Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain

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

00:00:02.240 | where we discuss science

00:00:03.720 | and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:00:05.920 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.240 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.320 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.280 | My guest today is Dr. Alan Shore.

00:00:17.760 | Dr. Alan Shore is a clinician psychoanalyst,

00:00:20.760 | and he is the world expert

00:00:22.520 | in how childhood attachment patterns

00:00:24.360 | impact our adult relationships,

00:00:26.880 | including romantic relationships,

00:00:28.840 | friendships, and professional relationships,

00:00:31.440 | as well as our relationship to ourselves.

00:00:34.200 | Dr. Shore is on the faculty

00:00:35.680 | in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

00:00:38.920 | at the University of California, Los Angeles

00:00:41.200 | School of Medicine.

00:00:42.320 | He is also the author of several important books,

00:00:44.880 | including "Right Brain Psychotherapy"

00:00:47.080 | and "Development of the Unconscious Mind."

00:00:50.160 | Today's discussion with Dr. Shore

00:00:51.640 | is an extremely important one for everyone to hear,

00:00:54.760 | to understand themselves,

00:00:56.080 | and to understand the people in their lives.

00:00:58.520 | Why?

00:00:59.360 | Well, we all go through the first 24 months of age.

00:01:02.720 | You wouldn't be listening to this if you hadn't.

00:01:04.800 | And during that first 24 months of age,

00:01:07.080 | your brain develops in a particular way

00:01:09.160 | depending on how you interacted

00:01:10.840 | with your primary caretaker,

00:01:13.020 | namely your mother,

00:01:14.040 | but also your father or other primary caretakers.

00:01:18.320 | In that first 24 months,

00:01:19.980 | your right brain and your left brain

00:01:21.960 | mediate very specific but different processes.

00:01:25.020 | For instance, today you'll learn from Dr. Shore

00:01:27.240 | that your right brain circuitry,

00:01:29.200 | that is specific circuitries

00:01:30.680 | on the right-hand side of your brain,

00:01:32.800 | are involved in developing a very specific type of resonance

00:01:36.220 | with your primary caretaker

00:01:37.960 | that transitions from states of calm and quiescence

00:01:41.220 | that you both share simultaneously

00:01:43.280 | to states that are considered upstates of excitement,

00:01:46.200 | of enthusiasm, of being wide-eyed.

00:01:48.400 | And the transitioning back and forth between those states,

00:01:51.060 | as Dr. Shore explains,

00:01:52.480 | is critical to our emotional development

00:01:54.880 | and how we form attachments later.

00:01:57.120 | So if you've heard, for instance,

00:01:58.400 | of avoidant attachment or anxious attachment

00:02:01.240 | or secure attachment,

00:02:02.680 | today you'll understand

00:02:03.840 | why those particular attachment styles develop,

00:02:06.640 | how they translate from early life

00:02:08.400 | to your adolescence, teen years, and adulthood,

00:02:11.040 | and in fact, how those childhood attachment patterns,

00:02:13.380 | which of course we can't control for ourselves,

00:02:15.520 | but we can control for our children,

00:02:17.700 | how we can modify them through very specific protocols

00:02:21.200 | in order to achieve better relations

00:02:23.480 | with both others and with ourselves.

00:02:25.880 | It's indeed a very special conversation.

00:02:27.840 | And to my knowledge, unlike any other discussions

00:02:30.160 | about relationships, neuroscience, or psychology

00:02:33.120 | that certainly I have heard before,

00:02:34.680 | and I fully expect that for you, it will be as well.

00:02:37.080 | Before we begin,

00:02:38.080 | I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:02:40.240 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:43.080 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:02:45.240 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:02:47.180 | about science and science-related tools

00:02:49.240 | to the general public.

00:02:50.720 | In keeping with that theme,

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00:05:46.240 | And now for my discussion with Dr. Alan Shore.

00:05:49.360 | Dr. Alan Shore, welcome.

00:05:51.120 | - Nice to be here.

00:05:52.400 | - To kick things off, I have a simple question,

00:05:54.620 | which is what percentage of our thinking and our behavior

00:05:59.440 | do you think is governed by our conscious mind

00:06:02.320 | versus our unconscious mind?

00:06:04.880 | - You understand that I was trained in psychoanalysis

00:06:07.760 | and I'm a psychodynamic psychotherapist

00:06:09.880 | in addition to a scientist, neuroscientist.

00:06:12.200 | So the unconscious has been something

00:06:14.120 | that I have been aware of and have been writing about,

00:06:16.720 | and it's a central part of what I'm writing about

00:06:19.200 | to this day, essentially, as we're gonna see.

00:06:22.040 | I'm suggesting that the right brain

00:06:23.840 | is the unconscious mind.

00:06:25.400 | So when you ask how much of things really are conscious

00:06:28.560 | and how much are unconscious,

00:06:30.520 | I'm also looking at that neurobiologically

00:06:32.800 | in terms of how much of activity

00:06:34.980 | is going on in the right brain.

00:06:36.400 | The right brain is always processing information, always,

00:06:40.560 | especially emotional information,

00:06:42.600 | at levels beneath conscious awareness,

00:06:44.880 | especially when you're in an emotional interaction.

00:06:48.440 | So how much really are things conscious?

00:06:51.000 | I would say that when it comes to the basic motivations

00:06:54.900 | of why we do what we do,

00:06:57.440 | 95 to 90% of that is unconscious.

00:07:00.480 | And there has been data to show that that is the case.

00:07:03.480 | At most, although we think that our conscious mind

00:07:06.560 | literally is making all of these decisions,

00:07:08.720 | underneath that, at all points in time,

00:07:11.400 | the unconscious is operating.

00:07:13.640 | Used to be thought that the unconscious

00:07:15.360 | only comes forth in dreams at night.

00:07:17.920 | But we now know that this right brain

00:07:20.200 | is reading unconscious communications between us.

00:07:23.340 | Communications, is it safe to be with you?

00:07:27.120 | Do you understand what I'm saying?

00:07:28.920 | Really, the critical ones always operating

00:07:33.000 | and much more important than we had thought itself.

00:07:36.200 | - Let's start thinking about and talking about

00:07:38.500 | this right brain versus left brain thing.

00:07:40.840 | And what I'd like to know is when we come into this world,

00:07:46.280 | how much lateralization, as we call it,

00:07:49.840 | how much right versus left brain specialization

00:07:53.360 | is there at the time when we exit the womb,

00:07:56.800 | when we take our first breath?

00:07:58.920 | - The answer to that is pretty clear at this point in time.

00:08:02.960 | And incidentally, some of these questions

00:08:04.760 | about the unconscious are provided by neurobiology.

00:08:09.040 | But essentially, here's what we know.

00:08:11.600 | There was discoveries that were being made

00:08:13.440 | in the '80s and the '90s about the human brain growth spurt.

00:08:18.080 | The human brain growth spurt occurs

00:08:20.560 | from the last trimester of pregnancy

00:08:23.000 | through the second until the third year of life.

00:08:25.680 | All of that time is a period of right hemisphere dominance.

00:08:30.320 | And actually, there have been six major studies

00:08:34.600 | in neuroscience laboratories around the world

00:08:37.520 | that have shown that the right hemisphere

00:08:39.320 | is dominant during that period of time.

00:08:41.360 | In fact, there's a recent study in Mexico

00:08:43.960 | where they looked at two to three months,

00:08:46.360 | six to eight months, nine to 12 months.

00:08:49.120 | At each point in time, they noticed

00:08:50.720 | that the right hemisphere was accelerating its growth,

00:08:53.720 | the left was not.

00:08:55.240 | So the right is dominant very early.

00:08:58.000 | In fact, there's evidence to show that even in utero,

00:09:02.000 | there is a right lateralization.

00:09:03.680 | Now remember, the lateralization is part of all systems.

00:09:07.920 | And what is lateralized is not only the cortical areas

00:09:10.880 | but the subcortical areas, et cetera.

00:09:13.480 | So if you take, let's say, the amygdala,

00:09:15.360 | there's a difference between the right amygdala

00:09:17.200 | and the left amygdala, and again, the right hemispheres.

00:09:20.840 | So the answer to that is very clearly now.

00:09:24.280 | The left hemisphere does not come into a growth spurt

00:09:28.200 | until the end of the second year and into the third year,

00:09:31.840 | up until that point, which means everything about attachment

00:09:36.840 | is about right brain dynamics.

00:09:40.080 | - Does that mean that everything about attachment

00:09:42.680 | is occurring in the first 24 months?

00:09:46.200 | - Yes, absolutely.

00:09:47.760 | And it's occurring during that brain growth spurt

00:09:50.080 | while the right hemisphere.

00:09:51.640 | So essentially what you have now

00:09:54.320 | is that in the baby's brain,

00:09:55.880 | that baby's brain is now in a right brain growth spurt.

00:09:59.680 | And the mother now is shaping that baby's right brain

00:10:02.960 | through the attachment mechanism,

00:10:04.680 | through her regulation of that brain.

00:10:06.520 | So she's helped shaping that brain for better or for worse.

00:10:10.600 | And incidentally, that means also

00:10:13.280 | not only secure attachments, but also the matter,

00:10:17.000 | because it's for better or worse,

00:10:18.600 | it's also the early evolution of insecure attachments.

00:10:23.320 | And we'll talk about what those insecure attachments,

00:10:25.920 | all of those really are being shaped by the right.

00:10:29.720 | What's more, there's evidence to show

00:10:32.120 | that it goes right hemisphere,

00:10:34.760 | then it goes left hemisphere,

00:10:36.760 | and then it goes back and to left

00:10:38.680 | and back and right along the lifespan.

00:10:41.840 | So although you have a tremendous growth spurt

00:10:45.000 | more than any other time

00:10:47.200 | in the first two and a half, three years of life,

00:10:50.560 | think now about adolescence

00:10:52.640 | where you have another growth spurt.

00:10:54.000 | - Is adolescence marked by a right brain growth spurt?

00:10:57.040 | - It's marked by the initially right and then it goes left.

00:11:01.840 | So essentially, with puberty

00:11:04.080 | and with the onset of testosterone

00:11:06.360 | and androgens and estrogens,

00:11:08.920 | it shifts now into another growth spurt

00:11:11.000 | at that point in time.

00:11:12.160 | Which means, just for the record,

00:11:15.840 | now the attachment relationship,

00:11:17.960 | which is essentially going to be about

00:11:20.840 | how we regulate our emotion,

00:11:22.400 | because I'll be talking about attachment

00:11:24.240 | is about the communication of emotions,

00:11:26.840 | right brain to right brain,

00:11:28.720 | in the first two years of life.

00:11:31.080 | And about the regulation of emotions

00:11:33.100 | in that same period of time, et cetera.

00:11:35.500 | But ultimately, that leads to the strategies

00:11:38.440 | that we have for affect regulation.

00:11:41.240 | An attachment is essentially affect regulation,

00:11:44.480 | affect communication and affect regulation.

00:11:47.720 | So now what you're looking at,

00:11:49.000 | if you have a mother and an infant,

00:11:50.780 | they are communicating with each other,

00:11:53.560 | right brain to right brain,

00:11:55.420 | and how are they doing it?

00:11:57.440 | By face, voice, and gesture.

00:12:00.480 | The mother is now reading the expressions

00:12:02.880 | of the baby's face, the visual.

00:12:06.280 | The auditory, the prosody of the voice,

00:12:09.680 | and then the tactile.

00:12:10.800 | So she's picking up these kinds of communications

00:12:14.240 | that are coming out of that baby.

00:12:16.140 | Tactile, gestural, visual.

00:12:18.640 | And she's now picking up those communications now.

00:12:21.920 | She's resonating with those communications.

00:12:24.840 | And then she is gonna regulate those communications.

00:12:27.520 | And that's essentially what it's about.

00:12:29.080 | In the end, what we have is strategies of affect regulation.

00:12:32.880 | How we regulate affect for the rest of our lives

00:12:36.560 | depends upon the attachment relationship

00:12:39.160 | of the first two years,

00:12:40.680 | which is a right brain to right brain connection.

00:12:43.480 | Now there have been hundreds, thousands of studies

00:12:46.880 | on attachment, as you're well aware, at this point in time.

00:12:50.300 | But the key to it, literally,

00:12:52.240 | I began this in 1994 with my first book,

00:12:55.120 | Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self.

00:12:57.880 | The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, okay?

00:13:02.340 | Remember, Bowlby was studying attachment in the '60s.

00:13:06.200 | But the problem of emotion really was not picked up.

00:13:09.520 | And early on, when they were looking at attachment,

00:13:11.960 | they were looking at behaviors

00:13:14.200 | and they were looking at cognition.

00:13:16.560 | So if you know the attachment literature,

00:13:18.080 | remember the strange situation?

00:13:19.620 | - Yeah, just to remind listeners,

00:13:20.940 | I've talked about this on previous podcasts.

00:13:22.520 | I'll provide a link to that segment.

00:13:23.840 | But a strange situation can briefly be described

00:13:26.580 | as parent and usually mother and child come into the clinic.

00:13:30.200 | They deliberately leave the baby with a caretaker.

00:13:35.800 | This is sort of a pseudo daycare type situation.

00:13:38.380 | Mother leaves, and then there's a lot of attention paid

00:13:40.840 | to how the infant or young child, toddler,

00:13:43.640 | whatever age they were looking at, reacts.

00:13:45.980 | Are they nervous?

00:13:46.820 | Are they able to engage in play?

00:13:48.680 | And then they look at the return of the mother

00:13:51.160 | and how they react to that.

00:13:52.440 | And there was this classification of behaviors

00:13:54.560 | along the lines of secure-attached, insecure-attached.

00:13:59.040 | There was a categorization

00:14:01.320 | of kind of an amalgam of different things,

00:14:03.740 | these so-called D-babies

00:14:05.380 | that were kind of a bunch of other things.

00:14:07.920 | And this is where we hear a lot nowadays

00:14:10.440 | about secure, insecure, and anxious

00:14:13.440 | and avoidant adult relationship styles.

00:14:16.480 | There's been a lot written about that and talked about that.

00:14:18.600 | We don't have time to go into all that in detail,

00:14:20.280 | but this is what Dr. Shore is referring to.

00:14:22.160 | I'm really intrigued by this idea

00:14:24.080 | that there's a right-brain, left-brain dominance

00:14:27.560 | that takes place throughout the lifespan.

00:14:29.460 | Has it been carefully mapped into adulthood

00:14:31.840 | such that we can say as a function of chronological age,

00:14:35.540 | you know, when somebody hits their early 30s

00:14:37.280 | that they're more right-brain or left-brain dominant?

00:14:39.200 | Or is it more developmental milestones

00:14:41.760 | as opposed to chronological age?

00:14:43.540 | - I think it's developmental milestones there.

00:14:46.600 | You know, I'm thinking that,

00:14:48.960 | remember Eric Erickson talking about different stages

00:14:51.280 | of life and how you have a hierarchy here,

00:14:53.600 | literally, because the attachment is a hierarchy.

00:14:55.960 | It starts subcortical and then it goes to cortical.

00:14:58.880 | So what he said was that there are changes along the line

00:15:02.440 | and that it fits with that.

00:15:05.780 | So the attachment relationship is there

00:15:09.200 | at later points in time, and really what it does,

00:15:11.840 | it guides us through our relationships with other people.

00:15:15.640 | It certainly guides us through strategies

00:15:17.960 | of what to do with stress.

00:15:20.520 | And that way that we deal with that stress

00:15:23.260 | is now going to depend upon how the mother

00:15:25.960 | is regulating that baby's stress during a critical period.

00:15:29.840 | Now, the term critical period is an important one here too,

00:15:34.840 | because again, at the first two years of life,

00:15:38.440 | it's the right brain is in that critical period there.

00:15:41.520 | But that leads to strategies of affect regulation

00:15:44.440 | of how we deal with stress,

00:15:46.360 | but also how we deal with novel situations.

00:15:49.280 | And again, all of it has to do with emotion.

00:15:52.080 | Now, I jumped there because I talked about

00:15:55.840 | there was attachment models move from behavior

00:15:59.600 | to cognition to emotion.

00:16:02.920 | And essentially, the first book that I wrote

00:16:05.200 | was on the neurobiology of emotional development.

00:16:08.760 | And in 1994, when I came out with that book,

00:16:11.280 | that was about the same time that Antonio Damasio

00:16:13.920 | came out with his book.

00:16:15.520 | And really, it was not until the mid '90s,

00:16:19.200 | partly because of the neuroimaging,

00:16:21.000 | which was coming during,

00:16:22.080 | you remember the decade of the brain,

00:16:23.960 | that emotion really now became a matter

00:16:28.000 | that science was looking at for the first time.

00:16:30.640 | The point that I'm making here

00:16:31.800 | is that attachment is not psychological,

00:16:34.800 | it's psychobiological.

00:16:36.800 | And there was always this rift

00:16:38.620 | between the psychological and the biological.

00:16:41.480 | But when you're talking about emotions,

00:16:43.560 | you're not only talking about psychological events,

00:16:45.840 | you're talking about physiological events

00:16:48.000 | that are associated with those events.

00:16:50.240 | For example, the physiology of the stress response,

00:16:52.800 | the physiology of the sympathetic nervous system,

00:16:55.920 | which is energy expending,

00:16:57.840 | and the parasympathetic nervous system,

00:17:00.000 | which is energy conserving.

00:17:01.440 | So the mother is a regulator of that.

00:17:04.200 | And the way that she's a regulator of that baby

00:17:07.280 | is that she's tracking that baby's arousal levels.

00:17:11.480 | She's tracking that baby's emotions

00:17:13.680 | as they change in time, moment to moment.

00:17:17.600 | And then she's synchronizing with that,

00:17:20.600 | and that allows her now to be able to regulate it.

00:17:24.920 | So we're going from recognizing that baby's emotions,

00:17:29.440 | synchronizing with those emotions,

00:17:31.520 | and then being an affect regulator.

00:17:33.280 | So the mother, who is securely attached now,

00:17:36.560 | is a good affect regulator of that baby.

00:17:39.200 | She not only is an affect regulator

00:17:42.520 | of the negative states of the baby,

00:17:44.220 | because negative states and negative affects

00:17:46.680 | are adaptive by definition.

00:17:49.720 | - Baby cries, mother nurses baby.

00:17:51.560 | - And that's a signal she's sending there, literally,

00:17:54.400 | and the mother then intuitively knows.

00:17:56.400 | Intuitively knows.

00:17:57.480 | She's not using her left brain

00:17:59.720 | to figure out what to do with that baby.

00:18:02.200 | She's doing it intuitively.

00:18:03.840 | And intuition is a right brain function.

00:18:06.640 | And she's regulating that baby implicitly.

00:18:10.980 | Now, let's go back over implicit to explicit, okay?

00:18:15.980 | You're seeing a lot now

00:18:18.160 | about the shift from explicit to implicit.

00:18:21.600 | Something that is implicit

00:18:23.120 | goes on at levels beneath awareness.

00:18:26.560 | So when she is intuitively knowing what to do,

00:18:29.920 | that right now this baby is down-regulating too much,

00:18:33.440 | and she wants to bring that baby up,

00:18:35.360 | she'll now use her tone of voice, literally,

00:18:37.960 | to raise that baby up into a more excited state.

00:18:41.320 | Or if the baby is dysregulated, sympathetic hyperarousal,

00:18:46.080 | she knows how to down-regulate that.

00:18:48.160 | And she'll down-regulate that by her facial expression,

00:18:52.040 | by the tone of her voice.

00:18:53.440 | Now her tone of her voice is now trying to soften

00:18:56.720 | and to quiet down.

00:18:58.260 | So essentially what attachment is

00:19:00.880 | is the regulator of arousal, of emotional arousal.

00:19:05.640 | And that emotional arousal also includes

00:19:09.040 | the autonomic nervous system.

00:19:11.360 | So what we have here is the regulation attachment

00:19:15.280 | of the limbic system, the emotion-processing limbic system,

00:19:19.500 | positive and negative, and the autonomic nervous system.

00:19:22.740 | So they are limbic autonomic circuits.

00:19:25.880 | And those circuits are in the right brain.

00:19:28.680 | Now on this matter,

00:19:33.520 | as it turns out, the right brain

00:19:37.120 | has a control system of attachment.

00:19:39.360 | Now since the right brain is there first before the left,

00:19:43.060 | because there's no speech at two years,

00:19:46.440 | she's regulating this baby at two months,

00:19:48.680 | six months, 12 months.

00:19:50.120 | All of it is occurring non-verbal.

00:19:52.160 | She's doing this implicitly, not explicitly.

00:19:56.760 | The left hemisphere processes explicit stimuli,

00:20:01.880 | conscious stimuli, rational stimuli.

00:20:05.760 | That's not there.

00:20:07.320 | Everything is being done implicitly

00:20:10.280 | beneath levels of awareness.

00:20:11.980 | And again, that allows her to be the regulation.

00:20:15.360 | So attachment theory, my attachment theory,

00:20:18.640 | regulation theory is essentially

00:20:21.480 | attachment is interactive regulation.

00:20:24.180 | Stay with me now.

00:20:27.320 | Ultimately, what we have are two forms of regulation.

00:20:32.320 | What we're doing is we're regulating the self, right?

00:20:35.540 | I mean, it's the subjective self,

00:20:39.840 | which is in the right hemisphere.

00:20:41.680 | The left is subjective self.

00:20:43.760 | The left is verbal, conscious.

00:20:47.320 | She's regulating the right hemisphere,

00:20:49.600 | and she's doing that, again,

00:20:51.960 | by tracking the baby's emotional states, as I said.

00:20:55.400 | But again, what the child learns now from that

00:20:58.920 | is that her right brain is becoming more and more complex

00:21:03.920 | from the first year to the second year.

00:21:06.820 | And it's gonna turn out some of these functions

00:21:10.520 | that are more complex are being also stimulated

00:21:15.220 | by the mother.

00:21:16.160 | And ultimately, by the end of the second year,

00:21:19.800 | that baby can regulate its emotional states by itself.

00:21:25.260 | In its right brain.

00:21:26.580 | But we have two forms of regulation.

00:21:31.340 | You can regulate your states by auto-regulation,

00:21:35.360 | by yourself.

00:21:36.600 | In other words, you're not with other human beings

00:21:38.640 | at this point in time.

00:21:40.140 | You have an efficient right brain, which can regulate.

00:21:43.320 | And incidentally, what we're talking about here

00:21:45.200 | is the regulation of the amygdala

00:21:48.560 | by the right orbital frontal cortex.

00:21:51.220 | The right orbital frontal cortex

00:21:53.680 | is the highest level of the right hemisphere.

00:21:56.200 | It also has the most sophisticated

00:21:59.120 | and the latest evolving parts of the brain

00:22:02.320 | are in the right frontal cortex.

00:22:05.300 | Not the left.

00:22:06.320 | The right orbital frontal.

00:22:08.760 | Not the left dorsolateral cortex is the key to this.

00:22:12.920 | So what we learn from attachment here, again,

00:22:15.820 | is how to, both in a secure attachment,

00:22:18.920 | how to auto-regulate your emotions

00:22:21.020 | when you're apart from people.

00:22:22.400 | In other words, you go to a quiet place

00:22:24.180 | at this point in time,

00:22:25.400 | you're regulating yourself down, so to speak,

00:22:27.760 | and you're getting a nice regulation of the amygdala

00:22:30.480 | by the right orbital frontal cortex.

00:22:32.920 | Or interactive regulation,

00:22:36.080 | which is now you go to another human being.

00:22:39.660 | We go to another human being under times of stress

00:22:44.360 | in an optimal situation.

00:22:47.320 | We also go to another human being to share joy states.

00:22:50.920 | And remember, I said that the mother

00:22:52.360 | is up-regulating joy states

00:22:55.600 | and down-regulating negative states.

00:22:57.480 | So in a secure attachment,

00:22:59.600 | you have somebody now who can do both.

00:23:02.000 | In certain forms of insecure attachment,

00:23:05.840 | that's not gonna happen.

00:23:07.680 | The avoidant attachment

00:23:09.040 | is always auto-regulating his states.

00:23:12.980 | - So just so I'm clear,

00:23:15.260 | in avoidant attachment,

00:23:18.440 | the baby, which is now, let's say,

00:23:21.400 | two and a half years old,

00:23:22.740 | three years old-- - That's already a toddler.

00:23:25.360 | - That's a toddler, excuse me.

00:23:27.760 | The toddler is auto-regulating more often

00:23:31.160 | than seeking another to help do coordinated regulation.

00:23:34.800 | - Yeah, what I'm saying is a secure attachment.

00:23:37.720 | And let me back up a step on it.

00:23:40.800 | The key to attachment

00:23:42.060 | is psychobiological attunement.

00:23:45.880 | You know the phrase.

00:23:47.080 | Notice psychobiological attunement,

00:23:50.120 | that the mother is regulating

00:23:52.240 | not only the psychological aspect,

00:23:54.400 | but literally is as regulating

00:23:56.360 | the physiological aspect of that,

00:23:58.360 | which means that she's regulating

00:24:00.240 | the autonomic nervous system.

00:24:01.760 | Think about porgous social engagement system.

00:24:06.200 | What we have here is the capacity

00:24:09.800 | by insecure attachment who have,

00:24:12.840 | and then the second part of the attachment is repair.

00:24:16.300 | Now let me go back.

00:24:17.400 | Psychobiological attunement.

00:24:20.800 | Sometimes she misattunes.

00:24:22.720 | Sometimes she misreads the baby states

00:24:25.320 | for one reason or another.

00:24:26.620 | What happens in a good enough caregiving

00:24:30.760 | is that the mother who was misattuned

00:24:32.760 | now returns to that baby,

00:24:36.200 | now re-synchronizes with that baby,

00:24:38.460 | now reconnects right brains to right brains with that baby.

00:24:42.520 | And that repair is the key here.

00:24:45.080 | So you have misattunement and repair.

00:24:47.380 | So the key to a secure attachment

00:24:49.260 | is not only psychobiological attunement,

00:24:51.820 | but it's also the repair of the misattunement.

00:24:55.700 | And that allows the baby now to expand that situation

00:25:00.700 | and being able to use that now to order a case.

00:25:04.220 | That's a secure.

00:25:07.100 | But if she misattunes, for example,

00:25:09.880 | and doesn't repair, let's say,

00:25:12.420 | or she's not that good at psychobiologically attuning,

00:25:16.840 | let's say as an avoidant mother,

00:25:18.400 | because avoidant personalities are uncomfortable

00:25:21.700 | with real closeness.

00:25:23.420 | Another term for an avoidant personality

00:25:25.580 | is a dismissive personality.

00:25:28.020 | And what they are dismissing

00:25:29.940 | is the need for interactive regulation.

00:25:32.420 | So they're always auto-regulating.

00:25:34.960 | Or you have another time

00:25:36.600 | in which you have another form of attachment,

00:25:39.360 | an insecure anxious attachment.

00:25:42.520 | Where that person is always interactively regulating,

00:25:47.160 | or is always going to others to help them regulate,

00:25:50.160 | but can't auto-regulate.

00:25:52.060 | - I think this is a really important thing

00:25:55.240 | to hover on for a moment,

00:25:56.620 | just given some context

00:25:58.920 | about hundreds of thousands of questions

00:26:01.760 | that I get about avoidant versus secure

00:26:03.760 | versus anxious attach.

00:26:05.640 | And you stated it all incredibly clearly,

00:26:08.000 | but I wanna make sure that we double-click on this

00:26:11.460 | as they say.

00:26:12.300 | The idea that if a child and mother

00:26:17.520 | did not coordinate their autonomic-

00:26:20.600 | - Use the word synchronize.

00:26:21.820 | - Synchronize.

00:26:23.400 | Did not synchronize their autonomic regulation

00:26:25.720 | in the proper way

00:26:26.560 | that there would be a non-secure attachment.

00:26:29.440 | I'm using that language for a specific reason.

00:26:31.720 | Makes total sense.

00:26:33.960 | But this idea that if the child,

00:26:36.480 | which soon the baby,

00:26:38.080 | which is a toddler at three or so,

00:26:41.140 | is avoidant,

00:26:42.960 | then they're going to have to learn to auto-regulate,

00:26:46.600 | and they're going to seek others

00:26:47.720 | to help them regulate less than a secure attached.

00:26:51.520 | And the anxious attached,

00:26:53.200 | baby, toddler, adolescent, adult,

00:26:57.720 | will do just the opposite.

00:26:58.680 | They're gonna have a hard time self-soothing,

00:27:00.940 | but they are going to feel,

00:27:03.120 | let's say that these might be the kind of people

00:27:05.080 | that don't well tolerate a text message

00:27:08.960 | not getting responded to at a very short latency,

00:27:12.060 | for instance.

00:27:12.900 | And we all, depending on context, we have this, right?

00:27:16.440 | But I find this to be incredibly important,

00:27:20.060 | which is why I wanted to go back through it,

00:27:21.780 | because I think nowadays,

00:27:24.320 | we hear so much about anxious and securely attached,

00:27:27.140 | avoidant, et cetera,

00:27:27.980 | in the context of adult romantic relationships.

00:27:30.500 | But I hope that people are realizing

00:27:32.500 | the truly incredible importance of your work,

00:27:34.860 | which is that the same circuitry and mechanisms

00:27:38.260 | that are used to establish infant mother attachment

00:27:43.120 | are repurposed later in life for adult relationships.

00:27:48.120 | I think that when we hear that, it makes sense,

00:27:51.000 | but I don't think that most people know that.

00:27:53.640 | They assume somehow that there's circuitry

00:27:55.280 | in our brain and body for adult romantic attachment

00:27:58.480 | that is distinct from our attachment circuitry

00:28:01.360 | that we had with our parent.

00:28:02.600 | And I think your work speaks very loudly

00:28:05.600 | that they are in fact the exact same circuitry.

00:28:07.800 | - All of this is happening in the right brain, all of it.

00:28:10.800 | And incidentally, attachment relationship

00:28:13.160 | is retained as an autobiographical memory

00:28:15.880 | in the first two years of life, even before.

00:28:18.680 | There's a left hemisphere,

00:28:19.980 | and that under later stress situation,

00:28:23.200 | that will be the key there.

00:28:24.240 | Incidentally, the attachment,

00:28:25.560 | whether it's secure or insecure,

00:28:27.080 | is also the key to positive and negative transferences.

00:28:30.520 | That's where it's communicated.

00:28:32.080 | Let me go back and say a little bit more

00:28:35.300 | about one other form of attachment,

00:28:37.160 | and that you mentioned the type D attachment.

00:28:40.200 | - The D babies, disorganized.

00:28:42.520 | - Disorganized babies.

00:28:44.200 | So you have secure.

00:28:47.000 | You have two types of organized insecures.

00:28:51.120 | Okay, the avoidant and the anxious.

00:28:53.160 | And then you have a disorganized, disoriented one.

00:28:56.760 | Now, ultimately, that person under stress

00:29:02.160 | is not able to autoregulate or to interact and regulate.

00:29:07.160 | So what they will do at that point,

00:29:10.000 | now I'm now thinking about, let's say PTSD,

00:29:13.520 | various borderline personality disorders.

00:29:17.080 | That person now literally can't go to the other

00:29:20.440 | for autoregulation or interact regulation.

00:29:23.680 | That person now will use a defense,

00:29:26.380 | literally to shut down the attachment system.

00:29:29.720 | And that's exactly what dissociation is.

00:29:32.960 | Dissociation just shuts down the attachment.

00:29:35.600 | So in the anxious attachment,

00:29:37.960 | you have a continual activation of the attachment system,

00:29:41.960 | which means a continual activation of the right hemisphere

00:29:45.400 | all of the time.

00:29:46.240 | And in the insecure dismissive attachment,

00:29:51.240 | you have a deactivation of the attachment system,

00:29:54.360 | which would be a deactivation of the right brain.

00:29:56.840 | So in the end, a secure attachment is an efficient one,

00:30:01.000 | but it's an efficient one

00:30:02.120 | that can switch back and forth between them.

00:30:04.800 | Not only that, it also, at a later point in time,

00:30:08.000 | when the left comes online,

00:30:09.820 | it can also communicate much better

00:30:11.560 | with the left hemisphere than without that.

00:30:14.980 | Regulation theory is essentially a theory

00:30:18.200 | of the development of the self in an optimal situation,

00:30:23.160 | but it also talks about the psychopathogenesis of the self,

00:30:27.400 | the early origins of psychiatric disorders

00:30:30.640 | and personality disorders.

00:30:33.120 | I'm thinking about not only schizophrenia and depression,

00:30:35.820 | but I'm now thinking about narcissistic personality disorders,

00:30:40.040 | borderline personality disorders.

00:30:41.520 | Maybe we'll come back to more on that.

00:30:43.000 | And then ultimately, the repair of the self.

00:30:45.600 | So regulation theory is about the development of the self,

00:30:48.840 | the psychopathogenesis of the self,

00:30:50.600 | and then the repair of the self.

00:30:52.160 | Because these attachment situations

00:30:54.320 | are now going to play out under all periods of stress.

00:30:58.720 | The right hemisphere is dominant for the stress response.

00:31:03.160 | The right hemisphere is dominant

00:31:05.860 | for the sympathetic nervous system, the energy expending,

00:31:09.240 | and the right hemisphere is dominant

00:31:11.520 | for the parasympathetic nervous system.

00:31:14.380 | So again, all of that will play out

00:31:16.960 | at later points under stress.

00:31:18.640 | And when those systems break down,

00:31:20.840 | that's when the patient will form symptomatologies

00:31:24.500 | and come into therapy.

00:31:26.400 | And in therapy, the therapist now, the key,

00:31:31.400 | I'm jumping here.

00:31:33.680 | - No, this is great.

00:31:34.600 | - Because there's a right brain to right brain interaction

00:31:38.800 | between the mother and the infant.

00:31:40.500 | There's also a right brain to right brain interaction

00:31:44.000 | between the therapist and the patient.

00:31:46.280 | And the key to both of them is regulation.

00:31:51.280 | Person is coming in in a dysregulated state.

00:31:54.480 | The key to that is regulation.

00:31:57.220 | And the key to any form of therapy,

00:32:00.240 | whatever the form of it is, again is interactive regulation

00:32:05.240 | and it's a therapeutic relationship.

00:32:08.080 | The thing which is the best indicator

00:32:11.740 | of whether somebody will do well out of therapy

00:32:14.960 | and whether a clinician will do well out of therapy

00:32:18.520 | is how well they can deal with the therapeutic relationship.

00:32:22.760 | And a really good therapist literally knows

00:32:25.900 | how to bring back those attachment things there

00:32:28.320 | because now the person is starting

00:32:29.800 | to feel safety and trusted.

00:32:31.360 | And incidentally, attachment is about safety and trust,

00:32:35.020 | which is very much autonomic.

00:32:37.020 | But again here, the key to therapy

00:32:41.640 | is being able to form a therapeutic relationship

00:32:44.620 | with the patient.

00:32:45.460 | So the key here is can the therapist form,

00:32:50.360 | co-create a therapeutic relationship

00:32:53.080 | with an avoidant patient, with a secure patient,

00:32:57.120 | with anxious patient, with a borderline patient.

00:33:00.600 | As you can imagine, the toughest thing

00:33:02.560 | is gonna be able to do with the borderline patient

00:33:05.880 | or the schizophrenic patient.

00:33:07.560 | So what you have here is that the attachment dynamics

00:33:10.440 | are building out.

00:33:11.680 | So in the very first session, what's happening,

00:33:14.820 | the therapist is listening to the verbalizations

00:33:19.120 | of the patient in order to diagnose

00:33:22.800 | and understand the symptomatology.

00:33:25.400 | But the therapist is also listening beneath the words.

00:33:29.400 | And the patient is tracking the attachment relationship

00:33:33.120 | underneath it, tracking the arousal

00:33:35.400 | and the arousal dysregulation underneath that,

00:33:38.120 | tracking it in his own body, so to speak, et cetera.

00:33:41.320 | And again, that is a different type of listening.

00:33:45.080 | Again, the therapist is listening to a left brain,

00:33:48.580 | but more or less, the therapist is listening

00:33:50.880 | to the right brain.

00:33:52.440 | And the question is, how does the therapist do that?

00:33:55.360 | And in order, just for the record, for the therapist

00:33:57.360 | to be able to get to the attachment dynamics, which

00:34:00.160 | are right lateralized, the therapist

00:34:02.640 | has got to switch out of the left into the right.

00:34:04.780 | And there's a term for that.

00:34:06.160 | The term for that is surrender, surrender.

00:34:09.480 | You cannot consciously, purposely put yourself

00:34:13.360 | into the right.

00:34:14.260 | You've got to let go.

00:34:16.440 | You've got to let go, let it be, so to speak.

00:34:20.040 | I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, AG1.

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00:35:51.620 | Tell me more about surrender.

00:35:53.420 | And I just wanna make sure I understand,

00:35:55.360 | this is surrender on the part of the therapist

00:35:57.920 | trying to, yes, listen to the narrative

00:36:02.320 | that the patient is sharing,

00:36:04.080 | but also paying attention to the underlying emotional state.

00:36:08.400 | Is the person quaking?

00:36:10.520 | Are they angry?

00:36:12.560 | Is there feelings of despair, shock?

00:36:17.560 | - Hyperarousal. - Disgust, right.

00:36:20.000 | Right, so they're carrying this in their parallel tracks.

00:36:23.360 | And then is the goal of the therapist,

00:36:25.520 | if they're an effective one, to then soothe the patient?

00:36:29.760 | Or is it to allow the patient

00:36:31.360 | to have some sort of catharsis, some release of this?

00:36:34.040 | Like at what point does the therapist intervene

00:36:37.360 | and try and coordinate and show the patient

00:36:39.980 | a different way to think about and feel about the topic?

00:36:44.280 | - All right, what I'm suggesting here

00:36:46.280 | is that essentially the therapist

00:36:47.800 | is listening left brain to left brain,

00:36:49.880 | but the therapist also is always listening

00:36:52.560 | beneath the words, et cetera.

00:36:53.840 | And he's listening to the right brain

00:36:55.420 | to right brain communication.

00:36:57.200 | And the patient now who is depressed

00:36:58.920 | is coming out with right brain communications.

00:37:01.420 | There's sadness in the voice.

00:37:03.080 | The face is clearly dysregulated.

00:37:05.720 | And essentially, as the therapist is tracking that,

00:37:09.720 | the emotional arousal,

00:37:11.280 | whether it's into hypoarousal and depression

00:37:15.040 | or hyperarousal into anxiety,

00:37:18.720 | the first thing there is to synchronize with that patient

00:37:22.400 | so that my physiology is syncing with their physiology.

00:37:27.400 | And now through the right insula,

00:37:31.560 | interoceptively, I now literally am feeling in my body

00:37:37.360 | what the patient is feeling in their body.

00:37:39.580 | I now understand that patient from the inside out.

00:37:45.440 | And incidentally, what I'm picking up in my body

00:37:49.440 | about the dysregulation of that patient

00:37:52.520 | may be very different than the verbal report

00:37:55.640 | that that patient is giving at that time.

00:37:58.040 | But the key here, literally, just like the mother,

00:38:01.840 | is synchronizing with that baby's crescendos

00:38:05.480 | and the decrescendos of that autonomic state,

00:38:08.040 | of those emotional state.

00:38:09.300 | I'm picking up those points

00:38:10.920 | where they are shifting into and out of an emotional state.

00:38:14.500 | I'm synchronizing with that.

00:38:16.200 | And then ultimately,

00:38:18.080 | when I'm in sync with that kind of thing,

00:38:20.160 | then at that point, purely implicitly,

00:38:24.440 | I'm now starting to slow the tone of my voice

00:38:27.720 | if I want to reduce that arousal down,

00:38:30.440 | or I'm upregulating the voice.

00:38:32.520 | At that point in time, I am now interactively regulating.

00:38:35.760 | And we are now synchronized together.

00:38:37.840 | So essentially, what's gonna happen

00:38:39.720 | is that as we synchronize,

00:38:41.840 | as they're going to dysregulation,

00:38:44.260 | we're now synchronizing together

00:38:46.300 | as we're going down into regulation.

00:38:49.840 | - So the therapist can literally and somatically

00:38:54.840 | show the patient what autoregulation is like,

00:39:00.680 | or what coordinated regulation is like.

00:39:03.640 | - And you'll see it on my face.

00:39:06.400 | Face, voice, gesture.

00:39:08.680 | You'll see it on my face.

00:39:09.980 | You'll see it in the tone of my voice.

00:39:12.440 | You'll see it in my gestures.

00:39:14.120 | Those three sensory modalities

00:39:15.880 | are now going back and forth between us.

00:39:18.080 | So the key of the first session, literally,

00:39:20.600 | is not only to diagnose.

00:39:23.880 | Really, it's to start to begin

00:39:25.880 | to synchronize with that patient

00:39:27.920 | and to form a therapeutic alliance with that patient.

00:39:30.840 | And at the end of the first session,

00:39:33.000 | the patient may say, "I don't know why,

00:39:35.560 | "but I'm feeling better.

00:39:38.480 | "And I have some idea that you can understand,

00:39:42.380 | "but it's gotta be more than that,

00:39:43.680 | "what I am feeling," literally.

00:39:46.500 | - So often nowadays, I think we hear

00:39:48.880 | that adult romantic relationships

00:39:53.640 | can provide a healing of some of the failures

00:39:58.640 | of childhood attachment.

00:40:00.860 | And there's also a phrase thrown around a lot

00:40:05.360 | that we need to learn to parent ourselves.

00:40:09.360 | This is more of a pop psychology,

00:40:11.640 | online, social media thing,

00:40:14.160 | that people need to learn to mother and father themselves

00:40:16.840 | at some level to self-soothe and to,

00:40:19.240 | who knows what that means?

00:40:20.160 | I'm not gonna try and define it.

00:40:21.440 | It's not operationally defined.

00:40:23.360 | So the question I have is to what extent

00:40:27.560 | do you think the process that you just described

00:40:30.320 | with the therapist can start to rewire

00:40:34.280 | some of the capacity to auto-regulate

00:40:38.840 | or coordinated regulate?

00:40:40.560 | - Essentially here, what you have is over time,

00:40:45.560 | partly because of this synchrony.

00:40:47.080 | First of all, let me spell synchrony with a capital S.

00:40:50.760 | What I mean by that is in the last five years,

00:40:53.980 | a huge amount of information has come out

00:40:56.960 | about this idea about interpersonal synchrony.

00:40:59.260 | The term synchrony comes from the Greek,

00:41:02.760 | sync meaning the same, chrony, time, same time.

00:41:06.820 | So that literally two people literally are synchronized.

00:41:10.460 | We are feeling something in the same moment

00:41:13.880 | and we are feeling it spontaneously between ourselves.

00:41:17.720 | We are feeling that kind of situation.

00:41:19.920 | So again here, the key to the mother

00:41:22.280 | really even more than the auto-regulation,

00:41:24.320 | the key is interactive regulation, number one.

00:41:27.360 | Number two, it's occurring at an implicit level.

00:41:30.940 | The mother literally is doing this

00:41:33.160 | without any conscious awareness.

00:41:35.200 | She's doing this intuitively.

00:41:36.580 | The right hemisphere is intuitive and it's imagistic.

00:41:38.960 | It's not rational and logical.

00:41:40.520 | The key to any disorder, whatever it is,

00:41:43.120 | is the regulation of a particular state.

00:41:45.760 | The regulation of rage, the regulation of loss,

00:41:49.620 | the regulation, the dysregulation of shame or disgust.

00:41:53.640 | So essentially what you have is the regulation

00:41:56.920 | of all of these emotions.

00:41:58.000 | But that regulation, I want to point out, is all implicit.

00:42:02.120 | And here's where the skill of being with patients

00:42:05.720 | over long periods of time is the key here.

00:42:09.000 | Because the key to making changes in the patient

00:42:12.440 | is not what you say to the patient

00:42:14.920 | or what you do to the patient,

00:42:17.220 | it's how to be with the patient.

00:42:19.280 | You understand the difference, how to be with that patient,

00:42:22.540 | especially while that person's being

00:42:25.720 | is in a dysregulated state.

00:42:27.820 | Now by definition, when they're coming in

00:42:31.160 | on the first session, they are in a dysregulated state.

00:42:33.800 | So again, it's implicit, it's not explicit.

00:42:36.520 | If explicit regulation is an intellectual understanding

00:42:42.860 | of my symptoms, implicit is an understanding

00:42:49.180 | an unconscious understanding at a physiological level,

00:42:52.740 | at a psychobiological level of that.

00:42:56.540 | And incidentally, synchrony is the mechanism

00:43:01.540 | underneath empathy.

00:43:04.660 | Now, we know, empathy literally has to be there.

00:43:09.060 | But empathy is a right brain function.

00:43:12.300 | And there is a difference.

00:43:14.780 | I said there's a difference in the hemispheres.

00:43:17.060 | There's a difference between emotional empathy,

00:43:20.480 | where I am feeling what you are feeling,

00:43:23.820 | and we are sharing the same feeling.

00:43:27.040 | And I don't have to think about that literally.

00:43:30.080 | I know at that point in time we are in the same place.

00:43:33.260 | There's a difference between emotional empathy on the right

00:43:36.420 | and cognitive empathy on the left.

00:43:39.100 | Cognitive empathy is an understanding.

00:43:41.980 | It makes no changes.

00:43:43.820 | Because essentially what we're attempting to do

00:43:45.580 | is make the changes in the right.

00:43:47.300 | Now, the changes in the right are going to be

00:43:49.740 | in the right axis.

00:43:51.160 | They're going to be the orbitofrontal cortex,

00:43:55.040 | which is the executive regulator of the right brain.

00:43:58.860 | The dorsolateral cortex is the executive regulator

00:44:02.940 | of the left brain.

00:44:04.380 | The orbitofrontal cortex now starts to form new connections

00:44:08.880 | with the cingulate, the insula, and the amygdala.

00:44:12.560 | And that's where you're now going to see the changes.

00:44:16.040 | But again, the changes are due to the regulation.

00:44:19.920 | So you'll see the person now starting to come

00:44:22.680 | into more regulated states.

00:44:25.080 | And the key is synchrony.

00:44:26.400 | So what's happening here,

00:44:28.920 | there's a strong therapeutic alliance,

00:44:31.440 | safety and trust.

00:44:33.080 | And in that situation now,

00:44:35.300 | the more synchrony that is there between the two,

00:44:40.000 | the more interactive regulation there is between the two.

00:44:43.880 | And first there will be synchrony

00:44:45.760 | between the patient and the therapist.

00:44:48.540 | Then there will be synchrony and interact regulation

00:44:51.080 | between that person and maybe other people,

00:44:53.580 | maybe a wife, a partner.

00:44:56.040 | And ultimately in the symptomatology will change.

00:44:59.360 | 'Cause remember the symptomatology is dysregulation.

00:45:03.280 | And the whole key is to change it to regulation.

00:45:07.280 | - It's fascinating.

00:45:08.880 | There are a couple of questions I have

00:45:10.440 | before we move forward about mother-infant attachment

00:45:15.040 | as opposed to father-infant attachment.

00:45:17.720 | So that's one.

00:45:18.560 | And I'll ask these again in a moment.

00:45:19.780 | But I think you'll see where I'm going here.

00:45:21.920 | And then I'm fascinated by the idea

00:45:23.720 | that these circuits get established early in life,

00:45:27.780 | then are repurposed for adult relationships.

00:45:31.400 | They can be modified in the way that you just described.

00:45:34.560 | But that they cross gender and gender lines.

00:45:39.560 | So for instance, a female baby

00:45:45.440 | can form these patterns of attachment

00:45:47.760 | with their mother, female caretaker.

00:45:52.560 | But then assuming that baby grows up

00:45:54.400 | to be a heterosexual woman,

00:45:56.240 | and she has attachments to men,

00:45:59.040 | then these things can be reactivated

00:46:01.960 | across gender lines, right?

00:46:03.480 | So this formation of the circuitry is not gender-specific,

00:46:07.400 | although it sounds like it's important

00:46:09.320 | that it be the mother to child in some way.

00:46:12.400 | You keep saying mother-child as opposed to caretaker.

00:46:14.960 | So to just spell them out one by one,

00:46:17.240 | first question, are there any data

00:46:19.840 | about the formation of the circuits in the baby

00:46:23.100 | where the mother is either not available,

00:46:26.200 | if it's an adopted mother,

00:46:28.480 | if it's a child raised by extended family?

00:46:31.560 | I mean, there's so many different configurations,

00:46:33.600 | but you get the point.

00:46:34.640 | - All right, here's what I'm suggesting.

00:46:37.320 | First of all, there has been some conflict on this,

00:46:41.120 | but after 30 years on this,

00:46:44.160 | I believe that there is a primary attachment figure.

00:46:49.600 | And the primary attachment figure

00:46:51.900 | is the person who is the interactive regulator

00:46:54.360 | of that baby when that baby is under stress.

00:46:57.020 | - Between age zero and two.

00:46:58.840 | - Yeah, or let me say it even another way.

00:47:01.540 | The primary attachment figure

00:47:03.520 | is the person who provides the right brain for that baby

00:47:07.000 | when that baby's right brain is dysregulated.

00:47:09.160 | - Could be dad, could be mom.

00:47:10.780 | - Could be.

00:47:11.940 | Yes, it's true, women are better

00:47:13.920 | at reading nonverbal cues than men are, but it could be.

00:47:17.600 | And incidentally, we now have some evidence

00:47:21.360 | that's showing that men do have right brains.

00:47:25.380 | (laughing)

00:47:27.760 | - For a second there, I wasn't sure if you were joking,

00:47:29.820 | but I don't know, maybe that's reflective

00:47:31.040 | of a natural being right brain.

00:47:31.880 | - Yeah, yeah, all right, now that being the case,

00:47:33.880 | what's happening here is that in the first year or two,

00:47:36.820 | the mother's right brain,

00:47:38.040 | she is the person who is the right brain,

00:47:41.740 | which in most cultures is a woman.

00:47:44.160 | But does not have to be, it could be a stay-at-home dad

00:47:46.720 | who literally has a good right brain,

00:47:48.600 | and maybe a couple are figuring out that literally,

00:47:51.320 | you know, he'd be better in that position,

00:47:52.900 | but it needs that right brain.

00:47:54.440 | But other than that, what happens here,

00:47:56.240 | when it goes now into the second year,

00:47:58.720 | toward the end of second year,

00:47:59.800 | and the father comes online, got me?

00:48:03.000 | At that point in time,

00:48:04.200 | the father now becomes a primary attachment figure also.

00:48:07.560 | But he has some differences,

00:48:08.880 | the way that he's dealing with that baby.

00:48:10.520 | He's usually more arousing with that baby,

00:48:13.440 | and that the play is more arousing with that baby.

00:48:15.960 | - So more activation of the sympathetic autonomic.

00:48:19.560 | - Yeah.

00:48:20.400 | - So sort of more up, let's call it up-level play.

00:48:24.280 | - Exactly, you're dealing with more up-regulation,

00:48:26.840 | and being able to tolerate more hyper-aroused states.

00:48:30.240 | Because in the second year,

00:48:31.800 | one of the things that the father will do with the infant

00:48:34.120 | is with toddler, infant first year, toddler second year,

00:48:37.880 | rough and tumble play, for example, rough and tumble play.

00:48:40.880 | So the father is that.

00:48:41.840 | So the father literally is now teaching the child

00:48:44.440 | literally how to take risks,

00:48:46.400 | but the father is now moving more towards autonomy

00:48:50.160 | and independence.

00:48:51.520 | The mother was there at the beginning

00:48:54.440 | about interactive regulation,

00:48:56.080 | but so the father is playing that role.

00:48:58.600 | And I've also suggested that just as the mother

00:49:03.440 | is shaping that baby's right brain in the first year,

00:49:08.120 | the father is now shaping that baby's left brain

00:49:11.920 | towards the end of the first year,

00:49:14.160 | second, and into the third year.

00:49:16.800 | That he's shaping that baby's,

00:49:18.760 | his left brain to that baby's left brain.

00:49:21.520 | That being the case, he may also, earlier on,

00:49:25.520 | have had good experiences with that baby early on in life.

00:49:30.520 | And a good example of that would be

00:49:33.400 | a father who is tender, tender,

00:49:36.440 | yet at the same time is instrumental

00:49:39.040 | and is teaching things about the world.

00:49:41.240 | So one brain is shaped by the mother figure,

00:49:46.120 | the brother by the father figure.

00:49:49.120 | - What about under situations

00:49:50.880 | where there's really just one primary caretaker?

00:49:54.760 | This is increasingly common nowadays.

00:49:56.560 | And in some countries,

00:49:57.480 | like in certain Scandinavian countries,

00:49:59.080 | people opt to do this, and elsewhere, of course,

00:50:02.880 | but this isn't always a divorce situation.

00:50:04.680 | Sometimes people decide to have children on their own.

00:50:07.560 | - You know, I think what's happening

00:50:08.600 | in that kind of situation

00:50:09.960 | is the person is initially providing the right brain

00:50:16.080 | and then that person is now providing the left brain.

00:50:20.880 | So let's say as a single woman with a child,

00:50:23.440 | her right brain is there on the get,

00:50:26.160 | but then in the second year,

00:50:27.720 | and incidentally, there may be father figures

00:50:30.000 | or family members who also can step into that,

00:50:33.000 | but essentially her left brain is there also.

00:50:36.880 | Remember, we both have right brains and left brains,

00:50:41.440 | but again, that's a different kinds of skill

00:50:45.760 | in a left brain,

00:50:47.560 | which would be the more autonomous situation.

00:50:51.120 | - What are your thoughts about some of the

00:50:53.960 | modern exploration of compounds

00:50:56.080 | that can facilitate more right brain synchrony

00:50:59.480 | between therapist and patient?

00:51:02.440 | I've done a few episodes about MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

00:51:06.680 | These, of course, were just recently not approved by the FDA,

00:51:11.680 | so these are not legal.

00:51:13.600 | Nonetheless, there are interesting clinical studies

00:51:15.680 | showing that these are in pathogens.

00:51:19.520 | One could imagine that they could be useful

00:51:22.480 | in the proper context to improve

00:51:25.880 | patient-therapist right brain synchrony

00:51:30.800 | and accelerate some of this process,

00:51:33.520 | but it seems like it would also require

00:51:36.240 | both the patient and the therapist taking the compound,

00:51:39.000 | and that seems like it would have

00:51:40.040 | all sorts of ethical issues.

00:51:41.280 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:51:42.640 | Remember, it's the relationship in the end

00:51:44.920 | that is the key there.

00:51:47.800 | I was also somewhat aware of that literature,

00:51:52.120 | and you used the word empathogen,

00:51:54.520 | which is not quite straight out empathic,

00:51:58.400 | but mimicking those kinds of situations there.

00:52:01.120 | My thought is that that might be more efficacious

00:52:07.040 | if it were specifically involving right brain dynamics

00:52:12.640 | with a person who knew how to work with those right brain.

00:52:17.040 | What you're getting there are very early forms

00:52:19.280 | of the behaviors which are subcortical.

00:52:21.320 | Remember, the attachment is also regulating

00:52:24.520 | the subcortical areas, and those are the key ones,

00:52:26.840 | and incidentally, we are paying too much attention

00:52:28.720 | to the cortical area.

00:52:30.040 | We literally have to shift,

00:52:31.400 | because the subcortical areas are the foundations

00:52:33.880 | of the human, and everything is built on top of that.

00:52:36.720 | I'll come back to in utero in a second

00:52:38.880 | if I don't get on that.

00:52:40.080 | In fact, I have some people who have worked with me

00:52:43.480 | have also been using right brain-type psychotherapy

00:52:46.800 | in that, with those patients,

00:52:48.880 | and I think that that will be

00:52:50.320 | really interesting possibilities of seeing changes

00:52:56.320 | where you have the relationship in addition to that,

00:53:01.320 | and also some understanding about how the right brain works,

00:53:05.800 | because one of the problems that you have

00:53:08.360 | where there is still some resistance,

00:53:11.360 | the idea that the right brain is just a simpler version

00:53:14.320 | of the complex left hemisphere,

00:53:16.320 | but that's not the case.

00:53:17.440 | This right brain is working completely differently,

00:53:20.560 | so I'm thinking that in that case,

00:53:24.440 | a better situation.

00:53:27.680 | Before I forget this, I wanna just throw one other piece in.

00:53:32.680 | I said that the right brain is in a growth spurt

00:53:35.360 | from the last trimester.

00:53:36.640 | In the last five years, 10 years,

00:53:42.680 | there has been a real interest in utero development,

00:53:46.720 | and evidence to show

00:53:49.520 | that you're even seeing lateralization in the fetus,

00:53:52.040 | and so, and there's even evidence now,

00:53:54.520 | scientifical evidence to show that the early memories

00:53:57.600 | in utero are stored in the right amygdala,

00:54:01.080 | so they're down there, so to speak.

00:54:03.000 | So we're now paying more and more attention

00:54:05.320 | to what is happening there,

00:54:06.960 | because at birth, literally what you have here

00:54:09.440 | is the deeper parts of the right brain

00:54:12.200 | are evolving in utero, the insula and the right amygdala,

00:54:17.200 | the central amygdala, and that's setting up,

00:54:21.080 | and you also have synchronization across the placenta,

00:54:25.960 | whereby they are regulating each other's

00:54:27.840 | autonomic nervous systems.

00:54:29.440 | - Can adrenaline pass across the placenta?

00:54:31.840 | I should know this.

00:54:32.800 | I know adrenaline doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier,

00:54:35.080 | but the brain makes its own adrenaline,

00:54:37.000 | but do we know if adrenaline crosses

00:54:39.000 | the placental barrier? - Well, first of all,

00:54:40.680 | most of the studies have been on cortisol,

00:54:43.440 | and high levels of cortisol, they're gonna cross it.

00:54:46.080 | So if you have, let's say the amygdala,

00:54:48.800 | which is in a critical period of growth,

00:54:51.120 | the right amygdala, and the cortisol levels are very high,

00:54:54.880 | that's really going to not be an optimal situation

00:54:58.240 | for that amygdala to evolve,

00:54:59.740 | because you're going to have a continuous stress response

00:55:02.120 | there, and essentially what that means also,

00:55:05.800 | that if the mother is in a very stressed state

00:55:08.120 | during a utero, some of that literally now

00:55:10.680 | is going to impact the lower areas of the brain.

00:55:13.800 | So as far as adrenaline goes, I'm not sure on that.

00:55:18.220 | I don't see why not, although hormones certainly cross.

00:55:23.220 | We're looking at not only changes in neuromodulators,

00:55:28.840 | especially, incidentally, the key here

00:55:30.960 | that we're trying to regulate are the neuromodulators.

00:55:34.240 | Excuse me, dopamine, reward, noradrenaline, adrenaline.

00:55:39.240 | It's those, which also early in life,

00:55:43.520 | literally form neuroplastic, so they will form circuits.

00:55:47.580 | That's what we're attempting to regulate here,

00:55:50.500 | to downregulate very high levels of noradrenaline,

00:55:53.960 | and upregulate dopamine, et cetera, et cetera.

00:55:57.460 | - I'd like to take a quick break,

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00:57:45.940 | As I recall in your book, "Right Brain Psychotherapy,"

00:57:48.820 | there was a description, beautiful description,

00:57:51.260 | of these up states,

00:57:53.980 | and then these more calming state coordination

00:57:57.140 | between mother and child.

00:57:58.220 | And I started to,

00:57:59.140 | I actually read this book when I was living in Topanga,

00:58:03.020 | I would walk on the road,

00:58:04.380 | I don't recommend this, there are no sidewalks in Topanga,

00:58:06.420 | and I would read the physical copy,

00:58:08.380 | and I recall very distinctly,

00:58:10.700 | thinking about this image of the baby and the mother,

00:58:14.600 | and the baby is a little bit hyper aroused, is upset,

00:58:18.560 | and so the mother would make sort of sounds,

00:58:22.400 | not necessarily words, like, "Shh, shh, shh, shh, shh,"

00:58:25.300 | these kinds of things,

00:58:26.140 | or humming, or- - Lullabies.

00:58:28.340 | - Bouncing lullabies, these sorts of things.

00:58:30.460 | - That's the prosody.

00:58:31.460 | - That's the prosody.

00:58:32.380 | And then the related release of things like serotonin,

00:58:36.580 | perhaps oxytocin as well.

00:58:37.940 | We can talk more about those.

00:58:39.400 | But then also how critical it is

00:58:41.460 | for the mother to be able to regulate

00:58:43.700 | the baby's transition to up states,

00:58:46.080 | like looking at the baby as it comes out of a nap,

00:58:48.000 | and saying, "Good morning,"

00:58:50.380 | and really wide eyes, lots of gesturing,

00:58:53.060 | lots of gesticulating, that is,

00:58:54.740 | you know, bringing the voice level up,

00:58:57.220 | and the baby going, you know, really waking up

00:58:59.900 | in a kind of a steeper slope of arousal,

00:59:02.980 | and how important that was,

00:59:04.360 | and then that being slightly more related,

00:59:06.540 | and this makes perfect sense,

00:59:07.940 | to norepinephrine, adrenaline at low healthy levels,

00:59:12.940 | and perhaps dopamine as well.

00:59:14.660 | Is that the right way to think about this?

00:59:16.780 | And if so, is that what's going on

00:59:19.620 | when we form adult friendships, adult relationships?

00:59:22.420 | Are we oscillating back and forth

00:59:24.380 | between the ability to hang out,

00:59:25.940 | and relax, and soothe each other,

00:59:29.220 | and the ability to kind of get excited about something?

00:59:32.540 | Is this the basis of all relationships and relating?

00:59:36.300 | - Yes, yes.

00:59:37.660 | The key here is emotional regulation, again,

00:59:41.380 | and again, it's implicit emotional regulation.

00:59:43.680 | One of the tenets, central tenets of my ideas here,

00:59:49.140 | is that, first of all,

00:59:52.100 | there has been too much of an emphasis

00:59:53.860 | on the down-regulation of negative states.

00:59:56.260 | You remember the original attachment theory,

00:59:57.860 | the secure base, the baby would come back

00:59:59.700 | in a stressed state,

01:00:01.060 | she would down-regulate the negative states.

01:00:04.300 | But really, attachment is about

01:00:05.860 | the down-regulation of negative states,

01:00:07.660 | and the up-regulation of positive states.

01:00:10.660 | Still, at this point in time,

01:00:13.260 | the importance of positive states

01:00:15.380 | in the human experience are overlooked.

01:00:18.180 | Positive emotions, joy, enthusiasm, excitement.

01:00:22.500 | Positive states literally are the key,

01:00:25.140 | and there are hormonal aspects to that,

01:00:27.380 | as you just point out.

01:00:28.420 | For example, dopamine, et cetera, et cetera.

01:00:31.260 | And this goes for therapy also.

01:00:32.820 | In therapy, it's not only just the down-regulation

01:00:35.380 | and the sharing the down-regulation,

01:00:37.380 | but it's also sharing the up-regulation of positive states,

01:00:41.220 | because that's a critical piece of it also.

01:00:45.500 | But there still is that bias, to look one way.

01:00:48.060 | Now, in the "Right Brain" book,

01:00:50.180 | I'm also talking about two types of love.

01:00:53.540 | Quiet love and excited love.

01:00:57.820 | This was the famous psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott,

01:01:02.740 | who was a pediatrician,

01:01:03.860 | who was one of the great psychoanalysts of the 20th century,

01:01:06.820 | and he made the distinction between quiet love,

01:01:09.740 | which would again be the down-regulation of noradrenaline,

01:01:14.100 | and excited, which is into a parasympathetic state,

01:01:17.100 | so you're going from a hypersympathetic state

01:01:19.820 | into a parasympathetic state, quiet love.

01:01:23.060 | And then excited love, which would be also passionate love,

01:01:26.660 | which is the high-arousal state out of it, so to speak.

01:01:29.900 | And they are both important,

01:01:32.060 | and ultimately, they both need to be integrated.

01:01:35.020 | And you may have a situation whereby one can do one,

01:01:38.660 | but ultimately, they have to come together.

01:01:41.220 | Let me make this important point.

01:01:43.300 | In the end, we have negative emotions for adaptive reasons.

01:01:47.740 | It's there.

01:01:49.020 | Let's say shame.

01:01:50.420 | Shame is meant to dose down very high levels of arousal.

01:01:54.740 | And if one can't do that, very high levels of arousal,

01:01:59.220 | let's say in narcissistic personality disorders,

01:02:01.940 | you need to be able to...

01:02:03.220 | So we need to have access

01:02:04.580 | to both positive and negative emotion.

01:02:07.020 | But the real key to a secure attachment

01:02:10.420 | is the ability to integrate

01:02:12.860 | both positive and negative emotions.

01:02:16.380 | So with a really good, securely attaching mother,

01:02:20.660 | when that baby is in a down state,

01:02:22.500 | literally, she can literally ride down with that baby

01:02:25.140 | and synchronize.

01:02:26.380 | And when it's an upstate,

01:02:27.980 | she can really ride up with that state.

01:02:30.660 | In the case of narcissistic personality disorders,

01:02:33.060 | let's say, for example, and I'm jumping here,

01:02:35.540 | we've got an insecure attachment.

01:02:37.860 | It can be an avoidant attachment,

01:02:40.580 | or the other one, depends on what kind.

01:02:42.420 | There are two different types

01:02:43.380 | of narcissistic personality disorders.

01:02:45.020 | - You can have anxiously attached narcissistic?

01:02:46.860 | - No, no, but you can have two different types

01:02:48.380 | of narcissistic personality disorders.

01:02:50.620 | A vulnerable attachment and an egotistical attachment.

01:02:53.780 | - You said a vulnerable attachment?

01:02:55.620 | - Vulnerable attachment is, again, an anxious attachment.

01:02:59.540 | - These people constantly need praise?

01:03:01.860 | - Yeah, yes.

01:03:03.580 | Sound familiar, but also egotistical attachment.

01:03:07.580 | But my point out of that, essentially here,

01:03:10.420 | is the stresses in life are there,

01:03:14.020 | and that the negative stresses are there,

01:03:16.500 | but we can learn from those negative stresses also, et cetera.

01:03:20.340 | And ultimately, what we need to do

01:03:22.820 | is to be able to know how to integrate.

01:03:24.660 | If we can't integrate the positive and the negative,

01:03:28.540 | we'll end up with splitting, you know the term.

01:03:32.700 | - Because I believe that's a primary feature

01:03:36.980 | of borderline personality disorder.

01:03:39.500 | - Yes.

01:03:40.340 | - Which I think we should also touch on.

01:03:41.300 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

01:03:42.300 | - So my understanding about splitting

01:03:44.260 | is that it's the I love you, I hate you phenomenon

01:03:49.020 | brought on by not just an internal switch,

01:03:53.380 | which is sometimes seen in bipolar disorder,

01:03:57.660 | but rather somebody with a borderline personality disorder

01:04:01.060 | will see something and be very upset.

01:04:05.540 | Suddenly, the fact that a glass is empty of a drink

01:04:09.140 | meant that they didn't think enough

01:04:10.460 | to like refill a glass or something,

01:04:12.820 | whereas a few minutes before, it was perfectly fine.

01:04:15.820 | It was not an issue, right?

01:04:17.140 | There needs to be a trigger, and then they split.

01:04:19.260 | Is that right?

01:04:20.100 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:04:20.940 | So essentially, you know, the splitting usually,

01:04:23.540 | the splitting goes out externally.

01:04:25.780 | That person is all bad, I am all good.

01:04:29.060 | So now you have that splitting, et cetera.

01:04:32.460 | You can't see anything of the goodness in that person

01:04:34.940 | at this point in time.

01:04:35.780 | - Does it sometimes go the other way?

01:04:36.780 | That person's all good, I'm bad?

01:04:38.540 | - Could also be that, all good.

01:04:39.820 | But you also have internally splitting.

01:04:41.540 | You have an internal split

01:04:42.900 | between a good self and a bad self.

01:04:45.820 | And internally, there's an internal object relationship

01:04:48.580 | that we all have as we internalize

01:04:50.620 | these external relationships

01:04:52.820 | so that there's a good self and a bad self, literally,

01:04:55.740 | and that they cannot be integrated, so to speak.

01:04:58.580 | And that that part of me, I hate that part of me

01:05:02.620 | versus I love that part of me.

01:05:04.020 | Or in terms of borderline,

01:05:07.100 | usually what you see at the very beginning

01:05:09.460 | is that there's an over-idealization

01:05:12.020 | of the positive values of that therapist.

01:05:15.700 | And then there are some stressors and misattunements

01:05:20.460 | and ruptures that aren't repair.

01:05:22.580 | And now all of a sudden,

01:05:23.860 | what was totally good now becomes totally bad.

01:05:27.060 | Incidentally, that could be,

01:05:29.020 | if there was not a strong therapeutic alliance,

01:05:31.740 | the point at which the person will drop out.

01:05:34.420 | - Are these people with borderline personality,

01:05:38.140 | I don't know if you still call it a disorder.

01:05:39.980 | Nowadays, it gets a little bit into the,

01:05:42.500 | let's call it borderline with borderline.

01:05:46.140 | Do they exhibit the same sort of splitting idealization

01:05:50.820 | and then the idea that somebody is terrible

01:05:52.860 | and they want nothing to do with them

01:05:54.040 | in the context of work relationships, friendships?

01:05:56.300 | Does it extend out into other domains of life

01:05:58.940 | or is it unique to certain types of relationships?

01:06:03.540 | - I think it's a way of seeing the world.

01:06:05.820 | Remember, and the way of seeing the world essentially

01:06:08.940 | is very different from the left hemisphere

01:06:11.500 | and the right hemisphere.

01:06:12.340 | The right hemisphere sees the world

01:06:14.300 | through emotional relationships.

01:06:16.300 | And that, so that can become a trait

01:06:19.180 | that can be really a hard and fast trait.

01:06:21.980 | Let me put it another way.

01:06:23.380 | In the case of narcissistic personality disorder,

01:06:27.800 | the baby is all good.

01:06:31.940 | The caregiver, primary caregiver,

01:06:36.100 | is always thinking very positive about that infant.

01:06:40.800 | But when that infant now all of a sudden becomes depressed,

01:06:44.460 | the interactive regulation stops at that point in time.

01:06:49.660 | - The caregiver doesn't want anything to do with them.

01:06:51.980 | - So at that point in time, now,

01:06:54.820 | everything is unconscious.

01:07:00.760 | If you and I are together

01:07:03.340 | and there is a misattunement between us,

01:07:05.540 | what possibility, let's say in a dismissive attachment,

01:07:08.960 | is all of a sudden I will disengage?

01:07:11.980 | We got too close.

01:07:15.600 | And at that point in time,

01:07:18.880 | maybe I'm acting out my early attachment dynamics

01:07:22.700 | because what the baby is doing

01:07:24.400 | is expecting what the mother will do next.

01:07:29.660 | And at that point in time,

01:07:32.040 | there's a misattunement like that.

01:07:33.960 | And so in the case of a dismissive personality,

01:07:36.920 | that person will emotionally disengage, okay?

01:07:41.280 | Become very abstract at that point in time.

01:07:44.360 | And at that point in time, I can't feel you.

01:07:49.200 | I hear what you're saying.

01:07:50.600 | And so at all points in time,

01:07:54.280 | you have this situation of coming closer and moving apart,

01:07:57.440 | coming closer and moving apart.

01:07:59.120 | And this will be acted out

01:08:00.520 | in the therapeutic relationship also.

01:08:03.180 | And so that every time the person is,

01:08:08.040 | the anxious person is stressed,

01:08:10.520 | they'll come in closer to you now.

01:08:12.880 | Now, they're more demanding about what they need from you.

01:08:15.040 | Look at the tone of my voice.

01:08:16.840 | Well, the insecure avoidant now

01:08:18.680 | is now gonna deactivate it.

01:08:20.280 | And at that point in time, my voice will now get flat.

01:08:23.700 | You can't even hear the affective tone of my voice.

01:08:27.620 | So I'm telling you that we always pick up

01:08:30.840 | at the level of our own physiology,

01:08:35.000 | how emotionally close or distant

01:08:38.480 | that person is at this point in time,

01:08:41.680 | especially at points of stress,

01:08:45.120 | whether I'm coming in or I'm moving out.

01:08:50.040 | Let me go back to this.

01:08:51.520 | All of this is occurring at an implicit level,

01:08:54.740 | which is why you said something about reparenting, et cetera.

01:08:57.800 | Too much is on a conscious level there.

01:09:02.160 | If you really want to make these changes in a personality,

01:09:06.800 | they have to be changes in the right brain.

01:09:09.680 | And that's why all therapy now is looking into emotion.

01:09:14.140 | All therapy, no matter what form of therapy,

01:09:18.260 | it's laying on top of the therapeutic relationship

01:09:21.720 | and emotion per se.

01:09:23.920 | - I'm pausing 'cause I'm just taking all this in

01:09:26.940 | and thinking about what are the ways

01:09:31.620 | that people can start to tap into this right brain health

01:09:36.620 | or lack of health and ways to repair

01:09:40.980 | their right brain circuitry, so to speak,

01:09:43.900 | without a therapist, or is that just simply impossible?

01:09:51.740 | - No, it's not impossible, no, it's not impossible.

01:09:54.360 | We all do grow, and incidentally,

01:09:57.080 | our right brains do grow.

01:09:58.760 | But again, the key here, I'm suggesting,

01:10:03.760 | the whole idea about interpersonal neurobiology,

01:10:10.900 | it was the editor of the Northern Syria,

01:10:13.760 | interpersonal, which is the two-person situation.

01:10:17.360 | There has been too much of an emphasis on order regulation

01:10:21.120 | and not enough emphasis on interactive regulation.

01:10:23.800 | The real key to changing a right brain

01:10:26.720 | is finding people you can be close with,

01:10:32.260 | finding people you can be open with,

01:10:34.940 | finding people you can be vulnerable with,

01:10:37.840 | that literally you can show your shortcomings,

01:10:42.920 | and opening yourself up to those people

01:10:45.880 | as they open up to you.

01:10:47.360 | It's literally to form that right brain to right brain

01:10:50.920 | communication system with someone else.

01:10:54.120 | - I think I just got it.

01:10:55.580 | I think, if I'm not mistaken,

01:10:58.440 | what you're describing is interactive dynamics

01:11:02.560 | that create or elaborate on circuitry

01:11:06.800 | that exists in all of us,

01:11:07.880 | but that for some people might be atrophied

01:11:10.440 | because of the lack of proper nourishment,

01:11:14.080 | emotional nourishment early in life,

01:11:16.380 | but that we can engage these circuits,

01:11:19.640 | these right brain circuits.

01:11:21.040 | But then when we're not around these people,

01:11:24.280 | there must be something about the right brain circuitry

01:11:26.500 | that provides a sort of a soothing function

01:11:30.080 | so that we must know at an implicit level

01:11:33.360 | that we can do this.

01:11:34.800 | We know how to attach in healthy ways to people.

01:11:37.240 | We have a close friend we can rely on.

01:11:39.360 | We have maybe friends, plural.

01:11:41.320 | We maybe repaired a relationship with a sibling,

01:11:44.860 | this kind of thing.

01:11:45.700 | So it's not that these circuits need to constantly

01:11:47.880 | be engaged every moment with the barista,

01:11:50.560 | with the, you know. - No, no.

01:11:51.640 | - But that we somehow at an unconscious level,

01:11:55.840 | it must be that we come to realize

01:11:57.680 | that this circuitry has re-elaborated

01:12:02.000 | or is elaborated in a way that we know,

01:12:04.320 | quote unquote, we can do it.

01:12:05.760 | - You know, remember, part of the problem

01:12:08.300 | is being able to take in, to take these things in here.

01:12:11.660 | But the key to emotion, incidentally,

01:12:13.880 | let me throw out an important,

01:12:16.040 | another important term in terms of a therapy situation.

01:12:19.800 | I've said essentially therapy is about

01:12:22.440 | literally reworking emotion.

01:12:24.120 | And the key to mental health and physical health

01:12:28.880 | is also a right brain emotional situation here.

01:12:33.760 | The key here is that there are heightened

01:12:37.140 | affective moments in a therapy session.

01:12:40.560 | I'm gonna go therapy,

01:12:41.400 | then I'm gonna come back to your question.

01:12:45.080 | We've now formed a therapeutic alliance.

01:12:47.800 | The stronger the therapeutic alliance is between us,

01:12:51.280 | more empathy between us, so to speak,

01:12:53.240 | the more we can share.

01:12:54.620 | I'm now going to start to drop some of my defenses

01:12:58.720 | because the defenses are there to block affect,

01:13:00.880 | negative affect, and begin now to take a chance now

01:13:05.240 | to open myself up, you know, to somebody else's.

01:13:08.120 | But in a therapy session,

01:13:09.600 | somewhere around the middle of that session,

01:13:11.480 | a person comes in out of the world in a left brain state,

01:13:16.480 | somewhere in the middle of the session,

01:13:19.380 | they start moving into affect.

01:13:20.960 | And now the person is starting to talk

01:13:23.360 | in a more affective level.

01:13:25.160 | And now talking about a memory or some sad situation

01:13:28.440 | or something that just happened

01:13:29.640 | in a relationship with a couple.

01:13:31.520 | Now, you even start hearing my voices now.

01:13:34.380 | The voice tone change.

01:13:36.420 | And these moments, which only may last,

01:13:40.800 | believe it or not, 50, 60 seconds,

01:13:45.200 | are heightened affective moments.

01:13:47.880 | These are moments when all of a sudden

01:13:49.720 | we are both in the right and we are both synchronized.

01:13:53.320 | And the affective now is out there, so to speak.

01:13:57.180 | And that's the possibility now to get this change

01:14:00.400 | in these heightened affective moments.

01:14:02.240 | So to be in an interpersonal relationship with someone

01:14:06.240 | and to co-create with that person,

01:14:09.240 | a heightened affective moment in both of us,

01:14:12.580 | which we are sharing at that point in time,

01:14:16.160 | by taking the risk to be open at that point in time also.

01:14:20.200 | These are the moments in life

01:14:22.400 | that you really go into your autobiographical memory.

01:14:25.600 | I remember my occasion with that person.

01:14:29.560 | I can bring back the whole context

01:14:31.840 | because remember the right brain acts with images, images.

01:14:35.960 | So I can bring back that image now.

01:14:38.120 | And I can remember the closeness that I felt

01:14:40.760 | at that point in time, et cetera.

01:14:43.240 | These are put into right brain.

01:14:44.600 | So we are always putting into our autobiographical memory

01:14:48.240 | these heightened affective moments.

01:14:50.080 | So to have those shared affective moments with other people,

01:14:55.080 | these are really whereby you're making changes in the right.

01:15:01.560 | And these are much more important, I want to suggest,

01:15:05.040 | than intellectually.

01:15:06.880 | Now, there have been certain fMRI,

01:15:10.440 | I'm now gonna move into a little bit

01:15:14.360 | of a different place here.

01:15:16.020 | What I'm suggesting is that these right brain

01:15:17.980 | to right brain communications are always going on.

01:15:21.000 | But certain people literally can't read them

01:15:24.600 | as well as other people can.

01:15:26.400 | And they can't read the face of voice.

01:15:28.340 | And they can't synchronize well.

01:15:31.320 | - Can I stop you and ask one question,

01:15:32.760 | which is, let's say that,

01:15:34.320 | let's take this conversation, for instance.

01:15:37.200 | I'm listening to your words very carefully.

01:15:39.920 | If I make an effort to listen especially carefully

01:15:42.960 | to what somebody is saying, the content of their words,

01:15:47.080 | is there a competition between left and right brain

01:15:49.720 | such that I'm now not getting

01:15:52.080 | as much right brain listening?

01:15:54.940 | - Yeah, okay.

01:15:56.140 | - This to me feels like the surrender aspect.

01:15:59.440 | Whereas I can, and I do this during these interviews

01:16:02.780 | slash discussions, where I'll sit back sometimes,

01:16:06.620 | and I'm still listening, but I widen my gaze.

01:16:09.640 | I don't look around, but I widen my gaze.

01:16:11.500 | And I'm trying to just feel something coming in.

01:16:14.740 | I'm not a therapist, obviously.

01:16:17.020 | No one would ever suspect that I was.

01:16:18.940 | But I only do it for a few seconds.

01:16:22.540 | And then I re-engage.

01:16:23.560 | And I used to think that it was like a relaxation of sorts.

01:16:27.300 | But inevitably, I feel like it's a different way

01:16:32.180 | to, the conversation takes a different direction.

01:16:35.500 | Is that more or less what you're talking about?

01:16:37.080 | - Yeah, that's a colossal shift.

01:16:38.420 | I mean, Stanley, the corpus callosum,

01:16:40.980 | you can shift from the left into the right

01:16:42.780 | in about 100 milliseconds.

01:16:44.780 | So essentially, you can't be in,

01:16:46.360 | you have to be in one hemisphere or the other.

01:16:48.660 | - So if I'm listening very carefully

01:16:50.300 | to exactly what you said,

01:16:52.180 | and I'm tracking everything you said,

01:16:53.920 | like we're in a courtroom situation,

01:16:56.660 | then my right brain is suppressed.

01:16:58.860 | - Okay.

01:16:59.700 | - Is that right?

01:17:00.520 | - Good feet, good feet.

01:17:01.360 | - Now watch where I go here.

01:17:02.460 | - Okay.

01:17:03.720 | - The right hemisphere is dominant for attention, okay?

01:17:08.420 | I mean, this baby and this mother,

01:17:10.220 | literally, she's focusing our attention

01:17:12.620 | on that baby's face tone voice.

01:17:14.700 | But there are two different types of attention,

01:17:17.020 | strong neuroscience to show this.

01:17:19.860 | The left brain operates by narrow attention,

01:17:23.420 | narrowly focused attention.

01:17:25.360 | The best example of narrowly focused attention

01:17:29.660 | is you are following my words one after the other.

01:17:33.140 | But there's another type of attention

01:17:35.000 | which is used by the right brain,

01:17:37.060 | which is called wide ranging attention,

01:17:39.940 | which comes right out of Freud,

01:17:43.380 | which he also called,

01:17:44.700 | maybe you'll remember this, evenly suspended attention.

01:17:48.060 | - I haven't heard that, but that's beautiful.

01:17:49.380 | - It's the same thing,

01:17:51.300 | which is much wider than that.

01:17:53.140 | And that form of attention is the form of attention

01:17:55.820 | that the right brain has,

01:17:58.080 | because the attention at that point in time

01:18:01.020 | is not only of what's coming from the outside,

01:18:06.020 | but also attention to what's happening in the inside,

01:18:12.900 | my own inside, the changes in my own physiology

01:18:16.580 | at that point in time also.

01:18:18.260 | So yes, there are these two different forms of attention.

01:18:22.220 | And essentially, the only way someone

01:18:25.380 | who was just narrow all the time,

01:18:27.960 | let's take a personality

01:18:31.440 | who just lives in the left hemisphere.

01:18:33.560 | - A hyper linear person.

01:18:35.160 | - Exactly, hyper logical, hyper rational,

01:18:38.600 | cannot really see the big picture,

01:18:40.160 | but literally that kind of a situation.

01:18:42.540 | So essentially, that kind of a person

01:18:45.160 | is always looking at the narrow aspects of it,

01:18:47.800 | and cannot see the broader context,

01:18:52.420 | the broader context,

01:18:53.840 | because there's a context that's being set up.

01:18:56.500 | Right now, between you and I,

01:18:58.620 | there's also a context that's being set up.

01:19:01.360 | And that context also has to it

01:19:04.280 | a kind of a feeling of safety and trust

01:19:06.820 | as we literally just go off wherever our thoughts are,

01:19:11.780 | with some idea that literally you will be able to follow

01:19:14.620 | that and you'll come back with me at the same time.

01:19:17.100 | So the context, the emotional atmosphere between us

01:19:22.220 | changes when you go left into the right like that.

01:19:25.960 | Point here is that it used to be thought

01:19:29.520 | that the only way you could understand the brain

01:19:33.640 | was by looking more intra-psychically into one brain.

01:19:37.680 | If you understood how one brain worked,

01:19:40.080 | and everything was intra-psychic,

01:19:42.260 | but then there's the interpersonal part of it.

01:19:44.720 | And so essentially, we're moving now

01:19:47.000 | from a one-person intra-psychic psychology

01:19:49.440 | to a two-person interpersonal psychology.

01:19:51.880 | You see what I mean by two-person?

01:19:53.240 | I got the mother here, got the baby there.

01:19:55.760 | I got the patient here, I got the therapist there.

01:19:58.400 | And between them literally are going back and forth

01:20:01.160 | at all periods of time,

01:20:03.320 | right brain to right brain communications

01:20:05.340 | underneath the conversation.

01:20:06.800 | So neuroimaging, hyperscanning,

01:20:09.840 | neuroimaging, you're familiar with hyperscanning,

01:20:12.980 | another paradigm shifting thing

01:20:15.440 | that is occurring now in neuroimaging.

01:20:17.820 | For the first time, we can now scan two people,

01:20:21.940 | NIRS, EEG, whatever you want,

01:20:24.340 | while they are in the middle

01:20:26.140 | of a basic interpersonal interaction,

01:20:28.860 | a numberable interaction between the two of them.

01:20:31.840 | These studies have now been done.

01:20:33.840 | And what they did was that they found

01:20:37.020 | is that the two brains,

01:20:39.280 | especially when they're into emotional states,

01:20:44.460 | and when they are looking at each other face-to-face,

01:20:47.340 | and they're concentrating literally

01:20:49.100 | on how to empathically be with that person, et cetera,

01:20:52.820 | emotions, so to speak,

01:20:54.580 | they find that the right brain of one

01:20:57.620 | will synchronize with the right brain of the other.

01:21:00.380 | And the part of the right brain

01:21:03.460 | that synchronizes with the other

01:21:05.340 | is the right temporal parietal junction.

01:21:09.580 | A lot of evidence now

01:21:14.380 | on the right temporal parietal junction.

01:21:17.880 | I said right brain to right brain.

01:21:20.400 | So now, the eyes are coming.

01:21:24.000 | And remember, the eyes are,

01:21:25.080 | I mean, direct eye connection

01:21:26.760 | really is the most powerful form of communication.

01:21:29.160 | - I always remind people,

01:21:30.320 | these are two little bits of brain

01:21:31.760 | outside your cranial vault.

01:21:33.120 | As weird as that might seem,

01:21:34.360 | they are two bits of brain.

01:21:35.480 | Your retina is central nervous system,

01:21:37.160 | and you're looking at,

01:21:39.320 | that's about as close as you can get

01:21:40.480 | to looking at somebody's brain state as anything.

01:21:42.680 | - Well, you know, the eyes are being controlled

01:21:46.000 | by the autonomic nervous system.

01:21:47.280 | So you got the,

01:21:48.120 | you have an autonomic nervous system

01:21:49.640 | with an autonomic nervous system synchrony here,

01:21:52.000 | so to speak.

01:21:52.840 | But essentially, what's occurring at this point in time,

01:21:57.520 | face, voice, gesture.

01:21:59.620 | The face is processed in the posterior parts

01:22:04.000 | of the right hemisphere, the face processing.

01:22:05.920 | Right hemisphere, face processing.

01:22:07.640 | The posterior parts of the right hemisphere,

01:22:10.880 | the sensory areas of the right hemisphere,

01:22:13.120 | process the voice.

01:22:15.400 | The melody of the voice, the tone of the voice.

01:22:18.260 | That's different than the semantics of the voice.

01:22:20.160 | - So this is prosody.

01:22:21.200 | This is what the Italians do so well.

01:22:24.080 | - Right, right.

01:22:25.120 | And the posterior parts of the right hemisphere

01:22:30.880 | also will process gesture and tactile, okay?

01:22:35.520 | All of that comes together,

01:22:38.440 | is integrated together

01:22:40.120 | in the right temporal parietal junction.

01:22:42.800 | So when two people literally

01:22:44.440 | are empathically synchronizing with each other,

01:22:48.800 | when we are sharing the same emotional state,

01:22:51.980 | the patient says at this point in time,

01:22:56.640 | "My God, it's rage.

01:22:59.060 | "I never realized it was anger."

01:23:01.240 | And at that point in time,

01:23:03.900 | the empathic therapist who is synchronizing,

01:23:08.480 | we are both literally now

01:23:11.520 | in that right temporal parietal junction.

01:23:13.720 | But the right temporal parietal junction

01:23:15.920 | is what sends the communications

01:23:18.660 | and receives the communications.

01:23:21.720 | Got me here?

01:23:22.540 | So essentially, that's where our linkage is

01:23:27.540 | and we are now literally in a right brain

01:23:29.920 | to right brain communication.

01:23:32.200 | And what they found was

01:23:34.000 | during a real psychotherapy situation

01:23:38.360 | where the patient comes in and they're there

01:23:40.580 | because they have interpersonal relationships problems

01:23:43.700 | and emotional problems,

01:23:45.560 | and they're face-to-face and they're eye-to-eye,

01:23:48.280 | and they're tracking each other's like that,

01:23:50.960 | you will find that synchronization.

01:23:53.740 | So the synchronization between my right temporal parietal

01:23:57.960 | and your right temporal parietal

01:24:00.360 | is a right brain to right brain communication.

01:24:03.200 | That right brain to right brain communication

01:24:05.660 | is always occurring in that kind of a context.

01:24:08.880 | And therefore, the most important new change

01:24:13.600 | in psychoanalysis is that the unconscious

01:24:18.020 | just is more than just happening at dreams.

01:24:21.660 | It's happening at all points

01:24:24.000 | because the unconscious we now know

01:24:27.040 | is a relational unconscious.

01:24:29.280 | It communicates with another relational unconscious,

01:24:33.580 | right brain to right brain.

01:24:34.920 | And this has really changed so much now

01:24:38.240 | in our understanding about what psychotherapy

01:24:40.720 | is about also.

01:24:42.120 | Incidentally, I wanna point out

01:24:43.400 | the major change mechanism in psychotherapy now

01:24:47.900 | is not insight, it's not cognitive insight.

01:24:50.680 | It's more the ability to have

01:24:53.440 | an emotionally laden conversation

01:24:56.040 | with another human being

01:24:57.440 | and to make emotional connections

01:25:00.080 | with another human being,

01:25:01.480 | which is why the therapeutic relationship really

01:25:04.080 | is the factor of the change.

01:25:05.840 | And that's very different than the old days

01:25:07.560 | was your unconscious is here,

01:25:10.360 | the analyst is there.

01:25:11.600 | I'm now going to interpret what you're doing

01:25:14.300 | as you are sinking down into the right.

01:25:17.080 | But I'm gonna stay up left and interpret it.

01:25:19.200 | That's why there was a real limitation to that.

01:25:21.760 | And that's why psychoanalysis really changed now also

01:25:25.080 | to a face-to-face contact,

01:25:27.400 | not just the couch also.

01:25:29.620 | - Fascinating and makes total sense

01:25:33.000 | based on the newer imaging tools,

01:25:36.320 | revealing synchrony, et cetera.

01:25:38.880 | I have two questions that can be asked in parallel,

01:25:43.580 | music and dogs.

01:25:46.100 | Why music and dogs?

01:25:48.500 | Well, some of what you're describing

01:25:51.120 | reminds me of the state shift that occurs

01:25:54.520 | when I hear particular pieces of music

01:25:57.760 | for which I'm not paying attention to the lyrics

01:26:02.340 | or in some cases the lyrics matter.

01:26:05.800 | I'm listening, but they don't make any sense.

01:26:07.800 | Like if they were read out as a paragraph,

01:26:09.600 | it wouldn't make any sense,

01:26:11.220 | but it feels like there's some fundamental truth there.

01:26:14.400 | So this is, I could state specific musical preferences,

01:26:18.360 | but it's highly individual.

01:26:19.480 | So for some people, it's classical music,

01:26:20.880 | for other people, it's music that contains lyrics,

01:26:22.780 | but there's this feeling like, yes,

01:26:26.400 | like there's a truth there.

01:26:28.000 | And I feel that truth,

01:26:29.480 | even though the content of the words,

01:26:31.640 | let's take, couldn't help myself,

01:26:33.080 | like a Bob Dylan song, for instance,

01:26:34.680 | he's certainly could be considered a poet, right?

01:26:37.500 | You know, and if you read the lyrics just as a paragraph,

01:26:40.840 | you'd be like, this is nonsense,

01:26:42.400 | but the way that it's sung, the meaning behind it,

01:26:44.580 | the timbre in the voice, the prosody, et cetera,

01:26:46.800 | and presumably the emotion that he was feeling

01:26:48.740 | at the time when the music was recorded

01:26:51.600 | communicates with us and we enter a synchronous state.

01:26:55.080 | And then in parallel to this,

01:26:56.160 | I mentioned dogs where, sure,

01:26:59.160 | they have a left brain and a right brain,

01:27:01.840 | but I think with animals generally,

01:27:04.400 | if they're domestic animals

01:27:05.520 | and we have a very close relationship to them,

01:27:07.880 | we can really feel a resonance with them

01:27:11.000 | and presumably them with us.

01:27:13.080 | And for anyone that's experienced it,

01:27:15.360 | some people might be chuckling now,

01:27:17.440 | but it's nothing short of profound, right?

01:27:19.680 | The extent to which we really feel like they see us

01:27:22.160 | and we see them and there's a bond.

01:27:24.640 | Clearly not the same magnitude as a parent-child bond,

01:27:28.240 | but nonetheless.

01:27:29.580 | So music and dogs, do you think it's tapping in

01:27:32.380 | to this same right temporal parietal structure?

01:27:36.440 | - Well, I think that it's, first of all,

01:27:40.200 | the right temporal parietal junction is the posterior

01:27:44.040 | and the right orbital frontal is the cortex.

01:27:45.640 | So the whole right brain there, so to speak.

01:27:47.400 | - Okay, so we're going,

01:27:48.240 | we're basically going from anterior to posterior,

01:27:50.000 | just their structure's the whole way back.

01:27:52.000 | - The orbital frontal is the regulation part of it.

01:27:55.340 | The temporal parietal junction

01:27:58.520 | is the communication part of it.

01:27:59.880 | So the whole key is the communication of emotion

01:28:02.200 | and the regulation of emotion.

01:28:03.600 | - Where is the surrender switch?

01:28:05.560 | - The surrender is the colossal switch

01:28:07.600 | out of the left into the right.

01:28:09.920 | - So not so much paying attention

01:28:11.520 | to the content of the words, the logic behind them,

01:28:14.880 | the logical flaws that might exist, the analytic part,

01:28:18.320 | but rather how the words sound,

01:28:20.520 | how the words feel, literally.

01:28:22.740 | - Yes, and clearly one of the, first of all,

01:28:26.660 | there has been a lot of neuroscience done on music

01:28:29.900 | and incidentally, most of that is right brain,

01:28:32.460 | showing right brain activation in music.

01:28:35.740 | The key here, even more than that,

01:28:38.660 | it's particular music to me.

01:28:43.160 | It has a particular meaning to me, subjectivity.

01:28:47.100 | And a lot shows that music is essentially a mechanism

01:28:51.780 | of affect regulation.

01:28:53.140 | But I wanna suggest to you that pets

01:28:55.140 | are also a mechanism of affect regulation.

01:28:58.740 | - Dogs everywhere smiling.

01:28:59.860 | - Absolutely, but maybe by the same things,

01:29:03.300 | I wanna suggest, I think that the communication

01:29:05.460 | between dogs, and I've had four dogs myself,

01:29:08.420 | is that literally it's tactile,

01:29:11.180 | it's the touch of that animal,

01:29:13.660 | it's the prosody of the voice,

01:29:15.300 | because literally that dog understands

01:29:17.860 | the prosody of the voice.

01:29:19.740 | And also, to some extent, I think they can read our faces.

01:29:24.740 | But more than that, there's one other sense

01:29:28.220 | which I haven't brought up,

01:29:29.260 | which is part of human relationship, and that's smell.

01:29:33.180 | Okay, and this is overlooked in human relationship.

01:29:36.020 | But in real intimate contacts between human beings,

01:29:39.100 | the smell is really a key there.

01:29:41.260 | You know, think about sexual arousal.

01:29:42.860 | So dogs are really very strong on our smell, et cetera.

01:29:47.020 | But if attachment is reunion after a separation,

01:29:51.820 | you come home, there's that dog sitting there, literally,

01:29:56.700 | and immediately you're down-regulating the day.

01:29:59.940 | You have now taken off the whole left hemisphere

01:30:02.380 | and our whole stresses of all of that,

01:30:04.220 | and you're now shifting left into right,

01:30:07.260 | and we use the mechanisms that is available to do that.

01:30:10.740 | And music is one of the ways to do that.

01:30:13.180 | So in some sense, music is an auto-regulation,

01:30:16.180 | although music can be live music,

01:30:18.700 | and then it's more than that.

01:30:19.860 | So that's the case.

01:30:21.020 | - Or playing music with others.

01:30:22.460 | This is something I'm incapable of

01:30:23.820 | because I have no musical ability.

01:30:25.540 | But playing music with others,

01:30:26.740 | you can see that when we talk about the chemistry of a band,

01:30:30.260 | it's so incredible to witness that,

01:30:32.500 | and then to feel it in mass

01:30:34.540 | with thousands maybe of other people.

01:30:36.620 | - Yeah, there have been studies to show

01:30:40.360 | that during a performance,

01:30:44.820 | there is a synchrony, there are synchronized states

01:30:47.940 | between the performer and the audience.

01:30:51.100 | And it's really, they're all,

01:30:52.740 | you can have thousands of people

01:30:54.260 | literally in that same synchronized state

01:30:56.300 | at that point in time here.

01:30:57.780 | - You mentioned earlier Steven Porges' work,

01:31:01.740 | and we know that brain and body

01:31:03.820 | are connected in both directions.

01:31:05.620 | And I should know this, but I don't know

01:31:08.420 | if the right brain has preferential communication

01:31:13.060 | with the parasympathetic or sympathetic

01:31:16.520 | or other aspects of, well, Vegas is parasympathetic,

01:31:19.700 | but I think it's probably both.

01:31:20.980 | I think the more we discover about the Vegas,

01:31:23.780 | it's likely to be mixed sympathetic, parasympathetic,

01:31:26.180 | but I'll catch some heat for that, but that's okay.

01:31:28.180 | But is the, bodily sensing is a real thing.

01:31:32.100 | Like there are ways that our diaphragm

01:31:33.740 | and our core relax when we're happy.

01:31:36.780 | I mean, all of this is obvious to anyone,

01:31:39.340 | but I'm just curious how right brain

01:31:41.700 | links up with bodily states.

01:31:44.060 | - The right brain is more connected

01:31:45.900 | into the body than the left brain.

01:31:47.720 | Incidentally, I'm going to,

01:31:50.500 | do you know the name Ian McGilchrist?

01:31:52.280 | - Yes, I know the name and many people have commented

01:31:55.580 | on our YouTube channel that I need to talk to Ian.

01:31:58.300 | That's all, I have gotten that far, but I've been busy.

01:32:03.660 | - Get him, get him.

01:32:07.140 | - Great, Ian, we'll send you an invite.

01:32:09.180 | - Yeah, I mean,

01:32:10.360 | there has been ongoing dialogue between us for some time,

01:32:17.060 | but Ian talks about that the right brain

01:32:19.460 | literally is much more connected into the body

01:32:22.380 | and incidentally is also more dominant for will.

01:32:27.380 | Unconscious will is more important than conscious will,

01:32:31.620 | which you kind of, at the very beginning,

01:32:33.260 | we were talking about the left versus the right.

01:32:35.460 | - Yeah, so I'm curious as to, you know,

01:32:38.500 | how people can start to sense

01:32:42.540 | these right brain, left brain shifts.

01:32:44.900 | We talked about how paying a little less attention

01:32:48.300 | to the content of words and a little bit more

01:32:50.820 | to how a conversation is feeling,

01:32:53.320 | independent of the word content, might be part of it.

01:32:58.060 | We hear a lot these days about, you know,

01:33:00.060 | how body posture matters, you know,

01:33:02.920 | like if people are closed up with their arms crossed,

01:33:05.220 | I don't know, but sometimes I'm just a little chilly,

01:33:07.180 | so I'll cross my arms, and sometimes I'll cross my arms

01:33:09.140 | and lean in and I know that I'm in a much more attuned state.

01:33:12.180 | So I don't put too much weight on that,

01:33:13.740 | but maybe I should put more weight on that.

01:33:16.420 | And what are your thoughts?

01:33:17.340 | - Yeah, there's a classical work on by an analyst

01:33:22.340 | by the name of Manuel Hammer,

01:33:24.540 | and he was talking about how to reach the affect.

01:33:27.380 | And what he suggested is that there are certain moments

01:33:29.700 | of the session when literally my body,

01:33:33.740 | in order to pick up the communications of the patient,

01:33:37.100 | I lean back.

01:33:38.660 | I'm not leaning forward, I lean back

01:33:41.240 | and let the atmosphere literally come over me, so to speak.

01:33:45.020 | - I love this, and I'm just, forgive me for interrupting,

01:33:47.220 | but I love this because people, especially on social media,

01:33:50.700 | they take a piece of information like, you know,

01:33:53.420 | if you're leaned back, you're disengaged,

01:33:55.140 | you're leaned forward, you're engaged,

01:33:56.300 | but you could also just turn it right around and say,

01:33:58.260 | if you're leaned forward, you're impending,

01:33:59.780 | and then the person doesn't have space.

01:34:01.180 | And so it becomes, frankly, it becomes a bunch of BS.

01:34:04.060 | - But notice here what I'm talking about,

01:34:05.660 | what the therapist is attempting to do

01:34:07.500 | is to make an emotional connection, an empathic connection.

01:34:11.220 | And in order to make an empathic connection,

01:34:13.420 | you're leaning back, you're leaning back,

01:34:16.940 | and literally as you lean back, all of a sudden,

01:34:20.520 | you're able to pick up things and hear things

01:34:22.900 | that you didn't see before, so to speak.

01:34:25.460 | And frequently what happens when you're

01:34:27.740 | in an emotional connection like that,

01:34:29.840 | images will come to your mind,

01:34:31.460 | images which really represent the emotional experience

01:34:35.320 | that the other is having.

01:34:37.060 | And at that point in time also,

01:34:39.020 | what you'll find is that just as you're picking up

01:34:41.860 | that person's image, he's picking up your person image.

01:34:45.820 | And what Hammer says is that what we have here

01:34:49.940 | is something that's like an affective wireless

01:34:53.420 | between the two, because it's going back and forth

01:34:56.660 | between the two of us, just like a right brain

01:34:59.740 | to right brain communication, affective.

01:35:02.780 | Freud said the human unconscious acts like a receptor

01:35:07.780 | and it picks up the communications of the unconscious

01:35:12.780 | of another human being.

01:35:14.760 | Freud said literally human beings can pick up

01:35:17.080 | the unconscious without it going through the conscious mind.

01:35:22.040 | So again, in that kind of a context,

01:35:24.720 | you know, that all makes sense.

01:35:28.040 | The other thing I wanna say about all of these behaviors

01:35:31.240 | that are going on now when there is

01:35:32.700 | an emotional communication,

01:35:34.120 | the key is spontaneous behaviors, spontaneous,

01:35:40.760 | not thought out behaviors, spontaneous behaviors.

01:35:44.420 | When there's spontaneous behaviors,

01:35:47.920 | there's more trust in them being, you know,

01:35:50.020 | in the first place, but there's not a mind

01:35:52.140 | that is attempting to present anything.

01:35:54.140 | And when you have two people revealing

01:35:57.340 | their spontaneous behaviors to each other,

01:36:00.420 | even if they're not sure how they're gonna be affected,

01:36:03.160 | that also is a matter for synchrony.

01:36:05.180 | In order for there to be synchrony,

01:36:07.260 | there has to be spontaneous two-way communications,

01:36:11.900 | turn-taking communications.

01:36:13.600 | And incidentally, as we talk about this conversation,

01:36:17.660 | what is set up in the attachment

01:36:19.400 | between the mother and the infant,

01:36:21.160 | the infant makes a cry, the mother responds,

01:36:24.820 | is that they are now taking turns.

01:36:26.940 | There's turn-taking behavior.

01:36:29.500 | And in a good relationship,

01:36:31.860 | what you find is more or less smooth turn-taking behaviors.

01:36:36.780 | And incidentally, you and I, who have never met before,

01:36:40.220 | are not doing too badly

01:36:42.140 | in these spontaneous turn-taking behaviors between us.

01:36:46.380 | - I appreciate you saying that.

01:36:47.540 | I feel the same way.

01:36:48.600 | Text messaging has become a dominant mode

01:36:52.660 | of communication these days.

01:36:55.500 | I've hosted a few guests expert in emotions in the brain,

01:36:59.400 | Lisa Feldman Barrett, for instance, and others.

01:37:03.620 | And she and others have talked about

01:37:07.060 | how the emojification of emotions,

01:37:10.500 | just like a smiley face or a crying face,

01:37:12.180 | or, "Oh, goodness," or, "You're mind-blown,"

01:37:14.380 | these things are convenient,

01:37:16.020 | as is shorthand text, lack of punctuation, et cetera.

01:37:19.580 | But today's conversation also highlights the extent

01:37:23.720 | to which text messaging is pretty much devoid

01:37:27.220 | of most everything that you're talking about.

01:37:29.220 | A green bubble or a blue bubble, seen or not seen,

01:37:33.300 | read or not read, depending on how you set your settings.

01:37:36.940 | The latency, the turn-taking,

01:37:40.780 | sometimes people layer in multiple conversations

01:37:43.060 | and you're going back and forth

01:37:43.900 | about a couple of different things,

01:37:45.080 | and then your food order comes.

01:37:47.460 | I mean, sure, the human brain can handle this,

01:37:52.100 | but this seems either not good,

01:37:55.120 | neutral, that is, or bad

01:37:59.500 | for building and reinforcing communication.

01:38:03.300 | It actually concerns me, but of course I'm now 49,

01:38:07.060 | so I can say things like, "Now that I'm 49,

01:38:08.900 | "I can say things like that," you know?

01:38:10.300 | But it concerns me because I think that you can imagine

01:38:13.980 | the young brain and the older brain

01:38:16.980 | essentially not being good at interpersonal dynamics.

01:38:22.660 | Because of text messaging.

01:38:24.260 | - I agree.

01:38:25.100 | I agree.

01:38:27.380 | First of all,

01:38:30.320 | let me mention that one of Ian's ideas

01:38:36.300 | is that essentially the left hemisphere

01:38:40.100 | is becoming more and more dominant today,

01:38:42.160 | not only in this country,

01:38:45.260 | and that he sees that as really as a huge problem,

01:38:48.060 | because the title of his book is "The Master

01:38:50.100 | "and His Emissary," and the emissary,

01:38:52.260 | which is the left brain, betrays the master.

01:38:54.940 | So he sees that one of the problems

01:38:56.560 | we're dealing with right now

01:38:58.120 | is that the left hemisphere is there,

01:39:01.340 | and that these right hemispheres,

01:39:03.100 | even metaphors are problematic.

01:39:06.100 | - So I have a rule.

01:39:07.020 | I don't argue over text.

01:39:09.080 | I don't like to argue over text.

01:39:12.700 | I don't like to argue, period,

01:39:13.780 | but I don't, you know, I'll pick up the phone.

01:39:16.340 | I'm of the generation where we called one another.

01:39:19.840 | I find text to be completely devoid

01:39:24.160 | of what I'm really seeking in terms of connection.

01:39:26.740 | And I think that there's an entire,

01:39:31.960 | I know there's an entire generation of people

01:39:33.840 | that grew up communicating mainly through short message.

01:39:38.580 | Jonathan Haidt, the author of "The Anxious Generation,"

01:39:41.800 | has been encouraging young kids to put away their phones

01:39:44.440 | and get out and interact more,

01:39:45.720 | encouraging parents to let their kids be more,

01:39:47.400 | what they call free-range kids, and do this kind of thing,

01:39:50.120 | arguing that there's far fewer dangers

01:39:52.040 | in the physical world

01:39:52.880 | than there are in the online world for young brains.

01:39:56.280 | He makes a convincing argument.

01:39:57.840 | For those of us that are seeking to have better connection,

01:40:03.800 | maybe even do some healing of the right brain circuitry

01:40:08.000 | that you've been talking about today,

01:40:09.680 | do you think that there's a hierarchy of effectiveness

01:40:14.120 | such that text would be perhaps at the bottom,

01:40:19.120 | voice memo maybe next level up, I'm thinking here,

01:40:22.640 | phone call, there was a time

01:40:24.720 | when we wrote handwritten letters,

01:40:26.040 | and those felt very meaningful.

01:40:27.880 | I've kept handwritten letters from people

01:40:30.080 | that I cared about and that cared about me.

01:40:32.840 | The handwritten letters sort of proves

01:40:34.560 | that it doesn't have to be a real-time exchange,

01:40:38.200 | but there's something about handwriting.

01:40:40.200 | A typewritten letter, by today's standards,

01:40:42.280 | would also be a significant thing,

01:40:45.000 | but there really seems to be something special

01:40:49.640 | about a letter, a face-to-face conversation.

01:40:53.720 | - Right, in terms of literally the point of the letter,

01:40:58.520 | and the attempt of the letter literally

01:41:01.240 | was to make a connection.

01:41:03.600 | I can remember in my childhood going away to camp,

01:41:06.720 | and we would write letters back and forth,

01:41:09.040 | and the words that were being used there

01:41:12.520 | were literally about making a connection

01:41:14.440 | and filling you in, which also meant

01:41:16.600 | that I had to reflect about myself

01:41:18.400 | and what was happening with me and how I felt about that,

01:41:20.920 | and I was sharing all of that with another person.

01:41:25.920 | That has really gone into the background,

01:41:29.720 | and things have become much more impersonal,

01:41:31.720 | but I want to point out that for a certain type

01:41:34.400 | of personality, texting fits perfectly.

01:41:38.720 | - These are people that walk around with left brains

01:41:41.000 | that are not hypertrophied?

01:41:43.000 | - People living in the left, living in the left,

01:41:47.640 | that's right.

01:41:48.480 | I just want to point out, there are other ways,

01:41:51.560 | literally, of feeding the right brain of what it needs,

01:41:54.240 | and one of the other ways also is going out into the world,

01:41:58.840 | is traveling, is being in nature,

01:42:01.800 | sharing those kinds of things also.

01:42:03.320 | Those are also in addition to the in-person situations here,

01:42:08.320 | but we're seeing changes here, we're seeing changes here,

01:42:14.000 | and I'm not so sure too many of these are good.

01:42:18.880 | Let me throw out, I made a little list

01:42:23.280 | of the areas which are now being studied,

01:42:27.240 | which are showing that clearly this is right brain dominance

01:42:31.680 | in these activities.

01:42:33.480 | - Please share.

01:42:34.840 | - Stop me at any point.

01:42:36.040 | Essentially, the argument that I'm making

01:42:40.280 | in this new book on human nature

01:42:42.880 | is that the highest levels of human nature

01:42:45.720 | are in the right brain.

01:42:46.920 | So essentially, intuition, now remember,

01:42:51.600 | intuition is there for all kinds of professions,

01:42:56.040 | that one of the things that a fireman gains over time

01:43:00.720 | is literally how to read a fire.

01:43:02.680 | So intuition, purely right brain,

01:43:06.160 | and intuition literally is drawing

01:43:08.960 | on body sensations also, et cetera.

01:43:12.200 | Imagery, creativity, a lot of evidence showing creativity,

01:43:17.200 | the ability to process things,

01:43:21.720 | something novel and something new, metaphors,

01:43:29.760 | imagination, studies, humor, music, poetry, art,

01:43:34.760 | morality, compassion, spirituality,

01:43:53.640 | and the best for last, love.

01:43:58.640 | - That's a spectacular list,

01:44:06.360 | making the right brain circuitry

01:44:08.880 | at least among the most exciting circuits,

01:44:13.880 | certainly important circuits.

01:44:15.600 | - I threw an ad for the next book.

01:44:17.280 | - I love right brain psychotherapy, love, love, love it.

01:44:22.120 | I own a hardcover copy.

01:44:24.560 | I've owned it for a couple of years now.

01:44:26.840 | Highly recommend it.

01:44:28.000 | We'll put links to your books in the show notes.

01:44:30.160 | - Get to development of the unconscious mind also.

01:44:32.680 | - Okay, will do.

01:44:33.680 | What are some activities that allow us to,

01:44:39.760 | quote unquote, drop into our right brain circuitry

01:44:43.200 | a bit more?

01:44:44.680 | One that immediately leapt to mind,

01:44:46.640 | as you mentioned nature and interacting with nature,

01:44:49.160 | and we were talking about music, is walking.

01:44:51.980 | And earlier we talked about, you educated us on rather,

01:44:58.720 | this notion of wide range attention,

01:45:02.060 | this evenly suspended attention

01:45:07.600 | that is associated with the right brain,

01:45:09.280 | this kind of widening of gaze

01:45:10.620 | as opposed to narrow gaze and narrow attention

01:45:12.900 | that is associated with left brain circuitry.

01:45:16.440 | When we're out in nature and when we're ambulating,

01:45:20.080 | when we're walking,

01:45:21.760 | provided we're not looking at our phone, one hopes,

01:45:24.360 | or looking for something specific

01:45:26.080 | like a bird that we've spotted,

01:45:28.960 | we tend to be in panoramic vision.

01:45:32.520 | I'm a vision scientist, so I can't help myself.

01:45:34.360 | You know, what we call magnocellular vision.

01:45:36.120 | These are like big pixels.

01:45:38.160 | - I'm aware.

01:45:39.000 | - Yeah, taking it all in.

01:45:39.880 | And it's more spherical than kind of a cone of attention.

01:45:45.880 | I would imagine that might be more right brain associated.

01:45:50.240 | What are some things that you,

01:45:53.240 | if you suggest to your patients like,

01:45:57.200 | hey, you know, until our next session,

01:45:59.120 | you know, do you encourage them to journal,

01:46:01.280 | free associate journal, to listen to music,

01:46:03.240 | to take walks,

01:46:05.220 | or do you restrict the activation

01:46:11.240 | of this right brain circuitry to the session

01:46:12.840 | and then let it just show up as it were?

01:46:15.200 | - Yeah.

01:46:16.040 | - Yeah.

01:46:16.880 | So you let them sort of just default

01:46:18.560 | to what's happening.

01:46:20.480 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:46:21.320 | Two points here.

01:46:26.200 | First of all, on therapy,

01:46:31.740 | I think there's been too much of an emphasis

01:46:36.080 | on technique in therapy.

01:46:40.360 | And really what the right brain research is showing

01:46:45.360 | is that it's the right brain process

01:46:51.240 | that's the key here more than the technique.

01:46:54.400 | And so that being the case,

01:46:58.400 | due to my own training,

01:46:59.520 | it's psychotherapy has shown to be more effective

01:47:02.880 | in making long-term changes

01:47:05.120 | and even changes after the treatment is over

01:47:09.600 | than other forms of therapy like CBT is.

01:47:11.800 | So I think there's been too much on that.

01:47:13.560 | On the matter of other experiences,

01:47:15.480 | the right brain is also dominant

01:47:19.440 | for processing novel information.

01:47:22.880 | Anytime something new comes up,

01:47:25.880 | the right picks it up first

01:47:28.240 | and you get a burst of more adrenaline out of that also.

01:47:31.440 | So the pursuit of continuing to have a curious mind,

01:47:36.880 | an open mind,

01:47:38.300 | I think is part of that.

01:47:42.560 | And seeking new experiences

01:47:45.600 | in different parts of the world.

01:47:47.500 | There's an economic piece of that also,

01:47:51.320 | but with new challenges,

01:47:52.760 | bring up new challenges that we have

01:47:54.720 | and to essentially, if possible,

01:47:59.200 | feed curiosity.

01:48:02.120 | Curiosity.

01:48:05.960 | Einstein even said something essentially

01:48:08.980 | along those lines there.

01:48:10.360 | So new experiences with new people,

01:48:13.080 | new challenges, new places to see,

01:48:16.560 | travel, I think is one of those.

01:48:20.200 | And it turned out to be one of the great fortunate gifts

01:48:24.080 | that came from all of this.

01:48:25.680 | I was a therapist only for about 45 years

01:48:31.720 | and I came into this late.

01:48:33.160 | I wrote this book late

01:48:35.340 | and literally it's led me into new relationships

01:48:40.340 | and new friends.

01:48:41.480 | Who starts making friends at 45 and 50 years old?

01:48:44.520 | But again, novelties.

01:48:46.080 | And sharing that, I think is also another way of doing that.

01:48:51.080 | Plus, you said this, I'll repeat it, exercise.

01:48:55.880 | Exercise is a key here.

01:48:57.820 | I happen to be interested in energy and in mitochondria

01:49:03.440 | and there's a scientist, Navio at San Diego,

01:49:08.440 | who has written on this

01:49:11.100 | and he's talking about the healing process.

01:49:13.340 | And part of the healing process literally is exercise.

01:49:18.140 | That's fundamental to healing of whatever,

01:49:21.900 | physical and mental, and also restorative sleep.

01:49:25.820 | So taking care of our body.

01:49:29.120 | One of the things that we learn early in our experiences,

01:49:34.120 | mostly taught through the bodies,

01:49:37.360 | literally how to take care of our bodies.

01:49:39.480 | And as you're all aware of, you don't see that

01:49:43.000 | in certain pathologies.

01:49:46.080 | And you also have certain,

01:49:47.880 | and I'm talking about more than just self-destructive

01:49:50.080 | like cutting the butt.

01:49:51.000 | Ultimately, the ability to be able to look inward

01:49:58.240 | and to be able to reflect back upon the self

01:50:02.480 | and to be able to see even what we wanna see

01:50:08.540 | and don't wanna see.

01:50:10.180 | Now, I wanna just make a quick reference to defenses

01:50:15.180 | because defenses can be adaptive and maladaptive

01:50:21.020 | and they're important and they're there.

01:50:23.220 | For example, we have defenses against overwhelming affect,

01:50:26.340 | the association is defense against overwhelming affect.

01:50:30.200 | But we also have defense like repression,

01:50:32.200 | which is part of all human beings.

01:50:34.960 | And repression can be normal and adaptive

01:50:37.680 | or it can be maladaptive.

01:50:38.920 | And it's maladaptive literally

01:50:41.060 | when the repression is very strong, essentially.

01:50:44.760 | What you have there is that the left hemisphere

01:50:47.320 | is just shutting out anything coming over from the right.

01:50:50.520 | That's what repression is.

01:50:51.680 | The left hemisphere is just shutting that all out.

01:50:54.340 | So part of this is becoming more aware of those defenses

01:50:57.720 | that we have also.

01:50:58.680 | And I wanna make this point also.

01:51:00.520 | There are certain parts of ourselves which we cannot see.

01:51:06.320 | We can only see them when we're getting feedback

01:51:10.920 | from somebody who knows us and can see those things in us.

01:51:15.920 | And even if at the time they're uncomfortable,

01:51:19.560 | but we need that feedback from somebody we trust

01:51:22.320 | to be able to see.

01:51:23.720 | Which is why this ability literally

01:51:25.600 | to completely change one's psychology

01:51:29.080 | is highly problematic.

01:51:30.480 | Because remember what you're attempting to do

01:51:32.280 | is to change the right brain.

01:51:34.920 | Which is why intimate relationships, close relationships

01:51:39.260 | with whom we can share things is really a key there also.

01:51:45.720 | Everybody has blind spots.

01:51:49.320 | And the way out of that again is trusting enough

01:51:54.320 | to take in negative feedback at times also.

01:52:00.800 | My own feeling is that when something hits me,

01:52:05.800 | let's say a disappointment hits me.

01:52:07.980 | And one of the things I learned early about my own emotion,

01:52:13.460 | because in order to study emotion,

01:52:15.800 | you have to study your own emotion, et cetera.

01:52:18.900 | That for me, literally when something comes,

01:52:23.040 | I just let it come and move wherever it's gonna go.

01:52:27.120 | And feel it just at all of its intensity and strength.

01:52:30.760 | And even after sharing it,

01:52:32.840 | literally letting it penetrate down so to speak.

01:52:37.120 | And ultimately at some point it'll come back

01:52:40.200 | into another shape and a form.

01:52:41.920 | But our emotions are adaptive.

01:52:44.520 | And again I want to point out one of the major fallacies

01:52:47.840 | is that negative emotions are bad

01:52:50.960 | and positive emotions are good.

01:52:53.000 | Positive emotions are good, manic emotions, et cetera.

01:52:56.680 | Negative emotions are bad.

01:52:58.560 | Losses, you know.

01:53:00.480 | We are wired for all of these emotions

01:53:02.780 | because they have adaptive value.

01:53:04.760 | And we need to be able to be familiar

01:53:07.160 | with all of those different types of emotions.

01:53:09.840 | You know, that come our way in our lives.

01:53:14.200 | - I have a friend, he's a songwriter.

01:53:17.000 | And he told me that he has this process

01:53:20.240 | whereby he writes music every day.

01:53:23.320 | But he starts his day by painting or drawing.

01:53:27.480 | And I think he's sold some paintings and drawings,

01:53:30.840 | but that's not his main vocation.

01:53:33.320 | But he told me that he draws and paints

01:53:36.200 | as a way to sort of grease the gears to songwriting.

01:53:41.200 | And then I learned that Joni Mitchell did this too,

01:53:44.360 | or something similar.

01:53:46.520 | And I can't help but wonder whether or not

01:53:49.560 | they've unconsciously tapped into a mode

01:53:52.960 | of bringing right brain circuitry up

01:53:54.760 | in terms of its activity.

01:53:56.140 | Neither of them are known as painters or artists,

01:54:01.600 | but of course musical artists

01:54:02.960 | and quite accomplished ones at that.

01:54:04.880 | Does that sort of tool or technique make sense?

01:54:09.940 | - Yeah, it does.

01:54:10.780 | Essentially it's creativity, you know,

01:54:12.620 | which again is the ability to see something novel

01:54:15.000 | in a new way.

01:54:16.960 | To look at the same thing, but through new eyes.

01:54:19.080 | So I think those are ways of literally,

01:54:22.400 | artists know literally how to surrender out of the left

01:54:26.880 | and get into the right.

01:54:27.880 | And you're seeing these mechanisms of surrender.

01:54:30.720 | But let me share into something else more autobiographical

01:54:33.160 | about what you're saying.

01:54:35.120 | When I decided to, I knew that I was gonna write something,

01:54:39.040 | you know, at a certain point in time.

01:54:41.820 | And so for 10 years, I went into a period of self-study.

01:54:45.800 | And literally I went to a library, Cal State library near me

01:54:50.360 | and I just went through the stacks.

01:54:51.980 | You remember what it was like to go through the stacks?

01:54:53.860 | - I do. - And I started to move

01:54:54.860 | into psychology, into neurology, into chemistry.

01:54:58.580 | But then I found myself doing something else.

01:55:01.220 | I went back to the piano.

01:55:02.580 | I took piano as a teenager, it led nowhere.

01:55:06.300 | But as an adult, I went back to the piano.

01:55:08.660 | We have a piano in the house.

01:55:10.540 | Came from my in-laws because I wanted to know something

01:55:13.860 | in my fingers.

01:55:14.860 | I didn't want to know something in my logic.

01:55:17.860 | I knew that the way that I usually would understand things

01:55:22.260 | would be rationally and logically.

01:55:24.660 | But I wanted to be able to play and be able to play again,

01:55:29.660 | purely so that it was in my fingers.

01:55:32.220 | And I also wanted to be able to visualize.

01:55:35.320 | So I got to a point now where I started to be able to now,

01:55:39.340 | to be able to see a cell.

01:55:41.300 | And I could visualize mitochondrial moving now

01:55:44.620 | up into the dendrites at the cell membrane.

01:55:47.180 | So that visualization capacity,

01:55:49.940 | as well as the musical capacity,

01:55:52.340 | was my intuitive way of starting now more and more

01:55:56.340 | to get me to lean into the right,

01:55:59.020 | to be able to learn how to be in the right.

01:56:01.860 | - Amazing.

01:56:03.260 | I love this.

01:56:04.100 | And I'll refrain from sharing my, you know,

01:56:08.260 | personal use of such a sort of,

01:56:11.380 | I guess we call them avenues into the right.

01:56:13.580 | But I want to make clear, I understand.

01:56:16.980 | You're in the stacks of books in the library.

01:56:20.260 | It feels and sounds like a cognitive endeavor,

01:56:23.820 | a left-brain endeavor.

01:56:25.420 | But then it just came to you.

01:56:27.100 | I want to play the piano.

01:56:28.740 | Or through the research that you were doing,

01:56:33.380 | this 10-year self-research, amazing, by the way.

01:56:36.380 | I'm like so struck by that.

01:56:38.180 | Then, did it just come to you in a flash?

01:56:40.620 | Like, I want to play the piano again.

01:56:42.460 | And was it because playing the piano contrasted so much

01:56:45.900 | with looking through the stacks, or they were aligned?

01:56:48.060 | - No, it just, those, for me, that was exploration.

01:56:53.060 | It was exploration, it was all new information.

01:56:56.180 | And I found that I could master more

01:56:57.900 | than what the field that I was trained in.

01:56:59.780 | Let me give you one other experiences

01:57:01.980 | that is a lot of evidence to show.

01:57:05.140 | The aha experience is right-brain also.

01:57:08.300 | So there are times when literally insights

01:57:11.500 | will come quickly and suddenly,

01:57:14.100 | and they'll seem to come out of nowhere.

01:57:15.620 | And all of a sudden, the muse is there.

01:57:17.660 | So that was an aha experience.

01:57:19.900 | And when I thought about it,

01:57:20.820 | it just made all kinds of sense.

01:57:22.500 | I mean, there was a purpose to it,

01:57:23.980 | because again, I needed to get past doing that.

01:57:28.460 | Let me tell you something else that I decided to do

01:57:31.140 | very early on as I was setting off

01:57:33.220 | into this 10-year period.

01:57:35.380 | I decided never to memorize anything.

01:57:38.180 | - Tell me more.

01:57:41.420 | - It's a lot of effort that gets nowhere.

01:57:44.180 | Literally what I wanted to do

01:57:45.780 | is I wanted to understand it

01:57:47.620 | in the way that I could understand it.

01:57:49.780 | So there's a lot of wasted time in memorization.

01:57:53.900 | And that being the case, as you can imagine,

01:57:57.020 | I have a rather enormous memory.

01:57:58.860 | I know where things are, I know where they are,

01:58:01.340 | I know how to get them.

01:58:02.580 | I know what's important,

01:58:04.460 | and I know how to put it into a place where I can get,

01:58:06.780 | I know where that article is.

01:58:08.100 | And incidentally, when I'm working,

01:58:10.300 | originally, I would write everything down,

01:58:14.020 | and the writing had an effect

01:58:15.620 | of putting that more into my memory.

01:58:17.980 | Even now, when I'm studying,

01:58:20.420 | I'll take papers, I'll Xerox them,

01:58:24.580 | and I'll read them at my desk.

01:58:26.060 | I will not read and study right off the computer.

01:58:29.220 | In other words, I was learning my own technique of learning.

01:58:32.780 | - So important, I often get asked,

01:58:37.380 | what's your note-taking process?

01:58:38.740 | How do you prepare a solo episode?

01:58:40.260 | I do these long solos

01:58:41.500 | that I have only a few pages of notes.

01:58:43.540 | But I could describe it,

01:58:44.940 | but the process is so specific to the way that I learn

01:58:47.900 | across the whatever, six, eight, 10 weeks

01:58:50.140 | that it takes me to prepare for one of those,

01:58:51.740 | sometimes more, that it wouldn't really translate.

01:58:55.540 | Like, it doesn't matter.

01:58:57.020 | - No, but there's a process of introspection there,

01:59:00.620 | about literally, how do I learn,

01:59:03.260 | and how can I literally absorb the information

01:59:08.020 | so that it goes in deep?

01:59:09.420 | The left hemisphere, essentially, is the surface hemisphere.

01:59:12.540 | The right hemisphere is the one of depth, so to speak.

01:59:15.780 | And what goes into the right, for example,

01:59:17.740 | if you have an experience, an emotional experience,

01:59:20.420 | that's really important,

01:59:21.820 | that goes deep into your autobiographical memory.

01:59:24.180 | That's much deeper than your attempting

01:59:25.940 | to memorize something at any point in time.

01:59:30.940 | - Given the extreme importance

01:59:33.140 | of this right brain circuitry

01:59:34.700 | and of this autonomic synchrony between mother,

01:59:39.700 | and typically mother, primary caretaker, that is,

01:59:43.840 | and infant, what are some things

01:59:47.100 | that are known from the literature

01:59:49.300 | as critically important about that stage

01:59:51.820 | in terms of amount of time spent with the child?

01:59:56.820 | Oftentimes, parents are working.

02:00:00.060 | There are nannies, or any number of different things.

02:00:02.660 | There are a lot of different structures nowadays

02:00:04.360 | for families and balancing work and family.

02:00:07.020 | But is there anything known about how to,

02:00:09.020 | I hate to use the word optimize,

02:00:10.260 | but maximize the health of the relationship?

02:00:14.100 | - Yeah, I don't think that this culture,

02:00:16.660 | compared to other cultures,

02:00:18.160 | really provides for that kind of time.

02:00:20.780 | I think that people are stressed because of that.

02:00:25.100 | And now I'm gonna talk about maternal leave

02:00:27.460 | and paternal leave in other rich countries.

02:00:30.680 | The paternal leave is three months,

02:00:36.180 | and maternal leave is six months or more in Scandinavia.

02:00:41.060 | So these other countries have figured out

02:00:44.580 | this time of life is critical,

02:00:48.140 | that if you really want to affect a personality

02:00:51.220 | and help shape that personality to be a moral person

02:00:56.420 | or to have values, et cetera,

02:00:58.820 | the time literally that they put in is the earliest years.

02:01:02.620 | That's when it's there, so to speak.

02:01:04.980 | And without that kind of leave policy,

02:01:08.500 | in this country, most people go back to work at six weeks.

02:01:13.500 | Six weeks is at the beginning

02:01:16.540 | of the critical period of the right brain.

02:01:19.160 | The autonomic nervous system is in a critical period

02:01:22.900 | at six to eight weeks.

02:01:24.380 | The amygdala is coming into a critical period.

02:01:27.440 | The basolateral amygdala, the insula, and the cingulate

02:01:31.280 | are in a critical period at that point in time.

02:01:34.020 | This is before the child has formed an attachment

02:01:38.180 | or a separation.

02:01:40.260 | So I see this as literally, and as I'm well aware of,

02:01:45.060 | there's now talking about this more and more.

02:01:47.900 | In fact, the recent debate,

02:01:49.780 | there was discussion of this also about this problem.

02:01:53.860 | The London School of Economics had a study

02:01:58.020 | about what is the best predictor,

02:01:59.780 | the best childhood predictor of adult satisfaction in life.

02:02:04.620 | And the best predictor was emotion,

02:02:07.840 | and the second was the child's conduct,

02:02:10.860 | and the third and last was the child's IQ.

02:02:15.380 | We have things upside down here.

02:02:17.780 | We are focusing too much on executive functions

02:02:22.780 | that come online at the third year.

02:02:25.380 | And again, what I'm suggesting to you

02:02:27.460 | is that the whole foundations of our personality

02:02:30.980 | are starting in utero through the second and the third year,

02:02:34.900 | and then with the father, et cetera.

02:02:37.260 | That's where we literally should be putting the money,

02:02:40.060 | and the money should be there so that it provides the time.

02:02:43.220 | Every other culture has figured this out.

02:02:46.240 | The UNICEF took a poll in 2021 of 36 countries,

02:02:51.240 | rich countries, we came in last in emotional well-being,

02:02:56.620 | childhood well-being.

02:02:58.380 | Shame.

02:03:00.100 | - It is a shame.

02:03:03.780 | What's wonderful, however,

02:03:05.700 | is that you're highlighting these issues.

02:03:08.380 | So many people are hearing about this,

02:03:10.000 | and I encourage everyone listening

02:03:13.940 | to really take in the ordering of importance

02:03:17.940 | of what Dr. Shore just shared,

02:03:19.860 | that IQ, third on the list, emotion regulation,

02:03:23.380 | number one.

02:03:26.100 | - Conduct. - Conduct, yeah.

02:03:28.420 | So the idea that we need to train our kids up

02:03:33.200 | as little memorizing computers is clearly the wrong idea.

02:03:37.680 | Clearly, there's important information

02:03:39.360 | that needs to be committed to memory

02:03:40.960 | to be a functional human being,

02:03:42.900 | but that we're missing not just critical knowledge transfer,

02:03:47.800 | but critical emotional transfer.

02:03:49.740 | And for that reason, and for so many other reasons,

02:03:54.780 | I really want to thank you for coming in today

02:03:57.180 | and having this conversation.

02:03:59.540 | It's unlike any conversation I've had on this podcast,

02:04:02.740 | for several reasons, not the least of which

02:04:05.060 | is that you have this incredible knowledge

02:04:08.140 | of the neurobiology, which for me is a delight,

02:04:10.480 | and I'm sure for the listeners too,

02:04:11.940 | but also the clinical experience, which is so rich.

02:04:15.900 | And it's clear you've also done your own work

02:04:18.500 | in exploring these ideas, and you've been here for,

02:04:22.000 | and participated in the evolution

02:04:23.660 | of this whole right brain, left brain thing,

02:04:25.740 | you know, the advent of neuroimaging

02:04:27.180 | and how that's really shed new light.

02:04:28.900 | And I just love, love, love the way

02:04:31.780 | that you braid all this together

02:04:34.620 | in terms of actionable things with patient and therapist,

02:04:37.160 | but also just in terms of one's understanding of self.

02:04:39.800 | I'm certain people are going to take this knowledge

02:04:42.780 | into their lives and into the world,

02:04:44.300 | and it's been really enriching for me,

02:04:46.420 | and I'm certain it's going to be

02:04:48.060 | immensely enriching for them.

02:04:50.080 | So thank you for the work you do.

02:04:51.540 | Thank you for taking the time to come here today,

02:04:53.660 | and I'm excited about your new book,

02:04:55.780 | so keep us informed as to when that comes out.

02:04:58.560 | Maybe we'll have you back on for another discussion

02:05:00.480 | if you're willing.

02:05:01.700 | And just, you know, just thank you so much

02:05:04.400 | for entering this left brain, right brain dance and dynamic.

02:05:09.400 | It's been thoroughly enjoyable for me.

02:05:10.940 | - Absolute pleasure for me too, Andrew.

02:05:13.060 | Absolute pleasure.

02:05:14.700 | - Thank you. - Thank you.

02:05:16.340 | - Thank you for joining me for today's discussion

02:05:18.520 | with Dr. Alan Shor.

02:05:20.100 | To learn more about his work

02:05:21.180 | and to find links to his books,

02:05:22.740 | please see the links in the show note captions.

02:05:25.300 | If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast,

02:05:27.860 | please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

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02:05:47.960 | If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast,

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02:05:57.880 | For those of you that haven't heard,

02:05:59.020 | I have a new book coming out.

02:06:00.240 | It's my very first book.

02:06:01.840 | It's entitled "Protocols,

02:06:03.240 | An Operating Manual for the Human Body."

02:06:05.380 | This is a book that I've been working on

02:06:06.560 | for more than five years,

02:06:07.720 | and that's based on more than 30 years

02:06:10.040 | of research and experience.

02:06:11.600 | And it covers protocols for everything from sleep,

02:06:14.640 | to exercise, to stress control,

02:06:17.140 | protocols related to focus and motivation.

02:06:19.600 | And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation

02:06:22.960 | for the protocols that are included.

02:06:25.040 | The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com.

02:06:28.940 | There you can find links to various vendors.

02:06:31.320 | You can pick the one that you like best.

02:06:33.080 | Again, the book is called

02:06:34.000 | "Protocols, An Operating Manual for the Human Body."

02:06:37.520 | If you're not already following me on social media,

02:06:39.820 | I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

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02:06:48.660 | I discuss science and science-based tools,

02:06:50.600 | some of which overlap with the content

02:06:52.120 | of the Huberman Lab podcast,

02:06:53.600 | but much of which is distinct from the content

02:06:55.440 | covered on the Huberman Lab podcast.

02:06:57.080 | Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

02:07:00.520 | And if you haven't already subscribed

02:07:01.800 | to our Neural Network Newsletter,

02:07:03.640 | the Neural Network Newsletter

02:07:04.800 | is a zero-cost monthly newsletter

02:07:06.480 | that includes podcast summaries,

02:07:08.320 | as well as brief one-to-three-page PDFs

02:07:10.680 | that cover protocols for things

02:07:12.240 | like deliberate heat exposure, deliberate cold exposure.

02:07:14.800 | There's a protocol for managing your dopamine.

02:07:16.720 | There's a protocol for optimizing your sleep,

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02:07:32.880 | Thank you once again for joining me

02:07:34.240 | for today's discussion with Dr. Alan Shor.

02:07:36.840 | And last, but certainly not least,

02:07:39.240 | thank you for your interest in science.

02:07:41.240 | (upbeat music)

02:07:43.820 | (upbeat music)

Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain

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