533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with researcher, neuroscientist, and author, Dr. Baland Jalal. They discuss human embodiment, the rubber hand experiments (which push embodiment beyond the physical), the deeper functionality of dreams, sleep paralysis, and a potential theory to explain alien abductions. Dr. Jalal is a neuroscientist and author at Harvard and previously a Visiting Researcher at Cambridge University Medical School where he obtained his PhD. Dr. Jalal's work has been featured in the The New York Times, Washington Post, The Today Show, The BBC, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, NBC News, New York Magazine, The Times, The Telegraph, Forbes, Der Spiegel, Reuters, Fox News, Discover Magazine, VICE, and PBS (NOVA). He writes for Time Magazine, Scientific American, Big Think, and Boston Globe. The Telegraph and BBC described him as “one of the world’s leading experts on sleep paralysis,” and he was ranked the "top-rated expert in sleep paralysis in the world" on Expertscape based on scientific impact in the past 10 years. This episode was filmed on January 17th, 2025. | Links | For Dr. Baland Jalal On X https://x.com/balandjalalphd On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/balandjalal/?hl=en Read “Transdiagnostic Multiplex CBT for Muslim Cultural Groups: Treating Emotional Disorders” (2020) https://a.co/d/d1nZUwP Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:54Speaker 04

  Así que miramos el cerebro como algo que es malleable y no fijo. Es un objeto dinámico. Así que los lados paráteles y el paráteles superior es específicamente involucrado en crear un sentido subjetivo de uno mismo. El sentimiento de que ocupé este cuerpo y no el de alguien más, ¿verdad?

• 2:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  La idea de Jung era que el sueño era un lugar de exploración para la remapación de la anomalía. Esto es muy raro también, todo el mundo.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  Así que tienes esta parálisis cerebral, obviamente. Estás paralizado de cabeza a pies durante el sueño cerebral. Estás soñando lejos. ¿Estás familiarizado con la parálisis de sueño?

• 2:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Algo me estaba pasando y me estaba congelado y no podía hablar. Y sabía que tenía que despertarme. Intentaba tirarme de la cama. A veces podía llamar a mi esposa y ella tenía que venir y me tiraría y luego me despertaría.

• 2:35Speaker 04

  Así que estaba durmiendo en mi habitación y luego tuve este sentimiento de monstruo de la esquina de mi habitación que me acercaba hasta que estaba en mi cintura y me estiraba.

• 2:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Cómo se veía el monstruo?

• 2:45Speaker 04

  Bueno, te lo diré.

• 2:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Bien.

• 3:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hola a todos. Tuve la oportunidad de hablar hoy con el doctor Baland Jalal. Es un neurociente y autor en Harvard y anteriormente un investigador visitante en la Escuela Medical de la Universidad de Cambridge. Ha sido presentado en The New York Times, The Washington Post y otras publicaciones tales. El Telegraph y el BBC lo describieron como uno de los expertos del mundo sobre parálisis de sueño y las maldades y oportunidades del sueño, la fantasía y la adaptación que acompañan esa condición. ¿Qué hablamos? El introto del curso de neurociencia en la Academia Peterson. La relación entre neuroanatomía, función cerebral, percepción, emoción y comportamiento. La función del estado del sueño.

• 3:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  El papel de la cultura y la concepción en lidiar con la emoción, en particular el miedo, y el paisaje cambiante de la universidad moderna. Es bastante un viaje. Unirse a nosotros. Well, thanks for coming in.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  Well, thank you, Jordan, Dr. Peterson. I'd love to be here.

• 4:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, let's talk about Peterson Academy first. You just, we just released a course of yours, Introduction to Neuroscience.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 4:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  So I'd like to know, I think it would be useful to talk a little bit about the course. But I'd also like to know about your experience doing the filming and

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 4:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  and your reflections on the process and the project itself.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, it was, it was a lovely process. Let me start there.

• 4:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  So I flew in to Miami. Great reception overall. Nice people around. Ben, Nancy, Vincent, everybody on the team, lovely. The shooting was, was great. So yeah, top professional, really like that. And then the course itself, it's a, it's a, it's a eight-hour course on the brain. And sort of going through, initially starting from sort of the basics of the brain, the different structures of the brain, then going all the way to sort of higher abstract things like human nature and, and sort of the nature of how art emanates in the brain and things like that.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  So it's got, it's kind of has the nitty-gritty of an, of a introductory neuroscience course, but then also taking in some more sort of poetic aspects of the brain. So it's, it's kind of all that mix.

• 5:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so it's an approach to the cultural from the bottom up, from the biological up?

• 5:26Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 5:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, how much, how much anatomy, functional anatomy and so forth is in the course?

• 5:31Speaker 04

  I make sure that the basics are there. So for a basics neuroscience course, for, as an introduction, you've got to have the basics there, all the

• 5:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  brain structures, the, the cortex, the brainstem, all the different names. But I try to keep it simple so people don't fall asleep. I used to, when I did my first bio- psychology neuroscience course, that was incredibly boring. I had all these names thrown at me.

• 5:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah. And you just had to force memorize them.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  It made no sense, right?

• 5:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  So what's the cerebellum doing, you know? What's this doing? You just had all these names, you had to memorize them, that was it. But I really made sure, make sure to, to describe the function and have an overall context for, for each

• 6:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, I found, like, I found that I got extremely interested in neuroanatomy, even at a detailed level, when I was reading scientists who associated the area with the function.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  It's very important.

• 6:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, it was also extremely useful philosophically. And one of the advantages, if you're a conceptual thinker, to studying neuroanatomy and neurobiology is that it puts limits on what philosophical propositions are plausible and possible.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  I really like that.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like, it's like you have to play a game with two different sets of rules then, right? It has to make sense conceptually, so that would be philosophically. But then it can't violate the principles of neuroanatomy and neuroscience that are already established.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's a very good way of initial triangulation.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, the way that I like to do is that I know that in this course I'll cover this, right? But then I kind of, and I kind of see and explore how I can sort of weave this into a sort of a narrative and a story, and then kind of put things in as we go along, and I feel like this makes sense to to put this aspect here and put that aspect here, so it doesn't come in this sort of, you know, very A, B, C kind of dry way. So that's my approach, and see how I can let things unfold in a natural way.

• 7:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so you said that when you went to do the recording, that the process worked well.

• 7:37Speaker 04

  Very well.

• 7:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  What about it worked well?

• 7:38Speaker 04

  I was very impressed. So I was very impressed by the whole, the whole process, the way things were arranged. Obviously, we were put in a very nice hotel. And we felt pampered, honestly.

• 7:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Good.

• 7:50Speaker 04

  It's a very, you feel pampered, you feel, everything is just on point. And yeah, and then the shooting itself, people around you, they take care of you, bring you food, they, you know, it's just, it's just very, you feel pampered. So it's great, so.

• 8:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, you know, we, I think we realized the importance of that, really, when I did the first Exodus seminar for The Daily Wire.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  We brought nine thinkers in, and we spent a fair bit of time on the hospitality side.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  And one of the things I realized, and I knew this in part from working at a university, was that a lot of the professors that we pulled in for that... Seminar, I wouldn't say they're exactly well-treated at their institutions. And that's foolish, because I invited the people who I did invite to the Exodus Seminar, because I thought they were great, and I wanted to hear what they had to say.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  And there's every reason to make that obvious in every in every detail of treatment.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, you know, one of the things I offer people who we offer at Peterson Academy, people who come and lecture, because people ask me, "Well, you know, what lecture do you need?" And that's not the right approach. My sense is, is that we, I find people whose views I want to know and share, and then I want them to do what they think would be best, because I wouldn't bloody well invite them if I didn't think they knew what they were doing.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I don't want to put constraints on them. And then if we find the right people, we can sort out the curriculum, rather than sorting out the curriculum and then forcing the participants, the professors into it. That makes no sense at all to me.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  Absolutely, and that was my approach too, right? So I would talk about my own research, what I, some of the nicest experiments that I, that I love about my work, and sort of weave into that, to that neuroscience curriculum in that way, right? So we talk about, for example, OCD, and then maybe you might mention the orbital frontal cortex, which is overactive in OCD. What's the function of the orbital frontal cortex? This, this, this, the structure in the brain, or the striatum and the basal ganglia in the context of Parkinson's? But again, taking in some of, some work that's very, you know, some experiments that, that are fascinating. So it's, it's kind of taking that natural approach, that sort of my own research or works of colleagues, and just weaving it in, in a more, more natural way, I think.

• 10:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so I'm curious.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 10:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Everybody who studies the brain in some depth.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Has their own approach. It's like exploring a continent, let's say, they have their own approach. And so, when you're, when you lay out the architecture of the brain, let's say, the basic anatomy.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Tell me how you do that.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I, I would like to hear how you conceptualize the brain. So.

• 10:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  So do that if you would.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I think the way that I my my view of the brain was inspired by my mentor Vias Ramachandran.

• 10:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right. You worked with him. Yeah.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  I worked with him.

• 11:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  He's a stunningly effective public speaker.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  He's extremely stunningly effective, charismatic. And when I went to California in my early days as an undergraduate, I ended up in his course. So I took his course. So let me take you there.

• 11:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  When was that?

• 11:15Speaker 04

  That was in 2010, 11, around 11, 2011. So I started there, became a research scholar in his lab eventually. And I think, you know, becoming very good friends with him, ending up in his laboratory, going on, you know, long, long walks on the beach all the time and just spending time with him and getting his view on the brain and sort of adapting that as my own view was, was, was something that, you know, influenced me. And, and, and his approach, obviously, and the approach that I've adopted is one where you sort of look at the brain holistically. You acknowledge that the brain is hyperplastic. So there's all these modules that are highly dynamic and the brain is extremely malleable. And so we look at

• 11:59Speaker 04

  the brain as something that extremely as a fluid process that that's malleable and not fixed and set in its own ways. It has this fluidity to it. So that's kind of my, my view of the brain overall, that it's, it's, it's, it's a dynamic object. But beyond that, let me also explain some of our experiments. So the way that we approach science and probing the human brain is through experiments where we look at conceptual experiments in neuroscience. So for example, there's the rubber hand illusion, if you probably know that.

• 12:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Lay it out and explain it to people.

• 12:35Speaker 04

  So the rubber hand illusion is this illusion where you have a chap, he puts his hand right here. And then you have his right hand underneath a table, right? And so me, Balan, the experimenter, will stroke and tap the hand of the experimental subject. I'll go stroke, stroke, tap, tap, tap, tap, stroke, stroke, underneath the table. And I'll stroke and tap the table in front of Joe, the subject. I'll go tap, tap, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, tap, tap. And about two minutes of me doing this, he will feel touch sensations arising from the table. And I don't mean this in kind of an abstract metaphorical sense. I mean this literally, he will have touch sensations, somatosensory regions of his brain becoming active from this process.

• 13:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, that's a very strange element of human perception, right? It must be strongly associated, not only with our ability to map sensation onto our bodies,

• 13:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  but also with our ability to use tools. So I know, for example, we're very good at it. Like if I pick up a screwdriver,

• 13:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  it takes me virtually no time to use the tip of the screwdriver

• 13:40Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 13:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  in a manner that very much approximates the tip of my finger.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and then when we go in a car, essentially what we're doing, especially once we're expert drivers, is that we expand the dimensions of our kinesthetic perception, our bodily perception, to include the car, right? So you're feeling with the tires, you're feeling with the brake.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and that's, well, part of my understanding of that is that that's very tightly associated with our tool-using proclivity. Because a tool is a bodily extension.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it's an embodiment, right? So in two minutes, I turn this subject into a table, right? And then more than that, if I, me, you know, Balan, was to take a hammer and go like this, pff, on the table, he'll go, you know, he'll feel pain sensations, right? So the pain regions of his brain will light up if I was to look in a scanner and, you know, look at the neurons there. So it shows you that in that way, you can take something, you can, first of all, you can create a sensation of this table belonging to you, but then-

• 14:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Big part of you.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  Big part of you, right? It becomes an embodied part of you.

• 14:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  But then beyond that, you inflict pain now to the person, to the table, in fact, and then you will feel-

• 14:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, that would also be part of social perception, I presume. I read a paper not- Not long ago, if I remember the details carefully, they were looking at the difference either, I think it was, I think the dimension was agreeableness.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  But it might have been psychopathy.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Uh, which would be the opposite of agreeableness, let's say. That more agreeable people, so less psychopathic people, feel, have more pain activation to the perception of other people's pain.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you could imagine that part of the utility in being able to morph your pain sensitivity, even to represent something objective like a table.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's also a variant of my ability to map my own body, let's say, onto your body, so that the empathy that I feel for you isn't conceptual.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's, and I've really been, I've really been thinking about this in terms of how we understand each other, because it looks to me like what we do to understand each other is, I notice what your aim is partly by watching your eyes.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  I infer your aim.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Once I infer your aim, I can inhabit your perceptual space, because if I know your aim, I know the objects that surround you. But I also know how your emotions are configured.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 16:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because they're configured in relationship to the aim.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  If I can adopt that aim, then I can embody those emotions and perceptions.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 16:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  I can read off that embodiment and then I, that's, so the understanding is actually my simulating you on my own neural architecture.

• 16:24Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 16:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then drawing the appropriate inferences from that. And it looks to me like children probably develop that ability. Some of it's nascent, I would say, some of it's there.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  It's very interesting. So we actually, we were the first group to show that people with OCD, who has very fixed sense of self, right? So they wash their hands all the times, washing and scrubbing. When they do this illusion, they have a much more sensitivity to it, to the extent that there's a control condition for this illusion, where you, so the, so the illusion, for the illusion to occur, you have to stroke and tap, tap, tap, stroke, and stroke and tap, in a synchronized manner.

• 16:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 16:59Speaker 04

  That's very important, right? So that's, that's, that's key.

• 17:03Speaker 00

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• 17:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so you're linking the visual perception to the kinesthetic perception?

• 17:36Speaker 04

  Absolutely, absolutely, right. But in people with, oh, so the control for this, by the way, is if you do it in a random sequence, like tap, tap, stroke, stroke, but everything is just random, right? And you do, again, the touching and stroking is random, then the illusion will not occur, or it would be slightly, so you have a slight illusion there, or most of the time, no illusion. That's, so this is the key control for the, for the illusion.

• 17:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so let's just walk through this so everybody understands clearly. So you have someone with their arm on a table, let's say, their left arm. Their right arm is under the table. So they can no longer see it. Now, what you're doing then is you're, you're interacting with their hidden arm physically.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  Physically, yep.

• 18:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  But they can't see that, they can feel it. At the same time, you interact with the table. Where they can see it.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 18:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you're syncing their visual perception with your kinesthetic perception. But it's not, but their kinis, or their visual perception isn't focused on their own hand. Now they start to react to the table like it's a hand.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 18:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, now you're extending this to the OCD situation.

• 18:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 18:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so elaborate on that.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Absolutely, and I just wanna, just one point here is that I mentioned a table. So the original experiment was done with a rubber hand, right? But I'm, I'm using table because it's more, it illustrates the, the experiment better, and I think, and, and you can, you can have a table as well.

• 18:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, people would start responding to a rubber hand as if it was their own.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  So instead of a table, you would just have a rubber hand that looks like your own hand, and then you stroke and tap the rubber hand, right, in front of the person.

• 19:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, with their other hand hidden.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 19:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  They start to respond to the rubber hand as if it's theirs.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  Right, right, exactly.

• 19:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then flinch if there's a threat to it.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  They'll flinch if there's a threat to it, right?

• 19:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay, okay. And that can be extended to something as inanimate as a table.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  Correct. Or in fact, in fact, you can do it in air. So you do know Rich Pagnelli?

• 19:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  Yes, a common friend, right, over in Harvard, right? So one day, Pagnelli and I did it in the air. So I did it on Rich, call him Rich. So it just drove, drove, tapped, tapped in the air, and he felt the rubber, like his own hand was floating in the air. This was kind of spooky.

• 19:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Wow.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  He went, "My god, what's happening? I feel my, I feel my hand, hand is floating in the air."

• 19:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, you know, that must also be associated with a really profound, with our sense of, of what constitutes ownership.

• 19:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  You know, because the idea that something is yours, or that something is mine, there's no reason to assume that that isn't an extension of something like embodiment. It's certainly the case that, you know, if, if people's cars are attacked, let's say, or kicked, they respond to that very much as if it's a bodily assault.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 20:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and so it begs the question, how much of our embodied concept of ownership, like that concept on which we platform the philosophical and philosophy and conception of ownership, is actually, the underlying scaffold for that is the, our ability to extend our embodiment to even inanimate objects, right? Because then they start to become part of us.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 20:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and part of what you're pointing to with your emphasis on brain plasticity, and then is that identity itself, even in terms of perception and pain sensitivity, is fluid and dynamic to a degree that you wouldn't, you wouldn't immediately presume.

• 20:51Speaker 04

  And I do want to differentiate between plasticity and then the dynamic nature of the function and of the modules of the brain. So for example, you have, in terms of the rubber hand illusion, it shows that, for example, we have a structure called the TPJ right here, Temporoparal junction is the fancy name for that. That structure is important for taking all the sensory modalities, touch, hearing, feeling, right? So smelling, and, and sort of unifying that into a whole.

• 21:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a cortical area?

• 21:20Speaker 04

  It's a cortical area.

• 21:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Where is it located?

• 21:21Speaker 04

  It's called the TPJ, so it's Temporal parietal junction, so it's kind of strategically located between the different sort of occipital somatosensory region and the parietal.

• 21:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so it's a religion that overlaps physiologically between the different sensory integration systems?

• 21:38Speaker 04

  Exactly, it's like a crossroad, so to speak, right?

• 21:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, is it, is it the same area that's used for silent reading?

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Silent reading, I'm not sure.

• 21:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, well, the reason I'm asking about that, from what I remember, is that the region that we use for silent reading is the space, is the overlap between the auditory and visual cortex.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 21:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Which makes perfect sense, right, because we're basically, when we read silently, we're using our eyes as ears.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 22:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, so, and those overlapping areas, okay, so this area is a place between many of this, between a variety of the different sensory.

• 22:12Speaker 04

  Between different sensory integration, it's a hub for integration, and interestingly, actually, it's also involved in the self/other distinction, so we have a distinction of the land here, Dr. Peterson over there, and then.

• 22:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's why we can't tickle ourselves.

• 22:26Speaker 04

  That's why we can't tickle ourselves, right, but that, that part of the brain, if you zap that, sometimes the self/other distinction can break down, so you feel like you're merging into another person, so that's very interesting, so it has that function. It also has connections to the frontal lobes, which is involved in, obviously, in empathy and, and seeing the perspective of somebody else, so feel like, like a theory of mind, what is Dr. Peterson thinking right now, what is his agenda right now, what is his motive, so that ability is also involved.

• 22:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  I've wondered about.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  And this comes to psychopathy point, actually, because if you have the temporal parietal junction being involved in body construction, so it's involved in self, in constructing a body image, which is expanded in the rubber hand illusion, but also involved in seeing your perspective as well, so it's, it's very dynamic.

• 23:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Experiencing your perspective.

• 23:14Speaker 04

  Experiencing somebody else's perspective.

• 23:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, one of the things I thought while you were discussing that is the theory of mind, theories of autism, that autistic people lack theory of mind, but I've never really liked that theory, because autism is a really fundamental disorder, like autistic people generally don't like people and they don't like to be touched.

• 23:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's not conceptual, like.

• 23:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mammals like to be touched. If you don't like to be touched, then something's gone wrong at a level that's like under mammal. It's really deep and profound. It's not some, what would you say, alteration in philosophy? But one of the things that is characteristic of autistic people often is that they don't look at people's faces.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  They don't look at eyes.

• 24:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so how, so then you could imagine it's not exactly a lack of theory of mind. It's that if I don't watch your eyes, I can't infer your aim. If I can't infer your aim, I can't mimic you on my own platform. So I'm, I wonder to what degree, I don't know if these experiments have ever been done. I mean, I'm, it isn't obvious to me exactly why autistic people don't watch the face. It's very mobile and changing. And that is something that seems to upset autistic people. Like they often, like furniture moved in a room that they're familiar with. But I wonder what would happen to their ability to experience empathy

• 24:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  if they were focally trained to attend to eyes, to learn to perceive the face properly.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  It probably could be trained. So I know Richard Davidson's. He's done some studies looking at amygdala activation in autistic children. And they do have, you know, an amygdala that's dancing with activity whenever they look at eyes. So they have that, but it's not entirely known why. It probably has to do with the fusiform face area. So there's a region of the brain specialized for recognizing faces.

• 25:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  And so it has to do with that, but this is.

• 25:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Properly oriented faces only.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  Properly oriented faces, exactly.

• 25:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  If they're upside down, it doesn't work.

• 25:22Speaker 04

  It doesn't matter. And to be frank, this area of the brain is also involved in dry classification of objects. So not only faces.

• 25:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Musical instruments?

• 25:31Speaker 04

  Probably.

• 25:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  I think so.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  So it's like it goes from, but it's not that, it's more dry. So it goes like a guitar from a piano or something like that. It doesn't have that specification. If you have to have specificity, you have to go higher up in the system. So it's, it has this more banal quality to it. So obviously, in visual processing, you have a hierarchy of where it becomes more complex with each step of in vision. And then the highest, so then it goes to a point where you start classifying objects in the world. That's the fusiform face area. And then after that, you go to vernica, which is more sort of meaning and purpose. And then you go to things like the hippocampus, which is involved in things like memory.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  So it goes from more simple stages of visual processing to tri-classification, faces. Dr. Peterson's from Alex, from Kim knowing different people. So that's that part, and then going to higher centers. So that's kind of that process.

• 26:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  So let's go back to Ramachandran.

• 26:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  I was really interested in his work for a long while, especially on hemispheric lateralization and neglect.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  Fascinating.

• 26:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, some of the experiments that you described emerged because of Ramachandran's investigations into neglect, right, originally. So neglect, for those of you who are watching, listening, is a very strange phenomenon. So if you have a stroke, and you have, correct me if I get any of this wrong, because it's been like 20 years since I thought about it, right parietal damage?

• 27:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, right parietal damage, yeah.

• 27:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  You lose your perception of the left side of your body. But more than that, this is where it gets very weird. You lose the perception of left itself.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I've tried to imagine it's sort of like, you know how everything that's behind you when you're looking forward, it isn't like it's missing. It's just simply not there at a level that's even more profound than missing. And I suspect what happens to people with right parietal damage is that the absence that characterizes your lack of perception of what's behind you.

• 27:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Extends so that now it's three quarters of the world instead of half. Anyways, weirdly enough, you lose your ability to perceive the left side of everything. And I have no idea how to conceptualize that. But one of the consequences of that is that people with profound neglect will wake up and they'll become aware of their left arm and/or their left leg after they've had a stroke and they'll try to throw it out of bed because they think it's someone else's. Or, and if you get them to draw a clock, for example, they'll draw half a clock and cram all the numbers into the right-hand side. And if you give them a plate, they'll eat half the food. I still can't figure this out because how do you think that works?

• 28:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's like, if I pick up my phone, now I look at the phone, so now the phone is foregrounded, but I'm not aware of the left side. Now, if I'm looking at the room now, do I miss the left side of the room? And in the room, do I miss the left side of all the objects? Like, I just don't understand how the hell that works perceptually.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. It's, it's, it's, they somehow don't attend to it, right? So they, they, you can, you can, they can draw, draw a flower the whole day, but they only draw half of the flower. And you keep telling them and they say, "Well, I did my best, I'm drawing it." But they can't, just can't attend to that part of the brain. Mind you, the parietal lobe is involved in spatial orientation, knowing not only the body, where it is in space, but also my, the spatial layout of the room, right? So it has that component, so that's, it's a really strange disorder. And in order to understand how they are, you know, experiencing this at a subjective level is really critical, it's, it's, it's a mystery of sorts.

• 29:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Ramachandran also did experiments with irrigation, didn't he?

• 29:31Speaker 04

  Irrigation, but before we go there, I was just wanna, so the parietal lobe and the superior parietal lobe, another fancy name there, right? So just above the tempor parietal junction is specifically involved in creating a body image as well. So the TPJ we talked about, taking information from various sensory modalities and then, and then whispering information to the superior parietal lobe, this area just above it, it's a neighbor, right? It's involved in creating a subjective sense of a self, the feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body, right? So when people have... A stroke to that part of the brain, as you mentioned, they will sometimes throw their hands out, say, "This arm doesn't belong to me, it belongs to you." Or "It belongs to my dad,"

• 30:15Speaker 04

  or "It belongs to, you know, this person or that person." So, literally, they will become delusional. You can play chess with them, you can have conversation. Nothing, nothing is wrong in otherwise. They're not delusional, they're not psychotic or anything like that. But they, after they had the stroke, affect this region of the brain, they will just say that this arm doesn't belong to me. Or sometimes, they might even say, you might ask them, you say, well, they might deny the paralysis. So that's anosognosia, right? So you say, "Joe, your arm is paralyzed." They will say, "No, it's not paralyzed." "Well, then, touch my nose, Joe." And they will say, "Okay." And they will take the lifeless arm and lift it like this and say, "I'm touching it, doctor, I'm touching it." Literally, taking it up like that, so...

• 31:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, it's almost as if... I wonder too if that's an... Is it a lack of capacity to update as well? Like, it seems to me that what must be happening is they're using a pre-stroke representation of their body.

• 31:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  And the tissue that's been destroyed normally would update that. Because I remember too with Ramachandran's experiments, when he irrigated, this is very weird too, everyone, Ramachandran would irrigate the ears, so pour water, cold water, in the ears of... Left ear, if I remember correctly, left ear, of the people who had neglect. And it would make them shudder. Now, that disturbed their vestibular system, which is involved with bodily orientation. And it would shock them into the realization that they had a paralyzed left side. And they would break down emotionally, catastrophically, with the realization that they'd been so badly damaged. But then, the effects of the irrigation would wear off,

• 31:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  and they'd snap back into this... And that's why I think it's not exactly a delusional state. I think they're stuck with the body representation that existed before the stroke. And what's been eradicated, the systems that could update that, the right hemisphere systems, they don't exist. So there's no way of fixing... There's no straightforward way of fixing it.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  So, one way to approach this or sort of think about this is that, you know, the left side of the brain, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere have different functions. I just want to make it clear to the listeners, I know you know this, right? But, so they have different functions. So, intriguingly, it's only then in the right side if you have the stroke in the left,

• 32:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  they will not have this delusion.

• 32:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 32:40Speaker 04

  That's the funny part, right? So, it's only in the right. So, this tells you that something going on about self in the right that's obviously different.

• 32:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Or alteration of self.

• 32:48Speaker 04

  Alteration of self, right? Interestingly, if you have a stroke to the prefrontal on the left side, you will develop catastrophic reactions to anything. So, you might have a conversation and start crying in the middle of the conversation.

• 32:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 33:00Speaker 04

  Without any, you know, obvious reason. If you get a stroke in the right prefrontal, you will have, become delusionally optimistic.

• 33:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  So, you'll go out and buy a Rolex. You can't, you know, and get, you know, become manic effectively. So, it shows us that the left hemisphere is involved in positive emotion and the right is involved in negative emotion. And in fact, today, when you use things like TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, you might zap the left hemisphere in people with depression and make it more active and you end up with less depression. So, the brain has these functions that are very lateralized and highly unique to each side of the brain.

• 33:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, so, Alkonan Goldberg, I really liked his, his model of brain lateralization.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 33:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Novelty versus routinization. And I know Ramachandran developed a theory that was either parallel or influenced by Goldberg, I can't remember. But, what that would imply, if the right hemisphere is associated with novelty recognition, so it recognizes anomaly.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Yep, that's right.

• 34:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  It makes sense that it would signal negative emotion because the first thing that should happen when something you don't expect occurs. Because that means the routine you're running doesn't map the territory well, right? Because what I'm trying to do is whenever I run a perceptual routine,

• 34:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 34:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  I have a goal in mind.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I'm presuming that my perception is adequate to the task.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  Right.

• 34:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  If something anomalous occurs, like if I tell you a joke and you don't find it funny, or maybe I tell you a joke and you get offended by it, then obviously the way I've mapped you is wrong. The way I've mapped the joke is wrong. God only knows how much error I've made. That's going to be signaled by the right hemisphere.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 34:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Anomaly, negative emotion.

• 34:46Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 34:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, then you're going to attend to that. Now, the problem with depressed people... Is they attend to it catastrophically.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 34:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  So like, if I make a, say if I'm depressed and I make a mistake like that with you. We're sitting here talking.

• 35:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  I make a little joke.

• 35:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you either don't find it funny, or you act offended. Even if that only took a brief amount of time.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  A depressed person would think, "Well, that didn't go over very well." "Obviously, I'm not very funny."

• 35:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  "Obviously, I don't understand people very, I don't understand this person very well."

• 35:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  "Oh, that's because I really, I really don't understand anyone very well."

• 35:26Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  "I didn't understand people very well in the past, and I don't understand them well, and I'm very unlikely to learn how to do that in the future."

• 35:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  People who are unable to learn like that socially, they're not very useful people. Some people are so useless, that it would be better if they weren't around at all. I'm one of them.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and so, I'm wondering if the, so you can imagine the right hemisphere, when it's analyzing a novel, something novel, opens up that entire space of potential consideration.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  My suspicions are, that the left prefrontal cortex probably puts a box around that continually.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  You know, because the right level of analysis, if I make a joke with you, and it falls flat.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 36:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  I should note that, but I shouldn't leap to catastrophic conclusions to begin with. I should just note it, like it should now become a, what would you say? An object of potential future significance.

• 36:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 36:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I've noticed in my clinical practice, that people who are well-regulated emotionally, won't undergo a detailed investigation into an anomaly, until it repeats, let's say, three times, until there's a pattern.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Whereas depressed people, they'll leap to the worst possible conclusion almost immediately. And that does look like something like, like that left hemisphere, left prefrontal hemispheric dysfunction that you described.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, you can imagine that the right hemisphere notes the novelty.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Elicits negative emotion, then opens up the search space, which could be indefinite.

• 36:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  The reason your joke didn't go over might be because you are the kind of unpopular loser who wreaks havoc wherever they go. But that shouldn't be your first

• 37:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  conclusion, right? So you lose the left hemisphere system and that whole cataclysmic reaction is dysregulated.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  I like that. I mean, it makes sense, right? So the right hemisphere is more emotional, big-picture oriented, as you say. And it could be that it goes into this infinite loop of possibilities in this big space land where there's no there's no way it can really get fixed. There's no anchoring, right? So that's

• 37:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay. So I would say, I'd like to know your thoughts about... So I'm very interested in archetypal psychology.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  And Jung had a very specific, Carl Jung had a very specific hypothesis about dreams, which I really like. And this is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today. Because you're interested in dreams and you've talked about them as simulations.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 37:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  So his idea about dreams, which is a brilliant idea, is that it wasn't hemispherically localized for him because he didn't have the neuroatomic knowledge. But so imagine that you encounter an anomaly.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 38:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, that's the place. You could say that that exploration that we just described,

• 38:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 38:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  which is, you know, is there something wrong with me socially? Is it generalizable? Am I a cataclysmic person? All of those are fantasies of a sort, right? And you could think of the fantasies as attempts to remap the anomalous situation.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 38:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? And then, like, a shallow remapping would require just a tiny alteration of fantasy. But a large remapping would mean a whole reconfiguration of character. Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration for the remapping of anomaly and that it could be undertaken safely because you could explore different perceptual configurations in the safety of dreams without exposing yourself to any danger.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you could imagine that... So the right hemisphere signifies,

• 39:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  detects anomaly,

• 39:11Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 39:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  and it begins this exploration process. But it's using it's using the landscape of fantasy, which would be simulation,

• 39:19Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 39:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  to start to... To start to explore.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you could imagine too, that one of the ways that that might be triangulated would be, imagine that your right hemisphere has aggregated a couple of different anomalies.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Not enough to be cataclysmic about them, but to have them sort of there as mysteries.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, now you search through the fantasy space.

• 39:45Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 39:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  And one of the new fantasies explains like several anomalies simultaneously.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 39:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  My guess is that's something like fantasy-related insight.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because you'd see that in therapy, you know, where someone will lay out a couple of different problematic scenarios.

• 40:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then contemplate the commonalities and sometimes they'll stumble across something that, "Oh, I see. I'm looking at this whole thing wrong." It's a restructuring of the theory and then those three anomalies are all accounted for.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that's going to give you a sense of conviction, right? Because now you have a theory that accounts for the new, the new information. And the dream is part of that process. It's the birthplace of that, the birthplace of that renovationalization of conception.

• 40:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. No, that's interesting. So I think definitely in terms of using the right hemisphere in dreams, there's got to be something there. So I'm not sure how much this has been explored in terms of the right hemisphere only.

• 40:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  But there's definitely, because dreams is so much about emotional updating and emotional, creating a sense of, making sense of an emotional landscape, right? So in dreams, for example, there's, it's heavily populated by people, right?

• 40:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 41:00Speaker 04

  REM dreams, for example, so each night you cycle through different stages of sleep, stage one, two, three, and then you have deep sleep and then you have REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, where your eyes go from side to side. During this stage of sleep, you're paralyzed from head to toe. So you have structures in the brain called the pons and medulla in the lower part of the brain that paralyzes your entire body. So you won't act out your dreams and hurt yourself, right? So this is, so I want to lay the foundation before I get to your point, right?

• 41:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that sets up the stage for exploration without risk.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  Right, so now you can, you can engage in this. Laboratory, you know, of testing, a testing space without any fatal consequences, right? You can do whatever you want and you don't hurt your sleeping partner or yourself. So you have that paralysis, first of all. You're in a physiological straitjacket, so to speak, right?

• 41:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, and you can explore deeply enough so that you could actually reshape not just your conceptions,

• 41:50Speaker 04

  Right.

• 41:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  but your perceptions.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 41:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that idea accounts for some of the bizarreness of dreams. Like, if you're exploring at the level of perception, it's gonna seem bizarre, honestly.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  So I just wanna, so I just wanna sort of go this, through this. So, so first of all, you're paralyzed in REM sleep, right? From head to toe, you can't move your, your eyelids can move because of a different circuit, by the way, just wanna add that. So it's this different circuit for the eyelids. Now, interestingly, the emotional part of the brain, the limbic centers behind, tucked behind your ears, become hyperactive. So you have that. Your prefrontal lobes, and the CEO of the brain, becomes less active for some reason. So that part of the brain dials down, right? More to reasons...

• 42:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Restriction of inhibition?

• 42:33Speaker 04

  Restriction of inhibition, and so everything in the world becomes less focused, right?

• 42:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Less constrained?

• 42:41Speaker 04

  Less constrained, right? So you don't think in a logical, straightforward, A, B, C-like manner, right? So if I wake somebody up from REM sleep and say, well, the word, and tell him the word "sun", he will think of chair instead of moon, right? So he doesn't think in a logical, serial manner, he will think in an unrelated manner. In fact, he will be more likely to say "sun" and "chair", versus when somebody's awake and I ask him, "Well, what do you think of now when I say sun?", they might say "moon", so they are more likely to relate unrelated words. So they think in a...

• 43:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Which is what you'd expect if it was an exploratory process.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  Exploratory process, right? So the prefrontal lobes turn down, right? The emotional part of the brain dial up, right? So you have that. You're paralyzed from head to toe. Now, this is a perfect cocktail for strange things. Not only that, but also the chemicals in your brain that have to do with logical and linear thinking, nor adrenaline. You have adrenaline in your body when you're anxious, or you're excited, you have adrenaline, you have no... noradrenaline in the brain, but also in the body, but noradrenaline is a cousin chemical of adrenaline. Now, this chemical, it turns out, there's a structure in the brain, in the brainstem called the locus celulose.

• 43:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  celulose.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  Celulose, yes, exactly. Your pronunciation is brilliant. Thirty-two thousand cells pitch black in the brainstem. They will stop secreting noradrenaline during REM sleep. So that means your way of thinking about the world is unfocused. It's like spacey, it's creative, right?

• 44:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, unconstrained, unconstrained by prior conviction.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 44:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Prior learning.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  Right. So this is a perfect cocktail now for craziness. The vestibular part of your brain become hyperactive. You know, the central motor region of the brain that has to do with automatic sort of behavior become hyperactive.

• 44:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Even though they're paralyzed?

• 44:36Speaker 04

  Even though you're paralyzed. So that's why dreams, you can sometimes feel like you're running, but you can't control your legs. You feel like some monsters is chasing you, but you can't move, or you feel like you're controlled like a puppet on a string. And that's because the parts of the brain, it has to do with automatic movements. Sporadically, the neurons, they're fired, so you cannot control your movement. So you have all that. And then you have the emotions, and it seems like then it's just perfect for what you're saying then, that the right hemisphere type of thinking, of exploration and emotion is just, it's hyperactive.

• 45:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so it's a safe place for exploration, for exploratory simulation that can be so extreme that it converge on the bizarre.

• 45:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  But why not? Why not explore the outer limits under safe conditions? Well, I've also, I remember that if you wake people up from REM sleep, the most common emotion they report is anxiety. And that makes sense too, if you think about this as part of the... What would you say? The reconfiguration in the face of novelty process. Yep. Because the most appropriate first response to something anomalous is anxiety. Yep. It's to... Because technically, what anxiety does is stop the operation of... It stops current operation. Right. So that's like a prey... It's like a prey animal response. Yep. Freeze! Yep. Why?

• 46:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because what you're doing has either not worked or exposed you to danger. So now, you're not where... You're not where you thought you were, and what you're doing isn't doing what you thought it was. Yes. Okay, now what? Right. Stop! Yep. That's anxiety. Then, then what? Then explore. So, like, if you throw a rat into a new cage. Yeah, yeah. The first thing it does is freeze. Right. Okay, then what it starts to do is to look around. I guess, to begin with, it doesn't even want to move its eyes, right? Because it doesn't want to attack... Attract the attention of a predator. So it freezes and crouches down. Right. And then, if nothing additionally terrible happens, it starts to thaw. It starts to look and starts to sniff. Yep. Right?

• 46:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then it'll start to explore and remap the territory. Yep. But that seems to be what's happening at the dream level, conceptually. As you imagine that you're encountering a landscape of anomaly or novelty that's signified by the right hemisphere. The emotion that's elicited is anxiety with a subtext of curiosity. Right, right. Right? Because both of those two things would be at play. Yep. And then, the fantasy landscape can be elaborated, so that even perception itself can be reconfigured because of the error. If you're betrayed by someone, you could say something like, "I can't even look at you the same way." Yep. Right, and that means that the betrayal has forced a reconception so profound that perception itself has been altered.

• 47:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like, you could find someone attractive... This happens often when people are dating. You could find someone attractive or unattractive on first meeting. Yep. And then, as you get to know them... Maybe you thought they were attractive to begin with, and that just goes away.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Or you felt that they weren't that attractive to begin with, but as you get to know their character, let's say, then the perception itself shifts. It's not merely the theory of mind or the conception you have of them, right? You literally look at them differently. Maybe it's because in part you actually see, I don't know, if you reconfigure the, what would be the patterns of interaction in their face?

• 48:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 48:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  You know, like someone graceful, for example, you're obviously perceiving something like a gestalt, and there's something charming and beautiful about that.

• 48:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  My guess is if you see a person of high character across time, you can see their integration.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that that would make them, that would allow you to perceive their attractiveness in a way that you might not have been able to do superficially.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  Absolutely, that's very interesting.

• 48:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  Well, to go back to the whole dream thing, right? So one of the things is that it's populated by a lot of people. And that's, again, right hemisphere is actually involved in decoding social, like facial expressions, for example. So that's one thing that obviously autistic people have problems with. But for some reason, there's a lot of faith, there's a lot of people, a lot of interactions in dreams, so you interact a lot with a lot of people. And usually, actually, these interactions are negative. And this shows us that for some reason, it's advantageous to dream of negative things because you're more likely to train your circuits in your brain to be able to, so, to put it shortly, like if I have an encounter with a serial killer in my dream, and I sort of

• 49:24Speaker 04

  overcome that, I'm not killed by it, right? By that serial killer.

• 49:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 49:28Speaker 04

  I can navigate that situation in an appropriate manner. I'm more likely to survive in real life. So it shows you that dreams has a lot to do with survival. And training the circuits in the brain, making them solidify the ones that can help me survive more, so that's a huge part of...

• 49:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, well, and it would make sense too, that what you should, look, the more sophisticated you are in your social perception.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  The less likely even encounters with dangerous people are to go wrong.

• 49:59Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 50:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  I'll tell you a story about that.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 50:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  So I had this landlord when I lived in Montreal, and he was an ex-president of Hell's Angels in Montreal. And he'd been in prison, and he was a rough guy. Yeah. And we couldn't communicate that easily because he spoke jus' all French, which is very hard to understand, even if you're French. And I spoke English. And there was quite a big class difference between us. And I was from Western Canada, and she was from Eastern Canada. And so, but we got along, you know? He lived right beside me. And to the degree we couldn't communicate, we did. And he did some artwork. He worked in Neon, as it turned out. And I bought some of his pieces. And we kind of got to know each other insofar as we could.

• 50:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, the problem, his name was Paulo. The problem was that now and then he would go on a bender. And he could drink, well, like an unlimited amount of alcohol over a three-day period, like 90 beer, you know? Like, and he would drink himself to a point where it was not even obvious how conscious he was, but he was still upright. Right. And then he'd drink up all his money. And then he developed a habit of coming to my door at like 3:00 in the morning to sell me like a toaster or a microwave because he needed money, because he wanted to keep drinking. And so I did that a couple of times. He showed up at like 3:00 in the morning. Now, he's a big guy, and he's tough.

• 51:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  I went out once to a bar with him. He put me on the back of his motorcycle, which is a 750 Honda, if I remember correctly. He put his wife's helmet on my head, which is his little tiny helmet, and away we went. And he said, "If the cops come after me, I'm not stopping, just so you know." Yeah. It's like, well, that was the beginning of a very interesting evening. And he got into all sorts of fights at the bars because people would come up and like, challenge him essentially, stupid people. And that didn't go well for them. So he was touchy, let's put it that way. Well, I talked to my wife about this. Because she didn't like the fact that I was giving Paulo money for his like toasters and so forth, because she knew that he was trying to quit drinking.

• 52:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, and then it also scared her that he would come over like at 3:00 in the morning. So, one day, he came over at 3:00 in the morning and he was standing there sort of swaying and looking at me. And I had to tell him that I wasn't going to give him any more money, starting then. And I had to tell him why. And so I said, "Look, we know you're trying to quit drinking. And when you come over and I buy your toaster, then you go and drink. And I can't do that anymore because it's not good." And he looked at me for like 10 seconds. And I know he was looking at me. He was looking at me to see if I was playing moral superiority games. Yeah.

• 52:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, in which case the interaction wouldn't have gone very well. Yeah. Right. And so the reason I'm bringing that up is because as your social perception becomes more sophisticated, the probability that you can navigate well in a complex and potentially dangerous situation increases radically. Right. So if you can practice that in a dream. Yes. Now, that should mean that you should concentrate on elements of social behavior that didn't go your way, that you don't understand. Right. And that would take you into a landscape of, well, hard to tell, but possibly into a landscape of malevolence. That would explain, for example, why people go and watch horror movies and movies about serial killers and so forth. It's like you want to sharpen yourself up.

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• 54:11Speaker 04

  And then that's a good point. So the fact is that, you know, when you, when you dream, that your brain takes you on this exploration, right? And it looks at various social scenarios, for example, that evoke emotions in you. So it takes, you know, Dr. Peterson and put him in a room with, with Kim and, and Joe, and, and see how he reacts. If, if the reaction is not an emotionally evocative one, it will literally take you and show you another scenario, until it hits on a scene that evokes your emotion, that gets you riled up, and then it explores that.

• 54:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  So it has to be, okay.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  It has, yeah, it has to have that element, and then it will go down that path more and explore it more. It's, it'll say, "This is interesting."

• 54:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, I see. So it presents scenarios.

• 54:52Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 54:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Until one evokes a limbic reaction.

• 54:56Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 54:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, but that, but is it also searching for emotional reactions that are primarily negative, or is it, is it intensity?

• 55:06Speaker 04

  Not necessarily. So it does, there's a, there's a huge dopaminergic aspect to dreams. So it's been shown that if you have a lesion to a part of the brain, the inferior parietal lobule, again, it's a region just below the superior parietal lobule, is involved in creating images, but also it's, so if you have a stroke there, for example, you won't dream, or the, the, the mesolimbic dopamine centers, it's a fancy name for the part of the brain where you have dopamine going to the prefrontal cortex. If you have a lesion there, you won't dream as well. So bliss and dopamine, as well as images, is involved deeply in, in.

• 55:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so it's emotional intensity and valence.

• 55:40Speaker 04

  Intensity, valence, yeah.

• 55:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, but it's tilted somewhat towards the negative.

• 55:44Speaker 04

  Tilted somewhat towards the negative.

• 55:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  We aren't generally, as human beings, tilted somewhat toward the negative.

• 55:47Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 55:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, okay, okay, so your brain is playing with various scenarios.

• 55:54Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 55:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  And if one evokes an emotional response,

• 55:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  so you see, the thing is, if it evokes a negative emotional response, that would indicate that your adaptation is weak at that point, right? Because. You're much more likely to be anxious about a situation that you haven't mastered.

• 56:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 56:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so you could imagine that the evocation of negative emotion is an indication of weakness in conceptual structure.

• 56:21Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 56:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so now the dream is playing with various scenarios around that

• 56:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  evocation point.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  Yep. So one, it's very interesting. So one thing that I want to make clear as well, it's that, you know, obviously, as you know, there's a corpus callosum, that, that, that there's a bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing the two hemisphere to, to, to communicate, right? So you have the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. So these hemisphere, if, if you literally cut it, there won't, you'll have two consciousness in one person, right? So it seems like dreams is also right hemispheric dominance for another, another reason, because the things you will see in your dreams are, are like poetry, right? It's visual metaphors that you can't explain in language, right?

• 57:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  I can, it's like going through an art museum and looking at things, but in a very poetically, beautifully, uh, non-language way, right? So you can't describe it necessarily. And obviously, the left hemisphere, the regions of the Vernaica and stuff like that, is involved in language, in understanding language. But it seems like, like the poetic aspect of dreams is very much a right hemispheric, uh, you know, thing as well.

• 57:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that, that should be associated with both the novelty-rootinization dichotomy. So the question is, well, how do you approach something that's novel? Well, if it's novel, if it produces anomaly, if you don't understand it, you haven't encapsulated in language. It's not rooted, rootedized enough so that you have a propositional description of it.

• 57:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you could imagine that during the day, when you're conscious, you're running well-rootedized, propositionalized routines.

• 57:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 57:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  But some of them don't work out as well as others.

• 58:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 58:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so now imagine the right hemisphere is sitting in the background, mapping the failures.

• 58:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so now you have like a collection of failures, it's something like that. Now it's nighttime, you shut down the propositional side and you open up the metaphoric side. And it's starting to explore that land, it's exploring, I think it's exploring unexplored territory fundamentally. That's the best way to conceptualize it. But it's also like the land, it's the same as the landscape of insufficient adaptation. Right? And so, and that should be associated with

• 58:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Negative emotion.

• 58:37Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 58:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  And now the question would be, what would be the utility of those metaphoric fantasies? Well, part of that's... Okay, so imagine that around any perception, there's a cloud of connotations, right? That are first order. We already talked about that. So like a first order connotation for you would... If I saw you, would obviously be male, right? So, and then imagine that outside of that, there's second order connotations and third order, and finally, things that are so distinct that they don't seem to bear any conceptual relationship.

• 59:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 59:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, as you open up the metaphoric landscape, that connotation width should expand.

• 59:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 59:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  And, and then you could imagine that what you're trying to do is to explore a new network of connotations that would map the territory more effectively, right?

• 59:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, and I think what is also interesting about dreams and that whole thing is that it seems to tap into a circuitry that's more mystical than the circuitry that we normally tap into. I mystical, I mean, it seems like some of the receptors involved in mystical experiences, when you take psilocybin and, and things like mescaline and, and DMT and stuff like that, the serotonin 2A receptors. So one theory actually talks about how... So obviously serotonin is another neurochemical in the brain. That, the part of the brain that produces that, the dorsoraphin nucleus, also shuts down its production of serotonin. So you don't have serotonin in your dreams either, in REM sleep.

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  And, and so you end up in this space without noradrenaline and without serotonin. But it seems like for some reason that the serotonin 2A receptors become, become dialed up. So that part of the serotonin 2 receptors become tickled for some reasons, and the rea...

• 1:00:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that is also happening in a psilocybin experience.

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  It also happens in psilocybin experiences.

• 1:00:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so that accounts in part for the overlap between the mystical experience and the dream experience.

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  The mystical experiences and the dream experiences. So there's something there that is... That's hyper cosmic in dreams that you can't, it's ineffable, you can't describe it in language. And even, and it's highly personal and has salience for you. So, one thing that I notice about dreams is a lot of people come and talk to me about their dreams all the time. They'll go, "Balan, I had this dream, I saw this and that." And they're very emotional about it and it's highly personal and cosmic, right? But, you know, I kind of go, "Oh, that's interesting, but it's not really that interesting." But it has that significance for you as a person. And that's kind of about the dream thing, it has personal salience. Kind of the type of personal salience you can get from a psilocybin experience.

• 1:01:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so, what do you think, Akkaun? Okay, so you said something paradoxical about that, right? That it's a weird combination of intensely personal and cosmic. Which means intensely universal, it brings those two things together.

• 1:01:39Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:01:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that's a strange conjunction, because those two things are actually quite far apart. The more personal something is, in some ways, the less cosmic, the less universal it is. But the dream unites those two things.

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  It kind of unites them, yeah.

• 1:01:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, so, I wonder... See, an archetype, in some ways, bridges the gap between the personal and the cosmic. So, well, here's an example of something you can do with a dream, that's very effective. So, imagine that you have a client who's chased by something awful in a dream, and that repeats. And then you ask them what they do, and they say, "Well, I run away or I try to hide." Okay, so then you say to them, "Well, here's what we're gonna do instead. I want you to sit there, close your eyes, then make them relax, so that they get into a state where they can visualize." Say, "Now, bring that dream to mind."

• 1:02:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  "Okay, now, close your eyes, bring the dream to mind. Now, tell me what's happening." So they'll replay the dream and say, "Now, okay, now, at the end, instead of running,

• 1:02:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  tell me what happens if you turn around and ask the..."

• 1:02:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Criminal, or the sadist, or the monster.

• 1:02:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  What it's up to.

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Or, what happens if you approach it instead of running?

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:03:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, and then, the dream will continue in their imagination, most of the time.

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:03:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  And, generally, what occurs in a consequence of that is that dream goes away.

• 1:03:12Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:03:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, I think the reason for that, and I think this is akin to this bridging of the gap between the personal and the cosmic, is because their personal response to being chased is to run.

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:03:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  And hide. So they're prey animals.

• 1:03:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, if you, if you transform that into voluntary explorers,

• 1:03:35Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:03:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Then, the, you're, what you're doing is you're inculcating an element of the hero myth into the dream landscape. It's like, no, the right strategy when you're threatened isn't to run, the right strategy is to turn voluntarily and to commence the process of exploration. That is what a hero myth is.

• 1:03:55Speaker 04

  That's very interesting. So, let's go on that whole thing, right? So, the monster in your dream represents your hyperactive amygdala and the limbic centers of the brain being hyperactive, up to 30% more active in the dream landscape, right?

• 1:04:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so that's that overplay of emotion.

• 1:04:09Speaker 04

  That's the overplay of the emotion, and by the way, the hippocampus is also, turns out, the memory part of the brain is also hyperactive in the dream REM world. So you have the memory spilling in, into this, this narrative about a monster chasing you, right? So you give it identity, you give it name, you give it, you know, all this, all these negative features.

• 1:04:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so you're, you're contextualizing the emotion.

• 1:04:30Speaker 04

  You contextualize it based, based on the hyperactive hippocampus.

• 1:04:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Speaker 04

  Then, it's chasing you, and you can't run away, because we said the motor, central motor generator of your brainstem is making it very hard for you to move. So you don't have the, so movement normally occurs in the motor cortex of your brain, that gives you voluntary movement. But because that part of the brain can compete with the central motor, automatic part of the brain firing, and, and making your behaviors all, you know, sporadic and automatic, so you can't get away. Now, what you said was interesting. You said, if you turn around and Approach the monster, the monster will be, it will become diminished in strength. And that's interesting because we know in the real world, if you walk, simply by walking, you will turn down the activity of the amygdala because you're telling your, you're telling your brain

• 1:05:17Speaker 04

  or your self that you are approaching, you're engaging in approach behavior instead of withdrawal.

• 1:05:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right, right. Which, which puts you, see, that shifts your identity in relationship to the thing that's chasing you.

• 1:05:29Speaker 04

  You're changing, you're saying now I'm no longer the prey here, I'm the predator. I am the one that is being, that is doing the haunting, you know? And so in that sense, it would make sense that the monster would vanish. So that's very interesting. But I also want to touch on that whole, on monsters, since we're on the topic of monsters. So this condition called sleep paralysis, and I talk about it in my Peterson Academy course, there's a whole lecture on sleep paralysis. So are you familiar with sleep paralysis?

• 1:05:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  I experienced sleep paralysis repeatedly.

• 1:06:01Speaker 04

  Is that right?

• 1:06:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  For years, yeah, especially if I slept on my back. That doesn't happen anymore.

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:06:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  But I'm very familiar with sleep paralysis, yes.

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  Do you see any monsters? Can you explain? I'm curious.

• 1:06:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Most of my experiment, experience was being unable to move and no, I knew what sleep paralysis was, so even when it happened to me in my dreams, usually my experience was that I, I, something was happening to me and I was frozen and unable to speak. And I, I knew I had to wake myself up.

• 1:06:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like I'd try to throw myself off the bed. Sometimes I could yell to my wife. I mean, literally in my life, I, I would yell and she'd have to come and shake me and then I'd wake up.

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  But no, I didn't have the

• 1:06:45Speaker 04

  Monster.

• 1:06:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Monster element to it.

• 1:06:47Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:06:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  But I had clients who did in sleep paralysis. I think the reason that didn't happen is because I knew what was happening.

• 1:06:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? So the, the monster too, just out of curiosity, so you could imagine that. With this interplay between the hippocampus and the amygdala, if the emotional systems are more active, okay, so now there's lots of emotions being triggered.

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, the memory systems are interacting with those emotions. They're gonna flesh them out.

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? So, here's the emotion, here's the thing that would be most likely to manifest that. So if it's a panoply of emotions, it would be an amalgam of emotion-evoking stimuli. And there's no difference between an amalgam of emotion eliciting stimuli and a monster.

• 1:07:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:07:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Those are the same thing.

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  Same thing.

• 1:07:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's what a monster is.

• 1:07:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? So a monster is your worst nightmare come to life.

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  It's your worst nightmare, right? It's whatever you dread, whatever is lurking in your unconscious mind, that's coming to the fore, right? And so during sleep paralysis, interestingly, you didn't have any of the monsters.

• 1:07:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  No.

• 1:07:46Speaker 04

  But it turns out about 40% of people will see monsters. Sleep paralysis is a terrifying experience. So you have this REM paralysis, obviously. You're paralyzed from head to toe during REM sleep. You're dreaming away. Occasionally, for some people, they might start feeling like they can, you know, they can see their surroundings, so they might open their eyes. And then they realize, my God, I'm paralyzed. I can't move, I can't speak. And it's terrifying at this point. And then they look around. And I had one of these experiences. So let me tell you about my own experience. So I was sleeping in my room as a teenager in Copenhagen. And I grew up in a ghetto-like neighborhood in Copenhagen. And I was lying there, sleeping. And then I woke up paralyzed, unable to move or speak.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  And then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me. And it came closer and closer, until it was on my chest, strangling me. And I saw my legs flying up and down. And mind you, at this point, I was like, is this real? It was as crisp as this conversation you and I are having right now.

• 1:08:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  What did the monster look like?

• 1:08:49Speaker 04

  Well, I'll tell you.

• 1:08:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay.

• 1:08:50Speaker 04

  So, at this point, I just saw my legs flying up and down. And it was choking me, and I couldn't, you know, do anything. I was literally trying to kill me. Now, on this occasion, I didn't see a monster. I didn't see a monster on this occasion, but I've had sleep paralysis since then on many occasions. And I've had various monsters. So I've seen, like, one was Colonel Gaddafi, you know him, eccentric figure. He was hovering over me when I was in Egypt. I was living in Egypt for a period of time in my early undergraduate years. I was a little bit out there. And I saw during the Libyan Revolution, of all people, Gaddafi was in my bedroom hovering over me, you know, attacking me. So that can happen during sleep paralysis, and that was...

• 1:09:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  So he's the monster of the oppressive patriarchy come to visit?

• 1:09:35Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:09:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  I had a wife, my wife had a dream like that about Richard Nixon, dressed in a general's outfit. So he was another figure, like, you could think about him as the monstrous form of the patriarchy. My wife kissed him.

• 1:09:49Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:09:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, so that was how she reconciled that conflict. Well, you can think about it, it's a funny move, right? Because the monstrous element of the patriarchy is, it's the negative side of the social order. It's something everyone has to contend with. That is, that's a class of monster, right? Like giant, it's the same thing as giant. And in hero mythology, of course, one of the categories of monster that the hero fights is giant. There's dragon, there's very, and dragon is a different, that's more like a representation of the terrible aspect of nature. That's a good way to think about a dragon. Okay, so you said you were in Libya?

• 1:10:27Speaker 04

  Well, I was in Egypt. Egypt, yeah.

• 1:10:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  What was happening around you?

• 1:10:30Speaker 04

  Around that time, there was a spring, the Arab Spring and the Libyan Revolution. All that was going on, and I was watching CNN all the time, you know?

• 1:10:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh yeah, you should never do that.

• 1:10:39Speaker 04

  That I should never do, right? So I was doing that, I was sort of watching the news and, you know, I was influenced in some way. So, and that's really interesting. So our research now in about seven countries has shown that, you know, whenever you have a cultural narrative for it, like stories of witches, of space aliens, or whatever, you will have those lurking into your unconscious and you will see that manifest, right?

• 1:11:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, we show... So those are categories of the monstrous?

• 1:11:09Speaker 04

  Those are the... Your Carl Jung archetype, you know, figures appearing. So, for example, in Egypt, we showed that the evil genius of Aladdin. You know Aladdin, the cartoon? You will have that appear in front of you. So, you know, they will have bloody things and everything will be creepy. Very scary monsters you will see in Egypt. In Italy, for example, in the Pandavica region of Italy, you will see these giant cats or witches. So that's very common. And in the US, space alien abduction is

• 1:11:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:11:40Speaker 04

  It's very common in the US, so you might see that.

• 1:11:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so what that would imply is that you could imagine that the cultural... Okay, so let's say the core of the revelation is diffuse emotional activation, much of it negative emotion.

• 1:11:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, now the question is,

• 1:12:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  what's the most basic form in which that could take perceptual shape?

• 1:12:04Speaker 04

  That's good.

• 1:12:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so the cultural narrative

• 1:12:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  would be like a first-order elaboration of the core of that fear. So then, it's not surprising at all that that's what your mind would latch on to when it was trying to clothe that emotion in perceptual reality.

• 1:12:21Speaker 04

  It's very interesting, actually. So it turns out if you go first order and the basic level, most people will just see shapes and shadows. So they won't even see the monster clothed and have all these details. So it turns out.

• 1:12:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, that's the truly unknowable monster.

• 1:12:36Speaker 04

  That's the V1, that's the... You know, the occipital lobes in the visual cortex responds to lines and basic shapes.

• 1:12:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, I see. Oh, that's so cool.

• 1:12:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  So the first order...

• 1:12:49Speaker 04

  Is the first order, it's simply the brain says, "Look, I don't even care about the details. I feel fear right now. I just want to hallucinate the basic..."

• 1:12:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Just the sketch?

• 1:12:59Speaker 04

  The sketch, right? So you have the sketch.

• 1:13:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so then as you explore, does it move up the visual...

• 1:13:04Speaker 04

  Then moves up the visual hierarchy, right? So we know then that you have a part of the brain called the MT, the motor part of the brain, has to do with movement. So that's the next in the hierarchy. Then you have a part of the brain that has to do with, as we said, putting faces, so, and depth and color. And so that comes as we move along the visual hierarchy. And then finally, you reach the vernica and the meaning part of the brain, the hippocampus. And you go, my God, this is Freddy Krueger from Elm Street. He's attacking me right now and he has this agenda and intentions. So but ninety, like most of the time, people will see these shadows and shapes. And that's it. And that's it.

• 1:13:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Are they most terrified at that level?

• 1:13:42Speaker 04

  It's very terrifying. Usually, the reason, the one reason for this is that usually when you don't have an identity, it's even more scary.

• 1:13:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, because you don't know what to do.

• 1:13:51Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:13:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, okay, so then you imagine that, oh, that's so cool. So then you imagine that adaptation would proceed in this manner. So when it's only shapeless form.

• 1:14:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:14:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  You have no idea what to do because there's, there's no concrete action you can take against a shapeless form.

• 1:14:10Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:14:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so now you could imagine using this in behavior therapy to deal with fears. It's like, okay, first of all, because you're trying to get it to take form.

• 1:14:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:14:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, why? Because the more form it takes, the more delineated the strategy can be for dealing with it.

• 1:14:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you're saying, okay, so first of all, you're doing a walk through the visual hierarchy.

• 1:14:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  You got just the shadows and the basic, and then you get the basic motion.

• 1:14:35Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:14:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then what's the next level?

• 1:14:36Speaker 04

  You get depth, for example, you get color, V4 area in the brain with color. So you buy at color, that could be another.

• 1:14:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, and then it takes a face.

• 1:14:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then it takes. And an identity.

• 1:14:45Speaker 04

  It takes a face, identity, and then you hook up the emotional part of the brain. So it gets emotions.

• 1:14:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, then next thing you'd need above that would be a behavioral strategy.

• 1:14:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  So if this named and faced figure now makes itself manifest, what do you need to do? And so, see, this is partly what you do if you're trying to treat someone for post-traumatic stress disorder is you help them specify very clearly.

• 1:15:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:15:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  So give form to the nature of the fear, but that's not enough. It isn't enough to know your enemy.

• 1:15:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? That's better than not knowing your enemy, because that's even more terrifying. But you want to lay out a behavioral strategy in relationship to that enemy that either quells the threat. Yep. So how do you deal with a criminal, let's say? Yep. Or, like, the optimal strategy would be to take the enemy and to transform him into an ally. Right? That's like, that's the highest possible level of adaptation. Absolutely. Because who needs an enemy? Yep. And partly what you're doing, like in therapy, you can go through someone's history and you can see where they might have had a repeated traumatic experience, like in a relationship. Mm-hmm. Then you have to find out what is it that's absent in their representation of relationship that's exposing them time and time again to that threat?

• 1:16:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because it means there's something in their perception. Yep. And their strategy. It's, because imagine this, imagine that you were selectively blind for, only for white vans that were approaching you from the left. It's not much of a deficit. But your recurring experience would be, once every two years, you get run over by a white van. Yep. And you have no idea why. Right. Okay, so that's the account of the lack of your perception and the repeat experience. Yep. So now you have someone who has a repetitive trauma. You think, well, you've got a hole in your adaptive structure. Okay, now you want to characterize that, so give it form. And you want to append a, it's a perceptual and behavioral strategy to it. And that'll, that's what'll make the nightmare go away. Yeah.

• 1:16:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  And it's really remarkable, my experience clinically was that it all, it took very few repetitions of a repeating dream. Yep. Where you inverted the strategy. Mm-hmm. The dream would, the, the dream would almost, my experience was that if you did that once, the person wouldn't have the recurring dream anymore. Right. Right, and it's because, you might say, at some very deep level, they had conceptualized themselves in that situation as nothing but a prey animal. Yeah. You do the same thing with exposure therapy, with agoraphobia, right? Is you get people to... Imagine what upsets them and then begin to confront it.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so, and the generalization element isn't the specific strategy of confrontation. It's the idea that they could be the one that confronts.

• 1:17:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's very interesting. There's two points on that I wanna, I wanna go into. It's really, very fascinating. So first of all, we've shown that when you have a specific cultural narrative for it and a name for it, right, the more terrifying and salient it becomes. So for example, if you live in Egypt and you say it's these evil genies, they come at night. They choke you, they strangle you, they kill you, then you will first of all have this experience much more frequently. So up to one-third of more frequency to the experience. That's the first thing.

• 1:18:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  If there's a cultural narrative.

• 1:18:08Speaker 04

  If there's a cultural narrative. So we compared Egypt to Denmark, my home country. So we compared these two countries and it turns out when, in Denmark, by the way, people say most of the time it's just the brain, it's stress. It's nothing terrifying, like there's no, there's no higher like explanation for it, right? So it's just physiology.

• 1:18:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:18:24Speaker 04

  In Egypt, you have the opposite, right, the complete opposite. More frequent, more fearful. So fifty percent of Danish people will say, I think, for Egyptians will say, I will die from this. This is fatal. So this is Egyptians, okay? So they have that. It become, they say the paralysis lasts much longer. So they will say the paralysis is intense, it lasts much longer. So it seems like through their cultural beliefs, the experience has become much, becomes much more salient, much more profound and impactful.

• 1:18:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's got elements of psychogenic epidemic to it, eh?

• 1:18:59Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And we said, is this true? Is this actually the case? And we took, went to Italy and we looked at the Egyptian, the Italians with these terrifying explanations of sleep paralysis. And we saw the same pattern. The Italians will also, would also have these long episodes. They would have them frequently and they would be extremely fearful.

• 1:19:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  So it's, it's like a contagious, maladaptive conceptualization?

• 1:19:23Speaker 04

  Absolutely, right? And so it turns out we have a theory for why that occurs.

• 1:19:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay.

• 1:19:28Speaker 04

  So it's imagine little Lisa living on this fictitious island in Simbach Chu, for example. And she has this conversation with her grandmother over, you know, dinner. Let's say the grandmother says, "At night, you will have this monster. It comes and attacks you, chokes you. It looks like this and that. It has all these features." She now goes to bed, right? And she has never had, by the way, she's never had sleep paralysis before, right? For the first time, she will have sleep paralysis now. She will wake up the next day, and she will have sleep paralysis again. A few days later, she'll have it again. And then, a month later, it's become chronic at this point, and she'll go tell other people about it, and they will have it too. And then you might be asking, "Why is this the case? What's going on?"

• 1:20:12Speaker 04

  And this is the idea. We think that, first of all, the grandmother implanted these ideas into her brain about what sleep paralysis is. When she's now sleeping in her bed, she will have nocturnal arousal, meaning the emotional part of the brain will be hyperactive during the REM stage. And she will engage in this hyperconformatory behavior where she will monitor there any paralysis sensations, saying, "Is something holding me down? Is something choking me?"

• 1:20:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now she's got a scary explanation for it.

• 1:20:42Speaker 04

  She's looking for an explanation for this now, and then whenever, and because of her emotional centers being hyperactive, whenever she feels something, she'll go, "My God, this is it. This is it." And she'll open her eyes, and then the emotional, the hippocampus and all the narrative part of the brain will spill over into the experience, and she will literally see whatever her grandmother was telling her. Now, you might say, "Why then does it happen a few days later?" Well, that created profound fear. And so, a few days later, she will have anxiety and stress, which will predispose her. We've shown that anxiety and stress predisposes you. So she will have it again, two days later, and three days later. And at this point, she'll go, "My God, I'm possessed."

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  It's no longer just one episode. This monster is, you know, chronically possessing me, and it's coming after me.

• 1:21:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  And the funny thing is too, it is a kind of possession.

• 1:21:35Speaker 04

  It is kind of a possession.

• 1:21:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  The grandmother transmitted the spirit to her.

• 1:21:38Speaker 04

  It's like a virus, right?

• 1:21:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, a meme. It's a monstrous meme.

• 1:21:42Speaker 04

  It's a meme, right? But at this point, what's interesting is that we've shown that people who have this episode, they will have more anxiety and more PTSD-like symptoms from this, right? So at this point, she might have these... Small tease of trauma of the monster coming and attacking you, and then creating an overall trauma. So it becomes almost a traumatic experience.

• 1:22:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, you could imagine how that would increase the probability that it would spread too. Because she might tell a friend.

• 1:22:08Speaker 04

  That's what I'm saying, right? So she goes around and tells her friends about it. And it turns out then that if you live in a culture where this, you know, like Egypt, it's twice as common versus Denmark. So we said that for an individual person, you will have it three times more than the person who has sleep paralysis. But beyond this, it's generally twice as common in cultures like Egypt and Italy and so forth. So there's this element to it that's very, very interesting. And I want to take you to an experiment that your colleague Rich did, Rich McNally, that sort of encapsulates all this. So he showed that people who think that sleep paralysis is based alien abduction. So these guys will say, well, I was sleeping in my bed and this gray came down in a spaceship.

• 1:22:53Speaker 04

  It attacked me, it choked me, it took out my semen. And it was all a lot of sexuality going on. And obviously, we know from REM sleep, the hypothalamus and these parts of the brain are hyperactive. The sexual parts of the brain are hyperactive. So you have sexual arousal during sleep paralysis.

• 1:23:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:23:08Speaker 04

  So you have the monster coming down, taking their semen and all that. Then they will have...

• 1:23:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like a succubus from the Middle Ages.

• 1:23:16Speaker 04

  Like a succubus, right? But then at this point, what's interesting is that these guys, when they listen to the audio script of their encounters of themselves narrating, so they'll listen to themselves saying, oh, I had this experience and this happened and that happened. Their physiological reactions to that, their GSR, their sweating and their heart rate and blood pressure will be as profound as somebody who went to war. So somebody with actual PTSD who went to a war situation, the physiological reactions they have is comparable to somebody who was sleeping in their beds and having sleep paralysis. So for me, this shows me this might be one of the most interesting phenomena in the science.

• 1:23:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, you could see, well...

• 1:23:58Speaker 04

  You know?

• 1:23:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Look, you know from psychotherapy that the simulations that produce the most psychophysiological response are the most curative.

• 1:24:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:24:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, for example, when Ed Nofoa was treating people with PTSD, and I think she did this as well as anybody's ever done it.

• 1:24:14Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:24:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  She would have people, this is counterintuitive in some ways, so imagine that the trauma was rape instituted. She'd have them bring the rape incident to mind in as much detail as possible. Voluntarily, that's the critical element, voluntarily.

• 1:24:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then she did psychophysiological measurements, and the participants who were, who showed the highest levels of psychophysiological response to the reenactment were the ones that got better faster.

• 1:24:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:24:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, that was, it was still damn hard on them while they were doing it, but it makes perfect sense that the more hyperrealist simulation, the more neurolog, the more learning would be associated with it.

• 1:24:57Speaker 04

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 1:24:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you could see how that could be pathologized. So then the question would be, this would be the tricky question for a therapist, is like, "Well, what do you do with a client that has a repetitive alien abduction experience?" Because now, that's a person who needs a strategy.

• 1:25:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:25:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:25:14Speaker 04

  Well, so we, I developed a therapy for sleep paralysis. I don't know, maybe you're interested in that?

• 1:25:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Lay it out.

• 1:25:19Speaker 04

  I can tell you about that, alright. So, it's a four-step solution that I came up with. So I, from my work around the world, I thought, I gotta have some, you know, some, some method to help these people, right? So, what, how could I help them? This was my thought, how can I help these guys, right? And so, one thing is that I noticed that, for example, prayer, and, and meditation, and prayer, and thinking about positive things was helpful. In a lot of instances, people would lay down and think about, you know, whatever god they're believing, and, and that would actually help them. So, that got me thinking about the attention system and the emotional parts of the brain, and how I can bring that into the experience, given that you have limited attentional capacities, and so, if you're lying there and thinking about ghosts, because your emotional part of your brain, the amygdala is hyperactive,

• 1:26:02Speaker 04

  and you know the amygdala has a lot of projections to the visual parts of the brain, so it can tell you what to see in the world. So, we know this, so it can spill over and penetrate the visual scene, so we don't want that. So I thought, how can I bring in the positive affect to the experience and make it more, you know, more benign? So it has four components. It goes, the first component is cognitive reappraisal. You know these terms, meaning simply you say, "Look, this is not a monster. This is just the brain. It's not terrifying. Let me change my thoughts about it." So that's the first point. You do that when the experience strikes. And you close your eyes to, just to filter any visual inputs.

• 1:26:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you're doing that with people when they're bringing the experience to mind?

• 1:26:49Speaker 04

  When they have the sleep paralysis episode. So these are the four steps. You apply directly during sleep paralysis. Obviously, you learn them when you're awake. And I train you.

• 1:26:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you practice.

• 1:26:57Speaker 04

  You practice, right? So this is, yeah, great. You made that point. So you have that first thing, you do the cognitive reappraisal, saying, "Well, this is just your mind and brain playing tricks on you." Next step is emotional and psychological distancing. You go, "Since it's just a brain, simply, given that it's common all around the world, there's no reason for me to be scared of this." So you kind of distance yourself from the event. So that's the second part, right? Thirdly, this is where prayer and meditation and affect comes in. You put all your attention on a positive emotional object in your mind. So you bring to mind, could be God, somebody who believes in God.

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  It could be your mother's face. It could be anything emotionally salient. And you focus hyper attentively on that because then...

• 1:27:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's why Mary is an antidote to the demonic, right? Because you bring the notion of mother and maternal care as the antithesis.

• 1:27:57Speaker 04

  Good point. So you bring in, so in that way, given that the limited attentional abilities of the brain and the frontoparietal regions and all that. So you focus intensely on this object, let's say God. And then, fourthly, you meditate. And meditate, meaning you do a mindfulness kind of detachment. You say, "I feel spasmy and pain in my legs, and I feel heavy, but I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm just going to let it fly. I'm just going to just leave it alone."

• 1:28:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:28:28Speaker 04

  And this turns out, this... These four steps, if you apply it during sleep paralysis, we did a pilot study, a small study that it showed it reduced sleep paralysis about 50%. So that's a significant amount, but obviously we have to do more studies. It's a very small study, but it's a first step. It's the first empirical study on this, on this as a treatment for, for sleep paralysis. So I was very excited about that, but we need to do more research. But I think, what do you think?

• 1:28:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  I walked the Via Dolorosa with Jonathan Pagé.

• 1:28:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  And we were talking about its significance. And so you could imagine that, imagine that one of the things that you have to do in life is to, what would you say, reconcile yourself to the monstrous.

• 1:29:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  While walking the road of the crucifixion does that because it enables you to voluntarily simulate intense suffering in the face of malevolence.

• 1:29:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right now, you can imagine that because it's voluntary rather than something that's imposed on you, you're switching your framework from victim to accept, it's very strange, accepting participant. It's like turning around to confront the monster. It's the same thing. So you could imagine, we talked already about the figure of Mary, let's say, as or briefly as the, as the maternal, as and as the antithesis of the monstrous. That's pretty obvious, but you could also imagine that practicing your ability to accept the reality of malevolence and suffering.

• 1:29:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a meta strategy for dealing with the monstrous itself and something like that.

• 1:30:03Speaker 04

  That's a good point.

• 1:30:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  That'd be my guess.

• 1:30:04Speaker 04

  That's a very, very interesting point. But you brought something to mind right now that I wanted to ask you about. So obviously I've seen your latest work on We Wrestle with God and all this. So do you have any thoughts about prophetic dreams? The, the kind of metaphors, do you have any, have you written about this? For example, Joseph's dream?

• 1:30:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  I wrote a little bit about it in the story of Noah.

• 1:30:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, well, so Noah.

• 1:30:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Is an archetypally good man.

• 1:30:31Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:30:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  But in the culturally and personally limited sense, in a way. Noah is as good a man as you could expect someone to be for the conditions of his time and place.

• 1:30:42Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:30:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, we know from the anthropological literature on elders that people who are singled out as elders in, let's say, traditional communities are people who other people are motivated to go to for advice when things aren't going well.

• 1:30:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so now you might imagine, well, what sort of person would you have to be to be the sort of person who people would go to for advice when things aren't going well? Well, you'd have to establish a reputation of either having had things go well for you, so you could avoid the catastrophes, or having withstood a variety of catastrophes and still be highly functional. Okay, so then that would make you a certain kind of person. Well, the insistence in the story of Noah is that if your orientation is upward, your intuition is valid. If your intuition is valid, you're a prophet, because you can see things coming when blind people won't see them.

• 1:31:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so why wouldn't... Like, there's no difference between forethought and prophecy, except time span.

• 1:31:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so you might say, well, a mature person is capable of forethought.

• 1:31:55Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:31:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, now if you are mature and maximally, optimally configured in your moral aim, your capacity for forethought would extend. You'd be able to see things coming long before other people. And maybe some of that would reveal itself in, like, visions? Those are fantasies.

• 1:32:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  They could be prophetic visions, they could come in dreams.

• 1:32:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  You know, imagine that your dream... Imagine now you're the sort of person who's dispensed with the first-order monsters. Well, your dreams are still going to be doing something.

• 1:32:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  They're going to be concentrating on more sophisticated forms of anomaly.

• 1:32:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Then maybe you master those. Well, then now you're up another level.

• 1:32:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, those are the sort of people that would be prophetic.

• 1:32:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because, look, one of the ways of being a prophet is just by looking at things that other people won't look at.

• 1:32:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, because... Even in the landscape of media, if a story comes out about what's monstrous, most people will just... they won't look into it.

• 1:32:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:32:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  They'll deny it.

• 1:32:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, imagine instead you delve into it. Like you delve into the character of the monster in the dream.

• 1:33:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:33:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, are you less prepared or more? Well, obviously, far more.

• 1:33:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I don't know... I don't think there's a limit to that.

• 1:33:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because there's also an insistence in hero mythology that you go to the heart of darkness.

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• 1:33:48Speaker 04

  Right, right. No, it's very interesting. And the one reason that I bring this up is I was... I used to live in Egypt, as I told you. And I was much inspired by the prophetic dreams of Joseph. I thought they were very... they were striking, the suns and sun and the moon, bowing down and all these kind of things. So I think there's something very interesting about the whole... that realm of explanation and how that sort of spills and trickles into... to narratives in religious scripture. So I thought that was...

• 1:34:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, the... like, one of the... one of the... you might say that one of the strong functions of the religious is... the religious is a meta-strategy for dealing with the monstrous.

• 1:34:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:34:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's not all it is.

• 1:34:32Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:34:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  But that's one of the things that it is.

• 1:34:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like, how do we contend with... Not, you could imagine, how do I contend with my neighbor who's being a pain?

• 1:34:42Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:34:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, then, how do I contend with the class of neighbors who are being troublesome?

• 1:34:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:34:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, then, how do I contend with the fact that people can be malevolent?

• 1:34:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Then, how do I contend with the existence of malevolence itself?

• 1:34:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, those are... You're getting deeper into the question with each of those iterations.

• 1:35:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:35:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  By the time you get to the point where your question is, "How do I deal with the existence of malevolence itself?", you're in the religious realm.

• 1:35:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  I would say that by definition.

• 1:35:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, so. It was weirdly the case when I, when I was working as a clinician, when I was dealing with people who were profoundly traumatized.

• 1:35:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:35:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, they had their reasons. The language always became religious when we were talking about it. You can't escape it, because if you've really been hurt by someone who really wanted to hurt you, you've been touched by something like the spirit of malevolence.

• 1:35:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  And when you're having a discussion about the nature of the spirit of malevolence, the language takes on, like, religious connotations and depth of its own accord.

• 1:35:46Speaker 04

  It's quite interesting, so there's a phenomenon I'm sure you know of, it's temporal lobe epilepsy. So, these guys will have epileptic seizures, so they will have that selectively in the temporal lobes. So, they will, and this is the emotional part of the brain, become hyperactive, and so they will see everything in the world as almost like they're living in a dream, everything is poetic, everything is highly salient. When I look at this pen right here, it's highly salient, it's emotional, it's godly.

• 1:36:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:13Speaker 04

  It's quite an interesting phenomenon.

• 1:36:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Dostoevsky had temporal lobe epilepsy.

• 1:36:16Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, so it's quite, and also, Rama Chandra and I wanted to study it more.

• 1:36:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:22Speaker 04

  But we didn't get into it, we focused on some of the OCD's work instead, but but it's interesting, so these guys will become hyper-religious as well. They will have hypergraphies, they will write all the time, you know, so they will develop this tendency to write. And yeah, it's become hyper poetic. And it's quite an interesting phenomenon. And some people have argued that in the temporal lobe, you have the god center of the brain, so to speak. In that region, that's where it all emanates in terms of the emotional landscape that where that belief.

• 1:36:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, one of the things, you know, if we have a further conversation at some point, I'd like to talk about the neurological conceptualization of the religious by definition. Like, because I think we're at a point in our understanding of neuroscience where we could have a conversation like that. So like, one of the hypotheses, for example, would be, imagine, I think that perceptions are the axioms of thought.

• 1:37:25Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:37:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, now, and so an axiom is a very deep presupposition.

• 1:37:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  You can imagine in any conceptual structure that there are shallow elements of the conception.

• 1:37:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then layers, kind of like the visual system, layers, and that there are axiomatic elements of the conceptual system.

• 1:37:44Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:37:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, if an axiomatic element is accidentally shifted, you're traumatized.

• 1:37:49Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:37:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  If it's voluntarily shifted, you're a hero.

• 1:37:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:37:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:37:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  As the level of depth of the inquiry maximizes, the inquiry becomes more religious in its nature.

• 1:38:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:38:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a definition.

• 1:38:07Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:38:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, and so then you could imagine that the salience of the investigation magnifies in proportion to its depth.

• 1:38:16Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:38:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so that would account for the experiential element of awe, for example. And, yeah, so that's something that would be very entertaining to discuss technically.

• 1:38:25Speaker 04

  Technically, yeah, so it's very interesting. And I think with the whole temporal lobe epilepsy, right? So the whole landscape becomes hyper, you know, so the regions, we talked about the fusiform face area before, the regions from the cluster of cells in the fusiform and the emotional part of the brain become hyperconnected and hyperactive. So there's kind of a kindling going on. So that's why when you look at a dry object like a pen, it becomes hyper cosmic and emotional and spiritual, right? But that's interesting. There's also the opposite in a way. So if you have what's called Quotard syndrome.

• 1:39:01Speaker 04

  Everything in the world is dead. Everything in the world is, it's almost like depression, in fact.

• 1:39:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:07Speaker 04

  But everything is in the world, and you look at yourself in the mirror and you go, "My God, I am dead." I'm a dead person.

• 1:39:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:39:13Speaker 04

  Right, and the doctor will say, "What do you mean you are dead?" They say, "I'm dead." And then they say, "What about if I take a needle and poke you and, well, are you dead?" And they will say, "Well, yeah." And then the doctor might go like this, and they bleed, and they say, "Well, how come you're dead? You're bleeding, can dead people bleed?" And so, yes.

• 1:39:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Apparently.

• 1:39:35Speaker 04

  Apparently, they can't.

• 1:39:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Since I'm dead.

• 1:39:36Speaker 04

  Since I'm dead, right? So it shows you that, that, you know, something intriguing is going on in the brain. When these centers are hyperactive, everything becomes salient.

• 1:39:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:39:45Speaker 04

  If they're underactive, you know, you are dead. You know, in fact, if that part of the brain, the face area in the brain and the emotional part of the brain is hyperactive, there's another syndrome called Frigoli syndrome, where you go around and you say, "Everybody in the landscape looks like my Uncle Joe," for example. So you go around and say, "Well, this looks like my Uncle Joe, and this looks like my Uncle Joe." And the reason is that you have hyperemotionality. You are hyperemotional, right? Because of that, the emotion part of the brain and the face part of the brain are hyperactive, and they're hyperconnective, the connectivity is in overdrive, and then you feel like, "I shouldn't have emotions," that's how your brain concludes. "I shouldn't have emotions when I go around in the landscape and looking at people."

• 1:40:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  But I do.

• 1:40:30Speaker 04

  But I do, therefore your brain jumps to these absurd conclusions and go,

• 1:40:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:34Speaker 04

  You know, "These are all my Uncle Joes."

• 1:40:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, you see the same, we should close with this, and we'll move to the daily wear section. But you see the same thing with the onset of paranoid schizophrenia, is that, say, someone is watching television,

• 1:40:46Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:40:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  and part of the speech becomes hyperemotionally significant.

• 1:40:52Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:40:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so now it stands out.

• 1:40:54Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:40:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay. And the more intelligent schizophrenics are more likely to become paranoid, by the way, because they build up the conceptual structures around the perceptual anomaly.

• 1:41:04Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:41:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  But it's the perceptual emotional anomaly that's the core of the pathology. It's like, "Well, why is that so significant?"

• 1:41:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, because you get this emotional hyper-response. It's like, it evokes anxiety and wonder, it's awe-inspiring. It's like, well, it's like this is particularly significant to me. It's a message to me. It's a message, what? It's a message from the television station? Is it a message from the satellites? Is it a message from the Pope? There's no denying the reality of the experience, right? So then the paranoid conspiracy, let's say, is overlaid on top of that as an explanation for something that can't be challenged, because it's so visceral, right? It is dreamlike in the sense that you just described. And one of the things you also alluded to was that we actually base our sense of reality on that valence, right?

• 1:41:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  So it's hyper-real if everything's over-valenced, and it's dead if nothing has significance. Significance is the marker of the real, right? That's very different than objective reality. Okay, we should stop. Here's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side. You're at Harvard, and you're working, really, in the same area in the Harvard Department of Psychology that I was in the 90s. And so one of the things I'd like to talk to you about is your experience there and your thoughts on the university system in general. So let's do that for half an hour on the Daily Wire side. So all of you who are watching and listening, you can, well, you can continue your investigation into exactly the topics that we described today.

• 1:42:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Obviously, at Peterson Academy, because I'm lecturing there and my guest is lecturing there, it's Introduction to Neuroscience? Correct. Yeah, yeah, and so that's one of the newer courses in our offerings. And so if you're fascinated by this sort of thing, it's so useful to know the anatomy and the neuroscience, as I said, because it gives you much deeper insights into...

• 1:43:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, the nature of the problems that you might encounter and also into the nature of their, of what? The universe of potentially viable solutions. That's a good way of thinking about it. And we're putting a tremendous amount together right now on the scientific and cultural front in relationship to the overlap between brain function, neurochemistry, physiology, and behavior, and profound philosophical conceptions. It's great to work at that interface. And so the courses that, well, this introduction to neuroscience course is one that focuses exactly at that nexus. We have several like that. So, in any case, join us on the Daily Wire side for another half an hour. We'll talk about the state of the modern university focusing in this case on Harvard

• 1:43:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  and the Department of Psychology there, although you've been at other universities too, and we can bring them into the mix. So join us on the Daily Wire side. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Yeah, really good to talk to you. Same here. Thanks to the film crew here today in Scottsdale and to the Daily Wire for making this possible, and finally to all of you for your time and attention.

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