Hi, guys. So we’re going to talk about the brain today. Last lecture I talked to you a little bit
about construct validation and what it means to measure something and so, we’re going
to take a bit of a detour. So I told you about measurement problems last
time. If you do your measurement properly in psychometrics—if
you’re studying personality, if you’re studying individual differences—there are
roughly six things that you can discover and they can be broken up different ways. That’s the big five model: extraversion,
neuroticism, agreeableness, contentiousness, openness, and they can be subdivided as you
should know because, in principle, you’ve read the paper that subdivided them into ten. That turns out to be quite useful, but for
now we’ll just presume that there are five, and then the other factor of human function
that’s pretty easy to derive and measure is IQ. Now, IQ likely nests under openness because
openness looks like it’s something roughly like intellect which is interest in ideas,
but—that’s probably an ability with ideas—but that’s probably measured better by an IQ
test, so if I ask you how smart you are and you say you’re pretty smart that would give
you a relatively high score on the intellect scale, but if I tested your IQ I will get
a better measure than that so in some sense IQ nests inside the big five model. But you can think about it as a separate thing
and I think it’s reasonable to do that so, you know, it depends on what you’re up to
fundamentally. Now, when the big five was first invented—invented
or discovered, depending on how you look at it—as I mentioned briefly, as well, it was
brute force statistics basically, so the idea behind the big five is that the—it’s called
the lexical hypothesis—and the lexical hypothesis is that, because human traits are so important
to us because we want to understand ourselves and, perhaps even more importantly, we want
to understand other people, and because we have language, there’s a reasonable probability
that we’ve encapsulated the structure of human personality within our language. And so, if you analyze the linguistic representations
properly, then perhaps you can extract out the central personality features, and that’s
basically what the lexical hypothesis is. And it’s important to know the lexical hypotheses. And it’s a bit more sophisticated than that
because it basically presumes that you can extract out relevant information about personality
from adjectives—descriptive adjectives—from phrases and from questions, and you’ll get
the same basic dimensional structure regardless of which of those techniques you use. And that turns out to be true for all intents
and purposes. Now, the lexical hypothesis depends on its
validity, depends for its validity on the initial claim that personality is accurately
represented within the structure of language. And so one of the things I would say is that
there’s a weak big five hypothesis and a strong big five hypothesis, okay? The weak big five hypothesis is that, insofar
as you use language to describe personality, personality has a five factor structure that’s
reliably extractable. Now the strong big five theory is that, no
no, personality has a five factor structure, and it’s accurately represented in language,
but when you pull out the structure from language, what you’re pulling out is actually representative
of genuine personality. Now, the weak hypothesis, I would say, is
established. And it’s worth knowing because what it means
is that if you invent a questionnaire that has anything to do with self description,
it might be self description at multiple different levels of analysis, like values for example,
instead of just adjectives, or attitudes instead of just adjectives, I mean, these categories
are sort of unclear. What’s the difference between your attitude
and your temperament? Well, it’s usually defined by the sentence
that you use the words in, right, you extract out the words, they sort of stand there alone—it’
s very difficult to clarify their meaning. Anyways, the lexical hypothesis I think is
one of the most well established—it’s one of the most well-validated claims in psychology. I think it may be the most validated claim,
apart from maybe the work that has extracted IQ out from cognitive questions. And basically it was brute force statistics,
you know, people developed different lists of adjectives and you can complain in some
ways about how they did it, and we’ll talk about that a bit later, but, because they
tried to throw out evaluative words like good and evil for example—those aren’t in the
big five—so they tried to only use adjectives that didn’t necessarily seem to be, like,
valued or devalued. So introvert and extrovert, well, they’re
opposites, but is it better to be an introvert? Is it better to be an extravert? Well, it’s not obvious so all the words
that cover that dimension can be kept in because there’s no value judgments associated with
it and the originators of the big five theory wanted to keep it as free of values as possible. Now that’s already a hypothesis right? It’s a hypothesis that you can come up with
an accurate description of human personality even if you eliminate all the words that are
clearly valenced. And we did an experiment here a while back
that was pretty interesting. We got hold of a data set of descriptive adjectives
and we put all the evaluative words back in. So, like nasty and horrible and awkward and
cruel, and then the good words as well: moral, pleasant, uplifting, all those things. And then we had people rate people they liked
and people they didn’t like using that expanded list and we got a real archetype in some sense
of the hateable person and a tremendous number of the words that were used came from the
evaluative dimension. So I think that when you throw out the evaluative
words you actually throw out a lot of what people actually use, descriptive words to
describe, because when you like someone or don’t like someone, if someone’s likeable
or unlikeable that’s a pretty important phenomena. I mean, you hang around the people you like
generally speaking and you don’t associate with the people you don’t like, so it’s
a fundamental choice. But we’ll talk about that later because
there’s reasons that happened and the reasons were valid, and it’s not that easy to fix
it. And besides that, the standard five factor
model has all sorts of utility. But you need to know what its strengths are
and its limitations are. Now, hypothetically, what you do to draw out
the five factor model was you take, imagine a set of all descriptive adjectives, okay,
and then you take a random sample of those descriptive adjectives, so that it’s not
biased—you’re not going to use all of them because, you know, if you asked someone
to describe themselves on a questionnaire using all the adjectives we have to describe
personality they’d be there for like a day. And so that’s not every efficient. And so you want to take a random sample. Maybe you only sample the words that people
are most likely to use. So for example if you go online you’ll find
that there are word frequency tables. You know, most of your language, about 500
words covers about 80% of what you say. You know, and I don’t remember what the
lexicon of the typical person is, I think it’s in the neighbourhood of 3500 words,
but that might be wrong, but there’s like 750,000 words in the English language. It’s an omnivorous language, it just pulls
words in from all over. And so we hardly use any of those words, and
you know, there’s ones that are used extraordinarily infrequently. So what you could do is you could look at
the total set of adjectives and then you could pull out, you know, identify the ones that
are used,, you know, the thousand most frequently used words and that’d probably cover 95%
of the territory, and then you can pick out a random set of 100. Then you could administer it to people, and
then you could factor analyze it—you’d administer it to lots of people—then you
factor analyze it and you get five relatively clear and stable factors. And the one that comes out first, it’s the
dominant factor in some sense, or the easiest measure or maybe the best represented in language
or something like that, it’s extraversion versus introversion. And the extraversion is a positive emotion
dimension. And it’s associated with enthusiasm and
assertiveness. And assertive people will say, they’ll dominate
the conversation with language. Or, well basically that’s the way to think
about it. Enthusiastic people, they’re up for anything,
you know, they’re the ones they’re always smiling and telling jokes and having parties
and that sort of thing. And generally extroverts really like to be
around people. So they’re happy, they’re gregarious,
they’re assertive, they’re enthusiastic, they’re noisy, they blink more than introverts—now
why that is I have no idea, but apparently they do [student laughter]. So if you notice someone blinking a lot you
can assume that they’re extroverts. If they’re not conscientious , you know
there’s this idea of people being impulsive, it’s a very badly defined term so when you
hear a psychologist talking about impulsivity the first think you could realize is they
don’t know, you don’t know what they’re talking about because probably there’s no
such thing as impulsivity. But extraverted people who are not very conscientious
tend to--that's one of the things you might think about as associated with impulsivity. There's all sorts of other things though to,
so--okay there's a positive emption dimension and that's extraversion and there's a negative
emotion dimension and that's neuroticism. And neuroticism seems to break down into something
like withdrawal and volatility. And volatile people are touchy. So, you know, they'll react quite a lot if
something negative happens. So if you tease them they might get upset
or if you start fighting with them in a sort of provocative way instead of sort of calming
everything down, they'll just ramp it up. And if there's two of you that're volatile
and you're having a conversation and the conversation goes a little bit, you know, into unpleasant
territory, you can really get each other going. So, yes? Student: "Is it like, in terms of the hero,
like internal states?" Both. Both, yeah. I mean, that's part of the problem with using
the word emotion because, you know, is an emotion an internal state or a set of behaviours,
and the answer to that is, as far as we can tell it's both. So now, I'm going to start talking about extraversion
and neuroticism, and part of the reason for that is because I think the evidence for the
relationship between those traits and the way the brain functions is, in some sense,
the clearest. Now, you remember the big five were extracted
out using statistical procedures, right, so there's no reason to assume necessarily that
the traits would bear any straightforward relationship to brain function. Because they weren't derived from analysis
of brain function. At least not directly. They were extracted from analysis of linguistic
representations of other people's and your own behaviour. But it turns out that there's quite a concordance
between certain elements of neuropsychological theory and the positive and negative emotional
traits: extraversion and neuroticism. And so what I'm going to do today is, I'm
going to talk to you about how positive and negative emotion are instantiated in some
sense, neurologically. But I'm going to put that in a broader picture
of brain function because, well first of all, why not? And second because a lot of the things I'm
going to tell you about the brain today will sort of retroactively shed light on some of
the clinical theories we've already talked about. So, which is nice, you know, because, one
of the ways you find out if something is true, and this is something we also talked about
during the last lecture, is that it manifests itself even when you use different measurement
techniques. And so you have statistical derivation, you
know, which basically took place, it really started to accelerate I would say, first in
the 1960s and then in the 1980s--it made a big comeback in the 1980s. But paralleling that were theories of brain
development. And they weren't really--the scientists that
were doing the one sort of research weren't really communicating with the scientists that
were doing the other kind of research. So they were methodologically separate. They used different techniques as well. They weren't talking back and forth much and
they were using different measurement techniques. So if they both come up with the same thing
then you think, oh well there's probably something to that because, you know, the sighted people
discovered it and the people who could hear discovered it. It's the same kind of idea. So, and you know, this has been worked out
in a fair bit of detail over the last 30 years really. And so the papers that you're supposed to
read with this, they're difficult papers. I believe you're reading Grey, which is a
model of the limbic system and basal ganglia, applications to anxiety and schizophrenia. And I think you have goals and behaviour,
that's the Carver&Scheier paper. I put the Swanson paper in as optional. That's cerebral hemisphere regulation and
motivated behaviour. That is a tough paper. And so is the Grey paper. And it's partly because these guys, both of
them, Grey's paper is a distillation of a very very thick book that's very very difficult. And that's been written twice. It was published first in 1982 and then again
in 1999. It's a brilliant book. It's had a tremendous impact on psychology. Grey was one of those people who, he was so
damned smart it was just painful. His reference list--I don't know how many
papers are in his reference list. Like 2,000. And one of the really weird things about Grey
that makes him stand out among scientists is, he actually read all those papers. And more than that, he understood them. And so that's really something. And so Grey's book on anxiety--he did a lot
of work on animal behaviour and, I'll tell you, if you want solid psychological information
about how the brain works, the people you pay attention to are the people who are studying
animal behaviour and animal brains. They know what they're doing. They're so methodologically careful. They're very very reliable. And the human neuropsychologists and the people
that use PET scanners and MRIs and all those things, they're way way way behind the animal
researchers. Because the animal researchers can just get
in there at a lot higher resolution and they can do much more stringent experiments. And they tend to be more methodologically
careful and more scientifically-minded. So anyways, the Grey book is a brilliant book. It took me like four months to read that damn
book. And I mean I really had to take it apart because
he probably poured 30 years of work into it, something like that. He worked a lot in 30 years. You know? He did a lot of experimentation and he read
a lot and so he built a model of the brain's function that was based partly on Russian
neuropsychology, partly on cybernetic theory, partly on animal behaviour, partly on neuropsychopharmacology,
and so that's the study of how drugs affect behaviour and cognition, and then partly from
a higher order conceptual perspective. And then he stacked all those things up, one
on top of the other, to make sure that the picture was the same at every single level
of analysis. It's absolutely brilliant work and it took
the social psychologists like--they really started about Grey, although he published
his book in 1982--they probably started thinking Grey seriously in about 2005. So it took 23 years for his book to start
to make its wide-scale entrance in the more general psychological community. Anyways, and so you're going to read this
paper which is a model of the limbic system and basal ganglia. And 30 years were distilled into the book
and then that was distilled into this paper. So you know, it's rough going. And then the Swanson paper, he's another guy--same
kind of guy--he's a developmental neuroanatomist and if you're really interested in psychology
I would really recommend reading those papers because they're hard going, but if you get
it, you have this substrata of knowledge underneath you that's really firm. And I really like Swanson's paper--the guy's
a genius. And what's so cool about Swanson's paper is
that, if you talk to human neuropsychologists you'll find that they're biased toward the
cerebral cortex. And they're sort of, I think there's sort
of an anthropomorphic pride that goes along with that. It's like, well how are we different from
animals. Well, you know, we've got thumbs and that's
great--hurray for the thumbs--and we stand upright, but if you look at us neurologically
the big difference is that we have this tremendously expanded cerebral cortex, especially the prefrontal
cortex, and so then people think--well because, you know, because that's one of the things
that differentiates us from animals and it's relatively evolutionarily modern, because
the human brain really really developed rapidly over the last two million years, that it's
like king of the brain in some sense. And it's the place where all the complicated
things happen. And that's just not right, because like, breathing--that's
complicated. That's why you don't get to control it voluntarily. And keeping your heart going, that's complicated
too, and so you don't get to have a decision about that. Your brain has made that automatic. Like millions of years ago because there's
just no way you're going to get voluntary control over something that's that vital. You know, so, assuming that newer brain areas
do more complex things, in some ways I think that's actually precisely backwards. It's the old brain areas that've been around
for, you know, a hundred million years, those things are smart. And that's why they survived for so long and
why they're distributed in so many different species. Your brain is somewhat like a lobster's brain--it's
a lot like a mouse brain. And it's a lot like a rat brain. And you might think a rat isn't a very good
model of a human, because after all, they're rats, but one thing I can tell you is that
a rat brain is a way better model of a human brain than your model of human brain is a
model of the human brain. You know what I mean? It's like people think of the brain. Well, they have a dopey model. Use a rat as an example, of course it's off
in some ways because rats can't talk for example, but there are so many levels of analysis where
you might as well be a rat, you know? Technically speaking. The pharmacology for example is very very
similar. The function of the neurotransmitters, the
basic anatomy of the structures. There's a tremendous amount of overlap. And so you might as well go for the commonalities
among brains before you focus in on the differences, because in some sense that way you get the
basic architecture right. Now one of the things that's really interesting
about Swanson, and he's not a neuropsychologist and he's not really even a psychologist--he's
a developmental neuroanatomist. And so, there's lots of ways of chopping up
the brain, you know, to look at it, because it's a really complicated thing. It's like saying, well how many ways can you
divide up a city to analyze it. Well, there's endless number of ways that
you can divide up a city to look at it. It's the same with the brain because it's
infinitely subdividable, in some sense, certainly all the way down to the molecular structures. And then even at higher order levels, you
know, because it's so complex and it's hierarchically structured you can just divide it up in all
sorts of different ways and so, at higher levels of resolution there isn't even that
much agreement on how to name the parts. Now, what the developmental neuroanatomists
do is that they look at how the brain develops in utero over time. Because it's a developing thing that sort
of unfolds like a flower unfolds, you know? And you can track which part of the early
brain turns into the later brain and you can get some sense of the--it's like an evolutionary
tree you know? If these three parts grew out of this part
then you can assume that there's some commonality between them. And that can also help you figure out how
to divide up the brain. And so that's one of the things that Swanson
does. But the other thing he does that I really
like is that, instead of looking at the brain from top down which is what human neuropsychologists
tend to do because they concentrate on say language and higher order cognitive functions,
which we think of as complex but you think, they're not that damn complex, you know, like
a computer can do mathematics so much better than you that there's not even any comparison,
you know. And it won't be very long before a lot of
the things that we think of as abstract cognition are things that computers are going to be
able to do. They just won GO tournament, for example. And the computers are now better--even your
PC is better at playing chess than probably anyone in this room. And the really high end computers are better
at playing chess than anyone who lives. And so computers are catching up damn fast,
but you'll notice that they don't do things like bus tables in restaurants, because it
turns out that's really hard. [Student laughter] Well, I mean think about
it. It's hard. You're carrying different sized loads all
the time. You have to interact socially with people
properly. You have to stay the hell out of the way. You have to exactly time when you're going
to come to the table. You have to move extraordinarily efficiently,
especially as the place gets busy. You know, there's a lot of demands on you
to do that job effectively. And you know, we think about it as a low end
job but it's not automated. The low end jobs are the ones that are going
to be automated first. And it's not obvious that they're going to
be the things that we associated with low-end labour. It's just that--well. Now, what Swanson did with the nervous system--I
was so happy when I found this paper because--he did exactly with the nervous system what Piaget
did with children. He showed how the nervous system builds itself
from the bottom up. And so Swanson lays right on top of Piaget--it's
lovely. And then the other thing that Swanson does
very very nicely is, he elucidates a lot of the Freudian presuppositions. So Freud of course talked about the id, and
the id is this, it's sort of like the archaic brain in some sense, you know. It's where all your primal impulses lurk. And you know he called that one thing the
id. Well you might say, well is there an id in
the brain and the answer is, well, vaguely. Vaguely. The brain does differ in terms of the age
of its subcomponents. And as you go deeper into the brain and closer
to the spine, the brain areas get phylogenetically older, and the more phylogenetically older
areas of the brain, which are underneath the cortex, they have their own little circuits. And there's some commonality between them,
and they do govern primal--I think of them as primal sub-personalities. We've talked about that before. It's better than thinking about them as drives
or goals or anything like that because not only do they--they're like sets of associated
behaviours, but they're not just that. They're also ways of looking at the world
and ways of thinking about the world. So, you know, if you're angry, it's not like
you're being driven to use your fists. That's not how it works. What happens is that the angry subpersonality
comes out and, you know, it does a whole bunch of things. It's got its own state of arousal. It's characterized both by positive and negative
emotion, which is something that's quite peculiar about anger, because it's both a defensive
action and an aggressive, forward moving behaviour. And it has a viewpoint. Like it's a biased viewpoint. If you're angry with someone, all you can
see about them is how damn irritating they are and how much they need to be defeated. You know, roughly speaking. And so it's a whole personality. Now, it's a one dimensional personality because
all it's really got is anger, and that's not enough to solve every problem. But you can't think about it as a drive exactly
because it's not deterministic. You know, even when you're angry, you have
a range of choices to make. Now, they're circumscribed by the fact that
you're angry, but it's best to think about it as a sub personality. I think you just get a lot farther that way. Now, what Swanson did--you know how Piaget
talked about children/infants, they start out with a few fundamental reflexes, right,
that they're sort of born with, including the ability to use their mouth and their tongue
as an exploratory device. And then they have certain reflexes that they
can manifest right away, and then they have the ability to modify those reflexes. And so, as far as Piaget was concerned, that
was enough to get the ball rolling. It was sort of like the child was like booting
up across time. It's got some, you know, outside of the operating
system you've got some bare processes in your computer that get it started enough so the
operating system can turn on. It sort of unfolds up into something complex. Well that's sort of what human beings do across
time. They start out with these basic reflexes that
are simple movements and then they earn how to modify the movements and then they learn
how to chain the movements together and then they learn how to use the chained movements
as tools, in some sense, as embodied tools, to allow these biologically determined sub-personalities
to operate in the world with some chance of success. Okay, now you can layer that onto the nervous
system, so part of what's happening when you get these basic movements down, the ones that
are not automatic like your ability to grip and the ability to do this with your hands
and all the basic subroutines you have with your body--those are automatized, they're
made into little machines, and a lot of them run spinally. You know, because what you think in some sense
is that, if you're walking, you're thinking about walking in some way--that's how you
walk. And it's like, that's not right. What happens is your orient yourself to a
goal, and in some sense you just disinhibit the system that knows how to walk. And then it more or less does it automatically,
and you know, you direct it. And you can modify what it's doing if there's
an error. But you kind of know that, right? You drive to school or you drive somewhere
you're familiar to, you don't even necessarily remember the drive if you've done it 50 times. It's because you're basically--in some sense
you're just sequencing automated behaviours. And, a good thing too because, if you didn't
have those automated expert behaviours at hand, you wouldn't know how to drive. Because, you're just not smart--the time that
you drive most consciously is when you first learn how to drive. Well, you don't want a conscious driver, you
want an unconscious expert driver whose consciousness is monitoring the world for anything unexpected. That's what you want. So, and that's the case with almost everything
you do. If you have to become conscious of what you're
doing, the probability that you don't do it very well is really high. And you know that because maybe you're talking
to someone, it happens when I'm lecturing sometimes--if I'm not really on top of things
I'll get self-conscious--and that's a terrible thing to have happen when you lecture, you
know, it just makes you stumble. If it's going well I know where I'm going
and I have all these little routines that're stories and things that I know that--they
just automatically sequence. All I have to do is point the lecture in the
right direction and, you know, the things that are logically associated with the direction
of the lecture will--they'll come up. They're primed in some sense. And so, Swanson helped me understand the functions
of the lower part of the brain quite well and then to map that onto Piaget. And one of the things he helped me understand
was just exactly how sophisticated the lower parts of the brain are, the more automatic
parts. Now, the behaviourists used to believe that,
or did believe and still believe to some degree, that a lot of your behaviour is reflexive. And the radical behaviourists, the guys from
the 50s, more or less made that case that even complex behaviour among animals is nothing
but the chaining together of automatic reflexes. So it was a deterministic chain of reflexes. Well, you do have reflex actions, you know,
so if you touch a hot stove you'll jerk your hand away, and your brain isn't involved in
that--it's just your spinal cord that's involved in that. Now, your brain is involved when the pain
hits, and maybe that's so you stop doing it in the future, but the conscious part of your
brain is too slow to get your hand away from the stove in time. And so, what's happening in your body in some
sense is that you have these multiple layers of neurological organization and some of them
are quite fixed--they're automatic deterministic systems and those are things you've really
really practiced and that you can just can run as a routine. And above that are those things that you've
chained together, but they can be chained together in different ways so they're less
automatized. And then if you keep going up they get more
and more complex and less automatized, until at the top, which is where your consciousness
is, roughly speaking, you have to program what you're doing, you know. You have to pay very careful attention to
how to go about doing this because you don't have the systems built into you. So you know what that's like if you're trying
to learn something new, it takes a lot of energy and you really have to pay attention. And then once you start to get it, well, what
really happens is there's things you don't have to think about any more. And thank god for that, because first of all,
you can't think that much because you're a limited capacity processor, and second, the
programming is quite difficult. Okay so if you look on the right there, there's a
little diagram that's a hierarchical--or a little table really and it's talking about
the motor system. Now the motor system is what allows you to
output action. And you're outputting action at all sorts
of levels that you don't even realize because, you know, you might think that sight is a
sensory activity, for example, but there's a very tight relationship between sensory
activity and motor activity. So, for example, when you're looking at a
scene, even though you don't know it, your eyes are going like this. And the reason you're going like that is because
if you held your eyes absolutely still, and you can actually learn to do this, if you
hold your eyes absolutely still your vision will fade right out and you won't be able
to see anything. And it's because the little retinal cells
that are picking up the light get exhausted and then so they stop transmitting. And so part of the reason you're zipping your
eyes back and forth is so that different parts of your eye can process the scene and it doesn't
get exhausted. And plus, you're also looking around and you're
looking at when things move, you know, you direct your attention to that, or if someone
makes a gesture. And so, you're actually kind of using your
eyes like tentacles, you know, to check out the information that's coded in the light. And even when you hear and that sort of thing
there's a fair bit of motor activity associated with it--you turn your head unconsciously
and there's all sorts of little motor actions in your ear that also help you tune in, and
so those things are tightly associated. But roughly speaking, the motor output is
action. And then Swanson shows that there are these
layers in the nervous system that go from the spinal cord upward. The first ones are the somatomotor neuron
pools, and the second are locomotor pattern generators, and the third are locomotor pattern
initiators and then the forth are locomotor pattern controllers. It's a hierarchy. And so, the way to kind of lay Piaget on it,
in some sense, is to think of the somatomotor neuron pools as simple actions that can be
implemented automatically. And then the locomotor pattern generator has
taken those simple actions and chained them into relatively more complex melodies of action,
so kinetic melodies, and then the locomotor pattern initiator more or less decides when
those kenetic melodies should be implemented. And even that can be unconscious. So it's still at that level of brain organization,
it's still more or less automatic. Even stimulus-response is a way to think about
it. And then you go one level higher and that's
when you get the ability to voluntarily use these automated things. So I can show you an example of how this works. This is called a ballistic movement. So, I'm going to take my hand and I'm going
to bring it down really fast right toward that edge. Okay so--alright now, so that's very fast
movement. Now one of the things that's cool about that
movement is that I don't have time, once that action starts, it happens so fast that it's
done by the time that the information about that action actually gets to my brain. Once I let that go, I can't control it. What I basically am doing is disinhibiting
the motor control systems that I already have established in my psychophysiological being. I'm disinhibiting one of those and then it
runs automatically. And so that's what you're doing all the time
when you're acting in life. It's kind of a neat--I wrote a paper a while
back with an undergraduate student of mine, he was a pretty bright character, and we got
invited to do a paper--I got invited to do a paper--on free will, and so we were thinking
about free will and, it's very interesting to think about free will in relationship to
these hierarchies because it sort of goes like this: it's that, out there in the future,
you've got free will. But as the future moves towards the present,
you don't. Once it gets close enough to the present you
have to have initiated something automatic that will happen. And so I can give you an example. People who play the piano very well, they
look ahead of where they're playing in the music. Because they know how to do this, they don't
have to think about it. What they have to do is look ahead so that
the part of them that knows how to do this gets ready to do it. And all of you are experts in that way likely--all
of those of you who drive--you're also experts that way. Because when you're driving, where do you
look? If you're a good driver, on the highway, you
look at least half a second or a second ahead. Why? Well because 50 feet ahead has already happened. Right, it's too close in time for you to do
anything about it, so basically what you're doing is you're looking at the road and then
you're disinhibiting sequences of actions--the ones that are going to correspond to what
you want to do with the road most adequately. And the closer you get to executing one of
those motor behaviours, the more automated it is. SO by the time you manifest the action, there's
no free will there at all. But you set it up to be released in some sense. So I can say, well, there's no free will in
that, but there was in deciding to do it at that point. So and that's sort of how your automaticity
meets your freedom. You've got to think about it as something
extending across time. Okay, so having established that then we're
going to get into the neurological localization a little bit. So you might say, well you collect all these
patterns of behaviour and then you automate them into routines. I can give you an example, so, for a child,
you know, when a child is first born, if you tap on its cheek it'll go like this. It's called a rooting reflex, and it'll move
its mouth and tongue. Well what it’s doing, roughly speaking,
is its searching for a nipple, and if you just put your finger there it'll clamp onto
that and start to suck. And so the child comes out with that ability. And that's a reflex, it's sort of built into
the neurology. But then when the child starts to interact
with the mother to actually breastfeed, well then that initial reflex has to be modified
quite substantially in the context of the relationship with the mother because the bare
reflex, it's enough to get the thing going but it's not enough to make it work. And so often mothers take a fair bit of time
to learn how to breastfeed, but it's also because the baby is taking a fair bit of time
to learn how to do it. So they have to establish the dance that goes
with that. And one of the things that's quite cool about
that dance, so to speak, is there's been studies done of depressed and non-depressed mothers
interacting with their infants. And so if you take a non-depressed mother
interacting with her infant and you just film them, and you speed up the film, you can see
the baby reacts and the mother reacts and the baby reacts and the mother reacts and
it's like a dance, you know, there's this continual flow of information between the
two of them. And if the baby's with a depressed mother
that doesn't happen. It's jerky and discontinuous. And so if you think about that you can see
how the dialectical interaction between the mother and child is building up the child's
repertoire of complex abilities--within a social context. I know I told you guys before, roughly speaking,
that kids really get socialized to play with each other between two and four. But that's not exactly true because even at
the lower level, more automated, and more primordial reflex behaviours, like the ones
that are associated with breastfeeding, even those develop under the constraints of social
guidelines. So society's always there, right from the
reflex level up. But you know what happens when kids are between
two and four, they have to learn to actually play, they have to learn how to play complex
games with other children and so that involves communication and negotiation at a verbal
level. And also with people their own age. So you know, it's continuous in some sense
and discontinuous in another sense. Okay so anyways, you might say well why do
you bother stringing all these things together, and well, you think about the breastfeeding
issue. Why does a baby bother to learn how to breastfeed? Well, that's pretty obvious isn't it. I mean, first of all, if it doesn’t then
it doesn't live. And there's a bunch of reasons for that--one
is obviously it's not going to be nourished properly, although, there are things you can
do to substitute for that. Although still, breastfeeding still seems
to be the best thing you can do for your baby. Although, you can work around it, but fundamentally
it seems to be the best thing you can do. But then the baby's also learning all sorts
of other things, like it's got skin-to-skin contact and it's snuggling and it being comforted
and doing eye gaze to eye gaze and it's cooing and the mother's imitating it and there's
just a lot of things going on there. And so the child is organizing all that, partly
to fulfill a basic biological need, which is two needs, both thirst and hunger, but
it’s also fulfilling its need for play, for example, because children have a circuit
for play. So you could say play is part of the id--it's
a fundamental biological need. And Jaak Panksepp was one of the people either
discovered that or worked on it, and that word was extended by Tiffany Fields in a hospital
in Florida--some really brilliant work. She was looking at Panksepp's work on the
necessity of tactile stimulation and she thought, hey I bet we could try that with premature
babies. Because if a baby's premature, a couple of
things are problems. I mean, first of all, at the need of the term,
pregnancy term, that's when babies lay on fat. You know, so they come out and they've got
some storage there in case things don't get going very well. And they're gaining a lot of weight in that
last period of pregnancy, so if they come out premature then they're really skinny. And then what happens often is they start
to lose weight and that's not good because they should be ramping up the weight gain
really quickly. A newborn baby will outgrow its clothes in
one week, you know, they're gaining weight quickly. The premature babies lose weight, and it's
hard to keep them going. They put them in an incubator, they feed them,
but what Tiffany Field did was, she had the nurses go in there with gloves and massage
the babies for three minutes ten times a day. And those babies gained weight as fast as
babies that were still in utero and you could still detect the differences in their development
six weeks later. Which in baby terms is like forever, right. I mean you change as much from zero months
to six months as you probably do from six months to 20 years old. It's such a radical transformation. Okay, the reason I'm telling you all this
is because, you lay out these hierarchies of behaviour that are well practiced and automatized
and brought under the control of social conditioning, but you really do them in the service of--well
that's the question. In the service of, we'll say, biological necessity,
for the sake of argument. Well you have to eat and you have to drink,
and so one of the reasons you lay out the hierarchy that's associated with breastfeeding
is so that you can do that directly, but also so that you can establish a relationship so
that not only are you doing it directly this day, but you're also going to do it tomorrow
and the next day and the day after that. And so the hunger system is integrated with
these other systems of biological constraint in some sense, and they're trying to come
up with an answer to the continual problem. So you have dedicated biological systems that
help you address problems that are associated problems that are associated with your biological
nature that are universal. And those would be the things that Freud would
describe as the id. So you can think of these hierarchies of motor
behaviour, which sort of develop up into sub personalities, as nested in some sense inside
of motivational states. So there's the motorbehavious hierarchy that
you use when you're angry, there's the motorbehaviour hierarchy you use when you're distressed--and
kids get very good at that, you know, so they'll cry, which is a reflex, but by the time they're
about two, they're pretty damn good at crying. You know, they've got a cry that sounds like
they're sad and upset when they're really angry. And so if you really listen you can hear the
difference. Because an angry baby sounds different than
a sad baby. But if you don't listen, the baby will have
you thinking it's sad no problem. Then you'll feel sorry for it and go help
it out, and really it's just thinking "up yours" [Student laughter]. So we know this partly because--so let's say
you've got a baby and it's under nine months, six months old, and it's crying in its crib. You think, well what should you do? You go in there and you pick up the baby and
you comfort it and you probably do that pretty much non-stop when the baby's that young because
they're so young they should really still be in utero--they're very young. But by nine months that baby's starting to
get smart. And so it's about nine months when it can
visually recognize people it knows and people he/she doesn’t know. And then, so the baby's in there and it's
squawking a bit and so, it wants some attention, and then someone walks in and it's not the
mother. And the baby bursts into tears and people
think the baby's all sad because its mother didn't show up. It's not sad, it's really irritated that the
wrong person showed up. And you can tell that because people have
done facial coding of the baby's expression and also its skin tone and an angry baby looks
angry. First of all it turns all red, it's really
angry. And you see that behaviour later too in temper
tantrums. Like a two year old that's having a temper
tantrum is just having a fit of rage. The rage system, because there is a rage system,
is just completely out of control, it's just absolutely dominating their behaviour. You don't really want to encourage that because
the rage system should start to be modulated by other systems and other higher order control
systems. Not so much suppressed or repressed which
is sort of how the Freudians would think , but integrated into more complex and sophisticated
modes of action, so the child can use its anger--which is an extraordinarily useful
capacity, because it allows you to defend yourself--so the child can learn to use that
in a sophisticated way so it can solve the problems that would lead to a rage attack
without ever getting to the point where it has to be enraged. That's a functional child--it's not like it's
learned to repress its anger, it's just that it gets along with people and never has to
get angry. So, now some kids learn to repress their anger
because they're in a household where any manifestation of anger is dealt with very very harshly. And maybe there's a rule that everyone has
to be nice to each other all the time, or else. Sort of a paradoxical rule. But anyways, you can imagine there's a lot
of these biological systems and so I want to show you some of their instantiation here,
so let's look at this one. When you get up above the spinal cord, there's
a little brain area, I'll show you about how big it is. There it is. So there's your brain, the top-on part, the
part on top, that's the cerebral cortex. That's the part that people are really proud
of. It's like, oh wow, look at our cerebral cortex. Doesn't it have a lot of neurons [student
laughter]. Then, in the middle there, there are older
brain area--phylogenetically old--and then as you go down toward the spinal cord they
basically get older and older and older and older. And more and more critical to your development. So the serotonin system, we talked about it
a little bit in lobsters, right. The serotonin system determines where a lobster
is in a dominance hierarchy, it determines whether it stands like this or whether it
stands like this. That's an old system. And when your brain is developing in utero
it's the serotonin system that guides its development. So that's how important it is, sort of like
the conductor of the orchestra, but it's also the thing that controls the entire unfolding
of the brain. And it's a really really archaic system, so
in some sense your being is controlled by these things that are ancient, beyond comprehension. Anyways, you look at the hypothalamus and
you think, well that's not very big. And yeah, it's not. But, if you take a cat and you--so a cat brain
looks something like that--if you take off all the stuff that's in light orange and most
of the top of the stuff that's above the hypothalamus that's in white--you just take all that out,
and it's a female cat and it's in a cage--you really can't tell the difference between it
and a cat that has all the rest of that brain. Now there's some things it can't do. It doesn't do very well if you take it into
a new situation because it can't learn. More importantly in some sense, it can't remember. So it's in a perpetual sense of everything
happening for the very first time. But it's still capable of a lot of the reactions
that would be necessary for you to stay alive. SO it can regulate its liquid intake, it can
regulate its food intake, it can react sexually, it's capable of defensive aggression, although
it'll really fly into a rage so it's kind of like a disinhibited two year old in some
sense. And as long as you keep it in the cage and
provide it with food and water it's like the way it lives. And it's hyper exploratory which I think is
just weird beyond belief. You know, you take the brain off a cat and
then all it wants to do is explore. Which is not what you think at all. It's like, a cat with no brain is really curious--it
just doesn't make sense. But it does actually because the systems that
drive your exploratory urge are rooted in that hypothalamus and they're actually the
same systems--it's individual differences in the functions and sensitivity of those
systems that are in part associated with individual differences in extraversion. So extroverts are sort of hyper exploratory
in social situations. Whereas introverts aren't. And the exploratory circuit that has its origins
in the hypothalamus runs on dopamine, roughly speaking, and then it runs through the base
of your brain and then up into your prefrontal cortex in particular. And it's also the system that responds to
cocaine and amphetamines and other drugs that people like to take because they heighten
positive emotion. So it's variability at a very very low level
in the brain that determines things like the differences in extraverts and introverts. Anyways, it's this tiny little part of the
brain and if that's all you have you can get along not too bad. But that's also because it's tiny from one
level of analysis, but it's really big from another. I mean, you can increase your resolution when
you're doing brain analysis all the way down to the molecular level and still be looking
at the brain, you know. Below the molecular level, at the atomic level,
well everything's made out of atoms. But the brain is already there at a molecular
level and it's insanely complicated at a molecular level, and the hypothalamus is way bigger
than a molecule. And so even though it's small compared to
the rest of our brain it's still a whopping big structure by atomic standards and so there's
a hell of a lot going on down there. And you notice the hypothalamus, you might
say, is there such a thing as the id. Well, yes and no. Is it in the brain? Yes and no. A really low resolution representation of
what's in the brain, that's one way of thinking about it. But then you might say, is there a hypothalamus? And the answer to that is, well, yes and no. Because there's the hypothalamic structure,
and you see it's made out of a bunch of things that are different. And so you could say, well should you even
group those things together. And the answer to that is, it depends on why
you're grouping them together. If it's useful for some purpose of understanding
or control, to group them together--they're similar in the way that they emerge in the
course of brain development, and they're roughly of the same phylogenetic age--but there's
lots of reasons to treat them as the same and there's lots of reasons to treat them
as different. It depends on what you're trying to do. Anyways, the hypothalamus has all these little
sub-structures that are really in some sense at the core of the sub-personalities that
we talked about. So, for example--okay so this is Swanson again
and he's showing you--this is a rat's brain from the bottom--and he's showing you the
layout of the hypothalamus. You see it's got all those different nuclei. It doesn't look like one thing, it looks like
a bunch of things. And so here he says, the descending paraventricular
nucleus is involved in the control of eating and drinking, and that's shown in green. So that's the thing that--when you get hungry
or thirsty--that's the thing that sort of turns on your hungry and thirsty sub-personality. And then the rest of the cell groups play
a major role in controlling two classes of social behaviour, that is, behaviours involving
interactions between animals: reproductive--that's the red areas--and defensive--the purplish
areas. So now what you can think is, you have all
those little subroutines that we talked about, that're sort of at hand and ready to go, and
then they're organized underneath these major classes of motivation so that, you have to
do something--like eat--and so it's like there's an eating robot in you, that's one way of
thinking about it, except it's smarter than that and it's alive and conscious. These things are alive, they're not machines
and they're not deterministic. You can think of them as low-resolution personalities,
or uni-dimensional personalities because the only thing the eating system really cares
about is whether or not you eat. And the drinking system is the same thing. You know, you see malfunctions sometimes in
people of these singular systems, so you can develop a condition if you have hypothalamic
damage where you'll drink water til you die and no one can stop you. They can lock you in a room away from sinks
and that would stop you, but you'd be raging away inside trying to claw through the door
to get to the damn water because you're so hyper-thirsty that it's all that there is
left of you in some sense and if you're allowed access to a tap, you'll just drink and drink
and drink and drink and drink until you drown. And, you know, people can say, hey you've
had enough water--it's like, forget that. The hypothalamus is a major league system,
and when push comes to shove, it's the thing that's in control. And one of the ways of thinking about the
way that you organize your life is that, the hypothalamus controls the major motivation
systems--we just talked about those--and so those are the things that people would think
about as drives. Although they're not drives, they're too complicated
to be drives. And then there's other systems that come up
later that we'll also talk about that govern emotion, like anxiety and a different system
that governs pain. Partly what you're trying to do as your organize
your life is to make sure those systems stay shut off. And then you think, well I'm in control. Well no, you're not. You just satisfied all the things that could
take control from you, and so now you have a modicum of choice. And basically what you're doing when all these
things have had what they need is you're running around exploring. You know, and that's also another one of these
circuits because the hypothalamus, as I already said, governs exploration. So, a lot of--see, psychologists often get
things backwards and they ask silly questions like why are people anxious. That's a stupid question. It's why are people ever calm--that's a question. Why are you anxious? Well, hmm, think of all the terrible things
that can happen to you. And they will happen to you, even worse, and
there isn't anything you can do about it. It's like why aren't you quaking in your boots
just sitting there. Well, that's a mystery. You know, and then, here you are in your normal
state--it's like, well no, this is not a normal state. People have been trying for seven million
years, as people, to create a situation so complex and comfortable that a couple hundred
of you can sit here without having your hypothalamus driving you toward something and actually
just listen to something for a few hours. That's not normal. That's so staggeringly abnormal that it's
a miracle. The typical person--and for most of human
history--it's like, you are hungry, man. And that's not the same. Like you people--well some of you have probably
been hungry in your life, but--is there someone here who's gone without food for more than
one day? Okay has anybody here gone without food for
more than a week. Okay, how about three days? Okay, so like, are you hungry? No. You're hungry when you haven't had anything
to eat for twenty days, then you're hungry. And the same goes for thirst and cold and
all the things we're just never exposed to. So we think civilized people are all calm
and nice and easy to get along with, it's like, yeah well you have absolutely everything
you need all the time and that makes you as easy to get along with as any completely insane
primate ever gets. Okay, so you might say, well god, if you can
survive with just the hypothalamus, what good is the rest of the brain? And the answer is, well, if you're thirsty--let's
say you're angry, the hunger system isn't going to be able to take care of that, right. So you're hungry, okay, that works. You're angry, that works. But then you have another problem, which is
you're hungry now and you're angry now, perhaps, you can move through those states. If you watch that, you'll see that in two
year olds--it's part of why they're so fun to be around. First of all, they're really excited and they're
running around playing and then they trip and they're crying like made and then you
poke them and they laugh and then they want something to eat and then they fall asleep
[student laughter]. You know, they're just run by their hypothalamus
and it's really fun to see because they're so alive and so enthusiastic and spontaneous,
but they're completely clueless. It's like, you take one of those creatures
to the mall and leave it there and it's just not happy at all. And the reason for that is, well it doesn't
know how to sequence any of its actions, right. It runs through these states of need, but
it isn't complicated enough to figure out how to address those needs in any consistent
sense across multiple environments in a social world. You need the rest of your brain for that. And that again fits in with the Piagetian
idea--is that what you're doing is you're taking these micropersonalities that are basically
instantiated within the hypothalamus and then you're organizing those into more and more
complex games. And you need the cortex to do that because
the cortex is partly what enables you to think about time. You know, because the hypothalamus, it's a
here and now thing. The hypothalamic cat lives in the present--there's
the present, and that's it. You can probably get some sense of that--like
one of the things that happens to people if they take amphetamines or if they take psychedelic
drugs is that some of the inhibitory control, some of the more complex control systems that
are cortical, shut down. And so then they enter a state where it's
all now and you know, the now just comes at people in that state. It's a transcendent experience, but of course,
despite that, you're not functional. And so in some sense you trade that transcendent
relationship with reality for a narrow functionality. And that's too bad and that's life, but it's
a tradeoff. So anyways you're organizing these sub-personalities
and you're using your cortex to do that because you don't just have to think about eating,
you have to think about, how am I going to get the food? When is the food going to come? How am I going to cook the food? What about all the other people that want
to eat? How do we regulate that in our family? And then how do we regulate that with the
fact that we also need to sleep and we need to work and we need to get along with other
people and we need to have something interesting to do and--it's ridiculously complicated. And there's no end to the complication because,
maybe you're just solving the problem for you, and then you're two. Or maybe you're trying to work it out within
your family. Well then that's sort of like the Crumb brothers,
they never get out of their family because they never come to an arrangement that works
well enough so that they can, in some sense move into the broader world. Then you solve the family problem but then
you've got the tribe problem and, maybe you can solve that to some degree, but then you
have the broader political problem and it's like--there's an infinite problems that crop
up for you to solve so there's plenty for you to do with your big cortex. And you know we paid a big price for that
thing because once we discovered time, we can make a bargain with the future, which
is basically what you do when you regulate your behaviour, right. You're making a bargain with the future. You say to yourself, if I forego so and so
now then, later, it'll pay off. And that's real useful. You can conceptualize the future, and you
can conceptualize the future as something you can bargain with. But there's a lot of cost to that. One is you don't get to do just what you want
right now, and of course that sucks--it's partly why people drink alcohol. Because alcohol is disinhibiting, it stops
you from--it actually doesn't stop you from thinking about the future--it stops you from
caring about what you think about the future. And that's just as good. And so then you can go out and have fun because
fun is impulsive and often extremely dangerous, because the long term consequences can be
really devastating. But it's a real pain to keep yourself controlled
all the time because you're foregoing direct reward constantly. I think it's part of the reason why people
in heavily industrialized complex countries aren't necessarily happy. You know, it takes a lot of grinding away
to keep all the machinery that keeps all of this in place going. So you're not getting typhoid and tigers aren't
tearing you apart, but by the same token, you have to be unbelievably disciplined and
ready to act constantly to keep everything that's so complex around you working. And that's not necessarily fun. Okay, now, let’s look at something else. Now you can tell me if I showed you this--I
hope I didn't show you this. You see that? Okay, good. Now some of you know this, and so you just
don't say anything. Although you probably don't know this specific
version. So if you've seen this sort of thing before
you're going to think you're smart while you're watching it, but it'll probably still trip
you up--I hope. Give me a sec here and we'll see if we can
actually get some sound out of this thing. Yeah, so that's quite the illustration. So one of the questions you might ask is,
well okay first of all, how many of you didn't see the gorilla? Okay, how many of you have seen this sort
of video before? Okay so you knew about the damn gorilla [student
laughter]. Of the people who didn't know about the gorilla,
how many people didn't see the gorilla. Well, some. Okay, fine. How many of you got the other things? Both of them? Okay, well so you get the point. The point is--and it's a brilliant experiment,
it's an insanely brilliant experiment--that you're blind to a ridiculous degree. And your visual system and your brain are
constantly coping with the fact that you're blind. And you can kind of detect it to some degree
if you look at someone, but you pay attention to the things that surround them, you'll see
that--so, I'm looking at you. I can't see your nose for sure, it's gone. I can’t even see your face. I can see your glasses. I can't see any features in your face at all. Can you smile? No, the one behind. Well one of the things I've noticed when doing
this is that if you look here--look at my finger--but pay attention to my face, it's
really hard. Because normally when you pay attention you
move your eyes to what you're paying attention to. Okay so here's what you might see--the first
thing you might see is that you can't see my nose [student laughter]. The second thing you might see is that you
can really see my eyes, especially if they move [uproar of student laughter]. Weird eh? Isn't that weird? God, it's so weird. It's like all of a sudden these eyes pop up
and they're going back and forth like this. Yeah, so we'll try this too. So look at my finger again. You can also see teeth. Well, why? Well, if you're looking here and there's something
there with eyes and teeth, you should probably be able to see it right? So what that basically means is that you've
got this tiny little fovea, which is right in the centre of your retina, it's just densely
packed with cells and then those cells transmit information along the optic nerve, and they're
just connected like mad to cells in the visual cortex. But you don't have that much room, so you
can't connect all the cells in your retina to like 10,000 cells at the first level of
connection. You'd have to have a brain this big you know,
and you don't. So you get by, and part of the way you get
by is you're always moving your eyes around. And so it looks like you can see everything,
but you can't. In fact, out here, like if I'm looking at
you--now I can tell my hands are there, although if I didn't know they were hands I probably
couldn't figure it out--they're kinda blurry I would say. And they're in black and white, but I can't
tell that. So out here, who cares what colour it is. So you just don't see the colour. But you don't know that you don't see the
colour. Now of course, I can have my hands here, and
then I put them here--I can hardly see them--and then oop, they're gone. They're so gone it's like they don't even
exist. It's not even--because you'd think in some
sense that what is behind your head would be black, like when you close your eyes, that's
nothing. But no no, what you can't see behind your
head is so not there that it's literally--it isn't even not there, that's how gone it is. Okay, so part of the way your eyes work is
that the periphery is attached to devices, in some sense, and some of them detect lines
and some of them detect movement. You remember Jurassic Park? "Don't move. The dinosaur can't see you unless you move." It's like, yeah, frogs are like that. And cats are like that to some degree. They can really see things move this way. Partly because their eyes are slitted, makes
it easier for them to see things moving like this. They're not so good at things moving like
this. Well, it's because they chase mice, right. Mice will--most mice, except ones that hop
[student laughter]--they move this way, and so cats are specialized for that. And so you're also specialized to see teeth
and eyes because you want to know if something's looking at you, and you want to know if it
has teeth. And so what that means in part is that the
surrounding tissue in your eyes reports to some degree to your visual cortex, which is
what you use to actually have conscious vision with, but a lot of it just dumps down into
some of the brain areas we haven't talked about. Not necessarily directly down to the hypothalamus,
although I suspect it has inputs there, I just don't know. But your eyes talk to your spinal cord directly,
so that you can see something snake-like, for example, and jump. Just like you jump if your hand touches a
hot stove. You don't even see the snake, it's like snake-jump. And the reason for that is if you wait around
to see the snake, it's like it's bitten you 15 times and you're dead. So you can't wait around and see this, like
"oh look. A snake." And then you jump. It's like, no. That doesn't work. Your body has conserved all these layers of
reflex and movement, all the way up to higher order voluntary movement, because otherwise
you just wouldn't be fast enough when something super fast happens. And then, the way your eyes are built, your
eyes can tell your body to jump. It's no vision, right. It's just pattern. Snake-pattern, jump-pattern. Snake-pattern, retinal-pattern, optic-nerve
pattern, brain-pattern, muscle-pattern. No vision. No seeing. Because you don't need the seeing. You just have to do pattern matching. It's a weird way of thinking about it, but
it's not much different than touching, you know. You can feel the pattern, you can build a
three-dimensional representation of it, you can really see well with your eyes--it's like
the idea that blind people can't see is a really dopey idea. They can't see colour. And they're not very good at detecting things
in the distance. But they have a visual world, it's just built
out of things that don't have colour. You know perfectly well that that's the case
because I can hand you an object and you could fiddle around with it behind your back and
after some fiddling around you'd know exactly what it looked like. And you know you might pull it out here and
say , well I didn't know it was blue. It's like, yeah okay, you didn't know it was
blue, but you still saw it. And you get pretty god-damn good vision with
your ears. So there are kids who're blind who've learned
to echolocate. So they go click-click-click, they don't make
that noise exactly, but they do click [clicking sounds] and they can detect the clicks bouncing
off of things. And they can do that well enough, not only
to walk, but some of them can actually ride bikes. It's like, hey that's impressive, man. Yeah, there's one kid--I saw a kid on youtube
who's blind who could shoot baskets, yeah, which is--that's impressive, man. But my point is that a lot of the neural tissue
is--it'll take whatever input it gets. So if you're born blind, your auditory systems
will invade your visual system. And then you have twice as much brain devoted
to your hearing. So, and then you know, you can use that quite
effectively. So I think we're probably pretty much out
of time. One thing I want to tell you before we go
on to the next part though is that--so now we've sort of built up the idea of these underlying
motivational systems. And now you can kind of see how they work,
so you might say to yourself, why didn't you see the gorilla and the curtain and the person
leaving. It's really complicated, it's really complicated. Well, the first answer is, you did what I
asked. And then you might ask, well why? Why did you do what I asked? I mean you missed the damn gorilla, right. It's like, obviously that wasn't a very good
decision. So you think, well why did you do what I asked? And the answer would be--well, it's sort of
like the Milgram obedience experiment except at a way lower level. It's like, we've got an agreement going on
here. You guys are all very sophisticated and complex
game players, otherwise you couldn't sit here peacefully for an hour and a half. So you're very well socialized, all of you. And so that means you've organized all your
motivations into a hierarchy, and that hierarchy is guiding your behaviour here. It might be something like, well we need to
learn something and hypothetically, you come here and you learn something. And so you're playing that out. And because that's the motivational state
that you're in, when I ask you to do something, you're just going to do it. Well then, what's so cool is that as soon
as you decide to point your attention at something, what you see in the world radically transforms. So I say, well count the basketballs and all
of a sudden all you can see are basketballs. And you think, no no, I see--I'm not blind. It's like well, you're pretty damn blind. And so, that's partly how you can understand
how motivation is a sub-personality. Like it has its whole sets of perceptions
and values. It's like, all of a sudden, I set you up in
a little motivated state--it was a complicated one--but it was just like, here's a task. And so you're all motivated, you're going
to do the task properly, for god only knows how many reasons, and then all of a sudden,
all that exists in the world are basketballs. And so, it's as if your goal-directed attention
has transformed the phenomenology of the world. And that's something that's really cool because
one of the things it implies is that what you see of the world depends on what you're
aiming at. And in a real sense--this isn't some trivial
sense. It means like literally what you're aiming
at--I'm going to count the basketballs--it means, well you're not noticing the gorillas. So one of the things that you might ask yourself,
and this is partly what the phenomenologists were on about is, what're you aiming at? And what is it that what you're aiming at
allows you to see, and what is it that what you're aiming at blinds you to. And it blinds you to a lot more than it allows
you to see. And so another thing that you can think about
is like, if everything you see makes you angry and bitter and resentful, you might think,
well hmm, what exactly am I aiming at that's making the world organize itself around me
in that manner? And that would be a complex, for a Jungian
perspective. A complex would do that. So it's a set of values, they're sort of economist,
they inhabit you, it's a sub-personality, it's quite complex, it's got something it's
aiming at. You might not even know what that is because
you're acting it out instead of understanding it. And because you're inside of it, it lays the
world out for you in a particular way that makes the world look like it's showing you
that what you think is right. But if you're--what do they say-- to the man
with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And that's one of the things that's so damn
cool about that experiment. It's like, really? I'm really that blind? I can miss something that radical just when
I'm involved in some dopey task like counting basketballs it makes me so blind that it's
almost beyond comprehension. Well, so in some ways you skip between different
states of blindness. A lot of them are biologically motivated. And you turn those into a hierarchy and that's
sort of your higher value system and then that thing points you at something, and the
whole world lays itself out around that. And the way it does it is divides the world
into irrelevant things--and so those would've been the curtains in this particular example,
or the gorilla or even the player in black who left the game--irrelevant, because it
didn't interfere with you counting. So what you look at makes most of the world
irrelevant. It makes some things , things that serve you. And that makes you feel positive emotion. And it makes other things things that get
in your way. And that's what makes negative emotions. And so you've got the hypothalamic systems
that point you in biological directions. You organize those, and then, as you're approaching
the things you're aiming at, the positive emotion systems tell you you're on track and
the negative emotion systems tell you when something's interfering. And those are actually different neurological
systems. So they're not in the hypothalamus. The positive emotion system is in some degree. But the negative emotion system, that evolved
later. And there's a couple of them. There's one that produces pain, we'll talk
about it more. And there's another one that produces anxiety. And so, now you kind of understand--roughly--the
relationship between motivation, perception, and emotion. They all act together. And they're all dependent in this weird way
on what you're after. So you can think for 50 years and you won't
get to the bottom of it. You know the Buddhists say that everything
is illusion. Maya, right, people live in illusion. Because what you're aiming at determines what
you see.