I talked a little bit last time about what
we were going to cover but we didn’t get quite through it so I’m going to finish
that. For those of you who weren’t here last time you can watch the lecture because
it’s online. So, we stopped at the depth psychologists, really, and those are the psychoanalysts.
And psychoanalysts are people who are concerned with—well, for a psychoanalyst, roughly speaking,
you’re a collection of loosely integrated spirits. That’s one way of thinking about
it—or sub personalities. You’re not a unity. And those subpersonalities have their
basis in, well in all sorts of things. They might have their basis in past especially
traumatic experience or in patterns of socialization that characterized your family, but they might
also have their basis in fundamental biological motivational systems. So, for example, a psychoanalyst
would contextualize anger, or perhaps sexual attraction, as a subpersonality. And the reason
for that is that—well you know what it’s like when you get angry. You get angry at
someone you love and you know, first of all, you know, and it’s some level you’re wishing
harm. Now, that might only be that you want to win the argument and you want them to be
nicely crushed while you do it, but so there’s a desire that comes along with the anger.
But there’s a lot of other things that happen too. So, for example, if someone’s annoying
you, even if you love them, the probability that at that moment you’re going to be able
to easily access all the memories you have about how annoying they are and have difficult
time accessing the memories about how wonderful they’ve been to you is quite high. You know
and you know that because sometimes you get angry with someone and you have an argument
with them and you sort of clue in later, you snap out of your more or less possessed state
and you think, “Yeah, well you know, I really wasn’t taking the context into mind and
I was kind of harsh.” So, well so and so then you think, “Well, who’s in control.”
And that’s the question the psychoanalysts are really interested in and their answer
is it’s not generally you. And so it’s very terrifying reading in some
sense because, you know, people like to think of themselves as masters of their own house
so to speak and it’s just, it’s only vaguely true. And, you know, people—you know that
too because you make maybe New Year’s Eve—ah, what do you call those?—resolutions. How
you’re going to be a better person. I think the most common ones is man, you’re going
to hit the gym three times a week. It’s like, “No, you’re not actually!” And
so very few people do and that’s partly because, well it’s hard and so you don’t
want to do hard things. And the reason for that is because they’re hard, so it doesn’t
take much explanation. But it’s also because you can’t just tell yourself what to do.
And that’s annoying too because life would be a lot easier if you could just say, “Okay,
well you know, sit down, study for two hours, don’t watch cats on YouTube—or whatever
it is that you’re watching.” And no, no, no, that isn’t what happens. You sit there
and you study for a while and then, you know, you’re thinking about cats and the next
thing you know you’re watching haunted mansions in London or some damn thing. You know, so
and it’s a scary idea in some sense because if you think well, if you’re not really
master of your own house, you know if you don’t know yourself under full voluntary
control—and you certainly don’t—then what does? And you know Freud is interesting in that
regard because he really talked about the motive powerful of fundamental motivational
systems. Mostly for Freud it was aggression and sexuality. And you know those are—those
are big motivators; let’s make no mistake about it. And so he thought of you as—that
the conscious part of your personality maybe as the—it’s like the caption of a ship
with a very unruly crew. It’s a nice metaphor because of course the ship’s on the ocean
and the oceans can be very stormy. And so you can only sort of plot your course and
you have to work with what’s thrown at you. And then the unruly crew is—well, it’s
all your drives. Drives is the wrong way of thinking about it. I like the psychoanalytic
notion of subpersonality because a subpersonality has a viewpoint, there’s things it wants,
and it plans. So it’s a living entity; it’s not some dead cognitive system, you know.
So Freud was interested in some sense more about, I would say, the biological underpinnings
of the subpersonalities, you know. Because he was quite biologically oriented and he
realized that sexuality and aggression were very fundamental subpersonalities. And then there’s Jung and Jung is much more
terrifying than Freud, which is really saying a lot because Freud’s quite terrifying.
But Jung, he’s just terrifying beyond belief. And, you know, for Jung the subpersonalities
that make you up are thousands and thousands of years old. They’re cultural constructions
that are thousands and thousands of years old and they have you in their grip. So, for
Jung, for example, one of the things he said and I don’t remember where it was—I love
this phrasing, it’s so true. And you can think about this for like five years and you
can still think about it after that. One of the things that Jung said was that people
don’t have ideas; ideas have people. And that’s really something to think about because,
you know, just think about your own situation. So no doubt you have political views and you
think, “I have political views.” It’s like, “Well, no you don’t,” because
you share them with a lot of other people. So, they’re certainly not yours. And not
only that, they’ve had a very lengthy historical development far before you ever showed up.
You know, so they’re rooted—they’re rooted right at the depths of your culture,
but then of course they’ve been elaborated by one philosopher or another extensively
over the last two or three hundred years and there’s this whole system of thought and
poof! It inhabits you brain and then you think, “Well I’ve got political views.” It’s
like, “No. The political views have you.” And that’s a very salutary thought because
it’s one of the ways to stop yourself from being possessed. Because people get possessed
all the time by ideas, right? That’s what happened in Nazi Germany; that’s what happened
in the Soviet Union. It happens everywhere all the time. And you might think, “Well,
possessed is a little strong,” but no it’s not actually. It’s a very nice—it’s
a metaphor obviously, but it’s the right kind of metaphor because a body of ideas like
political ideas, they’re a living thing, you know. They’re not some dead, dusty words
on a bookshelf somewhere; they’re an integral part of a dynamic society. And the motive
force those ideas have motivates you. You’re in their grip. And so, you can tell when you’re
talking to someone who’s completely possessed by an idea system or an ideological system
because they’ll just bore you to death unless you happen to belief exactly the same thing.
So, they’ll spout out a few of their fundamental belief axioms and then you can identify which
system they’re part of. And then they just speak in clichés from that point onward and
you can predict everything they’re going to say if you know the axioms of the system.
So, it’s very—it’s very non-authentic speech and that would be a way that say someone
like Rogers or Abraham Maslow, who were humanists of the 1960’s, might talk about it. Because
the person isn’t speaking from the depths of their own experience or from even their
embodied knowledge. You know, they’re just mouthpieces for abstract ideas. And so it’s very frightening to realize
the extent to which you can be the mouthpiece for abstract ideas, you know. And it’s actually
one of the dangers of becoming educated, especially in a mass system like the university system,
because a lot of what happens when you come to university is that you’re fed a set of
predigested ideas—I suppose that’s one way of thinking about it, you know. And it’s
very easy for you to think well that those are now you’re ideas; they’re not. They’re
not. Lots of ideas you have to earn and if it’s a great idea then you really have to
earn it. Because why should you be able to come along and like pluck up a great idea?
That’s not how things work. You have to earn things that are valuable. So anyways, the depth psychologists, man they’re
so good at that. It’s lovely to read them. And the problem too is with a lot of people
we’re going to talk about it’s very difficult to summarize their work. You know, because
often the devil’s in the details. So, you know, you might look at someone like Piaget
is a good example—the constructivist that we talked about briefly. Man, the guy wrote
dozens of books; you can’t just summarize those suckers. It’s not one coherent theory
that you can boil down to, you know, ten axioms and then you can read it while you’re flying
from Toronto to Montreal and poof you’re a Piagetian psychologist. Like, it doesn’t
work like that. The people who formulated these theories were extremely intelligent
and they were often great writers. And so a lot of the knowledge is actually in the
writing itself and not in what you can extract out from the gist, you know. And most of the
theorists: Freud—Jung it’s harder—but Freud, Rogers—people like that. You can
extract out the gist of their theories and then you can—ah, what would you say?—you
can stereotype it or you can caricature it and then you can point out how your caricature
is absurd and you can feel like you’re even smarter than Freud. And, you know, you’re
not. So, it’s not a good idea. And so these people should also be approached with respect
because man they have so much to tell you. It’s so useful. Okay, so we talked about the depth psychologists,
we talked about the constructivists; we didn’t talk about the humanists and the existentialists
and the phenomenologists. It’s a mouthful of words, you know, so let’s put a little
bit of foundation under those. So, if you’re a humanist—to be a humanist means really
to be a creature of the enlightenment. And a humanist thought in some sense—at least
this is what the humanists think—they think of it as post-religious. You know and they
think of humanistic thought as putting the value of the human being at the center of
the cosmos in some sense, valuing the person as they are, and then also valuing the person
that they could be and promoting the pathways of development that would allow people to
become what they could be as creatures that are valuable in their own right. So, a humanist,
for example, would be very skeptical of claims, so let’s say standard Christian claims—and
I use that example because the realm of ideas that these thinkers emerged out of was almost
always Judeo-Christian. And, so, you know, the roots of their thinking are in those systems
and you can’t understand their thinking without understanding that. So, part of humanism
was a rebellion against the idea that life on earth so to speak was of limited value
because anything of any importance was going to happen in the afterlife after you die.
So, it’s like, “No, it’s here and now. It’s right now that matters. And you know,
life in the present is what’s important, and you don’t need some kind of afterlife
or some kind of belief in a transcendent reality in order to find value right here and now.”
So you know, fine. There’s a lot of good things about that idea. You know and the whole idea that you can improve
yourself in some sense is a humanistic idea. And most of you—I mean how many of you believe
that can improve yourself? So, is there anybody who doesn’t believe that that’s willing
to admit it? So, usually people only don’t believe that if they’re very depressed or
hopeless. But it’s not self-evident, you know, I mean and in many cultures—you could
think of medieval culture, for example, in Europe where you know you were sort of stuck
in your position—there was no real idea of self-improvement. You could try not to
sin but you weren’t going to get like radically better in some way; you were just who you
were and that was that. But that’s not the case with the humanists. Now, existentialists, they’re kind of a
different kettle of fish. So, you know, when Freud talks about psychopathology—because
a lot of personality is about pathology, right, how personalities can go wrong—Freud kind
of thinks of the normal person, roughly speaking, as healthy in their normality, but perhaps
transformed into a pathological version of themselves by some sort of past trauma. And
that might often be an abusive childhood, you know, or maybe a sexually abusive childhood
because, you know, Freud talked a lot about that and it happens fairly frequently. So
for Freud, all things considered, if you weren’t healthy there was a reason for it. You know,
something terrible has happened to you and you needed to come to terms with that terrible
thing, however you might do that, and put yourself back together and then you could
wander along being a healthy person. But the existentialists, that’s not how they think
at all. They think the standard human being is pathological. And the reason they think
that is because they think that self-conscious existence, so life—the life of a creature
who knows it’s bounded in time and space, right? Knows it’s vulnerable to disease
and illness and death and the loss of things that they love. And the disintegration of
all things in some sense is—that’s enough of a problem to give you problems without
having to have been abused by it. And so the existentialists view life itself as a problem
of sufficient magnitude that it can destabilize you mentally merely be being aware of it. And, so, they also believe that often what people
do as a consequence of that is flee from their own awareness. You know, so how do you deal
with the fact that life is suffering? Well, you don’t think about it. Well, for an existentialist,
that’s not a very good answer. And I would also say, generally speaking, for clinical
psychologists that’s also not a very good answer because the literature suggests pretty
damn strongly that the harder you run from something that you’re afraid of the larger
it becomes and the faster is chases you. So avoidance of–avoidance is generally a very
bad strategy. Now it’s not always the case because sometimes you can’t do anything
about something, really you can’t. Well, there’s not a lot of sense spending a lot
of time planning and struggling against it, you know. And sometimes people are in generally
genuinely hopeless situations but often not. So, I really like the existentialists, man.
I think their—well all the people that we’re going to talk about—their thinking is extraordinarily
valuable. You know, it helps situate you in your own life. It helps clarify the nature
of your relationship to other people in the world. It helps you lay out what your future
could be if you were the creature that could be. It’s really wonderful. Phenomenologists: they’re a tricky bunch.
The fundamental phenomenologist was Martin Heidegger, who was also somewhat tangled up
with the Nazis, you know, which was clearly not a good thing. And, you know, people debate
about whether or not you can separate his philosophy from what tangled him up from the
Nazis and I think you can. You know, so anyways, Heidegger wanted to take a fresh look at the
nature of reality. And, so, Heidegger’s idea was we made a fundamental philosophical error
way back when we were Greek—Ancient Greek roughly speaking—and that we started concentrating
on the wrong elements of—he doesn’t really call it reality; he calls it being. So a phenomenologist
is someone who’s concerned with being. And you might think, “Well what’s the difference
between being and reality?” And the answer to that is it depends on how you define being
and it depends on how you define reality. So, Heidegger’s observation was that, for
modern people roughly speaking, reality was sort of a deanimated material objective substrata.
It’s dead in its essence, roughly speaking, and the things that are most real are precisely
those things. You could think about that as objective reality for all intensive purposes.
But what Heidegger tried to point out is it’s a choice in some sense, because your knowledge
is finite, because you’re fundamentally ignorant about most things, you have to decide
that certain things are true and then act from that point. And, you know, Heidegger’s
point was: there’s a lot of things that you can decide about at the very fundamental
level of axiom. And so one of the things you can decide, for example, is whether or not
the objective world is what’s more real or whether or not your lived experience is
what’s more real. Now, you might think, “Well what’s the
distinction there?” And I would say the distinction is probably something like watching
someone in pain on a video and being in pain yourself. You know, so pain’s a good example
of an element of being because it’s obviously—you experience it with your own…it’s hard
to talk about just because he uses different terminology. Pain is an element of your being.
And it’s not something—the pain itself is not something that you can even conceptualize
in objective terms. Like you can measure it. You know, maybe your heart rate goes up when
you’re in pain or something like that. Or your facial expressions change. You know,
so you can index it but the indexes are not the phenomena; that’s hence phenomenology,
right? And so phenomenologists have built up an entire system of thinking predicated
on the initial axiom that the best way to approach life is to assume that being is the
fundamental reality rather than the objective as the fundamental level. And then you might think, “Well, why do
people bother with that sort of thing?” And part of it is: one of the—this is an
existentialist claim—one of the consequences of developing the objective theory of existence
was obviously all the amazing technology we have around us and, you know, great, thank
God for that. Otherwise we’d be sitting outside freezing. But one of the consequences
of that is once people established objective reality and then defined it as ultimately
real, terrible questions of the meaning of life arose. You know, if the world—the universe—is
made out of nothing but dead matter, it’s eternally existing, we’re nothing but a
candle flash in the wind, the idea creeps into your mind that perhaps all the damn suffering
isn’t worth it. Or to put it another way, you know, does your life really have any real
meaning or is that just an illusion. Well, Heidegger would say the reason that you have
that problem is because you’re approaching the entire problem wrong. Clearly, things have
meaning; they just don’t if you make the hypothesis that what’s objective is ultimately
real and everything else is merely a secondary consequence of that. So, anyways, it’s complicated.
It takes a while to get your head around it. The humanists and the existentialists and
to some degree the phenomenologists: they all came out of—there was a variety of sources
for their thought and I would say one of them is the clash between religion and science
or between value and objective truth. And they’re trying to rectify the division.
And Piaget himself was trying to do some of that as well. So was Jung I guess. And the
other thing is a lot of the existentialist and humanist work was post-World War II and
so, you know, after World War II happened with its immense catastrophes, of course people
who were thinking about human nature were very interested in why such a thing could
happen. And existentialism, at least as a psychological school arose in part as a reaction
to the horrors of World War II. It’s a very serious branch of psychology and it mostly
characterized thinking in the 1950’s before the hippies came along and, you know, made
everything sweetness and light, so—which is more where Rogers and Maslow fit. So, we’re going to talk about them a fair
bit—the three different categories. It’s kind of a strange approach in some sense that
this class takes because I talked to you about some psychologists in that period but the
other people I talked to you mostly about, they’re not technically psychologists—depends
on what you mean by psychologist after all. I talk a lot about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
and also a lot about a Russian literary figure, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote a book called
“The Gulag Archipelago” which was one of the—there was a few cataclysmic events that
brought the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union to a halt. And you can argue about what
they were but one of them for sure was Solzhenitsyn’s publication of “The Gulag Archipelago”
which is a 2700 word book—2700 page book, got to get that right—that describes what
it was like to be there and how many people died. And it’s a searing book. He won a
Nobel Prize and he deserved it. I mean, Solzhenitsyn: a remarkable person. He’s like the Dostoevsky
of the twentieth century and that’s really saying something. And Dostoevsky’s another
person I use a lot in that section. And both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche regarded themselves
as psychologists fundamentally. And, you know, it’s funny because when you
think about scientists, you know, you usually think about people who are conducting experiments,
right? But, then, one of the things—and you’ll notice this if you think about it because
a lot of you have taken a fair number of science courses of one form or another. And, you know,
a lot of what you’re taught when you’re taught how to do science is how to generate,
you know, how to lay out an experiment properly, how to get the methodology right, how to do
the analysis properly, maybe how to structure the revealing of your findings in proper scientific
format, you know, and how to test a hypothesis. But one of the things that you’re never
really told about is, well, how the hell do you generate the hypothesis to begin with
because, you know, really that’s a least half the problem and it’s probably a lot
more than half the problem. And, so, part of being a scientist is the ability to be a hypothesis
generator, not just a hypothesis tester. Maybe you need to be both to be a true scientist
but maybe not. Maybe you can just generate extraordinary hypotheses and it’s certainly
the case that people like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were unbelievably good hypothesis generators. And so, you know, their thinking in many ways
underlies the entire development of thought—the sort of thought that you guys are going to
encounter in university anyways—their thinking underlies the entire development of the edifice
of I would say both scientific and nonscientific thought across the entire twentieth century.
And, so, it’s quite entertaining to go down there and, you know, wander around the roots
of these sorts of things because you find out how things are linked together and why
they’re linked together and how they developed and what that means. And, also, what it means
for you to have those ideas and why you have them and what role they play in your life. So, okay, so, after that, that’s pretty much—in
some sense, you might think that’s where the clinical and philosophical part of the
course ends. Now, I’m a clinical psychologist and most of the people who were great personality
theorists were clinical psychologists. And that explains to some degree why the first
part of the course is philosophical. Because the thing about clinical psychologists and
psychiatrists and medical doctors for that matter is that they’re not exactly scientists;
they’re more like engineers. So, what an engineer wants to do—an engineer might use
scientific knowledge and, you know, good for them; they should. But really what they want
to do is make something change. They want to build something, they want to transform
something, they want to act on a beneficial—generally—in a beneficial way. Well, the same thing is
the case with the health domains. It’s like someone comes to you with a psychological
problem. What you want to do is you want to make it better and better is not a scientific
category. So, to the degree that you’re a—like you can say well it’s scientific because
worse means abnormal. It’s like, that’s not right. You can make that case but it’s
shallow because there’s lots of times when you don’t consider normal healthy. You know,
you consider exceptional healthy, right? Or maybe you consider exceptional desirable and
desirable might even be better than healthy, right? So, you can’t get out of the value domain
when you’re trying to interact with people and sort out their lives. Because partly what
you’re always asking is: “What’s wrong?” “What’s the matter?” “Why are you
dissatisfied?” “Why are you suffering?” “Why aren’t you productive?” “Why
do you fight with everyone?” You know, “Why can’t you sleep at night?” “Why do you
wake up screaming?” You know, “Why can’t you pursue anything that’s to your own benefit?”
“Why do you hurt everyone that you know?” You know, those are moral questions. And then
the next problem is: “Okay, well what are we going to do about it?” “What do you
want?” “How would you like your life to look if it could look the way you wanted it
to?” And then, “How are we going to get from where you are to that?” And those are
all—they’re engineering questions in a sense but above all they’re ethical questions
because they deal with how to act. So, you know, I don’t want to just slide over that.
Because that’s generally what happens because physicians and clinical psychologists and
say psychiatrists—even though they’re physicians—they like to think that what
they’re doing science and that’s not right. It’s informed by science, but that’s not
the same thing. It’s particularly true with doctors because they’re not even trained
to be scientists. So, okay so that’s that. And then the next
part of the course—the last half—it concentrates on two elements of personality theory; more
modern elements I would say although not more valuable necessarily because of that. Partly
very neurobiological, because we’ve made a lot of strides in the last 50—100 years
let’s say. In understanding the structure and the function of the brain. Like the things
we don’t know about the brain, man, it’s—there are lots of things we don’t understand about
the brain. We have no idea, for example, what its relationship is to conscientiousness except
more or less it seems necessary. You know, so even that you can dispute to some degree
because there are great case histories of people who were born with hydrocephalus. And
so that means that your skull basically fills with water. And the most famous case of that
was a French guy who went for an MRI for God only knows what reason—it had nothing to
do with what was eventually discovered—but he only had five percent of his cortical tissue.
His whole brain—his whole head was filled with cerebrospinal fluid and the brain was
just a little skin around the side that was like a little balloon. And as far as they
could tell there was nothing wrong with him. It’s like, “Hmm, well isn’t that interesting?
What the hell’s all the rest of that brain for?” And then you get the other issue—like
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of (can’t remember her name…I think it’s Pepper…)
She had a famous parrot—an African grey. You can look it up: talking African grey parrot.
And that damn parrot, man, that thing could talk like a four-year-old kid. Way better
than any chimpanzee. Full sentences, it seemed to know what it was doing. It’s like, it’s
a parrot, right? Its brain is this big! So, how is that even possible? So, okay so there’s lots of things we don’t
know about the brain really. And it’s unbelievably complicated. So, but we have learned a lot
of things that are interesting. We kind of understand the existence and the location
of the fundamental reward and pain and anxiety circuits. That’s a big deal. Those are like
discovering major continents, you know? We understand to some degree how people learn
and under what conditions they learn and we understand, I would say to some degree, what
the fundamental motivations and emotions are. Now those are not scientific categories: motivations
and emotions. They’re linguistic categories but we’re stuck with them. So, but we know
a fair bit about their underlying neurobiological basis and I want to take you through that
in some detail because for a bunch of reasons. Partly, because it’s provides a nice scientific
underpinning to a lot of the hypotheses and presuppositions of the psychoanalysts, you
know? So, for example, Freud hypothesized the existence of the id. Now there is no id
in your brain but it doesn’t really matter because the id—the idea of the id—is a
functional category; it’s like a tool. But there are lots of id-like structures in your
brain. You know and one of them in particular is the hypothalamus and that thing—like
human beings like to think that their really impressive cortical cap is the thing that’s,
you know, in charge of things. But your hypothalamus, which is this little tiny thing that sits
at the top of your spinal chord, man, that’s what running you. You know, as long as you’re
not hungry or not angry or not chasing after sexual excitement and not gambling and not
addicted; so, as long as you’re completely well fed and warm and comfortable, then you
can think and you’re more or less in control. But as soon as any of those things go astray
it’s subcortical all the way. You know, and you can see this, for example,
in conditions like anorexia. You know, because anorexia—you could think of anorexia as
a war between the cortex and they hypothalamus. And I’ll tell you man, the only time the
cortex wins is when the anorexic dies, because other than that it’s the hypothalamus that
wins all the time, which is why anorexics cannot stop themselves from binging. So, you
know, so they’ll cut their body weight down to say seventy five percent of what it should
be and that’s hard. Like you really—it’s not easy to starve yourself like that. But
they’ll still binge like mad and, you know, eat a whole gallon of ice cream and two bags
of bread. And they can’t stop themselves and that’s because your hypothalamus, it
would rather you didn’t starve to death. And if you’re not paying attention, if you’re
not on top of the game or maybe if you’ve been hurt recently and so your resources or
your—what would you say?—the negative emotion has been interfering with your cognitive
capacity, the hypothalamus will come up and grab you and say, “Man, you’re hungry
and it’s off to the fridge with you.” You know, so two in the morning you’re going
to be eating everything in there in a kind of a daze. And you’ll snap out of that and
think, “Wow, what the hell was that?” It was like well, that’s the id, folks,
and it’s no trivial thing. And it’s a good thing too because if it didn’t tell
you what to do all the time—like think about how foolish you are. If you had to breathe
voluntarily how many days do you think you’d go through? Eh, it’s like you’d wake up
one day and an hour later you’d forget to breathe and then you’d be dead. So, like
your brain doesn’t let you do anything important; it takes care of all that in the background,
you know, because you’re just not that smart. I mean, you don’t know how to digest things,
for example. You actually don’t know how you walk even though you can do it. So, there
are fundamental subsystems, some of them aren’t even conscious, weirdly enough, even though
they’re neurological: they’re doing all the heavy lifting. And like your cortex is
along there—it’s along for the ride in some sense. And it sort of thinks its in control
but yeah, no. Not really. Okay, so we’re going to talk a fair bit
about fundamental brain structures and the function of those structures because I like
functional neuroanatomy. I like—I don’t want to know just what the brain is made out
of but I want know what all the parts are doing. And so, there’s difficult papers
in there; Swanson, that’s a hard paper, and the paper by Gray. Those are papers that
were written by I think genius-level neuropsychologists and, you know, they put their whole life’s
work into a paper and so, you know, you’re going to pick it up and you’re going to
think, “Wow, this is hard.” It’s like, “Yeah! Some genius spent thirty years writing
it. It’s going to be hard.” But they’re so informative; they’re worth the struggle
if that’s the sort of thing that you want to struggle with. So, that’s the biological end and then there’s
the psychometric end. And psychometrics—very unpopular field of psychology, even among
psychologists, and the reason for that is that psychometricians, I guess, have actually
discovered things and people hate what they’ve discovered. So, and no wonder. So, for example,
it was people who do psychometrics, engineers actually who entered psychology, who discovered
intelligence. Technical psychometric intelligence. IQ. And people will tell you there’s lots
of kinds of intelligence. It’s like, “No there aren’t. That’s wrong.” And it’s
wrong in this way: the statistics that psychologists use were invented by the people who discovered
IQ. And that means that every single thing that a psychologist has ever claimed that’s
been verified in some way using some statistical process has been verified the same way that
IQ was verified. And so you don’t get to say, “Well the IQ stuff’s invalid,”
without saying all of psychology—and a lot of other fields—is invalid too because it’s
the same methods of proof. And it’s even worse than that because like the relationship
between IQ and life success is way stronger than the relationship between almost any other
psychological phenomena and almost anything else. So, for example, for you guys, even
though, you know, you’re all far above average in intelligence—because otherwise you wouldn’t
be here—like at least eighty-fifth percentile. And that’s something to think about because
a lot of that is determined by biological factors so, you know, so a huge chunk of the
reason that you’re here is because, you know, you won part of the genetic lottery.
So like hooray for you. And no one screwed it up too badly as you were growing up. You
know, but even among you guys, the correlation between your intelligence and your grade point
average is quite high even though it’s a truncated sample, right, because you’re
all pretty bright. And even though there’s a lot of error in the grade measurement system
because it doesn’t only index intelligence, it’s still very powerful. And, so, if you
controlled for conscientiousness and other elements of personality, which you can do
statistically, in twenty years the ten percent of the people in this room who have the highest
IQs will have the highest income virtually certainly. You know, unless some terrible
thing happens to them. You can overcome it to some degree if you’re really hard working.
And that’s conscientiousness, you know, but that’s also a trait which seems to have
quite a heavy biological loading. So, well so that’s the sort of thing that
people hate about psychometricians because they come up with these facts and they’re
facts that are really dismal. And I can give you an example: so you guys all have an IQ
of over 115 roughly speaking. 100 makes you about as smart as the typical high school
graduate. You know, 115—that’s kind of the low end for managing the rigors of a fairly
high-end university. You know, 115, you’re still going to have a lot of trouble; you’re
going to have to work like mad. So, but okay so 115: now, that’s one standard deviation
above the mean. One standard deviation below the mean is an IQ of 85. Now there’s just
as many people out there in the world who have an IQ of 85 as there are people who are
able to go to college. Okay, so then you think, “What can you do if you have an IQ of 85?”
And, well, here’s one answer: so, the US Army has been doing psychometric testing for a
hundred and some years for a whole bunch of reasons but they’ve done a lot of the basic
science, you know. And one thing about the US Army is they like to have recruits. And
you can understand why because do you really want to go off somewhere and get shot? And
the answer to that is generally no. So it’s not like there are people lining up to get
into the army. Even in peace times it’s hard to get people. And also, the Americans
have used the US Army as a—you know, imagine you have an underclass of people who aren’t
doing well, which is the case in every society, and you want to boost some of them up, you
know, into something resembling the middle class. You can do that fairly effectively
by inducting young men in particular into the army because they get some training and,
you know, they get some discipline and maybe they can kind of clamber up into the middle
class. And so there’s a lot of policy reasons A) why the American Army armed forces want
people, and B) you know, just to be in the army but also for social reasons—positive
social reasons. So, they’re not likely not to let you in. The consequence of hundred
years of IQ testing was the establishment of a law in the United States: you cannot
induct anyone into the army; you cannot accept them into the army if they have an IQ of less
than 82. That’s ten percent of the population. So you think about that. That means one person
in ten cannot do anything that is of positive value in an organization that’s rather complex
but not more complex than other organizations that’s desperate for people. Nothing they
can offer has positive value. It’s worse to have them in the army than not to have
them there at all. Really, now, you know, that’s a terrible way of putting it but
it’s a horrible statistic. Because it also means, you know, if you think about the army
as roughly equivalent to world in some sense in terms of it’s complexity, it means that
there’s ten percent of the population who just cannot really exist well in a complex
cognitive society. So, and you might say, “Well, you know, something should be done
about that.” It’s like, “Good luck”. People have been trying to do something about
that for a very long time. Like, there’s been billions, if not trillions, of dollars
poured into attempts to do cognitive remediation in the United States. Well, not to mention
that we actually have an education system and the goal is actually to make people smarter. So, we’re going to talk a lot about psychometrics
and the thing about the psychometricians is they’re basically brute force statisticians.
In some ways they’re atheoretical. You know, and they use computer power, roughly speaking,
and advanced statistical techniques to look at large data sets and extract out patterns.
And, you know, I was—I hated the Big Five when I first came on it. I thought, “Oh
God, this is boring.” It’s like, there’s no theory behind it; it’s not prescriptive;
it’s not interesting in any literary manner, like it doesn’t have a good story; it came
out of—it’s so dry. But, you know, it works and that’s how it is. So, we’re going
to spend a lot of time on psychometrics and, you know, my lab too has done a fair bit of
work over the last ten years elaborating out the Big Five Model. So one of the things we’ll
talk about is the Big Ten Model and what it does, roughly speaking, is break each of the
five into two—we call them aspects. And they’re pretty interesting. Like they predict
political belief, for example, quite nicely. So, conservatives tend to be more orderly,
which is part of conscientiousness and less creative, less open. And liberals tend to
be more open and less conscientious. Which a cynic would say that’s why they’re so
into income redistribution: because they actually don’t work. So, you know, the conservatives
work like mad and the liberals say, “Hey hey, how about some of that money?” You
know, and, “The system’s unfair.” And the conservatives say, “Well no. We worked
hard and we’re not giving you any.” Well, you know, they both have flaws in their theories.
The liberals, by the way, make very good entrepreneurs. Like, no let me rephrase that. Most entrepreneurs
are liberal in their political outlook and that’s because they’re high in openness.
So the way it really seems to work is that liberal-minded people start businesses and
conservatives run them. So, they’re necessary for one other. Yeah, well because the liberals,
being open, they’re off to the next idea, you know, and they don’t want to attempt
to the damn details; they get bored of that. They’re not particularly orderly, you know.
But once you’ve established a process and it works you need someone to watch to make
sure the process keeps working. Well that’s not very interesting if you’re a creative
person. So, okay, so, that’s basically that. That’s
the course. So, now, what have we got for time here? So I think what I’ll do now is I’m
going tell you a story and you’re going to think it has absolutely nothing to do with
what we’ve been talking about, but that’s okay. That’s okay. So I picked this weird
picture. It’s a picture of Jonah—biblical character. It’s a 2500-year-old story so
that’s a pretty old story. And generally if a story is 2500 years old it’s a lot
older than that. You know, it just happened to be written down 2500 years ago, but, you
know, that long ago it wasn’t like there were novels and books and that you could find
fifty different stories, you know, at your fingertips. There were a few stories and everyone
knew them. And God only knows how long they’d been around but it was a very very very very
long time. So, this was written down 2500 years ago but we don’t really have any idea how
old it is. And, in some sense, it’s almost infinitely old, at least on any human scale.
Now, you see this picture and what you see is this thing that—what would you call it?
Well, it’s a medieval idea of a whale is what it is. You know, and you might think,
“Well, that isn’t really what a whale looks like,” and that’s kind of right
but a medieval whale wasn’t the whale that we have. Like, whale in medieval times meant
large terrifying underwater thing. You know, and, so, maybe that was—maybe a giant squid
was a whale and a whale was a whale and a shark was a whale and, you know, the category’s
not the same. So, that kind of accounts for the—that in pure ignorance is what accounts
for the kind of strange mythologized representation. But it’s still a representation of something;
it’s just a little generalized. Now what he’s doing is vomiting Jonah up onto dry
land. So, and you think, “That’s pretty damn weird.” How many have you seen Pinocchio? That’s
a lot, eh? How many of you haven’t? Really? You haven’t seen Pinocchio? What kind of
parents did you have anyways? [Students’ laughter] Okay, well, you remember in Pinocchio that
Pinocchio’s father is stuck in a whale, eh, and then Pinocchio has to go down there
and rescue him. And one of the things you didn’t notice when you were watching Pinocchio
is just how daft that is. There you are sitting there, you’re watching a puppet go down
into the ocean to rescue his father from a whale. And you think, “Oh, that makes sense.” [Students’ laughter] It’s like, well also that’s interesting,
right? That’s interesting. Why does that make sense? Why does that make sense? Because
it doesn’t make any sense. But see that’s a good example of the grip of any archetypal
idea because an archetypal idea is a very deep and old idea that makes sense to you
even though if someone points out to you that you believe, which you more or less do while
you’re watching a movie, you think, “Oh yeah, it’s really weird that I believe that.”
It’s like, you know, and that isn’t a puppet going down into the ocean to rescue
his father from a whale either, just so you know it. It’s a drawing of a puppet going
down into the ocean to rescue his father from a whale so it’s like divorced from reality
in all sorts of ways. But what’s so interesting is you go into the theatre and watch something
like that and if someone taps you on the shoulder and say, “Hey hey, do you know what you’re
doing?” You say, “Why don’t you shut up and let me watch the movie.” [Students’ laughter] Right, you don’t notice, “Oh yes I’m
very peculiar. I’m a very peculiar thing sitting here watching this and not noticing
how strange I am.” You know, and so well, that’s partly why I’m going to tell you
this story, because it’s true even though it isn’t. You know, and that’s a funny thing. I had
a very very strange professor at the University of Alberta. He died a few years ago. He got
on a bus, I think it was in Winnipeg, and he never got off the bus and no one ever say
him again. So, he had been a prison psychologist. He worked in the maximum-security prison in
the University of Alberta so who knows, maybe he met one of his old clients. You know, it’s
possible but it’s very strange—very strange ending. Anyways, one time we were talking
about fiction, you know, and he said, “Fiction is a lie that can tell you the truth.” And
that’s a very interesting way of thinking about it, you know, because you read fiction
and, you know, it’s true. But it’s not obviously because it’s not really about
a thing that actually happened. But it’s more than that in some ways because if it’s
good fiction it’s about a whole bunch of things that happened sort of like that. Right,
it’s a distillation. It’s like someone tells you a long story and then, you know,
you talk to your partner and they ask you, “What was that all about?” And then you
tell them in two sentences what it was about. You boil it down to the gist, right? Well
a really good story is the gist of something. And some of the really old stories, the really
weird ones like Jonah and the Whale, for example—which as I said is told to some degree in the story
of Pinocchio—they’re the gist of a lot of things and people have been boiling those
damn stories down for a very very very very very very long period of time. Thousands of
people over thousands of years and they come up with these weird stories that people remember.
And then people think, “Well, they’re real.” It’s like, “Yeah they are but
they’re not real in the way a scientific story is real. It’s a different kind of
real.” So here’s the story of Jonah. And so it’s
an old Jewish story. There’s probably a variant of it in the Quaran, but I don’t
know that variant so and maybe there isn’t. Anyways, Jonah lives in 500 BC and God has
a chat with him one day and he says, “Look Jonah, there’s this city, Nineveh, and people
there, you know, they’re really not on the straight and narrow and things are going to
go to hell in a hand basket very rapidly if someone doesn’t do something about that.
So, I think that you should go to Nineveh and you should tell the king and all the people
that are there that, you know, really they’re just not doing the right thing”. And Jonah,
being a perfectly intelligent person, says, “You want me to go to a city and you want
me to go tell the king, like this authoritarian guy who has absolute power over everything,
that there’s something wrong with what he’s doing that all his citizens are corrupt? That’s
what you want me to do?” And Jonah says, “There’s no way I’m doing that!” because
as I said he’s a smart guy. So he runs off and he goes to this town and as he’s running
off he rents a boat more or less. And it’s a big boat and there are fishermen on it.
And they’re going to like row him something that God can’t find him, which is not going
to be an easy thing. And, so, God of course can’t be fooled by such relatively poor
strategic choices because he’s omniscient and all that. And, so, he’s out on the water, Jonah, and
there’s the fisherman there and then so God calls up this big storm. And the fisherman
are shorting out about this because they’re going to swamp the boat and then they’re
all going to die and they’re not that happy about that. So, what they decide to do is throw
everything overboard so that the boat is lightened. But that doesn’t help much because the storm
gets worse. And so then they all of them start praying. And they all have different gods
so, you know, it’s like a little god competition. And one fisherman talks to one god and another
fisherman talks to another god and nothing’s happening. So, Jonah happens to be asleep in
the hold of the ship. Now, he’s already told them that he’s been running from his god
and so they think, “Ha, we better go wake up Jonah because maybe he’s the guy that’s
causing all the trouble.” So, they go down there and they wake him up and they ask him
about his god. And he says, “Well my god made the heavens and the earth,” and their
gods, they weren’t doing anything that magnificent so they’re pretty freaked out about this.
And so they told Jonah it’s like, “What the hell are you running away from this guy
for? It’s not a good idea.” And Jonah says, “Yeah, yeah, I’m sure it’s my fault
that this storm has come up so why don’t you just throw me over.” And they say, “Well
we can’t really do that because, you know, you shouldn’t run away like that, but you’re
not a murderer or anything; we can’t just toss you over.” And so they decide to try
to row to shore but God’s not having any of that. So, he raises up a big storm and it’s
getting worse and worse and finally the fisherman say, “Ah, you know, over you go.” And
Jonah’s into that because he knows he’s a bad guy. And, so, a whale swallows him. Now
you think, “Hmm, that’s probably not exactly right because first, if a whale swallowed
you then you’d be dead.” And it was probably a shark anyways. It’s not like you’re
going to be thriving down there. It’s not a big cavern like, you know, like the Pinocchio
whale; it’s solid and there’s no oxygen and so you’re dead. But that isn’t what
happens. Jonah’s in the whale and he’s kind of freaked out by this because now he’s
in a whale and there’s a storm and God’s angry at him. So, the first thing he does is
pray and tell God what an idea he his and that, you know, he’d like to be forgiven.
And so the whale zips up to shore and vomits him onto the beach, which the very very undignified
mode of arriving anywhere. [Students’ laughter] So, that’s the Jonah story. And, then, of
course Jonah picks himself up and he thinks, “Yeah yeah, you know, that wasn’t so good.
It was a little rough. I think maybe I’m going off to Nineveh to tell the Ninehvites,
or whoever they were, that they’re just not living properly because that’s a lot
better than making God angry. You know, because what with the storms and the fisherman and
the whales and all that.” So, then, he goes off to Nineveh and, you know, he tells them
what’s going on and it seems to more or less work. So, that’s a very interesting
story and you think, “Well, how did people believe that?” I mean, and one question
might be: well, do you believe that story? And then you think, “Well no,” but then
you think, “Well maybe that’s more complex question than you might think because it turns
out that I believed the Pinocchio story.” And you say, “Well, no I didn’t really
believe it,” and then I would say, “Well it kind of depends on what you mean by believe,
doesn’t it?” Because you watched it and while you were watching it man you were into
it, you understood it, you didn’t want it to be interrupted, you followed it. So, it’s
like, did you believe it? No, you were like a four-year-old skeptic sitting there thinking,
“Well, you know, puppet, whale. No, it doesn’t add up.” You’re not; you’re acting out
your belief in it by being engaged in it and if someone taps you on the shoulder and wakes
you up thirty years later or twenty years later you say, “Oh no, I don’t believe
that.” It’s like, you know, it’s kind of remarkable what you’ll believe. I mean, how many of you are Star Wars like
aficionados? You know you won’t admit it, will you? [Students’ laughter] Yeah, but there’s lots of you in here.
I know. You know, and so that’s all mythology. It’s all mythology. You know that of course,
the person who What was his name? The guy who came up with the Stars Wars idea. Lucas.
Lucas was a student of Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell was a psychologist/mythologist and
the Star Wars stories are updated mythology just like Harry Potter and all the other things
that capture people’s imagination. So, you bloody well do believe this. And there’s
a reason for it too. Now what time is it? Ah, we’ll stop there. I’ll tell you the
reason the next time we meet. [Students’ laughter]