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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
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Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
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Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
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We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
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And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
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It is Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another episode of Infinite Loops.
1:44
One of the things that I am amazingly grateful for is this show lets me talk to super smart people who are much smarter than I am and can correct all of my errors, and today, I have yet another on as a guest.
1:58
My guest today is Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's a neuroscientist, a psychologist, and the author of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain and How Emotions Are Made. Welcome, Lisa.
2:11
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Thanks for having me.
2:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, thank you for coming on.
2:16
I love Seven and a Half Lessons.
2:16
Do you want to tell us what happened to the other half that would've made it eight?
2:21
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah.
2:24
When I started to think about this book, I started with the question of, why do we even have a brain?
2:28
Brains are pretty expensive.
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That three-pound blob of meat between your ears is about 20% of your metabolic budget.
2:34
So that's the most expensive organ you have, and I thought, "Well, what the hell is it good for?
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Why do we even have one?"
2:40
It turns out that's actually a really long and interesting story, but I only really needed to tell the first little snippets, so that is the half lesson. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay.
2:52
You can probably anticipate my next question.
2:52
Tell me that half lesson.
2:54
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, if you go back 550 million years ago, animals didn't have brains and they got along pretty well without brains.
2:58
They were able to move under their own steam and reproduce, and so on and so forth.
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There's a really interesting narrative about how brains evolved and potentially even why they evolved and what is their most important job.
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It turns out that the most important job of your brain is not to think or to feel or to see the world with any degree of accuracy.
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The most important job that your brain has is to regulate the systems of your body.
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Now, you and I, and probably a lot of our listeners don't even think very much about the internal drama that's going in inside our own bodies every waking moment of life.
3:36
But there's a lot of complicated stuff going on in there and it all has to be coordinated and that's your brain's main job.
3:48
And really, as bodies got bigger and animals were able to move under their own steam a little faster and with wider range, and as they developed sensory systems like the ability to see and hear, and so on, which these early animals also didn't have, they needed a command center, something to coordinate everything to keep them alive and well.
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And that's really your brain's most important job.
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You see and think, and feel in the service of that goal.
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[crosstalk] Do you experience your life that way?
4:19
I certainly don't experience my life that way, right?
4:19
But that actually is what's going on under the hood.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: I have to tell you that when I was reading this theory of yours, I could not help thinking of the Jerry Seinfeld routine where he's scuba diving or snorkeling, and it goes something like he's swimming around and he's saying, "Oh, look. Coral. Don't die. Don't die. Don't die. Don't die."
4:37
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Exactly.
4:41
And can I just say also...
4:41
I just want to say, Jim, that you called it a theory, and I think it is a theory, but it's a theory not in the colloquial sense, but in the scientific sense.
4:50
In the scientific sense, a theory means a bunch of ideas that are backed up by a ton of evidence, not just a bunch of ideas.
4:56
I think that's important to say.
5:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree, and I've been actually trying to train myself to present things as thesis rather than, "This is what I believe," because...
5:05
And you make the important distinction.
5:10
Theories have a lot of evidence behind them and they also need to be falsifiable, right?
5:15
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Absolutely. Absolutely.
5:17
You know how people say, "The theory of evolution, ooh, it's a theory."
5:21
Well, if it's a theory, that means it's got a shit ton of evidence to back it up, right?
5:21
It's not just somebody's musings, right?
5:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
5:29
Lisa Feldman Barrett: [crosstalk] Yeah.
5:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it.
5:29
We are very simpatico on that. Yeah.
5:29
"Well, that's just a theory." Actually, no. Got a lot of evidence.
5:37
I loved reading that section, and I had read some other stuff that said basically the same thing.
5:44
My next question is, do you have a theory on how the higher functions, like thinking, emotions, et cetera, I know you do.
5:51
Can you explain that a little bit?
5:51
Because I agree that our brain was formed to keep us alive and that's really hard, right?
5:55
There's a lot going on that we don't even think about, but then consciousness became emergent, right?
6:05
and emotions, which we're going to talk a lot more about in a bit.
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Other ideas and the other thing I can't help but thinking about is the scare crow from the Wizard of Oz, who says, "There's awful a lot of people without brains who are doing a lot of talking."
6:21
But educate me please on...
6:21
So it's keeping us alive, then comes emotions, thoughts, feelings, please.
6:27
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah. Yeah.
6:29
I think in order to understand how this works, it's really important to think about this from your brain's perspective.
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And from your brain's perspective, it's trapped in a dark asylum block.
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It's your whole life called your skull.
6:40
And it receives information from the world, sights, and sounds, and smells, and stuff.
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And it also receives information from your body about the drama going on inside your body, from your heart beating, your lungs expanding, temperature changes, metabolizing glucose, that kind of stuff.
6:56
The thing is that the brain trapped in the box doesn't really know what's causing those changes, it only knows the changes.
7:07
The changes are outcomes of some set of causes and the brain doesn't know the causes, it only knows the outcomes. So it has to guess.
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Sometimes people think like, "Well, why is that important?"
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Here's why it's important, because let's say you hear a loud bang.
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Well, what is that loud bang?
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Is that a car door slamming?
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Is it someone dropping a box? Is it thunder outside? Is it a gunshot?
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Well, that is a lot of uncertainty for your brain to deal with, which is very expensive metabolically.
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That level of uncertainty will make you feel pretty uncomfortable.
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Also, your brain doesn't know what to do to keep you alive and well because you will do different things if it's a gunshot or a slammed door.
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And so what your brain is doing really, what all brains do is they use past experience that's similar to the present in some way to make a guess about the cause.
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If in the past, when it's been gray outside and raining, and you hear a loud bang, chances are that it's likely thunder.
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But your brain is able to make this guess very, very quickly and really without your awareness.
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And for animals that live a very long time like us, very long-lived, we need a lot of meat up there, a lot of neurons to be able to use the knowledge that we've gleaned over a lifetime of experience and bring it to bear to make meaning of sense state in the present to guide our actions.
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And through that process, that's how feelings are constructed, that's how we make sense of sensations as perceptions of the world, as beliefs about each other, as emotions.
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What you called our higher functions really emerged out of just that process getting more and more and more complex because we have very big brains relative to our body size because we live a really long time. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
9:18
One of the things that you wrote about, you say that expressing emotions in a granular level, right?
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allows for higher control in the person.
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And you suggest that things like increasing your vocabulary, learning new languages are helpful in this.
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It has some tangible benefits according to the piece that you wrote that I read.
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One is you go to doctors a lot less and you meditate a lot less, and you have fewer days in the hospital.
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Please elaborate a little bit about that.
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Is there a way people who don't naturally express or are able to, well, you say, learn better, bigger words, new languages.
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Are there any other ways that people can increase their ability to express emotions at a more granular level?
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Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah.
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Well, I think to answer your question, we probably need to back up a little bit and explain what granularity is and why it's useful to regulate and live a better life.
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Here's the way I would explain it.
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Your brain is always running a budget for your body.
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That's how it's coordinating what's going on in your body.
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The technical term is allostasis, but I like to refer to it with the metaphor of body budgeting.
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So your brain's running a budget for your body.
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It's trying to figure out where does glucose need to be shuttled, where does the oxygen need to be, where does...
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It's basically budgeting these things.
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Not money, but resources to keep you alive and well.
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And it's constantly sending sense data back to your brain about the consequences of that regulation.
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I mean your brain doesn't know what caused those sensations.
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It only knows the sense data were there and it has to guess the causes.
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And you don't feel every tog and every squish and every contraction going on in your body at every given moment in time, or at least I hope you don't, because if you did, you would have my deep sympathies.
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Instead, what you feel is a constant stream of simple feelings of feeling good, feeling bad, feeling worked up, feeling calm, feeling comfortable, feeling uncomfortable.
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This is what scientists like me call affect, with an A, but it's also what we colloquially call mood.
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So let's say you're feeling bad, you're feeling unpleasant.
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What do you do about that?
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I mean, I don't know, because there could be lots of things you could do because you don't actually know what the cause is.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
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Lisa Feldman Barrett: If you're feeling really pleasant in the moment, you don't know what the causes are, so you don't know what to make sure to repeat again.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
11:44
Lisa Feldman Barrett: And so what your brain is doing when it's making a guess about the causes, it's using past experience, and the more granular that that experience is organized, that is the more precise you can be, the better your guesses are.
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So some people have learned to make sense of their mood, their affect as emotions like anger, sadness, fear disgust.
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And for some people, irritation, frustration, rage are all synonyms of anger.
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For some people though, those are really distinct experiences with very distinct behavior, action plans that go with them, that you do different things when you're angry versus when you're enraged versus when you're irritated.
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And the more precise you can be in giving meaning, guessing at the causes of the sense data, the more precisely your brain will tailor its action plan to the situation. That's why...
12:47
And I should say that even making sense of the present moment as anger is more precise than, "I feel like crap," which doesn't tell you anything about what to do, right?
12:52
Or you may guess the wrong thing.
12:57
So anger, sadness, fear, these words actually refer to bodies of knowledge or episodes of knowledge that you have from your past.
13:05
And the more precisely you can organize them, the better off you'll be in terms of tailoring your actions.
13:12
It's like if I tell you, well, this is a plant.
13:17
Well, you don't know what that means, right?
13:17
I mean, it could be a weed, it could be a flower, it could be food. I mean, you don't know.
13:21
And even if I tell you, it's a flower, that doesn't really tell you exactly is it pink? Is it red? Is it big? Is it small?
13:26
And it doesn't tell you how much it needs to be watered, or if it needs to be watered.
13:31
It doesn't really tell you a lot.
13:35
The more precision you can get the better off you are.
13:35
And that's really what granularity is about.
13:40
And ironically, if you become granular, even about negative, unpleasant emotions, you still get benefit.
13:47
And I'll tell you the thing surprised me, Jim, the most is that when I observed these differences in people 30 years ago, it never occurred to me really ever that this ability to be granular would in any way translate into physical health, the tendency to get sick.
14:07
I never thought it would reduce your tendency to get sick.
14:07
It would speed your recovery if you do.
14:11
I mean, I was just really floored and the reason why is because basically you can think of words and concepts as tools for regulating the body.
14:17
I mean, we don't think of it that way, but that's really what they are.
14:22
The more tools you have the better off you'll be. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
14:26
I agree with that concept and do you think...
14:28
Can you learn to take in more of those tools and make them your own from other people, from things that you read from people that you interact with?
14:37
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah, you absolutely can.
14:40
And that's a double-edged sword.
14:40
One really interesting thing about humans and this is something that I wrote about in both books, but it's really, I think, distilled into a little gem in Seven and a Half Lessons is, humans have a suite of abilities that allow us to learn things very quickly and not always by having to experience them ourselves directly.
15:04
So we can learn from the experiences of other people actually just by watching them and we can communicate really effectively about it, and we can cooperate in doing so.
15:12
And we can be creative in the way that we do these things.
15:18
That means that you can learn things.
15:18
In fact, your brain is bathed in information that it's constantly taking in and your brain wires itself to the world that it encounters.
15:32
It does this really quickly when you're little and it does it slower when you're grown up, but it's still doing it when you're grown up.
15:39
So if you read books, see movies, talk to people over coffee, their experiences to some extent become your experiences.
15:49
And like I said, that's a double-edged sword because if you surround yourself with people who are exactly like you and believe exactly what you believe, then that's how your brain is wired to.
16:01
And you become, for many reasons, uncomfortable with differences and complexity, right?
16:09
Because everything is pretty much the same as you and you become uncomfortable for reasons we can talk about that have to do with the brain and how it works.
16:19
But the point is that you're always cultivating the environment that's wiring your brain, always. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep.
16:25
I agree completely, and that's a great way to put it because I have always believed that to gain maximum benefit, you need to read material and ideas and essays from a wide variety of people.
16:36
And for a lot of people, I've seen it as the shields go up and I think maybe that's because, like you've just suggested, perhaps they're just surrounding themselves a bit too much with people who are very like them.
16:55
And I love the idea of reading people that you know going into it, that you're going to disagree with them because it allows you to, the phrase, create a steel man, as opposed to a straw man.
17:07
When you're creating an argument you should know the other side's argument and you should make a steel man, not a straw man because they're not going to give you a straw man argument, if they're good.
17:16
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah.
17:17
And in fact, I don't know if you know this, but I mean, really good scientists that's what we do for each other. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
17:22
Lisa Feldman Barrett: I mean, some of my best friends are people who disagree with me.
17:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
17:25
Lisa Feldman Barrett: But that is what we do for each other.
17:27
The best colleagues that you can have, really, as a scientist are the ones who love you enough, respect you enough to tell you what they think is wrong with what you're doing and so you don't really have to be...
17:38
You don't have to agree all the time about everything or even about anything, frankly, in order to be useful and respectful to other people.
17:48
And I'm not kidding when I say like...
17:48
I have relationships with some of my colleagues, very deep affection for some of them, and they have for me and we agree on almost...
17:54
I mean, we agree that science is important. We both breathe oxygen.
17:58
I mean, it's at that level, right? That we're really.
18:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: There's this thing called gravity.
18:03
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly.
18:05
But we serve really important function for each other because we're going to make sure that they don't have blinders on for where they could be wrong about something.
18:17
And yesterday I did this discussion with Tim Snyder, the historian at Yale.
18:23
We were on an NPR talk show called On Point and we were talking about democracy and he was talking about it from a historical standpoint and the networks and networks of people and I was talking about it from a brain standpoint, that is the blobs of meat inside people's heads.
18:37
And you wouldn't think that how a brain works is important for understanding how democracy is important, but also fragile, but there it is.
18:44
I mean, there are some interesting lessons there, and those are lessons that people can actually apply even in their own everyday life.
18:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that.
18:56
Can you enumerate some of them?
18:56
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah, sure.
19:00
Here's, from my perspective, a really interesting thing, and this is just a speculation, but I think it's a reasonable speculation.
19:06
Remember that your brain is guessing, right?
19:06
It's making a guess about what sense data mean, because without that guess everything is uncertain and uncertainty is expensive metabolically for our brain.
19:23
The reason why is that the brain has to work harder when it's not really sure.
19:23
So if your brain can't make sense of what's going on around you and if your brain can't anticipate, right?
19:32
That's another piece of this is that the brain is making sense, not by reacting to things, but by guessing in advance. It's predicting.
19:40
If your brain can't do that, that's going to be metabolically very expensive for you.
19:46
And when that happens, your brain will increase the production of certain chemicals so that it can attempt to learn whatever it was you couldn't predict so that you can predict better the next time, and that everything will just be smoother the next time.
19:57
So there's a metabolic basis here to a metabolic decision that has to be made.
20:02
And I just want to say that I'm not reducing democracy to metabolism, okay?
20:08
I'm just saying that there's a piece of the puzzle here that everyone seems to be missing, which is the following.
20:14
If you're running a deficit in your body budget because you haven't slept well and maybe you're not exercising or eating healthfully, or maybe you're stressed from work, or maybe there's economic stress in your life, or I don't know, maybe there's a pandemic, right?
20:31
Or there's chaos politically, maybe.
20:31
Whatever makes it really hard for you to predict what's going to happen next that's going to basically be additional tax that you're going to pay metabolically.
20:42
And it makes it really hard to interact with people who are different from you so that you can learn from them. And so what do you do?
20:51
Well, what do you do with your bank account when you're running a deficit?
20:51
You stop spending, right? That's what we do.
20:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
20:58
Lisa Feldman Barrett: What does it mean for a brain to stop spending in a body budget?
20:58
Well, it means that it stops doing the things or it turns down the tendency to do the things that are the most expensive, and those are, move your body.
21:08
The most expensive things your brain can do, move your body and learn something new.
21:12
People feel fatigued and they feel lethargic and they feel tremendous malaise and they feel like they're languishing, which is really a lot of what people are feeling.
21:23
And if it goes on for long enough, they'll feel depressed.
21:23
They'll develop depression, which has a metabolic basis to it.
21:28
It's a physical illness with a metabolic basis.
21:33
But also what it means is they'll start surrounding themselves with people who are just like them, because you can predict what they're going to say, and they're very predictable to you and you're predictable to them.
21:41
And what this does really, is it leads you to prefer simple single answers for questions that actually are inherently complex.
21:57
And that, my friend, is the path to authoritarianism, the preference for single simple answers where people are willing to trade their freedom in a sense to simplify things, because they're really encumbered.
22:12
And democracy, I mean, I'm not a historian, but historians write about democracy as, and the founding fathers really, what their intention was with democracy.
22:22
And democracy is complicated. It means compromise.
22:29
It means considering lots of different perspectives, even ones you don't like very much.
22:33
And it means compromising sometimes.
22:33
Basically democracy requires the ability to tolerate a brief withdrawal from your body budget like exercise. It's like an investment.
22:42
But if you're already really encumbered, you don't have the spoons as it were.
22:48
You don't have any extra resources to invest in anything, and you won't.
22:54
And I'm not saying that we can reduce all of the political chaos to this, but it is not a surprise to me that if you look at the historical conditions for when authoritarian governments emerge or when totalitarian governments emerge or political systems, it's usually when people are really, really, really encumbered already.
23:19
And sometimes the political landscape is made more chaotic for the purposes of creating body budgeting deficits that lead people to do what's...
23:32
It seems irrational, but it's actually very rational to stop spending when you're in a deficit.
23:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes, that is absolutely true, historically as well.
23:39
I mean you have the French Revolution, you have the most chaotic time ever for the French, and you have the reign of terror where all of the people of the revolution are suddenly executed, pretty easy for Napoleon Bonaparte to emerge, because as you say, everyone is spent.
23:57
They're absolutely spent.
24:02
And so there's Napoleon, Germany with Hitler.
24:02
Again, the Treaty of Versailles was punitive, that's ending the World War I, very punitive to the German people.
24:09
To get back to emotions, it enraged the German people and it also made them feel literally like they'd fallen off the pecking order, so to speak, of nations.
24:23
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, think about it, Jim.
24:25
If your body budget is running a deficit, you're going to feel like crap and your brain is going to attempt to make sense of that crappy feeling. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep.
24:34
Lisa Feldman Barrett: I mean, that's what we do.
24:35
Our brains make sense of sense data and the affect that comes from those sense data.
24:42
And so our brains are attempting to make...
24:42
And so if you have someone saying, "Well, it's the immigrants. It's the Jews. It's the..."
24:44
I don't know, fill in whatever, then you have a simple single cause, simple solution and you don't even have to...
24:49
You have somebody basically telling you what to do.
24:56
But I'm not saying that people are simple minded in any way, but what I want to try to point out is that some of the times if you think about rationality as the absence of a feeling, that's an old idea that's in economics and it's in the law and so on, and it's just biologically impossible.
25:13
You can never be without feeling- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
25:18
Lisa Feldman Barrett: ...
25:18
because brain's always body budgeting.
25:21
And you might put feeling in the background for a moment, but it's always really there.
25:26
But what rationality really is, is spending when you've got the spoons, when you've got the resources and not spending when you don't.
25:33
And so in a weird way, you can think about some of the problems that get us into...
25:40
We get ourselves into problems sometimes when we reduce our spending, so to speak.
25:46
But actually it's rational.
25:46
You can think of it as rational from a body budgeting standpoint, even though it's very, very, very problematic and undesirable for our outcomes in other ways.
26:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree.
26:02
And why do you think that there are certain people who, despite chaotic times manage to continue to thrive almost and whereas many others, which I've written about and talked about a lot, fall into espousing and believing conspiracy theories, because again, they're one answer, right?
26:22
It's because of X, fill in the blank, and that is a scapegoat, right?
26:22
And we know the history of scapegoating and so why the huge difference?
26:27
Is there something these people are doing that is better than the people who are- Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, honey, if I knew the answer to that, that's the billion dollar question.
26:37
My guess is that there isn't...
26:43
Again, there aren't simple single causes for things.
26:43
There's not one thing that some people are doing that other people aren't.
26:47
I mean, my guess is it's a combination of many factors and you can't.
26:52
The interesting thing about these complex systems is you can't really just pull out one factor and say, "Well, it's really that." Jim O'Shaughnessy: No.
27:02
Lisa Feldman Barrett: [crosstalk] It's like saying, "Well, all I really need to bake bread is flour."
27:03
Well, actually no, you need the flour and the yeast and the salt. Think of it this way.
27:08
If you tried to bake bread without salt, it would taste like shit. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
27:15
Lisa Feldman Barrett: I mean it would taste like crap.
27:15
When you taste bread, you don't really taste salt, but it has to be there because the product is this complex emergence of a bunch of different factors.
27:26
And it turns out illness is also like that.
27:26
So is a virus, the cause, the single solitary cause of illness, like let's say COVID? The answer is no.
27:33
No, it's not the single solitary cause.
27:41
There are a number of factors.
27:41
Of course, it's a necessary cause.
27:41
You can't develop symptoms if you don't have exposure to the virus, but just being exposed to the virus in of itself is not sufficient to give you illness.
27:53
And so the same is probably true with people who gravitate to simple single causes for things like the immigrants or Jews or whatever the story is.
28:10
The thing that is important to realize, I think, is that we all have more control over...
28:18
Our brains work pretty automatically most of the time, but we all have some control over the paths that our brains take and the stories that our brains tell us automatically and that means we have more responsibility too.
28:29
So just because you can explain...
28:29
But even if we could explain the causes, it doesn't necessarily mean that it lets people off the hook from being responsible.
28:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree.
28:42
And I also agree with your thesis about democracy.
28:42
It is, in my opinion, the best of the various forms of government, but it's also one of the most difficult.
28:54
And it also requires, as you said earlier, a great deal of compromise normally, because even people of bad intentions often will compromise and cut a deal in a democratic situation.
29:07
Whereas if you emerge into an authoritarian or a totalitarian type government...
29:07
Now I should tell you that my prayers are...
29:13
I am extremely anti-authoritarian, and I have studied a lot of history, both economic and political and everything else and, yikes, authoritarian regimes do not lead to good outcomes ever, ever.
29:29
Lisa Feldman Barrett: They lead to good outcomes for certain people.
29:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Precisely. Well put. Well put.
29:36
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah.
29:38
I guess what I would say is that, I mean, I'm not a...
29:38
Nobody would ever accuse me of being Pollyanna-ish, honestly.
29:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
29:44
Lisa Feldman Barrett: However, I do think it's helpful to...
29:44
When you're faced with someone who really disagrees with you or has a really different view from you, I prefer to approach that person when I can, when I have the resources to do it, with curiosity instead of with contempt. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
30:01
Lisa Feldman Barrett: That goes even for people who I really, really strongly disagree with.
30:02
And, I think it's easier to do that when you realize that yeah, there are people who don't always have the best intentions, but most people have pretty good intentions and it's pretty easy to find where their good intentions lie, right?
30:23
There's something called the ladder of inference, when you disagree with people, to have a conversation, you start by finding common ground.
30:33
And like we said, we were joking, that common ground could be, "Oh, we're both affected by gravity," or, "We both breathe air."
30:36
But it could be, "We both have kids," or, "We both care about the environment," or, "We both care..."
30:41
There are lots of things it could be, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep.
30:46
Lisa Feldman Barrett: And so I try to think about just substantively talking with someone who's different from me as a mental workout in the way that physically getting on a bike or on the treadmill, or going for a jog or something is a physical workout.
31:04
It's an investment of energy that will pay dividends in a better me and maybe even, in the case of talking to somebody who's different from me, in a better democracy because what everyone does matters and it matters because we're social animals and we don't just make deposits and withdrawals in our own body budgets.
31:32
We, metaphorically, make deposits and withdrawals in other people's too.
31:32
And so who do you want to be?
31:37
Who do you want to be as a person?
31:37
Do you want to be somebody who's a metabolic burden to someone else?
31:42
Or do you want to be somebody who makes a deposit and we have a choice about those things.
31:48
And understanding a little bit about how your brain works helps you make that choice, I think, a little bit more deliberately. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
31:55
And I think that's a great way of putting it too, because if an alien landed on earth from a completely foreign environment and looked around, just by looking at us, we are not the natural apex predator of the planet.
32:07
I mean, come on, we are helpless for, I don't know, the first four years, the first, maybe, five years of our lives.
32:13
And so that alone led us to develop being social animals because we had to be social animals.
32:20
And so I'm fascinated by that.
32:25
But I do think that to flip it the way you're putting it I like, because if we could get people thinking around the terms of, "No, no, no, no, you know what?
32:31
We may disagree, but I'm trying to make a deposit, because I think that all if we make deposits as opposed to withdrawals from the global brain, right?
32:42
that is society, that's good.
32:42
That's good for society."
32:42
Does that mean that we won't have incredibly deep disagreements? Of course not. We will. We always will.
32:46
That's the idea of progressing as a society, I think.
32:54
And- Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, you're 100% right.
32:59
Democracy, as far as I understand it, requires that diversity.
33:04
It requires variation and diversity of thought.
33:04
That's the whole basis really of democratic functioning.
33:10
And so we have to be able to not just appreciate it, but maybe even cultivate it.
33:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree.
33:18
Sometimes I do wonder if... Fashion.
33:21
People dismiss the idea that fashion affects anything outside of fashion, but there is also thinking fashions, right?
33:27
And when the United States was formed, we had the great good fortune to be formed during a time when the fashion was to be the age of reason, the enlightenment, et cetera.
33:38
And then look at when India split from the UK, the fashion then was socialism.
33:45
Everyone thought the future was going to be socialism.
33:45
And so what's your position on the idea of memes as viruses of the mind?
33:50
Lisa Feldman Barrett: I think that's a great metaphor.
33:55
I think it's a fantastic metaphor actually.
33:55
Remember that brains wire themselves to their world, literally, okay? So your brain...
34:01
When an infant is born, their brain is unfinished.
34:09
So an infant brain is not a miniature adult brain.
34:15
It's a brain that's waiting for wiring instructions from the world.
34:15
And that world is a physical world with gravity and with light and dark that change over time.
34:26
But your brain is wired to the specifics of your body.
34:26
So your visual system finished wiring itself in relation to the distance that your eyes are from each other.
34:38
And so the shape of your ear influenced how your auditory system finished wiring itself.
34:38
And so this is really normal thing for brains to do.
34:45
And the really interesting thing is that this is continually happening throughout your entire life.
34:50
It's just in adults that it happens slower, but your neurons are always foraging, sending out little probes, little tendrils, trying to connect with each other and trying to learn new information, even though it's expensive to do.
35:07
That's really what neurons do.
35:07
And so the thing is, if something is repeated enough times, not only are you going to learn it, it's going to become really automatic. Like driving, right?
35:17
Remember when you learned to drive, right?
35:17
First, you had to concentrate, and everything was so hard and it was very...
35:21
But eventually it becomes super automatic, right?
35:25
And that's what memes do, and that's what you call fashion does, right?
35:25
In anthropology, this is called cultural inheritance.
35:33
It means that genes are not the only source of transmission of information from one generation to the next.
35:41
We have the kind of genes, we have the kind of nature that requires nurture, that requires learning, right?
35:45
So this whole idea of, are we the product of our genes or are we the product of our environment?
35:51
That's not even the wrong question to ask.
35:55
It's so wrong, it's not even [crosstalk] Jim O'Shaughnessy: Not even wrong.
35:56
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Not even wrong, right? So memes really...
35:56
If something is repeated enough times, you start to use it automatically.
35:58
And when you use knowledge automatically to make predictions and make sense of things, that feels good and it gives...
36:06
Scientists called this fluency.
36:06
It feels pleasant because there's not a lot of metabolic costs there.
36:11
And as a consequence, you come to feel that it's natural.
36:17
That this is the natural order of things.
36:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
36:22
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Because it feels that way to you.
36:22
And it is natural in a sense to you because your brain was wired that way.
36:28
But if you go somewhere else, you talk to somebody else, it's not natural for them.
36:33
And that means it's not really natural in some absolute sense.
36:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
36:38
You bring up a really good point that of the aggregate cultural evolution.
36:40
I've read some interesting things about how the exterior world that our brain is trying to figure out, can actually change, rewire our brain and change it.
36:53
I was reading in, I guess, it's the book about, what is it?
36:53
The Weirdest Population [crosstalk] Lisa Feldman Barrett: [crosstalk] in the world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
36:59
Lisa Feldman Barrett: [crosstalk] Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
36:59
So I enjoyed that book and I enjoyed the point, and I want to get your take on it, where the author is saying, "Basically, if you look at a picture of a brain that has learned to read, it fundamentally looks different than the picture of a brain that has not."
37:14
What are your thoughts on that?
37:14
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, yeah.
37:15
I mean, well, first of all, it doesn't really matter what my thoughts are.
37:18
It matters what the data say.
37:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
37:19
Lisa Feldman Barrett: The data are super clear on this point.
37:20
The wiring of the brain, in very profound ways actually, looks different before and after someone like a child is pretty verbal versus post verbal and also before and after reading, learning to read.
37:41
And it's basically every time you learn something new, every time you learn to do something new, your brain is changing its wiring.
37:43
And sometimes if you believe that functions are localized into little islands of activity in your brain, then you can imagine that only one little island would change when you learn something like language.
37:55
But that's actually not how your brain is structured and it's not how your brain functions.
38:02
There's no spot in your brain for language, or a spot in your brain for thinking, or a spot in your brain for emotion or a spot in your brain for Jennifer Aniston or whatever.
38:06
There was once a paper about Jennifer Aniston neurons.
38:11
There are no spots in your brain...
38:11
That's not how your brain really works at all actually.
38:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right. Right.
38:16
Well, that brings me to another thing of yours that I've read that I'd like to have you explain which is the three myths that deserved to die about the brain.
38:24
And the first is, cortisol causes stress.
38:24
The second, the amygdala is the source of fear and that the...
38:32
You told me the third, because I can't read my own handwriting.
38:35
Lisa Feldman Barrett: That's there.
38:35
It is that our brains evolved layers of sedimentary [crosstalk] Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, there we go. I love that one.
38:40
Explain each of the three, please.
38:45
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Sure.
38:45
So it's very, very popular, both in science and outside of science to refer to cortisol as a stress hormone.
38:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
38:53
Lisa Feldman Barrett: So the stress happens and then cortisol is produced and that's an indicator that you're stressed. That's not true.
38:54
Cortisol is a class of chemical called a glucocorticoid. It's a big word. What does it mean?
39:03
It means that it's a chemical that's important in helping cells to metabolize glucose.
39:17
So when your brain predicts that you have to do something that is very metabolically taxing, like drag your ass out of bed in the morning, or read something that is hard or something that you don't know or exercise, or face a boss who's critical of you- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
39:36
Lisa Feldman Barrett: ...
39:36
or try to figure out how to pay your bills or what have you.
39:36
Any time your brain is predicting that there's a big metabolic outlay, it's going to direct the adrenal glands that sit on top of your kidneys to produce cortisol.
39:49
So cortisol is secreted when you are stressed, meaning there's a big metabolic outlay there that needs to happen which may or may not be repaid, okay?
40:05
But it's not only in moments where you experience stress, it can happen in the normal routine.
40:12
It does happen in the normal routine of your life, cortisol [crosstalk] all the time.
40:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Let me dig because I have a quick question on this one.
40:18
You said you, whether or not you get repaid, right?
40:21
[crosstalk] Lisa Feldman Barrett: No.
40:23
Whether or not you're okay?
40:23
So, do you get enough sleep?
40:23
Do you eat [crosstalk] Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, all right. Thank you. Thank you.
40:26
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Or after you exercise, do you drink water? Do you eat protein?
40:29
Do you eat carbohydrates that are healthful?
40:29
Are you making deposits into your body budget in addition to making withdrawals?
40:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Got it.
40:40
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Good stress, with air quotes, right? Good stress is...
40:40
Exercise is considered to be good stress.
40:46
You make a withdrawal and then eventually you replenish, right?
40:46
You replenish what you spent.
40:50
And the idea is that what you're doing is you're making an investment in a healthier brain, in a healthier you, a healthier body.
40:56
I'm not equating you with your body but I mean, a healthier you, meaning [crosstalk] Jim O'Shaughnessy: I understand.
41:02
[crosstalk] Lisa Feldman Barrett: But stress can also be chronic, what's called chronic stress or bad stress.
41:02
And that's where your spending isn't repaid and it's not replenished.
41:09
Or you're spending so much and you're spending so inefficiently that a deficit starts to accumulate.
41:14
The secretion of cortisol in of itself doesn't indicate adverse circumstances.
41:22
It means that your brain is predicting that you're about to make a big metabolic outlay and you need glucose into your bloodstream quickly. That's what cortisol is.
41:35
It's part of that whole system.
41:35
And so thinking about it as stress really misses the point, I think.
41:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Are there methods though, in which we have learned to essentially cause that to happen.
41:44
In other words, like we were talking about totalitarian and authoritarian governments earlier, are there ways, little tricks if you will, to put people into a position where the brain thinks, "Ooh, I've got to really make a big investment here," and essentially trick them into releasing cortisol?
42:10
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, it's not really a trick.
42:10
Your brain is making predictions based on past [crosstalk].
42:12
So if you live in a world where chaos reigns, every moment of your life is an expensive moment.
42:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right. Yeah.
42:25
Lisa Feldman Barrett: I mean, think about it this way, Jim, we live in a world filled with... Just everyday life.
42:29
You don't even have to pick up a newspaper, right?
42:29
Everyday life is just filled with casual brutality.
42:34
People just speak to each other in absolutely horrible ways, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
42:38
Lisa Feldman Barrett: One person says to another person like, "Hey, fucker.
42:41
And you're like, "Is that like, 'Hi, nice to see you?'
42:41
Is that, 'I'm not happy to see you and I might actually punch you right now?'" Like, "Hey, bitch." What does that mean? Is that good? Is that bad?
42:52
Does that mean we're friends?
42:52
Does that mean we're enemies? What does that mean?
42:58
I mean, that's just one really small example.
42:58
And I guess what I want to say is sometimes when I talk about this, people get the idea that I think everyone should be nice to each other.
43:07
I actually do think everyone should be nice to each other.
43:07
It doesn't mean we can't disagree.
43:07
It doesn't mean that we can't vigorously disagree. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Sure.
43:13
Lisa Feldman Barrett: But I do think that we should be treating each other with a basic modicum of dignity and respect because it's due.
43:18
Otherwise, it's actually a public health problem.
43:18
To behave otherwise makes it more expensive for other people to be around you and over the longterm...
43:30
So it's not going to cause a problem today or tomorrow or after three sentences or four greetings, right?
43:35
But over the long-term over years, every time you secrete cortisol to prepare for a metabolic outlay that isn't coming, you get it wrong, right?
43:41
You're preparing for a stress that isn't there, let's say.
43:45
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right. Yep.
43:47
Lisa Feldman Barrett: You pay metabolic tax and those little taxes add up over a lifetime to make you more vulnerable to metabolic illness in middle age and old age.
43:57
And what are those illnesses?
43:57
Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, depression.
44:05
I mean, Alzheimer's disease.
44:05
So how you conduct yourself today, it's like a little piece of sand that gets thrown into an ocean, but eventually over a long period of time, it matters. It matters. That's what I'm saying.
44:21
And understanding what cortisol is and how it works as part of your daily life, I think is important.
44:29
First of all, it's just important to be accurate, scientifically, I think it's important, but more importantly, it's invitation to understand some of these larger issues which let you consider what kind of a human are you exactly and what kind of a human do you want to be and what kind of an impact do you want to have on other people?
44:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Very refreshing.
44:49
I admire that way of thinking.
44:49
I have been thinking about manners.
44:49
I'm 61 and when I was being raised that was the one thing my mother beat into me.
44:56
I was having a conversation with a friend the other day and we just came to the point where you hear many people say, "Oh, well, manners are hypocritical.
45:07
You really should say exactly what you mean."
45:12
And my thought is, "Okay. Yeah.
45:12
I almost always say exactly what I mean, but you don't have to be rude to other people to say what you mean," right?
45:22
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Exactly. Exactly.
45:22
You can say, "I respectfully disagree with you.
45:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
45:26
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Or you can say, "I'm going to play devil's advocate right now."
45:30
And the value of doing that is two things.
45:30
One is, it's saying, "I'm letting your brain predict now.
45:38
I'm making myself predictable to you."
45:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
45:39
Lisa Feldman Barrett: "I'm going to now challenge what you just said."
45:40
But basically, you might be challenging the thought, right?
45:43
Or the behavior, and that's different.
45:43
Disagreeing with a thought or behavior is different than disagreeing with a person's worth.
45:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I completely agree with that.
45:53
Why do you think, at least it seems this way to me and others, that as a society we have...
45:58
Well, we know you've explained one of the reasons why people go seek simplicity, but it does seem to me that people today are making their belief system, right?
46:13
Which I always say I'm probably wrong because I've studied history and like the smartest people from 300 years ago were mostly wrong about everything.
46:25
And literally it's only through the scientific method, as you outlined earlier in our discussion, that you can actually learn an error correct.
46:31
So that's fine with me to be wrong, but why do we see, or maybe I'm wrong, maybe I have a fallacious view of this, but it seems to me that people are equating their beliefs with themselves, and they see any disagreement with that belief as an attack on self.
46:49
Lisa Feldman Barrett: That's for sure.
46:52
And I have to say that also happens in science too.
46:52
I mean, part of the process of science is being wrong and learning from that, right?
46:56
There's a wonderful book, actually two books, written by Stuart Firestein at Columbia University.
47:02
One's called Ignorance and the other is called Failure.
47:07
They are tiny little books.
47:07
They're very small, very quick reads, but they're just masterful.
47:12
And I like Ignorance better.
47:17
That's my preference of the duo, though they're both really good.
47:17
And all my graduate students and postdocs have to read them.
47:21
They're required reading in my lab because they're opportunities for discovery.
47:26
And everything is stacked against you in science in a way, because the incentive structure of science is based on being right.
47:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
47:37
Lisa Feldman Barrett: But certainly I've been wrong about some things.
47:37
The data borne out of different...
47:37
Have not supported my hypothesis and pointed me in a different direction.
47:40
I try to be gracious about that.
47:44
And I have tremendous respect for scientists too.
47:44
I mean of course correction in their work because they've discovered they were wrong about something.
47:53
But I think that's really hard to do.
47:53
And for example, some people look at the president like Joe Biden or any president really, or any politician, and they'll say, "Well, you believed X, you believe this 10 years ago, and now you've changed your tune.
48:05
You're really inconsistent."
48:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But that's also like that's something bad.
48:12
I can say [crosstalk] Lisa Feldman Barrett: Or maybe you just learned.
48:13
Maybe he just was exposed to new information or exposed himself to new information and learned it- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly. Yeah.
48:19
Lisa Feldman Barrett: ...
48:19
and then changed his mind because he's responsive to evidence.
48:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right. Right.
48:24
Lisa Feldman Barrett: I don't know all the reasons why, and there have to be a multitude of reasons that are all interacting about why it would be hard for people to pay attention to the evidence.
48:26
But there's a book by a historian of science, her name is Naomi Oreskes. She's at Harvard.
48:33
And she's written two books.
48:33
One is called The Merchants of Doubt and the other is called Why Trust Science?
48:39
And in both of these she makes the point that when people deny evidence, and she's making this point about science, but I think it actually holds more generally to your question about why do people, when you disagree with them or you show them evidence that their belief is wrong, it feels like some fundamental essence of their being is being attacked.
49:04
She makes the point that when people deny evidence, scientific evidence, they're probably not really denying science.
49:09
The evidence has some implication for something else that they don't like, or that's threatening to them- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
49:19
[crosstalk] Lisa Feldman Barrett: ...
49:19
and that's really the problem.
49:19
And so I have to think that that's really at the heart of this, and maybe it's something as straightforward as when you're wrong about something, it means that you have to learn more, and usually that means confront complexity. So maybe it's that.
49:38
But I suspect that there isn't really one reason.
49:45
What I often tell my students is that when you are reading something or you're talking to somebody or you're listening to something, and your response in listening is, "That's exactly right.
49:56
That person's brilliant.
49:56
This is exactly correct." In those moments, right?
50:01
as well as in the moments where you listen to someone or read something and you think, "That's just crap. There's no way that's... That's just garbage."
50:12
In both of those moments, you should use your affect as a cue to pay attention because something has either confirmed a deeply held belief or challenged it and your job as a scientist, and I would actually say just as a well-functioning person, is to unearth those assumptions and hold them up into the light of day and evaluate them, consider them from all sides and intentionally adhere to them or discard them.
50:45
But don't just be driven by the automatic predictions that have been wired into your brain as a consequence of where you grew up or who raised you, or basically the situation that your brain was pickled in. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
51:02
That is something I have attempted to do most of my adult life, and it's hard.
51:04
Lisa Feldman Barrett: It's really hard. It's really hard.
51:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It really is.
51:08
It really [crosstalk] Lisa Feldman Barrett: It's hard, it's sometimes time-consuming, it feels crappy sometimes, and it's not something that's achieved. It's a constant stance. But it's the same...
51:12
We just keep coming back to the same idea, which is who do you want to be? Who you want to be?
51:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
51:19
Lisa Feldman Barrett: And what kind of person you want to be?
51:21
And when you come to the end of your life, when you look back, do you want to feel satisfied, or do you want to feel regret?
51:25
Do you want to be the kind of person who allows other people to be their best selves or not?
51:29
What does your best self look like?
51:29
I mean, I just think that it's not bad to consider these questions once in a while.
51:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree.
51:37
And it became habitual with me.
51:37
I document a lot of these thoughts and if you looked over there, you'd see just piles and piles of these journals. I think it's very good.
51:47
I think it's also very good for you as a person to write down, I think this, and as you're writing it, you see very quickly whether you know what you're talking about or not, or even if you understand the concept and it's just great as feedback to you, but then you've got to look and read others, listen to others.
52:04
And then I love the notion of training yourself when you're feeling, "Oh, man, I so agree with this person."
52:11
For me, immediately, that's like, "Okay, I got to stop."
52:18
And so I've trained myself to do this, right?
52:18
I got to stop and figure out.
52:23
It's like, "Yeah, they attribute everything to Mark Twain, of course."
52:26
One of the things that they attribute to him is whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. I love that quote. But also the opposite.
52:35
And I think even the opposite is even more important in a way, because the opposite, at least the way I interpret it, shows the limitations that you've built into your thinking.
52:45
And some of them can be really, really defeating if, as you say, your goal is to be a good person, lead a good life and succeed even, right?
52:52
And it doesn't matter really what profession you're in, if you don't error correct you're just going to be in stasis and that's not fun.
53:06
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah. Exactly.
53:06
I think most of us don't want to just survive.
53:08
We want to thrive and thriving requires error correction.
53:08
To get to the two other myths that you asked me about [crosstalk] Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes. Thank you.
53:15
Lisa Feldman Barrett: One being is the amygdala the home of fear in your brain?
53:15
The amygdala is actually a little clump of 13 little clumps of cells deep inside the temporal lobe of your brain.
53:20
So if you take your finger and you put it over your temple and you just went into the midline of your brain, there's one on either side, you've got these little almond shaped nuggets of cells.
53:38
And for various reasons, scientists believed for a very long time that the amygdala contained these ancient circuits for fear, an ancient circuit for fear, and the amygdala is a little bit like the rockstar of the brain because scientists focused on it for a long time and some journalists wrote about it and so a lot of people know the name and when they think about the brain, the amygdala, that's what they think.
53:58
But the thing is that the amygdala, first of all, it doesn't have a single function.
54:00
It's 13 different little clusters of cells, which we call nuclei in a human brain.
54:04
But even more importantly, it doesn't have a single psychological function.
54:10
So there's a lot of evidence.
54:15
Some of which I go over in how emotions are made.
54:15
And there's been more evidence since then that you can have episodes of fear where the amygdala is not really more engaged than it is at other times and you can have episodes of fear where it is.
54:25
And there are people without amygdalas who can feel fear and experience fear and perceive fear in other people.
54:30
And you can show that actually the amygdala is not really the home of negative emotion.
54:40
It's not really the home of emotion actually.
54:40
If you had to give the amygdala a single job, which it would not be a psychological job per se, one of the things, if you think about what these nuclei are all doing together, they're basically alerting the rest of the brain, like a sentinel almost, that something isn't predictable and the rest of the brain needs to try to learn it.
55:06
To learn whatever is not predicted, error correction.
55:06
So learn whatever's not predicted so that when the brain predicts next time error will be minimized.
55:11
If you had to give it a single function, that's probably how you would describe it.
55:17
So if I took your head and I stuck it in a brain scanner, and I showed you a bunch of images you've never seen before, we'd get massive changes in amygdala activity because all these things are novel to you.
55:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
55:32
Lisa Feldman Barrett: The myth of the fearful amygdala is linked to this third myth, which is that humans have an inner lizard, you've got a lizard brain, and then layered on top of that lizard brain you have a limbic system, including the amygdala and layered on top of that you have your big cerebral cortex- Jim O'Shaughnessy: And it's an old period, right?
55:53
The [crosstalk] Lisa Feldman Barrett: Triune brain. Yeah. Triune brain. Yeah. [crosstalk].
55:53
If you go all the way back to...
55:54
So what do people think these do?
55:54
The lizard brain is for instincts, the limbic system is for emotions and the cerebral cortex is for rationality.
56:00
That's the story and this is a story that's embedded in industry, right?
56:06
So [crosstalk] Jim O'Shaughnessy: Everything. Everything. Everything.
56:10
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah. Everything.
56:11
It's embedded in economics, in the law.
56:11
I mean it's really everywhere.
56:11
And even people who say they don't adhere to it but they'll talk about prefrontal cortex regulating the amygdala, that's a triune brain story.
56:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
56:23
Lisa Feldman Barrett: And it's so old though, Jim.
56:24
You could go all the way back to Plato and a human psyche is made of three parts.
56:33
It's two wild horses, the beasts, right?
56:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
56:38
Lisa Feldman Barrett: One for instincts, one for emotions and then the human charretier, who is the pinnacle of rationality kind of thing.
56:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
56:46
Lisa Feldman Barrett: This was believed for a really long time in neuroscience until scientists were able to peer into the genetic machinery of neurons.
56:48
And at that point, it became very, very clear that the only animal that has a lizard brain is a lizard.
57:09
And that certainly all mammals and maybe all vertebrates, but that's a bit of an inference, basically have the same brain plan.
57:15
And the developmental plan is basically the same, but what changes are the duration of the stages, and if a stage runs for longer, you get more cells and that reorganizes that part of the brain.
57:30
And so you can look to other...
57:30
And this is still a debated thing, but generally speaking, nobody is debating the idea that the triune brain exists, because it doesn't.
57:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
57:43
Lisa Feldman Barrett: It's not how your brain evolved, and it isn't really how your brain functions.
57:44
So it is a myth, and so anytime anybody ever talks about a lizard brain, your lizard brain getting the best of you, you know they haven't read my book.
57:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, what about The Master and the Emissary?
58:00
What do you think about that book?
58:05
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, I would say in general, there is as much evidence for the left and the right hemispheres doing different things as there is evidence against it.
58:16
So I tend not to think that that's the case.
58:23
I tend not to believe that story because I don't think that weight of evidence supports it.
58:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So you use phrases that are near and dear to my heart because we're quantitative investors at my company.
58:38
And so evidence, that's how we make our decisions.
58:38
We listen to the data because we think the cumulative data is smarter than I am, certainly.
58:47
And the weight of the evidence, because that's the way we build models, actually.
58:52
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Exactly.
58:52
Well, that's also how your brain builds a model, except what is it using to weight the information?
58:54
It's using its relevance to regulating the body.
58:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right. Right.
59:01
Lisa Feldman Barrett: So when scientists talk about reward or they talk about value, really what they're talking about is how much is this information important for regulating the body in the future?
59:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
59:13
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Your brain makes predictions about this.
59:14
But yeah, as a scientist though, for me, evidence is everything. Do I like being wrong? Not particularly.
59:18
But I will capitulate to the evidence [crosstalk] Jim O'Shaughnessy: You have to.
59:26
If you want to move on, you have to.
59:26
Lisa Feldman Barrett: No, you don't actually.
59:30
What would happen if you built an investing model and you didn't pay attention to the evidence, but you kept using it?
59:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I would fail, most likely.
59:37
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Right.
59:40
You would fail, but it might take you a while to figure that out, though. Jim O'Shaughnessy: True. Oh, yeah. No question.
59:46
Lisa Feldman Barrett: And in the process, you can probably do quite a bit of damage.
59:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No doubt about that.
59:50
The other thing that I wanted to ask you about is, we hear everyone saying that there's a huge replication crisis and you have an interesting take on that, which I think is right and refreshing, if you don't mind.
1:00:04
Lisa Feldman Barrett: No.
1:00:04
Getting back to simple, single causes, right?
1:00:06
There's an idea of how causation works, which is referred to as the machine metaphor.
1:00:13
And what that means really is just that something works like a machine, like an engine, like a car engine, and you can trace this metaphor all the way back to Descartes.
1:00:17
And- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, by the way, he has a lot to answer for [crosstalk].
1:00:23
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah.
1:00:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Anyway.
1:00:27
Lisa Feldman Barrett: He was also product of his time, so- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Of course. Of course.
1:00:29
Lisa Feldman Barrett: [crosstalk] But in psychology and in neuroscience, to some extent, but really very strongly in psychology, the assumption was for a very long time that the mind worked like a machine or the brain works like a machine in this very mechanistic way- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:00:43
Lisa Feldman Barrett: ... with one or two causes.
1:00:43
All you have to do is measure or manipulate one or two things, and you should be able to predict the outcome of behavior.
1:00:52
And that's how psychology largely works as a field.
1:00:52
And what's happened is many of these... Not many. I shouldn't say that.
1:00:59
Actually in psychology, there's as much of a replication problem as there is in biology or in chemistry, or...
1:01:04
I mean, psychologists don't have a special problem on their hands.
1:01:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:01:11
Lisa Feldman Barrett: We have the same problem as every other scientific field, and that is that when something is true, with a capital T, right/ or is a fact with a capital F, it should hold under any circumstances universally regardless of...
1:01:24
That's the machine metaphor.
1:01:24
If you take the engine out of a car, the part itself still functions like an engine and its ability to function like an engine isn't dependent on what it's connected to, or what's influencing it, or what it's influencing.
1:01:42
That's one view of causation.
1:01:42
Another view of causation is the bread metaphor.
1:01:45
The idea that how flour works and how salt works, how yeast works, how water works, depends on the presence of the other ingredients.
1:01:57
And they're all interacting with each other and you can't just remove one ingredient and understand what its function is in that ensemble.
1:02:02
understand what its function is in that ensemble. And so when scientists came along and started to talk about the crisis in psychology of a replication crisis, meaning studies weren't
1:02:15
replicating, we weren't seeing the same outcomes, the assumption was that you should be able to take any experiment from any lab conducted at any time of day with any group of subjects and plop it into some other lab at any time of day and you'd see the same effect and that's the machine metaphor and that's wrong. Jim O'Shaughnessy:
1:02:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:02:39
Lisa Feldman Barrett: I mean human brains and the minds that they create are complex systems and complex systems mean that you have a lot of small interacting factors, which work together out of which a behavior emerges.
1:02:53
And if you're not controlling or measuring all of those factors, then it will look as if your studies don't replicate, when in fact the problem is that you haven't identified all of the causal factors that are relevant.
1:03:16
So Jim, if I take you or even myself and I test you in the morning, I test your IQ in the morning, I test your memory in the morning and then I test your memory in the afternoon.
1:03:25
There's going to be about a standard deviation difference in your performance. Why is that?
1:03:32
Is it because the test is bad? No.
1:03:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:03:34
Lisa Feldman Barrett: It's because if I test you at certain times a day, you have more metabolic capacity, you have juice basically.
1:03:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: More gas in the tank.
1:03:40
Lisa Feldman Barrett: More gas in the tank.
1:03:40
More spoons in the drawer than you do at other times.
1:03:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:03:42
Lisa Feldman Barrett: If I test you on a day where you've got eight hours sleep the night before versus a day where the night before you got four hours of sleep, it's going to affect your performance.
1:03:48
In fact, there are some studies which estimate that you lose a full 10 points, a full standard deviation on an IQ test if you're tested after a sleepless night.
1:04:00
The point is that there are many, many, many factors that go into a brain that's constantly communicating with the body, in conversation with other brains and bodies around you in the world, and that's a complex system and it can't be modeled.
1:04:14
And so a replication crisis, isn't really a...
1:04:19
I would say, there's a crisis here, but the crisis isn't that people are faking their data or that scientists are sloppy in their experimentation.
1:04:28
I would say the crisis is that they have the wrong understanding of causation.
1:04:33
That's the problem, and I'll stop there, but I could honestly go on for a very long time.
1:04:34
And I just want to point out though that the people who are making this mistake are the very ones in addition to the ones...
1:04:39
There are a group of people in psychology who are criticizing everybody else for being sloppy.
1:04:43
And it's important to clear up the slop.
1:04:49
Nobody would ever accuse me of encouraging sloppy statistics or methods or whatever.
1:04:49
I'm known as a pretty hard-ass scientist.
1:04:55
I have very high standards and I'm not bragging about that, but some people have criticized me for having standards too high.
1:05:04
But I think the very people who are at the forefront of criticizing the field need to look at their own assumptions about causation, because they might want to reconsider what they think the major cause is of this problem if there is a problem.
1:05:20
And that doesn't just go for a psychologist, it goes for chemists and biologists and so on.
1:05:20
But I will say that I think chemists and biologists and physicists and so on have had to grapple with this issue of the nature of causation, of what causes your behavior or what causes the behavior of something.
1:05:37
And they've had to deal with this issue of reductionists machine metaphors, or complexity of causation and it's psychologists turn now. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:05:49
And endlessly, and I think one of the reasons for that and getting back to the social systems in which we live, the metaphors that get used for the brain reflect the current thinking of society, right? So you mentioned Plato.
1:05:59
You had a charioteer and two horses because that makes sense to Plato where he is in time and space.
1:06:05
And then we had the machine because of Newton, right?
1:06:10
And then we had a mechanical universe and then the quantum guys came along and it was like, "Yeah, you fuckers are wrong."
1:06:15
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah. Exactly.
1:06:19
And one of the quantum guys, I don't know if you've read Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli, but it's the best book. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I have.
1:06:26
Lisa Feldman Barrett: And what do the quantum guys have to say?
1:06:26
Everything is relational.
1:06:26
Everything is relational.
1:06:30
The meaning of everything is relational and that fits perfectly with this idea of complexity.
1:06:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Indeed.
1:06:38
And just as the last thought here, in what I do as well.
1:06:38
Markets are complex adaptive systems with feedback and in complex adaptive systems, try to change them from the top.
1:06:53
You're asking for trouble, because everything is related and economics, if you study economics, it's always all other things being equal, all other things are never equal.
1:07:03
Lisa Feldman Barrett: All things are not Equal. Exactly.
1:07:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, Lisa, this has been tremendously fun for me.
1:07:08
Thank you for taking the time.
1:07:08
Lisa Feldman Barrett: My pleasure.
1:07:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We always end with this question and I'm really interested in what your response is going to be, because we're going to violate what you know to be true.
1:07:16
Because we're going to say that we're waving a magic wand and making you the emperors of the world for a day.
1:07:21
You can't kill anyone and you can't round them up and put them in a camp, but you can incept them, right?
1:07:33
You can put two ideas in their mind.
1:07:33
They wake up the next day and they think these ideas are their own.
1:07:39
Which two would you incept in the population of our lovely little planet.
1:07:45
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Heal the earth, eradicate childhood poverty.
1:07:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, beautiful. I love it. Childhood, oh, man.
1:07:51
Lisa Feldman Barrett: One of the things I talk about in Seven and a Half Lessons, as you know, is that little brains are not miniature adult brains.
1:07:57
They are brains that wire themselves to their world and childhood poverty is a travesty.
1:08:03
And it's not just a moral travesty.
1:08:03
It is a moral travesty, but some people would disagree with me.
1:08:10
And so my response to this is, okay, let's just set aside the morality. It's stupid.
1:08:14
It's a waste of human capital. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
1:08:19
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Basically think about the next generation of innovators.
1:08:22
Think about the next generation of workers.
1:08:22
Think about the next generation of leaders, who are those people? Right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. No, I completely agree.
1:08:31
The evidence is overwhelming that childhood poverty leads to very, very bad things for them as adults.
1:08:38
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah.
1:08:41
Sometimes when I say this I get accused of being a, what do they call it?
1:08:41
A social, something warrior. You're a social...
1:08:46
Social justice- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Social justice warrior.
1:08:48
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Right. Right. Right.
1:08:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But you don't seem like a social justice warrior to me.
1:08:52
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Be that as it may, whatever my predilections are, I would say, no, I'm just actually talking...
1:08:56
If I were a business person, this is what I would be thinking actually, playing the long game.
1:09:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, absolutely I know and I am totally simpatico with you on that.
1:09:06
Anyone who thinks this way and understands the evidence, right?
1:09:13
If you want your business to go on you, you want the next crop of people working for you to be very bright.
1:09:18
Lisa Feldman Barrett: So, Jim, what are your two?
1:09:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, that's interesting. My two would...
1:09:24
I've never asked myself this question, so you're taxing me here, metabolically.
1:09:33
Lisa Feldman Barrett: [crosstalk] Jim O'Shaughnessy: My number one would be, you're probably wrong.
1:09:36
In other words, understand?
1:09:43
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:09:43
Lisa Feldman Barrett: That's great.
1:09:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So you're probably wrong and be tolerant, I guess would be my two.
1:09:46
Because we are probably wrong and if we aren't tolerant, it leads to really bad things.
1:09:53
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yeah. It's a pleasure.
1:09:55
It is a pleasure [crosstalk] Jim O'Shaughnessy: For me too. For me too. This is awesome. Thank you.