Transcript for:
Exploring Personality and Its Transformations

hello and welcome to psychology 230 personality and its Transformations it's called that because there are two things that you have to take into account when you're thinking about personality and one of those is how personality stays the same across time and that's really what gives you your ident and what allows you to identify other people and then also how personality changes and we're going to discuss both those things from a very large number of perspectives to find out all the information that you need for the course all you have to do is type my name into a browser and you'll get my homepage which is the page that you see here um on the left there's a table of contents that says current courses and then up here there's also a table of contents that lists the courses and this one's this one and then this is the introductory page here and then you can get to the course page like this I don't really like Blackboard so I'm going to use this instead so this is easy to get to and everything you need to know about the course should be here um so we'll start with the very straightforward things the first is there's there's two sources for reading in this course and one is a paperback book which is called introduction to personality and its Transformations um they're book there're chapters that I selected from a classic personality textbook that does a very good job of covering classic personality theorists although not such a good job of covering more recent work uh the book was published in 1982 Freud hasn't changed much since 1982 but there has been an awful lot of Personality research and so that brings us to the second source of readings and the second source of readings is actually this web page so if you go down the web page to lecture topics and readings you'll see in the third column a whole sequence of papers now you have to pay attention to this lectures and reading table more than anything else because it tells you what's going on for the for the duration of the course and tell you what the lectures are so today for example it's January 7th and so we're doing an introduction and overview maybe I can make that a little bigger and next week no on on uh Thursday we start with this reading it's called three forms of meaning in the management of complexity and all you have to use to get that reading is click on it and then you get that reading which is a fairly straightforward process um you would probably like the lectures better if you do the readings beforehand um that's it isn't necessary you can do this any way you want but you'll get more out of the course I think if you do that um there's two Tas for this course they're also listed here one is Vanessa go and the other is Victor Swift their availability is listed here so um Vanessa is available from 445 to 5:45 on Thursdays and Victor is is available from 3:15 to 4:15 Tuesdays their office offices are listed there as are their email addresses so that you can get in touch with them my office hours are Wednesday from 4:15 to 5:45 now the way I handle that is outside my office which is office 446 which is also listed there there are a number of signup sheets that I'm just going to post on the wall I'll do that right after class because they're printed out there's a number of signup sheets that are listed on the wall and your best bet is just to take a 15minute slot um don't take a whole bunch of them because the student to teacher ratio in class is obviously quite high and so just take one for now if you would and maybe if you have a meeting with me you can check back later to see if there's time for another one um I would like to have more time than that available but 90 minutes is what I can spare this semester so anyways they'll be up today now in terms of the mechanics of the course it's pretty straightforward there's no tricks um there's two midterms the first one is February 6th and the second one is March 13th and there's also a final and the midterm and the finals essentially make up 75% of the course it's actually 77.5% of the course but and then there's two writing assignments the first writing assignment is an essay and the essay has a number of different due dates so if you're on the website you can go to writing assignments and then you'll see all these different topics that you can choose from now if you click on one of these you get to this little signup sheet here and then you can put in your name and your email address and that signs you up for that topic and as you can see 10 people can sign up for each topic so if you're in love with a particular topic then you should sign up sooner rather than later um the the due dates fall a little after the course content that's related to that topic so it'll be the next class after the lectures on that topic end and I've spread them out across the year so that the Tas don't die of frustration and so that you guys can get your essays back with a reasonable degree of promptness hopefully within a week although let's say two weeks which seems reasonable so the second um writing exercise which is worth 7.5% the essay is worth 15% is a personality self analysis it's part of a suite of programs that I designed called the self-authoring suite and I can show you those and it's at selfauthoring.com and I'll show you this video at some point but for now there's information here on these programs but I'll give you code such username and password so that you can complete these and what you'll be asked to do is to complete an exercise that's B based on a big five model of adjective description of personality so since about 1930 statisticians have been studying the structure of language at a sentence level and at an adjective level to determine how what's the underlying correlational structure of descriptive phrases as they apply to human beings so for example if you're happy you're talkative and that might not be surprising but the fact that those two things are tightly connected was one of the things that's was discovered by the factor analytic processes that led to the development of the Big Five in the big five there are roughly five traits as the name might indicate extraversion which is a positive emotion trait neuroticism which is a negative emotion trait agreeableness which is warmth and empathy compassion the other side of that is kind of a harsh coldness I guess um openness which is both intelligence and creativity and conscientiousness which is industriousness and orderliness now there are virtues so to speak and faults associated with all of those Dimensions so you can be too extroverted which makes you rather impulsive and if you're very extroverted it's more difficult to get good grades in University because you're always out having fun with your friends and partying and and that might be good in that it'll help you develop a fairly extensive social network which is a useful thing if you're associated with people who are useful for social networking purposes um but it can really interfere with your ability to sit by yourself and study if you're conscientious that's a good predictor of academic success um because conscientious people do what they say they're going to do and they seem to suffer shame and self-disgust and self-contempt and guilt and so on if they don't um if you get too conscientious though you can get quite boxed in and and orderly and narrow and orderliness by the way seems to be associated with uh right-wing political views and when it's extreme it's it starts to get repressive and so the point of all this is that there are five traits and they have positive and negative aspects especially at the extremes and these programs are set up first of all so that you'll see a series of adjectives that are Universal descriptors so it's basically a small set of adjectives 100 that kind of cover each dimension of Personality with a reasonable degree of comprehensiveness then you'll be asked to pick which ones you think are particularly relevant to you and then you'll be asked to narrow that to a final list in one half of the exercise a list that represents your virtues and then in the other half of the exercise a list that represents your faults then you'll be asked to describe a time when that virtue played a positive role for you or when that fault interfered with you and then you'll be asked to describe how you might capitalize on that virtue in the future or perhaps bring that fault under control in the future and it turns out that writing exercises of this sort um are very practically useful they have a variety of positive effects one of which seems to be an increase in academic performance and our research so far has indicated that that increase can be quite substantial among with similar programs at McGill we raised the academic performance of struggling University students by 25% so a whole grade point and at a business school in Holland where this is being studied in some depth we've studied 2,000 people they are did the future authoring program not the present authoring program which is the one you're going to do and we improved their overall academic achievement by about 30% as well turns out that articulating yourself is an extraordinarily useful thing to do you could actually you could you could also think about that in a more comprehensive way as the goal of say Psychotherapy and personality transformation a lot of what's Happening as you mature and develop as a personality is that what you are whatever that means I guess it's your behaviors and your potential and I don't know exactly what potential is but your behaviors and your potential can be increasingly organized at a high level of Consciousness articulated at a high level of Consciousness and articulation is a funny word because partly it means joint articulation you know your hands are very articulated and that's why you can do a lot of things with them and hands and speech are very tightly related which is why most people's speech centers are in the same hemisphere as their dominant hand anyways articulating yourself makes you able to do many more things with yourself and it also seems to quell your negative emotion partly because it's clarifying you you know the more you leave things muddy in your life the less defined things are around you the more active your stress response systems are because if things are murky and undefined your stress systems basically assume that there are alligators and snakes and predators hiding in all that fog and Gloom and that you're in a very dangerous environment but if you clarify that with careful attention and articulation you can clear away the fog and the Gloom and that only leaves you with your actual problems which once Define carefully you might find manageable and an example that would be you know when you go into your room and you haven't done your homework for a while and there's piles of papers piling up or maybe there's piles of junk on your computer doesn't really matter and you'll have a very powerful tendency to avoid that not even to look at it right you don't even want to look at it because it's and that's chaos it's sort of growing in your environment and there's a specific part of your brain which evolved to detect snakes that deals with such little chaotic piles of undone business and the more of those that are around you psychologically or physically the more negative emotion you experience the less hope you experience and the larger your stress response chronically and that's not good because if your stress response is chronically elevated that suppresses your immunological function it makes you overweight it predisposes you to diabetes and cancer it makes you age faster it increases the probability that you'll have anxiety disorders and depression it's a bad thing so so clarifying who you are and what you're doing is a good thing unless you want all those other things to happen which seems highly improbable although people desire some very strange things and that's part of what we'll talk about as this course progresses okay so if you want to find out about the course you can go to jordanbpeterson.com and the courses are listed there or you can just type my name in a search engine and you'll find the courses this course is py 230 obviously I mentioned that there's a reading book which you have to buy the rest of the readings are online the order that you do that reading is listed on the syllabus you also have to do two assignments an essay which is only 750 words by the way but don't let that fool you because a 750w essay can be very difficult to write um the essay and then this personality analysis now the personality analysis all you have to do is show it to the TA to show them that you completed it because we don't want to know what you wrote down and we want to encourage you to write down things that you know that you'd like to write down that are likely private unless you want to broadcast your faults on Facebook which I suppose you could do after you complete the exercise so the reason I want you to do that well there's three reasons right one is well it'll familiarize you more with standard models of Personality because you'll have to apply them to yourself and so then you'll understand yourself better too so that's a good thing and then it's also a quasi clinical intervention and some of you because you're in this course are no doubt interested in CL Clinical Psychology and so this will give you a flavor of the sorts of things that a clinical psychologist might do except a computer is doing it and then which which turns out to be fine um people will actually often tell computers things that they wouldn't tell people because the computer doesn't care what you've done particularly not yet anyways and uh the third reason is that well it should be good for you and you know education should be good for you that's actually the purpose of Education right it's supposed to make you more healthy mentally and physically that's supposed to make you more productive and so that's what education is for and that's what this class is for so that's what we're aiming at so then there's two exams two midterms 25% each approximately they're multiple choice um I'll post sample questions so that you'll know what they're like they're not tricky people get worried about exams and rightly so but these aren't tricky exams if you do the readings and you come to the class the probability is quite high that you'll do at least reasonably well um I don't ask you to memorize dates and that sort of thing I try to keep it at a conceptual level and so the questions on the multiple choice test are usually conceptual questions where I try to get you to take something that you've learned or read and to apply it to the solving of a problem even though they're in standard multiple choice format there's there's usually not a tremendous number of questions so you'll be able to complete the exam in the time allowed without any trouble so now let's see I should tell you guys who should take this course and who shouldn't take it because you need to know that since it's your first day and so this course has two or three aspects one aspect is is scientific that really occupies the last half of the course I would say and in the purely scientific part of the course or the purely research oriented element of the course the first part is scientific too because science has more science is more than mere testing of hypothesis anyways the second half of the course deals essentially with trait Theory and with psychobiology so what I want to do is to tell you about the the basic dimensions of human variability and also how those are represented in the brain so that you can make a connection and and the body so you can make a connection between the theories and and the biological and cognitive substrates and so that's sort of a unifying attempt so you you got to be interested in that if you want to take this course and and you know and and have it go well for you so there's some psychometrics that's the science of measurement there's a little bit of Statistics there's a reasonable amount of neuros pychology and some of it's complex some of it isn't but I try to only pick things that I try to only pick things to discuss with you that are relevant at three levels of analysis I want them to be personally relevant so that they tell you something about yourself I want them to be intellectually relevant but I also want them to be culturally relevant so that not when you walk away from the study not only do you know something more about you and your friends but hopefully you're a better functioning creature in the broader social millu so so everything is picked to that and including the psychobiological or neuropsychological material and the trait material um there's a fairly he heavy emphasis on clinical issues the first half of the course deals with classic theorists of personality and all the classic personality theorists were clinicians now the UV at present doesn't have a clinical program although they're starting it up in Scaro but down here at St George there's not many clinicians I think I'm probably the only one I don't know why they let me in but they did and the the the emphasis on clinici that the emphasis of clinicians is twofold right one is well who is the person or what is the person but more importantly who could the person be or what should they be and that's a very strange thing about people right I mean if you have a cat you don't really sit around thinking what could this cat be because it's a cat and you know if it has spring they're going to be cats and in a thousand years they're still going to be just cats but people well we're strange in ways that are virtually un incomprehensible and we're not only what we are but we're also what we could be and in many cases especially for people of your age you're way more what you could be than what you are and so focusing on what you could be is an extremely important thing to do and in fact there's there's plenty of research and some of it's associated with the writing exercises that I told you about earlier that if you make efforts to Define who you could be and you know in a way that you find interesting because you might as well shape yourself into something that you want to be that that increases the efficiency with which you work substantially and also makes you a better person by reasonable measures of better which sort of means happier and healthier and you know more acceptable or at least less repulsive to other people so the clinical material is very useful for that and the clinical material is grounded in observation so it's kind of like ethology ethology is the study of animal behavior but not in the lab it's observational study and a lot of the clinical stuff has this observational quality to it it's heavily influenced by philosophy if you're not interested in ideas this is a bad course for you because it's it's it's a course that primarily concentrates on ideas I I want them to have practical utility because why not you might as well put constraints on them but but the the fundamental focus is ideas and so when we discuss the clinical material clinical personality material we'll discuss the philosophical background of that and we'll do the same thing when we get to the psychobiological material so you got to decide if you're not interested in philosophical ideas then this is a bad course because you're going to be stuck with with those sorts of things half the time so and there's some there's some elements of the course they almost straight philosophy because some of the clinical schools especially those that were developed in the 1950s like existential psychology are very tightly associated with fields of philosophy existentialism and phenomenology in that case and so um I think that sort of thing is very much worth learning because it's part of the history of ideas and you should know something about it it's also very interesting it's very useful to know something about if you're going to be a clinical psychologist because you should know a fair bit about a lot of things if you're going to be a clinical psychologist but even if you're interested in research science is half Hy hypothesis testing but the other half is hypothesis generation that's the most important half you got to think up an idea before you can test it and you know most of what you'll learn in a methods class has nothing to do with generating research hypothesis they just tell you to do that first generate your research hypothesis it's like yeah that's the big problem right there the rest of it just Machinery right we just grind it through this process and the way you generate research hypothesis is by knowing something and so you have to learn a lot in order to generate a research hypothesis that well first that someone hasn't already el hasn't already thought of and disproved which is highly probable it's actually depressing to gather more and more knowledge because what you find is that everyone's already thought of everything and and most your ideas are stupid so yeah so anyways now let's see oh yes here's another reason not to take the course there's a lot of reading and there's less reading than there was last year I took out one paper that was too hard I think it was too hard for people even though it was a great paper and but I left the rest of it in and so if you're looking for a course with a light reading load this isn't that course because this has a heavy reading load now on the upside for your essays I don't require you to read outside the course you can use the material that's in the course to write the essay so it's self-contained but there's a lot of reading and it's not easy reading and partly because a lot of it is original papers all the stuff that's listed on the web is original papers and then the textbook too it's a tough textbook it's mostly text it doesn't have a lot of pictures in it it has no stories at all about celebrities I think that's the only text left that doesn't have stories about celebrities in it so if you're if you're taking a tough course semester and you don't have a lot of time to read then well this isn't a course like that it's a course where there's an awful lot to read and the thing about the reading too is that you have to think about it you know like how fast you can read something seems to be a function of how complicated the words are that would be function one but the second function seems to be something like how many ideas there are per paragraph or maybe per page there are lots of ideas per paragraph in these readings that's why I picked them so you can't just zip through them you have to think about them and well that's a good thing because if you do read them you'll know a lot more at the end of the class than you did at the beginning of the class and you'll find that that knowledge is extremely useful I truly believe that this knowledge can change your life well that's what it was generated for right it's generated by clinicians and and personality psychologists that's what they're out there to do and they're out there to take unrevealed potential that could be anything and to hammer it and shape it into something that's hard and pure and solid and you have to do a lot of reading and writing and thinking to get to a point like that but it really beats the hell out of mucking about in the MC and unfortunately that's how many people live and I've seen the consequences of that and if you spend the next 30 years like that you will be old by the time you're 50 and so I wouldn't recommend that so it's worth doing the work it's really worth it so let's take a look now well first I'll ask you if there are any questions any questions yes so you said the personality analysis will be posted soon oh yeah I'll get the username and passwords up to you pretty quick so I just had to make contact with the guy designed it with to get the code so won't be long um can you buy the at I hope so that's the plan some of you have purchased it perhaps okay so it appears that you can there's also maybe some old texts from rlock floating about you can use those too you can get a good deal on them you can often get them secondhand on Amazon for like 20 bucks if you look the old text is fine except that it has more chapters in it but if you pay attention careful attention to the syllabus that won't be a problem because all the chapters are numbered and all you have to do is match the number on the syllabus to the number in the book so other questions okay so let's take a look at what we're going to learn about lecture two so you can think of human knowledge in some ways as branching into two components you can think of those two components as has knowledge about the subjective world and knowledge about the objective world that's one way of thinking about it the other way you could think about it is knowledge about what things are and knowledge about what to do now most of what you learn in university is knowledge about what things are but that's only half of what you need to know because you really need to know well what you should go about and do this is a real problem for human beings because we're always trying to think having to think of what we should be doing doing next and like that's the fundamental question of life which is well you know what should I do next or what should I do tomorrow or what should I do next week or next month or next year because that's another problem about being human is that not only do we have to figure out what to do next but we can also see the future or multiple Futures even and then we have to determine what those Futures could be and how to avoid others that we don't want to have come into existence at all and then how to configure our Behavior so that as we navigate through the potential future futes we land up more or less somewhere we want and not somewhere we really don't want and so that's a real problem and what that that's an existential problem in fact and what that means is that we need knowledge about the subjective and about the behavioral it's part of potential how do you unravel yourself across time now it's proved very difficult for human beings to formalize that kind of knowledge now we formalize scientific knowledge which is more knowledge about what things are and about the objective world the scientific method especially the research method formalizes our knowledge about the objective world and about what it's made of but it doesn't give us much insight into what to do about that all it seems to do actually is increase our power to do things but not necessarily to inform us as to the direction in which that power should be exerted and you don't really have to look any farther than the 20th century if you want historical proof of that because as people got more and more powerful so that we could sit in this lovely classroom and all be warm and cozy while it's terrible outside we also learned how to kill each other with unprecedented Gusto and potency and so science has enabled us on both sides and that's how it is good or bad on the behavioral side there's a tradition of knowledge and it's an ancient tradition and it's grounded in for of knowledge that are likely tens of thousands of years old or maybe even older than that and those are forms of knowledge that are essentially mythological or religious and the reason that I start with those is first of all religious systems are in many ways theories of personality um and there's very tight associations between certain religions and certain fields of psychology so Judaism is been identified fairly heavily with Freud and Christianity with Carl Jung's work and also with Carl Rogers work Rogers was actually a seminarian and a lot of the ideas about what a person could be so these are ideas about the ideal are derived from religious and mythological substrates because they have to be derived from somewhere right and so you think well how do people get their ideas about what's possible or what should be part of it's through storytelling that's why you go to movies right you go there to see what people could be and you enact all those people on the screen with your bodies well it's happening and you have a little neural system that does that so it puts you right in the action it's an amazing ability amazing human ability and the reason we're so attracted to that sort of thing is because we want to know what to do with ourselves and there's a very large body of very complex information that pertains to that one of the things that Carl Jung said was that one of the things he believed was that that form of knowledge had developed quite explicitly up to about the time of the Renaissance or about to the time of bacon and decart who who founded and Galileo who basically founded the scientific method and then we sort of stopped developing that kind of knowledge and the knowledge of the objective world just leaped ahead and and like exponentially and so that's left us with the same moral intelligence we had in the 1700s but with 21st century technology not necessarily a good thing so part of what we're doing in a sense is rescuing the past you know in my other class sometimes I show Pinocchio the movie how many of you have seen Pinocchio a lot of you he so yeah it's like the most popular animated movie ever made second I think because the Lion King is more popular in there's one scene in Pinocchio where Pinocchio rescues his father from a whale you may remember that you may notice that you watched that and that was perfectly fine as far as you were concerned right that you could watch a puppet swim with a cricket to the bottom of the ocean and rescue his father from a it's like okay so the first thing you might think about is how in the world could you sit there and swallow that and not even no notice notice that you were doing something as absurd and bizarre as any ritual you could possibly imagine well it's it's partly because we're very attracted to narrative and narratives have structure narrative through about behavior and they have a deep structure and they have a deep symbolic structure so for example the whale in Pinocchio wasn't just any ordinary whale wh right because if you remember it also breathed smoke and fire it's very strange behavior for a whale and not may even a whale that strange and that made it a dragon and so partly what that meant was that Pinocchio was rescuing his father from a dragon that's a very old story in fact that story is the oldest story that we have in written form it's a variant of a story that was told by the Mesopotamians about 5,000 years ago so part of that story means well you should rescue your father well from what well from the murky chaos in which your culture is embedded you know you guys are all inheritors of Rich cultural Traditions you know those aren't just words those cultural Traditions Orient you they keep you sane and if they're desicated and broken up and dead and archaic and lying in the bottom of the chaos then you better get them back out of there because without of them you're going to live shallow and difficult lives and that's a bad idea so starting with the historical perspectives we can situate ourselves in maybe some hundreds of thousands of years of History maybe even longer I can I can tell you in one manner it might be longer it turns out that part of the reason that we can see so well which we can human beings can really see well way better than almost any other animal except hunting birds h birds can see better than us but other than that man it's us and that's especially rare among mammals and particularly rare among primates so you might ask yourself well why can we see so well well it turns out that part of the reason is that we co evolved with predatory snakes so predatory snakes are newer than lizards by the way even though you wouldn't think so and there's a woman at UCLA named Lynn isbel who was thinking why do people see so well and so she went she had this snake detection Theory because she'd worked with primates she knew they could really see the sort of camouflage patterns that snake had snakes have and the motion that they make they're really good at detecting that plus human beings are very afraid of snakes innately plus if you take chimpanzees who've never seen a snake and you throw a rubber snake in their cage assuming they're in a cage then they jump to the top of the cage and because they're not happy about that snake but then they look at it and then if they're out in the jungle jungling around and they see a big snake then they have a specific sort of cry they make and they'll stand there for like 9 hours watching a big snake making this noise and all the other chimps depending on how afraid they are also come and look at the snake and so yeah because they want to know what that snakes up to and that's what we want to know too we want to know what the snakes are up to that's for sure and the circuit that we developed to detect snakes the visual circuit is partly what gives us such tremendous acurity of vision and partly the way is Bel figured that out was by correlating primate visual Acuity with the pre and its development over evolutionary time with the prevalence of predatory snakes in that geographical region and she found that there was a very high correlation so we can see sharply partly because we're always looking for snakes and you know that pile of undone homework in your in your in your room that's snakes as far as the part of your brain that developed to deal with snakes is concerned and so you know if you leave a lot of things undone around you then all you've got is snakes and you're their target and so that's no way to live and so that whale down there at the bottom of the ocean that's kind of a variant of a snake it's a dragon even though it's a whale it breathes fire right so let's call it a dragon because that's what it is and the idea that you have to rescue something from the dragon is an unbelievably old story and so that's partly what we're going to be doing at the beginning of this course we're going to be going way back into the MC and and mock of prehistory trying to understand what the hell we've been up to for the last 60 million years cuz that's when our tree dwelling ancestors first really started to deal with predatory snakes and my suspicions are that you're all evolved from one of those little tree dwelling Rats the first one who figured out that if you dropped a snake a stick on a snake it would probably run away so that's what we've been doing for 60 million years throwing sticks at snakes so that's the first lecture and you'll see why when you do the reading why this is broadly relevant because it also Accounts at least in part for the human tendency to demonize people who aren't like us because it turns out that we use the same circuit that we would use to handle predatory reptiles let's say we use that circuit to First process people who are straight strange to us and it makes sense because people who are strange to us who come from different cultures and who represent different ideals are unbelievably dangerous even though they might also be unbelievably beneficial you know the poor Native Americans they came out and they shook hands with the Europeans and then 95% of them died in the next 150 years right they all died of plagues they died of small pox they died of measles measles just wiped them out by the time the pilgrims came to North America which is you know fairly early in North American European history 95% of the Indians were already dead they were welcoming the Europeans because they didn't have many people to get their crops off so meeting someone who's strange is no trivial thing and even if they don't poison you with some horrible illness they'll come along with some cockamamy idea like Marxism and you'll be Chinese and then it'll be the 20th century and 100 million of you will die it's very useful to understand the Deep mythological structures that we live inside and the relationship to our brain and our body really gives you insight into how people function it's helpful the next lecture is on heroic and shamanic initiations and that brings us closer to the present than say 60 million years ago it's more like 50,000 years ago there are shamanic Traditions all over the world and the shaman is kind of the pre cursor to the to the to the to the man of intelligence to the man of intellect the man of culture and he's sort of a doctor and a scientist and a priest all wrapped up into one thing and he's often the person who's in charge of the culture many in many shamanic societies the shaman has a vocabulary vocabulary that vastly exceeds that of his peers and that's because he's been taught it in his initiatory process so that the culture within which that particular people survives can be transmitted down the generations with very little error people can remember things that are transmitted verbally in in pre-literate cultures with unbelievable accuracy and the the the shamanic initiation is very and the heroic initiations as well are very interesting processes because they involve they involve death and rebirth and death and rebirth is more or less equivalent to change so here's something to think about so if there's a mosquito and it wants to make another mosquito it basically lays 10,000 eggs right and then all those eggs hatch and 99,999 of those little mosquitoes die and then one mosquito makes it and lays another 10,000 eggs so it's pretty costly reproductive strategy right but so the way the mosquito works is that it knows that the world is chaotic and dangerous and it has no idea how to survive in that so it just makes a whole pile of mosquitoes and it hopes that one of them will sneak through and each of those mosquitoes is a tiny bit different from each other mosquito in terms of time and place and also genetic structure and maybe one's got some little advantage that allows it to survive but it's costly right it's 9 9,999 to1 otherwise we'd be covered with mosquitoes so so the way the mosquito deals with the fact that you can't figure out what's going on is by producing lots of mosquitoes but the way people figure out what's going on is by producing lots of ideas and ideas are the relationship of ideas to you and the external world is the same as the relationship of animals to the environment so there's a philosopher named Alfred North Whitehead who said human beings evolved to let their ideas die instead of them now that's a smart way of thinking thinking CU it means that you can parse off a little subpersonality of yourself maybe it's angry subpersonality or sad sub personality or an irritated or resentful or you know those aren't exactly ideas they're more like little spirits that are partly you they're kind of stupid because they've only got one direction but there's still variants of you and maybe you can present one of those to someone which you might do if you're dating someone and you want to assuming you still do that if you're dating someone and you want to press them maybe you spin off some little variant of yourself that you think is particularly attractive probably won't work I doubt if that work and if it doesn't work well then you can get all heartbroken and let it die and then maybe the next one you spin off will be a little more you know together and so that's how people progress they progress by dying and coming back to life at different levels say I mean maybe you're just making some little ratty mistake and so you can let it go and you're only ashamed momentarily and it's only a little pain when that circuit dies or maybe it's your whole damn personality that has to go you know and that happens to people when they encounter a catastrophe of one form or another so that might happen if someone Close to You dies or if you lose a limb or if you get an illness or you know any of the horrible things that plague people to very deep levels which might mean pretty much all of you has to go and maybe you'll actually die but if you don't well you can let go of what's holding you back and maybe that's your old self and then you can come back to life and I'll tell you it's a lot better to do that voluntarily before it's necessary than involuntarily in a moment of Crisis and I would say in some ways that's the lesson of Clinical Psychology confront the damn snakes first because it's really hard to get out of their bellies once they've eaten you so the shaman the shamanic initiations are death and rebirth initiations they formalize that they're often the the rituals themselves are often accompanied by the use of different classes of hallucinogens which for one reason or another seem to facilitate at least symbolically the process of transformation from life to death and back to life so they're dramatizations of the process by which people learn you learn something to really learn it some presupposition that you had before that has to crumble and then the new information comes in and you can build a new self around it but it's a painful process and that's partly why people stick to their ideas or their past selves you know when you could stick to your past self and that would be fine except that everything's changing around you all the time and so if you don't change then you just get more and more outdated you're more and more archaic none of your presuppositions work anymore and so you're like you're like this Rusty machine clanking around running into things all the time and your life is very miserable because you don't fit the environment anymore and so when I talk about personality and its Transformations something that you could ask yourself which is in some way the most fundamental question you can ask yourself is are you the thing that stays the same or are you the thing that changes and you know the thing that changes can live in a lot more places and so that's worth thinking about but the cost is well when you change you die a little bit and that's painful or maybe you die a lot and that's really painful so if you ever wonder why people don't change that's part of the reason then we the next section is on constructivism we're going to talk mostly about P he's actually a developmental psychologist um I like PJ a lot because PJ had an interesting question is which is it's not a genetic question or an environmental question and you know you might think those are the only two kinds of questions there are when you're thinking about the dev but it's not exactly that here here's why it's not clear to what degree you're specified by your genes so here's one possibility so let's say that encoded in your genetic structure are a whole variety of potential use like who knows how many all the potential use that the entire history of mankind has been able to weave into their genetic structure they're all sitting down there encoded in your genes and then that very complex structure that's r with potential pops out into a particular environment and then it interacts with that environment like a program interacts with a computer and gathers information of one form or another it takes that information and the material that it incorporates and builds the real you out of that and that's what P was studying he was trying to figure out how does a child go about taking itself from you know this thing that just lays there squats basically to something that's you know you go on YouTube and you see what people can do what human beings can do it's bloody unbelievable I mean we're so ridiculously versatile people can do things that are just impossible in in every Dimension you know intellectually physically spiritually they can even eat hot dogs at a rate that you can hardly imagine you know were very variable and P was very interested in trying to figure out how all of that embodied variability could come out of this little package of potential at the beginning of life it's very interesting so that's constructivism how does the individual construct him or herself from nothing in some ways from birth forward and so P especially his discussion of infant development sort of like the analysis of the unfolding of a human being because people do unfold too you know mean because babies when they're born they're all crunched up like this and so they have to stretch themselves out and you know get going and that was P's concern so so that's that's good and then we go from there to depth psychology you might think about that more as psychoanalysis now people have people aren't very happy generally speaking about analytic Theory especially if they're research oriented but there's a variety of reasons for that and one of them is they don't know anything about it that would be the first reason and people are often tempted to denigrate anything they don't understand and it's actually kind of hard to understand psychoanalytic thinking it's in fact it's very hard and the other thing about like scientists and research scientists who are engaged in psychological work is they're actually usually fairly mentally healthy you know at least they're healthy enough to to be scientists which you know you got to be pretty healthy to be a scientist you got to be disciplined you got to be able to get up and go to work every day you have to be able to think about complex things you have to be very orderly and persistent you know and so there's a lot of Demand on you if you're a scientific researcher so the problem with scientific researchers they hang around with other scientific researchers then they think that's what human beings are like and human beings are nothing like scientific researchers they're a tiny minority of the population and they're as bizarre as like albino buffalo and to to think of them as representative of human beings is insane first of all most of them have IQs in the 99th percentile so it's like why bother even thinking about them normal human beings are very weird especially the ones that don't function well and not functioning well is is a bottomless pit that that's why hell is a bottomless pit by because not functioning well is a bottomless pit and if you're dealing with people who aren't functioning well one of the most mysterious things is how they can take a situation that's God awful beyond your worst imaginings and then think up three or four creative ways to make it worse and if you're dealing with someone like that and you do if you're a clinician if you're dealing with someone like that good luck with your behavioral interventions man that's like throwing sticks at an elephant you're just not going to get anywhere and one of the ways I want to demonstrate this to you I'm going to show you a film called crumb crumb's a harsh film but it's the best documentary by the way of an underground comic named Robert Crum who's actually quite a genius even though he's perverse in precisely the Freudian ways that are interesting and his brothers are even worse so I'll walk you through that because I can't figure out any other way of giving you a taste of what Freudian Psychopathology is like it's not pretty and that's the other reason that sort of clean- minded research scientists don't like psychoanalytic thinking because it's really in many ways it deals with the most disgusting elements of human behavior and so it's not even that Pleasant to think about and then there's Yung who we'll talk about after Freud and Yung is so strange that he makes Freud look normal and Yung believed that as as I mentioned earlier believed that there is a universal grammar of ethics of morality it's not arbitrary it's not relative you know in the universities the theory has been at least since the 1960s that one person's ethics is as good as another person and there's no way of distinguishing reliably between them well I happen to think that's absolute nonsense it's also extremely dangerous nonsense and I also think there's no evidence for it whatsoever because we now know a lot about human universals which are aspects of human behavior that are constant across all cultures and there are a lot of them there are a lot of them and the other thing is there's just not that many ways that half mad primates can gather together in large groups and live productively it's not easy like you think of all the civilization work that went into allowing all you people from all these different cultures to sit here in peace and comfort it's mindboggling if you think there's a million ways to do that well think again maybe there's one way to do that you know and we do it well enough so here we are and no one's being knifed so so that's Yung and he's profound beyond belief really beyond belief so that's those guys all dealt with unconscious now it's it's kind of interesting to think about what the unconscious means and so I I can give you a bit of a hint it's it's partly the information that's coded in your behavior so for example there are a lot of things that you can do with your body that you don't know how you do like you don't know how you walk for example or how you ride a bike or how you talk you can talk but you don't know how you talk you just move your mouth I know but you get the point right you have no conscious apprehension whatsoever of the micro details that are necessary to allow you to move your mouth so there's a lot of information encoded in you that you don't have conscious access to and it's not only physiologically encoded it's also culturally encoded because you've been targeted and shaped by the interactions of all the people you've ever encountered and they in turn by all the people they've ever encountered including their ancestors so you're the product of this unbelievably complex multigenerational exchange of information that in some ways is all about how to make you acceptable to the public and there's only certain ways you can be acceptable to the public you know you have to be relatively clean for example at least in our society you can't be too boring or you won't have any friends you also can't be too exciting you know you can't be too violent you can't be too empty-headed unless you're associating with people who like to feel Superior you know there's there's we put a lot of Demands on each other in terms of what constitutes acceptability let alone ideal we're always telling each other about both of those what's acceptable what's ideal every interaction you have shapes you into an approximation of acceptable and ideal and that's all encoded in you too it's encoded in your behavior it's also encoded in your imagination and that's why you can go to a movie and you can instantly identify the hero and the villain which is of course the first thing you do when you go to a movie because otherwise it can't make sense out of it and so that encoding prior to articulation that's all the unconscious and that's what the psychoanalysts were interested in analyzing now the cognitive neuroscientists have kind of got there too but they're sort of diluted into thinking that what's in your head is information and then it's ideas and those are sort of cold and dead things and your head is not full of ideas and information it's full of devils and snakes and the psychoanalyst knew that and by that I mean you're alive and so are your subcomponents and all your little subpersonalities and not just ideas they see they think they hear they feel they have aims as you know for example when you get possessed by anger the aim can be entirely destructive I want to bring down the person I love half an hour later you think what the hell was I thinking about it's like yeah no kidding well you weren't thinking you're just possessed by a little subpersonality and that's what the psychoanalysts were interested in subpersonalities fantasies next we go to the humanists and the existentialists now they're interesting because they come at the problem of what's wrong with people from a kind of Universalist perspective now for Freud if you weren't sick you were healthy and that seems obvious because you we think you can make a clear distinction between sick and healthy but the existentialists they didn't want any of that their hypothesis was if you're [Music] human you're sick there's no way out of it and the reason you're sick in a sense and unlike any other animal is that life itself poses a paradoxical problem to you partly because you're so conscious and because you're self-conscious and actually a sequence of paradoxical problems a how do you live When You're vulnerable and Mortal that's a rough one because you might say well why should I bother it all or who's going to know anyways in a thousand years or a million years or why is there suffering or how do you go on in the face of Cruelty those are questions that grip at people's soul and crush it and they're not a consequence of mental illness it's like what how long should it take you to recover if your whole family is wiped out in a car accident what's healthy well we don't know the answer to that it's like should you ever recover maybe if you were halfways empathic it would just kill you you know a lot of times people can't recover from their grief because they're guilty they think how can I how can I live when all those people close to me died and they died unfairly well that's an existential problem and then so the there's one class which is vulnerability and mortality everyone's got that staring at them so how do you deal with that hard question second class of problems Well everybody's always evaluating you always and you're never good enough so what that means is that you're always in an insufficient relationship with society and history no matter how good you get it's not good enough and so history itself as well as culture always faces you as a judge and so that's the second category of existential problem then the third Pro problem is well what to do about you yourself you know there's nature you have to contend with and there's culture you have to contend with and then you've got yourself and your self-consciousness and your deep knowledge of all the things about you that could really use some repair and the thing about those problems is that everyone has them and they' always had them and as far as we know they always will and so they're built into the condition of Being Human and that's what existentialism is about it's like life is a paradoxical problem is there any possible solution to a paradoxical problem well that's that's that's in some ways the question of the meaning of life and one hint is that well what's the meaning of life and one answer to that is this is the hint is that that the meaning to life is the pattern of thought and action that you take that enables you to tolerate at least tolerate the conditions of life and then maybe you could move One Step Beyond that if you're feeling a little optimistic and say the meaning of life is the pattern of conception and action that enables you to welcome the conditions of life and then you might ask yourself well is there such a mode of being given the nature of the problem that you have to contend with is there actually a mode of being that would enable that you could say the vulnerability the Judgment the insufficiency it's worth it under these conditions and that's the other existential question and the people who posed those questions they weren't messing around you're going to read people like Frankle Victor Frankl and Alexander Sol niton and what those two people live through I mean it's unimaginably horrible and when they were wrestling with the questions that I just described they weren't academic they weren't academic issues they were embodied issues of life and culture and genocide and cruelty and so their examination of that had to be deep enough to be able to contend with questions like that and answers that are deep enough to contend with questions like that are frightening answers and we have reading week it'll be a relief the last part of the course this is when we switch over into the more scientific domain and so we're going to do two things as I said we're going to take a pretty deep look at how the brain functions as far as we know in our current state of unimaginable ignorance like we we really know so little about the brain or maybe we know a bit a bit about the brain but we certainly don't know anything yet about Consciousness and Consciousness seems to be a very well it's a relevant part of the brain right it's sort of the part that everybody cares about since Consciousness in some sense seems to be you even more than your brain is you I mean your brain it's just this thing inside your skull but your Consciousness you know that's your being we don't have a clue about Consciousness I our scientific we're not even able to conceptualize it in a scientific manner it's a real mystery so but having said that there's still plenty of things that are interesting to know about the brain and one of the things we're going to do and this is sort of associated with the Freudian idea of the ID you know the ID for Freud was the natural self and so that was your primordial you could think about them as drives or Temptations or or values values is probably the most accurate anger sexuality those are the top two Freudian concerns there's plenty others eating Freud didn't care about that we do now because everyone has an eating disorder or virtually everyone so for the victorians it was sexuality for us it's food sex doesn't seem to be a problem but we just can't eat anymore so we're going to take a look at the low level biological systems in the brain and those are systems God some of those systems are so old that even Crustaceans have them so for example this is so cool so if you give a lobster who's been defeated in a dominance fight because they fight for dominance and they might even know it if you give the lobster if you take a lobster who's been defeated in a dominance dispute he'll go back to his little lobster hole and pout and when when he's pouting he gets all collapsed and you can't even really get him out of his hole with a stick cuz he's going to sit in there and you know be upset about his dominance defeat and maybe he'll come out as kind of a new Lobster all ready to go again and maybe not if you take that same Lobster and you give him anti-depressants right after he fights he won't go back into his cave and hide and he'll fight right away again and so you think about that that means that the circuitry that underlies our defeat related depression is 300 million years old and even crustations have it so that's way down in your brain stem man cuz lobsters hardly even have brain in fact if the lobster is big and tough and he's been a dominant lobster for a long time and he gets defeated badly then when he goes off to pout he has to dissolve his whole brain because all it does is dominant stuff then he grows a new subordinate brain and he weasel around with that for a while so and that's useful to think about the next time you really get defeated because all that pain you're going through it's like you got some circuit repairs to make and if you've been badly defeated well maybe you should just let yourself collapse and and all that stuff clear away so that you could come back so that's lowlevel stuff brain stem stuff it's way down at the bottom of your being you know but we're going to talk about systems that are above that too but still low the hypothalamus for example it's a very cool brain area it's sort of responsible for all the basic drives hunger temperature regulation sexuality um defensive aggression predatory aggression looks like it's something different everyone has those systems you know so they're like these sub beings that live inside us but they're also preconditions for communication you know cuz you might say to your friend I'm angry today and your friend doesn't say well what do you mean angry he says well what happened to upset you because he knows what anger means and the reason he knows that is because he's already got it in his head he's like you he gets angry he gets sad gets afraid has the basic emotions but not only the basic emotions but the basic motivations and so we're going to look at the brain systems that underly the basic motivations and the basic emotions and in some sense those systems are equivalent to the physiological incarnation of the ID that Freud described at the end of the 19th century and so that's a nice way to look at it you'll go through the psychoanalytic thinking which which kind of puts Flesh on these systems because for the psycho analysts and this is why they're still relevant those weren't just systems they were living personal ities narrow oneeyed personalities they only want one thing but personalities nonetheless ancient gods that's another way of looking at them and things you have to contend with whether you believe in them or not we'll discuss all five traits as well extraversion as I said that's positive emotion neuroticism that's negative emotion people vary on those Dimensions agreeableness that seems to be associated with maternal behavior on one end and predatory hunting on another because human beings are hunters and mammals it's a weird combination right because if you're hunting mammal you have to figure out how not to kill and eat your children right and that happens in lots of mamalian species especially among the males so they have to be moved away but human beings have solved that more or less you know it gets complicated in mixed families because if you're the child of a stepparent you have 100 times the likelihood of being a abused so we'll talk about conscientiousness which is a great predictor of long-term life success but also associated with fascist political pre predispositions because it turns out that the way you vote has very little to do with what you think and very much to do with what your temperament is so even for high level cognitive functions like political belief these underlying systems play a determining role last two things we're going to talk about performance prediction and by that I mean well there's been in crewing evidence you might say what what what how do you have a happy life first of all I would say that's a stupid question but we'll go because happiness isn't it's not the right aim it's it's a way it's not a place to go it's a it's a manner of manifestation while you're journeying it's something like that leaving that aside what do you need to live a high quality life well we kind of know that already I mean it's it's kind of obvious you know you need friends you need Intimate Relationships you need meaningful work you know having more money than will pay your bills doesn't seem to help that much etc etc so it's like you know it's like intelligent moderation and discipline it's very boring it's exactly what you'd expect if you were pessimistic about excitement performance prediction we're going to look very carefully at the nature of the traits that make people successful in life and you know you might say well what do you mean by successful but you know one of the things I mean is not in too much pain and anxiety because that turns out to actually be more important to people than being happy you know if you say to people what do you want they say I want to be happy but if you analyze what they mean by happy they mostly mean not suffering and not terrified you get those two things under control like the worst that can happen to you is that you'll be bored so and then we'll wrap it up at the end okay so that's the course so um I'm glad to be teaching it it's good to see all of you here it looks like you kind of have a comfortable classroom so that's kind of nice um decide if you decide if you want to take the course because I don't want you to be disappointed at the end so I'm really I'm really telling you seriously you got to like ideas if you like this lecture you'll like the course and you got to do the reading and there's a fair bit of reading so we'll see you Thursday