34:42.860 | I don't think mirror neurons exist,

02:34:44.500 | I think that's the consensus,

02:34:45.660 | but our propensity to engage with other people

02:34:49.180 | by simulating on the substrate of our own self,

02:34:51.660 | and then inferring the goals and the feelings

02:34:55.020 | and the outcomes and the experiences

02:34:56.720 | of those experiences that we've simulated,

02:35:00.240 | that's what is very essential to being a human,

02:35:03.580 | but keeping in mind that there's also this layer

02:35:06.500 | of learned, lived, cultural, developed expectations

02:35:11.500 | we impose onto the world, and we, not filter,

02:35:15.640 | but we steer our attention, we steer our perception

02:35:20.180 | to accommodate, to align with our expectations.

02:35:24.220 | So it's never just the reality

02:35:26.320 | of what the person experienced or what happened,

02:35:28.340 | it's always our perception of that reality

02:35:30.960 | as we expected it to happen.

02:35:33.080 | So there's this very dynamic cultural co-construction

02:35:36.340 | happening that is messy, that is iterative,

02:35:40.320 | that you can learn to do in different ways,

02:35:43.500 | in different contexts, and that's kind of how I understand

02:35:47.500 | this notion of mirroring.

02:35:48.740 | - Before we conclude,

02:35:51.460 | I do want to answer your son's question.

02:35:53.800 | - Oh, I hope you don't.

02:35:55.420 | - So prior to recording, there was a text message

02:35:59.480 | that came, we don't have to read it verbatim,

02:36:01.700 | but the text message, Mary Ellen's son

02:36:06.700 | is late teenage years and he's been doing

02:36:09.840 | deliberate cold exposure, cold showers on a daily basis

02:36:13.140 | and reported that he hasn't had any colds

02:36:16.440 | since starting this.

02:36:17.380 | This is actually a pretty common experience

02:36:20.060 | because the pulse and adrenaline that is inevitable

02:36:23.900 | with a uncomfortably cold but safe shower.

02:36:26.420 | - Yeah, no, he jumps out of bed in the morning,

02:36:28.060 | does a whole bunch of exercises to get warm

02:36:30.540 | and then jumps in a freezing cold shower.

02:36:32.460 | - Amazing.

02:36:33.300 | That spike of adrenaline we know is neuroprotective.

02:36:35.620 | If it's a short-lived spike in adrenaline,

02:36:37.860 | you don't want chronically-

02:36:38.700 | - No, you don't want chronic stress.

02:36:39.660 | That's not good for you.

02:36:40.500 | - That's not good.

02:36:41.320 | We know that from the beautiful work of Bruce McEwen

02:36:42.740 | and Bob Sapolsky and others.

02:36:43.980 | - Yes, gorgeous work, yeah.

02:36:44.820 | - Yeah, so, but then he asked, should he get sick?

02:36:49.820 | Should he continue the cold showers?

02:36:52.540 | And the answer is no.

02:36:54.460 | I think that then it would be hot showers and hot baths

02:36:57.760 | and sauna type stuff is probably better,

02:37:00.040 | but not so hot that it's stressful.

02:37:02.220 | You really want to reduce stress on an ill system.

02:37:05.860 | So he sounds for many reasons like a remarkable young man,

02:37:10.260 | as is your daughter, it sounds like a remarkable.

02:37:12.840 | And listen, and you're remarkable.

02:37:16.200 | And I really mean that.

02:37:17.900 | I feel like we could go on forever exploring these ideas.

02:37:20.680 | I absolutely would love to have you back

02:37:23.580 | for another discussion or many about your research.

02:37:28.860 | I want to thank you for taking the time

02:37:30.960 | of your research schedule, your teaching schedule

02:37:33.380 | to come educate us today.

02:37:35.160 | These ideas are so vitally important

02:37:38.060 | and you provide so many real world examples.

02:37:40.440 | In fact, it's one of the things that I love so much

02:37:42.020 | about your work is that it's really nested

02:37:43.740 | in real world applications.

02:37:45.300 | - Thank you.

02:37:46.140 | - And your thoughts and perspectives on the education

02:37:49.320 | and how it could be better at the level of educating kids

02:37:52.600 | at home, teaching ourselves, teachers,

02:37:56.580 | and the education system, I hope will ring far and wide

02:38:00.840 | because they really can be implemented.

02:38:05.100 | We're not talking about the need

02:38:06.180 | to purchase a bunch of stuff.

02:38:07.660 | - No, we need to start with a different disposition.

02:38:09.740 | We need to start with a different goal.

02:38:11.340 | Yeah, the goal of education needs to not,

02:38:14.280 | learning's not the goal, it's not the outcome.

02:38:16.180 | It needs to be the development of the person, right?

02:38:18.100 | How is a person changing themselves having learned this?

02:38:22.360 | And then you design the learning opportunities

02:38:24.780 | to change who people are capable of becoming, right?

02:38:28.140 | So the learning is there, but it's not the end point.

02:38:30.860 | It's just the means to something else,

02:38:33.220 | which we haven't been attending to enough.

02:38:35.300 | And that's the development of the person,

02:38:36.860 | who they become having learned that.

02:38:39.940 | - Beautifully put.

02:38:40.860 | Well, thank you so much for your time.

02:38:44.180 | Thank you so much for the work you do.

02:38:45.660 | And I can't wait to have another discussion with you

02:38:47.900 | about the emerging research.

02:38:49.660 | - Okay, I'll be back.

02:38:51.220 | - Thank you.

02:38:52.060 | Thank you for joining me today

02:38:53.140 | for my discussion about emotions,

02:38:54.960 | social interactions and learning

02:38:57.080 | with Dr. Mary Helen Imordino-Yang.

02:38:59.260 | I hope you found the conversation to be as informative

02:39:01.780 | and enriching as I did.

02:39:03.500 | If you'd like to learn more

02:39:04.460 | about Dr. Imordino-Yang's research,

02:39:06.460 | please find the link to her laboratory website

02:39:08.680 | in the show note captions.

02:39:10.160 | In addition, Dr. Imordino-Yang authored an incredible book

02:39:13.720 | called "Emotions, Learning and the Brain."

02:39:15.700 | It's a book designed for the general public.

02:39:17.640 | It's incredibly informative

02:39:18.900 | and has a lot of practical tools as well.

02:39:21.040 | We've provided a link to that book in the show note captions.

02:39:24.720 | If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast,

02:39:27.300 | please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

02:39:29.020 | That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

02:39:31.320 | In addition, please subscribe to the podcast

02:39:33.600 | on both Spotify and Apple.

02:39:35.240 | And on both Spotify and Apple,

02:39:36.780 | you can leave us up to a five-star review.

02:39:39.080 | If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast

02:39:41.720 | or guests that you'd like me to include

02:39:43.300 | on the Huberman Lab Podcast,

02:39:44.960 | please put those in the comment section on YouTube.

02:39:47.400 | I do read all the comments.

02:39:49.400 | Please also check out the sponsors mentioned

02:39:51.200 | at the beginning and throughout today's episode.

02:39:53.160 | That's the best way to support this podcast.

02:39:55.660 | Not on today's episode, but on many previous episodes

02:39:58.060 | of the Huberman Lab Podcast, we discuss supplements.

02:40:00.660 | While supplements aren't necessary for everybody,

02:40:02.840 | many people derive tremendous benefit from them

02:40:04.880 | for things like enhancing sleep,

02:40:06.440 | for hormone support, and for focus.

02:40:08.700 | The Huberman Lab Podcast is proud to have partnered

02:40:10.820 | with Momentous Supplements.

02:40:12.060 | To see the supplements discussed

02:40:13.160 | on the Huberman Lab Podcast, go to Live Momentous,

02:40:15.560 | spelled O-U-S, so that's livemomentous.com/huberman.

02:40:18.880 | Again, that's livemomentous.com/huberman.

02:40:22.120 | If you're not already following us on social media,

02:40:24.400 | I am @hubermanlab on Instagram, Twitter,

02:40:27.400 | Facebook, and LinkedIn.

02:40:28.720 | And at all those places, I discuss science

02:40:30.960 | and science-related tools, some of which overlaps

02:40:33.000 | with the content of the Huberman Lab Podcast,

02:40:35.060 | but much of which often does not overlap

02:40:37.320 | with the content of the Huberman Lab Podcast.

02:40:39.040 | So again, it's @hubermanlab on all social media platforms.

02:40:42.740 | In addition, if you haven't subscribed

02:40:44.280 | to our neural network newsletter,

02:40:46.080 | it's a zero-cost monthly newsletter

02:40:48.340 | that provides summaries of podcast episodes,

02:40:50.360 | as well as toolkits.

02:40:51.800 | For instance, toolkits for optimizing sleep,

02:40:53.920 | or toolkits for learning in neuroplasticity,

02:40:56.160 | or for deliberate cold exposure,

02:40:57.560 | or for dopamine, and on and on.

02:40:59.480 | To sign up for the neural network newsletter,

02:41:01.120 | simply go to HubermanLab.com, go to the menu,

02:41:03.600 | scroll down to newsletter, and provide your email.

02:41:05.640 | We do not share your email with anybody.

02:41:08.200 | Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion

02:41:10.840 | with Dr. Mary Helen Imordino-Yang.

02:41:13.240 | And last, but certainly not least,

02:41:15.460 | thank you for your interest in science.

02:41:17.260 | (upbeat music)

02:41:19.840 | (guitar strumming)

Dr. Immordino-Yang: How Emotions & Social Factors Impact Learning | Huberman Lab Podcast

Chapters