Welcome to the huberman live podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is dr. Lisa Feldman. Barrett dr. Lisa Feldman. Barrett is a distinguished, professor of psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital where she is the chief scientific officer.
Of the center of law, brain and behavior dr. Baird is considered one of the top World experts in the study of emotions, and her laboratory has studied emotions using approaches both from the fields of Psychology and Neuroscience. Indeed today you will learn about the neural circuits and the psychological underpinnings of what we call emotions, you will learn what emotions truly are and how to interpret different emotional states. You will also learn how emotions relate to things? Like motivation, Consciousness and effect.
Affect is a term that refers to a more General State of brain and body that increases or decreases, the probability that you will experience certain emotions during today's discussion, dr. Feldman Barrett also teaches us how to regulate our emotions effectively, as well as how to better interpret the emotional states of others. You will also learn about the powerful relationship that exists between our emotional states and the movement of our body. In fact, much of today's discussion is both practical and will be highly informative in terms.
The mechanisms underlying emotions and it is likely to also be surprising to you in a number of ways. It certainly was surprising to me. I've been a close follower of dr. Feldman Barrett's work over many years now and have always found it be tremendously informative. And when I say her work, I mean, both are academic published papers as well as her public lectures that she's given, and her two fabulous books on emotions in the brain. The first one entitled. How emotions are made? And the second book which includes information about emotions, but extends beyond that.
Seven-and-a-half lessons about the brain as you'll see from today's discussion dr. Feldman Barrett is not only extremely informed about the neuroscience and psychology of emotion. She's also fabulously good at teaching us that information in clear terms. And in actionable ways, you'll also notice several times she pushes back on my questions. In some cases, even telling me that my questions are ill posed. And I have to tell you that, I was absolutely delighted that she did that because you'll see that every time she did that it was with the clear purpose.
Purpose of putting more specificity on the question and thereby more specificity and Clarity on the answer which, of course, she delivers. By the end of today's discussion, you will have both a broad and a deep understanding of what emotions are and their origins in our brain and body. You will also have many practical tools with which to better understand and navigate emotional states. And moreover, you will have many practical Tools in order to increase your levels of motivation and better understand your various States.
Consciousness before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is eight sleep aids,sleep make smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep, tracking capacity spoken many times before on this podcast. About the fact that sleep is the foundation of
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Monitor yourself. Go to levels dot link / huberman right now levels is offering an additional two free month of membership again, that's levels, dot link. Link2sd huberman to get two free months of membership and now for my discussion with dr. Lisa Feldman, Barrett, dr. Lisa Feldman, Barrett, welcome.
Oh, it's my pleasure to be here.
I've wanted to talk to you for a very long time. I'd like to talk about emotions. I think
Everyone has a sense somehow of what an emotion is, the only happy feeling sad, feeling excited, feeling curious, perhaps is even emotion. I don't know, you'll tell us what are the core components? What are those sort of macronutrients of a of an emotion? Because I know there's a debate about whether or not we should be talking about emotions versus States, but
What is an emotion? We all are familiar with what? One feels like to us, but from a scientific perspective. How do you define an
emotion? Well, scientist is a scientist debate about this. Nobody in the last 150 years. Has ever been able to agree on what an emotion is. And I think from my perspective, the interesting, but tricky bit, is that anytime you want to talk about, what the basic building blocks are of emotion. None of those.
Basic building blocks are specific to emotion. So for example, there are a group of scientists who will tell you. Well, an emotion is a coordinated response where you have a change in some physical state, a change in the brain, a change in the physical state, which leads you to make a particular facial expression. So you've got physiological changes in the body changes in the brain changes in the face or in motor.
It's okay. But that describes basically every moment of your life, your face is always moving. In some way, if it wasn't, you would look like an avatar, basically. So we're constantly engaged in movements and those movements have to be coordinated with the physiological changes in the body because whether we're, whether we're in a state that we would conventionally call emotion or not, because the physiology is supporting those supporting the
Now, the glucose and the oxygen and all the things that you need to make movements of your body. And of course, all these movements are being coordinated by your brain. So of course there's a coordinated set of features that doesn't really describe how emotions are distinct from any other experience that you have. But the, the claim was for a really long time that there would be diagnostic patterns, okay, so when something triggered
Sphere. You would have an increase in heart rate and you would have a propensity to run away or to freeze or not just to fall asleep. Although that is something animals do when they are faced with a predator. But that's not part of the western stereotype for fear. So that wasn't what scientists were looking for. And and also that you would make a particular facial expression which was presumed to be the universal expression of fear where you widen your eyes.
when you gasp like,
That facial set of facial movements in other cultures like in melanesian culture, for example, is a, is a symbol of threat where you are threatening someone, you are threatening them with aggression, basically is a war face. But in Western cultures, that's the face that Western scientists believed was the, you know, the, the distinctive part of that distinctive pattern for fear and so,
Way that scientists defined emotion for a long time. Was these kind of states where you'd see this diagnostic Ensemble of signals, and that would mean that any time. Someone showed one of those signals they made move their face in a particular way or their heart increased at a particular time. You'd be able to diagnose them as being in a state of fear as opposed to a state of anger or sadness or whatever the empirical evidence.
Just doesn't bear that out. And so it was kind of a mystery, the mystery is, how is it that you feel angry or sad or happy or you know, full of gratitude or ah how is it that you experience these moments? But scientists can't find a single set of physical markers that.
Bond with each state. Distinctively, write that in a way that you could tell them apart. That's a, that was a really big puzzle for a really long time.
I have to ask you about this perhaps myth perhaps truth about facial expressions and emotions. Because as you were explaining, the core components of emotions, I had to think back to the classic textbook images of the different faces associated with fear with delight with confusion and on and on, we will get to that and your opinions on that scientifically.
Informed opinions, of course. But there is a bit of a myth that the emotion system and the facial expression system run in both directions. For instance, people will say if you smile it's harder to feel sad or anxious. I can't say that's been my experience but I very well could be wrong so we know that
When people's emotional states change their facial expressions, often will change. Right? If you see someone crying on the street versus somebody smiling, really big? What you? We can make some assumptions about what might be going on at internally for them. But put simply, is it true that changing one's facial expression can direct shifts in the brain and body. Perhaps that change our emotional
states.
If you'll permit me, what I would say is that your question is ill posed.
So first of all, it presumes that there is an emotion system and that there's a facial expression system now clearly visits system for moving facial muscles, okay? But a movement is not the same as an expression, a movement is a movement and expression is an interpretation of the meaning of a movement, not all movements of the face are expressions. And this is a, you know,
A problem. It's a problem in science in it's often the case, I think, in my experience in the science of emotion, but elsewhere to that scientists in their efforts to make their work meaningful to. People will try to interpret their findings in ways that the average person would find interesting or the way that if
Addition would find interesting or a teacher or what have you to be able to use this information. But then they forget that they're actually making an interpretation and they start to refer to their observations with the labels of interpretation. So facial movements are facial, movements people move their faces and that those movements have meaning, but they're not always to express an internal state. In fact, one might think that they're very rarely to express an internal state so I
I know that there's a facial expression system either. So that's there are certainly like I said they're they're circuitry for moving a face but but what those movements mean is highly variable and so that would be my second point that where I would say, when you see someone crying on the street, you are not looking only at their face, you might be aware.
That you're focusing on their face, that might be the part of the entire sensory Ensemble, that you are focusing your attention on, but your brain is taking in an entire ensemble of signals, as you know, it's taking in not just the, you know, movements of the face that tears or whatever. It's taking in all of the, the entire sensory array. The Sounds, the smells what's going on inside your own body. Your brain is being bombarded with
From from all of those sources. And when it's making a new meaning out of any signal, it's doing it in an ensemble of signals. So, research shows that baby's cries aren't acoustically specific to when they're tired or hungry or right that you can. I can show you a video without context and show you someone crying and you might make a judgment. You might think make the stereotypic judgment in the west. Oh, that person is sad. And then we pan out
Out and really, you know, it's a little girl whose dad just came home from Iraq or something, right? So, brains are always interpreting faces in context, they're making guesses. This is something that I've talked about quite a bit that we don't read movements in people. We don't read emotions and facial expressions. We make inferences about the emotional meaning of facial movements and we do it in an ensemble of other signals, the context as you, if you will.
And that's really what's happening. So do I think that that there's feedback from the face to the brain? Sure, I mean there's feedback from every muscle but there's this constant conversation between the brain and the body. The brain is sending motor commands. The body is has sensory surfaces which are sending signals back to the brain. So
If the face is influencing the brain, it's doing so, in a way that's not special, it's doing it in a way that that works for all other parts of your body, too. And I guess,
what I would say this kind of a long-winded answer but
Over time, your brain has learned that certain patterns of signal over time recur. And so if you're smiling, if your brain is, you know, telling your your facial muscles to move in a particular way that looks like smiling. It's happening in a larger Ensemble of signals and then the brain is predicting, what's going to happen next because it's learned over time. What happens next? So
Probabilistically. So if you think about that as cause then, sure but it's not, as it's not this simplistic, kind of idea that an emotion is triggered, it causes facial muscles to move in a particular way. And therefore if you just pose your face in in those in that particular Arrangement, it that will somehow feedback to the emotion system and change the
System because there are no, there is no emotion system in your brain. And the causation just isn't that it's not that simplistically
mechanistic, that makes sense to me. I frankly, never bought the idea that just smiling would make me feel happy, especially if my internal state was not one of Happiness, like fighting the internal State. Also in the early 2000s, I
It was, there was a lot of discussion about how positioning the body in certain ways. You know, taking up more space would allow people to feel more powerful. And they, some of these studies and argue that there were even hormonal shifts associated with taking up more space that were associated with feelings of empowerment. And then when shrinking of oneself was in associated with elevated cortisol States. And as I say, all this, I'm I want to be clear that I do not take simplistic view of the nervous system.
Endocrine system and I didn't, I don't think either you were implying that either want to make sure that anyone listening in or watching isn't thinking that, for instance, that cortisol is bad, cortisol is wonderful and essential, you just need it regulated properly or that the idea that the body and emotional states are inextricably linked, makes a ton of sense to me. But the idea that you could just, you know, grab on to one of the nodes in the you have to be careful, not say motion system.
Like position of the body like being hunched over makes you depressed. No. That never made sense to me, taking up more space makes you feel more powerful. That doesn't it can't be that way. And yet we were told for about a decade through especially through popular, press that this stuff was true. And so what I love about your work is that it includes a neuroanatomical. A psychological, a network perspective that there isn't one seat of emotion.
And so on. So if we could go a little bit further into the facial expression, peace for a moment, sure.
I was taught in my Psychology and Neuroscience textbooks because it was right there in front of me that there were some core categories of facial expression that were Universal across cultures that conveyed, something about the internal state of the person that the downward, you know, lips in the corner and and some and maybe even a furrowing of the brow was associated with negative valence States like sadness, perhaps even depression that the opposite of upward turn corners of the mouth. And why?
Of the eyes was delight and excitement. Some of that feels pretty true to my experience. But how do you and other serious? Scientists of emotions, view that somewhat classic literature now.
Yeah, so I'll just say that my my journey here. My scientific Journey was not one of attempting to overturn, a Century's worth of
Earth of
Are we allowed to swear bullshit? Basically, I mean, it's just, it's like, it's stereotype. It's basically Western stereotypes. Enshrined as scientific fact and that sounds like a pretty harsh thing to say, but I think I pretty much stand by that at this point. But for me, when I was a graduate student, When I Was An undergraduate in in Psychology and in physiology and in anthropology, you know, I also had
Add that Darwin said that there were these distinctive facial expressions, that were coordinated with specific emotional states, the specific states of the nervous system. This was Darwin's View and I assumed it was correct until I started to try to use that information in the lab and everything fell apart, you know. So when you show
Someone in a laboratory like a student or somebody from The Community of Faith, a disembodied face, where there are the person's eyes are widened in the face and they're gasping like a stereotypic fear expression. Most of the time, they don't know what it is. And so I would try to use these faces and as stimuli and experiments and they weren't they weren't working the way that they're supposed to work.
And there were really going all the way back to the beginning of psychology. There were always debates about whether or not this was actually accurate. And there's a really interesting story about how Darwin came to this idea, which I can tell you about, but it's not because he cared about emotion, and he was basically taking his own, very Western views about a motion to make some claims about Evolution actually.
So I have more to say about that and about why it's a problem to take anything that anybody said even Darwin from you know hundred and fifty or so years ago or whatever it is and treat it like it's a modern text you know he was writing at a particular time for a particular purpose and that doesn't necessarily mean that whatever he wrote is true but I'll just tell you what the evidence says.
That there has been in Psychology a debate, really vicious debate actually, for probably 50 years about the nature of facial expressions and whether they are Universal and whether there's this one to one correspondence between a particular face and like a facial configuration and a particular, emotional state, smiling and happiness, scowling and anger, wrinkling, your nose and discussed. And so in
Then 16 I think the association for psychological science, tasked me and some other senior scientists with a attempting to write a white paper. A consensus paper on what the literature actually shows. So what is a research actually show, he read all the research, you know, can you find a pattern there? Does it actually reveal anything about whether or not facial expressions are Universal, particularly for a motion.
And the way they do this, they have a journal for this purpose, for taking a widely held belief, that is highly debated and bringing together a panel of experts who disagree with each other at the outset. And they have to work together to see if they can come to consensus over the data.
And this is something that, you know, people have tried in the past and I mean, there are really vicious people have been vicious with each other over this question. So when we brought together a group of people, so several people, refuse to serve senior scientists, refuse to serve on this panel,
but fear losing their funding or something.
You know, that's a whole other conversation about why scientists
And scientists would not want to engage with people who disagree with them. That's an interesting conversation to have but I don't think it's simple. Actually as just their career restore, they care about you know, their money or funding or whatever at that would be an easy answer. But I don't actually think that's what's going on but that's another sort of anyway. So there were five of us who got together all senior scientists all from
Different fields, some of us hadn't met each other. Before we all knew of each other, of course, and we met over Zoom for two and a half years. This is preak Ovid because people were all over the world, right? And we read over a thousand papers. So, so I was the only one in this group of the five of us who my starting hypothesis was that, facial movements are meaningful, but they're not. There's no one to one.
It's between a particular facial configuration, like a scowl.
And anger not not just that it would vary across cultures but that it varies.
For you across situations. I mean, do you scowl every time you're angry? I don't scowl. Every time I'm angry. In fact, and I also scowl at times when I'm not angry. So and there are scientific reasons to think that that the, that the collection of facial expressions that people make when they're angry, or when they're sad, or whatever would be highly variable. So that was my starting position and then the there were varying before guys. So there were I just
To them as guys. Because it was me and four guys. And the guys, they all to some extent thought that facial expressions were Universal, but they had differing reasons and for, for hypothesizing that and they also
Had different commitments degrees of commitment to that position but we right off the bat sort of agreed that we it didn't matter who was right, that was just not relevant. The only thing that mattered was that we could come to the consensus over the data. And if we couldn't, we had to really pinpoint why like, so what would be the critical experiments that would have to be done in order for us to come to consensus over?
Data. And we also agreed that we had all kinds of contingencies set up. So you know, you've got five senior people who are all running big labs and they're investing, you know, upwards of three years working on a paper. So if we can't come to consensus, what are we going to do? Are we going to write one paper and sort of write about the process or we going to write separate papers or, you know, but we had all these contingencies laid out. But the key here, I think is that we agreed that
we were not going to be adversarial about it because it didn't matter who was right? And in fact, if somebody had to admit, they were wrong and someone was going to have to admit, they were wrong. I mean it turns out all of us were wrong about something but it we were going to be like supportive of each other and and really encourage each other and because you know being wrong is no one likes to be wrong, but for scientists to admit they're wrong is hard and it's something that we should encourage each other to do. I think more and more public
And I think the people who do that are really Brave and so that was my position and they all agreed and the long story short here is that two and a half years. A thousand papers. Later, we all very reasonably came to consensus that, there was no evidence for facial expressions of emotion being Universal. And that instead, what is what there's clear evidence of is that facial expressions. The way that people
Move their faces. In, in moments of expression, is highly variable meaning sometimes in Anger, you scowl meta-analyses. So statistical summaries of many, many, many studies. Even in the west show that people scowl about 35% of the time when they're angry, which is more than chance. So get you good publication. And, you know, the proceedings of the National Academy
But that means, 65 percent of the time.
People are moving their faces and other meaningful ways, that's not scowling. So if you actually used a scowl or even, you know, a scowl and blood pressure or you know, just maybe not one signal but still a couple signals but you would be wrong more than half the time. You would miss more than half the cases, and even more importantly,
I think that's the reliability question. So there's low reliability for the correspondence between a scowl and anger. It's above chance. So, scowling is one expression of anger but it's certainly not the dominant one, and there is no dominant one. It's just highly variable depending on the situation that you're in. So sometimes when I'm angry, I sit quietly and plot the demise of my enemy. You know, sometimes I smile in Anger, Sometimes I Cry.
Anger it really depends on the situation.
But more importantly, half of this growls that people make are not related to anger.
That means that the specificity is again.
Higher than chance.
But not that much higher than chance. So, if you see someone scowling the chances are that they might not be angry, they might be concentrating. Really hard? Were, they might have gas. I mean, there are a lot of reasons why people make a scowl. And with we found this for every emotion category that had ever been studied, and I want you to notice what I just did there. I'm not. I'm no longer referring to an emotion as if it's an end to the Earth thing. So anger isn't one thing.
It's a category of things, a grouping of
things, and if I'm not mistaken, it includes verbs, right? That like anger, as a set of verb actions in the, in the brain and body? Yes, it's a process. It's not an
event, exactly. It's not a noun. It's a verb and it's, and it's a process. But the point is that it's a highly variable grouping of instances. If you're, if you are talking about all instances of anger, all instances of anger that
You have ever experienced or witnessed is a highly variable grouping of instances, that very not, they did, that doesn't mean they're random, but what the body does and anger depends on what the physical movements will be in anger. And that depends on the situation that you're in and what your goal is. And and there are ways to talk about that in Neuroscience terms, which are a little more precise. But the important thing to understand here, I think is that we're only talking about
Western culture is now the minute that you go outside of the West to or even to the east. I mean, so you know there are other cultures, you know that have been studied like China and cultures in China and Japan in Korea there, they all have access to knowledge about Western cultural practices and Norms. So what happens when you go, you know, to remote cultures, which have much
Much less access. So that it's not like they have no access because we live in a globalized world. So even hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, the hodza have access to Western practices and Norms but much, less much less and we did do that and and all bets are off there. I mean, most of the time they don't even they don't even understand or experience facial movements as having anything to
do with emotion. So if they saw an emoji of a smiley face,
They just assumed it was a couple that they might think it's a face there, because as we both know, there's some fairly hard wired, brain circuitry for the the two eyes that and a line beneath it and something in the middle that pseudo knows that organization of just spatial features Q's up face for both bird most primates including
those using that you say that because yes of course that's true but it's not there at Birth. What's there at Birth is a preference for that configuration, right? So
It's like, there's some and we can talk about why that's there. It's actually very controversial but, but what babies would newborns Orient to they Orient to that, or they Orient to that configuration, but it doesn't have to be a face and then very quickly, they start learning faces because they're exposed to face their. I mean, really the first three months of life is almost like, a massive, continuous tutorial on what faces are because they're, you know, being fed and
when everyone's in your face. So, Larry
Last night and you see the baby is Friends of on have a unbelievably cute baby. The big cheeks and you want and there's this desire to see the baby smile, right? So you do the things that and if that the baby shows some sort of facial expression that makes it seem like it's a little bit like resistant what you're doing you stop doing it. Use change up your strategy and then when baby cracks a smile. Like now I'm going to assume that the baby may or may not have been happy inside that little baby head. But when they do there's a reciprocity
I see then we smile. It's there's a template that that's very
robust, right? But I want you to notice though that. So, first of all, I'm not saying that that recognizing faces a face as a face is not hardwired it is but it's hardwired by not by genes alone, right? And in fact there's a really wonderful book called not by genes alone. Basically there's cultural inheritance, we have the kind of nature that requires a nurture, we have the kind of genes that require Early Learning, we
We need wiring instructions from the world, to get the rest of the information that we need to be competent, culturally competent, in our in our in our lives. And that starts at Birth, it probably starts before birth even but in third trimester, there's some evidence of learning, fetal, learning, even in the third trimester. So the point is not that people aren't hardwired for viewing faces or recognizing faces. Just, where does that hardwiring come from? It's
By genes alone, jeans aren't the blueprint. The brain is expecting certain inputs from the world and needs that because infant brains are wiring in themselves to their world. And part of that world is people making faces at them smiling and those people happen to also be the ones who are maintaining, who are maintaining that baby's nervous system. Mean there is reward learning right or reinforcement learning right off the bat. Because these are the people who keep you comfortable. They are the ones who feed you. They're the ones who help you get to sleep and so on. And so,
Earth and so you're going to be very, very sensitive to changes in the contingencies of their behavior, your brain as a pattern Learners, just going to learn those patterns. If we know that smiling is more, you know, smiling is a queue for happiness, it's because we've learned it and that doesn't mean that, that learning isn't hardwired. It just means that that information got into your brain by cultural inheritance, which is a part of evolutionary.
theory in the extended evolutionary synthesis, not in the original you know not in the original formulation that some people still kind of stick to
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Than it was presented to me in those textbooks. And it sounds like it was outright wrong on many
dimensions. Well, I just mention one thing though, please, this is really serious stuff. Like, sometimes people think, well, you know, what's the big deal? This is such a big deal. I'll tell you why, it's a big deal because in our culture, people believe that they can read mental states of other people by their face.
And they believed it so much that it's enshrined in the legal system.
and there are people who lose their lives because juries believe,
That they can read remorse, or, or the lack of it, and in fact, there was just a case, you know, last year, I believe we're, you know, the Innocence Project got involved because there was a woman who was on death row, and what? Put her on death row was a police officers claimed that he could read her emotions by her, the comportment of her face and her body.
And and, you know, it was possible to get a stay of execution so that she could be retried and you know, so I'm not saying she was guilty or not guilty. I'm just saying
What put her on death row was evidence that would not be admissible in a scientific way now and there are there are lots of cases where judgments are made that end up impacting people's lives in pretty serious ways. So this is a really serious thing and it's it's puzzling to me why? It's so it's
Got such traction. This idea that there are these Universal Expressions that we can use to read each other, you know it's just not true. I mean the science just it's so overwhelmingly I feel like you know scientists I don't like to use the t word you know the f word fact, you know it's a scary word, t word truth, but I think in this case I feel like I can I can really at least with a little tea. I can I can use it you
Probably have particular facial movements that you make on a regular basis that are tells for you. I know I do, you know, my husband can look at my actions and he can make really decent guesses about what's going on for me upstairs, right? But that's because he's known me for 30 years. Actually, 30 years today, I should just say it wasn't met each other 30 years ago today, but he's, you know, brains are pattern Learners. So I'm not saying that everything is random and there's no, it's all noise. I'm saying that there just aren't these
You know, Universal templates. They just it's not like that. And we really have to stop assuming that that there are
Well, I'm so glad that you're getting that message out there and I'm very thankful that you highlighted, the seriousness of this, these myths that have propagated. And that's a perfect segue into what I was already going to ask which is, it's based on something that I think is in very much agreement with what you're saying, previous guest on this podcast. Thing was our first guest episode dr. Karl deisseroth colleague of mine at Stanford incredible bioengineer really
You know,
.01 percent in his, you know, category of science as well as a practicing psychiatrist said something which really stuck with me over the years, which I once heard him say, you know, we don't really know how other people feel at all. In fact, most of the time we don't even know how we feel and that prompted the question for me about how good or poor are we at gauging our own emotional states and in
Ticular at labeling them, both to others, and for ourselves. And so, here's the direct question.
Is language sufficient to capture this incredibly complex thing that we're calling emotions. So for instance, the other day I was in New York with my sister, then she left. I went out for a bit, I was having a pretty good day and then I returned to the place where I was staying and I was hit with this feeling of intense loneliness and I don't know why. And then I had a bunch of ideas about how that related to growing up and it if I was gonna see friends the next day and I'm an adult and so I could use some top down
Ocean and say, you know, maybe I'm a little tired or I didn't because I hadn't slept as well, the night before I've been pretty rested recently and then I actually wrote in my journal. I said, you know, maybe most of feeling good is being pretty well rested and not in any physical pain. That's a big part of feeling good, is the absence of fatigue and the absence of physical pain, and then I thought. Wow, that's just so basic. It's like, two building blocks is clearly insufficient, but then I couldn't think of a word to adequately describe.
The emotion that came about an hour later when I was feeling a little bit better but not completely better. So, was, I lonely not really not anymore. Was I sad. Not really but, you know, as I had headed out into the city, I was thinking I don't really have a word for how I feel. I'm sort of okay, not great, not low, you know? And so I think that we have emotional labels. I certainly do Four Peaks, you know, these Peak emotional state, super happy. I loved the time with my sister, we do this every year. This was a particularly good year for us to do this. And, and it,
Went really well, we were texting back and forth how great it was. I certainly know what it feels like to be really down in the in the pits. I've got language for that but then there's this huge range in between. And so I guess the simple question is should we even trust the language as a way to understand how we're feeling or their additional? If not better signals that we should perhaps learn to elaborate our understanding of emotions
with
So I'm going to give you a simple answer and then I'm going to give you a more complicated answer. So the simple answer is no language is not sufficient.
Period. I think the way that you have, well, I should say one language is not sufficient. So English is not sufficient and probably French on. Its own is not sufficient and probably Swahili on its own is not sufficient. Although it's very interesting that the the states that we Mark with words in each culture, some of them overlap but a lot of them don't
And it's very, very useful to have labels of emotion Concepts from other cultures, that that capture configurations, or a state that we don't really, Mark, we don't Mark those and and sort of distinctively pull them out. As is different from other states. I'd love to know what some of those are. Oh, there there, I should have brought them with me. I mean, there are some like there's one, there's a German word, which I can't remember the name of the word, but it's like,
The experience of someone having a face, that deserves a punch.
I'm sure someone will tell us in the comments. Someone someone, who knows German or spend time there. Please put that word in in the comments but don't don't punch
any another one. That's my favorite is Lee good, which is it's a Polynesian headhunting emotion word and it means exuberant aggression in a group.
Like soccer, we're headhunting right? Where you're basically or I should say also in the military. So, when I was listening to NPR one day, A couple of years ago, must have been more than that because it's in my book. So it was probably more than seven years ago. I was listening to these guys talk these former military personnel, talk about being deployed in a war where there with their buddies
And there.
They're basically hunting the enemy and they feel exuberant like they are you know, and and there it's not that they're happy but they're its pleasant and it's very intense, very high arousal, you know, and in the moment it seemed right and then they come back, you know, and they ask themselves like they come back. And so there are now, you know, their deployments ended. Now they're back home and they're like, are my a psychopath? Like, I enjoy killing people. What is
About and I was thinking, no, no, you just experienced liquid. And if you had a word for it, you would understand that. It's a groupie feeling where you're all in it together, and it's really intense. And, you know, they were experiencing the, the intensity of having their life on the line and, and being responsible for their, for their brothers, you know, and sisters and in, in their troop and, you know, so the what they would realize,
This is a perfectly it's perfectly within the range of normal human variation. It's just that in English. We don't have a word for it, really, but there are words that are Concepts in other languages, right? Or not. The other one that I like is called giggle. Which is where when you see a baby, who's really cute? And you just want to like yesterday evening,
cheeks or just like jumping at you. And I want to parents are delightful people too, and they was just facing out because they have one of those. Yeah.
Facing baby things and it's just sort of like, yeah, it's and I
think Google, it's called
giggle, giggle, giggle does the from the other episode that we did on phone?
There's one in Japan. I think there's a Japanese word for the despair that you feel when you got a bad haircut, really? Yeah. Because it's, I mean, it's really is a different kind of feeling than, you know, because you've got to like wait for it to grow at, you know, whatever. Anyways, the point being that easy words for us mark,
Particular States and they're not all that. They're not always the states that other people in other cultures care about. But there's a but the, even again, the phrasing of your question, I just want to come back to and I'm not trying to
pick it. You but free, what I love is that what you said before when you said my question was Ill posed in your in the answer that followed it made it very clear. Why? And I learned something about how the the not emotion system but the things
All that. That create emotions work. So, feel free. I grew up in the same culture that you did. I'm not Canadian by birth, but, but in the academic culture. Yeah, you know, I mean that, the stuff that we take online, by the way, folks, is nothing compared to the kind of hazing that I experience growing up, in, in academic culture, as it was done, then, I don't know if it's still that way, now, so feel free. Yeah, I'm tougher than I look well, no, but I think my
point is that I'm trying to get at here. Is that when we ask questions, any of us me too.
Anybody asks a question there are certain assumptions that were making in order to allow us to pose the question. And sometimes what I'm taking issue with is not the question itself but it's the assumptions behind the question, right? And this is a very classic thing in philosophy of science. Which I know I just said the p word philosophy, which scientists, you know, usually they roll their eyes back in their head, the fall over when you talk about that. But I think it's really important. So, you know can language is language
Sent to label or to gauge emotional states, kind of sounds like. And this is the assumption that people make that there's a state in here called an emotion. And now I have to label it, I have to identify it. That is not how it works. Like that is not what your brain is doing at all. And in order to explain what I think is happening and what I my best available. Guess, you know, like based on what I understand it's like not even remotely that
That is just not a meaningful question at all. I do think words are important. I just don't think that they have to be insufficient by virtue of what the brain is actually doing. And the way that I come out, this is just really different from a lot of my colleagues. So really, for a hundred years. At least I hate when people say things like that, like, for 100 years but it really is, like, for 100 years. At least what psychologists and neuroscientists do have did.
Are still doing is they start with a folk experience, a folk category, a common-sense experience. I feel angry. I'm making a decision. Having a memory. I'm remembering something. They start with their experience and then they go looking for the physical basis of that experience in the brain or in, you know, in the body.
I think that's really problematic because not everybody in the world actually uses those categories or has those
experiences a lot of that has to do with the scientific publication process. First one of the most important statements I ever heard his from the late Ted Jones, one of the greatest neuroanatomists of probably the last five hundred years which was the following. He said a drug is a substance that when injected into an animal or a person produces a scientific paper.
Yeah.
And in many ways. Yeah yeah you gotta catch em catch him Square in the face. Can you go? Oh right? Yeah, I mean basically every drug disrupts if taken an hour or two before sleep changes, the amount of REM sleep that you get there. So so I could imagine that almost any perturbation of the language system, the body the facial movement system could give you a quote unquote effect that you can write a paper about. Yeah. But that doesn't mean. It has any semblance whatsoever?
To what's happening in the world when we are other people experience
emotions. And here's the here, you know, there's so much. And what you said that I just want his various very exciting to talk to you. So the first thing I'll say is that
You know, we often will identify we, as in the, you know, people but also scientists identify biological signals by what we believe them to mean psychologically. So serotonin is a happiness chemical, no serotonin evolved. As a metabolic regulator
It is a metabolic regulator and whatever it's doing. It's allowing an animal to spend resources when the animal the animals brain isn't sure. There's a reward at the end of that, right? So you were saying before, you know, the absence of fatigue, the absence of discomfort. That's a, that's a pleasant feeling, right? Well, yeah. So, maybe serotonin has something to do with pleasantness because it has something to do with energetics, right?
Cortisol. Cortisol is on a stress hormone, it's not a stress hormone. I mean, it's a hormone that is secreted more when the brain believes that there is a big metabolic outlay, that's required. That's what stress is. Basically, it's the brain believes, there's a big metabolic out like that's about to be required and it matters these kind of like little semantic tweaks. Like they matter a lot because of how we do because of how we do research. So,
So I would say, I don't start with the categories that drive from English and my own experience. I start with the nervous system.
I try to learn what is the best available evidence for how that nervous system evolved, how it developed, how it's structured right? Anatomy to me, is very important. Some of my best hypotheses, come from, just learning the anatomy and realizing, oh well, there's a connection there. That's direct that meet, that should be in something, you know, I mean, I could give you lots of examples of where we've had, we've made
Cover is solely because we noticed and a set of anatomical connections and we're really curious about what they might be involved with, but if you start with that premise, then you think about the brain and I think about the brain of really different way, right? So I don't think about the brain as a stimulus driven organ. I think about it more like this that the the brain is
First of all, the brain is not running a model or or making inferences about the world, all the brain knows issues are signals from the sensory surfaces of its body. So your brain is modeling your retina and it's modeling your cochlea and is modeling the sensory surfaces of the skin and sure signals. You know, are, you know, hit those surfaces and the surfaces transduce, those signals and send them up to the brain.
But the brain only knows the body and anything, it knows about the world, it knows about the world through the body, through the sensory surfaces of the body. So that's the first for me. Really big important point. The second important point is that I think about the brain as being trapped in a dark silent box.
Called your skull, you know, and it's so weird saying these things to you. You're so much, you know, you're like you're this really esteemed like neuroscientist and here I am explaining to you know, but how I think the brain works is just very, you know,
what's important for our audience. But it's also important for me even though. Yes. I know, I know these facts but it's I believe it's always informative to go back to the fundamentals because we forget, you know, actually I would say that.
If someone wants described the alcohol him the great because he's a great visual neuroscientist visual neuroscientist. Tony option who founded the department of neuroscience at NYU. Once said, you know, a real intellectual is somebody that can appreciate and work with a topic at multiple levels of granularity for sure but it's not about the and oftentimes the more expertise is associated with more focus on detail. So I love returning to the core Basics. So I think it's wonderful please. Please continue though, I
think about the brains being trapped in this box
And it's receiving signals continuously from the sensory surfaces of the body. But those signals are the outcomes of some set of changes in the brain, doesn't know what the changes are. It doesn't know the causes of those signals, it just knows the outcomes. That knows the signals, that's what he was receiving. And so it has to guess at what the causes of those signals are in order to stay alive.
And so that's in philosophy called an inverse problem. So the brain just has a massive continuous inverse problem that it has to deal with all the time
but you can't have, it doesn't have access to all the information. No, it's just a guessing
machine. It's a guessing machine. So for example, you know, if you hear a loud bang, what is that? Loud? Bang could be a car door, slamming it could be thunder. It could be a
Car, backfiring. It could be a gunshot. The brain doesn't know it has to guess, and it's not making a guess like, intellectual guess, the Guess is a motor plan. It's a plan for changing the internal state of the body. In order to support motor skeletal motor movements. Do I need to run? Do I need to shut the window? Do I need to get an umbrella? Do I, you know, do I need to hold my breath? Because the car is backfire.
You know, what do I need to do? So where does that plan come from?
Well, it comes from past experience. The experience that's been wired into the brain.
but the more, I think that the evidence suggests that what the brain is doing is basically
Reinstating bits and pieces of past experience. So remembering although we don't experience ourselves as remembering but basically it's re-implementing ensembles of signals from the past that are similar to the present in some way.
Now, a bunch of things which are similar to each other.
In Psychology is a category.
So what the brain is doing is it's creating a it's constructing category. And in fact, we think about the brain as a continuous category Constructor. It's constructing a category of possible Futures possible outcomes, possible motor plans. And how does it know which is the right one? Because it's not just picking one. There's going to be some sample that it's re it's re-implementing. But how does it know which one which is the right one? Because there can only
B1. Well, I feel like in the example of a loud noise, would I immediately thought of as you were describing? That is that my system would become aware of it? I would become aware of it, but then it's a question of. Is there. Another loud noise? How closely are those loud noises space? Is it getting louder or less loud? And then, and so a bunch of categories. It's like a bookshelf with an infinite number of books, but then with the second loud noise. Now it's just, you know, One Wing of the library and then with the next thing that happens is
and the context it starts narrowing and then pretty soon. You get presented with the book that says, you know, the roof is about to cave
in and I think your point your your analogy there is pointing out two things. One, is that really why? Why the, what the brain is attempting to do is to reduce uncertainty
Because uncertainty is super expensive. Now, sometimes we like deliberately, you know, cultivate uncertainty, right? Like we do not, you know, we deliberately try to learn things. We don't, you know that we don't know. We, you know, put ourselves in novel situations, you know, we seek novelty and because it's fun and interesting and whatever. Sure. But imagine every single waking moment of your life was like that where you didn't know you couldn't narrow things down from the library to the wing.
To the Bookshelf to the, you know, the to the particular shelf on that bookshelf. YouTuber, fun. Yeah. You it was verified. Yeah,
it would be, that's the label. I would give it would be terrified because I couldn't plan anything or do anything because all possibilities are
open, right? It's and it's just actually metabolically unsustainable and, you know, there are some there are some brains that are wired in a way that they don't predict very well. They don't create these categories very well and so there,
They're dealing with in really unbelievable amounts of uncertainty.
So that's one thing. I is the part of what's the goal here. If you could say, there's a goal is to reduce uncertainty, and I'm going to get to why this has anything to do with emotion in a minute. But I just need to setup the ground rules, or the assumptions, you know, of what I'm, what I'm working with here. So the other thing though that you pointed out, which I think is really important, is that the none of this is static? It's all evolving over time, right? The signals are evolving over time.
So both the signals that are constantly hitting the sensory surfaces of the body and making their way to the brain but also the intrinsic signals in the brain. It's all changing over time. So when we talk about context that's important, how is the brain making a decision about similarity? Like what are the features that are similar? It's, it's not just at a single snapshot in time. It's always happening. Dynamically over time, right? And most of the time, though,
You don't ask your. You don't wait to hear a second sound. You don't, you're not deliberately attempting to figure out what the sound is. Your brain is just sorting it out, right? And it's sorting It Out by narrowing, down the possibilities and there are some selection mechanisms in the brain, that help it, guess better, but also the signals coming from the world.
Are also helping to select which possibility is the right one.
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Stimulus to move right to end. And then some of the more seasoned soldiers are literally having bullets whizzing by their head. And people are dropping Dead all around them. And they're moving forward, steely-eyed and stable and upright. And in part, we look at that and say, okay, their courageous their season, maybe they're desensitized in certain ways, but actually, it fits much better with the idea based on what you're saying.
It fits much better with the idea that they have intimate knowledge, both conscious and unconscious knowledge, that something right next to them is a threat but not a threat worth responding to write exact. But if you were headed straight for them. Yeah, they would. So I quite understand what I
would say it is that it's it's not, you know, I keep referring to things as signals and really I'm just I'm that's like my generic word for a quantity of energy of some sort, you know? But your
My brain every brain is constantly making signal noise distinct. You know like distinctions do I need to care about this? Do I do I not need to care about this, right? And we have ways of learning and we also have ways of queuing each other. So you know humans use eye gaze to Q each other about what is signal and what is noise, right? So if you and I are sitting or let's say we were at a coffee shop and we were in a part of town that I had never been to before and we were sitting having coffee and, you know, a loud siren went by if you turned and looked.
I would probably turn and look because you just queued me that that was something I need to care about. If you ignored it, I would probably ignore it because you just killed me that I didn't need to worry about it. I didn't need to care and we're constantly doing that with each other, and we also do it with little babies and with kids. And that's how we teach children. This is signal, this is noise. This you need to worry about this. You can ignore. And so yeah, your your description is perfect. So what does this have to do any of this have to do with emotion?
In order to answer that part of the question, I want to say so, okay, you've got these signals. The brain is like, has these electrical signals going on. We'll just ignore the hormonal signals for the moment because that's complex, you know, one is complicated. So, it's got the all these electrical signals going on. It's when it's remembering something, it's just basically reinstating a pattern of signals. And it's got these signals coming in from the Sensory Services. Okay? So what's so what is the brain doing? It's a signal.
Processor. So what is it? I don't mean a computer. I mean a signal processor and the engineering sense. So what's it, what is it doing? Without getting into all the Dynamics of prediction and, you know, whatever what the brain is doing, is it's um it's assembling a set of features it. Some of the features that it's assembling are very close in detail to the sensory surfaces of the body. So in primary visual cortex, there's a
Topic map, the details. There are very, very low level, like a line and Edge, you know. Same thing in primary auditory cortex, right? It's Tona topic. So there are tones. But it's very, very, very low level details and we might there are many, many, many, many of these little features. So we would say there's a, it's a high dimensional array. Lots and lots, and lots and lots of features and then and let's just talk about one structure just the cerebral cortex. Let's not worry about. Look, just
But what I'm about to say is, basically true of really the rest of the brain as well. If you take the cortex off the surface of the cortical sheet off the that wavy, you know cortical she take it off the rest of the brain, the subcortical parts and you stretch it out like a napkin, you can see there's a compression gradient there in the architecture of the neurons. So at the primary sensory areas, there are these tiny little pyramidal neurons that are representing these little, these very low-level features.
And they feed into bigger neurons, which feed into bigger neurons, which feed into more bigger neurons. So, what's happening is you've got this very detailed array being compressed and it's dimensionality until you get to the middle of the brain at the front, where there are many fewer neurons, but they're bigger, and they have many more connections. So it's a dimensionality reduction that's happening.
So just to make sure I understand correctly and that the audience understands
The physical world obviously is transformed by our sensory apparatus eye, the retina, the cochlea, the sensing neurons in our skin its physical things mechanical pressure light Photon, sound waves. Okay. Now that's translated into neural code which is chemical and electrical. Yeah. And and those sensory inputs are fairly vast and these high dimension, high dimensionality. So lots of different orientation
Of lines a lot even even though it originates with just three cone photopigments, lots of opportunity for encoding, different shades of color contrast, okay? And all of that. And so you have lots of little neurons to represent all the possibilities of the physical world that are occurring, but as that information is passed, further up along. Sisk, you have to be careful with hide the use of hierarchies because that's controversial nowadays, not for political reasons, but for accuracy reasons, as that information is.
Passed along there's more convergence on to a smaller number of larger neurons. So these are neurons that have access to a lot of information but in coarser
form, right? So they're low, you know? Like like compressing an MP3 like, how an MP3 compresses information, for example. So, the cortex is representing features, so and I represent, I'm just using that in a generic way because that's also controversial about exactly how is the bring. Okay? But, yeah, but it but
But for now I'm using it just in a generic way. So you go from lines and edges to a shape like round shape to a face to, right? So you're basically you're you're you're going, what's happening is there are summaries of summaries of summaries
of some Rosa. I hope everyone hears that because I've been in this field of Neuroscience, a long time as you move along, the neuraxis from the
Three epithelium. Now it sounds very very nomenclature ish but from the surface of the skin in word, you're getting summaries. Yeah. A cent more and more summaries, I think that's so important. That's it. That's it. Like a gazillion dollar statement. Yeah. For understanding of the nervous system.
So but at each of those points, correspond to some mental feature, like a line, or an edge, or a circle, or a square, or a face or, right? But, but now,
Now then you when you when you're in the midline at the front, what are those features? Well, those features are things. Like there are, there are multi modal summaries. Meaning they are summaries of the sights and sounds and smells and right, but they and they are lower dimensional. Meaning they are there coarser. So there are things like threat reward, pleasure.
I mean really abstract, that's what abstract means, it doesn't mean that those representations have no sensory or motor, meaning that it means that threat. For example, a summary can have many different patterns associated with it and the brain is treating them all as equivalent.
This this to me again, feels so, so important for people to understand because as I'm
In this and this word summaries, it's just ringing my mind. It's so important because one of the core components of my experience of my emotions because that's all I can really say. For sure. My subjective interpretation and labeling of my own emotions is that they are pretty broad bins.
Like I described really broad beans and so that was that's where I was exactly where I was going. So what about the word anger? Where is that?
That represented like well that's a that's a one of these multimodal abstractions. In fact, anger is just a couple of phonemes, it's a couple of sounds but those sounds the sound of anger corresponds over thousands of instances that you've learned in your life. Two very different patterns of sensory motor features that's right. Because what's going on in your body?
During anger can vary. What way you move your face in Anger can vary depending on the situation, what you see, someone else doing and anger can vary in. So,
The word anger or any word is actually just a multi-modal summary of many, many, many, many instances, which are in their sensory and motor features the sensory and motor meaning very
different and, and it seems to me are highly constrained by Developmental and cultural experience be glue. Because just today, I learned that there's a word in Japan for the feeling that one has
Of having gotten a haircut. They don't like there's a word in Germany that pertains to the feeling of wanting to punch someone specifically because of the look on their
face. So we're like you like you they to you. It feels like they're asking to be punched in
the face, even so you added yet more dimensionality to it. So, upon learning just those things just today, there is additional dimensionality brought in such that if I were to ever want to punch somebody in the face.
Simply because of the look on their face. That I wouldn't necessarily label that as anger alone, it now has another dimension to it. And so, I think I'm finally, I think I'm finally starting to understand how the Developmental and the cultural influences plus the fact that language is a pretty crude descriptor for this neural process that you're
describing. Absolutely absolutely. But okay, so but been before you use the word granularity and so I'm
Use that word to. In fact I've uh I've coined that phrase emotional granularity just as an aside you know I coined that phrase almost 30 years ago and now people study it like it's a phenomenon which is cool in a sense but also I kind of want to keep reminding them like that's a word that refers to process. It's not a thing. It's a process and the but the process is
so when the brain is a category Constructor,
How fine-grained are the categories, how precise of the categories, right? Like if you're using, if you're feature of equivalence that your brain is using, is threat, you're in really big trouble, because there are like a gazillion different sensory motor patterns that could go with threat. So, your category is going to be massive. So how does the brain figure out, which of those? Massive number of options is the one to you.
Use in this, in this instance, if on the other hand, you don't just want to use sensory motor patterns as the features of equivalence or the features that you're using to say. This instance, right now is similar to these past instances. If I had to search like right now, what is similar to right now? It would be me sitting across the table from somebody who has a beard and is dressed in black. And, you know, there are a lot of details there, that probably don't matter, right? So
You'd be searching for a specific match from the past. That's not very efficient either. So you need something in the middle and then beat that is to say, you need to have your brain has to be able to make categories that are more fine-grained but not super fine grain but they have to be more fine-grained than just threat.
You want to keep the in the library analogy that I made earlier. You want to keep the rest of the library accessible at some level. Yeah, so you're not just staring at that one book.
But if you use the category bad, this feels bad. Then your brain is basically going to be
Partially constructing an entire Wing full of books. Like up Tire Wing full of options. If you use the word angry, then maybe it's a bookcase. It's constructing. A bookcase full of options and a category. That's the size of a bookcase. And if you were using the word frustrated, then maybe it's a shelf. The brain can learn to construct categories at different scales of generalizability. So if I'm in an
Since and my brain is making a guess. Is it drawing from past instances that were associated with the word? Anger, were associated with the word fear. Maybe it's some combination. It's the words are just features, they're just sounds. There are also all sorts of other features. Like what was my heart doing? What what kind of motor actions did I make? What did I see next? So, the point being that, I'm trying to bring here is that
It's not like your brain creates an emotional state and then labels it. What your brain is doing, is creating a category of possible futures of what's going to happen, what it's going to do next, and that state is largely determined by the, what the brain is remembering and how its drawing from that huge population, that huge library of options, which books
Is it sampling?
I love this so much, because it explains so much. That frankly is been perplexing to me. And also, somewhat troubling to me, like, for instance, I hear about emotional intelligence, you know. And sometimes I wonder whether or not true, emotional intelligence would be what you, just described the understanding of how this process works so that you can work with it. And I definitely want to talk about how one can work with this knowledge because I think it's incredibly powerful in its explanatory.
Tory power, but also it's actionable power. The other thing is that it's clear to me just based on my experience today of hearing these words from other cultures, that relate to different emotional states that this system. Unlike a lot of systems in the brain. I like to think is fairly plastic, like the moment that, you know, that there are additional Dimensions to sadness, anger, Etc. There's something comforting about that. What's really unsettling is the idea that we have such
Rod bins that we are we would Define you know a near infinite number of situations as just fear, that would suck. That's not a good existence and yet I have to ask whether or not you think that as a species not as a culture but in our entire species, whether or not we are taking the exact opposite approach that we're sort of moving into the Emoji ization, is that a word? I'll make it a word and people can assault me in the comments, the Emoji.
Ization of this very rich and complex system. We're starting to get into this mode of like, I'm going to post an angry face and therefore, like, this is a bad. I'm angry at you. This is a bad interaction. We're gonna get some combat, potentially combative or and you know, maybe Twitter, Acts or Instagram or other, social media sites are kind of the epitome of this, where you reduce this High dimensional space in. You keep the the sensory stimulation very high. It's movie after movie after movie and color and sound and
We'll be doing crazy parkour stuff in bears, eating giraffes, or whatever it is. It's probably not bear seeing drafts with luck. You know what I mean? And you can see stuff that sexual and violent and political and emotional and sweet, and then the cats are kissing the monkey and you're like, or the monkeys kissing the cat. And so it's high, dimensionality in terms of sensory space. But then, what do we call it? We're like, oh, this is an emoji, you assign an emoji, your heartening, something you're giving a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. So I almost feel like we're trying to we're
Regressing to a state where we're kind of like an infant trying to figure out, like, what the hell is going on and we're saying, you know what, you get, like, six categories of response. When in reality, we should probably be expanding the number of different responses that we can have in order to accurately match, the way that, our nervous system actually works.
Yes, exactly. There are many different things we could talk about with respect to the summary that you just gave which I I think is completely accurate. So what I would say is that if you
Through even just the last I don't know hundred sarso years like the 19th, you know, 19th 20th centuries. Maybe you can see that the complexity of the of people's responses
Expands and contracts, right? So for example, this is something that I've written really speculatively about. But one of the things that I found really interesting is that, you know, authoritarianism authoritarian thinking is the reduction of complexity to some things that are really, really simple. Like you're getting rid of all the complexity to, you know, basically these very very coarse low.
All judgements and Things, become black and white.
It's the avoidance of complexity so that there can be simple single answers to things and it happens in human culture at times and then then there's an expansion of complexity at times too. So what predicts that like what is it in the human nervous system or our Collective human nervous, you know like we're just a bunch of brains attached to bodies, interacting with other brains and
Right. So like what is it? That causes these ripples of. And I have some thoughts about that. That are really, really, really speculative. But I think the other thing that's really important is that we've talked about, it was a little go back to our cortical sheet that we've. And by the way, this is just one compression gradient in the brain that are others too, right? There are at least four others that I can think of. So this is just one but all
In grades work. The same way, which is that. Now we've talked about going from the low-level details compressing to these multimodal summaries. He's really like simple features that are right but that compression is what Engineers would call lossy. Meaning you lose the information, you lose the information. So when you go from lines and edges to a face,
Those neurons, they just know the face. They don't have they lose what they've thrown away. The details they thrown away. Those details are gone for those neurons that are representing if they don't have access to it, they don't have access to it. We don't so we said well the brain is making a guess it's making a guess about what these what this big very very high-dimensional you know soup of signals in the world and in the body like what do they mean right? When the brain makes a guest it starts
With the compressed low dimensional signals. It starts with the features like anger or like threat or it starts with these summaries and then it has to infer or guess at every synapse. There's a guess that's being made about what the details are at the next level. Because what's happening is the guess is basically the brain going from these really General things to these very specific.
Sensory motor patterns, it happens along the cortical sheeted happens also down the neuraxis down the nerve, you know, from the cortex, to the midbrain, to the brainstem to the spinal cord. You have to go from a representation of, you know, run to the actual physical movements of muscle, spindles and you know, angles of joints and things like that. So what you're doing is you're going in the other direction, you're adding
Your particular rising and the brain is guessing it's guessing. Well, if it's using anger, as the general feature will, which it, which instance of anger is it and what are the specifics that are going to happen? And
what are the buttons and forgive me? But what and what are the Adaptive steps that were? I might take or not take because I'm quoting a lot today, so forgive me. But in the words of the Great
Arrington Nobel prize-winning physiologist. The final common pathway is movement this movement and that and and movement is nuanced, right? Humans, I suppose have among the greatest variety of different speeds and types of movement. I think about parkour gymnastics. Think about then what like a cheetah can do cheetahs. Are impressive. Gymnast is truly impressive in terms of the range of movements and speeds Etc. In any event, the ultimate choice to the nervous system Master make is whether or not to move.
Which direction how fast or stay still move forward, move back. And I just I'll just add because I'm hoping that you'll expand on this. It's been said before that ultimately the nervous system is trying to make decisions about yum yuck or met. Like look at my again, move towards something. Am I going to move away from it or am I just going to stay
put? Well then lie that's only at the that's a very that I would say that those are very low dimensional features so those are those compressed features but that's not the only
Anything the brain has to decide, that's just a misnomer.
Well, I can get out of this little pickle that I just put myself in by saying that I didn't say that. Now I won't quote who did because he's a very famous neuroscientist, but he tried to reduce it all, he's at Caltech, it, he's not somebody who studies emotion, he studies the visual system, but he said that, you know, that that there's a, that the neural circuits maybe six is. He studies mice are essentially Bend into yum yuck and may outputs. And, and I've always liked it on the one hand because three is
And it's simple, but rarely is the way that we describe things, the way it actually
works, we would, you know, in studying humans we would say, well that's affect affect that's mood or, you know, it's just like, is it is it should I move towards it? Is it Pleasant? Should I move away from it? Is it unpleasant or, you know, is it irrelevant basically, I don't care. Okay, think about when you're feeling horrible, you just feel, you feel whore, you just feel you feel bad. What do you do? You don't know what you don't know, because you don't have a plan of action.
And that's ultimately that is what those those compressed like summary features. Those very low course features, they have to be decompressed into details. Otherwise you don't know what to do. So ultimately, what the brain is doing is its sampling from the past.
Based on similarity to the present to plan an action. And when I say action, I don't just mean skeletal motor action. Like moving a limb. The first actions that are planned, are the actions of coordinating the heart and the lungs. And you know, all of the internal actions that are required to support the motor, the skeletal motor movements. So your brain is making is categorizing and making it's creating a category.
It's there are options there, those options, the motor plans. Begin with should the heart beat faster. Should it be slower? Just blood pressure needs to go up? Should the, you know, should the blood vessels constrict or should they dilate? Should the breathing be deeper or more shallow? I mean, those are the first plans that get made. And then milliseconds later. There are the skeletal motor plans and then your experience of the world derives from those.
Motor plants those. Visceral motor, that is the plans for the viscera for the internal organs and the skeletal motor. So I'm just going to refer to them as motor. Those motor plans actually give rise to your experience of the world. There's not some state that exists as an emotional state, which then you apply a label to the label, is just a set of features.
That are useful for generalizing from the past, to the present and the bin size or the you know of of what a word refers to can change, it can change its different for different people and it can change in your lifetime and you can add new Bins. That is you can. So for example there's a there's a concept Goose skin look which I probably just butchered. So if you speak Turkish, I'm
But it's like it has features of it of like loss and like people blocking your goals. So we would say it's anger and sadness together, that's just skin. Look when you lose something in your pissed off about it. That's a but that's a category on its own, right? It's just a different way of parsing that stat, that really detailed soup and the more words, you know, the more words are just
It useful for pointing to a set of features that are similar to each other. So what I mean by that, is if I say to you, Andrew, I had pizza last night for dinner.
Pizza to sounds two syllables that those two syllables sat they stand in for like 50 different sensory and motor features.
Because I don't have to say to you. I had a food. I didn't have piece of last night, but let's say I did, I had a food that was round and flat and had sauce and also cheese, and it had mozzarella cheese and also a little parmesan cheese and it had mushrooms on it and a little bit of Olive and, you know, em and that's like really, really detailed and complicated, but instead I can just say I had pizza, two features, two sounds who syllables phonemes
And with those two phonemes, I have just communicated to you in your brain. My brain had 50 features, it was representing of details and now, I have just communicated those to you, or some number of them with two sounds very efficient. Now, of course, you might think that I was from Chicago and had deep dish pizza and I'll just resist. I don't want to like offend anybody from Chicago.
It's not. That's not all Kiza.
It's
not real pizza, right? So you could then ask me was it but you're from Chicago? Is that deep dish pizza? And then I would say, no no, I'm actually from Toronto which is just like New York and so notice thin crust pizza which is really the only kind of piece of there is just saying but you know but my point is that words are just stand in for their just lowly these like low dimensional features. These kind of gross features that stand in
In for many many many, many little detailed features and that's how we communicate with each other.
And we are constrained by, you know, what we know in our yes. So and what we can say and are the extent of our
Capital just say that little babies, three months old, they don't speak yet and they don't understand language, but they can use words to learn abstract categories. So would abstract just means that the the word refers to many different patterns
Of sensory motor features. So, the word is the category. The things that make the instances similar are a function or goal, not like the sensory motor features. So you say to a baby, very explicitly like, because if we're talking about three or four month old babies, right babies can also do this implicitly to, but in experiments you say do baby look sweetie. This is a
NG and you put the bling down and it makes a beeping noise. And then you say, now this looks different, feels different, right? Smells different look sweetie. This is a bling
It beeps. Now you take something else which also is different and you say look sweetie, this is a bling. Now the baby expects this to beep,
by the way, folks. Just listening Lisa just gave three examples first with a pen, then a coffee mug, and then her very own watch three very distinct objects. But all of which make that are told, the baby is told make a
Sound and they will spin those three. Yeah. Visually distinct objects. Functionally distinct objects into one single bin because
they make a because they are sharing a function, which is to be,
I think this is so is so important and I and if I may, I I want to ask whether or not, we can take this incredible understanding of emotions because that's really what we're talking
about.
What we're really talking about how the brain my version of how the brain works and how emotions emerge out of this system basically.
And and absolutely, you described it far better than I could and, and an anchor that to this concept of movement. But the movement is the final common path with the understanding that the movement system and forgive me, but that we have systems in the brain and body that allow us to move. That's for sure systems. Plural that they run in both directions in order.
Other words how we feel? What we feel. Our emotions has some bearing on the movements that are more or less likely for us in a given context and our movements clearly can also influence the way that we feel
internally. Well, it's well, I mean, so if if we just look at how things are happening, here's here's what the anatomy tells us, that when the brain makes a guess that guest starts, as a motor plan starts as a visceral motor.
I do plan and a skeleton motor plan,
so heart rate changes breathing, changes blood, pressure changes and and potentially skeletal muscle
movement, right? And literal copies literal copies effort and copies of those signals are sent to. They propagate to the sensory areas telling the brain telling those neurons. This is the last time we made this in this context when this other stuff just happened the like this temporal context, right? The and
Made these movements. Here's what we saw next here is what we felt next. Here's what we smelled next. So
yeah I think this is an image that pops in my mind. We should explain to people what you ference copy is in neuroscience and their Anatomy the connection to a structures called an afferent with an A and the connections out from a structure is called the efferent. But the way I was thinking
matter, it's just basically the point here is that in our experience, in our, in the way, the brain and your brain conjures, an
Perience. Okay. And that experience is that you feel something. First, you see, something. You feel something you act that's not what's happening. What's happening is your brain is preparing the action first and the feeling what end your experience comes from that action preparation? So it's a copy, it's like, literally you have axons that are sending motor signals down the, you know, brain stem to the spinal cord and literal copies.
Of those axons like those axons have branches that collateral branches, that just send axons other places the same signal that is being sent to your spinal cord to move stuff in your body. That same signal is being sent to other neurons in the brain as predictions of the sensations that are going to happen in a second. From now, a moment from now, probably faster than second. But you know, in a couple milliseconds
If you move and so, yes, it is the case that what you feel is linked to what you do, and what you do is linked to what you feel, but not in this simple mechanistic way that that neuroscientists and psychologists have been using for ever you, it's not like you are, you, are you your, probed by a stimulus? You see something you hear something and then you process it and evaluate it and then you react to it. No.
That's not, what's happening, what's actually happening under the hood? Is that based on how things are right now? Your brain makes a guess or some guesses and those guest is start as motor plans and the consequence of those motor plans are predicted Sensations. And then, of course, sensory signals are coming from the sensory surfaces and they say. And here's the really, here's to me the really the most mind-boggling thing about this cool explanation.
If your Sensory neurons, in your sensory areas are already. So, they're firing that the action. Potentials, the spiking has changed based on these prepared motor movements. These are sensory predictions. And, you know, when I give talks and on my website, I have some cool examples of how this works. You can experience it yourself. You you know, start to experience, you know, you hear things that aren't there. You feel vibrations in your chest that aren't there because your brain is predicting. It's predicting these
So let's say the sensations come but the sensory signals I should say, let me see. So the sensory signals from the sensory surfaces of the body, make it to the brain. If you have, if your neurons are already firing in a way to anticipate those signals, those signals, just confirm the firing and then they're done, they don't make it any further into the brain.
So when you're predicting well, your experience is constructed completely by your brain. The signals from the sensory surfaces are there just to confirm or
To change the signal. So if there's things you didn't anticipate, then those errors of prediction, those are the signals that are propagated and become compressed and stuff. And we have a special name for that in science. We call it learning, you know, Andy Clark is a philosopher who writes a lot about prediction, predicting brain and and so on and he talks about normal everyday experience as being a
Controlled hallucination.
That's true. Yeah, I subscribe to that. It's a fairly adaptive in most circumstances controlled hallucination. But but it has its limitations. And it, I mean, what we were talking about if I could be a somewhat of a Submariner on, you can tell me if my summary is, to course, is that first of all, that, that neural systems and the Brain. Let's just call the nervous system because we're talking about brain and body.
Or incredibly Dynamic. There's a bunch of inputs. Those inputs gets are incredibly elaborate. They get summarized the summary prepares the body for a certain action that's a motor commands, premotor commands and then some action may or may not be taken, but already, as soon as an action is taken or not taken the whole state of the neural system is different. It's changed as a consequence of Joseph of what just happened now. Of course, when people hear that, and when I hear that, indeed, I
I feel like, wow, it's a tough system to study because these are dynamical neural systems and and we have the technology to put people in functional scanners and look at what lights up. So to speak, we have the capacity to ask people how they feel based on questionnaires, but you can imagine that's incredibly crude. So then he give them likert scales of, you know, rate from 1 to 10, how happy or sad you are. And so you're adding some some depth and dimensionality to it, but it's incredibly crude. It's nothing like real experience.
And if somebody's more verbal less verbal, maybe they some at a size more or less mean example, comes to mind it, you know, occasionally you learn from social media, which often I learned from social media. And someone once said, I don't think in thoughts, I think in feels, and I thought, okay, great, you're probably also from Northern California and I said, wait, Andrew stop being so judgmental. What do you mean? And I asked, and they said I experienced emotions in their mind first as a as a bodily State. Then the
Abel comes much later, that's not how it works. For me, it feels fairly more integrated brain and body for me. But other people started chiming. In know, I think of emotion I experience emotions. Clearly as a verbal label, it's all in their head. And so you start to realize that we might all be encoding. The World Slightly differently or very differently and it's changing in time. So then the question becomes, you know, how what are the anchor points in terms of our understanding of emotions that?
We can work with and and the following questions come to mind. Neither you nor I are clinicians. As far as I know, I'm certainly
not. I was actually trained as a clinician so there you go.
I'm wrong again. No but I mean I
haven't I haven't practiced in like really gives aliens of
years and will your where you're more than qualified to answer the question. I'm about to ask which is to me, there is a great
Conflict of information in the psychology Psychiatry and let's just call it wellness and mental health space, which is when we are feeling lousy like not good. Let's put valence on it. Just lousy, I don't want in the state that we were having an emotion that we don't want to have.
There's an entire category of information that says, you need to feel your feelings into feel your feelings. You need to acknowledge that there there, you need to go into the feeling, maybe even full catharsis, you need to amplify the feelings until they quote unquote, leave your body after all Steve Jobs was in to scream therapy and helped him expunge his anger. Who knows you get these examples. He's probably the worst example because it seemed like he was angry a lot from what I hear. But then there's another category of thought, which is
No, you need to use your ability to top-down control inhibition of the cortex on Lower structures. Again, I'm deliberately using crude language here to say. Wait, you know, this is an emotion emotions pass. This is not real. This is just a limited set of High dimensionality stuff that's been summarized. And you know what? Like, I don't need to feel this way I can make myself feel differently. Maybe I'll go for a run. In fact, I always feel better after I go for a run. So,
Even this question, as simple as should we feel are our feelings.
Or should we not feel our feelings? And of course, you would hope that this would be answered appropriately. Such that people don't go harm other people or themselves. But but but assuming that they're not going to harm other people with themselves verbally or physically, then you really get yourself into a bit of a pickle. Like we don't understand what to do with emotions hours or other people's because clearly we don't understand emotions per
se. So I would say I'm going to answer
Your question and then I want to also pick it. The were the I want to pick it an assumption because it's come up actually a couple of times and there's something super important in your descriptions that I just want to pull out for for the listeners because I think it's really important and you're doing it very naturally but I think some people it would it just Bears commenting on. So let me just deal with the question of should we feel our feelings or use our words? You know, we stayed a little kids use
Words like don't throw a tantrum right? But then there was also this other feeling below, just feel it's important to feel and you don't want to get it, have it be pent up
and tells your body and like, like a little pillow. Yeah. I mean, there's scream therapy bite, the pillow Scream, the boat are the pillow. And there's into, you can pay five thousand dollars for a week of doing this. Yeah, so they'll tell you you're gonna feel better at the end. So the
answer there is it's the wrong question. Like flexibility is important for everything. Always right? So first of all,
You don't have you don't have emotions in your body, your body doesn't keep the score, you know,
yeah, great book title because it's super catchy. But with all due respect to I think the important work of Van Der kolk I think it over simplified and led people to believe that their back pain was trauma.
And that all trauma is some out of size and it's
not no it's not but I would go further and say, like first of all, your body does keep the score. Your brain keeps the score, your body is the scorecard. That's super important, and he has done really important work. But his explanations for why things work is scientifically incorrect. It just is because we don't feel things in our bodies. We everything we feel, we feel
In our brains, we don't see in our eyes, we see in our brains, of course, we need our eyes, but we don't see in our eyes, just like, if you, you know, pinch your your hand with, you know, take skin and pinched between, you know, two fingers, the skin. You don't feel that. Actually in your hand, you feel it in your brain. That's the magic of the brain in a sense. So what I would say is it,
It depends on the situation and what your goal is sometimes it is useful to use your words and sometimes it is useful to go for a run.
It just depends on what your goal
is, when both those cases, your that you gave both. Those example, scuse me your it's a way of Shifting off the emotion, I guess, what I'm asking is, well, sometimes we
don't want to shift off the emotion, sometimes the most sometimes, the wisest thing to do is live in the emotion, that is, you know, sometimes discomfort sometimes, when something feels bad. It doesn't mean something is wrong. It just might mean that you're doing something hard.
Well earlier, I wrote when you're high,
The broad categorisation of emotions. I wrote down, you know, simple as good, when it feels good. You like I just feel really great but then when things feel lousy well, that's where Nuance could be
beneficial. Yeah. Absolutely. Because we're because emotions are recipes for Action. When you go from be lit, feeling bad to feeling angry or sad, it's a recipe for action. And I would also say in this just, this is an analogy, but I sort of, I stand by it. You know, when I was
Was I had major back surgery a couple years ago, and I know something about chronic pain, it's not my area of study but I know something about it, because I've and reanalyzed some, some datasets and I've read a lot. So I'm not an expert. But, you know, I have ideas and I thought to myself, well, I just I don't want to end up with chronic back pain. So what I did was I made sure after I got through the first couple of weeks where I really needed oxycodone. So that I could walk you know, I was up and walking the same day
Surgery, if you could call it walking and sort of a euphemism for like, hobbling around on a, with a walker. But I made sure that I felt the pain that is I dosed myself with discomfort quite deliberately because I wanted to make sure that I'm sorry for using, you know, Cartesian language. I don't know how else to say this, I wanted my brain to be taking in the prediction error. I wanted my brain to, to feel the
I wanted to focus attention on the changing disc, you know, that the changing discomfort over time because it meant that my body was healing as the discomfort got less, but my brain would never feel that discomfort changing if I took painkillers and because the prediction error, the things that the brain doesn't predict are teaching signals.
And I think it's true also in your life, like sometimes you want to feel it because you want to feel the discomfort because it's instructive about something and sometimes it's not and that's maybe that's not really an answer. But the only way that you can figure that out for yourself is to do it. Sometimes, if you're always getting rid of discomfort, you never know when it's useful and it is useful sometimes. But now I want to get to this point that I was making before like we are talking about feeling and emotion interchange like their energy.
Changeable and they're not right. So here's how I would say it. Your brain is always regulating your body 24/7. And your body is always sending sensory signals back to the brain about the sensory state of the body and our nervous systems aren't wired for us to experience those sensory changes.
That are happening in the body in any degree of detail.
We're just not and it's a good thing. Like right now as we talk here our hearts are beating and are, you know, pancreas is squishing stuff out. You know, liver is, you know, filtering and like, you know, oxygen concentrations are changing. Like, oh there's a whole drama going on inside each of us and our listeners. And we're largely, we're not aware and I hope our listeners aren't aware because if they were they would not be listening to anything. We were
And they'd be completely, you know, in enraptured or in discomfort at what's going on inside them.
Instead the brain creates a low dimensional summary, this gross kind of like barometer which is feeling effective feeling we call it or you could call it mood, but scientists call it affect with an A Feeling Pleasant feeling unpleasant, feeling worked up, feeling, calm, feeling comfortable, feeling uncomfortable. It's kind of a general barometer of the state of the body. And it's not a motion that those feelings, those features of feeling are
Features of Consciousness because your brain is always regulate your body. Your body's always sending signals back to the brain. The brain is always representing them in this low dimensional way, whether you're paying attention or not like, whether the brain is focusing. Its, you know, applying attention to those neurons or not, the in those signals are there.
And even when we're not emotional,
you know, like if you're driving on the highway and somebody cuts you off and you think what an asshole, the asshole - of that person that intensity of that negative effect is you experience it as a property of that person. But really, it's coming from you. It's not a property of that person. It's that's a feature of your experience in that moment.
And effect is always there. Sometimes it's in the foreground, sometimes it's in the background. But it's always there. And it's a summary of physical things which is why it helps to, if you take ibuprofen or Tylenol it will reduce I mean studies show. It reduces negative feeling. If you go for a run, if you go for a walk, if you shift your attention to the outside world.
Then the features that of experience that are derived from the inside World diminish. That's why going for a run helps or going for a walk helps or, you know, getting sleep helps, right? These are all things where you're changing the state of your body. And so the sensory state of your body is changing and so your affect changes. But emotions are the story that the brain tells about what caused the
Signals that affect derives from. So what caused those changes? What do I need to do about those changes? That's, that's against, it's a much bigger event than just these features of experience which are all features of Consciousness which are always there. They're always there. And in fact,
In our culture.
We pathologize people when they just experienced their bodies as physical Sensations and not as emotions. Like we say, oh, that person is so much somatic sizing or so much sizing, they're not. They should, they're really there, they should be experiencing an emotion. But really they're just experiencing a stomachache and that's bad but that's actually a judgment call that is probably sometimes wrong. Sometimes it's probably better to experience a stomach ache. Sometimes it's more
Active part of being emotional intelligence, is knowing when not to construct an emotion.
you know, like right before the Cove ID pandemic was announced officially I was in New Zealand giving talks and my daughter
Who was it? Who was in college at that time was flying literally like I think less than a week before the pandemic was announced. She got on a plane and she flew to New Zealand to meet me because it was spring break and I always would bring her with me on spring break and in that and I remember really vividly, I was in New Zealand, there was only one case, one case of Cove ID in New Zealand at that point. And I got on the phone to my
Husband. And I said, I'm experiencing a very high level of arousal and it's very, very unpleasant.
Now, my husband knows me very well, and he said, yeah, there's a lot of uncertainty and I said, I know. Now he didn't say to me, well, you're anxious and you just don't really know it. I, because I wasn't anxious, I was feeling uncertain, and as, you know, or maybe people are know that when there's a lot of uncertainty, there's also a lot of arousal because the brain is attempting to learn and the neuromodulators that are
And
for learning new things happen to also cause a subjective sense of arousal. And some, they actually also modulate your autonomic nervous system, so your heart can be faster and whatever and our go to explanation for what that is, is to experience that arousal as anxiety, but I was uncertain and remember that how your brain. The story it's telling itself. The category it's making is a plan for action. Well, what do you do in anxiety and fear?
You freeze or you run away, what do you do in uncertainty? You forage for information, you tolerate the discomfort and you forage for information, which is what I was doing when I called and said, what should we do? Should i m the airport and turn around and come back, or should we have a vacation? Like, I don't really know. And you know what, I ended up doing was foraging for information for another couple days and then made a split-second decision in the air when we were flying from one Island.
The other in my just reroute it us, and we went home and then the borders closed, like two days later, you know? But my point is that this is not just, you know,
Psychological, mumbo-jumbo, you can train yourself to experience your heart pounding in your chest.
As determination when my daughter, this is all in how emotions are made these examples, but they're true. I mean, my daughter is just the this book. I wrote a couple years ago when my daughter was 12 years old. She was testing for a black belt in karate, she was 5 feet tall not even and she was testing against these like massively large adolescent boys, okay? Who were like a foot taller than her
And her Sensei who was a 10th degree, black belt didn't say to her, don't be afraid, he said, get your butterflies flying in formation and I was like enraptured. I was like, oh my God this guy is totally brilliant. That is the best, you know, meaning to give to arousal that changes the meaning of it. What you do when you create an
Motion is you're giving meaning to those effective feelings and you have more control than you might think and how you do that, you can do it by changing the physical state that gives rise to those feelings. But you can also change it by learning more how to make more categories and how to make them more fluidly. So that you do something different and the it's not that things will
Necessarily feel any more unpleasant or any less or any more pleasant it's that.
The feeling becomes a source of wisdom, it's a cue to do something different.
There's a case where I absolutely believe that knowledge about how emotions and effect and states of the brain and body work which is what your beautifully describing for people. Today is extremely useful in and of itself and I think and I it's a frankly.
It's a refreshing and welcome departure from a lot of the conversations that we normally have on this podcast. Where, you know, we talk a lot about protocols, we talk about tools, so I things that people can do ways, they can implement the knowledge. And here, this is certainly one of those cases as well. But it's a beautiful one and a very important one where
The knowledge itself, just the knowledge of additional words for different states. I love the example of butter, putting butterflies in the formation because it it inherent to that is that you're not trying to get rid of the Butterflies quite the opposite. Yeah, you're deploying them in certain ways and there's an action step in a psychological step there, of course that's required. But that it isn't, you know, if you morning sunlight for an average of ten minutes to set your circadian rhythm, which is something that I say over and over again, I'll go into the grave saying that.
They'll probably put a window over my grave so sunlight can get in at this point, but we should be fine with me. But in any case knowledge is power, something that we hear but it's not always true often. It's knowledge is power, but you need to do X, Y, and Z in a certain order, but here what you've provided and you your continue to provide is knowledge that people can use that.
Real estate within their brain. I'm deliberately not giving it a name because it's distributed real estate that allows them to take an unpleasant feeling and work with it that it has more dimensionality than we probably realize. That's becoming clear to me that rarely. If ever is there less dimensionality, you
can always give it more Dimension ality by just shifting your attention and you can practice this really. So, you know, like there's a story that I tell about when
The brief moment when I tried to learn how to paint, you know. And so there's an object, like a cup. And you have this three dimensional object and you want to render it on a two-dimensional canvas. So you could just try to draw the cup. And then what you get is a pretty shitty looking, you know, cup. But what what a realist painter will teach you to do is to take the cup and to break it apart into pieces of light and then what you try to paint
What are the pieces of light? So you're transferring your first? What you're doing is you're taking this very low dimensional course object called a cup and you're breaking it into tiny little pieces of Light, which is what the visual system, which is what the visual system does. And so what you're doing is you're categorizing it differently in order to emphasize the features that are more high-dimensional that are in there right there in there in in the brain but you can. But what you're doing is essentially is your your
Having the brain, your brain is applying attention to, basically focus more on those details. And then you transfer the details on to the two-dimensional canvas and what you get is a pretty decent looking. Three-dimensional Cup on a two-dimensional canvas unless you're me and then it still looks shitty, you know, and so maybe I'll take it up again sometime in the future, but my point is that you can do that with your own.
Our own sensory condition of your body in a motion. You can deliberately focus on what your heart is doing to the you're the best of your ability that you can sense it, right? Or you can deliberately focus on your breathing or you could deliberately focus on what your muscles are, how they how tense they feel you can you can change the dimensionality of your experience by the shifting of your attention.
Love it. And forgive me for giving another example, but I think it's one that will resonate with both of us and hopefully with our listeners as well.
Just the great Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author talked about. And wrote about, you know, he'd work with these patients that were either had locked in syndrome or severe autism or severe Tourette's or Parkinson's. And you know most people would even clinicians who specialize in those areas would look at those people and say that they're living in a diminished world. It's they lack capacities that other people have. And
And it's all about the, the absence of certain abilities. And and then what he did, eventually was incredible. He loved animals. So he would spend time thinking about what it would be like, for instance, to be a bat hanging in the corner of a room and experience the room, not through vision. But mainly through echolocation and he would spend a lot of time thinking about that. He also did a lot of drugs at one point his career and then stopped because they were very destructive, drugs, not just psychedelics
Also methamphetamines, yes, he has that, but eventually changed his practice to trying to experience human emotion. But first think about animal sensory experience and he would do that for lots of different types of animals, octopuses, and bats, and all these different things. And then it allowed him in his words, it allowed him to then interact with patients in a way where he could feel maybe even empathize a little bit with how they experienced life and then he would write books about it in a way.
Way and here I'm borrowing someone else's words that story did these people into almost greater larger-than-life characters. And now, of course, he wasn't trying to detract from their suffering, but he was trying to give people an understanding of what that suffering was like through their actual experience. And he did in my opinion and the opinion many other people, a masterful job in doing that job and it. But it came through much in the same way that your art teacher said, you know, pay attention to the way the
The changes in light across the the object as opposed to trying to drop draw, the object themselves that when we. So that the takeaway here that I think we're arriving at is that you've provided, is that, if we take a, if we add dimensionality to our description of or experience of the sensory inputs and there's a ton of it to reach two and we maybe even come up with some new internal labels or language-based labels that we
experience the world and much richer and much more adaptive ways.
Absolutely. And I love, I love your stories. And I love this story in particular, about Oliver Sacks because it resonates with my experience when I was reading Ed Young's new
book. If first, he wrote, We contain multitudes, which I think won a Pulitzer. And then, what is the recent one with the animal and immense were an
immense world? And what I, what I was thinking was, you know,
It's a first of all, it's a masterful masterful, masterful book, I wish I had written that book. I wrote him a fan letter. I was like, who's this amazing book? It's an amazing book but because he helps you experience. So what what I want to say is this that there are all these animals that have different sensory surfaces than we do and they can detect signals in the world that are that we that are not relevant to us because we don't have Sensory Services for them.
And it reminds you, first of all, that what you experience as reality is really not in the world alone and it's not in your head alone, it is in the transaction between the two, you know, you're the neurons in your brain and in your nervous system are also part of the reality. And so reality is the transaction, rather Aladar. The are the features that are the transaction between signals in the world and signals in your brain and
The parts of the world that some other animals experience that we will never experience. They're not really part of our reality because they don't interact with any of the anything that we have. But for those animals it's part of their Niche, it's part of their, you know, niches just the word for the parts of the world that matter to you basically. And I was thinking that if people read this book and, you know, maybe it will help them have empathy for other people who don't have Minds, like there's and who
Own experience the world in the way that they do your description of what what, Oliver Sacks his, what his his actions were in his goals. It did occur to me that this book by Ed, Yong would be a great tool.
For helping people to understand that the way that they experience the world, it might be different than how other people experience the world and even a little bit of a window on that, it would be a good
thing. So I'd like to ask you more about this word effect and then I'd like to discuss how things that we do or don't do might be useful for putting us in Broad categories of effect so that we might experience
They're arrays of emotions. So this is my attempt to understand affect in an effort to think about some actionable items. Absolutely. I love the word affect the way you described it or setting up a potential or a series of potentiality is for different emotions to occur. I make it a point to get sunlight in my eyes in the morning, to try and wake up my brain and body because indeed, it does. That broadly speaking, I
I make an effort to get good sleep at night because that makes everything better absolutely. When I'm not sleeping, well, or enough it makes everything worse. This is non-clinical, non nuanced language, but I think most people, when they hear affect and they think about the examples, I just gave you kind of understand like, yeah, like when a kid is tired young kid, they get cranky. When were sleep-deprived, you get cranky indeed. There are times when I'm sleep.
Arrived and Little Things. Great on me there, like a splinter, just feels super annoying and maybe even painful, but what I'm well-rested, things are going better, it's not that bad. So tell us more about effect because I think it's a really important Anchor Point for us to understand emotions in ourselves, and other
people neuroscientists.
think about
the sensory systems for touch and proprioception which we call somatosensation as being in the service of motor moves, skeletal motor movements, you really the our sense of touch and even Vision. Actually also works this way and he and actually auditioned us to these senses, actually serve and the brain's ability to control the movements of the body. And the same thing is true.
For the regulating, the systems of the body. So, brains one of their fundamental jobs are to coordinate and regulate the system's inside your body, your heart, your lungs, your gut, you know, all the moving parts and the information, the the sensory signals that that those organs and tissues and so on sent back to the brain,
As I said before, those sensory signals are important to the brain's ability to regulate the body, but we don't feel them directly. We usually experience them as effective feelings, these very simple, physical sorts of feelings, and then we elaborate them in various ways. They really, when they get very intense, that those are the moments when the brain creates a creates emotion out of them.
So the brains regulation of the body, the predictive regulation of the body is the technical term is a low stasis but when I'm explaining this to the public I use a metaphor and you know all metaphors are wrong but some metaphors are less wrong and useful. So the metaphor that I use is your brain is running a budget for your body and it's not budgeting money its budget.
Glucose and salt, and oxygen, and water, and all the nutrients that you need to stay alive and well. And so you can think about withdrawals from that budget like burning glucose or using up oxygen. You can think about deposits like sleeping and eating you can think about you know savings. So when you're with a friend who you trust and you know everything you do actually is just slightly
Less metabolically expensive, right? And you can also think about taxes. Like if you are stressed socially stressed within two hours of eating a meal that same meal will cost you 100 and the equivalent of 104 more calories in the inefficiency that you will metabolize it because of that stress,
meaning you'll burn more
energy, you'll be more inefficient in.
Metabolizing the food. So it's as if you had eaten 104 more
calories, so I had to exactly backward.
And so over the course of a year, that's 11 pounds.
So, when we say that people are taxing on us.
Yeah, we like, it's
literally their their language. What is their language were? So the
way I describe it is that you can think about affect as a quick and dirty summary of the state of your body budget if things are
Going reasonably well, then you'll feel. Okay, you might even feel Pleasant. If you're running a deficit in your body budget, then you're going to feel fatigued or or just stressed and that doesn't mean something is necessarily wrong. Like, for example, when you exercise, you get to a certain point where you've reached your ventilatory load. Usually it's like, you know, 20 minutes in or 10 minutes in or whatever, depending on how hard you're working.
And you start to feel unpleasant and fatigued. But that doesn't mean that something's wrong. That just means that you're working really hard and you have to push through it. And then, you know, when you're, you know, drink water and, you know, you eat afterwards and replenish and then you're fine, right? In fact, you're better. It's a way of building a better stronger future. You
So effect is basically, you know when things when you feeling really worked up, it probably means that something's uncertain somewhere. So I just think about these as like quick and dirty ways of thinking about your your what your what Your affect means. And and then often times as we've said before emotion regulation, that is controlling emotion, really. Actually, it's not so much about changing the meaning of affect its changing the effect.
Um, and so it's useful to understand that affect is tied to the state of your body or actually what is tied to is your brains beliefs about the state of your body, your brain is modeling the state of the body, and that's interception. That's the technical word interception is not your awareness of your body. It's your brains modeling. Everybody what your brain believes to be true about the metabolic state of your body?
And that's how I think about effect. That's how I think about my own affect that's and my daughter actually, who, you know, was depressed for. So I should say depression is like a bankrupt body budget, like you just can't move you feel fatigued. So fatigued that you can't move and you're very distressed, it's like bankruptcy. And actually if you I mean depression is a metabolic illness and if you look at the symptoms of depression,
And they really are about metabolic.
Having metabolic
deficits basically. And it's interesting that one of the Hallmark features of depression subjectively. Speaking is lack of positive anticipation about the future, which makes perfect sense from the perspective of a depleted and body
budget. Yes, exactly. Your end. You're basically think about the fact that prediction error, right? So if you're feeling unpleasant, you're not going to be anticipating Pleasant things, and even if those things that are in the world could give you pleasure, you won't notice.
Them? Because learning from prediction error, things that you didn't predict is expensive. And if you don't have the resources, you're not going to, right? So it's, but anyways, my daughter came up with this after we had this very interesting thing that happened to us on another trip. We were in Sweden because I was giving a keynote at The karolinska Institute and we went, I took her to Sweden and this is when she was recovering from depression and like you know, she is just one of the millions of
Of young adults who, you know, adolescents and young adults who were experiencing depression and we got to Sweden, and she was very, very jet-lagged. We both were was, like, one of these. Like, you know, we had to like, you know, Planes Trains and Automobiles, just, you know, getting there. And she woke up the next morning and she, she looked horrible. She felt horrible. It actually seemed to me.
She was about to enter another depressive episode and I said to her, I basically got her out of bed, I fed her a meal, I gave her for ibuprofen and I put her back to sleep and she got up five hours later and she was absolutely fine. Her mood was fine. Now I'm not telling you that Ibuprofen is the an antidepressant that you should take if you're depressed. But what I'm telling you is that, you know, you said something entered that was so interesting and the been getting. You said, am I fatigued just my body. Do I have pain?
Where's my body hurt? You know, these are well, right? When basically what she was having was she was fatigued and she was having what I would call. It's called the technical word is visceral nociception, which means her stomach hurt her. You know everything hurt and sure as you know her muscles probably heard to but it was really her innards, really? She just was distressed and the ibuprofen helped her get back to sleep. And then she slept and she got up and she was completely fine.
And then we walked around Stockholm for the rest of the day. Talking about this experience, which for her was like, flipping on a light switch. You know, how emotions are made this book that I referred to? I wrote that book for her, I wrote that book for her, but also for me, because it was a way of putting down on paper, all the things that I wanted her to know that and that I thought other people should know about their kids, you know, and maybe even their kids could read it.
But what she did with that was she came up with a new concept.
Called the emotional flu. And the emotional flu is when you're having a bad body budgeting day, and you're just like, you didn't get enough sleep, maybe or, you know, there's some stress at work or at school that you can't get rid of otherwise. You know, my husband likes to say, well, you know, other people's opinions of you are just electrical activity in somebody's head, which I love like, that's just another way of categorizing. It is sort of like taking apart the
Taking apart the cup into pieces of light, right? And so whatever, they're just these moments where you feel depleted and you could use that. I mean, the we usually we often use effect to as a as a indicator of how the world is. You know, if I feel bad, something must be bad wrong in the world, but you have to resist that sometimes because sometimes there's nothing wrong in the world, it's just that you didn't get enough sleep. Or, you know, you need to have a little bit more, you know, protein or maybe.
You haven't gone for a walk and you're stiff for whatever you need to do some
stretching those, sorry to interrupt, but I think people are going to want to Anchor to a few of these positive steps that they can take to to. I don't want to replenish but to shift affect in Positive Directions, sleep, movement nutrition. Yes and I've heard you say before that, we are essentially amino acid forging machines. So you I notice you said protein you didn't say you need a bagel. You said protein we
Go down that rabbit hole. Maybe, maybe we do, maybe we don't, but I want to use this also. Just as a quick opportunity to say as you're saying, all this one can immediately understand why alcohol and drugs of abuse are both so compelling, right? You're not feeling well yeah, so take it, you're feeling tired, take a stimulant that releases dopamine and epinephrine but you're taxing your already taxed body budget. Yes. In a way that then puts you in a more depleted State later or alcohol like
Like yeah, you feel lousy and alcohol never did this for me but friends, I have who are recovered? Alcoholics will tell me that it was like a magic Elixir. It made them feel right. That's their language. But then of course there's a price to pay later because then it drops your Baseline below where it was
initially absolutely 100 110 percent but I just also want to say that. So is serotonin like so are. So is so our ssris may be and when I say, maybe what I mean by that is
If you really have a metabolic problem like say, something's wrong with your mitochondria, or you're recovering from an illness. And you know that we're there's just some metabolic problem in your body.
That metabolic problem is real.
If you start to feel unpleasant you will, I mean, feel unpleasant. It will feel your mood will be negative.
If you start taking Sarah, if you start taking ssris, which will leave more serotonin in the synapses of your neurons before. It's, it's taken up again. That will juice the system, you will be able to spend, you'll be able to move. You'll feel like you have more energy for a while, but your nervous system is is a complex system. And so it's going to make adjustments elsewhere.
To try to deal with that budgeting problem. So exactly what happens when you take drugs of abuse and what happens on the short-term can happen for some people with ssris, on the longer term. We're first two starts to work and then it stops stops working, and you start to gain weight. And, you know, and your because your metabolism is slowing because your brain is attempting to deal with that with that budgeting problem. So it really matters. What the, you know, what the source is? It could be that.
Brain believes you have a budgeting problem but there really isn't one. It could be that there really is one. These things matter to how you treat. It
one thing to just mention about ssris and I unfortunately for reasons of confidentiality I can't cite The Source on this. But let me just say that somebody who's highly informed in the in the landscape of of pharmaceutical treatments for psychiatric challenges. Has told me that there's an emerging Theory among psychiatrists as kind of a collective.
Urging theory, that one of the reasons why nowadays, you hear about so-called treatment-resistant depression, but you did not hear about so-called treatment-resistant depression prior to, the Advent of ssris is that there's a growing body of thought, in the psychiatric Community. The ssris May over time as you're pointing out deplete, the very neural systems that subserve, enhanced mood. So it's, it's different than a drug of abuse. That gives you a very acute effect, like methamphetamine.
Or cocaine or alcohol. But that over time, you may actually be pulling the very neural circuits and neurochemicals that would allow for positive effect deeper, and deeper into the trenches, so to speak. And so there's a growing number of people who simply don't respond to the drugs any longer or other
treatments, right? So I wasn't trying to say the mechanism is the same. I was basically saying the theme is the same and then I'm agreeing with. Yeah, what happens over the short-term with drugs of abuse happens over the longer term with
some people with ssris because it hasn't been recognized yet that the at the basis depression is a metabolic problem and when you have a metabolic problem like diabetes or obesity or like or heart disease, it's not that that causes depression, it's that there's a common problem, which is that somewhere in this very complex system of your metabolism, there's there there's a drag and it produces
Of mood. And that's how you experience it. Sometimes it's good not to turn, it's productive not to turn that negative effect into an emotion. Sometimes, you know, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes you just need to deal with the effect of Problem by dealing with the physical, your physical state. And that's the tricky bit is knowing when is affect telling you, something is wrong with the world and when is it telling you, that there's something wrong with your physical?
That you need to attend to,
I think everything, to me, at least starts with a good night, sleep on a consistent basis, and, and every psychiatric Challenge. And indeed, suicide itself is seems to be associated with an often preceded by challenges in sleeping now changes in in in circadian rhythm. So I think that's why it to me, sleep is the foundation of mental health, and physical
health. Absolutely. And so when I tell people, when they say, well what can I do? I was like, well, there's only if
There's only one thing that you could pick. I would say, get get a good night's sleep on a regular basis. If you could pick two more, I would say eat healthfully like stop eating pseudo food. Don't get me wrong. Like, I love french fries. I love french fries. They're like, that's like God's most perfect food. I mean, really, but
Eat healthfully like eat real food and get exercise. And if you do those three things, I know I sound like a mother and so feel free to roll your eyes at me. But as a neuroscientist those are the actually before you start it with all the you know, mentalizing Jedi tricks. You could just start with this and that would actually take you pretty far
and and and that will resonate very well with our audience, the basics of sleep exercise food
Light and social connection are the ones. They just anchor to those fiber. The ones that that we just keep returning to over and over again. And I think people will say, oh, it's just simple motherly advice but I would I think that those five things even just the one thing around sleep, there's some work that's required to get that done. So, it's not as simple, the categories are simple, but the work that's required to get great sleep as often as one can on a consistent basis, if you're raising kids have a career.
Live in the world. There's a lot there and so that's where I think there's there's a there's an elaboration of things and one needs to learn to be flexible like when you're traveling. How do you do that? When you know friends are visiting? How do you do that when weathers off at? And so on the relationship
piece is something is going to. So glad you mentioned that because you said before and
this was another one of those moments I listen to you, I've listened to as many of your podcast as I possibly can but is I think it was the first or the second one with Lex Friedman?
Um, where you said, you know, we are regulating each other's nervous systems. I will never forget that and, you know, I imagine that you married your husband for a number of different reasons, but when people pair up with romantic partners with friends with coworkers, the ideal situation is one in which we are not taxed where maybe even people and just being around them or just knowing that they are in our lives.
Provides a sort of deposit to. Yeah.
It's a savings. It provides to savings, for sure. And then I
think that's a lot of what emotional resonance to put kind of Pop language on it is all about. Yeah, who feels good to be around? Who doesn't feel
good? I would say the best thing for a human nervous system is another human. And the worst thing for a human nervous system is also another human. And so you really want to be around the people who make you the best, the best version of yourself that you
Could be and that doesn't mean that you always get a savings. Like, sometimes you're sometimes you're taking care of that person. And so you're, you're absorbing some of the, their burden, right? And vice versa. But I would say the research on, you know, social isolation and loneliness and so on shows us that, you know, well, along with research on synchrony and there's a whole bunch of research to suggest that we are the caretakers.
Of each other's nervous systems and it doesn't matter. What your opinion is look, it doesn't, you know, it just but we just that's how we evolved species and so you get to decide what kind of a person are you going to be, you know, are you going to be, are you going to be a savings? Or are you going to be a text?
And in general, it seems that people who decide that they're going to be a savings tend to, because people gravitate towards that and want more of that, and hopefully would provide that also.
I mean, I think the reciprocity piece here feels really, really
strong. Well, that's a really interesting thing about about the synchrony work, right? So there's work that if you research that, if you put people together who don't even know each other, but if they, if they like each other and they have a sense of trust, even after a couple of minutes, they start to synchronize their physical signals, their heart rate starts to synchronize, their movements are just synchronize their heart. We probably synchronizes, because they're breathing starts to synchronize, right? And it's really interesting to see what you typically see, is that
Who is pacing and who is leading, like one person is the leader and then, the other person is the Pacer and I got that language from when I learned hypnosis by the way. And but it switches back and forth. Like who's the leader? Like in a good in a what we say, good like in an interaction that looks productive, it's switching all the time who is, who is pacing? And who is leading. It's not that always one person is is, is in charge so to speak.
Speaking,
we did a series recently on Mental Health with Paul Conti, who is a psychiatrist and the word narcissism came up a few times because people have a lot of questions about that, you know, and he emphasized that narcissists are not confident. They operate from a place of a deficit of pleasure. It's never enough and an intense Envy although that's not how they present. And they're often usually not aware of it themselves, but it's what leads healthy people to feel as if the interactions with those people nurse's office.
It can be very compelling in the moment but they feel very taxed afterwards and kind of confused by what happened and it sounds like it ties back to this lack of synchrony on the positive side of things. It's also clear from what you just said that, when people regulate each other's nervous systems in a way where people are making little deposits, and providing savings for each other, or maybe things are just neutral that those nervous systems are then in a position.
To like, pay attention to other things, too. And not just try and work out the Dynamics.
Oh, for sure. Oh, and that's very true at work. So, there's research showing that especially in the creativity, you know, sector Innovation sector of the economy. The best predictor of performance on the job, is the extent to which people feel I mean after you account for sleep and you know, watering and sleeping and feeding, right? Like the that the best predictor is the amount of trust that you have in your
R team and in your managers because if the world is predictable it could still be things. Could be hard, we even when things are unpredictable, you have people, you know who have your back and so basically what you're doing is you're your they're making you know, deposits or savings. They're causing Savings in each others body budgets. So their their resources can be spent on the harder things which is, you know, failing and you know, call it having to pick yourself back up and try again.
N which is, you know, partly what you do when you're an innovator. So I think that there's also research to show that in your personal life. When you do random acts of kindness for people or when you're kind in general you drive also body budgeting benefit from that, you know, so for a while, I had a friend who we would meet each other for lunch once a month and you know, we would take turns paying. I mean we could both
Both pay for ourselves but we got a got a double hit, you know, he paid for me one month and then I would pay for him one month and then you know, so we get the double hit of, you know, being kind to someone else and you know and also they got the, you know, benefit of someone being kind to them. And I'll just say I think kindness is a
I don't know that we have so many conversations about that in our culture right now but I think kindness is very very underrated and should be, you know, like when I'm when my when I feel like shit, I bake bread for my neighbor.
Who's in his 70s him and his wife. That's what I do when I you know, when I'm not feeling good and you know, Phi I mean after I've taken care of the physical the possible physical causes eye and then I feel great because he's always so
He's always so grateful and and then I felt like I made his day better. And then also he helps me in other ways like with my garden and stuff because he's just like a Master Gardener. And so I feel like we have this relationship where we help each other and I know it sounds really sappy, but
And even though all the research backs up what I'm saying is it doesn't quite describe. The feeling of when someone is just really happy because you just gave them a little surprise and there, you know, like that's that's, there's just some juice in that I think,
on some culture out there, there's a word for that. I'm sorry. Never tell us. That's right. Sure. There is well,
I have to say, I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, I have been looking forward to it for a long time, and you've provided us with a really broad Arc, but also a deep dive into, not, just how emotions are made, not just about effect, but as you mentioned earlier, really how the nervous system works and I am certain, in fact that our audience is taking this in and realizing
Saying that that knowledge is incredibly powerful. The addition of nuance, both to language into sort of self-reflection States as extremely valuable often times when one gets into a conversation that has some level of reductionism and you get into nomenclature and things like that, it can really pull away from the real life experience of something. But this is exactly the opposite. What you've done for us today is you've provided such a rich array of information that adds written richness.
And depth to the real life experience. And, and that is really invaluable. So on behalf of myself and all the listeners and the people watching this, I want to say thank you for today's discussion, thank you for the books, you've written which we provided links to in the show. No captions. Thanks for showing up on social media, despite the, the, the challenges that exist there, sometimes, you always handle yourself. So well there and we will refer people to your
Silent social media accounts as well. And, and just for all the work that you're doing in that your laboratory and you're now director of various things and related to Ai and more. And we'll talk about this hopefully in future episodes, but just a really enormous. Thank you. Thank you.
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East. Thank you. Once again for joining me for today's discussion with dr. Lisa Feldman, Barrett. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
