Dr. Kay Tye: The Biology of Social Interactions and Emotions | Huberman Lab

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. K. Tai. Dr. K. Tai is a professor of neuroscience at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

She did her training at MIT and at Stanford and is currently an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. which is a highly curated group of individuals who are incentivized to do high-risk, high-reward work and pioneer new areas of biological study.

Throughout her career, Dr. Keitai has made fundamental breakthroughs into our understanding of the brain, including demonstrating that a brain area called the amygdala, which most people associate with fear and threat detection, is actually involved in reinforcement of behaviors and experiences that are positive and involve reward.

Her current work focuses on various aspects of social interaction, including what happens when we feel lonely or isolated.

Today, Kei Tai will tell us about her discovery of so-called loneliness neurons, neurons that give us that sense that we are not being fulfilled from our social interactions.

She also describes a phenomenon she discovered called social homeostasis, which is our sense that we are experiencing enough, not enough, or just enough social interaction, irrespective of whether or not we are an introvert or an extrovert.

We also talk about social hierarchies and social rank, how people and animals tear out into so-called alphas and betas, subordinates and dominance, et cetera, in all sorts of social interactions.

I think everyone will find That discussion, especially interesting.

And we talk about the role of social media and online interactions. and why despite extensive interaction with many, many individuals, those social media and online interactions can often leave us feeling deprived in specific ways.

We talk about the neurochemical, the neural circuit, and some of the hormonal aspects of social interactions.

It's a discussion that, by the end, will have you thinking far more deeply about what is a social interaction and why certain social interactions leave us feeling so good, others feeling sort of meh. and why other social interactions or lack of social interactions can often leave us feeling quite depleted, even depressed.

It's a conversation central to mental illness and the understanding of things like depression and anxiety, PTSD and isolation. and it's a conversation central to mental health and in order to build healthy social interactions.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

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And now for my conversation with Dr. K. Tai.

Dr. K. Tai, welcome. Andy Huberman, what a treat.

Folks are going to hear you call me Andy and wonder if my name is Andy.

I always know who I'm speaking to. according to whether or not they call me Andrew, which is my family and people that I know after a certain period of my life, Drew, which are people that know me through my very brief and non-illustrious career in boxing and Andy, which are people that met me as I was coming up through science.

Let's just put it this way. There was another Andrew.

We did a coin flip and I lost. So Andy is fine.

Andrew's fine, whatever makes you comfortable.

What's important today is not how anyone refers to me, but rather, the discussion about your work, which is spectacular.

I've known you a long time and I've been following your career and it's just been amazing and wonderful to see the contributions you've made to science and also to the culture of science.

So we're going to talk about both of those things.

To kick things off, Let's talk about a brain structure that most people I think have heard of, but that is badly misunderstood.

And that's the amygdala. Most people hear amygdala and they think, oh, Fear, that's what the amygdala is all about.

But you know, and I'm hoping you'll educate us on the fact that the amygdala is actually Far more complex than that and far more interesting than that.

So when you hear the word amygdala, where does your mind go?

I agree that a lot of the bandwidth on the amygdala has been occupied by fear studies. but we've known actually for a really long time that the amygdala is important for all sorts of emotional processing.

Since Kluver and Busey, performed lesions on monkeys and found that monkeys would then have flat affective responses to all sorts of different stimuli. poop, food, inanimate object, whatever it was, just nothing.

No emotion. No emotional response, no motivational significance, however you want to phrase it. to things that usually would make you either disgusted or excited or neutral.

And so I think that knowledge about the amygdala was there from the beginning.

It's not something I came up with. But then it's interesting, it's almost a meta statement or a meta observation about how scientific research progresses, sometimes you make a lot of progress in one particular vein because It's easy to press forward there, but it's important to also think about all the other parts and filling in the space in between. to make sure you haven't missed anything.

So the narrative about the amygdala became about fear.

And I think also just when we think about survival, when you are an animal in the natural world, especially if you're a prey animal. which is the majority, that's a lot of animals, then you need to prioritize escaping a predator It's immediate threat on your survival versus reward mating, drinking water, getting food.

These things can be done later. escaping this predator is paramount.

And so there should be some natural asymmetry in how we process emotion at baseline.

And so that's something that we've looked into a lot as well.

But I think that the big picture – discovery that my team has contributed to our understanding of the amygdala is that it represents a fork in the road. for processing emotional valence and thinking about all these old psychological theories about how do you emotionally evaluate the world around you?

What's What's the chain of events? Is there a chain of events?

What's happening in a certain order versus what's happening in parallel?

For example, one model is... you know, there's all this information that comes in and then we have to filter out what's important, what's going to be something they need to pay attention to versus, what do I need to ignore?

If I'm driving, I need to pay attention to the road, this light, this pedestrian just started walking versus what it feels like for my sock to be touching my foot. not super relevant right now or my butt against the seat.

Nothing I need to pay attention to. I need to focus on the dynamic information. then you have to select, you know, the second step would be selecting whether it's good or bad and what you want to do with it.

And so that... I think the selection of whether you're assigning it a positive or negative valence happens in the amygdala.

So glad you brought up this word valence.

I think it's a word that some scientists, but most of the general public are probably not familiar with.

So let's talk about valence. And then I want to go back to the amygdala and kind of explore some of its diversity of function a little bit more.

So when I hear the word valence, I think. goodness versus badness of something.

Is that? Basically, basically it's been used in a lot of different fields.

I think of negative and positive numbers or –

But it's an analogy that we take to just mean, yeah, net positive, net negative.

And it's... intentional departure from the word value.

Value becomes very scalar. Everything's on a You know, it can be in the same direction with different magnitudes is often how we think about value.

It could be representing both valences. But often it's a small reward and a big reward or small punishment and big punishment is how experimentally we parse. value.

And so Valence is just asking about how your brain responds to things that are good or bad.

What are neurons that might respond similarly to things that are good and bad?

You know, those might be importance neurons rather than positive or negative valence neurons.

So yeah, I think it's just a term that signifies that next step.

So when we walk into say a novel environment, do you think that our amygdalas are active and really trying to figure out whether or not an environment, a set of people or a person is safe and really just check that box first in order to be able to do other things is is this business of determining valence and the role of the amygdala in that kind of the first gate that we have to walk through anytime we're in a new environment.

For instance, you showed up here today and you mentioned I think I locked my car and I said, you'll be fine in this neighborhood either way.

And then you walked in and Presumably, you were taking in the new environment, meeting some new people.

We had a little discussion about caffeine, a little discussion about alcohol.

And... Presumably because you and I know one another, you felt safe, I would hope so.

But presumably the amygdala is always performing this role, even if... we have some prior knowledge about something.

Just figuring out, am I safe here? Where are the exits?

Where are the entrances? Who's here? What's their story?

Do you think all of that is operating and do you think it's always conscious or is it largely unconscious to us?

Okay, so there's a few different questions there.

First, I want to address the question about novelty, and then I want to come back to the other issue of conscious.

But... The way the amygdala works is its job is to assign meaning to anything that could have motivational significance.

And so if it's a brand new thing, we're paying attention, we're seeing if it mattered.

Did it matter? And so I think anything that's novel, even if we don't know what it means, a loud sound you've never heard before, even if it signifies nothing of motivational significance, the first few times that you're presented with it, you'll get an amygdala response.

So you see this in the lab, play the tone for the first time, And then there's a response that rapidly decays when the tone doesn't end up predicting anything that the animal can detect.

Or human. Is this also true in humans? Yeah, this is true in humans.

If you're the type of person that puts your phone on do not disturb versus has it on vibrate.

And, you know, sometimes it's always vibrating and it's just...

It vibrates all the time. Whereas I put my phone on do not disturb.

And so when someone else's phone rings, it's very startling to me.

But they don't even notice because... That's just the sound the phone makes.

It makes it all the time. So I think it has to do with how many times you're presented with it.

And it's a startle response. So the first few times that you are presented with a stimulus, the amygdala will respond and then it decays very quickly.

And then only if that stimulus predicts something important or something rewarding or punishing, then will it begin to respond again?

So it's like you're giving everything novel a chance to tell you in one trial. and single trial learning if something's gonna happen.

And so I think a fire alarm is a great example You know, fire alarm goes off. instantly you know you're looking around is there anything happening even even just people rushing out you know there's there's this the salient thing that you're going to respond to and If you have a lot of fire drills, then you might respond differently after a while.

So I think that's the habituation component.

You mentioned that the amygdala will respond to a novel stimulus And if it predicts something interesting, then other things happen.

We'll talk about those. If not, the amygdala stops responding.

And you said something really important, which is that the amygdala will respond to something that is predicting reward or punishment.

And I think most people don't realize that.

In fact, I think a lot of Early career neurobiologists don't realize that, that the amygdala is not just involved in fear and punishment.

So when we talk about the amygdala, presumably we're talking about the amygdala complex, a bunch of other things.

So is it true that there are neurons in the amygdala complex that predict reward and others that predict fear and punishment.

Yeah. So as a graduate student, I worked on a part of the amygdala called the basolateral amygdala.

It's still a complex within the broader amygdala. this brain region is cortical-like in that it's mostly glutamatergic neurons. with some GABAergic neurons mixed in, but without the same structure that the cortex has.

I studied the amygdala in the context of reward.

I found essentially that when you induce plasticity, you get a synaptic strengthening, when you When animals learn things, amygdala neurons fire in response to cues that predict rewards.

And this was... coming into the context of a field that had shown that this happens with fear.

And so this became... I remember the very first time I gave a presentation at a scientific conference, I was a junior graduate student I was given a 10-minute talk at the inaugural Amygdala Gordon Research Conference.

Many famous professors were speaking. And there were two talks about the amygdala and reward, and I was one of them.

The response to the talk was just how is this possible?

How can the amygdala, how can you get the same readout for reward and fear?

And really it came to be, there's two possibilities.

I mean, there's more possibilities, but the main two possibilities are number one, that the amygdala wasn't specific for fear at all.

It just responds to anything important. If it's important, it responds, period.

The other possibility is that the amygdala is sending, has different neurons that respond to positive and negative predictive stimuli. and sends this information to different downstream targets to respond differently.

Obviously, I respond differently to a reward.

I walk towards it. I consume it. a punishment i'm avoiding it and so clearly the behaviors are diametrically opposed and so to me it seemed very possible, at least, that there was a divergence point and maybe this could be it.

And so we just did some very simple experiments. when I first started my lab, to trace the projection targets of amygdala neurons and record.

So everything's all mixed up together. So it's not obvious that this would be a fork in the road.

But when you look at them, you do see that there are projections that come from the amygdala that are predominantly encoding either reward or fear.

And there's many different projections. And this is just the beginning.

But this was a time when It was a novel concept to even think that neurons from one region could have completely different functions going to different downstream targets, which now seems totally obvious. there's hundreds and hundreds of papers showing it now, but at the time it was difficult to get this work published because that's just not how people thought about information moving through the brain, I guess.

Well, I think, first of all, such important work and so wonderful to be early in the the phase of recasting how the brain works, which is what you did.

I think most people in the general public still think think amygdala fear.

And clearly it's able to signal reward and punishment as you discovered and are now pointing out.

I'm curious, does the amygdala have a direct line to... some of the organs of the body that can change our bodily activation state. heart rate, breathing rate, muscle tension, because I think most of us experience fear and reward as both in our head in our brains, but also of the body?

Great question. Great question. I'll tell you the clues that lead me to my current working model, which is not necessarily the final word.

I would say that I think the amygdala complex, as we're discussing it, these 13 sub-nuclei that reside in the temporal lobe, they are important for assigning importance, but they're not important for producing the actual autonomic arousal that we associate with panic or fear.

The reason I say this is there's a famous case study, Patient SM, who has bilateral damage to her amygdala and You know no responses to emotional faces no responses to fearful stimuli But if you capable of having the panic response due to low to suffocation associated with it with suffocation and so there's still the ability to produce that panic and arousal response.

It's just not the cognitive evaluation of it.

I think that's what we think the amygdala is doing is assigning that.

It does receive information from the rest of the body.

There are, for example, ghrelin receptors in the amygdala. things that can sense hunger and we've done some work looking at this, kind of inspired by, I'm not sure if you're familiar with this study,

It's a controversial study, Danziger 2011, but where the Supreme Court judges, they looked at Supreme Court judge rulings on parole decisions across the day relative to meal breaks.

And you can see, Right after, it's like breakfast, you know, 90%.

Everybody's getting full. Everybody's getting out.

Yeah. And then it just... drops to 10%, then there's lunch, then we're back to 80%, and then it just precipitously drops to single digits again.

So the judges are changing the leniency of their rulings depending on how well fed they are.

You know, there are counterarguments to this, but that is strongly what the data suggests.

You know, it is not a controlled study. It's just a striking correlation.

But it's not a completely novel concept, the hangry phenomenon.

I'm sure, I don't know, everybody's different.

I certainly experience it. But we think that when you are getting strong signals from the body, for example...

I think the amygdala's gonna be able to detect a lot of different homeostatic inputs, even though we don't have evidence for that yet, but for specifically energy balance, When you're hungry, your amygdala can detect it perhaps through ghrelin receptors or other mechanisms.

And then what we see is that after one day of food deprivation for mice, you can see this shift in the balance between the positive valence encoding projection neurons and the negative valence encoding projection neurons. at baseline. fear trumps all.

The negative projection neurons can silence the reward projection ones, which makes sense.

If I need to run away from this predator, you know, I can't worry about eating this food right now. if I'm in a near starvation-like state, which for mice, they have very high metabolism, so one day without food is a really big deal.

They only last a few days. at this point they are kicking into survival mode where actually getting food becomes the greater need.

And you'll see animals, you know, hunting in ways they normally wouldn't hunt when they're really desperate.

And so this mode of food deprivation shifts things so that the reward pathway actually has stronger power to influence and silence the fear pathway than before.

Wow, the brain is so smart. It really is.

It can take what we normally think of as a priority list.

Fear and staying safe is more important than food reward. food and acquiring food is critical to survival. it can invert all that is what you're saying.

Amazing. And it happens, you know, in a day, it seems reversible.

So that's something that we're looking at right now and thinking about how specific is this Is this to food?

Is this true for lots of different things?

What about exercise? Other stressors that are, you know... potentially more positive, the amygdala is able to detect a lot of different signals from the environment.

And we're not sure how all of that gets in there.

So I think one of the detection of The environment has been really well worked out in terms of our basic sensory modalities.

Think about the things that really affect your emotions day to day, at least for me.

As a human in this society, the things that affect my emotions most today are almost entirely social interactions.

Very subtle ones. Ones that don't seem to threaten my life or safety.

You know, very small, subtle things. Social interactions are what, you know, have the greatest bearing, I think, on my emotional evaluation and my emotional bandwidth.

And what is that? How do we detect that?

How do we assemble this information, apply all the nuance, put on the onion layers of social programming to come out with whatever I interpret this gesture to mean.

It's pretty incredible. And so that's kind of where my research program has been sliding.

It's such an interesting area. Let's drill into it a bit.

And to put it in context, maybe we talk about social media.

So on social media, whether or not it's Instagram or X, those seem to be the two major platforms.

I'm not on TikTok. People say stuff. Sometimes they say positive things.

Sometimes they say negative things. Sometimes they say things that are sort of neutral.

So it seems to me that nowadays if one is on these social media platforms that we are – we've sort of crowdsourced this – phenomenon of social interaction in a way that we hadn't before.

I grew up prior to the advent of social media and I could bring my physical body into certain environments and not others.

Even at high school, I could hang out We had an area called the Bat Cave where skateboarders and some other at that time misfits hung out with the quad where the cool kids hung out, et cetera.

You could pick your niche. Social media is not like that.

You can pick followers, they can pick you, etc.

But I think since most people have social media nowadays, it seems, or are on there in some ways, that we've placed ourselves in the center of an arena which we have a ton of incoming input.

We all, most of us have amygdalas. Two of them, amygdalae, as you pointed out, one on each side of the brain.

And presumably we're on these platforms to... receive positive feedback and avoid negative feedback.

However, there does seem to be a cohort of people who seem to like the friction of combat or kind of let's just call it high friction interactions or moderate friction interactions.

They like to argue. They like to parse ideas.

It's not all bad necessarily. So have you ever looked at social media in your own mind, looked at social media through the lens of... of amygdala filtering or through the lens of neural circuit filtering and kind of wondered, what's going on there that someone without your in-depth knowledge of these brain circuitries would not think to look at that landscape.

Or maybe we could just do that now as a kind of playful experiment.

I like that. So I A lot of people ask me about social media from the context of, is this social contact meaningful?

Is this positive? Does this count? Does this help you not feel lonely.

And of course, I don't know the answer. We haven't done that particular study yet, and I don't know of that specific study having been performed, but My prediction is that it's not going to do much because I

I believe that a key component of what I would consider social contact heavily depends on having some interbrain synchrony, some interaction that is synchronous.

And I think with social media, sometimes there can be an engaging dialogue that... plays out in near real time.

But generally speaking, it's asynchronous.

You're looking at things that are happening that you're not a part of.

You're excluded from all these things. They happened in Australia yesterday and I'm on there saying, cool, love it.

Yeah. And then the person's already asleep.

Yes, exactly. Asynchronous like that. We're not experiencing things at the same time.

It's not a shared experience, you know, in terms of having that bond necessarily.

And so I've never actually been asked about how... the amygdala process is social media.

I guess I think what happens is The amygdala is just responding to stimuli.

It's sending up bottom-up signals. It's a caricature of... bottom up and top down processing.

Let's give an example that I'm walking down the street and all of a sudden I hear like a really ferocious dog barking and all going crazy.

And then I get super scared. And then I realized, okay, there's a fence.

So the amygdala detect, you know, heard the dog barking, And there's a dog barking, and I'm freaking out.

Then my prefrontal cortex realizes there's the fence, and it looks very sturdy.

This fence looks... and then I'm relaxing and I'm resuming my walking normally.

You know, I think that's sort of the dance that our brain is doing when we have top down and bottom up that we're trying to stay focused.

So for me, I think when I'm on social media, there's so many stimuli that are evoking responses and, um, To be completely transparent, and I know this is not something that everybody else does or can do or is necessarily what's best for them, but...

I work very hard to control input from the top down in terms of I really, really limit the amount.

I basically... don't check email or go on social media.

I would say I'm on social media or email. less than one hour per week, basically per week.

All I have to say to that is congratulations.

We'll talk about social media again in a second, but as a fellow professor, email once a week.

I've heard of people scheduling their times for email responses, but once a week, that is awesome.

No wonder you're so productive. I have people who help me get through it and filter out what's important.

Otherwise, whenever I do my own email, I say yes to all these things, then I make all these plans, and then I have too many trips.

And I'm responding, fragmented, fragmented.

And it's just, you know, overcommitting.

And I think I know my limits. Sometimes it's difficult for me. to be in my amygdala mode responding to stimuli and yet letting my prefrontal cortex do its thing.

So I've set some very heavy prefrontal cortically-selected limits of the input I put in so that my brain can function and be clear I can't be creative.

I can't have epiphanies if there's all this clutter of like writing this person back and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, tweet, tweet.

It's just, you know, get the trash out. wipe squeegee the brain down so that we can actually grow something beautiful and new.

Well, and I want to reemphasize what I said in my introduction, which is that, I mean, you are oh so productive.

And when I say productive, I don't just mean productive, like plug and chug. work you've done is incredibly creative.

You transformed our understanding of what this famous structure, the amygdala, actually does.

I mean, you've made so many important discoveries as a consequence of presumably other things, but including wiping away all this incoming and clutter, as you said, controlling the top-down inputs.

I have to ask just from a practical standpoint, during that one hour a week, Are you reading every email that came in or are you just being very selective about which emails?

No, no, no. So you're not opening most emails?

No, I don't open most emails. Amazing. No, I just I search for the ones that my assistant identifies as the one I need to open.

There's like a list of things that I'd be interested in.

And then we'll go through the list and then, you know, sometimes it requires me to go and find the email and respond to it myself because that is, and then I will do that for 10, you know, 10 minutes a day or something.

Just get out of there as soon as I can. Love it.

Do you pass on this advice to the people that you train?

I think it depends on what resources and what's your job right now, right?

So I think... As a trainee, I definitely did my, as assistant professor, I did my own emails, but at a certain point, I was just never getting to the bottom.

And then it would just stress me out, make me feel overwhelmed.

And what is my job? My job is to number one, be a stable core of a sustainable research program and That just requires me having a lot of mental health and well-being. and clear-mindedness and I need to be able to come up with creative ideas.

I need to be able to sprint when there's a deadline and I just can't exhaust my system with unnecessary I would call them quadrant four in the time management quadrant, if you're familiar with this.

Oh, yeah. What is it? It's important, urgent.

Yes. Certain things are urgent but not important.

Some things are urgent and important. And some things are neither important nor urgent.

That's most emails. if you read time management literature and you have the luxury to have someone else help you or something that's like so well-trained to be really good at capturing things that are important,

And sometimes I miss emails, but emails are not the way my trainees would reach me.

They would reach me in a different way. And then emails are for everyone else that I didn't give my number to, you know?

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I think this is wonderful advice for people to hear.

We have a future guest on this podcast named Cal Newport.

He wrote the book Deep Work and he has another book called A World Without Email.

He's a computer science professor at Georgetown where he talks extensively about the tremendous career, but also relationship and life value. of doing essentially what you're describing.

Although I do think, Kay, that you represent kind of the extreme of what I've... become aware of it in terms of people that can limit the amount of time on social media platforms and email.

Anyway, I just want to say. Congratulations.

I just want to say that again. And I think even if people don't reduce to one hour per week, I think that making some effort toward reducing the amount of incoming, as you said, controlling the top-down inputs – to the amygdala, but also to the rest of the brain involved in creative processing, et cetera, is so key.

And we actually do have agency. It's just, it's tough. sometimes to build up that discipline.

So you're doing a tremendous service by sharing that somebody as successful as you does this, presumably is successful in part because you do this.

Thank you. Could we by extension say that many people, since billions of people are on social media, are likely triggering the activation of their amygdala clouding out other more potentially productive activation of their neural circuits by sort of just making themselves freely available to the thoughts and words impulses of others.

I mean, to me, it seems the answer would be yes, but I'd like to know what you think.

And there's something to be said. There's definitely been moments where I've gone deep into social media and spent more time in a certain burst, right, that is isolated.

I think that there's a lot to be learned from social media.

So to actually to bring it back to one point you mentioned earlier, on social media sometimes people just want accolades and sometimes there's a lot of of friction One of the reasons I stay on social media, even though I'm making this big effort to sort of declutter my consciousness is because of that feedback.

Especially when, you know, for someone like you, I imagine this has got to be super true.

And even for me at... at a certain point in my career, it just felt like people don't want to tell me bad news to my face as much anymore. positive all the time and you know what they what are they really thinking and social media allows you the protection of anonymity to say what you really think without consequence, essentially.

And so on the one hand, the consequence-free nature of being able to just say things can be very dangerous.

But at the same time, for me, I really value... just being able to receive it.

I'm a big girl, I can filter out what I want when I get all the inputs, but if I don't receive the inputs, sometimes it's hard to learn from the feedback I'm not getting.

So even sometimes feedback's given in a not very nice way.

I can still create a model for someone else that has this perspective that I can take with me and that can be another perspective I can honor easily in the future because I have this theory of mine for someone, someone would get upset about that.

And that's something that could be harmful to people who have this theory of mind.

So I think it's super valuable. from that perspective and that's why I continue to use it.

Yeah, I really applaud that as well. I always read my teaching evals. because they're anonymous.

And yes, I do wonder what grade the different people who gave different evals got.

I don't know that information. I sometimes wonder, did they attend the class or are they just angry they didn't do well on the exam?

But that really represents the small fraction of feedback that I'm that I wonder about most of it. that's valuable to me is the, hey, you know, liked the course, but these parts really sucked, Professor Huberman. this part was completely unclear or completely hated the way you blank, blank and blanked. because that feedback is something I can really work with to improve.

So I think course evals are similar to what you're describing.

I think there's value there. If I were to just look at the positive feedback, and then ignore the negative feedback and write those people off, then I don't think I could improve as a teacher.

Actually, I always encourage comments and feedback and suggestions in the YouTube comments for this podcast for that reason.

And I do read the comments. I go through and I read and a few of them sting.

But, you know, the positive feedback is great, too.

Sometimes it's more of this, please. Or less of that, please.

I think there's information in that. So I think it sounds like you've been doing all of these things naturally.

So actually, since I've had my research group, my lab, we do an anonymous lab survey Every it's supposed to be about every 18 months and then it's a whole long process of going through it and it's just evolved I think it's the fourth or fifth time we've done it and so it's now I think it's like 70 questions.

It's so many questions. Maybe we should trim it down, but it ends up being hundreds of pages of... text, you know, short answer, sometimes long answer, feedback from anonymously from people in my lab.

My lab is So it's, you know, I'm not even trying to really guess who is saying it.

It's just feedback and it takes me months to go through with it. and get all the feedback and it is so useful.

I mean, in a class, amount of content that you have, it's restricted to this very specific time and space.

Whereas when you're mentoring someone over the course of years, there's a lot of different there's a lot of different points of content and interaction.

And you're in the lab all 40 hours a week or whatever.

And, you know, going trips, meeting here.

There's just a lot of different... ways to improve in ways that we've never, you know, I haven't had any training in how to be a really great mentor.

And so I'm getting that training now. I'm making my own course And my mentees are my teachers, and I really am grateful for the tutelage that they provide for free in this anonymous lab survey.

Sometimes it makes me cry, but sometimes it makes me feel really good about something that I'm doing that's working.

And in any case, It makes me feel that I have ground truth.

I guess I still don't know. But when people say things that sting...

It makes me feel like they're saying what they really think and they're not holding back.

It doesn't... You know? And... Bad news feels like reality.

And so that is very... Something about that is rewarding, just to feel like I have reality rather than I'm getting something else, you know?

The model doesn't quite fit. It's very unsatisfying when the model doesn't quite fit.

I love the word ground truth. There's something so beautiful to that.

And I resonate with what you're saying. Let's go back to social interaction, something that your lab is doing lots of work on nowadays.

And maybe we could shift to the sorts of social interaction that most of us are familiar with. sitting across the table, having a coffee with somebody, taking a walk with somebody, maybe a phone call.

Maybe a tough conversation. maybe a playful, unscripted conversation, maybe a meal at a holiday dinner.

You know, there's a huge range there. What do we know about the value of social interaction at the level of sort of core biological needs, like at the level of neural circuits and maybe even hormones, I mean, you know,

Most people have heard of oxytocin. They think the love hormone, but it's there's so much more there for people to understand and know about.

You know, how important is this thing that we call social interaction?

And how bad do things get when we're not getting the right kinds of social interaction?

You know, I think this is a great question and I'm glad that it's become something that has been... recognized at a more global and national scale, just the importance of of having social support in our lives for our well-being.

But social isolation or even just perceived loneliness has... immense health consequences for all social species.

So shortened lifespan, increased mood disorders. increased actually morbidity and mortality for diseases like cancer or heart disease that might not be what we would normally think.

And so I think understanding how each of those processes is happening, those mechanisms are far from being worked out. the correlational evidence is undeniable.

We're now taking this into the lab really for the first time.

And so something so simple as social isolation, how come we don't know way more about it?

And I'm someone who stumbled into the field of social isolation by accident prior to the pandemic.

And so I'll just say the whole story on why there's such a gaping hole in our knowledge as a neuroscience community about social isolation really comes from Harry Harlow's work.

This original work of maternal separation that was undeniably cruel.

It caused irreparable damage to these baby monkeys and They never recovered.

Sorry to interrupt. I apologize. I'm striving to not interrupt in my life, but so that people are on board.

Could you just briefly describe the Harlow experiments?

Yes. So they're very famous experiments where they separated... baby monkeys from their moms and then had either a wire sort of thing holding a bottle.

So, okay, what do you miss most about the mom?

Is it the food or is it the comfort? So they had a wire thing with a milk bottle versus blankets and cuddly, soft things.

And the baby monkeys would go to the cuddly soft thing.

But, you know, a blanket is not a replacement for a mother.

Nobody's saying that it is. And through these experiments, there was extended maternal separation, and it was deemed cruel.

There was permanent irreparable damage when you rehoused these monkeys.

They never re-socialized normally. They had lots of different mental and physical health problems.

And I think in humans, we know that solitary confinement is considered torture.

You know, social isolation is a difficult thing to study in a lot of conditions.

And we stumbled onto it by complete accident through working with a postdoc, a former postdoc in my lab, Jillian Matthews, who was a graduate student doing an experiment on... It was just trying to figure out if these dopamine neurons... would also respond to cocaine the way these ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons were known to respond to cocaine.

Wanted to see if these other dopamines respond to cocaine.

So sort of an incremental study. So when you do these cocaine studies, you inject the animal with cocaine or saline and then leave the naive animal in the cage.

And then you take brain slices, record from the neurons and look at the synaptic strengths and so you know the expected outcome sort of was that these dopamine neurons would be similar to other dopamine neurons that showed long-lasting potentiation after a single dose of cocaine.

But what happened instead was that, yes, there was potentiation of the cocaine.

There's also potentiation... in the saline animals relative to the naive group.

And this was a huge puzzle. What was this?

And it turned out, through many, many different experiments, that it's actually because when you inject animals with cocaine, you're separating them from the group because they act all crazy.

And this is just the way people do the experiment.

So you inject them with saline, you separate them.

The naive animals just stay there. with their other litter mates.

I see. So the control group, the saline control group is actually a social isolation condition.

So by accident. this control group that didn't make sense was how we stumbled onto.

So then we tried a novel cage. It's not the novel cage.

It's the, it's the social isolation. And so.

That is how we became a lab that studied social isolation.

It was a complete accident. We weren't sure what we were looking at.

And then we found these neurons, and we manipulated these neurons, and they produced... something very different than other dopamine neurons, which normally if you stimulate dopamine neurons, these ventral tegmental area, midbrain dopamine neurons.

Like 90% of the time when you hear people talk about dopamine neurons, they mean these ones.

And they're the ones where you press the lever, stimulate the nerves.

We'll press the lever thousands of times, you know.

They love to be stimulated. Yes, and if you're a human and you do cocaine, most people love cocaine.

They're very pro-social when they're on cocaine.

And so that's what dopamine neurons were thought to be doing.

But these other dopamine neurons dorsal raphe that I will also say is in the brainstem near to an aqueduct where you could detect signals from the body.

But these other dopamine neurons in the RAFE, when you stimulate them, Animals don't like it.

They will not work for reward. They actually will move away from a space where they're being stimulated. you know, conditioned place and real time place aversion.

I don't like the feeling of these neurons being activated.

Please stop it. And yet they would be pro-social.

And so for a long time, this was super confusing.

We couldn't understand it. And then Just because at the same time we had a hunger study going on in the lab, we just thought about it like...

I can eat food because it's delicious and I want to eat this yummy treat.

Or I could eat because I'm super hungry.

I feel shaky. I'm just gonna eat this nasty fiber bar out of my backpack because I'm so desperate. and my blood sugar is dangerously low.

And so there's two reasons that you can eat, and one of them is uncomfortable.

Hunger is not comfortable. it's not a good feeling to be hungry.

And so we thought about this and that's kind of how we circularly came around I think we've discovered the loneliness neurons. essentially.

And so what is loneliness? And loneliness is this unpleasant need state of wanting social contact that would have this pro-social effect as well.

And so that's basically the very serendipitous loop-de-loop way that I came to be studying how loneliness is represented in the brain.

Amazing. Before we talk a bit more about these loneliness neurons and some of their inputs and outputs in the brain, Um...

How has the discovery of these neurons perhaps changed the way that you organize your day and week in life?

Right? If at all. For instance, are you more aware of how much time you spend alone versus with others?

Are you... more careful or discerning about who you spend your time with.

I ask this because there's so many examples for me in the neuroscience literature where, you know, I learned something new about how the brain works and I think, oh yeah, you know, it makes a lot of sense why my sleep isn't great.

You know, it turns out that light exposure to the eyes at particular times of day really sets the whole body and brain into particular rhythms that, you know, explain why I was a little depressed when I was in graduate school, staying up all night doing experiments and I'd sleep much of the day and feel frustrated like I was getting eight, nine hours.

I don't get eight to nine hours now, but, um, And when I wake up early, for me personally, there's a bit of an antidepressant effect as long as I slept the night before.

Seasonal affect disorder is real. Right.

So I think as new information comes online, at least for me, it's changed the way that I organize my life in subtle or in not so subtle ways.

So the idea that there are neurons in the brain that encode loneliness, the absence of social contact.

Does that have you thinking, after a few days of managing the lab, which as you point out, you have a very large lab, lots of social interaction, but it's work context social interaction.

Does that, has that led you to think, hey, you know, we should go out to dinner as a lab or I should spend time with somebody who's not in science, or I should spend time by myself because I've had too much social interaction.

I'm not asking for strict protocols here.

I'm just wondering if you're willing to get like play in the sandbox of this with me a bit, how this information perhaps has shaped some of your choices, you personally.

And to be very clear, I'm not asking you to dictate what other people do.

Has it changed your social life? So it's really interesting that you ask this question.

And now that you're asking it this way, I mean, of course when I learn new things I take them and implement them into my life. to be honest, in the cycle of learning and studying and being curious.

And I actually think where I reside more is when something's going on with me. my research program, research is research, it becomes what the, it dictates what the research program evolves into.

And so for example, so I just had started studying loneliness a few years before. the pandemic hit, and then the pandemic hit, and it was just a step function-like change.

I went from I'm never alone unless you call being in an Uber alone or being on a plane.

And just, you know, constantly people in my office, even when I'm going to the bathroom, someone's waiting for me outside.

Like, you know, I'm not, it's like I'm hurrying in the bathroom.

I'm never alone. There's four people in my bed kicking me in the face.

I'm just, you know, there's just so much social contact.

And then boom, you know, there would be.

A day, I wouldn't see another, you know, just not zero, but just extremely sudden drop of social contact when there's no more work and you know it's just that that period of time and it was very depressing.

It was just this huge, I felt like I was in free fall and It made me, you know, at first it was really disruptive and I was worried about myself, you know?

And then at some point I adjusted to it.

And then I got used to working from home.

I got started a garden. I just started a different life pattern that involved a lot of alone time and something an alone time personal life grew where there wasn't any space for anything to grow before.

And then I became comfortable with it. And so then I started thinking about that that's really where the idea of social homeostasis was born.

This idea that, okay, Why is it with acute social isolation, humans, monkeys, mice, you acutely isolate the individual from the social group, you reintroduce them to the social group, rebound of pro-social interaction. oh, so happy to see you.

There's like all these affiliative interactions, a burst of affiliative interactions.

Whereas with chronic social isolation in humans, monkeys, mice, even flies. you reintroduce into the social group and you get territorial behavior, aggression, avoidance, antisocial behavior. or just sort of a very different negative valence response to the exposure to the group.

And so this, maybe people brushed it off for a long time as just, oh, it's confusing.

This literature is inconsistent. Or maybe there's one model that makes it all make sense.

That is social homeostasis where, you know, you're used to getting this at a certain point.

And so my effector system gets activated.

I detect that I'm alone. I want more. The deficit's detected.

Then my effector systems gets activated.

And then I start spinning all the systems that try to get me back into contact.

I'm calling my friends. I'm texting my friends.

If I'm a mouse, I'm making ultrasonic vocalizations.

I'm exploring outside of the burrow. And then, you know...

If my friends don't call me back, they're like, sorry, we don't want to see anyone till end of COVID.

Bye. Whatever it is, you know, it's not working.

My correction efforts are failing. or maybe a certain amount of time, we don't know, then I give up.

I stop calling. I stop going out. I just make a different life.

You don't leave the borough, whatever it is.

And there's in animals and humans, at least behaviorally, there's a near step function like drop off of attempts to, you know, you can see sort of date, oh, then they just give up on dating after this one, you know, whatever happens.

There's some, some, straw that breaks the camel's back and then this person doesn't want to date anymore or doesn't want to go out anymore whatever and and What is that?

So that adaptation, then you're at a new baseline.

You're expecting now your new normal. I'm expecting to have a gardening day at home alone, not see anyone. and then a bunch of people come over, it feels like a surplus.

So my previous optimum, reintroduction to the social group, is now feeling like a surplus, an overload, overstimulated.

And that's, I think, something that a lot of people experience this whiplash of going into the pandemic and coming out of it. different people to different levels.

It depends on how much you isolated while you were in the pandemic.

But I think thinking about your social set point as being flexible and dynamic was a new concept to me.

And then in my mind, The question is, what is the part of this process that is causing all these harmful health consequences like shortened lifespan, mood disorders? et cetera.

Is it the initial detection that I'm missing something and affect your system activation?

Because if that was the case, maybe I want to bandaid that.

Maybe I want to get a pet, get a Zoom buddy, I don't know.

You would have different prescriptions and advice to give people if that were the case, versus you would give almost opposite advice if the thing that's causing it is the the set point adaptation.

Then you want to stave it off versus if you wanted to accelerate getting into the set point.

Which is better? Is it the adaptation? Or is it kind of trying to fix it?

And so in one case, you would want to ease off having the set point happen the septic point transition happen and the other case rip it off like a band-aid cold turkey just adjust and then you'll be fine you know then you won't worry about it then you won't be lonely anymore because you'll just be comfortable being alone People talk about cognitive flexibility, and I think it's sort of like that, but it's social flexibility.

I want to be able to be alone.

I also want to be able to be in a large group and be comfortable.

And so I think what I've done, if anything, to change my lifestyle to accommodate these new insights I've had is to consciously create dynamic social experiences.

Lots of social experiences, yes, but also protecting alone time, which I never did before.

I just gave it all away. And I realized that having that just made my space homeostatic system feel more elastic and flexible and resilient and less like a crisis if something, you know, I'm very comfortable being alone.

I'm super comfortable in my own skin now.

And it requires investing in that relationship.

I like how you framed earlier, I think we were not recording yet, but the relationship with yourself as being a very important relationship.

And when I think about brain states, You know, we don't know this yet, but my working model would be that different individuals represent their identities, and whenever they're present, creates a unique ensemble of that combination of people being present.

And being alone is also a unique state. that cannot be achieved.

I have the brain state of being alone. I cannot achieve it if anyone else is around.

And that's just what, you know, that's kind of the working model I have.

I think what you're saying is essential for people to hear because it makes sense that loneliness would hurt.

It makes sense that some people are more extroverted, which I think is defined as getting energy from social interactions. and resetting energy through social interactions as opposed to introverted, which, by the way, folks, introverts like myself do enjoy social interaction.

It's just that we reset through more solo or one-on-one time than we do in larger groups.

That's my understanding of the introversion, extroversion literature.

We can revisit that. But this notion of social homeostasis is, I think, so key, important enough that I think we probably want to or restate it, rather, as many times as is necessary, Because I believe what you're describing is the same thing that one would experience with food.

If we eat a lot, we're consuming – I don't know, 3,500 calories a day.

And then suddenly we only have access to 1,800 calories a day.

It feels like a deficit because indeed it is.

Whereas- after some period of time at eighteen hundred calories a day, twenty two hundred calories a day feels like relative abundance, relative abundance.

When the pandemic hit, I certainly was unhappy about the state of affairs in the world, of course, but I recall feeling like, oh my goodness I finally don't have to commute 90 minutes in each direction to Stanford because I lived in the East Bay at that time um I felt like I had time to do things I hadn't done in a long time.

And thanks to Zoom, I was able to get certain things done, not others.

Then after about six to eight months, when I realized that this is going to carry on for a while, I remember feeling quite lonely and making some efforts to repair that.

I think... social media, not to harp on social media, could do either one of two things, and I don't know which in the context of social homeostasis. either going on Instagram and seeing a lot of familiar faces and comments and accounts, could make me feel like I'm getting some social interaction such that then when I close that app, and move to my work at my desk or something, which these days is mostly done solo, that I would feel like I had social interaction. or perhaps it's the equivalent of calories.

That then makes me feel more isolated when I'm not in the app.

Perhaps. I find it to be distinctly different than like the experience I had last night of going to dinner with someone I know quite well sitting down and having a, open-ended conversation and deciding to close out the night only when we realized, you know, we got to get up tomorrow for work.

So went our separate ways. there's something that felt very sating about it.

So I wonder in this context of social homeostasis, whether or not the analogy of social interaction to caloric intake, we could...

Is there another dimension to it where it's not just the total number of calories or the total amount of social interaction, but the quality of social interaction? the type of social interaction that actually feels like nourishment as opposed to just calories.

I love where you're going with this. And so when we wrote this review the first time, we were conceptualizing this idea of of how your social set point can change based on if you're acutely isolated or chronically isolated.

And The Y axis is the quality slash quantity of detected social contact, which is so fuzzy.

And, you know, it's, again, one of the most challenging frontiers of this field because, you know, how even if we measured every single component that the brain can detect of the social the social contact so much of it is about expectation you know like if i think i got a gesture If I get a nod from the president, I'm like, oh my God, did the president just nod at me?

That's so exciting. Versus if I get a nod from my partner, I'm like, oh my God, are they mad at me?

What's going on? Why did I just get a nod? right it totally matters the gesture you need the identity there's many different cognitive systems that need to all plug in to this wheel. to make it spin.

So I think that that is one of the, I think that's going to keep us busy for a while.

But in terms of your question about social media and when you switch from getting social media feedback and then doing work, I think it really depends.

I mean, social media is such a large category.

You can have many different types of responses.

Generally, I think the bounds, so when you say social media versus a real life interaction where you're with someone, maybe you're touching, maybe you're not touching, but even if you're just having conversation, you have interbrain synchrony.

You are having a lot of interbrain synchrony.

You're in the same place. But you can have interbrain synchrony even on the phone, right?

Just a voice call is actually a lot more interbrain synchrony than... than messages.

I think text messages can bring a lot of anxiety, and there's been a lot of commentary about that.

And same thing with social media. I think the thing about social media that is perhaps the most... harmful or negative, I think, in terms of when I'm thinking about social nourishment.

I'm sort of making that term up on the fly here, but... it's almost a withdrawal.

When social media is posted, It's not to you.

It's to everyone. And you could be one of the people that receives this message, but it's not even to you.

I'm not even talking to you. And I'm doing something that's without you.

Otherwise, you'd be in this picture and not reading on social media, listening to whatever.

So it's like by almost exclusively, you're posting about activities that you're being excluded from And someone's not even really talking to you unless they're DM, you know, direct messaging you.

But then I call, I kind of consider that a different category if it's like a one-to-one communication.

Social media to me is a blast, right? It's just catching up with someone on social media, I don't really see the merit of it because I'll just catch up with them when I catch up with them and their kids will just be like way older, but you know, I don't know.

I'll actually really catch up with them then just see pictures of, you know, I don't know.

I feel mixed about it because it's not a real connection.

And it doesn't, for me, sate my... social appetite to look at someone else's profile on social media.

That doesn't actually do anything for the connection.

I don't know, but I seriously doubt tons of oxytocin is released when I follow someone's feed about their vacation.

So I don't know. I think that it definitely matters, the quality.

And social media is different than real life interactions for many reasons.

I really appreciate your willingness to explore in this context. your mention of the fact that real life interaction involves interbrain synchrony, Could be by text, scaling up from that by phone, FaceTime or something like that. akin to that video chat.

On social media, there is comments back and forth, although That's time consuming and it's difficult because there's anonymity.

People are in different places, different time zones.

If you don't know someone, it's different context.

So I'm really... Thanks to what you're describing, I'm really starting to think about social media as so different than in-person social interactions or by phone or video chat social interactions and how those would differentially impact social homeostasis.

And it's leading me at least to conclude that at least for me, that most social media interactions would create more hunger as opposed to a sating of the need for social interaction.

I have to be careful with the analogies here, but since I can do this, I was almost going to make an analogy between pornography in-person sexual intimacy.

I suppose there's something in between where people could talk by phone, but we don't want to explore this in any kind of salacious way.

And then sexual intimacy with with emotion, with positive emotion.

There's a scaling factor there. And I'm not putting judgment or valence.

I'm certainly not. That's not my place. As a good friend of mine says, I'm not a cop.

I'm not telling people what to do they can't do.

But it's so interesting to think about these circuits within us that create these what you and I in our field call appetitive, the desire for, or aversive, the desire to move away from, type responses and how so much of our life, aside from you, because you're regulating your social media and you're and your email intake, but so much of life now is offering us the opportunity to Um, tickle these circuits or even hit them hard with a sledgehammer.

But we're not thinking about these homeostatic mechanisms of whether or not they're creating more hunger for or more satisfaction from.

And I cannot emphasize enough how critical this is.

And I think that's because I'm somebody who does spend a fair amount of time on social media.

A lot of my work exists on social media, YouTube, et cetera.

And I would hope that the work that we're putting into the world with this podcast. is creating a satiation or the desire for information rather than a hunger for more.

I do hope that. But I recognize that educational material on social media represents the tiny, tiny fraction of what's there.

Social homeostasis, I think, is a term that if people haven't already stamped into their they should be stamping into their mind.

And Dr. Keitai deserves credit for that.

I will say that, so you don't have to. I've heard you say before, you wrote in a review, something akin to social contact is either positive or negative when it's deficient or in excess, which is I think what you're describing is social homeostasis.

Is that right? When we talked about the quality and quantity, there's just in terms of contact, just amount of contact, there's such a thing as just the right amount There's some sort of thing that's too little.

There's such a thing as too much. There's overcrowding, right?

It doesn't matter who it is. It can be your family.

Sometimes it's like a lot. Your family.

Depends. Do you know the famous Ram Dass quote?

No. Think you're enlightened? Go spend a weekend with your parents.

No disrespect, Mom and Dad. I know, right?

I think with quality, it matters so much.

Like I was sort of saying before, you know, the same gesture from the president or my partner, it's going to feel very different to me whether that was a slight or, you know, it's relative to what is appropriate for our rank, for our prior history of relationships. for the environmental context.

And so I think with social media in general, and I agree, social media is great for a lot of things.

I mean, and I think that having a podcast like this that is accessible to the public makes research more sustainable.

So I have a lot of things to say about science communication that I'm very proud you know, grateful for.

But in terms of social media, think about the mutual investment When you are interacting with someone on social media, what are they investing in this connection?

So if I put out a post about my vacation, that is public, I'm investing .000000001% of my bandwidth to make contact with you.

You know what I mean? And so it scales up from them.

If you're making a voice call with someone, you're giving them at least most of your attention for the time that you're on the call.

That's a lot, right? So just thinking about the investment is another component.

There's the real-time component, and then there's the...

The investment component, who is it coming from?

It matters. If you're anonymous, I cannot tell. what this means.

A compliment or a hate comment or a love comment from an anonymous person I don't know what to do with this.

I just literally don't know how to, it doesn't really do anything for me because I don't know how to interpret it. it's almost uninterpretable without this other dimension that my brain is has evolved to look for, I think.

So that's speculation. I think social media is operating in a way that is not ethological and not designed to make us feel better.

It's just designed to make us want to use it.

And I think a lot of this comes down to things that are relative.

There's the famous There's the famous observations.

If a monkey sees another monkey get a cucumber, it's happy with the cucumber.

But if a monkey sees the other monkey get grape, Monkey wants grape.

You know, you want to keep up with the Joneses.

You want what, if you see someone else having something, Suddenly it feels like a loss that you don't have it, that you didn't even think of this thing that you needed.

Right. And so I think social media is exposing you to a lot of things that you don't, you know, that it's like this parameter space you didn't have.

There's all these things you didn't know you were missing that you didn't need to miss out on.

And so we have this whole project now I have two projects, one that's looking at social isolation and following what happens with social isolation across the time course to try to understand, is it the amount of time or is it the amount of effort that you put into correcting that deficit? that leads you to the giving up, you know, kind of state change.

And another project that is about the quality of social contact, specifically social exclusion.

So a different kind of deficit you're with your other animals but there's this this you know it's four animals that have um our cage mates and um Three animals are on one side able to drink a chocolate milkshake and the other animals excluded.

And this one excluded animal will... go up against the divider and look frantic and exhibit lots of behaviors that we would associate in humans with fear of missing out, trying to reunite with the group, trying to get the attention of the group. trying to get over there, a lot of attending, looks frantic, and studying what we think is actually going on.

And so I think coming up with paradigms to try to probe social isolation and we don't even know what behaviors animals exhibit when they're lonely.

This is a challenging field because there's no number of lever presses.

There's no script to follow and there's no trial structure.

And so for a neuroscientist, Neuroscientists were trained to be rigorous about our statistics because of the stochastic nature of neural neuroactivity and you know, how do we process things without a trial structure?

How do we be statistically rigorous when the animal is just free floating, deciding whatever it wants to do.

And so that is kind of, the crucible that my lab is working through right now to establish pipelines and techniques and ways to quantify social behaviors and peel off all the layers.

I love where your lab is headed, which just means we're going to have to have you back on here again at some point in the future to get the answers to those questions that you're now addressing.

I've long thought that we really know how we feel about somebody when something good happens to them or for them.

And I never quite understood this at the level of mechanisms.

How could I? It's not one of my lab studies.

But, you know, I think that there's a natural sort of empathy if one is a healthy, empathic person to seeing a member of our own species. also to observing the members of other species. experiencing some discomfort.

We don't like that, nor should we. So another human is in emotional pain.

Right. You know, the wail or the cry of loss is like one that just I think for any person who is empathically attuned is just like, oh.

Or an animal, you hear an animal in pain, like goodness.

I mean, I'm not here to diagnose sociopathy, but if that doesn't evoke a, at least some sort of response of like, oh, gosh, like what I wouldn't do to remove that pain, that their pain is your pain, empathy.

That seems like a very reflexive circuit, or at least I would hope so. but when somebody experiences something positive, I think it's normal and healthy to have a a graded set of responses.

If it's somebody that we really love, we may not even know them.

We think, yeah, like you're just reflexively happy for them.

Somebody that we dislike, I think there's a more natural tendency to be like, oh, you know, right.

You know, as, as opposed to if that person were in pain, I would like to think that even if one didn't like them, that you would think like, oh, that.

That sucks. I'm really sorry to hear that.

So I feel like there's some asymmetry in these empathic interactions.

They're both empathy. One has a negative valence. pain.

The other one has positive valence, another member of our species or other species receiving reward.

And we can delight in that. I mean, I'm almost embarrassed to admit how many ferret and otter and raccoon accounts I follow because I love seeing them eat.

I love seeing that little hands of the raccoons.

There's some great raccoon accounts, by the way.

And I delight in it. I delight in it. I want to see the raccoons win.

I don't know why, I love animals, and so I suppose that's why.

So do you think that we are asymmetrically wired for this empathic attunement?

Can we observe that in other animals? I realize this might not be squarely in the wheelhouse of what your lab is focusing on, but I think it, it relates enough to the topics that we're covering today that I'm just, you know, if you'd like to speculate on what might be going on there.

Yeah, I can definitely speculate. It's something that we think about a lot.

But again, there's some level of this, which is semantics.

I think of empathy as being defined as being able to understand another animal's emotion and also taking it on.

So I think something that's a little bit different than emotional contagion, right?

I see a panic. I'm in a group of panic. It's not the same thing as empathy.

Empathy is often used in sort of certain contexts like feeling sorry for someone, And it's maybe different for feeling happy for someone.

And this is something I was just talking about with one of my graduate students the other day.

Why is there an asymmetry? in empathy for positive and negative, or is it just what we've studied?

It's easier to study this. So there's a number of, we don't know the answer.

But I guess another conceptual framework to put out there, I'm not saying it's correct.

It's I think just a good tool for debate.

But it's not so much that there's good people and bad people and that good people are empathic and bad people aren't.

So it's not quite so simple. I guess the way I think about it is whether you view this other social agent as having aligned goals or agendas as you or are they adversarial so if they're if they're at in your alliance, whatever that means, broadly defined versus adversarial. you would have a different feeling.

And, you know, it's it's you see this. I guess I was just I was watching this.

OK, this is just sort of oversharing. But this is a podcast, not a primary research journal, so I can just say things, right?

So I watch some trash TV sometimes. And, you know, these reality competition shows where it's like then you vote the two best friends into elimination and they have to eliminate each other.

Mildly sadistic. But then they're best friends.

And then it's basically mutually exclusive.

Either you can care about your friend and feel bad not wanting to send them home, or you kick it, you just, it's game time and you compete.

And so you can see different individuals wrestling with these two brain states. and what to do, but they are essentially, you know, my speculation is that viewing someone as a competitor And they're an adversary.

They are standing in the way of me getting what I want.

Empathy goes down. It's like inversely correlated to empathy if you are viewed as a competitor.

So things that would contribute to you creating a model In a social agent, it is an adversary as opposed to a potential ally is really what it's going to come down to, to the degree that you feel empathy.

The second you realize someone's out to get you, no empathy.

No more empathy for this person who I just realized is out to get me or something like that.

Or, you know... In the case of being isolated for a long period of time, you've learned to exist on your own now. maybe everyone's your competitor or adversary.

You know, none of you guys are really helping me do my data.

Like, I don't really need you guys for anything.

So... I'm eating this food. I think it just becomes different when you're part of an ecosystem and you realize that you know, there's consequences and there's Every action that you take, you know, every act of altruism will be recognized.

And, you know, there's there's there's a there's. some score being kept when you're part of a society.

And then when you're not, there's none. There's none of that.

And so I think the degree to which you're integrated in society, it's almost like the extracellular matrix.

You know, this is a really, this is an out there analogy, but you know. when you think about synapses being made, connections between people, there's also all the support material that facilitates certain patterns and certain connections from happening or not happening.

And I think... It's stuff that we haven't quantified yet, but it doesn't, you know, I think those things should be studied.

Years ago, I worked with at-risk kids, and a fair number of them had just arrived. from a region of the world that had undergone dramatic socio-political evolution and change.

And it was remarkable because we would put out a tray of food to eat and then the format was everyone would serve themselves and then you could go get more food if everyone finished.

And a couple of these kids that had come from these very deprived environments would just take – more than their share.

It was clear that by taking that, other kids weren't going to get any.

And I remember telling them, listen, we all have to eat more or less equal parts.

And then we can, there is more, we can get more.

And I'll never forget this kid's response.

He just turned to me and he said, you can't hit us.

And I said, that's true. I can't hit you.

And he said, so I'm just going to take as much as I want.

And this took several weeks actually to work out, right?

Yeah. Because of course I would never hit him.

Everyone's his adversary. Everyone's his adversary.

And it was remarkable to see the evolution of these. kids across that, it was about three and a half weeks.

At which point they actually became incredibly, good at sharing, but it took a lot of work.

It was almost as if, even though they knew more trays of food could arrive, not limitless, but there was an abundance of food.

In the moment, they were solving for that short horizon moment.

And here we're talking about human beings capable of speech and expression of emotion, et cetera.

And he understood the fundamental rule, which was I couldn't hit him.

Therefore, he could basically do what he wanted without that consequence.

And- Which is the main consequence he'd faced, apparently.

Right, exactly. And I remember, it was so striking, I'll never forget that.

And the evolution to a different, more altruistic state was wonderful, especially because of what I think what it did for him. but I'll never forget thinking this is a human being who is essentially functioning like an animal. like an animal.

I mean, I had a bulldog mastiff and he was kind to other dogs, but if there were, unattended to toys at the dog park, he was going to pick them up.

And he put them right in front of himself, and this was down in San Diego, and he'd sit with them right in front of him.

And I'm like, Costello, you're not going to play with all those toys.

But if another dog came and he wouldn't, he would just sit in front of them.

Another dog would come and try and take one of those toys.

And he would, he had these giant mitts and he would just boom, stamp it out and drag it back.

And so it seems that there are these very primitive circuits about a resource allocation and protection of resources that in the absence of understanding that there's a much bigger landscape Costello eventually figured out tug's a fun game, although most dogs couldn't play tug with him.

There were a few that could. He was a 90-pound bulldog.

He had just a neck like this. But to see this in a human being was just so striking.

As you're describing this, it's like this adversary versus neutral versus friend. it's just so striking and it's gotta be, you know, that, that the brain as complex as it is, I've often wondered, and, our colleague Marcus Meister once said that circuits in the brain can broadly be divided into these sorts of circuits, into yum, yuck and meh, right?

Which is far too simplistic, right? But who am I to argue with the great Marcus Meister? and I'm not going to, but it's sort of interesting.

We sort of bin our responses into, Yes, okay, let's cooperate.

Or yes, let's cooperate. You're summarizing valence.

Yeah, or no way, no chance, like mine. Versus like, meh, meh.

And as complex as I'd like to think the brain is, and we are, I mean, maybe when it comes down to behaviors and how we interpret input and our decision-making, Maybe it's really all about feelings of safety and feelings of relatedness.

Yeah. I think it's also about the experiential statistics. that you have been exposed to.

So this boy who says, I'm gonna take all this food because you can't hit me.

I mean, we don't know, but the picture that grows out of my imagination is this boy's had a lot of experiences of people hitting them.

A lot of experiences of not enough food. and not a lot of experiences of strangers being nice to them.

Like not a lot of people that you could trust.

That's the experiential statistics that would fit this model. someone like you who's coming in being like, oh no, there's more for, I'm gonna give you guys more food for free.

I'm gonna give you even more food for, The experiential statistics are you've come from a world of abundance where people are generous.

You know, generosity. You've learned... being generous can make you have a lifelong friend and all these amazing opportunities that make your quality of life that food is never going to think about food again.

It's about the relationships because that's your experiential statistics.

And so I think this is such a profound concept about about neuroscience and the brain, about our social structures and how they form, what makes a structure egalitarian or despotic.

Right. Like how how can we as individuals take a structure that is is one format, let's say, despotic hierarchy and evolve it into something that's more egalitarian?

And what are the levers and what are the parameter spaces that we can pull on?

And I think these are questions that I mean, it's hard to think of what could be more important, but that perspective of thinking about from experiential statistics, I think really supports the need of diversity, bringing in people to academia who had very different experiences. experiential statistics, different biases of what they're going to think is interesting to work on and study, and obviously in every sector of our society.

So I think... Um, How can we get more diverse sets of experiences represented at each decision-making body that really matters?

Yeah. Amen to that. And also to be able to understand that differences in background experience require that we, earlier you mentioned, theory of mind, this ability to get into the mindset of others and sort of assume or presume certain mindsets in order to hopefully create a more benevolent environment for everybody.

You know, it requires... you know, realizing that some people's social interactions are, you know, have been terrible or traumatic It requires a departure from self, essentially.

It requires this empathy or something like empathy. in all directions, right?

I mean, in all directions, it requires that everyone at least make some effort to try and understand that.

I do wonder, and maybe someone would put on the comments on YouTube, maybe you're aware, Kay, of whether or not kids are being trained in that beautiful period of time of life where neuroplasticity is so robust, although it does continue throughout the lifespan, it is especially robust early in life, to be in a healthy way, empathically attuned, to be able to have theory of mind, more robust theory of mind.

Yeah, so I think it's really – I mean, so I'm a parent.

I have two kids that are in public school, and I think their public school is rated –

It's fine, but it's all right. But at the school, they definitely do get education about... um more holistic health and emotional regulation i think and and considering others um that's been that's a big focus of the school and i think that's actually really important i i mean Again, I'm super biased from my upbringing,

My kids are going to learn math whenever it's time to learn the math.

They'll learn it whenever they need it. You know, whenever they need it, they're going to learn it in a couple, I don't know, a couple weeks. and figure it out, do the thing.

Most of the things that they learned, they're going to forget them and then have to relearn them.

So what are the things that you're gonna really need to know no matter what you choose to do?

And I think regulating your own emotions and engaging other individuals in a healthy, sustainable way that you know, and I mean, sustainable in terms of the longevity of the relationships.

And I think those are the things that end up really mattering.

So I think also this question about exposure to abundance and scarcity, It's really interesting, too.

I mean, I don't know if that's the direction we want to go into.

Please, yeah. Well, I think, you know, it sounds sort of new agey when I say, you know, the abundance mindset, right?

I mean, you see this in people who are, recently divorced or newly single for whatever reason?

Is the world a place where... finding partnership is relatively straightforward with some work involved, or is it like, but there's only one person on the planet for you and they might be dead already, right?

If someone else's business takes off, maybe someone you went to college or high school with, where their lab is doing really well.

You're seeing them tremendously successful.

Maybe they made $100 million in a company acquisition.

Do you immediately feel like, oh, those are resources that I don't have, even though I'm not in that business or anything? do you see it as, wow, there must be a lot of money out there that people could earn and potentially make?

I really prescribe and believe in this abundance versus scarcity mindset framework.

I think there's absolutes, like the example we just talked about, the kid, you know, there's just not food.

There's scarcity of food, fact, you know?

Of course, there are individuals that experience scarcity of various different needs.

But many of us, we reach a threshold of abundance and then it becomes relative.

We have everything we absolutely physiologically need if we're not comparing ourselves to anyone else.

But then once we enter the social arena – comparison is essential.

Why do we compare ourselves to others? It's ingrained because social status is something that we need to attend to.

A large part of our Our brain is devoted to representing our relative social rank.

What's our place with the social network?

What's the dynamic? How do we fit into the social landscape? in comparison, I think is just a way to do that.

That's been evolutionarily conserved, perhaps for less of a good purpose at this point because So many of our basic survival needs are met for the large majority of humans on the planet today.

Not for everybody, of course, but... Yet, what is the percentage of humans who feel they have everything that they desire?

How many people feel like they don't want for anything?

And it's interesting because having things doesn't make you have an abundance mindset.

Having abundance is not sufficient to give you the mindset of abundance.

That's such an important statement. I mean just, I don't think they could be restated enough.

You've studied social rank. People hear social rank and hierarchy, and I have to guess that at least some neurons in their amygdala and other areas of the brain get buzzing. because as soon as people hear social rank, they, I think naturally started thinking, well, where am I in this social rank and how do I feel about how that rank is, you know, established and, and all sorts of interesting and important questions.

Some people get very angry that there are billionaires on this planet, especially given that in most major cities, you don't have to go very far to see people who have very limited resources.

So. Social rank is something that I think exists in every little niche at work and maybe even in the family, there's social rank.

I have a sibling, I remember who got more of a piece of cake, like even a slight difference in that was something that, my older sibling would point out because she was more effective at getting the slightly larger piece of cake because I was until I was big enough to fend for myself.

And my friends with larger sibling pools in their family, it was especially competitive.

I don't know if you've ever gone to a meal with somebody who had a lot of siblings.

They eat fast. different resource allocation methods than if they were an only child versus one sibling.

There's a variation here I'm generalizing.

But yeah, let's talk about social rank. What do we know about how social rank is organized in the brain? how we perceive our own social ranking.

What's the modern science on this stuff?

I find it fascinating. I'm not scared of any topic.

Well, most any topic. And I think this is one that affects us all.

I mean, I'll first say that social rank is something very specific to a certain type of hierarchy that assumes a linear hierarchy, which sometimes forms but oftentimes there's different types of hierarchies that are flatter or more amorphous it's not really clear who's Who's the alpha on the playground?

I don't know. There's this click here. And it can be dynamic.

Right, right. It's dynamic. It's not always organized as such.

But... If you get animals into a sort of small space, you will see in many species, especially within the males, forming a linear hierarchy.

And we wanted to explore this. And so I think one of the biggest challenges with studying social rank, and this is something we've struggled with as well, is how do you control for the individual identity versus the actual rank.

So what I mean by this is, let's say there's a study that says that neurons in a certain brain region fire to animals of different ranks according to the rank, fire most of the alpha, Less, less, less, less down to the rank, you know.

Does that tell us that this brain region encodes social rank?

Maybe in a loose sense. And I'm sure that when rank issues come up, a lot of the brain lights up for different reasons.

For example, let's say the amygdala would respond more to the alpha, maybe because it encodes social rank, but maybe also because... whoever is the dominant is the one who's most likely to have consequences.

And so all of my interactions with the alpha are relatively high consequence.

And so I'm sort of stressed out whenever I'm talking to Alpha, paying attention.

And you remember all the interactions you have with your boss more so than you know someone else there's an attention hierarchy subordinates attend more to dominance and so there's it's almost hard to make this comparison because it's not all flat like the the The clean experiment, which... we are still trying to do, it's difficult to do the perfect experiment, would be if you take an individual and change their rank.

So for example, I like to use this example with Barack Obama.

So just indulge me. I know that this is from a while ago.

But once upon a time, I met Barack Obama for a very brief moment when he was president.

And maybe there's some neurons that light up.

Oh, wow, there's the Barack Obama slash president neurons.

But if they are identity neurons, once he was no longer president, If I was to be presented with Barack Obama, then they would still fire.

If they were rank neurons, then maybe after he was no longer president. it's just these neurons fire to whoever is president now.

And so I think that, experiment is very difficult to do and has not been done but we're working on it right now um in uh another experiment where we take animals and they're living in groups and we rank them all.

And then we rehouse them. So everybody has a rank that they start with.

Then we put all the alphas together, put all the betas together, et cetera, so that everybody forms a new rank.

Then you have animals that went up. went down a rank or stayed the same for every group.

And so that's something that we're looking at right now.

So initially you take a pool of animals and then let's say you got your number one, two, three, four, just for sake of simplicity.

Let's say I take the number four, lowest in that hierarchy, but now I make them the top of a new hierarchy.

That's right. Got it. And so it's really preliminary and we'll see what happens.

But we're investigating. it seems that when you take alphas, intermediates, or subordinates and put them into new hierarchies, it takes them different amounts of time and the dynamics are very different in forming the new hierarchy.

And so... In any kind of predictable way that you're willing to share or is it just too early?

I think it's too early, but I'll just say, I guess it seems like the... the intermediates might be taking the longest amount of time to form the hierarchy.

They don't know where they sit in the hierarchy.

They were flexible or something. Whereas the dominants, they're going to duke it out. and then, you know, we're going to battle.

There'll be defeat. It's quick. The fight doesn't last that long.

Subordinates, you know, we have to still observe.

This is all still... We'll see if everything replicates, but certainly the dynamics are different. what the exact readouts, you know, we're working on what the features are, what key features to see, but it's kind of uncanny because these are genetically inbred animals that are all housed in, these should be all, everyone should be the same, theoretically, but this makes me think that during certain developmental periods, rank is shaping your long-lasting development.

I think it's a similar phenomenon perhaps to the older child, younger child phenomenon where, you know, If you're the oldest, you go into the world and you have lots of different roles.

You might be the bottom, you know, you're going to play on sports teams and be in different classes and all this stuff. the leadership desire slash potential skill seems to be correlated in a very non-scientific way. you know, the number of presidents that's often oldest or only children, this type of thing.

It's a loose correlation. There's a lot of other reasons why it might not be behavioral, but there's sort of you know, fluffy, fluffy correlations about that.

I think there's something to it, though.

When plasticity is happening, you're this becomes your most familiar state of assuming a certain role and that attractor state deepens with more time spent there.

And that's a fascinating, I've also observed, and I think I've seen a few papers on, I don't know how rigorous these papers. are that youngest, or let's just say not oldest siblings.

Here we're setting aside single children that don't have any siblings. that youngest siblings do tend to, quote, unquote, break the mold more in terms of socio and cultural norms of the family. they they venture further in terms of experiences and value systems, they're often seen as having had fewer constraints than the older sibling, which may or may not be true. but that the youngest siblings often will take on risk that older siblings won't.

Yeah. And that's certainly been my observation.

More non-conformists. Right. I mean, I'm a younger brother of an older sister.

But But then there was times in our childhood where she was out of the house and I was at home just with my mom.

So that sort of changes things. And this is very dynamic.

I realize we're playing here in a kind of loose space.

But I find social rank stuff to be super interesting.

I grew up in a big pack of mostly boys. That's just kind of how it worked out in my neighborhood at the time.

And it was very interesting because it was very clear it was a dynamic hierarchy where If we were skateboarding, certain kids were alpha.

If we were playing soccer, other kids were alpha.

If we were doing anything artistic, If it was kind of geeky knowledge and nerdy stuff, then it might have been somebody else who had the knowledge and had the information that people wanted.

So I think dynamic hierarchies are really important.

And I think get us out of that sort of more standard alpha, like kind of chess beating, telling everyone what to do, dictatorial model.

I mean, and this is now fully out of any science land and into speculation opinion land, but I think. that type of structure where when you're doing different tasks, different individuals become the alpha or the leader because it's based on competence is very healthy.

I think structures where you have a locked down, this is the hierarchy where someone's the boss of you because of this one skill, but then there's all these other skills that they're not as, They're not superior.

They don't outrank you at. And so how do you work all that out? and so i think that's also something about keeping score like what is what is the rank right and so we did this experiment where we designed a task animals are trained that a cue predicts reward delivery.

Only one animal can get it at a time. It's just a very narrow place.

So if one animal is getting it, you can't get it.

Then... We would have four animals that are cage mates, four mice that are cage mates, and we would have two of them duke it out at each point.

And we know the ranks. The ranks are stable.

They have a rank one, two, three, four in the cage.

And everybody does a round robin. Ones versus twos, ones versus threes.

They fight. Yeah. Well, they do round robin in this reward competition task.

They're food deprived, you know, and we we present rewards.

What's the what happens? And so subordinates do win some of the times, even though dominance win more, you know, they consistently win more.

And we found that prefrontal cortical neurons, you could represent very stably and decode which animal was dominant.

Um... flat, regardless of the trial. And then when you looked at whether we could decode competitive success, meaning who was going to win that next trial.

There's a new trial every 30 or 40 seconds.

And so, but 30 seconds before, which is as far as we can measure, because then we're kind of into the previous trial.

As soon as the last trial ends, even before the next trial ends, you can predict above chance significantly. which animal is going to win the next trial.

Just based on the firing pattern of prefrontal cortical nerves.

That's right. So you can predict winners and losers.

You can predict... and understand where they are in the hierarchy as well, based on the activation of neurons prior to the battle.

Like recording from the- By analogy, it's like recording from the prefrontal cortex of two, let's say, business competitors or martial arts competitors. and you can predict who's gonna win based on the pattern of firing in their brains prior to the competition.

That's right. And so that suggests all sorts of things.

Number one, it doesn't mean these competitions are not independent.

There's something about the state of the animal.

And when we looked at, is it just whoever won the previous trial?

That did not account for this. And so...

I thought this was really interesting, but when you look at the decoding accuracy for dominance versus subordinates about... who will win the next trial.

For dominance, it stays pretty flat. It just has to do with, I think, this is my speculation of our data, that you know, they either are engaged or they're not engaged.

The subordinates, the decoding accuracy is above chance, but then it shoots up somewhere around closer to the queue presentation.

And so my speculation about that is that the subordinates are looking at the dominance.

The dominant doesn't look like they're going to go for it.

It looks like they're turning away. I'm going to go.

I'm going to go. So it's not like they're both going out full every time.

It's a calculation. Which trials... Oh, he's not paying attention.

You know, it's like when you're driving in traffic and you're trying to find the... moment to cut over and you're waiting for the person who's like texting and there's a big space and everybody's just getting in right here.

You know, you can just see... You're looking for clues about the state of competition.

And then the dominance... they are not looking at the subordinate.

They're just doing whatever they feel like doing.

It's like there's a, I think there's that one scene in Mad Men where something happened in the work environment. and it was clear someone's account didn't sell or something didn't work out for one person versus the other.

And I think one of the characters says to, Don Draper, who's clearly one of the alphas in that work environment by virtue of role and says, you know, I sometimes think about the way that you blank, blank, blank, and blank.

And he goes on this brief tirade about how upset he was.

And Draper says, oh, I don't think about you at all.

And then the elevator, I believe, closes.

And it really cemented his status in the office.

Somebody who's really not paying much attention to what other people are doing.

He's just making decisions according to what's going to be best for the firm and in some cases for himself and in some cases both.

So I think that's essentially what you're talking about.

Yeah, I think it's kind of the nature of the structure.

That's what makes you the alpha is you have... you have other things that are occupying your attention. your visionary status, hopefully, if you're a productive, successful alpha and for a sustainable group.

And then everyone else is, they don't need to have the big picture.

They don't, you know, it becomes the reinforcement schedule is different.

I'm just looking for validation. Am I playing my role?

Okay. It's a very different mindset. I think, you know, as a scientist, when you're a trainee, sometimes you're a supporting member on a team where you're getting instructions, someone's telling you what to do versus the moment where you get your own project and maybe you're working by yourself maybe there's no one to command but no one's telling you what to do that is to me one of the biggest thresholds to step over when you're becoming a scientist or an investigator is the first time where you just do something and like try and experiment no one told you to do.

And it feels super weird. It feels like you're sneaking around or something.

And then, you know, I think in today's... mentorship chain, sometimes that happens too late.

I think if we could have that experience happen earlier, I think that would only be good for for the future of research.

I agree. I was very fortunate that my graduate advisor told me, look, I'm going to help you, but I'm going to have two kids while you're in the lab and I'm not going to be around a lot.

So you're going to have to figure it out.

Don't burn the lab down. Don't kill yourself with any of the poisons in the lab.

And then my postdoc advisor, the late and great Ben Barris, largely treated the postdocs as... as junior professors from an early stage.

And I remember thinking, he can't control the experiments I'm going to do.

This is up to me. And a great number of us who were training with him at that time went on to have her own lab.

So I think, um, there's really something important to that model.

And of course, we're discussing the research field, but this could be exported to any number of different fields.

Because what... Those mentors were essentially training us to do was to assume the role that we would eventually have as opposed to be subordinates.

Do you watch Chimp Empire? So actually, just this week, yesterday and the day before this, a postdoc interview who worked with the chimps on Chimp Empire, visited and interviewed him in my lab, and... talked about his work.

So I have not seen Chimp Empire, but it's at the very top of my to-do list.

That's so good. I don't want to spend the next 20 minutes talking about it, but you see all sorts of interesting. behavior very relevant to human behavior.

Hierarchies, yes, but also altruistic behavior, allopathic grooming.

I mean, in chimp culture as I've learned from the show, assuming it's accurate, that who grooms who is very important.

And there's all sorts of interesting maneuvers that subordinates make.

And there's all sorts of interesting displays of vigor that the alpha makes to remind people that they are the alpha.

And then as they age or make mistakes of judgment, the subordinates also will feign deference They'll be like, oh yeah, you're the alpha, you're really tough and secretly they're plotting to replace the alpha.

So whether or not we're talking about a scene from Mad Men or we're talking about Chimp Empire, we're talking about research laboratories or... or any other landscape, kindergarten.

I think these circuits are active in all of us.

And the sooner that we acknowledge those and try and find ones that generalize to the goodness of as many members as possible.

We're not doing our task, but clearly you're doing the task.

So, okay, social rank is something that we need to acknowledge, no doubt.

Which actually leads me to what might seem like a disparate topic, but one that I know we're both very interested in and that you're focusing on now, which is psychedelics.

Because one of the interesting things about psychedelics is their capacity to increase neuroplasticity.

But also some of the psychedelics – and I realize MDMA is not a classic psychedelic. but they are classified as pathogens.

They increase empathy for self and others.

So What are you looking into with psychedelics?

Which psychedelics? And yeah, what brought you to the study of psychedelics?

And by the way, I've done... participated in clinical, because people wonder, I have participated in clinical trials for psilocybin and MDMA.

I don't recommend people do psychedelics recreationally.

I do think they hold great promise for the treatment of depression and trauma, but People need to be careful.

There are certain people who could not and should not take psychedelics because it would be genuinely unsafe for them psychologically, especially young people.

So there's my disclaimer. But they are fascinating compounds.

So I guess I've always been interested in psychedelics.

I think I wrote my undergraduate thesis about...

It's about hallucinations produced by psychedelics, psychotic breaks, and REM sleep, and schizophrenia.

Just comparing what... is the common thread when our brain creates a reality that is not objectively there.

And psychedelics, of course, is a way that we can experience that and remember it and recall it in a way that's very difficult with REM sleep and sometimes with psychotic breaks.

Obviously, schizophrenia is not something that you can transiently give yourself and have that experience.

So I think having the ability to move into other brain states is what makes it so attractive.

I think the other component is the plasticity.

You can have an experience and perhaps the firsthand experience experience is You have an epiphany that you take with you.

It's life changing. And, you know, your life habits are completely different for a long lasting way after this. singular experience is kind of one of the things that makes it so different from all of the other therapeutic treatments that we've got, or most of the other ones, I'd say.

And so for me, you know, right now there's a lot of work going on exploring psychedelics as a therapy for various different conditions, disease states.

I think that's great. I think it's really important work.

I'm glad a lot is being done on that. I think my focus is is to turn over some rocks that might not have been turned over yet and just to get really down at a quantitative, rigorous, mathematical level of what is a hallucination?

For example, when I ask this question, what is a hallucination?

I'm interested in the actual cellular mechanisms are we just you know we think about neurons having signal to noise and Neuromodulation as changing that.

Are we just changing the signal to noise ratio and then pattern completing all the noise and that's what a hallucination is? we just you know take that we're just reinterpreting noise and putting sort of existing maps, everything's fitting to an existing mold or map that we've already got that then appears as some hallucination.

Or is, and maybe it doesn't have to be hallucination.

There's also obviously some various different thresholds of the psychedelic experience.

But all these clinical statements, these human self-reported statements, qualitative descriptions of the psychedelic experience.

Things like, having just more positive outlook, uniting one self and other, like a sort of clarity of the world, more labile in thoughts, more flexible thoughts.

We are trying to just create actual ways to test them so for example this idea about what is what is going on in your mind when you when you're having a psychedelic experience all of these different states might feel more labile.

Maybe the transition probabilities between different brain states of like, happy, sad, nostalgic, maybe it's just all looser.

And so you can access everything because the transition probabilities are just high.

Another possibility is that, and maybe it's dose dependent, at a certain dose you go into another brain state.

And so previously we've done this in the same project that I was just telling you about rank.

We were recording for prefrontal cortical neurons. and looking at all the behaviors.

And so the behaviors for representing social rank, we don't know what they are.

So we use computer vision to extract a bunch of behavioral motifs. and then tried to understand what's the best model that would predict you know, what the animal's gonna do next, not just wins and losses, but all the subtle gestures.

Are we gonna fight? Are we gonna give it up?

Are we gonna back off? and predict the behaviors from prefrontal cortical activity.

And the best model that we found was something called a hidden Markovian model, which essentially just means that there are hidden states, you might think of them as moods.

You might give them some other name, but I'll use moods loosely.

It's not perfect, but That's kind of one way that helps me think about hidden states, where you have certain statistics of behaviors that you would produce If I'm sad, there's certain things I'm going to do.

It's a different statistics than when I'm happy, different probability of going surfing if I'm sad or happy or things like that.

So we basically found that there are a certain number of hidden states.

And so if you are on psychedelics, would that change the number of states or just the transitions between them?

We also found in our prefrontal cortical representation that there's a certain distance of the representation of self and other in this dimensionality-reduced activity space.

So for mumbo jumbo, that just means there's a representation of self and other, there's some quantifiable distance. in abstract terms in the brain.

And we can quantify if those representations get closer together and merge.

Of self versus other. Of self versus other.

So that's something that we would want, we would be looking for If you are putting psychedelics on... These are questions that I'm interested in that are under construction.

So right now, we're recording from... animals while we're giving them psilocybin using neural pixels recordings.

So we're recording from thousands of neurons. in prefrontal cortex and other parts of cortex, because the shank goes to lots of places, and looking at how animals respond in a conflict tasks.

So there's trials where there's a cue that predicts reward, a cue that predicts shock, then there's some trials where both cues are presented and both outcomes are presented.

And the reason for this conflict trial is that actually if you give moderate to low doses of psilocybin or most drugs, honestly, animals can do this. even on lots of different drugs, most people can still, eat food and avoid getting hit by this truck.

I mean, there are exceptions, of course.

But generally speaking, you know... There's a lot of different brain states where you can still do these essential functions pretty robustly.

But it's about what happens in the more ambiguous zone. what happens when there's a conflict and what do you do?

How do you, when it's a little gray, I think that's when you can see a shift in valence assignments.

So that's something that we've been looking for and trying to see In clinical studies, they're exploring set and setting as maybe the factors that have in the past historically given very unpredictable outcomes for psychedelic therapies.

It's possible that it's set in setting. It's also possible that there's individual variability.

It's possible that there are biomarkers that can predict which individuals would be well-suited for this type of therapy.

And so those are also things that we're interested in.

I find this so fascinating and I just want to applaud you again for taking on these hard These are fairly high-level questions.

Certainly, there's a lot of clinical trials exploring psychedelics like psilocybin and their role in treating mental health.

There's, at the same time, a real dearth of studies exploring mechanistically how these compounds are working.

I mean, I do want to tip my hat to all the folks that have explored dendritic changes and cellular changes in the level of neurons and on and on.

But in terms of these like higher level states of self versus other recognition and psychedelics.

You know, those are tough questions that need to be addressed mechanistically, and it's clear you're doing that.

I think this notion that you're testing of whether or not psychedelics reveal more accessibility or liability as you described it between different states, like, oh, wow, I can actually move from sad to happy. there's a route for that and you can experience that as opposed to just being told that.

Hey, when you're feeling sad, feel your, you know, The field of psychology, especially pop psychology, is in a real crisis right now, in my opinion, because we're told to feel our feelings, but then we're also told to not react to our feelings, which sounds great.

But if those feelings get intense enough, that's very hard for most people to do. it's feel your feelings, but don't stay with it.

You know what? There's the cathartic model, you know, like feel your feelings and get them out screaming and et cetera.

And then there's the, The no, you know, the more you engage in neural pathway, the stronger that neural pathway gets, and therefore you're just going to feel more anger.

There's a lot of conflict right now in terms of the popular psychology version of this, whereas the clinical fields I think have an understanding that hasn't been translated.

I think one other thing about psychedelics that is interesting is that the transitions into states is also more labile.

Like if you start feeling a little sad –

There's the potential to feel very, very sad and to go into a state of sadness of an intensity you've never experienced before, which, by the way, could be therapeutically beneficial.

I think there's some evidence for that provided there's adequate support before, during, and after those sessions. but I think most people feel when they're not on psychedelics will feel emotions that are uncomfortable and will do all sorts of things to try and avoid those emotions.

So I, I'm not speaking as a clinician here, but I just, again, I think what the, the, uh, The range and specificity of questions that you're asking about psychedelics, I find so exciting.

The reason I'll say that we want to have you back to discuss those findings when they come out.

Let's talk a little bit about you. Okay.

I've known you for a while, but... To be honest, I think this is the longest conversation we've ever had, which is one of the reasons I love doing this podcast.

I get to sit down with colleagues and have intellectual conversations slash other conversations of substantial depth that I wouldn't have the opportunity to have elsewhere.

I know enough about you, however, to know that you've been involved in various things.

I'm not going to say peripheral to science, but you have other interests as well.

As I recall, you have been a yoga instructor or you've been involved in the kind of wellness fitness community industry.

Tell us about that. And then I'm also curious about how you structure your day, your routines, given that you're a parent of two young children.

You run a very large laboratory operating at the very highest level.

And of course you value important things like relationships and relationship to self and health and all these sorts of things.

So not to make it too open-ended, Tell us of your interests and of your relationship to wellness and fitness and well-being.

Yeah, I guess I think, you know, everybody comes to their calling in what feels like a path that you couldn't predict.

But when you look at it outside, I guess both of my parents are professors, so it doesn't look super surprising that I'm a professor.

But that's not how it felt to me when I was in high school.

I was a total rebel. I just threw parties at my house.

My parents weren't there. Sorry, everybody who's listening.

I don't recommend that. I just cared about I just cared about having fun and sports.

And I think School wasn't maybe challenging enough for me at that time.

I didn't necessarily recognize that was what it was, but...

I've always enjoyed being really active and that's what makes me feel good.

I definitely agree with stuff you've said on your podcast about having exercise routines in the morning that really influence the rest of your day.

I didn't always exercise in the morning.

I have different phases, but Yeah, after I was an undergrad, I took some time to travel around Australia, backpack around Australia. live in some very remote places, spend some time living in a tent.

Then I was a yoga instructor. Then... I went to grad school in the Bay Area.

I had a very active hobby of I was a semi-professional breakdancer.

I was very into breakdancing. Really? Really?

Yes. We did, you know, halftime shows or I guess technically third quarter timeout shows at Oracle Stadium for the Golden State Warriors.

I was the one girl who could do a windmill.

So they would use me. Okay, windmills. Someone's going to find footage of this.

Yeah, yeah. There's some, you know, very mediocre footage of me breakdancing.

And I was just really into it. But I think that's where my work-life balance passion comes from.

I talk about it a lot. I think about it a lot.

And people say to me all the time, Is this really true?

Why do you preach all this work-life balance stuff when you must have been a workaholic at some point in your life?

When I was younger, I definitely didn't like the idea that you had to only be one thing.

I wanted to be so many things I couldn't decide.

It was a huge challenge. I was going to be a writer.

I was going to be a yoga instructor. I was going to be, I never really thought I was going to be a professional dancer.

I just wasn't good enough. And there's not careers to be made from dancing, really.

It's very difficult. but had a lot of other interests.

And I wanted to prove, I don't know who I wanted to prove it to, I think myself at first, and then eventually it made me feel like I should maybe prove it to everyone that you can have a very whole life and not sacrifice everything.

You don't have to choose between family and career or personal life.

You can have them all. You just have to decide that it's a priority and own that and make those choices on a daily basis. and comes down to time management.

And so it's been a very, even though it looks like, oh, Kay just likes to have fun and have all this other, it's important because I think that we need more role models especially in academic science, where people bring their whole selves to their job.

And even though your job is a very specific thing, because you have a role as a mentor, and I suppose the mentor-apprenticeship relationship has evolved, and I have lots of comments about that too. in academia.

I still think ultimately when I was working in someone else's lab and I definitely looked up to them.

They were the role model, obviously. I'm looking at, yes, their science, but I'm looking at how they make this all work.

How are you doing this? How do they live their lives and how do they approach balancing it all.

And so I guess I just wanted to put some more data points on the scoreboard where people are, having lots of hobbies and other non-work activities while still making meaningful contributions.

And it doesn't make you less of a scientist or less of a person because you're a whole human. if anything, perhaps it makes people better scientists.

Yeah, definitely. Did your exploration of yoga and or break dancing inform anything about your your research or was it really about resetting uh your mind and body in healthy ways so that you could return to the lab feeling excited about returning to the lab.

I think I've always been of the mindset where sometimes things don't go well in a certain arena and it doesn't feel good to have all your eggs in that basket. stuff goes wrong.

Sometimes experiment doesn't work. Sometimes you find something out, you lose the whole data set.

It's, you know, bad news happens in the lab and I think just want to diversify your portfolio so that your happiness portfolio is not entirely based on your accomplishments at work.

I think we just wanna have more elements.

And the same thing goes for, at one point when I was really into dancing, I got a very serious injury And it took this huge part of my life away from me.

I'm so glad I had work. Thank God I have something I can do else.

And I just think having a lot of different... parts of your life make you more flexible, more creative, more awake, more engaged and you know, when I don't, I definitely have been a workaholic when I was a postdoc and assistant professor period, definitely did not make enough time for myself to have a richer a rich personal life at certain points and I

Very quickly, I just wither away into a shell of a human, a shell, empty shell of the person I used to be.

And it's noticeable. Everybody can feel it.

You can't pretend. you know everyone that works with you feels it eventually and so I think that's a big thing.

And so as I've taken feedback from my anonymous lab surveys and other forms of feedback and just reflecting, it's clear, you know, taking your lifestyle into and having agency over designing your lifestyle to be ideal for you is super important.

So a typical day for me, might look like, okay, the last workday, let's say I woke up, actually, so it was early high tide, so I gotta wake up in the dark. pack up my bags, go surfing, and then get home before surf, see my friends in the water.

And I think surfing is a lot of things. It's exercise.

It's a cold plunge. It's photons. Some of your favorite things.

Maybe a little bit meditative. Maybe some social community.

Then... And I go every time at the same day so there's the same group of people.

Then I go home. make the kids their snacks, breakfast, drop them off at school.

Then I go to lab and then run lab meeting.

And have meetings. Most of my day when I'm at work is spent meeting with people, Drawing on a whiteboard, mostly meeting with my trainees is what I like to spend most of my time on.

Of course, there's other stuff that gets in the mix, like administrative, whatever.

And then... Come home at a pretty early hour, pick up my kids, make dinner, and then go to sleep kind of early.

Kind of boring these days. That's my typical day.

Sounds exciting to me. Sounds exciting to me.

I think if one were to stay up late, then one feels sleep deprived if they wake up early.

If you wake up late, you're missing out on them. early morning sunrise the surf all of that I've never surfed actually once I paddled out once when I was in college and there was no surf so I would paddle back in but I keep hearing about this surfing thing and people seem to love it.

That's one of my concerns is that if you fall in love with it, you're going to spend a lot of time out in the ocean.

Clearly, it's all serving you well and must be wonderful to be a child in your home.

I can imagine how much fun it is and how interesting it is.

Um, you mentioned several times, uh, mentorship and trainees, and it's clear that, uh, reshaping the landscape of science for the next generation coming up is something that's a real passion to you.

I take great pleasure in asking this because it wasn't long ago that you and I were graduate students and postdocs and more or less the same vintage.

Right. And as is the case, people retire, people die.

This is the reality of life. And. people move up the ranks as you have.

So what are some of the things that you're most passionate about in terms of shaping the future of science? in particular research science, but maybe more broadly.

And what are you doing about it? I think that...

The academic culture has evolved. And I guess I should start by just saying, first, as I was driving over here, it was just a beautiful drive, and I'm just thinking, It is so cool that we get to do this for a living.

Isn't it amazing that Studying whatever I find interesting to me is something that I can have a secure job for.

And then just thinking about cool ideas and directions and talking about it, stuff that I would do for free. is really my job and I just am so grateful to have that and I think there are a lot of beautiful sides of academia that sometimes don't get the airtime. that they deserve and of course there's a lot of doom and gloom there always has been when I was a grad student There's lots of doom and gloom in the ether.

There's plenty now. I think perhaps it has become a little bit more dire. the plight of academia right now.

There's been a nationwide drop of postdocs in general.

There's just a mass exodus away from academia to industry.

And I think that reflects the changing environment.

And so I guess when I was a graduate student, I had this book in my desk drawer called Advice for Young Investigator written by Ramonica Hall. which is a great book.

It's thin. It's a quick read. It's got some whimsical anecdotes and some...

Important insights, I think. Also, a lot of misogyny.

Very much glamorizing workaholic tendencies.

You know, there was definitely a picture of a scientist.

This was the way to succeed. Other options not really offered.

And I really struggled with that. I had a lot of imposter syndrome. coming up through... I mean...

Someone asked me, when did I stop having imposter syndrome?

I think maybe 2021. Very recently, I think I spent 20 years of my career having imposter syndrome, wondering if I was good enough, if I was gonna make it.

Do I have what it takes? and constantly doubting and questioning it.

And I think that It would have been nice to not feel so alone at that period of my career.

So I think some of the things that were described in this original book were really important for academic research to be born as a thing.

How do we make this be a thing that you can get paid for?

How do we make this be a job that people get to have.

And then at this point, I think Most people would agree we need science.

Science is important. We want to we want to we benefit from science.

And I think. At this point, it's not so clear that we need elitism as much as we did before.

It's not... We're looking at a crumbling academic culture where we're struggling to retain people and You know, it's not a great sustainable dynamic.

I think trainees are not getting compensated well enough or treated well enough that it's an attractive choice.

And so I think we need to sort of make a change.

Nothing wrong necessarily about about the intentions that were set hundreds of years ago, but things change and we're where we are now and things are changing very quickly.

So I guess I get to make one of my childhood dreams, which is to write a book come true.

And one of the benefits of social media, I did have a tweet kind of, you know, just sort of spontaneously ranting about how this book is problematic and it's very misogynistic.

And maybe we need another book for other types of people.

And that makes people feel more included And this tweet went around, and I didn't expect anything to come of this.

I'm just... you know living my daily life and then my dm suddenly had literary agents and a book deal and then Okay, now I'm writing this book.

And so I'm about halfway through. But I think the goal of the book, I don't really have time for this project, to be honest, but it's such an important project to me.

I think that... I wanna see academia be one of the healthiest places why is it second only to the military in the pervasiveness of sexual misconduct and, you know, things like- Is that right?

Yeah, yeah. And did you know that? So actually, you know, factoid is-

Academia is, the military is worse. in terms of sexual misconduct, retaliation issues that occur, but academia is second.

And it makes you wonder, what are the parameters that make this type of abuse so rampant?

I think one of the obvious ones is the clear ranks, how stable the ranks are, how the power structure is. of academia and the military, very fixed, not super debatable, not difficult to move these, the ranks are, they're there.

And the power structure is very skewed. And those are the ingredients that facilitate abuse.

And so I think In the military, I could see a very good argument for why that strict, rigid hierarchical structure is necessary.

There's not time for making mistakes. Get it.

But with academia, there's time. It's not a war.

We're just studying stuff that we think is cool.

Why is such a rigid hierarchy with such devastating consequences necessary?

I would argue maybe it's not. And I think I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this for myself.

I've been I found this professional leadership coach I love. and just thinking about sustainability.

How do we make a sustainable ecosystem? It's not something you find in a lot of leadership management. literature that I've been exposed to.

So I'll take a note from the podcast and say, if anyone knows of literature that talks about developing sustainable ecosystems within leadership and management.

I would love to hear about that in the comments, but I think that's a big hole.

People think about making things stable.

The power structure should be stable. But actually being flexible and dynamic is what gives systems resilience and flexibility to survive.

And right now. All the cracks in the towers of academia are showing, and it's time to... to see if this is, are we going to adapt and survive or are we going to crumble?

There's a lot to unpack there and I'm grateful that you're drilling into all of that with I'm sure the same rigor and attention to asking the really critical questions that you have in your lab.

Certainly, I observe the landscape changing very rapidly.

I think there's also a lot to be learned and to explore that exports to other professions.

I certainly believe that the more first time opportunities to experience the beauty of doing research and biology in particular, because that's what I'm familiar with, the more likely that we are as a field of research and science to make more fundamental discoveries.

In other words, the more people that get the experience of trying science, doing exploratory research science, the more likely we are to pull from that pool.

And within that pool, there will be people of competence, talent and also gifted.

Like we just, you know, sort of like increase the size of the net.

And the net of course is netting something very specific, which is, You and I both know that while training certainly matters, knowledge is important. that ultimately, you know, love of craft and passion and just being tickled by that research bug, once that neuron, you know, gets tickled that lets us see something for the first time or know something down the microscope or in a, in a data plot or something, there's really no going back.

So I want to be very clear that I loudly applaud your efforts to extend the experience of research to people.

And earlier you were telling me that you're doing this, that many of the people in your lab are first time researchers.

They didn't come through the pedigree of research.

Yeah, I know we do a lot of outreach about 25% of my lab this summer was first time research experiences.

And so We've been really privileged to have the bandwidth to support that.

I will say though, I mean on the same tip, I think what you've done with this podcast is incredible. you've made millions of people who didn't have access to science or neuroscience be fascinated with neuroscience and now imagine What if every person that listened to this podcast and thought, this is such a great podcast.

I wish I could do some neuroscience. It could do it.

With some, you know, not full time. What if they could contribute in any, just whatever level that they wanted to.

That's so much more contribution that we're, currently missing out on because there's so many barriers. to be able to contribute to science.

And I think removing the ones that are really there as well as the ones that are just perceived to be there is so powerful.

I mean, the podcast is, you know, the proof is in the pudding.

The proof is in this podcast how many people could fall in love with science if they were given a chance to?

Well, thank you for that. It is indeed a labor of love for me.

And there are opportunities. Maybe we'll provide a link to a couple of them where. certain projects in neuroscience are crowdsourcing data analysis is actually quite fun.

There's the project where you can trace neurons.

It's actually very, very pleasing. You can do it while listening to podcasts or a book.

Kids can do it. You're tracing these neurons, basically filling in lines.

It's like a coloring book and you're contributing. to the parcellation of understanding the structure of the brain, including the human brain.

And without that crowdsourcing, It's just not going to happen.

I mean, there are efforts to make machine learning do it and to do it through AI, but there's a lot to be gained from having actual humans do this. those technologies don't quite yet approximate.

So we'll provide a link to some of those projects.

This is Kay, Dr. Tai, of course. I want to thank you so much.

First of all, for coming here today and sharing so much knowledge and also being willing to go into some places that were by virtue of my questions, a little bit speculative and really think about those and and address those through the lens of deep mechanistic understanding of how these circuits work and to make it clear to people.

Your enthusiasm for science is infectious in the most positive sense of the word, and I know that so many people are going to benefit from your knowledge and also from the work that you've been doing in your laboratory. your star rise, and it's still going, going, going, and it's just remarkable and extraordinary, but I must say, not at all surprising.

So that and your advocacy work and for all you do and that you're doing, I just on behalf of myself and everyone listening.

I just want to extend a genuine and really heartfelt thanks.

Thank you. Thank you so much. And it's been such an honor to be on the Human Lab podcast.

It's legendary. So thank you so much for having me.

Absolutely. We'll do it again. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion all about the biology of social interactions with Dr. K. Tai.

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Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. K. Tai.

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[The Neuroscience of Loneliness, Social Homeostasis, and Emotional Valence with Dr. K. Tai]-[Dr. Kay Tye: The Biology of Social Interactions and Emotions]

📋 Summary

The Neuroscience of Social Connectivity and Emotional Regulation

Redefining the Amygdala: A Fork in the Road

Social Homeostasis and the "Loneliness Neurons"

The Impact of Modern Interactions

Practical Strategies for Mental Health

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript