This podcast is brought to you and made possible by generous financial aid from Peter kanzler k --a n z l-- e-- r-- you can buy his Amazon books at your favorite Amazon Branch, for example, the original texts of lock Hobbs and the US Constitution of Pennsylvania put together into one book for only $15. Thanks for listening. Hello. Welcome to psychology to 30. Personality and it's transformations. It's called that because there are two things that you have to take into account when you're thinking about personality and one of those is how personality stays the same across time and that's really what gives you your identity and what allows you to identify other people. And then also how personality changes. We're going to discuss both those things. from a very large number of perspectives to find out all the information that you need for the course. All you have to do is type my name into browser and you'll get my home page, which is the page that you see here on the left. There's a table of contents that says current courses and then up here. There's also a table of contents that lists the courses and this one's this one. This is the introductory page here. And then you can get to the course page like this. I don't really like Blackboard. So I'm going to use this instead. So this is easy to get to and everything you need to know about. The course should be here. So we'll start with the very straightforward things. The first is there's there's two sources for reading in this course and one is a paperback book, which is called introduction to personality and it's Transformations. They're both are chapters that I selected from a classic personality textbook that does a very good job of covering. Classic personality theorists although not such a good job of covering more recent work. The book was published in 1982 Freud hasn't changed much since 1982, but there has been an awful lot of Personality research. And so that brings us to the second source of readings in the second source of readings is actually this webpage. So if you go down the webpage to lecture topics and readings you'll see in the third column a whole sequence of Papers now you have to pay attention to this lectures and reading table more than anything else because it tells you what's going on for the for the duration of the course and tell you what the lectures are. So today, for example, it's January 7th. And so we're doing an introduction and overview. Maybe I can make that a little bigger. and next week You know on on Thursday we start with this reading it's called three forms of meaning in the management of complexity and all you have to use to get that reading is click on it. And then you get that reading which is a fairly straightforward process. You would probably like the lectures better if you do the readings beforehand. That's it isn't necessary. You can do this any way you want but you'll get more out of the course. I think if you do that. There's 2 Tas for this course. They're also listed here. One is Vanessa Ghosh. And the other is Victor Swift. Their availability is listed here. So Vanessa is available from 4:45 to 5:45 on Thursdays. And Victor is an 8 is available from 350 to 450. Tuesday's their office offices are listed there as are their email addresses so that you can get in touch with them. My office hours are Wednesday from 4:15 to 5:45. Now the way I handle that is outside my office, which is office four zero four six, which is also listed there. There are a number of sign-up sheets that I'm just going to post on the wall do that right after class is they're printed out. There's a number of sign-up sheets that are listed on the wall. And your best bet is just to take a 15 minute slot. Don't take a whole bunch of them because the student Teacher ratio in this class is obviously quite high and so just take one for now if you would and maybe if you have a meeting with me, you can check back later to see if there's time for another one. I would like to have more time than that available. But 90 minutes is what I can spare this semester, so Anyways, they'll be up today. Now in terms of the mechanics of the course, it's pretty straightforward. There's no tricks. There's two midterms. The first one is February 6th and the second one. His March 13th, and there's also a final and the midterm in the finals essentially makeup 75% of the course. It's actually seventy seven point five percent of the course, but and then there's two writing assignments. The first writing assignment is an essay and the essay has a number of different due dates. So if you're on the website, you can go to writing assignments and then you'll see all these different topics that you can choose from now if you click on one of these You get to this little sign up sheet here and then you can put in your name and your email address and that signs you up for that topic and as you can see 10 people can sign up for each topic. So if you're in love with a particular topic, then you should sign up sooner rather than later. The due dates fall a little after the course content that's related to that topic. So it'll be the next class after the lectures on that topic and and I've spread them out across the year so that the Tas don't die of frustration. And so that you guys can get your essays back with a reasonable degree of promptness. Hopefully within a week, although let's say two weeks, which seems reasonable. so the second writing exercise which is worth 7.5% The essays worth 15% is a personality self analysis. It's part of a suite of programs that I designed called the self authoring sweet and I can show you those. And it's itself authoring.com and I'll show you this video at some point, but for now. There's information here on these programs, but I'll give you the codes that username and password so that you can complete these and what you'll be asked to do. Is to complete an exercise that's based on a fig five model of adjectives description of personality. So since about 1930 statisticians have been studying the structure of language at a sentence level and add an adjective level to determine what's the underlying correlational structure of descriptive phrases as they apply to human beings. So for example, if you're happy you're If that might not be surprising, but the fact that those two things are tightly connected was one of the things that was discovered by the factor analytic processes that led to the development of the Big Five in the big five there roughly five traits as the name might indicate extraversion, which is a positive emotion trade. Neuroticism which is a negative emotion trade agreeableness, which is warmth and empathy compassion. The other side of that is kind of a harsh coldness, I guess. Openness, which is both intelligence and creativity and conscientiousness which is industriousness and orderliness. Now there are virtues so to speak and faults associated with all of those Dimensions so you can be to extroverted which makes you rather impulsive and if you're very extroverted it's more difficult to get good grades and University because you're always out having fun with your friends and partying and that might be good in that it will help you develop a fairly extensive social network, which is Useful thing if you're associated with people who are useful for social networking purposes, but it can really interfere with your ability to sit by yourself and study. If you're conscientious that's a good predictor of academic success because conscientious people do what they say they're going to do and they seem to suffer shame and self-disgust and self-contempt and guilt and so on if they don't if you get too conscientious though, you can get quite Barks Denim and orderly and narrow and orderliness by the way seems to be associated with right-wing political views and when it's extreme, it starts to get repressive. And so the point of all this is that there are five traits and they have positive and negative aspects especially at the extremes and these programs are set up first of all, so that you'll see a series of adjectives that are Universal descriptors. So it's basically a small set of adjectives a hundred the kind of cover. Each dimension of Personality with a reasonable degree of comprehensiveness. Then you'll be asked to pick which ones you think are particularly relevant to you and then you'll be asked to narrow that final list in one half of the exercise a list that represents your virtues and then in the other half of the exercise a list that represents your faults, then you'll be asked to describe a time when not virtue played a positive role for you or when that fault interfered with you. And then you'll be asked to describe how you might capitalize on that virtue in the future or perhaps bring that fault under control in the future and it turns out that writing exercises of this sort are very practically useful. They have a variety of positive effects one of which seems to be an increase in academic performance and our research so far as indicated that that Increase can be quite substantial among with similar programs at McGill. We raise the academic performance of struggling University students by 25% So whole grade point and that business school in Holland where this is being studied in some depth. We've studied two thousand people. They actually did the future authoring program note the present authoring program, which is the one you're going to do and we improve their Overall academic achievement by about 30 percent as well turns out that articulating yourself is an extraordinary useful thing to do and you could actually you could also think about that in a more comprehensive way. As the goal of say Psychotherapy and personality transformation a lot of what's Happening as you mature and develop as a personality. Is that what you are? Whatever that means. I guess it's your behaviors and your potential and I don't know exactly what will cancel is but your behaviors and your potential can be increasingly organized at a high level of Consciousness articulated at a higher level of Consciousness and articulation is a funny word it because partly it means joint articulation. I know your hands are very articulated. And that's why you can do a lot of things with them and hands and speech are very tightly related. Just why most people speech centers are in the same hemisphere as their dominant hand. Anyways, articulating yourself makes you able to do many more things with yourself and it also seems to quell your negative emotion part because it's clarifying you, you know, the more you leave things muddy in your life. The less defined things are around you the more active your stress. Response systems are because if things are murky and undefined your stress systems basically assume that there are alligators and snakes and predators hiding in all that fog and Gloom and that you're in a very dangerous environment. But if you clarify that with careful attention and articulation, you can clear away the fog in the Gloom and that only leaves you with your actual problems, which once defined carefully you might find manageable and an example, that would be you know, when you go into your room and you haven't done your homework, A while and there's piles of papers piling up or maybe there's piles of junk on your computer doesn't really matter and you'll have a very powerfull tendency to avoid that not even to look at it, right? You don't even want to look at it because it's and that's chaos. It's sort of growing in your environment and there's a specific part of your brain which evolved to detect snakes that deals with such little chaotic piles of undone business. And the more those that are around you psychologically or physically the or negative emotion you experience the less hope you experience and the larger your stress response chronically and that's not good because if your stress response is chronically elevated that suppresses your immune logical function. It makes you overweight predisposes you to diabetes and cancer. It makes you age faster. It increases the probability that you'll have anxiety disorders and depression. It's a bad thing. So so clarifying who you are and what you're doing is a good thing unless you want all those other things to happen, which seems highly improbable. Although people desire some very strange things. And that's part of what we'll talk about as this course progresses Okay, so If you want to find out about the course, you can go to Jordan be Peterson.com. And the courses are listed there. You can just type my name in a search engine and you'll find the courses. This course is site 2:30. Obviously, I mentioned that there's a reading book which you have to buy. The rest of the readings are online. The order that you do that reading is listed on the syllabus. You also have to do two assignments and the essay which is only 750 words by the way, but don't That fool you because it's 750 word s it can be very difficult to write the essay and then this personality analysis. Now the personality analysis. All you have to do is show it to the TA to show them that you completed it because we don't want to know what you wrote down. And we want to encourage you to write down things that you know that you'd like to write down that are likely private less. You want to broadcast your faults on Facebook, which I suppose you could do after you complete the exercise. So the reason I I want you to do that. What was three weeks since right one is well it'll familiarize you more with standard models of Personality because you have to apply them to yourself. And so then you'll understand yourself better too. So that's a good thing. And then it's also a quasi clinical intervention in some of you because they're in this course are no doubt interested in Clinical Psychology. And so this will give you a flavor of the sorts of things that a clinical psychologist might do except computer is doing it and then which turns out to be fine. I'm people will actually often tell computers things that they wouldn't tell people because the computer isn't error what you've done particularly not yet. Anyways, and the third reason is that while it should be good for you and you know education should be good for you. That's actually the purpose of Education right? It's supposed to make you more healthy mentally and physically that's supposed to make you more productive. And so that's what education is for and that's what this class is for. So that's what we're aiming at. Out so then there's two exams two midterms 25% each approximately there are multiple choice. I'll post sample questions so that you'll know what they're like, they're not tricky people get worried about exams and rightly. So but these aren't tricky exams. If you do the readings and you come to the class the probability is quite high that you'll do at least reasonably. Well, I don't ask you to memorize dates and that sort of thing I try to keep Out of conceptual level and so the questions on the multiple choice tests are usually conceptual questions where I try to get you to take something that you've learned to read and to apply it to the solving of a problem even though they're in standard multiple choice format. There's there's usually not a tremendous number of questions. So you'll be able to complete the exams in the time allowed without any trouble so Now, let's see. I should tell you guys who should take this course and who shouldn't take it because you need to know that since it's your first day. And so this course has two or three aspects one aspect is is scientific that really occupies the last half of the course, I would say and in the purely scientific part of the course. For the purely research oriented element of the course. The first part is scientific to because science has more science is more than mirror testing of hypotheses. Anyways, the second half of the course deals essentially with trait Theory and with psychobiology. So what I want to do is to tell you about The basic dimensions of human variability and also how those are represented in the brain so that you can make a connection and the bottom so that you can make a connection between the theories and the biological and called you two substrates and it's not sort of a unifying attempt. So you got to be interested not if you want to take this course and and have it go well for you. So there's some psychometrics that's the science of measurement. There's a little bit of statistics. There's a reasonable amount of neuropsychology and some of its complex. Some of it isn't but I try to only pick things. That I don't try to only pick things to discuss with you that are relevant at three levels of analysis. I want them to be personally relevant so that they tell you something about yourself. I want them to be intellectually relevant to but I also want them to be culturally relevant so that not all when you walk away from the study not only do, you know something more about you and your friends, but hopefully you're a better functioning creature in the broader social milieu, so So everything is picked to that end including the psychobiological or neuropsychological material and the trait material. There's a fairly hemp heavy emphasis on Clinical issues the first half of the course deals with classic theorists of personality and all the classic personally theorists were clinicians. Now the U of T at present doesn't have a clinical program. Although they're starting to get up in Scarborough, but down here. It's a George there's not many clinicians. I think I'm probably the only one I don't know why they let me in but it is and But the emphasis on clinician that the emphasis of clinicians is to four right one is well, who is the person or what is the person but more importantly who could the person be or what should they be? And that's a very strange thing about people right? I mean if you have a cat you don't really sit around thinking what could this cat be because it's a cat and you know, if it has Offspring they're going to be cats and in the thousand years, they're still going to be just cats but people Well, we're strange in ways that are virtually on come in comprehensible and we're not only what we are but we're also what we could be and in many cases especially for people of your age. You're way more what you could be that what you are. And so focusing on what you could be is an extremely important thing to do. In fact, there's plenty of research and some of its associated with the writing exercises that I told you about earlier that if you make efforts to Define, Who you could be, you know in a way that you find interesting because he might as well shape yourself into something that you want to be that that increases the efficiency with which we work substantially and also makes you a better person by reasonable measures the better sort of these happier and healthier and you know more acceptable or at least less repulsive to other people. So the clinical material is very useful for that and the clinical material is grounded. Added in observation. So it's kind of like ethology ethology is the study of animal behavior, but not in the lab. It's observational study. A lot of the clinical stuff has this observation quality to it. It's heavily influenced by philosophy if you're not interested in ideas. This is a bad course for you because it's it's a course that primarily concentrates on ideas. I want them to have practical utility because why not you might as well put constraints on the butt, but the Focus is ideas. And so when we discuss the clinical material clinical personality material will discuss the philosophical background of that and we'll do the same thing when we get to the cycle biological material. So you ought to decide if you're not interested in philosophical ideas, then this is a bag course because you're going to be stuck with with those sorts of things half the time so, And there's some old there's some elements of the course. They're almost straight philosophy because some of the clinical schools, especially those that were developed in the 1950s, like existential psychology are very tightly associated with fields of philosophy existentialism and phenomenology and that cakes and so I think that sort of thing is very much worth learning because it's part of the history of ideas and you should know something about it. It's also very interesting. It's very useful to know something about it. to be a clinical psychologist because you should know a fair bit about a lot of things if you're going to be a clinical psychologist, but even if you're interested in research Science is halfpipe. Hypothesis. Testing by the other half is I bought this is Generation. That's the most important hat. You got to think up an idea before you can test it and you know, most of what you'll learn in a methods class has nothing to do with generating research hypotheses. They just tell you to do that first generate your research hypotheses. It's like yeah, that's the big problem right there. The rest is just for Machinery right with just grind it through this process and the way you generate research I bought This is by knowing something and so you have to learn a lot in order to generate a research hypothesis that well first. It someone hasn't already else hasn't already thought of in disproved which is highly probable. It's actually depressing to gather more and more knowledge because what you find is that it everyone's already thought of everything and most of your ideas are stupid. So, yeah, so anyways now Let's see. Oh, yes. Here's another reason not to take the course. There's a lot of reading. And there's less reading it was last year. I took out one paper that was too hard. I think it was too hard for people even though it was a great paper and but I read it left arrested and so If you're looking for a course with the Light reading load this isn't that course because this has a heavy reading load now on the upside for your essays. I don't require you to read outside of the course. You can use the material that's in the course to write the S. So it's self-contained but there's a lot of reading and it's not easy reading and partly because a lot of it is original papers all the stuff that's listed on the web is original papers. And then the textbook to it's a tough textbook. It's mostly text. Doesn't have a lot of pictures in it has no stories at all about celebrities think that's the only text left doesn't have stories about celebrities in it. So If you're if you're taking a tough course semester and you don't have a lot of time to read then well, this isn't a course like that. It's a course where there's an awful lot to read. And the thing about the reading too is that you have to think about it, you know, like how fast you can read something seems to be a function of how complicated the words are that would be function one, but the second function seems to be something like how many Diaz there are per paragraph or maybe per page. There are lots of ideas per paragraph in these readings. That's why I picked them. So you can't just zip through them. You have to think about them. Well, that's a good thing because if you do read them, you'll know a lot more at the end of the class than you did at the beginning of the class and you'll find that that knowledge is extremely useful. I truly believe that this Village could change your life. Well, that's what it was generated for. Right? It's generated by clinicians and the personality psychologists. That's what there route there to do and they're all out there to take unrevealed potential that could be anything and to hammer it and shape it into something that's hard and pure and solid and you have to do a lot of reading and writing but they be to get to a point like that but it really beats the hell out of mucking about in The Merc and unfortunately, that's how many people live and I've seen the consequences of that. And if you spend the next 30 years like that, you will be old by the time you're 50 and so I wouldn't recommend that so it's worth doing the work. It's really worth. So, let's take a look now. Well first I'll ask you if there are any questions. Any questions? Yes. Oh, yeah, I'll get the username and passwords up to you pretty quick. So I just had to make contact with the guy designed it with to get the code so I won't be long. Can you buy the book and I hope so, that's the plan some of you have purchased it? Perhaps okay, so it appears that you can there's also maybe some old texts from right schlock floating about you can use those to you can get a good deal on them. You can often get them secondhand on Amazon for like 20 bucks. If you look the old text is fine except that it has more chapters in it. But if you pay attention careful attention to the syllabus, that won't be a problem. Because all the chapters are numbered and all you have to do is match the number on the syllabus to the number in the book. So other questions. Okay, so let's take a look at what we're going to learn about. lecture 2 so you can think of human knowledge in some ways. It is branching into two components. You can take those two components as knowledge about the subjective world and knowledge about the objective world. That's one way of thinking about it. The other way you could think about it is knowledge about what things are and knowledge about what to do. Now. Most of what you learn in university is knowledge about what things are but that's only half of what you need to know because you really need to know what you should go about and do this is a real problem for human beings because we're always trying to fit having to think of what we should be doing next and like that's the fundamental question of life, which is well, what should I do next or what should I do tomorrow? What should I do next week or next month or next year? Because that's another problem about being human. Is that not only do we have to figure out what to do next but we can also see the future or multiple Futures even and then we have to determine what those Futures could be and how to avoid others that we don't want to have come into existence at all. And then how to configure our Behavior so that as we navigate through the potential Futures we land up more or less somewhere we want and not somewhere. We really don't want and so that's a real problem. What that that's an existential problem. In fact and what that means is that we need knowledge about the subjective and about the behavioral. It's part of potential. How do you unravel yourself across time now? It's proved very difficult for human beings to formalize that kind of knowledge. Now, we formalized scientific knowledge, which is more knowledge about what things are in about the object of world the scientific method, especially the research method formalizes our knowledge about the object of world and about what it's made of but it doesn't get as much insight into what to do about that. All it seems to do actually is increase our power to Two things but not necessarily to inform us as to the direction in which that power should be exerted and you don't really have to look any farther than the 20th century. If you want historical proof of that because as people got more and more powerful so that we could sit in this lovely classroom and all be warm and cozy. Well, it's terrible outside. We also learned how to kill each other with unprecedented. Gusto and potency and so science is enabled us on both sides and that's how it is good or bad. What the behavioral side? There's a tradition of knowledge and it's an ancient tradition and it's grounded in forms of knowledge that are likely tens of thousands of years old or maybe even older than that and those are forms of knowledge that are essentially mythological or religious. And the reason that I start with those is first of all religious systems are in many ways theories of personality and there's very tight associations between certain religions in certain fields of Psychology, so Judaism has been identified fairly heavily with Freud and Christianity with Carl Jung's work. And also with Carl Rogers work Rogers was actually a seminarian and a lot of the ideas about what a person could be. So these are ideas about the ideal are derived from religious and mythological substrates because they have to be derived from somewhere. Right? And so you think we'll how do people get their ideas about what's possible or what should be part of its through storytelling that's Why you go to movies right you go there to see what people could be and you enact all those people on the screen with your body's. Well, it's happening and you have a little neuro system that does that so it puts you right in the action. It's an amazing ability amazing human ability. And the reason we're so attracted to that sort of thing is because we want to know what to do with ourselves and there's a very large body of very complex information that pertains to that one of the things that Carl Jung said was that what were the things he believed was that That form of knowledge have developed quite explicitly up to about the time of the Renaissance or about to the time of bacon and Descartes who founded and Galileo who basically founded the scientific method and then we sort of stopped developing that kind of knowledge and the knowledge of the objective world just leaped ahead and like exponentially and so that's left us with the same moral intelligence. We had in the 1700s, but with 21st century technology, not necessarily a good thing so part of What we're doing in a sense is rescuing the past, you know in my other class sometimes I show Pinocchio the movie how many of you seen Pinocchio I'll I should be raised. So yeah, it's like the most popular animated movie ever made seconds. I think that the line is more popular in there's one scene in Pinocchio where Pinocchio rescues his father from a whale you may remember that you may notice that you watch that and that was perfectly fine. As far as you were concerned by that you could watch a puppet. It swim with a cricket to the bottom of the ocean and rescue his father from a whale it's like, okay. So the first thing you might think about is how in the world could you sit there and swallow that and not even notice that you were doing something as absurd and bizarre as any ritual you can possibly imagine. Well, it's it's partly because we're very attracted to narrative and narratives have structured narratives are about behavior and they have a deep structure and they have a deep symbolic. Structure. So for example the whale in Pinocchio wasn't just any ordinary way over because if you remember it also breathe the smoke and fire. It's very strange behavior for a whale and not make even a whale that's strange and that made it a dragon and so parking what that meant was the Pinocchio was rescuing his father from a dragon. That's a very old story. In fact, that story is the oldest story that we have in written form. It's a variant of a story that was told by the Ian's boat 5000 years ago, so Part of that story means why you should rescue your father. Well from what well from the murky chaos in which your culture is embedded know you guys are all inheritors of Rich cultural traditions in oh, no, those aren't just words those cultural Traditions Orient you they keep you sane and if they're desiccated and broken up and dad in archaic and lying in the bottom of the chaos, then you better get some back out of there because without them you're going to live Shallow and difficult lives and that's a bad idea. So starting with the historical perspectives, we can situate ourselves in maybe some hundreds of thousands of years of History. Maybe even longer I can tell you in one manner might be longer. It turns out that part of the reason that we can see so well, which we can human beings can really see well way better than almost any other animal except hunting birds hunting birds can see better than us. But other than that, it's us and that's especially rare among mammals and particularly rare among primates. So you might ask yourself. Well, why can we see so well, well, it turns out that part of the reason is that we co-evolved with predatory snakes. So predatory snakes are newer than lizards by the way, even though you wouldn't think so and there's a woman at UCLA in England is Bell who was thinking why do people see so well and so she went she had to snake detection Theory because she worked with primates. She knew they could really see the sort of camouflage patterns that snake has snakes have an emotion that they make the really good at detecting that plus human beings are very afraid of snakes. Innately plus if you take chimpanzees who've never seen a snake and you sort of The snake in their cage assuming there in the cage, then they jump to the top of the cage and because they're not happy about that snake, but then they look at it and then if they're out in the jungle jungle around and they see a big snake then they have a specific sort of cry they make and they'll stand there for like nine hours watching a big snake making this noise and all the other chimps depending on how afraid they are. Also come and look at the snake. And so yeah is they want to know what that sneaks up to you? And that's what we want to know too. We want to know what the snakes are up to that's for sure and the circuit that we developed to detect snakes the visual circuit is partly what gives us such tremendous Acuity of vision part of the way Isabel figured that out with by correlating primate visual Acuity with the print and its development over evolutionary time with the prevalence of predatory snakes in that geographical region, and she found that there was a very high correlation so we can see sharply partly because we're always looking for snakes and you know that pile of I'm done homework in your in your in your room that's snakes. As far as the part of your brain developed to deal with snakes is concerned. And so, you know, if you leave a lot of things undone around you then all you've got is sinks and your their target and so the that's no way to live. And so that whale down there at the bottom of the ocean. That's kind of a variant of a snake. It's a dragon even though it's a whale breathes fire, right? So let's call it a dragon because that's what it is. The idea that you have to rescue something from the dragon. It's an unbelievably old story. And so that's partly what we're going to be doing at the beginning of this course. We're going to be going way back into the murk and mock the prehistory trying to understand what the hell we've been up to for the last 60 million years because that's when our tree-dwelling ancestors first really started to deal with predatory snakes and my suspicions are that you're all evolved from one of those little treated. Well you Rats the first one who figured out that if you drop the snake a stick on a snake it would probably run away. So that's what we've been doing for 60 million years throwing sticks at snakes. So that's the first lecture and You'll see why when you do the reading why this is broadly relevant because it also Accounts at least in part for the human tendency to demonize people who aren't like us because it turns out that we use the same circuit that we would use to handle predatory reptiles. Let's say we use that circuit to First process people who are strange to us and it makes sense because people who are strange to us who come from different cultures and who represent different ideals. Unbelievably dangerous even though they might also be unbelievably beneficial, you know, the poor Native Americans they came out and they shook hands with the Europeans and then 95% of them died the next 150 years, right? They all died in place. They died of smallpox. They died of measles measles just wipe them out. By the time the pilgrims came to North America, which is, you know, fairly early in North American European history 95% of the Indians were already dead. They were welcomed to the Europeans because they didn't have any people get your crops off. So meeting someone who's strange is no trivial thing and even if they don't poison me with some horrible Illness, but come along with some cockamamie idea like Marxism and you'll be Chinese and then it'll be the 20th century and a hundred million of the you will die. It's very useful to understand the Deep mythological structures that we live inside and their relationship to our brain and our body really gives you insight into how people function it's helpful. The next lecture is on heroic and shamanic initiations and that brings us closer to the present from say 60 million years ago. It's more like 50,000 years ago. There are shamanic Traditions all over the world and the shaman is kind of a precursor. cursor to though to the to the to the man of intelligence the man of intellect the man of culture and he sort of a doctor and a scientist and a priest all wrapped up into one thing and he's often the person who's in charge of culture many in many shamanic societies. The shaman has a vocabulary vocabulary that vastly exceeds that of his peers and that's because he's being taunted in his initiatory process so that the culture within which that particular people survives can be transmitted down the generations with very little error people can remember things that are transmitted verbally in preliterate cultures with unbelievable accuracy and the shamanic initiation is very interesting the heroic initiation as well are very interesting processes because they involve They involve death and rebirth and death and rebirth is more or less equivalent to change. So here's something to think about. So if there's a mosquito and it wants to make another mosquito it basically lays 10,000 eggs, right and then all those eggs hatch and 9999 of those little mosquitoes die and then one mosquito makes it and lays another ten thousand eight. So it's pretty costly rep reductive strategy. Right? But so the way the mosquito works is that it knows that the world is chaotic and dangerous and it has no idea how to survive in that. So it just makes a whole pile of mosquitoes and it hopes that one of the most Through and each of those mosquitoes is a tiny bit different from each other mosquito in terms of time and place and also genetic structure and maybe one's got some little advantage that allows it to survive, but it's costly right. It's 999999 to 1. Otherwise, we'd be covered with mosquitoes. So so the way the mosquito deals with the fact that you can't figure out what's going on is by producing lawyers of mosquitoes, but the way people figure out what's going on is by producing lots of ideas and ideas are the relationship of ideas to you and the external world is the same as The relationship of animals to the environment. So there's a philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who said human beings evolved to let their ideas die instead of them. Now. That's a smart way of thinking is it means that you can parse off a little sub personality of yourself, maybe it's angry subpersonality or sad sub facility or an irritated or resentful or you know, those aren't exactly ideas. They're more like little spirits that are partly you. Kind of stupid because they've only got one direction but there's still variants of you and maybe you can present one of those to someone which you might do if you're dating someone and you want to sue me, you still do that. If you're dating someone and you want to impress them, maybe you spin off some little variance of yourself that you think is particularly attractive probably won't work. I doubt it'll work and if it doesn't work, well, then you can get all heartbroken and let it die. And then maybe the next one you spin-off will be a little more, you know together. And so that's how people Progress it progressed by dying and coming back to life at different levels. Hey, I mean maybe you're just taking some little ratty mistake. And so you can let it go and your only shame momentarily and it's only a little pain when that circuit dies, or maybe it's your whole damn personality that has to go, you know, when that happens to people when they encounter a catastrophe of one form or another so that might happen to someone Close to You dies or if you lose a limb or if you get an illness or you know, any of the horrible things that plague the Very deep levels, which might mean pretty much all of you has to go and maybe you'll actually die. But if you don't well you can let go what's holding you back and maybe that's your old self and then you can come back to life and I'll tell you it's a lot better to do that voluntarily before it's necessary then involuntarily in a moment of Crisis and I would say in some ways. That's the lesson of Clinical Psychology confront the damn snakes first. Because it's really hard to get out of their bellies. What if they've eaten so the shaman is shamanic initiation is our death and rebirth initiations. They formalize that they're often the rituals themselves are often accompanied by the use of different classes of hallucinogens, which for one reason or another seem to facilitate at least symbolically the process of transformation from life to death and back to life. So, Dramatisations of the process by which people learn you learn something to really learn some presupposition that you had before that has to crumble and then the new information comes in and you can build a new self around it, but that's a painful process and that's part of why people stick to their ideas or their past selves. You know, what? You could stick to your past self and that would be fine except that everything is changing around you all the time. And so if you don't change then you just get more and more outdated your more and more Arcane none of your presuppositions work anymore. And so you're like you're like this Rusty machine clanking around running into things all the time. And your life is very miserable because you don't fit the environment anymore. And so when I talk about personality on its Transformations something that you could ask yourself which is in some way the most The mental question you can ask yourself is are you the thing that stays the same or are you the thing that changes and you know the thing that changes can live in a lot more places, and so that's worth thinking about but the cost is well when you change your diet a little bit and that's painful or maybe you die a lot and that's really painful. So if you ever wonder why people don't change That's part of the reason then we the next section is on constructivism. We're going to talk mostly about PSAs actually developmental psychologist. I like Piaget a lot because Piaget had an interesting question is which is it's not the genetic question or an environmental question. And you know, you might think those are the only two kinds of questions. There are when you think about the hell, but it's not exactly that here's why. It's not clear to what degree you're specified by your genes. So here's one possibility. So let's say that encoded in your genetic structure our whole variety of potential use like who knows how many? Oh the potential use that the entire history of mankind has been able to weave into their genetic structure. They're all sitting down there encoded in your genes and then that very complex structure. That's Rife with potential. Pops out into a particular environment and then it interacts with that environment like a program interacts with the computer and gathers information of one form or another it takes that information and the material that it incorporates and builds the real you out of that and that's what Piaget was study. He is trying to figure out how is a child go about taking itself from you know, this thing that just lays there squats basically to something that's you know, you go on YouTube and you see If people can do what human beings can do it's bloody unbelievable. I mean, we're sold ridiculously versatile people can do things that are just impossible in every Dimension know intellectually physically spiritually, it can even eat hot dogs at a rate that you can hardly imagine. You know, we're very variable and Piaget was very interested in trying to figure out how all of that embodies variability to come out of this little package of potential at the Getting of life. It's very interesting. So that's constructivism. How does the individual construct him or herself from nothing in some ways from birth forward? And so PSJA especially his discussion of isn't developed. It's sort of like the analysis of the unfolding of a human being it because people really do one full to you know, because babies when they're born they have crunched up like this and so they have to stretch themselves out and you know get going and I was Piaget's concern so So so that's that's good and then we go from there to depth psychology. You might think about that more psychoanalysis now people. People aren't very happy generally speaking about psychoanalytic theory, especially if their research oriented, but there's a variety of reasons for that and one of them is they don't know anything about it. That would be the first weeks and then people are often tempted to denigrate anything. They don't understand. It's actually kind of hard to understand psychoanalytic. Thank you. It's in fact, it's very hard. And the other thing about scientists and research scientist who are engaged in psychological work is there actually usually fairly mentally healthy, you know what least they're healthy enough to be scientists which you know, you got to be pretty healthy to be a scientist to go to be disciplined. You got to be able to get up and go to work every day. You have to be able to think about complex things. You have to be very orderly and persistent, you know, and so if there's a lot of Demand on you if you're a scientific researcher, so the problem is scientific. Just the hang around with other scientific researchers, then they think that's what human beings are like and human beings are nothing like scientific researchers there a tiny minority of the population and there is bizarre as like albino buffalo and to think of them as representative of human beings is insane. First of all, most of them have IQs in the 99th percentile. So it's like why bother even thinking about them normal human beings are very weird, especially the ones that don't function well, And not functioning. Well is a bottomless pit that that's why hell is a bottomless pit by because not functioning. Well, it's a bottomless pit and if you're dealing with people who aren't functioning, well one of the most mysterious things is how they should take a situation this god-awful beyond your worst imaginings and then think of three or four creative ways to make it worse and if you're dealing with someone like that and you do if you're a clinician if you're dealing with someone like that good luck with your Behavioral. Interventions, man, that's like throwing sticks at an elephant. You're just going to get anywhere and one of the ways I want to demonstrate this to you. I'm going to show you a film called crumb crumbs a harsh film, but it's the best documentary by the way of an underground comic named Robert crumb who's actually quite a genius even though he's perverse in precisely the Freudian ways that are interesting and his brothers are even worse. So I'll walk you through. Through that because I can't figure out any other way of giving you a taste of what Freudian psychopathologies like, it's not pretty and that's the other reason that sort of clean minded research scientists. Don't like psychoanalytic thinking because it's really in many ways. It deals with the most disgusting elements of human behavior. And so it's not even that Pleasant to think about and then there's you know, who will talk about after Freud and Jung is so strange. Makes Freud look normal and you know believed that. As I mentioned earlier believe that there is a universal grammar of ethics of morality. It's not arbitrary. It's not relative, you know in the University's the theory has been at least since the 1960's that one person's ethics is as good as another person and there's no way of distinguishing reliably between them. Well, I happen to think that's absolute nonsense. It's also extremely dangerous nonsense, and I also think there's no evidence for it whatsoever because we now know A lot about human universals which are aspects of human behavior that are constant across all cultures and there are a lot of them. There are a lot of the other thing is there's just not that many ways that half-mad primates can gather together in large groups and live productively. It's not easy like you think of all the civilization work that went into allowing all you people from all these different cultures to sit here in peace and comfort. It's mind-boggling if you think think there's a million ways to do that. Well think again, maybe there's one way to do that, you know, and we do it well enough. So here we are and no one's being knifed. So So that's you and he's profound beyond belief really beyond belief. So that's those guys aren't dealt with unconscious. No, it's not interesting to think about what the unconscious means and so I can give you a bit of a hint. It's it's partly. The information that's coded in your behavior. So for example, there are a lot of things that you can do with your body that you don't know how you do like, you don't know how you walk for example, or how you ride a bike or how you talk you can talk, but you don't know how you talk. You just move your mouth. I know but you get the point right? You have no conscious apprehension whatsoever of the micro details that are necessary to allow you to move your mouth. So there's a lot of information encoded in you that you don't have Conscious access to and it's not only physiologically encode it's also culturally encoded because you've been targeted and shaped by the interactions of all the people you've ever encountered and they in turn by all the people they've ever encountered including their ancestors. So you're the product of this unbelievably complex multi-generational exchange of information that in some ways is all about how to make you acceptable to the public. And there's only certain ways you can be acceptable to the public. You know, you have to be relatively clean. For example, at least in our society. You can't be too boring or you won't have any friends. You also can't be too exciting. You know, you can't be too violent. You can't be too empty headed unless you're associating with people who like to feel Superior, you know, there's there's we put a lot of Demands on each other in terms of what constitutes acceptability let alone ideal. We're always telling each other about both of those what's acceptable what's ideal every interaction you have shapes you into An approximation of acceptable and ideal and that's all encoded in you to it's encoded in your behavior. It's also encoded in your imagination and that's why you go to a movie and you can instantly identify the hero and the villain which is of course the first thing you do when you go to a movie because otherwise you can't make sense out of it. And so that encoding prior to articulation. That's all the unconscious and that's what the psychoanalyst we're interested in analyzing. Now the cognitive Neuroscience have kind of got there too. But there are stairs are deluded into thinking that what's in your head is it? Formation and then it's ideas. And those are sort of cold and dead things and your hand is not full of ideas and information. It's full of devils and snakes and the psychoanalyst knew that and by that I mean you're alive and so are your sub components and all your little sub personalities and I'll just ideas. They see a thing. I hear it feel it have AIDS as you know, for example when you get possessed by anger the end can be entirely destructive. I want to bring down the person. I love half an hour later. You think what the hell was I thinking about like? Yeah, no kidding. Well, you weren't thinking you're just possessed by a little subpersonality. That's what the psychoanalysts were interested in subpersonalities fantasies. next we go to that humanists and the existentialist now, they're interesting because they come out the problem of what's wrong with people from a kind of a Universalist perspective now for Freud if you weren't sick you were healthy and that seems obvious because we think you can make a clear distinction between second healthy, but the existentialists they didn't want any of that their hypothesis was If you're human. You're sick. There's no way out of it. And the reason you're sick in a sense and unlike any other animal is that life itself poses a paradoxical problem to you partly because you're so conscious and because you're self-conscious and actually a sequence of paradoxical problems a how do you live When You're vulnerable and Mortal that's a rough one because you might say well why should I boil it all or who's going to know anyways in the Thousand Years or a million years or Why is there suffering or how do you go on in the face of Cruelty? Those are questions that grip at people's soul and crush it and they're not a consequence of mental illness. It's like what how long should it take you to recover if your whole family is wiped out in a car accident? What's healthy? Well, we don't know the answer to that. It's like should you ever recover maybe if you were half ways empathic would just kill you? You know, a lot of times people can't recover from their brief because they're guilty. They think how can I how can I live when all those people close to me died? And they died unfairly. That's an existential problem. And then so the there's one class which is vulnerability and mortality. Everyone's got that stereo. So, how do you deal with that hard question second-class a problem. Well, everybody's always evaluating all this and you're never good enough so what that means is that you're always in an insufficient relationship with Society in history no matter how good you get It's not good enough. And so history itself as well as culture always faces you as a judge. And so that's the second category of existential problem. Then the third problem is well what to do about you yourself know there's nature you have to contend with and there's culture you have to contend with and then you've got yourself and your self consciousness and your deep knowledge of all the things about you that could really use some repair and the thing about those problems is that everyone has them? I always have them as far as we know they always will and so they're built into the condition of Being Human and that's what existentialism is about. It's like life is a paradoxical problem. Is there any possible solution to a paradoxical problem? Well, that's that's that's in some ways the question of the meaning of life. And one hint. Is that what what's the meaning of life and one answer to that is this is the hint is that the meaning to life is the pattern of thought and action that you take that enables you to tolerate at least tolerate the conditions of life and then maybe you could move One Step Beyond that if you're feeling a little optimistic and say Meaning of life is the pattern of conception in action that enables you to welcome the conditions of life. And then you might ask yourself. Well, is there such a mode of being given the nature of the problem that you have to contend with? Is there actually a mode of being that would enable that you could say the vulnerability the Judgment the insufficiency it's worth it under these conditions and that's the other existential question. And if the people who pose those questions, they weren't messing around you're going to Read people like Frankel Viktor Frankl and Alexander solzhenitsyn and what those two people live through mean it's unimaginably horrible and when they were wrestling with the questions that I just described they weren't academic. They weren't academic issues. They were embodied issues of life and culture and genocide and cruelty. And so their examination of that had to be deep enough. To be able to contend with questions like that and answers that are deep enough to contend with questions like that are frightening answers. When we have reading week, it'll be a relief. The last part of the course this is when we switch over into the more scientific domain and so we're going to do two things. As I said, we're going to take a pretty deep look at how the brain functions as far as we know in our current state of unimaginable ignorance. Like we are we really know so little about the brain or maybe we know a bit of a bit about the brain, but we certainly don't know anything yet about Consciousness and Consciousness seems to be a very well. It's a relevant part of the brain. Right. It's sort of the part that everybody cares about since Consciousness in some sense seems to be you even more than your brain is you and your brains just this thing inside your skull but your Consciousness, you know, that's your being we don't have a clue about Consciousness our scientific. We're not even able to conceptualize it in a scientific manner. It's a real mystery. So but having said that there's still plenty of things that are interesting to know about the brain. One of the things we're going to do and this is sort of associated with the phrase idea of the end, you know, the ad for Freud was the natural self. And so that was your primordial you could think about them as drives or Temptations or values values is probably the most accurate anger sexuality. Those are the talk to Freudian concerns. There's plenty others eating for didn't care about that we do now because everyone has an eating disorder or virtually everyone. So for the victorians, it was sexuality for us. It's food sex doesn't seem to be a problem, but we just can't eat anymore. So we're going to take a look at the low level biological systems in the brain. And those are systems go out some of those systems are so old that even Crustaceans have so for example, this is so cool. So if you give a lobster who's being defeated in a dominance fight because they fight for dominance and they might even if you give a lobster, if you take the lobster who's been defeated in a dominance dispute, he'll go back to his little lobster whole and pout and when we when he's pounding he gets all clocks and you can't even really get him out of his hole with the stick because he's going to sit in there and you know be upset about his dominance defeat and maybe he'll come on was kind of a new Lobster already go again, and maybe not if you take that same Lobster and you give them antidepressants right after he fights He won't go back into his cave and hide and he'll fight right away again. And so you think about that that means that the circuitry that underlies our defeat related depression is 300 million years old and even Crustaceans have it. So that's way down in your brain stem and because lobsters hard to even have brains. In fact, if the lobsters big top of these being the dominant launched her for a long time and he gets defeated badly. Then when he goes off to pout he has to dissolve his whole brain. It's all he does is dominant stuff that he grows a new subordinate bring weasels around that so and that's useful to think about the next time you really get defeated because all that pain you're going through it's like you've got some circuit repairs. And if you feed badly defeated, well, maybe you should just let yourself collapse and all that stuff clear away so you could come back. So that's low level stuff brain stem stuff its way down at the bottom of your be it, you know, but we're going to talk about systems that are above that too. But still low the hypothalamus. For example, it's a very cool braid area. It's sort of responsible for all the basic drives hunger temperature regulation sexuality defensive aggression. Predatory Gresham. Looks like it's something different. Everyone has those systems, you know, so they're like these sub beings that live inside us, but they're also preconditions for Haitian, you know because you might say to your friend, I'm angry today and your friend doesn't say well, what do you mean angry? He says well what happened to upset you because he knows what anger beans and the reason knows that is because he's already got it in his head. He's like you he gets angry he gets sad gets afraid the basic emotions, but not only the basic emotions but the basic motivations and so we're going to look at the brain systems that underlie the basic motivations and the basic emotions and in some sense those systems are equivalent to the Physiological incarnation of the ID that Freud described at the end of the 19th century. And so that's a nice way to look at it. You'll go through the psychoanalytic thinking which kind of puts flesh on these systems because for the psychoanalyst and this is why they're still relevant those weren't just systems. They were living personalities narrow one-eyed personalities. They only want one thing but personalities nonetheless ancient gods that's another way of looking at them. And pays you have to connect again with whether you believe in them or not. We'll discuss all five traits as well extraversion. As I said that's positive emotion neuroticism. That's negative emotion people Darion those Dimensions agreeableness that seems to be associated with maternal behavior on one end and predatory hunting on another as human beings are hunters and mammals. It's a weird combination, right? Because if you're a hunting animal you have to figure out how not to kill it eat your children, right and that happens in lots of mammalian species, especially among the males. They have to be moved away. But human beings have solved that more or less, you know, it gets complicated in mixed families because if you're the child of a stepparent you have 100 times the likelihood of being abused. So we'll talk about conscientiousness, which is a great predictor of long-term life success, but also associated with fascist political priest predispositions because it turns out that the way you vote has very little to do with what you pay and very much to do with what your temperament is. So even for high-level cognitive functions, like political belief these underlying systems. Play in determining rule last two things. We're going to talk about performance prediction and by that I mean, well, there's been accruing evidence. You might say look what me. What how do you have a happy life? First of all, I would say that's a stupid question, but we'll go because happiness isn't it's not the Rite Aid it's it's a way it's not a place to go. It's a it's a manner of manifestation while your journey something like that leaving that aside. What do you need to live a high quality life what we kind of know that already. I mean, it's kind of obvious need friends need Intimate Relationships. You need me. For work, you know having more money than we'll pay your bills doesn't seem to help that much, etc. Etc. So it's like, you know, it's like intelligent moderation of disciplines very boring exactly what you'd expect. If you were pessimistic about excitement performance prediction. We look very carefully at the nature of the traits that make people successful in life. And you know, you might say, well, what do you mean by successful? You know, one of the things I mean is not in too much pain and anxiety is that turns out to actually be Be more important to people than being happy, you know, if you say to people what do you want to say? I want to be happy. But if you analyze what they mean by happy they mostly mean not suffering and not terrified you get those two things under control like the worst that can happen to you is that you'll be bored. So and then we'll wrap it up at the end. Okay, so that's the course so I'm glad to be teaching it. It's good to see all of you here. Looks like you kind of have a comfortable classroom. So that's kind of nice decide if you decide if you want to take the court because I don't want you to be disappointed you left hand. So I'm really really telling you seriously, you gotta like the ideas if you like this lectures you like the course and you got to do the read and there's a fair bit of read. So. we'll see if there's this podcast is brought to you and made possible by generous financial aid from Peter kanzler K. Ay n z l-- e-- r-- you can buy his Amazon books at your favorite Amazon Branch, for example, the original texts of lock Hobbs and the US. Can of Pennsylvania put together into one book for only $15? Thanks for listening.
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