Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. Today, my guest is dr. Mary, Helena more dino Yang, dr. Ahmadi no Yang is a, professor of Education, Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, her laboratory focuses on emotions and the role of emotions in learning.
Ting, as well as how social interactions impact. How we learn today's discussion is one that I found absolutely fascinating because it will reveal to you. In fact, all of us how our temperament that is our emotionality combined with our home environment and the school environments that we were raised in shape, what we know about the world and our concepts of Self in thinking about that, we also discuss the education system and how different aspects of rules and how we are told to behave and what
Really constitutes good behavior or bad behavior, shape, how we learn information and develop a sense of meaning in life. If any of that sounds abstract, I promise you that, today's discussion is incredibly practical, you will learn for instance, how different styles, of learning are going to favor different people from children, into adulthood, and how we ought to think about learning in terms of our emotional systems, being our guide for what we learn. And the information that we retain and how we apply that information throughout life for those
those of you that are parents or who are thinking of becoming parents or who were once children. So I believe that encompasses everybody out there. Today's discussion will arm you with an intellectual understanding of Psychology and Neuroscience as it relates to learning, but also practical tools that you can apply in order to be able to learn more effectively. What I like so much about doctoral, more, dino Yang's research, and the discussion today is that she frames up beautifully. How those who best learn from traditional forms of classroom?
Learning, as well as those who learn from non-traditional, forms of learning, either in or out of the classroom, can best use that understanding of Self in order to learn in the way. That is best for them before we begin. I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is eight sleep.
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Start off talking about something that to me seems a little bit high level, but I think is the perfect jumping-off Point. I've heard you talk before about inspiration and all and as somebody who's interested in the brain and as somebody who's interested in the role of emotions and learning and life experience inspiration. And aw seemed to me, rather high level emotional experiences compared to say,
fear or happiness, and yet inspiration. And awe, just seems so fundamental to how we learn and navigate life. And before we started recording, we were talking about David Goggins of all people and we'll get back to that. But if you could just share with us, what is the role of inspiration and awe, and story in how we learn and experience life starting at a young age and then maybe we can,
Position to older ages.
Yeah, I mean, I think what you've noticed is actually fundamental to the conundrum of being a human is that are most high-level complex, brain States. Mind states are also fundamentally hooking themselves into the most basic biological Machinery. That literally, we share with alligators that keeps us alive and that is both the power and the potential of being a
human and the danger of it. So our beliefs, our experiences, our interpretations of the meaning of things which that's where the story comes in the stories that we conjure about, you know, collectively with other people, culturally and spaces inside our own selves. Also those stories become kind of the through line that organizes the way in which we construct our own experience Consciousness, even I would say. So when we hook
To those very basic Survival Systems by recruiting them into these narratives, about the nature of reality, the power of the meaning we make, what happens is we get this amazingly both fundamental and high-level State simultaneously where we feel expansive. We feel like it's also incredibly beautiful. And we are I would argue actually ramping.
Into or catching into the very basic survival mechanisms, that make us conscious that make us alive. And and that's that's in essence, the power of being a human. That's The Power of our intelligence at this late stage in our Evolution. So, when I was a kid, I love stories of all kinds. Like, I think, like most kids. Yeah, I load my, Curious George books. I'm told, I like the Babar books but then quickly didn't like the Babar books. I like the book Where the Red Fern Grows,
Rose. I like books and stories about it. Generally was boys for me, for whatever reason that had some idea in mind or some ongoing Challenge and that played out over time and the character revolves across the story. And, of course, many, many, many, excellent stories have all those features. Yeah.
I can recall specific passages in those books to this day. That made me feel something in my body. Yeah, yeah. Actually a very familiar with the sensation of having chills go up my spine, as opposed to down, my spine, early on, I realized other sort of a different sometimes the travels up my spine, sometimes job. I saw even distinguish what that orient's me to were away from, but but it's a very Salient memory and experience for me to this day so much. So that, as I'm
Bribing the book Where the Red Fern Grows Right now, I can kind of feel it starting. Yeah, I've heard you say before, and I love this quote, and I want to make sure that you get attribution for this. Not me that we basically have a brain to control our body. Hmm. What is that the role of the brain in controlling the body? And do you think that there are an infinite number of ways, in which our brain does that, or are we really talking about a language between rain and
He of, you know, tingles on the back of our neck to go up tingles on the back of our neck, to go down stomach feeling, kind of tight and making us cringe away, or kind of warm and wanting to approach. In other words, do you think that the conversation between the brain and body is primitive, sophisticated? How nuanced is it? Because the language is very nuanced, we could probably come up with 50 words just in English for the state of being happy. Yeah, but the feeling of being happy I experienced along.
On the Continuum of a little bit happy to elated but it's it's got a one thing really. So if you would, could you comment on this notion of the brain, being the organ that's responsible for controlling the body. And what that dialogue is like what the syllables and consonants of it are like perhaps not at the level of biology but at the level of psychology and how we subjectively experience that sure. So the first thing I'll say is that I learned that idea from from work.
Antonio damasio. So he was my postdoctoral mentor. And he taught me first that this notion that the, that it's the feeling of the body. It's an organism's ability to represent or map the state of the interior and exterior of the body. That becomes the substrate for Consciousness and for the mind. So I would just want to give him credit because I didn't I didn't think of that first, but the work that I've been doing
Is an elaboration of that. It's basically addressing exactly the question that you're asking, which is how is it that we construct a narrative construct, a conscious feeling, which that word I take from Antonio and Hannah. Right damacio. How is it that we construct a feeling and sort of narrow ties that feeling elaborate that feeling into something that feels like a narrative that feels like a belief state or an emotion state or an experience. I mean, that in a very verb like way,
And what is the role of embodiment in that? What is the role of the brain in that? And what also is the role of the culture and the cultural context and other people in that? Because what we're really learning Across The Sciences, right now is just how incredibly social and interdependent our species is. I mean, our biology is inherently a social one. We are directly dependent on other people for the formulation of our own sense of self. And we
ER, act with one another and construct and co-construct, a sense of self, and a sense of meaning, via those cultural spaces, and those sort of nuanced ways of accommodating each other, mentally and physically that, that lead to the feeling of us. So, you know, back to your original question, there's a lot, we don't know their but I think what's very clear is that the kind of backgrounds
Sense of the body, the mapping and the regulation of the body is a basic substrate, a kind of trampoline for the mind. And so we are managing our survival, you know, we now have lots of evidence from across many kinds of science about the interdependence of our stress and social relationships and our immunity and our right and our ability to digest food. And and it's even now very clear that it's not even just us. There's
Whole microbiome, and all kinds of other organisms that are assisting Us in that and that are collaborating with us in that. And then the brain is, is this is a specialized organ of the body. In fact it's not a it's not a separate thing, it's an outgrowth or an elaboration of that process. It's a specialization of that process, a localization of it in a way that provides enough processing power to be able to really construct, all kinds of feelings.
And mental States and beliefs, and imaginings, you know, out of out of basically just the feeling of being here. And then the amazing part is that our brain is also imposing those back down onto our bodies. So the way in which our body reacts and is modulated in response to mental States is also very real. So we have a kind of like a dynamic conversation.
Happening that's happening in very raw and direct way is cat neurochemical and others and also in broader, longer-term slower fluctuating patterns around you know other kinds of hormonal changes and things like that. So along multiple time scales simultaneously we have a kind of hole, right? A humanistic whole of brain and body and mind that are kind of Co Conjuring one another in real time and that leads to all kinds of dynamic possibilities.
Basis for how we are and how we feel as we grow through time. And I think, as humans, the legacy of our intelligence is to tap into those possibility spaces and start to construct them into meaningful, meaningful, sort of chains of ideas, chains of experiences. Over time that we call story, and that I think is what you were tapping into. As a little boy, you were hungry for fodder for, for a kind of structure for those feelings that you could start to help them.
Them evolve from one into the other and chain them together in ways that produce meaning.
Yeah, I'm fascinated by the idea that early in life, we experience some interaction with the world could be with other people could be with an object in the world and it makes us feel something powerful. Yeah. And that lays a template for of recognition, meaning that later in life and perhaps throughout life, what we're always consciously or subconsciously,
Going back to trying to experience that same kind of awe or inspiration because again that the what the circumstance is almost certainly vary, from being a five-year-old, to being an adolescent and into adulthood and into the, I guess they geriatric years, do they still call it that probably good. That I probably use the politically incorrect term but forgive me 75 to 125.
And yet the feeling is the same, right? You feeling and so it's as if a word can mean the same thing but be used 50, different ways, maybe five thousand different ways to wrap this in this analogy, I'm saying that the word is the feeling and you know, and it's used so many different ways, because occasionally, I'll read a scientific manuscript. That is so cool. That's the same way that I feel. Yes. When I was 9 years old and I spend all my time in the
pet store looking at Tropical Fish and tropical birds and thinking, oh my God, that freshwater. Discus fish is the coolest thing I've ever seen. Yeah, and again, I think I must have a strong memory for these kinds of things because I still I feel it right now in my body. So it's as if the same thing maps to so many different circumstances. So is what we're learning across the lifespan, a recognition of feelings in our body as ah this is something I like because of the way it makes my body feel.
Or is it cognitive or both? It went from your answer a moment ago. It seems like it's so interconnected and bi-directional and fast that it's impossible to really say that feelings are in the body or in the brain. It's really happening
simultaneously. Yeah, it's a dynamic emergent State. They give you an example. So that I use sometimes to help myself understand the notion. So I'm, you know, my little, my little daughter, okay, Nora, when she was 22, and some months, two, and four months,
I've heard that she's very verbal kid and I was sitting in the kitchen one day, drinking a cup of tea. I was sad about something that happened in my life but I was weeping or anything. I was just sitting there, I must have looked kind of, you know, lost in my own thoughts. She's playing around on the floor, she came over to me. I'll never forget that this tiny little person. She comes over to me and noticed I wasn't really there with her. You know what I mean? And she my arm was hanging down. She picked up my arm and she held it against your face like that. And she said, I won't say in baby talk because you won't understand me.
I said, don't worry Mama, I'll take care of you and I said yeah and I said oh no that's so that's so sweet sweetie. I'll take care of you too and she said and Mama I where we love you, I really love you and then she said, I mean, I really love y'all. Oh, my really love your arm right.
Fast forward, two years later. Almost exactly two years. She's four and a couple months and she was in bed, one night laying in her bed, in the dark. And I walked by, and I listened at the door to see if she was sleeping there. And I hear this little whisper comes out and she says Mama
I love you more than I'm glad that there's daytime
Right.
What's changed developmentally from her at age? 22 her at age four. Right. I would argue that the physiological substrate of her attachment to her mother is probably quite similar. She had this sort of visceral automatic biological, you might say attachment connection to me, emotionally that she was trying to leverage in the service of making sense of, you know, being active in that world and adapting herself to the situation help.
Being me in the first case, right? But what's changed from markab? Lee is not the substrate of that attachment. It's her ability to conceptualize it, right? When she's to her love is experienced as this incredibly concrete embodied, real physical thing. Like, I love you. I mean I really love the body part. I am currently smashing against my face, right? Whereas two years later she can conceptualize that love in terms of an idea.
Which is, you know, wouldn't it be awful if there was night time all the time and there was no sunshine and daylight, and I couldn't go out to play and I couldn't
write. You're describing my biggest fear. I have people listening to this podcast. We know that I'm gonna go into the grave. Hopefully a long time from now. Yeah. Telling people to get morning, sunlight. Your eyes don't do it, but please continue,
no. But that's right. So she's thinking about how much she is grateful for there to be sunlight. And in her little mind, she connected that to the
Feeling of being attached to me and used one to explain the other, right? So that both things now have meaning and that is the way that is the way. I think that we start to elaborate these very basic physiological, attachment states of version States, right? Motivational states of various sorts into mental States, beliefs poems, you know, love songs. All the things that she does right, even between Age Two and age,
For that really are mental aberrations, meaning, making of that Berry physiologically, basic sensation. Does that answer your
question? It is answers it incredibly clearly and so much so that I'd like to continue to build on that. Yeah, sample. Because I think it's very relatable for people and it's the first time that I've ever heard the embodiment of emotions described in a developmental.
Framework, that truly makes sense. Oh, good. So thank you. So the contact with your arm, or your arm, or both was the was the life example that she was using it as a two-year-old, that maps to an internal feeling and and we're going to assume she's not here, we don't have her in a brain scanner. We can't ask her but we're going to assume that her experience of being put to bed at night and feel
Feeling so so much love from, and for you map to her, then growing understanding of the the world around her. The fact that there's day and night and sunshine, Joyce her knowledge base grows. She can add examples to the feeling and I'm assuming that doesn't matter how old she is now. But I'm assuming that is a 14 year-old. The knowledge base is going to be different and is going to map to that feeling again and again so the question is is what we are.
Wing across the lifespan is recognizing sort of. I don't want to call them Primitives but basic emotional states which are not infinite but can be along a each one along the Continuum. So a little bit of love completely in love, you know, a long Continuum and everything in between a little angry and annoyed to completely Furious. Are we talking about maybe 10 to
30 core emotions, that then we are just simply bending our experiences into and onto and mapping onto and then that's our life-story. And I'm not trying to oversimplify things, but that seems to me like a pretty great way for a nervous system to navigate a world that is infinitely complex. Yeah. And has a lot of surprise, both positive and negative. And in which like every organism, our main goal is to survive as long as
Possible and not for everybody. But in many cases to try and make more of ourselves in those seven to be the basic Drive survive and make more of oneself as seems to be the two basic functions of every state of
every species are more of your work or of your art,
right? Exactly. So is that an, an overly simplistic way to think about it? Or does it, does it work even if there's more that needs to be added? Does that work as a 20-year old? I learned things in college and I'm like, this is awesome. The
First time I learned about the hypothalamus this little marble size structure in the fact that different neurons sitting right next to each other. Can put us into a rage where will make us want to mate, or will make us thirsty or hungry or tired. I was like, wow. Yeah. I mean, it just, it blew me away. It still blows me away. Yeah. But the feeling is the same as looking at The discus fish and in Monet's Pet Shop on California Avenue and I'm 9 years old. So, is that the way to think about
it? I think, yes, I think there is there's an awful lot of bass.
Physiological mechanisms that are that become motivational mechanisms right in all the senses, adaptive, mechanisms that we share with all life-forms, not even just all animals, but all life forms, but they look different and different life forms for sure, because the Adaptive functions the time scales and everything are different. If you're a tree, then if you're a fish, then if you're a slime mold or your me, right? But I think you're right, that what we basically are doing is taking these very primitive.
Well, regulatory capacities that are essentially there to keep you alive and that's a very Dynamic thing to keep you alive. You have to constantly adjust for the needs of the internal organism, the needs of the external, you know, the the demands of the external environment on that organism and being able to manage in that space over time is a very complex Dynamic, kind of kind of iterative process and we take those processes and we conjure out of them.
Form of Consciousness and awareness of those processes. That becomes something that feels mentally powerful to us. And and I think one of the ways that we can know that what you're saying is right, is that, you know, this is just our first experiment on this, but, but I think it's really poignant. We first started to study the ways. People would react to social stimuli, right to have emotions, like, Compassion or admiration.
And in that MRI scanner by telling people stories of true. People situations that invoked these emotions in all kinds of piloting and then we asked people, how does it make you feel? And then we can see whether they actually feel that way and then we move them into the MRI scanner and ask him again to watch the story and feel it. And what we expected we had some very basic hypotheses that things like I'm watching somebody else under a physical pain would activate the same systems in your brain that allow you to feel physical.
In and the same with pleasure around admiration for skill by watching. Somebody do flips on their bike on a railroad tie, or whatever it is right or virtue, right? Watching a civil rights leader or someone who does something that's incredibly virtuously powerful, but not physically skilled and we had a real surprise in those findings, which I think really, when against the prevailing notion of how emotion works and which is still something which I wrestle with trying to understand. So we
We hypothesized that feeling emotions about very physical, direct things and feeling emotions about him, like drawing them in space, but feeling emotions, about complex elaborated, things like compassion, for someone having lost a spouse or something, or you don't see any real physical pain, but you can imagine how they're feeling based on your shared experience of loss, right? Or admiration for virtue that those things would build neurobiologically the way that they build developmentally. The way that
Build evolutionarily. And we did find that to be the case and many other groups in experiments have found that too. But what was a real surprise to us? Is that emotions based in pain and emotions based in something rewarding or pleasurable like virtue, which is really inspiring as people describe it, we're actually recruiting the same brain systems including the hypothalamus, right? And other systems, like the anterior insula which is basically visceral, somatic motor cortex,
Cortex that feels the state of how you're done, just in your lunch, whether your hearts pounding, all these kinds of things, right? What we found is that these emotions when they get complex, when they're about Stories, the valence is no longer the defining feature. The valence doesn't even matter that much. Instead, what matters is does the emotion pertain to a story? That is conjured in our minds, or does it mainly pertain to what you can directly with?
By looking at the person. So they step off a curb, they break their ankle and you go. Oh, that looks like it really hurt. Right versus there are eating dinner alone in a restaurant. And somebody tells you his spouse died, just a month ago, right? Where you have to tell yourself an entire story about how he must be feeling in that situation as compared to just looking at him and seeing the ankle and going, you know, and it was that leap which is really uniquely human. Which is
Fully developed really throughout a very protracted period, right? Little children do not fully appreciate those kinds of mental States yet, right? And in adolescence kids are all about trying to conjure and simulate these things. And they do it very, you know, they overdo it and they do it in these very sort of awkward ways that adults recognize as you know, not likely to correspond, fully to reality, right? Many times. And then we start to build more and more facility.
More and more sort of wisdom around Conjuring. The story that makes the most direct parsimonious sense out of the things that you. Imagine somebody else may have experienced given the complexities of the context in which they find themselves. It becomes more and more Dynamic more and more sort of inferential. And so this also goes back to what you were saying about development. This is actually how I see Development Across the lifespan, my little two year, old loves the arm then.
She loves me as much as something else that she really appreciates like daylight. And then she goes on from there. And when she's 80 God, willing someday, right? She'll be making a different kind of story. Picking out things that matter in more subtle ways that other people may not notice because of the historical context, because of her, her more lived experience that she brings to that story, right? So the things that become Salient, the things you learn how to notice and build a story out of our
Elemental and their learned across time, but the basic fundamental processes around the emotions are always driving the need to make the story. And so just to come back answering what you said before. I think we have this incredibly complex Dynamic set of basic emotions or whatever you want to call them physiological states that we share with other organisms that are basically action programs, that teach you run away from this right move,
That eat this, don't eat that right, but those things in humans, and to a lesser degree in other in other animals, become the fodder for not just action programs in the moment. But ideas, that transcend time ideas, that become the narratives of the stuff of beliefs of values of identities. Those more ethereal, you know, Essences of us.
That are conjured entirely by us, in cultural spaces are fundamentally grounded into our ability to experience the world in a real, physical embodied sense. But but elaborated, far beyond
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I started off studying the visual system and I don't want this to turn into a discussion about the visual system, but in the visual system, we know that there's a, what's called a hierarchical organization where the I encodes and can respond to edges and light versus dark and red green blue. And from that very basic set of building blocks there's an elaboration or a buildup of what's really called the iceberg model that was developed by my scientific.
It's David hubel and Torsten. Wiesel, who won the Nobel Prize for that work? Where you can look at somebody's face and recognize it or see a profile moving at a particular direction and still recognize that person or see a word written and and conceptualize in your mind's eye. What that word like bird actually, looks like like parakeet blue parakeet. In other words, There's A hierarchical build-up and what you're describing. Sounds somewhat similar that there's a hierarchy.
Organization whereby through development. We first learned, I guess earlier, I called them Primitives, but basic building blocks of, you know, when someone steps on my foot, it hurts can hurt a lot or a little bit depending on who stepped on my foot. Whether I have a shoe on see start learning context, but that there's a buildup on top of the, basic somatic experience of different examples that map to pain, including emotional pain and physical pain. Because we know those are interdigitated somewhat and that over time
I'm this builds up so that we have your countless examples but you add it you said something else that's that goes beyond that. The hierarchical organization that we see in the visual system which is that when there's a narrative or a story that we have to add, it changes something about the representation of emotion. I'm I'm so struck by this by this comparison between seeing somebody step off a curb and break their ankle like even as I'm describing just like a folding angle like out.
Ouch that really hurt what you're doing with
your face. That's your body,
right? Yeah, I broke my broken, my left foot five times growing up, doing the same Sport and it just, I can still hear and feel the thing going. And that means six months in a cast or whatever it is versus a story. You know, seeing somebody sitting alone in a cafe writing in their journal and then you learning that they just lost their spouse of 75 years to
Two fundamentally different visual images, right. The emotion could perhaps be the same like oh yes. That is rough and yet the need to impose story. Yes, changes, it do. I understand that correctly that there's something not just more developmentally mature about adding in story and adding context, but that when we have to do that, that there's something that's fundamentally different about how the emotions are mapped in the brain. It, I
The perhaps the the answer I'm looking for is, what did you see in brain-scanning experiments? Where somebody views, a simply a physical break of a, somebody's limb versus somebody has to add story? Is there something that that comes out in the subtraction of one from the other? That tells us? Oh, there's a whole set of brain networks. That are not just about saying, ouch. Yes, but that have to do with the need to conjure up story and what are those brain areas? And then perhaps we can, we can
Yeah, to digest those a little bit.
Yes. And actually, that is exactly what we found, a whole system of brain areas that did this, which now many people have described. And we're still trying to understand the full role of these networks. But, you know, these regions together are called in the literature. The so-called default mode Network, right? Because they were these, the the co activation of these characteristic regions of the brain which are in the back middle of the head and some characteristic regions on the
Roll parietal. And, you know, you know, those were first described in neuroimaging experiments where people were asked to just rest right. Rest and relax. Don't think about anything. Just clear your mind for a few minutes, right? This is Marcus Ray Cole and his colleagues back in 2001 and then and then contrasting that with tasks whether people have to do something very, you know, attention focus, requiring, where you really have to work hard and thinking they found.
And that these highly metabolic characteristic regions of the brain were coming online and activating themselves. When the person was resting and deactivating, a decoupling from one another, not talking back and forth, and exchanging signal very much when someone was doing a really effortful mental tasks, and that was a real conundrum for a long time. And what we now know is, you know, when you ask somebody to think,
Nothing or rest for a few minutes you're laying in the scanner thing. I'm thinking about nothing, I think about nothing. And then you start daydreaming about all manner of stories. You start to imagine yourself into the future here. I am winning the Olympics today, you know, our is my grandma's birthday next week. I wonder if she'd like to go to lunch or if she'd rather have flowers, you know, you're imagining other people's mind States, you're thinking is that guy mad at me at work, you know, or I wonder if I should you know change jobs, you know, you're thinking about all kinds of possible spaces that don't actually physically exist in the
Real here and now. And and so what we found is that our findings were I think some of the first if not the first to to actively demonstrate an increase in activation in these default mode systems, not a decoupling of them but an activation of them when we ask somebody to do an effortful mental tasks and what was the task asking people,
How do you feel about this story, which involves a lot of imposing of cultural and social and contextual knowledge to be able to appreciate? So the story of the guy sitting in the cafe writing in his journal, who lost his spouse of 75 years. You have to know a lot to be able to appreciate how he must be feeling. How does it make you feel? Let me pull up a lot of relevant knowledge, personal experiences and memories and
Then hypothesized generate some kind of narrative. Some kind of story line that would accommodate his situation and allow me to infer those kinds of stories which are very different from your, somebody stepping off the curb. Wow. Look at that ankle, right? It's very obvious. How you should feel that makes the person feel and how you should feel about that. You don't really need to bring a whole lot, of cultural knowledge about their personal history, with their spouse, to be able to understand that's breaking, your ankle hurts, right?
And what we found is that it was those kinds of stories where people had to bring a lot of contextual knowledge to fully appreciate that activated. These default mode
systems thus about the losing of the
smells losing of the spouse. So what we later showed in a series of experiments, contrasting, true stories that are meant to induce admiration for skill, right? Like something physically, skillful somebody can or
Natively, skillful and memorize a Rubik's Cube and solve it with your eyes closed, right? Or do flips, on your bicycle and land on a railroad tie, right? Like these, incredibly skillful things as compared to the same kind of basic emotion in the sense of feeling like inspired like attracted to it, like it's pleasurable. Like it's really cool. Like you wish you could do that too. But now it's about a state of that person's mind or quality of character or disposition of
Self. So talking about the incredibly Brave, actions of Malala and Pakistan standing up to the path, to the, to the Taliban right, where it's not about how well she walks down. The street. Holding her school book, there's nothing really physically skillful to see there. It's about the conditions under what she's doing it and what you can infer about her state of mind and her quality of character to be engaging in these actions under those
As conditions and those complex kinds of inferences, we found activate these default mode systems uniquely and in fact we can in trial by trial experiment. So literally depending on what you say about a story, whether it inspires you that particular story out of 50, right? In a two-hour interview beforehand. If you are inspired by a particular story as compared to another one, which may not resonate with you, right? Then when we put you in the MRI,
Are we can predict that you will actually activate. These neural systems differentially based on your psychological reaction in the interview. So we can actually show that there are systematic ways in which these large-scale networks of the brain. So the way in which the brains kind of balancing its activity, and it's crosstalk around the different parts that are contributing different kinds of processing. Those Dynamic balances are our different ones.
Someone is what we're doing. What we're calling now. Transcending, the situation of that person, right? And starting to learn something bigger about what it all means, or what the story is or the broader reason, why this inspires me and not just is about her, right? So, you can look at Malala and you can say, you know, oh, I hope she makes it that's that's, that's really unfair. And and like, right or you can look at her and say, and kids.
Fate has to us and experiments with teenagers, but wait a minute and they actually, wait, they cover their face, they close their eyes. They look away from the from the Malala video. And I look at the plane ceiling and we can actually get coders with the volume off to identify these periods of time. And say that when they come back from that pause their speech slows, their their postures closes, right? They put their hands down that kind of thing they don't gesture, right? And when they come back from that they are
Thing about two things, they're talking about the broader inferential narrative around, what all this means wait I didn't know, not everybody in the world doesn't get to go to you know, gets to go to school, you know, that's not right. Right? And and these ethical interpretations that's not right? And the third thing that comes up is a feeling of self and what it means for you because you're using your own self and Consciousness as a kind of springboard, like a trampoline. Like we said before to try to appreciate
It what it must be like to be her. So the next thing people say to us our kids say to us especially as it makes me realize that I go to school all the time and I kind of take it for granted and maybe I should work harder to try to do something about that for other people, you know? So we have this incredible Confluence in the brain and mind this layering of of of real physical actions and things that happen that you can directly observe with the visual system right in the world and then you impose upon those
Is a desire to construct a story or meaning and you elaborate that meaning and in doing. So, you also ramp up, the internal sense of self-awareness, of me, being me of conscious systems systems that support Consciousness in the brain and brain stem. Very basic things, we share with alligators, right? That become that kind of inspired state of, you know, like wait, it makes me want to do more for the
World or it makes me inspired to know. There are people like her. She gives me hope for Humanity. One kid told me, right? So we've got this incredible Dynamic layering of the feeling of the body, the real physical body, the observation and sensation perception of the world around us in a physical real, or social real sense. And then the elaboration of that into these cultural narratives that become feeling States and were valence kinds of disappears, right? It doesn't matter so much anymore, whether it's
Painful or pleasurable. It's more about, does it mean something I'm suffering because it's helping someone else. Right. And so, it becomes something desirable, even though it hurts me, right. Otherwise, none of us would go through childbirth, right? And so, it's that meaning process, that makes us really uniquely human. And that is the development of these emotions over time. I think incredible, if I'm understanding correctly, there's a feeling state in our
Body when we experience or observe somebody in in their own feeling state or experience, it may be the same. As theirs might be different. And frankly, as a neuroscientist, I'm going to say, we'll never know, exactly it. We won't know
Angel and philosophical debate. We won't if I see blue and you see players at the same variance, right?
Probably not based on some form of knowledge of color vision and the distribution of cones to explain why I'm saying that the distribution of
Cone photo pigments in your eye. And my I are extremely different to the point where we're not working with the same palette. Cool. And I think that makes life interesting interesting, but assuming that neither of us is colorblind red is similar enough to both of us that we both look at and say that's red. But one in eight emails is red green colorblind would look at it and would see what you and I call Red and call it Orange in any event.
When we let's say, listen to or watch and listen to Martin Luther King's your classic, I Have a Dream speech or when I hear certain music that I first heard, when I was 14 I was a particularly interesting for me time in my life in part because I was 14 and we'll get back to that. And what I mean by that is about adolescence, right? I'll just say, I'll go on record by saying that the I think that the music that we listen to in our
Adolescence and teen years is one of the main ways, in which we come to recognize the extremes of these feeling State templates that you're describing. I can one of the ways I prepare for podcasters is to walk. And for my solo podcast is to walk and go through some of the narrative. My neighbors. Think I'm crazy, but that's okay. I think they're crazy too.
Maybe that's right. That's right.
Exactly. And but I always,
As know what music, to listen to before I do a solo podcast depending on the state that I happen to be in driving into the studio versus the one. I need to be in in order to deliver that particular material. And I know because I it's almost like knowing what palette of colors emotional colors, I have in me at the moment and which ones are going to be required to deliver that material, because it's different. Depending on the topic matter for that episode, what I'm referring to here is, is this idea that
You know, we we come to understand emotions through our own experience and how observing other people and listening to certain music can influence that. And I realize that some people probably have more of a buffer between their experience of the outside world. So cold, exterior, receptions things outside us and their internal landscape. Some people I realized have very little narrative distancing, in fact live with someone who has very little narrative distancing. When she
She watches a movie, if the person gets punched. Yeah, she Ducks. She, she flinches. If it's a happy movie, she gets happy. Yeah, if somebody in a movie is sad, she really feels it in for a while. I thought I'm gonna say you know, this is like really seems a little extreme but I've talked to professionals about this and it's something called lack of narrative. Distancing
transportation is another way to say it. Yeah, being transported by story
right? And and I think that it has its adaptive utility I'm not being critical. I think that's an incredibly interesting
Back to ourselves. Some of us have a lot more narrative distancing, especially with violence and I think that's because I grew up around a lot more violence than she did. And so I see somebody, you know, get beheaded in a film and I, unless it's something where I've really been built into the story of that person and it was a real world thing that I knew actually happened, then I just kind of go okay, what's a movie? This is a movie, it's not real and if it's a movie about something that was real, that might be a little bit more of an emotional impact. And of course if it's a
Terry. And it's real footage. It's pretty rough. Yeah. But I don't I'm not horrified in the, in the way that she's horrified and I'm horrified, but not to the same extent. So obviously that some of us have more of a buffer than others. And you can see this in a movie or in a classroom full of kids watching a speech. Like the, I Have a Dream speech or hearing the Rosa Parks story, for instance, or list.
Went to and watching a David goggin. Social media post, which I met David earlier because your son had a question for me about David goggin. So I happened to have the Good Fortune of having met and know a little bit. I don't know him very well but I know in from some in-person interactions and he is every bit as intense and every bit as serious about his ongoing progression, as he appears to be theirs. There's no falsehood there. It is 100% data fact. Genuine he does what he claims to do and more. Yeah.
Yeah, that we don't hear about super impressive, human being. So when we see something like a David Goggins post or we watch, and listen to the, I Have a Dream speech and we start to feel something. Yeah. Like, whoa, we're feeling inspired to use the basic language. Are we mapping to some subconscious awareness of that in ourselves? Meaning our, we mapping to sometime when we felt inspired,
In another circumstance or are we really, you know, is this merely a kind of a return to a feeling state that we have to recognize? I don't know if experiments have ever been done on this but is there any way to determine whether or not? We can truly have novel emotions past age, 15, or we really just returning, or was really, just doing a sort of template matching of while I'm feeling this again. And this makes me feel capable, like I knew out and run today. Even though I was going to basically not run,
Today. Well, or, you know, it's possible to have a fantasy view about how the world could be in terms of equality that an opportunity. And you know what? The that's subconsciously as my brain saying. Yeah I remember when I was six and I didn't know the difference between some people have an opportunity and other people not having opportunity is that what's happening or do you think that we are more sophisticated than that? And we are actually really
Responding to what we think we're responding to.
Okay. Wow, there's a lot in there, a couple, a couple of things to start. So the first thing I was thinking before when you were talking about the visual system, which I think is relevant, now is, is that as humans? The more developed we get the more experienced, we have the more we've adapted to the context in which we live, you know, the real physical context in this case, the visual context included but also the
Several values of that context, the things we've noticed other people notice, right? How do you learn when you're living in the jungle that one you see eyeballs. You should, you know, go stand next to your mommy, right? So you learn what to notice, you learn what, what you need to attend to in the world and you're so, when we are perceiving things either, very basic things like a visual scene or hugely complex, elaborate things like Martin Luther King's speech, we are
As much imposing on to the world, our own expectations of what is there. As we are perceiving. What's actually there, right? So, as we impose onto the world, we bring what you might call, our cultural ways of seeing and knowing our values and beliefs, and we push them onto the experience of what we noticed. So, even in very basic ways, things like cultural values.
Change the way in which people observe and remember scenes, right? So, you know, there's classic work by shinobu, kitayama, and other people showing that in Japan versus in in the u.s. when you show people a scene of, you know, like an underwater scene with, like, all the beautiful things that are underwater, rocks and plants and things and little fish swimming by. And then one big fish swimming by, right? And you ask a Japanese person. What's this, a picture of, they tend to talk about, it's a scene of rocks and plants and little
And then a big fish swims by. If you ask an American Western educated person. What is this picture of they say, oh, it's a fish swimming through a scene, right? We tend to notice first and you can, he's shown that this is, you know, is very, very automatic. It's very low level. It's perceptual, not just conceptual and it actually changes what people actually notice in the scene and what they remember later and all that kind of stuff, right? We learn how to
To sort of filter input. We're not little, you know, robots or a little video cameras walking around observing the world. And so when we see something as complex as a social story, We impose onto that all kinds of personal experiences. So you said, are we ever able to experience new emotions after age, 15? I think, no, but we are very well able to experience new feelings, right? Which are the complex elaborations of these physiological States.
And the stories we tell ourselves about the meaning behind them that is developing all the time and it's developing through all kinds of quote-unquote cognitive media. We do it through our science, right by being inspired and interested in something by being in all of something. We do it through ART, through trying to express an emotion or a feeling or a value State through the way in which we portray something to other people, right? As humans we are driven. I mean, even as cave people, we were
Driven to say I was here. Here's my handprint, I'm going to spit it, onto a rock. So forevermore. Anybody else comes in here is going to see that it was me who was here and I have a me right? And so what we're really doing is moving through the world, not in this kind of receptive passive way, but we are actively imposing ourselves onto the world. We're actively bringing our interpretive power and adapting. What we do now.
Relative to the way in which we accommodate right Piaget talked about this a hundred years ago, accommodate or assimilate those things into us that we that that may disagree with our schema that may that may align and Accord and reinforce them. So this matters a lot for the ways that humans experience the world more broadly. Because think about, for example, a terrible topic like, genocide or the Holocaust, right? How does something like that happen, right?
How is it that people who have empathy? Who love their family? Who love their neighbors. Can suddenly turn on each other, right? What's happened? Is they've shifted the way in, which they naira ties. The context of those events the way in, which they impose interpretation on somebody else's pain, has been fundamentally shifted from that's another human suffering to. That's not a human, that's a read a pig, a bug or whatever.
It's right. And that dehumanization process allows us to shift our story set so that we bring another set of values and beliefs into the space.
Can I just say, I'm glad that you brought up that dark example. Yeah, because my understanding from my psychology courses and University where that as much as we would all like to think that we are incapable of being the committers of genocides, capable of it, that there are studies that we're done in.
50s. But then have been repeated over many decades showing that in certain contexts, essentially, everybody, and anybody would respond to a an authoritarian figure and torture, somebody else. And I'm sure as people are listening to us this, they're thinking no, I would absolutely not do that. But all the data point to the fact that if the conditions were set in a particular way you and I and everybody else most certainly would a very eerie idea that goes back to I think you
This idea that we have all things inside of us, and we certainly have all the neural circuitry components inside of us for rage and contempt and, and horrible mistreatment of others as well as all the good stuff. But I'm just glad that you brought up this example because I think that for a lot of people it's inconceivable, but I've never heard it framed the way that you're describing it, which is that if the story becomes not about the other person suffering, but primarily about One's Own Story of
Suffering and that can suppress or literally inhibit, the neural circuits that invoke empathy, then it makes perfectly good neurobiological sense as to why that would at least be possible. And of course I don't think it's a good thing, it's just like many aspects of our biology and psychology. Just happens to be the way things are.
It is and I think it really I think I mean I'm the ever The Optimist I'm also ever the educator right eye
You know, I'm a teacher. I'm very also very interested in the ways that we design educational experiences for young people. I think the only hope we have to protect ourselves against these possibilities, is to systematically develop dispositions in ourselves. Proclivities within ourselves to question our own motives and to deconstruct our own assumptions about situations and to engage with other people's perspectives.
Automatically. And when we develop those dispositions, the hope is that we are developing within ourselves, a kind of a veto system, right? A system for checking our own motivations against other people's experiences of those motivations and
You know, so much of what's leading. I think. No. Now we're going in another Direction in a kind of a political Direction. But some, what's what's leading us into these very divisive political types, for example, not just, and, you know, the rise of authoritarianism, not just in the US or the threat of it, not just in the US, but around many places in the world, all of which, by the way are Western educated is that we are taught that to know. Something means you own something in yourself, and then you take that with you and
Imposed on the world forever. More. I know how to do algebra 2 and I can do it whenever you asked me kind of thing. And that's what a good student is where when people in learn to engage with their own knowledge States, in more Curious, open-minded flexible ways, then we disposition Ali teach ourselves to to check our assumptions to rethink. What we think we know. And in this is key developmentally to notice when we need to do that. And when we should
just plow ahead and it's totally fine. And and so what we're doing I think right now to ourselves both in the education system. And in things like social media, is we're reinforcing our own biases by diving down rabbit holes, where you re hear the same thing over and over again, that reinforces your own belief systems and then you come to believe those things and those put you on a train toward a particular kind of action or belief system that never becomes deconstructed and it's very comfortable and it's easy to do. But the
A responsibility. I think we have as individuals and as groups as humans given the amazing intelligence we have, is to rise above that and actually look back on our own selves reflectively and deconstruct. Our preferences, deconstruct our values and our beliefs and systematically query them specifically around how they impact or influence or or change the situations of those around us or don't write the
Situations and sustainability of the world that supports us or don't. And so, it all comes back to the emotions that drive our thinking. So we have these very basic primitive physiological states, which vary across individuals, the degree to, which they are, you know, incredibly powerful easily evoked versus not, you know, there's a lot of range in that and all of that variation makes things interesting, right? But it's our ability to learn to experience those
To know, develop, wisdom around when we need to query, our own emotions, and deconstruct the narratives that are that were using to validate or substantiate, those kinds of emotions in order to assess, whether we actually are right whether we should continue or whether we should step back and and and, and, and reframe, right? And so that kind of mental
All flexibility really comes out of an emotional disposition. It is our ability, so it takes it back to what you're asking at the very beginning, it is our ability to not just drive from what feels like the bottom up, which, of course, is always starting in the top down because you've got some interpretation of the world that makes you feel fear that makes your body do this and makes you right. But also to be able to rise above to transcend and think about what are the broader systemic historical.
Ethical Civic implications of this narrative. I'm telling myself which feels default like the truth and how might I deconstruct those systematically and how might I invite others to give me their version of those events and engage with those systematically in order to be able to really appreciate the implications of my beliefs. And so, the bottom line is that the emotions that were talking about today are actually
Lee. The fundamental drivers of all of our thinking decision-making relationship-building, right? Our community lives and our personal well-being, all-in-one mix. But that doesn't kind of excuse us for acting on their bequest. It actually imbues us with a responsibility to then develop dispositions to systematically query, those and reframe them when they are not serving us.
World--well,
exactly what you said as so much. So that, you know, I, I'm a big believer in following lots of different types of social media accounts. Yeah, I've taken some heat here and there because people automatically assume that if you follow an account that you subscribe to that ideology. But I follow many accounts to my disagree with what they say. Yeah, specifically so that I can learn different perspectives. As far as I know, we're the same species
I mean, these other people. Yes. Far as we are, sometimes I wonder but they probably wonder the same way about me. They Wonder too and there's enormous range in those. Those accounts that I follow, and I follow different accounts for different reasons, some for entertainment, some for information, some for challenging myself, some for my desire to be baffled every now and again, but to always return to this idea that we're all, we are all basically working with the same building blocks of
Bonds and neurochemistry some people's dopamine which whether or not you're into Bitcoin or traditional currency the one true currency. That's Universal is dopamine. Yeah, everyone's working for dopamine and exchanging their own dopamine with World experiences but this one of the reasons why I think it's important to not be siloed in one's thinking or exposure to different things on social media, a somewhat controversial statement, actually, because I think a lot of people assume that if you follow,
Oh, somebody from a particular political party. Then that means that you vote that political party, Etc. But that to me, always seem crazy. I'm fortunate to have a good friend who was on this podcast, Rick Rubin. It was a extremely accomplished music, producer, and instead produced music from essentially every genre of music, punk rock, which is our syrup. I got my start and still love. Punk rock music so much but classical and Hip-Hop and everything in between and Rick is somebody who forges. So broadly and I've really learned to try and forage broadly.
Terms of ideas and ideologies. And it's I think a lot of people are just scared to be exposed to something that they hate so much because they don't like that feeling in their body of disagreement, but I
had dissonance. Yes. Very you know, that kind of cognitive dissonance, because it is very difficult, it takes work to resolve
it. Yeah, I guess is there. I like to think there's a way to step back from that, and observe it not from a disconnected stance, but from a place of curiosity about, what's driving, the those mechanisms in people and maybe where we need to adjust our thinking.
Maybe not to adopt their mode of thinking 100%, but maybe, you know, 10 percent or two percent. I think one of the reasons things are so divisive right now is because of social media and the siloing or of kind of Orchard. Very Divergent, trajectories of people only following and listening to in obeying certain kinds of information and other people the other. And I think the pandemic is the place where all that really clashed very heavily and continues to clash another areas, to certainly not something that's going to be
Inside of this conversation. And yet I do have a question that that grows from this aspect of our discussion, which is, you know, what do you think can be done at a concrete level in terms of Education of younger people, as well as educational people who are out of high school and and Beyond to try and adopt these more encompassing modes of of learning and experiencing the world?
I mean, it's one thing to say, you know, expose yourself to lots of different ideas. It's another to understand how to, how to do that, in a way that that is adaptive and any ideas you have, I think would do. I, and the audience would really appreciate and feel free to, to make this an editorial or map back to data. I mean, obviously, this is your wheelhouse. This is that this is your expertise, so I'm curious. What, what, what should we do? Should, should I send
A family members who have very Divergent political beliefs from me information to the contrary they're thinking or what do I do and what do I do for me? What you, what should we all be doing with our ten year olds in our? Yeah and ourselves.
Well, I won't, I won't comment on, should you send your family members? Your there's other people that do that and they do that work and they know how to
always frustrating each other over text message. It's okay. It's okay, it's okay any
worse? No.
Okay, we all
Of each other
anyway, but one thing I really do think a lot about in this is the way in which we educate, our young people. And what do we do with our ten year olds, right? And like the first thing I'll say about your ten-year-old, I don't know if you actually have a technical but is is query them about their beliefs when they follow something, when they think something is impressive or bad or, you know, ask them why teach them to unpack their own beliefs, that doesn't mean that you that you don't still hold them necessarily it.
I mean that you adopt the opposite belief, right? If I talk to someone who has a very different value, system than I do and I disagree with them, that's legitimate, but to it also. But in deciding that I disagree, I have sort of Revisited, my own belief and queried it. I've externalized it a little bit made that thinking visible. It's the way we talk about it, in education, that's David Perkins at Harvard talks about it that way, you know, making your thinking visible and then examining that thinking. And and so
I think one really important step that as Society will have to take or we won't make it. And I know that sounds a little dramatic, but I actually think it's true. Sadly. And I'm starting to think it's more and more true is that we need to really get Brave about how we think about the process of educating, our young people, and what it actually means to expose young people to develop.
The appropriate age appropriate opportunities to grow themselves. As thinkers as individuals and as Civic agents and community members. I think that our Western designed education system has in it. Some very basic beliefs about what counts as knowing and what is worth thinking about and knowing about
About and how do I know that? How do I test you on that? That I think is deeply. They are deeply problematic and lead us. I mean, I know this is a strong statement but they lead us to a place where we are. We are actively punished not just not encouraged but I would say actively discouraged from really playing with ideas, engaging systematically with our own beliefs.
Strutting those beliefs and engaging with complex perspectives on topics and ideas. That is just not what school is about and it needs to be. We need to shift. So right now, the way in which we think about school is about, is basically judged by quote-unquote learning outcomes. Right? What have you learned? And how do we know that we make you demonstrate it by yourself under time pressure in a particular setting, right? Or you're going to come back and
I'm going to give you a question and you're going to give you the answer. I had in mind. And if you do that in time, then I'll say you learned it. And now we're done. Check right?
As compared to a system and there are Educational Systems like this. This is not, there are people. For example, the performance assessment Consortium and New York City is a Consortium of public schools, some of which do this extraordinarily. Well they have a dispensation from the New York state government, not to give the Regents exam as their graduation requirements and their and their Mark benchmarks of learning. But instead, to have alternative ways of assessing
And kids were kids work for months to years, depending on the project, on these in-depth intellectual multidisciplinary projects, where they explore a topic, and they engage with their own process of learning about that topic and they bring in teachers and Community experts and other people. And they present their work. And then they query the work and they talk about their own learning process and what could happen next and what decisions they made and all these kinds of Trades pieces, exact
Actly. You have to invent, not just the work but the question you need to look at the world and notice what it is. We're not understanding that we would benefit from understanding and find a way to isolate and systematically query that why don't we build education systems from pre-school all the way up that in that engaged people systematically in that kind of intellectual?
Curiosity, we don't do that. So we know that little kids education, preschool education. If you don't have the water table in the sand table and the cool stuff in the choices and the ways to engage with each other. And you know, I mean, all the stuff being really age-appropriate for three-year-olds to touch and smooshing, you know, try to taste and whatever else they're going to be a mess on the floor. They're just not going to come. They're going to refuse to come to school, right? And they're going to be laying in the, in the doorway, throwing temper tantrums and by as so we know how to do little kid.
Well, doesn't mean we always do it, but we know that they need to be intrigued. They need to be invited to think and they bring their Natural Curiosity. And then you expand the range of ways they can leverage that Curiosity to discover new things. They hadn't known to think about before, right?
Then we get to the standard quote-unquote educational system, and we somehow think that that natural human proclivity to engage curiously and meaningfully with deep thinking about ideas and the world is is like inefficient and inappropriate and frightening and we teach kids no no no turn that off. It's dangerous if you do it it's considered insubordinate, right?
And what we want to instead to do is just, let me give you what I've already figured out for you. I'm going to give it to you and you are going to give it back to me.
So it seems to me that in the way that things actually happen in school. What is created is a kind of desire for the kid to be a computer. Not a human and they do have a dopamine system. However yeah. And so what becomes the the buzz the emotional Buzz is performance. Yes if
It becomes a buzz at all. So for the kids that don't get that buzz from performance or they don't they don't intrinsically love the math or the English or the books that they're being presented with who are or whatever the subject happens to be. Or maybe they only like one or two things then they emotionally dissociate from the rest of the material. I'm actually describing a bit of myself in high school. I was not a barely finished high school.
I dropped out of sixth grade for a few months. Yeah. Didn't work for me. Yeah.
Well, you know,
She got back to it and as I imagine you did too, we ended up as academics. But I think what you're describing is Sookie and I never thought about it from the perspective of, oh yes, young kids. Like we're given all the things that are going to drive our sensory world in the appropriate ways, touch and sound and
vision, and trying to build meaning in our
mind. And that we get to students young very Young Learners impose, some of our own intrinsic.
Ocean to do certain things and not others and that that isn't supported as we're adult. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor inside tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals. I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done. For the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term Health can only be assessed with a quality blood test, the problem with a lot of blood and DNA tests out there, however, is that, they'll give you information
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What you're describing is so vital, what age do you think this Cliffs off? So you okay, so in preschool kids are allowed to do this in kindergarten, they're allowed to first grade they're allowed to do it in true in most schools. But at what point do is the expectation imposed on kids to become little rote, learning, computer machines and to get their dopamine from performance rather from intrinsic pleasure in what they're learning thinking about you. And also, how do we
Restless issue that there are certain basic skills that not everyone is going to perform well at. And so for the kid that says, I don't
like math, but you still have to learn it like, well, you need to appreciate. How do you know, how do
you conjure up in a joy or an appreciation in that kid? And it seems like a hard thing. I mean, I eventually set myself, all along academic trajectory to that worked out, but that was initially, just out of pure fear because my life was was really bad. I
I made it circumstances and myself, made it bad and I was rescuing myself from basically becoming more of a loser. So, I was like, okay, schools the thing and I just school and that was that was the turn hard right into academics for me. But what do you do for the person? Who is like really doesn't like math? Because they're struggling with it? Or doesn't like biology or psychology and how do we, how do we evoke a at least an appreciation for that? It sounds like the emotions.
System is the key system to leverage in order to learn and and so could you talk about the relationship between emotion and learning? Yeah, because I realize this is really the center of what you do.
So I mean, you could say it this way, right? So whatever you're having a motion about is what you're thinking about, right? And whatever you're thinking about, you could hope to learn about, remember something from, right? Understand differently. So the key question for educators is
What? Everybody's always having some kind of emotions all the time. If you unless you're dead right? Or unconscious, what are people's emotions about in this space, if the emotions, because, whatever those emotions about that is what you're learning about. So, if the emotions are about the outcomes, did I get it right? I'm going to flunk and I am a plus, I'm so smart. I'm so stupid. What any one of those, right? If those are the main drivers, then that is what you're learning about. If the emotions are about the actual ideas in play,
The math the physics. The why does the ball roll down the ramp? Wait a minute, that's the same as why the moon goes around. You know what I mean? Like, there are right when the emotions are about ideas than what you're engaging with is learning about ideas. And so what I would argue is that in setting up the kind of accountability system, we have, we have taught people that their emotion should be about these high stakes accountability measures, which means
That's what we're learning. How to think about perform perform, not how to think about the ideas, not the intrinsic power of using math to understand the world in a different way. So how do you engage kids, right? You engage kids by setting out Rich problem spaces that in problems that invite them to try to engage with something.
Fix your curiosity, that's meaningful to them or have them bring in where the kid really hates it. Like, what is it that you do, find, interesting, kid, right? Start their start there and start using your academic skills in a way that will give you power to do what it is. You're interested in doing. That's the way in use your writing user Matthews, your persuasive argument skills, use your filmmaking skills. Whatever it is to tell the story of something that you find.
And deeply meaningfully powerful to understand and all the sudden you need the math kids actually say things like, like there's this lovely. There's this lovely long quote from a, from a Sudanese immigrant kid in one of these New York schools with the performance, Assessments in an article, I wrote with a colleague named Doug connect, the article is called building, meaning builds, teens brains, you can find it, it's end in educational leadership. There's a big long quote from this kid.
And he's basically explaining what math class meant to him which he had never passed a math class before. And he says he got this problem called walking to the door which is basically Zeno's Paradox, right? You get halfway to the door halfway to the door halfway there and you ever get to the door. Why or why not write? And they spent months learning the math. That would help them get at that problem and he talks about how I had a problem. He says, and I had to learn fractions, I had to in order to be able to solve the problem I had
Add. And as I engaged with fractions and that problem I got fascinated, he says by finite and infinite. And these ideas were driving my need to learn to do fractions, right? So we've got the cart before the horse, I'm not saying you don't have to learn math or you don't have to learn to read or write or or do all these other kinds of skills. But we make those, which is in the horses cart, you know, what's in the cart?
Call that the metric of the education system and the aim of it. When in fact it's the quality of the horse, can that horse pulled the thing right? That's the development of the person and what they put in their cart then serves that development. It's the tool could have ways of knowing and understanding that come with you as you move into the world. But this takes real real developmental skill on the part of Educators, right? Who are not supported or or or resource or
Trained to think about development in these ways. I mean, so you asked, when does this fall off, it really depends in what school system you are and in what demographic you are when it falls off. But for almost everybody, except for the privileged few who are in very Progressive alternative schools, it falls off by adolescents, which is when school gets serious and is also ironically when developmentally kids are developing the neural capacity and the psychosocial capacity.
And the drive to infer, complex narrative, meaning from the things they are doing, you know, these aren't just my shoes. These are a statement about, you know, what I believe about sustainability and about sports and about adults, and counterculture, right? And as we grow into a space where were driven to try to, you know, Challenge and think about big meanings and engage with perspectives and emotions and social issues and Broad.
Existential questions. Be they in physics, or be, they in art, or be they in the social Civic domain, right? What do we do? We double down on, controlling the input and the output transactional mechanisms that count as quote unquote academic rigor and achievement, right? We start to ask kids, you know, what's the name of the the servant who shows up in the scene and in and Great Expectations, right? Is it Molly?
Or is it Maria right? And it's, you know, like who the heck knows. And that is not the point of reading Great Expectations. Right, we take away because we're afraid as Educators as Society. We've got this narrative around young people's in particular, but everyone's propensity to build and construct. Meaning in these spaces and self in these spaces that agency. Frightens us. Because we're worried, they're going to take risks, they're going to do something stupid.
But they're going to, they're going to fall off the track, they're going to not make it in the traditional system and in trying to protect them and shield them from their own Curiosities, their own dispositions for meaning-making. We, I would argue actually stunt their ability to grow themselves. To the point where we have mental health crises, literally crises in mental health right now and adolescents across demographic groups
to the especially bad in Young,
Roles as I understand.
Yes. That's right. But but but a dad and everybody and it's worse than girls. Yes, we don't fully understand why that is get some suggestions. You know, what we're really doing is actually producing people who are gutted of their own inner drive to become someone who thinks powerfully in the space of the world. We are
frightened to let our young people have that power, which is the role of adults is to wrap around young people and help them learn to, to be reflective to be systematic to be rigorous with themselves. As they develop the capacities and dispositions to deconstruct their own beliefs, to deconstruct their own aims and goals, and the ways they understand the world. And to rebuild them iteratively over and over. In this
In this sort of intellectually, humble curious way where we're constantly querying ourselves constantly querying other people where were willing to sit with uncertainty, in complex, problem spaces and think through the possibilities rather than settle quickly onto one solution. What the school expect you to do settle immediately onto one solution, which by the way, is the solution I already had in mind when I gave you the question, right? As compared to sitting with young people and allowing them
the in safe and appropriate way is the space in which to actually grapple with complex powerful questions. When kids develop the proclivities to do that, they learn how to manage those very human capacities that we've been talking about the whole time that can lead to, you know, terrible evil as well as amazing virtuousness. They learn to appreciate and manage those capacities within their own selves. I think so much of what we see in terms of
These quote-unquote Failure to Launch examples are are because I know some of these, the children of friends, really, really smart kids that didn't map well to the system, and therefore, are not doing well really struggling and clearly have the intellectual power. It just wasn't served up to them and school wasn't served up to them in a way that we're, yeah.
That's a says, as much about the system as it does about the kid,
right? Yeah. I teach a course at Stanford.
To the medical students that every first-year medical student takes about Neuroscience. It's team taught, it's a phenomenal course because of the range of expertise in the teaching that comes through. And one thing I've noticed is that the they're all phenomenal teachers but the best instructors do two things simultaneously. When they teach first of all, they come to the table with Incredible expertise. Obviously these are these are leaving. They
understand what
I need to get out if you want people to engage with ideas. Yeah,
they are true. Luminaries in their respective Fields addiction pain, memory every system of the body and brain and that relates to the nervous system. It's taught in this course, but that I've noticed, every once in awhile that, there's a subset of them that, as they teach from that position of expertise, not only are they clear? Not only are they engaging not only are their slides sparse enough to understand but Rich enough to include
All the relevant detail, but they also flip back and forth in from the position of expert to the position of novice learning it. For the first time
that's almost out of intellectual curiosity. That they're keeping a lot. They have this disposition, we're talking about cultivating, sorry to cut you
off. No, please do as academics. We're familiar with that right there, interrupt. Interrupting in the landscape of academics, interrupting me is a sign of Interest. I think Carol. I think Carol dweck was the one who told me that, yeah,
Right. She's right there. Yeah. She's right. The great Carol dweck. Yeah. And so but I've seen this especially so you know, there are some topics that you know, I like to think that I might do this reflexively for because like for instance I started off in neural development and I adore the topic so I can't teach neural development without being completely blown away in the positive sense of how a brain develops. Yeah, I've still never thought about gonna podcast on it because
it tends to require visuals and we don't use those in the because the podcast most people listen to the podcast, but maybe I'll do something just for YouTube at some point. But that I think it's this the same experience occurs when I see somebody like dr. Sean Mackey, who runs our pain clinic at Stanford teach about pain in the systems of the body that relate to pain and emotion and how to cure certain forms of pain Etc, treat pain. It's like he's he's clearly
World expert, but the way he describes a system, you can tell he's learning it again for the first time in parallel to all of that. And I feel like that ignites the emotional systems of the Learners brain in such a powerful way that is distinct from just hearing an expert talk about something.
He's not relating, he's not a squirrel with knots and giving all the nuts to the kids. He's inventing the knowledge in front of them,
right? That's a great way to put it. As usual, others are more succinct in collecting.
My ideas that and expressing them than I am. So I think that's a, that's a powerful thing. I went to a high school that has a kind of a split reputation. It's known as being one of the best public high schools in the country. It's also the high school that at least for a while had one of the highest suicide rates in the country it's written up in various newspapers and and so on and so much so that nowadays they forbid the kids there from meeting more than an hour.
For school to practice for the standardized test, by the way, when I was at school, the only thing that school represented for me in high school was something can between breakfast and skateboarding and a lot of and frankly, I wasn't in school a lot and I don't recommend that kids go to school, stay in school, I missed a lot of school. I had a lot of
times of weird things, that's a
lot of making up to do in college as a consequence of stay in school, get the basics. But this is actually where I'd like to go. If you have a very interesting trajectory your our University,
Esther, you study emotion and learning and many other things across cultures and adolescents. And, and so many other important topics. But you are not a story of like growing up in an academic family, you grew up on a farm, you'll
sort of gentleman's Farm. My dad was a surgeon but we had animals in a farm and tried my parents tried to have us, you know, growing the things we ate
you've had a number of different experiences that were talking about before we started recording.
But but one of the things that you mentioned was getting involved in education where you were exposed to students who had very different backgrounds than you, maybe you could just talk a little bit about sort of the nodes of your experience so you grew up on this farm and then maybe just hit some of the other nodes. And and then let's let's take a foray into when you first got exposed to educating others. Yeah. And because I think that's an important backdrop for what, what we've been talking about.
About here and serves as a jumping-off point for where I'd like to go next.
I'll just jump in. I mean, it's always hard to talk about yourself. I don't know what's interesting. And what's not to me, it's just me, I think what's interesting
is knowing, you know, where you are, where you've been in the things that marked that mapped back to your emotional networks, in a way that for you feel like like that mattered in terms of what you're doing. Now
as a little kid, I remember.
Even as a little kid, not liking school. I was very good kid, I was very well-behaved kid. I went to a decent public school, but just the whole idea of it. I just always felt like I had two left feet and never felt like it was really me there. I was always trying to escape a little bit. You know what I mean? And thinking about when I first started educating others and like, my first memory of educating others, like specifically that comes to mind is I was six and I went on a little vacation in the summer to stay with.
Cousins in Petoskey, Michigan, which is a place on Lake Michigan, where there are these Stones where there's my understanding from what I was saying is that there are these like 200 million year old fossilized worms in these stones and you can see them when you look at the there's like little worms and you can see him. Yeah. So I just was fascinated by these stones, that these are actual fossilized 200 million year old worms. And I don't know if that number is correct. That's what I remember from age. 60 some paleontologists out there can correct me but I
I collected these stones and I went to the little local exhibit they had at the library whatever. And I learned about these stones and I brought some back and somehow somebody thought to ask me to teach my second grade class when I started school about these stones and I just remember, I don't know how I got asked to do this but I remember standing in front of my class and talking about these stones and just looking around the room and suddenly noticing you know that feeling when you're lecturing and you think, oh my God, they're fascinated by what I'm saying. Like every kid is looking at me and Mike
You know, like and I was so I'm like, all right, I'll keep going. I'll tell you some more about these stones and I passed him around whatever and it must have been, okay? Because I was then asked to give that talk all the way up to the 5th graders, who are way older than me and their oppressors are already fascinated by the natural world and able to, like, make meaning out of something in a way that inspired other people, if I can be. So, blunt us to say that, and yet I was constantly in trouble at school, for not having my homework, I was just
You know, the feeling of release on the Friday afternoon and the feeling of dread on Sunday, evening is hard to like described, you know, and I want to a reasonably well resource school, you know. Anyway, fast forward up to when I was older, I mean, I was just always fascinated by and I think some of this comes from my mom to trying to, you know, speak different languages engage with people who are different than myself. Just have conversations. So from the time I was
Is old enough to barely qualify to do these programs. My parents had the, the resources luckily, to be able to, let me to do these things. But I, you know, I went off to France and stayed on a farm there for a summer and went to, you know, Ireland. I went to Russia by the time I was 18. I was working with these little kids off the street, and camping with them in southern Siberia and all these kinds of things. When I was
as cold as they say in Siberia
is gloomy and rainy and muddy and cold. Yes, yeah.
I would say, Barry always sounds. So Bleak my parents really many times to send me there.
Oh yeah, no, that's a real threat. I'm just beautiful in many ways. But yeah, this, that was sad. It was a sad, sad story. Anyway. You know, I think what I was trying to do was actually learn by doing by being by engaging with other people who knew things I didn't learning how to you know, build things. I'm was always really interested in warm working and boat building. I went to
Kenya and spent eight months there as an undergraduate, right? Documenting. This traditional doll construction in northern coast of can construct. Dow O.R sailboats say about construction when I have no electricity and everything Cabinetry. Yeah. Cabinetry, you know what I
mean? I can actually build Furniture, so when people say they built furniture, but they basically assemble the key of furniture,
we're not talking.
Anything for myself so I don't have to feel but yeah I mean I think I was really torn between trying to build things and Learn by engaging with other people and in these different cultural spaces, you know, being a woman in a cabinet in a cabinet shop and Connecticut is really not a cultural space that I had grown up in. And then go, you know what I mean? And yet Right? Moving myself and changing myself to adapt to these different situations, somehow felt like learning to me, I think.
And I ended up in a strange situation where I cut my hand opening a window at a job site and I needed to I was on workers comp and I had to take some time to let it heal. And I couldn't run Machinery. So I had to figure out what to do with myself. I was 23 years old and I was not going to go back to my parents for more money, right? So I thought I have to support myself. So I thought, okay, I went to college at a, you know, a high-level Ivy League school and I majored in French because I
Good. That's basically what I was like. I don't know. I better finish. I do not fly. Guy can do French. I know, I know, I speak French fluently. I'll do a French literature major, and then with the quickly, then I'm like, what am I gonna do with myself? I never thought I could be a scientist, but I loved science. So I just want around taking like a year of every science. I took a year of astronomy and a year of biology and a year of physics and a year of, you know, human anthropology. Paleoanthropology, like all these things psychology and realized holy crap, like this is super interesting.
Testing you can study how babies think and and the natural world and then also be be bringing sort of a scientific lens to bear that helps. You understand things in a new way. So so here I was as a 23 year old with a cut hand and I thought what am I going to do with myself? I convinced the Massachusetts Board of Education that I, you know, had the background knowledge to be able to to teach
You know, sections of AP biology and physics that they had in their high school. So when I got to, you know, finally got an interview with this, you know, Public School, District in South Boston, where they were desperate for a teacher, like I'm noticing in the Boston Globe or two weeks into the school year and you still don't have a teacher, you know what I mean? Why don't you take me and, you know, managed to convince the Massachusetts Board of Education to give me provisional teacher certification based on the course work I'd done and how well I did in that course work, which I did, you know, I was really super motivated.
I did extremely well in all that and when I got there, they basically said, when I showed up for the interview, you know, another high school teacher wants to take those AP classes. Can you just teach full-time seventh grade? So I was like, okay, so I, you know, had my full contingent of 130 kids, right? Seventh graders, come into my classroom. And the middle school had just been shut down, because there wasn't sufficient funding in the town for it. So, they had taken the middle school, kids and pushed him into the high school space.
What that basically meant is I suddenly found myself in a fully equipped high school classroom with microscopes and all kinds of scientific equipment that would be used to teach later courses with my seventh graders and it also happened that the Massachusetts Board of Education had changed the the requirements for for the way they organize science, instruction and curriculum from, you know, seventh grade life science, eighth grade, physical science. Whatever it was, you know,
Different Sciences each year, they wanted an integrated interdisciplinary science all the way across. And of course that was very difficult for the traditional science teachers to do because they've been teaching only biology or only earth science or only physical science for their whole career and they didn't know how to teach the other subjects. And here comes me would like one intensive year of study. In each of these domains. I was perfectly situated to like, try to pull it together so some of the high school teachers helped me. Thank you to them and I built
out, as a new curriculum, for seventh grade for that District, around this interdisciplinary approach to science together with other
teachers, it was very
Hands-On, very, and it was very much like a web of Concepts, you know, we'd study nuclear fission and atoms and reactions and then the Sun and astronomy and the solar system and then and then how the energy is being, you know, shined over onto the under the planets and then the Earth, and then these organisms called plants are actually using those photons to
To do something chemical. Let's talk about photosynthesis and where you're at, and then we can talk about chemical reactions and breaking down sugars and molecules and right. So we built this whole web like curriculum that I was trying to help the kids. Appreciate the sort of dynamic complexity of the natural world. And some of my professors from Cornell also sent me materials and all kinds of cool stuff from the Cornell Museum that that they didn't really need. And then I gave it back when I was done, right, with all these instructions. What all this stuff is on hominid, Evolution and Ashley and hand.
Citizen all kinds of stuff. So I built out a curriculum around all this stuff and I realized the first time that I was in this amazingly fascinating space because it just so happened that the school I was working in was one of the most diverse culturally in the nation at that time. I think we had something like, 81 languages spoken out of 1,100 kids. Wow, that's a lot of first languages and kids were arriving from all over the world. This was right after the Rwandan Genocide. So kids were coming in from
East Africa. There were refugees from Kosovo and Eastern Europe. There were kids coming in from Jamaica, there were kids coming and from Haiti there are kids from Malaysia and Myanmar like there were there were kids Landing in that class like deer in headlights from very, very broad ranges of cultural backgrounds and they're Landing in my science class. And what I quickly realized is they were using these scientific
Ways of exploring the world and thinking about questions and and trying to make sense of what they had witnessed to try to understand their own sort of cells their own origin story their own place in the world. Why different people in this class look and eat differently than me dress differently than me? Like, how is it that you look like that? And I look like this and there was all this, a crazy, you know, adolescent turmoil.
I'll layered into this space where kids were grabbing on to the scientific ways of knowing as a handle to try to make sense of who they are and those kids started asking questions of me I'll never forget this one girl, black girl raised her hand and all the other kids are looking at it like yeah, I asked it a skit, right? And like you know she was being brave. Like she talked about it before school. Like I can't say that. No I cannot say it's it and she said, miss him or do you know, why is it that when we're studying
Hominid, Evolution and you show us these Miss Nova episode with early hominids in Africa. Why do they always show those creatures? Looking like they have dark skin. Why do they always look like black people? And I was like, well, because they're on the equator and you need that level of melanin in your skin to be able to adapt and live without getting skin cancer in that space, right? And it opened up this amazing class discussion that actually went on for months.
It's like evolved into a whole curriculum that was biology. It was culture of sociality where we started to really unpack the ways that we, as humans are natural beings in the world and the ways in which our cultural experiences are extensions of our natural ways of adapting, and that had me hooked, I realized, then that I could bring science, right? The science of adolescent development, and of learning and of
Ocean and of culture to this very pressing real world. Problem of how do we help? Our kids actually figure out who they are invent themselves in this incredibly crazy, Multicultural space, and become Scholars, and intellectuals who engage systematic with the ideas along the way. And so, I took those ideas and I started going to night school at Harvard Extension school to study cognitive neuroscience. And to
D language and cognition and you know all these kinds of topics and and quickly realized like I really needed this developmental perspective, infused, right? I wanted to understand, not just how these things work about, how they got that way. And so I took that back to grad school at Harvard and began to study, you know, social and cultural and emotional and cognitive development in kids and and and quickly, they're also kind of hit a wall where I was.
I went back to the school district in which I worked, and I went back to the teachers, who were my colleagues? And I worked with them. And I observed, their classes, and I interviewed their students. And we did all kinds of work around how kids were building scientific Concepts in ways, that reflected their cultural Concepts and ways of approaching the world. And I quickly realized, you know, it seems to me that kids are doing all this meaning making and we as adults are doing all this all this supportive, you know, meaning-making, we're also do
Aging and growing, and learning in ways that reflect not just, you know, knowledge, B, like little computers. But also that reflect the biological substrate on which the learning and the thinking are happening. And I wanted very much to understand how we could use and leverage developmental biology, as a kind of constraint to from which, to appreciate the kinds of theoretical frames. We were inventing in the in the real world.
Sort of anthropological, educational space, the developmental psychological space, how could these two systems, you know, act as a Venn diagram and how could the inner section between them, though, places, where the theorizing about the natural behaviors in the way kids were making meaning and learning and describing their knowledge and engaging with each other, on the one hand and the ways in which the brain and the biology are engaging in or supporting those processes. On the other hand, the place.
Is where those two circles would overlap? It seemed to me, that was where we could most directly Target to start to deeply understand the nature of our developmental, psychobiological growth, and selves. And so I set out to try to study about the ways in which culture and sociality shape the brain and Physiology and survival mechanisms and development. And at that time, which wasn't even that long ago, you know, it's like two decades ago. Quickly realized
Very, very little was known, you know about the way in which emotions be on things like fear, you know, flush a snake in your face and your amygdala lights up, right? Like I was thinking of something a little more nuanced. You know what I mean? Like what I'm seeing happening in science class among a kid from Kosovo in a kid from Rwanda, as they're trying to figure out why they understand how they look different, right? Those deeply emotional conversations they're having but they're not so cut and dry as the things we had been studying.
And so that's what really drove me to try to start to understand an integrated way, the way in which our biological development and our psychological development are actually sort of two sides of who we are. And of how we're organizing ourselves to build capacity mental capacity as well as sort of physical health and capacity over over the course of Our Lives as we're engaging with living
incredible.
Story, and foray into what sounds to me, like, really, your ability to identify how the universals Among Us, like the universal biological features. The universal psychological features can really strongly, inform specifically, what's happening. Now, in a classroom interaction, in the mind of a, of a of you or somebody else, or any of us, but to approach it from the other direction.
Ian, in other words to take what's happening now, and say, why is What's Happening Now happening? Yeah, as opposed to just saying is
actually happening underneath the surface right of the
behavior, right? As opposed to saying, okay, this is this is the psychology of character structure. This is the biology of the hypothalamus. But rather say, you know, is anyone else really shocked about the school shooting in Nashville and go through the feeling of shock and and go from there to the
Ology as a route of learning again. And of course, I don't want to take away anything from The Real World, seriousness of that yet. But, but it sounds to me, like you, you saw that there's that, there's a different portal through which to teach and understand experience in that we are all but especially young people are really tied to our emotional states as the as the main filters. Which we like that, just like that and therefore make decisions and move through life.
I mean, I think it's so key that early on. I mean, if we like a teacher, oftentimes, we like the subject if we happen to fall in love with, you know, figure for be in a paper great, but that's not as that's not how I went through graduate school, I just was blown away by the fact that sperm meets egg, you got a bunch of cell duplications and then and then you get a brain and your brain and then you get a brain front. How does that house is like a crazy amazing. And I was blessed with a graduate advisor. Who literally told me, this is how it works. In my
Lab is what she said. She said, we have everything you need here. I'll help you if you need help. But basically, you're going to mess around with stuff. You're not going to burn down the lab. You're not going to kill yourself with any of the poisonous stuff but then you're going to like mess some stuff up and do some stuff and going to figure some stuff out. This was literally the description and and I liked her lab because I had green countertops. And she had pictures of interesting animals on the wall and then she said and I'm gonna have two kids while you're in graduate.
School. So I'm not gonna be around very much, you have to figure it out on your own and I said, well, can I play the music? I want. She said, sure. And I said, can I put tinfoil on the Windows? Because I don't want to be bothered and she said, sure and I was like, okay this is the place for me. In other words she gave me a room to explore and of course she gave me a lot of guidance along the way. She was an amazing, amazing graduate, visor, extremely, extremely blessed but it sounds to me like that, that identifying, what's the, what's really going on now is key?
And that the other thing that's key is an openness to ideas. I mean earlier you talked about and of the let's just let's just admit where we're at right now. We're going to we're in a culture War right now,
weird space right now.
It's very divisive and one of the major problems is that we can't really talk about things. I mean, I think fear of getting cancelled fear of exploring ideas is real. It's very real, not just for academics. It's just real people.
Are so it's important to be sensitive to the experiences of others. Absolutely. But if we can't actually explore ideas and feel like we can walk out of the room safely, then we can't really explore ideas. And so I think right now it's not just social media. I think it's the fear of offending anybody and and probably the fear of voicing how upset certain people are about their experiences or the experiences of others, whatever it is. I don't see a landscape right now.
There is true. Open exploration of ideas, anywhere anywhere at least in this country. So what do we do? If there if the, if at least two of the requirements are, you know, an emotional gripping of something around the learning, plus an openness to thinking about things that maybe we don't feel right to us as a way to learn how to think something. I think we both agree if I may that
that is really critical and that the world will be a far better place if people could do that and how do we navigate this landscape? I mean, is what has to come first a demonstration of the value of openness and I have ideas and here, I'll just State my stance. I, I feel like any idea should be open to at least discussion any idea, but then it needs to be systematically dissected with some rigor. So,
People can't just assume any idea is true. You're just because it's true favorite. Yeah. Because just because it's true for them, and this, I actually learned from my graduate advisor. She's to say, you know, tolerance has to go both ways like when it comes to thinking about ideas and criticizing it can't just be, I'm right they're wrong or I don't tolerate that it has to be tolerance for all ideas and then you arrive at hopefully eventually core truths or at least Court trajectories. What do you think?
Could support this. How early should this start? I mean, should kids in elementary school? Be discussing the current landscape of politics and what they see from a place of like we talked about safe spaces but is a safe space one in which some no one gets offended. Where's a safe space? One in which, any idea can be discussed, I think that's never really been defined for me.
Yeah, that's really fraud issue. I mean first, let me go back to something you said, which I would have said it differently. So you said,
Emotions are a filter, right? And they do act like a filter but I actually don't think emotions are really filter alike so much as they are the drives that are undergirding the impetus to think, right? There pushing us to think about particular things. And I think I mean as a scientist, my disposition is always that to understand, something is good.
And the more.
Complexly, the more thoroughly you can interrogate and understand something the better, so there's nothing I'm afraid of knowing, right? And what you're really talking about there is the fear of knowing we why are people so afraid to engage with each other basically because
It's deeply threatening.
Two.
Reveal things about your own experience that are not going to land in a in a, in a space where we can kind of collectively engage with them as legitimate experience. That's the I sort of the opposite of canceling people, right? It's the opposite of dismissing people. It's actually developing spaces of trust where we can engage with ideas and and take them from ourselves.
Right. So that where they don't, they're no longer personal value, judgments, they become cultural memes or or or models, or schemas that we can. We can dissect together. We can engage with together and construct understanding around, right? And and I don't really understand my own position unless I also understand your opposition to my position, even if I still disagree.
Whew, I think there are really important conversations going on right now. I'll take it back to the education system because that's that's what I know what most about. There are really important conversations going around on right now around reframing, the experience and outcomes and aims of schooling around, Civic discourse in reasoning. So there was just a major report that was produced by the National Academy of education and another academies
elaborating with it, for example, around this topic and helping us to move as a society toward a space, where we learn to kind of lay ideas out and develop skills for reasoning around those ideas, including bringing ethical experiential, emotional cultural values to Bear but then being willing to deconstruct and engage with those
Ideas, whether they're the ones that are commensurate and fluid with our experience or that appear to be conflicting or disfluent with our experience. We need to develop a spaces for young people, especially, but for everyone, in to engage with the deconstruction of our own assumptions, like I said before, and to engage with the with the deconstruction of others assumptions and to try to reconcile the building blocks and that's where we
Can build some common ground, but we can also disagree, we, but we don't really understand our own position, unless we appreciate someone else's disagreement with our position, unless we can actually articulate and appreciate how it is that person's opinion is opposed to mine. I don't really understand mine.
It's such a key point. A one of the reasons why I do read all the comments on podcasts on YouTube, it takes me some time, but I do it or on social media, is that often times.
Get a comment or criticism that makes it very clear that I wasn't clear about something other times. I'll get a comment or criticism that makes it clear that I and the other person, fundamentally disagree about something, both of which are great. And for a scientist is a delight, keep it coming and of course when people agree and they agree and make it clear that they agree from a stance of understanding that, of course, is also gratifying. So it's exactly what.
Are saying and it's one of the one of the upsides. I think of social media, which is that unless people block their comments section and I do occasionally blog people if they're being offensive to other people and you say, whatever you want to meet
people, that's not inviting people into a conversation that's not constructive.
Actually have a rule, which is, I call it classroom rules, I've never announced it, but I allow for classroom rules. You can swear, but you can't swear at people. Yeah, that's what I was taught in graduate school. That's where we can swear.
People. It's also our rule at home, although we try not to swear, it's you can swear. But swearing at people is not not okay. And that, you know, a certain decorum of, you know, is required in order to have open discourse. So that works for me, I think that it's been a while since I've been in school, but I work at a school and I think that the ability to not just reinforce but challenge one's own stances, which
Times leads to reinforcing our own stance and hey, if they're well, man, that's legitimate. I mean I have to assume that in high schools, they still do debates and things of that sort. I mean, do they allow that? I mean, could you throw kids in a class and say let's debate, something really controversial and then but you have to debate it from the other side. I mean, just as a experiment of forcing the brain to try to be effective for sake of winning. But from the other perspective or
Answer seems like a great exercise. If I were a high school teacher, that's the first thing I do, we pick the most controversial topic and then I pick that ask people to divide along that topic and then I'd swap them into the other one and F them argue from the other one
stands. Yep, learning to appreciate perspectives. This is very is very,
and we use 14 ounce gloves. No, I'm kidding. It wouldn't be physical, it would be purely intellectual.
Yeah, I mean, let's take it away. Take it back to the brain for a moment to the conversation that we were having earlier, right? So we were talking about
That in our experiments and now and whole, you know, whole bodies of neuro scientific knowledge. We know that there is this very interesting neurobiological, sort of processing difference, between emotions and the thoughts that are part of those emotions that are. You know, the result of those motions that are also incipit ating, those emotions, right? Like that whole process, when it pertains to the direct actions observable characteristics.
Of your's, you know, of another person or situation that you can actually directly pretty much directly and learn or infer as compared to when you have to bring a whole lot of conceptual content knowledge to Bear experiential knowledge, simulation capacity to Bear to be able to fully appreciate the nature of a situation. And we talked about how that second kind of processing that I called Transcendent is that Essence about
Distancing yourself from the immediate physical, you know, situation the observable perceivable situation in a direct sense and instead constructing a narrative in your mind that's built from that. But that then brings to Bear all these other kinds of information that allow you to elaborate this into a narrative that takes on emotional, meaning, and psychological power, as a narrative. It becomes part of identity beliefs, all that kind of stuff. And we talked about that kind of thinking being associated with, the, so-called default mode.
Which is deactivated systematically and decoupled from itself, right? The different regions aren't talking to each other to each other. When you are in the world acting doing a task paying attention inferring, the direct things that you need to notice around you, you know, you're in the middle of playing a soccer game, the balls coming at your head, that's not a time to stop and Muse about you know, Title 9 and girls access to sports, right? You're going to you're going to trip and fall or you're going to miss your shot at the goal. Are we going to hit get hit with the ball, right? So,
Need to sort of manage that space in order to have these conversations. And I think what's important here is to remember that the default mode Network, that is the substrate. That's that is playing out your own sense of self and inner Consciousness and self-awareness. And is also the basis on which we construct these broader inferential narratives that are the elaborative stuff of stories and beliefs are fundamentally incompatible. The activation of those systems is fun.
To mentally incompatible with needing to be vigilant into the immediate physical or social situation around you. So if you feel physically emotionally culturally socially unsafe and you feel that your you need to watch your back either literally or metaphorically as you're thinking about things neurobiologically that situation is in conducive. It is not conducive to being able to
To actually conjure an alternative perspective, in which you construct a meaningful narrative with alternate, ethical implications with alternate, prospective possible future outcomes with alternate views of the historical precedent, or context. Being able to sort of mentally time travel into the space of those ideas, is only really possible when people feel safe to think.
Together. So is it sounds like it's anti
creative. Yes creativity is also associated with the activations of these networks. Yeah, causally. So in some recent
work I had the Good Fortune of having dinner last year with somebody. I won't reveal who it is but he runs a major social social media platform and he told me that in Japan. It's common for people to have to
Three or even as many as seven, different social media handles. Yeah. And that they do this in order to embody different versions of themselves safely. Yeah, so these are not troll accounts. These are not the accounts. And by the way, I see you troll accounts that say, whatever and then you go to their Accounts at some private account where they hide. Rather, these are individuals who have multiple accounts in one account. They might be a bit aggressive, maybe even a bully online, dare
As I say in another account, they might be very fawning and show up as this the person that everyone knows them to be in the real world and another account, they might be a university professor in another, they're an athlete and it's fabricated in the sense that the me the post that they put up often don't accurately represent who they are in the real world but it's accurate in the sense that it represents the different dimensions of their Persona that are driving their real-world decision. Making at some
level it's kind of like pretend play for little
kids. It's
And play, but it's not pretend because it's in cyberspace. I'll just can go back to Rick Rubin. Who, in addition to being this incredible music, producers is a enormous fan of professional wrestling for many years. And I asked him, you know, from a perplexed as like, why professional wrestling is that the athleticism? He says, it's the only thing that's real because everyone agrees, it's not real and so these are characters, right? So you're agreeing for it to not.
Not be real. And yet it allows these characters to fully embody these different personas, huh? And, and I had the experience years ago, I was at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory, summer camp for scientists, where I attended and taught. And I was in a cab driving out to Cold Spring. Harbor from the train station Syosset, and I got into a discussion with the cab driver. And he said, Okay, you're from California said, when York accent, she won't try and imitate. You say you're from California and he said, you know, you're governor who at the time was shorts and Egger.
He said, he's great and I said, tell me more. I yeah. And they're like Schwarzenegger for a number of reasons. He actually signed my PhD because he was governor and I went to a UC said and he said well, because if terrorists show up in California, he's gonna go out there with a machine gun and take them down. So in his head, don't mind the Terminator, he's the Terminator, he's the Terminator. And I realized in that moment, this was a smart guy.
This cab driver smart, got that it wasn't a lack of narrative. Distancing know, he had conflated the actor with the roles he played and I realized in that moment that this was not a reflection of him being unintelligent. It was a reflection of the fact that the brain often collapses identities, absolutely of others. And makes these, I think it's just an affectionate way, efficient way to parse the
world. Yeah, we decide. And then, that's that kind of this person. And we put them over there on a
shelf. Yeah. So
So to return to the discussion that we're having, I think that the ability to embody different aspects of self, but also the ability to transiently embody the personas of other people and to do that in a way that allows for really thorough exploration of ideas space. Yeah. I feel like can only be a good thing. Yeah. Provided it doesn't get physically violent or something, but that to me seems like the exact opposite of what's happening now, which is that
people are siloing off into their camps, where specific language and specific ideas are accepted and others are not. I mean, it's it's it's so interesting and perplexing and disturbing to me that the way that certain things that have nothing to do with politics, get lumped with one group or the other, you know. That it's so crazy to me on the one hand and yet, I think what you're describing seems to me the route out
Wall this I really mean that. I feel like you the education system starting Young And getting people emotionally engaged learning what they like what they don't like but then also teaching them about their emotional systems and how it helps them. Parse the world is really the solution so that when were upset, we can realize like, yeah, I'm upset. It makes sense why I'm upset. Let me explore it from the other side x. It also makes sense. Why they're upset and that seems to be what humans have done.
Done somewhat throughout history, never perfectly well, but it seems like it ought to be possible. I mean, the forebrain is there for a reason. So could you in in wanting to go back to a little bit of the biology in the research? What have you seen in terms of cross-cultural consistency? Yeah, about the role of emotions in it in our ability to parse and learn and because obviously we're not going to solve these problems today. But although I think your point
In light on some potential Solutions. What do we know for sure about human beings and their capacity to do what? You're describing to really learn differently. It worked in the classroom where you were teaching, but how could each and every one of us do this? I mean, how would we approach this? I'm I guess I want to take this to the Practical. What can we do when we read a newspaper article? What can we do when we're on social media? What can we do? When our
Kid is like refusing to do something because they simply don't like it or the teacher. They don't like the teacher. Are they are their paths through that that you've identified, or that you can sense work.
I can get funny examples of my own kids when they didn't like things. It's cool, right? This isn't a license, yeah. What tools do you? Use a myosins tonight? Yeah. So so my son, when he was in third grade, he was he was very upset about behavior chart that is teacher.
It's cool, right? So he had a, he had a behavior chart, they had a behavior. Try to back the room that the principal didn't agree with this but that teacher was there for a year and okay, so there's this behavior chart and you have green, you start on green with your little clip and then there's yellow. And then there's red, which is like call your parents, which I never understood why they don't put call your parents on the green. But anyway, right. So you know, you start on the green and then I get you get down to the yellow and they get around the red. And you know, there's Ted's little friend is always getting on the red by 9:00 a.m. It's like we just get it over with, you know, and
And he tried to talk with his teacher about why this behavior chart made him so uncomfortable. Because, and she couldn't, she could not understand his perspective because she kept saying, but you're always on green, you're always doing what you're supposed to be doing and you're respectful, and you're well-behaved. So why is it a problem? And what he was trying to say was that
somehow it just made him uncomfortable to have that there. So he was costly, bothering me with this. I finally told him I was trying to work one day and he was home from school because I would let him work from home some days because we needed to to kind of buffer a little bit and you know, he'd bring his work home and he do it himself, I'd be working. He'd be working, right? It's fine. He had all kinds of projects going on. You know, this is a kid who has little Side Story as a kid who went to first grade and then about two weeks into first grade. Good, first grade class he
Crying on a Sunday night to me, like I go to school, I don't want to catch colic. My well let's you know what's wrong is going thinking, he's getting bullied and these phonies like it. Finally looks at me, he goes, I have so much work to do. How do you expect me to get my work done? If I'm sitting in school all day, I can relate. I can relate, but can you relate? Because you're actually a motivated, right? We take kids motivations and the things they're interested in and we sideline them and try to structure them into something. So, back
to their Legos to,
yes,
Yeah, well, he was way into building armor at that time he would. Yeah, I know, we're probably terrible parents, but we gave him some safety glasses and we taught them how to use it, and we explained how metal, sharp, and we gave him some shoes. That is super cool, and some tin snips, and he made a whole suit of armor and the backyard at, you know, second grade. Anyway, it took a months and months. I mean, chainmail, the whole bit, he was super into amazing. No. Anyway. And he made airplane, heed me heed did all kinds of things, but so here's this kid and he's bugging me about is teacher in this paper too.
I said go read a letter to your teacher. If it bothers you that much, you go write a letter about why it bothers you, right? Because in doing. So he's first of all, helping to solve the problem. Secondly, he was, he was formulating his understanding of what this behavior chart is. And why specifically it bothers him and in so doing it helps him not be so bothered by it, right? So that's an example of something you could do, right? So he wrote this letter to his teacher, which ended up being published in the National Academy of Science, engineering and maths.
Hook how people learn Vol 2? Because I was on the committee of people that wrote it and we needed an example of kids, making sense, out of motivational things and actually took his name and the tissues them off and put the letter in the book. It basically is a little kid saying, listen teacher, when you put up this behavior chart, he called it a bad behavior chart which it wasn't. It was just a behavior chart but he interprets it as bad behavior. Check, when you put that up. It's as if you're, you're daring me to do something bad. You're, you're basically, he doesn't say it like this. He said,
You're basically making me uncomfortable because you are laying out a perspective on me a possibility, space for me that you're now bringing into the conversation that I could be like that. And let's see if you're going to be open not today or we're still on good man. And so where does this go? It goes back to the idea that kids are and all of us are interpreting the interactions and the structures around us not only for what they are. But for what
What they represent as somebody else's interpretation of what we are, or are not capable of. And he saw that behavior chart as a marker, that his teacher assumed that all kids in that class are capable of being badly behaved. And that their main aim of being in school is to be well-behaved, right? And so, he writes all about saying, saying, dear teacher every day, I come to school every single day, and every single
They is knew that's what he says, and I could learn something new, except then I see dot dot dot. The bad behavior chart, right? He's saying school is supposed to be about learning and, and US engaging, and you're making it about something. So, low level and basic. As are you going to behave yourself today? We're we are insulting him, by the way, we frame the context. So take it back to the bigger issues of Civic, discourse and all these things. I think so much.
Each of the way that we're organizing our lives, our social relationships our community, our Civic structures right now, is mirroring that teachers behavior
chart, right? She take the chart down.
I don't know. I don't think so.
And and what? And I ask because I'm not sure that it matters. I think what probably matters is that he had the chance to voice. He voices of his understanding and
his understanding of the chart. Yeah, that's right. And now, you know, anybody can read his understanding of the charge
In like, you know, the most used widely, read text book, I'm learning right and motivation. I mean, the point, there's a couple points. First is that we are structuring the way we structure. Our environment can unwittingly impose our mental models of other people's possibility spaces on to them, and people find that inherently abhorrent right? So think about how we're doing that in many contexts, not simply in schools. And then the second thing is from
The kids perspective deconstructing exactly why and something bothers you by understanding how it is that you are interpreting that thing. Then opens you up to be able to manage those spaces in a new way and to engage in the monoi. So if we take the conversation back to the idea of Civic discourse of Civic reasoning of engaging, with, with any idea, right there are ideas that are deeply problematic there.
Ideas that are deeply hurtful that have long histories of trauma associated with them of long, histories of power dynamics, and oppression associated with them the way in which I think we deconstruct. Those ideas is going to be critical to how those ideas live on implicitly in our social relationships and our society. If we cancel them, if we negate them and pretend they don't exist, all we're doing is
Is burying them in a place where they can't be deconstructed and only by actually taking them apart and appreciating the pain. The the relationship structures, the limitations the resource, allocations the inequities that are implicit in those Concepts only by deconstructing and deeply understanding those can we rebuild them in a different way. So it's very
Difficult because on the one hand, we have a space created for ourselves. Right now in society, that is deeply unsafe for many people. And when you're in an unsafe space, you are not in a space that is conducive to constructing. And deconstructing, meaning using those default on systems and other systems just to be crass about the brain, right? And kind of oversimplify it that are the substrate of autobiographical self of possibility spaces of ethics of Deep.
Moral and ethical emotions. So, on the one hand, we have a space that is deeply unsafe for individuals to think together and genuinely. So there are real implications for people to reveal certain kinds of identities to engage with certain kinds of ideas in culturally, culturally, formulated spaces, right? That we've constructed together and the irony is that we can only fix that and create a different way of interacting with one another.
I actually boldly going in there together. So it's a very nuanced line where we need to develop skills. And this is where I think, and many people think now that schools should be focused across disciplinary domains whether it's Math Science Social Studies, history art the Arts right Sports should be focused on helping young people and teachers develop capacities and dispositions for deconstructing and constructing again safe.
Safe cultural spaces to think together about, you know, interpretations about narratives about stories about assumptions about ideas. Because, as we engage in those thoughts together, we call that Civic discourse, right? We learn kind of rules for not triggering and sensibilities for not endangering. Another person's ability to engage on equal footing with us. Because if we
Those unsafe right dangerous places for people, they can't neurobiologically, then engage with us, deeply around, sharing their perspective, and deconstructing hours together to build something, where we have a shared understanding in the middle. We have to trust one another and Trust trusting. One. Another really means we have to have a space established in which we can feel safe to deconstruct.
Our own beliefs, and to allow others to do the same and to assure them that we can engage with those beliefs, no matter what they are, and then actually exteriorize them and evaluate them together. And think about them around core values, we probably both hold like, well-being, like sustainability of society, and of cultures, and of groups, write these things are core. Everyone wants to be, well, everyone wants to
Have a sustainable life and a Life future, and a cultural set of values. And so when we all appreciate that, we're bringing those things to the table but then are systematic about constructing a space for civic discourse, in which we are supporting one another in deconstructing, our own beliefs rather than each other's beliefs. Right? Then we are at a space where we can start to construct, some kind of understanding, some kind of nuanced more.
Adaptive more pro-social and the true sense. Way of engaging with one another would not necessarily way of agreeing with one another, but way of engaging and constructing and deconstructing meaning together, so that we can be adapted so that we can build a society where everyone can flourish. So that we can build a society where everyone can belong and can can actually have the resources. They
need. I would argue as long as free speech, is not possible for everybody. Yeah, that nobody knows. Yes, that's right. Then
Buddies. Say nobody say and that there's an illusion of safety around the idea that people who, who have voice are going to get what they want. Simply because they are the ones who are allowed to talk and other people aren't. I mean, I think you said it perfectly when he said that any time ideas, get buried. There's no way they can be solved. We know this from the scientific literature has their results within social science and biological science that are deeply troubling. Yeah. Um you know, I can think of
What's that we're done in the realm of neurosurgery on humans, in the 1960s, people stimulating different brain areas and seeing Rage or seeing very politically. Controversial ideas emerge from the person's mouth in real time as a function of stimulating that brain area and then you say well do they really believe that and they just never were saying it? And the person doesn't even recall that happening during the surgery or I mean this idea that young had that we have all things inside of us. Yeah, I think can be seen as a very dangerous Notions.
Territory that we have all these Shadows but the I'm also an optimist and I feel that the optimistic view of it is that by knowing that we have all things inside of us, potentially and by it. And by embracing that fact that we can manage that to steal what you just said, we can manage that and that we can function so much better when we see something in the world that we think. That's not me. I'm not that. And I hate that when if we understand that that also lives inside of us
Us. But that we just don't realize it. And I realize some people hear this and I'll go, that's not true. You know, I have my stances and I disagree with other things, I would say, absolutely yes. But the difference between one person stance, and another person stance is could be purely developmental wiring. It could be, it could be difference of having read different childhood books, and an oriented, towards one book versus another. I mean, I don't, I think that we are very similar at the level,
Of cour wiring in core algorithms that we run. But somehow these days we have the perception that we've diverged so much. I think the only thing that's really missing is what you're describing is a place where any and all ideas can be explored freely, not to establish consensus on
Dignity of certain kinds of ideas but to actually exteriorize the men and deconstruct them for what they actually are.
Absolutely. Thank you for working through that.
At that space because it's a tricky one. I realized it's very front. Yeah. It's very fraught. But so so very important. I have a question that's very basic but I've never gotten a good answer on. I was raised thinking that mirror neurons were a real thing that there that there are these neurons that exist in the in the brains of Us and other Old World primates like macaque monkeys but especially in humans. The so called mirror neurons that are
Are activated when we see somebody experienced something and it evokes a sort of empathic understanding in US. I've also seen some reviews written recently and some popular press, saying that mirror neurons are perhaps not playing the critical role that we thought they were. What's the story on mirror neurons? And we're not going after anybody's work in particular. I just want to know whether or not there's real validity to this notion of mirror neurons.
I'm not an expert but I can tell you what I know about it and the way that I think about it. So I mean I think it's pretty clear now that there are no such things as mirror neurons like some special kind of cell type that's in the brain that they've not been found. They were predicted but they were not found, but something else was also predicted back in the late 1980s. By Antonio damasio.
Show where he talked about the brain in terms of being organized in terms of what he called convergent and Divergent zones. So he talked about the brain being organized as networks. Converging, and then diverging again back out. So you have places where processing is kind of coming together and then then then what happens in there then determines how things get spread back out and you've got these
Of Loops happening in the brain and and his his thinking on that was very much, commensurate with others thinking about the notion of of goal-directed action and perception. So if you think back to developmental Scholars said nothing about the brain, very much like Jean Piaget. Right back in the early 2020s Century where he was observing young children and
Seing that they were interacting with the world and they expected certain things and they were he thought imposing theories or schemas on to the world and then and then accommodating was the word, he used the world with their actions, what it didn't act, the way they expected and then assimilating that back, right to change what they expected next time. So that he had this model that he built from from systematically observing children.
Children three in particular, right where he what he realized is that kids are not just flailing around sort of discovering things. Haphazardly they're imposing a certain logic onto the world and then they're systematically testing that logic so their hypotheses are basically, yes, right. They they're expecting things and then when the world does what they want that reinforces and when it does something different, that's surprising and then they have to accommodate and make sense and then they have to expect differently in the future.
So what does this have to do with me Renard's, I think when you bring these different ideas together, that the psychological observational ideas and then the neurobiological ideas, what we basically have and I wrote about this a little bit in like I think 2008, I have a paper called something. Like the smoke around mirror neurons and I forgot the second half of the title but it has the word goals and and and directed actions and things, right. The idea I think is is it's not that there are special neurons that are firing.
Then when we see another person, do the thing, right? That, but that we are, it goes back to the notion of us, imposing our expectations onto the world. You have to share and understand intuitively. The goal of the other ones action in order to activate these mirror regions, right? Where and what are those mirror regions? They are basically regions that are deeply interconnected with each other right there. Thoroughly interconnected with each other. In terms of white matter, fiber tracts, and they are regions involved in
Action planning, you know, goal-oriented actions and perceiving the outcomes of those actions. So it's a kind of a loop between acting and proceeding and acting, and perceiving, and, and I argued at the time, right? That goals are emergent, like, high-level goals are emergent from the dynamic feedback loops of acting in perceiving, right? So I was really taking a very Pious Jetty and view.
Ooh. But imposing that on the Neuroscience. So, I think you take what I'm saying together with like a Piaget and constructivist view. There are many other constructivist neuroscientist, all constructive psychologists also. And, and then also the neural data. What we see is that we don't have these special neurons built into our head, what we have is a natural proclivity and I don't know where that comes from, right. But we have a natural proclivity to try to appreciate another person's, actions feelings.
Experiences by leveraging our own similar actions feelings experiences. And so when we can share goals or experiences that becomes more facile, right? And that's been shown over and over in these mirror type papers right and when you distance yourself from those goals and actions or don't have an intuitive sense of them, then you don't get these mirroring activations, you don't get these kind of ramped up.
Sharing of of goals, right or of experience. So, I think it really comes back to the way, the nervous system is wired to be inherently. Social, we are cultural Learners, we are situated in Social spaces from the moment were conceived. And certainly from the moment were born and that social space, observing others interacting with others Co regulating each other's
Elegy, each other's attention each other's emotion, right? As we do those things. We accommodate to each other and we wire ourselves to expect certain kinds of feelings and then to recognize those same things in other people. And so, as we share constructed experience together, we start to appreciate the sameness right, the, the parallels between other peoples and our own emotions, thoughts goals, and
And we can also dehumanize them, you know, make the other, the other person not share our thoughts, emotions goals, and then we are capable of all kinds of horrible things we've talked about before, right? Where your where you've actually distanced yourself. So what's the scoop on mirror neurons? I don't think mirror neurons exist. I think that's the consensus, but our propensity to engage with other people, by simulating, on the substrate of our own self and then inferring.
The goals and the feelings and the outcomes, and the experiences of those experiences that we've simulated, that's what is very essential to being a human. But keeping in mind that there's also this layer of learned lived cultural developed expectations. We impose onto the world and we not filter, but we we steer our attention. We steer our perception to accommodate to align with
With our expectations. So it's never just the reality of what the person experienced or what happened. It's always our perception of that reality, as we expected it to happen. So there's this very Dynamic cultural co-construction happening. That is, that is messy. That is iterative that you can learn to do in different ways in different contexts. And and that's kind of how I understand this notion of mirroring before we conclude. I do want to answer your
This question. Oh, so so so prior to recording, there was a text message that came we don't have to read it verbatim but the text message. Mary Ellen's son is late teenage years and he's been doing deliberate cold, exposure, cold showers on a daily basis and reported that he's not get it. Yes. And had any colds since starting this, this is actually a pretty common experience because the Poulsen adrenaline
That is inevitable with a uncomfortably cold, but
safe. Yeah, no, he jumps out of bed in the morning, does a whole bunch of exercises to get warm, and then jumps in a freezing cold
shower. Amazing. I'm that Spike of adrenaline. We know as neuroprotective, if it's a short-lived spike in Adrenaline, you don't want chronically. I don't know what kind of stress, that's not good, that's not good. We know that from the beautiful work of Bruce, McEwen, and obstacles to another's work. Yeah. So but then he asked, should he get sick? Should he continue the cold showers? And
The answer is no, I think that then it would be hot showers and hot bath. And sauna type stuff is probably better but not so hot that it's stressful. Yeah. You really want to reduce stress on a hill system. So he sounds up for many reasons like a remarkable young man, as, as is your daughter at sounds like a remarkable and it was and your remarkable. And I mean, I really mean that I feel like we could go on forever, exploring, these ideas. I absolutely would love.
Love to have you back for another discussion or many about your research. I want to thank you for taking the time out of your research schedule, your teaching schedule to come educate us today, these ideas are so vitally important and you provide so many real-world examples. In fact it's one of the things that I love so much about your work is that it's really nested in real-world applications and your thoughts and perspectives on the education and how it could be better at the level of
Educating kids at home teaching ourselves teachers and the education system. I hope will ring far and wide because they they really can be implemented. I'm not talking about the need to purchase a bunch of
stuff. No, we need to start with a different disposition. We just start with a different goal. Yeah the goal of Education needs to not learning is not the goal, it's not the outcome. It is to be the development of the person, right? How is a person changing themselves having
This. And then you design the learning opportunities to change who people are capable of becoming, right? So the learning is there, but it's not the end point. It's just the means to something else, which we haven't been attending to enough, and that's the development of the person who they become Having learned that
beautifully. But well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for the work you do. And I can't wait to have another discussion with you about the emerging research. Hey, I'll be
back.
Q.
Thank you for joining me today for my discussion about emotions, social interactions and learning with dr. Mary Helena more dino Yang. I hope you found the conversation to be as informative and enriching. As I did, if you'd like to learn more about dr. Amaury, no Yang's research, please find the link to her laboratory website in the show, no captions. In addition dr. Amir Dino Yang authored an incredible book called emotions learning and the Brain. It's a book designed for the general public, it's incredibly informative and has a lot of practical tools, as well. We've
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