How to Make Better Decisions | Dr. Michael Platt

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Michael Platt Dr Michael Platt is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania his laboratory focuses on decision-making more specifically how we make decisions and the impact of power dynamics such as hierarchies in a given organization or group as well as hormones on decisionmaking we also discuss valuation that is how we place value on things on people and what you'll find is that there are many factors that impact whether or not we think something is good very good bad or very bad that operate below our conscious awareness in fact today's discussion will teach you how you make decisions how to make better decisions in the context of everything from picking out a watch or a pair of shoes all the way up to something as important as picking a lifemate indeed hormones hierarchies and specific things that are operating within you and adjacent to nearby the things that you're evaluating whether or not those things are people or objects are powerfully shaping the neural circuits that lead you to make specific decisions so today you're going to learn how all of that works and as I mentioned how to make better decisions Dr plat also explains how we are evaluating the hormone levels of other people both same sex and opposite sex and the implications that has for relationships of all kinds it's an incredibly interesting and unique conversation certainly unique among the conversations I've had with any of my Neuroscience colleagues over the decades and I know that the information you're going to learn today is going to be both fascinating to you it certainly was to me and that it will impact the way that you think about all decisions at every level in everyday life before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme this episode does include sponsors and now for my discussion with Dr Michael Platt Dr Michael Platt welcome thanks it's awesome to be here I've been following your work since I was a graduate student and it's really interesting you're an anthropologist by training turned neuroscientist turned practical applications of Neuroscience and related fields to everybody as it relates to business decisionmaking social interactions hormones you've worked on a lot of different things the first question I have is let's all agree we're Old World primates yes right most people don't even think of us as Old World primates but we are all Old World primates and we share many similarities in terms of the neural circuits that we have in our skulls with some of the other Old World primates like maak monkeys for instance when you step back and look at a process like decision making or marketing out in the world or how people interact with one another and gauge value of objects relationships or even their own value if I may how much of what you see in human Old World primates do you think is reflected by the interactions of Old World primates like reesus maccak monkeys and vice versa I mean in other words how primitive are we Andor how sophisticated are the other Old World primates that's a great way of putting it because I think it's both I always like to say there's a little monkey in all of us right and I believe that going in you know having spent actually my my formative years uh you know study just watching monkeys and I worked at the Cleveland Zoo you know when I was in college and I took every opportunity I could get to go you know I went to to the field you know I watched monkeys in South America and in Mexico and I think we all get that but over the course of my career I'm astonished at how deep that goes and um basically for every behavioral cognitive emotional phenomenon that we have been that we've trained our lens on uh it looks almost exactly the same in people and monkeys now obviously we're not just monkeys and you know we can talk and we're doing this and that's a that's a big big difference but all the things that you talked about decision making social interaction our the the way that we explore the world um the the Fountain of creativity uh not only the nural circuits but the actual expression uh is so so similar we have monkeys and people do the exact same things in the lab and if I didn't label the videos the outputs of like the avatars and whatnot in games you couldn't tell the difference H um what's striking about what you just said is that I recall a I guess at that time it was called a tweet um and I think it was from Elon that said that we're basically a species that got a supercomputer placed on top of a monkey brain so in thinking about it the other way what aspects of Being Human this old world primate that we are you think is distinct different than say a maack monkey aside from language I don't know that anything really is I mean so actually it's it's an interesting time to have you ask me that question because this spring semester I teach a seminar for the psychology department uh at Penn called being human and the whole idea of that we each week we tackle a an aspect of who we are that has at one point or another been considered to be uniquely human or close to right and that could be something like art and creativity or um or theory of mind right or um you know economics and markets and things like that and when you take it take a look at these things through the lenses of Neuroscience and anthropology this is how we do it economics psychology neurology and on and on and on um you start to really see that um there's a lot more continuity than discontinuity and uh that's kind of pretty shocking and I want to go back to that Elon um tweet if I may uh because I think that's where we go a little bit astray to and thinking about the the brain is a computer right so it's well obviously it's not built on silica right it's it's um it's made of meat and fat and it's subject to all of the constraints that um that go along that go along with that and what I think instead is a better metaphor is that we've got a 30 million year old Swiss army knife in our head right so yes you can learn how do all kinds of different things but you've got a a brain that's got essentially specific Tools in it you know you'll have you know it's like having a knife and a cork screw which is the most important one uh you know nail file saw Etc and the monkeys got those too now ours might be a little bigger you know and sharper um but they they look and and they look pretty similar and they do the job in a very um similar way and I think once we appreciate that then uh that opens up a lot of territory for for applications not you know not just trying to understand how some of those tools might get broken or dull as a result of um you know illness or injury or disorders Etc but also how we can measure them and how we can develop them better because some of those are you know we use all the time say in business I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor our place our place makes my favorite pots pans and other cookware so surprisingly toxic compounds such as pases or forever chemicals are still found in 80% of non-stick pans as well as utensils appliances and countless other Kitchen products now I've talked before on this podcast about these pases or forever chemicals like Teflon which have been linked to major health issues such as hormone disruption gut microbiome disruption fertility issues and many other health problems so it's really important to avoid them this is why I'm a huge fan of ourplace ourplace products are made with the 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those of us that are cited most humans are cited um we rely on Vision to assess the world around us to assess emotions of others Etc and so are the other Old World primates yeah right um how do we allocate attention like like what grabs our attention and maybe in this discussion we could also touch on because I know you've worked on this what underlies some deficits in attention um so yeah if you could if we could just explore this from the perspective of okay you go into an an environment let's say it's a familiar environment you wake up in the room you wake up in each day what grabs your attention what keeps your attention and if we do in fact have control over over our attention which we do to some extent why is it so difficult for many of us to decide you know what I'm just going to put everything away and I'm just going to focus on this task for the next hour why is that so challenging for so many people regardless of whether they have a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder okay there's a lot in that question many questions in there and let's talk about what attention is right it is a prioritization right or an amplification of of what you're focusing on right and we do that by where we point our eyes right and then that it gets turned up in the brain with a lot of consequences and and really why why do we have attention because you can't do everything at once right so so it's it's in the name of efficiency um what we attend to is a product of two things it's what we're looking for and what the world looks like right and that kind of what the world looks like part is importantly shaped by what our ancestors experienced and also what we experienced when we were developing when we were growing up so things that are bright or shiny or moving fast right or loud or whatever that grabs our attention things that stand out that are different um and for us as primates one thing that's super important and kind of really deeply baked in is uh other people so if there are our faces if there are people in the environment doing something then that naturally just grabs our attention unless we happen to be an individual who's sort of wired a little bit differently like folks on the autism spectrum disorder or you know schizophrenia things like that um where that prioritization is not quite um the same so so so that's kind of how our experience as primates you know and just the the design principle of of the way our brains work to overcome some of these limitations in this in the name of efficiency come about and then as you mentioned what we can control our attention to a certain degree and that's super important for a lot of I think overcoming a lot of the the challenges that we have and we can talk about that like in decision making for example because you or or learning because you because you can't control what you're attending to that gets turned up in the brain right and that affects what we choose and and it affects what we learn it affects what we remember um as well so now I'm trying to kind of go back to like then the the end part of your question oh so that had to do with multitasking or just things in the environment and that gets at this question uh or topic of in my view of foraging right and so uh I think that attention this is the argument we've made uh operates according to essentially the same rules and principles that um our bodies do when we are searching the environment for resources so all mobile animals uh search for food search for maid sear for search for water you know for the resources that they need to survive and to reproduce and um as it turns out that kind of decision do you know that that The Clash you know made you know very memorable should I stay or should I go uh that's the key thing so when you encounter something like the question is like do I take it do I stick with it even though it might be depleting getting worse or should I take a risk and invest time and energy and go look for something else um all animals have to do that it turns out there's an optimal solution to that which was written out by the one of the great mathematical ecologist Eric charnov in the paper in 1976 and so he he wrote this out and it's what's cool about is it's very simple it's basically you leave you abandon the the thing that you're um harvesting when uh what you're getting from it falls below the average for the environment that just makes sense the marginal returns right um this could be a social interaction could be a social interaction it could be food could be water could be the money that you're making in the moment could be the information that you're getting from uh a book or from a website or whatnot so uh and we from studies done over the last whatever that is now 50 years have shown that every animal that's ever been observed behaves as if they're performing that computation could you give an example in the context of let's say social media and as we um we're walking in record today we were comparing and contrasting X as a platform versus uh Instagram and it occurred to me now based on what you said a few moments ago that Instagram is very visual so you see faces yeah many accounts on X either the icon is so small or people even just have cartoons or whatever avatars there that aren't really faces in many cases and it does seem that on X there's a um kind of a elevated level of emotionality to what people write that's what tends to grab attention and I wonder whether or not that's because of the absence of faces I mean when somebody's on an Instagram post and they're kind of ranting a bit in fact I saw this yesterday um uh Tim Ferris another podcaster had the investor Chris on um and Chris was talking about the environmentalism and the fires and he had opinions about AI he's very very smart very opinionated guy but people were commenting I don't know how he felt how could I um but people were commenting he's so angry he's so angry and and he was just being passionate and emphatic maybe he was angry I don't know but he was clearly very very alert leaning forward into the camera and people were paying most of their comments were paying attention to the emotion behind what he was saying and whereas on X I I feel like if you just took the text of what he was saying and you put it there would be kind of uh below the average emotionality on X and so um when you say that we are uh drawn to faces or that faces are we naturally Forge towards faces versus other things um that feels very true and do you feel like elevated levels of emotion in faces are what harness the most attention and by parallel if you get a bunch of monkeys together and one of them is really upset do they all look at that monkey speculating a little bit here it's uh not thought about in the context of say you know X versus Instagram but I think you're I think you're you're right on I mean I think that's spot on um you're just combining like you're turning the volume gets turned up because there are faces there and if they're more emotional they're just going to be much more Salient to grab your attention and that's something that's really important to pay attention to because somebody who's very aroused right uh that's activation that's you know that's sort of preactivation before they do something like they they might attack you or they might you know take something from you who knows right something something could happen there but I want to take this back a little bit I'm older than you and I want to take this uh this idea of of um different sources like where you could place your attention take it back a little bit more in time because what's been shown and it's interesting computer science picked up on this marginal value um theorem from mathematical ecology uh around 2000 or so and began to investigate how people search the web and it turned out people would leave a website the moment their information intake rate fell below the average for sort of all the websites that they uh were encountering the average is determined by your behavior in what the preceding B bin of time like 10 minutes until you arrive at a site or within site so that that's less wellknown although we're now learning that it is it is pretty short term right so it seems to be uh driven by reinforcement learning processes that kind of are telling you how rich that environment is and so what one of the things about the martial value theorem I think is really really um profound for for understanding our current predicament is that it says that if you're in a really poor environment like you let's say you forge for apples right and there's one apple tree for the next 10 miles you in that apple tree until you picked every Apple rotten or not rotten not ripe right before you move on if you were in an orchard with apple trees everywhere you just pick the ones that are easiest to get and then you move on so now think about it in the context of um web surfing the web like when you were you know if you're coming up when I did uh you know I was in graduate school or or you know as an undergraduate the way I accessed the internet was through a dialup modem so it was very slow it was very poor environment you're sitting there waiting for the information to load up right it might take 30 seconds or longer um you don't abandon that you read the whole thing you might print it out put it in your file cabinet right now you get like super high speed internet yeah you can have 12 tabs open tab just so you spend like you know half a second or a couple seconds on anyone you don't you certainly don't scroll down beneath the fold right so it it totally makes sense now think about all the devices you might have in or it could be tabs it could be most people are sitting around with a TV on you know their phone a tablet a laptop whatnot I'm guilty of having have three I have three phones so you're just cycling you you are doing exactly what you're designed to do right which is to move between these resources um quickly and easily because it's so easy so in some going back to your question about like why is it so hard it's going to be really really deliberate you have to either reduce you know make it a harder environment I guess is the idea you would have to actually put things away or make the return rate that you're getting from any of them much worse like for example if you turn your phone monochrome some which we know works right it helps you to stop checking your phone and spend less time on it because what you it's just not as good as a source yeah the the information feels really depleted uh you reposted a a paper result recently and I I did as well after I saw it on your X account um that if you look at working memory the ability to keep information online in real time and work with it um it seems that working memory is worse when your phone is right next to you if it's somewhere else in the room that you're working then uh we're trying to do real work of some sort um your performance is slightly better than if it's right next to you but if the phone is completely outside of the room improvements in working memory are statistically significant in other words get the phone completely out of the room it's not sufficient to have it next to you turn face down or even in your backpack behind you it needs to be in a completely separate environment in order to maximize this effect yeah I mean it's completely consistent with what we're what we're saying here with regard to foraging but if I take my phone and I put it I don't have my phone here under the chair but let's say I did this result suggests that some component of our neural circuitry is operating in the background thinking well I guess something could be on there maybe I got a text or maybe there's a tweet I should look at or an Instagram post um it suggests that we are multitasking even when we think we are not multitasking yeah I I think you're absolutely right it's beneath our awareness right so that's and and that that's where I think the kind of comparative psychology comparative neurobiology is really important here because I don't necessarily um you know impute conscious awareness to all these Critters that are out there doing these things behaving exactly the same way we are and so to me that just indicates that you know all that Hardware those same routines are just running under the hood running under the surface and we're not aware of it so when your phone is somewhere within the sphere that could be accessed brain's aware of that and it's including that in the in the calcul ations about um that about what to do next and it actually um reminds me now of some it's actually a couple papers that we published some time ago on foraging and one of the things that's really interesting about it is that uh and is that as you are considering your options and you're you're experiencing sort of these depleting um Rewards or whatnot you see this urgency signal kind of building up in a part of the brain interior singular cortex that we know is important for moving on for switching for for for for searching for something new and it it does you know I I don't know what the emotional component of that is we never explored that but it seems reasonable to imagine that that's tied to you know this sense of like uh I really I really want to turn my phone over and check what's going on there are there any data that suggest that just being able to maintain a thought train independent of visual input can help us get better at maintaining attention so for instance this morning I woke up very early unusually early for me because I went to bed unusually early for me and I decided to try something uh which is uh something that actually our uh colleague in Neuroscience Carl di Roth had mentioned he does and a previous guest on this podcast joskin who is a former chess Grandmaster Champion has described something like this I decided to try it which was to uh keep my closed and just try and think in complete sentences not let my mind drift off topic for a while have a conversation with myself in my head but with the constant redirect of trying to stay in a thought train and it's it's actually much more difficult than I thought it would be right there's no other input my eyes are closed I was comfortable at the temperature the room was Etc I was well rested no phone no input and you know you get one sentence of thought out then the next it's a bit like writing except here no visual input so I would have thought it's a lot it's a lot easier because you don't have you know a set of tabs across the top or even a word dock with a like do you want to change it to bold Etc like no other input competing for one's attention and I found that after about 10 minutes it became pretty easy but it took me about 10 minutes to get into this redirective focus and then at one point I thought I better stop this cuz this seeming kind of weird but that was um very different I would say than sitting down to say um meditate and think about my breath which is a physical phenomenon that tangible at the level of feeling one's breath so how do you feel about practices that teach us to maintain attention and redirect our attention that are very deprived of visual input as a kind of training ground for being able to harness and maintain visual input when we need to get work done work on problem sets right um do like re what I call real work or Cal Newport would call Deep work so I've never tried that and it sounds fascinating and I I'm going to try to give it a shot you know tomorrow morning um at first I was thinking this sounds a lot like meditation right but there are a whole variet I'm not no expert on meditation but there are a whole variety of different kinds of meditation some as you mentioned you know you're focusing on on breath work physical stimulus but um but there are others that that are not and that are much more um kind of cognitively focused so um for example like uh loving kindness meditation is is one where you're you're kind of thinking about a particular person you're imagining them and you're imagining something really good happening to them right so it's sort of one of these um you know self-transcendent types of meditation which are not I don't think really tied to any external input coming in although it's an internal input right that that that's based on on your on your memory or or um awe based um meditation so maybe it's more similar to those but I that's like thematically anchored exactly exactly opposed to visually anchored like staring at a flame or concentrating on one's breath yeah I I didn't have a it was like free in terms of putting in language of foraging it's like I didn't have a plan I wasn't writing a paragraph it was just can I stay in a conversation with myself that's um where there's no moment that some external Voice or input or thought about something else in the room you know just can I just kind of stay in there can I just stay in there that that was really the question yeah I think that that makes complete sense because it it's kind of like you're forging for apples in that tree that's you know on the middle of the serengetti somewhere right and there's nothing anywhere around you and so you're going to stick with that and just keep mining it until there's nothing left one of the reasons that I brought up this example was um I noticed that anything that has to do with attention whether not it's visual attention or you know needing to write or um or cognitive attention and redirecting attention unless there's some high level of as you call it arousal or emotionality I find there's always a kind of warm-up period required and that this isn't taught to us in school and that so many people who think that they have a hard time maintaining attention uh I have this hypothesis that they are training uh non-attention or brief attention by you know scrolling through movies on a you know social media platform is basically training um redirecting your attention every couple seconds or or maybe every few minutes um so you get good at that you get good at scrolling you get good at what you what you do um but also I think it was always the case that sitting down to do something difficult or learn or write or pay careful auditory attention maybe even to a podcast that there's a kind of a warming up period what is the evidence that neural circuits in the brain are kind of um here I'm using very top Contour language uh in front of a you know another card carrying neuroscientist but that that neural circuits are kind of uh more dispersed in their um in their activation patterns but that over time we can drop into a trench not just of attention but that then the signal to noise of that circuit required for attention and the other components of the task gets much greater compared to the background noise do is there evidence for that in the same way that warming up to work out no one expects to walk in and and train with their work weight or to run at the speed that they would in mile three right you know that you warm up it's like it's a but this notion of warming up the brain for specific cognitive activities doesn't seem um as abundant out there and I think part of the reason might be and I'd like your thoughts on this that we are all familiar with something super exciting or scary grabbing our attention in this but then I would say well you can Sprint into the street to save your kid from getting hit by a car you didn't warm up for that but that's not how you exercise because there isn't the same level of urgency that's a deep question I think um and I you know it's funny to me too because it it I don't warm up often before I work out and that's like so you seem to be in great shape no but it's like funny you know I've been in CrossFit for like 17 years oh wow and you're still uninjured you're one of the few I've got plenty of injuries I you know I've had uh you know couple hernia surgeries and um maybe maybe just like five or six minutes of Mobility work you know we have a lot of episodes on this the mobility is really good and I I actually what I what I have you know periodically it's like take like you know many months off to do just purely Mobility PT because um and like I did pilotes intensively for a year and a half after um after one injury and and I loved it and it it's cool to see what it does to your body cuz it totally refashioned it I was cuz I've always been like big guy up here and then you do Pilates for or yoga for a long time I went through through a yoga period too and suddenly it's all core you know you become like a very different um very different human yeah so this issue of warming up you don't like warming up which explains your I like warming up it's just it's more a question of time the reason why and that's why got him to CrossFit in the first place was because I could do a workout in 10 minutes or under that um left me you know dead on the floor super awesome I'm telling you 100 jumping jacks just like in PE class is still the best warm-up I'm aware of it's amazing like people laugh at me you know it's like so old school but you do 100 jumping jacks before you do any kind of cardiovascular resistance training and I I don't I haven't run a study on this but you greatly diminish your chance of uh of injury probably because of just raising core body temperature but so the question is what okay well then let's pose it in this parallel fashion what is the equivalent of the 100 jumping jacks for cognitive work right for me it's like internally going like what's wrong with you Andrew why is it so hard for you to like punch out these 10 paragraphs um but if someone on my team says hey we need this in eight minutes I could do that anywhere unless I'm actually driving a vehicle I can work anywhere anytime but I would say we don't have the the equivalent of 100 jumping jacks for cognitive work but we need it we need that I think people need that and they need the understanding that it can help them get into that trench of attention I have a bunch of disconnected thoughts on this please so one would be the converse of that which is the the which you kind of alluded to earlier which is the not warming up but the opposite of warming up like the distraction so so there have been some really interesting studies done in uh in sort of more business settings management settings um about that that looked at foraging okay and uh think of it this way it more like a measure of creativity your your proclivity to explore to try new things to go to you know to to be the opposite of focused okay so um and you can measure that uh for example like like an anagram task so you get a bunch of letters make as many words as you can at some point you got to you decide to dump them and get new letters right and so that's sort of an you know you're taking a risk and you're exploring and you're getting a new a new set you don't know what's going to happen right um and really cool studies showed that uh if you precede that task with a task where people are foraging for points on a screen there's there's hidden it's like a visual kind of thing and you're you're just looking for stuff if the uh if the points are really dispersed and spread out then people we don't know how long that kind of after effect less but then people are way more kind of hyp explorers with the words in the later and if they're doing a if they have to like decide if they're playing virtual fishing and the number of you know the rate at which you catch fish in a pond is declining and you can press a button and take a time out to travel to another Pond people are much more willing to to move on okay when when they do that whereas if you put all the points kind of together which is essentially related to what you're saying um cognitively warming up by focusing literally instead of having your uh your filter you you know your aperture your lens like this it's now like this even though it's a different task that you're going to do oh I love this then you you're much more focused on that okay I I I've sat here and done many many podcasts and I have to say it's rare that I say I love this probably the first time I absolutely love this because as a person who's worked on a variety of topics in Neuroscience but visual Neuroscience has really been my first home um and continues to be the way that think about a lot of this you know there are a couple of really interesting papers um that have led to some practices mainly in China where students focus on a fixation point before they sit down to do cognitive work um and it improves their attention and performance on cognitive work and it sounds so silly to people people think oh okay I'm going to stare at a DOT and you're going to like stare at a DOT at the given distance I'm going to do my work how lame is that well I think it it's incredible because what you just said fully supports this idea that we well we all agree here and there's two of us that we're mainly visual even those of us that like to listen to music and things like that we're very sematic you know very visual creatures and that where we place our visual attention and the the size of the aperture of that attention whether or not we're looking at a small box or a big box not metaphorically but literally determines the aperture of our attention going forward in other words I think this is such an important thing because when we look at a horizon or we walk through a city you know there's information flowing past us you know and all kinds of you know um without us placing our our uh our eyes on any one particular point and that people don't notice until they do this and they hear this but that's very relaxing we look at a horizon it relaxes us and that's because panoramic Vision non-foliated vision is um it It's associated with a decrease in autonomic arousal so has this been leveraged toward teaching kids and adults how to attend better um because I think this is immensely valuable I mean this is uh behavioral behaviorally driven pharmacology as I like to call it because clearly there's a change in our chemistry when we do this sort of thing I mean other than what you just said about the the work that's done in you know what what they're doing in China which is entirely consistent with what I just said I'm unaware uh of any any utilization and I think um it could be I mean I I love that phrase that you just used right which is we understand the underlying um neurochemistry let's say uh that's great but you're you're not going to go in and directly manipulate people's neurochemistry no but if you can change the environment they're in or you can change uh the state that they're in behavioral State cognitive State emotional state then um that's an effective potentially effective practical ethical right way of of having the kind of same or similar impact I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor ag1 ag1 is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink with adaptogens I've been taking ag1 daily since 2012 so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast the reason I started taking ag1 and the reason I still take ag1 is because it is the highest quality and most complete foundational nutritional supplement what that means is that ag1 ensures that you're getting all the necessary vitamins minerals and other micronutrients to form a strong foundation for your daily health ag1 also has probiotics and prebiotics that support a healthy gut microbiome your gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that align your digestive tract and impact things such as your immune system status your metabolic Health your hormone health and much more so I've consistently found that when I take ag1 daily my digestion is improved my immune system is more robust and my mood and mental focus are at their best in fact if I could take Just One supplement that supplement would be ag1 if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 with your order of ag1 again go to drink a1.com huberman to claim this special offer yeah I think that so many people including myself think okay what's a way that I can increase my level of alertness and attention well I have this gallery of caffeine actually the middle one's water for those that are just listening I've got a mate gourd here plenty of caffeine in there I had a cold brew mate plenty of caffeine in there I had several actually and then water in the center but um caffeine raised as our level of alertness and thereby attent attentional capabilities but I think that most people are not familiar with using Behavior as a way to increase their endogenous release of the neurochemicals that increase arousal and attention and um we just tend to over rely on pharmacology and I'm not against that I use it obviously um but what do you think it is I mean now I'm asking you to be a bit of a of a cultural Anthropologist um what do you think it is that uh has led people in the United States and and you know Europe to mainly focus on this idea that if you can't attend easily that it's a pharmacologic issue that behavioral tools are not as useful because what the experiment you described is so cool right look at dots that are close together you're then cognitive space becomes kind of um more bundled into a tighter bundle um look at dots that are more dispersed and you tend to you know kind of disperse your cognition it becomes almost like more of a creative exploration right maybe this is why my my friend Rick Rubin whose name is sort of synonymous with creativity because he wrote that amazing book the creative act is so into sky and clouds and sunsets and space open space rarely have I ever heard Rick say Hey you know you should stare into a little you know Soda STW um I'd love to for you to just kind of Riff on on what you think some of the better tools are for improving attention and focus um and whether or not you think we're really as challenged in that as many people assume well I I I don't think we're that challenged I think as I mentioned earlier our brains are just performing the computations that they have been endowed with by millions of years of evolution which is to allocate attention to allocate Behavior to allocate Focus uh according to how rich I'll call it rich you know uh or poor the environment is how many different sources are there and so uh that's those are the rules your brain lives by and you're not really going to change those I mean you could kind of modulate up and down a little bit whether that's through neurochemistry or other kinds of things but ultimately it's in this case the brain in the environment that it's in so from my perspective the best thing you can do is just just change the environment put those devices away make to to enable you to focus right and um so any I don't know if I had that much more to say on that topic no I think I think what what's great about this is you're essentially pointing to the fact that we have control we're not somehow um deficient or messed up if we find ourselves having a hard time directing our attention because we've been training ourselves to uh to scroll we've been training ourselves to redirect our attention constantly to new things I mean as you can probably tell I'm a big fan of um intervening in that process so that one has the ability to drop into focused work I do feel as if progress in life it you know scales fairly directly with the ability to focus on one thing for some period of time um for sake of you know learning in school for sake of sport for sake of relationships the ability to have like a real connection to somebody um you know and we're going to get into a discussion about social interactions in a bit um but when it comes to foraging do you find that people uh fall out into different kind of clusters of how they forage for information and what are some of the themes of of that uh the or or kind of signatures of the different groups yeah that's a great question we I we haven't really approached it with the idea that there are clusters but rather that um there's let's say a Continuum uh and of being either you know most people are somewhere in the middle of course but some folks hyperfocused right and you might just metaphorically imagine them at the the extreme like like obsessive compulsive almost right you can't get unstuck from a routine and the other end would be folks who explore too readily right so folks who we would say have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and so folks fall somewhere along that distribution now we've seen that there are differences between species in terms of where they are on that difference is a function of uh age uh in humans so you kind of move from being more hyper exploratory toward more focused as you get older oh good um and that also one of the things that we've um talked about a lot is that that variation where you are on that continu Continuum might make you more or less suited to different types of careers different types of jobs it's not to say that people can't change but think of it this way uh for you've got a dial that goes from Super Focus to a major Explorer and that and creativity goes along with that uh one person might come with their dial set at three another person at seven and you could help that person at a three maybe turn Theirs to five but probably to 10 right a person is a seven you could turn them up to nine right so through through various kinds of practices and so I think it's really important to just recognize that people do vary um and that variation uh we pick up on in the sort of um neurological context of of like issues problems that people you know experience like with focus in school Etc like that people are are no doubt wondering well if I am good at dropping into a trench and focusing my attention for long periods of time maybe it's more obvious what types of careers would let uh that person would um be better at you know maybe it's programming or writing or who knows painting um but when you have somebody whose attention tends to flp between different things uh what sorts of professions uh do they align well with yeah that aligns with creative professions so and also being entrepreneurs actually if you look at the data on um entrepreneurs uh the rate of attention problems is 2 three 4X uh the general population you also see that um it's often comorbid with other issues related to uh anxiety bipolar Etc so they're kind of like all all cluster there with a with a a real issue um on that sort of focus and uh we work with um with a with a team out in Berkeley actually that provides support to entrepreneurs so that um so so that they can do their best do their thing which is to be like wildly creative right and to and Innovative I should say um but when they need that Focus so they can have it and we have we have a a a big research project going on right now looking at entrepreneurs in California and also MBA students at Wharton to just kind of try to identify you know the prevalence of these issues and then to potentially Provide support for them and that support could take any number of different forms it could be true psychiatric support in the sense of like maybe um you know attention focusing uh uh Pharmaceuticals drugs like like Ridin Aderall which can be used appropriately um but that doesn't Rob those individuals of their Mojo but in other cases it's going to be more like changing their you know providing an ecosystem right so where they can learn uh focusing practices as we've we've already talked about uh where when they build their teams they can um build complimentary strengths in the people that uh surround them so that they're much more likely to be successful and our economy depends on those people being successful right so that's where the vast majority of economic activity is coming from is people who start small businesses who are entrepreneurs and who are who are innovators so it makes all the sense in the world um to do that but I think we've been neglecting all this now actually the thing wanted to kind of say earlier about this and that where I think Neuroscience gives us a new tool to approach a lot of these business questions is that uh let's imagine you're hiring right and you're hiring you we need a creative type okay so you you put an ad out and uh you get you know resumés and responses and people come in for interviews how do you measure that creativity typically when you going say oh how creative are you and you're like you really want the job so you're like yeah I'm super creative you know like or you give them a personality test for example or you like Myers Briggs or something like that and um we know those are not particularly accurate and self-report can be not only uh inaccurate but but biased and biased by the context why am I here who's asking me a question how is that question asked whereas the Neuroscience Neuroscience gives us tools to kind of measure those things directly MH and in some cases you could measure it directly from the brain and we do that but that's not going to be practical not going to be scalable right um not going to be something a lot of people want to uh you know Embrace let's say as as applicants but find ways to interrogate the brain that are not asking people to assess themselves for instance what what would uh a small number of questions be that question one of the things that we've done is develop games like brief little very engaging games that are based on specific tasks that we know interrogate specific circuits in the brain like foraging for example uh where you know people are they're literally harvesting berries let's say okay and they're and they're going along and the goal is to kind of get as as many as you can and from their behavior we can figure out exactly where they are on that Continuum U mathematically and say okay well in the dashboard that we create like okay you are a little you are pitched a bit more toward uh being an innovator and creative type Explorer and and less so less likely to be say a good manager who would need to be you know sort of have a higher degree of focus and we do that for um for a number of different aspects of of you know of of cognitive emotional performance so things like uh uh like for in terms of social competence for example and so we have a little actually a little game it's it's mimic soccer and we've had monkeys play it humans play it we know exactly what it what it kind of uh elicits from the brain and what circuits it relies on and that allows us to numerically you know identify like your strategic planning abilities or your something like theory of mind getting in the head uh of an opponent and those games we found it's it's really uh been very gratifying to uh demonstrate that those predict performance in you know a number of different jobs in high performance jobs like soccer play actual soccer players but also in the military in um in cyber operations um and so we're now exploring and and we're helping we've helped to stand up a startup company uh in Philadelphia that is actually you know that's that's their mission is to go out uh and and try to use those tools to see if they can do better than basically a whole bunch of questions yeah it certainly goes Way Beyond um kind of typical Myers Briggs or anagram type personality tests which I think has certain value if nothing else they uh you know people like to know about themselves and um I I do think categorizing oneself a little bit according to it like are you a three on the anagram or a four or an eight you know what um certainly gives you a a a frame of reference but it yeah it doesn't seem very useful for the kinds of uh work environments that that you're describing whereas what you're describing sounds much more sophisticated um you mentioned theory of mind we should talk about theory of mind because here we are back to visual Neuroscience but I I have the understanding you can tell me if I'm right or wrong that as Old World primates one of the more impressive features that uh We've developed is the ability to attend to a location with our eyes but pay attention to something else in the periphery people used to refer to this as the uh the other cocktail party effect the the cocktail party effect is the ability to pay attention to a conversation while there's stuff in the background but this is the other cocktail party effect that uh sort of uh with sometimes Chuckles um gets described as you know you're out to dinner with somebody and you're listening to them and you're paying attention to them but you're also paying attention to the conversation next to you or maybe someone else at the bar um you know you can fill in the blanks there um this is an amazing ability regardless of what it's used for that a lot of other primate species don't have I mean as far as I know no other species have so this is this seems to be but we know maccs can do this for example and humans do this routinely we we assume all Apes do this um and the Adaptive explanation is is I think exactly what you're alluding to which is the fact that like when you live in a complex multi-level Society with differentiated relationships where the things that matter to you are like your family uh your rank your status right your friends your enemies all those kinds of things that then creates a really uh complex you know environment for as you said devoting your attention because uh you know where we look right is the focus of our typically that's the focus of your attention and what's turned up and other brains know that MH right and so now let's imagine you a baboon right and you're you're not the highest ranking baboon and the high ranking you know the alpha is over there and so you train your Gaze on that Alpha baboon but there's a really attractive female over here that you want to know where she's heading because you know that's a good mating opportunity later so it's that ability to kind of split attention from um your covert attention what your gaze is pointed at and covertly what you're amplifying uh and tracking um in the environment and there is this you know to tie this back to theory of mind um there's I think it's it's reasonable and and and consistent with some of the data that theory of mind which is a sense of being able to infer what somebody else knows um what they can see right what they what they want there state of mind which might be different from yours that it develops through the the way that as as infants and young children are experience of first um gazing at a caregiver maintaining attention with them and then learning to follow their gaze when they look somewhere and they say hey that's a you know that's an apple or whatever that you do the same thing and that gaze following then is a precursor to Joint attention and Joint attention being really important for the development of this uh of of theory of mind which is our our sense of being able to understand make predictions make inferences about what's going on in somebody else's head I feel like the the uh overlap of covert attention and theory of Mind as you described um comes from this assumption that I have which is that we have effectively two spotlights of attention and that we can merge them so I can place all my attention on you and what we're talking about in your face Etc I can SP split my attention between you and you know something over there in the corner or I can take that second Spotlight of attention and place it on myself like oh you know like I'm I need to move to the side because I've got a little you know you know maybe an itch on my thigh or something like that so but I don't think we have three spotlights that we can work with very easily anyway maybe we could train that up but that we don't naturally have more than two spotlights of attention we can merge these two spot lights of attention and I feel like and I've done some practice at this just CU I'm a neuroscientist and I like to try things of ramping up my level of focus just trying to really like like I'm doing it right now I'm looking at you and like the Contour of of your shape against the background like I can really decide to emphasize those borders I'm not really doing anything behaviorally that's different than I was a few moments ago but then I could also bring that Spotlight of attention kind of down a little bit in an intensity so I feel like we have two spotlights of attention that we can ramp up intensity and we don't normally do this so consciously normally we're more in stimulus response and I think about this a lot nowadays because and forgive me for referencing previous podcast but we had this brilliant absolutely brilliant 84 year-old psycho analyst yungan analyst named um James uh Hollis on the podcast um and he talked about you know what it is to be human and to create a life and it boiled down basically to two things which was to acknowledge that we're in stimulus response a lot of the day and how to be functional in that domain was a lot of that conversation but that there's this essential aspect to life which is to get out of stimulus response and bring that those spotlights of attention Inward and to think and to reflect and then go back into stimulus response and when we just sleep wake up and go into stimulus response all day or if we go meditate all day and are not in stimulus response neither is good so it's that balance and so this notion of two spotlights of attention I'd love for you to tell me this is like complete BS or that it works I I don't need to be validated here I I was more putting it out there as a hypothesis because it feels true to me but that's obviously just a feeling well I think that feeling is as far as I know is consistent with what we understand about how attention can you know how it amplifies the visual signals or other signals that are coming into our brains and the ways in which we can kind of I don't know if it's divided purely or if it sort of bleeds over you know what that really you know exactly looks like but the landscape let's imagine it's a landscape of neural activity and you can kind of raise up two humps or just one hump and it doesn't feel like you can go beyond that uh that's really really hard to measure um and I think you know our our best data on that comes from you know recording the activity of neurons in MAA and monkeys while they are uh doing attention you know these sort of visual discrimination tasks and and I I I think that'd be really really hard to like actually uh elicit that kind of um of behavior from them well we both agree I know because we were talking before we started recording that um certain types of stimula really grab our attention and influence our decisions and our valuation of things out there in the world so talk to me about monkey porn Okay we never called it monkey porn but a lot a lot of people have said that uh you know essentially you know no matter what else I do in my career that's going to be on my Tombstone um this man worked on this man unpacked the neurobiology of monkey porn Okay so let's go back in the way back machine you know and and so back when I was an anthropologist I'm going out I'm watching monkeys and and um it's very clear that there are certain uh things in the world that are important to them that they prioritize and those are very Sim they're the same things that that we do so they pay attention to each other to their faces um but also to other cues and these cues um seem to make adaptive significance right that they're they're relevant for your ability to survive and reproduce which is the name of the game for evolution that's all that that really counts okay and what are those things well they're cued to status like so who's dominant who's subordinate who can take my stuff who do I got to watch out for who can I you know Dominate and take stuff from and cues to how you know to sort of mate quality mating opportunities and if you look at non-human primates they display those things very conspicuously right so uh you know males have these big canines and they have sort of you know physical dominant features very square jaw all that kind of stuff and um and and females for example in Max display their state uh they their hormonal State how receptive they are to mating and and likelihood of of ovulating at that time through the sort of the swelling and coloration on their perineum here's a good here's a good word for your listeners perineum which we we introduced I think into the Neuroscience literature um and that's just the the sort of anogenital region so that's where they're putting a lot of someone else on here signaling Tain listen another another card caring researcher um Dr sha Shaina swan shaa Swan excuse me came on here to talk about um phalates and microplastics and endocrine disruptor she spent a career working on this she's a serious scientist and she talked about how taint sizes are diminishing in males by virtue of endocrine disruptors accessing the fetus during pregnancy this is a statistically very robust effect I know we're going to get into a discussion about fertility later um because you've worked on this issue as well so we can say the perenium taint and now everyone knows what we're talking about so um the females display their perenium region um differently when they're ovulating yeah so it becomes redder Fuller Etc so if you go you know go to the zoo and you just you could say you see the monkeys with the red butt big red butts they're the ones who are the females who are it turns out the males do that too so uh males um signal kind of their circulating testosterone levels by how red their taint is and actually even you can just see the physical size of their testes is is is a pretty good proxy in a Q and then in in Reese's Max there's also kind of these signals around the eyes that um they get a little bit darker uh the theory is that um humans so for a long time people said oh humans don't display their their anything about their you know their hormonal biological State uh you know to promote monogamy and all kinds of stuff like that even though it seems that monogamy is not the monogamy does not seem monogamy in terms of mating does not seem to be the dominant um strategy in humans let's let's call it that yeah ju but just to make sure that I'm clear on this it used to be said you are saying that it used to be said that humans don't signal their hor hormonal status and the reason people were saying that is because it was a promotion of monogamous Behavior which is actually not true in here humans well so um this goes back to Darwin really who who who sort of theorized that that humans during human evolution that um as monogamy became more adaptive for whatever reason you know it's all speculation right that uh that these sort of cues were hidden um so that you know IND males couldn't mon you know you wouldn't be encouraged to find other maing opportunities outside your monogamous relationship um and so it would kind of keep the focus to get back to that you know on on your uh partner but you know all the data that's out there both from you know like when societies were encountered by Western scientists like whether poyy was practiced or not um to just what we understand about extra you know extra pair matings like an offspring Etc that that that you know strict monogamy does not seem to be the the do you know to have been the dominant um strategy now that's also consistent with the observation that you know we're we are a sexually dimorphic species so if you know when you look at the animal kingdom or and primates in particular those that are obligate pair bonded monogamous primates males and females don't really differ much like we look at Marmet or Tamarind in terms of body size body size coloration you know conspicuous ual um characteristics brain structure as well it's another interesting point which we can Circle back to but even you just look at well we can even if you just look at brain size relative brain brain size relative to body size um that uh is is smallest in um pair bonded uh monogamous species the difference in brain size not between males and females but just overall and it sort of uh scales up with um with group size and group um complexity it's slightly different but there's a point there which is that well pair bond and monogamous species look very very different right it's it it different I'm sorry I'm I'm Different it's very usual let's just say this so it's is very unusual right um in mammals overall it's very unusual in primates there's only a few you know monogamous primates monogamous obligate pair bonded primates um and in general their behavior is not as complicated or complex MH as individuals that live in societies where there's a lot more going on in terms of strategizing to attain mating opportunities through um you know either through sort of physical challenge or through um you know being sneaky or you know or making friends etc etc there's a there's there's this sort of proliferation of different strategies that requires a lot more mental calculation apparently that um that goes hand inand with an increase in brain size cortex size uh which makes sense from the standpoint of like more prefrontal cortex more context dependent strategy setting and decision- making and it could be based on it seems that with more prefrontal cortex one can um a species can incorporate uh different valuations of mates it's it can be about hormonal status and I want to make sure we get back to that how humans signal hormonal status um but it could also be about uh you know reproductive potential as it relates to Resource allocation or um whether or not they'll be a good caretaker I mean a lot of additional factors can be incorporated um in and working with more variables flexibly requires more neural real estate mostly in prefrontal cortex right you uh absolutely although I will I will u based on a paper we published last year in nature I would say that our Notions of sort of the breakdowns of like where stuff is in the brain and how it's encoded I think is going to change a lot and there are a number of other studies that have come out in the last year or so that that Echo this and so this was a paper in which we did something Unthinkable I think you know in the sort of history of Neuroscience which is all about reduction let's let's make the this the the uh the experiment as simple as possible only VAR one thing right and we're going to find where that one thing is in the brain and that's the tradition going back to Hubble and weasel right hub weasel folks are my scientific great grandparents no we were bound to do it sooner or later they won the Nobel Prize for their understanding for their their parsing of the of the neural basis of vision neuroplasticity Etc um torsten's still alive I think he's like a 100 now last time I saw him he was 96 and he was still jogging and doing art David passed away amazing you can look it up H&W we call him he will res they're they're among are um uh they're on the Mount Rushmore of Neuroscience and we'll get back to this so um please yeah explain to us um what this paper showed and then uh we will then talk about how humans signal their hormonal status we'll go all the way back to monkey porn I hope because oh we won't we won't monkey porn we won't leave monkey porn in the past so near and dear to my heart um okay so human weasel you know let's let's we're going to really simplify because you know that that's that's how we figure out exactly how it works but it's not what our brains do that's not the environment our brains are in when you're out there in the world you've got this Welter this this just just incredibly complex visual environment social environment and what you do in any moment depends on what you experienced recently what you think might happen next what might have happened last week in a similar circumstance it's super complicated and it reflects all these different competing interests and values and that's true for monkeys too okay and so we did the dream my dream experiment from back when I was an anthropologist which was to get rid of the lab okay and instead we uh recorded wirelessly from thousands of neurons in the brain uh in prefrontal cortex which you mentioned and we we tend to think of as being you know important for decision- making and kind of setting goals and the context and also the the sort of high level visual area uh in the temporal lobe that's important for sensing objects and and um you know maybe faces and things like that so seemingly you know one at like an input level and one at like a higher order level we did this mostly because of the some of technological limitations but it turned out to be really like a good thing in the end because it it it told us something really unusual so what we did then is we let monkeys just be monkeys with each other okay so uh we'd have a male uh with his female friend uh or alone with a female friend uh on the other side of a you know a sort of plexiglass divider and then there could be other monkeys present like as observers like who are like watching what they're doing or not and then we also introduced challenges to them like so basically my my graduate student would come in and like you know threaten one of the monkeys and that solicits a lot of agitation and arousal how you threaten monke monkeys you know look we're just like big kind of not as hairy monkeys um to them and and you know that that makes to threaten them you look at them directly yeah so if you go to the zoo folks and you look directly at a monkey and you smile that's a threat if you want to be friendly with the monkeys lip smack it's an affiliation thing it almost looked like we were blowing kisses at one another you notice we both looked away probably where it comes from that's right probably so this so you got a naturalistic exper a natural experiment and so rather than having one you know varying one thing these monkeys engaged in like 27 28 different kinds of behaviors okay they they you know they they would Forge they scratch they groom each other they threaten they mount they do everything that monkeys do right and then we also you know as we were varying the context as well and so that's like blows the lid off of the typical the complexity in a typical experiment and what did we find we found that neurons in both these areas and they were indistinguishable uh were modulated they were affected their firing rates their activity was affected by the behaviors that the animals engaged in and what the other animals engaged in too also who's around who's watching me is it like male you know X or female Y and that and what what was really surprising so first of all you see these signals they're basically the same these two parts of the brain are supposed to be very very different and um the the average neuron uh cared about you know something like seven things rather than you know like one or two okay like a grandmother cell you know which was kind of one idea for how the brain encoded things like there's one neuron and it only responds to your grandmother right something like that Jennifer Aniston cells Jennifer Aniston cells very famous Barack Obama cells Obama cells and now there's this question about whether or not they're in a relationship so that's why I brought but that was actually in the paper there were there were neurons in cortex that responded to Jennifer Aniston specifically Jennifer Aniston sells Barack Obama specifically I'm guessing there are Donald Trump neurons probably quite a few right and there I'm guessing there were Biden neurons so maybe maybe so it's uh you're saying that two very distinct brain areas can respond very similarly to the same things and that so that's one interest interesting finding and the second interesting finding as I understand is that neurons are paying attention not just to what you're looking at or the monkey is looking at but also who's looking at them um who else is around what the goal is so individual neurons are multitasking they're they're multitasking and and or as we say multiplexing but it's really the same thing as as multitasking and that raises a lot of really interesting question why why why are these signals all over the place um which it seems to be the case right uh and one idea that's out there is that because the you know if you let's say it's a visual area those visual neurons might need to know the context in which something is happening in order to um appropriately like encode that stimulus right because it matters the meaning of that stimulus it's another monkey like when I'm looking at you it matters that we're in this setting here in California and I flew out here yesterday and all that stuff might be really really important for what my brain does with that information like what I how I how I encode it what what I put into memory Etc so that's sort of one um hypothesis that that that I think that we're all entertaining cuz it would be I mean it would be heresy to say that like actually it's a more like another Dame drop Carl Lashley kind of view the brain that it's just one big mush that sort of so in 30 seconds Carl Lashley ran a really critical experiment where it was the equ potentiality of Cortex experiment where basically uh there had been a Decades of experiments with um people lesioning a given area of the brain and seeing it some deficit in Behavior Lashley decided to do the same experiment and found that regardless of which area of the cortex this is important that it was the cortex specifically that he scooped out lesion got rid of set it an addition x to the his case I think it was rats um he didn't observe deficits in that behavior at least that persisted but you see this in the monkey and human data you can lesion a brain area see a huge deficit I know I'm telling you what you already know Michael but um I think most people don't realize this a a brain lesion can lead to a huge deficit in behavior that is recovered later over time through plasticity unless you start digging into the deeper stuff of the brain where lesions lead to permanent deficits unless some intervention is yeah the cortex seems to be maybe a little bit I don't want to say equip potential but it's it's very plastic it's very flexible uh and very adaptive so um this was a really cool finding I thought and you know we could decode from the population of of neurons exactly what each of the animals was doing and who was around and who's watching right I mean which I mean to me was very gratifying but the thing that was most exciting to me the most exciting I think that finding is really cool for neuroscientists but for the primatologist the Anthropologist and me the finding that was most exciting was that we discovered the account the mental account for our social relationships okay so um for monkeys this a large fraction of their the way that they build and maintain relation relationships is through grooming each other so when they go and they pick through each other's fur and um that's how you make friends okay that's how you make allies and the um what has been observed going back to when monkeys were you know first being watched is that uh they tend to be really Equitable right they like if I invest two minutes in you you will eventually invest two minutes back in me it might not happen right away but we're going to balance out it's going to come even and that raises the idea which most people thought was like ridiculous that wow they're actually tracking and and keeping notes on all this they've got a ledger for their Investments and withdrawals in this social relationship so to make it more more uh Salient for the listeners like think of it as like when you're texting and you text a friend and they text you back and then you text them and you text them again and you text them again and you're like am I getting ghosted what the heck's going on here why are you not Tex you start to feel that sense of of like urgency betrayal like and I'm not going to text you now I'm going to wait I'm going to wait until you text me back it's the same kind of thing we have this sense of and in fact when we think about now all the stuff that's going on soop politically you know in terms of Equitable relationships I think that that this this Bears on that so we did something had never been done before which is we tracked every single grooming interaction that ever happened between these monkeys over months CU we could we had cameras on them and we we used computer vision to to to do all that tracking and yeah they were perfectly Equitable but sometimes it you know sometimes it would take minutes to balance it sometimes it took weeks like you owe me you owe me and then it would come back what we found is that in the brain the brain in these two both of these brain areas we're carrying that mental account that precisely tracked who owed whom what amazing how much grooming they you know that blew I mean that blew my mind it's like cuz we all feel that right it's like the one of the most Salient things there is in our lives I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor betterhelp better help offers Professional Therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online now I personally have been doing therapy weekly for well over 30 years initially I didn't have a choice it was a condition of being allowed to stay in school but pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to 's overall health they're essentially three things that great therapy provides first of all it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about pretty much any issue with second of all it can provide support in the form of emotional support and directed guidance and third expert therapy can provide useful insights better help makes it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you resonate with and that can provide you those three benefits that come from effective therapy also because better help allows for therapy to be done entirely online it's super time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule there's no commuting to a therapist's office or sitting in a waiting room no traffic no parking issues ETC if you'd like to try betterhelp you can go to betterhelp.com huberman to get 10% off your first month again that's betterhelp.com huberman this explains um occasionally I'll get a text from a friend that says nice conversation which means they texted me a bunch before and I didn't respond yeah and part of that has to do with i for me the way that texts are archived they can kind of drift down and then they're hard to find and you know and and I'm a known long latency response person but then I barrage not intentionally I'll like get on a plane and be like oh that's right I'm going to get to these texts from a couple weeks ago and respond to them or a couple days ago and um I find voice memos to be a good solution to this I have a couple of people in my life with whom I mainly communicate through voice memo but it is very interesting that you know like my team here we we have a what feels like a very consistent Cadence and um balance of accounts like the like the even the text duration like you know like I'm fine with a one-word uh or even one letter text and I'm fine with an essay like but certain relationships you just don't do that so what is this just because I can't help myself uh what is the brain area that's tracking this account or is it a network it's a network okay great then we don't have to Lo people down with people with brain areas well this is amazing I mean I think that um rather than you know people talk about love languages right like people is it physical touch is it um acts of service I think you know there some of your uh words of affirmation I'm guessing that some people are tracking these very carefully too um in in humans and and balancing the account and that kind of love language idea seems like like our our five acts of of uh support or or five physical uh contact uh events whatever you want to call it I know I'm really sounding like a scientist um a nerd um are those equivalent to you know five sentences of affirmation I I what I'm gathering is that the brain is probably calculating these things on an individual basis so and so it's not like five sentences equals five acts of service so but that maybe it is that there's some like internal valuation that is like very mathematical you're trying to balance the check I think it is very mathematical but you I I think I want to point out that in in the pairs of monkeys we've now expanded this to multiple monkeys in in a big open field but they're equal kind of Partners right so it made sense that that balance was was sort of one for one and we know that um studies of you know wild monkeys wild primates that um the sort of conversion you know like you know dollars to pesos or whatever uh is not one to one if the if there's something else in in that relationship so if there's a power differential it's like if you're beta male um and you're grooming alpha male right it might be a 100 minutes of grooming that alpha male that you get like one groom back or more importantly you groom that alpha male for months and years on end and then he comes and saves your life when you are in an aggressive encounter with with another individual so you see how that there is this I I think that's what you're getting at me with the Love Languages which is that there there's um there is this underlying currency but the value of that um currency for each individual like varies depending on what they I don't know where that variation comes from but um depending on what's most important what's most Salient for them and then also probably what that relationship uh is like and if there's a power differential if there's any other kind of differential as well the math of power dynamics online is really interesting to observe uh on X where people tend to be a bit more combative at times not everybody but I've noticed this like you know this notion of like don't feed the trolls right like someone says something that's insulting and you know you don't honor them with a response you just let it go by that that would be somehow completing some sort of reward circuitry because what they really want is not to harm your reputation but to be acknowledged that their opinion matters and social media as long as people have access to an account effectively levels the field although then there's this prioritization of like high follower accounts and what used to be that when blue checks became purchasable right that a lot of people were upset because it was essentially like you know equaling the status playing field somewhat right but it's very interesting to see how this stuff plays out you know like do you honor somebody with a response or like ignoring somebody's insult that the classic uh Madmen Dawn Draper response you know in the elevator that has turned into a meme that well I don't think of you I don't think about you at all being the ultimate sort of display of his power that um in in terms of a you know not even allowing his neural circuits to to keep track of an account it's like zero for zero for you you know is essentially what he was saying so is is it the case that power dynamics are tracked across uh for Conflict for collaboration we talked about love life languages which is a collaboration um you know are some people do um seem in life to be very transactional is the word we we assign to it they're tracking like what you did this and I did this no you know you paid last time I paid this this kind of thing um or they're they're elevated by the idea that oh yeah you know they did this and this therefore that the relationship must be much much tighter than perhaps the other person in the relationship thinks it is these are complex features but the idea that we are Old World primates and that there's a brain Network tracking this stuff to me makes really good sense and I think it's wonderful that you've identified a physiological anatomical substrate for it I think it's it's lends a lot of support to like thousands of years of observations well thanks no I I I I think you're you're spot on there um in the in the sense that and at some point it's it's all really transactional in the calculus of evolution right so in ultimately it's if your calculations do the right thing so that you get resources and mating opportunities and translate that into Offspring and that they do that into Offspring as well then those whatever the biological substrate was that did that is going to proliferate and potentially become um honed and and really uh uh specialized uh for doing that job and that's actually the argument one other argument for why you know we study primates um because we are so closely related to them we share all these features of our our biology and our Behavior but also because and and this is where I think for example personally I find it much more um compelling to study animals like Reese's Maca as opposed to say marma sets which we talked about a little bit in the sense that um if we're thinking about the the forces that have made us who we are right uh which we just talked about you see it displayed on X every day like attending to all these things tracking all these different relationships deciding whether or not to give somebody your attention you know the purest form of generosity as it was said um that's what monkeys have to do too and so this this argument from um what we call neuroethology and ethology being the science of basically trying to understand Behavior as a product of of evolution right that it it it um that it's it's designed just like physical features just like the you the wing of a bird right that um are mental processes and the underlying mechanisms are designed to serve very specific um functions and so if we want to understand how we got to be the way that we are we should look toward animals that had you know seem to be doing the same kind of things facing the same kinds of pressures uh in the environment in particular the social environment which which seems to be the one that's most important for us how do humans signal their hormone status is on a very different end of the spectrum yeah but um you know everything we're talking about which is fairly high level um and in the brain exists as I like to think about it on a on a on a kind of a water level or a tide that's set by are levels of autonomic arousal like thinking feeling action changes when levels of autonomic arousal are very high AKA stress alertness versus when we're sleepy um and hormones certainly influence autonomic arousal and a bunch of other things too hormones is a broad category but let's just stay with the ones that most people are familiar with so um what are the data on how females signal um let's just say you know testosterone estrogen and um other you know uh relevant hormones and for males as well what are the what are the external signals or behavior or behavioral signals yeah so there so they that there that's a really important point that you made because they both you know those things go together so uh it's been most controversial for females but you know in my view the data is pretty clear and it you know aligns I think with our own intuitions um just from from daily life which is well some things are are apparently not consciously perceptible it's like hard to report but um but through studies where you just ask males for like okay is this you know how attractive is this woman Etc um that there are changes in the face for example and that's been one argument is that this is going to sound funny but that the signals that in non-human primates are in the rear are because we're walking upright you can't see that really so now it's kind of in in the face and so these changes that um happen that the ovulatory cycle is reflected in the turgidity how how tight the skin is in the face because it gets a little plumper and a little bit redder and we may not be consciously aware of that but the that that it's there right and it shows up in sort of preference data when when when you ask heterosexual males you know do you you know how attractive is this woman Etc so that that seems to be the case um and also um behavioral you know so so uh sort of flirtatious Behavior um increases around the time of ovulation yeah yeah yeah yeah there's there was a classic study that um that exotic dancers strippers um would actually get bigger tips more tips when they were ovulating than when they're not ovulating interesting uh so there maybe and it could be by it could be by virtue of their their behavior their but it could be the way they they dance proximity to the uh to the what I guess The Observers clients whatever you call them I I I don't recall that being um Quantified but um but it suggests that there's there's a latent signal there and that uh men are uh unconsciously processing this they're not saying oh her cheeks are particularly exactly uh uh plump and red right now they're that um but that if you measure their ratings or their scores of of attractiveness when she's ovulating it's the these features that are that might be drawing out that response correct we can take this back to the monkey porn studies which is was our first real foray into trying to quantify the uh the value of various kinds of social information for guiding decisions and we already came into this uh with a sense that like yeah things like status physical prowess mating status um you know are you are you um you look like good mate bad mate are you in in mating condition you know you Etc and so when you know you think about that like how do you ask a monkey that question you could ask them they not going to tell you because they they can't talk but you have to develop a behavioral way to elicit that and so what we did I think it was pretty clever was to Riff on the studies that you know I had already done uh looking at varying the expected value of two options so this was the work I did as a postto with Paul glimcher where we um revealed uh economic signals in the brain in the in the parietal cortex an area between where visual signals come in and where you make a choice um to to to make a behavioral response and we varied like in this case monkeys don't work for money they they'll work for juice okay it's been actually it's really fun you spend a lot of time figuring out what juice they really love best and to then economically you would vary like the size of the juice reward that each of the two offered or its probability while maintaining size constant that when you combine those you multiply those together you get expected value that's the first model of economic decision-making that was really ever developed right you compute the expected value different options you choose the one has the highest value it it you know doesn't work all the time but it's sort of a rough proxy and we showed that yeah neurons and PR cortex signal that monkeys are good economists they choose the one that has a higher expected value okay so now take that experiment I'm going to have monkeys choosing between two options that vary and how much juice they pay out but I'm also going to pop up a picture when they choose one of them okay and they don't know what picture is coming up but the picture is going to be it could be it could be a nothing burger just like some gray Square it doesn't mean anything or it could be the the the perum or of a female if it were males that we were studying we did this with males uh sorry females making choices eventually as well could be a face of a dominant male face of a subordinate male face of female ET what's the equivalent of of the uh swollen taint of a female monkey um for if you reverse the experiment and it's the female monkey who's making a choice about male monkeys what do they what do they find really attractive in a male monkey yeah so it's the taint of the male monkey because it's providing a signal about how much monkeys looking at taints how much testosterone is circular you know that they've got on board basically which is a good predictor of their status um it's a good predictor of their you know fighting ability all that kind of stuff and and if you're a female and that that's that's a reasonable kind of choice to make because if you have male offspring and females are predisposed to choose that then they'll your male offspring are going to do pretty well so that's what we did and uh we varied how much juice so sometimes monkeys would get paid they'd have to give up juice to see the pictures sometimes they get paid more to see the pictures and what we did then is we we we construct a choice curve and we use the different IAL if that if it's not 50/50 if it slides one way or the other it tells us that monkeys are are paying x amount to to see certain kinds of pictures or you have to overpay them right and so what did we find it was really I think scientifically revealing but it's pretty fun people got it immediately uh they will pay juice juice they will give up juice they will pay it to see pictures of the perum the the hind quarters of females this was original study was in male monkeys they will pay to see the faces of dominant males and you had to pay them to see the faces of subordinate males okay so so so females will give up juice to see the taints of testosterone Rich male monkeys and male monkeys will pay juice to see the swollen taints of female monkeys that are because of the swelling indicates a better reproductive competence yes better you know DS the time the time is ripe okay to to to M but it just in general it's a signal that is like what we would say is it's important it has value something you should track and in fact yeah they're paying for it so you know this just blew up on the Internet even back then it was like suddenly Mill every websit was like oh you proven monkey porn blah blah blah um it was kind of a fun ride it did it was a New York Times uh idea of the year uh in 2005 which was um again kind of shocking you know this like well on that but but people it makes sense and the thing I want to point out is that um we ran the same experiment in people not with uh unclothed humans so we used and we used only well no it was it was and we had to create our own stimulus set because all the stimulus sets that were out there for visual studies of humans were like like a bunch of you know German people looking very D they were very well controlled and we wanted something that's was more natural so we downloaded thousands of photos from this website hotter.com I don't know if you recall that but it was a website where you could upload pictures and people would rate you I mean now that like probably wouldn't be allowed now I remember I remember rate my pet rate my pet Rate My Professor I think which is still around when you're saying rate rate yes rate rate with a t at my pet yeah but this was hotter not.com so you get all these really natural looking and then we had this was really funny though too um so we had uh a group of separate groups of Raiders uh from the people who we actually test in the experiment so we had you know a group of males heterosexual males rating the female photos and vice versa and um that was interesting in its own right so we were just trying to establish like we're not saying why they're attractive or anything like that just like let's measure it okay and it was really fun because um you know by the and it took was hard work you're having to do one every 3 seconds and it took like an hour and the uh you know when the women were done rating they're like okay I'm glad that's over uh the hours over and our male Raiders were like do you have any more um you know can I I I'd be happy to sit here and rate more photographs for you interesting um so women got sort of like uh they got tired of rating males for attractiveness males did not Tire of reading females for attrac they did not at all which is that's anecdotal but it's still I think it's revealing then we ran the pay-per-view experiment just like in monkeys uh on humans payview and we also uh ran a couple of other economically you know econ standard economic tasks one would be how long are you willing to wait so that's a delay discounting like and generally you you will wait longer for a bigger reward a smaller reward and also how hard would you work and we the work was like you had to alternate pressing two keys on a keyboard it was really just menial laborious you know Etc so um the two interesting just sociologically it's interesting what comes out of this uh our female subjects um basically wouldn't give up money they were working for money they were hearing the sound of coins coming out of a slot machine which is proportional to how much money they actually got choice money if you ignor the pictures you'd go home with like $17 extra compared to if if you were influenced by them and the females did really well economically so they pretty much kind of ignored the pictures of the males even though they were rated even the ones that were super hot they were not very uh concerned with that for the males it was the exact opposite so the males are giving up essentially they're paying and they they had thousands of Trials they're paying somewhere between a half and three4 of a cent to see images of women who are rated in the top like third of of attractiveness they also would wait significantly longer and they would work really hard it's like rats pressing for cocaine quite literally to keep those pictures up on the screen okay so that's the setting we've established in monkeys and in people similar economic principles uh that are guiding social you call it attention social valuation whatever so we're like okay let's go look in the brain so we did an MRI experiment fmri experiment to measure measured blood flow to you know different parts of the brain um in we only tested males um because they were the ones who displayed uh you know differential preferences there and what we found is that um kind of parts of the visual system that are involved in encoding faces but then the reward system was activated and tracked linearly how much money these guys were paying to see uh images there basically the trade-off value the currency the translation of pictures into money okay then in monkeys we studied all the same areas but now we could record from Individual neurons in those areas rather than looking at blood flow which is a crude proxy and we found exactly the same thing which is that you know neurons in the reward system uh were spontaneously and strongly activated by the those um pictures you know that um and that made sense right so the pictures of the pera of females um by uh dominant male faces um and that correspondence I thought was pretty compelling right so these are brain areas that are involved in value based decisionmaking yeah not unlike the value-based decision making of tracking how many grooms uh grooming events one received versus needs to give yeah or texts one has received or gives or acts of service one trades for some other love language I mean I'm here I'm extrapolating to a lot of different themes but um I mean talk about transactional I mean this implies that our neural circuitry while flexible we can you know trade two of those for one of those or we can decide you know I'm just going to be a selfless Giver um that that's a decision and that altruism well it certainly exists I mean we fortunately see acts of altruism a lot probably not as much as you know Humanity would be served by but it exists altruism exists uh but nonetheless there's a formula that's maintained in the brain like I'm going to do all this for nothing and the the the circuit kind of understands that versus I'm going to do this but there's an expectation maybe with a long latency that at some point it's going to be payback I I expect to be paid back the idea of altruism has been very controversial within kind of evolutionary biology uh for a long time um because it's kind of hard to imagine a a scenario in which being purely selfless um could persist if there was a genetic uh you know part of that right if if it were heritable so that's why we have ideas of like kin selection like I will give up my life for you know eight of my cousins for example well right in I was saying in in parenting and taking care of young like we give selflessly but there's this like unconscious or semiconscious backdrop which is you want your own offspring to prolif to survive and and flourish and so it's not quote unquote really selfless although in the in the short-term it can appear selfless that's I guess suppose the real evolutionary biology argument I would say that in terms of um just pure acts of giving where we don't expect anything in return I think most people that do that um say certainly I've had this experience right it feels good so there is a return on investment it's just that the return doesn't come from somebody else doing something to reciprocate in the same domain but it feels good you know there's nothing more impressive than an anonymous donor right you know actually uh I don't want to take us too far off track but there's this idea in a lot of Europe that if somebody donates a lot of money to a cause that you know they're doing philanthropy that they're like trying to hide something whereas in this country that tends to be not the case although it's sort of growing this idea that oh if somebody's giving a lot of money to a university they want their name on the side of a building they're really looking to kind of either hide other features of their life Andor they want respect right they they want they want um uh no uh fame um so it's it's kind of interesting I I like to believe in pure altruism I just it feels good to me to believe in true altruism so I I you know I don't think this is settled and I think this is where uh there's another feature of of human and maybe human evolution that humans and human evolution that's relevant here which is that we may be one of the only organisms in which something called group selection might happen right and that's this idea that like groups are competing with each other in addition to individuals competing and and and and collaborating and competing and so that an indivi evolution might favor groups in which there are certain individuals who are in a sense wired to be selfless and um there's one of my colleagues at um Penn guy named Duncan Watts has done these really interesting experiments where he'll he had he ran these massive online like prisoners dilemma games where you know people are having to decide whether to um you know to either support you know their their partner or or um defect essentially and uh but what was unusual about these games is he let people played them over and over again hundreds and hundreds of times what typically happens is once you've experienced the fact that like if you cooperate you're going to get screwed eventually then everybody just says I'm just gonna I'm just screwing the other guy from here on out but he identified that there's a population like 20% of people I think something like that who are assistant Cooperators who cooperate no matter what their experience and that is resonant with this idea kind of from group selection that groups that had individuals who were Cooperators who were selfless no matter what might outcompete other groups right and that I think that's a really interesting idea I want to Circle back to what you were saying about the feel good like when you give there's a real substrate to that if we can engage in a little reverse inference which is that and this and this was um shown actually a couple decades ago by by a neuroeconomist named Bill Harbaugh for the first time which is that um when you give to like a charity that you love you see activation of reward circuitry that looks just like if you got the reward yourself right so so it's like if I give to whatever March of Dimes or something and and that's what I love then it it in essence feels good to me and that reward system activation right is the thing that uh through dope mean reinforces Behavior so when you have that warm glow it makes you more likely to do that again uh in the future it's a self-reinforcing signal I love that those sorts of circuits exist because they seem to serve the greater good and I'm not you know trying to you know uh rub away our more um I don't know harsher features of prime brain wiring but they're all in there so um speaking of which are there external signals besides muscularity uh jaw shape Etc that relate to levels of testosterone in male humans that um are transient you know the male hormones don't cycle as robustly uh as female hormones because of the lack of a menstrual cycle uh they might change with age Etc but um is there anything that signals um testosterone or free testosterone level um certainly stress hormone level is signaled um quaking of hands uh that kind of thing um but what about testosterone signaling that is independent of the the kind of like uh Vigor display stuff that we normally hear about it's a good question I think it's it's important as you pointed out that it doesn't vary too much over you know weeks or months or anything like that it's it's pretty stable but well one thing we can think about is work done by my colleague giddy na who is um who's in the marketing department uh at Wharton and working with Colin camer actually out out here at um Caltech and they did a number of studies not where they were measuring testosterone but doing very well-controlled uh Placebo you know Trials of applying testosterone gel versus you know something that you know people you know you didn't know which which arm you were getting so testosterone versus placebo versus placebo yeah and measuring things like uh um desire for uh you know conspicuous consumption so buying you know luxury cars or things like that or um other things are uh they're cognitive reflection like they're really bad at uh you they start to fail on things that require not just giving the simple answer uh they become more risky taking uh so there's a number of features that we kind of I think collectively anecdotally think of as being like hyper masculine associated with testosterone like you want a signal like you're a big guy you take more risks um and and you're less reflective you play more and you're less reflective so that you know that and I'm going to screw it up right now if I actually tried to give you the the question you know but it's like you know a bat and a ball cost A110 together how you know I'm going to screw it up and then you're going to say well you know you lack C reflection but let's just leave that aside but then they're much more likely to give the wrong answer go to the jump to the conclusion which seems obvious but it's wrong so higher testosterone more um impulsive with uh responses less reflective tend to be wrong more often yes um but more confident but more confident um more risk-taking that kind of that's kind of a kind of a okay fully expected one um and and I guess the purchasing you know uh items that signal um wealth or status it's a display so you know I think of as like the chimpanzee so when when when researchers first went out to studi chimpanzees you know in in Africa and then they they had like generators or whatnot around and they had these big gasoline cans or whatever and the male chimps uh one of the male chimps you know discovered that he could take these cans and run around uh the group banging them together and getting a lot of attention you know which is similar you see them up in a tree TRG display Vigor display displaying that yeah just grabbing I think so much of its attention just look at me look at me look at me um and I think that's what you've got going on with this sort of you know buying a jaguar or whatever you know it's like uh it it or people are trying to Signal what they don't have actually have right I mean it's it's it's It's tricky because we um now you can buy things on like you know the there a bunch of jokes about Los Angeles that can be made here you know my my I grew up in the Bay Area and there are areas of the of the Bay Area where there's a tremendous amount of wealth my dad used to always say you know you know appear like wealth is really kind of hidden back in in the trees literally you know you go to La and there's all this display through stuff it depends on where you are in La um but it's largely true you see let me put this way you see a lot more yellow Lamborghinis here than you do in pora Valley but I'll be willing to bet that there's far more money in pora Valley than there is uh in all of Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles if you really just looked at actual net worth not an experiment I want to run right but I I'd be willing to bet one entire limb of somebody's choice to run that experiment and so there is this kind of strange thing where the display of vigor is is so flexible in humans right like um right it's like uh you know nowadays there's a lot of discussion about billionaires signaling more um traditional or primitive forms of vigor like fighting ability or muscle um versus you know like it's almost like and I think part of the reason for that is that um the concept of a billion dollars is very hard for most people to conceptualize as like a like an operational thing like what they would do with it and how it would impact their level of happiness which is probably actually very little Etc but we we can assess physical qualities so readily like and so um anyway I guess that this this is really just my way of taking us back to this idea of valuation like how we place value on a potential mate or a friend or a co-worker it sounds so transactional but clearly the brain is performing these operations all the time and it's highly uh variable depending on who you are the social context you live in and yet these hormones especially testosterone and estrogen seem to really be playing with the the the volume or the gain on all of this stuff yep that's exactly how and in fact that's how I think about all all all you know we can think about oxytocin the same way as like a volume knob for pro-social uh interactions in general in testosterone it's so so I think that works I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors function last year I became a function remember after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing function provides over 100 Advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily Health this snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health Hormone Health immune functioning nutrient levels and much more they've also recently added tests for toxins such as BPA exposure from harmful Plastics and tests for paases or forever chemicals function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from Top Doctors who are expert in the 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podcast if you'd like to try function you can go to function health.com huberman function currently has a weight list of over 250,000 people but they're offering Early Access to hubman podcast listeners again that's function health.com huberman to get early access to function let's talk about oxytocin we hear about it as the love hormone the affiliative hormone folks it's a neuro hormone so it somewhere in between a neuromodulator and a hormone let's set all that aside all the mechanistic stuff and um love to know your knowledge about like what changing levels of oxytocin does to perception to behavior yeah humans and so yeah oxytocin I mean we've been interested in it for a long time because as you said it it seems to be a dial that uh can turn up or turn down certain aspects of social behavior and other other aspects of of mental uh and emotional function it's important to point out that oxytocin and its sister neuron hormone um vasopress Arginine vasopressin um which is sort of maybe a little more important in males than in females and females oxytocin little more important but they they're in both and and they've been around a long time they've actually you know there a very early in in vertebrate evolution in mammals oxytocin has the primary role right of um helping to build bonds between Mom and baby so um oxytocin is released during child birth it's released when Mom is nurs and it seems that in humans and some other social you know really really social creatures it's now been co-opted to kind of have that similar kind of role in the relationships you have with other people who are not your Offspring or your your parate right so because oxytocin for example is released uh you know when you orgasm and so then that's you know thought to be why that sort of Pillow Talk afterward is you know like it's more engaging and you know people feel things um at that time that they might that they're different from what they would have felt it Fosters attachment Fosters attachment EXA that's a good way of putting it so oxytocin levels are hard to measure right um You can measure at at a distance in the periphery in the blood but it's not exactly like one toone correlated with what's going on in the brain and in general we don't want to put like a a you know a pump or a little thing in your brain uh that we could measure how much is in there so uh um so we can look at instead what is often done is to look at what happens if you introduce oxytocin more oxytocin that you normally have like into the brain you can't inject it or anything like that and the way that it's typically applied is to squirt it up your nose and or inhale it uh intranasally so it then is taken up by the nerves that are in your sinuses and whatnot and then goes into the brain that was what it was thought to I think that we were the first to show that that's actually how it Works um we did all the work in monkeys where it's uh all these things are just sort of easier to do and the behavior is a little bit less complex so it it our readouts are are I think a bit more straightforward in the human studies there's a lot of Vari you know there's it's controversial because there's a lot of like there's some crap studies and there's just a lot of variability in the effects across studies I think some of that's just because you ask people to squirt it up their own noses and so there's a lot of that introduces variation in in just how good they were getting it in the right place with the monkeys what we did instead is we used what's called in nebulizer aerosolizer like I had noticed when like my kid had like pneumonia and I took him to the ER they put this mask on them and they you know they they missed this albuterol which opened up his Airways oh we could do that with oxytocin too so that's what we did with the monkeys it makees sure they get like a really good dose and then we show that that gets right into the brain okay now that puts us in a position ask questions of what does it do um one of the first things that oxytocin does is it relaxes you so just overall um you know you were talking about autonomic function it's a it's a relaxer it's an um analytic so it uh and in in monkeys what that does is it reduces their vigilance to sort of any threats so they're just a lot more chill uh so that's sort of a primary thing and then we've looked at how it affects their behavior in males and females separately because as I said before they sort of first of all males and females have different strategies and and behaviors and and the the expression of where where oxytocin receptors are in the brain Etc and vasopress recept is a little bit different in in male monkeys it's super interesting because you know we've been talking about how you know dominance and they really like recent Ms this really steep hierarchy and one of the things we found right away is that you give oxytocin and it just flattens the hierarchy so the dominant male monkeys become super chill and friendly and the subordinate ones become a bit Bolder um perhaps because you know when if I dose if I dose my own or I've dosed you with oxytocin would change your behavior which would change my behavior so it reverberates across individuals so so it flattens the hierarchy they spend more time making eye contact they pay more attention to the other individual and we've shown that um it's burning man yeah it's true I've never been to burning I've never either but this is what I hear no I think it's that that's the right point and I'll I'll Circle back to that because we also showed that um uh in a task-based situation where a monkey can choose we gave monkeys choices where they could give a reward TOS to another monkey to a a bottle that could collect reward you know in case they just like to see juice dripping out and they would become more pro-social so they're much more likely to give a reward uh to another monkey they're more altruistic um as you you know you as we talked about earlier so that's like it looks like a real pro-social kind of thing right which I think is is super interesting in females is it's a little bit different they um females become kind of nicer to each other and we see that greater eye contact Etc but they come more aggressive toward males and we speculate I think it's the hypothesis that um because oxytocin is released when you've got an infant basically for females uh males are a bigger threat then because in many primate societies and other mammals uh males sometimes can be infanticidal because if they kill off a female's infant that's you know then that will bring that female into uh receptivity for mating much more quickly and so so that's sort of The evolutionary yeah it is brutal The evolutionary rationale behind that so that's kind kind of our supposition um the other thing I thought was really uh interesting as well is we find uh a greater or an increase in the synchronization of behavior so when I do something you know this idea of mirroring um which has been talked about in in business context for a long time you know it's a real thing and it's a marker of a good relationship a strong relationship if you have good rapport with somebody you tend to adopt the similar move movements and postures and if you do those things shirts shirts exactly we didn't coordinate clothes you just happen to be a great dresser well you know same here um so so when you have that you know actually if you do those things if I subtly mirror you you're and I'm in a job interview I'm more likely to get the job going to get a higher salary Etc all those sort of good things so oxytocin turns up behavioral synchrony and one of the things this is like something I've been fascinated in for the last decade and we and a lot of other people have been working on is that this synchrony at the behavioral and neural level physiological synchrony uh is kind of it's this black magic of of social behavior it's the glue that um allows us to live and work together so the observation is that if you and I we have a good rapport here let's say if we were measuring uh activity in our brains right now we'd see that they were coming into alignment so they might have been very disperate when I arrived here and you arrived here today and as we've grown closer um and we've discovered things that are similar about us that the you know our mindsets and our emotional sets are more overlapping so we see this world more similarly we feel more similarly about it we're more likely to take similar decisions and um and then that rever the coolest thing is this reverberates down to your body so uh if I if our brains begin to align our hearts actually begin to beat together even if we have different resting heart rates uh you to breathe together and you start to move together you start to look at the same things in the environment we've talked about attention when you look at something the same thing you're getting the same data and that a feedback loop which I think now you can see that that is a way to coordinate behavior and that is the essence of sort of that's our secret sauce as a species which is that we can collaborate and do things together and it seems to like oxytocin vasopressin are involved in this as a way of kind of turning up the dial on synchrony it seemed to turn up the socalled social brain Network and then that synchrony is is the glue and it's a biomarker a biological marker of a close relationship that predicts better communication increased trust better teamwork you know uh whether your marriage is going to last I mean the things that it predicts you know group decision- making so we showed that in like in a business context text uh committees that are more in sync with each other that their hearts are beating together are more likely to reach the right decision in a really difficult problem than committees that are not the cool thing is that now that you have a biomarker you can hack that right in the sense that now we can start looking at all those trust building exercises or anything else that you know was supposed to turn things up turn up the dial on teamwork or communication and we have a readout we could say yeah that's working that's actually doing the thing it's not BS right you should invest your time and energy in that rather than something else and there's like now we've been working through this list as well as others there a whole host of things that seem to actually turn up synchrony uh and that's a shortcut to team chemistry so interesting um I'm sure you're familiar with the molecule um uh MDMA AK ecstasy never Tak in I have high on my list yeah I have um it's an illegal drug but it if you um are part of a clinical trial exploring MDMA then you can do it legally um if you're not you're breaking the law right so um methylene dioxy methamphetamine is it's very interesting because it dramatically increases dopamine but not nearly as much as it increases serotonin and it also leads to enormous increases in Oxy oxytocin and it's not really a classic psychedelic it's uh an empathogen um and it has unique properties um in that it raises dopamine and serotonin simultaneously that's unusual among compounds like amphetamine dopamine epinephrine uh you know psilocybin serotonin you know they broadly speaking there's a really nice experiment that was done trying to isolate the effects of dopamine versus serotonin versus oxytocin on the pathogenic effect and by administering different drugs and in the case of oxytocin oxytocin directly what they basically concluded was that oxytocin has very little if anything to do with the Imp pathogenic aspects of um of MDMA but if I recall correctly and I have to go back and look at this but if I recall correctly it had a profound impact on as you pointed out the um reducing anxiety and that reduction in anxiety brings us back to this idea that you know as we change the tide of of autonomic arousal Things become more or less available to us in terms of emotions and behavior so I I find oxytocin to just be like spectacularly interesting compound for so many reasons but perhaps for that reason um uh more than all the others that it it's like it's our own affiliative as you said anotic is that I pronounce that correctly yeah yeah um to uh I never actually said that word out loud I've written it many many times but it's kind of when I said it I was worried that like maybe I'm saying the opposite or angiolytic or is it Ang anyway reduces anxiety folks um chills you out chills you out and I think that's so interesting that oxytocin can be evoked by all these different types of stimuli yeah so as you mentioned it's like postcoidal or post-orgasmic it it's uh but it can be elicited by um nonsexual affil affiliative touch by um uh there's actually really interesting evidence that and this led to this question about whether or not cesarian sections versus um you know uh tra vaginal births are are you know are are they truly equal in terms of their effect on the fetus um and it does seem to be at least in rodent models that The Passage through the vaginal Canal during birth helps stimulate oxytocin that it has a bidirectional effect on the mother infant relation ship well is there any evidence of that in primates as well uh I know the evidence that you're talking about I don't know of evidence uh in primates for that um but I think I'd like to Circle back to what you talked about in terms of social touch which I think is a really especially right now today uh I think is a very important topic to consider so we like other primates um we have these uh they're actually unspecialized sensors in our skin uh the hairy parts of our skin like your arm whatever your and they provide input essentially to A system that releas the system that releases oxytocin directly and that's basically all they do they're really bad at telling you exactly where or how you know what's being done or how much pressure but they operate best at um body temperatures so you're being touched with a body temperature stimulus and in a way that's very what we would consider to be very pleasant like getting tickies you know it's like grooming like this is the same thing as grooming in uh in monkeys and so um it tells us that this is an ancient part of our heritage to building relationships which is actually through social touch right and it's been said and I think reasonably that we're living through an epidemic of the loss of social touch for a lot of good reasons right because of raising awareness of inappropriate touch Etc but now it's almost as if we've swung the pendulum too hard in One Direction which is that we're being robbed of this very natural intrinsic signaling mechanism for building bonds that humans would normally uh you know normally would you know in the past have benefited greatly from and it's you know it's not clear how we move forward in terms of like replacing that um but I do think it's possibly part of the constellation of forces of losses that uh is is making us very sick as a species and as a society you know namely the loneliness epidemic the the uh the sort of antisocial Century um which with concomitant you know with basically all these fallons in terms of anxiety and depression and despair despair exactly despare it's such a great word captures so much um couple of Reflections about this because I think about this a lot never forget when I was um traveling overseas in 2019 so this is like pre- lockdowns and all that um you would see in certain areas of the world uh men walking holding hands right um and you know I didn't know their sexual orientation but my assumption was that they were heterosexual men holding hands cuz it was like just very much part of the culture over there um the other thing was if you and I have gone to South America you'll see a school kids walking home all holding hands boys and girls just walking holding hands it's very you know casual um you know non-romantic handholding right um a lot more hugging a lot of like like like I wouldn't say long firm Embrace but I'd say like like like vigorous Embrace upon meeting kind of thing yeah and um and I grew up in the era of you know like fist bumps and and side hugs you know that's like a thing over over here and um as you pointed out I I think that uh the lack of physical Touch of that sort meaning just whatever is culturally acceptable um consensual casual physical touch um definitely according to the literature that I'm aware of signals to the rest of the nervous system and body isolation even if we're surrounded by people and I watched that chimp Empire series on Netflix um where they talk about this allopathic grooming this collaborative grooming like I'll trade you know five you know pick pick your back for a while you pick mine and when they decide that they're going to ostracize a a given member of their troop for what whatever reason sometimes it's because the the the chimp misbehaved other times it's more diabolical than that they're trying to really get rid of they're trying to adjust the Power Balance in in the troop um for other reasons uh they basically just leave that chimp to try and groom itself and then the parasites start to eat away at it it develops these immune issues and then they often just go off on their own and die it's it's an incredibly hard thing to watch um and what the underl reasons are in each case are are not made completely clear but um I think about this whole thing of like deaths of Despair and you know not long ago you were talking about group selection I feel like um these two themes might be related I feel like right now politically and culturally in this country and now starting in Europe as well it really is it has become an US versus them kind of scenario there doesn't seem to be a middle at all it's like a big trough yeah and even the suggestion that somebody could kind of switch between groups is kind of like a no because they believe and have said and done this no because they believe in us that have done this and very strong opinions from both sides so um I don't think we're in a just hug it out kind of uh landscape right now and um so I'm curious what forms of non-physical affiliative Behavior exist out there there are social media accounts out there like Upworthy which you know just consistently puts out positive content there's there are people who are very positive in their you know in their online Behavior but and there's encouragement is exists online but it seems to be swamped by these like high salience like attacks like what's the deal what can we do yeah I mean this is a this is a fundamental question for our age I think and we're on a trajectory toward um well I mean I I don't want to give the pressure I'm a complete pessimist but I could I was about to say toward Oblivion um between like the despair that's drive has been driving uh people to uh to either commit suicide or to you know develop severe mental illness or um physical health issues cardiovascular disease diabetes Etc that are I think uh a consequence of being in some cases a consequence of being isolated because you are not interact that's that's part of who we are as a species and we don't Thrive I mean the you the work is very clear that like being isolated being alone is worse for your health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day I mean it it's just really really bad and it's it scales it's almost linear uh to how many contexts you have you know per week or per month so that's all really bad and I do believe that's also driving um that's a big driver for not just the deaths of Despair but like the lack of coupling and the lack you know and crashing of fertility which is is also a real thing and is happening and if if we don't counter it's it's it's going to be bad getting back to synchrony one of the most effective ways to get in sync with somebody that you're out of sync with or that you don't know right who's different from you is through conversation but deep conversation okay and there's a couple parts of this you have to make the time and the space to do this you have to have an intentional mindset and we and other scientists have worked with there there are these structured sets of questions that have been developed there were there's one called Fast Friends developed by the erands in the late 1990s there's commercially available decks online that you can get and they're cool because they each question you know you can kind of take it a superficial level or a deep level but they're designed to kind of like break the ice and then get you really fast into like really deep questions is this like a 100 questions to fall in that was published in the New York Times yeah it's very similar to that um but in this case it's a about uh connecting like deep connection I think it's more about deep connection than sort of romance part of this and um what happens during that and and my my good friend and colleague Emily Faulk at at um the anenberg school uh had a really nice paper recently that showed that by measuring brain activity itself in people who don't know each other as they work through these questions and their brain you know one brain is in this space another brain is this space and they over time come into really close uh alignment and that's associated with all this good stuff like I like you more I feel closer to you I value you more etc etc and once you're in that kind of alignment now you're set to sort of do things together and now I think that gets back to your question like we can't hug it out but we have to somehow create space and when I say space like give people the space to do that like I'm going to talk to you know somebody from the other political party or from the whatever um that's not a bad thing right in fact that's what we need to do but instead we are especially online reinforcing and making the barriers harder to have those conversations which are the necessary thing I think to establish the glue that keeps us together yeah I I feel like unless there's a organized effort to try and create a bridge it ain't going to happen I just feel like there's um I don't want to take us too far off course but maybe is a good segue into the Neuroscience of decisionmaking and uh value-based decision-making which is so much of the work that you've done but I feel like there's this property of the human brain that there's evidence for I've seen in beautiful neuron paper showing that like confirmation of our beliefs leads to a a reward-based activation of a reward-based mechanism basically we're getting a little bit of dopamine for confirming our biases essentially about others and then of course if we then experience more affiliative behavior from our group we feel more protected and then there's a tendency to do more of that and um I feel like with the knowledge that we have about dopamine incentive schemes group uh group selection Behavior there ought to be a program that could be established that isn't um hug it out but that is designed to um again that word exploit is so so loaded to leverage the same neural circuits that led to the Divide to try and Bridge this divide and you know what what it has to do though is it has to break with the value system of of both groups I me let's just be frank we're talking about the left and the right here I don't want to like I don't want to dance around the margins you know and and somehow acknowledge that there's good and bad within both of those groups which itself as I say is like a heretical statement like people are going to mean there's just so many assumptions made just on the basis of that but create a new uh value based system that is self-rewarding and allows for group selection to you know fill in in the gap or at least come up with a third option if not politically then um in terms of Sociology yeah so the solution is Independence Day you know that movie um so we need an alien invasion so there's an out group that we can all um you know findi identify with each other as okay we have to come together to fight you know because I think that's really at the root of this which is that because of group selection humans are sort of very tribal by Nature we are wired to connect to glue together with the people who are in our tribe but that means almost by definition there's another tribe right so so that uh we are over here and we're defending ourselves against them not it's not like complete right people have been engaging in long-distance trade for you know 100,000 years plus uh you know there is interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and denin um so there's you know some flexibility in those rules but in general yeah I mean uh to have an ingroup that means you have to have um an outgroup and if we want to take the left and right and put them together in some ways it's like the easiest way to do that is if we had a third outgroup that we needed to unite against such as um drones from over New Jersey or or you know aliens or uh you know who knows what but these go back to Classic psychology experiments right as I recall where if you know the best way to build affiliations have a common common goal uh or Andor enemy yeah like that's unfort unfortunately being under attack when two opposing groups are both under attack they form alliances so it's the the classic minimal group experiments of Zion in the in the 60s which I I love and I teach on this all the time because it's it's relevant for all these tribal biases and so and what he did was like you take the random people off the street and you go like okay you're on the red team you're on the blue team you're on the red team you're on the blue team okay uh in five minutes you're going to have to compete against the other team and immediately the people on the red team are like I don't like the people on The Blue Team they're stupid and they're ugly and you don't know anything about them right but you end up immediately forming a tribe uh even though you might not have had anything in common and um what I think is really interesting and relevant here is that any number of different biases that are sort of superficial based on um uh race or ethnic group or whatnot which have been you know shown to you know even though people say like oh I feel you know if I see you in pain like you're getting stuck with a needle like oh I feel the same for anyone doesn't matter but it tends to be selective for your own tribe when you measure the brain activity but if you now put the emphasis on team like literally do that science experiment that minimal group experiment and I put you in a red or like we're both wearing black t-shirts and so you're going to work with the other people's black t-shirts doesn't matter who you are that and I think the way it does this is through attention is put my attention on what's shared rather than what's different so now we're on the same team and now that kind of recovers restores um that uh that the empathy that I didn't feel toward you uh before and that's interesting when you think about say in the US the first places the first groups that became integrated were like military and sports right and what's what what's common amongst those they wear uniforms right so the uniforms say we're on a team that takes your attention away from the things that are different and the Stanford prisoner famous zimbardo experiment where you know sign people The Prisoner versus guard and that led where it led exactly that occurred not about a short distance from where my my lab was so we have this um anxiety lowering pro- affiliative oxytocin thing activated by touch affiliation and it's bidirectional like it promotes more touch which promotes more feelings of safety which lowers anxiety further and um and then we have testosterone which signals certain things about others and um seems to play a role in the hierarchy and you mentioned that when um oxytocin is given that it kind of flattens the hierarchy and my understanding of testosterone from Robert spolski and others is that testosterone tends to exacerbate existing traits in people it doesn't turn nice people into jerks or um jerks into nice people but rather it turns jerks into Super jerks and nice people into super nice people which um fits well with my idea that testosterone makes effort feel good and what type of effort feels good depends on a lot of complex features within within us as humans like like too many things to explain by by molecules yeah um so I feel like the primate literature and the human literature map so well to one another and and I think this is a good segue to take us into value-based decision making because I do recall a paper published I think it was in proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences USA should point that out there are other proceedings in other countries um that showed that you know if day Traders or or people on the stock market floor took testosterone or um they tended to be more aggressive in their uh and impulsive in their um decision-making or if you just looked at performance and then you measured testosterone that it tended to fall out on a pretty nice uh correlation between higher testosterone and basically more aggressive decision-making more risk-taking so is that all still true is that I mean that's my read of literature that's that is still true and um you know it does raise I think a worrying Spectre of you know cuz like I don't know how much of a phenomenon it is now but there it was the case um maybe a decade ago or so that like you know a lot of guys who were traders who were feeling like they were losing their Mojo after they you know after 40 or whatnot you know declining testosterone so they decide they're going to start um you know juicing okay put some AndroGel on and if that is then have you know that's like taking you above typical you know levels then what might that do in terms of markets if like enough people are actually or even if they're juicing just for physical performance right and they're engaged in you know in trading um that could have a lot of a lot of bad effects right as it cascaded through the market yeah I would say that probably the dominant effect of of exogenous androgens um and all this trt nowadays is it it's very clear that it allows people to maintain moderate to high testosterone levels even if they're not sleeping as much uh it enhances recovery so if people have their behavior is Right their nutrition their sleep Etc it really does give them a you know significant advantage if they don't have their behaviors right it gives them the significant advantage of not having to deal with the normal fluctuations caused by minimal sleep Etc but the decisionmaking process like to say yes no maybe or maybe later is reliant on things like good sleep being rested things other than testosterone like like this is the idea of a of a committee as opposed to one individual you know recklessly driving decision based on state of mind or androgens so if we could zoom out and in for a moment on some of the work that you did with um Paul glimer when you were a post talk in his lab but also in your own laboratory when I sit down and make a decision should I do something should I not do something um let's say I have some general sense of what the the potential payoff is within a range the potential payoff of not doing it within a range and I always think of like some like kind of tension or pressure as it relates to time like for instance I've been considering buying a house I really like the house it's a bit of a reach for me for a number of reasons um and I'm trying to make this decision right and I'm trying to gauge whether or not other people are looking at this house also what do we know about how we start to establish an internal representation of that and I and I give that example as just one example this could really translate to any number of different scenarios about whether or not to get married or not whether not to stay in a relationship or not whether not to move whether or not to have another kid and on and on and on what are the core mechanics of of value-based decision making as it relates to outcomes and time yeah so we I think we understand this system pretty well at this point so the last 25 30 years have been enormously productive so we have a good sketch of the circuitry that does this and essentially what happens is you're confronting a situation and it doesn't really matter whether it seems to be the same process matter whether you're trying decide between eating a doughnut or an apple or buying this house versus renting an apartment or marrying this person you know proposing or not it's it's sort of all the same system and what happens is you you you you you come to the situation and your brain uh takes in evidence about the Alternatives what are the options that are available to me um what do I know about them from their stimulus properties and from um you know maybe prior encounters or just other information and it takes that evidence and it weighs it against um stored information about uh things you've done in the past other decisions you'd made and then begins to assign value computes the expected value of those different options in terms of what it will return to you and then essentially that is the basis along which that decision ision gets made so uh it's you know it's a soft Max function as we say so it's not like a hard deterministic one so there's there's some statistical noise in there for some you know we could talk about what that reason might be you make a choice and whenever you make a choice in any any behavior that you're engaging in your brain is making a forecast of what's going to happen next as a result of that and your brain then uh determines computes did things go exactly as predicted right is it better than predicted or is it worse than predicted and then that signal gets fed back into the system to update it so that it hopefully performs that job better in the future right so like oh actually that was it went way better than expected you should um assign that a higher value and and do that thing um again this process of weighing up the evidence takes time and that's why we have this speed accuracy tradeoff in decision-making where we observe that the faster you go the more mistakes you tend to make been there exactly we've all made split-second decisions that uh we regretted later oh yeah or sleep or slightly sleep deprived sleep deprived exactly the more time you take the more evidence you can accumulate and when you you have to recognize that the data your brain is taking in from the environment is noisy right it's not perfect it's noisy because of the environment it's noisy because the wet where the brain is statistical and and biological so you can make the wrong choice by virtue of the noise dominating the signal and that happens when you go too quickly right and one of the things that's so so there's a good Mantra from that you know which is if you want to make really good decisions or if it's really important you kind of have to decide ahead of time like do I need to be accurate or do I need to be fast and if accuracy is important you need to slow down take your time take as much time as needed to get it you know the most information that you can and even in the moment um that doing like simple strategies like uh breathing or having a you know a mantra that says like you know it's not what matters you know every little decision do is not what counts but it's the long run that helps to turn we've talked about arousal a lot here and that turns down arousal one of the things you think of arousal is doing when you keep talking about volume knobs it's like a volume volume volume knob for the stuff that's coming into your brain that could be signal or noise so it can turn up noise too so you could count as evidence toward the value of an option something that is not actually you know evidence and then you make the wrong decision so by turning down arousal slowing down you're relying more on evidence than than on noise does increasing arousal increase the likelihood of false positives that is thinking something's there that's not generally speaking um as well as false negatives you know um thinking that something's absent when actually it's present I haven't thought about it that way before but it seems to me like that's uh yeah that seems consistent with my understanding just by way of example uh one of the things that's been really different for me in the last few years is how quickly you move to publication when you podcast or when you're um when you're doing social media um you just click it's out in the world uh versus you know the way I was weaned was you know spend two three four years on a project maybe it doesn't go anywhere maybe it does goes to multiple papers gets reviewed so by time it comes out you know it's been proof read and you've read the proof so it's been vetted by a number of hopefully expert sources usually really good sources um of feedback um as opposed to nowadays where you can just kind of move immediately to publication and um I I used to have this saying which was uh in the lab because sometimes you know you have two months to do a revision or something it's never really two months it always takes five times as long um I used to say I go as fast as I carefully can and I used to tell my students in posto that we go as fast as we carefully can because the moment you start going fast you start making mistakes you start making mistakes you definitely pay for it later and the mistakes that I've made podcasting were a product of going fast M Andor fatigue and the two things kind of relate to one another um or occasionally somebody will highlight conflicting evidence and then nowadays you can go back and and repair things with AI you can you know you put things but um but I feel like so much of life in terms of decision- making is trying to make decisions when most of the time we think we don't have more time but most of the time we do have more time unless somebody's hemorrhaging we usually have more time but then there are some real things where we don't always have more time I mean we are biological aging machines and there there is such a thing as too late yeah yeah so how do you think these systems change as a function of you know playing a game for some money in the lab we can or we can get caught up in it but there's this like tremendous backdrop of context you know $100 might be fun for one person might be the difference between making rent and not making rent for for another person um you know the decision to stay in a relationship or leave a relationship when you're in your teens or 20s is fundamentally different than when somebody's for instance at the um near the transition zone of of having versus losing their fertility I mean these are like yeah and those change all sorts of these pressures are so real and yet if we only have one system in the brain that handles this similarly to the reward system it seems like we ought to learn in school how to uh like um work with and update our decision-making process based on immediate term shortterm like all the different time scales to be able to do that seems really important um are there any ways to train that up yeah I think it's a so so there's a few things in in here that um I think are are worth unpacking um I mean one is what you brought up about fatigue which I think is um really critical and we we did some work with the wrestling team at Penn um coach came to us and I I had had a few of the wrestlers working in my lab and he said you know we're having this problem which is that um and I don't know if you've ever wrestled I wrestled my my middle son in one match the worst six minutes well I didn't quit because I lost that match and I did lose that match this seventh grade I quit because uh my dad gave me a choice I could either continue to wrestle yeah or I could play this other sport I really wanted to play he said you can't do both yeah because it was gonna impact my grades negatively and so I opted for the other sport what was the other sport soccer okay yeah okay and just yeah and I I love soccer um and um but you know losing that one wrestling match was informative the guy just dead fished on me the whole time and he deserved a win like it was a really good strategy he just like dead fished on me uh you know and I I like couldn't couldn't Gumby out of there but it is the worst six minutes of your life you're you're exhausted Within like 30 seconds it's it's incredibly grueling and what uh what the coach observed was that um their guys it was the men's wrestling team was they were performing very well in the first two periods and they got to the third period and they started making really dumb mistakes bad decisions and so we so he said what's going on I said well it's about this speed accuracy trade-off but we have to investigate how it's related to fatigue so uh what we did this was a really fun experiment so we go to the wrestling room and uh we wire these guys up they got wearable EG heart rate monitors the whole nine yards and what we do we gave them like this simple little um decision-making impulse control task it's just like a controll response task there's a you know a trade-off if you go too fast and you make mistakes okay so it's like there's it's like a go no go and uh so they do it then we run them through two minutes of CrossFit exercises really brutal then they come back off and they have to do the same thing again we do that three times and then they have to wrestle each other so it's cognitive and physical yeah not on like chess boxing which is not a sport I recommend have you seen this where they play around they play some chess and then they literally fight and then they it's crazy it's like switching between these two very different states of it's insane but also somehow really appealing you know it's well I think for the neuroscientist in you and me and I think we're all neuroscientists to some extent we want to understand the brain and ourselves so this notion of very disperate um behaviors boxing and playing chess being associated with very disparate sort types of arousal mhm and um and how those map on to one another I think is interesting I think the uh the the Confluence of uh chess boxing is fencing uh which is very much like chess my my youngest son fenced for a number of years and so mentally it's like that but it has the physicality or jiujitsu my friend JSU Brazil you tell me that it's like there's an infinite number of options that become constrained in certain yeah Dynamics and you yeah yeah yeah very similar so this this was really cool because what we found was that uh speed accuracy trade-off the more fatigue they got the more calories they spent um the faster they would slide down to emphasizing speed over accuracy they just started like just like just going just got to get done just got to get I don't know what they're feeling but that they were just not deliberating not really being focused they just lost the capability uh of doing that and aside from the you can say well we could help you guys you you could become more physically fit maybe when fatigue is fast but they're about as fit as they could be they said well why don't we do this why don't we offload the decision in the third period to the coach as soon as you in the third period you're going to just look at the coach um uh at at you know some Cadence or whenever he's going to yell at you to look and you do what the coach tells you so and I think this is really interesting because you think about it in like other contexts like in a business context or something when if somebody's really fatigued or your unit's fatigued maybe you have an external person then who takes over uh making the decision that you are just um you just execute in a sense right um the other thing I want to say about this all too which I it gets to your point about well in the lab it's like you know it's one thing you're you're you're you got an undergraduate gambling for 10 bucks over an hour and that's how do how well does that map on to the real world where there are all these other things going on and I think that um that's the challenge all the you know when I teach business school or you know classes MBA students or Executives through exec Ed they all want to know like give me the fstep formula you know and it's like that's supposed to apply how do I take into all and it's like well we mostly know about one this Dimension or that Dimension or that Dimension and not how in the real world you know on a real complex environment to put that all together so that is a I think that's a gap that's a and one that we're trying to fill which is to study decision- making whether it's individual or Collective decision- making in real world environments right to where all of these um factors you know context and the various priorities that are coming in uh are more you know more natural they're not controlled and how then I mean we think we know how that works but we haven't really proven it yet so often we think that we know how we feel about something but some of the work that you've done in monkeys and in humans has really highlighted the extent to which we base our valuation of other things and People based on things that are in proximity to those things and people could you tell us about this experiment and um I swore I wasn't going to say the words highly processed foods um during this episode episode but I think we got to talk about monkeys and Doritos ah all right I thought this could have gone there's a number of different and I I will I do want to bring up one study that I think uh people find interesting that gets at this difference between what we think we know and feel and what our brain what our brains are actually telling us so we talked about how monkeys and people their uh brains are I don't want to say hardwired but they're they're tuned tuned to uh value social information and particular kinds of social information like information about high status individuals right and information about um sexy individuals attractive individuals right and it and it's baked into the same circuitry or attention circuitry or reward circuitry and that once we had observed that of course it led me to wonder well okay there's this really weird phenomenon in humans that that in marketing right that we use celebrity you know status celebrity and sex to sell two people like why should they ever care about uh you know Brad Pit likes this thing or Jennifer Aniston likes SmartWater when in the world who you're never going to meet them are they do they really know a lot about you know water or whatever like what what's the point of all that and if George Clooney selling espresso yeah who cares right but now when you think about it in the context of like oh our brains are wired tuned to attend to and process more deeply and value uh information about others that are essentially High status celebrity sexy you know whereas like George Clooney all of those things um put together now that starts to make some sense and so we thought well given that monkeys are humans monkeys and humans are so alike in this regard I bet we could run an advertising campaign on monkey it's based on sex and celebrity so that's what we did we just basically had monkeys you know they were just sitting there in in their home colony and we had a you know television monitor computer monitor in there that would display like uh you know the Doritos logo next to you know High status monkey a and maybe the Cheetos logo next to low status monkey b or um uh you know Coke next to like sexy monkey butt and you know know Pepsi Next to You know the front end of you know or backside of monkey that's not so sexy okay so you just do that just do it just pairing and so it's just just Association simple Association and then what we did is we then gave the monkeys uh choices between um brand logos that had either been endorsed by you know essentially celebrity monkeys sexy monkeys or peon monkeys right and they got the same reward no matter what no matter what they chose they always got the same banana pellet but the monkeys favored the brands that had been paired with celebrity and sexy monkeys just like you see in people you know I just keep saying this there's a little monkey in all of us I'm shaking my head because it says a couple of things to me but one of the things says it that says to me as a neuroscientist is that it's almost like the bins like the map of valuation in the in the brain there there's overlap of I'm going to get into lingo here for a second and then I'll explain of the receptive Fields so like you mentioned Hub visel H&W and I mean they basically won the Nobel Prize for a couple of things but not the least of which was the identification of like what are the specific qualities and positions of light and shapes of light that activate a given neuron which eventually led to the Jennifer Aniston right Barack Obama cells and by the way their coexistence in the same sentence does not mean that they that I have knowledge of their dating I have that paper was that study was done a long time ago right but it but it speaks to the same principle which is that when we see two things next to one another sometimes there's a uh there's a merging of those in our cognitive space or our memory when in fact there's no overlap conceptually right in you you know you where you see this uh very uh dramatically is that if there's a podcast with a man male and a female guest host pairing I guarantee that 25% of the comments are theories about their dating and or sleeping together right it's it's just it's incredible it's like people see male and female together right and they just like start doing this thing of like oh they're dating or they're with you know they see flirtation where it may or may not have existed you know it's just wild and so that when I hear about this experiment that you did a pairing products yeah with sexy monkey or non-sexy monkey or high status or low status monkey I can't help but feel that the area of the brain that's involved in valuation is just taking visual images conceptual images because it be visual it could be any number of things and that there's just overlap in the maps of these in the brain and then that the effect is born out of that overlap that's one interpretation the other interpretation I suppose and they're not mutually exclusive is that we want to go up the hierarch key and that's kind of an assumption that maybe we could just like poke at like a couple of nerd academics for a second because like I like my life very very much there are people that live near me that have far more resources than I do and I never for a nanc wish for their home or my home I've tried to make it a point in life to either have the life I want or be aspiring to the life I want you know have the things I want or aspire to the things I want but I I've never found myself in a mode of like oh I want to be working on that experiment or I want to be living Liv in that house if I see a beautiful house or or beautiful thing or some feature of someone's life it inspires me to want to go try and create something similar and so I I'm not it's not that I'm without competitive spirit in me I am like anyone else but I feel like that's so far and away different than the notion of a hierarchy where for me to move up someone else has to move down and for somebody to be above me in any domain that means that you know uh I'm quote unquote below so that so can we talk about hierarchies as they exist in Old World primates like the cxs versus us because I I don't want to map this on to anything political but often times they this will get mapped onto the political some people live through the lens of abundance there's plenty to go around some people live through the lens of scarcity their win is my loss their loss is my win that kind of thing do you see this in monkeys too again it's really hard you know you can ask the monkey but he won't necessarily tell you because he doesn't know what you're asking them but I you know I I think it is well first of all across primate species there's different degrees of the steepness of hierarchy so in Reese's maccax they're really despotic they have a very steep hierarchy um in like barar maacs which live in in North Africa um and in jalter uh very relaxed uh Society even though they're maacs they're all they're all the same genus so why that's so we don't really know the general idea is it has something to do with uh how rich the the the environment is the resources that are available and how monopolized um they are so if if you can monopolize resources then that can help to create a um a a steeper hierarchy if they're not monop like let's imagine you you eat grass for a living um you know you're like a cow or whatever and there there are some monkeys that do that eat grass uh like I can't hoard all the grass to myself it's just everywhere and so everybody can just spread out and kind of eat grass it's a very boring life and you spend all your time digesting and fermenting in your you know in this extended gun which is kind of a gross thing to do in aside but I think you can see that like that that that spans a Continuum of what you're saying from uh abundance to scarcity and has a lot more to do with whether it's sort of monopolize and does that make sense so if you can monopolize something then you then you have something that other PE other monkeys need right and you're creating that scarcity yeah so let's drill into this because I think this is everybody is operating from a certain frame in this context and so for instance uh there are billionaires hundreds of some people like Elon has hundreds of billions of dollars doesn't seem to care much about money for money's sake or I think he sold all his homes or whatever you know he's motivated by clearly other things as well if money at all um and then there are people who are destitute poverty I think many people will say why does anyone need that much money kind of thing they'll say this about billionaires um what's been interesting is one of the more prominent themes in Psych pop psychology that is supported by research is this idea that past a certain level of income your happiness doesn't scale upwards linearly with the increase in income or maybe at all and the the number that's thrown around is like past $75,000 a year you know your happiness doesn't grow I would argue that indeed money can't buy happiness but it absolutely can buffer stress or certain kinds of stress let's just give an example of a single mother with three raising three kids on her own versus a single mother raising three kids with three night nurses when they're infants and nannies different different level of output required like you just can't argue between those two now whether or not one is happier than the other is a discussion different discussion altogether excuse me but I think you know the cow example makes a lot of sense the hierarchies within primate troops make sense but as humans I think that you I observe tremendous variation as to whether or not people say oh wow this person is a millionaire or billionaire but I'm good with what I've got or this person has so much more and I resent them for it and I I guess um we don't really think about there being a limited amount of money in the same way that we think of as like grass or resources now if we were to talk about mates and that that's very that's a whole other thing um but you just have to go to a bar with a with a particular uh bias towards having more men or women and then you know like that starts to play out immediately right um but let's keep it simpler do you think that this whole stance about abundance versus scarcity is dynamic meaning like if you're surrounded by people that make more or less the same amount of money as you do you feel better than if you're surrounded by billionaires that have yachts and I I I think the fundamental Drive is to to climb the hierarchy is more or less kind of baked in again with a lot of variation across individuals and probably across cultures which um I'll get to in a moment going back to that 75,000 being kind of like where you know it just the asmp tootes there's a number of papers that came out from colleagues uh at Penn and Wharton um so a guy named Matt Killingsworth showed in a famous paper five or six years ago that in fact it actually continues like happiness just keeps going up with income and and then there was a back and forth with Danny comment about that and then they they worked on a paper together and what it looks like is this it kind of goes up flattens out for a while and then like above another level wow happiness really goes up when you got a lot a lot of money so ah so that study isn't discussed as much so that's new well it's new it's like in the last year or two so so being very very wealthy does increase your level I think yeah I mean and for variety of reasons right so you know sure it's a buffer of stress but it also allows you access to lots and lots of uh different things that can make your life just easier right so um so that's that's that's I think part of it but the other part and I think this gets back to that question of what makes us human is that we can intentionally just like you said about yourself it's like well I'm just going to chill I'm happy with what I've got and there's lots of you know aesthetic Traditions um in a variety of cultures especially you know Eastern cultures that um that that have taken that approach or even even in the west like you know early Christianity Etc and um I'm trying to remember the name of the book that was uh recommended me I haven't read it yet but but that in for example in India in you know in among some of the most extreme poverty uh in the world you have people who are kind of ecstatically happy and they're they're very very happy with with being alive and being alive where they are when they are and um with the people that they're happy with how does that happen I don't know but here's my guess or part of my guess I guess which is gets back to what we talked about in terms of attention so what you attend to is being turned up in the brain and what you're not attending to is being turned down it's kind of like glass half full glass half empty and if you're paying attention to the sort of good things then those are getting kind of priority of access to your brain so you're kind of getting like oh every it's magnifying every little small positive surprise is Amplified in your brain and you get a bigger dopamine hit for that um rather than the the sort of small negative surprises now I'll put that into another context which is we've done a number of studies on loss aversion right loss aversion is this observation that if I give you a 50-50 gamble like win some money lose some money um in general for most people I have to offer them a lot more to win than to lose for them to take the gamble which doesn't make any sense you know rationally and economically it should be it's it's it's even chances so people are loss averse and there's been a lot of theories about why Danny Conan famously uh you know thought that people feel the pain of loss more than the pleasure of winning right so and I think that's true we investigated that using combination of modeling computational modeling we and we looked at people's behavior we did ey tracking because we're measuring where people attend your average person most people attend to what they might lose rather than what they might win and the longer they focus on what they might lose the more loss uh of they are and that tends to be associated with people who have like negative affects so if you're anxious or you're depressed you're in a negative State then you're you're looking more for what you could lose than what you could win so that sets up a really interesting um test causal test which you're like well you know where you look is a function of what you're looking for they're looking for what might hurt them and also what the world looks like so let's just manipulate the visual display we made the winds bigger font or brighter than the losses okay when you do that that attracts people's attention they look at the winds what they could the good things they could get rather than the bad things just by changing the font just by changing the font size or the brightness they look at it more this gets turned up in the brain and now they're not lers anymore now they're willing to take the gamble so that's what I'm talking about in terms of like what you focus on so if you and that's a way to do it I mean obviously that you could take advantage of people by doing that but with their consent so for example we started that work on behalf of a financial services company who is saying we're having trouble with our customers older customers to get them to take good risks like that could really pay off for them because they're they're too afraid and so we did some basic work and then we tested that we could actually causally change that we could shift that like um so with their consent yeah if we Amplified we just make just put the put what you win instead of what you could lose in a make it more obvious people pay more attention to that and then that will subtly shift the decisions that they make wow we are so malleable when it comes to changing the context and thereby the variables that shape our decision making but I'm always struck by the way that it comes in below our conscious detection this might be this is the appropriate time to ask about meme coins ah right because you know we all grow up learning about you know the US dollar or Euro or whatever backed by something right backed by the FED but also you know backed by real world physical objects of gold yeah that's what we're told anyway right you know and this is you know why just printing more money is never the solution right because um meme coins born out of the kind of uh larger theme of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin are an interesting kind of um derivative of of uh cryptocurrency whereby you're pairing reputation of a person or in some cases a Shibu Uno dog right with a currency that has no intrinsic value except for the person's reputation plus whatever backing whatever value backing it's obtained when people in decide to purchase that coin so I don't know how many listeners you know track cryptocurrency and I am by no means an expert on this but you know one thing that people get excited about is how much money is flowing into a coin not just the value of the coin you know on a given day so you know essentially how much has been invested in that coin as something of potential value so when we hear about um hakua girl coin the hakua coin or um there's a trump coin now I think um there's a milania coin um there's a doge coin that was developed long before the idea of Department of government um Doge um the Shibu coin um is this all just exploiting again there comes that word leveraging um this proximity between reputation and value so I think it's that's partially it but it it may be even simpler than that which is it's leveraging it's harnessing our wiring to attend to what other people are doing and what they're getting or losing so we care a lot about you know when when we're in a group The behaviors of other people so let's let's think about how we learn something the value something if you're a simple animal you learn from direct experience and that's reinforcement living you know enforcement learning driven with the dopamine system Etc you can also learn from what you didn't choose counterfactual effictive learning and then in groups you have this rich source of of information what other people are doing like I could watch you try that food and if you die from eating it then I won't eat it right so that that's that's we're deeply wired to pay attention to the decisions that other people are making and if they look good or if they you know then we start to copy what they're doing and you see this in it's not just these meme coins but like meme stocks you know like um GameStop this is very similar to the to the FTX phenomenon debacle where celebrities joined in and people had trust in these celebrities admiration of these celebrities and invested a lot of money and what turned out to be you know in the end a failure so how often is this happening in advertising like if we really step back and we go like is the BMW really the better choice compared to the um you know compared to the Range Rover like like are we really basing our decisions on the thing that we're purchasing as much as we think no I don't think so at all there there's a few things we could kind of unpack there I think in terms of meme coins meme stocks there's probably two things a Confluence of two things going on so one is this sort of celebrity endorser and we have studied that also as well we talked about the monkey stuff but um we looked at we did eye tracking studies of people making choices amongst products and brands that had been endorsed either by celebrities or not just paired with them right and one of the things we found is that when people uh chose uh a product or brand that that was sort of unfamiliar to them if it had been endorsed by celebrity that uh that pupils their pupils didn't dilate normally they would dilate because that's like a overcoming your default and mental effort and arousal goes up because it's sort of surprising and so the pupil staying silent is an indicator of kind of enhanced confidence and Trust if you will that I'm not making a mistake I'm putting a lot of words here but like you know you're that that that that was the impact in a very subliminal way of that celebrity endorser so I think that could be going on as well as the the um the this other process I was talking about in terms of what we pay what other people are doing which seems to be a major driver of bubbles in stock markets like that goes all the way back to like Isaac Newton losing his fortune in you know the South Seas trading Market you know he famously said like you know I you know I can I can Divine the mechanics of the the planets in the heavens but I can't understand the minds of men or something like that um he just couldn't help himself he got out first and then he got back in when he saw his friends were making continuing to make money and then he he got wiped out so we were like super interested in this and we ran experiment with MBA students uh at Wharton and they were playing a stock market game actually it turns out it's a stock market we developed for monkeys we had monkeys play the exact same stock market they're buying selling they you know they've got a portfolio that they can they can trade in for juice the humans get money for this okay uh this was based on some some studies that Colin camer and and his colleagues had and and benedetto D Martino did a while ago in the MBA students we used a standard psycho psychometric um uh scaler you know a questionnaire that's used to test people for sort of social uh impairments okay and then what we did is we looked at uh how their likelihood of getting caught in a bubble Market related to social sensitivity how attuned they were to other people and basically the more dial in you were to other people the higher your likelihood of losing everything uh in a bubble and it was those people who were like you know socially impaired who did the best they never got sucked into bubbles now what was cool is we found the same thing in monkeys okay so uh monkeys in the same stock market okay if they're playing alone they're making pretty good decisions okay as soon as you put another monkey in the market that they can see they see they watch what that monkey did that monkey buys um GameStop or whatever then I buy GameStop and he sees me do that and then he does the same thing and it just goes back and forth back and forth they create this bubble and then and then you get this crash it was like really phenomenal and we found that um the brain circuit that is essentially involved in theory of mind that but is about controlling your attention to others and registering what they're doing is driving that okay and it it was really funny it was like the bigger the portfolio and balance between what I've got and what you got the higher the signal in you know in this area the monkeys are like [ __ ] well I don't know if I can say that but you can say whatever you want on here well [ __ ] I'm losing relative to you so I'm going to I'm paying even more attention to what you're doing and what you've got in your portfolio and I'm going to be much more likely to uh to copy you and do what you're doing so again like there's a little monkey in all of us uh I see very little difference between what people are doing you know with GameStop and what monkeys are doing in that market so when we hear about these for lack of a better phrase pump and dump type things where um like I'll never forget in 2017 a friend who's a spectacularly successful investor um said you should put 2% of your investable earnings into Bitcoin and I was like well you know I don't know about that and then not long after that um there was some press releases about who was buying Bitcoin and the price shut up and then um I said went back to them and said I have to be really careful here and said uh you were right they said yeah you know um but you know whenever you read about who's buying Bitcoin it's not clear when they bought that you know a lot of those purchases were likely made a long time ago so there are there are ways that people you know kind of um kind of it like build some hydraulic pressure through social interaction on these things right yeah he's not a you know it's very different than like someone picking up the phone and you know the whole like notion of like insider trading right very different yeah um you know if if people kind of create a swell around something this is great or that let's make it real estate it's a little more tangible for people like that neighborhood is is really terrific we're all going to move there and then you know people to like you know start moving there then you realize that they've actually owned that very inexpensive property for a long time right and they're actually the seller right you get a very different impression of of the the advice that you got so um and I'm not a finance guy but you know I I think about these things in terms of the neuroscience and the human psychology I mean it just again I'm just struck by how our notion of valuation is adjusted in the short term by virtue of proximity probably also in the long term but that how we kind of lose ourselves in these things that we we just become less than rational um based on things like arousal um the relationship between hormones and arousal what I love about what we're doing today is in case people haven't caught on aay that we've got multiple mechanisms and themes here that are starting to converge yeah as arousal goes too high it's mostly what we're exploring you start making you start speeding up you start misjudging information you you you think noise is signal and you start correlating things that are like not correlated in reality and then you can quickly find yourself down the path of bad decisions I think one of the best advice I ever got was if somebody ever wants you to make a decision very very quickly and it's not clearly an emergency like you don't see them hemorrhaging chances are it's a scam like if anyone you know this is the best thing to tell um anyone that's uh older let's say um because they'll get these calls from people it's like this is urgent this is the the urgency uh us is suggestive of it being false like like using time pressure on people like I need I need this money now I'm going to miss my bus and my kid's going to be waiting for me this kind of thing I mean and you like pulls on you right you don't want some kid waiting out in the middle of nowhere but if this is somebody you don't know then you could say well maybe five bucks I'm willing to lose it maybe that that's probably the calculation I would do I'm willing to lose it um I don't if if they're lying okay if they're telling the truth great but when it starts getting higher Stakes gets kind of kind of kind of scary I think we should uh address the word rational rational rationality they used which is like oh we're make we're being irrational it seems like we lose our rationality um that that's a you know that's a word that's that's bandied about a lot right and especially in economics and that you know kind of makes the assumption that we are you know essentially a computer um and just kind of weigh things up dispassionately and uh we have complete access to all information um here and now and into the future there are other Concepts here one is called bounded rationality which uh this this guy gerd gigerenzer kind of came up with and which is the idea that there's there are constraints there are brain constraints that are built in we've got energetic constraints we've got you know which which actually limit how much information we can process which is why we fall prey to Choice fatigue and decoy effects and things like that why we see visual Illusions in some some way is um and then there's another uh concept of uh ecological rationality which takes that bounded rationality and it puts it into what you might call the environment of evolutionary adaptation which kind of we've talked about before like what's the environment our brains are designed for and it's not the one we're in right now so our brains are designed for I mean probably 13 million years ago but let's say 200,000 years ago our species right um Homo sapiens and what did what was that environment like well uh we lived in small groups with face-to-face contact of somewhere between probably 20 and no more than 100 people you saw you knew all of them uh you know you talk to them every day uh things didn't really move faster than an antelope or change faster than the seasons MH okay uh there was very little uh wealth inequality okay people are Physically Active uh all day long and they uh ate natural food right and so what are we like now we are in this so-called weird environments Western um educated industrialized Rich Democratic but but you we in these industrialized societies we have money we're in markets we're interacting with thousands of people perhaps millions of people their behaviors their thoughts everything are impinging on us stuff is changing super super fast right we sit on our butts all day long we're not active right you only it's it's like you have to be intentional and have enough resources uh to be active and we eat garbage and you know for those reasons I think that's the source of like a lot of the misery that that we have is that now now I'm not saying we should go back to being subsistence you know hunter gatherers or horticulturalists maybe we should it'll be a painful process to get there and we may end up getting there given some of the trajectories that are you know we're we're on but people who live in those environments seem to generally be you know healthier and and happier for example you know like uh studies of um you know brain and body in subsistence uh hunter gatherers horticulturalists uh people who are in their 70s look like people you know westerners in their 30s or younger they're like incredibly fit lean no evidence of cardiovascular disease no evidence of anything like you know dementias um major cognitive decline and we're always trying to hack that we're trying zones and then people say well it's the diet no it's the the wine by the way it's not the wine um now now finally after years I'm not going to say I told you so but alcohol is not good a little bit maybe every once in a while but not more than a little bit I'll respond to that in a minute the uh but the social component seems critical yeah um what are your thoughts on the longevity movement if you will like I always assumed if I do well yeah that I'll probably live to be somewhere between 85 and 102 and my hope is that um my last five years I like the Peter Atia thing like what is the quality of your final decade right right will be um at least as vigorous as my dad's my dad's 80 gosh he's 81 and he's doing great um mentally physically um he was a guest on this podcast actually he's a scientist yeah we it was it um and so but he's always been very very moderate about his drinking he'll have like a half glass of wine now and again he just never ate too much he never exercised too much he worked 9 to 5 n to six just consistently but he never was a you know like burn the midnight oil type but he's just his consistency is what's so impressive um so I think that might have something to do with it but um what what are your thoughts on the economics of decision-making as it relates to um live fast Die Young versus um be more monastic and try and um live a very long time well that's a personal preference isn't it so I you know that and that kind of is that's interesting because it maps on to Concepts in ecology they typically we use to describe different species which are like our selected and K selected I don't know if you've heard of this before but R selected are species that are limited just by their pure reproductive rate think about weeds or rabbits you know something like that and K selected are like oak trees and um you know I don't know whal whales and humans are sort of like this mix right and I and so that's where we are very um plastic and flexible so in some environments you can be more our selected like especially if conditions are really not very favorable toward investing in the long term then it's kind of like kicking up your reproductive output but if conditions can be favorable right that you that that investment is worthwhile then you you know then you can do that and be more like the whale or the oak tree or something like that now you know yeah you're right I think that does map on to economics in a certain way because all you know certain people by virtue of what they know and what they have can invest in trying to live the longest healthiest life and other people who may not either have the wherewithal or the knowledge are going to be invested in survival in until the next day right and so humans are sort of you know exist in that whole space in between my dad died at 55 so outlived him by two years you know so for me every day is like gravy um but I also don't have this sense of a longtime Horizon which is you know just being a little weirdly self you know just introspective may be uh you know part of my drive to like work a lot and it might have served you well I mean I've read and listened to Steve Jobs's um biographies by Walter isacson several times in part because I grew up seeing that stuff happening because I was born and raised in the South Bay and Steve used to come into the um toy store skateboard shop that I worked at to get new rollerblade wheels and so like I would like see him around and see him at this little shop called um Shady Lane which is like little Trinkets and like he was around town a lot and so then of course he became jobs right and um or he was Steve Jobs and he stayed Steve Jobs but um in that book he talked about where it was talked about him that he humans knowledge that we are going to die someday can be the ultimate motivator right mean I think I I look at some of the mistakes I made um with you know bringing myself to places of of physical risk in my life and it's not like I thought I was Immortal but I didn't really have a good sense of time and I think as I get older I'm 49 now so I can finally say that um I think my sense of the passage of time and mortality is is much more visible to me in my psychology yeah um so yeah this is the ultimate time scale over which one has to make decision make decisions um so actually let's talk about this so if your dad died two years younger than you are now do you have the assumption that you'll make it to a given age or are you just trying to maximize on the day the week the month what's your what's your unit of of time scale so I think I did not anticipate like 55 was a magic number for me the Double Nickel you know like Michael Jordan uh I didn't know what I would do or think about when I um if I got past that and I got past it and I was like okay I got past it but now I'm kind of I'm I'm it I'm confused I guess I mean physically I show no evidence of like like rapid decline no you seem you appear very you appear very healthy um uh not just for your age but you're like very physically fit you're cognitively fit clearly so that started to you know I think that I'm I'm opening up and I'm trying to uh look at some wisdom that's out there about like hey yeah you know probably got a lot of life ahead of me and if I keep doing what I'm doing what do I want to do that's another another part of it because probably because of the focusing on that 55 and I'm like oh God everything that's come my way every opportunity that's come my way I've taken it and I just keep adding I've never I don't subtract so we could talk about this I keep adding more and more things you could look at the diversity of papers that I published or the other things that I'm doing and it's just getting wider and wider and I keep taking more things on and reluctant to give anything up but at some point I think that's not the recipe for Success like there's going to have to be some winnowing uh and I you know okay 57 so when's that going to happen uh I don't know 62 65 I mean I you know I don't plan on retiring although you know also that was like Wow people in my family never got the chance to retire they didn't live long enough this is but that's the short way to death though I think too and decline is like retiring if you don't do something else so I might have a solution for you good thought about this a ton and I think about time perception yeah constantly and people can laugh because I'm always late but that's cuz I'm really enveloped in whatever I was doing previously like I'll be thinking about this conversation tonight and tomorrow morning when I wake up for sure right um okay couple of Reflections and then ideas about this so previous guest on this podcast Josh whiteskin uh Grandmaster chess champion at a very young age then realized at some point started asking the question of whether or not his um love for the game was gone or whether or not it was taken away from him was it the fame was it the because a lot of things came to him Young when that around chess and he spent two years asking himself that question and then cut ties with chess forever never picked up a chess piece again but pivoted into martial arts investing now foiling you know this like yeah um but then had a had a near-death experience um he had a drowning event survived fine decided then to move his family down to Costa Rica where he now F spends four and a half hours a day or more foiling raising his sons um I you know that struck such a chord with me I've been involved in a number of things I don't want to make this about me but like you know early on it was like fish I was obsessed with fish then Birds then skateboarding then firefighting then eventually it was like neuroscience and then now I do this and so I would say I've read a lot about people who are need something to bite down into they can't retire and it seems to me my informal read of this is that the ones that are happiest who don't die young or in their 50s like Steve Jobs did um tend to be for lack of a better way to describe it kind of Serial monogamous as it relates to their uh Pursuits which is the way I would describe myself like I I'm you know like super into whatever it is professionally and then after about anywhere from five to 15 years it's like done and kind of um move forward some of the elements and the learnings from that into the next thing but Josh Whit skin is the ultimate example of this of of achieved like world champion status in multiple things and then now seems very very much to achieve world champion status at like family life yeah and he's got his his his uh you know economic and professional life intact from the previous stuff but also he's still involved he's you know like he coaches for the Celtics and he's not the head coach but he coaches and so on so I feel like the serial monogamy version of this is the ultimate and then the question is when to when to cut and and and pivot into the next thing yeah but I'm not telling you not to go with bread but I was looking over your CV and your papers I was like this is going to be a really interesting conversation because you have worked on a tremendous number of different things adding in more isn't the thing but then again maybe some of us are just designed to be involved in a ton of different stuff and your Vigor is undeniable right like like you're super fit mentally and physically so I don't know I'm not going to tell you what to do I just I get I offer Josh as an example of one extreme you're sort of at The Other Extreme I suppose and then um and I suppose I'm kind of in the middle so I think well I've done a bit of that uh over my career and the way that has happened is through external leadership um opportunities not really opportunities I was like you need to do this like you know so uh is you kind of you know broaden portfolio is getting bigger and then somebody says I want you to direct this thing and then I would say well then I have to I have to cut some of this out and then go back and narrow again and then the problem is then I start to do this again and then okay then I move to you know pen and and I got the narrow again but now it's bigger than it ever has been so the question is like at some point does that just fall apart or can I I think intentionally you know at some point and may maybe some of those decisions you know the other thing the other thing one can do is just allow the universe to um to make some of those decisions for you right it might be the case that some of the research I do will not be fundable at some point right and then that decision is made for me I know I have lots of other things I can do um you know we have you know for for example if like outside of the pure Neuroscience basic and clinical and Technology development you know we've got all this corporate um facing work funded work uh through Wharton which is a totally new space a new opportunity so if you know if one you know I don't want it to be taken away but if it is then you know there's there's plenty left to do well you're clearly one of the few people that I'm aware of that is you know a true card caring research neuroscientist highly respected in the domain of like real Neuroscience who's also involved in like business school type stuff and you know people on both sides of that take you really seriously because there's real rigor there and the Vigor uh perhaps goes along with it's hard to know uh what's caus yeah which comes first but um any about it maybe we parse this over coffee sometime um Apple and Samsung o Apple and Samsung I'm an Apple guy me too um but I heard that the cameras on the Samsung phones are pretty cool how much do you love your iPhone how how what's your loyalty what's your brand loyalty for Apple I grew up near the original Apple Store it was in a different location um gosh I love Apple products um I don't like that they keep changing the the PS I know that's an super annoying um but they seem to be like hovering on USBC now um I love the ease and simplicity and yeah I have a bit of a kind of like a historical South Bay relationship to it so yeah I would say could you get me to um use a a Samsung phone Noah yeah so I mean this is the interesting observation like loyalty for let's let's just talk about smartphones and Apple and Samsung are the dominant players in the US market they're basically the same device you know I mean they're they're both handheld computers that can do a million things and uh amazing stuff and yet the Loyalty amongst the Apple users is through the roof it's near 100% year in year out and that's not true for Samsung despite Steve Jobs passing away yeah despite I mean just a legacy right but I think that reflects a lot of the the design and and the emphasis I think that he put into um the product but also like trying understand it through the lens of the customer right so that's like an empathy I mean there really is empathy this was one of the first questions I got when I you know when I came to business school I was like what the hell accounts for empathy for a brand it's not a person or this connection like why do I have loyalty to a thing that's not a human being you know a product and a brand a company right what in the world is that all about doesn't make sense and there's this idea in marketing that actually and it makes sense is that we're what's happening is we're applying or we're getting uh leveraged the hardware in our brains that's used to connect to people and now it's connecting to Brands into the brand community and you could see that kind of in like the words we use to talk about brands for example that's a rugged brand the creative brand you know we use personality words to talk about them say I love my brand I hate that brand whatever and Steve understood this he talked about the Apple icon needing to look a certain way that it was like friendly but technically right but you know balance I me this is um the idea that objects or images could look friendly when they weren't objects or images of faces or or bodies is a very interesting concept yeah yeah so so we decided to test this idea so we brought people in lab we've done now like I don't know 10 studies on this brought people in who are Apple or Samsung users um and the first experiment we did we was a brain Imaging experiment and uh first we just asked all the standard marketing questions how how how many how long have you had the product how much do you love it what's your loyalty what's your identification with it you know Etc and it was equivalent Apple and Samsung they they said the same things about their brands okay so now we bring them into the lab put them in the MRI machine and we're going to expose them to news bits about each of the two Brands like something good happened to Apple something bad happened to Apple or Samsung Etc and we ask them to rate it how do you feel good neutral bad about that and then we go through the whole thing we scan their brains take pictures of what's going on in their brains and um it was really interesting because what we found is that behaviorally in terms of their responses they both expressed empathy for their brands which hadn't been really measured before I feel good for good news about my brand bad for bad news about my brand and for Apple customers they said yeah that's really true for Apple but I don't feel so much about Samsung Samsung customers said yeah I feel really strongly about my brand oh and they had reverse empathy or shod and Freud of for Apple which was is part of the story so they felt really good when something bad happened to Apple and they felt really bad when something good happen to Apple talk about tribalism that's that's that's tribalism right there when you look at their brains is totally different so in apple apple customers show empathy in their brains for Apple you get activation of areas that are active uh for reward for myself reward for my kid winning spelling be for good news and the extended pain Network pain for me pain for my loved one for things that happen to Apple if I'm an Apple customer and Silent for Samsung you look at Samsung user you know customers and if you're the CMO of Samsung you should be worried because they show absolutely nothing no feelings towards anything that happened to Samsung the only thing you see is this shot in Frey this reverse empathy so you see like pain for good news about Apple and and and joy for bad news about Apple so the first take- home message is it's all about Apple like apple customers choose Apple cuz they love apple and they want to be part of something bigger and I'll get to that in a second and Samsung users choose Samsung because they don't they hate apple right so that's that's sort of that or they hate winners they hate winners whatever there's a whole thing they don't want to be part of the community uh they don't want something bigger than themselves there is something too in our data that essentially apple is like kind of like a cult you could say it's a family I would say it's the dominant culture now though they're not the niche like thing Samsung's the niche thing right they're yeah well what's what's really fascinating now is that um and this is by virtue of of things that Apple smart things Apple has done to reinforce this sense of in group be part of that Community like the um the you know the green text bubble thing so now it's like 91% of teenagers are choosing Apple over Samsung because they don't want to be left out they don't want to be ostracized now we talked about synchrony before and synchron is this marker of community and closeness and and we're all on the same team so we used EEG uh to measure brain waves uh in people while they're um in in a number of conditions while they're reading getting news about Apple and Samsung also while they're watching the commercials you remember that spectacular Apple commercial where they they crushed all those beautiful instruments and what not and turned into a iPad or whatever and then there was the Samsung response to that so we measured EG activity and what we found is that Apple people are all in sync with each other their brains are humming along at the exact same rhythm to News of the World to ads about Apple and Samsung each Samsung person is like an island unto themselves they're just not in sync at all there these are like the incels of Technology you said it I didn't say it probably going to catch a lot of for this but but look the data is the data and so Apple's this sort of extended family and they're all in sync with each other right they're like they're like a real team and um and you don't see that in in Samsung so Apple people are seeing the world through similar eyes right and feeling similar um things and beyond that I said well if this is all true maybe is it it's a question of now like are Apple people wired that weight you know at Birth in a sense you know or how much what's the balance of like what what who they are versus what Apple has done uh you know through their marketing and and design activities I I can't we can't do that experiment is really hard but when we looked at the structural MRI data we found something really interesting which is the parts of the brain that are really intimately involved in Social managing our social relationship so the parts that are like involved in theory of mind and empathy which are exact so those are physically larger in apple people than in Samsung people they're physically larger in monkeys monkeys who have more friends those same brain areas are bigger than monkeys who have fewer friends please tell me you've run this on politically leaning left versus politically leaning right so we started to do that experiment and then the pandemic hit so we haven't gotten that excuse I know it's an excuse we haven't gotten that back off kiding true I would be too afraid to run that experiment not because I'd be concerned about the the result or what people would say if I shared the result but here's why I feel like um when I was growing up it was like if you were a rebel you were associated with anything like Indie music punk rock Rock like you were associated with like hip hop anything was kind of outside the mainstream which at the time this was like the 80s and 90s we had a mix of Republican and Democrat um governments at that time you know depending on which four-year segment we're talking about but there was this idea that like if you liked anything about the government you know you're this is kind of the carryover I think from the post from the Vietnam era and the post Vietnam era that if you liked anything associated with government that you were a conformist yeah and if you didn't you were iconic class right yeah now I feel like it's become very issue specific right like who's in power basically that the party like politics has it was always split into two it used to be you agree with the establishment or you don't agree with the establishment now it's like depending on who's in power people say Well they're The Establishment so the the it's like the game has changed it's sort of subdivided itself and changed and so if one were to run the experiment of um kind of like affiliation I would I would assume my prediction would be that within the right there's a lot of affiliation within the left there's a lot of affiliation but that you wouldn't necessarily see a difference in terms of activation of affiliative neural circuitry it depends on on with whom they're sitting absolutely which is very different than the phone situation that the Samsung versus Apple thing is a lot more like when I was growing up um and it's complicated because what used to be Niche and rebellious inevitably becomes mainstream yeah like I remember the movie Revenge of the Nerds of course which of course was about like the Nerds being marginalized and then you know and then being like the popular ones and and on and on everything was like a John Hughes film jocks versus you know rockers versus you know nerds versus that things really Blended together for you know 20 years or so and then now it's very divided along the lines of politics yeah whereas before it was politics versus non-conform right now it's like depends on which C like literally color it's like gang Warfare yeah yeah it's like Blues it's Blues versus Reds and jets and sharks Jets and sharks so it feels very um like like the experiment that's why I'd be afraid to run the experiment I I wouldn't know how to design the experiment yeah I mean I I I think well it would be interesting just at the outset to demonstrate uh that like well very easy way to elicit these sort of empathy signals is like just create a video that's fake is what something a former postdoc of mine did in some studies uh you just like a fake needle stick to the cheek and uh you you get you know generally um this sort of activation of empathy signals in the brain um but it tends to be tribal specific or ethnic group specific which is like even though people say I feel just as much pain for these two different people um the brain signals which we know or what actually predicts what you'll do next you know it predicts your behavior the brain signals are specific to within your group so I think that's what that was in fact the experiment we're going to do which is like people are going to be you know we'll have these videos of like uh proud Republican or proud Democrat whatever you want to say on the hat and then they're getting stuck with a needle um and then we me we ask you what you feel and we measure your your brain activity and you know I think it would be obviously very highly specific you might say you feel pain for that person who's from the other political party maybe you wouldn't now anymore maybe you'd be like yay um you see a lot of um a gosh you see a lot of people take enjoyment in other people's suffering um when the person's suffering is uh sort of perceived by a lot of others as a winner yeah we saw that with the fires with with rich people's houses burning down and and a lot of people piling on oh yeah you know right well the media was very skewed there like we're like we were hearing about people's you know first of three homes burning and that's hard for people that have very little to um at the same time you know for anyone experiencing loss it's loss yeah it's a it's a tough one it's tough It's a tough one yeah man this conversation has given me a ton more to think about which means it's a great conversation I have to say you know in our business of research science um there's that term you know um he or she is a serious scientist I feel like there are very very few serious scientists doing experiments in the real world or trying to map to the real world I probably just offended about 300 scientists but Hey listen we only have a limited number of guests we can bring on here anyway so no I'm just kidding um there are others certainly but I have to just applaud you for the range of things that you've embraced and and taken on at the level of neural anthropologic sociologic psych psychology like you know Endocrinology this is this is a big field that you're trying to get your arms around a big a big set of questions and yet it's clear you are a serious scientist you do like real experiments with isolating variables and all all the necessary controls that are required to really tease out mechanism and larger theme so whereas a few minutes ago we were talking about maybe you taking on less I I'm not I would say first of all who am I to tell you what to do second of all um and I'm not hope I didn't give that impression um and second of all like what a service to the world you're doing because certainly in researching for this podcast and um even with guests you know oftentimes it's really a struggle to try and figure out how to talk to someone who's really down at the level of mechanism who's not working on small animal models or even if they are how to map that to Everyday experience and today you know we've been talking about potential mate valuation um meme coins uh politics um hierarchies uh decision-making time scales I mean all through the lens of real serious science so first of all thank you so much for coming here and spending these hours with us educating us and right alongside that thank you for doing the work that you're doing it's it's really spectacular I I knew we were going to get into a number of these things but I I didn't really um anticipate just how much was going to geys her out of this in terms of changing my way of thinking and I'm certain that's changing the way that other people are thinking now and are going to think about their decisions and just kind of themselves and the world i' be very grateful if you'd come back again and talk to us about the next round of amazing experiments before too long well I would love that um and thanks for having me and this has been a really stimulating conversation I've enjoyed it there is a lot more um that we could cover which would be super fun surely and um your endurance is uh something to behold um thank you please do come back again thank you for the work that you're doing we will provide links to all the resources and places to find out more about your book the work that you're doing and some of these tests that you were talking about earlier yeah where that go beyond like standard personality tests so that people can answer those critical questions about where they are you know perhaps best placed in the landscape between creativity and you know strategy implementation in a different way so thanks so much this this was a real thrill for me thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Michael Platt to learn more about Dr Platt's work and to find links to his books please see the show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to festar review if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics you'd like me to consider for the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I am Hu lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter Facebook LinkedIn and threads and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the hubman Lab podcast again that's hubman lab on all social media platforms and if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter the neural network newsletter is a zeroc cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep how to optimize dopamine deliberate cold exposure we have a foundational Fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training all of that is available completely zero cost you simply go to huberman lab.com go to the menu tab in the top right corner scroll down to newsletter and enter your email and I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Michael Platt and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]