there'll be an exam on Thursday I presume it'll be multiple choice like the last one was um you you've already taken one exam so you you just kind of have some idea about what they're like so um it'll be here like the last one was um and this lecture will be covered so okay so we talked a little bit about motivation last time or quite a bit about motivation and what I I told you that I was basically teach you teaching you a personality Neuroscience approach to personality and um part of the reason that I have to go into the biology to give you is to give you the kind of foundation that you need in order to understand I would say what's essentially The Cutting Edge in personality research you know I mean I I know that what we're going what we covered last lecture and what we're going to cover today are relatively complicated but if you get them right then you're right at the Forefront of of of our ideas about brain function and emotion and about personality so you get all that at the same time and today you'll get a little bit of learning theory thrown in as well so learn learning theory is basically what used to be what's what's alternatively described as behaviorism and I don't I used to teach behaviorism in this class but I've subsumed it underneath the biology because the old a lot of the old behavioral presuppositions although they were extremely useful were not right is which is exactly what you'd expect they were formulated in the 1950s um and it's actually the sign of the progress of a science that theories that are 60 years old are no longer right so um we'll also cover a little bit of Behavioral Theory today too so okay so the hypothesis we've been working on so far or we'll call it the working theory is that motivations set goals or more accurately that they Define a conceptual space within which you perceive the world and within which you act towards some goal and or to some end point and the end point in some sense is specified by the motivational system it's a hypothalamic system often but not always but not only is the goal specified but they the underlying motivational systems also tune your perception so you're only looking at the things that you know to be relevant to the pursuit of that goal and they also either disinhibit or activate the behavioral schemes that you would normally use to pursue the goal and sometimes those or let's say the motor schemes because that would be more accurate when you think about Behavior you tend to think about voluntary Behavior but a motivational state will disinhibit or activate depending on the situation autonomic responses so for example when you when you're food deprived and you start to think about food and start to organize your behavior towards food as an end and to perceive the world that way your body also prepares for food and and so the motivational state is an all-encompassing psychophysiological phenomena it's not something as simple as chain Behavior which was an early be behavioral Theory or as simple as something that's merely setting a goal it's much more complicated than that it's it's useful to think about as we've already talked about with regards to psychodynamic Theory it's useful to think about a motivated State as a micro personality I mean it's it's got one aim in mind fundamentally so it's it's not particularly sophisticated but it has all the other elements of a personality so now so motivation establishes the framework within which goals are pursued and the goal itself and then roughly speaking emotions or at least many of the emotions track progress towards goals and so they kind of tell you whether you're on the right track or not so that's a reasonable way of of distinguishing them even though there is no single motivation system or single emotion system here are some basic motivations um these are the sorts of things that Freud would have Associated fundamentally with the ID so and he thought of those as primordial and that's exactly right because pretty much all of these motivational systems we share certainly with other people also with other mammals and then of course with animals that are farther down the evolutionary chain than mammals so some of these systems are extraordinarily old in fact all of them are extraordinarily old Hunger consequence of food deprivation obviously thirst obviously people are very dependent on water um pain Pain's complicated there's there's physical pain and then there's it's mental equivalents and the mental equivalents of pain are grief disappointment frustration roughly speaking and so you can the way you can think about that is you you know you saw the picture of the nervous system that I showed you last time with the branches going up into the brain obviously but with all the branches or the roots say going down into the body so we discussed the central nervous system as a sort of all-encompassing system distributed throughout the body imagine that part of that Network throughout your body is associated with pain reception and that would be roughly equivalent to systems registering levels of input that are high enough to potentially damage them that's that's where pain seems Seems to come in and that different pieces of that can be activated at different times so if it's psychological pain as I said grief frustration disappointment seems to fall into that category uh loneliness is another one um then maybe it's primarily the cortical circuitry for pain that's activated and although people who are depressed for example or who are grieving often have somatic pain as well and depression really looks like it's a pain State um we know loneliness is because if you you take like little chicks or little kittens and you make them Lonesome and they'll cry you know which is a or or or peep if they're chicks and you can stop them from doing that by using opiates and uh it's not because it stops them from vocalizing because that would be a possibility just get them so stoned on you know morphine that they can't Peep and you think well they're now they're they're not Lonesome anymore so that's the experiments have been done carefully enough to factor out the effect of the opiates on the vocalization so and that's also led to some suspicion that people who have have had a a history of extraordinarily painful personal relationships might be those who are more prone to opiate use and so opiates analgesics are they basically dampen out pain and frustration and disappointment and grief and loneliness so there's an anger and aggression system it's complicated there's probably two of them one is defensive aggression that's probably more associ iated with neuroticism technically the other is probably predatory aggression and you know human beings are definitely Predators we're meat eaters and you know our closest relatives chimpanzees for example they're they're pretty good Hunters um they they'll they'll pack gather together in packs and bring down 30 PB cbus monkeys and and the meat is very popular Among The Chimps and so predatory aggression seems to be a separate circuit and as we'll discuss further along I think the predatory aggression circuit and the maternal solicitude circuit because there's also a Care Circuit have evolved to be at opposite ends of the same distribution I think that's the agreeableness distribution in the big five so on one end there's maternal solicitude and the other end there's predatory aggression and you can imagine how those things have to inhibit one another um because well with with many mammals bears for example the the males are so predatory that you have to keep them away from the the Cubs because they'll kill them the human beings I mean there's some aggression towards children especially if the children aren't biological relatives but men are pretty caring for male mammals and and women are actually quite predatory for male mammals so thermal regulation your hypothalamus takes care of whether you're hot or cold panic and Escape that those are circuits that also seem to be associated with with pain fundamentally although threat can maybe trigger them as well and the Panic Escape system doesn't exactly seem to be the same system as the anxiety and fear system even though they sound they sound roughly equivalent right you might think of panic as just the extreme level of fear and I think fear can trigger panic but Panic seems to be a more primordial circuit and if you're panicking there's an immense impetus to to escape so that's a different circuit affiliation to care we covered sexual desire exploration and play both both of those seem to be separate circuits so Jack PP Yak PP actually who wrote a great book called affective Neuroscience by the way if any of you are interested in like the psychobiology of behavior and motivation Yak pp's book is one of the best we I don't have a paper by him in in our collection but he's a very smart guy he wrote this book called affective neuroscience and it's actually given its title and the relative complexity of its of its thoughts it's actually quite readable even though it's a text it's more personal than your typical text might be and PP is also very interested in uh psychodynamic and personality ideas so he's a very broad thinker and so if you're interested in a you know an approach to psychology that sort of crosses the threshold from personality into emotion and biology panp as well as gray there's a gray paper that you're reading are pp's a very very good source he's a very he discovered the play circuit for example um and he also discovered that rats laugh so if you tickle a rat it laughs you can't hear it though because it it laughs ultrasonically like a bat but if you record the rat giggling and then slow down the tape then you can tell that the rat laughs and rats need to play and most mammals need to play in order to uh socialize them so so one of the things you can think about this when you're parents too and this is probably especially relevant for the man because one of the things you might ask is what role do men play in the socialization of children and one thing that men really do seem to do with kids is to engage in rough and tumble play especially once they're a little older than two say two to five or something and kids love that they absolutely love rough and tumble play gets them so excited that you know they get out of control fundamentally but Rough and Tumble play is an excellent mode of socialization because it teaches the child the the distinction between aggression and too much aggression right because if you're wrestling with a kid the kid has to keep their behavioral output under a fair degree of control to keep the game going to make it rough enough to be exciting but not so rough that they get hurt or you know that they stick their thumb in their dad's eye or something like that and you you can think of that from a pedian sense too because it's a game but imagine that if you're trying to figure out how to configure yourself around other people if you haven't had that rough and tumbled play you don't really know where the bound boundaries of your body are you know and and you don't know how much you can take and how much you can be stretched and how much you can be thrown around and when something actually hurts rather than is frightening and so all that intense sort of play that that um that boys in particular are likely to engage it although girls also like it um seems to be very useful for teaching children about how to engage with the world but and with other people in a physical way and that's one of the phys ological foundations for higher order socialization so it's very useful I mean I've I've often noted that children who haven't had the opportunity to engage in physical play they're kind of awkward you know they're not they're not seated well in their body and it's like they're kind of vague physically whereas the ones who've been twisted around and bent and thrown up in the air and you know wrestled in general they're a lot more conscious of their limits and their abilities in their body and they're also much more able to invite other kids to play you can think about this with regards to dogs you know if you have a dog you know the dog you can tell when the dog wants to play right what does the dog dos around yeah it jumps around and it puts its rear end in the air often and its head down and it looks up which is a little bit submissive and a little bit friendly and it wags its tail and it might bark and it moves back and forth and like little kids that want to play do well they don't put their tails in the air obviously but they they they they engage in like play invitation behaviors like that you know little bit of teasing sometimes and they're trying to get some play initiated um it's also practice for later dominance um when chimps play the males in particular as they approach adolescence the play Behavior because they'll all they'll throw sticks at the old chimps who are laying down and sleeping or come up and poke them or you know tease them and then as they become more and more powerful and more and more adolescent say into adulthood then that play will become full-blown dominance challenges as you don't no doubt noticed if you were in junior high school because that's exactly what happens to teachers right the little elementary school kids they're kind of cute when they misbehave they're sort of playful but by the time grade eight or grade nine comes around the pushing on the teacher is a lot harder and so you can see how play Shades into dominance dispute but it is a separate circuit exploration that's a separate circuit and one of the things that we'll talk talk about today is Swanson's elaboration of the fact that half of the hypothalamus is fundamentally devoted towards exploration which is quite cool it means exploration is a really really really old system and it's sort of like if you haven't got anything else to do so you don't want to play you're not hungry you're not thirsty you're not angry you're not too warm or too cold etc etc your default isn't sort of quiescent sleep right you don't just run out of batteries and lie on the flooor unless you're of course obviously unless you're very tired what'll generally happen is if the other fundamental motivational states have been satiated then you'll engage in Exploration and some different people at different rates if you're extroverted you'll engage in exploration in the social environment and if you're open then you'll engage in Exploration at a more cognitive level so that would be with regards to artistic creativity or to fiction or or the expr ex of some sort of intellectual or philosophical Pursuit and the reason that you're wired up that way is because if you have a little extra energy you might as well use that to map out more of the environment so that when push comes to shove somewhere down the road you'll be in possession of more information and more flexible and more knowledgeable in your in your in your conceptual and perceptual structures and also in your actions so people have a pretty strong tendency to default to exploration but there's variability in that um you can also sort of divide up these motivations as ingestive or defensive that's not a bad way of looking at it and then there's reproductive motivations as well that's unlikely to be a full map it kind of depends on where you put the emotions because we know for example that there's a separate disgusted circuit and that doesn't seem to load with anxiety or with pain it's it's it's its own biologic iCal um system and and it seems to be associated with trait conscientiousness maybe and also with political conservatism and orderliness so those things are all quite interesting they all kind of Clump together and but whether that's an emotion or motivations not exactly clear but um we'll talk about a little bit more so there's the hypothalamus and as you can see um it's not one thing of course nothing at the macro level in the brain is one thing obviously it's this layered thing just like everything else in the world except even more so because the brain is so incredibly complicated and you can see by looking at that there's all those little all the things that are colored there basically hypothalamic um modules I guess would be a reasonable way of putting it and you can tell they're even an anatomically distinct so obviously they're not doing exactly the same thing so you might think of brain and to be a sort of a fixed what would you call something that we've already managed quite well and we have all the category systems down and the structure of the brain's quite well known and that's really not true at all like the brain is truly Terra incognita and it isn't even like our naming uh rituals let's say or conventions are not necessarily appropriate for onetoone mapping of say structure onto function so um they're they're they're sort of anatomical they're markers for anatomical conv venience in some ways okay so so here's a way of thinking about it so you have your frame which specifies your lack say I'm hungry and then a goal pops up which is well I should have something to eat and the hypothalamus is modulating perceptual and cognitive circuits so that you think that and so that you start to parse up the world into a place where a hungry person like you could become satisfied and then the behaviors kick in that are relevant to that um Pursuit and so you can think of yourself as popping through these sorts of frames on a fairly cyclic basis throughout the day you know obviously you get hungry you get thirsty you get tired and so your Consciousness is being modulated by subcortical circuitry that is basically charged with your self-preservation and in some ways you come along for the ride I mean your Consciousness is mostly there in some sense to detect deviations from not so much expectation but from desire right because you lay out one of these little maps on the world and then you want something to happen and what your Consciousness does more or less is Mo Monitor and if something that you don't want to happen happens then Consciousness will take a look in some sense remember that hierarchy of goals that I showed you from you know motor output up to high order goals your Consciousness kind of moves up and down that thing if if you've made an error trying to figure out at which level of abstraction that error should be rectified which is sort of what you do when you think and so that process is going to kick in whenever you're moving towards your desired end and something that you don't want to have happen happens right you usually stop that sort of an an anxiety response the stopping and then if nothing else happens that's too bad well then you you'll start to explore animals often do that by moving around but people will do that just as with with equal facility just by running simulations in their mind and trying to calculate what went wrong right try to think about it that's a form of exploratory Behavior as well that would be more associated with trait openness and with intelligence so so there's how um Swanson divides up the hypothalamus see the uh little pink things there on the left are part of the defensive circuits and then the red things on the left are part of the reproductive circuits and you know obviously those the fact that those circuits exist lays onto darwinian Theory quite nicely the defensive circuits obviously protect you from dying and the reproductive circuits you know facilitate your reproduction it's not much of a what fairly obvious conclusion and so those are all you located in this in this you know essential part of the brain the the hypoth hypothalamus now this is something a little that's a little more complex so I'll go through it a little bit more carefully so if you look on the right this is where Swanson Maps perfectly onto p and I I put this Swanson paper in as a optional reading but if you're interested in the sorts of things that we're covering this class that's a great paper to hack your way through even though it's very hard because you you learn a lot about the underlying biology of some of these more complex clinical and developmental theories that we've covered so basically what Swanson is pointing out is that at the lowest level at the highest resolution level of your central nervous system your your you have motor output circuits that are enabling you to move move and those are communicating in large part with your spine but also with lower parts of your brain stem so those are fundamental movements of the sorts that PJ would call reflexive and then the locomoter pattern generator I think the best way to think about this from an analogical perspective and actually Alexander Lura used this analogy he called behavioral patterns kinetic Melodies it's a lovely phrase because you know how obviously a song is made out of notes and then the notes combined into phrases and the phrases combined say into passages and then well even more interestingly then if it's an orchestral piece of music multiple instruments are playing at the same time so it sort of extends right into the social domain but your your actions are sort of like that they're made out of micro routines and then those are chained together and those are chained together in higher order abstractions and so on all the way up to the cortex and so Swanson points out that the the motor system has three sets of inputs so the cognitive system that's sort of way up that's a level of abstraction that's way up in the brain so the cognitive system is where you know you might do a voluntary action so you look at something you say well I'm going to pick up this piece of paper and so that's top down cortical control and then the state system input to the motor system the state system is your body monitoring what's going on inside of itself and the autonomic nervous system is part of the motor output system and so the state monitoring system takes a careful look and the hypothalamus does a fair bit of this takes a careful look at what's going on inside you and then activates different parts of your digestive and you know the the gut system fundamentally that that you have no conscious control over and then obviously there sensory system inputs too so so those are the three main inputs into the into the motor system and that act on the environment and then the motor system has this hierarchical nature that's built from the spine upwards and so you can think of like the brain as a collection of ever expanding control systems that that allow you to what learn and undertake ever more complex motor schemes of action you know and one of the things that people think about human beings is that we're very good at thinking right but we're not just good at thinking like we're we're crazy crazily adaptable in terms of our motor output I mean if you watch the watch the Olympics you know and you see human beings can do things that no other animal could even think of doing I mean we're completely crazy when it comes to the sorts of things we can do with our body like we're good on ice we're good in the water we can ski people are really good at jumping they can climb across buildings like people who train themselves can climb like mad I mean human beings are unbelievably variable in terms of their motor output so that's another part of our intelligence that's not just abstract and so in part that's because we have this very welldeveloped cortical area that enables us to chain ever more complex P patterns of behavior together and also to develop patterns of behavior that are sort of outside instinctual specification so imagine with an animal that has a less complex brain a lot of its behavior is going to be limited to those quas instinctual patterns of behavior that are devoted directly towards the solution of basic biological problems but you know we can kind of solve those without too much effort and then we have all this spare motor capacity left over and people do the weirdest things with it you know and and really remarkable absolutely remarkable things so that's that's pretty cool we're pretty cool that way we don't get enough credit for it I don't think because human beings if think about human being as an animal which you know people are kind of loathed to do we are definitely the most interesting animal I mean if you saw like a what a pygmy hippopotamus skateboarding you'd think that was pretty remarkable you know but people they do those sorts of things all the time and you know we just take it as a matter of course the lowest somat motor neuron pools the lowest level of the locomoter system it's Locomotion and and action is formed by a subset of moto neuron tools that's wrong moton neurons in the spinal cord ventral horn that innervates the limb muscles responsible for locomotor Behavior I dictated this with dragon dictate and now and then it does weird things say so tools God only knows where that came from so a set of motor neurons in the spinal cord ventral horn so it's way down in the spine that inate the Lum mus limb muscles responsible for locomoter behavior when you start to think about the brain as something that moves your body it's a lot easier to conceptualize the brain as something that's distributed through the body you know and your spine is actually quite smart so even though in some sense you don't think with it it's capable of very complex sensory detection and also motor mapping and so um mostly relatively automated and relatively reflexive one level up the existence of a spinal locomoter pattern generator so this shows that the spine isn't responsible just for the most basic of motor outputs or sensory inputs it can actually generate patterns is demonstrated by the fact that whereas a spinal animal displays no spontaneous locomoter activity so if you sever an animal its nervous system so it only has a spine it'll just lay there you know you'd think it's paralyzed that's what you would think but coordinated limb movements characteristic of locomotion may be elicited when the limbs of such an animal are placed on a moving treadmill thus providing sematic sensory put to the pattern generator and so they've done this with people who are paraplegic if you take someone who's paraplegic and so they can't obviously walk and you hoist them up and you put them on a um treadmill and you lean them forward their legs will walk and that's spinal controlled so that's what you're doing with your spine you know because you're not thinking when you walk or you're not thinking about walking unless you know unless you're one of those people who can't chew gum and walk at the same time so anyway so it just shows you how complex you are even at the you know the sort of the base levels of your of your intelligence hierarchy level up locomoter pattern controller so it's controlling the locomotor pattern generator in contrast undisturbed chronic hypothalamic animals okay so now one of the ways people figured out how the brain works was by sectioning animals nervous systems when they're alive at different level of complexity so a spinal animal is one that's basically paralyzed its brain is separated from its spinal cord but then you can separate the hypothalamus with the intact spinal cord so it's one unit from the cortex and even from the memory systems and even from most of the emotion systems and so the animal in some sense hardly has a brain at all you know I mean the hypothalamus as you saw it's a little tiny thing and everything that's on top of that can be separated from it and the animal can um still act spontaneously so so here's an example if if this has been done with cats and if you have a female cat and it's in a cage and it's only a hypothalamic animal it can basically manage like it can't learn new things very well and it can't remember anything like it doesn't have episodic memory and so but it can it can maintain its temperature it can eat it can engage in sexual activity it's got defensive aggression like most of the animal in some sense is still there from an from an input output perspective um it's also hyper exploratory which is quite interesting he because you wouldn't think well animal with no brain is the most exploratory kind of animal well it happens to be the case as long as it has a hypothalamus so that shows you a how old exploration is but it also kind of gives you some clue about what the rest of the brain is doing I mean you you explore new things we'll say say so what that means is you have to be able to tell the difference between what's new and what isn't and so what you need to tell the difference between what's new and what isn't is memory and so a lot of what the higher order parts of the brain are doing is basically keeping track of where you've been and so if you've been somewhere before then the exploratory circuit is basically shut off as long as everything that you're doing there is working and you need the whole brain basically to shut off the hypothalamus in some sense that's how the thing works it's like you're kind of a default on system you know your your motor systems are ready to go and you're kind of you're alive and you're ready to go like a wild animal but the cortex dampens that down and it does that by only allowing the activities that are relevant to that area that might be none of them to function at any one time so you take off the cortex while the animal can still do a lot of things but you know its ability to match Its Behavior to novel situations and to learn new behaviors is very very limited so it it becomes hyper exploratory but it can't remember anything and it becomes very limited in the flexibility of its behavior and so as you move farther up the hierarchy of complexity then you're able to do more and more novel and more and more complex and more and more situation specific things so in the sense of providing a certain level of endogenous activity which means self-generated activity so the hypothalamic animal will move by itself without being stimulated the hypothalamic Lo locomoter region can be thought of as a locomoter pattern controller which generates spontaneous inputs ultimately to the spinal locomoter pattern generator so there there's hierarchy um I already talked about behavioral State inputs there's another picture of the nervous system just to remind you of how it looks um how it's distributed through the body oh this is very interesting too I I didn't learn this till I read this paper by Swanson I thought that's so dumb how could I've have not learned that like 30 years ago Swanson said that um let's go back one did I yeah rayon K was like the world's greatest neuroanatomist he was the guy who really established the field so did a tremendous amount of Investigation into the fine structure of the brain like 10 years ago a long time ago and he pointed out that sensory systems have a dual projection within the central nervous system I told you guys about Blindside already you know and the fact that your eyes map on to different levels of the hierarchy say of sensory input and motor control Kyle basically outlined the circuitry for that one branch goes directly to the motor system so it's that's for I to Output mapping So that's fast because there's not a lot of thinking in between and you might think that's bad because you want to think but it's good because sometimes you know what to do and you don't want to think you just want to execute it as fast as as you possibly can so these lower order simpler inputs are good for that sort of thing one goes directly to the motor system and the other goes more or less directly to the cerebral cortex where Sensations and perceptions are elaborated and voluntary motor impulses are generated so this sort of explains for a long time experimental Psychology was dominated by behaviorists who thought of the animal as a stimulus response machine and and never paid much attention to the function of things like thought or emotion or complex internal States and you know the behaviorists got an awful long way with their idea of the animal as a sort of simple stimulus response machine and that's partly because of this hierarchy that we're describing you know because you you can treat an animal as if it's a pretty simple machine because it has all that simple Machinery in it it's just that on top of that simple Machinery there's a lot more complex machinery and so but the simple Machinery does a lot more than people generally think and can do more than people think and so the fact that there are these at least two projections they Branch more than that gives you right away a sense of why the behaviors could have been right and the cognitive psychologist could have been right and even the psycho dnamic thinkers can be right because they're analyzing the system at different levels of hierarchical complexity and extracting out slightly different um what would you call uh observations and and some of these things are even the like the simp systems can have quite complex output so so one of the things that the simpler sensory motor system does is detect snakes because primates don't like snakes in fact there's a a woman named uh Lynn Isbell wrote a nice book on primate vision and snakes and she was very curious about why human beings could see so well and uh she also noticed that we're very good at detecting um the sort of camouflage patterns that snakes use especially in the lower half of our visual field and she did this cross-cultural survey around the world and found out that where there's more predatory snakes the primates have better Vision so we sort of coevolved with snakes and snakes gave us Vision just like it says in Genesis which is pretty damn funny as far as I'm concerned and it was snakes and trees even so and fruit of course gave us color vision so the whole Genesis story nailed it pretty well but you know snakes have been around long enough and have been our enemy or say predatory reptiles you know if if you don't really want to go with the whole snake thing that are we've we've evolved we've co-evolved with them it's like 60 million years it's a very very long period of time so Darwin used to amuse himself in a darwinian way he'd go to the there was a a zoo or a a rep place that shows reptiles I don't remember what they're called but they had one glass cage where there was some kind of poisonous snake I think it was a cobra and Darwin would put his face right up against the glass and the Cobra would go whack and he'd jump back back and he he did that many times cuz he was curious about whether or not he could actually bring the snake avoidance reflex underc conscious control and he couldn't every time the snake jumped he'd jump backwards he couldn't control it and so that's because all the primates that could control it when there were snakes biting them are dead so it was Darwin was the beneficiary of the darwinian process in that in that sense so so the point is your body's conserved all these lowlevel f fast operating circuits and so you're a simple machine and a sort of complex machine and an extremely complex machine and then something that's so complex that you can't even think about it as a machine and you're all those things at the same time and there's Swanson's take on how the motor system and the hypothalamus are integrated so it's quite nice he shows that the hypothalamic controller so that's one of the circuits that we've been talking about that are responsible for a basic motivated State get sensory input behavioral State input that's about the body and input from the cerebral hemispheres hypothetically that's thought or or voluntary action plan something like that and then it has output to the motor pattern initiator the generators and the motor neuron pools and then you act lovely it's beautiful beautiful model and so you can see that it Maps very nicely onto that with the sort of higher order levels of the of the hierarchy of sensory motor framing associated with cognitive abstractions and the lowest levels associated with the sorts of things that you do with your spine and this I flip this upside down here because it's I I've been very interested in how people get traumatized and it's easier to think of trauma when you flip the thing because once you develop the higher order abstractions cortically you know you say well I'm a good person let's say then that sort of the the fact that you're a good person or what constitutes good starts to become a box the box within which all the things that are associated with it are put it's one of the dangers of abstraction right and categorization because if you couldn't think of yourself as a good or bad person let's say you didn't have that capacity for that level of abstraction which is like a binary abstraction right good is you know one and and bad is zero so it's a really it's a really simple abstraction and so if someone if you do something that a good person wouldn't do well clearly you don't fit into the one category because a good person wouldn't do that so maybe you fit into the zero category and that's that capacity for abstraction is also precisely the sort of thing that allows human beings to undermine themselves with thought because once you have that capacity for abstraction you can make these ridiculous overgeneralizations in fact they're really simple I'm not a good person I'm a horrible person it's like that's what how someone who's really depressed things whenever whenever anything goes wrong and so it's the danger the powerful danger of abstraction is that you can make a terrible mistake in overgeneralization this is partly because well let's say uh I don't know you're out with your girlfriend and you flirt with someone else um so what does that say about your character well she might think that puts you in the zero category like now right you're not a good person it's like well it's complicated is that are is that true do you do you belong in that zero category she might treat you like that for a week or two I mean should you be taking yourself apart completely because you've made that error or should you seek farther down the the chain of abstractions for a more specific mistake and or should she help you do that it's like well you're not a complete zero you're more like a you know 0.1 she could help you figure out exactly where in your personality hierarchy you have this fault assuming that it's a fault you know maybe it's an indication that the relationship is over who who knows so anyways I wanted to show you that because then you can develop a sense of how this hierarchical system can also lead to cataclysmic overgeneralization and that's associated with lots of different mental illnesses especially depression because depressed people generally go from a small mistake well a mistake hard to parameterize right to the highest level of abstraction say well I've made error a therefore I'm useless you know or therefore I'm bad it's not good it's uh too undifferentiated I put that in there to remind you that all these little things are um informed by the underlying hypothalamic circuits so you know that whole hierarchy has to be imagine how it's conditioned that whole hierarchy of motor output part of it is conditioned by and this is sort of like an output or an input system that Swanson didn't talk about sort of sensory that whole motor sensory sensory motor hierarchy sensory motor perception action hierarchy will say has to be constructed so that your basic motivational States stay satiated right because otherwise you get thirsty enough and you die or you get hungry enough and you die it's like you have to organize your behavior so that those basic motivations stay fulfilled so each of the little ovals that make up that hierarchy have to be organized and laid out with that set of limitations in mind but then of course there's a higher order limitation which is more the one that PJ talked about which is that not only do you have to or organize your internal hierarchies to take care of all of your basic motivations but you have to do that well everyone else is doing the same thing and so in some sense the hypothalamic system that's generating the impetus for these layers and layers of motor output also has to do so in a social context because otherwise you know you fight to the death over a stick of bread which seems like a very counterproductive thing to do so I I'm trying to point out to you how many parameters those that hierarchical organization has to meet simultaneously also that one of the implications of that is that it's not an arbitrary system this is one of the problems I have with the radical moral relativist stance it's like wait a minute wait a minute for you to set up your perceptual and behavioral system it has to solve a whole bunch of problems like and they're really complex problems and they're they're kind of arbitrary in some sense like you get hungry and you need to eat it's arbitrary so what that means is you can't fill that hierarchy with just any old thing you know not only does it have to work to keep all the complex parts of you functioning here and now but it has to keep them functioning here and now in a way that doesn't disturb them functioning tomorrow or the next day or the next week or the next month so that's integration across time spans that's a killer right because you can't just go out tonight and drink 40 o a vodka and then you know write the test on Thursday so there's a probably not so some of you might try so but then you also have to organize your behavior in the Here and Now with your behavior spread across time frames in the presence of other people who are also organizing their behavior across time frames it's like once you put that many parameters on the organization of a personality you can see right away that it can hardly be arbitrary you know it's tightly constrained okay so here's some basic emotions we talked about basic motivations and so the what we're going to do in a simple way is we're going to divide them into two positive emotions and negative emotions okay and that basically gives you extroversion and neuroticism so positive emotions they kind of fall into two classes the one class is the positive emotion you feel when you when you run a motivational frame to its limit so you're hungry you go have a peanut butter sandwich and then you're no longer hungry okay so what's the state how do you define the state after you've eaten your peanut butter sandwich and you're no longer hungry well you know you're not jumping up and down and cheering like someone who just made a touchdown right so it's it's not that kind of enthusiastic positive emotion that you see when people are celebrating you know it's more like satisfaction and and that's actually technically what it's known as satiation and so when a motivational routine runs successfully what happens is it eliminates it's it eliminates the necessity for it to exist temporarily so basically what happens is you run a a framework to its logical conclusion poof it disappears because it's done and you know you might be satisfied about that but that the next thing that happens is another motivational framework pops up and you're you know you're in the same game it's Copus fundamentally so anyways it's satiation that is TE the term satiation is technically used to describe the state of being that's characteristic of the successful execution of a motivated frame it's also known as consumatory reward consummation consume and that's associated with unconditioned that's an unconditioned response it which means you don't have to learn it so it's a it's an unconditioned positive response so and that means that satiating stimuli when delivered to a creature in the proper motivational frame have the properties of unconditioned rewards so you get three things there you know the satiation brings the mo frame motivated frame to an end the satiation is also known as consumatory reward consumatory reward is very similar to what the behavior described as unconditioned reward unlearned so you can you can stack each of those things to know on top of each other and then you've got them the other kind of positive emotion is the positive emotion that you feel when it looks like you might get a consumatory reward right right hope curiosity anticipation excitement enthusiasm all of the positive emotions that we think of as really like happy happy usually has to do with evidence that your pursuit of a valued consumatory reward is going well okay now that that's incentive reward and the reason it's called incentive reward is because you're incentivized to move forward to the reward and the moving forward the impulse to move forward towards a desired goal that's what your positive emotion systems the dopaminergic systems that are nestled have the roots in the hypothalamus that's what they motivate you to do that's what positive emotion is fundamentally positive emotion is there something good I'm going to go get it it's the I'm going to go get it part that's associated with excitement and positive emotion it's what you feel maybe you're at extrovert you want to go to a party and so you're probably more excited about going to the party than you will be when you get there you know because it's the it's the apprehension of the reward that's with human beings because we're such weird creatures so often the apprehension of the consumatory reward is a more powerful emotion than the emotion that's actually felt as a consequence of gaining the reward itself and that that's partly and this is where it gets a little more complicated that's partly because we're so bloody exploratory you know so there's things that you can learn about that are associated with a consumatory reward those are conditioned rewards so an incentive reward and the conditioned reward are in the same category although not all incentive rewards are learned this is where the behaviors went wrong because the behaviors thought there are consumatory rewards those are unconditioned rewards to a conditioned to if you condition a stimulus to an unconditioned reward you get a conditioned stimulus with a conditioned reward as a response but the problem with that line of thinking is that there's actually incentive reward circuitry it's not just secondary learning it's like incentive rewards have been around so long so those are things that indicate that a consumatory reward is coming they've been around so long that your brain has developed its own circuit for that and that's the one that produces positive emotion and so that's all also produced by the way if you when you're taking a drug of some sort that you really like that's because it's activating this dopam energic incentive reward system if you take a drug that activates consumatory reward you just like lay in front of the fire like a sleeping dog you know it's it's not exciting it's cocaine amphetamines alcohol for lots of people nail the incentive reward system and that's the dopaminergic exploratory system that emerges out of the hypothalamus and it's also the thing that learns what to ass associate with consumatory rewards so I know that's a lot to take in but well it doesn't matter that's how it is so so the approach systems respond to cues of consumatory reward and they also they also respond to a large set of um biologically prepared stimuli smells for example so now you should approach good things but if a bad thing happens what should you you do well one thing you should do is stop another thing you should do is get the hell out of there so there's a constellation of negative emotions that are associated with defense and avoidance and we kind of ran through those already pain grief frustration disappointment and then fear which is sort of what you learn you learn that things to be feared signal primary pain stimulus you know so a child's going to be afraid of a needle especially if a child's got a needle before most children are smart enough to figure out they should be afraid of the needle even when they haven't had it but the the thing is is that if you come into contact with something that's already caused you pain and now there's something that only signals that that's likely to happen that's when you experience fear okay and fear is its own circuit again which is where the behaviorist in some sense went a little bit wrong too because they thought of unconditioned punishment which produces pain as the primary motivational system so it would be unconditioned punishment unconditioned reward then there were things you learned about those that produced conditioned punishment conditioned reward okay but all of those have circuits independent circuits so the defense and avoidance negative emotions seem to be roughly pain anxiety and fear but then there's disgust and people have been looking at disgust a lot lately and it doesn't load on neuroticism it doesn't seem to load on neuroticism so it's its own circuit so okay so here's another one other complexity that you need to Grapple with which is there are things that hurt that cause you pain there are things that are satiating and that are consumatory reward then there are things that signal each of those but there's one class of stimuli so to speak or things that you're going to encounter that are paradoxical and that's the class of things that you don't understand that's novelty and Novelty it's it's it's novelty itself that's sort of associated with with what the phenomenologists are primarily concerned about the idea of the revelation of meaning because the revelation of meaning is mostly associated with you encountering something that you haven't already understood right you explore that new information comes out of it a new you comes out of it okay so you're going from point A to point B what might happen well things might happen that it that appear to demonstrate that you're on the right track so that makes you happy that's the yellow box positive emotion you know your your pathway is being facilitated so that's why tools are s sort of in that category or you can be moving towards point B and you get something gets in your way and that might be something that hurts you that'd be and that hurt would be pain or disappointment or frustration or grief or something that signals that you might get hurt which is threat and that produces fear and so the positive emotion is moving you towards the desired goal and the negative emotion is protecting you and so if a negative things happens you'll stop and then you'll reconfigure the behavior that you're using or the framework in order to get around the obstacle and to continue or if it's a bad enough obstacle you'll you might say well I'm not I'm too tired to eat and I'm too hungry to sleep that happens to people right it's a conflict of motivations and so if you get up and you go into the cupboard and you find out there's nothing to eat you might say oh to hell with it then I'll just go to sleep you know so sometimes the way you solve a problem is by flipping the problem it's like we're not going to solve that problem right now we'll turn to another problem some and that's an exp that's an exploratory move sometimes you operate within the frame you know you go to the cupboard the cupboard is bare but you're hungry so you walk down to the corner store and you get something to eat and so that way you've sort of stayed within the frame and altered you know you've altered your behavior to to you've thought up another path and altered your behavior so that that motivated State can run to completion here's another way of looking at it you can be moving from point A to B and what you predict or want is happening that's a good thing that keeps your mood straight and you happy and that makes you hope that's a promise which the promise is you're going to get what you want and that fills you with hope that's positive emotion or you can have an unpredicted outcome when you're you know you uh I don't know you're supposed to be going out with your friend you go to the door you knock and there's nobody there so it's like what's up with that and so it's in a sense when that happens there's like a hole in your framework you know because your framework was predicated on the presence of your friend right it was a presupposition and so now and then you'll run out of Behavioral routine and one of your presuppositions is wrong and sort of like there's a hole in your theory and the hole you sort of drop into it and when you drop into that hole you get anxious CU you don't know exactly what this unexpected thing means and behind that you get exploratory so with most people they're going to get afraid first they're going to have negative emotion first when their little plan is blown and then if nothing additionally awful happens and if they don't drive themselves crazy with some hypothesis about he doesn't like me anymore and so no one likes me anymore so I'm a terrible person you know then the once they calm down a little bit the exploration circuit will come up and maybe they'll walk somewhere else go to a bar or maybe they'll stand there and think well you know this didn't work out so what else could I do an emotionally stable person say a non-neurotic person they'll flip to that really fast especially if they're extroverted and open whereas someone who's heavy a negative emotion you know the fact that their friend wasn't there when they told him they would be that might just produce a hole that they fall into and it's you know so deep and painful they just go home and cry so so the the neuroticism and the extraversion are in some sense they vary with the degree to which the negative emotion system is strong or the positive emotion system is strong and they're two different systems and so you can think of them in some sense you can think of them as units of positive emotion per unit of promise I mean it it's a weird thing to try to quantify or units of negative emotion per unit of threat so you know if someone maybe someone there's a rumor going around that you're going to lose your job well how much should you worry about that well God you don't know so how do you decide well you don't you're your wiring decides so if you're high negative emotion you're going to get all anxious and freak out about it which might be the right thing to do maybe you will lose your job and if you're emotionally stable you're going to think ah I probably won't lose my job but even if I can even if I do I'm I'm not going to worry about it it's innate or a lot of it's innate so okay so to recapitulate learning theory behaviorism there are unconditioned rewards those are rewards you don't have to learn those are the things that bring a motivated state to its closure roughly speaking and that makes you satisfied satiation that by the way is associated with serotonin serotonin is a satiating neurochemical so if your levels of Serotonin are high you're kind of satisfied which means you don't experience a lot of positive emotion or a lot of negative emotion you're just kind of satisfied it's a high dominance thing it's like all the consumatory rewards are there when you need them you don't have to worry and you don't have to get too excited conditioned Rewards or incentive rewards indicate progress towards a consum consumatory reward they can be learned or conditioned but they can also be innate and they're associated with dopaminergic activation and that's the exploration circuit that com comes out of the hypothalamus half the hyp hypothalamus does goal specification and the other half does exploration and so again if you're pursuing something that's an identifiable goal and you fail well then you're going to back off that's negative emotion then you're going to start to explore and that's that dopam energic circuit what's associated with dopaminergic activation exploration extroversion happen play enthusiasm assertiveness and the positive element of novelty okay soes that make sense anybody have any questions I know that's a lot of information but I I kind of designed this part of the course so that at this point the levels of analysis would stack up so that you could understand them simultaneously so the hypothalamus sets up your frames of motivation running one of those to the to its positive conclusion that's satisfying that's innate it's cons it's consumatory reward you'll work for that anything that indicates that that might happen that's incentive reward you can learn that but some of it's also innate which is where the the behaviorist didn't know that because they thought of all all the the secondary stuff the condition stuff has learned it's not all learned some of it's already prepared you see a snake that's a threat you don't have to learn that so fire is sort of like that as well um blood is like that teeth are like that staring eyes are like that predatory postures are like that um loud loud vocalizations especially if they're like low low in uh frequency they indicate a large animal all those things are things you don't have to learn to be afraid of because they've been so consistently dangerous in the past that you've built up a circuit that responds automatically to them question the EXT of neoism it seems like they're at least in the example that you that mutually exive do know yeah it's complicated you know because they do play a bit of an inhibitory role but they're separate circuits you know so you can be very extroverted in very high negative emotion okay so and you can be very emotionally stable and very low in extra verion too so but they are definitely separate things now it's hard you know you can flip from laughing to crying very rapidly you know so people are very much capable of experiencing mixed states of positive and negative emotion plus there are forms of manic depressive disorder where people are Manic and depressed at the same time which I wouldn't recommend the people I know that have had that they they seem to think that is certainly not fun so agitation tremendous agitation So you you're probably sort of like that when you're deeply confused and you're really bothered by it because then the threat circuits are going but you're also sort of wandering around going oh what am I going to do that's all that's all like approach Behavior approach motivation isn't always positive E I mean most of the time it is but intensity matters and controllability matters too so okay unconditioned punishments fundamentally they produce pain they also tend to if you run a behavioral routine or motivated framework that results in punishment you're less likely to run it again in the future that's learning if you run a motivated frame and it works you're more likely to run it in the future that's learning too so unconditioned punishments decrease the probability that you're going to run a given motivational frame because it it failed right you ran it and you got hurt it's like don't do that again that's part of the purpose of memory and the pain like emotions just to say again are pain frustration disappointment grief sadness is in there as well so those are pain-like states of emotion condition punishments those are things that indicate that a punishment is likely some of them you can learn some of them you don't have to because they're already built into you the negative emotions are dampened by serotonin that's the fundamental brain system fundamentally the serotonergic system is like a conductor of the orchestra it keeps every in in balance and Gaba Gaba is a anxiolytic it makes people less anxious it's endogenous your brain produces it if you take valium or barbituates they act on the Gaba system and so does alcohol that's part of the reason why people like alcohol because it dampens anxiety now for some people alcohol also produces dopaminergic Activation so they really like alcohol because it calms them down like they're not anxious anymore and it it also feels it produces incentive reward activation Like Cocaine so for some people alcohol is an absolutely deadly drug you can probably find out if you're susceptible to alcoholism quite straightforwardly if you want to find out sit in a bar take your pulse down five shots four shots if you're little you got to get your you got to get your blood alcohol level above legal intoxication or you won't be able to tell and then take your pulse again 10 minutes later if your pulse is gone up8 beats or more watch it because you're probably producing an opiate response to alcohol secondary consequence of the opiate response is a dopaminergic response reasonable probability that you'll like alcohol enough to find it difficult to stop drinking once you start some of you are probably like that right you have a few drinks it's like yeehaw that's how we do it in Alberta anyways so so part of that's queuing the incentive reward system and because it's an approach system and it's being queed by the alcohol you just continue to hit it and the dopamine kicks only occur as your blood alcohol level is rising so you have to keep nailing it nailing yourself with alcohol because otherwise your blood alcohol level won't keep rising and you won't get that nice enthusiasm and assertiveness that goes along with the Positive element of alcohol neuroticism so this is the neuroticism dimension um there's a gender difference in neuroticism women are about half a standard deviation higher negative emotion than men It's seems like a cross-cultural universal the difference is more enhanced in egalitarian States like Scandinavia which is exactly the opposite of what you'd presume right if you were a say as u a radical I can't remember the name if you're someone who believes that everything occurs as a consequence of socialization as you equalize a society the gender differences in personality become larger rather than smaller so which is you know not what anybody expected but that's what happened so boys and girls seem to have about the same level of negative emotion but as soon as puberty hits women become higher negative emotion than men on average there's still a lot of overlap between the genders and it never goes away again Across the Life Course once it kicks it in puberty and the reasons for that women are smaller they're they're upper bodies are weaker so they're more physical they're they're at a physical disadvantage if they're in a dominance dispute they're sexually vulnerable plus they have to take care of infants so I think those four things are probably enough to tilt the nervous system of women more towards negative negative emotion I've often thought maybe that women's NE emotional systems the negative ones in particular are actually not tuned to the woman I think they're tuned to the woman infant combination so you know if you think about it from an if you think about it for a bit it almost has to be that way because an infant has to be carried around for like a year and a half and so at that point when you have an infant and maybe you're going to have 10 you know you guys won't but in the evolutionary past that would have been the case you'd have an infant for much of your life and then you'd be a grandmother and have an infant it's like why wouldn't your nervous system be tuned at puberty for the two of you instead of one of you so how how could it be any other way anyways all right I'll give you one more what time is it this clock says 146 is that vaguely correct okay 148 fine okay now I'm going to run you through a problem that took me like yes yes 248 yes so let's see here oh yes okay two things so you've got your hypothalamus and then on top of that you've got some circuits that deal with memory and emotion so I'm going to run you through the hippocampus and the amigdala relatively quickly so this is a theory that was basically put together by soov who was a Russian neuros psychologist back in 1962 but it's a variant of a theory that Norbert Wier developed back in the 40s so here's the idea you wander through the world and you if you're in a place that you know your memory systems the hippocampus looks inside your memory systems to see what it is that you want to have happen based on your understanding of the world okay so you're in a motivated state but you have certain expectations that make sense within that state so the hippocampus is watching what you think is going to happen but remember that's motivated it's not just expectation and then the hippocampus is also looking at the world now it it's looking at an interpretation of the world because you can't help but interpret the world but fundamentally the hippocampus is looking inside you and outside you and then it's seeing if what's happening inside and what's happening outside are the same which means you know what you're doing and you know where you are and if they're the same so if it detects a match then the hippocampus inhibits the amydala and the hypothalamus roughly speaking now what it actually seems to do there's a little circuit in your brain stem called the reticular activating circuit and it's the thing that turns your brain on at night if you're sleeping and you hear a noise that you shouldn't hear it's like bang you're awake it's the reticular activating system way down in your brain stem puts your cortex into a high arousal State and poof you're conscious now the hippocampus tells the reticular activating system to basically remain calm as well as as long as what it's what you're expecting and Desiring and what's happening are the same thing so it's sort of like it's saying I know you could jump up and freak out and run about but you don't have to right now because everything's going according to plan but as soon as there's a deviation that's an omaly say then the hippocampus says Whoa something's wrong here and the IT disinhibits the reticular activating system that turns on your emotions especially your negative emotion but it primes your positive emotion and it primes some of the hypothalamic circuits too or disinhibits them because one way of solving the fact that something isn't going well is to switch to something else so it's sort of like there's a bunch of circuits on underneath you but they're being held back like horses in a racehorse and then something that you don't expect happens and the gates come up a little bit because then you're prepared now a lot of that's negative emotion uh oh you don't know where you are but a lot a lot of the rest of it is be prepared to do whatever the hell you might need to do next and so anomaly the hippocampus detects anomaly that's something unexpected and then it disinhibits your lower circuitry and it gets you ready to go now the problem is this one how how worried should you be when something that you don't expect happens and the answer to that is you don't know that's a big problem with life because now something went wrong here's the possibilities you're not looking at the world right so it's actually a perceptual problem right gray for example believes that you just see the world just like it is because he's sort of a behaviorist it's full of stimuli you don't have to interpret them that's wrong you have to interpret them so if something goes wrong it might be that you're looking at things wrong your perceptual systems are out it's unlikely but sometimes it's the case but forget that let's say that you're looking at the world correctly and you know your inferences about what went wrong what went wrong isn't the consequence of you misperceiving it's a consequence of some stupid problem with your stupid plan the problem is you don't know where the error is located and that's why I think there's temperament sometimes if something unexpected happens you should really freak out other times you should ignore it but you can't tell which of those is true right away so what happens is there's a distribution when a little thing happens some people really get upset about it and other people hardly care at all and sometimes the people who get really upset about it are right and sometimes the people who don't care at all are right and that's why there's variability in neuroticism okay now what you do when you're exploring is you start to decompose your plan right if you're if you if you can manage it if you're not so like gripped by anxiety that you're paralyzed then you go into your plan and you think well am I a complete like loser or is it some micro thing that's going wrong and then you can start to decompose it and reconstruct your plant okay so now there was something else I want to tell you about that yeah the other the other thing that this little diagram helps you understand it's like look what happens is when you're laying out a plan a motivated plan and a hole appears in it you have to figure out why you fell in the hole and then what you have to do is you have to take that motivated plan that's kind of running on automatic and you have to remember what it's made out of and so what opens up underneath you when when you've made a mistake is the complexity of the plan and then also potentially the complexity of the world on the off chance that you misperceived it right you're just someone might say you're not understanding me properly you know maybe there's something wrong with you that's interfering with the perception and then you have to do this massive search to try to figure out where the error lies now part of the reason I believe that people stick to their beliefs so hard is because people don't like it when a hole appears in one of their big abstractions right so they've got these high order representations of the world that are shorthand ways of representing something they're sort of like axioms of faith and if they if a hole appears in one of their axioms of Faith then all this complexity comes rushing up and it's overwhelming and so people hate it when you undermine one of their high order abstractions and so I think I told you this before don't do that in relationships right it's best not to do it to yourself as well okay I'll stop with this these are medusas and what what happens when you see the Medusa okay so what what what might that mean you bet it's a it's a prey response and so that's a sort of that's the sort of thing that occurs when you're moving towards your goal in your frame and the bottom drops out it's like uhoh what's there you don't know so what's the logical First Response well if you're high neuroticism it's going to be this you're going to freeze and then and only then if nothing else terrible happens to you you'll start to relax a bit and then maybe you'll start to investigate this structure of your planet maybe you'll start to investigate the structure of the world and then from a constructivist perspective say once you start to do that you gather information from the world and then you remake your plan and You remake your conception of the world and then you could move on so you do that under the guidance of the positive and the negative emotions okay that's good we'll see you Tuesday