Lisa Feldman Barrett: Love, Evolution, and the Human Brain | Lex Fridman Podcast #140
the following is a conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett her second time on the podcast she's a neuroscientist at Northeastern University and one of my favorite people her new book called 7 and a half lessons about the brain is out now as of a couple of days ago so you should definitely support Lisa by buying it and sharing with friends if you like it it's a great short intro to the human brain quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode a FL of greens the all-in-one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases eight sleep a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep master class online courses that I enjoy from some of the most amazing people in history and better help online therapy with a licensed professional please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that Lisa just like manolis Kellis is a local brilliant mind and friend and someone I can see talking to many more times sometimes it's fun to talk to a scientist not just about their field of expertise but also about random topics even silly ones from love to music to philosophy ultimately it's about having fun something I know nothing about this conversation is certainly that it may not always work but it's worth a shot I think it's valuable to alternate along all kinds of Dimensions like between deeper technical discussions and more fun random discussion from Liberal thinker to conservative thinker from musician to athlete from CEO to Junior engineer from friend to stranger variety makes life and conversation more interesting let's see where this little podcast journey goes if you enjoy this thing subscribe on YouTube review it with five stars and apple podcast follow on spot sptify support on patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman and now here's my conversation with Lisa Felman Barrett based on the comments in our previous conversation I think a lot of people will be very disappointed I should say to learn that you are in fact married as they say all the good ones are taken okay so uh I'm a fan of your husband as well Dan he's a programmer musician so a man after my own heart can I ask a ridiculously over romanticized question of when did you first fall in love with Dan it's actually it's a really it's a really romantic story I think so I was divorced by the time I was 26 27 26 I guess and I was in my first academic job which was Penn State University which is in the middle of Pennsylvania surrounded by mountains so you have it's four hours to get anywhere to get to Philadelphia New York Washington I mean you're basically stuck you know um and I was very fortunate to have um a lot of other assistant professors who were hired at the same time as I was so there were a lot of us we were all friends which was really fun um but I was single and I didn't want to date a student and there were no and I wasn't going to date somebody in my department that's just a recipe for disaster yeah so so even at 20 whatever you were you were already wise enough to know that yeah a little bit maybe yeah I wouldn't call me wise at that age but anyways um not sure that I would say that I'm wise now but um and so um after a you know I was spending probably 16 hours a day in the lab because it was my first year and as an assistant professor and there's a lot to do and I was also bitching and moaning to my friends that you know I hadn't had sex in I don't know how many you know months and it was I was starting to you know become unhappy with my life and um I think at a certain point they just got tired of listening to me and moan and said just do something about it then like do you know if you're unhappy and so the first thing I did was I I made friends with a sushi chef in town and this is like a State College Pennsylvania in the early 90s was there was like a pizza shop and a sub shop and actually a very good bagel shop and one good coffee shop and maybe one nice restaurant I mean there was really but there was a the Second Son of a Japanese sushi chef who was not going to inherit the restaurant and so he moved to Pennsylvania and was giving Sushi lessons so I met this guy the sushi the sushi chef and we decided to throw a sushi party at the coffee shop so we basically it was the goal was to invite every eligible bachelor really within like a 20 mile radius MH we had a totally fun time I wore an awesome crushed velvet burgundy dress it was beautiful dress um and I didn't meet any I met a lot of friend new friends but I did not meet anybody so then I thought okay well maybe I'll try the personals ads which I had never used before in my life and um I first tried the paper personals ads like a then newspaper like in the newspaper that didn't work and then a friend of mine said oh you know there's this thing called Net News so we're going this is like 1992 maybe so there was this Anonymous you could do it anonymously so you would you would read um you could post or you could read ads and then respond to an address which was Anonymous and you that was yolked to somebody's real address and um and there was always a lag because it was this like a bulletin board sort of thing so at first I read I read them over and I decided to to respond to one or two and you know it was interesting sorry this is not on the internet yeah this is totally on the internet but it takes there's a delay of a couple days or whatever right it's 1992 there's no web web no pictures there's no pictures the web doesn't exist it's all done in asky format sort of um and you know but the but the ratio of um men to women was like 10 to one I mean there were many more men because it was basically academics and the government that was it those no I mean I think AOL maybe was just starting to become popular but um and so the first uh person I met told me that he was a um he wor he was a scientist who worked for NASA and um yeah um anyways it turned out that he didn't actually yeah this is how they brag is as like you elevate your as opposed to saying you're taller than you are you say like your position is high yeah and I actually I would have been fine dating somebody who wasn't a scientist it's just that they have it's just that whoever I date has to just accept that I am and that I'm I was pretty ambitious and was trying to make my career and you know that's not that that's not an I think it's maybe more common now for men to maybe accept that in their female Partners but at that time not not so intimidating I guess yes I I that has been said and so um and so then the next one I actually corresponded with and we actually got to the point of talking on the phone and we had this really kind of funny conversation where you know we're chatting and he said he he introduces the idea that um you know he's really looking for a dominant woman and I'm thinking I'm a psychologist by training so I'm thinking oh he means sex roles like I'm like no I'm very assertive and I'm glad you think that you know okay anyways long story short that's not really what he meant okay got it yeah so and I just you know that will just show you my level of naive like I was like I didn't completely I was like well yeah you know no at one point he asked me how I felt about him uh wearing my lingerie and I was like I don't even share my lingerie with my sister like I don't share my linger with anybody you know no no the third one I interacted with was a banker who lived in Singapore and um that that conversation didn't last very long because he made an anal I guess he he made an analogy between me and uh character in The Fountain Head um the woman who's who's raped in the Fountain Head and I was like okay that's not that's not a good that's not a good that's not a good one not that part not that scene not that scene so then I um so then I was like okay you know what I'm going to post my own ad and so I did I posted well first I wrote my ad and then of course I checked it with my my friends who were all also assistant professors they're like my little greek chorus and then I posted it and I got some like uh I don't know 80 something responses in 24 hours I mean it was do you remember the pitch um like how how you I guess condensed yourself I don't remember it exactly although Dan has it um but um actually for our 20th wedding anniversary he took our our exchanges and he printed them off and put them in a leatherbound book for us to read which was really sweet um yeah I think I was just really direct like I'm almost 30 I'm a scientist I'm not looking to you know I'm I'm looking for something serious and you know but the thing is I I forgot to say where my location was yeah and my age yeah which I forgot yeah so I got lots of I mean I will say so I printed off all of the responses and um I had all my friends over and we were you know had a big I made a big um pot of gumbo and we drank through several bottles of wine reading these responses and I would say for the most part they were really sweet like Earnest and genuine as much as you could tell that somebody's being genuine it seemed you know there were a couple of really funky ones like you know this one couple who told me that I was their soulmate the two of them then they were looking for you know a third person and I was like okay but mostly super seemed seemed like super genuine people and so I chose five men to start corresponding with and I was corresponding with them and then then about a week later I get this other email and okay and then I post something the next day that said okay you know thank you so much and I'm going to I answered every person back but then after that I said okay and I'm not going to answer anymore you know because it was they were still coming in and I couldn't you know I have a job and you know a house to take care of and stuff so um and then about a week later I get this other email and um he says you know he just describes himself like I'm this I'm this I'm this I'm a chef I'm a scientist I'm a this I'm a this and so I emailed him back and I said you you know you seem interesting you can write me at my actual address if you want here's my address I'm not really responding I'm not really responding to other people anymore but you seem interesting you know you can write to me if you want um and then he wrote to me and uh I um then I wrote him back and I it was it was a non-descript kind of email and I wrote him back and I said thanks for responding you know I'm really busy right now I'm I was was in the middle of writing my first slate of Grant application so I was really consumed and I said I'll get back to you in a couple of days and so I did I waited a couple days I until my grants were you know safe Grant application safely out the door and then I emailed him back and then he emailed me and then really across two days we sent a 100 emails and text only was there pictures and any of that text only text only wow and then so this was like a Thursday and a Friday and then Friday he said let's talk on the weekend on the phone and I said okay and he wanted to talk Sunday night and I had a date Sunday night so I said okay sure we can talk Sunday night um and then I was like well you know I don't really want to cancel my date so I'm just going to call him on Saturday so I just called I co called them on Saturday and a woman answered oh wow that's not cool not cool and uh so she says you know hello and I say oh you know it's down there and she said sure can I ask who's calling and I said it tell them it's Lisa and she went oh my God oh my God I'm just a friend I'm just a friend I just have to tell you I'm just a friend and I was like yeah this is adorable right she doesn't and then he gets on the phone not high nice to be the first thing he says to me she's just a friend so I was just so Charmed really by the whole thing so it was it was yam kapor it was the Jewish um uh day of atonement that was ending and they were baking cookies and going to a break fast so people you know as you know fast all day and and then they go to a party and they break fast so uh I thought okay I'll just um I'll just you know cancel my date so I did and I stayed home and we talked for 8 hours um and then the next night for 6 hours and it basically it just went on like that and then uh by the end of the week he um he flew to State College and you know we had gone through this whole thing where ID said we're going to take it slow we're going to get to know each other you know and then really by I think we talked like two or three times these like really long conversations and then he said I'm just going to fly there and then so of course there's I don't even know that there were fax machines at that point maybe there were but I don't think so anyway so he we decideed we'll exchange pictures and um so he you know I take my photograph and I give it to my secretary and I say to my secretary facts this I say this say send this priority mail priority mail and he goes okay I'll send a priority mail Priority Mail he's like I know Priority Mail okay and then uh so I get Dan's photograph in the in the mail um and um you know it's it's him in a in a in shorts and you can see that he's probably somewhere like the Bahamas or something like that and it's like cropped so clearly what he's done is he's taken a photograph where you know he's in in it with someone else who turned out to be his ex-wife so I'm thinking well this is awesome you know I I've hit the jackpot he's he's you know very appealing to me very attractive and um and then you know my photograph doesn't show up and it doesn't show up and you know so like one day and then two days and then you know he's he's like you know you're I said well I I asked my secretary to send a priority I mean I don't know you know um what he did and uh and he's like I said I'm like well you don't have to you know you don't have to come and he's like no no no I'm gonna I'm gonna you know we've had like five dates the equivalent of five dates practically um and then um so he's supposed to fly on a Thursday or Friday I can't remember and uh I get a call like maybe an hour before his flight's supposed to leave and he says hi and I say and it's just something in his voice right and I say cuz at this point I think I've talked to him like for 25 hours I don't know and he says hi and I'm like you got the picture and he's like yeah and I'm like you don't like it and he's like well I'm sure it's not I'm sure it's your I'm sure just not a good you know it's not it's probably not your best oh no you know you don't you don't have to come and he's like no no no I'm coming and I'm like no you don't have to come and he's like no no I really want to I'm you know I'm I'm getting on the plane I'm like you don't have to get on the plane um he's like no I'm getting on the plane and so I go down to my I go I'm in my office this is happening right so I go downstairs to my one of my closest friends who's still actually one of my closest friends um who is one of my colleagues and um Kevin and I say Kevin and I go to Kevin I go Kevin Kevin Kevin he doesn't like the photograph and Kevin's like well which photograph did you send and I'm like well you know the one where we're shooting pool and he's like you sent that photograph that's a horrible photograph I'm like yeah but it's the only one that I had that was like where my hair was kind of similar to what it is now and he's like Lisa like do I have to check everything for you you know you should not have sent that yeah you know but still he flew over but so he flew where from by the way uh he was in he was in graduate school at Amherst yeah at um UMass Amherst so he flew and um I picked him up and at the airport and he was happy so whatever the concern was was gone yeah and um I was dressed you know I carefully carefully dressed were you nervous I was really really nervous cuz I I am not I don't really believe in fate and I don't really think there's only one person that you can be with but I think you know people who some people are curvy they're kind of complicated and so the number of people who fit them is maybe less than I like it mathematically speaking yeah I got it um and so when I was going to pick him up at the airport I was thinking well this could I could be going to pick up the the person I'm going to marry or not I mean like I really but I really you know like our conversations were just very authentic and very moving and um and we really connected and and I really felt like he understood me actually um in in a way that a lot of people don't and um and and what was really nice was at the time um you know the airport was this tiny little airport out in a cornfield basically and so driving back to the town we were in the car for 15 minutes completely in the dark as I was driving and so it was very similar to we had just spent you know 20 something hours on the telephone um sitting in the dark talking to each other so it was very familiar and we basically spent the whole weekend together and you met all my friends and we had a big party and um and at the end of the weekend um I said okay you know if we're going to give this a shot we we probably we shouldn't see other people so it's a risk you know it's commitment um but but I just didn't see how it would work if we were dating people locally and then also seeing each other at a distance because I you know I've had longdistance relationships with war and they're hard and they they take a lot of they take a lot of effort and so we decided we'd give it three months and see what happened and that was it this such an interesting thing like we're all what is it there are several billion of us and we're kind of roaming this world and then you kind of stick together you find find somebody that just like gets you and it's interesting to think about there's probably thousands if not millions of people that would would be sticky to you depending on the curvature of your space but what what is the could you speak to the stickiness like to the just the falling in love like seeing that somebody really gets you maybe by way of um telling do you think do you remember there was a moment when you just realized damn it I think I'm like I think that's this is the guy I think I'm in love we were having these conversations actually from the really from the second weekend we were together so he flew back the next weekend to stay College because my birthday it was my 30th birthday my friends were throwing me a party and we went hiking and we hiked up some mountain and we were sitting on a cliff over this you know Overlook and talking to each other and I was thinking and I actually said to him like I I haven't really known you very long but I feel like I'm falling in love with you which can't possibly be happening I must be projecting but it be projecting but it certainly feels that way right like I don't believe in love at first sight so this can't really be happening but it sort of feels like it is and he was like I know what you mean and so for the first three months or four months we would say things to each other like I feel like I'm in love with you but you know but that can't but things don't really work like that so but you know so and then it became a joke like I feel like I'm in love with you and then eventually you know I think um but I think that was one moment where we were we were talking about I don't just you know not just all the great aspirations you have are all the things but also things you don't like about yourself things that you're worried about things that you're scared of and then I think the that was sort of solidified the relationship and then there was one weekend where we went to Maine in the winter which I I mean I really love the beach always but in the winter particularly CU it's just beautiful and calm and whatever yeah and I also I I do find beauty in starkness sometimes like so there's this Grand Majestic scene of you know this very powerful ocean and it's all these like beautiful blue Grays and it's just it's just stunning and so we were sitting on this huge Rock in Maine and where we had gone for the weekend it was freezing cold and I honestly can't remember what he said or what I said or what but I I definitely remember having this feeling of um I absolutely want to stay with this person like I and I don't know what my life will be like if I'm not with this person like I need to be with this person can we from a scientific and a human perspective uh dig into your belief that first uh love at first sight is not is not possible you don't believe in it because there is there you don't think there's like a magic where you see somebody in the in the Jack carck way and you're like wow that's something that's that's a special little oh I definitely oh I definitely think can connect with someone instant in an instance and I definitely think you can say oh there's something there and I'm really clicking with that person romantically but also just with friends it's possible to do that you recognize a mind that's like yours or that's compatible with yours there are ways that you feel like you're being understood or that you understand something about this person or maybe you see something in this person that you find really compelling or intriguing but I think you know your brain is predictive organ right you're you you're using your past you're projecting you're using your past to yeah make predictions and I mean not deliberately that's how your brain is wired that's what it does and so it's filling in all of the gaps that you you know there are lots of gaps of information that you don't you know information you don't have and so your brain is filling those in and um but isn't that what love is no I don't think so actually I mean to some extent sure you you always you know there's research to show that people who are in love always see the best in each other and they you know when there's a when there's a negative interpretation or positive interpretation you know they choose the positive on there's a little bit of positive illusion there you know going on that's what the research shows but I think um I think that when you find somebody who not just appreciates your faults but Lo loves you for them actually you know like maybe even doesn't see them as a fault that's you so you have to be honest enough about what you're what your faults are so it's easy to love someone for all the things that they um uh for all the wonderful characteristics they have it's harder I think to love someone despite their faults or maybe even the faults that they see aren't really faults at all to you they're actually something really special but isn't isn't that can't you explain that by saying the brain kind of like you're projecting it's you're you have a conception of um a human being or just a a spirit that really connects next with you and you're projecting that onto that person and within within that framework all their faults then become beautiful like little maybe but you you just have to pay attention to the prediction error no but maybe that's what love like maybe you IGN you start ignoring the prediction error that's maybe love is just your ability uh like to ignore the prediction era well I think that there's some research that might say that but that's not my experience I guess um but there is some research that says I mean there's some some research that says you have to have an optimal margin of Illusion which means that you um that you put a positive spin on on smaller things but you don't ignore the bigger things right and I think without being judgmental at all when someone says to me you know um you're not who I thought you were I mean nobody says has said that to me in a really long time but certainly when I was younger that was you know you're not who I thought you were my reaction to that was well whose fault is that you know yeah um I'm a pretty I'm a pretty upfront person um I mean I will though say that in my experience people people don't lie to you about who they are they lie to themselves in your presence yeah um and so you know you don't want to get T tied up in that tangled up in that and I think from the ge-o Dan and I were just for whatever reason maybe it's because we both have been divorced already and you know um you know he told me who he thought he was and he he was pretty accurate as far as I pretty much actually I mean I there's very I can't say that I've ever come across a characteristic in him that really surprised me in a bad way it's hard to know yourself it it is hard to know yourself to communicate that for sure I mean I'll say you know I had the advantage of training as a therapist which meant for five years I was under a  microscope yeah um you know when I was training as a therapist it was hour for hour supervision which meant if you were in a room with a client for an hour you had an hour with a with a supervisor so that Supervisor was behind the mirror why for your session and then you went and had an hour of discussion about what you said what you didn't say learning to use your own react your own feelings and thoughts as a tool to probe the mind of the client and so on and so you you can't help but learn a lot of you can't learn help but learn a lot about yourself in that process do you think um knowing or learning how the sausage is made ruins the magic of the actual experience like you as a neuroscientist who studies the brain do you think it ruins the magic of like love at first sight or are you do you consciously are still able to lose yourself in the moment I'm definitely able to lose myself in the moment is wine involved not always chocolate I mean some kind of mind altering substance right but um yeah for sure I mean I guess what I would say though is that [Music] um for me part of the magic is the process like so ah you know so so I remember a day there was well I was working on this on this on this book of essays I I was in New York um I can't remember why I was in New York but I was in New York for something and I was in Central Park and I was looking at all the people with their babies and I was thinking every every that each one of these there's a tiny little brain yeah that's wiring itself right now and I and I I just I felt in that moment I was like I am never going to look at an infant in the same way ever again and so to me I mean honestly before I started learning about brain development I thought babies were cute but you know not that interesting until they could do interact with you and do things of course my own infant I thought was extraordinarily interesting but you know they're kind of like lumps that you know until they can you know interact with you but they are anything but lumps I mean like you know so and part of the I mean I all I can say is I have deep affection now for like tiny little babies in a way that I didn't really um before um ju because of the I'm just so curious but the actual process the mechanisms of uh the the the wiring of the brain the learning all the magic of the the neurobiology yeah and or you know something like you know um when you make eye contact with someone directly sometimes you know you you feel something right yeah and um yeah that's weird what is it and what is that and so so to me that's not um that's not backing away from the moment that's like expanding the moment it's like that's incredibly cool you know when I was um I'll just say that when I was when I was in graduate school I also was in therapy because it's almost a given that you're going to be in therapy yourself if you're going to become a therapist and I had a deal you know with my therapist which was that I could call time out at any moment that I wanted to As Long As I was being responsible about it and I wasn't using it as a way to get out of something and he could tell me no you know he could Decline and say no we're you're you know you're using this to get out of something but I could call time out whenever I want and say what are you doing right now like what are you here's what I'm experiencing what are you trying to do like I wanted to use my own experience to interrogate um what the process was and that made it more helpful in a way do you know what I mean so yeah I don't I don't think learning how something works makes it less magical actually but that's just me I guess I don't know would you yeah uh yes I tend to uh have two modes one is one is an engineer and one is a romantic and I'm conscious of like like the gear like you like there's two rooms you can go into the one the engineer room and I think that ruins the romance so I tend to there's two rooms one is the engineering room think from first principles how do we build the thing that creates this kind of uh behavior and then you go into the ROM ROM Mantic room where you're like emotional it's a roller coaster and then you're uh the thing is let's take it slow and then you get married the next night that you just this giant mess and you write a song and then you cry and then you send a bunch of text and anger and and whatever and somehow you're in Vegas and there's random people and you're drunk and whatever all that like in poetry and just mess of it fighting yeah yeah that's not those are two rooms and you go back between between them but I think the way you put it is quite poetic I think you're much you're much better at adulting uh with love uh than uh then perhaps I am because there is a magic to children I also think like of adults as children it's kind of cool to see it's a cool thought experiment to look at adults and think like that used to be a baby and then that's like a fully wired baby and it's just walking around pretending to be like all serious and important wearing a suit or something but that used to be a baby and then you think of like the parenting and all the experiences they had like it's it's cool to think of it that way but then you I started thinking like from a machine learning perspective but once you're like the romantic moments all that kind of stuff all that falls away I forget about all that I don't know that's the Russian thing maybe maybe but I also think it might be an age thing or maybe an experienc thing so I think um we all I mean if you're exposed to Western culture at all you are exposed to the uh sort of idealized stereotypic romantic romantic you know uh exchange and what what does it mean to be romantic and um so here's a test um um I'm see how to phrase it okay so not really test but this this tells you something about your own ideas about romance uh for Valentine's Day one year my husband bought me a six-way plug is that romantic or not romantic like sorry 6p play that's like an out like a yeah like to put in an outlet is that romantic or not romantic I mean depends the look in his eyes when he does it I mean it depends on the conversation that led up to that point depends how much uh it's like the music because you have a very you're you're both from the my experiences with you as a fan you have both a romantic nature but you have a very pragmatic like you cut through the of of uh the fuzziness and there there's something about a six-way plug that cuts to the that connects to the human like he understands who you are exactly yeah exactly yeah that was the most romantic gift he could have given me because he knows me so well he has a deep understanding of me which is that I will sit and suffer and complain yeah about the fact that I have to plug and unplug things and I will and moan until the cows come home but it would never occur to me to go buy a bloody six-way plug whereas for him he bought it he plugged it in he arranged he taped up all my wires he made it like really usable and for me that was uh that was the best it was the most romantic thing because he understood who I was and he did something very or you know just the Casual like we moved into a house that went we went from having a two-car garage to a onecar garage and I said okay you know I'm from Canada I'm not bothered by Snow Well I mean I'm a little little bothered by snow but he's very bothered by snow so I'm like okay you can park your car in the garage it's fine every day when it snows he goes out and cleans my car every day like I never asked him to do it he just does it because he knows that I'm cutting it really close in the morning you know when we when we all used to go to work um I have it timed to the second so that I can get up as late as possible work out as long as possible you know just to and into my office like a minute before my first meeting and so if it snows unexpectedly or something I'm screwed because now that's an added you know an added 10 or 15 minutes and I'm going to be late um anyways you know it's just these little tiny things that he's he's um he's he's a really easygoing guy and he doesn't look like somebody who pays attention to detail he doesn't fuss about detail but he definitely pays attention to detail and it's it is very very romantic in the sense sense that he um you know he loves me despite my little details it understands you yeah it is kind of hilarious that that is the six-way plug is um the the most fulfilling richest uh display of romance in your life I love it I love that's mean about romance romance is really it's not all about chocolates and flowers and you know whatever I mean those are all nice too but um sometimes it's about the sixth way plan sometimes it's about the six way plan so um maybe one way I could ask before we talk about the details you also have the author of another book is we talked about how emotions are made so it's interesting to talk about the process of writing you mentioned you were in New York what have you learned from writing these two books about the actual process of writing and maybe I don't know what's the most interesting thing to talk about there maybe the biggest challenges or the the boring mundane systematic like day-to-day of what worked for you like hacks or or even just about the Neuroscience that you've learned through the process of trying to write them here's the thing I learned if you think that it's going to take you a year to write your book it's going to take you three years to write your book that's the first thing I learned is that you no matter how organized you are it's always going to take way longer than what you think um in part because um very few people make an outline and then just stick to it you know the the some of the topics really take on a life of their own and to some extent you want to let them get you want to let them have their voice you know you want to follow leads until you feel satisfied that you've dealt with the topic um uh appropriately but I and that part is actually fun it's not fun to feel like you're con ly behind the eightball in terms of time yeah um but it is the exploration and the foraging for information is incredibly fun for me anyways I found it really enjoyable and if I wasn't also running a lab at the same time and trying to keep my family going uh you know it would have been the whole thing would have just been fun um but I would say the hardest thing about the most important thing I think I learned is also the hardest thing and that for me which is um knowing what to leave at out a really good Storyteller knows what to leave out in in academic writing you you shouldn't leave anything out you you all the details should be there right and um and I you know I've written or participated in in writing over 200 papers um peer-reviewed papers so I'm pretty good with detail knowing what to leave out knowing what to leave out and not harming the validity of the story that is a tricky tricky thing it was tricky when I wrote how emotions are made but that's a standard um popular science book so it's 300 something pages and then you know it has like a thousand endnotes and then each of the endnotes is attached to a web note which is also long so I mean you know it's um and it start and I mean the final draft I I wrote three drafts of that book actually and the final draft and then I had to cut by a third I mean or I mean I you know it was like 50,000 words or something and I had to cut it down to like 110 so um obviously it's I struggle with what to leave out you know brevity is not my strong suit I'm always telling people that it's a warning so that's why this book was a I you know I always been really fascinated with essays I I love reading essays and after reading a a a small set of essays by an fatan um called at large and at small which I just loved these little essays what's what's the topic of that those essays they are they're called um familiar essays so there the topics are like everyday topics like male um coffee chocolate I mean just like and what she does is she weaves her own experience it's a little bit like these conversations that you're so good at curating actually um you're weaving together history and philosophy and Science and also personal Reflections and a little bit you feel like you're like eavesdropping on someone's train of thought in a way it it's really they're really compelling to me and even if it's just like a mundane topic yeah but it's so interesting to um learn about like all of these little stories in the in the wrapping of the history of like male like that's in that's really interesting and so I read these essays and then I wrote to her a little fan girl email um this was many years ago and um and I said I I I just love you I love this book and how did you learn to write essays like this and she gave me a reading list of essays that I should read like writers and so I read them all and anyway so I decided it would be a really good challenge for me to try to write something really brief where I could focus on you know one or two really fascinating tidbits of of Neuroscience connect it to connect each one to something philosophical or um you know like just a question about human nature do it in a really brief format without violating the validity of the science that was a I just set myself this what I thought of as a really really big challenge in part because it was an incredibly hard thing for me to do in the first book yeah we should say that this is uh the seven and a half lesson is a very short book I mean it's uh it's like it embodies uh brevity right the whole point throughout is just I mean you you could tell that there's editing like there's pain in trying to bring it as brief as possible as clean as possible yeah yeah so it's I the way I think of it is um you know it's a little book of big science and Big Ideas yeah really big ideas in and in brief little packages and um you know I wrote it um so that people could read it I love reading on the beach I love reading essays on the beach I read it I wrote it so people could read it on the beach or in the bathtub or you know a subway stop yeah even if the beach is frozen over in the snow yeah so my husband Dan calls it the first Neuroscience Beach read that's his um that's his phrasing yeah and like like you said you learned a lot about writing from your husband like you were saying offline well he's he is of the two of us he is the better writer he is a masterful writer um he um he's also I mean he you know he's a PhD in computer science he's he's a software engineer but he's he's also really good at uh organization of knowledge so he built for a company he used to work for he built one of the first Knowledge Management systems and he's he now works at Google where he does engineering education like he's he understands how to tell a good story just you know about anything really um he's got got impeccable timing he's really funny and luckily for me he knows very little about psychology or Neuroscience well now he knows more obviously but so you know he was really when how motions were made um you know he was really really helpful to me because um the first draft of every chapter was me talking to him about what on you know I would talk out loud about what I wanted to say and the order in which I wanted to say it and then I would write it and then he would read it and um tell me all the bits that could be excised yeah and sometimes we would you know I should say I mean we don't he and I don't really argue about much except um directions in the car like we're that's where're that's if we're going to have an argument that's going to be where it's going to happen where what's the what's the nature of the argument about directions exactly I don't really know it's just that we're very I think it's that spatially you know he he um I use egocentric space so I want to say you know turn left like I always I'm I'm reasoning in relation to like my own physical corporeal body so you know you walk to the church and you turn left and you then you you know whatever you know I'm always like and his you know he gives directions um aloc centrically which means um organized around north south east west right so to you the the Earth is at the center of the solar system and to him no I'm reason I'm at theer you're at the center of the Sol system okay so uh anyway so we we but but here we you know we we had some really RI roaring arguments like really rip roaring arguments where he would say like who is this for is this for the 1% and I'd be like 1% meaning not you know not wealth but like civilians versus academics you know are these for the scientists or for the CI is this for the civilians right so he speaks for the for the people for the people and I'd be like no you have to and so he made you know after one terrible argument that we had where it was really starting to affect our our relationship because we were so mad at each other all the time um he made these little signs writing and Science and we only us them this this was like when you when you pulled out a sign that's it like the other person just wins and you have to stop fighting about it yeah and that's it great and so we just did that um and we didn't really have to use it too much for this book cuz this book was in some ways um uh you know I didn't have to learn a lot of new things for this book I had to learn some but I a lot of um what I learned for seven and uh for um how tions are made really St stood me in good stead for for this book so there was a little bit each essay was a little bit of learning a couple were was a little more than than a small amount but um but I I didn't have so much trouble here um I had a lot of trouble with the first book um but still even here you know um you know he would tell me that I could take something out and I really wanted to keep it and um I think we only use the signs once well if we could dive in some aspects of the book I I would love that um can we talk about so one of the essays looks at evolution let me ask the big question uh did the human brain evolve to think that's essentially the question that you address in the essay can you speak to it sure you know the the big cave out here is that we don't really know why brains evolved the the big why questions are called teologico those questions because we don't don't know really why we don't know the why however for for a very long time the Assumption was that Evolution worked in a progressive upward scale that you start off with simple organisms and those organisms get more complex and more complex and more complex now obviously that's true in some like really General way right that that um life started off as single cell organisms and you know things got more complex but the idea that um that brains evolved in some upward um trajectory from simple brains in simple animals to complex brains in complex animals is called a philogenetic scale um and um that philogenetic scale is embedded in a lot of evolutionary thinking including darwins actually um and it's been seriously challenged I would say by modern uh evolutionary bi biology um and so you know thinking is something that rationality is something that humans at least in the west really prize um as a great uh human achievement and so the idea that the most common evolutionary story is that you know brains evolved in um like sedimentary rock um uh with you know a layer for instincts that's your lizard brain and a layer on top of that uh uh for emotions that's your limic system lyic meaning border so it borders the parts that are for instincts oh interesting and um and then um the uh neocortex or new cortex where um rationality is supposed to live that's the sort of traditional story it just keeps getting layered on top by Evolution right and so you can think about you know I mean sedimentary rock is the way typically people describe it the way I sometimes like to think about it is um you know thinking about the cerebral cortex like uh icing on an already baked cake you know um where you know the cake is your inner Beast these like boiling you know roiling instincts and emotions that have to be contained and the the by the cortex and the the it's just um it's a fiction it's a myth it it's a myth that you can trace all the way back to stories about morality um in ancient Greece but what you can do is look at the scientific record and say well there there's others there are other stories that you could tell about brain Evolution and and the the context in which brains evolved so when you look at creatures who don't have brains and you look at creatures who do what's the difference and um you can look at you know some animals um so we call scientists call an environment that an animal lives in a niche their environmental Niche what are the things what are the parts of the environment that matter to that animal and um so there's some animals whose Niche hasn't changed in 400 million years so they're they're not these creatures are modern creatures but they're living in a niche that hasn't changed much and so their biology hasn't changed much and you can kind of verify that by looking at the genes that lur deep you know in the molecular structure of cells and so you can by looking at various animals in their developmental State meaning not you don't look at adult animals you look at embryos of animals and developing animals you can see you can piece together a different story and that story is that brains evolved under the selection pressure of hunting that in the Cambrian Period hunting emerged on the scene where animals deliberately ate one another um and what so you know before the Cambrian Period the animals didn't really have well they didn't have brains but they also didn't have senses really the very very rudimentary senses so the animal that I wrote about in seven and a half lessons is called an amphioxys or a lancelet and um little amphioxys has no eyes it has no ears it has no nose it it it it has no eyes it has a couple of cells for um uh detecting light and dark for circadian rhythm purposes so and it it it can't hear it has a vestibular cell to keep its body upright um it has a very rudimentary sense of touch and it doesn't really have any internal organs other than this like basically stomach it's like a just like a it doesn't it doesn't have an enteric nervous system it doesn't have like a gut that you know moves like we do it just has basically a tube yeah um so it's like little container like a little container yeah and so and really it doesn't it doesn't move very much it can move it just sort of wriggles it doesn't have very sophisticated movement and it's this really sweet little animal it sort of wriggles its way to a spot and then plants itself in the sand and just filters food as the food goes by um and then when the food concentration decreases it it just it it just um ejects itself wriggles to the ne some spot randomly where probabilistically there will be more food and plants itself again so it's it's not it's not really aware very aware that it has an environment it has a niche but that Niche is very small and it's not really experiencing that Niche very much um so it's it's basically like a little stomach on a stick that's that's really what it is and um but but when animals start to literally hunt each other um all of a sudden it becomes important to have to be able to sense your envir ironment because you need to know is that blob up ahead going to eat me or should I eat it mhm and so all of a sudden you want distance senses are very useful and so in the water distance senses our vision and a little bit hearing um old faction smelling and touch because in the water touch is a distant sense because you can feel the vibration so it's right so in um on air on land you know vision is a distant sense touch not so much but for Elephants maybe right um the vibrations vibrations um all faction definitely because of the concentration of you know the more concentrated something is the more likely it is to be close to you so animals developed senses they developed a head like a literal head so aoys doesn't even have a head really it's just a what's the purpose of a head that's a great question is it is it to have a jaw that's a great question so jaw so yes Jaws are a major um useful feature yeah I would say they're a major adaptation after there's a split between vertebrates and invertebrates so amphioxys is thought to be very very similar to the animal that's before that split but then after the development very quickly after the development of a head is the development of a jaw which is a big big thing and um and what goes along with that is the development of a brain it's weird is that just a coincidence that the thing the part of our body of the M mammal I think body that we eat with and like attack others with is also the thing that contains the uh all the majority of the brain type of well actually the brain goes with the development of a head and the development of of a visual system and an auditory system and an old factory system and so on so um your senses are developing and um and the other thing that's happening right is that animals are getting bigger yeah because their and also their Niche is getting bigger well this is the just sorry to take the tiny tangent on the niche thing is uh it seems like the niche is getting bigger but not just bigger like more complicated like shaped in weird ways so like predation seems to create like like the whole world becomes your oyster whatever but like you also start to carve out like the places in which you can operate the best yeah and in fact that's absolutely right and in fact some scientists think that theory of mind your ability to make inferences about the in inner life of of other creatures actually developed under the selection pressure of predation because it makes you a better Predator do you ever look at you just said you looked at at babies as these wiring creatures do you ever think of humans as just clever Predators like that there is under uh Underneath It All is this uh the nian will to power in all of its forms or are we now friendlier yeah so it's interesting I mean there there there are Zeitgeist in how humans think about themselves right and so if you look in the 20th century you can see that um the idea of an inner Beast that we just Predators we're just basically animals baseless animals violent animals that have to be contained by culture and by our prodigious neocortex um really took hold particularly after World War I and really um held sway for much of that Century um and then around at least in Western writing I would say you know we we're we're talking mainly about Western Western Scientific writing Western philosophical writing and and then you know late 90s maybe um you start to see books and articles about our social nature that we're social animals and we are social animals but what does that mean exactly and um um about it's us covering our different Natures in the space of ideas it looks like I think so I think so so um so you know do um humans um are can humans be violent yes can can humans be really helpful ye yes actually and humans are interesting creatures because you know know other animals can also be helpful to one another in fact there's a whole literature booming literature on how other animals um are um you know support one another they they regulate each other's nervous systems in in interesting ways and they will be helpful to one another right so for example there's a whole literature on rodents and how um they um they signal one another what is safe to eat and uh they um will um perform uh acts of generosity to their consp specifics that are related to them or or who they were raised with so if an animal was raised in a litter that is that they were raised in although not even at the same time they'll be more likely to help that animal so there's always some kind of physical relationship between animals um that predicts whether or not they'll help one another for humans humans you know we have ways of categorizing who's in our who's in our group and who isn't by non-physical ways right by even by just something abstract like an idea and we are much more likely to extend help to people in our own group whatever that group may be um at that moment whatever your whatever feature you're using to Define who's in your group and who isn't um we're more likely to help those people than even members of our own family at times so humans are much more flexible in their in the way that they help one another but also in the way that they harm one another so I don't um I don't I don't think I subscribe to um you know we are primarily this or we are primarily that I don't think have humans have Essences in that way really I apologize to take us in this direction for a brief moment but I've been really deep on Stalin and Hitler recently uh in terms of reading and is there something that you think about in terms of um the nature of evil from a neuroscience perspective is there some lessons that are sort of um hopeful about human civilization that uh we can find in our brain with regard to the Hitlers of the world do you do you think about the the nature of evil yeah I do I don't know that what I have to say is so useful from a I don't know that I can say as a neuroscientist Well here here's a study that you know what I so I I sort of have to take off my lab coat right and now I'm going to now conjecture as a human who just also who has Ain I but who also maybe has some knowledge about Neuroscience but I'm not speaking as a neuroscientist when I say this because I don't think neuroscientists know enough really to be able to say but I guess I the kinds of things I think about are um what so I have always thought even before I I knew anything about Neuroscience um I've always thought that um I don't think anybody could become Hitler but I think the majority of people can be can do are capable of doing very bad things um it's just the question is really how much encouragement does it take from the environment to get them to do something bad that's what I kind of when I look at the life of Hitler it seems like there's so many places where something could have intervened inter changed completely the person I mean there's like the caricature like the obvious places where he was an artist and if he wasn't rejected as an artist he was a reasonably good artist so that that could have changed but just his entire like where he went in Vienna and all these kinds of things like like little interactions could have changed and there's probably millions of other uh people who are uh capable who the environment may be able to mold in the same way it did this particular person to create this particular kind of charismatic leader in this particular moment of time absolutely and I guess the way I would the way that I would say it I I would agree 100% And I guess the way that I would say it is like this in the west we have a way of reasoning um about causation which focuses on single simple causes for things you know there's a there's an Essence to Hitler there's an Essence to his character he was born with that essence or it was forged very very early in his life and that explains the um the landscape of his the horrible landscape of his behavior but there's another way to think about it a way that actually is much more consistent with what we know about biology how biology Works um in the physical world and that is that most things are complex not as in wow this is really complex and hard hard but complex as in complexity that is more than the sum of their parts and that most phenomena have many many weak nonlinear interacting causes and so little things that we might not even be aware of can shift someone's developmental trajectory from this to that and that's enough to take it on a whole set of other paths that you know that and that these things are happening all the time so it's not random and it's not really it's not deterministic in the sense that like everything you do determines your outcome but it's a little more like um you know you're nudging someone from one set of possibilities to another set of possibilities and I but I think the the thing is the thing that I find optimistic is that the the other side of that coin is also true right so look at all the people who risk their lives to help people they didn't even know I mean I just watched Borat the new Borat movie and the thing that I came away with but you know the thing I came away with was look at how like generous people were in that because he's making there are a lot of people he makes fun of and that's fine but think about like those two guys those those the the Trump supporter guys Trump supporter guys those guys cool those kind those kindness in them right they took a complete stranger in a pandemic yeah into their house who does that like that's a really nice thing or there's one scene I mean I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't seen it but there's you know there's one scene where he goes in he dresses up as a Jew I I laugh myself sick at that scene seriously but um but he goes in and he and there are these two old Jewish ladies yeah what a bunch of sweethearts oh my gosh like really yeah I mean that was what I was struck by actually I mean there are other ones or or like the babysitter right I mean she was really kind and yeah so that's really what I was more struck by like you know sure there are other people who you know who do do very bad things or say say bad things or or whatever but you know or like there's one guy who's completely stoic like the guy at the um who's doing the like you know sending the messages I don't know if it's facts or whatever he's just completely stoic but he's doing his job actually you know like you can't you don't know what he was thinking inside his head you don't know what he was feeling but he was totally professional doing his job so I guess I just I I had a a bit of a different um you know view I guess and I so I also think that about people I think everybody is capable of kindness and um but for but you know it's the question is how much does it take and what are the circumstances so for a lot some people it's going to take a lot and for some people it only takes a little bit um but you know are we actually cultivating um an environment for the Next Generation that um provides opportunities for people to go in the direction of caring and kindness yeah or you know and I'm not I'm not saying that as like a you know poana is uh person um I you know I think there's a lot of room for competition and debate and and so on um but I don't see Hitler as an anomaly and I never have that that was even before I I learned anything about neuroscience and now I was would say knowing what we know about Developmental trajectories and life histories and how important that is um you know knowing what we know about um that the whole question of like nature versus nurture is a completely wrong question you know we have the kind of nature that requires nurture we have the kind of genes that allow infants to be born with unfinished brains where the brains their brains are wired across a 25-year period with wiring instructions from the world that is created for them and so I don't think Hitler is an anomaly um you know even if it's even if it's less probable that that would happen it's possible that it could happen again and it's not it's not like you know he's a bad seed I mean that doesn't I just want to say for like of course he's completely 100% responsible for his actions and all the bad things that happen so I'm not in any way this is not me saying but the environment is also responsible in part for creating the evil in in this world so like Hitler's and different versions of even more subtle more smaller scale versions of evil but I tend to believe that uh there's a much stronger uh I I don't like to talk about evolutionary advantages but it seems like it makes sense for love to be a more powerful uh emerging phenomena of our collective intelligence versus hate and evil and destruction because from a survival from a niche perspective it seems to be uh like for in my own life in my thinking about the intuition about the way humans work together to solve problems it seems that love is a very useful tool I definitely agree with you but I think the caveat here is that um you know humans the research suggests that humans are are capable of great act of kindness and great acts of generosity to people in their ingroup right and so we're also tribal yeah I mean that's the K that's the kitchy way to say it we're tribes we're tribal yeah so that's the kitchy way to say it what I would say is that you know there are a lot of features that you can use to describe yourself you don't have one identity you don't have one self you have many selves you have many identities um sometimes you're a man sometimes you're a scientist sometimes you're a you have a brother or a sister brother so sometimes you're a brother you know you you sometimes you're a friend sometimes you're human so you can keep zooming out yes living organism on Earth yes exactly that's exactly that's exactly right and so um there are there are some people who there is research which suggests that um there are some people who will tell you I think it's appropriate and better to help I should help my family more than I should help my neighbors and I should help my neighbors more than I should help the average stranger and I should help um you know the average stranger in my country more than I should help somebody outside my country and I should help humans more than I should help you know other animals and I right so there's a clear hierarchy of helping and there are other people who um you know they are their Niche is much more inclusive right and that they're humans first right or or creatures of the Earth first let's say um and I I don't think we know how flexible those attitudes are because I don't think the research really tells us that but in any case there are you know and there are beliefs people also have beliefs about there's this really interesting research in um really in anthropology um that looks at what are cultures particularly afraid of like what the people in a particular culture are organizing their social systems to prevent certain types of problems so what are the problems that they're worried about and and so there are some cultures that are much more hierarchical and some cultures that are you know much more egalitarian there are some cultures that you know in the debate of like getting along versus getting ahead there are some cultures that really prioritize the individual over the group and there are other cultures that really prioritize the group over the individual you know it's not like one of these is right and one of these is wrong it's that you know different combinations of these features are different solutions that humans have come up with for for living in groups which is a major adaptive advantage of our species um and it's not the case that one of these is better and one of these is worse although as a person of course I have opinions about that and as a person right I I can say I would very much prefer certain I have certain beliefs and I really want everyone in the world to live by those beliefs you know but as a scientist I know that it's not really the case that for the species any one of these is better than any other they're different solutions that work differentially well in particular you know ecological parts of the world but for individual humans there are definitely some systems that are better and some systems that are worse right but when when anthropologists or when neuroscientists or biologists are talking they they not usually talking about the lives of individual people they're talking about you know the species what's better for the species the survivability of the species and what's better for the survivability of the species is variation that we have lots of cultures with lots of different solutions because if the environment were to change drastically um some uh some of those Solutions will work better than others and you can see that happening with coid right so some people might be more susceptible to this this virus and others and so variation is very useful say Co was much much more destructive than it is and like I don't know 20% of the population was died uh you know that's it's good to have variability because then at least some percent Will Survive yeah I mean the the you know the way that I used to describe it was you know um using uh you know those movies like The War of the Worlds or or um Pacific Rim you know where like aliens come down from outer space and they you know want to kill humans and so all the humans band together as a species like and they all like all the you know little squabbling from countries and whatever all go you know goes away and everyone is just one big you know well that you know that doesn't happen I mean because coid is you know the vi a virus uh like Co like Co 19 is like a creature from outer space and that's not what you see happening what you do see happening it is true that some people I mean we could use this as an example of essentialism also so just to say like exposure to the virus does not mean that you will become infected with a disease so I mean in controlled studies one of which was actually a Corona virus not coid but an this was these are studies from 10 or so years ago you know only somewhere between 20 and 40% of people uh were developed respiratory illness when a virus was placed in their nose yeah um and so then there's a dose question all those well not in these studies actually so in these studies the dose was consistent across all people um and everything you know they were sequestered in hotel rooms and what they ate was you know um measured out by scientists and so on and so when you hold dose I mean the dose issue is a real issue in the real world but um in these studies that was controlled um and only somewhere between TW depending on the study between 20 and 40% of people became infected with a disease so exposure to a virus doesn't mean de facto that you will um develop an illness you will be a carrier and you will spread the virus to other people but you yourself may not uh you're immune system may be um in a state that um you you can make enough antibodies to um not uh not show symptoms not develop symptoms um and so um of course what this means is again is that you know like if I asked you do you think you know a virus is the cause of ill of of a common cold or you know most people if I ask this question I can tell you because I I I ask this question so do you think of virus is the cause of a cold most people would say yes I think it is and then I say yeah well only 20 to 40% of people develop respiratory illness in exposure to a virus so clearly it is a necessary cause but it's not a sufficient cause and there are other causes again so not simple single causes for things right multiple interacting influences so it it is true that individuals vary in their susceptibility to illness Upon a exposure but different cultures have different sets of norms and practices that allow that will slow or or speed the spread and that's the that's the point that I was actually trying to make here that um that you know when the environment changes that is there's a a mutation of a virus that is incredibly infectious some cultures will succumb People In some cultures will succumb faster because of the particular norms and practices that that they've developed in their culture versus other cultures now there could be some other you know thing that changes that where those other other cultures are you know would do better so very individualistic cultures like ours may do much better under other types of of selection pressures but for Co for things like Co you know my colleague Michelle Galant her research shows that she she looks at like loose cultures and tight cultures so cultures that have very very strict uh rules versus cultures that are much more individualistic and where personal freedoms are um more valued and she you know her research suggests that for pandemic uh circumstances tight cultures actually the people survive better just to linger a little bit longer we started this part of the conversation talking about you know did the humans evolve to think did the human brain evolve to think implying is there like a progress to the thing that's always improving that's right we never yeah and so the answer is no but let me sort of push back but so your intuition is very strong here not your intuition the way describe this but is it possible there's a direction to this Evolution like do you think of this Evolution as having a direction like it's like walking along a certain path towards something we you know uh what is it uh is it Elon uh musk said like uh this the Earth got bombarded with photons and then all of a sudden like a Tesla was launched into space or whatever Rockets started coming like is there a sense in which even though in the like within the system the evolution seems to be this mess of variation we're kind of trying to find our niches and so on but do you think they're ultimately when you zoom out there is a Direction that's strong that does tend towards um greater complexity and intelligence no so I mean and I and again what I would say is I'm really I'm really just echoing people who are much smarter than I am about this but see you're saying smarter I thought it doesn't there's no I thought there's no smarter no I didn't say there's no smarter I said there's no Direction okay so I think the thing to say or or what I understand to be the case is that um there's variation it's not unbounded variation and there are selectors there are there are there are pressures that we select and so not anything is possible because we live on a planet that has certain physical realities to it right um and but those physical realities are what constrain the possibilities um the physical realities of our genes and the physical realities of our corporeal bodies and the physical realities of um uh you know the of life on on this planet so what I would say is that um there's no Direction um but uh there is not it's not infinite possibility because we live on a particular planet that has particular statistical regularities in it and some things will never happen and so though all of those things are are interacting with um uh with our genes and so on and our you know the physical nature of our bodies to make some things more possible and some things less possible look I mean humans have very complex brains but birds have complex brains and so do uh you know um so do uh octopuses have very complex brains and all three sets of all three of those brains are are are somewhat different from one another you know uh bird Birds some birds have very complex brains some even have rudimentary language they have no cerebral cortex I mean they admittedly they have this is um now lesson two right they have is it lesson two or lesson one let me think no this is lesson one they have um uh they have the same neurons the same neurons that that in a human become the cerebral cortex birds have those neurons they just don't form themselves into a cerebral cortex but I mean crows for example are very sophisticated animals they can do a lot of the things that humans can do in fact all of the things that humans do that are very special that seem very special there's at least one other animal on the planet that can do those things too what's special about the human brain is that we put them all together so we learn from one another we don't have to experience everything ourselves we can watch another animal or another Human Experience something and we can learn from that well there are many other animals who can learn by copying yeah that we communicate with each other very very efficiently we have language but we're not the only animals who are efficiently efficient communicators there are lots of other animals who can efficiently communicate like bees for example um you know we cooperate really well with one another to do Grand things but there are other animals that cooperate too and so every Innovation that we have other animals have too what we have is we have all of those together interwoven in this very complex dance in a brain that is not unique exactly but that is you know it does have some features that make it use that make it particularly useful for us um to do all of these things uh you know to have all of these things intertwined so you know our brains are actually the last time we talked I I I made a mistake because I said um in my enthusiasm I said you know our brains are are not larger are relative to our bodies our brains are not larger um than um than other primates and that's actually not true actually our our brains relative to our body size is somewhat larger so yeah an ape who's not a human that's not a human um their brains are larger than their body sizes than say relative to like a smaller monkey and a human's brain is larger relative to its body size than a than a gorilla that's a good approximation of your um of whatever of of the bunch of stuff you that you can shove in there well what I was going to say is but our cerebral cortex is not larger than what you would expect for a brain of our of of of of its size so so relative to say an ape like a like a gorilla or a chimp or even a mammal like a dolphin or an elephant um you know our brains our our cerebral cortex is as large as you would expect it to be for a brain of our size so there's nothing special about our cerebral cortex and this is something I explain in the book where I I say okay you know like by analogy um if you walk into somebody's house and you see that they have a huge kitchen you know you might think well maybe you know maybe this is a place I really definitely want to eat dinner at because you know these people must be Gourmet Cooks but you don't know anything about what the size of their kitchen means unless you consider it in relation to the size of the rest of the house if it's a if it's a big kitchen in a really big house it's not telling you anything special right if it's a big kitchen in a small house then that might be a place that you want to eat for you want to stay for dinner because it's more likely that that kitchen is large for a special reason and so the cerebral cortex of a human brain isn't in and of itself special because of its size however there are some genetic changes that have happened in the human brain as it's grown with to whatever size is you know typical for for the whole brain size right there are some changes that do give the human brain slightly more of some capacities they're not special but there's just they just you know we can do some things much better than other animals and you know correspondingly other animals can do some things much better than we can we can't grow back limbs we can't lift 50 times our own body weight well I mean maybe you can but I can't live 50 times body ants with that regard are very impressive and then you're saying with the with the frontal cortex like that's the size is not always the right uh measure of uh capability I guess so size isn't everything size isn't everything that's a quot you know people like it when I disagree so let me disagree with with you uh on something or just like play Devil's adoc a little bit so you've uh painted a really nice picture that Evolution doesn't have a Direction but is it possible if we just ran Earth over and over again like this video game that the final result will be the same so in the sense that we're eventually there'll be an AGI type HAL 9000 type system that just like flies and colonizes nearby by uh earthlike planets and it's always will be the same and and the different organisms and the different evolution of the brain uh like it it doesn't feel like it has like a Direction but given the constraints of Earth and whatever this imperative whatever the hell is running this universe like it seems like it's running towards something is it possible that it will always be the same thereby it will be a Direction yeah I think you know as you know better than anyone else that that answer to that question is of course there's some probability that that could happen right it's not a yes or no answer it's what's the probability that that would happen and there's a a whole um distribution of possibilities so maybe we end up what's the probability we end up with exactly the same uh complement of creatures um including us what's the likelihood that we end up with you know creatures that are similar to humans that are but you know similar in in certain ways let's say but not exactly humans or you know all the way to a completely different um distribution of of creatures what's your intuition like if you were to bet money what does that distribution look like if we ran Earth over and over and over again I would say given the um you're now asking me questions that this is not science this this is not science so but I would say okay well what's the probability that um it's going to be a carbon life form Pro probably high yeah but that's because I don't know anything about Alternatives yeah you know I don't I'm not I'm not really well versed in that um what's the probability that you know so what's the probability that the animals will begin in the ocean and crawl out onto Land versus the other way versus I would say probably high I don't know but you know but do I think what's the likelihood that we would end up with exactly the same or very similar I think it's low actually I I wouldn't say it's low but I I would say it's not it's not 100% and I'm not even sure it's 50% you know I would say I I don't think that we're here by accident because I think like I said there are constraints like there are some physical constraints about Earth now of course if you were a cosmologist you could say well the the fact that the Earth is if you were to do the big bang over again and keep doing it over and over and over again would you still get the same solar systems would you still get the same planets would you know would you still get the same galaxies the same solar systems the same planets you know I don't know but my guess is probably not um because there are random things that happen that can again send things in one direct you know make one set of trajectories possible and another set impossible so um but I I guess my my my if I were going to bet bet something money or something valuable I would probably say it's not zero and it's not 100% and it's probably not even 50% so there's some probability but it will be similar that would be similar but I don't think I just think there are too many degrees of freedom there are too many degrees of freedom I I mean one of the real tensions in writing this book is to on the one hand there's some truth in saying that humans are not special we are just you know we're not special in the animal kingdom all animals are um well adapted if they're survived they're well adapted to their Niche it does happen to be the case that our Niche is large for any individual human your Niche is whatever it is but for the species right we live almost everywhere not everywhere but almost everywhere on the planet but not in the ocean and actually other animals like bacteria for example H have us beat miles you know hands down right so we're by any by any definition we're not special we're just you know adapted to our environment but bacteria don't have a podcast they're not exactly exactly and so that's the tension right so on the one hand you know we're not special animals we're just you know you know particularly well adapted to our Niche on the other hand our Niche is huge and we you know we don't just adapt to our environment we add to our environment we make stuff up give it a name and then it becomes real and so no other animal can do that and so I think the the thing the way to think about it from my perspective or the way I made sense of it is to say you can look at any individual Single Character istic that a human has that seems remarkable and you can find that in some other animal mhm what you can't find in any other animal is all of those characteristics together in a brain that is souped up in particular ways like ours is and if you combine these things multiple interacting causes right not one not one Essence like your cortex your big neocortex but um which isn't really that big I mean it's just big for it this for your big brain uh for the size of your big brain it's that it's the size it should be um if you add all those things together and they interact with each other that produces some pretty remarkable results M and if you're aware of that then you can start asking different kinds of questions about what means to be human and what kind of a human you want to be and what kind of a a world do you want to curate for the next generation of humans so you I think that's the goal anyways right is just to just to have a glimpse of instead of thinking about things in in a simple linear way just have a glimpse of the some of the things that matter that seemed that evidence suggests matters um to um the kind of brain in the kind of bodies that we have um once you know that you can you can work with it a little bit you're right words have power over your biology right now I can text the words I love you from the United States to my close friend in Belgium and even though she cannot hear my voice or see my face I will change her heart rate her breathing and her metabolism by the way beautifully written or someone could text something and be uous to you like is your door locked and odds are that it would affect your nervous system in an unpleasant way so I mean there's a lot of stuff to talk about here but just one way to ask is um why do you think words have so much power over our brain well I think we just have to look at the anatomy of the brain to answer that question so um if you look at the part parts of the brain the whole the the the systems that are important for processing language you can see that some of these regions are also important for controlling your major organ systems and your like your autonomic nervous system that controls your cardiovascular system your respiratory system and so on that you know these regions control your uh endocrine system your immune system and so on so and you can actually see this in other animals too so in birds for example the neurons that are responsible for bird song also control the systems of a bird's body and the reason why I bring that up is that the there's some scientists think that the anatomy um of a of a bird's brain that control bird song or homologous or structurally have a similar origin to the human system for a language so the parts of the brain that are important for processing language are not unique in U and specialized for language they do many things and one of the things they do is um control your major organ systems do you think we can fall in love have arguments about this all the time uh do you think we can fall in love based on words alone well I think people have been doing it for centuries I mean they it used to be the case of people wrote letters to each other yeah um with you know and then uh that was how they communicated and I guess that's how you and Dan got exact exactly exactly exactly yeah exactly so is the answer a clear yes there because I get a lot of push back from people often that you need you need the touch and the smell and uh you know the bodily stuff I think the touch and the smell and the bodily stuff helps okay but I don't think it's necessary do you think you can have a lifelong monogamous relationship ship with an AI system that only communicates with you on text romantic relationship well I suppose that's an empirical question that hasn't been answered yet but so I I guess what I would say is um I don't think I could could any human could the average human could you know so so um if I if I um I I even I want to even I want to even modify that and say I'm thinking now of um Tom Hanks um and um the movie um cway yeah you know with Wilson yeah I think if if that was if you had to make that work if you had to make that work well the volleyball yeah if you had to make it work could you you could you prediction and simulation right so if you had to make it work could you make it work using simulation and you know your past experience could you make it work could you make it work you as a human could you could you like could you have a could you have a relationship literally with an inanimate object and have it sustain you in the way uh that another human could yeah um your life would probably be shorter because you wouldn't actually derive the body budgeting benefits from right so um we've talked about uh you know how um your brain its most important job is to control your body and you can describe that as your brain running a budget for your body yes and um there are metaphorical you know deposits and withdrawals into your body budget and you also make deposits and withdrawals in other people's body budgets figuratively speaking so you wouldn't have that particular benefit um uh so your life would probably be shorter but I think it would be harder for some people than for other people yeah I T my intuition is that you can have a deep fulfilling relationship with a volleyball I think I think a lot of the the environments that set up I think that's a really good example like the constraints of your particular environment Define the like I I believe like scarcity is a good Catalyst for deep meaningful connection with other humans and with in animal objects so the less you have the more fulfilling those relationships are and I would say a relationship with a volleyball the sex is not great but uh everything else I feel like it could be a very fulfilling relationship which I don't know from an engineering perspective what to do with that just like you said it is an empirical question but but there are places to learn about that right so for example think about children and their blankets right so there there's something tactile and there's something old factory and it's very comforting I mean even for even for non-human little animals right like puppies and so I don't know about cats but um but cats are cold-hearted they're there there's no there's nothing going on there I don't know there are some cats that are very doglike I mean really so some cats identify as dogs yes I think that's true yeah they're they're um species fluid so you also right when it comes to human Minds variation is the norm and what we call quote human nature is really many human Natures again many questions I can ask here but maybe an interesting one to ask is um I often hear you know we often hear this idea of be yourself is this possible to be yourself is it a good idea to strive to be self is it does that even have any meaning it's a very Western question first of all because which self are you talking about you don't have one self there is no self that's an essence of you you have multiple selves actually there is research on this um you know to quote um the great social psychologist Hazel Marcus you're never you cannot be a self by yourself you you know you and so different contexts pull for or or Draw on different features of your of who you are or what you're what you believe what you feel what your actions are um a different context you know will put certain things make more some features be more in the foreground and and some in the background it's it takes us back right to our discussion earlier about um Stalin and Hiller and so on the thing that I would caution in addition to the fact that there is no single self you know that you have multiple selves who you can be um and you can certainly choose the situations that you put yourself in to some extent not everybody has complete choice but everybody has a little bit of choice and I think I said this to you before that one of the pieces of advice that we gave Sophia you know when she went our daughter when she was going off to college was um try to spend time around people choose relationships that allow you to be your best self we should have said your best selves but um this you know the pool of selves given the environment uh yeah but I I the one thing I do want to say is that um the risk of saying be yourself just be yourself is that um that can be used as an excuse well this is just the way that I am I'm just like this and um that I I think should be tremendously resist isted so that's one that's the that's for the excuse side but you know I'm really self-critical often I'm full of doubt and people often tell me just don't worry about it just be yourself man and it's the thing is uh it almost it it's not from an engineering perspective does not seem like actionable advice because uh I guess constantly worrying about who what are the right words to say to express how I'm feeling is I guess my self there's there's a kind of line I guess that this might be a western idea but something that feels genuine and something that feels not genuine and I'm not sure what that means cuz I would like to be fully genuine and fully open but I'm also aware like this morning I was like very like silly and giddy like this is just being funny and relaxed and light like there's nothing that could um bother me in the world I was just smiling and happy and I remember last night was just feeling like very grumpy like uh like stuff was bothering me like certain things were bothering me and like th what are those are those are different selves like what who am I in that and what do I do because if you know if we take Twitter's an example if I actually send a tweet last night and a tweet this morning it's going to be very two different people a tweeting that and I don't know what to do with that because one does seem to be more me than the other but that's maybe because there's a Nar the story that I'm trying this something I'm striving to be like the ultimate human that I might become I have maybe a vision of that and I'm trying to become that but it it does seem like there's a lot of different Minds in there and they're all like like having a discussion and a battle for who's going to win I suppose you could think of it that way but there's another way to think of it I think and that is that um maybe the more Buddhist way to think of it right or more contemplative way to think about it which is not that you have multiple personalities inside your head but you have your brain has this um amazing capacity it it has a a population of experiences that you've had that it can regenerate reconstitute and it can even take bits and pieces of those experiences and combine them into something new um and it's often doing this to predict what's going to happen next and to plan your actions but it's also happening this also happens just um that's what mind wandering is or just internal thought and and so on that's it's the same mechanism really and so a lot of times we hear the saying you know just think if you think differently you'll feel differently but your brain is having a conversation continually with your body and your body your brain's you know trying to control your body well trying your brain is controlling your body your body is sending information back to the brain and impart the information that your body sends back to your brain just like the information coming from the world initiates the next volley of predictions or simulations so in some ways you could also say the way that you feel your I think we talked before about affective feeling or mood coming from the sensations of body budgeting you know um influences what you think and um as much as so feelings influence thought as much as thought influence feeling and maybe more but just the the whole thing doesn't seem stable well it's a dynamic system Mr engineer yeah right it's a dynamic it's a dynamical system right nonlinear dynamical system in a re and I think that's I'm actually writing a paper with a bunch of Engineers about the about this actually but um I I mean other people have talked about the brain as a dynamical system before but you know the real tricky bit is trying to figure out how do you get mental features out of that system like it's one thing to figure out how you get a motor movement out of that system it's another thing to figure out how you get a mental feature like a feeling of being loved or a feeling of being worthwhile or a feeling of you know just basically feeling like how do you get a feeling a mental Fe a mental features out of out of that system um so I would what I would say is that you aren't the the Buddhist thing to say is that you're not one person and you're not many people you are um you are the sum of your experiences and who you are in any given moment meaning what your actions will be is influenced by the state of your body and the state of the world that you've put yourself in and you can change either of those things one is a little easier to change than the other right you can change your environment by literally getting up and moving or you can change by paying attention to some things differently and letting other some features um come to the FL and other features be backgrounded like I'm looking around your place oh no and I see this is not something you should do no I'm not but I'm going to say one thing yeah no green plants no green plants cuz green plants mean a home and I want this to be temporary fair fair but what's what's what goes to your mind when you see no green plants no I'm just making the point that but um what if you like again you know not everybody has control over their environment some people don't have control over the noise or the temperature or you know any of those things but everybody is a little bit of control and you can place things in your environment photographs yes plants anything that's meaningful to you and use it as a shift of environment when you need it yes you can also do things to change the conditions of your body when you exercise every day you're making an investment in your body actually you're making an investment in your brain too it makes you even though it's unpleasant and you know there's a cost to it if you replenish if you in invest and you make up that um you make a deposit and you make up that um what you've spent you're basically making an investment in making it easier for your brain to control your body in the future so you can make sure you're hydrated drink water you don't have to BU drink bottled water you can drink water from the tap this is in most places maybe not you know maybe not everywhere but uh but most places in the developed World um you can try to get enough sleep not everybody has that luxury but everybody can do something to make their you know body budgets a little more solvent and that will also make it more likely that certain thoughts will emerge from that prediction uh machine that's the control you do have is uh yeah being able to control the environment that's really well put uh on the I don't think we've talked about this so let's go to the biggest unanswerable questions of Consciousness what is you just rolled your eyes I did that was my yeah so what is consciousness from a neuroscience perspective I know you I mean uh I made notes you know because you gave me some questions in advance and I made notes for every single well except that one yeah well that one I had what the and then I took it out um so is there something interesting because you're so pragmatic is there something interesting to say about intuition building about Consciousness or is this something that we're just totally clueless about that this is uh let's focus on the the body the brain listens to the body the body speaks to the brain and like let's just figure this piece out and then Consciousness will probably emerge somehow after that no I think you know well first of all it'll just say up front um I am not a philosopher of Consciousness and I'm not a neuroscientist who focuses on Consciousness I mean in some sense I do study it because I study affect in mood and that's that is the um uh you know to use the phrase that is the the hard question um of Consciousness how is it that your brain is modeling your body your brain is modeling the sensory conditions of your body it's um and it's being updated that model is being updated by the sense data that's coming from your body and it's happening continuously your whole life and you don't feel those Sensations directly you what you feel is a general sense of pleasantness or pleasantness Comfort discomfort feeling worked up feeling calm so we call that affect you know most people call it mood so how is it that your brain gives you this very low dimensional feeling of mood or affect when it's presumably receiving a very high-dimensional array of sense data and the model that the brain is running of the body has to be high dimensional because there's a lot going on in there right you're not aware but as you're sitting there there quietly as your listeners or our our as our viewers are sitting um they might be working out running now or as many of them right to me they're laying in bed smoking weed with their eyes closed and that's fair so maybe we should say that bit again then so if so some people may be working out some people may be uh relaxing but you know even if you're sitting very still while you're watching this or listening to this there's a whole drama going on inside your body that you're largely unaware of yet your brain makes you aware or gives you a status report in a sense by virtue of these mental features of feeling Pleasant feeling unpleasant feeling comfortable feeling uncomfortable feeling energetic feeling tired and so on and so how the hell is it doing that that is the basic question of of Consciousness and like the status reports seem to be in the the way we experience them seem to be quite simple like it doesn't feel like there's a lot of data yeah know that there isn't so when you feel when you feel um discomfort when you're feeling basically like you feel like what does that tell you like what are you supposed to do next what caused it I mean the thing is not one thing caused it right it's multiple factors probably influencing your physical state your body very high dimensional yeah very high dimensional um and that and the there are different temporal scales of influence right so um it you know the state of your gut is not just influenced by what you ate five minutes ago it's also what you ate a day ago and two days ago and and so on so um so I think the you know when I'm I'm not trying to weasle out of the question I just think it's a it's the hardest question actually do you think we'll ever understand it um as scientists I think that we will understand it as well as we understand other things like um the birth of the universe or the you know the nature of the of the Universe I guess I I would say so I do I think we get to that level of an explanation I do actually but I think that we have to start asking somewhat different questions and approaching the science somewhat differently than we have in the past I mean it's also possible that Consciousness is much more difficult to understand than the nature of the universe it is but I I wasn't necessarily saying that it was a question that was of equivalent complexity I was saying that I do think that we could get to some I I am optimistic that I I would not I would be very willing to invest my the time my time on this Earth as a scientist in trying to answer that question if I could do it the way that I want to do it um not the way that it's currently being done so like rigorously I don't want to say unrig usly I just want to say that there are certain set of assumptions that you know scientists have what I would call ontological commitments they're commitments about the way the world is or the way that nature is and they these commitments lead scientists sometimes blindly without they don't scientists sometimes sometimes scientists are aware of these commitments but sometimes they're not and these commitments onth less influence how scientists ask questions how what they measure how they measure and I I just have very different views than a lot of my colleagues about the ways to approach this not everybody but um but the way that I would approach it would be different and it would cost more and it would take longer it doesn't fit very well into the current incentive structure of Science and so do I think that doing science the way science is currently done with the budget that it currently has and the incentive structure that it currently has will we have an answer no I think absolutely not good luck is what I would say people love book recommendations let me ask what three books oh you can't just like you can't just give me three I mean like really three what uh 7 and 1/2 books you can recommend so you're also the author of 7 and A2 lessons about the brain you're uh author of how emotions are made okay so definitely those are the top two recommendations of all two greatest books of all time other than that are there books that uh technical fiction philosophical that you've enjoyed or you might recommend to others Yes actually you know every PhD student when they um when they graduate uate with their PHD I give them a set like a little Library like a set of books you know some of which they've already read some of which I want them to read or um but um I think non-fiction books I would read the things I would recommend are the triple helix um by uh Richard lanon it's a little book published um in 2000 which is um I think a really good introduction to complexity and um population thinking as opposed to essentialism so this idea essentialism is this idea that you know there's an Essence to each person whether it's a soul or your genes or what have you as opposed to this idea that you we have the kind of nature that requires a nurture we are a we are you are the product of a complex dance between um an environment between a set of genes and an environment ment um that turn those genes on and off to produce your brain and your body and really who you are at any given moment it's good title for that triple helix so playing on the double helix where it's just the biology it's bigger than the biology exactly um It's a Wonderful book I've read it probably six or seven times throughout the year he has another book too which is it's more I think scientists would find it I don't know I've loved it it's called biology as ideology and it is all about I wouldn't call it one of the best books of all time but I I love the book because it really does point out you know that SC science as it's currently practiced I mean the book was written in 1991 but it actually I think still holds that scientist science as currently practice has a set of ontological commitments which are somewhat problematic so the assumptions are limiting yeah in ways that you it's you know it's like you're a fish in water and you don't like okay so yeah so here Foster walls stuff but but you know but here's a here's a really cool thing I just learned recently is it okay just to to to go off on this tangent for a minute yeah yeah that's called tangent great okay um I was just going to say that I just learned recently that we don't have water receptors on our skin so how do you know when you're sweating how do you know when when a raindrop when you know when it's going to rain and you know like a raindrop hits your skin and you can feel that little drop of wetness how is it that you feel that drop of wetness when we don't have water receptors in our skin and I was when I my mind is blown already yeah that was my reaction too right I was like of course we don't because we evolved in the water yeah like why would we need you know it just it was just this like you know you have these moments where you're like of course there's like a yeah so you'll never see rain the same way again so the answer is it's a it's a it's a combination of um temperature and touch yeah but it's a complex sense that's only computed in your brain there's no receptor for it anyways yeah that's why like snow versus cold rain versus warm rain all feel different because you're you're trying to infer stuff from the temperature and the size of the droplet it's fascinating yeah your brain is a prediction machine it's using lots and lots of information combining it you know anyway so but um so biology's ideology is I wouldn't say it's one of the greatest books of all time but it is a it is a really useful book there's a book by um if you're interested in Psychology or the mind at all there's a wonderful book A little it's a it's a fairly fairly small book called naming the Mind by Kurt danziger who's a historian of psychology everybody in my lab reads both of these books so what was the book it's about the origin of the where do where did we get the theory of mind that we had have that uh the human mind is populated by thoughts and feelings and um perceptions and where did those categories come from because they don't exist in all cultures Al this isn't that's a cultural construct the idea that you have thoughts and feelings and they're very distinct is definitely a cultural construct it's another mind-blowing thing just like the rain um so Kurt danzinger is a the opening chapter in that book is absolutely mind-blowing I love it I love it I just think it's fantastic um and I would say the there are many many popular science books that I could recommend that I think are extremely well written in their own way you know before I maybe I said this to you but before I undertook writing how motions are made um I read I don't know somewhere on the order of 50 or 60 uh popular science books to try to figure out how to write a popular science book because while there are many books about writing Stephen King has a great book writing on writing and um you know where he gives tips um interlaced with his own personal history um that was where I learned you write for a specific person you have a specific person in mind and that's for me that person is my is down that's fasc I mean that's a whole another conversation to have like which popular science books like what you learn from that uh search because there there's uh I have some for me some popular science books like I just roll my eyes like this is too um it's like same with TED talks like some of them go too much into the flowery and don't I don't I would say don't give enough respect to the intelligence of the reader uh and but that's this is my own bias very specific I I completely agree with you and in fact I have a colleague his name is um van Yang who you know he um produced um a cinematic lecture of how emotions are made that we wrote together with Joseph fredman no relation yes um well we're all related well I mean you and I are probably you know have some yeah yeah um but um I remember it's the memories are in there somewhere yeah it's from many many many generations ago um well half my family is Russian so from the good half the good half right um but you know he one his goal actually is to produce [Music] um you know videos and lectures that are beautiful and educational and that don't um don't dumb the material down um and he's really remarkable at it actually I mean just uh but again you know that's that that requires a bit of a paradigm shift we could have a whole conversation about the split between entertainment and education in this country and why it is the way it is but that's a that's another conversation to be continued but I would say the if I were to pick one book that I think is a really good example of good science writing it would be the beak of the finch which is one of it won a a pullit Sur prise a number of years ago and I'm not I'm the I'm not remembering the author's name I'm blanking um but the I'm guessing is it uh is it focusing on birds and the evolution of birds actually there's also the evolution of beauty which is yeah which is also a great book but the no the beak of the finch is um it's a it it has two story lines that are interwoven one is about Darwin and Darwin's um Explorations in the Galapagos Island and then modern-day researchers from Princeton who have a research program in the Galapagos looking at Darwin's finches mhm and um it's just a really first of all there's topnotch science in there and really science like you know evolutionary biology there a lot of people don't know and it's told really really well it sounds like there also there's a narrative in there there it's like storytelling too yeah I think all good popular science books are are storytelling you know but storytelling grounded constrained by you know the evidence and then I just want to say that there are for fiction I'm a really big fan of love stories just to return us to the um the topic that we began with and so my some of my favorite uh love stories are major pedigree Last Stand by Helen Simonson it's a it's a love story about people who you wouldn't expect to fall in love and all the people around them who have to overcome their prejudices and and um I love this book what do you like like what makes a good love story there isn't one thing you know there are many different things that make a good love story but I think in this case um you can feel you you can feel the journey you can feel the journey that these characters are on and all the people around them are on this journey too basically to come to grips with this really Unexpected Love really profound love that develops between these two characters who are very unlikely to have fallen in love but they do and it's just it's very gentle another book like that is um the um the storyed life of AJ FY um which is also a love story but in this case it's a love story between um a little girl and her adopted dad and the dad is this like real kogy you know um guy uh but of course there's a story there and um it's just a beautiful love story and but it also it's like everybody in this community falls in love with him because he falls in love with her and he you know she just gets left at his store his bookstore he has this failing bookstore and he he discovers that you know he feels like inexplicably this need to take care of this little baby and um this whole life emerges out of that one decision which is really beautiful actually um very poignant do you think the greatest stories have a happy ending or a heartbreak at the end that's such a Russian question it's like it's like Russian tragedies you know so I would say the answer to that for me there has to be heartbreak yeah I really don't like heartbreak I don't like heartbreak I want there to be a happy ending or at least a hopeful ending but the but you know like Dr shivago like or The English Patient oh my goodness like why oh it's just yeah no well I don't think there's a better way to end it on a happy note like this uh Lisa like I said I'm a huge fan of yours thank you for wasting yet more time with me talking again U people should definitely get your book and uh maybe one day I can't wait to talk to your husband as well well right back at you [Laughter] Lexi thanks for listening to this conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett and thank you to our sponsors athletic greens the all-in-one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases eight sleep a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep master class online courses that I enjoy from some of the most amazing humans in history and better help online therapy with a licensed professional please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast if you enjoy this thing subscribe on YouTube review it with fast stars and apple podcast follow on Spotify support on patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman and now let me leave you some words from sunzoo and the Art of War there are not more than five musical notes yet the combination of these five give rise to more Melodies that can ever be heard there are not more than five primary colors yet in combination they produce more Hues than can ever be seen there are not more than five Cardinal tap tastes and yet combinations of them yield more flavors than can ever be tasted thank you for listening and hope to see you next time