May 10, 2024 • 57 mins
In this episode, Lisa Feldman Barrett explores the science of how your brain really works. Eric and Lisa discuss a variety of practical strategies to improve your emotional well-being and resilience, based on the latest neuroscience research. Get ready to see your brain in a whole new light as you learn about the inner workings of your brain.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Discover how social interactions directly impact your nervous system and overall well-being
- Uncover the brain’s crucial role in regulating your body and maintaining balance
- Explore the significance of emotional granularity for enhancing your overall well-being and self-awareness
- Learn effective strategies for managing body budget deficits and improving your emotional resilience
- Understand the pivotal role of the predictive brain in shaping your everyday experiences and emotions
To learn more, click here!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We can really contribute to the well being of other
people in very profound ways, sometimes with very simple actions.
But we can also really create a significant physiological burden
for another person, really without trying very hard.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true, and yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
(00:44):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. We
(01:18):
hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. Thanks for
joining us. Our guest on this episode is doctor Lisa
Feldman Barrett, who is among the top one percent most
cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in
psychology and neuroscience. She's a university Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University,
(01:39):
with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Doctor Barrett was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Neuroscience in
twenty nineteen. She's the author of many books, including the
one discussed on this episode, Seven and a Half Lessons
about the Brain.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Hi, Lisa, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Thanks so much for having on your podcast.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, it's such a pleasure to have you back on.
I did not look at the date from when we
had you on, but it's been two or three years,
probably at least, so very happy to have you back on.
We're going to be discussing your latest book, which is
called Seven and a half Lessons about the Brain. But
before we do that, let's start like we always do
with the parable. There is a grandmother talking with her
(02:22):
grandson and she says, in life, there are two wolves
inside of us that are always at battle. One is
a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second.
He looks up at his grandmother. He says, well, grandmother,
which one wins, and the grandmother says, the one you feed.
(02:46):
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
It means that you should always surround yourself by people
who allow you to be your best self.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
That's fair, very straightforward, and yet so powerful.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
You know. One of the things we'll talk about, I'm sure,
is the fact that we have a predicting brain and
that really as we cultivate experiences for ourselves in our lives,
what we're doing is we're constantly cultivating the past in
order to have more control over who will be in
(03:23):
the future. And so the parable has a very real
life scientific meaning in that if you create experiences for yourself,
or put yourself in situations, or create environments for yourself
that allow you to be your best self, then that's
what your brain will wire itself to and that's who
(03:45):
you'll be in the future.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Yeah, you have a line in the book that really
struck me from less than five about talking how our
brain really works secretly with other brains, right, how they correspond.
You say, the best thing for your nervous system is
another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is
another human. And I was really struck by that and
how powerful or how destructive our relations with other people
(04:10):
can be.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Well, we are social animals, and what that means is
that we regulate each other's nervous systems. And we don't
usually think about our interactions that way. We don't think
about every hug we give or every insult we bear
that way, but that is actually what's happening. And we
(04:32):
regulate each other really automatically, typically not you know, deliberately
or on purpose, but we do it in all kinds
of ways, you know, with sights and sounds and smells
and so on. Our brains are reacting to each other,
or actually not so much reacting, but sort of taking
account of each other in these various channels. But humans
(04:54):
also regulate each other with words. And that's because the
parts of our brain that are important for understanding language
and speaking are the same parts that regulate the systems
of our body, our heart and our lungs and our
immune system and our metabolism and so on, And so
we can really contribute to the well being of other
(05:16):
people in very profound ways, sometimes with very simple actions.
But we can also really create a significant biological physiological
burden for another person, really without trying very hard. And
so it's important to understand that you are, in some way,
you know, the caretaker of the nervous systems of the
(05:38):
people around you. Even if you don't think of yourself
that way, or you don't really like that idea, it
doesn't really matter. That's just really how it is.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Yeah, I really like that phrase, the caretaker of other
people's nervous systems, you know. And it's obvious we want
to be clear about where sort of, you know, our
responsibility ends and others begins. But it is so clear
how strongly we affect each other, you.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Know, Eric, I think it's really important to say that
nothing in the universe works in simple, single causes. The
fact that you are more responsible for other people than
you might like does not in any way mean that
they are not responsible for themselves. It's not a zero
sum game. I think that's really important to say. And
(06:23):
you know, we live in a culture that privileges individual
rights and freedoms, and that's great. I like living in
that culture too, but it does present a particular quandary
for us, because we are social animals and we can
make each other healthier or sicker, and we might not
(06:46):
like that, we might not believe it. It doesn't really
matter what you believe, and it doesn't really matter whether
you like it or not. It just actually is the case.
So who do you want to be? What kind of
a person do you want to be? If you think
of yourself as somebody who has more responsibility for other people,
for the fellows around you, it doesn't mean that you're
letting them off the hook or that you're not expecting
them to have personal responsibility for themselves.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Yeah. I think that's really important and true. It's not
a zero sum game. We are both responsible for others
and responsible for ourselves. It makes me think of another
line in the book that you say, you're talking about
responsibility and you say sometimes we're responsible for things not
because there are fault, but because we're the only ones
who can change them. And you're talking about the impact.
(07:31):
I believe at that point in the book that our
early patterning has on us, the way that we are raised,
what it does to us, and how prominent that is.
But I love that idea because oftentimes when we say
you're responsible for what happened, people think that the word
that gets translated in mind is fault. It's my fault.
(07:51):
And I love the way you say that we're not
responsible for things, not because there are fault, but because
we're the only ones who can change them. And that
is really true. We're the only ones who can, and
very often we're the only ones who will.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
There's a distinction that you can make between responsibility and culpability.
You can be not culpable for something, meaning it's not
your fault, but that doesn't really necessarily absolve you over
the responsibility to change it. And sometimes we are responsible
for things because we're really the only ones who can
change it, even if we're not culpable for being in
(08:28):
the situation that we're in. I first said this during
a TED talk, and I wasn't really sure how it
would go over, and millions of people literally have responded
extremely well to this idea. I think it gives people
hope and energy to maybe take a little more charge
(08:52):
of their life circumstances, even if life has not dealt
them an easy hand. People experience it as the way
that I meant it, which was to be supportive, but
also to sort of nudge people in the direction of
trying to take more control in their own lives.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Yeah, I mean, so much of my background is in
the recovery community, addiction recovery, and it's absolutely true that
one of the biggest predictors of addiction is having suffered
trauma for which you are not at fault for. And
yet it's also absolutely true that one of the pillars
of recovery is suddenly going, I am responsible for changing
(09:35):
my relationship to my substances, you know, And so both
those things are true at the same time.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Yeah, I mean, I think that trauma, you know, in adversity,
particularly if it visits you as a child, you're victimized twice. Really,
you're victimized the first time because of what happens to you,
which is not your doing, and then you're victimized in
a sense a second time because who's going to clean
up the map? Yes, it's only you, my friend, And
(10:03):
that feels unfair, and it is unfair, but it's just
how it is. And once you realize that, there's a
certain power, actually, there's a certain empowerment in realizing that.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
I think, Yeah, that's certainly been my experience. Let's circle
back to some of the basics here of your work
and some of these seven and a half lessons, And
I want to start with really kind of where you start,
which is what is the brain for? The typical idea
we would have is the brain is for me to
think and for me to learn things and for me
(10:38):
to figure things out. And you're starting in a very
different place than that. Why do I have a brain?
Some people might argue that I don't, but let's assume
I do. Let's go with the assumption I do.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, the why question is really hard to answer, But
I think the better question, or maybe the better question
for a scientist is really what is your brain's most
important job? And you know, for that we can look
back to an evolutionary time, to a time when the
(11:11):
creature's really in the ocean didn't have brains. But like you,
I was really interested. I actually what partly got me
started was the question of why do we even have
a brain? Brains are really expensive organs. So your brain
costs you something like twenty percent of your metabolic budget
every day. That's the most expensive organ you have. And
(11:34):
so what is a brain good for? Exactly? And why
do we have it? And you know where did it
come from? So those are the kinds of questions that
it were really intriguing me. And the answer is both,
I think, really surprising and then also mundane at the
same time, which is that your brain's most important job
(11:55):
is not thinking, it's not feeling, it's not even seeing
or hearing. Your brain's most important job is running the
systems of your body. So right now, as we're talking
to each other and as our listeners are listening to us,
(12:15):
inside each of us is a whole drama unfolding inside
our bodies, and you can't really, I mean, I hope
you can't access it. If you do, you have my sympathies.
But the way that I talk about it, the metaphor
that I use, is that your brain is running a
budget for your body. It's not budgeting money, it's budgeting
(12:37):
glucose and salt and water and oxygen and other chemicals
and nutrients that your body needs to stay alive and
keep well. And you can think about your actions as withdrawals.
So when you learn something new, or when you exercise,
when you move your body in any way, those are
(12:57):
withdrawals from your body budget. And then you can make
deposits into your body budget. You can you know, sleep
and you can eat healthfily, and you can exercise, which
is a withdrawal. It's like an investment in a future
healthy brain and body, so you know, you can think
of that as sort of an investment that you expect
to get a return on. And being around other people
(13:20):
can add a little tax to your body budget, or
it can give you little savings in your body budget.
It can make things a little cheaper to run, and
you can think about addiction really or think about something
simpler like having a cup of coffee. You can think
about caffeine as borrowing energy from tomorrow to use today.
(13:41):
And if you start to run a deficit in your
body budget, you don't experience that directly as sensations in
your body. You experience it as unpleasant feeling. So when
you feel it crap, it's usually because you have expended
(14:01):
energy that you haven't replaced yet. You've made a withdrawal
that you haven't replenished yet. These simple feelings, which are
not emotions, feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling comfortable or uncomfortable,
feeling worked up, or feeling calm, These are simple feelings
that tell you something about the state of your body budget,
and you can use them. They don't tell you what's wrong,
(14:24):
but they do tell you something about you know, whether
your body budget's running a deficit or whether you're flush
and your body budget is solvent. And in this way,
your brain is always budgeting for your body, and your
body is always sending sense data back to your brain,
and your brain is always experiencing this as these simple feelings,
(14:47):
which you can call mood or scientists call affect. And
this goes on really for your whole life. So you
don't experience you are a brain regulating your body. Usually
you don't experience your life as if that's your brain's
(15:07):
most important job. But that actually is your brain's most
important job. And so what you think and what you
do and what you see even really is in the
service of managing that body budget.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Yeah, there's so many things in what you just said
that I could choose to go with. One that I'm
going to go with is one of my favorite lines
from your previous book, which has stuck with me. I
do one of these a week, so it's hard for
things to stick with me a lot of times. But
You basically are saying, if your body budget gets out
of whack, then you're going to feel crappy no matter
what self help tips you follow. It's just a matter
(15:44):
of which flavor of crap. And I love that, you know.
I think it's so true that at a foundational level,
there are these foundational things that we have to do
to take care of ourselves or we're going to feel bad.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, and it really does sneak up on you. Eric.
That's the funny thing too. What I would say is
that think about when you exercise. I know when I exercise,
I exercise every day, and you know, when I'm usually
about twenty minutes in, as I'm hitting my ventilatory load
and building up carbon dioxide, it's harder to keep pushing,
you know, forward with the exercise. I start to feel
(16:19):
really uncomfortable and I want to stop. And actually, this
is the point at which a lot of people stop.
But you shouldn't stop. You should keep going. But why
is it that this happens. It happens because I need
more oxygen. I'm not expelling enough carbon dioxide fast enough,
and I'm burning through glucose and water and other nutrients.
(16:42):
So I'm starting to feel like crap, basically to echo myself.
But it doesn't necessarily mean something's wrong in the larger sense. Right,
Sometimes we feel like crap because we're just working really
hard at something, and then we can replenish. So when
I'm done exercising, I might have a protein shake, or
I might drink some water, or you know, I might
(17:04):
make sure that I have to get enough sleep that night,
what have you. When you're working really hard at something,
when you're learning something really hard, when you have to
really really make some kind of metabolic investment, it can
feel really uncomfortable. But sometimes feeling bad isn't necessarily a
sign that anything's wrong. It might be a sign that
you're just burning through resources really quickly and you need
(17:26):
to replenish. But I guess I should back up and say,
what is stress? Stress is just your brain preparing you
for a major metabolic outlay. You know, Cortisol is not
a stress hormone. It's a hormone that gets glucose into
your bloodstream quickly because your brain believes that you have
(17:46):
a big metabolic outlay to make, whether it's getting out
of bed in the morning or giving a talk to
the members of your team, or taking a test, or
even just talking to somebody on a pond. Right, maybe
it's even listening to a podcast and listening to ideas
that are really new and frankly counterintuitive to you. All
(18:08):
of these things cost glucose and can make you feel unpleasant,
but it doesn't necessarily mean that something's wrong. What it
means is that you just need to replenish the energy.
On the other hand, when you feel stressed, when you're
in a stressful situation, so your brain is preparing you
for battle, right and you don't need it, or you
(18:30):
don't get enough sleep, you don't eat healthily, or you
don't exercise on a regular basis, or you're on social
media too much. Because one thing that's really expensive for
a human brain is ambiguity and uncertainty. For example, COVID
for the last year, Full of Uncertainty has been a
real body budget drain for a lot of people. You
(18:52):
see reports of people anxious and they're depressed and they're
really struggling. Why is that. It's because we didn't even
enter COVID with balanced body budgets to begin with. We
live in a world of casual brutality. We do all
kinds of things to tax our body budgets all the time.
And then it was with this level of depletion that
(19:14):
we entered into COVID, you know, which has been a
year of uncertainty and real angst for a lot of people.
And so the point that I want to make here
is that each time you spend too much, or you
spend but you don't replenish, you pay a little metabolic tax.
It's really really small, but each time you pay a
(19:36):
little tax. And these taxes add up over time, and
sometimes it can take years for them to add up.
But you know, it's kind of like water dripping on
a pipe. You know, the first drip isn't going to
do anything, the second drip isn't going to do anything,
but eventually, if it keeps going on, that water is
going to bore a hole through that steel pipe. And
(19:58):
your metabolism kind of works in the same way. And
this is why adversity in childhood is a major predictor
of physical illness in adulthood and middle age. You know,
there were a number of studies done called viral challenge studies,
(20:18):
which were done ten fifteen years ago where they took
people volunteers, and they put them individually in hotel rooms,
and they controlled what they ate and how they slept
and so on, and then they put a virus exactly
the same amount of viral load in every person's nose.
And actually one of these studies actually used a coronavirus
(20:40):
and only twenty to forty percent of people developed symptoms.
That means sixty to eighty percent of people who were
exposed to the virus didn't get sick. That means that
a virus is not the sole cause of illness, because
many people were exposed to the virus and didn't get sick.
(21:01):
The other cause that's necessary but not sufficient, that you
need in order to get sick is a compromised immune system.
So your brain has to be in a particular state
in order for you to get sick. And you know
what was the biggest predictor of who got.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
Sick, adverse childhood experiences exactly yep.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Now, why is that? It's because the seeds of metabolic
inefficiency are planted really really early in life, and so
your brain as a child wires itself to its world,
and part of your brain's world is your body and
the world that other people create for you. So if
(21:45):
you have a brain that wires itself to adversity, to
deal with adversity, you're paying an extra tax, and you
just keep paying that tax and paying that tax, and
that makes you more vulnerable to stressors later in life.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
I've often wondered about why exercise remains a challenging thing
to do sometimes. And what I mean by that is,
I think every single time I've exercised, and that's been
thousands of times, at this point, when I'm done, I go,
I'm really glad I did that. That was really wonderful.
(22:53):
And yet you would think with that sort of consistent
positive reinforcement, I would hop up and be ready to
run to exercise. Is it just the fact that it's
such a withdrawal that it sort of violates the principle
of conserving energy, that there's just a natural resistance in there?
Do you think that could be part of it? I
just it's a phenomenon I don't fully understand, because again,
(23:18):
I would think that the positive reinforcement being so strong
would make it always something I want to do. And
it's not that it's hard to do necessarily sometimes, but
it's certainly harder than turning on the TV.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Well, first of all, I don't think that conserving energy
is really what nervous systems are about. I think nervous
systems are really trying to optimize energy input and output.
So many people love novelty. Some people love novelty more
than others. But most people don't like to eat the
same food every day, and they don't like to wear
the same clothes every day, and they don't necessarily like
(23:52):
to do the same things every day. So things that
are predictable are much cheaper metabolically speaking than things that
are novel or unpredictable. That being said, you know, we
still like novelty. So why is that? And the answer is,
you know, we don't just go sit in a dark
room and baste away. And the answer is because for
living creatures, I don't really think we're trying to not spend.
I think we're trying to spend efficiently. And I think
(24:14):
the question that you're asking is a really good question.
And it's a question that plagues me, honestly, because every
morning I drag my yass out of bed and I
procrastinate to go exercise, even though I know I'm going
to feel better at the end. But to get to
that end, I get I have to go through some
significant discomfort. And sometimes even when I'm in it, I'm
(24:38):
happy to make the discomfort worse by peddling harder or
lifting more or whatever. But it's just getting myself to
that point. It's you know, and I've been doing this
for more than twenty years at this point, and still,
you know, every morning is a struggle. But I guess
I would say obviously we have learned something because despite
(24:58):
the fact that we know it's going to be pleasant,
we still do it. We've talked about the last time
you know that I was on your podcast, and I'm
sure we'll talk again that you know, brains predict they
don't react to things, and so your brain is always
predicting what it expects to happen next. And next can
be in the next moment, or it can be in
the next ten minutes, or it can be in an
(25:19):
hour from now, after you've run a couple of miles
and you're in the shower. What you're asking me is
a really interesting question that I don't have an answer for,
because I don't think we know the answer to how
a brain makes decisions about what the immediate outcome is
versus what the outcome is going to be in an
hour from now or in a year or ten years
(25:40):
from now, Because what you're asking me really is the
same kind of question as how can I get myself
to not spend money now and put it away in
my retirement savings account so that I'll have money later
when I retire in you know, X number of years.
I mean, you know you need to do it, and
you know you'll be happy if you have money at
(26:01):
the end of your life where you can retire and
live well, and you probably don't need the shiny new
thing that you want, or you don't need to go
out to a restaurant, or you don't need to do
whatever it is you want to do in the moment
to spend that money on. But yet it's still a struggle.
You know, some people experience what's called the pain of
paying This is a scientist at Carnegie Mellon came up
(26:24):
with this phrase, which mean the discomfort that you feel
after you've spent money and you know you really shouldn't have,
but yet people still do it. So I don't have
an answer for you. All I'm trying to say is
it's a pervasive phenomenon. And it's a really interesting question
that you know, economists have tried to answer in psychologists,
but I don't really think there's a terrific answer to
(26:46):
that question.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Yeah, because I think that certainly, the further off the
reward is from the act itself, the harder it becomes.
I know, for me, exercise became a lot easier to
do when I realized, like, the payoff for me is
in twenty minutes or thirty minutes, because it's in how
I feel versus trying to go. Well, the payoff is
(27:07):
in three months when I look better, or twenty five
years when I don't have heart disease.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, that's fair, But I have to tell you that
the payoff for me sometimes is an hour later when
I'm in the shower, but sometimes it isn't.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
I remember when I gave birth to my daughter, and
you know, people tell you all these things about how
beautiful and wonderful it's going to be when you nurse
your daughter or your child or whatever. Let me tell
you something, it hurts a lot for many, many, many months,
(27:41):
and yet women do it, And so why do they
do it? You're not even doing it for yourself. You're
doing it for this other little creature which is like
completely dependent on you. I mean eventually it stops hurting,
you know, after four months or something. But it's actually
really uncomfortable at first. And I mean uncomfortable. I don't
mean psychologically uncomfortable, I mean physically uncomfortable. But yet you
(28:05):
do it, and you do it willingly, and you do
it happily. So it's really hard to answer the question
of how this works. But what I will say is
that when your brain is predicting, part of what it's
doing is it's not some abstract thing. Your brain is
actually changing the firing of its own neurons to anticipate
(28:26):
what the sensory consequences will be in a moment from
now of whatever your brain is preparing you to do. So,
if your brain's gonna stand you up, it's gonna also
raise your blood pressure so that you don't faint, because
that would be metabolically costly. You have mechanisms basically that
(28:46):
will raise your blood pressure as you stand so that
oxygen can get to your head. At the same time,
certain parts of your brain are preparing other parts to
have the sensory feeling of standing up, having your feet
against the floor and you're backstraightened, and so on and
so forth. Now, if you've ever had a song going
(29:07):
through your head that you cannot get out of your head,
you know, it's kind of like that. Or you know,
sometimes I'll ask people to imagine an apple in their head.
You know, can you imagine a red Macintosh apple? You know,
in your mind's eye. Can you imagine grasping that apple
in your hand? Can you imagine taking a bite out
of that apple, sinking your teeth into the apple, and
(29:29):
hearing the crunch of the apple and tasting the apple.
Many people can do this, you know. They have a
ghostly image of an apple, they can hear the crunch,
they can taste the apple, they start to salivate. Sometimes
this is literally your brain changing the firing of its
own neurons to be prepared to taste an apple and
(29:51):
see an apple, and hear an apple and feel an
apple even though there is no apple there. And this
is what your brain is doing all the time. But
but when your brain is trying to predict something in
the longer term future, it's harder to simulate, which is
what this is called. This changing the firing of your
(30:11):
own neurons to prepare for the sensory changes in the
next moment. Your brain just has a harder time doing that.
So I can tell you that if you turn up
the heat a little more, or you turn up the
air conditioning a little more so that you're a little
more comfortable, now, that's going to have a cost in
terms of climate change later which will make you much
(30:33):
more uncomfortable. It's harder to simulate that change later on,
and so it's less potent of an experience to control
your actions.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
So let's go into this brain prediction piece a little bit.
And I'm about to wander into territory I have no
business wandering into, but I'm going to do it anyway,
which is, how do we know that our brains are
doing this sort of prediction. So, just for listeners to
be clear, what neuroscientists are saying now is that our
brain is predicting what's going to happen. And so if
(31:06):
I'm looking out the window, there's actual sense data coming
back to me, but my brain is also predicting and
correct me anything I'm going to get something wrong here,
But my brain is also predicting what it expects it's
going to see out there, and if those two things
match up, then that sense data doesn't even necessarily ever
reach different levels of the brain, right, it just gets
(31:29):
discarded because it's like, well, prediction matched. Now, if there's
a difference in the sense data and what my brain predicts,
there's a couple different things my brain can do, and
we can talk about that. But from reading your book
and other books, it sounds like this is what the
brain is doing all the time, and very predominantly, And
I don't understand how we know that. And again I'm
wandering into a whole realm of not knowing how we know.
(31:51):
But I know. Is that a question you can answer succinctly.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
That's assuming I can answer any questions succinctly, and that's
a that's a big assumption. Well, when you say how
do we know, I guess I can say how scientists know.
Scientists know because there's just an overwhelming amount of evidence
that this is the case. So we know because of
(32:15):
how brains are structured, that parts of your brain that
are supposed to be sensory parts that are supposed to
be taking in information from the world, like primary sensory
region in your cerebral cortex called primary visual cortex, which
is supposed to be the part of your cerebral cortex
that receives visual sense data from your eye. You know,
(32:35):
ninety five percent of the neurons that connect to primary
visual cortex come from other parts of your brain and
not from the part that is bringing the sense data
from your eye. So that's one way we know. Another
way we know is that we can study animals, non
human animals, and we can look and see watch the
(32:59):
flow of information from neuron to neuron. And actually we
can now do this even in some humans who are hospitalized,
and we can measure the changes in neurons when they're
in the hospital. We can do experiments to see at
this point, probably over one thousand papers that have been
peer reviewed, you know, measuring neurons either directly or measuring
(33:22):
brain imaging. You know, for humans, when we brain image humans,
we don't directly measure neural activity. We're measuring blood flow
changes which are related to neural activity. But there are
many many studies that directly show the prediction signals in action.
There are you know, anatomical studies which provide the same evidence.
(33:43):
Actually what ended up convincing me that this was a
really viable hypothesis is that at the same time, I
was reading work on electrical signal processing, because neurons are
electrical units, they function with electricity. Actually that's partly how
they communicate with each other. And I was reading that literature,
and I was reading an anatomical like anatomy brain anatomy,
(34:06):
and I was reading some work on experiments with non
human animals, and all of them were pointing to exactly
the same hypothesis. But these literatures don't speak to each other.
They were just all converging on the same idea. But
I would say, what usually convinces people is not data,
(34:26):
it's their own experience. And so I'll just say, for example,
have you ever had the experience that you are really
thirsty and you drink a big, tall glass of water
and then your thirst is quenched immediately.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
But it's like a mundane thing that we do every day,
except it's really really fascinating because it actually takes twenty
minutes for any water that you ingest to make it
into your bloodstream to get back to your brain to
tell your brain that there's enough water in your system.
Now so how is it that your thirst is quenched
(35:05):
immediately even though it takes twenty minutes for that information
to make its way to the brain.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
And the answer is, I assumed it was prediction.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Yeah, it's prediction. What's your favorite food?
Speaker 3 (35:17):
Eric, pizza?
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Pizza? You know, I'm having pizza for dinner. Actually, what
is your favorite pizza?
Speaker 3 (35:22):
I'm kind of a plane cheese kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
We're having margarita. Okay, yeah, margarita pizza with fresh mazzarella,
thin crust.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
And so when you think about your simulate your favorite pizza,
do you start to salivate? No? Yep, yeah right. And
in fact, sometimes when you sit down for dinner or
for lunch, you might even start salivating a little bit beforehand.
But why is that happening. That's prediction. Your brain is
actually preparing you to ingest food because it's metabolically efficient
(35:57):
to predict and correct, it's not at all metabolically efficient
to react to things. For example, if you're a coffee
drinker and you have coffee every day at the same time,
and then one day you just don't have coffee at
that time, you get a headache. A lot of people
have this experience. Why do you have a headache. Why
do you get a headache? The answer is because your
(36:19):
brain basically has learned that every day, at a certain
time you are going to drink coffee, and caffeine will
cause vascular constriction in the blood vessels of your head,
and your brain really needs constant blood flow. That doesn't change.
So what it does is it dilates its blood vessels
(36:42):
right around the time when you're supposed to be drinking coffee,
because the coffee's going to come and it's going to
constrict those blood vessels. So the net result will be
no change. But if one day you don't drink coffee,
your blood vessels dilate and you have a headache. Prediction
is why people become addicted to drugs. Because your brain
(37:05):
starts to predict that those chemicals will be there, it
adjusts the chemicals it makes to keep that level constant.
I could keep going baseball. You know, there is no
sport that would exist that involves any precision with bats
and balls and stuff like that, sticks and pucks if
(37:28):
people did not have a predicting brain, those games just
wouldn't exist at all because they're all predicated on prediction.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
Let's change our direction a little bit here. Boy, there's
so many great things that we're just not going to
get to. I feel like we've covered like two out
of seven and a half lessons. But what I'd like
to get to is kind of ground us here at
the end in some practicality of what some of your
research bears out. And again I highly recommend this book
(38:29):
the previous book. There is a lot of really fascinating
science about how our brains actually work to create our experience.
But I'd like to end a little bit with what
are some things that we can do. Knowing the predictive
nature of the brain, knowing the way that emotions are constructed,
which is a real big part of your earlier book.
Knowing these things, what does that tell us about some
(38:51):
things that we can actually do to make the quality
of our day to day lives a little bit better,
to make us feel better.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Well, there are a couple of things I think that
are pretty basic. One is that we haven't really said
where these predictions come from. So when your brain is
making a prediction, so if we stop time, we just
full time constant what's happening. Your brain has taken stock
of what's happening in your body, what's happening in the world,
And it's going to predict what's going to happen next,
and how's it making that prediction? Because it's using your
(39:21):
past experience, it's basically asking itself figuratively speaking, the last
time I was in a situation like this where I
was experiencing these things and I just did these things
like what happened next? What caused it? What did I
do about it? That's really what it's asking itself. So
it's using your past experience. So what this means, as
I said before, is that in a sense, you're always
(39:42):
cultivating your past that your brain is going to use
later to make predictions. So one thing that you can
do is you can cultivate new experiences for yourself. You
can curate new opportunities. These are kind of expensive, like
they take effort because you know, anything which is unexpected
(40:05):
is going to be more expensive. So that's why learning
anything new is exhilarating. There can be arousal there. Sometimes
you construct it into anxiety, but you could just as
easily construct it into exhilaration or determination. You know, get
your butterflies flying. Information, so you can think of it
a little bit like exercise. You're making an investment in
a healthier brain, only this time instead of physical exercise.
(40:29):
Maybe what you're doing is you're exposing yourself to a
movie that you have ever seen before that might be
really different. Or you might meet someone new who's really
different from you and has different really views on life.
Or you might, you know, one day when we could
travel again, go to a place that's really different from yours,
where the norms and customs are really really different. Like
(40:52):
really challenge yourself. You can learn a new language, you
can learn a new skill. There are all kinds of
things that you can do that will cost in the moment,
but you can think of that cost like an investment
that you're making in a healthier brain. And the really
cool thing is that most skills like this are like driving.
(41:13):
If you practice making the experience over and over and
over again, you get kind of automatic at it. Right, So,
just like driving, at first, it's really hard, but then
eventually you get really good at it. So one example
I'll give you is when I was preparing to write
How Emotions Are Made. I have a colleague who studies
positive emotions. You know, I was kind of skeptical, like,
oh yeah, sure, you know, AWE, AWE supposedly like really
(41:35):
good for you. Right yeah, okay, okay, okay, you know,
verily skeptical. I'm just by nature, really skeptical. It was like,
all right, well, okay, I'm going to try it, so
let's see what happens. So I'm going to every day
for five minutes, I'm going to experience aw I'm going
to find something. I'm going to feel like a spec
I'm gonna you know, cultivate a sense of wonder and admiration.
It's something larger than myself. And so I practiced every day.
(41:58):
So it might be a little a crack in the
sidewalk and like an ugly little weed became a wondrous
example of the power of nature and you know, humanity's
inability to constrain it and control it right, Or it
might be you know, so just things like this. It
might have been the color of a particular flower or
(42:19):
taking like a dandelion. You could see it as a
weed that's going to just like destroy your lawn. But
also it's actually quite beautiful actually if you look at
the structure. So I practice this day and day and
day in and day out for five minutes, and sure enough,
whenever things are super stressful, I can take a break
(42:39):
just without moving, I can take a break. I can
just shift my attention and cultivate awe in the moment,
and for a moment, I'm a spec and that means
my problems are a speck just for a moment. It
just gives my nervous system a break, and it allows
me to take some dipty breaths, which is a way
(43:01):
of resetting your autonomic nervous system and kind of changing
the trajectory of the moment, which is sometimes all you need.
So I'm not trying to say that you can just
snap your fingers and form a couple of little mind
tricks and then you'll feel better. But I do think
that this is one useful thing that you can do.
Another useful thing that you can do, which is going
(43:22):
to sound really like I'm being a mother, and I
am a mother, and my daughter hates it when I
say this, but it is I'm actually speaking to us
an euroscientist. Get enough sleep, get enough sleep, eat healthfully,
get enough exercise, and don't be around people who are
a drain on your body budget unless you can replenish.
(43:43):
Sometimes people say like, what's the one thing I can
do to improve my life? And I'm like, get enough sleep. Seriously,
it's not just that it makes you feel better. Your
brain doesn't run properly and your body doesn't run properly
if you don't get enough sleep. But you know, if
you're caring for someone who's sick, or you're caring for
a little kid, that's a major drain on your body budget.
(44:04):
So be aware of that, make plans accordingly. The thing
I like to reinforce is that you know, not everybody
can control everything, but everyone can control at least one thing.
Everybody has more control over their environment than they think.
Most of us just don't have as much control as
we would like. But that's not the same thing, right,
(44:28):
And I would say it's not a zero sum game.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
And not a zero sum game as we were talking
about before.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Yeah, there's this idea in evolutionary biology. I'll use the
fancy term. It's called niche construction. What is niche construction?
Niche construction is the idea your niche is the part
of your surroundings that matter to you, and so animals
actively construct their niche. So when I say you're the
(44:54):
architect of your experience. Part of what I'm saying is
engage in niche construction. What does that mean for a human, Well,
it probably means some boring things like don't keep potato
chips in your house, and don't drink too much caffeine
and maybe make sure you walk and stretch enough, and
don't keep painkillers in the house, or you know whatever.
(45:15):
But it also means things like, don't be around people
who are constantly making withdrawals, unless, of course you're responsible
for them and you've deliberately chosen that rule. Don't be
around people who are a drain on your body budget.
Engage in random acts of kindness. You know, I would say,
make sure you get a hug every day, but that's
tricky because of COVID, and it's also tricky now because
(45:38):
we have to be respectful of each other's bodies and boundaries.
But the truth is that physical touch is actually really
important to humans. We have opioid receptors in our skins.
It's important to be touched. But you know, if you
can't afford to get a massage and it's safe for
you to do that, do it. If you can't buy
a soft sweater or a soft blanket, use the stuffed animal.
(46:02):
I mean, there are lots of ways that you can
get that stimulation. And I don't mean to trivialize it,
but it is really important, you know, being outside, for example,
in the sun. You know, make sure you wear sunscreen,
but being in the sun is really restorative. Each of
these things, again, like none of them is going to
have a huge effect, but they're all gonna sort of
(46:22):
nudge you in the right direction, you know.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
Yeah, that's one of my favorite phrases is little by little,
a little becomes a lot. You know, these things they
all add up. One of the other things that you
have talked a fair amount about, which I think is
a really important one also, and maybe this is where
we'll wrap up, is really increasing your uh. I think
the term you use is emotional granularity. Talk a little
(46:48):
bit about what does that mean to increase our emotional
granularity and what are some practical ways to do it.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
If you think about what your brain is doing all
the time, your brain is basically making sense of the
sense data that come from the world and from your body.
So when you hear a loud bang, what is that
loud bang, What caused it? And what do you need
to do about it? Is it a car door slamming?
(47:14):
Is it a car backfiring? Is did somebody drop a box?
Is it a gunshot? You know what your brain understands
the cause to be will determine what actions your brain takes. Right. Similarly,
if you have a tug in your chest, you know,
your brain will ask what is it? What caused it?
You know? Is it anxiety? Is it heartburn from eating
(47:37):
too much food? Is it the beginnings of a heart attack?
This example actually is not trivial, because when people go
to the hospital with tightness in their chest, whether they
and the emergency room physician make sense of that tug
as anxiety or as the beginnings of a heart attack
(47:57):
can determine whether or not that person to the next day.
There are accountable number of mistakes that are made in
that regard. I know at least three people who lost
their mothers because the mothers went to the hospital and
were told they'd had anxiety and they should go home,
(48:19):
and they did go home and then promptly died of
a heart attack. And in fact, this happened to a
friend of mine who's man, and they didn't send him
home at a time when they would have normally sent
a woman home, and he had a heart attack right
in the emergency room. And in fact, he had what's
called a widow maker heart attack, meaning that if the
(48:39):
cardiologists hadn't been right there standing in front of him,
he would have been dead. And you know why he
went to the hospital. He had been feeling had a
tight chest all week. He went to the doctor. The
doctor did a bunch of tests, said, there's nothing wrong
with you. It's just anxiety. It's just anxiety. And then
he went home and he laid down and as he
was lying there, he remembered that he and I had
had a converse because I was on his podcast and
(49:02):
he read how motions were made and we were talking
about this, and I was telling him this story, and
he thought, I'm just going to go to the hospital.
And he went to the hospital and they did tests
on him and they said, no, you're fine, you know,
you can go home. And he said, but I'm not fine.
I'm feeling worse. And I'm feeling worse. It's getting more
painful and more painful, and the tightness is getting more
and more and more. And they were like, okay, just
(49:23):
wait here, we'll get the cardiologist, and then he did,
and then basically he had a heart attack right there.
Your brain is always making sense of the sensations, and
the way that your brain makes sense of sensations is predictively,
as we discussed. So it's not like the information comes
in and your brain goes, ooh, what's that. It's that
(49:44):
your brain is making a guess about what the sensations
will be in a moment from now, and part of
that guess is not just what will they be, but
also what caused it. Now, if you can make many guesses,
if there are many possible guess is that your brain
can make, and it can try to fit a guess
(50:04):
to the situation, then your brain is going to have
a better chance of making the right guess. But if
your brain can only make one or two guesses, it
doesn't have a lot of options, it's just one or two,
then the likelihood that your brain will make the wrong
guess is higher. Granularity just means that your brain can
(50:26):
make many guesses right, so that a tug in your
chest or a bang that you hear could be many, many,
many different things, each one with its own situational context.
And if your brain learns to make sense of sense
data in many different ways, each one in a specific situation,
then you have lots of options to know how to respond.
(50:48):
So I guess another way to say it would be,
let's say your body budget is running a deficit and
you feel crappy. Well, what caused the crappy feeling and
what should you do about it? I mean, you don't
know because many things work to add together to make
that crappy feeling, and it's hard to know what to
do about it. But if your brain can make meaning
(51:10):
of the sense data as more than just a crappy feeling,
but specifically, you know, is it irritation or is it fatigue?
Or is it I'm dehydrated, or is it I'm anxious.
It could be emotional, it might be something purely physical.
It might be, you know, feeling crappy because I'm really
determined to learn this thing, and I'm really tenacious and
(51:32):
I'm not going to let it go until I've learned it.
The more options you give your brain basically, or the
more options your brain gives itself, the more you learn,
and the more options you learn, the more flexibility you
have and flexibility is the key to resilience.
Speaker 3 (51:47):
Yeah, I think that's well said. And the example that
I use in my own life of that is that
I think for a lot of years I got in
the habit of labeling a host of things as depression.
There's not a lot of granularity in that. It's just
like something crappy is happening inside and I go, I'm depressed.
Not only does that not allow my brain to make
(52:09):
a better decision about what's actually happening and make a
better decision, it reinforces a conception of what's happening with me,
which is this thing. And I've really been paying a
lot of attention over the last six months to what
I would call depression and how often it's tiredness.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
Oh, absolutely, absolute, hundred percent. I'll just tell you this
one story and then we'll wrap up. A couple of
years ago, I went to the doctor, new doctor, right,
So my doctor retired, So now I have a new doctor,
and I go the doctor and I say the doctor,
I'm really really really tired. I'm so fatigued. And he says,
maybe you're depressed, and I say, no, I'm not depressed.
(52:50):
I'm just really, really really tired. And he says, well,
do you have any stress in your life? And I'm like, yeah,
of course, you know, yes, I run a lab. It's
a large lab, and you know, of course i have
stress in my life. But I've always had stress in
my life. And I'm really, really, really tired. And he said, well,
maybe you're depressed and you just don't know it. And
(53:11):
I was like, maybe you don't know the DSM criteria.
You know their criteria for depressions. So let's think about
what those criteria are. Do I have any of those criteria?
You know? No, I'm not depressed. I'm tired. Okay. As
I'm leaving, thinking I'm never coming back to this doctor again,
the nurse says to me, honey, are you perimenopausal? Because,
(53:32):
unbeknownst to me, hormones like estrogen and testosterone are metabolic regulators, dopamine, serotonin,
I mean, they're all metabolic regulators. They all have something
to do with metabolism. So if you start losing your hormones,
you know, men lose testausone slowly over their adult life.
(53:54):
Women lose their estrogen, you know, over a couple of years.
You know, she says to me, maybe you're tired because
you're going through menopause. Here's a book. Read this book,
you know. She gives me the title of a self
help book. So I read the self help book and
then I go get you know, twenty five articles and
start reading them. And sure enough, what is one of
(54:14):
the major signs of menopause. It's fatigue because you're losing
your estrogen. Now, the point that I want to make
is that physition, unbeknownst to him, was attempting to construct
my experience for me as depression. And what if I
had accepted that and really felt it. Well, the first
thing that would have happened is I would have started
(54:35):
taking antidepressants, which actually could have had the effect of
driving my body budget into a deficit position, even though
you know it was in that position because I was
losing estrogen. Second of all, I'd start wondering what it
is in my life I have to make changes about
because clearly something is wrong, like in a big way
(54:58):
because I'm depressed. I mean, it would have really been
a trajectory shift for me, and not necessarily a good one,
I would say. So I think, you know, I have
been depressed once in my life and It's not an
experience that I'm eager to repeat. Let's just say it's
agonizing to be depressed. But there is a way in
(55:20):
which you can also understand depression as a bankrupt body budget,
you know. So I'm not saying that you can cure
depression by just like sleeping more and like, you know,
getting little exos, but I do want to point out
that depression is a metabolic illness. It is many things
that there's I meanological problems, but all of these problems,
including the really negative mood, results from basic metabolic problem.
(55:45):
You are bankrupt. Basically, what do you do when you're
bankrupt in your bank account? You stop spending. What does
a brain do when it's body budget is bankrupt? It
stops moving your body, and it stops you learning. So
you are trapped in your head. Basically, context insensitive, You're
just trapped in your head. Those are two major symptoms
(56:08):
of depression. So it helps to know a little bit
I think about not just how to make sense of
not just how to make fifty shades of crap, you know,
crappy feelings of all different you know, but it helps
to also understand something about the biological basis of the
moods that you experience, because that actually adds to your
(56:31):
granularity because it allows you to have different action plans
that you can take again flexibility and resilience.
Speaker 3 (56:39):
I could riff on that for another hour because there
were so many good points in that.
Speaker 1 (56:43):
But my pizza is getting cold.
Speaker 3 (56:45):
So your pizza is getting cold, and we are way long,
so and I don't want pizza to get cold. That
is a tragedy. So thanks so much Lisa for coming
back on. I have really enjoyed talking with you again.
It's always such a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (56:56):
Thank you so much for having me back, and hopefully
we'll have a chance to again.
Speaker 2 (57:16):
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Speaker 3 (57:32):
Now.
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(57:54):
the show.
We can really contribute to the well being of other
people in very profound ways, sometimes with very simple actions.
But we can also really create a significant physiological burden
for another person, really without trying very hard.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true, and yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
(00:44):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. We
(01:18):
hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. Thanks for
joining us. Our guest on this episode is doctor Lisa
Feldman Barrett, who is among the top one percent most
cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in
psychology and neuroscience. She's a university Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University,
(01:39):
with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Doctor Barrett was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Neuroscience in
twenty nineteen. She's the author of many books, including the
one discussed on this episode, Seven and a Half Lessons
about the Brain.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Hi, Lisa, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Thanks so much for having on your podcast.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, it's such a pleasure to have you back on.
I did not look at the date from when we
had you on, but it's been two or three years,
probably at least, so very happy to have you back on.
We're going to be discussing your latest book, which is
called Seven and a half Lessons about the Brain. But
before we do that, let's start like we always do
with the parable. There is a grandmother talking with her
(02:22):
grandson and she says, in life, there are two wolves
inside of us that are always at battle. One is
a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second.
He looks up at his grandmother. He says, well, grandmother,
which one wins, and the grandmother says, the one you feed.
(02:46):
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
It means that you should always surround yourself by people
who allow you to be your best self.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
That's fair, very straightforward, and yet so powerful.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
You know. One of the things we'll talk about, I'm sure,
is the fact that we have a predicting brain and
that really as we cultivate experiences for ourselves in our lives,
what we're doing is we're constantly cultivating the past in
order to have more control over who will be in
(03:23):
the future. And so the parable has a very real
life scientific meaning in that if you create experiences for yourself,
or put yourself in situations, or create environments for yourself
that allow you to be your best self, then that's
what your brain will wire itself to and that's who
(03:45):
you'll be in the future.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Yeah, you have a line in the book that really
struck me from less than five about talking how our
brain really works secretly with other brains, right, how they correspond.
You say, the best thing for your nervous system is
another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is
another human. And I was really struck by that and
how powerful or how destructive our relations with other people
(04:10):
can be.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Well, we are social animals, and what that means is
that we regulate each other's nervous systems. And we don't
usually think about our interactions that way. We don't think
about every hug we give or every insult we bear
that way, but that is actually what's happening. And we
(04:32):
regulate each other really automatically, typically not you know, deliberately
or on purpose, but we do it in all kinds
of ways, you know, with sights and sounds and smells
and so on. Our brains are reacting to each other,
or actually not so much reacting, but sort of taking
account of each other in these various channels. But humans
(04:54):
also regulate each other with words. And that's because the
parts of our brain that are important for understanding language
and speaking are the same parts that regulate the systems
of our body, our heart and our lungs and our
immune system and our metabolism and so on, And so
we can really contribute to the well being of other
(05:16):
people in very profound ways, sometimes with very simple actions.
But we can also really create a significant biological physiological
burden for another person, really without trying very hard. And
so it's important to understand that you are, in some way,
you know, the caretaker of the nervous systems of the
(05:38):
people around you. Even if you don't think of yourself
that way, or you don't really like that idea, it
doesn't really matter. That's just really how it is.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Yeah, I really like that phrase, the caretaker of other
people's nervous systems, you know. And it's obvious we want
to be clear about where sort of, you know, our
responsibility ends and others begins. But it is so clear
how strongly we affect each other, you.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Know, Eric, I think it's really important to say that
nothing in the universe works in simple, single causes. The
fact that you are more responsible for other people than
you might like does not in any way mean that
they are not responsible for themselves. It's not a zero
sum game. I think that's really important to say. And
(06:23):
you know, we live in a culture that privileges individual
rights and freedoms, and that's great. I like living in
that culture too, but it does present a particular quandary
for us, because we are social animals and we can
make each other healthier or sicker, and we might not
(06:46):
like that, we might not believe it. It doesn't really
matter what you believe, and it doesn't really matter whether
you like it or not. It just actually is the case.
So who do you want to be? What kind of
a person do you want to be? If you think
of yourself as somebody who has more responsibility for other people,
for the fellows around you, it doesn't mean that you're
letting them off the hook or that you're not expecting
them to have personal responsibility for themselves.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Yeah. I think that's really important and true. It's not
a zero sum game. We are both responsible for others
and responsible for ourselves. It makes me think of another
line in the book that you say, you're talking about
responsibility and you say sometimes we're responsible for things not
because there are fault, but because we're the only ones
who can change them. And you're talking about the impact.
(07:31):
I believe at that point in the book that our
early patterning has on us, the way that we are raised,
what it does to us, and how prominent that is.
But I love that idea because oftentimes when we say
you're responsible for what happened, people think that the word
that gets translated in mind is fault. It's my fault.
(07:51):
And I love the way you say that we're not
responsible for things, not because there are fault, but because
we're the only ones who can change them. And that
is really true. We're the only ones who can, and
very often we're the only ones who will.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
There's a distinction that you can make between responsibility and culpability.
You can be not culpable for something, meaning it's not
your fault, but that doesn't really necessarily absolve you over
the responsibility to change it. And sometimes we are responsible
for things because we're really the only ones who can
change it, even if we're not culpable for being in
(08:28):
the situation that we're in. I first said this during
a TED talk, and I wasn't really sure how it
would go over, and millions of people literally have responded
extremely well to this idea. I think it gives people
hope and energy to maybe take a little more charge
(08:52):
of their life circumstances, even if life has not dealt
them an easy hand. People experience it as the way
that I meant it, which was to be supportive, but
also to sort of nudge people in the direction of
trying to take more control in their own lives.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Yeah, I mean, so much of my background is in
the recovery community, addiction recovery, and it's absolutely true that
one of the biggest predictors of addiction is having suffered
trauma for which you are not at fault for. And
yet it's also absolutely true that one of the pillars
of recovery is suddenly going, I am responsible for changing
(09:35):
my relationship to my substances, you know, And so both
those things are true at the same time.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Yeah, I mean, I think that trauma, you know, in adversity,
particularly if it visits you as a child, you're victimized twice. Really,
you're victimized the first time because of what happens to you,
which is not your doing, and then you're victimized in
a sense a second time because who's going to clean
up the map? Yes, it's only you, my friend, And
(10:03):
that feels unfair, and it is unfair, but it's just
how it is. And once you realize that, there's a
certain power, actually, there's a certain empowerment in realizing that.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
I think, Yeah, that's certainly been my experience. Let's circle
back to some of the basics here of your work
and some of these seven and a half lessons, And
I want to start with really kind of where you start,
which is what is the brain for? The typical idea
we would have is the brain is for me to
think and for me to learn things and for me
(10:38):
to figure things out. And you're starting in a very
different place than that. Why do I have a brain?
Some people might argue that I don't, but let's assume
I do. Let's go with the assumption I do.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, the why question is really hard to answer, But
I think the better question, or maybe the better question
for a scientist is really what is your brain's most
important job? And you know, for that we can look
back to an evolutionary time, to a time when the
(11:11):
creature's really in the ocean didn't have brains. But like you,
I was really interested. I actually what partly got me
started was the question of why do we even have
a brain? Brains are really expensive organs. So your brain
costs you something like twenty percent of your metabolic budget
every day. That's the most expensive organ you have. And
(11:34):
so what is a brain good for? Exactly? And why
do we have it? And you know where did it
come from? So those are the kinds of questions that
it were really intriguing me. And the answer is both,
I think, really surprising and then also mundane at the
same time, which is that your brain's most important job
(11:55):
is not thinking, it's not feeling, it's not even seeing
or hearing. Your brain's most important job is running the
systems of your body. So right now, as we're talking
to each other and as our listeners are listening to us,
(12:15):
inside each of us is a whole drama unfolding inside
our bodies, and you can't really, I mean, I hope
you can't access it. If you do, you have my sympathies.
But the way that I talk about it, the metaphor
that I use, is that your brain is running a
budget for your body. It's not budgeting money, it's budgeting
(12:37):
glucose and salt and water and oxygen and other chemicals
and nutrients that your body needs to stay alive and
keep well. And you can think about your actions as withdrawals.
So when you learn something new, or when you exercise,
when you move your body in any way, those are
(12:57):
withdrawals from your body budget. And then you can make
deposits into your body budget. You can you know, sleep
and you can eat healthfily, and you can exercise, which
is a withdrawal. It's like an investment in a future
healthy brain and body, so you know, you can think
of that as sort of an investment that you expect
to get a return on. And being around other people
(13:20):
can add a little tax to your body budget, or
it can give you little savings in your body budget.
It can make things a little cheaper to run, and
you can think about addiction really or think about something
simpler like having a cup of coffee. You can think
about caffeine as borrowing energy from tomorrow to use today.
(13:41):
And if you start to run a deficit in your
body budget, you don't experience that directly as sensations in
your body. You experience it as unpleasant feeling. So when
you feel it crap, it's usually because you have expended
(14:01):
energy that you haven't replaced yet. You've made a withdrawal
that you haven't replenished yet. These simple feelings, which are
not emotions, feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling comfortable or uncomfortable,
feeling worked up, or feeling calm, These are simple feelings
that tell you something about the state of your body budget,
and you can use them. They don't tell you what's wrong,
(14:24):
but they do tell you something about you know, whether
your body budget's running a deficit or whether you're flush
and your body budget is solvent. And in this way,
your brain is always budgeting for your body, and your
body is always sending sense data back to your brain,
and your brain is always experiencing this as these simple feelings,
(14:47):
which you can call mood or scientists call affect. And
this goes on really for your whole life. So you
don't experience you are a brain regulating your body. Usually
you don't experience your life as if that's your brain's
(15:07):
most important job. But that actually is your brain's most
important job. And so what you think and what you
do and what you see even really is in the
service of managing that body budget.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Yeah, there's so many things in what you just said
that I could choose to go with. One that I'm
going to go with is one of my favorite lines
from your previous book, which has stuck with me. I
do one of these a week, so it's hard for
things to stick with me a lot of times. But
You basically are saying, if your body budget gets out
of whack, then you're going to feel crappy no matter
what self help tips you follow. It's just a matter
(15:44):
of which flavor of crap. And I love that, you know.
I think it's so true that at a foundational level,
there are these foundational things that we have to do
to take care of ourselves or we're going to feel bad.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, and it really does sneak up on you. Eric.
That's the funny thing too. What I would say is
that think about when you exercise. I know when I exercise,
I exercise every day, and you know, when I'm usually
about twenty minutes in, as I'm hitting my ventilatory load
and building up carbon dioxide, it's harder to keep pushing,
you know, forward with the exercise. I start to feel
(16:19):
really uncomfortable and I want to stop. And actually, this
is the point at which a lot of people stop.
But you shouldn't stop. You should keep going. But why
is it that this happens. It happens because I need
more oxygen. I'm not expelling enough carbon dioxide fast enough,
and I'm burning through glucose and water and other nutrients.
(16:42):
So I'm starting to feel like crap, basically to echo myself.
But it doesn't necessarily mean something's wrong in the larger sense. Right,
Sometimes we feel like crap because we're just working really
hard at something, and then we can replenish. So when
I'm done exercising, I might have a protein shake, or
I might drink some water, or you know, I might
(17:04):
make sure that I have to get enough sleep that night,
what have you. When you're working really hard at something,
when you're learning something really hard, when you have to
really really make some kind of metabolic investment, it can
feel really uncomfortable. But sometimes feeling bad isn't necessarily a
sign that anything's wrong. It might be a sign that
you're just burning through resources really quickly and you need
(17:26):
to replenish. But I guess I should back up and say,
what is stress? Stress is just your brain preparing you
for a major metabolic outlay. You know, Cortisol is not
a stress hormone. It's a hormone that gets glucose into
your bloodstream quickly because your brain believes that you have
(17:46):
a big metabolic outlay to make, whether it's getting out
of bed in the morning or giving a talk to
the members of your team, or taking a test, or
even just talking to somebody on a pond. Right, maybe
it's even listening to a podcast and listening to ideas
that are really new and frankly counterintuitive to you. All
(18:08):
of these things cost glucose and can make you feel unpleasant,
but it doesn't necessarily mean that something's wrong. What it
means is that you just need to replenish the energy.
On the other hand, when you feel stressed, when you're
in a stressful situation, so your brain is preparing you
for battle, right and you don't need it, or you
(18:30):
don't get enough sleep, you don't eat healthily, or you
don't exercise on a regular basis, or you're on social
media too much. Because one thing that's really expensive for
a human brain is ambiguity and uncertainty. For example, COVID
for the last year, Full of Uncertainty has been a
real body budget drain for a lot of people. You
(18:52):
see reports of people anxious and they're depressed and they're
really struggling. Why is that. It's because we didn't even
enter COVID with balanced body budgets to begin with. We
live in a world of casual brutality. We do all
kinds of things to tax our body budgets all the time.
And then it was with this level of depletion that
(19:14):
we entered into COVID, you know, which has been a
year of uncertainty and real angst for a lot of people.
And so the point that I want to make here
is that each time you spend too much, or you
spend but you don't replenish, you pay a little metabolic tax.
It's really really small, but each time you pay a
(19:36):
little tax. And these taxes add up over time, and
sometimes it can take years for them to add up.
But you know, it's kind of like water dripping on
a pipe. You know, the first drip isn't going to
do anything, the second drip isn't going to do anything,
but eventually, if it keeps going on, that water is
going to bore a hole through that steel pipe. And
(19:58):
your metabolism kind of works in the same way. And
this is why adversity in childhood is a major predictor
of physical illness in adulthood and middle age. You know,
there were a number of studies done called viral challenge studies,
(20:18):
which were done ten fifteen years ago where they took
people volunteers, and they put them individually in hotel rooms,
and they controlled what they ate and how they slept
and so on, and then they put a virus exactly
the same amount of viral load in every person's nose.
And actually one of these studies actually used a coronavirus
(20:40):
and only twenty to forty percent of people developed symptoms.
That means sixty to eighty percent of people who were
exposed to the virus didn't get sick. That means that
a virus is not the sole cause of illness, because
many people were exposed to the virus and didn't get sick.
(21:01):
The other cause that's necessary but not sufficient, that you
need in order to get sick is a compromised immune system.
So your brain has to be in a particular state
in order for you to get sick. And you know
what was the biggest predictor of who got.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
Sick, adverse childhood experiences exactly yep.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Now, why is that? It's because the seeds of metabolic
inefficiency are planted really really early in life, and so
your brain as a child wires itself to its world,
and part of your brain's world is your body and
the world that other people create for you. So if
(21:45):
you have a brain that wires itself to adversity, to
deal with adversity, you're paying an extra tax, and you
just keep paying that tax and paying that tax, and
that makes you more vulnerable to stressors later in life.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
I've often wondered about why exercise remains a challenging thing
to do sometimes. And what I mean by that is,
I think every single time I've exercised, and that's been
thousands of times, at this point, when I'm done, I go,
I'm really glad I did that. That was really wonderful.
(22:53):
And yet you would think with that sort of consistent
positive reinforcement, I would hop up and be ready to
run to exercise. Is it just the fact that it's
such a withdrawal that it sort of violates the principle
of conserving energy, that there's just a natural resistance in there?
Do you think that could be part of it? I
just it's a phenomenon I don't fully understand, because again,
(23:18):
I would think that the positive reinforcement being so strong
would make it always something I want to do. And
it's not that it's hard to do necessarily sometimes, but
it's certainly harder than turning on the TV.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Well, first of all, I don't think that conserving energy
is really what nervous systems are about. I think nervous
systems are really trying to optimize energy input and output.
So many people love novelty. Some people love novelty more
than others. But most people don't like to eat the
same food every day, and they don't like to wear
the same clothes every day, and they don't necessarily like
(23:52):
to do the same things every day. So things that
are predictable are much cheaper metabolically speaking than things that
are novel or unpredictable. That being said, you know, we
still like novelty. So why is that? And the answer is,
you know, we don't just go sit in a dark
room and baste away. And the answer is because for
living creatures, I don't really think we're trying to not spend.
I think we're trying to spend efficiently. And I think
(24:14):
the question that you're asking is a really good question.
And it's a question that plagues me, honestly, because every
morning I drag my yass out of bed and I
procrastinate to go exercise, even though I know I'm going
to feel better at the end. But to get to
that end, I get I have to go through some
significant discomfort. And sometimes even when I'm in it, I'm
(24:38):
happy to make the discomfort worse by peddling harder or
lifting more or whatever. But it's just getting myself to
that point. It's you know, and I've been doing this
for more than twenty years at this point, and still,
you know, every morning is a struggle. But I guess
I would say obviously we have learned something because despite
(24:58):
the fact that we know it's going to be pleasant,
we still do it. We've talked about the last time
you know that I was on your podcast, and I'm
sure we'll talk again that you know, brains predict they
don't react to things, and so your brain is always
predicting what it expects to happen next. And next can
be in the next moment, or it can be in
the next ten minutes, or it can be in an
(25:19):
hour from now, after you've run a couple of miles
and you're in the shower. What you're asking me is
a really interesting question that I don't have an answer for,
because I don't think we know the answer to how
a brain makes decisions about what the immediate outcome is
versus what the outcome is going to be in an
hour from now or in a year or ten years
(25:40):
from now, Because what you're asking me really is the
same kind of question as how can I get myself
to not spend money now and put it away in
my retirement savings account so that I'll have money later
when I retire in you know, X number of years.
I mean, you know you need to do it, and
you know you'll be happy if you have money at
(26:01):
the end of your life where you can retire and
live well, and you probably don't need the shiny new
thing that you want, or you don't need to go
out to a restaurant, or you don't need to do
whatever it is you want to do in the moment
to spend that money on. But yet it's still a struggle.
You know, some people experience what's called the pain of
paying This is a scientist at Carnegie Mellon came up
(26:24):
with this phrase, which mean the discomfort that you feel
after you've spent money and you know you really shouldn't have,
but yet people still do it. So I don't have
an answer for you. All I'm trying to say is
it's a pervasive phenomenon. And it's a really interesting question
that you know, economists have tried to answer in psychologists,
but I don't really think there's a terrific answer to
(26:46):
that question.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Yeah, because I think that certainly, the further off the
reward is from the act itself, the harder it becomes.
I know, for me, exercise became a lot easier to
do when I realized, like, the payoff for me is
in twenty minutes or thirty minutes, because it's in how
I feel versus trying to go. Well, the payoff is
(27:07):
in three months when I look better, or twenty five
years when I don't have heart disease.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, that's fair, But I have to tell you that
the payoff for me sometimes is an hour later when
I'm in the shower, but sometimes it isn't.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
I remember when I gave birth to my daughter, and
you know, people tell you all these things about how
beautiful and wonderful it's going to be when you nurse
your daughter or your child or whatever. Let me tell
you something, it hurts a lot for many, many, many months,
(27:41):
and yet women do it, And so why do they
do it? You're not even doing it for yourself. You're
doing it for this other little creature which is like
completely dependent on you. I mean eventually it stops hurting,
you know, after four months or something. But it's actually
really uncomfortable at first. And I mean uncomfortable. I don't
mean psychologically uncomfortable, I mean physically uncomfortable. But yet you
(28:05):
do it, and you do it willingly, and you do
it happily. So it's really hard to answer the question
of how this works. But what I will say is
that when your brain is predicting, part of what it's
doing is it's not some abstract thing. Your brain is
actually changing the firing of its own neurons to anticipate
(28:26):
what the sensory consequences will be in a moment from
now of whatever your brain is preparing you to do. So,
if your brain's gonna stand you up, it's gonna also
raise your blood pressure so that you don't faint, because
that would be metabolically costly. You have mechanisms basically that
(28:46):
will raise your blood pressure as you stand so that
oxygen can get to your head. At the same time,
certain parts of your brain are preparing other parts to
have the sensory feeling of standing up, having your feet
against the floor and you're backstraightened, and so on and
so forth. Now, if you've ever had a song going
(29:07):
through your head that you cannot get out of your head,
you know, it's kind of like that. Or you know,
sometimes I'll ask people to imagine an apple in their head.
You know, can you imagine a red Macintosh apple? You know,
in your mind's eye. Can you imagine grasping that apple
in your hand? Can you imagine taking a bite out
of that apple, sinking your teeth into the apple, and
(29:29):
hearing the crunch of the apple and tasting the apple.
Many people can do this, you know. They have a
ghostly image of an apple, they can hear the crunch,
they can taste the apple, they start to salivate. Sometimes
this is literally your brain changing the firing of its
own neurons to be prepared to taste an apple and
(29:51):
see an apple, and hear an apple and feel an
apple even though there is no apple there. And this
is what your brain is doing all the time. But
but when your brain is trying to predict something in
the longer term future, it's harder to simulate, which is
what this is called. This changing the firing of your
(30:11):
own neurons to prepare for the sensory changes in the
next moment. Your brain just has a harder time doing that.
So I can tell you that if you turn up
the heat a little more, or you turn up the
air conditioning a little more so that you're a little
more comfortable, now, that's going to have a cost in
terms of climate change later which will make you much
(30:33):
more uncomfortable. It's harder to simulate that change later on,
and so it's less potent of an experience to control
your actions.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
So let's go into this brain prediction piece a little bit.
And I'm about to wander into territory I have no
business wandering into, but I'm going to do it anyway,
which is, how do we know that our brains are
doing this sort of prediction. So, just for listeners to
be clear, what neuroscientists are saying now is that our
brain is predicting what's going to happen. And so if
(31:06):
I'm looking out the window, there's actual sense data coming
back to me, but my brain is also predicting and
correct me anything I'm going to get something wrong here,
But my brain is also predicting what it expects it's
going to see out there, and if those two things
match up, then that sense data doesn't even necessarily ever
reach different levels of the brain, right, it just gets
(31:29):
discarded because it's like, well, prediction matched. Now, if there's
a difference in the sense data and what my brain predicts,
there's a couple different things my brain can do, and
we can talk about that. But from reading your book
and other books, it sounds like this is what the
brain is doing all the time, and very predominantly, And
I don't understand how we know that. And again I'm
wandering into a whole realm of not knowing how we know.
(31:51):
But I know. Is that a question you can answer succinctly.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
That's assuming I can answer any questions succinctly, and that's
a that's a big assumption. Well, when you say how
do we know, I guess I can say how scientists know.
Scientists know because there's just an overwhelming amount of evidence
that this is the case. So we know because of
(32:15):
how brains are structured, that parts of your brain that
are supposed to be sensory parts that are supposed to
be taking in information from the world, like primary sensory
region in your cerebral cortex called primary visual cortex, which
is supposed to be the part of your cerebral cortex
that receives visual sense data from your eye. You know,
(32:35):
ninety five percent of the neurons that connect to primary
visual cortex come from other parts of your brain and
not from the part that is bringing the sense data
from your eye. So that's one way we know. Another
way we know is that we can study animals, non
human animals, and we can look and see watch the
(32:59):
flow of information from neuron to neuron. And actually we
can now do this even in some humans who are hospitalized,
and we can measure the changes in neurons when they're
in the hospital. We can do experiments to see at
this point, probably over one thousand papers that have been
peer reviewed, you know, measuring neurons either directly or measuring
(33:22):
brain imaging. You know, for humans, when we brain image humans,
we don't directly measure neural activity. We're measuring blood flow
changes which are related to neural activity. But there are
many many studies that directly show the prediction signals in action.
There are you know, anatomical studies which provide the same evidence.
(33:43):
Actually what ended up convincing me that this was a
really viable hypothesis is that at the same time, I
was reading work on electrical signal processing, because neurons are
electrical units, they function with electricity. Actually that's partly how
they communicate with each other. And I was reading that literature,
and I was reading an anatomical like anatomy brain anatomy,
(34:06):
and I was reading some work on experiments with non
human animals, and all of them were pointing to exactly
the same hypothesis. But these literatures don't speak to each other.
They were just all converging on the same idea. But
I would say, what usually convinces people is not data,
(34:26):
it's their own experience. And so I'll just say, for example,
have you ever had the experience that you are really
thirsty and you drink a big, tall glass of water
and then your thirst is quenched immediately.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
But it's like a mundane thing that we do every day,
except it's really really fascinating because it actually takes twenty
minutes for any water that you ingest to make it
into your bloodstream to get back to your brain to
tell your brain that there's enough water in your system.
Now so how is it that your thirst is quenched
(35:05):
immediately even though it takes twenty minutes for that information
to make its way to the brain.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
And the answer is, I assumed it was prediction.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Yeah, it's prediction. What's your favorite food?
Speaker 3 (35:17):
Eric, pizza?
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Pizza? You know, I'm having pizza for dinner. Actually, what
is your favorite pizza?
Speaker 3 (35:22):
I'm kind of a plane cheese kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
We're having margarita. Okay, yeah, margarita pizza with fresh mazzarella,
thin crust.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
And so when you think about your simulate your favorite pizza,
do you start to salivate? No? Yep, yeah right. And
in fact, sometimes when you sit down for dinner or
for lunch, you might even start salivating a little bit beforehand.
But why is that happening. That's prediction. Your brain is
actually preparing you to ingest food because it's metabolically efficient
(35:57):
to predict and correct, it's not at all metabolically efficient
to react to things. For example, if you're a coffee
drinker and you have coffee every day at the same time,
and then one day you just don't have coffee at
that time, you get a headache. A lot of people
have this experience. Why do you have a headache. Why
do you get a headache? The answer is because your
(36:19):
brain basically has learned that every day, at a certain
time you are going to drink coffee, and caffeine will
cause vascular constriction in the blood vessels of your head,
and your brain really needs constant blood flow. That doesn't change.
So what it does is it dilates its blood vessels
(36:42):
right around the time when you're supposed to be drinking coffee,
because the coffee's going to come and it's going to
constrict those blood vessels. So the net result will be
no change. But if one day you don't drink coffee,
your blood vessels dilate and you have a headache. Prediction
is why people become addicted to drugs. Because your brain
(37:05):
starts to predict that those chemicals will be there, it
adjusts the chemicals it makes to keep that level constant.
I could keep going baseball. You know, there is no
sport that would exist that involves any precision with bats
and balls and stuff like that, sticks and pucks if
(37:28):
people did not have a predicting brain, those games just
wouldn't exist at all because they're all predicated on prediction.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
Let's change our direction a little bit here. Boy, there's
so many great things that we're just not going to
get to. I feel like we've covered like two out
of seven and a half lessons. But what I'd like
to get to is kind of ground us here at
the end in some practicality of what some of your
research bears out. And again I highly recommend this book
(38:29):
the previous book. There is a lot of really fascinating
science about how our brains actually work to create our experience.
But I'd like to end a little bit with what
are some things that we can do. Knowing the predictive
nature of the brain, knowing the way that emotions are constructed,
which is a real big part of your earlier book.
Knowing these things, what does that tell us about some
(38:51):
things that we can actually do to make the quality
of our day to day lives a little bit better,
to make us feel better.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Well, there are a couple of things I think that
are pretty basic. One is that we haven't really said
where these predictions come from. So when your brain is
making a prediction, so if we stop time, we just
full time constant what's happening. Your brain has taken stock
of what's happening in your body, what's happening in the world,
And it's going to predict what's going to happen next,
and how's it making that prediction? Because it's using your
(39:21):
past experience, it's basically asking itself figuratively speaking, the last
time I was in a situation like this where I
was experiencing these things and I just did these things
like what happened next? What caused it? What did I
do about it? That's really what it's asking itself. So
it's using your past experience. So what this means, as
I said before, is that in a sense, you're always
(39:42):
cultivating your past that your brain is going to use
later to make predictions. So one thing that you can
do is you can cultivate new experiences for yourself. You
can curate new opportunities. These are kind of expensive, like
they take effort because you know, anything which is unexpected
(40:05):
is going to be more expensive. So that's why learning
anything new is exhilarating. There can be arousal there. Sometimes
you construct it into anxiety, but you could just as
easily construct it into exhilaration or determination. You know, get
your butterflies flying. Information, so you can think of it
a little bit like exercise. You're making an investment in
a healthier brain, only this time instead of physical exercise.
(40:29):
Maybe what you're doing is you're exposing yourself to a
movie that you have ever seen before that might be
really different. Or you might meet someone new who's really
different from you and has different really views on life.
Or you might, you know, one day when we could
travel again, go to a place that's really different from yours,
where the norms and customs are really really different. Like
(40:52):
really challenge yourself. You can learn a new language, you
can learn a new skill. There are all kinds of
things that you can do that will cost in the moment,
but you can think of that cost like an investment
that you're making in a healthier brain. And the really
cool thing is that most skills like this are like driving.
(41:13):
If you practice making the experience over and over and
over again, you get kind of automatic at it. Right, So,
just like driving, at first, it's really hard, but then
eventually you get really good at it. So one example
I'll give you is when I was preparing to write
How Emotions Are Made. I have a colleague who studies
positive emotions. You know, I was kind of skeptical, like,
oh yeah, sure, you know, AWE, AWE supposedly like really
(41:35):
good for you. Right yeah, okay, okay, okay, you know,
verily skeptical. I'm just by nature, really skeptical. It was like,
all right, well, okay, I'm going to try it, so
let's see what happens. So I'm going to every day
for five minutes, I'm going to experience aw I'm going
to find something. I'm going to feel like a spec
I'm gonna you know, cultivate a sense of wonder and admiration.
It's something larger than myself. And so I practiced every day.
(41:58):
So it might be a little a crack in the
sidewalk and like an ugly little weed became a wondrous
example of the power of nature and you know, humanity's
inability to constrain it and control it right, Or it
might be you know, so just things like this. It
might have been the color of a particular flower or
(42:19):
taking like a dandelion. You could see it as a
weed that's going to just like destroy your lawn. But
also it's actually quite beautiful actually if you look at
the structure. So I practice this day and day and
day in and day out for five minutes, and sure enough,
whenever things are super stressful, I can take a break
(42:39):
just without moving, I can take a break. I can
just shift my attention and cultivate awe in the moment,
and for a moment, I'm a spec and that means
my problems are a speck just for a moment. It
just gives my nervous system a break, and it allows
me to take some dipty breaths, which is a way
(43:01):
of resetting your autonomic nervous system and kind of changing
the trajectory of the moment, which is sometimes all you need.
So I'm not trying to say that you can just
snap your fingers and form a couple of little mind
tricks and then you'll feel better. But I do think
that this is one useful thing that you can do.
Another useful thing that you can do, which is going
(43:22):
to sound really like I'm being a mother, and I
am a mother, and my daughter hates it when I
say this, but it is I'm actually speaking to us
an euroscientist. Get enough sleep, get enough sleep, eat healthfully,
get enough exercise, and don't be around people who are
a drain on your body budget unless you can replenish.
(43:43):
Sometimes people say like, what's the one thing I can
do to improve my life? And I'm like, get enough sleep. Seriously,
it's not just that it makes you feel better. Your
brain doesn't run properly and your body doesn't run properly
if you don't get enough sleep. But you know, if
you're caring for someone who's sick, or you're caring for
a little kid, that's a major drain on your body budget.
(44:04):
So be aware of that, make plans accordingly. The thing
I like to reinforce is that you know, not everybody
can control everything, but everyone can control at least one thing.
Everybody has more control over their environment than they think.
Most of us just don't have as much control as
we would like. But that's not the same thing, right,
(44:28):
And I would say it's not a zero sum game.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
And not a zero sum game as we were talking
about before.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Yeah, there's this idea in evolutionary biology. I'll use the
fancy term. It's called niche construction. What is niche construction?
Niche construction is the idea your niche is the part
of your surroundings that matter to you, and so animals
actively construct their niche. So when I say you're the
(44:54):
architect of your experience. Part of what I'm saying is
engage in niche construction. What does that mean for a human, Well,
it probably means some boring things like don't keep potato
chips in your house, and don't drink too much caffeine
and maybe make sure you walk and stretch enough, and
don't keep painkillers in the house, or you know whatever.
(45:15):
But it also means things like, don't be around people
who are constantly making withdrawals, unless, of course you're responsible
for them and you've deliberately chosen that rule. Don't be
around people who are a drain on your body budget.
Engage in random acts of kindness. You know, I would say,
make sure you get a hug every day, but that's
tricky because of COVID, and it's also tricky now because
(45:38):
we have to be respectful of each other's bodies and boundaries.
But the truth is that physical touch is actually really
important to humans. We have opioid receptors in our skins.
It's important to be touched. But you know, if you
can't afford to get a massage and it's safe for
you to do that, do it. If you can't buy
a soft sweater or a soft blanket, use the stuffed animal.
(46:02):
I mean, there are lots of ways that you can
get that stimulation. And I don't mean to trivialize it,
but it is really important, you know, being outside, for example,
in the sun. You know, make sure you wear sunscreen,
but being in the sun is really restorative. Each of
these things, again, like none of them is going to
have a huge effect, but they're all gonna sort of
(46:22):
nudge you in the right direction, you know.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
Yeah, that's one of my favorite phrases is little by little,
a little becomes a lot. You know, these things they
all add up. One of the other things that you
have talked a fair amount about, which I think is
a really important one also, and maybe this is where
we'll wrap up, is really increasing your uh. I think
the term you use is emotional granularity. Talk a little
(46:48):
bit about what does that mean to increase our emotional
granularity and what are some practical ways to do it.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
If you think about what your brain is doing all
the time, your brain is basically making sense of the
sense data that come from the world and from your body.
So when you hear a loud bang, what is that
loud bang, What caused it? And what do you need
to do about it? Is it a car door slamming?
(47:14):
Is it a car backfiring? Is did somebody drop a box?
Is it a gunshot? You know what your brain understands
the cause to be will determine what actions your brain takes. Right. Similarly,
if you have a tug in your chest, you know,
your brain will ask what is it? What caused it?
You know? Is it anxiety? Is it heartburn from eating
(47:37):
too much food? Is it the beginnings of a heart attack?
This example actually is not trivial, because when people go
to the hospital with tightness in their chest, whether they
and the emergency room physician make sense of that tug
as anxiety or as the beginnings of a heart attack
(47:57):
can determine whether or not that person to the next day.
There are accountable number of mistakes that are made in
that regard. I know at least three people who lost
their mothers because the mothers went to the hospital and
were told they'd had anxiety and they should go home,
(48:19):
and they did go home and then promptly died of
a heart attack. And in fact, this happened to a
friend of mine who's man, and they didn't send him
home at a time when they would have normally sent
a woman home, and he had a heart attack right
in the emergency room. And in fact, he had what's
called a widow maker heart attack, meaning that if the
(48:39):
cardiologists hadn't been right there standing in front of him,
he would have been dead. And you know why he
went to the hospital. He had been feeling had a
tight chest all week. He went to the doctor. The
doctor did a bunch of tests, said, there's nothing wrong
with you. It's just anxiety. It's just anxiety. And then
he went home and he laid down and as he
was lying there, he remembered that he and I had
had a converse because I was on his podcast and
(49:02):
he read how motions were made and we were talking
about this, and I was telling him this story, and
he thought, I'm just going to go to the hospital.
And he went to the hospital and they did tests
on him and they said, no, you're fine, you know,
you can go home. And he said, but I'm not fine.
I'm feeling worse. And I'm feeling worse. It's getting more
painful and more painful, and the tightness is getting more
and more and more. And they were like, okay, just
(49:23):
wait here, we'll get the cardiologist, and then he did,
and then basically he had a heart attack right there.
Your brain is always making sense of the sensations, and
the way that your brain makes sense of sensations is predictively,
as we discussed. So it's not like the information comes
in and your brain goes, ooh, what's that. It's that
(49:44):
your brain is making a guess about what the sensations
will be in a moment from now, and part of
that guess is not just what will they be, but
also what caused it. Now, if you can make many guesses,
if there are many possible guess is that your brain
can make, and it can try to fit a guess
(50:04):
to the situation, then your brain is going to have
a better chance of making the right guess. But if
your brain can only make one or two guesses, it
doesn't have a lot of options, it's just one or two,
then the likelihood that your brain will make the wrong
guess is higher. Granularity just means that your brain can
(50:26):
make many guesses right, so that a tug in your
chest or a bang that you hear could be many, many,
many different things, each one with its own situational context.
And if your brain learns to make sense of sense
data in many different ways, each one in a specific situation,
then you have lots of options to know how to respond.
(50:48):
So I guess another way to say it would be,
let's say your body budget is running a deficit and
you feel crappy. Well, what caused the crappy feeling and
what should you do about it? I mean, you don't
know because many things work to add together to make
that crappy feeling, and it's hard to know what to
do about it. But if your brain can make meaning
(51:10):
of the sense data as more than just a crappy feeling,
but specifically, you know, is it irritation or is it fatigue?
Or is it I'm dehydrated, or is it I'm anxious.
It could be emotional, it might be something purely physical.
It might be, you know, feeling crappy because I'm really
determined to learn this thing, and I'm really tenacious and
(51:32):
I'm not going to let it go until I've learned it.
The more options you give your brain basically, or the
more options your brain gives itself, the more you learn,
and the more options you learn, the more flexibility you
have and flexibility is the key to resilience.
Speaker 3 (51:47):
Yeah, I think that's well said. And the example that
I use in my own life of that is that
I think for a lot of years I got in
the habit of labeling a host of things as depression.
There's not a lot of granularity in that. It's just
like something crappy is happening inside and I go, I'm depressed.
Not only does that not allow my brain to make
(52:09):
a better decision about what's actually happening and make a
better decision, it reinforces a conception of what's happening with me,
which is this thing. And I've really been paying a
lot of attention over the last six months to what
I would call depression and how often it's tiredness.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
Oh, absolutely, absolute, hundred percent. I'll just tell you this
one story and then we'll wrap up. A couple of
years ago, I went to the doctor, new doctor, right,
So my doctor retired, So now I have a new doctor,
and I go the doctor and I say the doctor,
I'm really really really tired. I'm so fatigued. And he says,
maybe you're depressed, and I say, no, I'm not depressed.
(52:50):
I'm just really, really really tired. And he says, well,
do you have any stress in your life? And I'm like, yeah,
of course, you know, yes, I run a lab. It's
a large lab, and you know, of course i have
stress in my life. But I've always had stress in
my life. And I'm really, really, really tired. And he said, well,
maybe you're depressed and you just don't know it. And
(53:11):
I was like, maybe you don't know the DSM criteria.
You know their criteria for depressions. So let's think about
what those criteria are. Do I have any of those criteria?
You know? No, I'm not depressed. I'm tired. Okay. As
I'm leaving, thinking I'm never coming back to this doctor again,
the nurse says to me, honey, are you perimenopausal? Because,
(53:32):
unbeknownst to me, hormones like estrogen and testosterone are metabolic regulators, dopamine, serotonin,
I mean, they're all metabolic regulators. They all have something
to do with metabolism. So if you start losing your hormones,
you know, men lose testausone slowly over their adult life.
(53:54):
Women lose their estrogen, you know, over a couple of years.
You know, she says to me, maybe you're tired because
you're going through menopause. Here's a book. Read this book,
you know. She gives me the title of a self
help book. So I read the self help book and
then I go get you know, twenty five articles and
start reading them. And sure enough, what is one of
(54:14):
the major signs of menopause. It's fatigue because you're losing
your estrogen. Now, the point that I want to make
is that physition, unbeknownst to him, was attempting to construct
my experience for me as depression. And what if I
had accepted that and really felt it. Well, the first
thing that would have happened is I would have started
(54:35):
taking antidepressants, which actually could have had the effect of
driving my body budget into a deficit position, even though
you know it was in that position because I was
losing estrogen. Second of all, I'd start wondering what it
is in my life I have to make changes about
because clearly something is wrong, like in a big way
(54:58):
because I'm depressed. I mean, it would have really been
a trajectory shift for me, and not necessarily a good one,
I would say. So I think, you know, I have
been depressed once in my life and It's not an
experience that I'm eager to repeat. Let's just say it's
agonizing to be depressed. But there is a way in
(55:20):
which you can also understand depression as a bankrupt body budget,
you know. So I'm not saying that you can cure
depression by just like sleeping more and like, you know,
getting little exos, but I do want to point out
that depression is a metabolic illness. It is many things
that there's I meanological problems, but all of these problems,
including the really negative mood, results from basic metabolic problem.
(55:45):
You are bankrupt. Basically, what do you do when you're
bankrupt in your bank account? You stop spending. What does
a brain do when it's body budget is bankrupt? It
stops moving your body, and it stops you learning. So
you are trapped in your head. Basically, context insensitive, You're
just trapped in your head. Those are two major symptoms
(56:08):
of depression. So it helps to know a little bit
I think about not just how to make sense of
not just how to make fifty shades of crap, you know,
crappy feelings of all different you know, but it helps
to also understand something about the biological basis of the
moods that you experience, because that actually adds to your
(56:31):
granularity because it allows you to have different action plans
that you can take again flexibility and resilience.
Speaker 3 (56:39):
I could riff on that for another hour because there
were so many good points in that.
Speaker 1 (56:43):
But my pizza is getting cold.
Speaker 3 (56:45):
So your pizza is getting cold, and we are way long,
so and I don't want pizza to get cold. That
is a tragedy. So thanks so much Lisa for coming
back on. I have really enjoyed talking with you again.
It's always such a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (56:56):
Thank you so much for having me back, and hopefully
we'll have a chance to again.
Speaker 2 (57:16):
If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
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Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this
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It's our way of saying thank you for your support.
Speaker 3 (57:32):
Now.
Speaker 2 (57:32):
We are so grateful for the members of our community.
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To learn more, make a donation at any level and
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(57:54):
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