533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal

Speaker 1 So we look at the brain as something that's malleable and not fixed. It's a dynamic object.

Speaker 1 So the parietal lobes and the superior parietal lobula is specifically involved in creating a subjective sense of a self, the feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body, right?

Speaker 1 Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration for the remapping of anomaly. This is very weird too, everyone.
So you have this REM paralysis, obviously.

Speaker 1 You're paralyzed from head to toe during REM sleep, you're dreaming away. Are you familiar with sleep paralysis? Something was happening to me, and I was frozen and unable to speak.

Speaker 1 I knew I had to wake myself up. Like, I'd try to throw myself off the bed.
Sometimes I could yell to my wife, she'd have to come and shake me, and then I'd wake up.

Speaker 1 So, I was sleeping in my room, and then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me, and something was on my chest, strangling me. What did the monster look like?

Speaker 1 Well, I'll tell you. Okay.

Speaker 1 Hi, everybody. I had the opportunity today to speak to Dr.
Balan Jalal. He's a neuroscientist and author at Harvard, and previously a visiting researcher at Cambridge University Medical School.

Speaker 1 He's been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other such publications.

Speaker 1 The Telegraph and the BBC described him as one of the world's leading experts on sleep sleep paralysis and the terrors and opportunities of dream fantasy and adaptation that accompany that condition.

Speaker 1 What did we discuss? Dr. Jalal's Intro to Neuroscience course at Peterson Academy.

Speaker 1 The relationship between neuroanatomy, brain function, perception, emotion, and behavior, the function of the dream state, the role of culture and conception in dealing with emotion, particularly fear, and the changing landscape of the modern university.

Speaker 1 It's quite a trip. Join us.

Speaker 1 Well, thanks for coming in. Well, thank you, Jordan, Dr.
Peterson.

Speaker 1 Lovely to be here.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about Peterson Academy first.

Speaker 1 We just released a course of yours, Introduction to Neuroscience.

Speaker 1 So I'd like to know, I think it would be useful to talk a little bit about the course, but I'd also like to know about your experience. doing the filming and

Speaker 1 your reflections on the process and the project itself. yeah yeah

Speaker 1 well um first of all it was it was a lovely process let me start there so i i flew in uh to miami great uh reception overall um

Speaker 1 nice people around uh ben nancy vincent everybody on the team lovely uh the shooting was was great um

Speaker 1 So yeah, top professional, really like that.

Speaker 1 And then the course itself,

Speaker 1 it's an eight-hour

Speaker 1 course on the brain and sort of going through

Speaker 1 initially starting from sort of the basics of the brain the different structures of the brain then going all the way to sort of higher abstract things like human nature and and sort of the nature of how art emanates in the brain and things like that so it's got it's kind of has the nitty-gritty of an of a introductory neuroscience course but then also taking into in some more sort of poetic aspects of the brain so it's it's kind of all that yeah mixed right so it's an approach to the cultural from the bottom up, from the biological up.

Speaker 1 Right, right. Right, how much, how much anatomy, functional anatomy, and so forth is in the course? I make sure that the basics are there.

Speaker 1 So for a basics neuroscience course, as an introduction, you've got to have the basics there, all the brain structures,

Speaker 1 the cortex, the brainstem, all the different names. But I try to keep it simple so people don't fall asleep.

Speaker 1 I used to, when I did my first biopsychology neuroscience course, that was incredibly boring.

Speaker 1 I had all these names thrown at me. Yeah.
And it was

Speaker 1 memorize them. It made no sense.
So what's the cerebellum doing? What's this doing? You just had all these names, you had to memorize them, and that was it. But I really

Speaker 1 make sure to describe the function and have an overall context for each. Yeah,

Speaker 1 I found that I got extremely interested in neuroanatomy, even at a detailed level, when I was reading scientists who associated the area with the function. It's very important.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, and it was also extremely useful philosophically.

Speaker 1 I mean, one of the advantages, if you're a conceptual thinker, to studying neuroanatomy and neurobiology is that it puts limits on what philosophical propositions are plausible and possible.

Speaker 1 I really like that. So

Speaker 1 it... Like it's like you have to play a game with two different sets of rules then, right?

Speaker 1 It has to make sense conceptually, so that would be philosophically, but then it can't violate the principles of neuroanatomy and neuroscience that are already established.

Speaker 1 It's a very good way of initial triangulation. Yeah, the way that I like to do is that I know that in this course I'll cover this, right?

Speaker 1 But then I kind of and I kind of see and explore how I can sort of weave this into a sort of a narrative and a story and then kind of put things in as we go along.

Speaker 1 And I feel like this makes sense to put this aspect here and put that aspect here so it doesn't come in this sort of,

Speaker 1 you know, very ABC kind of dry way. So that's my approach and see how I can let things unfold in a natural way.

Speaker 1 And so you said that when you went to do the recording, that the process worked well. Very well.
What about it worked well? I was very impressed. So I was very impressed by the whole process, the way

Speaker 1 things were arranged. Obviously, we were put in a very nice hotel and

Speaker 1 we felt pampered, honestly. Good.

Speaker 1 You feel pampered. You feel

Speaker 1 everything is just on point um and yeah and then the the the shooting itself people around you they take care of you bring you food they they you know it's it's just it's just very you feel pampered so it's great so so yeah well you know we i think we realized the importance of that really

Speaker 1 when i did the first exodus seminar for the daily wire right we brought nine thinkers in

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 we spent a fair bit of time on the the hospitality side.

Speaker 1 And one of the things I realized, and I knew this in part from working at a university, was that a lot of the professors that we pulled in for that seminar, I wouldn't say they're exactly well treated at their institutions.

Speaker 1 And that's foolish because I invited the people who I did invite to the Exodus seminar because I thought they were great and I wanted to hear what they had to say.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there's every reason to make that obvious in every

Speaker 1 in every detail of treatment.

Speaker 1 And so you know one of the things I offer people who we offer at Peterson Academy people who come and lecture because people ask me well, you know, what lecture do you need?

Speaker 1 And that's not the right approach. My sense is, is that we, I find people whose views I want to

Speaker 1 know and share. And then I want them to do what they think would be best because I wouldn't bloody well invite them if I didn't think they knew what they were doing.

Speaker 1 And I don't want to put constraints on them.

Speaker 1 And then if we find the right people, we can sort out the curriculum rather than sorting out their curriculum and then forcing the participants, the professors into it.

Speaker 1 That makes no sense at all to me. Absolutely.
And that was my approach, too, right? So I would talk about my own research,

Speaker 1 some of the nicest experiments that I love about my work, and sort of weave into that neuroscience curriculum in that way, right?

Speaker 1 So we talk about, for example, OCD, and then you take, maybe you might mention the orbitofrontal cortex, which is overactive in OCD. What's the function of the orbitofrontal cortex?

Speaker 1 The structure in the brain or the striatum and the basal ganglia in the context of Parkinson's. But again, taking in some of some work that's very, you know, some experiments that are fascinating.

Speaker 1 So it's kind of taking that natural approach, that sort of my own research or works of colleagues and just weaving it in in a more

Speaker 1 natural way, I think. Okay, so I'm curious.

Speaker 1 Everybody who studies the brain in some depth

Speaker 1 has their own approach. It's like exploring a continent, let's say.
They have their own approach. And so

Speaker 1 when you lay out the architecture of the brain, let's say, the basic anatomy, tell me how you do that.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I would like to hear how you conceptualize the brain. So

Speaker 1 do that, if you would. Yeah, absolutely.
So for me, I think the way that I, my view of the brain was inspired by my mentor, V. S.
Ramachandran.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right. You worked with Ram.
Yes. I worked with Raman.
He's a stunningly effective public speaker. He's extremely stunningly effective, charismatic.

Speaker 1 And when I went to California in my early days as an undergraduate, I ended up in his course. So I took his course.
So let me take you. When was that? That was in 2010, 11, around 11, maybe 2011.

Speaker 1 So I started there, became a research scholar in his lab eventually.

Speaker 1 And I think, you know, becoming very good friends with him, ending up in his laboratory, going on, you know, long, long walks on the beach all the time, and just spending time with him and getting his view on the brain and sort of adapting that as my own view

Speaker 1 was something that,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 influenced me. And his approach, obviously, and the approach that I've adopted is one where you sort of look at the brain holistically.

Speaker 1 You acknowledge that the brain is hyperplastic, so there's all these modules modules that are highly dynamic, and the brain is extremely malleable.

Speaker 1 And so, we look at the brain as something that extremely, as a fluid process that's malleable and not fixed and said in its own ways, it has this

Speaker 1 fluidity to it.

Speaker 1 So, that's kind of my view of the brain overall, that

Speaker 1 it's a dynamic

Speaker 1 object. But beyond that, let me also explain some of our experiments.

Speaker 1 So, the way that we approach science and probing the human brain is through experiments where we look at conceptual experiments in neuroscience.

Speaker 1 So for example, there's the rubber hand illusion, if you probably know of that. Lay it out.
Explain it to people.

Speaker 1 So the rubber hand illusion is this illusion where you have a chap, he puts his hand right here, and then you have his right hand underneath a table, right?

Speaker 1 And so me, Balan, the experimenter, will stroke and tap the hand of the

Speaker 1 experimental subject. I'll go stroke, stroke, tap, tap, tap, tap, stroke, stroke underneath the table.
And I'll stroke and tap the table in front of Joe, the subject.

Speaker 1 I'll go tap, tap, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, tap, tap. And in about two minutes of me doing this, he will feel touch sensations arising from the table.

Speaker 1 And I don't mean this in kind of an abstract metaphorical sense. I mean this literally.
He will have touch sensations, somatosensory regions of his brain becoming active from this process.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, that's a very strange element of human perception, right? It must be strongly associated not only with our ability to map sensation onto our bodies,

Speaker 1 but also with our ability to use tools. So I know, for example, we're very good at it.

Speaker 1 Like if I pick up a screwdriver, it takes me virtually no time to use the tip of the screwdriver in a manner that very much approximates the tip of my finger.

Speaker 1 And then when we go in a car,

Speaker 1 essentially what we're doing, especially once we're expert drivers, is that we expand the dimensions of our kinesthetic perception, our bodily perception, to include the car, right?

Speaker 1 So you're feeling with the tires, you're feeling with the brake, right?

Speaker 1 And that's, well, part of my understanding of that is that that's very tightly associated with our tool using, tool using proclivity, because a tool is a bodily extension. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 It's an embodiment, right? So in two minutes, I turn this

Speaker 1 subject into a table, right? And then more than that, if I, me, you know, Balland was to

Speaker 1 take a hammer and go like this

Speaker 1 on the table, he'll go, you know, know, he'll feel pain sensations, right? So the pain regions of his brain will light up if I was to look in his scanner and

Speaker 1 look at the neurons there. So it shows you that in that way, you can take something, you can, first of all, you can create a sensation of

Speaker 1 this table belonging to you, but then

Speaker 1 a big part of you, right? It becomes an embodied part of you.

Speaker 1 But then beyond that, you afflict pain now to the person, to the table, in fact, and then you will feel. Yeah, well,

Speaker 1 that would also be part of social perception, I presume. I read a paper not

Speaker 1 long ago. If I remember the details carefully, they were looking at the difference either, I think it was, I think the dimension was agreeableness, but it might have been psychopathy,

Speaker 1 which would be the opposite of agreeableness, let's say, that

Speaker 1 more agreeable people, so less psychopathic people,

Speaker 1 feel have more pain activation to the perception of other people's pain.

Speaker 1 So, you can imagine that part of the utility in being able to morph your pain sensitivity, even to represent something objective, like a table, right?

Speaker 1 That's also a variant of my ability to map my own body, let's say, onto your body, so that the empathy that I feel for you isn't conceptual.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I've really been thinking about this in terms of how we understand each other, because

Speaker 1 it looks to me like what we do to understand each other is

Speaker 1 I notice what your aim is partly by watching your eyes.

Speaker 1 I infer your aim.

Speaker 1 Once I infer your aim, I can inhabit your perceptual space because if I know your aim, I know the objects that surround you, but I also know how your emotions are configured because they're configured in relationship to the aim.

Speaker 1 If I can adopt that aim, then I can embody those emotions and perceptions.

Speaker 1 I can read off that embodiment, and then I that's so the understanding is actually my simulating you on my own neural architecture

Speaker 1 and then drawing the appropriate inferences from that. And it looks to me like children probably develop that ability.
Some of it's nascent, I would say. Some of it's there.

Speaker 1 It's very interesting. So we actually, we were the first group to show that people with OCD, who has a very fixed sense of self, right?

Speaker 1 So they wash their hands all the time, washing and scrubbing, when they do this illusion, they have a much more sensitivity to it to the extent that there's a control condition for this illusion.

Speaker 1 So the illusion, for the illusion to occur, you have to stroke and tap, tap, tap, stroke, and stroke and tap in a synchronized manner. That's important, right? So

Speaker 1 that's key.

Speaker 1 Right. So you're linking the visual perception to the kinesthetic perception? Absolutely, absolutely, right?

Speaker 1 But in people with, oh, so the control for this, by the way, is if you do it in a random sequence like tap, tap, stroke, stroke, but everything is just random, right?

Speaker 1 And you do, again, the touching and stroking is random, then the illusion will not occur, or it would be slightly. So you have a slight illusion there, or most of the time, no illusion.

Speaker 1 So, this is the key control for the illusion. Right, so let's just walk through this so everybody understands clearly.

Speaker 1 So, you have someone with their arm on a table, let's say, their left arm, their right arm is under the table, so they can no longer see it.

Speaker 1 Now, what you're doing then is you're interacting with their hidden arm physically,

Speaker 1 but they can't see that, they can feel it. At the same time, you interact with the table where they can see it.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 So, you're syncing their visual perception with their kinesthetic perception. Absolutely.
But it's not, but

Speaker 1 their visual perception isn't focused on their own hand. Now they start to react to the table like it's a hand.
Correct. Okay, now you're extending this to the OCD situation.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Okay, so elaborate on that. Absolutely.
And I just want to... Just one point here is that I mentioned a table.
So the original experiment was done with a rubber hand. Right, right.

Speaker 1 But I'm using table because it's more, it illustrates the experiment better. And I think, and you can have a table as well.

Speaker 1 Right, people would start responding to a rubber hand as if it was their own.

Speaker 1 So, instead of a table, you would just have a rubber hand that looks like your own hand, and then you stroke and tap the rubber hand right in front of the person with their other hand hidden. Correct.

Speaker 1 They start to respond to the rubber hand as if it's theirs. Right, right, right.
Right. And then flinch if there's a threat to it.
They flinch if there's a threat to it, right? Okay, okay.

Speaker 1 And that can be extended to something as inanimate as a table. Correct.
Right. Or in fact, in fact, you can do it in air.
So, you do know Rich Magnelli, he's

Speaker 1 some common friend, right? Over at Harvard, right? So, one day, McNally and I did it in the air. So I did it on Rich, call him Rich.

Speaker 1 So stroke, stroke, tap, tap in the air, and he felt the rubber, like his own hand was floating in the air. It was kind of spooky.
Wow. He went, my God, what's happening?

Speaker 1 I feel my hand is floating in the air. Right.
You know, that must also be associated with a really profound, with our sense of what constitutes ownership. Right.

Speaker 1 You know, because the idea that something is yours or that something is mine, there's no reason to assume that that isn't an extension of something like embodiment.

Speaker 1 It's certainly the case that, you know, if people's cars are attacked, let's say, or kicked, they respond to that very much as if it's a bodily assault.

Speaker 1 Right. And so

Speaker 1 it begs the question: how much of our embodied concept of ownership, like that concept on which we platform the philosophical and

Speaker 1 philosophy and conception of ownership, is actually

Speaker 1 the underlying scaffold for that is our ability to extend our embodiment to even inanimate objects.

Speaker 1 Because then they start to become part of us.

Speaker 1 And part of what you're pointing to with your emphasis on brain plasticity

Speaker 1 is that identity itself, even in terms of perception and pain sensitivity,

Speaker 1 is fluid and dynamic to a degree that

Speaker 1 you wouldn't immediately presume.

Speaker 1 And I do want to differentiate between plasticity and then the dynamic nature of the function and the of the modules of the brain so for example you have in terms of the rubber hand illusion it shows that for example we have a structure called the tpj right here temporoparietal junction is the fancy name for that that structure is important for taking all the sensory modalities touch hearing feeling right so uh smelling and and sort of uh unifying that into a whole and talk and that's a cortical area it's a cortical area where is it located it's called a tpj so it's temporarparietal junction.

Speaker 1 So it's kind of strategically located between the different sort of occipital, somatosensory region, and the temporal junction.

Speaker 1 Right, so is it a region that overlaps physiologically between the different sensory integration systems? Actually, it's like a crossroad, so to speak. Right.

Speaker 1 Is it the same area that's used for silent reading?

Speaker 1 Silent reading, I'm not sure. Okay, well,

Speaker 1 the reason I'm asking about that from what I remember is that the region that we use for silent reading is the space is the overlap between the auditory and visual cortex right which makes perfect sense right because we're basically when we read silently we're using our eyes as ears right right right right so and those overlapping areas okay so this area is a place between many of this between a variety of the different sensory between different sensory integration it's a it's a hub for integration and interestingly actually it's also involved in the in the self-ar the distinction so we have a distinction of the land here dr peterson over there and then

Speaker 1 we can't tickle ourselves. That's why we can't tickle ourselves, right? But that part of the brain, if you zap that, sometimes the self-other distinction can break down.

Speaker 1 So you feel like you're merging into another person. So that's very interesting.
So it has that function.

Speaker 1 It also has connections to the frontal lobes, which is involved in, obviously, in empathy and seeing the perspective of somebody else. So feel like theory of mind.
What is Dr.

Speaker 1 Peterson thinking right now? What is his agenda right now? What is his motives? So that ability is also also involved.

Speaker 1 This comes to your psychopathy point, actually, because if you have the temporal parietal junction being involved in body construction, so it's involved in self and constructing a body image, which is expanded in the Robert Hand illusion, but also involved in seeing your perspective as well.

Speaker 1 So it's very dynamic.

Speaker 1 Experiencing your perspective. Experiencing somebody else's perspective.

Speaker 1 One of the things I thought while you were discussing that is the theory of mind, theories of autism that autistic people lack theory of mind. But I've never really liked that theory because

Speaker 1 autism is a really fundamental disorder. Like autistic people generally don't like people and they don't like to be touched.

Speaker 1 That's not conceptual. Like

Speaker 1 mammals like to be touched. If you don't like to be touched, then something's gone wrong at a level that's like under mammal.
It's really deep and profound. It's not some,

Speaker 1 what would you say, alteration in philosophy. But one of the things that is characteristic of autistic people often is that they don't look at people's faces.
They don't look at eyes.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 So then you could imagine it's not exactly a lack of theory of mind. It's that if I don't watch your eyes,

Speaker 1 I can't infer your aim. If I can't infer your aim, I can't mimic you on my own platform.

Speaker 1 So I wonder. to what degree,

Speaker 1 I don't know if these experiments have ever been done. I mean, it isn't obvious to me exactly why autistic people don't watch the face.
It's very mobile and

Speaker 1 changing, and that is something that seems to upset autistic people. Like, they often don't like furniture moved in a room that they're familiar with.

Speaker 1 But I wonder what would happen to their ability to experience empathy if they were focally trained to attend to eyes, right? To learn to perceive the face properly.

Speaker 1 It probably could be trained. So I know Richard Davidson's, he's done some studies looking at amygdala activation

Speaker 1 in autistic children, and they do have an amygdala that's dancing with activity whenever they look at eyes. So, they have that, but it's not entirely known why.

Speaker 1 It probably has to do with the fusiform face area. So, there's a region of the brain specialized for recognizing faces.

Speaker 1 And so, it has to do with that. But this is properly oriented faces, only properly oriented faces, exactly.
They're upside down. It doesn't work.
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 And to be frank, this area of the brain is also involved in dry classification of objects. So not only faces.

Speaker 1 Musical instruments? Probably.

Speaker 1 I think so. So it's like it goes from, but it's not that, it's more dry.
So it goes like a guitar from

Speaker 1 a piano or something like that. It doesn't have that specification.

Speaker 1 To have specificity, you have to go... higher up in the system.
So

Speaker 1 it has this more banal quality to it. So obviously in visual processing, you have a hierarchy of

Speaker 1 where it becomes more complex with each step in vision. And then the highest, so it goes, then it goes to a point where you start classifying objects in the world.
That's the fusiform face area.

Speaker 1 And then after that, you go to vernica, which is more sort of meaning and purpose. And then you go to things like the hippocampus, which is involved in things like memory.

Speaker 1 So it goes from more simple stages of visual processing to try classification, faces,

Speaker 1 Dr. Peterson's from Alex, from Kim knowing different people.

Speaker 1 So that's that part, and then going to higher centers. So that's kind of that process.
So let's go back to Ramachandran.

Speaker 1 I was really interested in his work for a long while,

Speaker 1 especially on hemispheric lateralization and neglect. And

Speaker 1 now, some of the experiments that you described emerged because of Ramachandran's investigations into neglect, right? Originally.

Speaker 1 So neglect, for those of you who are watching and listening, is a very strange phenomenon.

Speaker 1 So if you have a stroke and you have, correct me if I get any of this wrong, because it's been like 20 years since I thought about it, right parietal damage. Yep, right parietal damage.

Speaker 1 You'll lose your perception of the left side of your body. But more than that, this is where it gets very weird.
You lose the perception of left itself.

Speaker 1 And I've tried to imagine it's sort of like, you know how everything that's behind you, when you're looking forward, it isn't like it's missing.

Speaker 1 It's just simply not there at a level that's even more profound than missing.

Speaker 1 And I suspect what happens to people with right parietal damage is that the absence that characterizes your lack of perception of what's behind you.

Speaker 1 extends so that now it's three quarters of the world instead of half. Anyways, weirdly enough, you lose your ability to perceive the left side of everything.

Speaker 1 And I have no idea how to conceptualize that.

Speaker 1 But one of the consequences of that is that people with profound neglect will wake up and they'll become aware of their left arm or their left leg after they've had a stroke and they'll try to throw it out of bed because they think it's someone else's.

Speaker 1 And if you get them to draw a clock, for example, they'll draw half a clock and cram all the numbers into the right-hand side. And if you give them a plate, they'll eat half the food.

Speaker 1 I still can't figure this out because how do you think that works? It's like, if I pick up my phone,

Speaker 1 now I look at the phone. So now the phone is foregrounded, but I'm not aware of the left side.

Speaker 1 Now, if I'm looking at the room now, do I miss the left side of the room? And in the room, do I miss the left side of all the objects?

Speaker 1 Like, I just don't understand how the hell that works perceptually. Right, exactly.

Speaker 1 They somehow don't attend to it, right? So

Speaker 1 they can draw a flower the whole day, but they only draw half of the flower.

Speaker 1 And you keep telling them, and they say, well, I did my best, I'm drawing it, but they can't attend to that part of the brain.

Speaker 1 Mind you, the parietal lobes is involved in spatial orientation, knowing not only the body where it is in space, but also the spatial layout of the room, right? So it has that component.

Speaker 1 So it's a really strange disorder. And in order to understand.
understand how they are

Speaker 1 you know experiencing this at a subjective level is really critical.

Speaker 1 It's a mystery of sorts.

Speaker 1 Rabbit Chandron also did experiments with ear irrigation, didn't he? Ear irrigation.

Speaker 1 But before we go there, I just want to say, so the parietal lobes and the superior parietal lobule, another fancy name there, right?

Speaker 1 So just above the temporal parietal junction is specifically involved in creating a body image as well.

Speaker 1 So the TPJ we talked about, taking information from various sensory modalities and then whispering information to the superior parietal lobule, this area just above it, its neighbor, right?

Speaker 1 It's involved in creating a subjective sense of a self, the feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body, right?

Speaker 1 So when people have a stroke to that part of the brain, as you mentioned, they will sometimes throw their hands out, say, this arm doesn't belong to me, it belongs to you, or it belongs to my dad, or it belongs to

Speaker 1 this person or that person. So literally they will become delusional.
You can play chess with them, you can have conversation, nothing, nothing is wrong.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, they're not delusional, they're not psychotic or anything like that. But after they had the stroke affect this region of the brain, they will just say that this arm doesn't belong to me.

Speaker 1 Or sometimes they might even say, you might ask them, you say, well, they might deny the paralysis. So that's anosagnosia, right? So you say, Joe, your arm is paralyzed.

Speaker 1 They will say, no, it's not paralyzed. Well, then touch my nose, Joe, and they will say, okay.

Speaker 1 And they will take the lifeless arm and lift it like this and say, I'm touching it, doctor. I'm touching it.
Literally taking it up like that.

Speaker 1 So yeah, well, it's always as if, I wondered too, if that's an

Speaker 1 it's, is it, is it a lack of capacity to update as well? Like, it seems to me that what must be happening is they're using a pre-stroke representation of their body. Right.

Speaker 1 And the tissue that's been destroyed normally would update that.

Speaker 1 Because I remember too, with Ramachandran's experiments when he irrigated, this is very weird to everyone, Ramachandran would irrigate the ears, so pour water in, cold water in the ears of left ear, if I remember correctly, left ear, of the people who had neglect, and it would make them shudder.

Speaker 1 Now that disturbed their vestibular system, which is involved with bodily orientation, and it would shock them into the realization that they had

Speaker 1 a paralyzed left side and they would break down emotionally, catastrophically, with the realization that they'd been so badly damaged.

Speaker 1 But then the effects of the irrigation would wear off and they'd snap back into this.

Speaker 1 And that's why I think it's not exactly a delusional state. I think they're stuck with the body representation that existed before the stroke and what's been eradicated.

Speaker 1 The systems that could update that, the right hemisphere systems, they don't exist. So there's no way of fixing

Speaker 1 straightforward way of fixing it.

Speaker 1 So one way to approach this or sort of think about this is that, you know, the left side of the brain, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere have different functions.

Speaker 1 I just want to make it clear to the listeners. I know you know this, right? But so they have different functions.

Speaker 1 So intriguingly, it's only then in the right side, if you have the stroke in the left, they will not have this delusion. That's the funny part, right? So it's only in the right.

Speaker 1 So this tells you that something is going on about self in the rights. That's obviously

Speaker 1 alteration of self. Alteration of self, right? Interestingly, if you have a stroke to the prefrontal on the left side, you will develop catastrophic reactions to anything.

Speaker 1 So you might have a conversation and start crying in the middle of the conversation without any

Speaker 1 obvious reason.

Speaker 1 If you get a stroke in the right prefrontal, you will have become delusionally optimistic. So you'll go out and buy a Rolex if you can't and

Speaker 1 become manic effectively. So it shows us that the left hemisphere is involved in positive emotion and the right is involved in negative emotion.

Speaker 1 And in fact, today, when you use things like TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, you might zap the left hemisphere in people with depression and make it more active, and you end up with less depression.

Speaker 1 So the brain has these functions that are very lateralized and

Speaker 1 highly unique to each side of the brain. Well, so Al Conan Goldberg, I really liked

Speaker 1 his model of brain lateralization.

Speaker 1 novelty versus routinization. I know Ramachandran developed a theory that was either parallel or influenced by Goldberg.
I can't remember. But

Speaker 1 what that would imply, if the right hemisphere is associated with novelty recognition, so it recognizes anomaly. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 It makes sense that it would signal negative emotion because the first thing that should happen when something you don't expect occurs, because that means the routine you're running doesn't map the territory well, right?

Speaker 1 Because what I'm trying to do is, whenever I run a perceptual routine,

Speaker 1 I have a goal in mind,

Speaker 1 and I'm presuming that my perception perception is adequate to the task.

Speaker 1 If something anomalous occurs, like if I tell you a joke and you don't find it funny, or maybe I tell you a joke and you get offended by it,

Speaker 1 then obviously the way I've mapped you is wrong, the way I've mapped the joke is wrong. God only knows how much error I've made.
That's going to be signaled by the right hemisphere.

Speaker 1 Anomaly, negative emotion. Okay, then you're going to attend to that.
Now, the problem with depressed people is they attend to it catastrophically.

Speaker 1 So, like, if I make a, say, if I'm depressed and I make a mistake like that with you, we're sitting here talking, I make a little joke

Speaker 1 and you either don't find it funny or you act offended, even if that only took a brief amount of time. A depressed person would think, well,

Speaker 1 that didn't go over very well.

Speaker 1 Obviously, I'm not very funny.

Speaker 1 Obviously, I don't understand people very well. I don't understand this person very well.
Oh, that's because

Speaker 1 I really don't understand anyone very well right i didn't understand people very well in the past and i don't understand them well and i'm very unlikely to learn how to do that in the future yeah yeah people who are unable to learn like that socially they're not very useful people

Speaker 1 some people are so useless that it would be better if they weren't around at all i'm one of them yeah right and so I'm wondering if the, so you can imagine the right hemisphere when it's analyzing a novel, something novel, opens opens up that entire space of potential consideration.

Speaker 1 My suspicions are that the left prefrontal cortex probably puts a box around that continually.

Speaker 1 Because the right level of analysis, if I make a joke with you and it falls flat,

Speaker 1 I should note that.

Speaker 1 But I shouldn't leap to catastrophic conclusions to begin with. I should just note it.
Like it should now become a,

Speaker 1 what would you say, an object of potential future significance.

Speaker 1 And I've noticed in my clinical practice that people who are well regulated emotionally won't undergo a detailed investigation into an anomaly until it repeats, let's say, three times, until there's a pattern.

Speaker 1 Whereas depressed people, they'll leap to the worst possible conclusion almost immediately. And that does look like something like...

Speaker 1 like that left hemisphere, left prefrontal hemispheric dysfunction that you described.

Speaker 1 So you can imagine that the right hemisphere notes the

Speaker 1 novelty,

Speaker 1 elicits negative emotion, then opens up the search space, which could be indefinite.

Speaker 1 Like the reason your joke didn't go over might be because you are the kind of unpopular loser who wreaks havoc wherever they go, but that shouldn't be your first conclusion.

Speaker 1 So you lose the left hemisphere system and that whole... cataclysmic reaction is dysregulated.
I like that. I mean, it makes sense, right?

Speaker 1 So the right hemisphere is more emotional, big picture oriented, as you say.

Speaker 1 And it could be that it goes into this infinite loop of possibilities in this big space land where there's no way it can really get fixed. There's no anchoring, right? So that's crazy.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I would say I'd like to know your thoughts about,

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 I'm very interested in archetypal psychology. Right.
And Jung had a very specific, Carl Jung had a very specific hypothesis about dreams, which I really like.

Speaker 1 And this is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today, because you're interested in dreams and you've talked about them as simulations.

Speaker 1 So his idea about dreams, it's a brilliant idea, is that it wasn't hemispherically localized for him because he didn't have the neuro anatomical knowledge. But so imagine that

Speaker 1 you encounter an anomaly. Okay, that's the place.

Speaker 1 You could say that that exploration that we just described, which is, you know, is there something wrong with me socially? Is it generalizable? Am I a cataclysmic person?

Speaker 1 All of those are fantasies of a sort, right? And you could think of the fantasies as attempts to remap the anomalous situation,

Speaker 1 right? And then, like, a shallow remapping would require just a tiny alteration of fantasy, but a large remapping would mean a whole reconfiguration of character.

Speaker 1 Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration for the remapping of anomaly, and that it could be undertaken safely because you could

Speaker 1 explore different perceptual configurations in the safety of dreams without exposing yourself to any danger.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you could imagine that, so the right hemisphere signifies

Speaker 1 detects anomaly,

Speaker 1 and it begins this exploration process, but it's using it's using the landscape of fantasy, which would be simulation, to start to

Speaker 1 start to explore. And you could imagine, too, that one of the ways that that

Speaker 1 might be

Speaker 1 triangulated would be: imagine that your right hemisphere has aggregated a couple of different anomalies,

Speaker 1 not enough to be cataclysmic about them, but to have them sort of there as mysteries.

Speaker 1 Okay, now you search through the fantasy space, and one of the new fantasies explains like several anomalies simultaneously. My guess is that's something like fantasy-related insight.

Speaker 1 Because you'd see that in therapy, you know, where

Speaker 1 someone will lay out a couple of different problematic scenarios

Speaker 1 and then

Speaker 1 contemplate the commonalities and sometimes they'll stumble across something that, oh, I see, I'm looking at this whole thing wrong.

Speaker 1 It's a a restructuring of the theory and then those three anomalies are all accounted for. And that's going to give you a sense of conviction, right? Because now you have a theory that accounts for

Speaker 1 the new new information. And the dream is part of that process.
It's the birthplace of that, the birthplace of that re-novelization of conception. Yeah, yeah.
No, that's interesting.

Speaker 1 So I think definitely

Speaker 1 in terms of using the right hemisphere in dreams, there's got to be something there. So I'm not sure how much this has been explored in terms of the right hemisphere only.

Speaker 1 But there's definitely because dreams is so much about emotional updating and emotional creating a sense of

Speaker 1 making sense of an emotional landscape, right? So in dreams, for example, it's heavily populated by people, right? So it's REM dreams, for example.

Speaker 1 So each night you cycle through different stages of sleep,

Speaker 1 stage one, two, three, and then you have deep sleep and then you have REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, where your eyes go from side to side.

Speaker 1 During this stage of sleep, you're paralyzed from head to toe. So you have structures in the brain called the pons and the medulla in the lower part of the brain that paralyzes your entire body.

Speaker 1 So you won't act out your dreams and hurt yourself, right? So this is, so I I want to lay the foundation before I get to that to your point, right?

Speaker 1 And that sets up the stage for exploration without risk. Right, so now you can you can engage in this laboratory, you know, of testing, a testing space without any fatal consequences, right?

Speaker 1 You can do whatever you want and you don't hurt your sleeping partner or yourself. So, you have that paralysis, first of all.

Speaker 1 You're in a physiological straitjacket, so to speak, right? Yeah, and you can explore deeply enough so that you can actually reshape not just your conceptions, right, but your perceptions, right?

Speaker 1 And that idea accounts for some of the bizarres of dreams. Like

Speaker 1 if you're exploring at the level of perception, it's going to seem bizarre.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I just want to sort of go through this. So first of all, you're paralyzed in REM sleep, right? From head to toe.
You can't move.

Speaker 1 Your eyelids can move because of a different circuit, by the way. I just want to add that.
So it's a different circuit for the eyelids.

Speaker 1 Now, interestingly, the emotional part of the brain, the limbic centers tugged behind your ears, become hyperactive. So you have that.

Speaker 1 Your prefrontal lobes and the CEO CEO of the brain becomes less active for some reason. So that part of the brain dials down, right? Motor.

Speaker 1 Restriction of inhibition?

Speaker 1 Restriction of inhibition. And so everything in the world becomes less focused, right? So you can less constrained? Less constrained, right? So you don't think in a logical,

Speaker 1 straightforward ABC-like manner, right? So if I wake somebody up from REM sleep and say, well,

Speaker 1 the word and tell him the word sun, he will think

Speaker 1 chair instead of moon right so he doesn't relate think in a logical serial manner he will think in an unrelated manner in fact he will be more likely to say sun and chair versus when somebody's awake and I ask him well what do you think of now when I say sun they might say moon right so they are more likely to relate unrelated words so they think in a which is what you'd expect if it was an exploratory process exploratory process right so the prefrontal lobes turn down right the emotional part of the brain dial up right so you have that You're paralyzed from head to toe.

Speaker 1 Now, this is a perfect cocktail for strange things.

Speaker 1 Not only that, but also the chemicals in your brain that have to do with logical and linear thinking, noradrenaline. You have adrenaline in your body when you're anxious or

Speaker 1 you're excited,

Speaker 1 you have adrenaline. You have noradrenaline in the brain, but also in the body.
But noradrenaline

Speaker 1 is a cousin chemical of adrenaline. Now,

Speaker 1 this chemical, it turns out there's a structure in the brain, in the brainstem, called the locus.

Speaker 1 Cilurius, yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 Your pronunciation is brilliant. 32,000 cells, pitch black, in the brainstem, they will stop, you know, secreting noadrenaline during REM sleep.

Speaker 1 So that means your way of thinking about the world is unfocused.

Speaker 1 It's like spacey, it's created.

Speaker 1 Yeah, unconstrained. Unconstrained by prior conviction.
Absolutely. Prior learning.
Right. So this is a perfect cocktail now for craziness.
The vestibular part of your brain become hyperactive.

Speaker 1 You know, the central motor region of the brain that has to do with automatic sort of behavior

Speaker 1 become hyperactive. Even though they're paralyzed.
Even though you're paralyzed. So that's why dreams you can sometimes feel like you're running, but you can't control your legs.

Speaker 1 You feel like some monster is chasing you, but you can't move, or you feel like

Speaker 1 you're

Speaker 1 controlled like a pocket on a string. And that's because the parts of the brain that have to do with automatic movements.
Sporadically, the neurons, they're fire, so you cannot control your movement.

Speaker 1 So you have all that. And then you have the emotions.
And it seems like then it's just perfect for what you're saying then, that the right hemisphere type of thinking of exploration and emotion

Speaker 1 is just,

Speaker 1 it's hyperactive. Right.
So it's a safe place for

Speaker 1 simulation. for exploratory simulation that can be so extreme that it can verge on the bizarre.
Yeah. But why not? Why not explore the outer limits under safe conditions?

Speaker 1 Well, I've also, I remember that if you wake people up from REM sleep, the most common emotion they report is anxiety. And that makes sense, too, if you think about this as part of the,

Speaker 1 what would you say,

Speaker 1 the reconfiguration in the face of novelty process.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 the most appropriate first response to something anomalous is anxiety.

Speaker 1 It's to, because technically what anxiety does is stop the operation of, it stops current operation. So that's like a predator, a prey,

Speaker 1 it's like a prey animal response. Freeze.
Why? Because what you're doing has either not worked or exposed you to danger. So now you're not where...

Speaker 1 You're not where you thought you were and what you're doing isn't doing what you thought it was. Okay, now what?

Speaker 1 Stop.

Speaker 1 That's anxiety. Then, then what? Then explore.
So if you throw a rat into a new cage, the first thing it does is freeze.

Speaker 1 Okay, then what it starts to do is to look around. I guess to begin with, it doesn't even want to move its eyes, right? Because it doesn't want to attract the attention of a predator.

Speaker 1 So it freezes and crouches down.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 if nothing... additionally terrible happens it starts to thaw it starts to look and it starts to sniff yeah right and then it'll start to explore and remap the territory.

Speaker 1 But that seems to be what's happening at the dream level conceptually is you imagine that you're encountering a landscape of anomaly or novelty that's signified by the right hemisphere.

Speaker 1 The emotion that's elicited is anxiety with a subtext of curiosity,

Speaker 1 right? Because both of those two things would be at play.

Speaker 1 And then the fantasy landscape can be elaborated so that even perception itself can be reconfigured because of the error.

Speaker 1 If you're betrayed by someone, someone, you could say something like, I can't even look at you the same way.

Speaker 1 Right. And that means that the betrayal has forced a reconception so profound that perception itself has been altered.
Like you could find someone attractive.

Speaker 1 This happens often when people are dating. You could find someone attractive or unattractive on first meeting.

Speaker 1 And then as you get to know them, Maybe you thought they were attractive to begin with and that just goes away.

Speaker 1 Or you felt that they weren't that attractive to begin with, but as you get to know their character, let's say,

Speaker 1 then the perception itself shifts. It's not merely the theory of mind or the conception you have of them, right? You literally look at them differently.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's because in part you actually see, I don't know, if you reconfigure the

Speaker 1 what would be the patterns of interaction in their face.

Speaker 1 You know, like someone graceful, for example, you're obviously perceiving something like a gestalt. And there's something charming and beautiful about that.

Speaker 1 My guess is if you see a person of high character across time, you can see their integration and that that would make them,

Speaker 1 that would allow you to perceive their attractiveness in a way that you might not have been able to do superficially. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 That's very interesting. Yeah, yeah.
Well, to go back to the whole dream thing, right? So one of the things is that it's populated by a lot of people.

Speaker 1 And that's, again, right hemisphere is actually involved in

Speaker 1 decoding social, like facial expressions, for example. So that's one thing that obviously autistic people have problems with.

Speaker 1 But for some reason, there's a lot of faith, there's a lot of people and a lot of interactions in dreams. So, you interact a lot with a lot of people.

Speaker 1 And usually, actually, these interactions are negative.

Speaker 1 And this shows us that for some reason, it's advantageous to treat of negative things because you're more likely to train your circuits in your brain to be able to.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 to put it shortly, like if I have an encounter with a serial killer in my dream and I sort of overcome that, I'm not killed by it, right?

Speaker 1 By that serial killer, I'm can navigate that situation in an appropriate manner, I'm more likely to survive in real life.

Speaker 1 So it shows you that dreams have a lot to do with survival and training the circuits in the brain, making them solidify the ones that can help me survive more. So that's a huge part of right.

Speaker 1 Well, and it would make sense too that what you should look,

Speaker 1 the more sophisticated you are in your social perception,

Speaker 1 the less likely even encounters with dangerous people are to go wrong.

Speaker 1 I'll tell you a story about that.

Speaker 1 So I had this landlord when I lived in Montreal, and he was an ex-president of Hell's Angels in Montreal. And

Speaker 1 he had been in prison, and he was a rough guy.

Speaker 1 We couldn't communicate that easily because he spoke Jual French, which is very hard to understand, even if you're French, and I spoke English. And

Speaker 1 there was quite a big class difference between us. And I was from Western Canada, and she was from Eastern Canada.
And so, but we got along, you know.

Speaker 1 He lived right beside me, and to the degree we could communicate, we did. And he did some artwork.
He worked in Neon, as it turned out, and I bought some of his pieces.

Speaker 1 And we kind of got to know each other insofar as we could. Now, the problem, his name was Paulo.

Speaker 1 The problem was that now and then he would go on a bender and he could drink, well, like an unlimited amount of alcohol over a three-day period, like 90 beer, you know, like,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 he would drink himself to a point where

Speaker 1 it was not even obvious how conscious he was, but he was still upright.

Speaker 1 And then he'd drink up all his money.

Speaker 1 And then he developed a habit of coming to my door at like three in the morning to sell me like a toaster or a microwave because he needed money, because he wanted to keep drinking.

Speaker 1 And so I did that a couple of times. He showed up at like three in the morning.
Now he's a big guy and he's tough.

Speaker 1 And I went out once with a, to a bar with him.

Speaker 1 He put me on the back of his motorcycle, which is a 750 Honda, if I remember correctly. He put his wife's helmet on my head, which is a little tiny helmet.
And away we went.

Speaker 1 And he said, if the cops come after me, I'm not stopping, just so you know. It's like, well, that was the beginning of a very interesting evening.

Speaker 1 And he got into all sorts of fights at the bars because people would come up and like challenge him, essentially, stupid people. And that didn't go well for them.

Speaker 1 So he was touchy, let's put it that way. Well, I talked to my wife about this

Speaker 1 because she didn't like the fact that I was giving Paulo money for his like toasters and so forth because she knew that he was trying to quit drinking.

Speaker 1 So, and then it also scared her that he would come over like at three in the morning. So one day he came over at three in the morning and he was standing there sort of swaying and looking at me.

Speaker 1 And I had to tell him that I wasn't going to give him any more money starting then. And I had to tell him why.
And so I said, look,

Speaker 1 we know you're trying to quit drinking.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 when you come over and I buy your toaster, then you go and drink. And I can't do that anymore because it's not good.
And he looked at me for like. 10 seconds and I know why he was looking at me.

Speaker 1 He was looking at me to see if I was playing moral superiority games. Yeah.
Yeah, in which case the interaction wouldn't have gone very well. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 1 And so the reason I'm bringing that up is because

Speaker 1 as your social perception becomes more sophisticated,

Speaker 1 the probability that you can navigate well in a complex and potentially dangerous situation increases radically.

Speaker 1 So if you can practice that in a dream, now that should mean that you should concentrate on elements of social behavior that didn't go your way, that you don't understand.

Speaker 1 And that would take you into a landscape of, well, hard to tell, but possibly into a landscape of malevolence.

Speaker 1 That would explain, for example, why people go and watch horror movies and movies about serial killers and so forth. It's like

Speaker 1 you want to sharpen yourself up. And that's a good point.
So the fact is that, you know, when you, when you dream, that your brain takes you on this exploration, right?

Speaker 1 And it looks at various social scenarios, for example, that evoke emotions in you. So it takes, you know, Dr.
Peterson and put him in a room with Kim and Joe and see how he reacts.

Speaker 1 If the reaction is not an emotionally evocative one, it will literally take you and show you another scenario until it hits on a scene that evokes your emotion, that gets you riled up, and then it explores

Speaker 1 it. It has, yeah, it has to have that element, and then it will go down that path more and explore it more.
It'll say, this is a very good idea.

Speaker 1 I see. So it presents scenarios.
Exactly. Until one evokes a limbic reaction.
Absolutely. Now,

Speaker 1 but is it also searching for emotional reactions that are primarily negative or is it intensity? Not necessarily. So it does,

Speaker 1 there's a huge dopaminergic aspect to dreams.

Speaker 1 So it's been shown that if you have a lesion to a part of the brain, the inferior parietal lobule, again, it's a region just below the superior parietal lobule.

Speaker 1 It's involved in creating images, but also it's, so if you have a stroke there, for example, you won't dream. Or

Speaker 1 the mesolimbic dopamine centers, it's a fancy name for the part of the brain where you have dopamine going to the prefrontal cortex. If you have a lesion there, you won't dream as well.

Speaker 1 So, bliss and dopamine, as well as images, is involved deeply in okay. So, it's emotional intensity and valence, intensity valence, yeah, right?

Speaker 1 But it's tilted somewhat towards the negative, tilted somewhat towards the side. We are generally as human beings tilted somewhat toward the negative.
Absolutely. So, so, okay.

Speaker 1 Okay, so your brain is playing with various scenarios. Absolutely.
And if one evokes an emotional response,

Speaker 1 so you see, the thing is, if it evokes a negative emotional response, that would indicate that your adaptation is weak at that point, right?

Speaker 1 Because you're much more likely to be anxious about a situation that you haven't mastered. Right.
Okay, so you could imagine that the

Speaker 1 evocation of... negative emotion is indication of weakness in conceptual structure.
Okay, so now the dream is playing with various scenarios around that

Speaker 1 evocation point. Yeah.
So one, it's very interesting.

Speaker 1 So one thing that I want to make clear as well is that, you know, obviously, as you know, there's a corpus callosum that there's a bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing the two hemispheres to communicate, right?

Speaker 1 So you have the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. So these hemisphere,

Speaker 1 if you literally cut it, there won't you have two consciousness in one person, right?

Speaker 1 So it seems like dreams is also right hemispheric dominance for another reason because the things you you will see in your dreams are like poetry, right?

Speaker 1 It's visual metaphors that you never can't explain in language, right? So, I can, it's like going through an art museum and looking at things, but in a very poetically, beautifully

Speaker 1 non-language way, right? So, you can't describe it necessarily. And obviously, the left hemisphere, the regions of the vernica and stuff like that, is involved in language and understanding language.

Speaker 1 But it seems like

Speaker 1 the poetic aspect of dreams is very much a right hemispheric

Speaker 1 thing as well. Well, that should be associated with both the novelty routinization dichotomy.
So the question is, well, how do you approach something that's novel?

Speaker 1 Well, if it's novel, if it produces anomaly, if you don't understand it, you haven't encapsulated it in language. It's not routinized enough so that you have a...
propositional description of it.

Speaker 1 So you could imagine that during the day, when you're conscious, you're running well-routinized, propositionalized routines.

Speaker 1 But some of them

Speaker 1 don't work out as well as others.

Speaker 1 Okay, so now imagine the right hemisphere is sitting in the background mapping the failures.

Speaker 1 Okay, so now you have like a collection of failures. It's something like that.
Now it's nighttime.

Speaker 1 You shut down the propositional side and you open up the metaphoric side and it's starting to explore that land. It's exploring, I think it's exploring unexplored territory fundamentally.

Speaker 1 That's the best way to conceptualize it. But it's also like the land, it's the same as the landscape of insufficient adaptation,

Speaker 1 right? And so, and that should be associated with

Speaker 1 negative emotion, right? Right.

Speaker 1 And now, the question would be: what would be the utility of those metaphoric fantasies? Well, part of that's

Speaker 1 okay, so imagine that

Speaker 1 around any perception,

Speaker 1 there is a cloud of connotations,

Speaker 1 right, that are first order. We already talked about that.
So,

Speaker 1 like a first order connotation for you, if I saw you, would obviously be male, right?

Speaker 1 So, and then imagine that outside of that, there's second-order connotations and third order, and finally, things that are so distinct that they don't seem to bear any conceptual relationship.

Speaker 1 Well, as you open up the metaphoric landscape, that connotation width should expand.

Speaker 1 And then you could imagine that what you're trying to do is to explore a new network of connotations that would

Speaker 1 map the territory more effectively.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 and I think what is also interesting about dreams and that whole thing is that it seems to tap into a circuitry that's more mystical than the circuitry that we normally tap into.

Speaker 1 I mystical, I mean, it seems like some of the

Speaker 1 receptors involved in mystical experiences when you take psilocybin and things like mescalin and DMT and stuff like that, the serotonin 2A receptors. So one theory actually

Speaker 1 talks about how,

Speaker 1 so obviously serotonin is another neurochemical in the brain.

Speaker 1 The part of the brain that produces that, the dorsor rapher nucleus, also shuts down its production of serotonin. So you don't have serotonin in your dreams either, in REM sleep.

Speaker 1 And so you end up in this space without noadrenaline and without serotonin. But it seems like for some reason reason that the serotonin 2A receptors become dialed up.

Speaker 1 So that part of the serotonin 2 receptors become tickled for some reasons. And the reason, you know, sometimes

Speaker 1 in psilocybin experience. It also happened in psilocybin experiences.
Right, so that accounts in part for the overlap between the mystical experience and the dream experience.

Speaker 1 And the mystical experiences and the dream experiences. So there's something there that is...

Speaker 1 that's hyper-cosmic in dreams that you can't, it's ineffable, you can't describe it in language, and even and it's highly personal it has salience for you.

Speaker 1 So, one thing that I notice about dream is a lot of people come and talk to me about their dreams all the time. They'll go, Baland, you know, I had this dream, I saw this and that, and

Speaker 1 they're very emotional about it, and it's highly personal and cosmic, right?

Speaker 1 But you know, I kind of go, oh, that's interesting, but it's not really that interesting. But it has that significance for you as a person.
And that's kind of about the dream thing.

Speaker 1 It has personal salience,

Speaker 1 kind of the type of personal

Speaker 1 salience you can get from a psilocybin experience.

Speaker 1 Okay, so

Speaker 1 what do you think, account? Okay, so you said something paradoxical about that, right? That it's a weird combination of intensely personal

Speaker 1 and cosmic, which means intensely universal. It brings those two things together.
Yeah, absolutely. And that's a strange conjunction because those two things are actually quite far apart.

Speaker 1 The more personal something is, in some ways, the less cosmic, the less universal it is. But the dream unites those two things.
It kind of unites them, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So I wonder, see, an archetype in some ways bridges the gap between the personal and the cosmic.

Speaker 1 So, well, here's an example of something you can do with a dream that's very effective. Yep.
So imagine that you have

Speaker 1 a client

Speaker 1 who's

Speaker 1 chased by something awful

Speaker 1 in a dream and that repeats. Yep.
And then you ask them what they do and they say, well, I run away or I try to hide.

Speaker 1 Okay. So then then you say to them, Well, here's what we're going to do instead.

Speaker 1 I want you to sit there, close your eyes, then you make them relax so that they get into a state where they can visualize, right? Say, Now bring that dream to mind. Yeah, okay, now

Speaker 1 close your eyes, bring the dream to mind. Now, tell me what's happening.
So they'll replay the dream and say, Now, okay, now at the end, instead of running,

Speaker 1 tell me what happens if you turn around and ask the

Speaker 1 criminal or or the sadist or the monster

Speaker 1 what it's up to.

Speaker 1 Or

Speaker 1 what happens if you approach it instead of running?

Speaker 1 Well, and then the dream will continue in their imagination most of the time. And

Speaker 1 generally, what occurs in a consequence of that is that dream goes away.

Speaker 1 Now, I think the reason for that, and I think this is akin to this bridging of the gap between the personal and the cosmic, is because

Speaker 1 their personal response to being chased is to run and hide. So they're prey animals.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 if you transform that into voluntary explorers,

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 what you're doing is you're inculcating an element of the hero myth into the dream landscape. It's like, no, the right strategy when you're threatened isn't to run.

Speaker 1 The right strategy is to turn voluntarily and to commence the process of exploration. That is what a hero myth is.
That's very interesting. So let's go on that whole thing, right?

Speaker 1 So the monster in your dream represents your hyperactive amygdala and the limbic centers of the brain being hyperactive, up to 30% more active in the dream landscape, right?

Speaker 1 Okay, so that's that overplay of emotion. That's the overplay of the emotion.
And by the way, the hippocampus also turns out the memory part of the brain is also hyperactive in the dream REM world.

Speaker 1 So you have the memory spilling in into this narrative about a monster chasing you, right? So you give it identity, you give it name, you give it, you know, all this, all these negative features.

Speaker 1 It's very important.

Speaker 1 You're contextualizing it based based on the hyperactive hippocampus.

Speaker 1 Then it's chasing you, and you can't run away because we said the motor, central motor generator of your brainstem, is making it very hard for you to move.

Speaker 1 So, you don't have the movement normally occurs in the motor cortex of your brain that gives you voluntary movement.

Speaker 1 But because that part of the brain can compete with the central motor, automatic part of the brain firing and making your behaviors all you know sporadic and automatic so you can't get away now what you said was interesting you said if you turn around and approach the monster the monster will be it will become diminished in strength and that's interesting because we know in the real world if you walk simply by walking you will turn down the activity of the amygdala because you're telling your you're telling your brain or your yourself that you are approaching you are engaging in approach behavior instead of withdrawing yeah right right which which puts you, see, that shifts your identity in relationship to the thing that's chasing you.

Speaker 1 You're changing it, saying, now I'm no longer the prey here, I'm the predator. I am the one that

Speaker 1 is doing the haunting.

Speaker 1 And so in that sense, it would make sense that the monster would

Speaker 1 vanish.

Speaker 1 So that's very interesting. But I also want to touch on that whole, on monsters, since we're on the topic of monsters.
So this condition called sleep paralysis, and I talk about it in

Speaker 1 my Peterson Academy course. There's a a whole lecture on sleep paralysis.
So, are you familiar with sleep paralysis?

Speaker 1 I experienced sleep paralysis repeatedly

Speaker 1 for years, yeah, especially if I slept on my back. That doesn't happen anymore, but okay, but I'm very familiar with sleep paralysis.
Did you see any monsters? Can you explain? I'm curious.

Speaker 1 So, most of my

Speaker 1 experience was

Speaker 1 being unable to move and

Speaker 1 know

Speaker 1 I knew what sleep paralysis was, so even when it happened to me in my dreams, usually my experience was that

Speaker 1 something was happening to me and I was frozen and unable to speak. And I knew I had to wake myself up.
Like I'd try to throw myself off the bed. Sometimes I could yell to my wife.

Speaker 1 I mean, literally in my life, I would yell and she'd have to come and shake me and then I'd wake up. But no, I didn't have the

Speaker 1 monster element to it.

Speaker 1 I had clients who did in sleep paralysis. I think the reason that didn't happen is because I knew what was happening.
Right. So

Speaker 1 the monster, too, just out of curiosity.

Speaker 1 So you can imagine that with this interplane between the hippocampus and the amygdala, if the emotional systems are more active, okay, so now there's lots of emotions being triggered.

Speaker 1 Now the memory systems are interacting with those emotions. They're going to flesh them out.

Speaker 1 Right. So here's the emotion.
Here's the thing that would be most likely to manifest that. So if it's a panoply of emotions, it would be an amalgam of emotion-evoking

Speaker 1 stimuli. And there's no difference between an amalgam of emotion eliciting stimuli and a monster.
Those are the same thing. That's what a monster is.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So a monster is your worst nightmare come to life. It's your worst nightmare, right? It's whatever you dread, whatever is lurking in your unconscious mind, that's coming to the fore, right?

Speaker 1 And so during sleep paralysis,

Speaker 1 interestingly, you didn't have any of the monsters.

Speaker 1 But it turns out about 40% of people will see monsters. Sleep paralysis is a terrifying experience.
So you have this REM paralysis, obviously. You're paralyzed from head to toe during REM sleep.

Speaker 1 You're dreaming away. Occasionally, for some people, they might start feeling like they can, you know, they can see their surroundings.

Speaker 1 So they might open their eyes and then they realize, my God, I'm paralyzed. I can't move.
I can't speak. And it's terrifying at this point.
And then they look around.

Speaker 1 And I had one of these experiences. So let me tell you about my own experience.
So I was sleeping in my room as a teenager in Copenhagen. And I grew up in a ghetto-like neighborhood

Speaker 1 in Copenhagen. and I was lying there sleeping, and then I woke up, paralyzed, unable to move or speak.

Speaker 1 And then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me, and it came closer and closer until it was on my chest, strangling me, and I saw my legs flying up and down.

Speaker 1 And mind you, at this point, I was like, is this real? It was as crisp as this conversation you and I are having. What did the monster look like? Well, I'll tell you.

Speaker 1 So at this point, I just saw my legs flying up and down, and I, and, and it was choking me, and I couldn't, I couldn't, uh, you know, do anything. I was literally trying to kill me.

Speaker 1 Now, on this occasion, I didn't see a monster. I didn't see a monster on this occasion, but I've had sleep paralysis since then, on many occasions, and I've had various monsters.

Speaker 1 So, I've seen like one was Colonel Gaddafi, you know him, eccentric figure. He was hovering over me when I was in Egypt.
I was living in Egypt for a period of time in my early undergraduate years.

Speaker 1 I was a little bit out there.

Speaker 1 And I saw during the Libyan revolution, of all people, gaddafi was in my my bedroom hovering over me you know attacking me uh so that can happen during sleep paralysis and that was so he's a he's the monster of the oppressive patriarchy we could visit yes absolutely i had a wife my wife had a dream like that about richard nixon yeah dressed in a general's outfit all right so he she he was another figure like you could think about him as the monstrous form of the patriarchy yeah yeah my wife kissed him okay right right so that was how she reconciled that conflict oh yeah it's very well you can think about it.

Speaker 1 It's a funny move, right? Because the monstrous element of the patriarchy is it's the negative side of the social order. It's something everyone has to contend with.

Speaker 1 That's a class of monster, right? Like giant. It's the same thing as giant.

Speaker 1 And in hero mythology, of course, one of the categories of monster that the hero fights is giant. There's dragon.

Speaker 1 And dragon is a different,

Speaker 1 that's more like a representation of the terrible aspect of nature. That's a good way to think about a dragon.
Okay, so you said you were in Libya? Well, I was in Egypt,

Speaker 1 Egypt. Yeah, what was happening around you? Around that time, there was a spring, the Arab Spring, and the Libyan revolution, all that was going on, going on, going on.

Speaker 1 And I was watching CNN all the time, you know.

Speaker 1 You should never do that. That I should never do, right? So I was doing that.
I was sort of watching the news, and you know, I was influenced in some way. So,

Speaker 1 that's really interesting. So, our research now in about seven countries has shown that

Speaker 1 whenever you have a cultural narrative for it like stories uh of witches of of of of space aliens or whatever you will have those lurking into your your unconscious and you will see that manifest right so right we show so those are categories of the monstrous those are the the your your um your carl jung uh archetype uh you know uh figures appearing so for example in egypt we showed that the evil genius of aladdin you know aladdin the cartoon you will have that appear in front of you so you know they will have bloody fangs and everything will be creepy, very scary monsters you will see in Egypt.

Speaker 1 In Italy, for example, in the Pandafica region of Italy, you will see these giant cats or witches. So, that's very common.

Speaker 1 And in

Speaker 1 the U.S., space alien abduction is

Speaker 1 very common in the U.S. So, you might see that.
Okay, so what that would imply is that you could imagine that the cultural Okay, so let's say the core of the revelation

Speaker 1 is diffuse emotional activation, much of it negative emotion.

Speaker 1 Okay, now the question is:

Speaker 1 what's the most basic form in which that could take perceptual shape?

Speaker 1 Okay, so the cultural narrative

Speaker 1 would be like a first-order elaboration of the core of that fear.

Speaker 1 So then it's not surprising at all that that's what your mind would latch on to when it was trying to clothe that emotion in perceptual reality. It's very interesting.

Speaker 1 Actually, so it turns out if you go first order and the basic level, most people will just see shapes and shadows. So they won't even see the monster clothed and have all these details.

Speaker 1 So it turns out

Speaker 1 the truly unknown.

Speaker 1 That's the V1.

Speaker 1 That's the, you know, the occipital lobes and the visual cortex responds to lines and basic shapes. And as we...

Speaker 1 Oh, that's so cool. Yeah.
So the first order.

Speaker 1 It's a first order. It's simply the brain says, look, I don't even care about the details.

Speaker 1 i've i i feel fear right now i just want to hallucinate the basic this just the sketch the sketch right so you have the sketch and then okay so then as you explore does it move up the visual then moves up the visual hierarchy right so we know then that you have a part of the brain called the mt the motor part of the brain

Speaker 1 has to do with movement that's so that's the next in the hierarchy then you have a part of the brain to that has to do with as we said putting faces so and depth and color and so that comes as we move along the visual hierarchy and then finally you reach the vernica and the meaning part of the brain and the hippocampus and you go my god this is freddy kruger from elm street he's attacking me right now and he has this agenda and intentions so but 90 like most of the time people will see these shadows and shapes and that's it and that's it are they most terrified at that level it's very terrifying usually but the reason the one reason for this is that Usually when you don't have an identity, it's even more scary.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Because you don't know what to do. Exactly.
Yeah. So, okay.
So then you imagine that, oh, oh, that's so cool. So then you imagine that adaptation would proceed in this manner.

Speaker 1 So when it's only shapeless form,

Speaker 1 you have no idea what to do because

Speaker 1 there's no concrete action you can take against a shapeless form.

Speaker 1 Okay, so now you can imagine using this in behavior therapy to deal with fears. It's like, okay, first of all, Because you're trying to get it to take form.

Speaker 1 Well, why? Because the more form it takes, the more delineated the strategy can be for dealing with it. So you're saying, okay, so first of all, you're doing a walk through the visual hierarchy.

Speaker 1 You got just the shadows and the basic, and then you get the basic motion.

Speaker 1 And then what's the next level? You get depth, for example, you get color V4 area in the brain, but color. So you might add color, that could be another.
Okay, and then it takes a face. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then it's an identity. It takes a face, identity, and then you hook up the emotional part of the brain.
So it gets emotions.

Speaker 1 Okay, the next thing you'd need above that would be a behavioral strategy.

Speaker 1 yeah so if this named and faced figure now makes itself manifest what do you need to do it so see this is partly what you do if you're trying to treat someone for post-traumatic stress disorder is

Speaker 1 you help them specify very clearly right so give form to the nature of the fear but that's not enough it isn't enough to know your enemy yeah right

Speaker 1 That's better than not knowing your enemy because that's even more terrifying. But you want to lay out a behavioral strategy in relationship to that enemy that either quells the threat.

Speaker 1 So how do you deal with a criminal, let's say, or like the optimal strategy would be to take the enemy and to transform him into an ally, right?

Speaker 1 That's like, that's the highest possible level of adaptation. Absolutely.
Because who needs an enemy?

Speaker 1 And partly what you're doing, like in therapy, you can go through someone's history and you can see where they might have had a repeated traumatic experience, like in a relationship.

Speaker 1 Then you have to find out what is it that's absent in their representation of relationship that's exposing them time and time again to that threat, because it means there's something in their perception and their strategy.

Speaker 1 It's because imagine this, imagine that you were selectively blind for only for white vans that were approaching you from the left.

Speaker 1 It's not much of a deficit, but your recurring experience would be once every two years, you get run over by a white fan, and you have no idea why.

Speaker 1 Okay, so that's the account of the lack of your perception and the repeat experience. Okay, so now you have someone who has a repetitive trauma.

Speaker 1 You think, well, you've got a hole in your adaptive structure.

Speaker 1 Okay, now you want to characterize that, so give it form, and you want to append a, it's a perceptual and behavioral strategy to it, and that'll that's what'll make the nightmare go away.

Speaker 1 And it's really remarkable. My experience clinically was that it all it took very few repetitions of a repeating dream

Speaker 1 where you inverted the strategy.

Speaker 1 The dream would almost, my experience was that if you did that once, the person wouldn't have the recurring dream anymore.

Speaker 1 Right. And it's because you might say at some very deep level, they had conceptualized themselves in that situation as nothing but a prey animal.

Speaker 1 You do the same thing with exposure therapy, with agoraphobia, right? Is you get people to

Speaker 1 imagine what upsets them and then begin to confront it. Yeah.
Right. So, and the generalization element isn't the specific strategy of confrontation.

Speaker 1 It's the idea that they could be the one that confronts. Yeah.
Yeah. It's very interesting.
There's two points on that I want to, I want to go into. That's very, very fascinating.
So first of all,

Speaker 1 we've shown that when you have a specific cultural narrative for it and a name for it, right?

Speaker 1 the more terrifying and salient it becomes.

Speaker 1 So for example, if you live in Egypt and you say it's these evil genies, they come at night, they choke you, they strangle you, they kill you, then you will, first of all, have this experience much more frequently.

Speaker 1 So, to up to one-third of more frequency to the experience. That's the first thing.
If there's a cultural narrative. If there's a cultural narrative.
So, we compared Egypt to Denmark, my home country.

Speaker 1 So, we compared these two countries. And it turns out, in Denmark, by the way, people say most of the time it's just the brain, it's stress, it's nothing terrifying.

Speaker 1 Like, there's no higher

Speaker 1 explanation for it, right? So, it's just physiology.

Speaker 1 In Egypt, you have the opposite, right? The complete opposite. More frequent, more fearful.
So 50% of Danish people will say, I think for Egyptians, will say, I will die from this. This is fatal.

Speaker 1 So this is Egyptians. Okay.
So they have that.

Speaker 1 They say the paralysis lasts much longer. So they will say the paralysis is intense.
It lasts much longer.

Speaker 1 So it seems like through their cultural beliefs, the experience has become much more salient, much more profound and impactful and we brought elements of psychogenic epidemic to it absolutely and we said is this true is this actually the case and we took went to the um to italy and we looked at the egyptian the italians with um with these terrifying explanations of sleep paralysis and we saw the same pattern the italians will also would also have these long episodes they would have them frequently and they would be extremely fearful so it's a it's like a contagious maladaptive context conceptualization Absolutely, right?

Speaker 1 And so it turns out we have a theory for why that occurs. Okay.
So it's imagine little Lisa living on this fictitious island in Simbukchu, for example.

Speaker 1 And she has this conversation with her grandmother over, you know, dinner. Let's say the grandmother says, at night, you will have this monster.
It comes and attacks you, chokes you.

Speaker 1 It looks like this and that. It has all these features.
She now goes to bed.

Speaker 1 right and she has never had by the way she's never had sleep paralysis before right for the first time she will have sleep paralysis now.

Speaker 1 She will wake up the next day and she will have sleep paralysis again. A few days later, she'll have it again.

Speaker 1 And then a month later,

Speaker 1 it's become chronic at this point, and she'll go tell other people about it, and they will have it too. And then you might be asking, why is this the case? What's going on? And this is the idea.

Speaker 1 We think that, first of all,

Speaker 1 the grandmother implanted these ideas into her brain about what sleep paralysis is.

Speaker 1 When she's now sleeping in her bed, she will have nocturnal arousal, meaning the emotional part of the brain will be hyperactive during the REM stage.

Speaker 1 And she will engage in this hyper-conform conformatory behavior where she will monitor any paralysis sensations, saying, is something holding me down? Is something choking?

Speaker 1 She's got a scary explanation for it. She's looking for an explanation for this now.

Speaker 1 And then whenever, and because of her emotional centers being hyperactive, Whenever she feels something, she'll go, my God, this is it. This is it.
And she'll open her eyes.

Speaker 1 And then the emotional, the hippocampus, and all the narrative part of the brain will spill over into the experience. And she will literally see whatever her grandmother was telling her.

Speaker 1 Now, you might say, when, why then does it happen a few days later? Well, that created profound fear. And so a few days later, she will have anxiety and stress, which will predispose her.

Speaker 1 We've shown that. anxiety and stress predisposes you.
So she will have it again two days later and three days later. And at this point, she'll go, my God, I'm possessed.

Speaker 1 It's no longer just one episode. This monster is

Speaker 1 chronically possessing me and it's coming after me.

Speaker 1 And a funny way, funny thing is, too, it is a kind of possession. It is kind of a possession.
The grandmother transmitted the spirit.

Speaker 1 It's like a virus, right? Yeah, and

Speaker 1 it's a monstrous virus. As a meme, right?

Speaker 1 But at this point, what's interesting is that we've shown that people who have this episode, they will have more anxiety and more PTSD-like symptoms from this, right?

Speaker 1 So at this point, she might have these small T's of trauma, of the monster coming and attacking you, and then creating an overall trauma. So it becomes almost a traumatic experience.

Speaker 1 Well, you can imagine how that would increase the probability that it would spread too, because

Speaker 1 she might tell a friend. That's what I'm saying, right? So she goes around and tells her friends about it.

Speaker 1 And it turns out then that if you live in a culture where this, you know, like Egypt, it's twice as common versus Denmark.

Speaker 1 So we said that for an individual person, you will have it three times more than the person who has sleep paralysis. But beyond this,

Speaker 1 it's generally twice as common

Speaker 1 in cultures like Egypt and Italy and so forth. So there's this element to it that's that's very, very interesting.
And I want to take you to

Speaker 1 an experiment that your colleague Rich did, Rich McNally, that sort of encapsulates all this. So he showed that people who think that sleep paralysis is a space alien abduction.

Speaker 1 So these guys will say, well, I was sleeping in my bed and this gray came down in a spaceship. It attacked me, it choked me.
It took took out my semen. It was also a lot of sexuality going on.

Speaker 1 And obviously, we know from REM sleep, the hypothalamus and these parts of the brain are hyperactive. The sexual parts of the brain are hyperactive.
So you have sexual arousal during sleep paralysis.

Speaker 1 So you have the monster coming down, taking their semen and all that. Then they will have like a succubus.
Like a succubus. Middle-aged.
Like a succubus, right?

Speaker 1 But then at this point, what's interesting is that these guys, when they listen to the audio script of their encounters, of themselves narrating, so they'll listen to themselves saying, oh, I had this experience and this happened and that happened, their

Speaker 1 physiological reactions to that, their DSR, their sweating and their heart rate and blood pressure will be as profound that somebody who went to war.

Speaker 1 So somebody with actual PTSD who went to a war situation, the physiological reactions they have is comparable to somebody who was sleeping in their beds and having sleep paralysis.

Speaker 1 So for me, this shows me this might be one of the most interesting phenomenon in the culture. Well, you can see, well,

Speaker 1 you want to, look, you know from psychotherapy that the simulations that produce the most psychophysiological response are the most curative.

Speaker 1 So for example, when Edna Foa was treating people with PTSD, and I think she did this as well as anybody's ever done it.

Speaker 1 She would have people, this is counterintuitive in some ways, so imagine that the trauma was rape

Speaker 1 instituted. She'd have them bring the rape incident to mind in as much detail as possible

Speaker 1 voluntarily. That's the critical element, voluntarily.

Speaker 1 And then she did psychophysiological measurements. And the participants

Speaker 1 who showed the highest levels of psychophysiological response to the reenactment were the ones that got better faster.

Speaker 1 Now, that was still damn hard on them while they were doing it, but it makes perfect sense that

Speaker 1 the more hyper-real a simulation,

Speaker 1 the more learning would be associated with this, obviously. Absolutely.
And you could see how that could be pathologized. So then the question would be,

Speaker 1 this would be the tricky question for a therapist is like,

Speaker 1 well, what do you do with a client that has a repetitive alien abduction experience? Because now that's a person who needs a strategy. Right.
Right.

Speaker 1 Well, so we developed a therapy for sleep paralysis. I don't know, maybe you're interested in that.
I could talk about that. All right.
So it's a four-step solution that I came up with.

Speaker 1 So I, from my work around the world, I I thought I gotta have some, you know, some method to help these people, right?

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 what, how could I help them? This was my thought. How can I help these guys, right?

Speaker 1 And so, one thing is that I noticed that, for example, prayer and meditation and prayer and thinking about positive things was helpful.

Speaker 1 In a lot of instances, people would lay down and think about, you know, whatever God they believe in, and that would actually help them.

Speaker 1 So, that got me thinking about the attention system and the emotional parts of the brain and how I can bring that into the experience, given that you have limited attentional capacities.

Speaker 1 And so if you're lying there and thinking about ghosts, because your emotional part of your brain, the amygdala, is hyperactive and you know the amygdala has a lot of projections to the visual parts of the brain.

Speaker 1 So it can tell you what to see in the world. So we know this, so it can spill over and penetrate the visual scene.
So we don't want that.

Speaker 1 So I thought, how can I bring in the positive affect to the experience and make it more, you know, more, more benign?

Speaker 1 So it has four components. It goes, the first component is

Speaker 1 cognitive reappraisal. You know, these terms.
Meaning simply you say, look, this is not a monster. This is just the brain.
It's not terrifying. Let me change my thoughts about it.

Speaker 1 So that's the first point. You do that when

Speaker 1 the experience strikes. And you close your eyes too, just to filter any, you know, visual inputs.
So you're doing that with people when they're bringing the experience to mind?

Speaker 1 When they have the sleep paralysis episode. So these are the four steps you apply directly during sleep paralysis.
Obviously, you learn them when you're awake and I train you. When you practice.

Speaker 1 You practice. Yeah, yeah, okay.
So this is the, so this, yeah, great, you made that point.

Speaker 1 So you have that first thing, you do the cognitive reappraisal, saying, well, this is just your mind and brain playing tricks on you. Next step is emotional and psychological distances.

Speaker 1 Distancing, you go, since it's just the brain,

Speaker 1 simply,

Speaker 1 given that it's common all around the world, there's no reason for me to be scared of this. So you kind of distance yourself from the event.
So that's the second part, right?

Speaker 1 Thirdly, this is where prayer and meditation and affect comes in. You put all your attention on a positive emotional object in your mind.
So you bring to mind,

Speaker 1 could be God, somebody who believes in God. It could be your mother's face.
It could be anything emotionally salient. And you focus hyperattentively on that because then...

Speaker 1 That's why Mary is an antidote to the demonic, right? Because you bring the notion of mother and maternal care as the antithesis. Good point.

Speaker 1 So in that way, given that the limited attentional abilities of the brain and the frontal parietal regions and all that, so you focus intensely on this object, let's say God.

Speaker 1 And then, fourthly, you meditate. And meditate, meaning you...
you do a mindfulness kind of detachment. You say, I feel spasmy and pain in my legs and I feel heavy,

Speaker 1 but I'm not going to do do anything about it. I'm just going to let it fly.
I'm just going to just leave it alone.

Speaker 1 And this turns out,

Speaker 1 these four steps, if you apply it during sleep paralysis, we did a pilot study, a small study that showed it reduced sleep paralysis about 50%.

Speaker 1 So that's a significant amount. But obviously, we have to do more studies.
It's a very small study, but it's a first step.

Speaker 1 It's the first empirical study on this, on this, as a treatment for sleep paralysis. So I was very excited about that, but we need to do more research.
But I think

Speaker 1 I walked the Via Doula Rosa with Jonathan Pajo. Yeah.
And we were talking about its significance. And so you could imagine that,

Speaker 1 imagine that one of the things that you have to do in life is to

Speaker 1 reconcile yourself to the monstrous.

Speaker 1 Well, walking the road of the crucifixion does that because it enables you to voluntarily simulate intense suffering in the face of malevolence.

Speaker 1 Right now, you can imagine that because it's voluntary rather than something that's imposed on you, you're switching your framework from victim to accept, it's very strange, accepting participant.

Speaker 1 It's like turning around to confront the monster. It's the same thing.
So you could imagine, we talked already about the figure of Mary, let's say, as, or briefly,

Speaker 1 as the maternal, as an... as the antithesis of the monstrous.
That's pretty obvious.

Speaker 1 But you could also imagine that practicing your ability to accept the reality of malevolence and suffering, yeah, that's a meta-strategy for dealing with the monstrous itself.

Speaker 1 It's something like that. That's a good point.
That'd be my guess. That's a very, very interesting point.
But obviously, you brought something to mind right now that I wanted to ask you about.

Speaker 1 So, obviously, I've seen your latest work on We Who Wrestle with God and all this.

Speaker 1 So, do you have any thoughts about prophetic dreams? The kind of metaphors. Do you have any? Have you written about this, for example?

Speaker 1 I wrote a little bit about it in the story of Noah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Right. Well,

Speaker 1 so Noah

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 an archetypally good man. Yep.
But

Speaker 1 in the culturally and personally limited sense, in a way, Noah's as good a man as you could expect some to be for the conditions of his time and place.

Speaker 1 Okay, we know from the anthropological literature on elders that people who are singled out as elders in, let's say, traditional communities

Speaker 1 are

Speaker 1 who other people are motivated to go to for advice when things aren't going well. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, so now you might imagine: well, what sort of person would you have to be to be the sort of person who people would go to for advice when things aren't going well?

Speaker 1 Well, you'd have to establish a reputation of either having had things go well for you so you could avoid the catastrophes or having withstood a variety of catastrophes and still be highly functional.

Speaker 1 Okay, so then that would make you a certain kind of person. Well,

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 insistence in the story of Noah is that if your orientation is upward, your intuition is valid.

Speaker 1 If your intuition is valid, you're a prophet because you can see things coming when blind people won't see them.

Speaker 1 Right. So why wouldn't, like, there's no difference between forethought and prophecy, except time span.
Yeah. Okay.
So you might say, well, a mature person is capable of forethought.

Speaker 1 Okay, now if you are mature and

Speaker 1 maximally, optimally configured in your moral aim, your capacity for forethought would extend. You'd be able to see things coming long before other people.

Speaker 1 And maybe some of that would reveal itself in like visions. Those are fantasies.

Speaker 1 They could be prophetic visions. They could come in dreams.

Speaker 1 You know, imagine that your dream land, imagine now you're the sort of person who's dispensed with the first order monsters. Well, your dreams are still going to be doing something.

Speaker 1 They're going to be concentrating on more sophisticated forms of anomaly. Then maybe you master those.
Well, then now you're up another level.

Speaker 1 Those are the sort of people that would be prophetic.

Speaker 1 Because look, one of the ways of being a prophet is just by looking at things that other people won't look at.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 even in the landscape of media, if a story comes out about what's monstrous, most people will just, they won't look into it. They'll deny it.

Speaker 1 Well, imagine instead you delve into it, like you delve into the character of the monster in the dream. Right.
Well, are you less prepared or more? Well, obviously, far more. And I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't think there's a limit to that.

Speaker 1 There's also an insistence in hero mythology that you go to the heart of darkness. Right, right.
No, it's very interesting. And

Speaker 1 one reason that I bring this up is

Speaker 1 I used to live in Egypt, as I told you, and I was much inspired by the prophetic dreams of Joseph.

Speaker 1 I thought they were very, they're very striking, the suns and sun and the moon bowing down and all these kind of things.

Speaker 1 So I think there's something very, very interesting about the whole that realm of explanation and how that sort of spills and trickles into

Speaker 1 narratives in religious scripture. So I thought that was...
Well,

Speaker 1 you might say that one of the strong functions of the religious is the religious is a meta-strategy for dealing with the monstrous. That's not all it is.
But that's one of the things that it is.

Speaker 1 Like, how do we contend with

Speaker 1 not, you can imagine, how do I contend with my neighbor who's being a pain? Yep. Well, then how do I contend with the class of neighbors who are being troublesome?

Speaker 1 Well, then how do I contend with the fact that people can be malevolent? Yeah. Then how do I contend with the existence of malevolence itself?

Speaker 1 You're getting deeper into the question with each of those iterations.

Speaker 1 By the time you get to the point where your question is, how do I deal with the existence of malevolence itself? You're in the religious realm. I would say that by definition.

Speaker 1 It was weirdly the case when I was working as a clinician,

Speaker 1 when I was dealing with people who were profoundly traumatized.

Speaker 1 So they had their reasons. The language always became became religious when we were talking about it.

Speaker 1 You can't escape it because if you've really been hurt by someone who really wanted to hurt you, you've been touched by something like the spirit of malevolence.

Speaker 1 And when you're having a discussion about the nature of the spirit of malevolence, the language takes on like religious connotations and depth of its own accord.

Speaker 1 It's quite interesting. So there's a phenomenon I'm sure you know of, it's temporal lobe epilepsy.
So these guys will have epileptic seizures.

Speaker 1 So they will have that in the you know selectively in the temporal lobes.

Speaker 1 So they will and this is the emotional part of the brain become hyperactive and so they will see everything in the world as almost like they're living in a dream. Everything is poetic.

Speaker 1 Everything is highly salient. When I look at it, this pen right here, it's highly salient.
It's emotional. It's godly.

Speaker 1 It's quite an interesting. Dostoevsky had temporal lobe epilepsy.
Yes, yes. So it's just quite, and also

Speaker 1 Ramachandra and I wanted to study it more,

Speaker 1 but we didn't get into it. We focused on some of the OCD's work instead.

Speaker 1 But it's interesting. So these guys will become hyper-religious as well.
They will have hypographies. They will write all the time.

Speaker 1 So they will develop this tendency to write.

Speaker 1 And yeah, just become hyper-poetic.

Speaker 1 And it's quite an interesting phenomenon. And some people have argued that in the temporal lobe, you have the...

Speaker 1 God center of the brain, so to speak, in that region, that's where it all emanates in terms of the emotional

Speaker 1 landscape.

Speaker 1 belief.

Speaker 1 Well, one of the things, you know, if we have a further conversation at some point, I'd like to talk about the like neurological conceptualization of

Speaker 1 the religious by definition. Like, because I think we're at a point in our understanding of neuroscience where we could have a conversation like that.

Speaker 1 So like one of the hypothesis, for example, would be, imagine, I think that perceptions are the axioms of thought.

Speaker 1 Okay, now,

Speaker 1 and so an axiom is a very deep presupposition. Yeah,

Speaker 1 you can imagine in any conceptual structure that there are shallow elements of the conception, and then layers, kind of like the visual system, layers, and that there are

Speaker 1 axiomatic elements of the conceptual system. Okay, if an axiomatic element is accidentally shifted, you're traumatized.

Speaker 1 If it's voluntarily shifted, you're a hero.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 As the level of depth of the inquiry maximizes,

Speaker 1 the inquiry becomes more religious in its nature. That's a definition.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And so then you could imagine that the salience of the investigation magnifies in proportion to its depth.
And so that would account for the experiential element of awe, for example. And

Speaker 1 yeah, so that's something that would be very entertaining to discuss technically. Technically, so it's very interesting.
And I think with the whole, with temporal lobe epilepsy, right?

Speaker 1 So the whole landscape becomes hyper, you know, so the regions, we talked about the fusiform face area before, the regions from

Speaker 1 the cluster of cells in the fusiform and the emotional part of the brain become hyper-connected and hyperactive. So there's a kind of a kindling going on.

Speaker 1 So that's why when you look at a dry object like... like a pen, it becomes hyper cosmic and emotional and

Speaker 1 spiritual, right? But that's interesting. There's also the opposite in a way.
So if you have what's called Cotard syndrome,

Speaker 1 everything in the world is dead. Everything in the world is, it's almost like depression, in fact.
But everything is in the world. And you look at yourself in the mirror and you go, my God, I am dead.

Speaker 1 I'm a dead person. Right, right.
And

Speaker 1 the doctor will say, what do you mean you're dead? They say, I'm dead. And then they say, what about if I take a needle and poke you? And are you dead? And they will say, well, yeah.

Speaker 1 yeah and then the doctor might go like this and they bleed and they say well how come you're dead you're you're bleeding can can dead people bleed they say yes apparently apparently since I'm dead since I'm dead right so it shows you that that you know something intriguing is going on in the brain when these centers are hyperactive everything becomes salient right if they're underactive you know you're you are dead you know in fact if that part of the brain the the the phase area in the brain and the emotional part of the brain is hyperactive there's another syndrome called Frigoli syndrome, where you go around and you say, everybody in the landscape looks like my Uncle Joe, for example.

Speaker 1 So you go around and say, well, this looks like my Uncle Joe and this looks like my Uncle Joe. And the reason is that you have hyper-emotionality.
You are hyper-emotional, right?

Speaker 1 Because of that vision, the emotion part of the brain and the face part of the brain are hyperactive. and they're hyper connective.
The connectivity

Speaker 1 is an overdrive. And then you feel like, I shouldn't have emotions.
That's how your brain concludes.

Speaker 1 I shouldn't have emotions when I go around in the landscape and looking at people. But I do.
But I do. Therefore, your brain jumps to these absurd conclusions and goes, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, these are all my Uncle Joe's. Yeah, well, you see the same.

Speaker 1 We should close with this and we'll move to the daily awareness section, but you see the same thing with the onset of paranoid schizophrenia: is that, say, someone is watching television

Speaker 1 and part of the speech becomes hyper

Speaker 1 emotionally significant.

Speaker 1 So now it stands out.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 And the more intelligent schizophrenics are more likely to become paranoid, by the way, because they build up the conceptual structures around the perceptual anomaly.

Speaker 1 But it's the perceptual emotional anomaly that's the core of the pathology. It's like,

Speaker 1 well, why is that so significant?

Speaker 1 Well, because you get this emotional hyper-response. It's like it evokes anxiety and wonder.
It's awe-inspiring. It's like,

Speaker 1 well, it's like this is, it's particularly significant to me. It's a message to me.

Speaker 1 It's a message. What? It's a message from the television station? Is it a message from the satellites? Is it a message from the Pope? There's no denying the reality of the experience, right?

Speaker 1 So then the paranoid conspiracy, let's say, is overlaid on top of that as an explanation for something that can't be challenged because it's so visceral.

Speaker 1 It is dreamlike in the sense that you just described.

Speaker 1 And one of the things you also alluded to was that we actually base our sense of reality on that valence.

Speaker 1 So it's hyper-real if everything's over valence. And it's dead if nothing has significance.
Significance is the marker of the real.

Speaker 1 That's very different than objective reality. Okay, we should stop.
Here's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side. You're at Harvard and you're working really in the same

Speaker 1 area. in the Harvard Department of Psychology that I was in the 90s.

Speaker 1 And so one of the things I'd like to talk to you about is your experience there and your thoughts on the university system in general. So let's do that for half an hour on the Daily Wire side.

Speaker 1 So all of you who are watching and listening, you can,

Speaker 1 well, you can continue your investigation into exactly the topics that we described today, obviously at Peterson Academy, because I'm lecturing there and my guest is lecturing there.

Speaker 1 It's introduction to neuroscience.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, and so that's one of the newer courses in our offerings.

Speaker 1 And so if you're fascinated by this sort of thing, it's so useful to know the anatomy and the neuroscience, as I said, because it gives you much deeper insights into,

Speaker 1 well, the nature of the problems that you might encounter and also into the nature of their, of what, the universe of potentially viable solutions. That's a good way of thinking about it.

Speaker 1 And we're putting a tremendous amount together right now on the scientific and cultural front in relationship to the overlap between brain function, neurochemistry, physiology, and behavior, and like profound philosophical conceptions.

Speaker 1 It's great to work at that interface. And so the courses that,

Speaker 1 well, this introduction to neuroscience course is one that focuses exactly at that nexus. And we have several like that.
So

Speaker 1 in any case, join us on the Daily Wire side for another half an hour. We'll talk about the state of the modern university, focusing in this case on Harvard and the Department of Psychology there.

Speaker 1 Although you've been at other universities too, and we can bring them into the mix. So join us on the Daily Wire side.
Thank you you very much. Thank you very much.
Yeah, really good to talk to you.

Speaker 1 Thanks to the film crew here today in Scottsdale and to the Daily Wire for making this possible. And finally, to all of you for your time and attention.