Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science -based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
My guest today is Dr.
Jordan Peterson. Dr.
Jordan Peterson is a psychologist and author and one of the most influential public intellectuals of our time.
Today we discuss the human animal, what it means to be a human being at the level of psychology, at the level of neuroscience, and indeed at the level of expression of different personality types within us.
Most of us don't think about having different personalities, however, as we discussed today, due to the activity of specific brain circuitry, including the hypothalamus, the prefrontal cortex and others.
We each and all can adopt different states of mind that powerfully influence our emotions, our thoughts and our actions.
And in so doing, we are different people depending on those states of mind.
Today's discussion is both an intellectual one and a practical one.
You will learn where and how to place your thoughts.
You will learn the relationship between the call to adventure and responsibility.
And as Dr. Peterson emphasizes in his new book, We Who Wrestle With God, he emphasizes the use of story, in this case, biblical stories, to understand oneself and to best guide one's actions towards the most positive and generative outcomes.
We discuss the self, romantic relationships and commitments, the family, community, and culture.
We also discuss the media, politics, cancel culture, things like social media and pornography, shifting masculine and feminine roles, and the innate human drive to create action at a distance, both in space and in time.
Today's discussion is both intellectual and practical.
Dr. Peterson emphasizes how to use different sources of story, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to understand and best guide one's decision making process.
Indeed, he discusses the tight relationship between the call to adventure and responsibility as a trustable framework for moving forward in life towards one's best possible outcomes.
And I'm certain that by the end of today's discussion, you will be thinking about your own neural circuits, that is the connections in your brain that drive emotions, thoughts, and behavior, as well as your psychology, your different states of mind, and you are going to have a number of different tools and frameworks
with which to apply all that knowledge toward the best possible outcomes.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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And now for my discussion with Dr.
Jordan Peterson. Dr.
Jordan Peterson, welcome.
Thank you, sir. Delight to have you here and want to talk about elements within your new book.
Yeah. Also some elements within your previous books and within that mind of yours generally.
As a framework for that, I'm wondering if you would tolerate or permit a little bit of a discussion about sort of brain and psychology.
Just kind of lay the groundwork for where we might prod some of the themes that you bring up related to the book.
So I view the brain as obviously a bunch of cells and parts, etc., but I distill it down to some sort of basic features.
First of all, we have an autonomic physiology.
I think we both agree on that.
That regulates our sleepiness and wakefulness, our breathing, our heart rate, stuff that runs in the background.
And then we have a lot of circuitry devoted to what I would call impulses, things that we desire.
We want to move toward a petative behaviors and we also have some impulses to avoid things that are putrid, painful, etc.
That's all in there like it is in other animals.
I should talk about the idea of impulse in relationship to that characterization.
Because there's an important point to be made.
You pay a price for characterizing that as impulse and I'd like to explore that with you because it's crucial.
Great. Well, circle black to impulse, I'd like to do that.
And then we have a lot of circuitry.
People will hear about it as executive function, prefrontal circuitry, which does many things.
But I like to think of as a circuit that can say, and here I'm borrowing from a previous guest who is a neurosurgeon, it can say, shhh, or exert what's called top -down suppression on these, what I'm calling impulses.
It can - We should talk about that too, the suppression idea, the inhibition idea in general.
Because I think there's a parallel problem there to the notion of impulse that's very much worth delving into.
Great. So circuitry that's devoted to our ability to self inhibit the desire to reach for something or to avoid something.
We can push ourselves into things that would otherwise be aversive.
We can avoid doing things that would otherwise drive us to quote unquote, just do it anyway.
And then we have what I think of as our default settings, kind of how we're operating in the world with respect to food, other people, ourselves, our thoughts.
If we don't intervene with ourselves and these default settings are of course established by both nature, a genetic program that wires up circuitry, but also nurture because of the immense neuroplasticity that occurs in the first 25 years plus of life, but especially those first years of life.
And then of course we have neuroplasticity, this incredible gift that humans have more of than any other species as far as we know, which is we can decide to make changes.
Now, the reason I lay out this framework as opposed to starting with a question is because there are so many amazing questions that you ask in this book, you know, we who wrestle with God, I've been trying to wrap our arms and minds around this huge set of questions.
And it occurred to me to step back from all of that and ask, it's part of the reason that we have a concept of God, that there are multiple religions.
Is that the consequence of some humans at some point realizing or perhaps God himself realizing that what we are equipped with as humans, which we just described, is insufficient to allow us to evolve as a species and be the best version of ourselves.
I think this for me really is like the central question of at least my life, which is to what extent do I need to intervene with my default settings, rewire them, engage that prefrontal cortex and push down on some repetitive or aversive behaviors?
And to what extent can we do that?
And to what end? And to what end, and maybe we need a rule book.
You know, I am starting to believe, and I'm now 49 years old, that we need a rule book, that the neural circuitry that's encased within our skulls is not sufficient to allow us to navigate through life to our best outcome.
We kind of know that we need a rule book.
Even you admitted that in some ways implicitly when you discussed the fact that we have a 25 year socialization window.
And what that means is that we have to interact with other people and our traditions in order to set us right.
And that's so complex it takes 25 years.
And so we're learning something from that.
And that's indication that our, let's say, default biological settings are insufficient to guide us into the future.
Right. And so then the question is, well, what is it that you're learning as a consequence of that socialization process?
And you can think about it and people have thought about it as a series of complex inhibitions of lower order motivational states, impulses.
But I'm not very happy with the inhibition model because inhibition is unsophisticated socialization, integration is sophisticated socialization.
So here's a way of I really learned this, I think, from contrasting Freud with Piaget, because Freud's model superego is really an inhibition model.
And Freud was a neurologist.
Piaget's model is very different.
He thought of the properly socialized person as someone who had integrated their lower order, we'll call them impulses for now, into a sustainable voluntary structure that regulated them and gave them all their proper place.
That's very different than an inhibitory model.
So for example, I'll give you an example from my own life.
My son was quite a willful young child.
Wonder where he got it from.
Fair enough. And my father was a formidable character.
And so my son liked to do what he liked to do.
And it took him quite a bit of tussling with him to help him, I wouldn't say inhibit that or regulate it, to integrate it.
And one of the consequences of that was he became a very good athlete.
And so why is that relevant?
Well, because it wasn't like he stopped being assertive or even aggressive.
It's that he learned how to put that aggression in its proper place in relationship to a goal that was much more sophisticated than merely getting his own way moment to moment.
OK, so integrations are better.
Like a very sophisticated athlete, a team athlete in particular, isn't not aggressive and they're not inhibiting their aggression on the playing field.
They may now and then when they're provoked, let's say, but all things considered, what they've done is subordinate their aggression to a higher order goal that enables them to be more successful, but also to be successful in a maximally social and sustainable way.
And Piaget's point, and he's absolutely right about this, is that that's much better conceptualized as integration.
And then with regard to impulse, because I said I would return to that, I spent a lot of time walking through the behavioral literature.
Right. And a lot of that was derived from animal experiments.
And it was predicated on the idea that if you could explain something on the basis of a deterministic reflex, you should.
And there's some there's something to be said for that hypothesis.
Don't make your theory any more complex than it needs to be.
How far can you get with a theory of chained reflexes, a deterministic theory?
The behavior has gone a long way.
They couldn't get to the highest strata of human endeavor with a chained reflex theory.
But there was a lot of things they did that were very good.
But one of the things they made a big mistake about was to conceptualize motivational states, let's say, as impulses or drives.
That's not sufficient because it fails to take into account the effect of those states on perception.
So it's much better to think of a motivated state.
This is what helped me integrate behavioral theory with psychoanalytic theory, especially the psychoanalytic theory of religious endeavor.
It's much better to think of those lower order motivational states as personalities.
They're subpersonalities.
They have their perceptions.
They have their objects of perception.
They have their cognitive rationalizations.
You certainly see that in addiction.
Let's say they have their emotions like they are small personalities.
Unidimensional, very narrow minded personalities, but their personalities, they're not impulses.
So are they personalities within what most people would think of as our larger personality?
I mean, what I'm hearing is that let's say somebody is an addict.
It depends on how integrated you are because you could be nothing but a succession of dominion of subpersonalities.
That's what a two year old is.
Right. And so you have to build an integrating personality on top of those subpersonalities, but not in a matter that inhibits them.
That means your socialization is unsophisticated.
Even Freud knew this because even though he had basically an inhibitory model of say super ego regulation, he believed that a healthy personality would have the impulse of aggression and the impulse of sexuality to take two major lower order motivational states into account, would have them integrated
into the functioning ego.
The issue is integration.
And so what you're doing when you're social, like, OK, when my son, for example, would become willful in a manner that I regarded as counterproductive for him and the household.
And the rule would be you can't act that way because if you act that way, people aren't going to approve of you.
And that's a bad plan.
So you have to you have to control that because it's not going to work out well for you if you don't.
OK, so I use timeout.
Now timeout is an effective disciplinary strategy for social creatures because we don't like isolation.
And so timeout basically takes child, puts the child in isolation.
That produces a pain like response because social isolation produces pure inhibition.
Well, well, that's the question.
You see, that's the question he had to inhibit his immediate desire, say, to run around because he was going to sit on the steps.
But see, I put a rule in place there.
And the rule was, as soon as you get yourself under control, you can leave the stairs.
OK, so now the question is, what does under control mean?
One interpretation is inhibition.
Another interpretation is no, no, he's developing a superordinate personality, probably courtically, that has enough dominion so that those underlying motivational states can now be integrated and placed properly into a hierarchy.
And when I'm insisting that he regulate his behavior and I allow him to move off the step when he is now able to be a social creature again, instead of falling prey to his whim, I'm reinforcing the cortical integration of those underlying motivational states.
Now, you might think the human organism is comes into the world with with a warring battleground of primordial motivational states.
That's perfectly reasonable view.
We know a lot of that is mediated by the hypothalamus, for example, the amygdala and these lower order biologically, what preprogrammed to some degree, preprogrammed systems.
Now, the specific manner in which those systems should find their expression and the specific way that they're going to be hierarchically integrated is going to depend to a tremendous degree on the particulars of the society at that moment, which is why you need that 18 year framework to to hone the manner
in which those systems make themselves manifest.
But I think the best way to conceptualize that is that it's it's the hierarchical integration of the motivational states within an overarching superordinate personality.
And that personality is not bound to the moment.
It takes the medium and long term into account.
And it's not self -serving like a two year old would be because you have to take other people into account if you're going to be successful.
So and this is where the cortex comes in as far as I'm concerned.
This is what it's doing.
It's stretching the it's integrating the lower order, temporally bound motivational states that are specifically self -serving to a much broader vision of the world that takes the future into account and other people.
And and that's that's hard.
It's very hard. I love this and I'll tell you why, because the way that I think of the prefrontal cortex is that its main job is context dependent strategy setting.
Right. Context, context dependent.
That's a crucial issue.
And you mentioned hypothalamus.
This you know, it's basically the size of, you know, two marbles or so sitting above the roof of our mouth, tiny tiny little brain area.
It's mostly switches in there.
What do I mean by that?
Any time a neurosurgeon has stimulated neurons in a little sub area of the hypothalamus, you get either rage or sexual appetite or mating with inanimate objects.
I mean, this was done in both non -human primates and in humans.
Uncontrollable thirst.
Uncontrollable thirst, hunger, total suppression of hunger.
I mean, all the basic drives are operating there like switches and prefrontal cortex has direct access to it to the context dependent decision making.
And I love that you brought in this notion of changing an impulse in the example that you gave in your son's impulse to be aggressive or wild in some way that was inappropriate for the home environment at that moment.
And two things that you said really resonate, the prefrontal cortex, his prefrontal cortex had to learn that whatever he was feeling for himself, his own desires needed to be placed in a context of other people's wishes, desires and needs as well.
So there's even for him to thrive.
Right. It's not merely a sacrifice of his own desire for the sake of others.
It's like, no, no, look, kid, if you're we know this, if you're if you have the same orientation towards other people at four that you did when you were two, especially if you're tilted a little in the aggressive direction, you will not make friends and you'll be isolated and alienated for the rest
of your life. So that two year old impulsiveness that has its place to it starts to modify radically at three and it better be fixed by four.
And the reason for that is that you have to integrate yourself into the social world, which means in the case of children, it means you want to have friends.
And so the reason you're you're you're disciplining your child isn't to teach them that what they're doing is bad.
You know, in that simple, in that simple sense that you might interpret punishment, it's like, no, you need to be more sophisticated.
Well, why? Well, you have to be able to take turns.
Well, why? Well, because you know, one like you otherwise.
Well, what's the problem with that?
Well, first of all, we're hyper social like you can punish psychopaths by putting them in isolation.
That's how social human beings are.
You take the most antisocial human beings there are and you can punish them by making them be alone.
Right. So that's how social we are.
So you want to you're you're modeling for your child a strategy of of even satisfaction for his own basic drives that takes context in the most sophisticated possible way into account.
Right. And that is see, as soon as you understand that that's the fostering of like a meta personality.
And the child, which would really be the personality of that child, the integrated personality, you start to understand how that might be related to religious thinking because religious thinking is the attempt to formulate something approximating an ideal personality.
Right. Now, that's attributed there.
That's often attributed elements of the divide.
But there's reasons for that we could go into.
But as soon as you know that the basic structure, even at the lower motivational level, is personality.
Well, then that that changes the way you view the brain.
Look, a lot of archaic deities are motivational systems.
Could you give me an example?
The God of War. Mars, that's rage.
That was a god that the Vikings invoked before they went into battle.
They would use Ammonita mascara and they imitated predators from a nerdy age.
This is a acetylcholine, by the way, folks, as to general receptor systems, the nicotinic system, which is a stimulant, but also relaxes you.
That's why people like nicotine and then the muscarinic system, which creates changes in our self perception and perception of the things around us.
It's not so much a stimulant as it it's a I would veer towards almost like a psychedelic or it has a an effect of making us less fearful.
And an intrigued radically atypical psychedelic.
Yeah, it's hard to describe.
Yeah, it's outside the LSD psilocybin mescaline domain.
So people would take this as an agent.
The Vikings would take this as an agent before going into it, because what they were trying to do is make the personality of rage superordinate with no pain.
Right. And they practice that from a very early age.
So the Vikings worked themselves up.
They went berserk. That means to wear the bear shirt.
Right. They transformed themselves, so to speak, into predators.
They would narrow the context within which they're I'm calling them impulses, but you're giving a more sophisticated explanation for them within which they're the aggressive impulse, the strategically aggressive impulse could be channeled.
Right, because that full reign, given full reign.
Right. They were experts to be able to decapitate people, eviscerate people, do whatever it was that they needed to do in order to and to suppress their own feelings of pain.
Yeah, well, then you could imagine in a way that what they were doing was bringing the full resources of the cortex to and placing them at the service of the rage circuits in the hypothalamus.
Like we have no idea what that would be like.
No, there aren't, we don't do that.
We have no idea what a human being who does that is like if they're expert at it.
You would give you nightmares to think about it deeply.
There's an experiment, if I may, that might shed some light on what it would look like.
A former guest on this podcast, actually, David Anderson at Caltech has been studying hypothalamic circuits, and he and his former postdoc, Duyu Lin, discovered a small, tiny, tiny collection of neurons in the ventral medial hypothalamus that, when stimulated, would send these animals, these mice, you
can find videos of this online, into a rage.
Now, the interesting thing is, is it required the presence of another mouse?
Right, right, right.
So it's still somewhat context dependent?
Somewhat context dependent, if they were alone in their cage, they wouldn't attack themselves or the walls of the cage.
But if you put a air or water filled glove within the cage, they would absolutely attack it to try and destroy it.
Then you turn off these neurons, the mouse is calm.
We can put a link to this in the show, no caption.
Now, here's what's remarkable.
The ventral medial hypothalamus has these neurons basically interspersed with other neurons that, when stimulated, suppress rage and activate copulation.
Incredible, right, within the same structure.
You have these mutually exclusive sets of neurons and behaviors, and it speaks to, I think, some of the things that Freud and others have talked about in terms of the juxtaposition of these neurons, but that they mutually inhibit one another, which lends itself to some really interesting questions about when aggression and sexuality
become combined in states of pathology.
OK, so but in any event, so context dependent control over impulses, over the hypothalamus seems to be the theme here.
And the other thing that that you mentioned is the ability for your son in this case, but presumably also the Vikings to be able to broaden their temporal scope, to be able to think about the time domain differently.
This is something I was absolutely obsessed by.
The more we experience what I brought up at the beginning was that we have this autonomic arousal system, the more alert we are, the less we are able to take ourselves into notions of this two shall pass, the past, the present, the future, tense, autonomic activation, stress, panic, fear, anger tend
to make us lose sight.
We get blinders on lose sight of the fact that there was a past, there's a present and there's a future.
Well, that's because they're collapsing, they're collapsing your domain of apprehension to the moment.
So you will act. You have to collapse to the moment to act.
Right. And so we should also point out for everyone that the other you don't want to underestimate the sophistication of the hypothalamus.
And this is partly why conceptualizing its various states as sub personalities is so useful.
I mean, it's it's not unsophisticated.
You can take a female cat and take out its whole brain except for the hypothalamus.
So it's like 95 percent of its brain is gone and in a relatively controlled environment.
It's indistinguishable from a normal cat.
It can do cat things and live now.
It it's high and it's hyper exploratory.
Now, that's that's a very strange thing.
Whereas a cat with no brain is hyper exploratory.
It's not what you'd think at all.
But it shows you how sophisticated the hypothalamus is.
It can run these programs, but they're programs of personality because they have perceptions.
It can run them and it and it it's and it can do that quite successfully.
Now, all the higher order sub cortical and cortical systems are, well, I think they are.
To your point, their ways of expanding the apprehension of those fundamental motivational systems across broader and broader spans of time, incorporating more and more people, but also solving the problem of the conflict that emerges between those fundamental motivational states.
Right. It's like, well, what do you do when you're hungry and tired?
Right. Well, you have to mediate between the states to some degree.
What do you do if you want to solve the problem of being hungry and tired over a long period of time with other people?
Right. Well, you need more and more brain to calculate that.
Right. And so a huge part of what maturation is is when we think about it as the capacity to forgo gratification.
Actually, what's happening is that as you mature and your cortex comes online, let's say, you're able to regulate your behavior with more and more other things taken into account.
Right. Right. And, you know, that there has to be some war there, which is why you're wrestling with God, let's say.
There has to be some war there because it's also the case that you do have to satiate yourself in relationship to your basic biological needs or you die.
And so there's going to be tension.
That is something like the tension between the individual and the group, you might say.
That's how the Rousseauians and the Freudians would think about it.
So the weird thing about that is that it's not useful to to identify your individuality with the dominion of a whim.
And that's what hedonists do.
And that's what immature people do.
They think, well, why shouldn't I get what I want?
It's like I see. So your claim is that the you that superordinate is what you want.
That isn't that means you're subjugated to these lower order personalities.
And you might say, well, why why is that wrong?
It's like, well, you're a two year old.
It doesn't work, you know, if it's all about you and your immediate gratification.
Well, first of all, you're rather psychopathic because you could think of psychopathy as the extension of immaturity into adulthood.
That's a pretty good default way of conceptualizing it.
And it's like it's an unsophisticated strategy.
They want what they want now regardless.
And they don't care about the we or the future.
So you see one this is one of the ways I caught on to this relationship was because I studied antisocial behavior for a very long time.
Psychopaths in particular are notorious for their inability to learn from experience.
OK, so what does that mean?
It means that if they do something impulsive that causes them trouble in the future, the fact of that future trouble has no bearing on their continued behavior.
Well, what that means is that they are so non -communitarian that they're willing to even betray their own future selves.
There's no difference between that betraying someone else.
It's exactly the same mechanism.
Very much a toddler toddler.
Well, so here's something I learned in Montreal.
I worked with a man named Richard Trombley there.
And Richard, I think Richard's lab used up one third of all social science funding for Quebec at one time.
He was a radically successful researcher and he was really interested in antisocial behavior and and was trying to get to the roots.
And one of the conclusions that our lab enterprise moved towards was that one observation was that if you take two year olds, if you take kids at different ages, you could imagine you made a group of two year olds, three year olds, group four year olds all the way up to 15.
You just let them interact.
The two year olds are the most aggressive.
And but if you analyze the two year olds themselves, you find that all the aggressive kids are boys and it's only a fraction of them, about 5%.
So if you group two year olds together, 5 % of the boys will kick, steal, hit and bite, which was our definition of early onset antisocial behavior.
Almost all of those kids are socialized by the age of four.
Right. The remnant that aren't get alienated because they have no friends and they're the ones who become juvenile delinquents and then early onset criminals and then repeat offenders.
Right. And so what it is, is imagine there's some kids whose default, their rage circuits are a little bit more dominant than the typical kid.
They're often bigger physically.
Yeah, especially the bite, the biting of, forgive me for interrupting, there's a very interesting paper published about two years ago showing that there's a specific circuit.
From the hypothalamus to the neurons that control jaw closure that are independent of the neurons that control jaw, jaw closure for eating and for drinking.
Oh yeah, yeah. That are specifically for aggressive biting.
I mean, I hope people understand the significance of this because what this means is there are dedicated circuits for aggressive biting in your hypothalamus.
We all learn to suppress these, except probably under conditions where our life is endangered, in which case you'd probably bite like hell in order to try and get out of that circumstance.
But we are all born with this circuit.
We die with this circuit.
Most of us, apparently not these kids, learn to suppress the circuit.
Right. Or integrate.
An eight year old biter is a scary.
Right. Right. Right.
A one year old biter is like a little bit of a worrisome thing.
A two year old like, okay, we need to work on this.
Yeah. An eight year old biter, people are starting to be concerned, I think even without knowledge of the psychopathology literature, one would be very concerned if their eight year old is biting other kids.
Right. Not just because of the damage induced, but it's so very different and so much more primitive than even hitting or spitting or something.
It's the indication of a virtual absence of sophisticated socialization.
They are truly in their hypothalamus.
Yeah, right. Exactly.
And that's, well, especially if you have a hypothalamus that's tilted towards rage, let's say, and defensive or predatory aggression, that's bad news.
Now, so what's the upshot of that?
Well, the upshot is that there is a subset of kids whose default reactions aren't socialized, and we associate that with psychopathy and longterm criminality.
It's a really useful thing to understand that much of what we see as pathology, and I would say the same thing about narcissism and certain forms of hedonism, essentially what it is is failure of socialization, right?
And this has very interesting political implications because it also implies that imagine that impulsive self -gratification is a personality, the desire for impulsive self -gratification is a personality with its own political opinions.
Nietzsche said in the late 1800s that every drive attempts to philosophize in its spirit.
Brilliant, a brilliant observation.
Far different than conceiving of the, say, hypothalamic drives as deterministic chains of only impulses.
And another thing to consider, too, with regards to the effect of hypothalamic motivation on perception, that mouse that you talked about whose attack system is activated electronically.
See, when that glove is dropped, you can see that there's a relationship with perception.
Because if there's no target for attack that's biologically relevant in the environment, there's no impulse.
So you could imagine that what happens is when you activate those neurons is that there's a set of perceptual stimuli that are much more likely to be classified as a defeatable enemy.
Now, even a glove will do it.
Right, right, so you drop in a glove and that's now perceived as defeatable enemy or perhaps threat because we don't know exactly what the perception would be.
But then you see then it's the perception driving the behavior.
That's not an impulse.
Right, right. That's more like a strategy.
And that's it's I really started to understand some of the literature on the evolution of religious thinking when I started to understand motivational states as personalities.
Because one of the things that you see, this is so cool, something I tried to talk to Dawkins about.
The greatest historian of religions who ever lived was Murchai Eliade and he wrote a sequence of brilliant books.
The Sacred and the Profane is the best one to start with.
Very short book, very elegant book.
And what Eliade documented across the world was the pattern by which polytheistic belief systems turned into monotheistic belief systems.
That parallels maturation.
It's the same thing.
And so the polytheistic gods tend to be representations of of motivational states.
I I'm going to pause you there because I think this is extremely important.
So the god of war or the god of love, the guys love exactly exactly that.
So the idea that the different gods are the reflective of different persons.
Let's just say that as as neuroscientists as different hypothalamic and related circuits, why wouldn't they be gods?
You know, beware of falling under their dominion, beware of becoming their playthings.
And the other thing that's very interesting, you see, is that you also have to understand that these don't exist independently of historical context.
So let's say rage. It's like there's a there's a there's a literature of rage.
There's a culture of rage.
There are patterns of rage that are played out in drama and literature.
Like it's not only that the motivational impulse is a personality.
It's a personality with a history and a philosophy.
And if you don't think it can possess you, you don't know very much about possession.
So like, for example, if you're fighting with someone and you and you become enraged, as you said, your temporal purview shrinks and your notion of what constitutes victory is radically transfigured.
So if you're fighting with someone you love, you might want to defeat them or even hurt them independently of the fact that you actually love them.
Well, then you think, well, you're you're gripped by these impulses.
No, no, you're inhabited by the spirit of rage.
And if you're a sophisticated person, there's going to be an endless stream of sophisticated intellectual rationalizations that come along with that possession.
Right. It's full fledged personality.
And it's one of the things you see with people who are psychotic, you know, who drift off into the landscape of their imagination is that they dwell on such states of possession.
So, for example, these kids that shoot up high schools like they're fantasizing under the influence of rage and resentment for thousands of hours.
That just takes control of them.
And it's not it's not a simple impulse.
It's like, no, they've they've inverted the you could think they've inverted the neurological order and the god of rage is now the what would you say the leading personality of integration or the god of resentful rage, even worse.
And the circuit may run in reverse.
My colleague, David Spiegel, who's our vice chair of psychiatry at Stanford, has done some beautiful experiments examining the relationship between prefrontal cortical areas and the insula, a brain area that has a map of our internal body state, interoception, you know, our ability to sense our internal
workings, et cetera.
In any event, there are certain conditions, including depression, where the direction of flow between the prefrontal cortex and the insula literally reverses.
It's like running against the typical traffic.
This is a very different example, because here you're presenting in the context of rage or and sociopathy and these kids who shoot up schools.
But I do absolutely subscribe to what you just said, that if one drops into one of these more primitive states and emotions and all the things that go with it for a very long time, it's almost as if the governor, which is the prefrontal cortex, starts to become the governed, that the whole circuit starts
to run from bottom up as opposed to top down.
And I think there's good neurologic evidence in addiction.
Again, so you hit the you hit that circuit that's seeking the drug with repeated doses of dopamine.
You know, people say they have a monkey on their back.
It's like, no, they have a monster in their brain and it's and they grew it and it grows because it's reinforced with dopaminergic hits.
And as it grows, its capacity to dominate increases.
And so when there's a cue for the addiction, this is why people relapse when they get out of a treatment center.
They'll go back to their normal environment after having dealt with the physiological withdrawal, let's say.
And a cued craving will make itself manifest like a friend they free base with and it's all of a sudden.
Whoa, that monster is alive and it just shuts everything else down.
And it's got a personality.
It can lie. You know, one of the hallmarks of addictive behavior is lie.
And the lies are the rationalizations of that subcircuit sub personality for its own pathological behavior.
And so and that's all reinforced to by the dopaminergic hits.
It's like there's multiple people in there.
You know, in everyone.
One of the most incredible, polytheistic paganism, polytheistic.
Yeah, that's the default condition.
Right. Right. That's the condition of the two -year -old.
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One of the most remarkable real life examples I've ever witnessed of the power of belief in God, I'm just going to say it as it occurred.
I have a good friend who for many years struggled with alcohol and drug addiction of multiple kinds.
Incredibly kind person, incredibly successful in his career, married to beautiful children, multiple relapses.
Crashed his truck at seven in the morning after getting intoxicated at six 30 in the morning.
Got out of that one happened again and again, multiple rehab centers of the store sort of standard treatment, etc.
And then ultimately enough happened within that whole set of circumstances that his wife said, you know, this is it.
You've got it. Solve this or we just can't be with you.
Very scary situation for everybody involved, including him.
Right. Who absolutely adored his family.
He told us, his friends, that he was going to go to a center here in Los Angeles that treats addiction with essentially religion, a belief in God.
He was already fairly religious.
Most most Sundays he attended church and things of that sort.
And you can imagine we all fought, including myself, like, OK, dude, like, good luck.
Yeah. I hope this works.
But like I would say zero minus one confidence in his ability to get and stay sober.
He just had not succeeded prior to this.
He's been sober more than four years now.
He got out of there and never looked back.
And I wonder now whether something something must have changed in his brain by adopting what was essentially a different incentive structure, right, different incentive structure.
But fear wasn't doing it before.
Fear of extreme consequences, which were on the table at that time when he went in weren't enough.
Something about going there and the work that he did there allowed him to then it's almost like he he got another prefrontal cortex, a more powerful prefrontal cortex.
So maybe we could talk about that.
Well, that's that's not a bad way of thinking about what it is that people are trying to do when they say pray.
They're so. You can invite in spirits to possess you.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
I know that's odd terminology, but that's what you do when you dwell on your rage.
Right, right. Now, imagine that you're doing that in the most positive possible direction.
So what you're doing is you're generating a hypothesis about the mode of conduct and perception that would best typify you if you were ideal.
And then establishing a relationship with that and inviting it in.
That's what the in that evangelical Protestants are doing when they formulate a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
That's exactly what they're doing.
Now, on the addiction side, so I studied alcoholism for years.
That was the target of my dissertation in the first 20 papers that I published.
I knew the alcoholism literature very well and the neurological end of it as well.
And it was known among alcohol researchers to be known for 60 years, more even, that the most reliable treatment for alcoholism was religious transformation.
And this is well accepted among researchers in the field who have no religious affiliation whatsoever.
And I do believe that a huge part of that is a consequence of incentive restructuring.
So you said, for example, with your friend that fear wouldn't work.
Well, alcohol is a pretty good at it, anxiolytic drug, but it's also for people who are prone to alcoholism.
It's a good incentive reward source like cocaine.
If you're going to you can't get rats addicted to cocaine if they live in a natural environment.
They have to be isolated in a cage before they'll bar press to their own death for cocaine.
So one of the things you want to do when you treat addiction is you want to substitute a new incentive structure.
Right. Because the part of the addictive process is.
You fall into a false incentive pattern, right?
Because cocaine makes you feel like you're doing something useful in respect to an important goal, even though you're not.
It mimics that even if you know you're not, even if you know, I don't say I've never done cocaine.
I would be open about it.
If I had, I, I think I like dopaminergic states enough that I've been very scared of doing it.
Also, it wasn't around much just because of when I went to college, it just wasn't a drug that was around much.
But it's a remarkable drug in the sense that people who take cocaine seem to be excited about everything.
There is high dopaminergic state and the brain becomes exceptionally good at finding cocaine even in the absence of resources, which is pretty remarkable.
If you think about it, you know, I mean, most people can't find the thing or get the thing they want in the absence of the resources to get it.
But people who take hard drugs that really spike dopamine somehow manage.
Yeah, sure. Sometimes they find the path.
She says lie, cheat and steal extremely lie, cheat and steal, but they'll do other things too, right?
They'll socialize with people that have it.
So they don't have to lie, cheat and steal.
It's, it's, it's incredible to see that drug and things like methamphetamine take over people's minds.
And now I'm thinking the pathway appears when the aim is firmly in mind.
Right? See, this is another, this is another insistence that's derived from the religious literature.
So because the idea there is that if your aim is upward, the pathway forward to that will make itself manifest.
And that's true. You just pointed out that it was true in relationship to addiction.
Right. Is that if once that, once you're in that realm of possessed personality, the pathway forward will show itself to you even under straightened circumstances.
Right. And it's partly because you could think of our perceptual systems and our emotional systems for that matter as navigating tools.
Right. So now the addiction, the addicted brain, like they see the aim is possessed by the substance of addiction, right?
So now the highest God is cocaine, let's say.
And so now all pathways in the world are pathways to cocaine.
All objects in the world are markers on the pathway to cocaine because it just dominates.
But it's not, it's not just an impulse.
It dominates the perceptual landscape as well.
That's makes it, and the emotional landscape.
And it comes with all these rationalizations.
That's all those lies, right?
The whole thing. It's a whole personality.
Yeah. Brutal. Brutal.
Nowadays, I get a lot of questions about pornography.
And the discussion around pornography is always related to the discussion around masturbation.
But let's just talk about pornography for a moment in this context of these primitive drives and these circuits within the hypothalamus, which we were all born with, that clearly some of them are devoted to our progression as a species through reproduction.
Zero question about that.
Sexual behavior being linked to reproduction, not always, but certainly we can all agree on that.
It's a necessary precondition.
I hope we can still all agree on that.
But last time I checked, that's still true.
A sperm and an egg met someplace in some context to create all of us.
Okay. We're still grounded in that.
Pornography is something that I hear quite a lot from typically young males, but sometimes young females or even older females who say that they can see themselves trying to resist the desire to go look at it.
And it almost doesn't feel like a desire anymore.
They're sort of just in a kind of a compulsion that is that is almost unconscious, but they're just aware of the fact that they're like a needing disorder.
They're doing it. They know they shouldn't be doing it and they can't help themselves.
And we could think about two ways to attack this if one believes it's a real concern and they certainly do.
So I do. I don't I would be open if I if I had or do I pornography has not been my thing and I don't struggle with it.
But but when I hear from these people, it's so clear that they're asking is it the prevalence of pornography out there or is it something really broken in them?
Like, are they broken?
But I don't know that I would say after having the discussion we've had thus far that they're broken.
It seems to me that it's like that, as you said, it's the manifestation of one part of their it's one personality within them.
Well, it's been it's been compulsively rewarded.
So, you know, when when a when you see yourself moving towards the combination of a desired goal, a dopamine, that's a company by dopamine release.
OK, and so two things, you know this, but everybody who's listening might not.
There's two elements to that dopamine release.
One is pleasure. But the other is that the dopamine, imagine that there are circuits activated as you're acting.
What the dopamine does is increase the probability that the circuits were that were activated just before the positive experience happened, grow.
OK, so now if you're engaged with pornography and that culminates in sex in in successful sexual satiation, which it can, that's what masturbation does.
Then the whole personality that's oriented toward that set of stimuli is going to come to dominate.
It's very much like an addiction, except it's it's.
You know, there has been there's been work done with generally simpler animals on these phenomena called super stimuli.
I think it's stickleback fish where this was first observed.
So males, I hope I get this right, but I've got it approximately right.
I believe it's male sticklebacks will they are very aggressive towards other male sticklebacks.
And the reason they're aggressive is because the other male sticklebacks have a red dot on their bellies.
So they don't like red dots at all.
And so you could really enrage a stickleback with a red dot.
And if you use a red dot, it's a little bigger and a little brighter than the typical red dot.
You get a super stimulus.
It's virtually irresistible to the stickleback.
And it's weird because the maximal activation is produced by a stimulus that they wouldn't see in nature.
It slightly exceeds that's exactly what pornography does.
It's a super stimulus.
Right. And it's not surprising that young males in particular are susceptible to that because male sexuality in human beings is very visually oriented.
And a lot of our brain is visual way more than virtually every other animal.
Certainly every other primate and and every other mammal.
And so we have a situation where any 13 year old boy can see more hyper attractive super stimulus women in one day than the most successful man who ever lived 100 years ago would have ever seen in his whole life.
Yeah. Well, that's like an evolutionary ecological radical ecological transformation and the and it's worse because it's easily accessible.
So it takes no work.
Right. So not only is it a super stimulus, it's one that's at hand.
So to speak and the and the the analog in the food world would be highly palatable, highly processed food.
Yeah. Sugar fat. You go into the other day, I went into a gas station to use the restroom because I was traveling home for Thanksgiving.
And I looked around and I and I I thought this isn't a convenience store.
This is a pharmacy.
All right. Everything that had chocolate also also seemed to have caffeine and color.
Everything. Every drink seemed to combine not just sugar, but also caffeine and some other things that would provide stimulants and you've got nicotine and drinks.
And these things on their own aren't necessarily bad.
Any one of these one elements and low, low enough doses in frequent use, etc.
But maybe sugar being the one that that clearly I think deserves a deeper investigation.
Right. But it just occurs to me that it's different than difference between manufacturing sugar and manufacturing cocaine.
I mean, you take something that's available in its natural form in relatively low concentrations and purify it.
I mean, coca leaves, the natives used coca leaves forever as mild stimulant didn't seem to cause them any trouble, but that's way different than cocaine.
Right. And sugar has the same arguably the same pathological properties.
Well, I didn't think we were going to go here, but I think it's extremely appropriate and important that we do.
So I know that you followed what is essentially an elimination diet for a number of years.
You eat meat. All right.
I eat meat, vegetables, fruit and some starches, unrefined starches in any event.
One thing that I think is absolutely clear from following a clean diet, so to speak, of any kind, but let's say of the sort that you follow or I follow is that you very soon learn the relationship between taste of the food, volume of the food, macronutrient, so protein, fat or carbohydrate content,
micronutrients and satiation, which is, if you think about it, it's sort of like a big plate of broccoli or a big steak or something.
The brain learns and the hypothalamus learns the association between the taste, the caloric content, what else is in there and satiation.
If you think about highly processed food or even combinations of multiple ingredients, that's absolutely impossible to do.
The brain can't parse what are the various things in here and how do they relate to my feelings of satisfaction.
It's the difference between a super drug and what I believe are the elements that were that we have.
Explain why you think that link about satiation can't be learned in the case of these processed foods.
Yeah, because in the context of these processed foods, they're activating multiple neuron systems in the hypothalamus and gut.
We know that the gut has neurons that can respond to sugar, fatty acids and amino acid content.
And there's this prominent theory that one of the main reasons we eat is to forage for amino acids that will eat until we get enough of the essential amino acids.
And we correlate that with taste, but that the gut has neurons where we know the gut has neurons that signal through the vagus, up through a little relay called the no -dos ganglion.
If you want to look at it, fun, fun name.
And then up to the dopaminergic centers of the brain, which make us, oh, when we eat something that has a high essential amino acid content like a steak, a really tasty steak, the neurons in the gut in a way that is independent of taste are signaling to the brain.
I'm getting essential amino acids.
You should eat more of this thing.
If those, let's just say a small fraction of those amino acids that are present in a candy bar or in a package of Skittles, which I'm guessing there's very few of them, if any, you're going to continue to forage for food, because those neurons will also respond to sugar.
Basically, it will keep you eating until you get enough of those amino acids.
In other words, there are two parallel tracks, one within our taste system.
Multiple pathways to satiation.
Totally right. Multiple pathways to satiation.
One dependent on taste, one dependent on actual nutrient content.
The mouth can only learn taste association.
The mouth can't actually learn nutrient content.
The gut knows nutrient content.
The problem is you take a food that is low in a micronutrient or macronutrient or essential amino acids or essential fatty acids.
After all, there are no essential carbohydrates.
They're only essential amino acids and essential fatty acids.
And it will keep you eating and it will keep the appetite system revving until you get enough of those.
Now here's the issue.
If you've ever done this, it's probably empty calories.
So in some ways, this again is an analog to the whole discussion around pornography, masturbation and reproduction.
I'm not saying that reproduction is the be all end all of sexual activity, but in the evolutionary sense, it absolutely is.
Right. There's no question about that.
There's no moral judgment there.
That's just the reality.
So the situation with food is the following.
If we are eating without any gut level understanding of what's coming in, we will keep eating.
If you let me give an example, you probably haven't done this experiment in a while, but if you've ever just had, you know, ribeye steak or two, it's pretty satiating.
Maybe you also have a salad if you're me or some broccoli or something like that.
If one takes, then even after you've eaten all that one bite of pasta, one bite of pasta, the next impulse is more.
Yes. Right. Even though you already have enough essential amino acids from those steaks, you're losing, you know, a threshold, you've reached that, et cetera, all of that good stuff.
Why? Because blood glucose goes up and then you desire more because blood glucose elevations are linked directly to the dopaminergic system.
So what I'm basically trying to say here is that I do think that there are elements to our food, modern food, if you will.
It seems like it's anything but modern in the sense that it's worse for us than the more primitive foods, but highly processed foods, pornography, any drug that spikes dopamine dramatically, like methamphetamine, for instance, any behavior that spikes dopamine dramatically, that very quickly hijacks
these circuits. And to me the way to teach those circuits a calmer, more prudent version of themselves, right, to enter a different hypothalamic activation pattern is to start breaking the things down into their essential elements, right, about the motivation, the pleasure, et cetera, to tamp all that down.
I mean, we know that for pornography, if the pornography is very extreme, then less extreme pornography doesn't seem to work.
Well, that's because there's also a novelty kick in dopaminergic striving, right?
I mean, so with any basic, appetitive pleasure, there's a dopaminergic kick, but with any novelty, there's also a dopaminergic kick.
So there's an optimized threshold for novelty and appetitive striving that plays out in pornography.
So there's the direct effect of the stimulus as such, but there's variation in the stimulus that's also novel.
And so it's a common pattern for pornographic usage to become more, what would you say, fetishistic.
That's one way of thinking about it as it progresses because that keeps the novelty alive.
Right. That's very dangerous.
That's a very dangerous development.
Right. And I would venture in a very different domain that if you were to eat your steak slathered in barbecue sauce for a couple of weeks, going back to the way that you eat them now, which, by the way, this is a great opportunity to educate people about something that you taught me when we had dinner
last, which is that if you're gonna order a steak, order a Pittsburgh char.
The char on the outside is incredibly tasty.
We love that the umami taste, is that we should have a devoted taste receptors.
That's complex. So and if they don't know what a Pittsburgh char is, then maybe you're in the wrong restaurant or you need to educate them.
But incredibly satiating, delicious.
But if you were to slather those steaks in a bunch of things, I would suspect that after a while, your plain steaks wouldn't taste as good.
Oh certainly. But the way to make them taste good again would be to eat them plain for a period of time in which the stuff that all the condiments, etc., would start to become aversive.
I do believe that when we return to the sort of most naturally satisfying mode of engaging with these circuits.
Here we're talking about food and sex in parallel that they become especially satiating.
And I think that, you know, in hearing from all these people that are addicted to pornography and they're not addicted like they telling me they love it and they can't stop.
They're telling me it's no longer working for them, that there's this, you know, diminishment in the amount of dopamine that they're getting over time.
And they feel trapped within it and they have no sense whatsoever because they haven't been socialized to go out and find a real relationship.
A real sexual relationship or a relationship.
Well, it also it's also there is some evidence suggesting too that if you've been socialized into pornography sexuality, it's actually quite difficult to establish a sexual relationship with an actual partner.
Now I would say to some degree that's always been difficult because it's a complex form of behavior.
But the introduction of pornography, well, it sets up a whole landscape of expectation, for example, that's not necessarily going to play out that well in the real world, let's say.
And there's also a learning of those biological systems in the brain to evoke arousal by observing sex as opposed to participating.
Yes, right. Complete, completely different.
So some of these. That's voyeur, right?
You're basically learning to be a voyeur.
Right, right. And so you think about young brains that are highly plastic, learning that.
So the returning that we have no idea what to make of that, because especially for young men, because when they hit puberty, sexuality becomes a very insistent force.
And we have no idea what effect pornography has on the development of male sexuality.
None. I've wondered for a while whether there's something inherently rewarding about creating impact or action at a distance.
Here's why. I've been watching these videos of Elon's rockets and thinking like, that is awesome.
That is awesome. We're built on a throwing platform.
You know, yeah, just there's one image of the, of the rocket thrusters that just captivated me.
I'm not a spacecraft guy.
I mean, I think it's really cool, but I mean, I wouldn't consider myself somebody that like looks at the stars and things I want to go.
You know, I want to go up there.
I might, if I'd given the opportunity, but that's not been my thing.
But I looked at this and I thought, what an awesome display of power.
But then I was saying, like, what is power?
It's really about having impact or action at a distance.
When we were kids, we targeted dirt, cloth wars, right, targeted, right.
What an incredible display of funneling the laws of physics and engineering into something that can have enormous action at a distance.
And perhaps even take us into new galaxies.
Amazing, right? The word sin in many languages means to miss the target.
Right. And it speaks to exactly what you're describing.
Like that, that the cache of action at a distance, that's unbelievably deeply embedded in us.
That's why I made that throwing gesture.
Like human beings throw.
That's our physiology.
Right. We can throw something at a distant target.
Well, that's structured our our cognition.
We're using our thoughts to hit distant targets.
That's what we do. All the games that young men play, so many of those games are target games.
All of the sports spectacles that people want to participate in vicariously, even vicariously, they're target hitting games.
Like our gaze specifies as the center of a target.
There's targets everywhere.
And we're unbelievably focused on bridging the gap between where we are and where we're going.
Yeah, that's the whole perceptual landscape.
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So this thing about action at a distance to me feels like so inherent to our progression as a species.
Most technologies are about that.
In fact, if you think about social media, you know, somebody tweets something and, you know, when people react to it, maybe positively or negatively, the school shooter in a very dark example, a sad and tragic example, right?
Action at a distance.
Then you think about pornography and masturbation.
And I'm not passing any moral judgment here.
It's like the ultimate form of creating action at a distance would be to create a new human being with somebody, right?
I mean, that's it. You're propagating it in physical distance, creating a new being and in time, incredible.
And then you think about masturbation and you think about pornography and there is no action at a distance.
And I'm not just punning here.
I mean, literally, there's not much action at a distance.
It's all up close to oneself.
But there's there's no impact on anybody.
It's almost as if the energy that we're born with to be able to create positive things to evolve our species through action at a distance, through creation of knowledge, technology, children, communities, culture.
Oh, the ultimate expression.
It's just really it's just loop back into oneself.
It's it's as if and I don't know what language there is for this in biology, but it's as if like all that dopaminergic drive is just kind of looped.
Back into oneself. And it goes nowhere.
And I think when I hear about the incredibly like what the language for it is only like the diminished souls of these people who are coming to me saying like, you know, like help.
And I'm thinking, OK, listen, I'm a podcaster, I'm a scientist, I know some things about the dopaminergic system, but, you know, there are ways that they can get help.
I think there are 12 step programs for this and so forth and other things.
But, you know, I think what they're saying is that they're they're just kind of dissolving in their own in their own reflex.
But there's no action at a distance for them.
This is the same thing I see with the failure to launch kids who are still living at home who are not having any action at a distance.
I think we were designed to disperse from our families and to create action at a distance up until a certain age.
But I see so many of the problems that we face as failure to find a productive way to have action at a distance.
I would say in the terminology that I've been developing.
So, for example, in this in this book, We Who Wrestle With God, I'm one of the stories I analyze is the story of Abraham.
And it's very interesting story psychologically.
I mean, I think it's it's it's stunning, actually, and I'll lay some of that out for you and tell me what you think about it.
So so the divine is characterized in the classic stories of our culture as the ultimate up.
So you can think about the divine as the target as such rather than any particular target.
So here's a way of thinking about it.
You know, so an ambition will seize you and then you'll aim at fulfilling that ambition.
But once the ambition is fulfilled, a new ambition makes itself manifest, which might be a greater ambition, let's say, if your personality is expansive.
And then if you fulfill that, the same thing will happen.
So then you could imagine that there's a meta ambition behind all proximal ambitions.
OK, now the divine characterization of the divine is a characterization of that meta ambition.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
So it's something that recedes as you approach it.
But it's also the thing that all ambitions have in common.
And we know there is such a thing because otherwise we wouldn't have a concept of ambition, right, which speaks to a commonality among ambitions.
OK, in the story of Abraham, the divine is characterized in relationship to something like ambition.
So Abraham has the he's already immersed in a situation that's akin in a way to the scenario of wealthy and a person in the modern world who's in a situation of abundance.
Abraham's parents are wealthy and they provide for him.
There's nothing he needs to do.
And in consequence, so he's attained the socialist utopia or the consumerist utopia.
You can look at it either way.
And there's no reason for him to move forward.
So he doesn't. He doesn't do anything till he's 75.
And then the voice comes to him, which is the voice of adventure.
And it's God in this story.
That's how God is defined.
Right. And God says to Abraham.
You have to leave all this comfort, which is a very interesting proposition to begin with.
It's like, why the hell would you leave that when you have everything you need?
Well, the implication is, is that you don't have everything you need when you're being delivered everything you need.
That isn't how life works.
OK, so God says you have to leave your your father's tent.
You have to leave your tribe.
You have to leave those who speak your language.
You have to venture out into the world.
So God is conceptualized in this story as the impulse, the voice that compels you out into the world and that encourages you to do so.
So that's a hypothesis about what the ultimate up is.
OK, and Abraham agrees and he does so in two ways.
He he builds an altar signifying.
