and so you know mighty treat people who
have post-traumatic disorder or symptoms
of post-traumatic disorder
and so let's say they got post-traumatic
stress disorder because again because a
relationship collapsed on them suddenly
which is quite common you know they get
betrayed or someone leaves them suddenly
and then they don't know what to do
because especially if their
conscientious because then they just
tear themselves into pieces trying to
figure out what they did wrong to bring
about that event and the reason they're
doing that is because they want to
retool their perceptions and their
actions so that the probability that
they'll have the same experience again
is minimized and their mind won't leave
them alone until they do it and the
wonder right because if you fall into a
big pit and you get really hurt the
first thing you should figure out is how
to not fall into big pits anymore and
your mind is set up exactly for that and
so what you do with someone who's having
problems like that so maybe they're
waking up at the middle of the night
obsessing about what went wrong is you
walk them through it you do a
situational analysis first because one
of the oversimplifications that people
make and this is especially true for
conscientious people is if something bad
happened to me I must have done
something to deserve it now that's
actually a pretty functional idea
because it suggests that there are
things about your behavior that you
could change that would make the future
better but the problem is is that say if
it's the collapse of a relationship and
you've been with that person for eight
years or longer well you did so many
things with them that the idea that you
did something wrong pretty much extends
to every single thing you ever did with
them and that's how are you gonna fix
that and so that's part of the trauma
actually that the trauma is 80-million
snakes all at the same time it's like
well forget it
you don't have time to go through all
that material and so partly what you do
is with people and this is what you
should do with yourself too is you do a
situational analysis it's like don't be
assuming necessarily that the thing that
happened to you only happened to you
because of
what you did or didn't do there's all
sorts of factors at play so one of the
things that sometimes I do with clients
is if they were in a relationship and I
can get some reasonable personality
information about both of them I can
point out where they were temper
mentally incompatible you know like if
you're a highly conscientious person and
your partner is very very low in
conscientiousness it's like well good
luck to you too how the hell are you
ever gonna work that out because you
want everything to be exactly where it's
supposed to be and you're working all
the time and your partner could care
less whether things were where they
supposed to be and they're not gonna
work and you can butt heads about that
forever the probability that you're
going to shift it you know except to
some minor degree is very very low and
so sometimes you end up with someone
with whom you get along very well on one
temperamental dimension and you're an
absolute catastrophe on the other four
and the probability that you're going to
be able to mediate a huge temperamental
difference is extremely low you wouldn't
expect yourself to mediate a huge
intellectual difference right you're
gonna make the other person smarter or
maybe you smarter depending on who
you're with it's like no probably not
bit maybe so you do a situational
analysis and so what you're trying to do
is to extract out information from your
past and your present that will enable
you to conduct yourself properly into
the future and so that's another example
of the pragmatic element of of thought
well then within the brain itself apart
from the major subdivisions which which
which we just described there are minor
subdivisions and here's a bunch of them
listed the caudate nucleus the cerebral
cortex the huge newest part of the brain
that's about a square meter if you
unfold it it's all folded up and most of
the processing occurs right on the
surface that's that's the idea anyways
the thalamus that's a place where a lot
of the information in the brain appears
to be integrated the cerebellum helps
you with balance and the sequencing of
complex motor activities the hippocampus
that's the one we talked about before
one of the things that the hippocampus
does seems to do is compare your model
of the world as its unfolding with the
model that that you desire to be okay
and then keeps track of mismatches and
if it detects a mismatch then it
disinhibitor emotional and motivational
centers and that's the beginning of your
response to the unknown so one of them
is the hypothalamus I'm gonna
concentrate on it for a bit it's a
little tiny part of the brain that's
pretty much at the top of the spinal
cord see it's really small compared to
the rest of the brain now it turns out
that if a genetic altering except for
the hypothalamus which which people do
you take off the whole cortex for
example and then the cat still live if
you do it carefully but it doesn't have
much of a brain and so you might think
well that cat would just do nothing but
cats actually pretty functional if it's
reduced just to its hypothalamus and
that's because the hypothalamus is an
incredibly important part of the brain
and it provides what I would say
constitute the major frames the major
psychological frames and so so I like a
decorticate cat can still eat and drink
and regulate its body temperature and
engage in defensive aggression and if
it's female it can still mate a male
can't because the male mating behavior
is more complicated and as long as you
keep it in a bounded environment it can
function reasonably well it's hyper
curious though which is very weird
because you wouldn't expect a cat with
no brain to be curious about ever
anything but a cat with no brain is
curious about everything and that seems
to be because part of the reason that
you aren't curious about something
anymore is because you've investigated
it and you've built a representation of
it that's functional and that functional
representation then stands for the thing
itself and then you can ignore it and so
you learn to ignore things there they're
interesting to begin with and then you
learn to ignore them and so one of the
things that I think artists do if
they're great artists is remind you that
there's more to things that then you see
now that you've learned to ignore them
so you get a kind of a hallucinogenic
painting of flowers like van Gogh might
produce like his famous irises which I
think sold for like two hundred and
twenty million dollars there's something
outrageous it's like what van Gogh is
trying to
show you is what those flowers look like
before you thought you could see them
because now you flower and you walk by
you know you don't see it at all because
you're off to get a peanutbutter
sandwich or something you don't have
time to glory in the wonder of the world
you know we've got something practical
to do so all right so we're gonna zoom
in on the hypothalamus here and what you
see of course when you zoom in on the
hypothalamus is that it's not a thing
it's a whole bunch of things and then
it's one of those horrible whole bunches
of things that are made out of even more
bunches of things and they're made out
of more bunches of things and what's
really interesting about going down the
body from an analytic perspective it
doesn't seem to get less complex as you
go farther down you know like some of
them I should actually show you that I
haven't showed you that little video of
DNA fixing itself a oh I better show you
that it's so cool it's ridiculously cool
so you definitely need to see it so like
that's just so ridiculously mind-blowing
but mmm it's almost unbearable I mean to
think about that as clockwork even is a
pretty strange idea because while those
little things walk over obstacles it's
like how the hell does that happen
they're just molecules so it's so cool
cuz when you go down you'd think simple
but you know and you know he said at the
beginning when they were taking that
when the little machines were taking
that DNA apart that he didn't show the
error-correcting you know there's other
little machines that go along and see if
everything's okay and if it isn't they
cut it out and put a great piece in it's
like yeah things we don't understand
there's no shortage of them that's for
sure okay so what I'm doing in some
sense is walking you through a
psychophysiological or representation of
psays developmental process i would say
so i wanted to zero in on the
hypothalamus because it seems to me the
thing that sets the most basic frames
and so we'll go ahead with that
so you see that it's made up of all
these little parts and so it's called
the hypothalamus more for convenience
than because it's a homogenous set of
structures because it's not a homogenous
set of structures and this is something
to consider very carefully when you're
thinking about the terminology that
psychologists use or that you might use
to describe your own behavior because
you know you can roughly there is a
psychology of motivation and there's a
psychology of emotion and you might
think well emotion and motivation are
categorically different entities but
they're not in fact there's no such
thing as a uniform set of motivations
and there's no such thing as a uniform
set of emotions and the distinction
between a motivation and emotion is
unclear to say the least and that's
partly because the physiological
substructures that subsume what we call
motivations and what we call emotions
and it's not like there's a motivation
center that's how--that's homogeneous
the closest is the hypothalamus but it's
made of structures that are
qualitatively different
and then the emotions because I have to
use that descriptive terminology because
we have to communicate it about it
somehow there's all sorts of different
structures in the brain that contribute
to emotional expression and they're not
even in the same place much less much
less composed of identical structure or
function so you know we have these short
hands that we use to divide up the world
but they're they're awkward and
untenable as the level of resolution
increases but anyways I'm still going to
go with motivation and emotion because
it's a useful simplification but you can
see with the hypothalamus that there's
all these you know complicated little
subsystems in there and I showed you
that video to show you just how
complicated the subsystems are all the
way down to the really to the molecular
level how those little machines manage
what they do is completely beyond me now
to call it clockwork when those little
things that walk can walk over obstacles
it's like clockwork does one thing you
know only click-click click-click that's
all it does no exceptions this thing
walks over obstacles to get where it's
going it's like who knows what's going
on down there but it works well enough
so here we are weirdly enough