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A | 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 Doctor Mary Helen Imordino Yang. Doctor Imordino 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, 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, to 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 actually 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 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 Doctor Imordino 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 element. Element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium, and potassium, the so called electrolytes and no sugar, salt, magnesium and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrolytes need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions in electrolyte concentrations or dehydration of the body body can lead to deficits in cognitive and physical performance. Element contains a science back to electrolyte ratio of 1000 milligrams. That's 1 gram of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough electrolytes. And while I do any kind of physical training and after physical training as well, especially if I've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement. That's lmNt.com huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drinkelement lmnt.com Huberman Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up. Waking up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga Nidra sessions, and NSDR non sleep deep rest protocols. I started using the waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing yoga Nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app, turned out to be the waking up app, which could teach you meditations of different durations, and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states, and that he liked it very much. So I gave the waking up app a try, and I too found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up app has lots of different types of yoga Nidra sessions. |
B | For those of you who don't know. |
A | Yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations, and there's excellent scientific data to show that yoga Nidra and something similar to it called non sleep deep rest or NSDR, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy, even with just a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up app, you can go to wakingup.com huberman and access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com huberman to access a. |
B | Free 30 day trial. |
A | And now for my discussion with Doctor Mary Helen Imordino Yang. |
B | Doctor Imordino Yang, good to be here. Great to have you. I'd like to 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 awe. 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 awe seem to me rather high level emotional experiences compared to, say, fear or happiness. And yet inspiration and awe just seem 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 transition to older ages. |
C | Yeah, I mean, I think what you've noticed is actually fundamental to the conundrum of being a human is that our 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 collectively with other people, culturally, in 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 into 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 all so 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 that's, in essence, the power of being a human. That's the power of our intelligence at this late stage in our evolution. |
B | So when I was a kid, I loved stories of all kinds. I think, like most kids, I loved my curious George books. I'm told I liked the Babar books, but then quickly didn't like the Babar books. I liked the book where the red fern grows. I liked 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 evolves across the story. And of course, many, many, many excellent stories have all those features. I can recall specific passages in those books to this day that made me feel something in my body. I actually am very familiar with the sensation of having chills go up my spine, as opposed to down my spine early on, realize, oh, there's sort of a difference. Sometimes it travels up my spine, sometimes I still haven't distinguished what that orients me to or away from, but it's a very salient memory and experience for me to this day. So much so that as I'm describing 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. We basically have a brain to control our body. What is 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 brain and body, of tingles on the back of our neck that go up, tingles on the back of our neck that go down, stomach feeling 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 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 experience along a continuum of a little bit happy to elated, but it's kind of 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? |
C | Sure. So the first thing I'll say is that I learned that idea from working with Antonio Damasio. So he was my postdoctoral mentor, and he taught me a first. That this notion 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 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? Damasio. How is it that we construct a feeling and sort of narrative, 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 interact 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 lead to the feeling of us. So back to your original question. There's a lot we don't know there, but I think what's very clear is that the kind of background 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. 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 ability to digest. And it's even now very clear that it's not even just us. There's a 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 a specialized organ of the body. In fact, 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 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 body. 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 ways, neurochemically and others, and also in broader, longer term, slower, fluctuating patterns around other kinds of hormonal changes and things like that. So along multiple timescales simultaneously, we have a kind of whole, 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 possibility spaces 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 a kind of structure for those feelings that you could start to help them evolve from one into the other and chain them together in ways that produce meaning. |
B | I'm fascinated by the idea that early in life, we experienced some interaction with the world. It could be with other people, could be with an object in the world, and it makes us feel something powerful. And that lays a template of recognition, meaning that later in life and perhaps throughout life, we're always consciously or subconsciously going back to trying to experience that same kind of awe or inspiration. Because, again, the what? The circumstances almost certainly vary from being a five year old to being an adolescent and into adulthood and into the, I guess the geriatric years. Do they still call it that? I probably used a politically incorrect term, but forgive me, 75 to 125. And yet the feeling is the same, right? The feeling. It's as if a word can mean the same thing but be used 50 different ways, maybe 5000 different ways to represent. And 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 and I'll be like, that is so cool. It's the same way that I feel when I was nine 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. And again, I think I must have a strong memory for these kinds of things because 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? 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. |
C | Yeah. It's a dynamic emergency. Let me give you an example that I use sometimes to help myself understand the notion. So my little daughter, okay, Nora, when she was two, two and some months, two and four months, something like that. She's a 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 wasn't weeping or anything. I was just sitting there. I must have looked kind of lost in my own thoughts. She's playing around on the floor. She came over to me. I'll never forget it. This tiny little person. She comes over to me and noticed I wasn't really there with her, you know what I mean? And my arm was hanging down. She picked up my arm, and she held it against her face like that, and she said, I won't say in baby talk. Cause you won't understand. But she said, don't worry, mama. I'll take care of you. And I said, yeah? And I said, oh, Nora, that's so sweet, sweetie. I'll take care of you too. And she said, and, mama, I will. We love you. I really love you. And then she said, I mean, I really love your arm. I really love your arm. Right. Fast forward two years later. Almost exactly two years. She's four in 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 asleep in 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 two to 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 being active in that world and adapting herself to the situation, helping me in the first case. Right. But what's changed remarkably is not the substrate of that attachment. It's her ability to conceptualize it. Right. When she's two, 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 smushing 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 nighttime all the time and there was no sunshine and daylight and I couldn't go out to play and I couldn't write? |
B | You're describing my biggest fear, people. Listeners to this podcast will know that I'm gonna go into the grave, hopefully a long time from now, telling people to get morning sunlight in their eyes. |
C | I know. |
B | I still do it, both of you, but please continue. |
C | 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 I think that we start to elaborate these very basic physiological attachment states, aversion 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 four that really are mental elaborations, meaning, making of that very physiologically basic sensation. Does that answer your question? |
B | It answers it incredibly clearly, and so much so that I'd like to continue to build on that example 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 life example that she was using as a two year old that maps to an internal feeling. 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 gonna assume that her experience of being put to bed at night and feeling so much love from and for you mapped to her, then growing understanding of the world around her and the fact that there's day and night and sunshine. So, as 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 as a 14 year old, the knowledge base is gonna be different and is going to map to that feeling again and again. So the question is, is what we are doing 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 each one along a continuum. So a little bit of love, completely in love along a continuum, and everything in between, a little angry and annoyed to completely furious. Are we talking about maybe ten to 30 core emotions that then we are just simply binning 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 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. I mean, those seem to be the basic drive. Survive and make more of oneself. It seems to be the two basic. |
C | Functions of every species of your ideas or more of your work or more. |
B | Of your art, right, exactly. So is that an overly simplistic way to think about it, or 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 sized structure and the fact that different neurons sitting right next to each other can put us into a rage or will make us want to mate or will make us thirsty or hungry or tired. I was like, wow. |
C | Yeah. |
B | I mean, it just. It blew me away. It still blows me away. But the feeling is the same as looking at the discus fish in Monet's pet shop on California Avenue when I'm nine years old. So is that the way to think about it? |
C | Yes. I think there's an awful lot of basic physiological mechanisms that become motivational mechanisms 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 in different life forms, for sure, because the adaptive functions, the time scales, and everything are different if you're a tree, than if you're a fish, than if you're a slime mold or you're me. Right? But I think you're right that what we basically are doing is taking these very primitive physiological 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, 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 iterative process. And we take those processes and we conjure out of them a form of consciousness, an awareness of those processes that becomes something that feels mentally powerful to us. And I think one of the ways that we can know that what you're saying is right is that this was just our first experiment on this. 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 in the MRI scanner, by telling people stories of true people's situations that invoked these emotions in all kinds of piloting. And then we ask 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 them again to watch the story and feel it. And what we expected, we had some very basic hypotheses that things like watching somebody else endure physical pain would activate the same systems in your brain that allow you to feel physical pain, 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. Watching a civil rights leader or somebody 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 went against the prevailing notion of how emotion works, and which is still something which I wrestle with trying to understand. So we hypothesized that feeling emotions about very physical, direct things, and feeling emotions about, I'm, like drawing them in space, but feeling emotions about complex, elaborated things, like compassion for someone having lost a spouse or something, where 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 they build evolutionarily. And we did find that to be the case, and many other groups and 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, were actually recruiting the same brain systems, including the hypothalamus, and other systems like the anterior insula, which is basically visceral, somatomotor cortex. It's cortex that feels the state of how you're digesting your lunch, whether your heart's 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 witness 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 they're 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 to, 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 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, are developmental, and they're 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 toward that, eat this, don't eat that right. But those things in humans, and to a lesser degree 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 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 that. |
B | I'd like to take a quick break. |
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B | 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 what's called a hierarchical organization where the eye 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 great grandparents, David Hubel and Tornson 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 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 buildup. And what you're describing sounds somewhat similar, that there's a hierarchical organization whereby, through development, we first learn. I guess earlier I called them primitives, but basic building blocks of when someone steps on my foot, it hurts. It can hurt a lot or a little bit, depending on who stepped on my foot, whether or not I have a shoe on. So you start learning context, but 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, this builds up so that we have countless examples. But you said something else that goes beyond 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 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 ankle. Like, ouch. God, that really does just look at. |
C | What you're doing with your face, right? Yeah. |
B | I mean, I've broken my left foot five times growing up doing the same sport, and 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. Two fundamentally different visual images. The emotion could perhaps be the same. Like, oh, yes, that is rough. And yet the need to impose story. Yes, changes. 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? I guess perhaps the answer I'm looking for is, what did you see in brain scanning experiments where somebody views a simply a physical break of somebody's limb versus somebody has to add story? Is there something 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, but that have to do with the need to conjure up story. And what are those brain areas? And then perhaps we can digest those a little bit. |
C | Yes, and actually that is exactly what we found, a whole system of brain areas that that did this, which now many people have described, and we're still trying to understand the full role of these networks. But these regions together are called in the literature, the so called default mode network, right? Because the co activation of these characteristic regions of the brain, which are in the back, middle of the head and some characteristic regions in the lateral parietal. And those were first described in neuroimaging experiments where people were asked to just rest and relax, don't think about anything, just clear your mind for a few minutes. This is Marcus Rakel and his colleagues back in 2001. And then contrasting that with tasks where people have to do something very attention, focus, requiring, where you really have to work hard and think that these highly metabolic characteristic regions of the brain were coming online and activating themselves when the person was resting and deactivating and decoupling from one another, not talking back and forth and exchanging signal very much, when someone was doing a really effortful mental task. And that was a real conundrum for a long time. And what we now know is when you ask somebody to think about nothing or rest for a few minutes, you're laying in the skin and you're thinking, I'm thinking about nothing. I'm thinking 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, ta da. Or hey, it's my grandma's birthday next week, I wonder if she'd like to go to lunch or if she'd rather have flowers. You're imagining other people's mind states. You're thinking, is that guy mad at me at work? Or I wonder if I should change jobs. You're thinking about all kinds of possible spaces that don't actually physically exist in the real here and now. What we found is that our findings were, I think, some of the first, if not the first, 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 task. 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 hypothesize, generate some kind of narrative, some kind of storyline that would accommodate his situation and allow me to infer those kinds of stories which are very different from. Here's somebody stepping off the curb. Ow. Look at that ankle. Right? It's very obvious how you should. How 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 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. |
B | The losing of the spouse. |
C | The 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 cognitively 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 yemenite railroad tie. Right? Like these incredibly skillful things as compared to the same kind of basic emotion in the sense of feeling inspired, 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 in Pakistan, standing up 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 which 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 conditions and those complexity 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 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, then when we put you in the MRI scanner, 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 brain's kind of balancing its activity and its crosstalk around the different parts that are contributing different kinds of processing, those dynamic balances are different when someone is 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 really unfair. Or you can look at her and say, and kids say this 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 Malala video, and they look at the plain 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 posture closes, they put their hands down, that kind of thing. They don't gesture. And when they come back from that, they are talking 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. Gets to go to school. That's not right. 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 what it must be like to be her. So the next thing people say to us, or kids say to us especially, is 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 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 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, like, wait. It makes me want to do more for the world, or it makes me inspired to know there are people like her, or she gives me hope for humanity, one could 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 where 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. |
B | Incredible. If I'm understanding correctly, there's a feeling state in our body. When we experience or observe somebody 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. We won't know. |
C | It's the age old philosophical debate. If I see blue and you see blue, is it the same experience? |
B | It's probably not based on. So from my knowledge of color vision and the distribution of cones, to explain why I'm saying that the distribution of cone photopigments in your eye and my eye are extremely different, to the point where we're not working with the same palette. |
C | Cool. |
B | And I think that makes life interesting. |
C | Makes life interesting, exactly. |
B | But assuming that neither of us is colorblind, red is similar enough to both of us that we would both look at it and say, that's red. But one in 80 males is red. Green colorblind would look at it and would have 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 classic I have a dream speech, or when I hear certain music that I first heard when I was 14, it 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 14 is? |
C | A thing's a thing. |
B | We'll talk about adolescents, right? I'll just say. I'll go on record by saying that I think that the music that we listen to in our adolescents 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. One of the ways I prepare for podcasts is to walk. For my solo podcast is to walk and go through some of the narrative. My neighbors think I'm crazy. Yeah, I do that, too. But that's okay. I think they're crazy, too. |
C | Maybe they're both right. |
B | That's right. Exactly. But I always 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 it's almost like knowing what palette of colors, of 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 this idea that 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 called exteroception, seeing things outside us and their internal landscape. Some people, I realize, have very little narrative distancing. In fact, I live with someone who has very little narrative distancing. When she watches a movie, if the person gets punched. Yeah, she ducks, she flinches. If it's a happy movie, she gets happy. If somebody in a movie is sad, she really feels it. And for a while, I thought, goodness, 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. |
C | Yeah. Transportation is another way to say it. Being transported by story. |
B | Right. And I think that it has its adaptive utility. I'm not being critical. I think that's an incredibly interesting aspect to ourselves. Some of us. I 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 get beheaded in a film, and I. 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, well, it's a movie. There's a movie. It's not real. Even 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 documentary and it's real footage, it's pretty rough. |
C | Yeah. |
B | But I don't. I'm not horrified in the way that she's horrified. I'm horrified, but not to the same extent. So obviously, 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 listening to and watching a David Goggins social media post. We were talking about David earlier because your son had a question for me about David Goggins, who I happen to have the good fortune of. Of having met. I know a little bit. I don't know him very well, but I know him 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. There's no falsehood there. It is 100% data fact. He does what he claims to do and more 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 like, whoa, we're feeling inspired to use the basic language. Are we mapping to some subconscious awareness of that in ourselves? Meaning, are we mapping to some time when we felt inspired in another circumstance, or are we really, is this merely 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 are we really just returning? Are we really just doing a sort of template matching of, wow, I'm feeling this again. And this makes me feel capable, like I can go out and run today, even though I was going to basically not run today. Or it's possible to have a fantasy view about how the world could be in terms of equality and opportunity? And you know what? That's subconsciously is my brain saying, yeah, I remember when I was six and I didn't know the difference between some people having 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? |
C | Okay, wow, there's a lot in there. A couple of things to start. The first thing I was thinking before, when you were talking about the visual system, which I think is relevant now, is that as humans, the more developed we get, the more experience we have, the more we've adapted to the contexts in which we live. You know, the real physical context, in this case, the visual context included, but also the cultural 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 when you see eyeballs, you should go stand next to your mommy, right? So you learn what to notice, you learn 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 onto 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, push them onto the experience of what we notice. So even in very basic ways, things like cultural values change the way in which people observe and remember scenes, right? So there's classic work by Shinobu Kiriyama and other people showing that in Japan versus in the US, when you show people a scene of, like, an underwater scene with 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 fish, 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 he's shown that this 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, we learn how to sort of filter input. We're not little robots or 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 awe 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, 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 next relative to the way in which we accommodate. Right? Piaget talked about this 100 years ago. Accommodate or assimilate those things into us that may disagree with our schema, 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? What's happened is they've shifted the way in which they narrative, 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 rat, a pig, a bug, or whatever it is. 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. |
B | Can I just say, I'm glad that you brought up that dark example, because my understanding from my psychology courses in university were that as much as we would all like to think that we are incapable of being the committers of genocide, that there are studies that were done in the fifties, but then have been repeated over many decades, showing that in certain contexts, essentially everybody and anybody would respond to 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. All the data points 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, Jung's 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 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's 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, it just happens to be the way things are. |
C | It is. And I think it really, I think, I mean, I'm ever the optimist. I'm also ever the educator, right? 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 systematically. 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 so much of what's leading, I think now we're going in another direction and kind of a political direction, but so much what's leading us into these very divisive political types, for example, not just. And 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 you impose it on the world forevermore. I know how to do algebra two, and I can do it whenever you ask me kind of thing. And that's what a good student is. Where when people learn to engage with their own knowledge states in more curious, open minded, flexible ways, then we dispositionally teach ourselves to check our assumptions, to rethink what we think we know. And 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 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 rehear 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 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 change the situations of those around us or don't. 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 incredibly powerful, easily evoked versus not. There's a lot of range in that. Now, all of that variation makes things interesting, right? But it's our ability to learn to experience those and to develop wisdom around when we need to query our own emotions and deconstruct the narratives that we're 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 reframe. Right. And so that kind of mental flexibility really comes out of an emotional disposition. It is our ability. So it takes it back to what you were 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, that 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 we're talking about today are actually 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 or the world. |
B | Well, exactly what you said. So much so that I'm a big believer in following lots of different types of social media accounts. 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 whom I disagree with what they say specifically, so that I can learn different perspectives. As far as I know, we're the same species, me and these other people. |
C | Yes, as far as we are. |
B | Sometimes I wonder, but they probably wonder the same about me. They wonder, too. And there's enormous range in those accounts that I follow. 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 are all basically working with the same building blocks of neurons 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. Everyone's working for dopamine and exchanging their own dopamine with world experiences. But this is 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 somebody from a particular political party, then that means that you vote that political party, et cetera. But that, to me, always seemed crazy. I'm fortunate to have this good friend who was on this podcast, Rick Rubin, who's an extremely accomplished music producer, and he said, produce music from essentially every genre of music, punk rock, which is where I sort of. 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 forages so broadly, and I've really learned to try and forage broadly in 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. |
C | But I. Yeah, dissonance, it's very, you know, that kind of cognitive dissonance we call it, is very difficult. It takes work to resolve it? |
B | 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 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% or 2%. I think one of the reasons things are so divisive right now is because of social media and the siloing of, or very divergent trajectories of people only following and listening to and 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 in other areas, too. Certainly not something that's going to be solved inside of this conversation. And yet I do have a question that grows from this aspect of our discussion, which is, what do you think can be done at a concrete level in terms of education of younger people as well as education of people who are out of high school and beyond, to try and adopt these more encompassing modes of learning and experiencing the world? I mean, it's one thing to say, expose yourself to lots of different ideas. It's another to, to understand how to do that in a way that is adaptive. And any ideas you have, I think I and the audience would really appreciate and feel free to make this an editorial or map back to data. I mean, obviously, this is your wheelhouse. This is your expertise. So I'm curious, what should we do? Should I send my family members, who have very divergent political beliefs from me, information to the contrary of their thinking? Or what do I do? And what do I do for me, what should we all be doing with our ten year olds and ourselves? |
C | Well, I won't comment on should you send your family members. There's other people that do that. They do that work and they know how to. |
B | We're always frustrating each other over text messages. It's okay. |
C | It's okay. |
B | It can't get any worse. |
C | Yeah. No. Okay. |
B | We all love each other anyway. |
C | 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 without 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 ten year old, but is query them about their beliefs when they follow something, when they think something's impressive or bad, or, you know, ask them why. Teach them to unpack their own beliefs. That doesn't mean that you don't still hold them necessarily. It doesn't 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 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 is the way we talk about it in education. That's David Perkins at Harvard talks about it that way, making your thinking visible and then examining that thinking. 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 developmentally 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. 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, deconstructing 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 me 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. But as compared to a system, and there are educational systems like this, this is not. There are people, for example, the performance assessment consortium in 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 they're benchmarks of learning, but instead to have alternative ways of assessing kids where 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 things. Exactly. 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 preschool all the way up that engage 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 and the sand table and the cool stuff and the choices and the ways to engage with each other and you know what I mean? All the stuff being really age appropriate for three year olds to touch and smush and, 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. Right. But as, so we know how to do little kid education, well, it 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 inefficient and inappropriate and frightening. And we teach kids, no, no, no, no. Turn that off. It's dangerous if you do it. It's considered insubordinate. Right. And what we want you 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. |
B | So it seems to me that in the way that things actually happen in school, what is created is kind of desire for the kid to be a computer, not a human. And they do have a dopamine system, however. And so what becomes the buzz, the emotional buzz is performance, if it becomes a buzz at all. So for the kids that don't get that buzz from performance or they don't intrinsically love the math or the English or the books that they're being presented with 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. I barely finished high school. |
C | I dropped out of 6th grade for a few months. Yeah. Didn't work for me. |
B | Yeah, I eventually got back to it and as I imagine you did too, because we ended up as academics. But I think what you're describing is so key, and I never thought about it from the perspective of, oh, yeah, as young kids, we're given all the things that are going to drive our sensory world in the appropriate ways, touch and sound and vision. |
C | Right. We're trying to build meaning in our. |
B | Mind and that we get to as students, very young learners, impose some of our own intrinsic motivation to do certain things and not others, and that isn't supported as we're adults. What you're describing is so vital. What age do you think this cliffs off? Okay, so in preschool, kids are allowed to do this. In kindergarten, they're allowed to do it first grade, they're allowed to do it in most schools. But at what point 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 about? |
C | Yeah. |
B | And also, how do we address this 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, well, you still. |
C | Have to learn it. You need to appreciate it. |
B | So how do you conjure up in a joy or an appreciation in that kid? It seems like a hard thing. I mean, I eventually set myself along a academic trajectory that worked out, but that was initially just out of pure fear because my life was really bad. Circumstances in myself made it bad, and I was rescuing myself from basically becoming more of a loser. So I was like, okay, school's the thing. And I did school. And 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, how do we evoke at least an appreciation for that? It sounds like the emotion system is the key system to leverage in order to learn. Could you talk about the relationship between emotion and learning? Because I realize this is really the center of what you do. |
C | You could say it this way. Whatever you're having emotion about is what you're thinking about. 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, unless you're dead right or unconscious. What are people's emotions about in this space? If the emotions, because whatever those emotions are about, that is what you're learning about. So if the emotions are about the outcomes, did I get it right? Am I going to flunk? Am I going to a plus? I'm so smart, I'm so stupid. 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, then 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 and problems that invite them to try to engage with something that piques your curiosity, that's meaningful to them or have them bring in the kid who really hates it. Like, what is it that you do find interesting, kidde? Right, start there. 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, use your math, use your persuasive argument skills, use your filmmaking skills, whatever it is, to tell the story of something that you find deeply, meaningfully powerful to understand, and all of a sudden you need the math. Kids actually say things like, like there's this lovely, there's this lovely long quote 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 in educational leadership. There's a big long quote from this kid at the end, 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 to the door. Do you ever get to the door? |
B | Why? |
C | Or why not? Right? 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. 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 do all these other kinds of skills, but we make those. Which is in the horse's cart? You know, what's in the cart? We 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 pull the thing? |
B | Right? |
C | That's the development of the person and what they put in their cart then serves that development. It's the toolkit of 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 who are not supported or resourced or trained to think about development in these ways. I mean, so you asked, when does this fall off? It really depends on 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 adolescence, which is when school gets serious. And it's 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 we're driven to try to challenge and think about big meanings and engage with perspectives and emotions and social issues and broad, important 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 servant who shows up in the scene? And great expectations, right? Is it Molly or is it Maria? Right? And it's 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 peoples 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, 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 in adolescents across. |
B | Demographic groups, especially bad and young girls, as I understand. |
C | Yes, that's right. But it's bad in everybody, and it's worse than girls. Yes. We don't fully understand why that is. Get some suggestions. 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 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 sort of intellectually humble, curious way, where we're constantly querying ourselves, constantly querying other people, where we're willing to sit with uncertainty in complex problem spaces and think through the possibilities rather than settle quickly onto one solution, what the school expects 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 in safe and appropriate ways, 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 terrible evil as well as amazing virtuousness. They learn to appreciate and manage those capacities within their own selves. |
B | I think so much of what we see in terms of these failure to launch examples 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 worked. |
C | Yeah, that's what says much about the system as it does about the kid, right? |
B | 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 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. |
C | Obviously, I deeply understand what you're trying to get at if you want people to engage with ideas. Yeah. |
B | They are true luminaries in their respective fields. Addiction, pain, memory. Every system of the body and brain that relates to the nervous system is taught in this course. But that I've noticed every once in a while 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 from the position of expert to the position of novice, learning it for the first time. |
C | It's that intellectual curiosity that they're keeping alive. They have this disposition we're talking about cultivating. Sorry to cut you off. |
B | No, please, sue. As academics, we're familiar with that, right? Interrupting in the landscape of academics, interrupting me is a sign of interest. I think Carol Dweck was the one who told me. That's right. And she's right. Carol. She's right. The great Carol Dweck. But I've seen this especially. So there are some topics that 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. |
C | Yeah. |
B | I've still never talked about this or done a podcast on it because it tends to require visuals and we don't use those because the podcast, most people listen to the podcast, but maybe I'll do something just for YouTube at some point. I think the same experience occurs when I see somebody like Doctor Sean Mackey, who runs our pain clinic at Stanford, teach about pain and the systems of the body that relate to pain and emotion and how to cure certain forms of pain, et cetera, treat pain. It's like he's clearly the world expert, but the way he describes the system, you can tell he's learning it again for the first time in parallel to all of that. And I feel like that that ignites the emotional systems of the learner's brain in such a powerful way that is distinct from just hearing an expert talk about something he's not relaying. |
C | He's not a squirrel with nuts and giving all the nuts to the kids. He's inventing the knowledge in front of them. Right? |
B | That's a great way to put it. As usual, others are more succinct in collecting my ideas and expressing them than I am. So I think 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 so on and so much so that nowadays they forbid the kids there from meeting more than an hour before school to practice for the standardized tests. By the way, when I was at school, the only thing that school represented for me in high school was something that came between breakfast and skateboarding. And frankly, I was in school a lot, and I don't recommend that kids go to school, stay in school. I missed a lot of schools. I had a lot of weird things. I had a lot of making up to do in college as a consequence. So stay in school, get the basics. But this is actually where I'd like to go. You have a very interesting trajectory here you are, you, university professor. You study emotion and learning and many other things across cultures and adolescents 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 and. |
C | Sort of gentleman's farm. My dad was a surgeon, but we had animals and a farm and tried, my parents tried to have us growing the things we ate. |
B | You've had a number of different experiences that we were talking about before we started recording. 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 the nodes of your experience. You grew up on this farm, and then maybe just hit some of the other nodes. And then let's take a foray into when you first got exposed to educating others, because I think that's an important backdrop for what, what we've been talking about here and serves as a jumping off point for where I'd like to go next. |
C | 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. |
B | I think what's interesting is knowing where you've been and things that mapped back to your emotional networks in a way that, for you feel like that mattered in terms of what you're doing now. |
C | As a little kid, I remember, even as a little kid, not liking school, I was a very good kid. I was a 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. It 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 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 my cousins in Petoskey, Michigan, which is a place on Lake Michigan, where there are these stones. Where there's. My understanding from when I was six is that there are these, like, 200 million year old fossilized worms in these stones. And you can see them when you look at. There's like, little worms and you can see them. 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 six. So some paleontologist out there can correct me, but I collected these stones, and I went to the little local exhibit they had at the library or 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, like, holy crap. 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 them around, whatever. And it must have been okay, because I was then asked to give that talk all the way up to the fifth graders who are way older than me. |
B | And you're a professor. You're a professor. |
C | I was already fascinated by the natural world and able to make meaning out of something in a way that inspired other people, if I can be so blunt as to say that. And yet I was constantly in trouble at school for not having my homework. I was just. 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 went to a reasonably well resourced 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, too, trying to, you know, speak different languages, engage with people who are different than myself, just have conversations. So from the time I was 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. |
B | When I went as cold as they. |
C | Say in Siberia, it was gloomy and rainy and muddy and cold. Yes. |
B | Yeah, Siberia always sounds so bleak. My parents threatened many times to send me there. |
C | Oh, yeah. No, that's a real threat. I mean, it's beautiful in many ways, but, yeah, that was sad. It was a sad, sad story. Anyway, 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 build things. I was always really interested in ward working and boat building. I went to Kenya and spent eight months there as an undergraduate documenting this traditional Dow construction in northern coast of Kent. Dow, which are sailboats, sailboat construction where they have no electricity and everything. |
B | Cabinetry. |
C | Yeah, cabinetry. You know what I mean? |
B | You can actually build furniture. So when people say they built furniture, but they basically assembled Ikea furniture. We're not talking about that. |
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