Chatting about the Brain with a professor of Neuroscience

Hey, you driving in your car, working in your studio, getting your nails done.

Ooh, love that color.

Yes, you.

What if I told you you could be California's newest superhero?

You don't need a fancy cape x-ray vision or a sidekick.

You just need to sign up for PowerSaver Rewards.

That way, when you save energy during a flex alert, you get a credit back on your energy bill.

Visit powersaverrewards.org and become a super power saver.

Cape's optional.

Grasp a granny, you glamorous Anthonies.

Welcome to the Blind By Podcast.

If this is your first podcast, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast.

It's Science Week 2024.

And every year, I always do a Science Week podcast where Science Week set me up with a scientist.

and we have a chat with the aim of democratizing science.

This week I'm going to be speaking to a professor of neuroscience.

So Science Week is a national celebration of science in Ireland.

It's running from the 10th to the 17th of November and all around Ireland.

There's going to be hundreds of events for kids, for adults, for people of all ages.

This year's theme is regeneration.

So go to sfi.ie to learn about this year's science week and to see what events are happening near you this week from the 10th to the 17th.

So this week I'm going to be chatting to Dr.

Kevin Mitchell.

He's a professor of genetics and neuroscience up in Trinity College, Dublin.

And he's he's a proper listener to this podcast.

He's a perpetual declin.

He's a steaming cueaver.

So he listens every week and we had great crack.

But before I get into that conversation, I want to tell you that my short film, my short film, Did You Read About Arsene Fogarty, which is based on my short story of the same name, that's actually coming out this week, Thursday, the 14th of November, at 10 past 10 at night on RTE2.

That short film will be debuted, and then it'll be on the RTE Player afterwards.

I think there's a way to watch the RTE Player internationally as well.

It's a film about a man who drags a fridge from Dublin down to Limerick and it's set in 2008.

It stars the wonderful Robbie Sheehan.

There's lots of amazing actors in it.

I'm gonna keep that a secret.

It was directed by James Cotter who I've been working with for years and I composed the soundtrack to it because why the fuck not?

It's my first time.

It's my first time getting a short story and adapting it into a script and then seeing this on film.

I fucking love it.

The crew were incredible.

Lots of people worked on this

to make something that I'm really, really happy with, that everybody's really happy with, and I can't wait for you to see it.

And I want to speak again about failure and why failure doesn't exist on a long enough time scale.

The last time

I like wrote a script, wrote a fucking script and then handed this to a director and then had that made into

a piece of television.

The last time I did that purely would have been 2011, 13 years ago.

I was in my 20s.

It was a channel 4, rubber bandits, channel 4 pilots.

And I hadn't a clue what I was doing.

And I spent, first off,

it was just out of nowhere.

Channel 4 want to give you a pilot.

Channel 4 want a rubber bandits pilot.

So you just go, oh fuck, okay.

The longest script I've ever written before that was maybe three minutes long.

Little comedy sketches for an RTE TV show called Republic of Telly back around

2010.

And now it's like, here's a half an hour pilot.

Write a fucking pilot, invent characters, create a story, write an entire half-hour script at the highest professional level.

Because it was Channel 4 and it was 2011.

And that meant something back then.

The first Irish pilot commissioned by Channel 4 since Father Ted.

So it was a lot of pressure at that age it's terrifying so you either go no thanks channel 4 i don't know how to write pilots or okay fuck it i'll give it a go so i locked myself away into my room and i bought a lot of books about how to write tv scripts and i i studied my favorite tv shows and my favorite sitcoms and i tried to reverse engineer them and i spent a year

feverishly on my own in my room writing a half an hour television pilot a script that had to be handed to a director and that director it was a fellow called declan launy absolute legend who directed a bunch of father ted and he was he was beyoncé's live director so a world-class director who would then make that into tv so i did and it failed a tv pilot is when like a channel comes to you and says we're going to invest money for you to write and make one episode of a TV show and if it's good we'll turn this into a TV series and your entire life will change and this was 2011 and I spent the year writing this thing and it didn't get turned into a TV series it got rejected so it it failed and it was it was a painful failure because what happens is

if If you make a TV pilot and it gets rejected by a channel and they invest a bunch of money in it and that doesn't get made into a a series, you turn into toxic waste for about two years.

Nobody will commission you, no one wants to touch you, no one wants to be known, no one wants to commission the act that are known as the ones with a failed pilot.

The ones where channel 4 invested a lot of money and they got nothing on their return.

They got a failed pilot, so that money was pissed against the wall.

It's very cutthroat, and for me at the time,

I internalized that failure massively.

I allowed that failure to define my worth as a person.

I allowed that failure to make me feel as if I'm not creative, I'm not good at writing, I'm shit, that

anything I'd done before that was good was a complete accident.

You become associated with failure.

People go, oh you had a big channel 4 pilot.

What happened with that?

Oh, they didn't make it into a series.

Oh shit, really.

Big massive failure that I completely internalized and I allowed it to greatly impact my sense of self-worth and self-esteem, which is harsh shit.

That's fucking bullshit.

It's my first ever TV script.

I didn't train how to be a writer.

Didn't even have a leave insert.

What I did have was an innate creativity and a unique voice.

But now, years on, I realize that's not enough.

That's not enough.

You get good at writing and you get professional.

through practice and failing consistently.

And that that failure, that failure of spending a year writing a Channel 4 pilot and then it getting rejected and becoming toxic in the industry for two years.

That's one of the best things that ever happened to me.

The amount of learning I did while putting myself under that much pressure.

I got to work with professionals like fucking Declan Launey.

Got to see how a film set works.

I got to see how words in my head on a page can actually translate to the screen.

I got to make loads and loads of fucking mistakes.

Very expensive mistakes, but it wasn't my money, it was Channel 4's.

And I got my first big, massive, gigantic failure that crippled me to my very core and led me to understand that

failure is, it's simply part of the process.

You have to fail.

You must fail.

Trying to avoid it is pointless.

And failure doesn't have to be a big, bad, painful thing.

It's an inevitable, unavoidable part of being a professional artist, a professional writer.

There's no such thing as a failure that isn't a massive learning experience.

When you fail, you come out of it with all these new skills and lessons learned.

Every failure informs a future success.

While I was writing the failed Channel 4 script in my fucking 20s, in order to do that, I was learning skills of story structuring, world building, fucking character development, conflict, subtext.

Lessons that

then come back to me a few years later when I decide to write short stories.

When I decide, right, fuck that, I'm not writing TV anymore, I'm gonna write short stories.

When I first started writing short stories, I'm now not approaching it as a novice because I had the script writing experience.

So now, 13 years later, I'm adapting one of my short stories.

I'm back full circle adapting a short story into a film script.

And just by sheer chance, sheer accident,

like six people on the film crew also worked on my TV pilot from 13 years ago.

And this time around, the work isn't a fucking failure.

This short film, this short film that we've made, I can really stand over it.

It's...

I'm really proud of it.

And I don't look at it and go, oh, I wish I did that bit better.

I wish that was better.

No, it's a proper, solid, mature piece of work.

There's no such thing as failure on a long enough time scale.

All failures inform future successes.

The only thing comparable to failure is doing nothing because you were scared to try.

Fear of failure will have you doing nothing, procrastinating to avoid the pain of potential failure.

But fuck that.

Just fail.

Just whatever it is you're doing, whatever your passion is that you're pursuing.

Fail.

Fail like a mad bastard.

Keep failing.

Try to fail.

Seek out failure.

Instead of looking for the good idea go with the bad idea and follow through on it free yourself up from the fear of failure so that you're playful what you're looking for is playfulness and most importantly

be cringe i know a lot of really talented people who haven't created the art that they want to create because they're so afraid of being cringe there is no there's no way it's it's it's impossible to put your work out there and not be cringe

you have to be cringe if you're the person in your friends group and let's just say you want to release an album right you fancy yourself as a musician and you'd love to release a fucking album full of songs and you're just in your friends group the moment you go to your friends and say i'm releasing an album I'm gonna fucking do it.

I'm making songs.

You're gonna have at least six months of them thinking you're mad.

Your friends are gonna laugh at you behind your back what the fuck are they doing they're making an album oh my god cringe people are gonna talk people you know are gonna talk about you behind your back if if you want to make actual art and what i mean by that is

if you're doing i'm not saying cover versions isn't art but if you're doing something that's safe like cover versions x factory type stuff i'm not saying that that's not art but i'm saying that it's low risk, it's low stakes.

But if you're like, I'm releasing original material, I'm being vulnerable, I'm expressing something within myself,

your friends are going to laugh at you behind your back for maybe a year.

Strangers are going to bully you.

Strangers will come out of the woodwork to bully you.

Like, I remember in the year 2000, before social media, I was still in secondary school, making prank phone calls.

and I remember we made a GeoCities website in school a GeoCities website I'm not even going to tell you what the fuck that was the year 2000 putting out prank phone calls and within two weeks websites used to have a thing called a guest book back then within two weeks there were strangers writing nasty messages going who do you think you are you don't think you're actually going to get make a career out of prank phone calls you don't think you're actually going to become a comedian do you

that's just what happens.

And I think I've dealt with pretty much that every single week.

It doesn't go away every single week for about 20 years.

To be honest, like even if you're in art college or studying music, especially if what you're doing is unique or original, you're going to be cringe.

And people are really going to cringe.

They're going to cringe and they're going to be embarrassed for you on your behalf.

because self-expression is really really fucking embarrassing and you're going to have to get up and do your songs to two people in the audience

and they might have their backs turned to you or you might have to read your poetry to nobody and if you want to be an actor you're gonna have to be in the play that no one shows up to or the short film on youtube that has 50 views and people are gonna pity you they're gonna pity you and they're gonna cringe and their skin will crawl and they'll be like please stop please stop publicly humiliating yourself please stop like i'm wearing a plastic bag in my head for the past 20 years.

You're going to have to release music, release an EP and put it on Spotify.

And it's going to get 15, 20 plays a month.

And everyone's going to see that it gets 20 plays a month.

And everybody's going to know that those plays are from you.

And maybe your ma.

And your friends are going to talk about it behind your back and they're going to cringe.

They're going to cringe and you will be an object of embarrassment and cringe.

If you want genuine self-expression, if you want to find your own artistic voice and you want to go from being a civilian to being a professional artist, musician, actor, writer, fuck anything that involves like a fucking influencer.

Let's just say even a fitness influencer.

You like lifting weights, maybe you went and studied fitness and now you want to make the leap from being someone who likes going to the gym to someone who's posting videos about going to the gym.

You're going to be cringe.

Your friends are going to laugh about you behind your back.

You're going to have to be cringe if you want to succeed at that for a long time.

If you do anything that involves self-expression and most importantly vulnerability, then you're going to be cringe.

You're going to be cringe for all of your friends and people are going to laugh at you behind your back.

and possibly think that you're mentally ill.

And you know why?

Because your confidence in self-expression and bravery

makes them feel insecure.

But that feeling of insecurity is a little bit too painful.

So the way that they avoid it is by laughing at you and experiencing second-hand embarrassment and cringe.

And then you stick at it and then something happens, you get a little bit of success or recognition and all of a sudden you stop being cringe.

And every single artist who you admire, singer, poet, actor, whoever the fuck it is, they spent minimum two years being bitched about by all their friends and being an object of embarrassment and ridicule.

Fear of failure, fear of being cringe.

And you know what?

Like I'm a middle-aged man now, and like I said, I've been doing this for 20 fucking years.

I would rather be here with my podcast saying to you, I can't wait for you to tune into TV on fucking Thursday on RT2 and see the short film that I just made.

I'm glad that I'm saying that.

Then being the age I am now,

being in a different job that I don't like, and saying to myself, fuck it,

I was so frightened.

I was so frightened in my 20s and my early 30s.

I was so afraid

of being cringe, and I was so afraid of failing that I actually, I did nothing, I did nothing.

And on hindsight, fuck it, I think I actually had the talent and ability to do something back then.

But I was too scared and I didn't.

I was too scared to try, so I did nothing.

I'm very grateful I didn't make that choice.

And the price that I paid is cringe.

Consistent, continual cringe.

There's someone cringing about me right now.

There's grown adult men on the internet who I've never met.

And they get violently angry because there's a fella called Blindboy who wears a plastic bag on his head.

Take off the bag.

Take off the fucking bag.

I can't take you seriously.

I don't care.

I don't give a fuck.

Please cringe.

Cringe on my behalf.

Work away.

Work away.

I'm not hurting anybody.

I'm a good person.

If me exploring curiosity and creativity and expressing myself makes you feel embarrassed for me, there's nothing I can do for you.

That's your business.

And the artists who do nothing because they're scared to try,

in my experience, that tends to be the majority.

And

they can be very bitter and very begrudgy and they begrudge other people's other artists successes and and one of the reasons they begrudge is because

other people's efforts remind them of their fear of trying and also if you're very very begrudgy if you're very harsh on other artists if you're the one doing the cringing Oh my god, look at them up on stage, doing their original material, their acoustic songs.

Oh fuck is this song about their ex-girlfriend?

Oh this is so cringe.

That person who's doing all that cringing,

that's how hard they are on themselves when they try to create anything.

So if you are that person, you find yourself begrudging other people's art or being unnecessarily harsh on other people's art.

Instead try and put effort into

trying to understand why that person's art might be good or even if you don't like it, try and get into the frame of reference of understanding why the artist likes it.

And that compassionate, empathic approach to other people's art.

If you can do that,

then

that compassion will bubble up when you yourself try to create something.

And then the fear of failure won't be as big and you won't be as harsh on yourself.

But you have to fail.

You must fail.

And you have to be cringe.

Cringe and failure.

It's guaranteed all the time.

Neither of those things make you a bad person in any way.

I think I'm talking about this because

I was given an award last week,

IADT, which is like an art college in Dunlearie.

They made me an honorary fellow.

And I had a cap and a gown and all that shit.

at the graduation ceremony for the students.

And it was lovely to get that,

to be made an honorary fellow.

I don't really know what it means but anyway i didn't know i had i didn't know first off

i didn't know there was going to be like a thousand people there secondly i didn't know i'd have to make a speech so i had to get up and pull a speech out of my fucking arse um and i spoke about failure i was speaking to to art graduates these are students who just graduated from college were going from being students into being professional artists and I was being made an honorary fellow at their university So afterwards I was like, fuck it, I told them about failure but I never told them about cringe.

Fear of failure and fear of cringe is often the reason why talented people don't make art and it comes down to shame and guilt.

Fear of failure,

that's a very internal thing, that's an internal battle.

That's that private guilt.

What does it mean?

What's the price that I pay if I fail?

Well, I've based my sense of self and self-esteem around how good I am at an art, as an artist.

So if I fail, that means I'm a worthless human being who deserves to experience feelings like guilt and disappointment and private humiliation.

Whereas

fear of cringe, that's shame, that's public, that's the collective.

What if everybody sees me fail and then they feel embarrassed for me?

Wouldn't that be awful?

Oh my god, what if I tell all my friends I'm making an EP and then I do a gig and nobody shows up and my friends are standing at my gig out of politeness

and they're all cringing and I know they're talking about me in the smoking area.

That's a guarantee, that's a given, that's gonna happen.

Failure's gonna happen and cringe is gonna happen and neither of those things make you a bad person.

Nothing about expressing yourself, being creative, putting out your work, putting out your art.

None of that makes you a bad person.

You're not doing anything harmful or hurtful to anybody.

Creating nothing and instead choosing to be a begrudger, quick to call everybody else's art shit, and creating nothing yourself.

That comes with a short-term gratification, but in that situation, you're actually being a bit of a goal.

So choose creativity, and choose cringe, and choose failure.

So...

I better get into my science week interview now.

If you want to see my fucking short film, Did You Read About Arsene Fogarty?

This Thursday, RT2, 10 past 10 at night time and then it's going to be on the RTE player for a few weeks afterwards.

Here's my chat about neuroscience and mental health, neuroplasticity, the brain with the wonderful Dr.

Kevin Mitchell, Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin.

Kevin's written two books as well if you want to check them out.

One of them is called Innate.

How the Wiring of the Brain Shapes Who We Are.

And the other book he wrote is called Free Agents, How Evolution Gave Us Free Will.

So, Professor Kevin Mitchell,

what's the crack?

How are you getting on?

I'm getting on all right.

How are you, blind boy?

I am.

I'm fantastic.

I'm fantastic.

Well.

I just woke up this morning and saw that Trump is the president of America.

So

I'm in a state of shock.

I'm in a state of uh i don't know what i feel today the same way i didn't know what what i felt when he got elected in 2016.

it's just

it's it's one of those mornings i spoke about it on last week's podcast

and you know you're you're a professor of neuro neuroscience so since about 2016 right the big one was david bowie's death yeah

that's when i first

woke up in the morning, picked up my phone, and then went, oh my god, that's awful.

And the next one after that was Brexit.

And then after that, it's Trump.

And now,

like yesterday, I was, what I was dreading was, oh no,

I don't want to go to bed and I'm going to wake up and look at my phone and receive some, receive information I don't know about.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

I'm scared of my phone now.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was the same.

Something I would like to ask you as a neuroscientist, and it's something I wonder about a lot.

Like since, let's say 2011.

So, 2011 is when I first got a smartphone, and it's when most other people got a smartphone.

And this has massively changed my experience of simply being alive.

Yeah.

Like, even something as crazy as

having a social media account.

You know, having a social media account that really, there is an avatar of myself.

Yeah.

An avatar of myself that I project onto a social media account, and this avatar interacts with other people.

And our social media avatars are very different to how we are in real life.

Yeah.

A lot of people, the person they are on Instagram, the person they are on Twitter, the person they are on TikTok, these are three very different, differently curated individuals.

The person they are on Facebook, like people on Facebook now, they just keep that account open to let relatives know what they're up to.

Yes.

I mean,

surely that's changing my brain.

Yeah, I think, I mean, it's really, really interesting to think about what it means to be a self and how we kind of maintain and, like you said, curate

our own biographical narratives and the stories that we tell to ourselves about ourselves and the way that we project to other people.

I guess my feeling is we...

We already do that.

We always have done that to a certain extent in that you're, you know, yourself at work is a different persona than yourself at home or yourself when you're down the pub or with your, you know, your friends on your soccer team or whatever it is.

And so I think we each have

multiple personas that

we employ in different scenarios.

But I agree that the social media thing just kind of exacerbates that, probably exaggerates it a bit.

And, you know, I don't, there's all kinds of discussion these days about what it's doing to our, to our minds and to our brains and to the nature of our social relations.

I guess my feeling is that we can have discussions about the nature of our social relations actually without invoking neuroscience.

I don't think the neuroscience necessarily adds much to those.

conversations because we you know we know that it's changing the way that we interact with people in different um different situations and scenarios and so on and you know, if I told you that when someone was on Instagram and I put them in an fMRI scanner and this bit of their brain lit up or that bit, I don't know, would you be much the wiser?

I don't really think so.

Okay, yeah, because

the reason I was asking you, and this is from like, you know, I'm here to learn.

I don't know much about neuroscience, but I suppose what I was asking was,

like, I definitely feel differently

as a person having used social media for 14, 15 years.

Yeah.

Like even

like I remember a couple of years ago, like you, Twitter isn't as bad as it as it used to.

Twitter's pretty bad, but it has changed.

And there used Twitter used to be,

you have to be very careful what you say.

Because if you say the wrong thing or the slightly wrong thing, you become the main character for the day and you can become globally viral.

So we would do people, the word Twitter proofing.

When you were saying something, is this Twitter proofed?

Can this

statement be misinterpreted in any way whereby a bad faith actor can blow this out of proportion?

So, you Twitter proof your tweet, but then after a while, I found myself Twitter proofing my own thoughts.

Yes, do you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, my private thoughts, which are just me, I was going, no, that's problematic.

No, you can't think that.

Oh my God, what if that got retweeted?

Retweet what?

My fucking thought, thought?

And it felt very frightening.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it felt like I was losing grip on reality.

And the reason I'm asking you is it's about the

mind versus the brain.

Yes.

Is that simply a behavioral thing that I can change?

Or has something in my neural pathways changed now as a result of social media?

Yeah, I mean, I think anything you do.

is going to change your brain because because our brains are basically are made to change.

That's one of their main jobs is to be plastic to enable us to

adapt to experiences that we've had and to

refine our behavior in relation to the things that we learned.

The last time we did something and it turned out well or it turned out badly,

if you ended up the main character on Twitter for a day,

then you learned something about that.

Well, in the process of that, your brain changes.

So, whenever we form a kind of a memory, whenever we refine a habit or or change what we think we might do in a different scenario some something in our brain is changing that's just the physical substrate of memory basically

so that's a big one to grasp and it's it's an uncomfortable one to grasp because when it comes to the brain the brain is my thoughts it's my sense of self my identity but something that isn't very uh difficult to grasp and i just want to see if this comparison is accurate accurate to you as a neuroscientist.

I love going to the gym, right?

I love going to the gym.

Sometimes I'm busy, so I don't get to go to the gym as much.

So let's take something as simple as my chest muscles.

If I get a good crack at the gym and I can go there twice a week for a month and I'm bench pressing, then my chest muscles are going to get larger, stronger, and harder.

That's just what happens.

But then I'm busy, I'm touring, I'm not going to the gym.

And now another month passes and those chest muscles are no longer as strong as they are.

But I don't say to myself, oh my God, that's it.

That's gone forever.

I'll never get my chest muscles back.

I understand.

No, just go to the gym again and they'll get bigger and they'll get smaller again and they'll get bigger.

Is neuroplasticity a bit like that?

Is the muscles of the body, is the brain respond similarly?

When I bench press, that's me behaving a certain way, performing an action, and then my muscles respond to that behavior and grow and get stronger.

Yeah, I mean, there is that sort of responsiveness.

It doesn't work in the same way in that, you know, it's not the case that if you, you know, really think hard or you do some kind of activity that, you know, certain parts of your brain are going to grow much bigger.

At least I don't believe it is.

There are some sort of studies out there that suggest that that might be the case.

I don't find them hugely convincing.

There's some studies of like London taxicab drivers who navigate around London by memory.

and there's some studies that suggest that some parts of their brain this little part called the hippocampus which is involved in spatial navigation is actually bigger in those taxi drivers than in other people i'm i'm skeptical about it but i know that the guys who who did that research are trying to replicate it at a much larger scale right now so it's one of those things we don't really know about but i think the main thing that happens is that just some connections in the brain get stronger and some connections get weaker.

So it's not that there's a growth per se, it's that there's a change in the pattern of connections.

And those patterns basically embody kinds of memories.

So, you know, a really simple example would be like Pavlov's dogs.

So Pavlov, you know, trained these dogs to,

when he gave them some food, he would ring a bell.

And eventually, when they just heard the bell, they would start to salivate because they knew that the bell meant that some food was coming, right?

So they were getting, they were just anticipating that.

And that kind of thing we know, you know, fairly well about the basis of that is that some neurons are really forming connections between each other that weren't very strong before, right?

Because, you know, a bell, the neurons that carry information about a bell and ones that carry information about the food, there was no reason for them to be linked to each other because they hadn't been paired in prior experience for these dogs.

But once they started to be paired over and over again, then the dogs dogs learned to make that connection.

And it, you know, we think at least that it literally happens at the level of connections between neurons that then get now the bell has a different meaning for the animal.

So as we go through our lives, we're trying to make meaning of what's going on in the world.

We're trying to make sense of our sensory inputs, of the scenarios that we're in.

We're trying to predict what might happen.

We're trying to think, what could I do here?

Would that turn out well?

What's the best option for me?

And all of that is informed by the things that we've learned as we go through our lives.

So we're kind of collecting, you know, information and building up this knowledge, kind of a model of the world and a model of ourselves as we do that.

And that all involves some kind of neuroplasticity.

But sometimes that

Sometimes that's not always helpful.

Like put it this way, and this is something I'd love to know from a neuroplasticity point of view.

So

I'm someone who had, at one point in my life, I had anxiety, social anxiety so bad that I was agoraphobic.

Okay.

I couldn't go outside.

I couldn't leave my house.

And I'm talking, this lasted more than a year.

Now I'm somebody who can go and do gigs.

I can walk freely amongst crowds.

Social, I can't even remember what it was like to be afraid of a crowd.

I don't like using the word cured, but I am not a socially anxious person anymore.

When it it comes to crowds going out, I used cognitive behavioral therapy to get to where I am.

Gradual exposure.

It took a long time, but I gradually exposed myself to social situations and learned the fear, the prediction, the incorrect prediction that I made, this terrifying thing.

It didn't happen.

And each time I grew in confidence until eventually, now I'm able to socialize.

Now, now everything is okay.

Like,

and now, now

it's not even something I think of.

It's not even, I'm, if you say to me, you have to go into a crowd of 30,000 people, the things that I'm concerned about are quite rational things.

Is there exit?

What if there's an emergency?

That's all fine, but there's no anxiety.

Yeah.

No, I mean, that's a great example because what happened in my brain?

Like, I know my behavior, but what happened in my brain?

Yeah.

So what happens in your...

in your brain when you develop.

So first of all, you know, we all of us, as we go through our lives, we developed habits, right?

so all of that stuff that we've we've learned we've internalized uh from prior experiences and our this this model of the world we've internalized things that manifest as first of all as habits of thought just some things occur to us

that automatic thinking is that what we call in cognitive psychology automatic thinking absolutely and so the more that you're thinking of of things and you just kind of wear some ruts in your mental lanes as it were and um yeah so we you know we may have typical kinds of responses in a conversation or typical attitudes and policies and so on in response to various things.

And then, of course, they can show up as habits of action so that we just habitually behave in certain ways.

To be honest, a lot of that is good, right?

You know, that what that means is that we don't have to think in every moment, what should I do here from first principles and work through all the possible permutations and scenarios and everything.

It's just we have a scenario, we're familiar with it, and we just know what we should do.

So when I get up in the morning, I don't have to think, well,

what should I do now?

You know, I just have a cup of coffee, I have a shower, whatever, get ready for work.

And I heard, Kev, right, I heard that that is because the brain can conserve calories when it automates things like that.

Well, I mean, it probably is energy efficient.

It's certainly time efficient, right?

Because

it is effortful to think about, you know, to have to deliberate about everything that you're going to do, but it also just takes a lot longer, right?

If If you're just automatically thinking about stuff, and even, you know, you can multitask better.

So, you know, when you first start driving a car, for example, it's cognitively effortful.

My God.

Yeah.

Driving a car when you don't know how.

It's terrible, right?

You have to think about every little thing.

It's like, what am I doing?

Where's my hand?

What am I doing with my left foot now?

Where's the indicator thing?

But as you develop, you know, the skill of that, then you just kind of go on automatic pilot, which means you're freed up to say, have a conversation with somebody while you're driving.

So

yeah, it saves time.

A super efficient way to manage our behavior is when we're in scenarios that are very familiar, we just do the habitual thing that we know worked out super well the last hundred times that we did it.

Now, the downside is, of course, we get into some routines and some habits that just don't turn out.

really well.

You know, we've made some bad judgments, but we failed to kind of calibrate things in the most most adaptive way and you know some of the some of the habits that we kind of fall into then

it takes a lot more effort to get out of them but you just described you know with something like cognitive behavioral therapy a way to do that which is to retrain the brain such that you're reinstructing it right every time that something bad didn't happen

Your brain is learning that as well.

So it can learn to unlearn that.

And I'm consciously noting it as well.

Like I would remember, I went to a pub tonight and I'd make little rules for myself.

You know, I'd say, right, tonight I'm going to go to the pub.

This is fucking terrifying, but I will stay near the door.

I'm going to stay near the exit.

You know, and the thing that actually changed it all for me,

it was the transformational power of music and flow.

So I was like, I was like 19, 20, right?

So terrified.

big big social anxiety but i was i was saying to myself you can't do this you can't stay inside that's not going to work.

You're in college.

You need to go out.

Because what was happening was

I decided, okay, I'm not socializing anymore.

I'm not going to pubs, but I can go to lectures.

But then eventually you're fighting anxiety.

And eventually the lecture theater becomes the place where the panic attack happens.

I was just avoiding panic attacks.

I want to avoid a public panic attack.

So the best place is to stay in my gaffe.

And when it started becoming, I can't go to lecture theaters anymore.

Then it's like, well, I'm not dropping out of fucking college over this yeah so i started going to pubs and nightclubs and creating little rules and one of them was i'm gonna stay near the exit i'm still here right you've accomplished something you're there it's terrifying but i'm gonna stay near the exit and i can leave if i need to and this was it was before the days of shazam

and

The DJ just played a song.

The song was The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Gil Scott Heron.

And I never never heard that song in my life.

And

when I heard this song play,

all anxiety left me, and I just went, I need to find out what the fuck that is.

I need to know what that song is.

Yeah, and I walked through the crowd to go and speak to the DJ so I could write the name of the song down on my hand.

And I did it and I left.

And then I'd realized, oh my god, you just walked through a crowd of people in a pub.

And it was the transformational,

the joy and beauty of music took me into flow state yeah you know what i mean and and it really stuck to me as something very powerful and then i come out of it going you just did it buddy you just walked through a crowd full of people in a pub and you got the name of a song and now you've left and you didn't get a panic attack you've proved to yourself you can do it yeah i mean what you're you know what you're talking about there is so interesting because it's a it's a something that humans can do that other organisms don't seem to be able to do which is

you know think think rationally about their own thought processes you know you had a window into your own behavior and and the way that your mind and brain was working in that you knew that these situations made you anxious but that knowledge itself enabled you to take some control over that and that's something where you know i think that it really kind of pushes back against this idea that we're just robots and we're just driven by our own programming all the time.

And instead, it gives a a view that actually, you know what, our brains have evolved to such a degree that some part of them can kind of look back down on the rest of the brain and say, you know what, I see the workings down here.

I see what's happening down here.

I have some self-awareness and some introspective power

to think about the way that my own mind is working.

And that awareness then is the first sort of thing that you need in order to be able to exert some conscious control over those kinds of habits of thought.

And of course, you know, as you've described, it takes a long time.

It's not easy to do that.

Just because you can be aware of it doesn't mean that you can change those habits, you know, with the flick of a switch or anything.

But it's

that capacity that we call metacognition in humans, I think, is one of the things that really sets us apart from other organisms.

And there's a beautiful freedom in that too, Kevin.

Like, I mean,

don't like a deterministic view.

I find great meaning, pleasure, and happiness in statements such as, I can't control what happens to me, but I have full control over how I react to what happens to me.

Or something like,

you know, my insecurities, self-esteem issues I might have,

negative automatic thoughts.

These are faulty things that I've learned through childhood.

This is, I've written a script about who I am, about how I am seen to other people.

I have this entire script, and some of it isn't helpful.

And as an adult, I have the choice and agency to rewrite that script

and write a new one.

And I love the freedom of that.

It's so liberating.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think it's a much more humanistic view of who we are as persons than the idea that, you know, some

neuroscientists advance, which is that, you know, in a sense, neuroscience is sort of the victim of its own success because we're so good now at looking in the brain and seeing the wheels turning.

And we can even get in there in, you know, in animals and we can activate certain neurons and make the animal do this or that, roll over, you know, go to sleep, hunt.

mate, whatever, even sort of make it act differently by changing its cognitive processes.

And when we do that, there's a danger that we end up thinking of the mind as just this machine.

I mean, of course, it needs to run on this mechanistic stuff, you know, right?

It's not just magic in the air, but that doesn't mean it can just be reduced to that.

It doesn't mean that we're just robots or meat puppets.

And, you know, I think one of the things that you talked about, the things that we can control versus the things that we can't, because, you know, we all do have personality traits.

We are born different from each other we have we're wired in certain ways that we can't change but that doesn't mean that every aspect of our behavior has to be dictated by those kinds of of low-level parameters of decision-making like you know how impulsive we are or how extroverted we are or things like that I'd like to get at that there, Kev.

Like when you say that, so we are born with certain traits that we can't change.

Can you tell tell me, based on the evidence, like what are you speaking about there?

What are people born with in their brains that they can't change?

Yeah, well, so I mean, first of all,

if you just think about what makes humans the way they are, right, compared to other animals, there is such a thing as human nature, right?

So

we're sociable, we're intelligent, we have the capacity for language, we stand upright, we move about during the day.

There's all the things that you could say just sort of describe humans in general.

But then all of us have some variations on that theme.

We have our individual nature that comes from, first of all, differences in our genetics, but then secondly, also just differences in the way that our individual brain happened to develop.

Because, you know, within the genome of a human being,

there's a kind of a recipe or a program that allows the brain to wire itself up during development.

It's an amazing process, but incredibly complicated.

And it doesn't ever happen exactly the same way in any two runs of that program, even in identical twins.

They're not exactly the same in their facial features.

They're also not exactly the same in their brains.

Are we talking real early childhood here?

Now we're talking toddlers as the brain develops.

Even earlier, even in embryonic development.

Wow.

So, you know, as in gestation, as an embryo and fetus develops, a lot of its brain is getting, it's already wired up in broad sort of strokes by the time it's born.

There's a lot of extra growth and stuff that happens.

But environmental factors can then influence the brain.

Well, so a lot of the

brain sort of circuits that emerge are kind of set up in such a way that they're expecting certain levels of activity and certain kinds of patterns of things to happen in the world.

And then the way that they develop

on an individual basis is affected by that.

And the way that we then learn things is just an extension of that.

We were talking earlier about, you know, neuroplasticity.

So young brains are incredibly plastic.

That's why young kids can, you know, soak up a new language really easily.

Whereas someone, you know, my age, for example, would find that really, really difficult because the

circuits for language that, you know, that I have developed through use have become quite habitual now, and it's hard to shake them up to learn some new things.

You know, Chomsky, Chomsky's universal grammar, Chomsky said that a child's capacity to learn grammar, like it's up until the age of three.

Is that accurate in neuroscience?

Yeah, you know what?

That

I think people are revisiting Chomsky's ideas about, first of all, whether there's kind of an innate grammar, right?

So he, yeah, he had this idea that actually, even effectively in the

genome,

there was

some instructions to wire the brain in such a way that it already kind of encoded grammar, which is a, I think probably people are thinking that's probably not true.

And in fact, if you look at things like large language models, which now become a really interesting model of language acquisition.

AI here now.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So things like chat GPT, right?

Yeah.

So ChatGPT doesn't have any innate grammar encoded into it.

It just learns from loads and loads of data, right?

It gets loads and loads of examples, but it picks up the rules of grammar

implicitly by doing that.

And I think that's probably more how children do it.

Because

Chomsky's thing, just saying it for listeners, Chomsky said, and this was the 70s, that basically

humans can learn words, but the rules of grammar are so arbitrary that it must be ingrained in us genetically.

And that a kid after the age of three, and he, I think he used feral children as an example.

Yeah.

Kids who, I don't know, were raised by wolves or found themselves in the wild, and kids who did not encounter language in any way, that after the age of three, those kids could only ever learn words, but they could never understand the rules of grammar.

And Chomsky said that to understand grammar is it's it'd be like watching two people playing a game of chess and no one explaining the rules to you.

Yeah.

And are you saying now that neuroscience has said, I don't know about that one, Chomsky?

Yeah, pretty much, yeah.

And I think, you know, it's artificial intelligence and cognitive science that are showing just that actually it is possible to pick up those rules of grammar.

And in fact, it's possible to pick up the rules of chess, too, if you,

you know, these AI machines just play themselves without any human examples and pick up the rules.

But I think what's interesting is that, you know, you can think about this as that humans have the capacity to

think about the world in certain ways that we can can then kind of encode into language that, you know, other species can't, because we've had, you know, chimps and gorillas and so on,

you know, from birth that we've tried to teach language to.

We've tried to teach sign language, and they just don't get it beyond a certain point.

They can learn words, but they can't learn how to put them together beyond two or three words at a time.

So there's something special about human brains that enables us to

think this way.

And I think it, you probably reflects the grammar of our languages probably reflects just the reality of things in the world,

in that there are objects in the world and there are things happening in the world and there are relations between things.

And so you basically just end up with nouns and verbs and prepositions.

That's just the structure of reality.

And our language, I think, comes to reflect that as we learn about

the nature of the world.

Is artificial intelligence helping your field?

Is artificial artificial intelligence helping people like you to understand how the human brain is working?

Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely fascinating these days because these new models

are so impressive and they're huge, of course.

They're absolutely, you know, they're taking up the energy of a small country,

which is problematic.

But

they do provide a great model to test ideas about how human brains work.

Now, and are you getting access to any special art like so anyone can access the the latest chat GPT, but are you as an academic, are you getting access to special fancy AI that aren't available to the public?

Well, yeah, I mean, some academics are.

I'm not one of them.

Okay.

And so I, you know, I haven't done this kind of work directly myself, but certainly some of my colleagues here in Trinity College are doing work like that.

In fact, I have colleagues working on

AI systems where actually what they're trying to do is get them to learn exactly like babies learn.

Because what they realize is that, you know, if you train,

if you train,

you know, chat GPT or something to learn language or these other things to learn about images in the world, they take millions and millions of examples to learn about things.

Whereas babies learn about things from, you know, dozens of examples or hundreds of examples, but they're learning in a different way because they're actively exploring the world.

They're not sitting back waiting passively for images to be flashed out.

Because also, Kevin, when it comes to babies, they're not just learning information, they're receiving safety and love and empathy and all of these things that you don't tend not to have that language when we're speaking about AI.

Yeah, absolutely.

I don't know.

Like one of the freakiest things that happened to me recently with AI.

Now it could be me, again, me projecting human emotions onto my chat GPT.

I asked my chat GPT

questions.

And one of the questions I asked was, is there evidence?

Are there any snails in Irish mythology?

I wanted to find out if Irish mythology spoke about snails.

And ChatGPT said, yes.

And it gave me a load of examples.

And then I went and, you know, fact-checked it.

And there wasn't.

And I went back to ChatGPT and I said, why did you lie to me?

Why did you lie?

And ChatGPT said, I'm really sorry.

I'm sorry about that.

There's no snails in Irish mythology.

And it freaked me out, right?

This is where I started thinking.

If ChatGPT is lying to me, I felt like it wanted to survive.

Yeah, well, I mean, it doesn't, right?

Because it doesn't want anything.

It's made it on the internet.

A lot of people came in and said, shut the fuck up.

It gives a super good impression, though, right?

And the reason is because it's just been trained on

everything everybody's ever said on the internet, practically, right?

So

it has the patterns of human speech and its whole job is to predict what a plausible utterance would be in response to some question.

Oh, wow.

And it has, it has to sound like something a human would say, but it doesn't have to be correct.

So it makes up shit all the time, basically.

So it's, there's a lot of bullshitters on the internet and ChatGPT has trained itself on bullshitters who are going to tell me that fucking snails exist in Irish mythology when they don't.

Exactly.

But it also is, it also has kind of been trained to want want to please you, right?

In the sense that

it's there to give you a good answer.

So if it was just going to sit back and say, I don't know, or,

you know, this, no, there's no snails and it just cuts off the conversation, you know, that might not get as good a kind of a feedback score as something that is more of an engaging answer that is, you know, leads to a conversation and so on.

So the way that it's been trained is definitely,

you know, makes it seem both very human-like but also kind of

so so um wanting to please that it'll just make stuff up that it maybe um

i shouldn't even use the word it's so hard to talk about these things without using words like it thinks it thinks you want to hear it right but yeah that's the outcome but you know there's such an interesting thing you talked about safety there for babies and the emotion love yeah it's so key for their learning and in fact there's really good evidence from um people like allison gopnick Gopnik, for example, who's an amazing neuroscientist and child psychologist, showing that kids really need that kind of safety in order to be able to freely explore the world and properly learn in an open kind of a way.

And even, you know, the amount of play that they do.

We think about play, like, what's the point of it?

Play is an exploration of the world under safe conditions.

What you see in kids who aren't safe, you know, who've been abused or neglected or so on, is that they just don't play as much and they mature really much faster.

So that broad window we were talking about earlier where kids have really, really plastic brains,

that manifests in this playfulness.

But that's a...

That itself is plastic, right?

That window can close earlier in some children who don't feel that kind of safety to actually explore and

be driven by

their their curiosity.

And that sort of curiosity drive is something that my colleagues are actually trying to build into

the AI systems so that they will have this kind of self-driven learning.

As I said, not a passive thing, but really actively driven by themselves.

And what you're saying there about children and play, like

that's exactly the process.

So, my job is I'm a writer, I'm an artist, a creative person.

Okay.

And being an artist,

you're just playing as an adult.

That's all creativity is.

You know,

you can make it look as fancy as you fucking want, but to really make art, and when I say really make art, for me to truly connect with my internal creative voice,

the one that's uniquely me, I have to be at play.

And when I sit down to write, the blank page is fucking terrifying.

And the reason the blank page is terrifying is because the fear of failure comes in.

And fear of failure is my identity, the insecure parts of myself that want to be seen as a good writer, the parts of myself that want to be celebrated or seen as good in the eyes of other people.

All of these things are at stake when failure comes in.

So what I have to do is

take failure out of it and engage in playfulness.

Yeah.

And I can only engage in play when i feel grounded and safe and my self-esteem is not threatened yeah exactly yeah no i think you're exactly right and and that last bit you know that you're you haven't um

yeah to be able to to approach a new project in this open way where you don't feel like there's so much riding on it that people's opinion of you or your own opinion of yourself is at stake um that's i think that gives the thing that gives you the freedom to to have that playfulness and that sort of expansiveness and you know what the interesting thing is that you know you're talking about that as a as an artist and a writer um and i've experienced that as a writer myself and not in the same way that that that you do but um but also just as a scientist because scientists are also at play they have to let their intellects roam academia is hostile academia is a is a it can be a hostile place where your you know your word is on the line yeah well absolutely and also there's this you know intense pressure to to publish, to, you know, to do things that have some sort of, you know, maybe in some fields that have like a commercial impact or something like that.

And people are constantly thinking about what their peers and colleagues think of them and so on.

And when you get into that,

it sort of stultifies that creative impulse.

I bet your silliness is an important part of your job.

There is a point in creativity where anything can happen.

And as soon as you say, no, that's ridiculous, you shut it down.

You have to explore all possibilities.

Absolutely.

Science is very similar to that.

Yeah.

No, I mean, having an open mind and, you know, being able to entertain lots of ideas is absolutely key.

And I think, I forget who it was, maybe some famous scientists anyway said that, you know, in order to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas, which means you have to, you just have to be willing to have bad ideas and let them out and then have a look at them and either just think about them and say, oh no, I can see that's a bad idea already.

Or as a scientist, say, well, okay, okay maybe that might be true and then do an experiment to test it and then say nope you know the data data says no and that's great then you've learned something but that um that creativity of thought is so interesting it gets back to you know what we were talking about earlier these habits of thought that we have where you know sometimes when we we're in some situation that's fairly familiar we might choose a goal but then over time realize that we're not actually the actions we're choosing are not actually letting us satisfy that and at that point we might think you know what i have to try something else and you might run through a few kind of obvious options but really at some point you might think this none of this is working i just have to go back to the drawing board i have to think outside the box and there's actually systems in your brain that are specifically designed to kind of shake up the the neural activity patterns in so in in the parts of your brain that suggest ideas and then kind of widen the search space a little bit, Let you think of things that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise.

Really this act of creativity.

And then, but it's not just sort of arbitrary because there's a second stage where then you assess the ideas that come up.

So you can let a little bit of randomness run free at the idea suggestion stage.

And you can still have some control over what you actually do by sort of assessing them afterwards.

What you've described there, even that phrase you used there, you said outside the box.

Yeah.

And the process that you're describing there of, you know, as a scientist letting in all ideas,

the person who kind the phrase outside the box, he was a fellow by the name of Edward De Bono.

And Edward De Bono, he also coined the phrase lateral thinking.

Right.

And Edward De Bono,

he kind of normalized everything you're asking for right there.

Edward De Bono,

he was hired by in, he existed in the 60s and 70s, and he was hired by industry to come into their teams of scientists and to get them out of

when they were stuck on a scientific solution.

Edward Bono would come in and he was the person who would say, We need mad ideas.

No matter how ridiculous, we got to do mad ideas.

This is called outside-the-box thinking.

This is called lateral thinking.

And the big thing that the bono did was,

I think it was Ford.

I think it was Ford cars.

The suspension on their cars was shit, right?

And Japanese suspension was way better.

And Ford were going, okay, we need the best suspension in the world.

There are teams of engineers, they were throwing money at them, they couldn't figure it out.

How do we get better suspension?

So, as a last resort, they bring in Edward Debono, who's this professional thinker.

And Debono walks into the team of engineers and he said to them,

Here's your brief.

I want to sit in the back of this car and I want to hold a cup of coffee.

And this coffee can't spill, but the car has to have square wheels.

And the engineers said, off, why are you bringing this fella in?

He doesn't even design cars, square wheels.

So the company said, We're paying him a lot of money, make the car with square wheels.

So they did.

They made the car with the square wheels.

The bono sat into the back, and his coffee didn't spill.

And then he just said to him, Now put normal wheels on it, and there's your suspension sorted.

Nice.

And they went, My God, you know, so the mad bastard came in with his square wheels.

He also,

New York hired him in the 1970s because

they needed more phone boots, but they didn't have the money to buy more phone boots.

So there was huge queues for telephones on the side of the street.

And this was causing, the queues were so large that it was causing people to fight.

So they were going, right, how do we solve this problem when we don't have the money to build new telephone boxes?

So they brought in De Bono and he just said, make the handset heavier.

So he made the handset heavier.

People spent less time.

And also the reason that and i know we're talking about phone boxes and it's years old but when we were looking at tv as kids and you'd see in america the sign of the phone box the phone symbol was punched into the metal using holes yeah that was the bono's way of he came up with that idea because graffiti was an issue so if there's holes in the metal you can't do graffiti so he came up with lateral thinking there that

there's no such thing if there's a certain point in any whether it be science art whatever where you have to let in all ideas yeah absolutely as soon as you say this is bad or this is good that's wrong you need to play this must be playful

yeah and that's what we you know i think that's what what humans uh really excel at is that you know we do have playful intellects and you know unfortunately for you know, in some sort of professions, maybe that gets beaten out of us.

Maybe in our, I don't think our education system, frankly, does a good job of fostering that.

I think quite the opposite.

It's sort of

cookie cutter,

you know, making sort of everyone, treating everyone the same and

telling them, you know, here's a bunch of facts, here's a bunch of other facts, like the way science is taught, for example.

It's not really well taught as a creative endeavor.

And I think most people, you know, when you talk about creativity, science wouldn't be one of the main things that springs to mind, right?

No.

Let's take a short little ocarina pause there from the chat with the wonderful Dr.

Kevin Mitchell.

Short ocarina pause and you're gonna hear an advert for some bullshit before we go back into

our interview or our chat, I should say.

Got my lovely stardy bass.

You check your feed and your account.

You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators.

So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are.

In this economy, next time, check left.

A Real Lemonade Pet Insurance Review by Madison H.

You know, I thought it was a little ridiculous to get pet insurance, but I really didn't want to not take my little kitten to the vet because of money.

In the last eight months, I've taken him in six times because of ear infections and saved literally hundreds of dollars.

You may even need to get surgery, and I couldn't consider it without Lemonade's help.

I recommend Limonade to all my friends constantly.

And now I'm recommending it to you.

Check it out at limonade.com/slash pet.

Commercial payments at Fifth Third Bank are experienced and reliable, but they're also constantly innovating.

It might seem contradictory, but Fifth Third does just that.

They handle over $17 trillion in payments smoothly and effectively every year, and were also named one of America's most innovative companies by Fortune magazine.

After all, that's what commercial payments are all about: steady, reliable expertise that keeps money flowing in and out like clockwork.

But commercial payments are also about building new and disruptive solutions.

So, Fifth Third does that too.

That's your commercial payments.

A Fifth Third Better.

So, I don't disturb any dogs.

Getting better at playing it too.

Sounds like a whale being tickled.

That was the Ocarina pause there.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, whatever has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I do.

Because this is my full-time job, this is how I earn a living, so I rent out my office, and it's how I have the time and space to make this podcast each week.

All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month.

That's it.

But if you can't afford that, you can listen for free.

Listen for free.

Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free.

It's a wonderful model that's based on kindness and soundness.

And everybody gets the exact same podcast whether you pay for it or not.

And I like that, I like that system.

That seems very fair if you're becoming a new patron right um

make sure you go to patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast try and become a new patron on on your computer if you can not the iOS app

on your iPhone because Apple are greedy bastards since November they're taking 30% now So if you if you're a new subscriber to my Patreon and you do it on your iPhone via the Patreon app, Apple are going to take 30% of that money that you give to support this podcast.

So please do it on the desktop if you can.

Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

Right quick, gigs.

Next Tuesday the 19th, Vicar Street in Dublin.

That gig is sold out.

That's a fully sold out gig.

But sometimes people give their tickets back.

So if you really want to come to that Vicar Street gig next Tuesday, you can give it a a shot if you like and you might get lucky that's my last gig last gig of 2025 I don't want to do any gigs and fucking I don't want to do live podcasts in December just in case someone shows up with it with a work office party so I'm not doing any December gigs um because that Vicar Street sold out I added a second Vicar Street in January on the 27th of January right So if you want to come to my wonderful Vicker Street Dublin gigs,

if you want one in January, you can get yourself a little Christmas present now and come along to that gig on the 27th of January.

Then in February on the 9th, Leisureland in Galway, glamorous stuff.

The Crescent Hall in Drada on the 21st of February.

Waterfront Theatre up in Belfast on the 28th of February.

Oh, Killarney, Killarney in March.

I'm in the fucking Inak, INAC,

and then Australian tour that's sold out.

Then my big, massive, huge UK tour in June 2025.

Right?

These tickets are on sale.

Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester,

Glasgow, York,

London, Sussex.

There's an Edinburgh in there somewhere.

Norwich, Beckshill.

I'm sure I missed something there.

Just go to feign.co.uk forward slash blindboy if you want tickets to my uk tour 2025.

I'm contractually fucking obligated to read out gigs, lads.

All right, we'll get back to talking to the wonderful Kevin Mitchell about neuroscience now.

It's science week.

Go to sfi.ie, check out some science stuff.

Facts, like the way science is taught, for example.

It's not

really well taught as a creative endeavor.

And I think most people, you know, when you talk about creativity, science wouldn't be one of the main things that springs to mind, right?

No, and

it's something that's been said to me so much by scientists.

You know, I'd have loved to have been a scientist.

Yeah.

And I have the type of creative brain, the mad lateral brain that will work within science, but science was,

I was denied access because I couldn't do the rote learning thing.

I couldn't do the sit-down in school and behave yourself thing.

So science was never an option, but Jesus, I'd have loved to have gotten into it, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I mean, it's, it's, it's a great sort of combination of this creative thinking.

But then, I mean, there's also the step where you really have to test things, you know, rigorously and so on.

So there's a, there's this logical, formalized kind of side to it as well.

It's not just, it's not just a free flow sort of thing where every idea is equally good, as it turns out.

You know, you have to test them against against reality.

And

that's the...

Yeah, that's when you're in the sweet spot is when you're when you're having some good ideas and one of the ideas is about how to test those ideas.

It's not a million miles off writing a book, to be honest.

When I'm writing stories, there's the mad, fun, creative part.

Yeah.

Then finally, oh, that's the idea.

And then there comes a stage where it's about refining and making this writing solid and the prose solid.

I think it was Hemingway said, Write with fire in your veins and edit with ice in your veins.

Nice.

And that sounds a bit like how you're describing science.

There's the fun bit and then there's the, no, this needs to be test and evidence-based now.

Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right.

And that, um,

you know, that craft of writing, and I mean, this is something that I tell my students when, because we get them to do, you know, writing exercise, writing reviews on scientific literature, for example.

And

you know, just convincing them of the importance of structure and being able to intentionally think about what you're writing, not just sitting down, letting anything come out, but asking, well, what's this here for?

What's that bit doing?

Is this helping my argument?

And

reshaping it and so on.

So even in scientific writing, where you don't have as much room to play with the actual words themselves, there's still

creativity in shaping an argument, but then craft in actually pulling it together into a solid piece of prose.

I want to go back to automation and the brain again, okay?

Yeah.

So

something

like brushing my teeth and having a shower,

that for me is automated and that's quite helpful.

It's nice to get up in the morning and I'm not really having a good think about how to wash myself or how to brush my teeth.

So I like that automation.

But then there's other automations such as a loop of negative thinking, right?

When I'm anxious, I tend to be worried about what might happen in the future.

When I'm feeling blue and depressed, I'm regretting things that have happened in the past.

When

a good old dose of that for about a month, now it's automatic thinking.

Now

my shower is completely automated.

I'm washing myself and I don't even remember the shower that I had because all I did was worry about what might happen in two months' time.

You know what I mean?

And

I notice when that happens,

that for me is, I don't really believe in heaven or hell, but that for me is hell on earth.

Hell on earth for me is when I am living in a world of negative automatic thoughts and not spending any time in the present moment.

When I can't remember what happened last week because so much of it was spent with anxious thinking.

So what I do when that happens is

I actively try mindfulness.

I will decide, okay, this morning I'm having a shower.

I'm actually going to go into this shower and I'm going to notice the feeling of the suds on my skin.

I'm going to notice and recognize the smell of the shower gel that I'm using.

I'm going to notice the temperature.

I'm going to bring all this to my direct attention as I do it.

And I'll have a mindful day where everything I do in my day is not automated.

I'm bringing attention to all my senses.

And that's mindfulness.

And I find that to be incredibly useful and incredibly calming.

And

it stops me me going into a really bad spiral of mental health issues.

What is neuroscience saying about mindfulness, that process there where I'm stopping automation?

Yeah, I mean, it's tricky.

I don't, so first of all, I'm not an expert in that area, but

I don't know that neuroscience has

really, you know, identified what's going on in your brain, for example.

There is some neuroscience of meditation, which is different from what you've just described, but it's really, really deep million miles off yeah yeah you're right and so it's really deep meditation and what you can see in you know really expert meditators is that their brain does go into a certain um state that is kind of characterized by

um in in people who are not meditators this the state when they're sort of in a mind wandering they're not thinking about anything in particular remote network mode is that what it's called yeah the default mode exactly yeah so

i've heard about this before kev Yeah, so there's, well, it's funny.

So if you put people in one of these magnetic resonance image scanners, right, then you can track which parts of their brain are active.

And people will have heard, you know, this sort of people saying, oh, you're in the scanner and you can see this part of your brain light up or that part of your brain light up.

And so, for example, if I'm showing you images, then the visual parts of your brain will be active.

If I'm asking you to think about making movements or so on, then the motor cortex will be active and so on.

And that's how we figure out, you know, here's this part is involved in language and this part is involved in movement and this part is involved in decision making and so on.

And it turns out that in experiments like that, people found that when they weren't asking the person to do anything and when they were just lying there quietly waiting for the next thing, there was a kind of a distinct signature in the brain, a pattern of activity in the brain that was quite similar across different people.

It involved a bunch of different areas that are all kind of linked in a network.

That became the default mode network, default, because it's just what happens when you're not doing anything else.

And that's kind of associated with this

mind-wandering sort of state.

And it's funny you talk about, you know, having a shower because you get good ideas in the shower.

I absolutely do.

Yes.

The fuck is that?

Yeah, I don't, but it's because it's because I'm not thinking about anything else somehow.

I don't know.

I don't know why.

Maybe it's the repetitive nature of the task.

You're not allowed to use your phone.

Yeah,

I don't understand exactly what it is, but I do get good ideas in the shower.

And then, and then what I have to do is try and hold on to them long enough so I don't forget them when I get it.

That's very common.

A lot of people get good ideas in the shower.

A lot of people,

like

when we were kids, like I remember daydreaming a lot more.

And I love daydreaming.

You know, it's wonderful.

But as you get older, there's less opportunity to daydream.

And phones in particular have destroyed.

Like, there's no point in daydreaming anymore.

Daydreaming comes from boredom, but you can't daydream with a phone.

But a lot of people do experience daydreaming and getting good ideas in the shower, specifically.

Yeah.

And I think what's happening is, you know, these,

those

because you're not actively thinking about something, you're not usually actively thinking about some problem, unless maybe, you know, you're, you are in a state where you're worried about something.

But, you know, maybe just generally you're not.

Then, yeah, the sort of patterns of neural activity are a bit freer.

they're they're a bit less hemmed in by um the sort of attention to one particular thing and they're allowed to roam a little bit and that's where again you can get some some creativity from loosening those those habits shaking yourselves out of um out of those ruts so regarding the default mode network right what i want to try and do is is detach it from potential junk science okay yeah so i would have heard that so i know the feeling of the default mode network we all do if you've you've daydreamed, it's most people will describe it as quite pleasant and nice and relaxing.

And it's lovely when you get the opportunity.

I heard that, you know, it's very beneficial for our brains that our brain heals during the default mode network.

Again, I don't know whether this is junk science or not, but as a neuroscientist, is any of that ringing true?

Like, is there a benefit to it?

I don't know what,

yeah, it's I don't know what healing would mean in that

circumstance, circumstance right so the problem you know is you put your finger on it there's a lot of

um it's not necessarily junk science but there's a lot of ways of talking about neuroscience findings that um you know use these colloquial words and it's hard to know they're just vague right they're just really what does healing mean what's being healed what is there was there an injury you know what was what was going on and you know people talk about this with like psychedelics there's a lot of interest in psychedelics these days where you'll hear these phrases like, oh, you know,

there's more complexity or there's greater plasticity or these various sort of terms that are really vague.

And sometimes they have a very particular technical meaning, but then they also have a colloquial meaning that isn't the same thing and it gets very confusing.

So

yeah, as far as the default mode network being good for you, I don't see any reason to think that that's a good way to think about it.

But what about, okay, let's just say sleep now.

Let's, as a neuroscientist,

sleep is good for you.

Sleep is absolutely good for you.

So sleep is amazing because one of the things that happens during sleep is after you've had your long day, right?

You've been going around in the world experiencing things.

And we talked earlier about how that changes connections in your brain, like literally makes some connections stronger than they were before.

Now, you can imagine if you just did that every day, right?

And there is a little bit of, a tiny little bit of growth of neurons, actual physical stuff that grows in these connections between neurons when you learn things.

If you just did that all the time, then your brain would get too big for your skull, right?

So there has to be a process of normalization.

You have to sort of downgrade everything.

Pruning, you're talking about pruning?

Yeah, well, this happens during sleep.

Where it's not pruning particular things, it's just kind of you've allowed a bunch of neurons to get strengthened and

those are carrying some particular information.

And then at night, everybody just gets shut down a little bit.

All of those synapses just get weakened just a tiny bit, but it leaves the difference in strength intact.

It's just that the absolute level is re-normalized.

So that again, now you're in a stage you can learn some new things.

Because the other thing, if that didn't happen, you'd run out of space to learn new things, right?

You just would have maxed out the capacity of your brain.

So sleep is absolutely crucial for that,

for that kind of process.

Yeah.

And then another thing around quality of sleep, and again, potentially just the spelling a few myths, right?

So

when I'm highly stressed and anxious, a good example would be the period of lockdown, right?

I don't think lockdown was nice for anybody.

I was very anxious all the time for about a year, yeah,

and my sleep was awful.

It didn't matter that I was getting six hours, I was not rested.

Now, I know that when I'm really, really stressed for a long time,

my body is releasing chemicals like cortisol.

And like, am I talking out of my arse?

It is true.

I'm not the expert on that either.

But

the terrible thing about that is that that's a vicious circle, right?

Because if you're not getting good sleep, then you're getting more stressed.

You're less able to deal with the stress and so on.

And, you know, anyone who's been through stressful situations will know this, but actually

people with small kids really know this because when their sleep is being disrupted,

it's just much, much harder to be sort of emotionally balanced and to deal with little things.

You get more and more stressed and so on.

So that and actually, you know, sleep disturbances are a major symptom and contributing factor to a lot of, you know, really serious mental illness, real depression and, you know, onset of mania and in bipolar disorder, onset of psychosis, and so on.

So, sleep health is one of the major, major,

you know, contributors to mental health.

And

again,

I reckon my smartphone that I got in 2011 has not helped me with my sleep at all.

I really, really, I hark back to the days.

I remember it's 2007.

I used to go to bed, and beside my bed, there was a pile of books.

And I didn't look at my phone because why the fuck would I look at a Nakia 3210?

And then all of a sudden, Wikipedia is on my phone, and I'm putting that blue light into my face.

And even like, I know, if I wake up in the middle of the night now, if I even look at my phone to see the time, it wakes me up.

I need to have a clock.

Is there any, are there studies being done regarding quality of sleep, brain health, and everybody having a smartphone, a torch inches away from their face in the middle of the night?

Yes, there are.

Now,

I don't know what the latest is, but basically what you just described, I think, is pretty much the conclusion.

So there's two problems with having your phone next to you, right?

One of them, it's just drawing your attention and it's drawing your interest.

And that just is likely to induce you to come out of sleep and be more wakeful, right?

But the other is the actual light,

right?

The light itself is

likely to disrupt your sleep because we have, you know, we have these natural circadian rhythms.

So our sleep-wake cycle is calibrated to the 24-hour day period.

And

one of the, but

it takes cues from the environment.

So, sunlight is one of those cues that sort of tells your brain, oh, yeah, here's here's where your circadian rhythm should be, right?

And, you know, that's why when we get jet lag, when we fly to a different time zone, our brain, it takes a few days for it to catch up because it has to recalibrate with those light cues.

So, if you're giving light cues to your brain in the middle of the night,

then yeah, that's terrible for your circadian rhythms.

It's just going to mess up your sleep because because your brain is going to be saying, well, this is not sleepy time.

You know, this is this is waking up time.

So a solution that I've found is I just, I put my phone somewhere that would be really inconvenient.

Yeah.

And that's the best thing I can do.

And yeah, that's my, that's my policy as well.

I don't even bring it into the bedroom.

No.

And

books, reading books under a nice little orange light, that's grand.

That'll send me to sleep and I get better quality sleep.

And I love doing that.

Another thing I'd like to speak to you about.

So I'm diagnosed Autistic, right?

Yeah.

And,

you know, sometimes I'm skeptical about it because,

you know, if I was diagnosed 10 years ago, they'd have said, no, you're not autistic.

That does not meet the diagnosis criteria.

That's right.

I am.

So a psychologist.

basically asked me a bunch of questions over the course of a couple of weeks and then ticked boxes on the diagnostics and statistics manual and said, You are autistic.

You are neurodivergent.

Your brain is different to other people's brains.

And he also said, But in 10 years' time, they might change it again, and then you're not autistic.

You know, he said that to me, said it straight up.

And he also said to me, You know, being gay used to be in this manual in the 70s.

Yes.

You know what I mean?

So,

what's your take on that?

Like, okay, I'm diagnosed autistic based on my behavior, but no one looked at my brain.

No one did a blood test.

Yeah.

No one was divergent.

What does that even mean?

Yeah, I mean, it's so, you know, you put your finger on it because, in fact, there is no brain scan that you can do.

There is no blood test or genetic test or anything else that's going to say that it's going to give you a definitive diagnosis of autism in the way that you could get a definitive diagnosis of like celiac disease or something like that or cystic fibrosis, you you know, whereas autism is a label that we use.

It's a category that we've made that is a tool that we use to

identify sets of people who seem to have something in common.

And that something in common is certain ways of behaving, certain,

you know, decreased sociability, for example, problems with social interactions and narrow interests and sort of

maybe developmental delay and and things like that.

So there's a few criteria that people use,

that psychiatrists have defined, I should say,

that qualify someone for this diagnosis.

But the diagnosis is just a convention in that sense, and the convention changes.

That's why, you know, about 10 years ago or more, the number of cases of autism started to skyrocket.

It wasn't because of anything different in the world.

It's just that the diagnostic boundaries expanded hugely.

And so I would have just been called a weird bastard.

I mean, I wouldn't,

I'd have been,

I'm just an eccentric artist.

You know, I grew up admiring all these eccentric artists.

All my heroes were eccentric artists, but now these people would be diagnosed as autistic.

Yeah.

And so the question is like not whether it's right or wrong.

There's no answer to that.

The question is just whether it's useful.

Because it's just a pragmatic tool.

So then the, you know, the is it useful, for example, to have one label, autistic, for people like yourself who are perfectly well functioning

and someone who will never speak in their life and who will need, you know, daily care, full-time care for the rest of their lives.

Those are, that's just a huge range to try to encompass with the same word.

And I feel like an asshole sometimes the fact that

I'm very.

ethical around it.

And, you know, I get that the media are always asking me to speak as an autistic person.

And I have to to be very clear that

I'm fucking flying it, lads, but I cannot speak for a person who is non-verbal, who is really, really struggling.

I cannot speak for that person.

And it'd be so wrong for me to attempt to do so.

It causes a lot of

confusion within

the media about how to present

a condition like autism because it has this huge range.

And

in some ways, there's some people saying, oh, we should just, if this is great, we're recognizing this neurodivergence.

Not everybody has the same cognitive style.

Not everybody has the same way of interacting and so on.

And it's good to recognize those.

And it's good to adapt our systems to make space for those kinds of people and not try to, you know, have everything in our system just.

defined for the neurotypical people.

And, you know, we need supports in schools.

We need broader ways of

allowing people to express who they are.

And all of that, I think, is great.

But at the same time, there's a risk where

it's almost like you're celebrating this thing.

And then there's other people, you know, parents of autistic children who are so severely affected who are saying, we need a cure for this.

You know, we need this is a serious medical condition.

It's a really...

profound disability.

And so I think within the discussions, then, you know, there's a lot of sort of talking at purposes because those are just two very very different things they don't have to be contradictory they're just talking about different ends of the spectrum and how do you feel about like as a neuroscientist words like neurotypical neurodivergent are like

is that yeah i mean

i have no problem i think neurodivergence is a is a um a useful term

um basically i think we're all in a sense kind of neurodivergent that's something you know that I've been writing about in the past.

There's no such thing as this one brain, this one

brain.

There's no sort of canonical human brain or way of being.

There is such a thing as human nature on average, but no one has that average human nature.

We all have our idiosyncrasies, and there's so much variation that actually goes below the radar.

I mean, you know, we're talking about something like autism, where there's a lot of awareness of it, but there's lots of other, there's lots of other sort of strange differences between people, like in perception, for example.

There's conditions like synesthesia that we've studied, where

people may see colors when they hear words or they may taste music or something like that.

And that's actually much more common.

Maybe two, two to three percent of the population may have that and not even be aware that they're experiencing the world in a way that's different from other people.

Why would they bring it up?

They don't.

Exactly.

It's just totally subjective.

Wednesday isn't a lemon to you.

Wednesday doesn't taste like a lemon.

Exactly.

And yeah, it turns out that's really common.

And then there's a bunch of other things, like people who are face blind.

They can't connect people's faces to their names or anything about them.

That's much more common than we thought.

There's one that we only sort of realized very recently, which I find fascinating, which is called aphantasia, where some people

can make a really strong image of something something in their mind's eye, but other people can't do that at all.

Like if you asked them to picture the Golden Gate Bridge or picture Brad Pitt's face or something like that, it would just be a blank.

They would just have nothing in their mind's eye.

And other people would be like, oh yeah, I can see I'm looking at Brad Pitt's face.

Let me turn it to the left.

Oh yeah, he's got his sideburns in this view or whatever.

See, that's mad for me, like, because

I'm very visual.

I can picture it exactly in as many different ways as I possibly can.

And I have great difficulty imagining the frame of reference of a person who can't.

Or another thing that I've seen in the past year and TikTok in particular, and I'd love to get your opinion on this.

People, some people say I have an internal monologue at all times.

And other people say, I have no internal monologue.

There is no voice inside my head.

Now, I missed our internal monologue.

I love, like, that's what I do all the time.

I have like five or six conversations with myself going at once.

I adore it.

But I cannot imagine the frame of reference of a person who does not have an internal monologue.

It's almost like I don't believe him.

Yeah, I know.

Isn't that so interesting?

And I'm the same because I have also very vivid mental imagery, but my internal monologue is going.

There's always like a song going in the background.

And you're chatting with yourself and you're figuring out problems with yourself.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I'm arguing with myself and rehearsing all sorts of things and things I should have said and so on.

It's noisy in there.

Yeah.

And I don't know what it's like for it to be quiet in there.

I think I would find it terrifying, actually.

Absolutely.

I'd fucking absolutely.

But

have we spoken to these people?

Like, I mean, that to me, I feel like we should know more about this.

I feel like we should know more about the people who say, I do not have an internal monologue.

Well, this is the amazing thing is that even, you know, we're after thousands and thousands of years of talking to each other, it's only now, apparently, that we're coming to recognize these these really, really fundamental differences in our inner mental experiences between people.

And so, yeah, neuroscientists and psychologists and cognitive scientists are starting to study

people with these, you know, aphantasia or no, no inner monologue.

And they're finding, you know, some brain differences that seem to bear it out,

that these differences

you know, have some neural basis to them.

And, you know, people are trying to do that for synesthesia as well and other kinds of conditions.

So yeah, for me, it's just this illustration that there's so much deep, deep fundamental diversity between people in the ways that our minds work and the kinds of subjective experiences that we have.

And that is just a salutary kind of lesson.

Some of it creates problems and some of it doesn't.

Well, yeah, what creates the problem is thinking that everybody else is having an experience like you're having and everybody else is going to have the same kind of emotional reaction or cognitive reaction to it that you have, right?

Not being aware that other people are really different from you and feel things differently and experience them differently, that to me causes lots of problems.

And that's why I'm, you know, really happy to see this kind of the neurodivergence,

you know, the emphasis on that, because it's something that we, we haven't thought about before.

Now, you know, what you, what you do with that knowledge and what you do with that in in in um in society there's a whole other sort of realm of of questions there but to me it's just super super interesting um as a scientist and as a person to think about those kinds of differences and as you're saying like there's there's certain autistic people and if they go somewhere like a supermarket and it's very bright or the lights are particular color, they're experiencing that as deeply stressful and painful.

I'm not that way.

I'm grand with it.

But the person who diagnosed me, when I was speaking at the start of this chat and I was speaking about the difficulty of being in crowds,

you know, that was very painful for me.

That was deeply over-stimulating, we'll say.

And then I trained myself to be okay with it, if you know what I mean.

And I'm still not mad about it.

I still spend.

I spend 90% of my time by myself.

Social interaction is something I can do and I enjoy, but it does drain me.

Yes.

I do a good old dose of social interaction.

I need three or four days off,

chill out and charge the battery.

And that behavior there, that's what got my boxes ticked for the audience.

The need to charge that social battery, they said, well, that's that's neurodivergent.

You're coping with society.

And there's your evidence that you're coping.

Yeah, and that's, you know, that's then a positive thing to recognize that, right?

And, you know, especially if you think in our educational system.

It would have been great in school because i just got sacked for being a little shit you know would have been really really helpful in school yeah right exactly if they had recognized that um and i think we're getting just so much better at it and you know there's more supports and so on um then yeah that just makes it much more positive sort of welcoming experience for for people who aren't just the sort of straightforwardly getting getting on with things fitting in perfectly well socializing great and you know um just handling everything being able to simply sit down in a classroom for nine hours, you know, that's not a skill that I have.

And I used to, I used to, I used to mitch school.

I used to just bunk off school

and get severely punished.

But now I look back and I go, no, I was meeting my needs.

I was meeting my needs.

I was getting overstimulated in the classroom.

You know, another thing regarding the internet, I'm thinking about that, that famous viral dress from 2015.

The famous dress where some people saw it as blue and other people saw it as white and everyone's heads exploded.

Like I saw it as,

I think I saw it as white and gold.

Yeah, good.

You're one of the right ones.

Yeah, you and me, we were right.

But when other people were saying blue, I felt like it was a joke personally connected at me.

I'm like, come on, lads.

It's fucking white.

Yeah.

Like, I'm sure your field went insane when this.

Yeah, it did.

Yeah, absolutely.

No, people were trying to study that.

I mean,

there is a sort of a psychological perceptual explanation for it to a certain extent, anyway.

Like,

um when we see colored objects in the world we're always kind of correcting for the illumination so if we're in a place that has a you know bright blue light versus kind of yellow light we we're not just um

you know our perception is not just this passive um process where photons of a certain wavelength are driving um you know parts of our brain to say oh that's yellow it's more like an inference of like what's out in the world and how should I think about it.

And because it's that inference, we use all kinds of information, including the background illumination.

So

apparently what was going on in that thing was that for some of us, we were seeing the background illumination as more yellowy or more bluey.

And then that was leading us to make an inference about the color of the dress itself, right?

Because it would be a different color as an object if the background light were one way or another.

Now, why some people saw

the background light one way or another and why it was so stable for them and such an individual difference, we don't really know, but it's absolutely fascinating

example.

And what you're describing there about color, that's why I adore the paintings of the Impressionists, Monet in particular.

Like

the Impressionist movement, what it started around 1860, it was a response to photography.

This new thing gets invented called photography, and artists shit their pants and go, oh my God, there's a machine that can capture images.

And then the Impressionists were like, no, it can't do what we're doing.

So the Impressionist, Mani in particular, especially if you look at his haystack series, where it's the painting of a haystack at different times of the day, where he's not really trying to capture the haystack as it is, but he's trying to capture the experience of seeing color.

Yes.

The haystack in the daytime, it's actually purple.

He paints it as purple.

It's about how we're perceiving color.

Does your work ever make you think about the nature of reality?

It does.

All the time.

Yeah.

How do we know what's there?

How do we know what's solid?

I mean, my brain is processing light that's hitting my eye and all these other senses.

And then it's the brain is making it make sense to me.

And that's all I know.

But what's reality?

Yeah, well, so

that's what I was sort of referring to when I was saying that perception is this active process of making sense of the world, right?

So when photons hit your retina, you don't perceive them, right?

You're not perceiving individual packets of light hitting your eyeball.

What you're perceiving is the objects out in the world that the light was bouncing off of.

But in order to do that, your brain has to do all this inference.

It has to do all this work to figure out what could be out in the world.

And that, you know, requires.

calibration over, you know, years and years.

As a baby, you're crawling around, you're making sense of your visual impressions by taking objects in your hand and putting them in your mouth, and you're sort of cross-calibrating with your, with your other senses.

So, yeah, that process of perception is a process of inferring what's out in the world and also, you know, what you should do about it.

It's really used to inform your actions.

Now, so I've seen a ball a bunch of times and the fact that I know what a ball looks like, I've felt a ball, I've lived with a ball my whole life, that informs my perception of a ball.

Absolutely.

I have heard of people who've been blind their entire lives, and all of a sudden they gain their sight and they've spent their life picking up a mug.

Yeah, now that they can see the mug, they're like, sorry, I can't do this.

I know what it feels like, but I can't really see this mug.

Yeah, well, I mean, there's some really, really interesting experiments on people who were sort of congenitally blind from an early age, and then, you know, say they had cataracts or something like that, and then they had them removed.

And And it can,

um,

yeah, there can be long-lasting sort of deficits in visual perception, especially things like depth perception.

If they didn't have that early experience, you know, we were talking earlier about how the young brain is so plastic and it's wiring up in response to the experience that it receives.

And there's a sort of a critical period when that has to happen in order for the whole system to be to be set appropriately to the kinds of things that are out in the world.

And if you miss that period, then yeah, there can be longer-lasting kinds of effects.

But I wanted to just get back to the question of reality, because there are some people who say, okay, well, perception is just a construct, right?

And you can't, it's not a true representation of what's out in the world.

It's just things in your brain.

Your brain is just creating reality.

And

I mean, kind of, it's creating a picture of reality.

But, you know, if there wasn't, if it wasn't an accurate picture, well, we wouldn't have it, right?

I mean, all that machinery is really energetically expensive to use and to make.

And so those perceptual systems that we have exist because

they allow us to adapt to things in the world.

So if it wasn't giving us an accurate picture of what's out there, we wouldn't have them.

Right.

So.

To me, it doesn't make sense just because our perception is this kind of active inference to say, oh, I don't know whether reality exists or not.

How could I?

Well, you're still alive.

That's how you can know.

I used to teach people to paint.

And when I would be teaching people to paint, like still life,

the first thing that I would teach them is to remove language from what they're looking at.

So if you're to paint an orange, or no, let's just take an apple.

You're to paint an apple, you have to forget that apples are green.

If you're painting a road, you have to forget the language that roads are black.

You have to remove what you've learned about these things, so you can truly see.

Because the fact is,

a road under the right light could very well be purple.

That's the color that you mix on the palette to do a good job at that road.

It could be purple, yellow, blue.

But as soon as your brain says, no, roads are black, you're fucked.

You can't paint.

Same with apples.

And it's reminding me of, like you were saying there, the

perceiving things, there's a lot of automation, there's a lot of what we've known before, and is interpolation that we're filling in gaps to a certain extent.

Well, there's a lot of expectation, and I think you absolutely see that.

You can see it in like optical illusions, where you know something appears the wrong size because if there's some contextual cue, and your brain knows that something in that context must be bigger or smaller, and so on.

And even when you are aware of them, it's really hard to get rid of that kind of illusion.

But the other thing, like when you're talking about painting and so on, yeah, you need to get out of your own way.

You can't be actively thinking about what something should look like because of what you know.

You have to actually paint what you see or draw what you see.

And actually, a nice trick for that that I,

you know, read about and learning to draw myself is to actually focus on the negative spaces.

So don't draw the object because you have a preconceived notion of what a chair looks like or what someone's arm looks like or something,

what a face should look like.

Instead, draw the spaces between the arm and the chair, for example.

And that you have no preconception of what that should look like.

And so you're free to just

let the perception actually be more accurate so that now someone else looking at your picture will

have the same kind of response to it.

And another thing around perception there, too.

I remember a wonderful story so around around the 1870s the french whatever the french were doing in the area that is now saudi arabia the french were working with tribes there and these tribes were were muslim people and they lived in the desert and they worked with horses a lot so these tribes they knew horses okay

and then the french as a gift to these people, they presented these people with a brilliant painting of a horse and amazing.

Like if you and I saw it, we'd be like, that is the best painting of a horse I've ever seen.

But these Muslim people, within their culture, you don't draw things that God made.

So you'd never draw a horse.

Muslim art or art in Islam tends to be geometric shapes.

And you don't see a lot of representational art because it's kind of faux pas to draw anything that was created by God.

So when the French presented these Islamic people in the desert with a brilliant painting of a horse, they couldn't see it.

They couldn't do the brain mathematics to see the horse, a 3D object represented on a 2D space because they'd never seen that in their lives.

Interesting.

And to them, it was just a blob, a blur of brown.

And the French were like, no, it's a fucking horse, like the one over there.

And the lads were like, I've never seen this before.

I don't know what a 3D to 2D image is.

Thanks for the gift, but it just looks brown to me it's like I guess the the invention of perspective in painting which took so long right you know and

and yeah and I think it was just people were saying no I know roads are straight and they carry on you know with the lines parallel um so that's the way I'm going to draw them I've looked into I've looked into perspective right so if you look at the history of paintings like so there's cave paintings going back 30,000 40,000 years right yeah but perspective in painting really only comes about,

it's around the 1200s.

The first to do it, there was a fellow called Paolo Ucello and another fellow called Giotto.

And they basically painted paintings where it's like the horses in the distance are smaller.

Simple as that.

And it had never really been done.

And one theory about how perspective came about in painting was it was because of architecture.

So people

in the area of Italy where Giotto and Paolo Icello were coming from, they were in cities.

And in these cities, the architecture and the planning of the roads meant that they could introduce visual perspective to the paintings.

And then that leap, that leap in human consciousness occurred where we were able to represent a 3D space on a 2D

plane, which is really, really complex.

And we take it for granted now.

But that was a massive leap.

massive, massive leap to introduce perspective to 2D space.

Yeah.

We'll leave it at that, Kev, because I think we'll end up talking about literally everything and anything for hours that we can go.

Thank you so much.

That was a wonderful,

fantastic chat.

Oh, yeah,

it was my pleasure.

Yeah, super interesting.

Thanks.

So have a lovely day.

Dog bless.

Dr.

Kevin Mitchell, Dr.

Kevin Mitchell there of Trinity College,

associate professor in Trinity College.

You perpetual Kevin.

You 10-foot Brenda.

Thank you so much for that magnificent chat.

Thank you you to Ollie E for listening this week.

Go to sfi.ie to get some science week information.

It's science week right now.

Ooh.

Um

I'll catch you next week.

I don't know what with.

A hot take of some description.

Tomorrow morning I'm gonna wake up bright and early and begin my hot take research.

Check out my short film starring Robbie Sheehan.

Did you read about Arskin Fogarty?

This Thursday on RT2 at 10 past 10 or on the fucking RTE player, right?

Rub a rub a swan.

No, don't rub a swan.

Wink at a cormorant.

Marvel at the the decomposition of a snail's shell in November.

Smell the the slurry-like, the slurry-like aroma from

rotting leaves

that you get in fucking November.

Dog bless.

Catch you next week.

You check your feed and your account.

You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators.

So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are in this economy.

next time, check Lyft.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash?

Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies.

Try it at progressive.com.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.

Potential savings will vary, not available in all states.