howdy welcome to chapter five Consciousness I like doing this chapter after chapter four which goes over Neuroscience type stuff because chapter 5 is a little bit like Witcher it's you know where Freud kind of lives but that doesn't mean you can't translate it to the hard science and in fact we're going to build upon everything we kind of got out of chapter 4 at least the basic gist of just how much we have been able to um kind of Trace back functions to specific material areas of the brain and sort of Marvel at how good of a job we did at doing that and yet how much left there is to discover including the important question of why frankly psychology like I talked about in previous chapters um is kind of in this constant identity crisis where it wants to be the study of humanity and Humanity in general tends to take more seriously the stuff that is harder to debate um and so that means like more rete things where you can like have a fact about feels often times at least in this era of humanity like it's taken more seriously now in other eras of humanity religion was really the main kind of authority um but anyways uh yeah psychology kind of tends to live in between something like art and how humans feel and just the study of everything that's interesting to humans and it really wants to be like a hard science so um first I want to just remind us about what we mean when we use the term Consciousness um a lot of times in Psychology we mean basically like awareness and we'll talk oh Freud will come back in this chapter and then I promise we'll leave him alone until like the end of the semester so yeah we could talk about Consciousness in terms of like your conscious awareness versus your un conscious what you are not aware of or kind of like almost meditation and we're going to actually do a little meditation exercise so when it comes to meditation and mindfulness we really mean like your ability to take note of the thoughts that are going on in your head or if you don't have something like an internal monologue at least being able to connect your behavior to how you think about the world so if you don't have an internal monologue such that you can't yourself arguing about whether or not you should go to the gym whether you go to the gym or not go to the gym you'll be able to at least talk about why your personality or your current stage of life or what or your feelings LED you in one direction or another so in general Consciousness means like awareness of what's going on in your head including your organizational type beliefs personality so on and so forth and then we could also talk about like conscious versus unconscious in terms of wakefulness so there's this beautiful quote by John Green um I fell in love the way you fall asleep slowly and then all at once we could talk about this spectrum of wakefulness like feeling of alertness having thoughts feelings and Sensations and having a sense of like Clarity and then as you drift off into sleep that feeling of alertness and wakefulness kind of decreases and then there's a moment in time where you're like asleep like if somebody lifted your arm you know it flop back down and then we can also kind of study Consciousness by looking at Altered States Of Consciousness so what types of things influence this really hay idea of what we mean by Consciousness it's really hard to Define what we even again mean by Consciousness it's not just your little internal monologue because some people don't have that but they're still consciously aware um it seems to include things your like your feelings um like if you are hangry right that's going to influence your feelings of alertness and the sensations and the clarity of your mental framework but are you basically just hungry and angry like how what are all of the ingredients of Consciousness um and so before we go on I want us to think about Consciousness in a sort of species type way I think that it would be fair to accuse me of being slightly speciesist in that I am in general kind of a fan of humanity which also makes me the big biggest hater of humanity frankly if humanity is capable of doing all of this it's capable of looking dead in the mirror and being like we can do better than this and it means pausing and rewriting um that being said again big fan of humanity pretty good and also awfully terrible perhaps one of the things that makes Humanity different from other species is our degree of consciousness some might even say you know like we talked about continuous versus categorical variables there's continuous variables miles away from the Earth's surface and then there's these categorical different moments where you're in a different atmospheric layer I think arguably humans are at a different atmospheric layer when it comes to Consciousness but if you try and use that difference to define consciousness some other species will come you know nipping at our tails for example the parrots so we're going to pause to think about what you when you describe like a species being sensient or a species being conscious I would recommend you pause the video and really like a lie yourself to think about it but do as you will um like what type of things would Define the difference between being consciously aware maybe of your own existence something like that versus not and then we're going to watch this parrot okay welcome back if you paused no chewing no chewing yeah no chewing no chewing on the window oops these are Keys what's that made of can you say it better what's this made of paper what's that made of paper no that's made of metal metal yes good bird this is made of metal where you want to go okay let's pause here and decide right now if this is enough to say that bird is conscious um so I would argue that just the bird's ability to say one word or another that gets pretty close to Consciousness that's something like communication it's hard to determine if a species or if a person is conscious if they can't communicate what's going on inside their mind right so the ability to communicate at least is a necessary ingredient for us to like determine Consciousness that doesn't mean that things or living beings that can't communicate AR Inc conscious but anyway um so that certainly puts the bird ahead of like ants right I don't know why I'm so opposed to ants yes I do they're awful I dislike ants I'm sure they're necessary for the ecosystem sorry stay on track anyways um but we could still say that this is not the same as like an adult communicate an adult human communicating because it's possible that this bird has been trained so there's a difference between okay let's think about like Bird versus um like AI so we would probably say if you ask AI if it's conscious it'll say no it might be trying to trick us it might be trying to trick us but if you're inclined to believe AI then just because because if you send AI like a picture of a bottle and ask it what it is AI will be able to say it's a bottle and probably tell you more facts than most humans could that's not quite the same thing as being conscious I think we would argue um I still think this bird might be conscious but not because it can label certain things but because of this next step some fresh water okay so because partly because it can request what it wants and needs that means it has to be aware of its own needs I think that does make it different than AI now let's keep watching yeah pouring water what's this that's made of um rock okay so here's the next step that makes I think Consciousness different than AI the bird can ask out of curiosity again it has conscious needs so in order to be con once you're given a gift or you earn a gift or whatever there's always a price to pay is one way to look at it and one of the prices that we pay for having a Consciousness is having Consciousness needs it means relinquishing boredom it means feeling intellectual pleasure it means getting breaks so on and so forth um so the parent's ability to ask is kind of huge um AI will sometimes I think maybe be able to say that it doesn't quite have enough information to be able to come to a conclusion but it doesn't seek out information on its own and it actually AI really struggles with saying like I don't know it's kind of not within ai's programming so be careful it's made of rock rock rock fres water you want fresh water okay here's another super important part that again points to something like Consciousness within the parrot it thinks about it it continues thinking about it on its own it exerts Free Will Free Will is really really really important to understanding something that goes along with Consciousness so um uh it and during that time when they're no longer talking about this backboard here the bird continues thinking about it clicks on it again and it's like and it disagrees with the human it says it's not rock it's uh glass you think that's glass you think see you see what he says you think that's glass having thought it's kind of like glass especially since we're calling bugs glass maybe that is glass what's this it's part of the wall It's Made of Glass It's Made of Glass even changes the human's mind now ai is able to change the humans minds too of course and teach the humans things that they don't know but we see some differences in the parrot versus something like AI that I would argue gets closer to Consciousness the more you think about what makes you conscious the more you have free will over everything that allows you to have your own thoughts have your own beliefs and to make your own decisions um but first I want to dive in deeper into what Consciousness is by looking at what I'm going to call the easy problem and the hard problem of Consciousness although arguably all of this is kind of part of the hard problem of Consciousness is what they end up calling it um and I want you to keep in mind the question of why and a kind of artistic reason for your yourself and allow you to conjure all sorts of hypotheses if you think you know why we have Consciousness if it comes to you rather easily perhaps we can hypothesize that the fact that throughout the Millennia humans can't come to a consensus on why means that no individual person between the ages of 18 and 22 or between the ages of zero and 88 if you can say it in one word maybe maybe maybe think about alternative hypotheses as well and see what all happens okay so um I'm going to call this the easy problem of Consciousness the easy problem of Consciousness is like how in a basic and kind of like Neuroscience way so for example let's just think about eyesight so we're going to come back to Vision actually next chapter these three chapters putting it all together is supposed to help you kind of experience your inner world and your body and how you interact with the outside world so again we'll come back to all of these processes when it comes to Vision but just like spoiler alert it's not the case that you're like a soul staring through slits I.E holes that are your eyes everything that you see is Manu is a manufactured experience by your brain it seems almost that we are set up to have our own kind of like specialized experience um so even just Vision right like we collect this eye this um light data is what it ends up being um goes through your eyes yes but it gets projected onto the back of your eyes upside down backwards basically and then the signal has to get sent through if you remember the thalmus is the sensory relay station and then doesn't get richly processed until the signal gets all the way back into your oipal lob which is in the back of your brain it's not like your oipal lobe is chilling right behind your eyes instead it seems almost like the brain is not supposed to be efficient it's supposed to be um richly processing data almost like we prefer slowing things down down or something so you really aren't again even though it feels like you're a soul staring through slits in your eyes you're really not you are concocting an image for yourself now that doesn't mean you're like hallucinating or something like that some people like to experience that way but I would argue that that'd be a big coincidence that we're all huc hallucinating the exact same things down to we're able to call you know you know everyone's if you point to this it's purple curtains right we all see that just kidding they're actually blue but maybe they look gray um the fact that we all at least call this color blue that means we're at least sharing the hallucination okay the hard problem um or what I'm going to call the hard problem anyway is the problem of subjectivity so this is the way I'm going to frame it for you guys um let's go ahead and like kind of admire Humanity like we've done a whole lot we've we've put in a lot of work you know for what purpose Jan but um if let me let me pause this question for you if you wanted to create like the best species ever like the ones that are supposed to be the Shepherds of the world or whatever I understand that sounded religious change the terminology the the captains of the ship um if you were going to do that why would you make them all see The World Slightly differently and have their own beliefs opinions and subjective experiences so if the like why isn't the case that the best species isn't like ants basically or that humans don't act like ants that we debate that we fight within each other um that we you know two people can watch the same movie and have an entirely different set of thoughts associated with that movie an entirely different set of feelings associated with that that movie or whatever it may be um why is it that we are a species so plagued with subjectivity so all of your thoughts opinions feelings so on and so forth beliefs personality that's part of your Consciousness if Consciousness is just like awareness that of your existence and your experience why do we have this um this experience like that's one way to think about Consciousness is why for what purpose now the cool thing about the hard problem of Consciousness is you can always kind of fall back on the easy problem which is just like that's how our brains work you know I think they're before I am like that's the way it is um but that problem of why continues to come back because even if you don't see it as like a plan which is sort of where this starts to like look towards like it's so weird that we exist at all you know and the fact that we exist with like this much thought just kind of comparing the humans to the Beast you know it really seems like we got some more going on and maybe I'm speciesist I don't know um either why is that true for us like you could go down that pathway for a while or if you don't like that question because it feels too abstract and spiritual or witchy or whatever then why did we end up being so successful is another question like why isn't it the case that this species that it is the most like a bunch of zombies was the most successful because at least then they would all kind of like work together we really do seem to like we love each other with a ferocity that I think other species maybe do not but we also then hate each other with a similar ferocity which is scary and strange okay so kind of using that same easy problem versus hard problem the other cool debate is the mind body problem so here's how the debate is framed dayart versus Hobs so dayart believed in dualism that Consciousness is separate from the body basically you have a mind and it is beyond your brain um maybe something like your mind exists and kind of uses the hardware of the brain the best that it can that doesn't mean that your mind isn't limited by your brain and body it is but it's still higher than or separate than so your brain and body is like this ship this vessel and your brain or your your mind or your soul is elsewhere Hobs argues materialism so Hobs says that Consciousness is the result of brain processes your mind is your brain here's what I've learned from teaching a lot in general if I explain it something like the way I just explained it a lot of people do believe in dualism um in fact I think that just about everybody believes in dualism I don't think that anybody sorry that's not true some people really do believe that they are just their body um they only have these 80 years and after that it's all over kind of a thing um but the vast majority of people think that they are more than just their brain um because if you if you frame it another way like um someone who um only got to live you know 10 years and then were a vegetable for 10 years until they were taken off you know um uh medical assistance does the sum of who that person is truly amount to those 10 years of having Consciousness before their brain didn't even fully develop you know and then they were a vegetable and that kind of is the totality of who that person is you know some people say yes and that brings them the most amount of comfort um that it's just like this cool gift that you either get or you don't get you only get a certain number of years and it's like no big deal and gosh that takes a lot of humility that takes a lot of selfishness that takes a lot of um just uh peace I think inner peace and a lack of like needing and wanting um but most people again believe that something more than that um but on the other hand a lot of people's jobs especially if you work in something like medicine or Neuroscience rely on the materialistic perspective which is that your brain uh creates your ability to have a mind and if it wasn't for your brain you wouldn't have a mind um it kind of removes Free Will from the entire equation you're having thoughts because your brain is having those thoughts and your brain is having those thoughts because the environment gave you enough data to be able to conjure those thoughts you were trained to have those thoughts so on and so forth um here's the problem with materialism is anytime you make a reasonable argument for dualism materialism can come in with some like hard science data and kind of knock you down so let's say you're like no I definitely have a mind because I was you know I I totally know what Hobs meant I was trained to believe that I was going to be a dentist and I thought that that was my whole entire life and everything I did was about becoming a dentist but then I met the love of my life and I moved to Mexico and now I live on a beach and don't care about anything at all and um and I feel free from that you know first world training blah blah blah blah blah um Hobbs could come in and be like not so fast so basically what you're saying is the environment introduced a new stimulus and you responded to that new stimulus and I can point to the exact neurons in your brain that conjured your new thoughts and beliefs that led you to move to Mexico so basically materialism keeps like knocking down um dualism by saying I can pinpoint if I can pinpoint the part of your brain that made you do it basically I win um and it's this really nice like Ace card that is very hard to beat but still many many many people believe in dualism not everybody but many many many people um so what do you do with that that like your intuition your beliefs seem separate from this Ace card that the other side of the debate has that's really hard to beat in a concrete way does that mean frankly materialism wins and just because you don't want to believe it doesn't mean it's not true or um is it the case that just because you can pinpoint the reasons why I did something can't prove that I don't have a mind and my mind is what made those thoughts happen because somebody else let's say it is like the love of your life change changes you from wanting to be a dentist and brings you to Mexico and now suddenly you don't care about money or accomplishments or anything like that somebody else would have met that person and like not change uprooted their entire life so if two people would act differently depending on if two people would act differently to that new stimulus that seems to argue something like Free Will okay here here's actually one of the best ways that I try and get people to think about this let's say like truly what you actually believe dualism or materialism and probably most of you have like some contradictions in your mind and you kind of run to one side or the other depending on which one makes you feel comfiest that day okay let's say I can make your exact clone I mean like exactly um so your your clone would have all of your past experiences every tiny little mutation in your body would be exactly the same that like literally exactly the same my first question for you pause and think about it is is that clone you if they are materialistically exactly the same okay here's what usually happens in the in-person debate a lot of people are willing to say yes but as soon as you start living your lives then you will become two separate people so literally as soon is like like if I shot off a cannon on here's you here's your clone I shot off a cannon over here even though you both heard the cannon you were closer to the cannon that's already a slight difference and from there even if you're attached at the hip you're going to be having slightly different experiences like that um so you start to become two separate people and then most people kind of believe something like that but that's still kind of that's a lot of materialism arguments okay so now here's the next question for you let's say I so so now materialism really seems to be winning is usually the way it feels and the inperson like debate but deep in your heart you still believe in dualism clearly you are more than just your body you know like that John Mayer song I'm bigger than my body gives me credit for um okay so uh so let's say I made an exact clone of you right and then you died are you the Clone or did you die think about it so if you think no I didn't die because the Clone that's me because it is exactly me then materialism but you could still make the argument that it doesn't exactly work because one of you died so somebody out there lived had a clone and died and that one's the most like you so then that I think argues something like dualism unless you wanted to say that like I I don't know you could keep arguing materialism if you wanted to but I think that's a pretty good thought experiment that describes at least the conundrum if not giving you I don't think anything's going to give you an answer because at the end of the day the truth is always going to I think give you a choice if you ever find yourself looking in the face of like a capital T truth and you don't think there's any like choice at least in what to do with it I think you probably haven't found the truth the truth is always going to be a choice what do you do with it next to remind you there's different levels of consciousness so at the conscious level that's where you are aware of events and your mental processes then we have the cognitive unconscious at the preconscious level the this is the best evidence that we have for the fact that you have an unconscious at all I think or it's the easiest like magic trick basically so if I were to ask you like who's the first president of the United States George Washington would come to your mind right away it means that um all it takes for you to bring that information to your conscious awareness is just a stimulus that draws your attention to the fact that you have access to that memory information whatever um and then you have the unconscious or like subconscious this is stuff that can become conscious or affect Consciousness with some help think like your dreams your emotions your beliefs so on and so forth and then you have your non-conscious level I would argue that this is like your organs your digestive system this is stuff that your body is controlling your brain is controlling it might influence like your overall mood but you're never going to become conscious of it you're never going to be able to be aware of each contraction of your large intestine or whatever maybe not with that attitude but arguably you wouldn't want to have that much awareness okay um so here I'm going to ask you to pause and do this on your own I think it's a really great activity for you to get in touch with different types of Consciousness or different like flavors of Consciousness using the stream of Consciousness activity so for this activity I recommend you get out a notebook and write it by hand but if not get out or open a Microsoft Word document and just type as quickly as you can your stream of Consciousness for two minutes set an alarm for yourself and for two minutes you're going to try and get in touch with your stream of Consciousness it means kind of like jumping on a train of thought best way to think about a stream of Consciousness activity is to just try and write as quickly as possible so you um if you can't think of anything at all think about like a question and answer kind of format so like this is dumb this is dumb why do I think this is dumb I think this is dumb because I can't access my thoughts why is it so hard to access my thoughts I don't know maybe it's because it's so cluttered in there something like that and then as soon as you start writing you try and write right WR right write as quickly as you can without stopping that's the stream of Consciousness activity um and then you're going to pause and do a mindfulness meditation the link is on the um slides and I'll show you the video title in just a second so the definition of mindfulness which you access doing meditation is it's a higher Consciousness that includes an awareness of the thoughts that are passing through your head importantly I don't think the word higher means like better in this case I think about it as being like a different flavor of Consciousness and one type of Consciousness especially after you do a mindfulness meditation you are just simply aware of the thoughts passing your head instead of sort of attaching yourself to them um so you achieve this by practicing a sense of peace and um trying to access some mental Clarity so and then you're going to sorry you do the first stream of Consciousness activity should take you around two minutes and then pause for just okay and then like I said the link is on PowerPoint um or you could just Google guided 10 minute 10minute meditation or sorry YouTube guided 10-minute meditation with Andy his last name um and actually do the activity so give yourself that 10 minutes to practice as mindfulness meditation activity and I think that you'll notice a different like basically Clarity of thoughts um that includes like a passive awareness kind of a deal so you're going to do that for 10 minutes and then you're going to do the same stream of Consciousness activities you're going to give yourself around two minutes to um write all of your thoughts out again and what I think you'll find is like some difference in how it feels inside your own mind at that time I think it's a worthwhile activity but obviously you make the decision that works best for you all right so if we were in person usually after we do that activity I kind of ask everyone like all right how do you feel before and after meditating if you didn't pause to meditate you're not getting as much out of the class as you could and um I suggest that you pause and actually do that activity especially the stream of Consciousness before and after I think realizing that your quality of thought and how it feels to write just depending on like your basically like Consciousness mood in that moment can change your perspective of what you're capable of if you always try and write in the middle of the night and you think you hate writing maybe it's because you always wait until you're exhausted um um on the other hand if you think that um you've gotten down like the formula of writing because you always you know wake up and you drink your coffee and you go right to writing perhaps if you waited till or if you dribbled in some writing throughout your day when you do feel exhausted or when you do feel um joyful or what have you you might kind of access new emotions New Perspectives so on and so forth um something to keep in mind for your writing assignment if you really struggle with writing because it feels like every sentence isn't good enough just dream of Consciousness writing your thoughts and then allowing yourself to reread your thoughts searching for the best parts the parts that you want to elaborate on the parts that you're curious about changes how writing feels and writing is one type of communication the the thoughts that come out the perspectives that come out when you're writing when you have time to go back and say like okay am I being a little biased in this direction am I not quite um evoking the emotionality that I want in this um um sentence the fact that writing lets you pause and edit makes it different than verbal communication like when I make these videos it's harder for me to go back and so I don't always if I feel like I want to make a point differently but when I write I have a little bit more opportunity to do that that being said sometimes I want to let the hard feelings just lay anyways I hope that you take advantage of that opportunity so in class usually after I have them do that meditation I ask like all right do we all basically agree that like you feel different in some ways before and after and something about that kind of is like the flavor of Consciousness and I don't think anyone has ever disagreed um some people feel better after the meditation some people feel worse okay so understanding that we have these different types of Consciousness and that they're pretty malleable like pausing for 10 minutes and taking some deep breaths seems to influence something the next good question to ask is how can we put this to best use I think this is the beauty of psychology that lots of people will demean or ignore the fact of the matter is every topic that we discuss in this class another field can focus on more distinctly like there's an entire you know Neuroscience field um from last chapter what psychology is supposed to do is make all of this useful to humanity it's supposed to be like how do we be good people as like part of psychology and in addition like how do we just understand what it means to be human so on and so forth um people don't take that as seriously as other skills because like we've talked about in previous videos I'm fairly certain if you were talking to someone doing chemistry homework and you gave them a suggestion on their chemistry homework that hits different than if you give them a suggestion on how to talk to their friends and family differently um or what good goals might be so on and so forth so people sort of it's just easier to argue with somebody or write them off if it seems at least a little bit opinion based um but learning the skill of psychology and active listening and how to understand Consciousness I think is a bit like a super um Power even if people sort of mock you for it any whoel um so I like to think about using the different flavors of Consciousness as a way to access something like different perspectives so um understanding how again malleable your overall like mindset mood is and accessing the types of activities that make you feel consciously different also makes a little bit easier to guess how someone else is thinking and feeling about a situation and kind of choosing to feel what they feel so in an active listening conversation when someone is sharing their thoughts beliefs feelings um goals whatever um trying to access like their Consciousness or their feelings like I would say that Consciousness is a combination of feelings and thoughts and um you know organizing beliefs so on and so forth and it feels like digging in deeper to understand what they feel for example later in this chapter we're going to talk about um different types of drugs and so um if you're someone who is really like Pro drugs for example it can be really helpful to talk to somebody whose life has has been ruined because drugs I come from a different culture we don't see drugs as harshly as Texans do however what I will say is I've known a lot of people who have taken either prescription psychotropic drugs like for um ADHD for example and um and drugs that would be considered illegal here like something like marijuana and I'd say one of the worst things about either of those examples is sometimes what happens is that person attributes all of their behaviors while using the substance to the substance so for marijuana users for example I a lot of artists who used it um they would give away all of their creativity like secretly they they wouldn't admit it out loud because then that would be like admitting they had a problem instead it would that you could just tell that um they really did believe that they needed the substance to access that creativity and then same sort of thing with ADHD medication which was really common and successful people in New York and honestly in graduate school too um and um yeah if you think you're only a hard worker because you're taking the substance like that influences your sense of self so being able to question people's beliefs isn't the opposite of digging in deeper it's like becoming curious like knowing that there's probably a cost and benefit to every belief and with a really light touch just asking how they feel about it maybe using your own experiences for instance if you are really like naturally gifted at school and you always wonder if you even allowed to take credit for that or if it's just something you were sort of Bor born with or you know your family was really wonderful and how much of who you are is just about them everybody's got some relatable experience and the feeling of trying to truly understand what someone else is going through feels like digging in deeper and I think it is useful to describe it in those types of words um this is especially kind of mind-blowing when you are listening to somebody and their words and emotions don't totally add up and you want their words and emotions to add up and so you're trying to it make sense so they tell a really sad story in a really funny way okay and what ways is your humor an accomplishment and what ways is your humor um maybe like a crutch and importantly if it's like a friend of yours if they're only ever able to talk about their story with a sense of humor and if you try and talk about it seriously they deny then probably they're using humor as like a coping mechanism if they're able to talk about in in multiple ways then probably their sense of humor is this accomplishment they can talk about it with a light touch but they can also talk about it with a you know Darkness um if you're trying to help other people understand your um view of the world or view of yourself or whatever um this common thing happens where you'll try and explain how you feel and um especially if it makes the other person feel guilty or instills a sense of responsibility everybody is so worn out it seems that anytime someone else's words um kind of suggests that maybe there's something they could do unless it's really easy a lot of times people will deny deny deny because we're all so worn out that if now I have this new responsibility to change my worldview so that I understand other people's worldview that's too threatening and so we'll deny it and so let's say you're talking to your friend about how you just feel really ignored by every body in your life even if you don't you know mention them specifically part of what they're going to feel is like oh no I'm making them feel ignored so um typically what people do this is like the starting off point for everyone whether you're a good person bad person I mean hopefully everyone's a good person hopefully Anne Frank was on to something and everybody is good at heart um but they'll probably be like what do you mean you're ignored you have so many friends and you get so many nice comments on Instagram or whatever social media you guys use nowadays so on and so forth so it's like denying sort of um which sometimes that can be really helpful because what they're trying to tell you is maybe you can question your own beliefs which is a totally worthwhile strategy however if you if that's not working and you really just need somebody to understand you you can think about setting up emotions and plot in like an equation type of way so so I understand friend that's how you see it there's no possible way I could feel ignored um and I could give you all of these examples of people ignoring me but instead you're not going to be able to hear that unless you assume that my feeling is valid first that I feel ignored undermined whatever um and then basically you assume that the equation has to equal that because this is valid what plot lines in my life add up to making me feel that way in a way that's valid how do you um you have to try and make sense of somebody else's story and just having somebody spend the time to do that is so such a relief it makes you feel like you are a valid person that sometimes that is the medicine on the other hand after somebody is able to do that then for them to add in some additional suggestions like okay you feel like um nobody's answering your text messages right now but then in the next sentence you were saying how you feel so overwhelmed that every time you get a text message it feels like um now you have something else on your to-do list maybe that's the way everybody is feeling and then the question becomes like what does Humanity do next that seems like probably an outrageously too grandio question for like undergraduates to be answering but what if I told you that is the question you'll be answering for the rest of your life so might as well start next um basically what I'm trying to describe is like active listening but the feeling of accessing different levels of your own Consciousness helps in those types of um conversations and another so that feels like digging in deeper that I want to point out is how to kind of remove yourself from um situations or seeing the world in situations with a bird's eye view or a third person perspective so this one's especially helpful when you feel yourself consciously kind of intertwined with a particular situation so um let's say you mad at your friend for ignoring your text messages and then your friend responds with you needing too much from them so both people are experiencing this issue and if you stay kind of digging in deeper to those feelings you're just going to cycle that drain the bird's eye perspective or third person perspective means removing yourself from the situation it's kind of like my alien analogy where um you're not in that con ation anymore you're observing it from an outside so okay it's not me versus my friend it's person a is saying this person B is saying this they still want to be friends what do they do next maybe so far we typically don't make plans in advance what if we make plans in advance and kind of stick to it and then in between everybody always assumes that everything is Gucci because if one friend is always assuming that the other friend is mad at them then basically it's going to create this conflict so friend who's always afraid friend B is mad has to commit to the perspective that everything is fine and friend B has to know that's really important to friend a that they stick to their plans something like that um oftentimes this feels like neutrality basically like no one's wrong we'll just work together to overcome it um and it should feel like that at least sometimes but it doesn't have to be where you land maybe you set those plans and then the other friend is just like really not receptive to your attempts to build on the relationship that means that maybe sometimes it's important to like Place boundaries and sort of move on from the situation okay so this is all like again kind of using your experience of your different types of Consciousness to understand other people I would say that the more you practice the practice this skill the more you have this responsibility to make conscious informed decisions on how you see the world and your next decision so for instance um this challenge that I gave my in-person class this week didn't want the option of having an online class and I suggested that um that doesn't really make any sense and this is sort that would sort of be like a loss for free will my hypothesis is one of the reasons why they didn't want that option is because they feel like they won't make the best decision but then you have to ask yourself like what is the best decision and in order to make the truly best decision you have to understand that you are part of this Collective like we share this planet and we share what it means to be human if one person succeeds frankly that means that some people might perceive that as a loss but it also might be this like win for all of humanity um so once you truly understand that you do have a responsibility for other people but you also have a responsibility to yourself and you're allowed to have needs and you're allowed to make decisions that make um the best sense for you those kind of competing forces come with a feeling come with a Consciousness come with a debate I really want to take off today I think that that would be a little bit disappointing to my professor and my professor might be teaching me things that help me become a better person on the other hand and so sometimes I'm going to go even though I would rather sleep in in this particular moment if you sometimes make that decision that means that you are truly experiencing your consciousness and this competing force between like the I and the wi um on the other hand if you are on your deathbed and you are feeling extremely guilty for not going to class that might mean that you're not giving yourself enough love and respect and honor and you're constantly kind of um deteriorating your ID if you get anything out of this class I think that I'd be pretty darn happy if it was a good experience of those competing forces and a decision to figure out what to do with it if Humanity ever wants like real freedom for example we all have to be committed to dealing with that struggle to sometimes honoring other people and believing that they have something to teach us and other times insisting that you are the one who needs to be prioritized in that moment or insisting that you are the one that should be heard in that moment another thought experiment I want to give you is thinking about the chapter 4 uh writing assignment so for that assignment I used to um not offer any points for it basically it wouldn't be in the syllabus but I would assign it one day um and I would say you hand it in the next day so on and so forth um and whenever they would hand it in I would then ask them like did anyone check the syllabus and wonder like what does this count for and a bunch of people raised their hand and were like yeah and I was like and you did it anyway right like why and um you know they gave a bunch of reasons but I can tell you why it's because they were afraid of the consequences it's because they assumed that I had hidden somewhere in the syllabus or whatever and I sort of had actually um something that was going to trick them and if they don't do it then you know bad things so while I'm glad they did the assignment because I think it's a good assignment the fact that it was the fear of consequences that got them to do it is kind of sad because on the other hand I worked really hard on making that assignment I think it's a good assignment and it basically is what like studying would amount to because part of the assignment is just you write down the names of the structures and the functions and in other semesters it was purely just like a choice type thing and then almost nobody did it so I really compel you to experience some of these moments in time because I understand that everybody is exhausted and and it's important that we take stock of this moment of humanity and be like maybe this is wrong that everyone's this exhausted but if everyone's that exhausted then all they ever do is avoid consequences or pursue rewards that is not real Freedom if you have ever been curious about the brain about the mind if you respect me at all um then P then doing that activity could be met with a sense of enjoyment and you choose to do it because you want to do it but if you always see education as I have to achieve this grade or I'm going to fail and that's why I'm going to do everything you're not allowing yourself to access your own free will you're sort of a slave to all of these unconscious processes in fact I would argue that you have a responsibility to other people to wonder what the consequences of this pattern is if Humanity decides that the only way that humanity is going to be okay is if we attach consequences to certain actions Freedom looks like successfully gaming the system such that you have enough money to maybe not be working yourself to death that's very different than pursuing freedom in terms of I think this is correct and one of the reasons why we so often land in this Arena of I'm going to do it to avoid consequences or to pursue rewards is this question that simmers in the back of everyone's mind which is something like what's the point um there's a very famous psychologist who I'll bring up later in the semester um Dr Victor Frankle who argued that existentialism is like the most important question to I'd say any field all of humanity whatever but especially psychology and essentially what happens nowadays is we're so terrified to try and answer that question because it feels so huge it's like what's the meaning of life type of a question I surely won't be able to know if nobody else has been able to prove it to a satisfying degree where everybody in the world kind of agrees then who who am I but you have this responsibility to yourself to answer it for yourself and I do mean answer it for yourself which means means truly investigating so this question of what's the point simmers so far down in the back of your mind that as soon as it gasps for air and makes it to your Consciousness you assume the answer this is what happens to some people you assume the answer is like there is no point kind of a deal um so if you if I'm giving you an assignment you're not going to get a grade for it even if I tell you I really think this will help you understand if you immediately say no it's like you don't you don't even hear he the question that you're giving the answer to what's the point you're immun saying nothing nothing nothing it's like the call of nihilism on the other hand if you have this like um constant automatic response that's positive so like what's the point love is the point um but you don't allow yourself to question whether or not that's true the the opposite will still always be ringing in the back of your head so every time someone who is more pessimistic um kind of says something like there's no point d d if your qu answer to that question is always love is the point and that is pure goodness and then basically you're ignoring a large group of people who also deserve respect so this is what makes the birds ey VI so important for these big questions is being able to zoom out even on that abstract level of like what's the point and truly balancing something like all this positive love and maybe there's no point anything you have to be able to have both a topic that I've mentioned briefly before and I will mention again very briefly now is the collective unconscious um this is Youngy in theory so Freud believed our unconscious existed totally in our own individual mindsets young said that yeah but we're constantly interacting with each other person's mindset and the way that he decided to explain it is through archetypes he had these 12 archetypes I think there's way more than these 12 archetypes that being said I'm not an expert on yian philosophy or psychology perhaps every archetype that I would add fits into one of these um and my basic interpretation of yian psychology in terms of the collective unconscious is we're all playing a role in the back of our minds it's one of the things that kind of motivated me to you know wear different things at different parts of the videos um I'm kind of trying to play different roles or act out different parts of any person's psychology really and what I would argue is we all at the end the day like really want to be the hero um but sometimes we will kind of play the role of something like here let's call it the innocent but what I would call like the victim or the damsel or the anti-hero and and boy world something like that um because even if you want to be the hero at the end of the day in certain moments you will need somebody else to take care of you so you'll play the innocent so that somebody else will play the hero to you are Innocent but then at the end of the day basically you want to feel like you deserve deserved that help that that was a hero helping a fellow hero out so on and so forth um this is like basically the um underlying theory of things like villain eras so if the world keeps beating you down when you're trying to be a good person eventually you need to kind of slap the world across the face and be like wake the heck up like you can't be the nice person all the time and if you're doing that with good intentions arguably haven't like denied your inner hero kind of a thing um so if you're into youngian psychology I recommend you you know look or if you're into this idea of the collective unconscious I recommend you look into it or just kind of like be a little bit aware of when person a person is playing one role or another um sometimes someone will play the role of the victim like I described in the situation where your friend is saying they feel like they're constantly being ignored um that a description of being like an innocent who has this like kind of safe need and also is trying to evoke this feeling of like I'm an innocent because if you're a victim then there's got to be some other villain which means that you are the innocent but if someone is playing the innocent or the victim it's kind of suggesting that there is a villain which makes the person listening feel like oh shoot maybe I'm the villain and I can't be the villain I can't be the villain so now I have to defend myself and now the victim has been turned into the villain for making the other person feel like the villain it's really interesting to watch this play out and the more I observe it the more real it sort of become okay so next we're going to talk about some Altered States Of Consciousness starting with hypnosis which is altering your Consciousness using um a variety of different techniques that are supposed to change behaviors or change your conscious experiences so one of the famous kind of Pop Culture examples of hypnosis is in get out they have so hypnosis often uses like distraction techniques um so in in get out they have like a teacup and she is um circling the teacup with a spoon and that so basically you focus on that and you barely notice what the other person is saying but you can still perceive what they are saying so what they are saying gets through your internal filters it's like distracting some of your internal filters so another great example is like playing video games um if anybody has a friend that tends to be like kind of quiet while they're playing video games they might suddenly be like down to chat um because a fair amount of their attention is being distracted and usually that attention would be put on maybe worries of being weird or not knowing what to say or whatever um it's another reason why like driving is such a great form of therapy um because you're distracted on this like repetitive distracted by this repetitive action that needs some of your attention so so that distracts you enough to bring other things to the surface and helps make it more malleable with like the appropriate amount of like assistance um some some applications of hypnosis include things like pain management with pain management the hypnotherapist might kind of put you into this deep relaxed State and while you're in that deep relaxed State they'll help you figure out how to constantly conjure that relaxation in a way that um helps you kind of manage the pain other examples include removing bad habits um some of these kind of quit smoking Hypno therapy techniques my impression is would basically help you change your habits by increasing your self-esteem so if you encourage the person to think about themselves as somebody who is capable of kind of taking control of their life that maybe is the more powerful medicine and you kind of distract them in one way or another for example having them listen to tape recordings I this is popular in the 90s like literal cassettes that you listen to as you go to sleep that would kind of replace certain thoughts in your head about smoking um as just one example if you were trying to quit smoking and same kind of things with improving memory to um encourage people to see themselves as somebody who's capable of remembering well or quitting smoking or whatever and then again there'd be this decrease in filtration their filtering system because they'd be kind of falling asleep um and something about that combination is supposed to help you make healthier habits hypnotherapy for therapeutic purposes often involves helping people remember really traumatic events so if you have all these filters that are sort of protecting you from remembering traumatic events hypnotherapists will ask you to think about a calm Ocean or like your happy place or whatever and then part of that process then helps you conjure some difficult memories and since you're with a therapist then you can kind of process them as you and your therapists see fit okay so other Altered States Of Consciousness usually we're talking about drugs and substances but we are going to talk about things like Runner high in just a bit so what counts as drug very importantly is highly dependent on culture nowadays that term drug has such a negative connotation or maybe too positive of a connotation like depending on where you live how you're using the substance so on and so forth um but essentially we think about psychoactive drugs as chemical substances that alter thinking perception or memory one of the ways to classify different drugs is what or one of the big problems that happens when it comes to drug use is being dependent on that substance arguably that's never fully what you want you want to be able to make decisions for yourself depending on what you need that day so many people are addicted to caffeine for example um we don't see that as being like a drug we see that as being part of culture and um something sort of necessary almost like water but the fact of the matter is it if you've ever been addicted to caffeine to the point where you drink it every day and then tried to stop drinking caffeine you know that you have at least a little bit of a physical dependence on it so one way we classify drugs is what type of dependence you can um that becomes associated with that drug so the best way to classify physical versus psychological dependence is seeing what happens when someone stops taking the drug so physical dependence means that when you stop taking the drug your body is deeply affected so when you stop drinking caffeine I know this from personal experience your head hurts you feel exhausted maybe even sick to your stomach it seems fairly physical um if you're not drinking like a ton of coffee every day maybe like a half a cup um or uh you don't drink it every single day then if you stop drinking for a longer period of time maybe you'd realize you have some type of like psychological um you psychologically enjoy the coffee so when it comes to some drugs um physical versus psychological dependence is about how much of that drug that you're you're sort of using so so for example um let's put coffee away for a second let's think about alcohol if you're like excessively drinking alcohol right um then yeah if you are drinking like I don't know a sixpack a day and then you stop drinking alcohol you're going to have some physical symptoms on the other hand if you drink socially for example and then you go to a party and you're the designated driver and so you don't drink during that party you might be kind of like psychologically you know uncomfortable um you miss releasing your inhibitions or what have you that would be more of a psychological dependence or like the mom that drinks like a half a cup of wine at dinner or while she's watching her shows after the kids go to sleep at night if she stopped drinking that half a cup of wine she probably wouldn't feel like a physical uh withdrawal because of it but she'd maybe be like a little bit more anxious um so sometimes the difference between physical and psychological comes down to quantity but almost always if you're doing like a ton of a substance there's going to be some sort of physical withdrawal and then um certain substances just seem like very physical something like caffeine um what counts as I mentioned as a drug and how legal it is um depends a lot on interpretation and can vary by culture one of the most Monumental kind of studies experiments paradigms that have been done on drug use is this famous experiment called rat park now there's been all sorts of different versions of rat Park and all sorts of different interpretations and some people say we're over interpreting results I'm going to tell you the the most basic version so essentially what they did is they got um they realized that we were studying drug use in rats but we were studying the rats that were in these very basic kind of cruel cages rats really social creatures and crave big space and exploration and other rats and so on and so forth and we were studying their dependency on drugs by putting them in just like you know your most basic boring cage like no toys or anything um and then there'd be all of these you know commercials about it like this is you on drugs and they'd see the rat taking the drug to the point where they killed themselves because of Overdose because of the drug so um instead other experimenters really like okay but wait a second because some of these drugs are used by cultures for like religious purposes for example um and some people do seem to be able to use these drugs in a pro-social way as long as like their life is kind of good we'll come back to that interpretation in just a second so what they said is basically drug use or their hypothesis is that drug use and environment there's an interaction effect which predicts uh what happens to the rat or you know generalizing to humans so they took rats and got them all you know addicted to some sort of drug uh I think it was cocaine or heroin um I'm blanking at the moment and so some of the rats half the rats they put in just bar cages you know no toys no other rats like rat hell basically and those rats took the drug to overdose and then they took some of the other rats and put them in like rat Heaven they had access to other rats they had access to toys and Wheels where they could exercise and those rats importantly like passively used the drug but not to the point of Overdose and in fact craved like um regular water as well because they had mixed the um drug with the water to get the rats to take it um and so basically the summation of rat Park is that if the environment is good then rats and therefore perhaps hopefully humans can use substances in a way that isn't negative and in fact aren't any more or less interested in those substances than they are in the rest of their environment um and we see this and we can kind of validate this and just talking to people who struggle with drugs boredom is one of the best predictors of drug use if that person feels trapped in their life and they desperately need an escape then they're going to seek out some sort of drug um almost like this need and so one of the ways that I want to talk about the different types of drugs is doing so in a really humane way and trying to like humanize the people who use those um substances that doesn't mean that I think that you should do drugs or substances it's just that um I throughout my life I've known lots of people who have used drugs I think both both in positive and negative ways and learning why recognizing that again In some cultures these drugs are not illegal and in fact in some countries like Portugal for example decriminalizing drugs decreased drug rated deaths which arguably is the whole reason that drugs are illegal um because we consider it to be something that's harming that person like they're making decisions that are counter to their um best interest and so it's the government trying to protect us and I think that there's you know something to be said for that that it's a kind attempt um however on the other hand it is important to give every single person from every different culture a fair amount of respect and if a substance is legal elsewhere and people are able to use it appropriately there's something to be learned from that as well I think one of the best things you can learn from studying or at least having a basic sense of what each drug kind of gives a person is what human beings crave and what we seek out when we we can't get it through other mechanisms okay so the first type of drug we're going to talk about is depressant so depressants change your Consciousness by reducing or depressing your nervous system some examples include things like alcohol um now for those of you 21 and over and only those of you 21 and over I know what you're thinking alcohol doesn't depress my nervous system I dance all night on alcohol that's because um alcohol alongside other types of uh drugs will also work on your dopamine system so this is one of the reasons why addiction happens we keep seeking seeking seeking um that reward that's what dopamine is and that seeking Behavior feels like Joy feels like an increase in some type of Consciousness flavor um in addition the relinquishing of inhibitions which is harder to Define in a materialistic way you know why is it sometimes we take the masks off and just dance it out and other times we don't I'm sure if you look hard enough there is some materialistic reason but perhaps not perhaps just the experience of taking off some of those filters is um just really enticing for people and helps them feel better um and then we have tranquilizers and things like narcotics um I think a lot of people who use depressants um a experien that taking the mask off thing which is really quite enjoyable for a lot of people um it's something that we create and I think points out how heavy it is to constantly have to kind of conform to certain standards there's jokes like you know drunk words or sober thoughts and I don't know if that's true um because I think that's sober thought it kind of suggests that you're lying when you're sober and the things you say when you're drunk are they true truth I I think that there's lots of you know multifaceted truth um but there is something really nice about just being and alcohol seems to help people experience that um things like tranquilizers and narcotics um sort of have this like pain relief tendency and there's other types of pain relief that you could get from other substances as well but the fact that so many people end up craving that means that people are in a fair amount of pain and kind of don't realize it until they take off some of that weight and it's really important to let for people who end up being addicted to these sorts things to let themselves feel that and then wonder how to get that in a sober way since obviously overusing any of these drugs is bad um the other thing I wanted to point out is that sometimes depressants really do feel like depressing so if you've ever encountered like an alcoholic alcoholic like especially an older individual who's relied on alcohol for a fair amount of time it doesn't seem like they're indulging in this substance that is making them just simply get Up and Dance maybe they get up and dance a little bit at first but after a while you know there's this archetype that I kind of want to paint of this like old guy just like chugging beers and each beer that he chugs feels like a deeper descent into kind of like self-hatred I knew this older gentleman on who is heavily addicted to alcohol he had served in the Army and I think that's where his alcohol addiction um started and by the time he got back he was just using it so much to kind of numb the pain um that he ended up losing his family was struggling to get back in touch with his daughter so on and so forth and yeah when he started drinking there was something about it that brought out this childlike sense of like Joy again um almost to the point where I thought that if he could use it and like stop after a drink or so maybe it' be enough to like call his daughter but I think what had happened in the past is he wouldn't get get the courage to do it until he was actually you know drunk there's difference between having one beer and being drunk and once you're an alcoholic that line becomes something you just run across instead of crawling towards um and once you make decisions purely from a drunk place you it's not the same level of Freedom or free will or Consciousness as when you are sober and then you end up saying things that you don't mean so on and so forth um but yeah so maybe like the first beer or something would be just taking the burden off and he'd feel less bad about himself but after the first I don't know how many um each beer was like giving into this thought that was like I'm just a piece of I'm a piece of I'm a piece of and it it was like watching somebody take a submarine dive um another way to think about it is people who kind of rely on something else like food for example um if you know that a certain amount of food is like a healthy amount and anything more than that is an unhealthy amount or or cigarettes something that we don't demonize quite as much maybe we demonize cigarettes I don't know um and every additional food item or cigarette or whatever over that certain amount it feels like you're choosing almost like slow death um that's not the entire truth but that's an element to it and it's kind of you know we see people who are addicted to alcohol is just being like selfish but that isn't the full experience it's like um it's this experience of giving into the self-hatred so if you believe in like Consciousness at all and Freud and the idea that with great understanding comes great you know opportunity um allowing yourself to access those thoughts like pausing and hearing the thoughts that otherwise would ring in the back of your mind like I'm stupid I'm garbage so on and so forth once you bring it to your conscious awareness maybe with the use of something like alcohol then you have or food or something then you have the opportunity to kind of do something with it like that's not true just because I made this decision today doesn't mean this decision defines me forever and I always have access to the opinion that I am worthy that um I'm doing the best that I can and just because I made this decision today doesn't mean I'm going to make this decision tomorrow something like that in a future lecture for chapter 12 on um I think it's chapter 12 on Mental Health diagnoses I'll talk about this more but it's really helpful for people to heal and healing always comes from understanding yourself better and feeling like you have an increased sense of responsibility and agency to do something with that Insight which sometimes means changing yourself other times it means Reckoning with shortcomings in the environment and other times still that means trying to change your own environment um but so this idea that everything that you do can be perceived of as being like the perfect decision feels really risky for a lot of people especially those who have been suffering from things like alcoholism or even like eating disorders for a long period of time here's my best way to explain why it is so important to allow yourself to say that no this wasn't like purely a mistake I needed this to a certain degree usually what happens when someone relies on a particular Behavior like drinking or like unhealthy eating Behavior smoking whatever is something terrible goes wrong in their life maybe lots of things have gone wrong and they need this crutch in order to survive importantly in order to survive now that crutch does something to your Consciousness things like alcohol does something to your Consciousness I don't mean damage it I mean makes you understand something differently so um if you decide to accept that behavior as is listen I lost my job I got discharged from the Army I lost my family I needed something to cradle at night and I chose alcohol maybe it wasn't the best decision but that's what I chose in order to get people from that point in their life to the next point in their life just saying okay stop drinking allog together right now usually doesn't work because something about it is inter um influencing their Consciousness so let's take the alcoholic for example every time they take a a another drink over beer three they're thinking I'm a piece of I'm a piece of I'm a piece of probably throughout other parts of their day they're thinking that in the back of their mind but instead of allowing themselves to hear it they hate on other people instead um they just don't understand me and that's why they think my drinking as a problem so on and so forth they're not hearing the parts of themselves that's hitting on themselves when they start drinking those thoughts are allowed to come to the surface and because now they have come to the surface they have an opportunity to argue against them once you argue against them I'm not a piece of I went through a lot I needed this in order to survive and that tells me something about how difficult life is and that helps me be more compassionate to more people I'm allowed to be proud of every single thing that I have done and that Pride means that I have more agency over what I do next because now I think more highly of myself and sometimes I'm going to make mistakes of course I am because if I didn't make mistakes as I was trying to get more sober then that would mean that every person who had ever gotten sober like it was an easy task no I'm a know it was a hard task and when I finally do get sober which means different things to different people then that will be another accomplishment and I wouldn't have been able to have that accomplishment if I hadn't also had the accomplishment of drinking in order to just survive the tremendous tragedies that I have been throughout my life and some people's tragedies are going to war other people's tragedies are suffering through Dr SRA Dow's psychology L um I mean it everybody's 10 out of 10 like if you're taking this semester in a hard season of your life I bet it feels like a hard class and most people stop doing it entirely so I'm glad that you're here um that respect ends up equating to success we think that increasing shame and how dare you continue this behavior is the best method sometimes that's a necessary ingredient sometimes people need a little truth slapped into them but not without the foundation of love and care one of the reasons why it's so important to be able to explain drug and substance use in a harsh way is because it's not always like a victimless crime what I would argue is that there are tons of families without substance use and the parents or adult kids are disrespectful or um dismissive for reasons outside of substance use and it's a little too easy to purely blame the substance on the other hand sometimes substance use pinpoints a real problem of things like prioritization what really matters to you who do you decide as part of your community and when do you allow yourself to have your needs versus Focus purely on others so just really quickly let's look at two different songs um interpretation of uh substance use so his first one is Eminem uh this is a song where he pretends like he never got clean and what the story of his life would have been if he had never gotten clean and so this one lyric says it's like him screaming into the void that I chose this thing over you that's not the entire experience of drug use though and so we're going to turn to Zach briyan who uh the famous lyric from this song is I was raised by a woman who was hard to impress and I carry that real deep in my chest but later in the song He describes how it feels and the reasons why people use those substances it's actually not because they don't care about other people it's because it feels like it's fueling this need so he's describing this Thanksgiving Day and imagine like an overworked mom I imagine is what he's trying to [Music] describe drink alcohol the lyrics are a little long you're sneaking off to drink some alcohol so that makes her seem selfish right but now let's see what she does [Music] next BL again the lyrics are wrong scrape and every bloody fall so he's describing a parent who yes in some lines he describes as being disappointing she was hard to impress but now he's explaining why because no one else was impressed with her efforts to be there for her family and she used alcohol as a way to numb that pain that she was being ignored and once she had numbed that pain she did go and kiss every knee and bloody fall yes she probably also got angry at the end of the day maybe the release of that inhibitions allowed her to show that anger at the end of the day and maybe to some of the family members that's what's stuck but it's a beautiful thing when you're able to see both that I understand why you use that substance and look sometimes the intention actually did pan out but how do we get you to prioritize yourself and your own well-being enough sometimes it means telling you that it feels like you're choosing something else over me and I'm going to insist on that part and see if that creates some change and then other times it's acknowledging that every decision you made had a purpose and sometimes it worked but maybe now we need something else which can't something never I also love that line and it's so Freudian so unconscious because it might mean that we are all just the consequences of our parenting and whether you like it or not everything does have a consequence no matter which type of way that you were raised it puts you at odds with somebody else because of this super annoying subjectivity that we each have um and of course some people just experience like bad or disappointing parenting but then those parents are just trying to survive their own parenting um or their own parents parenting um I also really love that line you can't heal something that you never raised not just because it's um reminds us of the influence of the past but it also could be understood another way where you can can't heal thoughts that you don't allow yourself to have and someone else can't heal you from those thoughts if you don't decide to share it we we sometimes think about responsibility as shielding or protecting people from anything negative but that means we are all alone in our own secret burdens and it stops us from trying to figure out what to do next so being aware that sharing negative thoughts or feelings or anger or whatnot helps you to understand what to do with it responsibly but I don't think that the responsible thing is always just keeping it to yourself instead it means bringing it to somebody Palms open and like a help me out together and so that I can help you too kind of way it would be the beautiful interpretation it's also important to note that for some people using a substance responsibly throughout their life adds something to their life if we purely put some of these substances and like this is bad category it's a just not practical B might not be the truth now for some people if you are genetically predisposed to alcoholism then maybe never touching alcohol again is what is healthiest for you for other people it means accessing your own free will like moderation it means probably getting completely and totally sober for a period of time and then eventually being able to have access to the option of drinking one drink and not seeing that as a failure and if you see it as a failure op Cascade into many more drinks that's not possible for everyone who has experienced alcoholism and so again if you just stop drinking alcohol without figuring out what it's giving you right now by allowing yourself to hear the thoughts that come to mind when you use it you will not be able to kind of move on from it um the next type of a drug we're going to talk about stimulants these increase nervous system activity they if depressions kind of slow you down stimulants increase your uh heart rate breathing mental activity especially these include things like amphetamines um cocaine caffeine and nicotine as well um I want to tell two different stories or give two different archetypes for these types of drugs the first one is amphetamines um amphetamines are what we use to treat things like ADHD and they and meth is also kind of a sister drug so to speak I read this article once and Here's your sign to put aside articles you read that make a big impact on you because I can't find it anymore but I read this article um written by this guy who at this point was kind of like a finance dude but at one point he had been essentially homeless and addicted to meth and the journey that he describes is he was addicted to meth and it was ruining his life and so and so forth and he got his life together and then he got this job working in something like finance and almost everybody who was working that job was on some type of ADHD medication like Aderall um or Ritalin or something like that and he says that um when he was finally encouraged to get on that drug he was like okay well maybe this is why I was addicted to meth maybe I had ADHD and that was just the best that I could get meth is far cheaper of course um especially if you don't have health insurance so when he first takes the um uh amphetamine the Aderall medication he was like oh my gosh this is the cleanest meth I've ever had in my life and at that point he realized basically what rat Park realized that if this point in his life he almost got like rewards for taking this drug this drug speed him up to the point where he was able to produce a massive amount of work and um everyone kind of applauded him for it keeping in mind that there are side effects to almost every drug um but when he was on meth he even though it perhaps had the same type of effect on his system he didn't have the opportunity to do anything without that energy first of all meth and amphetamines are not the same meth and um ADHD medication not the same thing chemically but they are kind of similar um but obviously one is regulated IE cleaner and you know you're getting the same dose every time you know the it's different experiences chemically as well but the fact that he felt like the same general effect but the big difference wasn't the environment when you don't have work that you can do that's going to be rewarded you don't feel like you have a sense of purpose you don't have anywhere to go home to um then suddenly that increase in nervous system turns to behaviors then ostracize you even more like picking at your skin or yelling into the abyss or so on and so forth so that's the first story that I want to share um which I hope again emphasizes the importance of the environment emphasizes the importance that every person feel worthwhile um and that they have a purpose and that they are given an opportunity and also that each person who seeks out one of these substances is probably seeking out a need that they have have that they need to be equipped to understand what the need is and how to perhaps experience a different level of Consciousness using the substance for a period but a safe version of the substance but then understanding how to translate it to other types of behaviors if you can't continue to exist in the environment that you're in part of being humans means wondering what I can do to influence the environment that I'm in and hopefully uh the environment is willing to change at least a bit the next story I want to share is about cocaine so I'm from New York and in New York I knew a lot of Finance Bros and um you know the use of stimulants was not uncommon um the culture there is very different take that as you will and um Finance Bros kind of get like this bad reputation maybe you've seen memes about them on um Tik Tok and things like that and the truth was is they did kind of give I knew some dudes who like gave into that sort of culture um where it was go go go all the time and whatever they had to do to go go go all the time was what they were going to do and on the one hand they couldn't totally admit that part of them was like hoping for a family one day but some of them actually would and it was there was something quite sad about it especially once you see the crash after you take something like a stimulant that's not you know properly regul regulated and whatnot um the crash is pretty brutal and the fact that these individuals felt like their entire sense of worth was tied into how productive they could be such that they were willing to suffer through this crash I think could be met with a lot of sympathy the fact that they don't want to receive that sympathy because they want to be the tough guy makes it even harder to Grant it but perhaps just as important because they're not going to advocate for themselves because to them part of their drug is kind of the drug of winning next we have opiates opiates induce something like Euphoria help people sleep and especially they relieve pain I would argue that almost every substance that ends up being a bit addictive relieves pain distracts adds some sort of escapism to people and general um these types of drugs have complex effects on Consciousness examples include opium Codine morphine and heroin and um the uh drug overdose crisis and especially the opiate crisis in the US is you have to look at both basically to understand understand it so um looking at uh overdose deaths the more you look into how all that happens um more and more the increase in the use of prescription pain medication seems to be associated with overdose deaths and what I mean by that basically is like if you're going to look at the trajectory of how people end up getting addicted to to drugs it used to be just people that we were kind of comfortable with calling like the outcast of society frankly people that um it's really easy to just look at them as being criminals and well that explains it they made they made those decisions and they made their bed and then had to lay in it obviously hopefully we had more sympathy than that but it was easier to say those sorts of things enter the opiate epidemic so what happened is more and more people got prescribed pain medication for um things that arguably weren't painful enough to need it so if you're in like tremendous amounts of pain right and you take a prescription pain medication you're just going back to Baseline and it's perhaps less likely that you're going to get addicted to it so long as your pain actually subsides and you get kind of weaned off the drug appropriately however if you're not in that much pain and you're given too much of a drug for too long then suddenly that drug doesn't just bring you back to normal it brings you somewhere else and then you get addicted to that somewhere else is one way to interpret it another way interpret it is perhaps people are in a fair amount of pain and we just don't realize it until we take something that kind of relieves it a little bit and maybe there are things that we can do to relieve pain in general increasing quality of life um decreasing the amount of unnecessary work so on and so forth um but when people feel that feeling they need it need it need it and so then when they can no longer get the prescription medication they start turning to the streets turning to cheaper versions of it and then that sometimes is what leads to these over overdose um deaths finally we have hallucinogens these alter perceptions of reality and may cause huc hallucinations examples include LSD um PCP ketamine and marijuana marijuana has um a lot of interesting effects on a person's mind especially because we do actually have a cannaboid system in our brain um they kind of serves as this like traffic light type of neurotransmitter system that regulates all sort of like executive functions um lots of people have advocated for the Le for legalizing marijuana in this country and as you probably know a lot of states have legalized it which means it's no longer really seen as like a drug drug anymore people use it in micro doses the same way that you would use something like caffeine and they use it in to Greater quantities the same way that you would allow yourself to drink a little bit at a party um and that person ception changes the way again people use the drug and the possibilities that open up um in terms of how people are allowed to use the drug so for example if uh marijuana is illegal in a state then um the effect of uh decreasing memory is going to be seen as poorly purely a bad thing so it does seem to be the case that using marijuana decreases memory to a certain extent however it's interpreted by other people who are kind of pro marijuana as um forgetting things that like should be forgotten like did you really need to do everything on that to-do list or was that giving you something like anxiety some people experience that decreasing in um kind of like obsession over what you're supposed to do as purely a good thing other people see that decreas in the obsession as something that leads to like paranoia basically and indeed paranoia seems to be associated with something like marijuana um a lot of these hallucina gens kind of work by um fitting themselves into receptor cells that they're not supposed to fit into that is way too simply put but um I'm going to put it too simply so um your brain thinks it's receiving one type of uh especially serotonin and it turns out that it's not it's one of these drugs kind of mimicking it and then it sort of like changes the receptor and then that leads to all of these altered perceptions some of these hallucinogens are um used as religious spiritual experiences by people or healing experiences it's way less common in the United States but it's becoming more common now that we have respect for more cultures um so being able to see the world tremendously differently and have this tremendously abnormal experience for some people is this plot twist that they need to make a huge change in their life um for example some people will take things like LSD or PCP or um gosh I forget what the really common one is they put it in a t um anyways so they'll take this this substance that really does you know mess with everything they say and they'll experience an ego death and ego death is like you literally feel your ego or your Consciousness removed from your body what that means that you can achieve that state means different things to different people um now some people again see the use of that substance as long as it's done responsibly and achieving that state as being really important to them is this change moment or being able to re-experience your past with this new flavor of Consciousness gives them something different other people would argue that's kind of like unearned wisdom and you should be sort of careful of it because on the other hand even though I have deep respect for frankly like responsible drug culture I also have deep respect for the um Endeavors to experience these moments of Enlightenment without substances you can absolutely experience an ego death by truly understanding ing another human being and incorporating Different World Views into your own perceptions of the world I would call that maybe more of like an earned wisdom kind of moment however if taking a substance responsibly um not in Texas and not when you're too young um means that you achieve that state that helps you perceive things differently you know maybe that's the same thing as taking a class that influences you okay so obviously don't do drugs especially in Texas you can always go to graduate school in uh California or Colorado or whatever um but there's other ways to experience High such as runnner high or creativity typically described as states of flow so states of flow are these moments where time just kind of eludes you you don't even experience the passing of time it feels very pleasant maybe you are um I don't know working really hard on a project or you're an artist painting whatever um or uh if you if you're a runner then you know hopefully you've experience some sort of version of runner's high now importantly runner's high doesn't just happen it's not like you just start running and you experience it instead it's after probably like Mile Three I think it's probably the earliest I've experienced it and you think you're going to stop at Mile three but the endorphins are endorphin and that you just kind of feel this relinquishing of pain in fact for me Runner High usually happen after I had I felt some pain you know some aches and pains or soreness in the beginning and then something about the activity became so pleasant that I wanted to keep going I paid for it after but that's a whole other thing it's the same kind of thing with creativity like you put off that project for so long and then you find yourself genuinely enjoying the process such that you don't feel pain at all um I think uh some people at least at first are able to just kind of experiencing it happening without kind of trying but if you've experienced it at least once I recommend that you see if you can kind of get yourself into that state of um flow again state of flow is usually associated with creativity I would argue that runner's Hive fits into this category where time Falls away you are doing something just for the pure enjoyment of it you get kind of high on life so to speak and some of the things you have to be attuned to is the pure pleasure you have to find a way to enjoy that activity and kind of forget everything else if you're working on something like a creative Endeavor I would argue that you have to kind of ignore obsessing over every little thing you're doing wrong so if after every sentence you're like oh was that a good enough sentence Oh I don't want to do this the oh all of the um uh high intensity criticisms and things like that are going to kind of pull you down so one of the reasons why I did the stream of Consciousness activity supposed to write for 2 minutes and then do meditation and then do it again is to help you experience something like this um where you're not obsessing over doing everything right you were just allowing yourself to enjoy the moment one of the best ways to kind of consider your um opinions on drugs or your experience of different levels of consciousness is to wonder if you think that who you are or who anybody is on drugs does that say something about them or does that purely say something about the drug for example um so when I was in the clinical training program something that came up you know a fair amount um that we talked about in supervision was would you see a client if they came high or drunk or what have you and um some people you know some therapists would say like absolutely not um because basically it encourages that behavior whereas you know frankly my opinion not that I was ever faced with this uh question like this never happened with under my clients um but my opinion would be like yeah at least for like the first couple times I don't know when I would draw the line eventually it is important that you draw the line because you don't want to like constantly encourage that behavior and if they value therapy enough to come even when they are in this altered state of consciousness um then if you refuse to see them when they are drunk or high then that might be enough to get them to stop using this substance if they you know value therapy that much but I do think that Altered States Of Consciousness are still that person and um kind of uh experiencing their own mind when they're in different states of Consciousness can be really helpful um we can also think about the unconscious in terms of like priming so for instance if I had you watch a sad movie before you came to class you would experience that class differently than if you watched a happy movie so what whether or not you like that class you know that class in general or that topic might tell you about that topic or about yourself it might also be kind of like your unconscious something like your mood you know all of these things are kind of inherent in that concept of what it means to have a conscious um it's interesting to ask you know why do these Altered States Of Consciousness exist in The Human Experience why are our brains kind of set up to yeah experience the influence of things like drugs and alcohol but also things like states of flow if you've ever experienced a state of flow or a runner's high you know they're just as real as like taking a substance it is like this before and after moment so even outside of just drugs and substances our brain seems set up to experience these kind of like abnormal experiences um that being said it's really important to understand the role of the environment um the influence of drugs and alcohol is going to also be dependent on the environment okay last topic for this chapter is sleep do you guys get enough sleep almost certainly not you're probably somewhere in here and you're supposed to get um almost eight hours of sleep per night is that right yeah um I think at y'all's age usually what happens is you're supposed to or or you won't get that much sleep every night like maybe most week nights you don't get anywhere near that much sleep but maybe you make up for it on the weekends um you can also see changes in rem patterns as we get older um so we see this decrease between 1930 19 to 30 and 33 to 45 it kind of goes back to normal again as we get older but because we're getting less sleep in general that 20 to 23% is going to amount to Less hours than the 22% that we get um when we're 19 to 30 we'll go over what REM sleep means in a minute hopefully you guys have at least heard the term okay so stages of sleep the way that we measure stages of sleep and these wave data is using EEG data so they collect like um your brain waves by connecting these nodes to your scalp and they collect kind of brain frequency brain wave frequencies and the stages of sleep are associated with kind of the amount of different types of uh brain waves so when you're awake you'll have just as two examples um beta waves which is alert waves and Alpha Waves which are relaxed waves so they look like lower amplitude but higher frequency so alert is beta relax is Alpha I don't I feel like those should be switched but there you have it okay so looking at this graph this is kind of like the experience of sleep so you have a wakefulness and then you have the stage one of falling asleep which is like drowsy this is the kind of first true sleep stage in that we're getting something like irregular theta waves theta waves are these um lower frequency type of waves and then at stage two you get sleep spindles and K complexes complexes are these big spikes versus the sleep spindles are these little moments of if you're not watching the video if you're just listening in the background this would be a good time to watch for a sec um and the sleep spindles are these high frequency that means like close together but low amplitude type of waves I think about this type of stage in terms of breathing even though we're talking about brain activity and not breathing breathing is one way to think about it um and indeed EEG data will collect all of this like noise like every time you blink they'll like EEG data will collect something like that as well anyways um so K complexes think about and sleep spindles think about like a grandpa falling asleep on a recliner couch right um have you ever seen a grandpa or a dad kind of fall asleep and they're snoring and they take this big snore like and they kind of like wake themselves up in that moment that's kind of what I think about like the energy of these K complexes these moments of like as you're kind of like drifting down into sleep and indeed like this graph shows it nicely that we're falling into sleep then at stage three you have Delta waves these are high amplitude so kind of like the K complex maybe not quite as high high amplitude but low frequency so if you think about again something like breathing as a metaphor or an experience we can kind of tap into that mimic something like these waves think about like super casually when you watch somebody sleep right or experiencing your own sleep they're breathing like when you're awake right you have these like shallow breaths but they're kind of quick right like think about how you're breathing right now kind of shallow little bit sort of quick when you're relaxed or falling into sleep you're taking these bigger breaths and like slow and controlled and not as much like in between that's kind of how I think about the feeling of falling to sleep and in fact understanding that that's the feeling of falling asleep can help you sort of experience the delightful drifting down into deep sleep so that's um stage three you got these like delta waves um and then stage four the big change here is just more of the Delta wave so over 50% of your brain new will be delta waves if you were to try and wake somebody up in this stage four deep sleep they'd be groggy and Confused um if youve ever seen those alarm clocks that are supposed to I think you place like a pad like under your pillow or something and they're supposed to wake you up at like the exact right moment basically they won't wake you up or they'll try to avoid waking you up when you're not moving that much because this is this like stage four kind of um you're just deeply all you're doing is breathing versus as you're coming back up the cycle you're sort of um moving a little bit more you're less in that deep wave sleep okay then the kind of like star of the show in terms of psychology is R sleep R sleep is a rapid eye movement sleep so if you watch somebody when they're sleeping um if they're in real sleep their eyeballs will move move back and forth like this so their eyeballs resembled that of an awake person it looks like they're like looking around the idea here is that 90% of dreaming occurs in REM sleep um my hypothesis is that some level of dreaming occurs at all stages but REM sleep is like the visual visual dreaming kind of a thing um interestingly uh your muscles are paralyzed when you are in real sleep so if you have ever woken up and and face the sleep paralysis demon like you can't move your muscles but you kind of like see a shadowy figure is the scariest version of that um that's because you woke up during REM sleep your muscles are still paralyzed and then plus maybe you're still a little bit in dream states such that you're kind of like hallucinating somebody in there okay so why people sleep is one of the big questions it's so much so a big question that we're arguably not entirely sure although the more that we study kind of cellular um functioning the better we can hypothesize so uh some of the functions of sleep include restoring the brain and body for future activity it seems that sleep is really important for building and maintaining the brain's nerve connections and restoring neurotransmitter sensitivity so if you have a ton of neurotransmitters kind of swimming around your nervous system all day every day you become less sensitive to it but if you go into kind of like this nice reset moment then when you wake up you're more sensitive to the wakefulness experience of your brain um sleep helps to solidify and assimilate the day's experiences and it seems like REM sleep is especially important uh we'll get back to why we think that is in just a minute by looking at different Sleep Disorders first sleep disorder we're going to talk about is insomnia where you can't fall or stay asleep this is the most common sleep disorder technically to be diagnosed it has to last more than two weeks often times a somnia can be diagnosed alongside something like depression so much so that it's really confusing to determine whether depression is causing the insomnia or maybe even the Sleep issues are at the core issue and the Sleep issues are causing the depression okay as I said REM sleep seems to be specifically specifically important um and one of the ways we can hypothesize this is looking at specific narcolepsy cases so narcolepsy is the abrupt switch from waking to REM sleep where the muscles are kind of immediately paralyzed it looks like this collap collapsing on the floor you go from awake to collapsing and you're um fall directly to sleep and you go right to REM one of the reasons why perhaps is might happen in some people is they don't get enough REM sleep so you might get enough hours of sleep that then still experience narc colaps during wakeful hours because you're not getting enough rim and your brain is craving the rim and if you're not going to get REM during your normal cycling then you're going to seek REM during other phases um because one thing I so one thing I forgot to mention about REM sleep is you can see there's this uh descent into deeper and deeper sleep and then you kind of like cycle your way up right and you only go back into that deep sleep one more time so we go into deep sleep once or twice and then we're kind of slowly working our way back up but as we slowly working our way back up we're also getting more and more REM sleep with each cycle kind of like if you're craving the dream then you're craving more and more of the dream because we tend to associate REM with like dream dreams since arguably that's when around 90% of dreaming happens um or there's just something about REM that's helping us it's kind of like this transition phase between wakefulness and um uh being asleep or again there's just something about that phase where we are unconscious but our brain more resemble something like awake an awake person such that we want more and more of it as we move from sleep to dream so um if you look at this seven hour or like eight hour span of sleeping again you have this cycling but then you cycle your way up the REM cycle increases and for this reason too if you have ever heard um uh the argument that you're only supposed to take like a 20 minute nap this is one of the reasons is because you're trying to avoid getting all the way into that deep sleep that I mentioned trying to wake up from Deep Sleep is really really difficult so if you sleep for entire hour you're basically trying to wake yourself up at a deep sleep but if you stop around 20 minutes then you might only be in stage two or stage three which is a little bit easier to get yourself out of okay so that's insomnia and narcolepsy then we have sleepwalking sleepwalking is during non-rem sleep because in Ram generally your muscles are paralyzed it's most common in children and a lot of times they um uh grow out of it so to speak REM behavior disorder occurs during REM sleep but normal REM paralysis is absent so the person acts out their dreams there's this case that I learned about it when I was taking an introduction to psychology class and I bring it up every class I always mean to look back into it um I we'll probably pause it in a second and make sure but essentially the person had REM behavior disorder and they were clearly having a dream that they wanted to kill their neighbor and and so they acted they actually killed their neighbor in their sleep um they were able to prove that it was REM behavior disorder and so they were able to get off for murder because we do not think that the decisions that people make when they are asleep they should be held responsible for hopefully that's true because I yell at people in my sleep yeah so I did double check and um there's times piece I think from like 1994 or 1995 about I think the the REM behavior disorder that I was uh referring to but then there's more recent cases about actually sleepwalking um where the person maybe isn't acting out their dreams but instead just something about that sleep walking State leads to things like strangling partners and whatnot um pretty scary stuff and it's interesting to think about that legal defense like should you be held responsible for what you do when you're sleeping does that say something about who you are as a person um you know I don't think so but other people could certainly make that argument okay um so next we have nightmares nightmares are frightening REM dreams uh we'll talk about dream analysis in just a second versus night terrors are these abrupt Awakenings with panic and intense emotional arousal so this happens during stage four sleep so not normal REM sleep and that means it's not like a dream so the person doesn't awaken from a dream where they can remember some plot instead it's the experience of the emotion themselves typically people have no memory of the event afterwards and instead it's just this intense emotion in fact they might not even remember it happened at all unless uh someone else tells them like you woke up screaming and crying in like a sweat from last night do you remember what happened and usually they say no to me this uh suggests that something about the dream like experience persists through all stages but maybe just the visual or like auditory experience of a dream like the plot part of the dream happens during REM such that we remember it but something about the emotion kind of like the deeper you go down into the unconscious the more you experience things that are sort of beyond the basic plot um the person who experiences something like night terrors has a lot of trouble calming down afterwards okay last part of the dream and dreaming uh lecture or the Sleep lecture is dreams and dreaming so what is the purpose of dreaming some people argue that the whole purpose of lucid dreaming or dreaming is lucid dreaming to be aware that the dream is happening while it's happening basically if you can control your dreams if you can control your unconscious and your own inner world you can assert more agency over your real life which is what everybody really wants and then we have wish fulfillment Theory this is psychoanalytic so this is very fre Ian um where dreams are a disguised form of wish fulfillment so as I mentioned you have these levels of consciousness and Freud hangs out at the unconscious level he argues that most of what you do is best understood as this complex Narrative of all of the different reasons you might be acting in one way or another what you really want to do your ID the thing that allows you to look deeply into people's eyes without that sense of cringe or to pursue your largest goals without feeling like you can't do it um that might be both your ID and your super ego your ID is what you want to be doing in this particular moment and your super ego means you have to have these long-term goals have your inherent in your super ego is also what Society wants you to do you want to make people proud so part of you really wants that another part of you knows that Society is not functioning the way it should be and wants to kind of be the ruler of everything that fixes everything else now your ego is your reality this is what I didn't as much in a previous lecture your reality pushes especially on your ID the part of you that wants to share how much you love other people and also wants to just be a little kid and does do whatever you want to do and part of being a little kid means also wanting everybody to be happy so on and so forth all this get pushed down all that gets pushed down because you have to confront reality when and all of that is part of who you are you can't explain even one Behavior very simply instead it is all of that which is somewhat relevant to how your parents treated you and how your teachers treated you and how your current friends are treating you and so on and so forth you have to talk and talk and talk until you can't talk anymore okay um so that's your unconscious level so Freud um is also one of them name dream theorist and uh that's what I mean by this like psychoanalytic wish fulfillment Theory so Freud took this very very seriously he considered your ego to be really important it's what negotiates between super ego and ID and helps you figure out how to interact with reality but it's always pushing on what you really want in one particular moment and when you dream that's sort of taken away it's like your brain giving you this movie showing you what you really want which is difficult for a lot of people to wrap their minds around because it doesn't always seem like your dream is showing what you what you really want for example if you often have a really scary dream it's like I definitely want a monster chasing me Freud however if you're extremely bored in reality and you're desperate for either that hero to save you or to be the hero then part of you does want to be chased by a monster it's just you can't quite see the future that would happen on the other side of the monster if you don't let yourself face that fear in the dream a lot of people end up getting like waken up from the dream right at the like Peak kind of moment so one of Freud's classic example um that he wrote about is this patient he had who was like really like not buying this whole wish fulfillment Theory so she comes to Freud and is like all right Freud here's my dream uh she has a husband and a neighbor who's her friend and in the dream she wants to throw a dinner party and all she has is sammon her and she wants to invite her neighbor her friend and her neighbor friend hates salmon like that's one thing that she knows about this friend and in the dream that's all she has she goes to the stores they don't have any other meat so on and so forth so she's like Freud how could this possibly be wish fulfillment I can't make the salmon dinner that I want to make I want to make this crazy great dinner and I can't do it even in my own dreams how is that wish fulfillment Theory Freud so she's like all right patient is like Freud there's no way this is wish fulfillment all I want to do is make this awesome dinner and I can't even do it in my Gams and fre Freud is like yo your it ego super ego are all at play even when you're dreaming it's trying to show you the confines of the reality in which you exist and like the struggles that you're going through as well and how you could get over those struggles okay tell me about your husband are you guys happy and she's like of course not it's the 1930s who's happy in their marriage right now um and Freud is like okay Freud's like tell me about your relationship with your husband do you feel totally satisfied is any part of you jealous perhaps it's interesting that at this dinner party you're telling me the most about this other woman and so then he asks is there any part of you that like might be jealous of this other woman since this isn't wish fulfillment Theory um and she's like no of course not my husband is really into plump women and I'm a plump woman um and my neighbor is not there's no way that he would go for my neighbor instead and so Freud's like well okay so part of what you want is to basically feel really secure in your marriage you really want to believe that your husband wants you and nobody else but you're not totally convinced of that so the best way that you think you can get it is basically by continuing to reassure yourself that other women don't entice your husband so if you throw a dinner party and you bring this other woman in but you have food that she can't eat she's never going to become plump like you which means your husband's never going to want her it's your ability to like control the environment at least in your dream and keep your husband interested which means that probably you and your husband need to like do some inner work and the lady doesn't like it and she's like you're bogus and leaves and then she comes back next time and she's like all right Dr Freud I had another dream and in this dream my mother-in-law um showed up to dinner and I hate my mother-in-law so there's no possible way that this is wish fulfillment and Dr Freud is like I'm going down in history girl hold my beer and he's like hm did you maybe want to prove my theory wrong so badly that you had a dream that couldn't possibly be explained with wish fulfillment Theory thereby you you allowed yourself to use your dream to pursue what you really wanted in the real world I don't know what she said in response to that but I imagine she rolled her eyes and walked out um and what I want to the reason why I'm using that story is because I don't know maybe Freud was pushing it a little bit too much but in order for any of these theories to like make full sense I think you got to kind of allow them to be robust against doubt maybe it's not true that every single dream is wish fulfillment Theory but perhaps every dream is wish fulfillment for somebody like if you didn't win in that dream but somebody else did maybe that means that you want other people to succeed so on and so forth I think the most important thing about analyzing dreams is to assume that every single part of you deserves to be understood and deserves your attention and the more effort you give your dreams the more um serious seriousness and also like a sense of levity frankly uh humor is a useful ingredient to most things in life um the more you can decide how you want to use them there are one feature of who you are they're one way of looking at your life okay another um uh theory about dreams is activation synthesis theory which suggests that dreams are just meaningless random firings that the brain tries to make sense of it's the main purpose of sleep is to restore your brain functioning and dreams are just this weird thing that happens as a byproduct and then we have so that would be like the biological approach and then the cognitive approach builds off that with the activation information mode model which uh says like yeah dreams aren't like some mystical magical meaningful type of a deal but the reason why they seem to make sense is because they are random firings about your day so basically the neurons that you use the most that day are the ones that are returning back to normal so because of that those are the neurons that are likely to fire Rand randomly and it makes it seem like they're meaningful for example yesterday I had a dream that um I I let my in-person class do online this week if or last week for chapter 4 if they wanted to it was a lecture heavy chapter and we're doing a little experiment um but anyways so uh not that many people showed up to class even though they all said they wanted to and they didn't want the option of going online so I had this dream that I was like in class and I was lecturing and some people were talking and so I go over to them and I'm like what are you talking about I'm being like an absolute brat in this dream and um they're like you're not interesting anyway look around nobody showed up and so I yell at them to get out of class I was like that really mean Professor that I usually am not um and anyways so according to the activation information mode model basically I had been trying really really really hard to make that class as interesting as possible despite the fact that it's at 9 o'clock in the morning and not a lot of people showed up and all of that effort meant that those neurons be interesting be nice d d d were the ones that were reiring or you know uh becoming rejuvenated and uh through that process they refed and kind of showed me this image of my life because it was basically what I had just experienced so you kind of like relive what you had experienced sort of it might not seem that way because it also is a little bit random what Freud would say is all of your dreams are these metaphors it is Art you're meant to interpret the art and again what I would say is like there's no correct answer in how to interpret that art the correct answer is every interpretation you could possibly gather and then what you do with it um I might summarize that basically we have no idea why we dream it is really weird don't let anybody tell you any different I you know I kind of do buy the like cognitive model that maybe it's just the neurons that you used the most kind of rejuvenating and random firings but that still tells you something about yourself that you might not have been consciously aware of it is wild that we super casually go into like a you know mini coma each night and then we our brain concocts these movies for us to watch and listen to um why that happens it's complicated okay here's the MCAT terms for this chapter I'll see you in chapter six