howdy all right we are back with our chapter 4 um biology of behavior I think this would be part three so so far we have talked about the cellular level of the nervous system and then we talked about the peripheral nervous system and we even got into the central nervous system and our depiction of the spinal cord so the only thing that's left is the brain brain look at that be oh Her Majesty okay so the brain interprets and stores information and sends orders to the muscles gland and organs it is the most complex part of the nervous system I submit to you the hypothesis opinion that it's the most complex part of the human body and perhaps the human brain is the most complex organ um or part of body of any species that one's kind of a hot take it certainly allows for the richest information processing within the human body um or within any organism that has a brain okay so uh the study of the brain started off with phenology so way back in the day um our ancestors used to Guess that the structure of our skull could tell them about all different all sorts of different things about us so when I was first thought about phenology I was taught that it goes kind of hand inand with with another ancient technique called trepanning where they would drill a hole into your skull usually to like release evil spirits but um or at least that was my impression um you'd have to do a whole history class on the history of abnormal psychology throughout the Millennia um but anyways uh my impression was that it was mainly like a spirit there's a big connection between something like spirituality and psychology the more you study it the more difficult it is to remove something like a self or a soul especially the more you try and understand and kind of like fight for the hope that we have something like free will so there was this uh practice of drilling a hole in someone's School release evil spirits but also associated with other sorts of um disorders or diseases things that we now would call like epilepsy trauma and things like headaches and other mental illnesses surprisingly people actually survived trepanning as I said um it seems to be the case that these two practices phenology is kind of like using the school to understand things like your personality and overall functioning um that probably is at least relevant to the surgical procedure of tranning but um they also kind of exist in their own separate worlds as well the more you know right so like the drilling Poes part less than ideal I think we can all agree with that however it's kind of impressive that they kind of mapped out something up here in terms of like what kind of determines all the different parts of you so if you just like go back back in time right like think about how much Insight they would have to have that this either they were like chopping up bodies and like recognize that there was some like big old foldy organ in the head type Arena but then they'd have to figure out that like their conscious thoughts really do seem to be happening like up here you know that that organ is responsible for like a lot of stuff and they were kind of like not wrong in fact I mean they were wrong about the Skull part and they were wrong about the you should just like drill holes into skulls part um but the basic idea that something up here um is determining LS of parts of who you are is basically modern Neuroscience so since then we have tried to map out different parts of the brain and come up with what all those parts of the brain do and I'm going to talk about both hopefully what gets across is how amazing it is that we've been able to do that and it does seem to be the case that parts of the brain are um necessary for the downstream consequence of behavior it's really hard really really really hard to get at meaningful interpretations of any of that so for instance the idea that or any study that you read on something like coffee for instance and what coffee might do to your health or like mental health or otherwise so most of the time when we're looking at those sorts of studies if they include some sort of like neurological data or biological data it seems more real and more like clearly correct however there really is this big gap between research and actual implications of that research um so let's say they did a study and found that coffee I don't know uh actually I was just talking about this earlier that it depends what time of day you drink coffee okay so rather than try and explain it myself we're going to watch uh this sort of applying science to real life In Action especially using like the biomedical biochemical sort of approach so here's the background information Dr Andrew huberman is like this really famous really well-known scientist on The interwebs and he's especially wellknown in that he's able to take like the basic science sort of literature and explain how you can apply it in your real life this is huge this is important this is a beautiful thing I'm not saying anything besides admiration for Dr hberman however what he's doing is also illustrating what science does this doesn't mean that he's lying and that blah blah blah blah blah it just means like this is what happens with science and there is a disconnect between the basic science and how it actually works in the real world and then we'll explain sort of why I hope you stick with me on this I think this is fascinating it's one of my favorite examples because I am quite addicted to coffee and you will not take it away from me okay so this on the other hand is um oh my gosh what's his name James Hoffman and so James Hoffman is like the YouTube coffee dude he's really impressive when it comes to making the best coffee and he's really fun okay so first we're gonna see what Dr hberman says about coffee in the morning and notice how he gives background information and he's a he's a Stanford Professor trusted scientist there's no lies here you know it's interpretation looked at these tried them tested them and people ask me about them for one specific reason in there he makes a very specific recommendation regarding your coffee in the morning I purposefully delay my caffeine intake to 90 minutes to 120 minutes after I wake up one of the factors that induces a sense of sleepiness is the buildup of adenosine I want to make sure that I don't have a late afternoon or even early afternoon Crash from caffeine one of the best ways to ensure a caffeine crash is to drink a bunch of caffeine block all those adenosine receptors and then by early or late afternoon when that caffeine starts to wear off and gets dislodged from The receptors a lower level of adenosine is able to create a greater level of sleepiness now that's very compelling the biology the biochemistry of all okay so adenine makes you sleep caffeine makes you energize those two are kind of competing if you drink a lot of caffeine you're just blocking receptors but there's still going to be adenine in your body and so when it wears off um you're more sensitive to the adenosine which means you get sleepy and like lots of people experience this afternoon crash so a lot of people hear that and be like Oh that explains it but then and very importantly he gives a recommendation basically to reduce your caffeine intake in the morning or delay it because of this basic science fact of like what adenosine does to the system versus what caffeine does and that that recommendation would require an experiment in order to really test call back to chapter two what's the difference between an experiment and a descriptive study descriptive study is what I'm calling basic science like um explaining what a denzine is versus explaining what caffeine or cortisol is so on and so forth so what's the difference between experiment versus descriptive studies yes experiments manipulate the independent variable if you do not manipulate the independent variable you cannot philosophically theoretically speaking determine causality good job um and that's what he's going to explain in just a minute which I think is brilliant and this is what each individual person is capable of doing if you decide that you are capable of doing it this man does not have a PhD this man is a curious individual person with probably a similar level of Education as you all ah he probably already got his bachelor's degree let's let's listen makes sense to me it's presented with a great deal of confidence as if this is fact makes sense that I should skip my morning coffee I should wait and I will feel better later in the day but there's an important thing to understand that I don't think is properly disclosed here this may be science based tools for everyday life but the science behind this isn't really there this recommendation is kind of an inference it's a a recommendation based on some studies but none that have asked and answered this exact question there are no Metro anal okay so that's really important I'm going to show you another scene that describes something else about basic science especially from the biochemical sphere in a minute he has taken it upon himself to understand the science I don't know what his bachelor's degree is in but he's talking amongst people with phds using basic science Intel and listening to the debates and then responding intelligently and then applying his own knowledge base which is coffee he's the coffee dude so um next he talks about how people have okay like taken it upon themselves to try this new morning routine and saying well they don't experience this afternoon decrease anymore but the thing is those people are highly motivated to see their change and their actions as being helpful like imagine you decrease the amount of caffeine you had in the morning you pushed it off 90 minutes you really want that to work and you're trusting the science dude who tells you that it's going to work basically he's arguing that it could be like a little bit of a placebo effect um so then he calls upon another science um Communicator who's really popular on the internet whose name is escaping me right now but we're going to hear from him in just a second um to talk about another type of science study and like what why that can be kind of problematic so the type of science study that he's responding to which again is very like physiological data um and very neuro to nervous systems because they're talking about cortisol which is the stress hormone so coffee increases cortisol we know that we've seen it blah blah blah blah um but then other people argue that cortisol makes you store fat so if you drink coffee then you're that's bad for fat loss basically um and so now we're going to listen to the response if you actually look at the randomized control trials that isn't what you see if we take people and we have them take caffeine or drink coffee and all the things do they gain body fat no they do not in fact sometimes the opposite happens and his argument is what you've got here is a single mechanism you find a mechanism a specific hormone okay this is what I want you to pay attention to this is like most applied science you're taking one Mech mechanism coffee that might raise some hormone once you have data that says look I can show you an increase in this hormone suddenly everybody bows down because everybody's nervous to debate with something like that because we think that when it comes to hard science there's correct and incorrect answers first of all already that's unlikely to be true um at least in terms of everyone when you have data uh that doesn't mean to generalize this to everybody but even if you did have like a pretty simple fact like coffee in general almost always raises cortisol then what people try and do with that is make recommendations based off of that and that's where things will always get sticky and he explains why beautifully you say o this raises that hormone that means you're going to get this Downstream effect outcomes are not just a single mechanism usually whole body outcomes are the accumulation of hundreds if not thousands of mechanisms all occurring at the same time that actually results in outcomes and so you kind just okay so if your cortisol is increased by coffee yeah um that it probably is one mechanism that increases cortisol throughout your day your cortisol is on a roller coaster that is just one thing that's influencing your cortisol levels plus you don't know even if a coffee increases cortisol in one moment that doesn't mean that then coffee is done working on your body there might be an in a decrease in another moment which equals to homeostasis blah blah blah blah blah there are a million a million Downstream effects science is very good at looking at the data point with these variables you can barely even see any light through that just like one or two and that is wonderful and important and has led us to all sorts of technological advances so I'm not saying by any means that we throw signs out entirely I'm saying that it is important that we be like um James here and James Hoffman and use our own lives and be able to test out science now you're not going to be able to test out every recommendation that any scientist or doctor gives you which is why it's so wonderful that we can do things like randomized controls to see what works but the point is like you need to be in touch with your own body and you need to have an education about in general what your body is doing and then guess about your body's response so for some people like workouts that increase their cortisol a lot like high-intensity workouts at some point in their lives that's going to be really use ful to them and other points of your life that's going to feel like death to you and that is not the correct answer um because every person's hormone levels are being influenced by a million different things and depending what on What other mechanisms are influencing that one hormone that has a million Downstream effects including something like fat loss or fat gain a million different things influence fat loss or fat gain just like a million things influence cortisol um so if you try and take just one mechanism out of a million that influence is this which has a million different Downstream consequences you're going to drive yourself bad because maybe some of those work for sure in One Moment In Time and another moment in time it won't work because some of the other mechanisms in your life have changed which means getting an education is wonderful and being and knowing when okay I lack Insight I lack knowledge in this area and I'm going to gain it and then I'm going to use that knowledge in a way that works for me that's what really good education offers that's what critical thinking offers I will never be able to give you no one will ever if they try to you know they're lying a million different um steps that are going to change your life and if you follow this plan exactly your life is going to be perfect you know immediately that person either does not understand science or is lying to you that doesn't mean that people won't be able to give you really good recommendations but you have to be able to test it within you um I love this video I think you should watch the entirety of it um he actually tests it himself um using a double bind uh or double blind mechanism so like he doesn't know if it's decaf or caffeinated coffee they found out that they couldn't tell the difference between whether or not they had decaf or caffeine so this mechanism that supposedly makes such a difference on things like tiredness what the biggest thing that they found is they really couldn't tell a difference watch it if you're interested all that being said um our brains are way more similar than they are different however the nuances of each of our brains are very meaningful in terms of the implications of how our brain functions and how that actually feels to us how we experience it and other again sort of Downstream health effects all right but anyways three main parts of the brain forbrain hindbrain midbrain especially if we're looking at like structures so forbrain all the foldy parts then we got the midbrain this little doodad in the middle it's so mid it's in between and then we have the hindbrain the hind brain um think about the hind brain as being like the most uh archaic or ancient it's called the the ancient part of the brain and by ancient I mean like okay um if humans have evolved from being just another species just like any other animal right to being the super sophisticated beings that we are now um rewind time the structures of the hind brain this is not true what I'm about to say is not true but to illustrate what the hindbrain actually does we're going to pretend like it's true if humans were just little robots or just like ants you know all we had to do was like stay alive and do the most basic movements and didn't have to plan for those movements so it really seems like ants for example are not like sitting there with some blueprints like planning out the tunnels that they're going to dig they just kind of do it so they don't have that planfulness that humans have versus humans like when we built the pyramids for instance most of the humans working on the pyramids were sort of just like being doing what they were told but somebody had to tell them what to do in addition for humans to build the uh uh pyramids they had to be told explicitly what to do it wasn't coming from somewhere in their brain okay so if all humans had to do was like simply stay alive this is not true but like you could think about the hind brain as being like the hind brain could keep you alive and doing the most basic activities like as if we were ants that's why why I think of like the ancient parts of the brain and arguably things like the for brain including the lyic system in here have probably evolved the most to allow us to have more higher order thinking and then the midbrain I just think about being like the connector piece Okay small tangent so as I said in the beginning of the this chapter um it's really useful to get the basic jargon down so I'm going to kind of give you the basics about what each parts of the brain is sort of associated with um I'll walk you through those I beg your pardon how ever I kind of think about it being at least a little bit of a lie in the end and here and it's not that they're a lie but it's that like if all I had you do was list out each part of the brain and tell me what functions are associated with that part of the brain that would be so watered down that at the end of the day it's almost kind of a lie you know when you look at how complex it is so if you try and do that like in other classes for instance or in this class and you just can't get yourself to memorize like part of the brain and function I really want you to trust that wisdom because basically what I've learned getting super old as I have um is that each time I return back to like a part of the brain whether it's down to the cellular level or um like structures in the brain each time I return I'm able to add a new nuance and each new nuance like kind of completely changes how I saw that part of the brain before so and hopefully I'll give you a couple examples about what I mean so in truth the brain is complex and research is mostly correlational um for instance to just give one idea about um what I mean by this it's that if for example if anyone part of the brain serves a specific function it does so in con ERT with other parts of the brain that's one of the reasons why you will drive yourself Looney if you try and just separate out structure and function because almost every structure ends up being like kind of implicated in like so many different like basic functions like oh my gosh if you try like for a base an intro class you might be able to have um such a large structure of the brain because there's different ways of organizing the brain right like we could go down to like tiny little spaces down to the pathways we talked about one of the pathways of the basil ganglia last time so yeah if you go down to that basic of a level you might get to a very specific function but in general if you zoom out even a little bit something like memory or language like so many different parts of the brain end up being responsible for memory or language so if you try to memorize it like you're memorizing like a vocabulary list what I have found for me is that it drove me sort of loony it's like how many different parts of the brain are implicated in something like memory and if someone asked me like which part of the brain is important for memory I'd have to give them this like laundry list so then the question becomes like um how is memory actually created and that is such a more interesting question perhaps a more important question but a kind of impossibly hard question to ask we are going to try and describe maybe how some memories get created via the coordination of many different parts of the brain but at the end of the day if all you do is memorize that like the hippocampus is memory what you end up what you might end up believing is like the hippocampus is like the storage space of the brain and that doesn't seem to be the case in fact the way that the hippocampus is important for memory is like kind of a mystery and it sort of takes a little bit of artistry to imagine how or why that's happening okay that being said we're going to try and give the basics anyway give like a kind of play of the land like General Vibe of different parts of the brain like we talked about the H brain so the midbrain if you Google it or ask AI it's going to tell you the midbrain is responsible for all sorts of things the way that I think about the midbrain is like it's this in between piece to the ancient parts of the brain the hind brain that's kind of like basic survival and the other parts of the brain which are more sophisticated kind of like the farther you get away from the hind brain the more sophisticated it gets kind of a deal um so the lyic system in here these parts is still like a bit more automatic but um but really important for higher order thinking and then the foldy parts up here are like you know personality and um planful Behavior things like that so I think about the hindbrain as being a connecting piece so I think about words like integrates and coordinates it integrates movements with sensory input and it coordinates simple movements with sensory input so it really is this like quintessential middleman there'll be other descriptions that are better because some people's entire career is studying this one little part of the brain okay then the hind brain we have the ancient and most basic brain structures these major brain structures include the medulla the cerebellum and the ponds and again I think about these as like keeping you alive so when it comes to the medulla for for instance right at the base of the spinal cord we have vital functions like um blood pressure heart rate and breathing uh so again just keeping the human alive you can feel the medulla best or the implications of the medulla when you stand up super fast and you get all lightheaded that's because basically the medulla thought you were chilling the medulla was like we on the couch we cool and then some other part of your brain that just remembered that you have a meeting in 20 minutes that you totally forgot about is GNA make you jump up before the medulla kind of catches up because the medulla that you were chilling the planful part of your brain that has all these other plans besides just trying to survive hadn't totally communicated with the medulla yet and if you think about like the big jolt from like chilling to uh kind of thing like you have to re-regulate a lot of different vital function processes is like heart rate blood pressure and breathing and if the medulla hasn't done that yet it's going to get you know the other parts of the brain aren't going to catch up and feel okay until the medulla catches up and feels okay then you have the ponds which is right here above the medulla ponds is going to be mostly responsible as like a more of a crossover section maybe between the cerebellum and like other parts of the body that help you move in a more sophisticated way it also regulates things are like very unconscious like things like sleep dreaming um and a wakefulness which is kind of what I mean by arousal significant to the reticular activating system which we'll get to later it kind of serves as like filter um to determine what stimuli matter which ones you you are going to actually perceive which is versus which things are going to be sort of sorted out if the medulla has to like keep you alive at different levels of like functionality and attentiveness and speed and whatnot the pwns is trying to respond to some of that neural energy because I also think about it as like neural Pathways like once something in down here changes um it might send signals up here or it might send signals down the spinal cord like the direction of neural communication is interesting Rabbit Hole to jump down um but the stuff that's getting sent up here has to kind of go through the ponds um to a certain extent you know depending on how long axons are or whatever this is one of my favorite um tricks that one of my um psychology professors taught us and we didn't get too much into like the weeds of it but it helped me understand just how much the brain is really set up to commun unicate and it's almost like the behaviors are like the downstream consequence of the communication which I mean some of the communication is there to make you behave a certain way but anyways um yeah keeping in mind which structures are like kind of right next door to other structures sometimes teaches you about why the brain does what it does so for instance like the old factory parts of the brain so smell is really close by to memory which might be why we um memory and like emotion which might be one of the reasons why when we smell something where certain smells anyways um we sort of it feels like a memory um almost like the essence of a memory or it pulls us into emotional types of memory so when you smell like a pumpkin spice candle for instance um you might feel basically this feeling of Christmas which is like the amalgam or whatever fall/ witer holiday Cate you celebrate so like um old factories right next to memory so what's really happening is a lot of uh neural energy activation whatever is going on in the smell part of the brain but it's like in order to turn that on it's going to communicate via memory and so that's why memory is connected to smell I don't know the degree to which that's been like scientifically proven or anything like that to be honest um but I really liked that way of thinking about the brain if for no other reason and it really emphasized to me how much the brain is about communicating and um yeah okay so then we have the cerebellum which almost looks like this tiny brain all on its own because it's coordinating it's it's doing kind of a lot especially compared to other parts of the hind brain so the celum is important for fine coordinated movement maybe something like walking things that are really well rehearsed and you can um feel the effect of cerebellin the most uh via sorry things like stroke and alcohol so when you drink alcohol the brain is kind of immediately impacted because it travels through the blood really well um so and it's going to hit the cerebellum pretty hard and that's one of the reasons why we have poor coordination and balance when we drink um and why our speech is sometimes also sort of slurred because we don't think about speech as being like a movement per se but it is like your your mouth and your tongue have to coordinate really well to produce the correct sounding sounds and so the fact that when the cerebellum is influenced our speech is slurred teaches us just how much communication is yeah thoughts but also specific behaviors okay so moving on to the forbrain there's two major components of the forbrain the lyic system and the cerebral cortex the lyic system we'll talk about there's a couple specific structures in there that really do like basically look fairly different and then the cerebral cortex basically think about like the foldy parts and then you have like the insula which is kind of like more foldy parts inside the outside foldy Parts okay um so uh let's talk about the complexities of the brain first because basically uh part four of this chapter is going to be talking about the lyic system and we're going to get some practice putting together structures to try and describe how yeah each one is kind of responsible for different functions but when you look at the downstream consequences of any of those functions it's really hard to not describe them together and um I want to add a couple complexities because to say that one part of the brain is purely responsible for like decision making or something kind of ignores how that part of the brain even kind of like gets turned on or something like that so the first complex I want to point out is um the default Network so you have a default Network in your brain which is basically like when you're not doing anything so there's the I like talking about the default Network in the most basic sense um for one reason and that's we have this intuition that like um behaviors and thoughts equal more neural activation and so if you're doing nothing nothing like chilling then that's going to mean less activation in the brain while that might be true importantly you're never not using any of your brain or you're dead so instead what it is is even something like Chillin is still a verb and that verb is associated with parts of the brain that must be activated in order to maintain the important behavior of chilling so the default network is basically your chill it's like you're sitting on the couch maybe you're scrolling or maybe you're just kind of like passively thinking like there's other people around you you're not trying to think about anything particular maybe there's a show on TV that you've seen a million times that kind of a Vibe is like basically the default Network and another thing that I want to point out is that um in order to do something else in order to do something active basically you have to turn off that part of the brain so for instance older adults struggle with suppressing the default Network I think it's the case that you even have to apply more more neural activity in order to suppress you kind of need yeah you need like some sort of um neural signal that says like okay stop you need the um uh what you call it inhibitory um sort of signals because again brain is one big communication device um and so if you wanted to do something active Not only would you have to turn on different parts of your brain you'd probably have to turn off that part of the brain otherwise the verb of Chillin is still going to be calling to you and sometimes that's mad Coolio you know sometimes like you want to teach a class and you don't want the vibe to be high excitation and like energy and fun and d d you you want it to be a little more like delivering it really kind of neutral or straight or whatever maybe the default Network continuing to be turned on is going to be helpful versus have you ever seen that super cool chemistry professor I'm in physics Professor not chemistry here she is Dr Tatiana I've seen her online doing so many cool things she it seems like just one of the genuine like world's best um so take your to if you can and like genuinely her energy is unparalleled oh my word she she's on like Tik Tok and stuff gez Louise that woman has Boundless Energy in order to give a lecture like that oof you better believe her default network is probably turned off I don't know at this point maybe she's given those lectures so many times that like she just kind of meditates her way through it but I doubt it that woman is jumping around she's got liquid nitrogen woof um so to give a lecture like that again you have to have one part other parts of your brain turned on and you have to kind of shut off off the part of your brain that wants you to chill otherwise you're going to be in constant battle and feel constantly driven towards the couch or the seat as you're trying to jump around with liquid nitrogen um okay so that's the default Network importantly it's big summary parts of your brain are there to help you chill even chilling is a verb and you have to suppress them which means adding neural energy or activity or whatever in order to tell that part of the brain to sh I need to act now um and then once certain parts of the brain have been suppressed then other parts can be turned on so all of that is going on in addition to any part of the brain that might serve any particular function whatsoever and then we have the reticular activating system and again these are just some of the complexities of the brain the reticular activating system I think about being like this filter um so it basically uh it's a lot about like your sensory information but also how much like attention you sort of give so I think about it as being like this executive assistant um and again it's this like filter so it control the biggest thing I want us to think about it um attri contributing to is attention so let's say and again think about it being like a filter so with sensory information right your brain has to process any of that sensory information and one of the ways it does that is by deciding what's important and a lot of that has been pre-programmed you have to put quite a lot of energy into changing your mindset if you don't want to keep filtering out the same information and hyperfocusing on other information so um one of the classic studies I read about years ago was I decided to overcome my own verticular activating system and decide that this was worth not filtering out so people will use terms like this all the time I read a study once because I do it too you know why because if you say I read a study people listen differently than if you say I read online at one point I tried really hard to find this study and I don't know maybe I read the original study at least at first but I'm pretty sure I read a secondhand account like this I don't think it was this one exactly that comes from a doctor um talking about a study that was done on couples so I'm about to describe it you know eventually but I just want us to think about like what we actually end up valuing in terms of human Insight so do you care if the study was done do you care or are you only willing to listen and trust somebody if they did the study if they read the actual study if they are the doctor talking about the study and they read the study if you're talking to a doctor I do have my PhD um talking about a doctor who talked about a study um are you willing to trust the coffee study that we talked about earlier today that coffee study if you actually go back and watch that video is pristine and terms of following the scientific method it includes both quantitative and qualitative data I think that's one of the most trusted studies that I have read I trust that those results more than other studies that I have read for lots of reasons in term including ability to be um applicable to lots of different people and the fact that it doesn't suppose that it has like the correct answer however that's not a peer review journal so do we not trust that throughout this class I have a couple different studies um especially in the emotions chapter I have one that are not done in peer-reviewed journals because frankly it represents a better uh scientific method exploration of Truth pursuing in addition one of the things we talked about in chapter 3 in terms of Freud is is it possible that the only way to pursue the truth is not just science that there are lots of different mechanisms so anyway I introduced myself and then I will let myself continue talking about the study in question that I may or may not have read the original study on um or in my mind it's study anyway um is a couple who lived near a or this is like an example um who lived near an airport um not because the mom is any less good than the Dad we're talking about this very unconscious filtering system you'd have to try to reprogram it the whole point is that it happens outside of your conscious awareness um by and it the whole point of it is to focus on things you value that are a threat and that and ultimately kind of support your goals so um they live near an airport right which means super I mean right next to airport so super loud noises like fairly often um but they don't notice it like at night they're not woken up every time a plane flies over because they probably were at first because um we kind of pre-programmed to see loud noises as a threat but eventually they learned that that was not a threat that was going to come into fruition so to speak so um but then they had a baby and the baby cries not as loud as the plans are that's how close to the airport they are so babies's crying if your ability to sense sounds should be purely kind of relevant or determined by by how loud the sound is if we were purely this computer um that didn't have things like values or that didn't want to stay alive so the louder the noise if we were purely a sensory computer the more we'd hear it but what we find instead is as filtering system is more sophisticated than that so they stopped hearing the planes but the baby Mom especially heard mom heard the baby cry more than Dad because the baby like she was kind of pre-programmed to hear that baby because she's pre-programmed to Value you know protecting the young kind of a deal that's basically the work of the reticular activating system um I think it's also important for again things that we value like when you're um reading a book if you let's say you were reading a neuroscience book if you were more of a medical Sciences student you'd probably um read you know posterior sing posterior singulate cortex and you'd be like immediately turned on by those types of terms because you know maybe you'll have to learn them for medical school and maybe that just makes you more Curious versus if you're a psychology student you're going to read things like I don't know um anxiety and you're going to say okay I'm definitely interested in anxiety so something turns on in you you can feel it turn on in terms of attention it's like oh that that should be important to me and then you read more intensely versus if there was a whole long list of all of these types of words you might be like really kind of allergic to it because you're running away from a perceived threat um same thing with medical science people like maybe they'd read anxiety and they'd be kind of pre-programmed to find it boring or irrelevant and so they're not going to feel this like immediate it's like an energy to it is how I think about particular activating system so arguably um neural information or sensory information at the very least like hits the reticular activating system kind of first and this is too simply put but like everything else is already a downstream consequence to like this right here and we don't know what each person's particular activating system is doing when we're studying something like I don't know the amydala which we'll talk about next time okay so other complexities I want to talk about is neural data so do you know the difference between an MRI and an fmri or an FM Ryan EEG think about it all right right if no an MRI is just an image of like the structures of the brain and it's way more um detailed versus fmri is supposed to be functional and that we can see different parts of the brain and how it's activated that's why you get these like colors so yeah you still get an image of the basic structures but it's not as detailed as an MRI but then in addition you get these like lit up spots um the brain is lit up in these different areas which means that a certain type of blood is Flowing to that a and then EEG data is um I think we talked about it briefly last time and we'll talk about it more in the Consciousness chapter shows you brain activity in terms of like brain wave data um we'll talk about that more next chapter okay first I have a little video to kind of show you the Majesty of fmri data especially it's quite impressive okay so this first video is about fmri so it's the functional um functional brain activity so we're seeing which parts of the brain are lit up or being used and it talks about the Bold signal Theory which basically helped us develop this fmri this is functional MRI data where we measure how active different brain regions are over time we're able to do this because as neural regions become more active on a microscopic scale they signal with nearby blood vessels this causes more oxygenated blood to flow into that region of the brain blood has a high iron content so it changes the magnetic field in the neural tissue ever so slightly using modern MRI we are able to measure those tiny magnetic fluctuations caused by changes in the blood we can then use this information to determine how active brain regions are on a much larger scale so importantly we're like inferring based on what we know about blood flow and what not using what we call the Bold signal theory in order to that helped us develop fmri and interpret it okay now let's take a look at what some of these fmri scans kind of look like pretty impressive right okay so first off yeah like that is really quite a kind of medical um or physiological data Marvel fmri data it's amazing that we can see what's going on in the brain it's imagine it's amazing that we can um measure um EEG data or brain wave data and it's amazing that we can see brain activity um importantly again I want to remind you of how important it is to constantly kind of question um what we do with this data because the more hard hard in terms of like we can see it with their own eyes and it's outside of that person's subjectivity the more hard the data seems the more likely we are to kind of rush to oh this is definitely the cause of some sort of dysfunction um and jumping right to that if we can see it in the brain there that must be and there's something going ay um that must be the reason that this person is struggling instead of like the environments and which we exist for example um that type of mentality is what led to um many people being lobotomized for example in the' 60s mainly without consent the idea is like your brain dysfunction um we can tell you exactly what it is and why because look we have these fancy brain scans and what's more is like it's your responsibility kind of to fix it is one of the ways is that we sometimes look at something like mental health like almost like it's contagious we sort of see um psychological distress as being just so easy to ostracize either easy to disrespect and see it purely as a disease mentality or see it as something that like we don't want to deal with like you keep that to yourself kind of a deal and again I want to remind you how like that's kind of philosophically not totally um well founded because there's a big difference between descriptive versus experimental studies for instance so we're not manipulating people's brains and unfortunately when it comes to something like a lobotomy even when we were physically manipulating somebody's brain it's kind of like well what's the outcome that we're most happy with so if somebody is very different personality-wise but they're crying less but they're you know less um vibrant is the less crying kind of like we're okay with that we're good with that um even if it seems like they're a little bit kind of dead inside and obviously that's kind of taking it to like an extreme approach but um if you've ever seen the movie oh gosh what's it called um something Housewives oh I kind of want to check it yeah something like the step forred wives so obviously that's not exactly how it was like you're unhappy being a housewife and then you got a labotomy and then suddenly everything's fine but like that's kind of the most dystopian view is like how much of mental distress um if you can fix it purely neurologically should you or does that take away that person's organic response we've talked about that a fair amount but brain stimulation um type data will basically stimulate different parts of the brain and then see what happens next in terms of feelings Behavior whatever so nowadays like electroconvulsive therapy obviously you know hardly ever happens but we we do have like trans cranial magnetic stimulation or uh transcranial direct current stimulation which will kind of stimulate either different parts of the brain or the brain in general and we can observe what all happens next um sometimes it's used for um very reoccurring uh depression treatment although obviously more rare than things like therapy and medication okay so if we wanted to like put all of this together in order to look at how neurodata is actually collected we have MRI the structures of the brain we have fmri the brain activity based on The Bold Theory we have EEG brain wave data um and then keeping in mind that all of that is purely descriptive we are observing what all happens with the brain sometimes we can get people to do different behaviors and then see how that um changes their brain activity for instance and then we also have brain stimulation where we can stimulate the brain slightly differently and then see what happens to Downstream consequences like things like depression um we also have neurotransmitters importantly like our technology is not sophisticated enough where like we can see where all the neurotransmitters are going of course specific neurons um have receptors for one two I think I've read as many as like three different neurons or types of neurotransmitters so we can certainly make guesses about where all in the brain the neurotransmitters are kind of hanging out but um the amount of neurotransmitters in any one particular moment is really I'm going to say impossible to measure right now I'm not up to date on all the current technologies that being said so most of the time we're measuring neurotransmitters with something like urine analysis um which again hard to measure on a moment by moment kind of basis okay so for instance if you wanted to take the basics of everything we've learned so far you got neurons right you got neurotransmitters maybe neurotransmitters equal kind of like emotional experiences the neurons their main job is to communicate but without neurons firing it really seems like the neurons firing are relevant to our thoughts whether you are a special unicorn that is simply using the Machinery of your brain to make you have thoughts or your neurons firing creates your thoughts honestly is probably a little bit of both um unless you absolutely don't believe in anything like a mind or Soul or whatever and you legitimately think you were born as a baby you're going to die as an elderly person and there's nothing more to it um the only reason that my flesh suit knows words like hippocampus and your flesh suit doesn't is because my flesh suit heard those words stored it in memory the only reason Einstein created his theoretical um theory of relativity uh is because his neurons fired in a particular way Einstein as a self doesn't like actually exist besides the fact that we call that flesh suit with those neurons firing that created that theory Einstein that's the degree to which you would have to take your theory that you do not have to have a self um that's how much you would have to like de spitify everything okay so anyways um thinking about what we have so we have neurons firing they transmit neurotransmitters we tend to associate neurotransmitters with something more than just monotone thoughts like if I could describe the tone of neurotransmitter type data or the way we talk about it is like if your neurons fired the same neurotransmitter we like maybe wouldn't have things like emotions we would be more like robots um similarly things like AI don't have the neurotransmitters but they do have connector nodes that is the extent of my computer science knowledge in fact the word nodes is probably not even the right word but they have like a neural network of sorts but they do not have the neurotransmitters maybe that's what makes that means that they don't have like emotions so to speak um okay so now let's think about like and and we've started to talk about different areas of the brain now different areas of the brain are going to be more or less associated with certain neurotransmitters because as I said maybe neurotransmitters are just like the language it's not a whole lot about emotion but we sure do talk a lot about neurotransmitters equals emotions um so let's just like hypothetically like try and put some of these pieces together let's say let's talk about the thought I'm an idiot I have this thought a lot sometimes I say it rather sarcastically sometimes I simply mispell a word or mistake a word and I'll want to or someone else will threaten to kind of throw away everything I said as being the ramblings of an idiot so I will have the ter the the the thought oh yeah I'm an idiot you know something like that then other times I'm really hating on myself and I will think I'm an idiot and like it will be painful in my body one way that people try and think about the brain and then others will argue with it the truth is it's complicated and you'd have to spend a very long time trying to describe it and the other treat this we just don't know um but there's one at least way of thinking about it where basically if the same neur thoughts are associated with neurons firing and those same neurons would basically fire in order for you to have that brain now any experience is going to be more than two neurons but your thoughts are also only just one little tiny bit of your experience and then all of that that is happening right on a cellular level but then those neurons those cells create different structures within the brain and then on top of that one of the things we'll talk about next chapter in the Consciousness chapter is EEG data which kind of compile potentials and creates the electrical activity kind of data about the brain like different wave frequencies and things like that which means in any one particular moment yeah there's particular parts of your brain working there's particular Action potentials that are allowing you to have thoughts in addition there's this even more abstracted vision of your brain where we can see kind of like the general mood of your thoughts are you high frequency are you low frequency and how does that make you feel okay now here's kind of like the problem or where neurotransmitters might sort of come in if you think about neurotransmitter is giving like some starting the process of getting some giving some emotional significance Beyond just the very Machinery of our body you might imagine that the words coming to mind in your monologue I'm an idiot perhaps they'd have to be produced by at least two different sets of neurons one when those that thought is conjured the neurons must be releasing some something like dopamine not today AI for those of you just listening you miss a lot of stuff there's a lot of stuff going on on the screen anyways um if see notice how AI says yes the same neurons can fire when you see little qualifiers like that you know the answer is like um okay so if these two neurons fire in order to allow me to have the thought I'm yeah oh yeah I'm an idiot like they must be releasing something DOP mean versus if I have the thought it's kind of like sad like H I'm an idiot you know I don't I don't know what neurotransmitter that would be associated with because most of the time I think about sadness as being like a lack of some neurotransmitters but maybe something like acetylcholine um like it's like slowing me down it turns out that acetylcholine was actually a pretty good guess because apparently levels are elevated in some actively depressed um individuals however what I want to point out is that another interpretation is that it's not that different neurons associated with different neurotransmitters are are producing thoughts that feel different even though the words are the same so like oh yeah I'm an idiot versus oh God I'm an idiot um it might just be that similar neurons fire in order to allow you to have that thought but it is the overall percentage of acetylcholine versus serotonin versus dopamine that are in the body in general so it's not that those thoughts releasing those neurotransmitters or those neur or those neurons that allow you to have those thoughts it doesn't matter what neurotransmitters they're admitt emitting instead it's your entire body's neurotransmitter Matrix in that particular moment that gives that thought its emotional resonance that one is a lot easier to um test and especially considering that again we're not momentto moment measuring which neurotransmitters are being released in this particular moment in this particular part of the brain it's certainly not by those particular neurons and instead we're doing like urinary analyses and even more importantly you might think like okay so if Neuroscience is that important to understanding something like depression surely we're giving everybody a bunch of physiological measures to determine if they have depression no of course not almost nobody I don't think I've ever met a single person or a single doctor like psychiatrist or therapist or otherwise who's asking for a urine sample to determine if you have like the right levels of neurotransmitters for me to be able to diagnose you with something like depression even disorders that seem to be pretty neurological or at least that's the theory um like ADHD and autism most of the time we're not taking brain scans on people why because it's expensive not in this economy or um because we just like how are you going to it's your own mental health is so subjective how are you going to be face to face with somebody who's like I'm super depressed and be like sorry you have enough serotone in your body such that that can't be true plus we just don't have the research to be able to suppose that that's true but we teach it like it's true this is really important the um serotonin hypothesis which I've talked about before of depression seems to be all but debunked essentially but if you read up on anecdotal experiences of psychiatrist psychiatrist will still describe the theory to patients as if this is true um so you interview a psychiatrist and be like you know the serotonin like hypothesis is you know not totally debunked but like kind of basically and like I knew that obviously no serious psychiatrist is going to sit there and say um that depression is purely the result of not having enough serotonin in your body plus it was never the entire hypothesis to begin with but when they're prescribing medication to a client the assumption is that client won't be able to understand the truth and they'll give the simplest version which is that your body isn't producing or using enough serotonin and this medication will help and the truth is you know everybody is doing the best they can and maybe presenting the medication that way to somebody who didn't get education in Neuroscience is going to mean that they are more likely to actually follow that medication protocol which might be helpful a lot of people have found ssris and other medication that influence something like serotonin to be helpful at least in the short term on the other hand the fact that most people don't get a psychological or neurological education might be the reason why the techniques don't work if you don't understand what depression really amounts to that it is both your environment it's your psychology in terms of your particular coping mechanisms it's your society in which you exist and it's your brain which may which is responding to the environment in which you exist if you understand all of that that gives you way more agency over what you do with any medications that influence your your um brain if you don't understand that you're expecting that drug to work in a similar way as like an antibiotic is supposed to work for something like strep throat so um sometimes I allow myself to think about neural communication that way so if you wanted to like create the perfect brain part of what I'm trying to argue is like it can't be a like you have no business studying the brain if you don't also study it psychology or you will end up losing your entire Humanity similarly I don't think that you that anybody who studies psychology should be denied the opportunity to study neuroscience and most people decide that they're too stupid to or that's that's just not their specialty because they don't have conversations like this um so the big dream for people who really like neuroscience and kind of think that it is the cure for everything which totally makes sense because the brain is this organ that kind of controls everything else obviously your neuro Health uh influences just about everything else but um I think it's kind of dystopian I'm gonna point out once again to hope that if you could just change somebody's neurochemistry everything would be fine um because you'd have to have like the perfect brain right and be like everybody else is brain should be like this that is kind of the Paradigm we have this image of this like average brain and mo most brains are more similar than they are different um kind of but let's say we had like a perfect brain like what counts as a perfect brain and you could say well it's the degree to which that person is happy with their brain okay does that person also wish they could take a vacation because if the problem is that they can't take a vacation or they can't afford the house that they have why are we put the idea that you could just change their brain and make them fit in better to their environment is like far too simple that being said obviously obviously understanding the brain is really important I think each person understanding their own particular brain is especially important but I'm begging you to keep your Humanity in the hard Sciences I'm begging you to see that brain as being attached to a person who has some degree of agency I'm begging you to see that person's brain as being responding to an environment that likely isn't perfect and as soothing as it can be to Hope that I don't know we could come up with the perfect neurosurgery to create you know any any issues that a person might be facing we could tailor it more to how their brain should be um or medication or whatever um like that is really hopeful and it is really important to wonder about the degree to which we need that for some people to experience um mental health but I also hope that you keep mind that perhaps it's a little dystopian and so what I need to get across to you is I understand I'm repeating myself a little bit um probably even more than I realize sometimes because I teach a lot of classes but I I'm very um I need to get this through is in order to influence overall health from a neuro approach exclusively you would have to be able to get down to that person's neurons to that person's neurotransmitters to that person's neural activity to that person's structures of the brain um so on and so forth down to for something like Alzheimer's we're talking about microt tubules within that person's neurons and all of those things are worthwhile Endeavors however it is also really important that you recognize that that person steering that ship of that body their actions also influence the brain so to accomplish this task of curing things purely via Neuroscience we would need all of those puzzle pieces I have never read a study that has put together all of those puzzle pieces all at once and as I said we don't even have the technology for to even understand something like neurotransmitters very well I Neuroscience is a mirle it's everybody should have to learn it period um but that's the micro level that we would have to work with so it seems much more likely that the better method is compiling information teaching it to people developing medication teaching that to people helping them increase sensive agency changing environments that clearly do not work and do not promote Health which environments do not promote he promote Health all the ones that make you miserable without much um win like yeah maybe this video is kind of boring hopefully it's not making you miserable and I want us to think about how difficult it is to take out subjective interpretation maybe especially with the brain Sciences we've already talked about so far um how important it is to kind of keep the humanity in the hard Sciences because the humanity is already in the hard sciences and you have responsibility to interpret the data well because you will always be interpreting data okay so um I'm just trying to make a case for how um studies on older adults can really seem to be a little bit aist and and how it's kind of got this feeling of like you can't win so in order to understand this wake up okay so background information older adult versus younger adult neuro literature in general we tend to see um younger adults as being basically better faster stronger and older adults as kind of like at the end of life Decay a little bit I'm being overly cruel um especially if your your whole job is studying older adults obviously you have a lot of like respect for that population but in general so young if we tend to associate brain activity and like better more brain activity as being like you're using that part of the brain very good you know like have you ever heard that it's apparently a myth but that we only ever use 10% of our brain um we kind of like said oh you're only using 10 10% of your brain that means humans are like dumb another way to interpret that is like efficiency but anyway so younger adults let's say in general I'm not even sure this is entirely true no it's got to be true because uh older adults do um have this decrease in like brain volume which means that there's going to be less neural activity so even if younger adults typically have more neural activity than older adults how do we interpret that younger adults are thinking better they have better memories so on and so forth um but there's this very specific way of looking at older adults which is looking at the different hemispheres of the brain so the brain we haven't gotten to this part yet but um you've probably heard this before the brain has two different hemispheres the left and right hemispheres and for the most part there's kind of Parts on parts of the brain on either side that are important for performing a particular task but you don't necessarily need it and some parts of the brain seem to be like very hemispher okay so younger adults on this same task compared to older adults tend to use one hemisphere of the brain older adults tend to use two hemispheres of the brain so they're using more like structures as one way to put it so that's the basic gist older adults in general like less and slower and except in this one data set where they use two hemispheres and most of the time um compared to younger adults who to use one hemisphere to complete the same task okay so this is a quote from Grady 20202 about um neuroimaging studies on aging and how difficult the interpretation is so um we're going to start reading right here sometimes brain activity is reduced in older adults relative to younger adults as I mentioned in general younger adult brains Stronger Faster smarter something like that um and sometimes it's increased the increase I'm pretty sure they're alluding to is the two hemispheres older adults tend to use two hemispheres younger adults one okay now we're going to look at the interpretations of those differences decreased brain activity brain activity has typically been interpreted as a reflection of cognitive deficits in older adults so that means oh well that's why their memory isn't as good and they're not thinking as quickly or as well as younger adults because there's a decrease in brain activity however increased activity has often been interpreted as compensatory so what happens in older adult literature is when they see that older adults are using two hemispheres they're like well one hemisphere wasn't enough so they had to compensate for the fact that one hemisphere wasn't enough and they're using two hemispheres so basically they're inefficient and that's why they need to use more brain activity um and then I there's another like explanation down here but let's just focus on these two okay imagine you knew an older adult and you think that their brain is absolutely perfect reading this let's say they had and compared to you a younger a young they had more brain activity um how is that likely to be interpreted if they have more brain activity compensatory their brain is going to be seen as inefficient versus um let's say they had less brain activity than you how is that going to be interpreted a reflection of cognitive deficits so it's kind of like no matter what the adult brain older adult brain literature is not looking at older adults as being kind of something to to Aspire to in fact it's always something that you know we have to like stop the aging process which I'm not saying isn't a valiant effort because a lot of older adults do kind of complain about memory issues I mean it it also depends if you're talking about like the disease model of older adults like diseases that are more likely to hit older adults than younger adults versus like healthy aging um but okay even if older adults um complain a little bit about memory they also will often say that they're angry when they feel like some of their rights have been taken away so I I need you to pause we're not in person so I can't make sure that at least one of you does this but typically during this part I would um have the entire class pause and look at this cognitive task so the idea with like Neuroscience research that tries to take neurological data and explain it through behaviors is they will look at the neurological data and then they'll have some sort of like behavioral dependent um measure and the idea is that that behavioral dependent measure is supposed to translate to some realworld um situation so the first thing we're going to do because I'm kind of trying to also prepare you just a little bit for your paper that you have to write and for that paper you have to um site two I believe sources and for one of them you're supposed to describe it fully this is now I've said this a couple times understand me you have to describe it fully which me you have to describe the method section let's take a pause and look at one of these method sections so you're going to pause right now and see how long it takes you to describe in your own words basically what they did so pause welcome back to the two of you who actually paused and did my stupid little activity okay how long did it take you a fair amount of time right to basically find out that like in general what they're doing is a um like matching task like they're trying to yeah perceptual matching get some sort of stimulus um along with three Choice stimuli in the lower part and the task was to indicate which of the three match the sample so you have a picture up here and a three pictures down here um pick which one as this one and their main dependent variable is probably something like accuracy but they're also looking for where does it say it reaction time so I'm sure they're measuring accuracy too um but like reaction time is the main dependent variable so basically how fast can you do that okay so let's say in that study the older adults were a little bit slower than younger adults for a um variable to be statist statistically different it doesn't have to be that much like it might be less than a second and it's still statistically significant I'm not exactly sure but like let's say because it depends on things like the um standard deviation of the mean so on and so forth but like let's let's say that older adults responded less quickly to that task okay now I want you to think but like who cares like at the end of the day the question is like who cares so now I want you to assume that this task does um is relevant to some real world activity what real world activity do you think involves quickly responding to like matching type tasks pause and think about it if you don't know usually what the class comes up with which I agree is something like um a like like driving you have an image in your mind of what it looks like when the traffic light turns from red to green and you have to quickly respond when the light turns a certain color something like that so maybe this is speaking to some experience like that okay so if this mattered in the real world basically we'd want to know like like if this mattered in the real world then basically older adults would be less good at driving right let's say who's actually less good at driving okay so if you said teenagers you were surprisingly wrong actually the worst drivers are like the people that you would expect to be the best drivers um wait B Millennial are okay damn really it's because we're so stressed out because we're trying to fix the world give us a break the next age group for the worst drivers we're 35 to 44 so again people you'd expect to be kind of responsible um so put it putting putting it on together the uh drivers between ages of 25 and 44 were like the worst age group the group that you would think would be the best because you probably thought like teenagers and old people right because you're a stereotyper um actually I don't know if this data set included 18y oh no they did probably the young people aren't as bad because they're not driving as much because they don't own their own car and also because they're nervous and being super careful and then the best drivers were 63 to 72 so like the exact age that if it was true that this translated to the real world that group would be one of the worst groups and of course that's not looking at like very old age like I don't know let's say 80 to 85 and up um but some of the cognitive declines that we sort of observe start happening much earlier than like 85 so instead if what we decided to observe from this study is that older adults are Chiller and we actually want to be a little bit more like the older adults who were Chiller then we would learn to be more chill and then our brains would be deficient compared to them maybe the older adults who were doing this study were not trying to impress the researcher not playing a game to see how fast they could possibly go and something about that allows older adults to enjoy life more older adults tend to be a little bit more happy um not saying that that's always a good thing because older adults um do tend to be like almost toxically positive there's a big difference between being genuinely happy and being unwilling to talk about negative things older adults don't feel like it's their responsibility to like talk about the negatives anymore they're kind of like in their own world is how some people are you know but the truth is that everybody is going to be different um but you get a very different interpretation when you look at things not assuming not assuming anything you get a very different interpretation versus when you start assuming so what I need to get across you is I understand I'm repeating myself a little bit um probably even more than I realize sometimes because I teach a lot of classes but I am very um I need to get this through is in order to influence overall health from a neuro approach exclusively you would have to be able to get down to that person's neurons to that person's neurotransmitters to that person's neural activity to that person's structures of the brain um so on and so forth down to for something like Alzheimer's we're talking about microtubules within that person's neurons and all of those things are worthwhile Endeavors however it is also really important that you recognize that that person steering that ship of that body their actions also influence the brain so to accomplish this task of curing things purely via Neuroscience we would need all of those puzzle pieces I have never read a study that has put together all of those puzzle pieces all at once and as I said we don't even have the technology for to even understand something like neurotransmitters very well I Neuroscience is a miracle it's everybody should have to learn it period um but that's the micro level that we would have to work with um so it seems much more likely that the better method is compiling information teaching it to people developing medication teaching that to people helping them increase sense of agency changing environments that clearly do not work and do not promote Health with which environments do not promote he promote Health all the ones that make you miserable without much um win like yeah maybe this video is kind of boring hopefully it's not making you miserable um