0:00 We think of emotions like fear being universal around the world. But I think that's wrong. What's universal around the world is danger. Emotions are culturally determined. All of our emotions are schema that we've acquired in the course of life. So you have fear schema. The fact that we call it the same thing doesn't mean that we experience it the same way. The big picture of emotion kept getting more and more about the amydala fear center. The amydala fear center. The amydala fear center. But the amydala is not a fear center. It's an ancient defensive survival circuit. It's a circuit that is present in every kind of mammal, every kind of vertebrate. But we can't conflate those mechanisms with the actual experience of consciousness. Conscious experience of danger is a
0:47 different thing altogether. Joseph Vadu is by almost any measure the greatest emotion neuroscientist who has ever lived. His work has been cited more than 180,000 times. He's written five landmark books on neuroscience, including the emotional brain, the book that defined the field. He put the amygdala on the map. His fear circuit is the most famous model in all of neuroscience taught in every textbook in every neuroscience course ever given. He ran the foundational split brain experiments alongside Michael Kazanaga, the godfather of cognitive neuroscience. He spent decades building that emotional fear model. Then he decided it was wrong. So when Leoo tells you everything you thought you knew about emotion is wrong, you listen. Subscribe to find out
1:32 what a brain split in half reveals about the voice in your head. We are confabulating 24/7 in our lives. May our lives make sense. And given that we have so many unconscious processes in our brain that are controlling our behavior all the time and our conscious mind is seeing all of that, it's got to create a story that makes all that non-concious control of behavior make sense. First time in studying the brain patients. There was evidence that there were two conscious minds. I just want to tell you about one experiment we did that became the foundation of my entire career. >> This model is still being taught. your name is is still on the slide. Um yet you actually fundamentally disagree with its main assertion now. But I want to
2:18 know how you came to that conclusion like what was the light bulb moment? You spent decades building this model and this pathway and it became so famous. Your name is attached to this idea. How do you then wake up one day and say actually I'm getting something fundamentally wrong about this? So, um, Joseph Adoo, it's a giant honor. You are a true hero of neuroscience. So, I couldn't be more excited and grateful to be speaking with you today. >> Oh, it's very kind, Evan. >> If the listener at home is somehow unfamiliar with you and your work, what is the most important context for them to understand?
3:04 Oh boy, that's that's complicated. Um I think um you know I I I started out from a very con nonconventional perspective here. So I had uh two degrees in business administration, one in business administration, one in marketing. Um and it was this was the 1960s early 70s and it was uh it was not cool to be in marketing. at that time because it was like the you know the hippie revolution and I was as much a hippie as anybody else but I got stuck in this marketing stuff before I knew what a hippie was. So we um I I uh had to figure out some angle that made my life self-respecting.
3:51 What I was doing was trying to help uh consumers become more knowledgeable about why they buy stuff and products and so forth. So, it was a kind of, you know, goody goody kind of a prank to what I could do and still be in business and not be hated by all my friends. So, um, I took a class, uh, looked at the courses. This was at Louisiana State University and, uh, which where I went to, uh, college, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Um and in my fountain for the first time because I grew up in a small town and for the first time I became uh aware of psychology and Freud and all that kind of stuff. So I started taking classes like that and I took one called learning and motivation. I thought it'd be
4:36 relevant to my consumer protection work. And when I got to the class, it turned out that the uh class was about uh a professor who was studying rat brains and memory. And so, "Wow, you can make a living studying rat brains and and memory. I had no idea you could do that kind of thing." And um so I just I started hanging out in his lab. And uh never did much research, but I just kind of watched what he was doing. And by the end of the fall semester, this was the fall of 1973, um, I went back to his office and said, "So, this is what I want to do with my life." And he looked at me like I was crazy. So, he had no credentials. How
5:22 you going to do this? I said, "I could you write some letters for me?" So he wrote a bunch of letters and um they all came back no thanks except one uh which was at the state university of New York at Stonybrook on Long Island. I was in Louisiana was in New York and I um you know I said okay uh the this is the only one that wanted me and I didn't know why they wanted me but it turned out that the guy who wrote the letter knew somebody at Stonybrook and they took me in. Um, and that's where I began my scientific career. Um, I dropped everything in Louisiana and moved up to New York, the island in New York, and uh, I was introduced to my professor
6:08 uh, who was studying maretss and uh, their play behavior. And I I hadn't come, you know, 1500 miles from Louisiana to study marmicets. I wanted to study the human brain. and uh it just wasn't uh the guy that I was working for wasn't going to be somebody that could help me in that. So I stumbled ac across um a person who was actually studying the brain. His name was Michael Kazanaga and he was studying patients called split brain patients. And these people have uh the two the connections between their two hemispheres are separated connections are are cut uh to relieve intractable epilepsy. And so the um it's a uh radical procedure still done
6:56 occasionally but the medications were not very good back in those days. So it was something that had uh you know it was helpful to the people who were involved. Many many of the people that I saw with this problem that had these these surgeries were young people. Um and they still had they had a life ahead of them. But they in order to lead a good life, they would have to have some kind of control over their epilepsy and and the drugs just weren't doing it. So the split brain thing was useful. And when you split the brain, that means that you've got on the left side of your brain, the left side of the patient's brain uh is uh um the language system of the brain and then on the right side are you know other things that uh usually don't have much language. So when you
7:45 know the the standard thing in studying all these patients to was to ask the patient what do you see? So you present a stimulus to the left hemisphere on a screen. Everything on the right side of the screen goes to the left hemisphere. So you say, "What did you see?" And he says, "I saw an alcohol." Then you put a stimulus in the left visual field goes to the right hemisphere and you say, "What did you see?" And he said, "I didn't see anything." Because the left hemisphere didn't see anything. The left hemisphere could talk. The right hemisphere would hand point to what it saw, couldn't talk about it. Um but then we discovered something us unusual in these stations that we had this one patient who um could all could obviously point with his left hand to what the
8:31 right hemisphere saw. The right hemisphere could control his hand and point to what he saw. But there was no talking about it. But in this case, this boy's case, he was able to read in his right hemisphere as well. So he had language on both sides. He just couldn't talk out of the right. So he gave him a bunch of scrabble letters uh and had him spell out the name of what he thought in his right hemisphere. And so if we put his name Paul in the right hemisphere, all would spell out his name. So he knew who he was, he had a sense of self in the right hemisphere. We asked him all kinds of questions like that. And it was clear that for the first time in studying split brain patients there was
9:18 evidence that there were two conscious mind going on in this one brain after this burn up brain and the right hemisphere had a conscious mind because it was able to read and respond in a verbal way. So that that's a big step towards uh showing that that it was a conscious person over there and the we did this I don't mean to just linger on and on here but I just want to tell you about one experiment we did that became the foundation of my entire career. So we yeah as my mentor Mike would say uh you know we spent um 20 years not we but he had spent 20 years studying split vein patients and the uh question that
10:05 everybody was asking in that field was what did you see but finally in this one experiment we asked why did you do that rather than what did you see so what we did is we put a picture of a snow scene on the left side of the spring and a picture of a chicken claw on the right side. And so the left hemisphere is seeing a chicken claw. The right hemisphere is seeing the snow scene. The left hand points to a shovel. The right hand points to a chicken. So he said, "Why did you see that?" I'm talking to the left. He said, "Well, I saw a chicken claw." So, I pointed to the titten and
10:50 you need to double clean out the chicken shed. The left hemisphere had no idea what the right hemisphere saw. Had nothing knew nothing about snow scene, but he saw a shovel and he saw a chicken and it he told a story. It created a narration that made his behavior make sense. And you know that was wow you know because like what that meant was that the the the normal interpretation would be that okay this patient has brain damage and so he's confabulating a story to make his behavior make sense and that's all fine and well but you know what we do we we study these patients that were all in New England and we drive up there and test them and
11:35 so forth and then that at the evening after the long day of testing the patients. We'd go to uh a restaurant, a bar or something, have a drink and talk about the date. Um and in this particular case, we were just, you know, we're kind of fascinated. We knew the confabulation was cuz you know, we studied a bunch of uh patient different kinds of brain problems, but um we what we came to conclude was this is not something that just happens in in patients with neurological problems. We are confabulating 24/7 in our lives to make our lives make sense. And given that we have so many unconscious processes in our brain that are controlling our behavior all the
12:21 time and our conscious mind is seeing all of that uh it's got to tell it's got to create a story that makes all that non-concious control of behavior make sense. So it you know it's kind of like we just said okay um this is this is an important thing and we started writing some articles about it. We um uh ended up writing a book and this is the kind of benefit story. So the first day that I met my mentor Mike Gazanigan um could I wanted to leave the guy was studying warmers and and work with Mike and so Mike said okay let's talk what do you want to do and I said well I want to study these patients that that you're interested okay we go write a go write a
13:06 uh proposal two-page proposal bring it back to me so I went and I wrote a two-page proposal dropped it off and then he called me back to an office and he Okay, you can join the lab and uh I would like you to uh to uh revise my my most recent book in your spare time. Okay. So, I did this out of marketing uh walked into this guy's office. He say the lab and he wants to look on called the uh biseffected brain about these these patients and I was totally green. asked, "Why are you doing is this a joke?" He said, "No, I've never had a a student who could write."
13:53 And she lo, no one had ever told me I could write uh years of college and so forth. So I was excited, he was excited. And we I started writing. We you know, we go up to New England once a month. And so, um, I would have a lot of time to kill. I took some courses and stuff. But in the meantime, I was also kind of trying to revise his his book as as the studies went along. More the deeper and deeper we got into the studies, the more and more I was writing. But in the last year, it was a four-year program. So in the last year of uh the program um we decided that u we were going to throw we weren't going to do that revision of the book at all.
14:40 What we were going to do is take what we've been studying for four years and turn that into a new book. And the new book was going to be called the integrated mind because the bisected brain was about what happens when you take the brain apart. And the integrated mind was about what taking the brain apart like that means for all of us. You know that that we have these stories we tell and so forth. Um and so this book came out uh two weeks before my PhD thesis and so I had a very strange graduate career because basically all I did was go test a few patients um took classes as was required but they only had two classes required. one was uh um
15:26 uh you know behavioral approaches uh behaviorism sort of approaches to route behavior and the other class was statistics. So those were the only two classes I had in graduate school. Um and by the end of the the my four years there I had a a you know a PhD in in study consciousness and split or brain patients and a book on it. So I was just really lucky that the dominoes just kind of fell, you know, and that that's how my life got started. >> So before every episode of this show, I spend a lot of time in research papers. I have tried every PDF editing tool out there and UPDF is the one that stuck. Let me show you exactly why. The AI assistant feature is what I use the
16:12 most. It runs on GPD5 and DeepSeek R1. I open a paper and highlight something, ask it directly, explain this methodology or summarize section 4 and it answers questions from the actual document, which means no hallucinations. You can also translate entire documents, which I use constantly for non-English papers and generate one-click mind maps from any PDF, which is generally useful for mapping out a field before an interview. They've also built in academic paper search right inside the app. Find papers by keyword. you can pull them in, start reading and annotating so you don't have like 30 browser tabs open at one time. I don't know if that's familiar for you. And if you've ever tried to read a scanned paper from the '9s, which I've done actually a surprising amount of, it's basically an image. So UPDF's OCR can
16:59 convert that into fully searchable editable text. It's a lifesaver for older literature. UPDF also has many other professional editing tools such as PDF merging, compression, conversion. You can also directly edit PDF text, images, and links super easily. Single license works across Mac, Windows, Android, or iOS at about a sixth of the cost that Adobe charges. And if you hate subscriptions like me, you can also do a once- off lifetime purchase. Also something Adobe doesn't offer. There's a limited time offer running right now, so click the link in the description. I really could not recommend UPDF more. And so the the next step was that I wanted to one of the things we concluded from all that was that um the massive kinds of unconscious processes in our
17:46 brain um are candidates for what generates these behaviors. these behaviors that require that we have some kind of dissonance reducing uh uh narrative that we tell kind of cognitive dissonance that that when you see yourself doing something that you consciously didn't do, you have to have to um narrate that in some way in order to make it make sense that the reason you did it was you make up a story as to why you did it. And uh it's a contabulation that that we all do all the time. And the idea was that the emotion systems in the brain might be uh the kind of systems that would generate these unconscious behaviors that require
18:33 these producing narratives. Uh and so uh I decided that you know I wanted to study emotion because we Mike at at the bar one of these nights that after one of these test things Mike said you know there's not much research on emotion and we had done one emotion study in in these footbrain patients I said okay that's what I want to do um and so I decided that the methods available to study uh emotional functions in the human brain were quite limited um but what I wanted to do was not study conscious emotion but instead to study the kind kinds of non-concious behaviors that we would use. I I decided to do that in rats because it was assumed in the field at that time that uh a lot of
19:20 uh emotional behaviors have been inherited through our million ancestry and therefore the um um the kinds of responses we study in rats could be the same kind of responses that demand these these narrative. humans. Obviously, they're not asking rats to generate narrations, but the the you know, let's say you you're freezing to a snake, a rat will freeze to a snake. So, it's that kind of response. And so if you're reading to a stand, be able to tell yourself the story about what you're going to do and how you're going to uh come to terms with software. But that pain kind of my motto uh studying rats. Um and so there were a lab in in New York City that uh was studying rat brains. Uh and the
20:08 um the the the uh the lab in terms of the kinds of uh capacities it had. It had every kind of neurological neurobiological tool that one would ever want at that time because the guy who was running the lab had all the latest and greatest tools. So I joined this lab um and he uh he allowed me to do whatever I wanted to do. I just uh had to study blood pressure in some way because that's what he was making. Uh that's where he got all his grants. So we did some studies uh on brain and behavior and finally got around to doing some studies on trying to map pathways in the brain for emotional behavior and stuff. And so I wrote a grant. The grant
20:55 uh went to the review committee in the United States we have this uh uh national institute of mental health. So we submitted the grant to there and the grant came back uh rejected and the rejection was because neuroscientists do not study emotions. This is shut this was a lingering effect of behaviorism on the assumption that what I was talking about in terms of emotion was emotional consciousness and consciousness was still taboo in neuros psychology. Neuroscience was a brand new field. Um I got into it in 1974 but it had only become an actual discipline in the late 1960s. the first
21:41 meeting of the of the conference huge conference now but it was very small then first meeting was like in 1969 or something so I the um the field I was coming into was very very uh small and that's probably one of the reasons why they took me at Stonybrook because they needed people do work uh because neuroscience is not very popular um and the the research was pretty you know behaviorist dominating um because you're studying animal behavior and the way you study animal behavior is by studying um using behaviorist methods. Uh and so that was the kind of the the motto of of the field. Um and so what I had to do I had to really disguise myself. U the grant was was based on
22:30 Pavlovian conditioning uh because that seemed like a good way to trace pathways in the brain. And so uh the but the the regret reviewer re rejected me because not only uh because I was studying uh uh I wasn't supposed to study emotion but be also because he rejected it because uh the um procedure I was used ploing fear conditioning um was used to study learning and memory and you could the only way you could study learning and memory and distinguish whether something was really learned uh as an association or whether it was instead uh something that was uh uh the result of some kind
23:15 of a startle response or something uh that didn't have learning involved. It was more of a kind of automatic response. So the grant was rejected both because it involved emotion and because there was no control group or pavlovic conditioning as a learning procedure. So I just you know I was pretty angry at the time because I thought I had a good thing going. Um but I decided okay I'll play the game. I changed the name of the grant. Uh I made it more about uploading conditioning uh rather than emotional uh behavior. made no s no kind of move towards emotional consciousness or anything like that. Um and that was accepted the next time and so for
24:00 decades I basically I kind of fell in love with the whole PBLO of conditioning field and so I did a lot of research on that and all wrote lots and lots of papers on it. Um and that was what uh I got known for in the field of neuroscience being about conditioning researcher. >> At the same time though when I would write let's say a book chapter or something I would always put in it a part at the end about consciousness. Um and nobody read those books you academic books and so nobody read them but you always I mean you have to write a book chapter for this conference or that. Um the I was I was kind of you know masquerading as a Pavlovian conditioning
24:46 researcher which was really what I wanted to get to is to understand these non-concious behaviors that control emotional reactions. And so you know the decade went on I had all these discoveries about the amygdala. Um there were there were just a few people working on the amygdala at the time. uh the amygdala became you know the brain sphere center I tried to push the idea that the amygdala was an implicit non-concious controller of emotional behavior that's the kind of behavior I wanted to study going back to the split writing study I wanted to study emotional behaviors in rats that were relevant to emotional behavior in humans and that might lead to these narrative processes in humans and so I
25:32 thought I was getting something good out of the rat work. But the idea that the amygdala was an implicit emotional center uh as opposed to a conscious uh emotional center or an explicit emotional center which I thought was somewhere else in the cortex. Uh that that distinction between uh the implicit and explicit worked so beautifully in memory research, but it just didn't catch on in emotion research. The amygdala was emotion. It was not implicit. It was just emotion. Forget all this implicit explicit. The amygdala was the brain's fear center. And you know, I did a lot of research on uh the the basic mechanisms of of learning and
26:20 memory in terms of molecular processes, genetic processes, neuranatomical processes. Um, and at the same time, the this the work we were doing, it wasn't just me. I mean, there were a couple other guys uh at the same time that were uh involved in this and Bruce Cat uh and Michael Davis. We were the three guys that were kind of pushing the whole rat uh fear conditioning thing in the amygdala. Um but what what was happening I was starting to feel uncomfortable with the idea because a lot of research was starting to happen using Pablo conditioning in humans as well and the human work um was was treating the amygdala the same way that we were treating it in the uh uh rats. Uh it was
27:09 treating it as a fear center. There was no you know conscious no unconscious kind of stuff wasn't going that way. it was going more as a kind of um automatic response system that was equated with an emotion but it wasn't. Uh, and then there was some research that uh, a colleague of mine, Liz Phelps, and I did uh, that Antonio Deasio did this as well and a group in in London, Ray Dolan. Uh, this was the beginning of fMRI. And so we were all doing studies in the human brain of the amygdala and its uh, um, ability to respond not only to conscious stimula but to uh, subliminal stimula that were presented to it. So the amygdala was able to detect and respond
27:56 to danger uh subliminally and the person couldn't tell you why it it did why it did he or she did what uh they did uh because the stimulus only went to the amydala and you couldn't talk about it. So it was consistent with this implicit kind of learning uh thing but the big picture of emotion kept getting more and more about the amydala fear center the amydala fear center the amydala fear center and so by 19 I'd say by 2008 u I um I'd been at a conference a whole term conference at Oxford um on consciousness and that was really what I was trying to to pursue all the time uh and I wrote a chapter in a book there uh
28:42 that was about emotional consciousness. Um and that was my the beginning of a new phase for me because I learned a lot about what was going on in the field of consciousness uh during that that uh six or seven week term that that I was at Oxford and there were because there were philosophers involved there were some researchers involved animal human research. It was a great really great uh group about six or seven of us. Um and I learned a tremendous amount and uh especially about uh these theories of consciousness and and the higher order theory of consciousness of David Rosenthal which I didn't know anything about. uh and I kind of got really attracted to that and uh that ended up being a very important uh direction that
29:27 I went because I kept I started doing more and more writing about consciousness and the brain consciousness and emotion uh because there wasn't really a kind of emotional consciousness idea in the field um so that that's what I began to push and and slowly uh towards 2012 or so uh I was getting to the point where I felt I had this kind of imperceptible itch that needed to be scratched and so I wrote a paper called rethinking the emotional brain. So in 1996 I wrote this book the emotional brain and you know I was kind of like going this way and going that way part of the book I was talking about consciousness and the and emotion and the amygdala and part of it I was
30:12 talking about the amydala the implic it was it wasn't all consolidated at that point. So in in rethinking the emotional brain, I I proposed this whole new idea which is that the amygdala is not a fear center. It's an ancient defensive survival circuit. It's a circuit that is present in every kind of uh mammal, every kind of vertebrate. Um when you go to other animals, let's say bugs and slugs and other invertebrates, they don't have an amygdala, but they have a a survival circuit that protects them in danger. So these survival circuits not only involve animals but they go back to the beginning of life. Uh I wrote this book the u uh 4 billion year history the
30:58 4 billion year story of uh conscious brains. Uh it's about if you trace back the beginning of danger throughout the history of life, danger began with the first organism or the ability to detect danger uh uh resulted when the first organism was able to live long enough to divide and create the next organism. Other words, like a bacterial cell, uh these early bacterial like cells had to be able to acquire nutrients in the m the time that they were alive and they had to protect themselves from danger. So these two things were things that became automatic parts of being a living biological organism. And that history goes all the
31:45 way back to the beginning of life and all the way to the present. The amygdala is one manifestation of of that kind of defensive response. Uh the whatever a a fly or a bee has or an octopus has, it has its own defensive mechanisms. Um but we can't conflate those mechanisms with the actual experience of consciousness. Conscious experience of danger is a different thing altogether. you know, we we think of um emotions like fear being universal around the world, and it's often said that that that is the case. But I think that's wrong. What's universal around the world is danger. And every culture has a word for danger. And the the English word has been
32:32 translated into languages all around the world. And so it's assumed because you can turn the English word fear into a word for every other kind of culture. it must mean that that culture is feeling the same fear that we do. That's not the case because emotions are culturally uh determined. Uh they uh every culture you grow up you grow up in a culture, you're going to learn the the the ways of that culture. Uh and different cultures respond to to fear and to other kinds of emotional situations in different ways. Uh the fact that we call it the same thing doesn't mean that we experience it the same way. And that I think is a really important point. Uh so again it's danger that's uh universal not the emotion itself. The emotion itself is
33:20 something that you acquire in the process of going through your life. So every family you could say uh is a a source of a different kind of approach to what an emotion is. Let's say fear. So if you grow up in a family, let's say your mother's very anxious um and some so someone might say, well your mother's anxious, therefore that's why you're anxious. But that anxiety could be uh not necessarily uh uh genetic, but something that has just been that your mother was was uh made anxious by her mother who was anxious or by her father who is anxious. So the the culture that you grow up in is not just you know the culture at large but it's also your
34:06 family culture and it's also the subculture in which your family is in. Uh so for example in the United States we have lots of lots of uh disagreement now because there are lots very strong subcultures that are you know at each other's throats about all the politics and stuff and so and it's these are different these are different things because in the process of growing up and becoming an adult you what you acquire is a set of experiences that in your mind are what you call fear. But in someone else's mind, the same thing might not be fearful at all. So I think that you know all of our emotions are uh schema that we've acquired in the
34:54 course of life. So you have fear schema that you acquire within the family. You know you you respond to the to danger the way you were taught by your family to respond to danger. you're you are you respond to um uh adults and other people in a way that your family taught you to respond. So the you you come up with a lot of stuff that is family specific and the family specific is in a kind of subculture specific thing like let's say the town you live in can have a kind of motif about it and their approach to life and the the the larger uh county or country that they're in. You know all of these things determine how you
35:40 experience your world. You acquire these schema. Schema are bodies of knowledge about information that you've stored over the course of your life. And we all call it fear. We all call it love. We all call it uh happiness. But it's all it's each different for each of us. We're each different people because we've acquired different things. And so I think the the way we have to think about emotions is not in terms of these hardwired states. The hardwired states control your behavioral and physiological responses. But the emotion experience is a schematic process, a a set of memories that defined who you are non-conciously and also consciously.
36:27 I've spent years trying to make a daily routine of meditation, but probably for a different reason than most. If you've been following the join yoga for a while, you know that I'm fascinated by this question of altered states of consciousness. I've interviewed top scientists who study psychedelics, sensory deprivation, lucid dreaming, and they all say a similar thing that these kinds of states of consciousness can be achieved by trained meditation. Now, while I've always been skeptical of this claim, it's just been repeated again and again by the top scientists, people who I really trust. So, I had to try this myself. But the problem that I've always had is that when I do meditation, it's very hard to stay consistent when I don't know if I'm improving, making any
37:13 progress, or if anything is happening at all. That's where Muse comes in. It's a portable EEG headband used by NFL athletes, NBA stars to train focus during stressful moments. I've been using it to achieve deeper and more focused meditative states and track my progress over time as I improve. Now, as you can see, it also has the added benefit of making you ridiculously handsome. This has been verified by multiple sources. Muse measures brain activity, heart rate, and blood oxygen in real time and gives you live audio feedback that shifts based on your brain wave state. When your mind wanders, you hear it. When you drop into deep focus, the soundsscape changes. There's over
38:00 500 guided sessions. There's sleep tracking and a structured mental health strength program built on top of the world's largest EEG data set, over a billion minutes of brain data. I've been tracking my sessions for weeks now, and I finally have a dashboard that I can see my progress. I can actually see I'm improving. And this has such a good feedback cycle for actually doing it every single day because I know that that graph is going up. I'm getting better. I'm going towards something. Now, the device is definitely not for everybody, but at least personally for me, it has turned meditation from this uncertainty of not really knowing if anything is happening to an actual structured plan that I can see something improving. And that has massively improved my own motivation to do it. And just how cool would it be to have an altered anomalous state of consciousness
38:47 and catch your brain in real time and see what's happening? I mean, that idea is so cool to me. Use the link in the description for a special discount. Now, back to the episode. >> So, the the the great Carl Lashley, who was the inventor of uh behavioral neuroscience in the 1920s, once said, and I think it was in 1949, that was the year I was one, he wrote in a a book chapter that the every conscious experience is preceded by a non-concious set of thoughts. So it's you have this preconscious set of experiences that come the basis for what you're conscious of. So in my in my you know I struggled over
39:32 all these things for for years and um in the last book I wrote the four realms of existence I came to a kind of um resolution or understanding of what Lashley meant and because I knew about this all the way back in when I was studying split brain patient. What is that unconscious thing that underlies conscious experience? And what I came up with in in the four realms is a twoman mineral model approach. So the idea is that we uh let's say you've got all this information coming from your body from your visca. You've got information uh coming in from your senses, your eyes and your ears. All of that stuff is is
40:18 being put together as information online and um so it's it becomes a kind of cognitive representation uh of that non-concious information non-concious information processing that will allow you to um make um to to plan something in a goal- directed way. non-conciously uh and to act on it non-conciously have a goal- directed behavior. So because not all of the things that we do that make sense are oh okay I better I better do that because we have these templates we have these schema that we've acquired and they're part of this
41:05 unconscious process that we don't need to to re you know relearn or be reconscious about everything that happens. We just have to be uh we we don't have to it's there. We respond non-conciously and that gets confused with more automatic processes. So in the four realms of exist existence I came up with the most basic realm of life is the biological realm. Every organism that has ever lived has lived is a biological organism. Then there's a kind of neurobiological organism. Only animals have nervous system. So only animals can have uh the neurobiological realm. Now the neurobiological realm is an automatic realm. It involves uh uh
41:52 reflexes and and uh Pabloian conditioning and so forth that allows you to detect and respond to danger automatically. You don't have to do anything. You you step you're about to step on a snake, you freeze so forth. So this is the neurobiological level that got conflated so much with the cognitive and the conscious level in the study of fear. It's like the the inigdala is the neurobiological level of fear where you detect and respond to danger. You have these physiological arousal uh and these these u muscle uh uh responses. Um the next level though not not all neurobiological creatures uh take the next step. The next step is cognition. So how much cognition a butterfly has, I
42:41 don't know. I mean it's hard to know. But let's just say that uh we know that from from uh very sophisticated tests that uh uh rats and mice and monkeys and humans uh all have the ability to uh make decisions on the basis of cognition. uh and there are also birds that are very sophisticated in doing this but they evolve this simultaneous oh sorry in parallel separate evolution it's parallel evolution uh because there's no ancestor of birds and mammals uh that are shared right that that had this kind of cognition so the the the uh
43:26 the Jays and so forth that are so famous for having these fancy cognitions um are not the kind that kind of cognition is not present in every kind of bird. It's only in in in celebrities and a few other birds. So there's no ancestor of that kind of cognition. Now if you go all the way to the beginning of birds and reptiles uh is so it's really something that has happened cognition that happened in careral law uh in humans sorry in mammals and birds. So they were, you know, all of this is post um uh the end of the dinosaurs when the birds and and mammals began to be able to explore the environment more comfortably without the dinosaurs taking over all the time. So um the the point
44:15 is that cognition uh is not necessarily conscious. So what what we take away from this, what I take away from this is that all mammals and some birds get to they cross the finishing line and get and they have cognition. And we know that in humans we not only cross the cognition finishing line, but we also cross the consciousness finishing line. And so that we know that other humans are conscious because we have the same brains as all other humans. Yeah. And so we're going to be different. We're going to use our brains different. But our brains are different from other primates brains and their brains are different from brains of other mammals. So it's going to be different within within the
45:00 this mamleian species. Um but there's going to be some similarities that overlap. So I I'd like to uh to emphasize the the work of Endel Toling who introduced the idea of um semantic and episodic memory long ago. And at one point he also decided that each of those two kinds of memory semantic memory and episodic memory was associated with a different kind of consciousness. So episodic memory is associated with self-awareness. So he called that autonoetic consciousness whereas um no whereas the uh semantic
45:46 memory is associated with uh noetic consciousness which is factual knowledge. So all all primates have factual knowledge. They all have working memory similar to what the human brain has. So that's a kind of cognition that is shared amongst primates. If you go to other mammals, lower mammals, um they have um a tiny working memory thing. So if if we we start with all mammals, we know we have this kind of working memory that expands as we go from lower mammals to primates to great apes to the human version of great apes and so forth. And it's possible that you know some great apes have all these autonetic
46:31 consciousness things as well. Um but it's also possible that autonetic consciousness is a unique human capacity or at least grade eight. Uh >> that was probably the best run on a on a question I've ever gotten in my entire life. You managed to preempt 15 questions in a row and answer them perfectly in one of the best monologues I've ever had on the channel. So in Tolving's u uh two kinds of memory and two kinds of consciousness uh approach um he introduced a third kind of consciousness which is called anoetic. So autonoetic is self-awareness. Uh noetic is about factual knowledge and anoetic is about more of a kind of
47:19 feeling of rightness. In other words, there's not a lot of content to it. It's, for example, you walk into your home every day and you don't say, "Oh, this is my home." You know, it's your home and you don't have to say that. But if you walk in and something is disturbed and the place books are all over the place or something, all of a sudden that anoetic sense of everything is okay is gone and you are bumped up to a knowetic sense that something is wrong and then bumped up to a selfnoetic sense. In other words, autonomic sense that something is happening to me. Not just that something's wrong, but it's
48:04 happening to me. So you all mammals have this anoetic kind of uh capacity that you know is it right or is it wrong? When they you know they see food that is common, they approach it. They taste it. If it's not right, they leave it. So they have these it's a kind of primitive consciousness that rats for example would have. Um and so if we if we were to understand in the human brain how autonetic knowetic and anoetic consciousness works in our brains uh and which brain areas and systems are involved in each of those. Uh then we could ask
48:50 does a grade 8 have the same systems as we do? If not then it can't have the autonoric that we do. And same thing with lower mammals and let's say primates uh the monkeys and so forth. Um will they will they have the same circuits that we do? uh and that would involve working memory uh and the primate working memory system is where our working memory system came from and it's quite sophisticated in uh primates. So for noetic consciousness it's possible that uh that since we think
49:36 that noetic consciousness involves working memory in the human brain and the monkey brain is similar to our brain in terms of working memory then maybe monkeys have that kind of uh knowetic consciousness but perhaps not the self-aware kind of conscious. And then we turn to mammals and they have uh if if the if if what I'm okay so if the noet if the aoetic consciousness in the human brain back up let's say if aetic consciousness in the human brain uh involves areas of the human brain that are present throughout all mammals and that would be the medial uh cortical areas of all mammals and so stick the brain apart And you got the medial wall of the
50:23 hemisphere. You got the hypocampus, the amygdala, u all kinds of uh kind of circuits that are good in terms of cognition and and so forth. Um and those could be present because that because all mammals have those circuits. Uh if the human anoretic depends on those circuits and all mammals have those circuits, then all mammals should have that kind of consciousness. So the idea is rats and mice and fly not mat rats mice uh um bird not birds. So rats, mice, um owls, chickens, montes could all have the this kind and humans all have this anoetic
51:10 consciousness. Primates would have this knowetic consciousness and humans would have this autonomic because we don't really know about self-awareness in the human brain that well. But there is a part of the human brain right here called Broca's area 10 um that has a part on the lateral surface of the prefrontal cortex that is um present only in humans possibly in the great apes but you aren't allowed to study the great apes uh scientifically so you can't see whether they have it but monkeys uh don't have it. monkeys have a uh version of it that's on the inside in the medial wall of the hemisphere. Um and so but
51:57 they don't have the that that part that makes us human and that may be the the basis of of human consciousness. But that's just the speculation. >> Fascinating. I mean, as I said, what a what a response. I've never I've never had someone in a row just predict so many of the questions I was going to ask and do it so eloquently and perfectly. literally step by step from like split brain to fear pathways to amydala to change a model like everything. I wanted to touch on one thing h that you said really early on with Michael Gazaniga because I was lucky enough for him to come in I think about eight years ago now and tell that exact chicken story to my necience class. Um and I still genuinely remember the experience in my body of getting like a full body
52:44 goosebumps from hearing that result. And I think it was one of the most seinal moments I've ever had in my life that has set me on the trajectory I am now. Because I still when I'm doing science communication, what I think about is am I going to give someone the goosebumps experience that Michael Gazan gave me when he told me that chicken story because it just blew my mind. It just completely shattered me. I was like, "Oh my god, that's insane." So that's like the high part. >> It's amazing. Yeah, that that was mind-blowing to us at the at the bar that night when, you know, all this kind of transpired and has been stuck in my head all these decades, you know. And so what I was I was saying in the about the the four realms book and the and the uh
53:32 the way that what what I got in got out of all this was that you got this preconcious stuff like Lexi said that underlies each of your conscious experiences and that can exist with or without consciousness. So you can have these goal directed actions like I've been talking to you all morning about this. I I haven't planned a single word of it, you know, it's preconciously coming out and when I hear it and and I say, "Oh, and I'm screwing that up and stumbling on this on that." And I'm thinking I'm starting to like now become conscious of what I'm talking about because I messed up some stuff that I was saying. So we have a first of all we have this preconcious a it's called a u it's it's a kind of
54:19 narrative kind of making this up but I'm borrowing from some people who had written kind of like this that the the narrative is a um uh aodal narrative. It's not like you know a talking narrative. It's amodal. It takes in all the body signals and the brain signals and uh packages them into a way that you can now you know you you're putting you're bringing a lot of system into this immortal thing. Immortal thing is is basically the um you know it's it's the preconcious model. It's generating an a set of outputs that go to speech.
55:05 to goal directed behavior and to the conscious mental model. So the the first mental model is not conscious. I'm just talking it's just coming out, right? Uh and that that that often like you know blows people's minds. Yes, we're talking we're not we're not conscious about what we're talking about. So you got that mental model going and uh it's allow you to do these things but it's at the same time there's a kind of output that also goes into what makes our conscious experiences those higher order thoughts that we use to construct the world around us and be aware of it and that feeds back into the preconcious mental model. So you have a you have all these things coming out and
55:52 then goes conscious and then back into the preconscious. So it allows you to be conscious of what you were just conscious of. That's a little opaque but uh and I describe it better in the book. So if anyone wants to really say it to go there uh but the the important thing is that the um these thoughts can be used in three different ways. Right? So if you got if you had all of those different systems that were coming in, you had to piece them all together at each step of the way, it would would not work. So you have aal thoughts that can be turned into speech, can be turned into action, and it can be turned into a conscious experience.
56:37 And the um you know that that is how I think it all kind of falls together. uh is a thought I had or wanted to say that the um Oh, so this is why when we what we say isn't always congruent with what we do and neither what we say nor what we do is always congruent with what we're conscious of. So we have to narrate those things that are not congruent. So that's that's where we started. That's what it's all about. this aodal thing that sends out three pathways. Uh, and they each do something different and consciousness is just one of those. >> So well articulated. I love that. What
57:23 I'm really curious about is so your model of these fear pathways is probably still the most famous affective neuroscience model of all time. It's being taught neuroscience. >> Exactly. That's what I want to narrow narrow in on because it, you know, it's what I learned in college. It's what people are, you know, sitting neuroscience lectures tomorrow are going to learn and what people are earning all the time. >> I want to know because this is fascinating to me, you know, that this model is still being taught. Your name is is still on the slide. Um yet you actually fundamentally disagree with its main assertion now. But I want to know how you came to that conclusion like what was the light bulb moment? You spent decades building this model and this pathway and it became so famous. Your name is attached to this idea. How
58:09 do you then wake up one day and say actually I'm getting something fundamentally wrong about this? Because people don't often do that, right? Exactly how you say it. Like we're biased to believe in the things that we produce and you're getting so much success from it and now all of your name is behind that. >> So how do you how do you kind of see past all that bias and actually say I think I'm getting this wrong after decades convincing yourself that it's right? So um not too long ago I was watching a documentary uh about George Martin the guy that did all the Beatles music the producer and the uh uh it was it was a interview with him and his son. His son was also became a famous music
58:56 producer. They were just talking and the the son said, "Well, you know, Dad, that the reason that um you were so successful." Oh, no. What what George George Martin said first um well, I went to um when I went to music school, I didn't know anything about music and I felt a little bit like an outsider. And so that you know, and the the son says, "Yeah, dad, and that's why you were such a great uh producer because you weren't indoctrinated by the the system." And that's that's me. Uh you know, I came into the field with nothing and uh I didn't have the indoctrination that
59:42 would cause me to not question. Yeah. I I did what I wanted and I just kind of floated around and um it was I just felt it was wrong. You know, I got to the point where okay, the amydala was this, but I I don't see it that way. But if you think back of all the things I've said, I always said the amydala was not a conscious experience. It was I didn't always it was kind of fuzzy sometimes. But from the split brain time on, that's where I was going and that's how I got to uh thinking it's not right because you know if it's not implicit and there was lots of research that showed it was implicit. If you're just going to dismiss the implicit explicit and say it's just fear, you're losing what's
1:00:28 important because you know why do people go to uh therapist? They want to feel better. So drug companies take rats and mice and put them into test chambers and give them drugs. And if the rat freezes less, that means the rat is feeling less fear and therefore a person should feel less fear. But it doesn't mean the rat is feeling less fear. Just means the rat is having those neurobiological automatic reflex responses to the stimulus. That's not fear. That's that's an automatic response that goes back to the beginning of life. Um, and so that was my my insight and I thought it was just wrong to keep saying that uh we're going to ignore the difference between implicit and explicit. And I I didn't
1:01:15 use those those terms anymore so much. But the important thing was that I decided that I had to um do something about it because the drugs were not helping people uh the way they should. you you know yes you would let's say you take a drug you might have a little bit less stage fright or you you might be a little less jittery or less you you're sweating less or something. So the behavioral and physiological responses are um can be taken care of to some extent by these medications and the assumption is that if the the if the objective responses behavior and physiology if those objective responses are treated then the fear will go away the anxiety will go away. That doesn't
1:02:01 happen. What happens is the person is just less jittery and less uh less uh behavily jittery and and less aroused but still anxious. And you know the fact is that person is going to be anxious forever because the only way to treat that is not by drugs but by having uh well it's a three-step process. First you have to tame the amygdala amydala parac all those subcortical circuits to control these automatic responses that we have. You have to tame that and you might be able to do that. Let's say you have a spider phobic. Spiderhobics do not like to have uh cognitive behavioral therapy with the spider in the room. So suppose you could like flash the spider sublimally to the
1:02:47 amygdala and you could do that u and repeatedly do that. you could extinguish the amygdala in the spider phobic. And then uh if that happened then the spider phobic might be able to be in the room with the spider and begin to talk about spiders and what they know about spiders and um how sp what goes on in in the hippocampus and memory at that point. So first you tame the amygdala then you have to kind of retune the hippocampus and then number three and as and the retuning of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex is really retuning or renarrating who you are. So number three then is you got to go to that psychiatrist, psychologist, whatever it
1:03:32 is the rest of your life because it's going to you're going to you're never going to get rid of this. But if you have a path that is able to uh allow you because you you changed your memories about things and and you pain the amigdala in terms of its behavioral and physiological arousal, you're going to have to repeat that sometimes um and stick with the the therapist that knows your history and uh perhaps stay with that therapist the rest of your life because it's a constant process of reassessing, renarrating who you are. And you know, maybe maybe some people are good enough at renarrating for themselves, but those that have difficulty in renarrating going to have to stick with the psychiatrist or or
1:04:18 know the therapist to to make this all better. Um, and this goes all the way back to the 1950s when uh Freud was still kind of the the king of of psychiatry and younger psychiatrists started to say, well, you know, this Freudian stuff is, you know, it's too too soft. Uh, we need to be more objective, more scientific in psychiatry. And so what they did was they followed the behaviorist procedure focus on the objective responses and don't worry about the subject it will go away. And so all the drug companies over the decades kept looking and looking and relooking and relooking and it all it'd always be the same thing benzoioipines
1:05:04 serotonin reuptake inhibitors over and over again. Um, and then the people take these and they get some help, but they're not that's not going to renarrate their lives for them. You have to have that renarration process and you have to do it with somebody that can guide you through it because otherwise you're going to, you know, find yourself going back down the same old roads. All right, I think I, you know, shot my mouth off. >> Really well said. I mean, it's a great practical example to show that it's not just a pedantic or semantic difference we're making here that your change of heart, I mean, this has absolutely gigantic therapeutic implications. But I guess what I really want to drill down on is what these higher order theories
1:05:49 of consciousness are really, what do they mean? If when this unconscious amygdala survival circuit gets re-represented in the frontal loes and becomes an experience that I I I guess correct me if this is wrong, but this is sort of the central claim of these higher order theories is that these unconscious circuits get re-represented in higher order frontal areas and then they kind of become phenomenology. They become conscious experience. I'm curious if you have any idea why that is. What makes it special? Why is this re-representation different? Is it the shape? Is it the geometry? Is it the connectivity? Why why is one representation this and another? One is why is one experience and why is one
1:06:35 not? Basically, I know it's the biggest question in consciousness, but I mean you would be pretty well, you know, um I think to answer it, I think you're you're pretty qualified. >> Well, it's all about the two mental models. You know, you have the one that is preconcious and that I've used talking to you for most of this talk with you've asked me a question. So now I'm kind of conscious and think about it. The other part is that the you know the the preconcious is what is the basis of the conscious part and so that is what a higher order thought is. Now, David Rosenthal, who's the the father of the higher order theory um doesn't like necessarily the way I present it because, you know, he he has
1:07:20 his his theory and this has been a problem I think in in philosophy and neuroscience for a long time. The philosophers created theory. Then the neuroscientists start looking for the neural mechanisms. But when you do that, you you learn things, you see things differently about the philosophical theory. But the philosopher doesn't want you to. That's what this theory I understand. So I think we need to call it something else beside the high order theory. It's that's basically what it is. It's like a stimulus comes in. It's integrated in this aodal thing that goes to the three systems speech behavior and consciousness itself. The consciousness comes back into the the the stream and allows you to be conscious of what you were just conscious of. So you can maintain that thought of consciousness over time and maintain that feeling. uh
1:08:06 and then if you get distracted then you have to start over again. So it's very simple. It's really just a kind of a diagram that shows how integrated information across all systems of the brain becomes put into a code that has no modality. It's not visual, not speech. There's no it has no particular kind of code. It's just pure. And that can be because you have a system that's controlling behavior. The Amodal can affect it. And because it's it can also affect speech and because it's a can also affect our conscious experience and tie all three together. Fascinating. Do you think it has a shape? Like do you think in the future
1:08:52 we'll be able to look at it and know from its very specific geometry and structure that yes, that's a conscious experience we're looking at? So yeah, the one thing I should have point out uh that um I gave this lecture at Yale um uh a couple of years ago now. And um the you know this was the two middle model system. And so what I was talking about is the uh you know while while I think this mental model two mental model system is good it also introduces a kind of difficulty because that means we never know in an experiment
1:09:37 which mental model is talking. Right? So, I'm talking to you. You don't know which middle model I'm using at any m particular moment. Uh, and I've gone back and forth between which ones I use. Um, but this this very clever student afterwards said uh came up to me and said she had an idea how you might distinguish that, how you might tell. Um, this was like before the kind of mega AI evolution uh that's happened in the last year or two. Um what she said was well there are all these uh studies that that do the you know you this uh AI kinds of approaches to take apart narrative text or speech or u uh the narration of sorry or the um the theme
1:10:25 of a a film or the the you know the whole stream of thought of what a film is and all of that. So the idea was that that you can pick apart you might be able to pick apart uh what was conscious and what was non-concious by um uh how how uh clear the speech was because when you start talking consciously you're more coherent whereas the unconscious part might be more kind of all over the place when you put it into an analysis and see what is actually being said. So if you took this thing I'm talking about today and ran all the passages through uh and sometimes I'd be kind of you know
1:11:12 I don't stumbling and stuff and sometimes I'm not. So but it's not clear which one it's not even clear that the conscious one is the the clearer one you know because that's what I was going to say consciously kind of like you're thinking about it and messing it up. >> Yeah. Yeah. So do you think this this is really cool? Do you think this kind of classifier approach for speech then maps onto emotion and maps on to other forms of unconscious circuits, unconscious processing and conscious experience? would be would we be able to use a similar sort of classifier um then system to map like what was unconscious jittery um you know
1:11:59 sweating versus fear or conscious anxiety is it sort of the same sort of
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