christian interpretation of teeth falling out in a dream

christian interpretation of teeth falling out in a dream

so momentarily we’re going to return tothe basic story. i want to talk to you today about how yourbrain organizes your perceptions, and th... Januari 24, 2017

so momentarily we’re going to return tothe basic story. i want to talk to you today about how yourbrain organizes your perceptions, and then i want to talk to you about how that’s representedin mythology. the first thing i’d like to point out, iswe talked about the difference between darwinian and newtonian viewpoints a while back. one claim that you might make if you weredarwinian is that whatever your brain is adapted to is reality. that seems to be the central claim of darwinianevolution, is that you can’t define reality any more accurately than that which selects.

i want to tell you about how i think the brainis organized. then i want to show you, i hope, that theway fundamental narratives work can be mapped on to that brain structure. to me that implies that there’s somethingright about fundamental narratives, because otherwise why would they map onto the brainstructures that have evolved to adapt us to the environment? people think about reality in objective terms,and they think about it as decomposable into tiny subunits. i think that’s a limited viewpoint, a powerfulbut limited viewpoint.

i think it’s much more realistic to assumethat whatever reality is, is more like a continual interplay of very, very complex patterns. i suppose you could make the case that thosepatterns are ultimately made out of particles, but even that’s not exactly true becausethe particles have to be arrayed in space. that’s part of the atomic theory is thatthere’s not just subatomic particles and atomic particles, but that they’re arrayedin space. if they’re arrayed in space, that meansthe manner in which they’re arrayed can be informative. and if you reduce the phenoma to the particle,without taking into account the patterning

of array of the particles, then there arelevels and levels and levels of information that you lose. those levels of information are – they maynot be relevant for our physical understanding of the make-up of atomic and subatomic particles,but they’re definitely relevant to whether we can walk across the street safely. i would say if you’re related to realityproperly, the kind of information that you’re processing is precisely the kind of informationthat allows you to cross the street properly; and to do all the other things during yourdays, your weeks, your months that you have to in order to stay alive and fundamentally,in some sense, propagate.

alright, so we’ll start with the neuropsychologicalargument. now we’ve already established the idea thatthese little frames of reference, or maps, or stories, or whatever you call them – i’llcall them stories from hereon in, are little gold-directed units. they’re units of conception and emotionand perception and behavior; they’re little sub-personalities. the sub-personality has an initial startingpoint and a destination point, and then it implements behaviors to transform the startingpoint into the destination point. then you might say, well what forms theselittle sub-personalities?

the answer to that is very complex, but oneanswer is: fundamental motivations. i arranged the fundamental motivations onthis particular diagram pointing out that you can roughly consider motivations, as thosethat maintain you, and those that propagate you. now it’s just a heuristic, it’s just away of thinking about it. under self-maintenance there’s thermal regulation,thirst, hunger and elimination, and there’s all sorts of other things as well, but thosewill do for the time being. under self-propagation there’s affiliativedesire and sexual desire. the things that’s quite interesting aboutall of this is that there are brain structures

that underlie the manifestation of these fundamentalsub-personalities. now people tend to think about them eitheras motivations or emotions, and i think that’s another useful heuristic. you can say that, roughly speaking, that amotivation pops up an entire frame of reference and emotion tends to orient you within thatframe of reference. but that’s only a conceptual simplification,because what you see when look at the actual brain structures is that there isn’t anemotion center – there are a bunch of micro-units in the brain, and there are separable micro-unitsfor different emotions and different motivations and they don’t necessarily have that muchin common in terms of their locale, except

that they tend to be relatively deep in thebrain. some are hypothalamic and some are in theamygdala, and some are in the periaqueductal grey, which seems to be responsible for painresponses. so we can classify things as motivations andemotions, but it doesn’t map one-to-one on the underlying brain structure. now i think what we’ll do with regards totalking about the brain is we’ll start from the bottom up. it’s appropriate to start from the bottomup because you are more dependent on your ancient brain structures than you are on yourmodern brain structures; in that, if you damage

your modern brain structures, and i mean relativelymodern, let’s say the ones that have really evolved in great detail over the last twomillion years, the cortical cap, in particular, the prefrontal cortex, a lot of the visualcortex. if you damage that you can pretty much goon. now you’re going to have one impairmentor another impairment, but you can still stay alive. however, there are structures that are lowerdown that if you damage, that’s the end of you. so for example, the ascending reticular activatingsystem, which is the thing that wakes you

up when you’re asleep at night, when a noiseoccurs that shouldn’t occur. it seems to be the activating center for consciousness,whatever that means. it’s way deep down in the brain, it’sway deep down at the top of the spinal cord, roughly speaking. if you twist your head in a car accident alittle bit too roughly, and you sheer off the ascending fibers, and you’re in a comapermanently, then nothing can wake you up. that’s pretty interesting – to know thatconsciousness, our tendency is to think about that as a function of the higher corticalsystems, is dependent completely on something that is unbelievably ancient.

so it begs the question, exactly what levelof neuronal complexity do you have to be before you have sub consciousness? the answer to that is, we don’t know. the relationship between consciousness andneuronal structure is insanely complex. for example, you have very neuron-heavy structuresin your brain, like the cerebellum, which has a very rough outer-coating like the cortex,and it has about as many neurons as the cortical sheet does. yet, you can take it out of people and theydon’t seem to show any impairment in consciousness, but they get ataxic and they can’t controltheir behavior that well.

they have a hard time guiding it – but thatseems to be more or less it. now it isn’t, because there are other thingsthat the cerebellum does, but my point is that you can have massively neuron-heavy structuresthat seem to be related in very minimal ways to our experience of consciousness. your autonomic nervous system is sort of likethat – there are a lot of neurons in your autonomic nervous system, but i think it’sa mistake to say that we’re precisely conscious of our autonomic nervous system; althoughnow and then we’re conscious of its outputs. it governs the operation of our organs andall the things that are so complex that we aren’t allowed to mess with them as consciousbeings.

but it’s not conscious, and then somehowsome neurons are conscious. i tell you, we don’t know anything aboutconsciousness. we really don’t, we don’t have a clue. i think it’s probably because we’re formulatingthe question wrong. there are people who are materialist reductionists,and they believe that consciousness is an emergent property of the underlying neuronalfunction. the problem with that philosophy is that it’spredicated on the assumption that they understand what the matter is that’s making up thatneuronal substrate. i can tell you that by the time we’re ableto reduce consciousness to its underlying

material structure, we’ll think of whatevermatter is, in a way that’s completely different than the way we think of it now. so there might be an eventual reduction, butat the same time there’s going to be a transformation of the theories. it’s clear that we don’t understand materialthat well, particularly because when you go down to the tiny underlying substructuresat the subatomic level it behaves in a very, very peculiar manner. so anyways, all bets are off in regards toconsciousness. it also does seem to be something that’slikely very ancient.

there are people who have attributed consciousnessto insects. insects, by the way, seem to go out of theirway to take hallucinogenic drugs, which is quite interesting. so the fly agaric, for example, is the famousred and white mushroom that you always see in fairy tales and in super mario brothers. it pops up everywhere. flies will come and take a bite of it andthey fall unconscious beside the mushroom and they stay there for ten or fifteen minutes,and then they get up, but they go eat it again. reindeer really like them too and they getblitzed out of their mind on amanita muscaria.

there’s evidence for the desire to transformstates of consciousness, way, way down in the animal kingdom, way farther than you’dthink. so god only knows. then you think well a big brain is necessary,but if you consider something like irene pepperberg’s african grey parrot, which died a couple ofyears ago – a famous animal which could speak better than a three year old kid. it had a good vocabulary, more than five hundredwords, and it could put together meaningful phrases. it could speak better than a chimpanzee.

they use sign language of course. this was one smart bird. if you think about a bird, it has no brain,a bird. it’s got a brain about this big. i know a bird isn’t very big, and that actuallymakes a difference. the fact that that much intelligence couldbe compacted in that small of an area, means as far as i’m concerned, that we don’treally understand very much about how the brain works. we do understand some things, and most ofthe things we understand have actually been

discovered by animal experimentalists. which is a useful thing to know. because of course there are a lot of peoplewho think that animal experimentation isn’t a good idea, or that we could substitute computermodels – which is a spectacularly idiotic theory. obviously if we had accurate computer modelswe wouldn’t need to do the animal experimentation. we’re not going to build a computer modelthat’s better than our current understanding, at least not yet; we may in the future. anyways you can think of the basic structuresthat are producing these little sub-personalities

as the output of fundamental biological systems. they’re either motivations or emotions. the structure that appears to be most responsiblefor this sort of thing, at least initially, is the hypothalamus. i should show you a little bit about the hypothalamus. just so you kind of have a sense of what itis. it’s not very big, and you’ll see in thisdiagram that it sits right on top of the spinal cord and the base part of the brain. that’s just that little bitty area there.

it looks from the diagram it seems to be aboutone percent of the entire brain mass or something like that. i think i mentioned to you before that ifyou take a cat and you take all of its brain off, except for the hypothalamus, roughlyspeaking, as long as it’s a female cat in a restrictive environment, it can pretty muchlive a cat life; except that it’s hyper-exploratory. which i do think is quite remarkable, becauseyou’d think that it would just lay there passively, since it doesn’t have a brain. the hypothalamus, i’ll show you some morepictures here of the hypothalamus, this is a rat hypothalamus, and this is a diagramfrom larry swanson, who’s a real genius,

and well-worth reading, although very complicated. he’s a developmental neuro-anatomist, ifi remember correctly, and he’s interested in how the brain unfolds across the courseof fetal development in all sorts of different animals. assuming by doing that in part, you can trackthe evolution, but you can also understand the relationship between one brain part andanother. what you see here, you see all of these littlesub-units of the hypothalamus, they’re indicated in orange, green and black, and so the firstthing that you can see is the hypothalamus is not one thing, it’s a bunch of ganglia,i think is the correct name for the hypothalamic

sub-organs. so, it’s called a hypothalamus sort of forconvenience sake, you can identify it anatomically and it might be a good short-hand for a roughdescription of the macrostructure of the brain, but of course the problem with the brain is,you know, it’s pattern one at this level and it’s pattern two at this level, andit’s pattern three at this level. you can go a long ways down before you runout of complexity. a cell is an unbelievably complicated thing,and you have, god only knows how many of those things you have in your brain. i don’t remember exactly what the latestestimates are, but it’s in the hundreds

of billions. each of those cells is as complex as reallycomplex factory, and it’s full of these little molecular machines and they’re doingthings that are so complicated and amazing, you just can’t believe it when you – i’veseen computer animations of some of these structures in operation, and the complexityof what they do to take the dna molecule apart, and then to rebuild it little bit by littlebit, and to do error correction at the same time, it just boggles the mind. i cannot see how you can possibly accountfor that using a straight, sort of newtonian deterministic model of clock ward behavior;the stuff is so sophisticated.

it looks more like advanced robotics thanit does the interaction of tiny little molecules. there are molecules that work with the dnathat can walk, and as they walk they carry other molecules, and not only can they walk,they can walk over obstacles. they’re like made out of ten molecules! what’s going on? it’s just beyond belief. okay, so all of these little nuclei in thehypothalamus, they’re all doing slightly different things, they’re radically differentthings, although they have commonality in function.

so, roughly what you could say is that onehalf of the hypothalamus is devoted to popping up little sub-personalities that are devotedto the satisfaction of fundamental biological requirements. it’s not obvious what a fundamental biologicalrequirement is, because that’s a heuristic, it’s not a category, it’s a fuzzy category,but we can agree on some of its contents. so of course thirst, hunger and the need tobreathe would be in there, and might also add pain, and sexual desire and the need forplay, although that’s a separate circuit and it’s not mediated by hypothalamic structures,there’s a different circuit for play. play slash affiliation.

roughly speaking what an animal basicallychases and requires on a day-today and week-to-week basis is mediated in large part by the hypothalamus. and the hypothalamus is also a crucial nexusin the brain for identifying what’s going on in the body and then telling the brainwhat to do about it. so for example the hypothalamus is the thingthat makes you hungry and the thing that makes you thirsty. it does that because it monitors levels ofsubstances such as sugar in your bloodstream, and also the degree to which you’re hydrated. you can sustain tiny little bits of damageto the hypothalamus, which has unbelievably

extreme consequences. so for example, if you get unlucky, you candevelop hyper aphasia or, uncontrollable thirst. if that part of your hypothalamus is damaged,people just can’t keep you away from water supplies, you’ll just drink and drink anddrink and drink until you drown. you can’t control it. so the hypothalamus is no joke and hyperphagiais the same thing, except in relationship to food. there have been reports of people who developed-i knew a guy in montreal, who used to work at harvard.

his name was frank irvin. he did some of the earliest studies in theworld on the physiology of violent crime. frank had identified the role of epilepsyas a progenator to violent crimes. the defense rage circuit is part of the hypothalamusand if you’re unlucky you can have a particular form of epilepsy that will activate the defenserage system. i knew someone who had a seizure conditionlike that. then they get uncontrollably aggressive. now this guy has quite an interesting story. so it first happened to him when he was abouteighteen.

he was out drinking in a bar. now, alcohol lowers your seizure threshold. so he’s out drinking in a bar and all ofa sudden he got up and tore his shirt off. he was in an aggressive stance and backedinto the corner, and his friends were coming towards him. he told them to go away or i’ll hit you. now he was a very well socialized person,so i think what happened is he went into this defensive rage state, but because he was sowell socialized, he could tell people to stay away from him, but he couldn’t stop himselffrom hitting them and attacking them if they

got close enough. so anyways, i believe at that point he slappeda police officer who came to rescue him. they took him to the hospital and on the waythere he hit his fingers against the hood of the car and put dents in it, and then whenhe got to the hospital – now i don’t remember the particulars of this – but he pickedup a kidney bowl, which is like an enamel covered steel bowl, and twisted it in a figureeight. it’s like, try that, it’s not so easy. the next time it happened he was in anotherbar, so what the hypothesis was then, was that someone had spiked his alcohol with somesort of drug, but that was never demonstrated.

he got off of all that because he had no record,he was a perfectly peaceful person. then the next time it happened he was in anotherbar, and he did the same thing. he backed into the corner and he ripped offhis shirt, and he told me that when he was looking, he looked down the hallway and allhe could see was fire. a policewoman came to get him, because thebar called the police, and he hit her. then after that he had eeg testing, whichshowed that he was susceptible to seizures so he swore off alcohol. he never had another drink and he’s likethirty-five now. he never had another drink in his life andit never happened again.

it’s just a good example of – there wasa kid at the university of texas, at austin, about thirty years ago, who seemed to havea perfectly reasonable family life and so far, a reasonable upbringing, and he startedto become increasingly violent in his fantasies. he climbed up onto the tower, because there’sa high tower at the university of texas at austin, and he took at high-powered rifleand i think he shot sixteen people before they finally got him. when they did an autopsy, they found he hada high-pressing tumor that was growing on the hypothalamus. the hypothalamus is no joke.

for those of you who’s introduction to neuropsychologyhas made you assume that the cortex is in control, let me tell you, the cortex is onlyin control when all of your other basic requirements are satiated. since you’re a modern person, and you livein luxury, that’s unparalleled in the history of the world, all of your fundamental biologicalsub-personalities are always satiated. that’s what you think you’re like. you’re only like that because you’ve neverbeen anywhere where you weren’t like that. so anyways, here’s one of the things that’scool about the hypothalamus. the first thing is that you have these differentsub-systems, these different nuclei that are

responsible for these different sub-personalities. oriented towards sexuality, oriented towardshunger, oriented towards thirst, oriented towards temperature regulation, etc. i think of them as sub-personalities becausethey have a viewpoint, they want something and they want to go somewhere, they want toaccomplish it efficiently, and they have emotions that go along with it so, you know, if you’regoing for some water and you drop your glass, or somebody gets in your way, or the tap isn’tworking, you’re going to feel frustration, anxiety and irritation. they come fulyl equipped with emotions, theyhave their own motor outputs, so they basically

prime, and those would be the motor outputsthat are aggregations of habits that you have been able to learn that have aided you previouslyin your water-searching behavior. so for us, that would be getting a glass outof the cupboard, which is a gripping issue, and a transport issue, and then you have toturn on the tap. luria, who’s a famous russian psychologistcalled those things kinetic melodies. if you think about it from a piagetian perspectiveand a lurian perspective at the same time, you think how piaget talked about how childrenput together basic – they’re not reflexes exactly, they’re complex sequences of whatstarted as reflexes. then those can be linked together in a sortof dance that you’re always doing with your

body. each of those little dances, you think water-seeking,you’re going to have a set of water relevant dances that you can do that your experiencestaught you to become an expert at. when you get thirsty those are likely disinhibited. that’s my guess, they’re disinhibitedand prepared for execution. then the specifics of the circumstance thatyou’re in will determine which ones are disinhibited enough to actually run. it’s like you’re full of little machinesand they’re all on. they’re ready to go, but they’re all heldin stasis in some sense by some cortical inhibition.

i like to think of the brain sort of likea nuclear reactor. the core is really active, it’s on, butthen you have all of these rods going into the core to keep it from going critical. the cortex is sort of like that in relationshipto the lower parts of the brain. those parts of the brain, man, they’re alive. they’re like the titans of mythology. they’re sitting down there, these fundamentalforces and they’re ready to leap into action at a moment’s notice. but the cortex basically keeps them inhibited,and it seems to do that – so imagine that

you have a vision of your desired future. then a vision of the transformation stagesthat you’re going to undertake to move from where you are to that desired future. then what you’re doing is you’re comparingyour interpretation of the present to your interpretation of the desired future. as long as those two things match, which thehippocampus is the thing that’s determining that, it’s the thing that’s computingthe match between your fantasy of what you want to happen with your fantasy about whatis happening. as long as that matches then the hippocampusbasically, now we don’t know exactly how

this works, although it seems to work to somedegree through modulation of the reticular activating system – if the hippocampus matcheswhat you want with what’s happening, then all these other little sub-systems basicallyturn off. if the hippocampus detects a mismatch, whichis when novelty occurs – something went wrong, then you get disinhibition of the reticularactivating system. it’s like you wake up, and then everythingis primed for action. that solves the problem of what you shoulddo when you don’t know what to do. the answer is, you should get ready to doeverything. you should be on alert and ready to implementwhatever actions – it’s not even whatever

actions, it’s more like you should be readyto implement whatever sub-personalities the situation seems to call for, as soon as you’reable to identify what they are. otherwise it’s sort of like an army that’son alert. you don’t know who’s going to be calledon, but everybody should be ready. that’s a high stress situation. okay, so part of the hypothalamus, let’ssay for the sake of argument, it’s popping up all of these little sub-personalities thathave to do with basic instincts. the words are all wrong because they’renot – an instinct sounds like a drive and people aren’t driven.

we’re not that simple, we’re much moreflexible than that. even rats aren’t driven. there’s a very seminal experiment that wasdone at the height of behaviorism. so the idea with behaviorists, perfectly smartidea, was that the way a rat learned was, it would start with a reflex, sort of in thepiagetian sense, and then you could teach it a new routine which was an aggregationof little, tiny reflexes, you could teach it a new routine by rewarding it. so let’s say, here’s what you do witha rat: so you want to teach the rat to climb the ladder and go across it.

so the rat’s sniffing around in the littlerat cage. then it gets close to the ladder, so you giveit a food pellet. then it hangs around close to the ladder. it’s because you’ve reinforced the manifestationof those micro-behaviors that are associated with the ladder. then maybe at some point the rat puts a littlepaw up on the first rung, so you give it a food pellet. then the rat is going like this very frequently. then the next thing that happens is it putstwo paws up there, and you know if you’re

patient, using reward you can get that damnrat to do damn near anything. skinner taught pigeons to navigate guidedmissiles by maps in the second world war, by pecking. they never did use them, but really that’spretty impressive. you think pigeons are stupid, they’re notstupid they can read maps, which is pretty damn amazing. so the idea was is what the animal is doingis chaining together deterministic reflexes. the thing about a deterministic reflex isthat it’s not flexible right? if it’s a deterministic reflex, it reallyis a drive.

action a initiates action b, which initiatesaction c and it’s a fixed action pattern. some animals do seem to learn that way. there are these little animals. i think they’re moles that do this, it’sshrews. let’s say you teach a shrew to go from pointa to b by a very inefficient maze-like route. but the shrew could just walk straight there,but once he learns to do this, but he can’t figure out that he’s going from here tohere. whereas if you train a rat to do this therat will figure out, to hell with all of this circuitousness, it’s just going to go straightfrom point a to point b. that finding was

part of what indicated to early neuro-psychologicalresearchers that animals produced a map of the environment. in some sense what we’re talking about whenwe’re talking about these structures, the a to b structure, is a map. that’s another way you can look at it. so you’ve got this rat and it’s behaviorsare all chained together. so i already told you, i spoiled the storyin some sense, because i told you that the rat could learn to take a short cut. one of the earlier demonstrations of the independenceof rat learning from the reflex of conditioning

was that - so let’s say you’ve traineda rat to run down a maze. okay so hypothetically it’s using it’sfront legs and it’s back legs and it’s learned to chain all of that together. “front leg, back leg, movement, turn left. front let, back leg, movement, turn right. etc.” so then, what if you put the rat,you tie up it’s back legs and you put him in a little rat wheel barrel, so it’s gotwheels instead of legs – it’s like the rat zooms through the maze. so much for the reflex theory because obviouslyyou didn’t train the rat to use a cart with

it’s rear-end stuck in it, it figured thatout all by itself. so anyways there is a system in you that allowsyou to chain reflexes together. it’s a very primordial reflex system andthe behaviorists got that right. it’s fast, very very fast, because it requiresfew neural connections. so there are some advantages to simple learningbut once you get up to even the moderately higher cortical and sub-cortical functions,you’re past the point of mere reflex chaining. okay so, let’s for the sake of simplicitythe hypothalamus says, you need water. so you’re current state is that you’rethirsty and you’re desired state is you get to go to the tap.

you can feel your mouth dry and so forth,and some fantasies of drinking water start to come to your mind, and then all of suddenyou’re kind of possessed by that. so it’s starting to interfere with yourconscious goal-directed behavior at that point, and finally it’s insistent enough like somethingknocking at the door so you think, man i’m thirsty. maybe you enough think that you’ll workbetter if you have something to drink. so you go off to the fountain, and what yourhippocampus is doing – you’ve got this little idea, which is your desired futurewhich is about how this trip is supposed to go, and then you’re watching to see howthe trip is actually going, but that’s an

interpretation too. if there’s a match between the two thenthe hippocampus just leaves you the hell alone and you don’t get anxious, you don’t getknocked off the track. you go there, you have the water, that satiatesthat system, that’s a form of reward it’s called consumeratory reward, and then thatsystems disappears. it goes back to the dungeons from which itemerged and in all likelihood another one pops up. now, it’s an oversimplification of humanbehavior to assume that you just go from one hypothalamically mediated state to another,although i would say that’s what two-year

olds do. in some sense, that’s what animals do. the two-year old’s doing it because thatlittle creature hasn’t gotten any more organized than hypothalamic. you can see this if you watch two year olds. it’s like they’re laughing and then they’recrying. then they’re hungry and then they’re hotand then they need to go to the bathroom and then they want to play. it’s just one, pure, motivated or emotionalstate after another.

it’s quite fun to watch. they’re also relatively hyper-exploratoryand playful. they’re cycling through those things allof the time. so you can’t say that that’s really whatan adult human does. the reason for that is that the problem withthe pure – the reason you need a cortex and other sub-cortical structures that aren’thypothalamic is because the world is too complex for those primordial systems to solve theproblems they’re supposed to solve a, in every possible situation, and b, across multipletime frames, and c, in an environment that consists of the interactions between othervery complex beings.

so it’s almost like an arm’s race of complexityin some sense that’s driven our evolution – the smarter you get in some sense themore variable you get. that’s a problem because as i got smarter,say over the course of evolution, well you people got smarter too. we’re all competing and cooperating witheach other, so the whole damn system is getting more and more complex. you have to grow a brain in order to managethat at least, or you keep it simple – well, we didn’t keep it simple. so we decided to grow a brain instead.

i don’t know if you know this but you’velooked at a chimpanzee – they don’t look a lot like human beings. there are obviously some things in common,their hands are quite human and their ears are quite human, but their forehead comesdown to about here, and they’re kind of shaped like this. they’ve got a huge, round body, and whereasa human being is sort of like a stick with two sticks coming out of it, and two moresticks – we’re really, really thin, hardly any gut. whereas a chimpanzee, it’s intestinal structuresare way, way, way longer than ours.

so it has to pack that into this huge gut. a damn chimpanzee sits around for eight hoursa day chewing. the reason for that is it eats leaves. you go out into the forest and see how manydamn leaves you have to eat before you feel full. all the chimp does is sit there and chew leaves. then it has this huge gut so it can extractsome nourishment out of it. we figured out how to solve that problem oncewe discovered fire and hunting, because we could cook things.

that enabled us, at least in principle, totrade gut for brain, which i think was a pretty useful trade, all things considered, althoughit still might get us into trouble. the brain’s a very energy-hungry organ. we eat very, very efficient food and it turnsout that cooked food is much more nutritious from a caloric perspective than raw food. you can afford to sit around and develop abrain if you’ve got high-quality food. otherwise you’re out there in the junglechewing on leaves like an idiot, it’s just about as bad as pandas. do you know why those things are damn nearextinct?

they used to be carnivores but all they eatis bamboo shoots now. that’s it, nothing else, bamboo shoots. they have no nutrition so they have to eatbamboo shoots all day. now and then the bamboo crop fails and therearen’t any shoots. it’s like, so much for the pandas. if an animal ever deserved to go extinct itwas definitely the panda. hunt something, the lazy bastards! anyways, now i discovered this about the hypothalamuswhen i was ready larry swanson, it just bloody-well blew me away, you’ll see why, at least inpart.

half of the hypothalamus, roughly speaking,is sort of devoted to popping up these basic, primal sub-personalities; the sorts of thingsthat you share with animals. then you might say, what happens when oneof those doesn’t work? the answer is, well you get an anxiety response. now, the anxiety response is not mediatedby the hypothalamus, and neither is pain. so, if you’re an idiot your body hurts youor tells you or scares you. what’s interesting about that is the painsystems and the anxiety systems are not in the hypothalamus, they’re separate systems. the pain system is old, old, old.

it may be as old as the hypothalamus, it’sway down there in your brain. but, the anxiety system is a lot newer andthat kind of makes sense. you can imagine the primordial organisms reallydidn’t stop until they ran into something that was hurting them.” they couldn’t think, “oh no, i might runinto something that will hurt me. you can’t think that roughly until you havean amygdala. the amygdala is responsible for lots of things,and all of these areas are interconnected. one of the things it seems to be responsiblefor, at least impart, is anxiety. when your hippocampus detects a mismatch betweenwhat you want to have happen and what is happening,

it disinhibits the reticular activating system,and one of the things it activates is the anxiety system. the anxiety system says, “stop, you idiot,you don’t know where you are or what you’re doing and so you should quit before you getinto trouble.” we don’t like that feeling very much, thatfreezes us, but it’s better than pain. you feel anxiety so you don’t have to feelpain. pain seems to occur when you encounter a stimulus,let’s say a situation, where the stimulus magnitude is sufficient to damage those partsof you that are encountering it – so too bright a light, too hot a flame, too colda piece of metal, too hot food, whatever.

if it’s of sufficient magnitude to damageyou, you get a pain response out of that. the pain response is supposed to teach thepart of you that moves forward, not to do that again. the anxiety system responds to cues of pain. the pain system is pretty complicated as well. frustration is a pain-like stimulus. disappointment is a pain-like stimulus. grief and loneliness are pain-like stimuli. depression is probably a pain condition.

so even though the pain system is quite primordial,it’s grown up like a complex tree, and it consumes many different functions. it’s still a very ancient system, whereasthe amygdalian system, which is newer, you’ve developed over time to tell you what mighthurt you so that you can avoid contacting it. you’ve got your hypothalamus and it’stelling you – it’s laying out these little sub-personalities that are helping you dealwith the fundamental necessities of the word. the pain system is there to tell you whenyou have encountered a situation that’s harmful, the anxiety system is there to tellyou when you might going to encounter something

harmful. that’s the thing that’s activated whenthere’s a mismatch. the mismatch says you don’t know where youare or where you’re going, and so you might get hurt. the other thing that happens, roughly speaking,is that when the hippocampus disinhibits the reticular activating system that turns theother half of the hypothalamus on. this is quite cool because the other halfof the hypothalamus is the place where the ventral tegmental area is located. the ventral tegmental area is the part ofthe brain where the dopaminergic tracks emerge,

and those are the tracks that you use a, toexplore, and b, to respond to cues of consumatory reward. so what that means in non-technical languageis that when you encounter mismatch you get anxious, which is what you should do, youshould stop, something’s wrong. as long as nothing else happens that’s painfulor threatening, than that system starts to acclimatize, partly because you’re lookingaround and thinking. people often talk about this as habituation. that’s a stupid idea. it’s habituation if you’re a sea slug.

it’s not a habituation if you’re a person,except that in very, very primordial reflex-like levels of the nervous system. at the higher order levels that we’re talkingabout, it’s learning. if you stop and you’re anxious, what happens? well, generally speaking, you start thinking,what the hell might be going on? you’re running through all of these differenttheories and part of the way that works is that it’s partly a consequence of state-dependentlearning. if you’re anxious you’re going to be primedto remember situations that you were anxious in before.

why should you do that? the reason for that is that “things thatmake you anxious” is a category. it’s actually a category. we tend to think of categories as somethingthat exists in the objective world. that is not how your brain categorizes things. you have to learn that really painfully tomake objective categorizations. as far as your natural nervous system is concernedall things that go “bump” in the night are the same thing. what is that?

it’s some bloody, horrible predatory, crocodilian,dragon-like, monster that hides under your bed and comes out and bites you when you’rethree. i just read a little paper today about thiskind of cat that lived back when were still figuring out how to use spears. this was a particularly nasty kind of cat,and it preyed on us, roughly speaking. we didn’t get eaten by too many cats becausecats really can’t bite through the skull. they could go for your neck but they didn’tnecessarily kill you. this cat had a mouth that fit right aroundyour skull and it had two teeth that went in here and two teeth that went in here.

it was a silent killer. there is evidence that even children are capableof recognizing the motion in pattern of a predatory cat, and one of the hypotheses isthat we still have all of our primate ancestors that didn’t get eaten by that particularcat. we’re pretty damn good at detecting cats,at least of that type, and we seem to have conserved that ability at least to some degree. you think about a category, you might thinkwell there’s fish and there’s birds and there’s mammals and there’s reptiles,those are linnaean classifications, they’re based in some sense on evolutionary divergence.

where they’re not, on morphology. who cares about that? things that eat you, that’s a category. you need that category. the other category is also things that mighteat you. so things that eat you, those are things thatcan hurt you and the things that might eat you are things you haven’t classified yet,but might be dangerous. that’s your brain’s natural category;one of them. then you might think well if that’s thenatural category, see that’s the sort of

thing that the guy that wrote an ecologicalapproach on vision perception, he talked about as an affordance. an affordance is something who’s meaningyou instantly perceive. so you might say, “no, no, no, you see acat.” then you infer that it might eat you. no, you see something that might eat you,and then you might be able to figure out that it’s a cat. it’s the “might eat you” that you seefirst, no the damn cat. this is a fascinating phenomenon because itsuggests, like the heidigerians proposed,

that what you perceive first in the worldis meanings and out of the meanings you extract objects. it’s not the other way around. if you look at the way your brain is organized,that’s how it works folks. the more primordial your brain system is,which means the more ancient it is, the more its perception is action predicated. so for example, if you hear a loud noise behindyou and you startle, that’s your response. so you’re going into a crouch where it wouldbe difficult for a tiger to bite your neck. you do that, man that’s way before yourthinking.

it’s before your perceiving, consciously. you’re not getting images or sounds at thatpoint. it’s so quick. that’s a category: things that make yougo like this. that’s a good category. the reason i’m making such a case aboutthat category is because that’s one of the mythological categories: things that go bumpin the night. one of the things that primordial people weretrying to figure out is – you could think of any old animal as figuring out how to escapefrom a predator.

that isn’t what human beings wanted to figureout. not once we were able to abstract. what we wanted to do instead was to figureout how to escape from the class of all things that could eat you; not just any particularold thing, but all of them at once. that’s the advantage to categorization. can we arrange things so that nothing couldeat us? how do you go about doing that? believe me, we’ve been working on that problemfor a very, very long time. one of the answers we came up with, we’llget into this later, is the idea of sacrifice.

sacrifice is a very, very ancient idea. i’ll just give you a bit of a preview. it took me like twenty years to figure thisout. human beings discovered sacrifice a long timeago. they acted it out before they understood it. we act out lots of things before we understandthem. the idea is sort of well we can make a bargainwith god. you might say, well what’s god? we’ll approach that problem later, it’sa very complicated problem.

one thing you could think of god as, is, godis the anthropomorphic representation of the entire social structure across time. you might say, well god will reward you ifyou behave properly. what does that mean? imagine you could conceive of everyone thatwasn’t you as one metaperson. imagine that that metaperson is god. you can make a deal with that thing. you can say if i behave properly that metabeingwill respond positively to me in the future. it’s true, right?

you know that. if you make a promise to someone and you keepit, something good is likely going to happen to you in the future. so that’s a god the father derivation – it’sfar more complicated than that, but that’s not a bad point. we kind of figured out that we could bargainwith it across time and that would work. i read a really interesting paper by someonewho’s actually a former student of mine, azim shariff, and he analyzed the relationshipbetween criminal behavior and belief in hell across a whole set of countries.

i don’t know if it was an exhaustive analysis,correlational analysis. it’s way more peaceful in countries wherepeople believe in hell. you think should you believe in hell? yes and no. atheist arguments aside, we’re not evengoing to bother with them because they’re kind of moronic. the idea here is that there are certain actionpatterns that if you undertake, you will be viciously punished in the future. you try lying to everyone you meet and seehow well you’ll do in a twenty-year period.

you’re going to be in such trouble by theend of that twenty-year period that hell will be the only accurate way to describe whereyou’re situated. so it’s no joke these are real things andpeople came up with these ideas for a reason. hell isn’t only where other people put youif you’re bad, it’s a lot more profound a concept than that. that’s not a bad start. anyways, the sacrificial notion was somethinglike we cannot do what we want to do right now and do something else, and that will makethings better in the future. think about that people.

that’s the most brilliant idea human beingsever came up with. there’s this old story, which is probablynot true, about how to catch a monkey. you get this jar that’s got a pretty thinneck. just big enough for a monkey to put its handin, and you fill it with things monkeys like to eat. let’s say hard candy for the sake of argument. so you put that out there and the monkey goesand sticks its hand in and grabs a bunch of candy. it can’t get its damn hand out because it’sonly big enough for it to put its hand in.

so then you can just go and pick up the monkey. well, what’s the problem with the monkey? it can’t sacrifice. it won’t sacrifice its grip on the damncandy for its future existence. that’s what your parents have been teachingyou ever since you were little kids. let go of the candy so that you can live. that’s delay of gratification, right? that’s contentiousness, that’s the discoveryof time and its relationship to the social environment.

it’s so brilliant. part of what people were trying to figureout when they were developing these rituals of sacrifice is – okay, so you think aboutsociety as a meta-person, it’s usually represented as male by the way, but not always, it dependson the circumstances. so what does this meta-person want? you have to try to figure that out. part of what it wants is – don’t eat allthe damn grain today, save some for next year, right? act as if the future exists as part of thesocial contact.

god, that’s such a discovery man. it’s only people who figured that out. i mean squirrels have kind of got it in somesense because they store nuts, and squirrels are smart. they just kind of got the inkling of it. i think what squirrels do is they eat allof the nuts they can possibly eat right now, and then they store the rest of them. it wouldn’t go hungry if you store nutsfor the future, human beings will do that – don’t eat the seed grain, right?

then you’re going to die next year. alright, so back to the hypothalamus. now, you’re doing something you want todo and you’re tracking how that’s going – both of those are hypotheses, by the way. all of a sudden something happens that youdon’t want to have happen, like you live in flint, michigan for example. so you decide to go have some water and itturns out that it’s not water at all, it’s led. i don’t know if you guys know about that,but it’s just the sort of thing that makes

your jaw drop. the state is in big trouble – michigan. so they appointed an auditor to control finances,i believe at the state level. it might have been only at the city level,but it doesn’t matter. let’s say the state level. so the auditor was looking for ways to savemoney and one of the ways they decided to save money was to hook up flint, michigan’swater supply to a river instead of to the great lake, which is what it’s right beside. turns out, since flint was an industrial centerforever, that the water’s just full of led.

so now they have something like fifty thousandled-poisoned people living in flint, michigan. that is not a good thing. led lowers your iq rapidly and it makes youviolent. for the ten thousand dollars they saved theyprobably cost themselves half a million dollars per person. it wasn’t actually that there was led inthe water it was that the water was more acidic. oh, it took the led out of the pipes, yeah,good point. well i’m not here to complain about michiganpoliticians, the point is, is that just because you think you’re out for a drink of waterthat does not necessarily mean that’s what’s

going on. that’s why i said that you’re comparingyour vision of the future to what you think is going on right now. now if you read the neuropsychologists likevinagradova, sokolov and jeffrey gray, they’re basically behaviorists. so what they tell you is this – and thisis different – what they tell you is you have this little expectancy map that’s likethe rat has of its surroundings – it’s a spatio-temporal map. so when you’re doing something, you expecta certain outcome, okay.

what you compare that to is reality as itunfolds. so you could say, so you’ve got this mapand then stimuli appear to you, and those are objectively real. no, that’s wrong. it’s wrong. it’s interpretation everywhere. you think you know what’s going on rightnow and you think you know what you want. the reason i’m making such a big deal outof this is because look, if you’re a rat and you’re going about your business andsomething you don’t want happens, according

to the gray behaviorist model, you have torevamp your expectancy map. according to the model that i’m proposingit’s way worse than that, because you don’t know where the damn error is. it might be in the map of what you want, notwhat you expect, that’s a different thing, but it also might be in the map you have that’sof the present. so it’s not just the map that you have that’sa prediction of your actions that’s at fault, it could easily be the way you’re construingthe world right now. it could be error at any level of behaviorand so what it means is when an anomaly occurs, it spreads doubt through the entire hierarchythat we were describing including the future,

the present and even the past. you know this, you know this perfectly well. you can see it when you encounter complexanomaly. so a complex anomaly would be you have a long-termrelationship and you get betrayed. so betrayed means you’ve trusted someoneand they enticed you to do so, and then they exploit that trust and hurt you. for dante, the betrayers were in the lowestcircle of hell. so it’s a particularly nasty thing to doto people. if you think about trust as the preconditionfor interpersonal relationships, which it

is, then if someone acts towards you in away that violates your trust in trust, then they’ve done you the worst disservice thatsomeone could possibly be done. okay, so you get betrayed. alright so, bang! that’s an anomaly. what does it imply? that’s the wrong question. the right question is, what doesn’t it imply? it implies that you just don’t have thefoggiest notion of what you’re doing or

what human beings are like. especially if it’s a particularly viciousbetrayal, maybe you’ve been suckered by a psychopath, it’s like, okay, update yourmodel and account for that – good luck, especially if you’re naive. the probability that you’ll be able to reachdown into the depths far enough to come up with a coherent explanation for why someonewould do that is very, very low. what i’ve discovered in my clinical practiceis that if you get betrayed badly enough, the only language that you can use to describeit is fundamentally religious. at some points of betrayal it’s good versusevil.

it’s malevolence. it’s the malevolence that really traumatizespeople. it’s the fact that that person was out tohurt you. what’s a human being like when they’recapable of that? it’s an age-old question. i’ll tell you something weird and interesting. there’s this old idea in genesis, one ofthe first ideas in genesis, is that god made people a paradise to live in. let’s just be wild about this for a moment,and assume that your little model when it’s

going well is a little paradise, right? the world’s turning out the way you wantit to. there’s a snake in there somewhere, andthat means – well, why is there a snake? there’s a bunch of things you’re not payingattention to while you’re going about your business, right? in fact, there are almost an infinite numberof things that you’re not paying attention to. the problem is that one of those infinitenumber of things that you’re not paying attention to can shift on you all of a sudden.

so there’s always this snake in the garden. then you have to figure out what to do withit. the thing is, if you interact with the snakeyou get more conscious. the problem with that is you lose your littleparadise. okay, well it’s worse than that, becausethat story is really old. we have no idea how old it is. it’s disseminated all over the world, orit emerged independently in different places, we don’t really know. in any case it doesn’t really matter.

it’s a fundamental enough story – treeplus snake plus people – that no matter where you go some people have tree snake stories. i think that’s because we lived in treesfor like thirty million years and we got eaten by an awful lot of snakes. so it’s a story that really appeals to us. every bloody science fiction movie you goto most of the time if the aliens are bad, they’re always reptilian. you don’t get furry little koala aliensthat are chasing you around, it’s like the one’s an alien.

a reptile inside a reptile, they’re nastybeasts, and they come out inside of you even. which is another symbolic idea. okay, so you’ve always got the damn snake,and it’s popping out all of the time, and there’s nothing you can do about it exceptgetting ready to deal with snakes, no getting rid of them. so that’ the first lesson, you’re notgetting rid of the damn snakes. you better learn to deal with them. then the next question is, what is the worstpossible snake? one of the things that happened in christianity,and this was influenced in part by zoroastrianism,

was the idea of almost an independent evilarose. in fact there was a branch of christianitycalled manichaeism, that construed the world as a battle between good and evil where goodand evil had equal reality. they were in this eternal battle. now that got wiped out by the standard christiantheory that evil was actually just the absence of good, which anyways you could have a bigdebate about that and people have for thousands of years. as christianity developed, there’s thisweird mythology that grew up around the weird myth of genesis.

the weird mythology was that the snake inthe garden of eden was also satan, and that he’s the king of all evil. okay, what does that mean? it’s pretty straight- forward. what’s the worst predator? well that’s easy, the worst predator isa human being. the worst of all possible snakes is the mostmalevolent possible being. that’s exactly right, and that’s why thatassociation was made. it’s so interesting because it took peoplethousands of years to make that association.

it wasn’t really put together well untilmilton formalized in paradise lost. we kind of observe this in action, that therewere bad people. okay, so bad is a category. what does bad entail? mythologies of evil center in on what constitutesbad. carnivorous might be one of the things; malevolent,out to hurt, right? betrayal, lying, and all of the cardinal greatsins. that’s the worst snake. it’s a psychologization of the idea of thepredator.

it’s even more sophisticated than that,because one branch of that theory is that the worst predator is the evil force outsideof you, but the next branch of that is that the worst predator is the evil force withinyou. yeah, well that’s when it gets really psychologized. you think, well is that superstition? hey, that’s not superstition boys and girls,it’s a lot more intelligent than that. it’s the most sophisticated theory of theway things work that we have and it’s correct. now what that means from a metaphysical perspective,we’re not going to talk about that because we can, but we can certainly talk about whatit means in practical darwinian terms.

you better know what’s after you, and theworst thing that could possibly be after you is a fully motivated and completely malevolenthuman being. skull-crushing cats be damned. all they want to do is eat you, they’renot going to torture you; whereas if you fall into the hands of the wrong human being man,you could be in excruciating pain for the next twenty years. so people are very imaginative if they figureout how to hurt someone. they can keep it up for a long time, and they’refully motivated to do so under some conditions. so you really got to watch out for that.

alright so back to the hypothalamus. so when you have a mismatch between what youdesire and what you’re after, then the hippocampus says, “uh, we don’t know where we are.” that’s what it says. you no longer know where you are. okay, what should you do when you don’tknow where you are? you should stop moving. then you should – well then what? you should prepare to do a lot of things.

okay, then what? then you should explore. well that’s where the other half of thehypothalamus comes in; that dopamanergic circuit that mediates positive emotion, right? almost all the positive emotion that you experiencein your life, the kind you like, which is hope and curiosity and expectation and surpriseand that’s all mediated by the dopamanergic systems. it’s a major-league contributor to the totalityof your being, especially in a positive direction. that’s rooted in the hypothalamus, so whatthat means is that, it’s quite cool, you

got your fundamental motivations, you knowyour basic biological motivations, “bang!” they fail, that’s anxiety, that’s a newersystem, and exploration. that’s an older system. that damn exploratory system has been thereforever. now if you look at classic hero mythology,which we’re going to do in great detail, what you see is that the typical myth of humanityis we live in a place, we’ll say. we have to live in a place, and the placeis doing quite nicely, thank you very much. the hobbits and frodo. so you’ve got the little shire there, right?

it’s all peaceful, it’s full of theselittle people who are a little on the arrogant side, they’re kind of dopey, they have noidea what the hell’s going on in the outside world, but they think that’s okay, theythink you know, peculiar people are concerned about that sort of thing. they’ve got their little happy paradisegoing, they live a long time, they eat a lot, they party a lot. unbeknownst to them, which is a very interestingfeature of the story, the only reason they have any peace at all is because they’redescendants of old kings, continually patrolling the borders, right?

those are the striders. aragorn, he’s the member of the race ofold kings who patrols the borders. those are ancestral figures, it’s like youcan all sit here in your little happy paradise, but the only reason you can do it is becausethe sons of great kings have put borders around your kingdom. it’s funny because in the hobbit, the hobbit’sbasically despise the strider, they’re very, very suspicious of him. he’s kind of dirty and dusty and he lookslike he’s been banged around all over the world.

he’s sort of like a tramp. they don’t know he’s the son of a greatking, good thing for them that he is, however. okay, so then you’ve got the little shire,what happens? evil things are stirring. what is it? well, fundamentally it’s a great dragon. well that’s a snake, except it’s likea meta-snake. it’s snake with fire. you can be sure that fire was not only oneof our greatest allies, but one of our greatest

enemies, especially when we lived on the blankin africa. that thing would burn now and then. so, get the hell away from that. so anyways, one hobbit, who’s woken up bya wizard – the wizard is the symbol for the self from the jungian perspective. so there’s one hobbit who’s a little bitmore creative and exploratory than the rest and everybody has a little respect for himbut they think he’s pretty damn peculiar. he decides that he’s going to, under thetutelage of the wizard, he’s going to go check out this dragon.

so he leaves the borders and goes out intothe unknown. then the rest of it is an adventure and oneof things that’s very interesting, again from a jungian perspective, is that, whatdoes the hobbit have to become in order to conquer the dragon? a thief. now that’s pretty weird, because you thinkhey man, this guy’s out being a hero, so he should be a hero. no, he turns into a thief. why?

well it’s because if you’re going to conquera dragon you better be a hell of a lot tougher than you are naive. so, partly what happens is, for the hobbitto masker up the forces that are necessary for him to confront something that is thatfundamental, he has to transcend the cowardess that he describes as morality. okay, so nietzsche for example, nietzsche’soften viewed as a critic of morality. that’s not true. nietzsche identifies morality with cowardess,but that’s not what he does. what nietzsche says is this: if you’re tooafraid to do something, so you won’t do

it, then you’ll say that the reason youdon’t do it is because you’re moral. that’s not the reason. the reason is that you’re too damn afraidto do it. you might want to, but you’re too afraid. that doesn’t make you moral. so what happens to the hobbit, for example,once he gets outside of the kingdom, he has to develop a whole array of potentials thathe never developed before, because they were either not necessary in his civilized place,or because they were forbidden as immoral by the cultural situation that he grew upin.

you have to be touched by the snake in orderto defeat the snake. where else have you seen that motif? harry potter, right? harry potter’s a strange character becausehe’s not obedient, not at all. in fact, he’s quite disobedient. he breaks the rules in the service of highermorality. the higher morality is that he faces downthe dragon that paralyzes you, and he frees the virgin. that’s what happens with ginny – virginia,virgin, it’s the retelling of saint george

and the dragon. and interesting enough, the reason that harrypotter revivifies, is because dumbledore’s phoenix comes by and cries in his wounds. well the phoenix is something that dies andis reborn and so the meta-myth underlying the second-volume of the harry potter seriesis that the part of you sustains you through an encounter with a dragon that paralyzes,is the part of you that can die and be reborn. what that means in a sense is if you’rewrong about something, and you fall into a pit, then you should let go of what you’rewrong about, so that something new can arise. so it’s better to be the thing that transformsin response to catastrophe, than it is the

thing that’s static. that’s another big discovery of people. we’re agents of transformation, which isof course why kids are so bloody obsessed with magicians and wizards, which are agentsof transformation. that’s all embedded in the mythology, it’sall acted out. nobody understands this sort of thing to speakof. certainly the kids don’t, it just hits them. they can recognize the pattern. they know that there’s something magicalabout them, even though they’re living in

a cupboard in a london suburb, where everythingis boring and flat and under control. that’s not the real world, and it’s true,it’s not. is that why we have more patience for people,including criminals, who admit their crime and do their punishment and redeem themselves? oh not only patience, we often have admirationfor them. oh yeah, how many movies feature attractivebad guy? well or for that matter, attractive bad woman? it’s because of the nietzchian observation. the people who are good aren’t good, they’rejust cowards.

whereas the guy who’s bad, well at leasthe’s not a coward. well then you might say, well you know, yeahhe could stop being a coward and also become a good guy, but that’s often but not alwaysthe actual plot of the movie. that’s the redemption of the bad guy. it’s also what woman fantasize about inrelationship to the beauty and the beast mythology. they don’t want a coward. he’s the guy that wants to be the friend. it’s complete bullshit. the bad guys going to advance over that – butnot a big enough advance because he’s a

bad guy. the best thing you want is a civilized badguy. that’s what you want. well no wonder, because it’s only a civilizedbad guy that’s going to be capable to be dealing with the dragons. it’s right. lloyd axworthy, when he was the minister offoreign affairs for canada, we know the massacres were going on in yugoslavia. it was front-page news at one point.

he said, “i don’t have the imaginationfor that kind of evil.” oh well, that’s really impressive misterminister of foreign affairs, did you ever read about the holocaust? it’s like, it’s time to wake up a littlebit! these things happen, but he said it as a moralclaim. i just couldn’t imagine that sort of thinghappening. well, you’re a little on the naã¯ve said,aren’t you? and parading that around as morality is nota reasonable thing to do when you also happen to be minister of foreign affairs.

you should be looking out for the snakes allof the time. they’re definitely out there, and milosevicwas definitely one of them. so if a naive person meets someone like that,the naive person loses. that’s not good because there’s lots ofpeople like that and it would be better if they didn’t win. so anyways, the fact that the exploratorycircuitry is embedded into the hypothalamus way down there with lust and thirst and hunger,it’s so great because it shows you how the mythology works. it basically says, okay, here’s a bunchof things you’re doing now and then they’ll

go wrong. you need a system to deal with things whenthey go wrong. what’s the system? well it might kill you, bang! you better have some pain and anxiety to protectyou. you better figure out what it is. okay, better have an exploratory system sothat you can go out there and gather some more information. well that’s the human story: gather informationin the face of danger.

that’s the human story. that’s what we do. so that’s the hero myth. the hero myth is redemptive, and that’sbecause it is redemptive. that is what works, or at least what we’vestated our being on. who knows? maybe all of this exploration will just getus in trouble. that’s another part of genesis, right? poke around and see what happens.

well you know you’re doing that all of thetime. you‘re in your little paradise, beedlingaway all happily, and then you just can’t stop yourself from pulling on a thread somewhere. then you find out, oh my god, then maybe that’swhen you get suspicious about your partner cheating on you. you think, maybe this person’s cheatingon me, and you can’t leave it alone. you can’t leave it alone, you got to golook at the snake. turns out it’s there! down you go into the underworld.

you might think, maybe the bliss of ignorancewould have been better. well, it’s not like psychologist don’ttell you that. all those positive illusion people, that’sthere whole shtick. it’s better to be a little bit dumb abouthow things work, because otherwise there’s no way you can be happy. that’s an idiotic theory on two accounts. a, happy isn’t the point, and b, dumb isnot the goal. so it’s so ignorant that it’s actuallycorrupt. which is really saying something, becauseyou have to be pretty damn ignorant before

you get to corrupt. so it’s a hell of a thing to teach people. you have to delude yourself in a minor wayotherwise you can’t stand being alive. oh my god, that’s awful, that’s reallyawful. here’s a different story, maybe you’retough enough to open your eyes. that’d be a much better story. it’s possible too because people are really,really, really tough. it’s just that they live in these littleprotected places and they never get out there and hammer themselves out against the world,so they never discover that they’re tough.

you might thing, well that’s your opinion. well no, it’s not my damn opinion. we know that if you take someone who’s naã¯veand paralyzed by anxiety, and you put them in psychotherapy and you expose them to thethings that they’re afraid of and disgusted by and avoiding, that it isn’t that theyget less afraid, they get more confident. that’s what generalizes. if you bring someone in who’s got a mousephobia and you treat the mouse phobia, then they’re not as afraid of a bunch of otherthings. why does that happen?

they weren’t afraid of the damn mouse, they’reafraid of their own inadequacy. then you teach them that they don’t haveto be afraid, and then they think , “hey, i don’t have to be afraid.” then they’re not afraid of a whole bunchof things. so you get generalization from behavioralexposure. there’s no question about whether or notexposure to the things that you avoid is curative, it’s the fundamental axiom of psychotherapy. that and figuring out what you’re goingto do with your future. even in psychoanalysis it’s face what threatensyou.

it’s just that the psychoanalysts go afterpast traumas. it doesn’t matter as far as your brain isconcerned. a dangerous thing in the past is exactly thesame thing as a dangerous thing in the present. it seems to be partly because the amygdaladoesn’t have any sense of time. it’s interesting because one of the thingsjung observed was that there’s no time in the collective unconscious. it’s like everything is an eternal now. so let’s say you got traumatized when youwere a kid, your amygdala grows; maybe you got bitten by a spider.

you’re afraid of that spider then and nowand in the future. it’s the same. it’s outside of time. the hippocampus is the thing that’s dealingwith time. so, you know, if you really learn a lessonit’s supposed to be timeless. you can still help people overcome their phobias,but you can’t get their damn amygdala to shrink again. so, you can just get it back under control. okay, so that’s pretty cool.

then, we could say, let’s go up a levelor two. well, let’s look at the amygdala for a minute. things about the amygdala have probably changedsince i updated my knowledge, but it doesn’t really matter because the fundamental systemsi’m telling you about exist. they keep moving around in the brain becausewe don’t know exactly how they work, but at a system level of description and usingslightly vague neuropsychology, we can localize these sorts of things in the brain. okay so the amygdala gets inputs from everywhere. basically what it’s looking for are thingsthat might threaten you.

you could say in a sense that the amygdalahas an inbuilt sense of the monstress. let me show you, this is a good time to showyou a comic. this is a great comic. someone stoned came up with this comic. they really did. i really like this comic because it showsyou what’s going on perfectly. okay, so there are these hippies. they’re all friends of this guy named fatfreddie. they’re basically useless hippies.

they don’t pay rent and all they do is smokepot. anyways, at one point they make a bunch ofmoney on some cocaine deal and they buy this home out in the country. they think they’re going to go out thereand live in paradise, so they bring their cat along, which is fat freddie’s cat whohas his own adventures with cockroaches and so on. anyways, if you’ve ever had a cat one thingyou know about cats is they don’t like to move. it makes them very upset and nervous, andif you put them in a new house they’re not

happy about it. the reason for that is you’ve blown theirmap, right? the cat will slink around in a new territoryand map every single place and every hiding place, obsessively, until it knows what thehell’s going on, and then it will finally relax. a cat in a new place is not a calm cat. a cat in a new place is a nervous cat, whichis also an indication that you don’t have to learn to be afraid. what you have to learn is how to be calm.

that reverse the way that psychologists generallytalk about anxiety, because they’re all hobbits and they think that life is safe. so because they think that life is safe, youhave to learn to be afraid. that’s dopey. the natural condition is terror and curiosity. if you’re really lucky now and then, you’resomewhere safe enough so that you don’t have to be afraid. that’s tenuous and delicate. so what you have to learn is how not to beafraid.

not, how to be afraid. anyways, they got the cat. so he’s in his box and they take him outof the box and the cat thinks, “so this is the country.” so the cat goes really low and starts sniffing,and that is what animals do when they first start exploring. both of those things: they crouch down becausethat makes them less visible to predators, and they sniff. the reason they sniff is because most animalshave their whole brains built around their

sense of smell; unlike us, where most of ourbrain is built around vision. anyways, the cat’s slinking around thereand it smells something that it doesn’t know. it thinks, god only knows what this thingthat i don’t know is. it would freeze first and then it would hastilyretreat. so now it’s underneath the porch. one hippie says, “where’d the cat disappearnow?” the other one says, “under the house.” the cat’s down there shaking, which is whatcats do when they’re freaked out like that,

and it’s got it’s little fantasy going. you’d hide to if you smelled what i did. then it imagines up this monster. a monster technically is the amalgamationof unrelated parts. so what’s the monster? well its got duck feet and bare arms and itsgot a skunk tail and its got kind of a wolf head, and its got antlers. you think, well that thing doesn’t exist. that’s wrong.

that thing exists. in fact it’s a really accurate representationof what’s out there in the forest. any one animal wouldn’t look like that,but the set of all possible animals looks exactly like that. then you might think, well what do you wantfirst, when you’re analyzing something? do you want quick and dirty representationof what to be afraid of? or do you want to hang around trying to figureout whether that thing has hooves and teeth? it’s like no, you want a quick and dirtyrepresentation of just what might be lurking out there.

that’s intelligent hypothesizing. it’s the kind of hypothesizing that wouldbe evolutionary driven. did you ever see the far side cartoon, monstersnorkel? i love that cartoon. there’s this little kid in his bed, it’sdark and he’s under cover. he’s one of those ugly little kids thatgary larson always drew. he’s got this snorkel that you use for scubadiving. snorkeling, not scuba diving. all that’s sticking out from under the coversis his snorkel so that he can breathe.

of course in his imagination there’s somereptilian dinosaur sitting beside his bed. well, why? that’s what he’s hypothesizing. because that’s what’s in the dark. you can tell your kid, there’s no monstersin the dark. then you tell your kid to never talk to astranger. well get your story straight people. really? it’s so dopey.

yes there are monsters in the dark. what do you tell your kids? no, there’s no such thing as monsters. first of all they’re driven half crazy becausethey think what am i afraid of then? second, you tell them all of the time thatthere are monsters in the dark. in fact you’re probably more paranoid aboutthe things than your damn kid is. so what do you tell them? there are monsters in the dark but you canprobably handle them, especially with our help.

okay, so now i’ll tell you a story. so my nephew, he was six, and he had nightterrors. night terrors are this strange phenomena whereall of a sudden you wake up screaming. it’s quite unpleasant. you might say, well why is this happening? the answer is that we really don’t knowbut there was some instability in his household at that point. a, he was just going off to kindergarten,so that’s a big transition. it’s out of paradise and out into the world.

b, his parents were in the throws of approachingdivorce, so there was that sort of undercurrent in the house. you know what that’s like. you walk into a house like that and you knowsomething’s up. it’s like the air is frozen. it’s probably something you can smell, ithink. whatever, it doesn’t matter, but you cancertainly tell. so anyways, he’s waking up at night screamingaway. he’s a very verbal kid.

during the day he’s running around, i guesshe was about four, not six. he’s got this little night hat that he wears. it’s a plastic night hat. so he zooms around with that all of the time,and he’s got this plastic sword, and he zooms around with that too. so you think what’s he up to? he’s playing knight, which is kind of weirdin a way. because you’d think why would being a knightbe attractive to a kid? we weren’t knights for that long.

whatever, it doesn’t really matter. he was running around playing knight. he goes to sleep and he puts his knight hatand is sword right beside his bed. so fine, i watch that. i’m watching what’s going on with themand i’m figuring out what’s going on in the house. his mom is worried because he’s having nightterrors. yeah, it’s horrible he wakes up screaming. so okay, nighttime comes.

he wakes up screaming, we’re all sittingat the breakfast table the next day. i said, did you dream about anything? he said, yeah! he got right into this dream and he said okay,this is what happened: i was out in a field and all of these little dwarfs were aroundme. they only came up to my knees but they hadbig beaks, they didn’t have any arms, but they had big beaks. they were covered with hair and grease, sothey were all greased down. there was a cross-shave at the top of theirhead, and wherever i went these beaked dwarfs

would jump at me with their feet and biteme. they’re everywhere! everyone stops eating breakfast to look atthis kid, thinking, wow no wonder why you’re screaming man. then he said, yeah, and it was worse thanthat because there was smoke and at the back of the dwarfs there was this dragon and thedragon was breathing out smoke and fire and the smoke and fire would turn into the dwarfs. oh my god, what do you do about that? wiping out some dwarfs, who cares, but thedragon will just breathe up some more.

that’s life man. i’ve got this excellent picture, let meshow it to you because it’s worth finding, even though it’s going to interrupt my storya little bit. well i’m not going to find it because itwill take too long, but i’ll tell you what it is. it’s a greek amphora. you know amphora, it’s like a vase, andpeople used to keep wine in them. it’s painted on like a cartoon, it’s sortof black and white. it’s got this hero, who i believe is hercules.

hercules is facing this snake, and it’sa really cool snake. so first of all it’s tail is curled in aperfect circle. if you look at dragons and snakes in mythology,their tales are often curled in a circle. it means something like infinity. then there are all these snakes – it’sa hydra. it’s a snake with eight heads. then there’s hercules with his sword – well,what’s the problem with the hydra? you cut off one head and eight more headsgrow. quit cutting off heads – it’s a good pieceof foreign policy advice for the middle east.

the hydras keep growing. okay, so cutting off heads isn’t going tobe of any utility. here’s what the story is saying: no matterhow many problems you solve there’s going to be a bunch more problems and it’s evenworse than that. if you have a problem and you solve it that’sgoing to lead to more problems. so even the solution is a problem. that’s the law of unexpected consequences. that’s why automobiles have destroyed theatmosphere. everybody thought an automobile is for gettingfrom point a to point b. it turns out it’s

not. it’s for turning the world’s holes intojungles. we didn’t know that. so that’s an unexpected consequence. so anyways, the kid is faced with this horribleconundrum. what am i going to do? i’ve got these stupid dwarfs and then there’sthis dragon. so i said, what could you do about that? now that’s called a loaded question andit would be inadmissible in a court of law

in a sense because it’s a question – butit isn’t because i’m telling him something. you could do something about that. well that’s a hell of a theory. well yeah, i should just lay down and letthe dwarfs eat me. no, no you could do something about it, isaid. what could you do? then he said, i’d put my hat on, i’d getmy sword, then i’d go get my dad and we’d go up to the dragon. i would jump on his head and then i’d pokeboth his eyes out with my sword and then i’d

go right down to his stomach to the placewhere the fire comes out and i’d cut a piece off of that and i’d use it as a shield. and i thought, “right on, kid! you got it.” it was so cool because he had the whole thing,eh. that’s why he was running around playingknight. he’d almost got it, and all i had to dowas drop – there’s this fifth chemical phenomena called a super-saturated solution. it’s kind of cool.

so if you take - water can only dissolve somuch sugar until the sugar starts to crystallize out. if you really slowly cool down then waterand you don’t tap it there’s no impurities. you can get the solution super saturated whichmeans, weirdly enough, it holds more sugar than it can. it’s like it forgets to crystallize or maybeit needs a little impurity or shock or something to get it going, but it’s like it forgetsto crystallize. so then if you take a little crystal of sugarand you drop it in, it’s like it goes “sound” and instantly it’s all crystals.

so that’s what happened to this kid: hewas there, he was ready, he had to answer, and all i had to do was say you could do somethingabout this and “poof!” instant hero myth. the cool thing is no more night terrors. so you get the picture, it’s very, verycool. alright so, back to our discussion. now, alright so you’ve got the brain here. this is the brain as conceptualized by alexanderluria, who was russia’s most famous neuropsychologist. so basically he said that there’s a bunchof different ways you can divide up the brain. it depends on what you want, which is an interestingway of thinking about it.

because you might say well how should youdivide up the world and the answer is it depends on what you want. it depends on some degree of the world, butit depends even more on what you want. so one of the things luria said was if yougo from the back to the front of the brain – the front’s the grey part here – whatyou see is, roughly speaking, the back half of the brain does sensory processing, especiallyvisual processing, and the front half of the brain does motor processing. okay, and so if you look at the back of thebrain the sensory unit there, you see there’s an auditory area and a visual area.

what’s cool is those overlap to some degree. so there’s some hypothesis that the placewhere the sensory systems overlap are the parts that are responsible for your experienceof a unified perceptual field. so here’s an example: imagine the visualcortex and the auditory cortex overlap in once place. okay, so it would sort of be here, about thereon the left side. that’s the part you use for silent reading. isn’t that cool? it means your using your eyes as ears.

the way you do that is you use the overlapbetween the visual and the auditory cortex. it’s so cool, you can use your eyes as ears. so the senses aren’t as separate as peoplethink. i used to wear glasses and i couldn’t hearwhat people were saying when i wasn’t wearing them. the reason for that is i wasn’t watchingtheir lips. so a lot of what i was hearing in languageprocessing was the expression on their face and the movement of their lips. i take off my glasses, and i’m deaf.

so anyways, that’s the sensory unit, halfof the brain. most of it’s the visual cortex because we’revisual creatures. the front half is the motor unit. okay, why? well because we proceed and act. so it’s the part of the brain that’s responsiblefor zipping you around. you’ve got voluntary action, right? you inhabit a nervous system that enablesyou to navigate your way around the world. we’re navigators, fundamentally.

we really are navigators. you know ants can navigate by the stars? think about that. how the hell can an ant navigate by the stars? they figured that out by watching ants figureout how to get back, and then covering up the sky, and then the ants would wander aroundnot knowing where they were going. yeah there’s lots of things we don’t understand,i can tell you that. so anyways, the motor unit. you’ve got the motor strip.

now if you touch that with an electrode duringbrain surgery then people will either move or have the impulse to move and you can mapout how the body is represented in the brain by touching that strip with an electrode,and that was done by wilmer penfield at the montreal neurological institute. it was a major move forward in the understandingof the brain and he did that on epileptics before surgery, because he didn’t want totake out parts of the brain that were necessary so he was trying to figure out what they weredoing. so that’s the part that enables you to actvoluntarily, and in front of that there’s the premotor strip.

in front of that there’s the prefrontalcortex. now, what’s cool is that the premotor stripand the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor strip over the course of evolution. so then you might say, well why do we think? the answer isn’t so that we can come upwith accurate, objective representations of the world. the answer is, so that we can plan what todo. what you see, fundamentally, is that as youmove forward in the brain you go from action to planning action.

so by the time you get to the prefrontal cortex,let’s say the dorsal-lateral prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain thatyou use for abstract thinking, what you’re basically doing is conjuring up avatars ofyourself in an imaginary world, running them as simulations in your imagination, and thecollective imagination, that’s what stories are, running the simulation until the endto see if you live or die. if you die then you don’t implement thesimulation. if you live and thrive then you do implementthe situation. so – who was it – carl popper, philosopherof science said, the reason we think is so we can let our thoughts die instead of us.

right, that’s smart. that also ties into the death and rebirthidea, right? are you going to die, or are you going tolet your avatars die? one way of thinking about that is that yourcurrent self is just an avatar. now if you understand that, that means youalso understand the relationship between the jungian self and the ego. the ego is an avatar, the self is the thing. now i don’t know if you know this, but theword avatar is actually a theological term. it’s from sand script.

an avatar is the form that a god takes onearth. it’s pretty cool that that turned into theterm for the thing you use in a video game. that’s your little, disposable self. you throw it out there in the world and itcan live or die, and you’re back there like god just being eternal all along the way. so, that’s a very, very weird thing. anyways, even before we had video games wewere doing that. we had fiction, we had stories, we had imagination,and it’s decoupled from our motor systems. so we can implement these hypothetical instancesof ourselves before we implement them.

that’s kind of how we fight hydras. okay, so you have eight snakes, what do youdo about that? you have eight potential selves. you multiply potential selves just as fastas you multiply snakes. that’s what evolution does, right? let’s say you’ve got a mongoose. mongoose like to eat snakes, they’re reallygood at it. they can eat cobras. go mongoose!

so you think, well a mongoose gets killedby a cobra. well that’s not a very good mongoose butthat doesn’t matter because the mongoose are generating all sorts of mongoose, andone of them is going to be able to kill the snake. that’s all that really matters. there’s a very funny mouse that lives inthe desert in arizona. i like this mouse a lot, and it jumps. it’s so cool, this mouse, it feeds on scorpions. how the hell did it learn to do that?

anyways, it has to teach its young to eatscorpions, and its quite immune from scorpion venom, which is quite helpful. still it goes out – it’s like you goingout to wrestle a blank crocodile – it’s like a scorpion is a big thing compared toa mouse. the mouse will hop on to the scorpion andthey have this terrible fight, and finally the mouse tears it a part. then it brings it back and feeds it to itsmice babies. do you know what it does then? it goes outside and howls at the moon likea wolf.

it sounds like a mouse so it’s really squeaky,but if you slow it down, you know, which is what you have to do if you want to, for example,hear mouse vocalizations, because they’re often much higher than your threshold forhearing. blank that, to hear a rat’s laugh when youtickle them, you have to slow down their vocalizations because they laugh at ultrasonic frequencies,so you have to slow down your vocalizations to hear them laugh when you tickle them. anyways, these damn mice go out in the desertat night, after eating a scorpion, and they howl at the moon. go mice.

so anyways, back to the brain here. there are all of these terrible monsters beinggenerated. you generate avatars of yourself to cope withthem, and generally used to have to evolve to do that, but human beings, being the smartcreatures that we are, generated up an environment in the imagination and then populated it withimaginary representations of ourselves, and then tried those out. then we implement the ones that we think aregreat. then you might think, well we’ve been doingthat for a very, very, very long time. then you might think, maybe we’ve figuredout exactly what thing we should implement,

then we might say well that’s the saviorfigures in mythology. that’s what they are. what else would they be? people have been trying to figure out whatthe hell we are forever. the fundamental question, what is realitymade of, is not the fundamental question. the fundamental question is, how do you actin the world? that’s a whole different way of thinkingabout the world, but i think, given that i’m a darwinian, i think it’s the fundamentalquestion. you know, obviously, given what i’ve describedto you so far, you can’t fall in love too

much with your current self. what if it’s wrong? then you should let that sucker die. then you might think, well what part of youis it that doesn’t die when your avatars die. well that’s what jung called the self. let’s say you undergo a personality transformation. there’s the old you, you’re all naã¯veand something comes along and just wallops you, bang!

into the underworld, you fall apart. then, bang! there’s a new you. maybe a little battle weary, but wiser. then you know that one gets walloped out andinto the underworld and up you come again. fine, what’s constant across all of thosetransformations? that’s the core element of the person. that’s what jung called the self. brilliant, it’s so smart.