#140 – Lisa Feldman Barrett: Love, Evolution, and the Human Brain

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a neuroscientist, psychologist, and author. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get $200 off – MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off annual sub – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off EPISODE LINKS: Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (book): https://amzn.to/2Sp5ar9 How Emotions Are Made (book): https://amzn.to/2GwAFg6 Lisa’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/LFeldmanBarrett Lisa’s Website: https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/ PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:27) – Falling in love (25:10) – Love at first sight (39:49) – Romantic (43:48) – Writing process (54:32) – Evolution of the human brain (1:08:41) – Nature of evil (1:17:23) – Love is an evolutionary advantage (1:21:59) – Variation in species (1:27:41) – Does evolution have a direction? (1:45:19) – Love with an inanimate object (1:49:37) – Just be yourself is confusing advice (1:59:49) – Consciousness (2:06:26) – Book recommendations

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

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett, her second time on the podcast. She's a neuroscientist at Northeastern University and one of my favorite people. Her new book, called Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, is out now, as of a couple of days ago, so you should definitely support Lisa by buying it and sharing with friends if you like it. It's a great, short intro to the human brain. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Aflata Greens, the all-in-one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases. Eight Sleep, a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to

• 0:41Lex Fridman?

  enjoy sleep. MasterClass, online courses that I enjoy from some of the most amazing people in history. And BetterHelp, online therapy with a licensed professional. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Lisa, just like Manolis Kellis, is a local brilliant mind and friend and someone I can see talking to many more times. Sometimes it's fun to talk to a scientist, not just about their field of expertise, but also about random topics, even silly ones, from love to music to philosophy. Ultimately, it's about having fun, something I know nothing about.

• 1:23Lex Fridman?

  This conversation is certainly that. It may not always work, but it's worth a shot. I think it's valuable to alternate along all kinds of dimensions, like between deeper technical discussions and more fun random discussion, from liberal thinker to conservative thinker, from musician to athlete, from CEO to junior engineer, from friend to stranger. Variety makes life and conversation more interesting. Let's see where this little podcast journey goes. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. As usual, I do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle.

• 2:08Lex Fridman?

  I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps. So if you skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Athletic Greens, the all in one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It replaced the multivitamin for me and went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals. I do intermittent fasting of 16 to 24 hours every day and always break my fast with Athletic Greens. I honestly can't say enough good things about these guys. It helps me not worry whether I'm getting all the nutrients I need. One of the many reasons I'm a fan is that they keep iterating on the formula. As an engineer, I love continuous improvement.

• 2:52Lex Fridman?

  Life is not about reaching perfection. It's about constantly striving for it and making sure each iteration is a positive delta. The other thing I've taken for a long time outside of Athletic Greens is fish oil. So I'm especially excited now that they're selling fish oil and are offering listeners of this podcast free month's supply of Wild Caught Omega 3 Fish Oil. When you go to athleticgreens.com/lex to claim this special offer. So you can be lazy like me and get all your nutrient from the same company. Click the athleticgreens.com/lex link in the description to get the fish oil

• 3:31Lex Fridman?

  and the all in one supplement I rely on for the nutritional foundation of my physical and mental performance. This show is also sponsored by Eight Sleep and its Pod Pro mattress. It controls temperature with an app. It's packed with sensors. It can cool down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. It's been a game changer for me. I just enjoy sleep and power naps way more now. I feel like I fall asleep faster and get more restful sleep. Combination of cool bed and warm blanket is amazing. Now, if you love your current mattress, but are still looking for temperature control, Eight Sleep's new Pod Pro Cover adds dynamic cooling and heating capabilities onto your

• 4:16Lex Fridman?

  current mattress. It can cool down to 55 degrees, or like on a very cold day in Boston like today, heat up to 110 degrees and do so on each side of the bed separately. Also, it can track a bunch of metrics like heart rate variability, but honestly, cooling alone is worth the money. Go to eightsleep.com/lex and when you buy stuff there during the holidays, you'll get a special savings as listeners of this podcast. That's eightsleep.com/lex. This show is also sponsored by MasterClass. $180 a year for an all-access pass to watch courses from literally the best people

• 5:00Lex Fridman?

  in the world on a bunch of different topics. Let me list some that I've really enjoyed watching. Chris Hadfield on space exploration. Neil deGrasse Tyson on scientific thinking and communication. Will Wright, creator of SimCity and Sims on game design. Carlos Santana on guitar. Gere Kasparov on chess. Daniel Negrono on poker. Neil Gaiman on storytelling. Martin Scorsese on filmmaking. He's one of my favorite directors. Tony Hawk on skateboarding. And Jane Goodall on conservation. And many more. By the way, you can watch it on basically any device. Sign up at masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off the first year of an annual subscription.

• 5:45Lex Fridman?

  That's masterclass.com/lex. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help.

• 5:54Lex Fridman?

  They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. I chat with the person on there and enjoy it. Of course, I also have been talking to Mr. David Goggins over the past few months, who is definitely not a licensed professional therapist, but he does help me meet his and my demons and become comfortable to exist in their presence. Everyone is different, but for me, I think suffering is essential for creation, but you can suffer beautifully in a way that doesn't destroy you. Therapy can help in whatever form that therapy takes. And so BetterHelp is an option worth trying. They're easy, private, affordable, available worldwide. You can communicate by text anytime

• 6:39Lex Fridman?

  and schedule weekly audio and video sessions. I know you didn't ask me, but my two favorite psychiatrists are Zigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Since in my youth, I wanted to be a psychiatrist, their work was important in my intellectual development. Anyway, check out betterhelp.com/lex. That's betterhelp.com/lex. And now here's my conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett.

• 7:27Lex Fridman?

  Based on the comments in our previous conversation, I think a lot of people will be very disappointed, I should say, to learn that you are in fact married. As they say, all the good ones are taken. Okay, so I'm a fan of your husband as well, Dan. He's a programmer and musician, so a man after my own heart. Can I ask? A ridiculously over romanticized question of when did you first fall in love with Dan?

• 7:57Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  It's actually, it's a really, it's a really romantic story, I think. So I was divorced by the time I was 26, 27, 26, I guess. And I was in my first academic job, which was Penn State University, which is in the middle of Pennsylvania, surrounded by mountains. So you have, it's four hours to get anywhere, to get to Philadelphia, New York, Washington. I mean, you're basically stuck, you know? And I was very fortunate to have a lot of other assistant professors who were hired at the same time as I was. So there were a lot of us, we were all friends, which was really fun. But I was single and I didn't want to date a student.

• 8:40Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And there were no, and I wasn't going to date somebody in my department. That's just a recipe for disaster.

• 8:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So.

• 8:49Lex Fridman?

  So even at 20, whatever you were, you were already wise enough to know that.

• 8:53Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, a little bit, maybe. Yeah, I wouldn't call me wise at that age. But anyways, I'm not sure that I would say that I'm wise now, but.

• 9:02Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And so after, you know, I was spending probably 16 hours a day in the lab because it was my first year and as an assistant professor and there's a lot to do. And I was also bitching and moaning to my friends that, you know, I hadn't had sex in, I don't know how many, you know, months. And it was, I was starting to, you know, become unhappy with my life. And I think at a certain point, they just got tired of listening to me bitch and moan and said, just do something about it then, like do, you know, if you're unhappy. And so the first thing I did was I, I made friends with a sushi chef in town. And this is like a.

• 9:43Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  State College, Pennsylvania, in the early 90s was, there was like a pizza shop and a sub shop and actually a very good bagel shop and one good coffee shop and maybe one nice restaurant. I mean, there was really, but there was a, the second son of a Japanese sushi chef who was not going to inherit the restaurant. And so he moved to Pennsylvania and was giving sushi lessons. So I met this guy, the sushi, the sushi chef, and we decided to throw a sushi party at the coffee shop. So we, basically, it was, the goal was to invite every eligible bachelor, really, within like a 20 mile radius. We had a totally fun time. I wore

• 10:23Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  an awesome crushed velvet burgundy dress. It was beautiful dress. And I didn't meet any, I met a lot of friends, new friends, but I did not meet anybody. So then I thought, okay, well, maybe I'll try the personals ads, which I had never used before in my life. And I first tried the paper personals ads.

• 10:44Lex Fridman?

  Like in a newspaper?

• 10:46Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Like in the newspaper. That didn't work. And then a friend of mine said, oh, you know, there's this thing called Net News. So we're going, this is like 1992, maybe? So there was this anonymous, you could do it anonymously. So you would, you would read, you could post or you could read ads and then respond to an address which was anonymous and you, that was yoked to somebody's real address. And, and there was always a lag because it was this, like a bulletin board sort of thing. So at first I, I read them over and I decided to, to respond to one or two. And, you know, it was interesting.

• 11:31Lex Fridman?

  Sorry, this is not on the internet.

• 11:33Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, this is totally on the internet.

• 11:34Lex Fridman?

  But it takes, there's a delay of a couple of days or whatever.

• 11:36Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, right, right. It's 1992. There's no web.

• 11:40Lex Fridman?

  No pictures.

• 11:41Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  There's no pictures. The web doesn't exist. It's all done in ASCII format, sort of. And, you know, but the ratio.

• 11:48Lex Fridman?

  Lovely ASCII, yeah.

• 11:49Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But the ratio of men to women was like 10 to 1. I mean, there were many more men because it was basically academics and the government. That was it. That was, no, I mean, I think AOL maybe was just starting to become popular, but.

• 12:07Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And so the first person I met told me that he was a, he was a scientist who worked for NASA. And yeah, anyways, it turned out that he didn't actually.

• 12:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, this is how they brag is you elevate your, as opposed to saying you're taller than you are. You say like your position is.

• 12:30Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, and I actually, I would have been fine dating somebody who wasn't a scientist. It's just that they have, it's just that whoever I date has to just accept that I am. And that I'm, I was pretty ambitious and was trying to make my career. And you know, that's not, that's not, I think it's maybe more common now for men to maybe accept that in their female partners, but at that time, not so common.

• 12:56Lex Fridman?

  Could be intimidating, I guess.

• 12:58Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yes, I, that has been said. And so, and so then the next one I actually corresponded with, and we actually got to the point of talking on the phone, and we had this really kind of funny conversation where, you know, we're chatting and he said, he introduces the idea that, you know, he's really looking for a dominant woman. And I'm thinking, I'm a psychologist by training, so I'm thinking, oh, he means sex roles. Like, I'm like, no, I'm very assertive and I'm glad you think that, you know, anyways, long story short, that's not really what he meant.

• 13:32Lex Fridman?

  Okay, got it.

• 13:33Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, so, and I just, you know, that will just show you my level of naivete. Like, I was like, I didn't completely understand, but I was like, well, yeah, you know, no. At one point, he asked me how I felt about him wearing my lingerie. And I was like, I don't even share my lingerie with my sister. Like, I don't share my lingerie with anybody, you know, no. The third one I interacted with was a banker who lived in Singapore and.

• 14:05Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  That that conversation didn't last very long because he made an analogy. I guess he he made an analogy between me and a character in The Fountainhead. The woman who's who's raped in The Fountainhead. And I was like, OK, that's not.

• 14:24Lex Fridman?

  That's not a good.

• 14:25Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  That's not a good. No, that's not a good one.

• 14:27Lex Fridman?

  Not that part, not that scene.

• 14:29Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Not that scene. So then I so then I was like, OK, you know what? I'm going to post my own ad. And so I did. I posted. Well, first I wrote my ad and then, of course, I checked it with my my friends, who were all also assistant professors. They're like my little Greek chorus. And then I posted it and I got something like, I don't know, 80 something responses in 24 hours. I mean, it was.

• 14:51Lex Fridman?

  Do you remember the pitch? Like, how you, I guess, condensed yourself?

• 14:57Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I don't remember it exactly, although Dan has it. But actually, for our 20th wedding anniversary, he took our our exchanges and he printed them off and put them in a leather bound book for us to read, which was really sweet. Yeah, I think I was just really direct, like, I'm almost 30, I'm a scientist, I'm not looking to, you know, I'm looking for something serious and, you know. But the thing is, I forgot to say where my location was.

• 15:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 15:25Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And my age.

• 15:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 15:26Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Which I forgot.

• 15:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So I got lots of, I mean, I will say, so I printed off all of the responses and I had all my friends over and we were, you know, had a big, I made a big pot of gumbo and we drank through several bottles of wine, reading these responses. And I would say, for the most part, they were really sweet, like earnest and genuine, as much as you could tell that somebody's being genuine. I mean, it seemed, you know, there were a couple of really funky ones, like, you know, this one couple who told me that I was their soulmate, the two of them, when they were looking for, you know, a third person. And I was like, OK. But mostly, super seemed seemed like super genuine people.

• 16:10Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And so I chose five men to start corresponding with, and I was corresponding with them. And then about a week later, I get this other email. And OK, and then I post something the next day that said, OK, you know, thank you so much. And I'm going to, I answered every person back. But then after that, I said, okay, and I'm not going to answer anymore. You know, because it was, they were still coming in and I couldn't, you know, I have a job and, you know, a house to take care of and stuff, so.

• 16:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 16:36Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And then about a week later, I get this other email. And he says, you know, he just describes himself, like, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm a chef, I'm a scientist, I'm a this, I'm a this. And so I emailed him back and I said, you, you know, you seem interesting. You can write me at my actual address if you want. Here's my address. I'm not really responding, I'm not really responding to other people anymore, but you seem interesting. You know, you can write to me if you want. And then he wrote to me and I, then I wrote him back and I, it was, it was a nondescript kind of email and I wrote him back and I said, thanks for responding. You know, I'm really busy right now. I'm, I was in the middle of writing my first slate of grant applications.

• 17:18Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So I was really consumed and I said, I'll get back to you in a couple of days. And so I did, I waited a couple of days until my grants were, you know, safe, grant application safely out the door. And then I emailed him back. And then he emailed me and then really across two days, we sent a hundred emails.

• 17:39Lex Fridman?

  And text only, was there pictures or any of that?

• 17:41Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Text only, text only.

• 17:43Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 17:43Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And then, so this was like a Thursday and a Friday. And then Friday, he said, let's talk on the weekend on the phone. And I said, okay. And he wanted to talk Sunday night and I had a date Sunday night. So I said, okay, sure, we can talk Sunday night. And then I was like, well, you know, I don't really want to cancel my date, so I'm just going to call him on Saturday. So I just called, I cold called him on Saturday and a woman answered.

• 18:13Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow. That's not cool.

• 18:16Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Not cool. And so she says, you know, hello, and I say, oh, you know, I stand there and she said, sure, can I ask who's calling? And I said, it, tell him it's Lisa. And she went, oh, my God, oh, my God, I'm just a friend, I'm just a friend. I just have to tell you, I'm just a friend. And I was like, yeah, this is adorable, right? She doesn't, and then he gets on the phone, not hi, nice to meet. The first thing he says to me, she's just a friend, so. I was just so charmed, really, by the whole thing. So it was it was Yom Kippur. It was the Jewish Day of Atonement that was ending and they were baking cookies and going to a breakfast. So people, you know, as you know, fast all day and then they go to a party and they breakfast.

• 19:01Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So I thought, OK, I'll just I'll just, you know, cancel my date. So I did. And I stayed home and we talked for eight hours. And then the next night for six hours. And basically, it just went on like that. And then by the end of the week, he he flew to State College. And, you know, we'd gone through this whole thing where I'd said, we're going to take it slow. We're going to get to know each other, you know. And then really, by, I think we talked like two or three times, these like really long conversations. And then he said, I'm just going to fly there. And then so, of course, there's, I don't even know that there were fax machines at that point.

• 19:43Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Maybe there were, but I don't think so. Anyway, so he, we decide we'll exchange pictures. And so he, you know, I take my photograph and I give it to my secretary and I say to my secretary.

• 19:58Lex Fridman?

  Fax this.

• 19:58Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I say that, say, send this priority mail.

• 20:01Lex Fridman?

  Priority mail.

• 20:02Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And he goes, OK, I'll send a priority mail. I'll make this priority mail. He's like, I know priority mail. OK. And then, so I get Dan's photograph in the in the mail. And, you know, it's it's him in a in shorts and you can see that he's probably somewhere like the Bahamas or something like that. And it's like cropped. So clearly, what he's done is he's taken a photograph where, you know, he's in in it with someone else who turned out to be his ex wife. So I'm thinking, well, this is awesome. You know, I've hit the jackpot. He's he's, you know, very appealing to me, very attractive. And and then, you know, my photograph doesn't show up and it doesn't show up. And, you know, so like one day and then two days and then, you know, he's he's like,

• 20:46Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  you know, you're, I said, well, I I asked my secretary to send a priority. I mean, I don't know, you know, what he did. And

• 20:55Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And he's like, I said, I'm like, well, you don't have to, you know, you don't have to come. And he's like, no, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, we've had like five dates, the equivalent of five dates practically.

• 21:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And then, um, so he's supposed to fly on a Thursday or Friday, I can't remember. And I get a call like maybe an hour before his flight's supposed to leave. And he says, hi, and I say, and it's just something in his voice, right? And I say, cause at this point, I think I've talked to him like for 25 hours. I don't know. And he says, hi. And I'm like, you got the picture? And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, you don't like it? And he's like, well,

• 21:33Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I'm sure it's not, I'm sure it's your, I'm sure it's just not a good, you know, it's not, it's probably not your best.

• 21:40Lex Fridman?

  Oh, no.

• 21:41Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You know, you don't, you don't have to come. And he's like, no, no, no, I'm coming. And I'm like, no, you don't have to come. And he's like, no, no, I really wanna, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm getting on the plane. I'm like, you don't have to get on the plane. Um, he's like, no, I'm getting on the plane. And so I go down to my, I go, I'm in my office, this is happening, right? So I go downstairs to my, one of my closest friends, who's still actually one of my closest friends. Um, who is one of my colleagues and Kevin, and I say, Kevin, and I go to Kevin, I go, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, he doesn't like the photograph. And Kevin's like, well, which photograph did you send? And I'm like, well, you know, the one where we're shooting pool? And he's like,

• 22:19Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  you sent that photograph? That's a horrible photograph. I'm like, yeah, but it's the only one that I had that was like, where my hair was kind of similar to what it is now. And he's like, Lisa, like, do I have to check everything for you? You should not have sent that.

• 22:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You know?

• 22:34Lex Fridman?

  But still, he flew over.

• 22:36Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So he flew.

• 22:37Lex Fridman?

  Where from, by the way?

• 22:38Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Uh, he was in, he was in graduate school at Amherst. Yeah, at, um, UMass Amherst. So he flew and, um, I picked him up and I, at the airport, and he was happy. So whatever the concern was, was gone.

• 22:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 22:56Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And, um, I was dressed, you know, I carefully, carefully dressed.

• 23:00Lex Fridman?

  Were you nervous?

• 23:01Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I was really, really nervous. Cause I, I'm not, I don't really believe in fate. And I don't really think there's only one person that you can be with. But I think.

• 23:15Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You know, people who, some people are curvy, they're kind of complicated. And so the number of people who fit them is maybe less than.

• 23:24Lex Fridman?

  I like it, mathematically speaking, yeah.

• 23:27Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And so when I was going to pick him up at the airport, I was thinking, well, this could, I could be going to pick up the, the person I'm gonna marry. Or not. I mean, like, I really, but I really, you know, like, our conversations were just very authentic and very moving and, um, and we really connected. And, and I really felt like he understood me, actually.

• 23:55Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  In, in a way that a lot of people don't. And, um, and, and what was really nice was, at the time, you know, the airport was this tiny little airport out in a cornfield, basically. And so, driving back to the town, we were in the car for 15 minutes, completely in the dark as I was driving. And so it was very similar to, we had just spent, you know, 20 something hours on the telephone, um, sitting in the dark, talking to each other. So it was very familiar. And we basically spent the whole weekend together and you met all my friends and we had a big party. And, um, and at the end of the weekend,

• 24:40Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I said, okay, you know, if we're gonna give this a shot, we, we probably, we shouldn't see other people. So it's a risk, you know?

• 24:51Lex Fridman?

  It's commitment.

• 24:53Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But, but I just didn't see how it would work if we were dating people locally and then also seeing each other at a distance. Cause I, you know, I've had long distance relationships before and they're hard and they, they take a lot of, they take a lot of effort. And so we decided we'd give it three months and see what happened. And that was it.

• 25:10Lex Fridman?

  It's such an interesting thing. Like, we're all, what is it, there are several billion of us and we're kind of roaming this world. And then you kind of stick together. You find, find somebody that just like gets you. And it's interesting to think about, there's probably thousands, if not millions, of people that would, would be sticky to you, depending on the curvature of your space. But. What, what is the, could you speak to the stickiness? Like to the, just the falling in love? Like seeing that somebody really gets you? Maybe by way of telling, do you think, do you remember there was a moment when you just

• 25:54Lex Fridman?

  realized, damn it, I think I'm like, I think that's, this is the guy. I think I'm in love.

• 26:00Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  We were having these conversations actually from the, really from the second weekend we were together. So he flew back the next weekend to state college because my birthday, it was my 30th birthday. My friends were throwing me a party and we went hiking and we hiked up some mountain and we were sitting on a cliff over this, you know, overlook and talking to each other. And I was thinking, and I actually said to him, like, I, I haven't really known you very long, but I feel like I'm falling in love with you, which can't possibly be happening. I must be projecting, but it, but it, but it certainly feels that way, right? Like, I don't believe in love at first sight, so this can't really be happening, but it sort of feels like it is. And he was like, I know what you mean. And so for the first three months or four months, we would say things to each other

• 26:41Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  like, I feel like I'm in love with you, but, you know, but that can't, but things don't really work like that. So, but you know, so, and then it became a joke, like, I feel like I'm in love with you. And then eventually, you know, I think, but I think that was one moment where we were, we were talking about, I don't know, just, you know, not just all the great aspirations you have or all the things, but also things you don't like about yourself, things that you're worried about, things that you're scared of. And then I think the, that was sort of solidified the relationship. And then there was one weekend where we went to Maine in the winter, which I, I mean, I

• 27:26Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  really love the beach always, but in the winter particularly.

• 27:31Lex Fridman?

  Cause it's just beautiful and calm and whatever.

• 27:34Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah. And I also, I, I do find beauty in starkness sometimes, like, so there's this grand majestic scene of, you know, this very powerful ocean and it's all these like beautiful blue grays and it's just, it's just stunning. And so we were sitting on this huge rock in Maine. Where we'd gone for the weekend, it was freezing cold. And I honestly can't remember what he said, or what I said, or what. But I definitely remember having this feeling of I absolutely want to stay with this person. Like, and I don't know what my life will be like if I'm not with this person. Like, I need to be with this person.

• 28:18Lex Fridman?

  Can we, from a scientific and a human perspective, dig into your belief that first, love at first sight is not, is not possible? You don't believe in it? Because there is, you don't think there's like a magic where you see somebody in a Jack Kerouac way? And you're like, wow, that's something, that's a special little.

• 28:41Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Oh, I definitely, oh, I definitely think you can connect with someone instant, in an instance. And I definitely think you can say, oh, there's something there, and I'm really clicking with that person. Romantically, but also just with friends, it's possible to do that. You recognize a mind that's like yours, or that's compatible with yours. There are ways that you feel like you're being understood, or that you understand something about this person. Or maybe you see something in this person that you find really compelling or intriguing. But I think, you know, your brain is predictive organ, right? You're using your past.

• 29:21Lex Fridman?

  You're projecting.

• 29:22Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You're using your past to make predictions. And, I mean, not deliberately, that's how your brain is wired, that's what it does. And so it's filling in all of the gaps that you, you know, there are lots of gaps of information that you don't, you know, information you don't have. And so your brain is filling those in, and.

• 29:47Lex Fridman?

  But isn't that what love is?

• 29:48Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  No, I don't think so, actually. I mean, to some extent, sure, you always, you know, there's research to show that people who are in love always see the best in each other. And they, you know, when there's a, when there's a negative interpretation or positive interpretation, you know, they choose the positive ones. There's a little bit of positive illusion there, you know, going on. That's what the research shows. But I think.

• 30:15Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I think that when you find somebody who not just appreciates

• 30:24Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  your faults, but loves you for them, actually, you know, like, maybe even doesn't see them as a fault. That's... So you have to be honest enough about what your what your faults are. So it's easy to love someone for all the things that they

• 30:47Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  for all the wonderful characteristics they have. It's harder, I think, to love someone despite their faults, or maybe even the faults that they see aren't really faults at all to you. They're actually something really special.

• 31:00Lex Fridman?

  But isn't that, can't you explain that by saying the brain kind of, like, you're projecting, it's your, you have a conception of a human being or just a spirit that really connects with you and you're projecting that onto that person? And within that framework, all their faults then become beautiful, like little...

• 31:22Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Maybe, but you just have to pay attention to the prediction error.

• 31:27Lex Fridman?

  No, but maybe that's what love, like, maybe you start ignoring the prediction error. That's maybe love is just your ability, like...

• 31:37Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  To ignore the prediction error? Well, I think that there's some research that might say that, but that's not my experience, I guess. But there is some research that says, I mean, there's some research that says you have to have an optimal margin of illusion, which means that you, that you put a positive spin on, on smaller things, but you don't ignore the bigger things, right? And I think, without being judgmental at all, when someone says to me, you know, you're not who I thought you were. I mean, nobody says, has said that to me in a really long time, but certainly when I was younger, that was, you know, you're not who I thought you were. My reaction to that was, well, whose fault is that? You know?

• 32:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 32:20Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I'm a pretty, I'm a pretty upfront person. I mean, I will, though, say that in my experience, people, people don't lie to you about who they are. They lie to themselves in your presence.

• 32:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 32:38Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And so, you know, you don't want to get tied tied up in that, tangled up in that. And I think from the get go, Dan and I were just, for whatever reason, maybe it's because we both have been divorced already. And, you know, um, you know, he told me who he thought he was. And he was pretty accurate as far as I could. Pretty much, actually. I mean, I, there's very, I can't say that I've ever come across a characteristic in him that really surprised me in a bad way.

• 33:14Lex Fridman?

  It's hard to know yourself.

• 33:16Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  It is hard to know yourself.

• 33:17Lex Fridman?

  And to communicate that.

• 33:18Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  For sure. I mean, I'll say, you know, I had the advantage of training as a therapist, which meant for five years I was under a fucking microscope.

• 33:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:28Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You know, when I was training as a therapist, it was hour for hour supervision, which meant if you were in a room with a client for an hour, you had an hour with a supervisor. So that supervisor was behind the mirror for your session. And then you went and had an hour of discussion about what you said, what you didn't say, learning to use your own react, your own feelings and thoughts as a tool to probe the mind of the client and so on. And so you can't help but learn a lot of, you can't help but learn a lot about yourself in that process.

• 34:05Lex Fridman?

  Do you think knowing or learning how the sausage is made ruins the magic of the actual experience? Like, you as a neuroscientist who studies the brain, do you think it ruins the magic of like love at first sight? Are you, do you consciously are still able to lose yourself in the moment?

• 34:27Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I'm definitely able to lose myself in the moment.

• 34:29Lex Fridman?

  Is wine involved?

• 34:31Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Not always. Chocolate? I mean, some kind of mind altering substance, right? But, um, yeah, for sure. I mean, I guess what I would say, though, is that, um,

• 34:43Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  For me, part of the magic is the process. Like, so, you know, so, so I remember a day, there was, while I was working on this, on this, on this book of essays, I was in New York. I can't remember why I was in New York, but I was in New York for something. And I was in Central Park and I was looking at all the people with their babies. And I was thinking, every, every, that, each one of these, there's a tiny little brain that's wiring itself right now. And I, and I, I just, I felt in that moment, I was like, I am never going to look at an infant in the same way ever again.

• 35:24Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And so to me, I mean, honestly, before I started learning about brain development, I thought babies were cute, but, you know, not that interesting until they could do, interact with you and do things. Of course, my own infant, I thought was extraordinarily interesting, but, you know, they're kind of like lumps. That's, you know, until they can, you know, interact with you, but they are anything but lumps. I mean, like, you know, so, and part of the, I mean, I, all I can say is I have deep affection now for like tiny little babies in a way that I didn't really before because of the, I'm just so curious.

• 36:07Lex Fridman?

  But the actual process, the mechanisms of the, the wiring of the brain, the learning, all the magic of the neurobiology.

• 36:14Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah. And, or, you know, something like, you know, when you make eye contact with someone directly, sometimes, you know, you, you feel something, right?

• 36:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 36:28Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And.

• 36:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's weird.

• 36:29Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  What is it? And what is that? And so, so to me, that's not, that's not backing away from the moment. That's like expanding the moment. It's like, that's incredibly cool. You know, when I was, I'll just say that when I was, when I was in graduate school, I also. Was in therapy because it's almost a given that you're gonna be in therapy yourself if you're gonna become a therapist. And I had a deal, you know, with my therapist, which was that I could call time out at any moment that I wanted to, as long as I was being responsible about it. And I wasn't using it as a way to get out of something. And he could tell me, no, you know, he could decline and say, no, you're, you know, you're using this to get out of something.

• 37:13Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But I could call time out whenever I want and say, what are you doing right now? Like, what are you, here's what I'm experiencing, what are you trying to do? Like, I wanted to use my own experience to interrogate what the process was. And that made it more helpful in a way. Do you know what I mean? So, yeah, I don't, I don't think learning how something works makes it less magical, actually. But that's just me, I guess. I don't know, would you?

• 37:43Lex Fridman?

  Yes. I tend to have two modes. One is, one is an engineer and one is a romantic. And I'm conscious of like, like the gear, like you like, there's two rooms. You can go into the one, the engineer room. And I think that ruins the romance. So I tend to, there's two rooms. One is the engineering room. Think from first principles, how do we build the thing that creates this kind of behavior? And then you go into the romantic room where you're like emotional, it's a roller coaster. And then you're, the thing is, let's take it slow. And then you get married the next night, that you're just this giant mess and you write

• 38:24Lex Fridman?

  a song and then you cry and then you send a bunch of texts and anger and, and whatever. And somehow you're in Vegas and there's random people and you're drunk and whatever, all that, like in poetry, just mess of it. Fighting, yeah, that's not, those are two rooms and you go back between, between them. But I think the way you put it is quite poetic. I think you're much, you're much better at adulting with love than, than perhaps I am. Because there's a magic to children. I also think

• 38:59Lex Fridman?

  Like of adults as children. It's kind of cool to see. It's a cool thought experiment to look at adults and think like, that used to be a baby. And then that's like a fully wired baby. And it's just walking around pretending to be like all serious and important, wearing a suit or something. But that used to be a baby. And then you think of like the parenting and all the experiences they had. Like, it's cool to think of it that way. But then I start thinking like from a machine learning perspective. But once you're like, the romantic moments, all that kind of stuff, all that falls away. I forget about all that. I don't know. That's the Russian thing.

• 39:39Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Maybe, maybe. But I also think it might be an age thing or maybe an experience thing. So I think we all, I mean, if you're exposed to Western culture at all, you are exposed to the sort of idealized, stereotypic, romantic, romantic, you know, exchange. And what does it mean to be romantic? And so here's a test.

• 40:09Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I'm gonna see how to phrase it. Okay, so not really a test, but this tells you something about your own ideas about romance.

• 40:20Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  For Valentine's Day one year, my husband bought me a six-way plug. Is that romantic or not romantic?

• 40:31Lex Fridman?

  Like, sorry, six-way plug, that's like an outlet?

• 40:34Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, like to put it in an outlet. Is that romantic or not romantic?

• 40:40Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it depends the look in his eyes when he does it. I mean, it depends on the conversation that led up to that point. Depends how much.

• 40:52Lex Fridman?

  It's like the music, because you have a very, you're both from the, my experiences with you as a fan, you have both a romantic nature, but you have a very pragmatic, like, you cut through the bullshit of the fuzziness. And there's something about a six-way plug that cuts through the bullshit that connects to the human, like, he understands who you are.

• 41:13Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Exactly.

• 41:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:15Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Exactly.

• 41:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:16Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  That was the most romantic gift he could have given me, because he knows me so well.

• 41:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:22Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  He has a deep understanding of me, which is that I will sit and suffer and complain.

• 41:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:28Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  About the fact that I have to plug and unplug things.

• 41:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:31Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And I will bitch and moan until the cows come home, but it would never occur to me to go buy a bloody six-way plug. Whereas for him, he bought it, he plugged it in, he arranged, he taped up all my wires, he made it like really usable. And for me, that was, that was the best present.

• 41:53Lex Fridman?

  The most romantic thing.

• 41:54Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  It was the most romantic thing, because he understood who I was, and he did something very, or you know, just the casual, like, we moved into a house that went, we went from having a two-car garage to a one-car garage. And I said, okay, you know, I'm from Canada, I'm not bothered by snow. Well, I mean, I'm a little bothered by snow, but he's very bothered by snow. So I'm like, okay, you can park your car in the garage, it's fine. Every day when it snows, he goes out and cleans my car. Every day. Like, I never asked him to do it, he just does it. Because he knows that I'm cutting it really close in the morning, you know, when we, when we all used to go to work. I have a time to the second.

• 42:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So that I can get up as late as possible, work out as long as possible, you know, just to, and make it into my office like a minute before my first meeting. And so if it snows unexpectedly or something, I'm screwed, because now that's an added, you know, an added 10 or 15 minutes, and I'm gonna be late. Anyways, you know, it's just these little tiny things. He's, he's, he's, he's a really easygoing guy, and he doesn't look like somebody who pays attention to detail. He doesn't fuss about detail, but he definitely pays attention to detail. And it's, it is very, very romantic in the sense that he, um...

• 43:16Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You know, he loves me despite my little details.

• 43:20Lex Fridman?

  And understands you.

• 43:22Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Lex Fridman?

  But it is kind of hilarious that that is the six-way plug is the most fulfilling, richest display of romance in your life. I love it.

• 43:36Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  That's what I mean about romance. Romance is really, it's not all about chocolates and flowers and, you know, whatever. I mean, those are all nice, too, but.

• 43:44Lex Fridman?

  Sometimes it's about the six-way plug.

• 43:46Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Sometimes it's about the six-way plug.

• 43:48Lex Fridman?

  So maybe one way I could ask before we talk about the details, you also have the author of another book, as we talked about, How Emotions Are Made. So it's interesting to talk about the process of writing. You mentioned you were in New York. What have you learned from writing these two books about the actual process of writing? And maybe, I don't know, what's the most interesting thing to talk about there? Maybe the biggest challenges or the boring, mundane, systematic, like day-to-day of what worked for you, like hacks, or even just about the neuroscience that you've learned through the process of trying to write them?

• 44:24Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Here's the thing I learned. If you think that it's going to take you a year to write your book, it's going to take you three years to write your book. That's the first thing I learned, is that no matter how organized you are, it's always going to take way longer than what you think. In part because very few people make an outline and then just stick to it. You know, some of the topics really take on a life of their own, and to some extent, you want to let them, you want to let them have their voice. You know, you want to follow leads until you feel satisfied that you've dealt with

• 45:03Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  the topic appropriately. But I, and that part is actually fun. It's not fun to feel like you're constantly behind the eight ball in terms of time.

• 45:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 45:15Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But it is, the exploration and the foraging for information is incredibly fun. For me, anyways, I found it really enjoyable. And if I wasn't also running a lab at the same time and trying to keep my family going, you know, it would have been, the whole thing would have just been fun. But I would say the hardest thing about, the most important thing I think I learned is also the hardest thing, and that it, for me, which is.

• 45:41Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Knowing what to leave out. A really good storyteller knows what to leave out. In academic writing, you shouldn't leave anything out. You, all the details should be there.

• 45:56Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 45:57Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And, and I, you know, I've written or participated in writing over 200 papers, peer reviewed papers. So I'm pretty good with detail. Knowing what to leave out, knowing what to leave out and not harming the validity of the story. That is a tricky, tricky thing. It was tricky when I wrote How Emotions Are Made, but that's a standard popular science book. So it's 300 something pages. And then, you know, it has like a thousand end notes. And then each of the end notes is attached to a web note, which is also long.

• 46:40Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So, I mean, you know, it's, and it start, and I mean, the final draft, I mean, I wrote three drafts of that book, actually, and the final draft, and then I had to cut by a third. I mean, or, I mean, I, you know, it was like 150,000 words or something, and I had to cut it down to like 110. So obviously, I struggle with what to leave out. You know, brevity is not my strong suit. I'm always telling people that. It's a warning. So that's why this book was, I, you know, I'd always been really fascinated with essays. I love reading essays. And after reading a small set of essays by Anne Fadiman,

• 47:22Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  called At Large and at Small, which I just love these little essays.

• 47:26Lex Fridman?

  What's the topic of those essays?

• 47:28Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  They are, they're called familiar essays. So the topics are like everyday topics, like mail, coffee, chocolate, I mean, just like, and what she does is she weaves her own experience. It's a little bit like these conversations that you're so good at curating, actually. You're weaving together history and philosophy and science and also personal reflections. And a little bit, you feel like you're like.

• 48:00Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Eavesdropping on someone's train of thought, in a way. It's really, they're really compelling to me.

• 48:07Lex Fridman?

  Even if it's just a mundane topic.

• 48:09Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, but it's so interesting to learn about like, all of these little stories in the wrapping of the history of like, mail. Like, that's really interesting. And so, I read these essays and then I wrote to her a little fan girl email. This was many years ago. And I said, I just love, I love this book. And how did you learn to write essays like this? And she gave me a reading list of essays that I should read, like writers. And so, I read them all. And anyway, so I decided it would be a really good challenge for me

• 48:50Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  to try to write something really brief where I could focus on, you know, one or two really fascinating tidbits of neuroscience. Connect it to, connect each one to something philosophical or, you know, like, just a question about human nature. Do it in a really brief format without violating the validity of the science. That was a, I just set myself this, what I thought of as a really, really big challenge. In part because it was an incredibly hard thing for me to do in the first book.

• 49:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, we should say that this is, The Seven and a Half Lessons is a very short book. I mean, it's a, it's like, it embodies brevity, right? The whole point throughout is just, I mean, you could tell that there's editing, like, there's pain in trying to bring as brief as possible, as clean as possible. Yeah.

• 49:51Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, so it's, the way I think of it is, you know, it's a little book of big science and big ideas.

• 49:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, really big ideas in brief little packages.

• 50:01Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And, you know, I wrote it. So that people could read it. I love reading on the beach. I love reading essays on the beach. I read it. I wrote it so people could read it on the beach, or in the bathtub, or, you know, a subway stop.

• 50:15Lex Fridman?

  Even if the beach is frozen over, in the snow.

• 50:18Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah. So my husband, Dan, calls it the first neuroscience beach read. That's his, um, that's his phrasing. Yeah.

• 50:27Lex Fridman?

  And like, like you said, you learn a lot about writing from your husband, like you were saying offline?

• 50:31Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Well, he's, he is, of the two of us, he is the better writer. He is a masterful writer. He, um, he's also, I mean, he, you know, he's a PhD in computer science. He's, he's a software engineer, but he's, he's also really good at, uh, organization of knowledge. So he built, for a company he used to work for, he built one of the first knowledge management systems. And he's, he now works at Google where he does engineering education. Like, he's, he understands how to tell a good story, uh, just, you know, about anything, really.

• 51:11Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  He's got impeccable timing. He's really funny. And luckily for me, he knows very little about psychology or neuroscience. Well, now he knows more, obviously, but, so, you know, he was really, when How Emotions Were Made,

• 51:28Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  you know, he was really, really helpful to me because, um, the first draft of every chapter was me talking to him about what, you know, I would talk out loud about what I wanted to say and the order in which I wanted to say it. And then I would write it. And then he would read it and, um, tell me all the bits that could be excised.

• 51:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 51:49Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And sometimes we would, you know, I should say, I mean, we don't, he and I don't really argue about much, except, um, directions in the car. Like, we're, that's where, that's, if we're gonna have an argument, that's gonna be where it's gonna happen, where.

• 52:02Lex Fridman?

  What's the, what's the nature of the argument about directions, exactly?

• 52:06Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I don't really know. It's just that we're very, I think it's that spatially, you know, he, he, um, I use egocentric space, so I wanna say, you know, turn left. Like, I was, I'm reasoning in relation to like my own physical corporeal body. So you know, you walk to the church and you turn left and you then, you know, whatever, you know, I'm always like, and his, you know, he gives directions alocentrically, which means organized around north, south, east, west.

• 52:37Lex Fridman?

  So to you, the, the earth is at the center of the solar system and to him.

• 52:41Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  No, I'm at the center. Reasonably. I'm at the center.

• 52:43Lex Fridman?

  You're at the center of the solar system. Okay, so.

• 52:47Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Anyway, so we, but, but here, we, you know, we, we had some really rip roaring arguments, like really rip roaring arguments where he would say like, who is this for? Is this for the 1%? And I'd be like, 1% meaning not, you know, not wealth, but like civilians versus academics. You know, so are these for the scientists or for the, is this for the civilians, right?

• 53:10Lex Fridman?

  So he speaks for the, for the people, for the civilians.

• 53:12Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  He speaks for the people and I'd be like, no, you have to. And so he made, you know, after one terrible argument that we had where it was really starting to affect our, our relationship because we were so mad at each other all the time. He made these little signs, writing and science. And we only use them, this, this was like, when you, when you pulled out a sign, that's it. Like the other person just wins and you have to stop fighting about it.

• 53:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:40Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And that's it.

• 53:41Lex Fridman?

  Great.

• 53:41Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And so we just did that.

• 53:44Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And we didn't really have to use it too much for this book because this book was, in some ways,

• 53:51Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  you know, I didn't have to learn a lot of new things for this book. I had to learn some, but I, a lot of,

• 53:59Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  what I learned for seven, for how emotions are made, really stood me in good stead for, for this book. So there was a little bit, each essay was a little bit of learning. A couple were, was a little more than, than the small amount, but, but I, I didn't have so much trouble here. I had a lot of trouble with the first book.

• 54:20Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But still even here, you know, you know, he would tell me that I could take something out and I really wanted to keep it. And I think we only used the signs once.

• 54:31Lex Fridman?

  Well, if we could dive in some aspects of the book, I would love that. Can we talk about, so one of the essays looks at evolution.

• 54:44Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask the big question. Did the human brain evolve to think? That's essentially the question that you address in the essay. Can you speak to it?

• 54:55Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Sure. You know, the big caveat here is that we don't really know why brains evolved. The big why questions are called teleological questions. And in general, scientists should avoid those questions because we don't know really why. We don't know the why. However, for a very long time, the assumption was that evolution worked in a progressive upward scale, that you start off with simple organisms and those organisms get more complex and more complex and more complex. Now, obviously, that's true in some like really general way, right? That life started off as single cell organisms and, you know, things got more complex.

• 55:40Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But the idea that that brains evolved in some upward trajectory from simple brains in simple animals to complex brains in complex animals is called a phylogenetic scale. And that phylogenetic scale is embedded in a lot of evolutionary thinking, including Darwin's, actually. And it's been seriously challenged, I would say, by modern evolutionary biology. And so, you know, thinking is something that rationality is something that humans, at

• 56:20Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  least in the West, really prize as a great human achievement. And so, the idea that the most common evolutionary story is that, you know, brains evolved in like sedimentary rock with, you know, a layer for instincts. That's your lizard brain. And a layer on top of that for emotions. That's your limbic system, limbic meaning border. So it borders the parts that are for instincts.

• 56:52Lex Fridman?

  Oh, interesting.

• 56:53Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And then the neocortex or new cortex where rationality is supposed to live. That's the sort of traditional story.

• 57:04Lex Fridman?

  It just keeps getting layered on top.

• 57:06Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Right.

• 57:07Lex Fridman?

  By evolution.

• 57:08Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Right. And so you can think about, you know, I mean sedimentary rock is the way typically people describe it. The way I sometimes like to think about it is, you know, thinking about the cerebral cortex like icing on an already baked cake, you know, where, you know, the cake is your inner beast. These like boiling, you know, roiling instincts and emotions that have to be contained. And the, the, by the cortex and the, it's just, it's a fiction. It's a myth. It's a myth that you can trace all the way back to stories about morality in ancient Greece. But what you can do is look at the scientific record and say, well, there, there's others,

• 57:53Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  there are other stories that you could tell about brain evolution and, and the, the context in which brains evolved. So when you look at creatures who don't have brains and you look at creatures who do, what's the difference? And you can look at, you know, some animals. So we call, scientists call an environment that an animal lives in a niche, their environmental niche. What are the things, what are the parts of the environment that matter to that animal? And so there are some animals whose niche hasn't changed in 400 million years.

• 58:34Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So they're, they're not, these creatures are modern creatures, but they're living in a niche that hasn't changed much. And so their biology hasn't changed much. And you can kind of verify that by looking at the genes that lurk deep, you know, in the molecular structure of cells. And so you can, by looking at various animals in their developmental state, meaning not, you don't look at adult animals, you look at embryos of animals and developing animals. You can see, you can piece together a different story. And that story is that brains evolved under the selection pressure of hunting, that in

• 59:15Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  the Cambrian period, hunting emerged on the scene where animals deliberately ate one another. And What, so, you know, before the Cambrian period, the animals didn't really have, well, they didn't have brains, but they also didn't have senses, really, the very, very rudimentary senses. So, the animal that I wrote about in Seven and a Half Lessons is called an amphioxus or a lancelet. And little amphioxus has no eyes. It has no ears. It has no nose. It, it, it has no eyes.

• 59:55Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  It has a couple of cells for detecting light and dark for circadian rhythm purposes. So, and it, it, it can't hear. It has a vestibular cell to keep its body upright. It has a very rudimentary sense of touch, and it doesn't really have any internal organs other than this, like, basically stomach. It's like a, just like a, it doesn't, it doesn't have an enteric nervous system. It doesn't have, like, a gut that, you know, moves like we do. It just has basically a tube.

• 1:00:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So, it's like-

• 1:00:31Lex Fridman?

  A little container.

• 1:00:31Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Like a little container, yeah. And so, and really, it doesn't, it doesn't move very much. It can move. It just sort of wriggles. It doesn't have very sophisticated movement. And it's this really sweet little animal. It sort of wriggles its way to a spot and then plants itself in the sand and just filters food as the food goes by. And then, when the food concentration decreases, it, it just, it, it just ejects itself, wriggles to the, some spot randomly, where probabilistically, there will be more food, and plants itself again. So, it's, it's not, it's not really aware, very aware that it has an environment. It has a niche, but that niche is very small,

• 1:01:16Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  and it's not really experiencing that niche very much. So, it's, it's basically like a little stomach on a stick. That's, that's really what it is. And- But but when animals start to literally hunt each other,

• 1:01:36Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  all of a sudden, it becomes important to have to be able to sense your environment. Because you need to know, is that blob up ahead gonna eat me? Or should I eat it? And so all of a sudden, you want distant senses are very useful. And so in the water, distant senses are vision and a little bit hearing,

• 1:02:02Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  olfaction smelling and touch. Because in the water, touch is a distant sense because you can feel the vibration. So it's right. So in on air, on land, you know, vision is a distant sense. Touch, not so much, but for elephants, maybe. Right?

• 1:02:20Lex Fridman?

  The vibration.

• 1:02:21Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Vibrations. Olfaction, definitely, because of the concentration of, you know, the more concentrated something is, the more likely it is to be close to you. So animals developed senses. They developed a head, like a literal head. So anthioxus doesn't even have a head, really. It's just a.

• 1:02:39Lex Fridman?

  What's the purpose of a head?

• 1:02:42Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  That's a great question.

• 1:02:43Lex Fridman?

  Is it is it to have a jaw?

• 1:02:45Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  That's a great question. So jaw, so yes, jaws are a major.

• 1:02:51Lex Fridman?

  Useful feature.

• 1:02:52Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, obviously, they're a major adaptation. After there's a split between vertebrates and invertebrates. So anthioxus is thought to be very, very similar to the animal that's before that split. But then after the development, very quickly after the development of a head is the development of a jaw, which is a big thing. And and what goes along with that is the development of a brain.

• 1:03:18Lex Fridman?

  It's weird, is that just a coincidence that the thing, the part of our body, of the mammal, I think, body that we eat with and like attack others with is also the thing that contains the, all the majority of the brain type of stuff?

• 1:03:38Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Well, actually, the brain goes with the development of a head and the development of, of a visual system and an auditory system and an olfactory system and so on. So your senses are developing and, and the other thing that's happening, right, is that animals are getting bigger.

• 1:03:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Because they're, and also their niche is getting bigger.

• 1:04:00Lex Fridman?

  Well, this is the, just sorry to take a tiny tangent on the niche thing, is it seems like the niche is getting bigger, but not just bigger, like more complicated, like shaped in weird ways. So like predation seems to create, like, the whole world becomes your oyster, whatever. But like you also start to carve out like the places in which you can operate the best.

• 1:04:24Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah. And in fact, that's absolutely right. And in fact, some scientists think that theory of mind, your ability to make inferences about the inner life of, of other creatures, actually developed under the selection pressure of predation, because it makes you a better predator.

• 1:04:43Lex Fridman?

  Do you ever look at, you just said you looked at babies as these wiring creatures. Do you ever think of humans as just clever predators? Like that there is under, underneath it all is this, the Nietzschean wildepower in all of its forms? Or are we now friendlier?

• 1:05:07Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah. So it's interesting. I mean, there, there are zeitgeists in how humans think about themselves, right? And so if you look in the 20th century.

• 1:05:20Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You can see that the idea of an inner beast, that we're just predators, we're just basically animals, baseless animals, violent animals, that have to be contained by culture and by our prodigious neocortex,

• 1:05:35Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  really took hold particularly after World War I and really held sway for much of that century. And then around, at least in Western writing, I would say, you know, we're talking mainly about Western scientific writing, Western philosophical writing. And then, you know, late 90s, maybe, you start to see books and articles about our social nature, that we're social animals, and we are social animals, but what does that mean exactly? And about-

• 1:06:16Lex Fridman?

  It's us carving out different niches in the space of ideas, it looks like.

• 1:06:19Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I think so, I think so. So, you know, do humans, can humans be violent? Yes. Can humans be really helpful? Yes, actually. And humans are interesting creatures because, you know, other animals can also be helpful to one another. In fact, there's a whole literature, booming literature, on how other animals are, you know, support one another. They regulate each other's nervous systems in interesting ways and they will be helpful to one another, right? So, for example, there's a whole literature on rodents

• 1:07:02Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  and how they signal one another what is safe to eat and they will perform acts of generosity to their conspecifics that are related to them or who they were raised with. So if an animal was raised in a litter that they were raised in, although not even at the same time, they'll be more likely to help that animal. So there's always some kind of physical relationship between animals that predicts whether or not they'll help one another. For humans-

• 1:07:41Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Humans, you know, we have ways of categorizing who's in our, who's in our group and who isn't by non-physical ways, right? By, even by just something abstract like an idea. And we are much more likely to extend help to people in our own group, whatever that group may be, at that moment, whatever your, whatever feature you're using to define who's in your group and who isn't. We're more likely to help those people than even members of our own family at times. So, humans are much more flexible in their, in the way that they help one another, but also in the way that they harm one another.

• 1:08:25Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So I don't, I don't, I don't think I subscribe to, you know, we are primarily this, or we are primarily that. I don't think humans have essences in that way, really.

• 1:08:40Lex Fridman?

  I apologize to take this in this direction for a brief moment, but I've been really deep on Stalin and Hitler recently, in terms of reading. And is there something that you think about in terms of the nature of evil? From a neuroscience perspective? Is there some lessons that are sort of hopeful about human civilization that we can find in our brain with regard to the Hitlers of the world? Do you, do you think about the nature of evil?

• 1:09:20Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, I do. I don't know that what I have to say is so useful from a, I don't know that I can say as a neuroscientist, well, here, here's a study that, you know, what I, so I sort of have to take off my lab coat, right? And now I'm gonna now conjecture as a human who just also, who has opinions, but who also maybe has some knowledge about neuroscience. But I'm not speaking as a neuroscientist when I say this, because I don't think neuroscientists know enough, really, to be able to say. But I guess, I, the kinds of things I think about are, what, so I have always thought, even before I knew anything about neuroscience, I've always thought that.

• 1:10:09Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I don't think anybody could become Hitler, but I think the majority of people can be,

• 1:10:16Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  can do, are capable of doing very bad things.

• 1:10:21Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  It's just the question is really, how much encouragement does it take from the environment to get them to do something bad?

• 1:10:27Lex Fridman?

  That's what I, kind of when I look at the life of Hitler, it seems like there's so many places where-

• 1:10:35Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Something could have intervened.

• 1:10:37Lex Fridman?

  Intervened, no, it changed completely the person. I mean, there's like the caricature, like the obvious places where he was an artist. And if he wasn't rejected as an artist, he was a reasonably good artist. So that, that could have changed. But just his entire, like where he went in Vienna and all these kinds of things, like little interactions could have changed. And there's probably millions of other people who are capable, who the environment may be able to mold in the same way it did this particular person to create this particular kind of charismatic leader in this particular moment of time.

• 1:11:13Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Absolutely. And I guess the way I would, the way that I would say it, I would agree 100%. And I guess the way that I would say it is like this.

• 1:11:22Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  In the West, we have a way of reasoning

• 1:11:28Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  about causation, which focuses on single, simple causes for things. You know, there's, there's an essence to Hitler. There's an essence to his character. He was born with that essence, or it was forged very, very early in his life. And that explains the, the landscape of his, the horrible landscape of his behavior. But there's another way to think about it, a way that actually is much more consistent with what we know about biology, how biology works in the physical world. And that is that most things are complex, not as in, wow, this is really complex and hard, but complex as in complexity,

• 1:12:13Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  that is more than the sum of their parts. And that most phenomena have many, many-

• 1:12:21Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Weak, nonlinear, interacting causes. And so little things that we might not even be aware of can shift someone's developmental trajectory from this to that. And that's enough to take it on a whole set of other paths that, you know, that, and that these things are happening all the time. So it's not random and it's not really, it's not deterministic in the sense that like everything you do determines your outcome. But it's a little more like, um, you know, you're nudging someone from one set of possibilities to another set of possibilities.

• 1:13:02Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And I, but I think the, the thing is, the thing that I find optimistic is that the, the other side of that coin is also true. Right? So look at all the people who risked their lives to help people they didn't even know. I mean, I just watched Borat, the new Borat movie. And the thing that I came away with, but you know, the thing I came away with was, look at how like generous people were in that, oh, he's making, there are a lot of people he makes fun of and that's fine, but think about like those two guys, those, those-

• 1:13:43Lex Fridman?

  The, the Trump supporter guys, like-

• 1:13:44Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  The Trump supporter guys. Those guys-

• 1:13:46Lex Fridman?

  That was cool. Those kindness, there's kindness in them, right?

• 1:13:49Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  They took a complete stranger in a pandemic-

• 1:13:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Into their house. Who does that? Like, that's a really nice thing. Or there's one scene, I mean, I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't seen it, but, but there's, you know, there's one scene where he goes in, he dresses up as a Jew. I, I laughed myself sick at that scene, seriously. But, um, but he goes in and he, and there are these two old Jewish ladies.

• 1:14:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:20Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  What a bunch of sweethearts. Oh my gosh.

• 1:14:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Like, really?

• 1:14:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I mean, that was what I was struck by, actually. I mean, there are other ones, or, or like the babysitter, right? I mean, she was really kind. And yeah, so that's really what I was more struck by, like-

• 1:14:40Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You know, sure, there are other people who, you know, who do very bad things or say bad things or whatever, but you know, or like, there's one guy who's completely stoic, like the guy at the, um, who's doing the, like, you know, sending the messages, I don't know if it's facts or whatever, he's just completely stoic, but he's doing his job, actually. You know, like, you can't, you don't know what he was thinking inside his head, you don't know what he's feeling, but he was totally professional doing his job. Okay, so I guess I just, I had a bit of a different, um, you know, view, I guess. And I, so I also think that about people, I think everybody is capable of kindness. And, um, but, but, you know, it's, the question is, how much does it take and what are the

• 1:15:25Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  circumstances? So for a lot, some people, it's going to take a lot, and for some people, it only takes a little bit. But, you know, are we actually cultivating, um, an environment for the next generation that, um, provides opportunities for people to go in the direction of caring and kindness? Yeah. Or, you know, and I'm not, I'm not saying that as like a, you know, Pollyanna-ish person. Um, you know, I think there's a lot of room for competition and debate and so on. But I don't see Hitler as an anomaly, and I never have, that was even before I learned anything about neuroscience.

• 1:16:08Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And now, I would say, knowing what we know about developmental trajectories and life histories and how important that is, um, you know, knowing what we know about, um, that the whole question of like, nature versus nurture is a completely wrong question. You know, we have the kind of nature that requires nurture, we have the kind of genes that allow infants to be born with unfinished brains, where the brains, their brains are wired across a 25-year period with wiring instructions from the world that is created for them. And So I don't think Hitler is an anomaly.

• 1:16:48Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You know, even if it's even if it's less probable that that would happen, it's possible that it could happen again. And it's not, it's not like, you know, he's a bad seed. I mean, that doesn't, I just want to say for like, of course, he's completely 100% responsible for his actions and all the bad things that happen. So I'm not in any way, this is not me saying.

• 1:17:09Lex Fridman?

  But the environment is also responsible in part for creating the evil in this world. So like Hitler's in different versions of even more subtle, more smaller scale versions of evil. But I tend to believe that there's a much stronger,

• 1:17:30Lex Fridman?

  I don't like to talk about evolutionary advantages, but it seems like it makes sense for love to be a more powerful emergent phenomena of our collective intelligence versus hate and evil and destruction. Because from a survival, from a niche perspective, it seems to be like in my own life and my thinking about the intuition, about the way humans work together to solve problems. It seems that love is a very useful tool.

• 1:18:04Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I definitely agree with you. But I think the caveat here is that, you know, humans, the research suggests that humans are capable of great acts of kindness and great acts of generosity to people in their in-group.

• 1:18:23Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:18:25Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And.

• 1:18:25Lex Fridman?

  So we're also tribal.

• 1:18:27Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the, that's the kitschy way to say it. We're tribes, we're tribal. Yeah. So that's the kitschy way to say it. What I would say is that.

• 1:18:37Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You know, there are a lot of features that you can use to describe yourself. You don't have one identity, you don't have one self, you have many selves, you have many identities. Sometimes you're a man, sometimes you're a scientist, sometimes you're a, do you have a brother or a sister?

• 1:18:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, brother.

• 1:18:56Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So sometimes you're a brother, you know, you, you, sometimes you're a friend.

• 1:19:01Lex Fridman?

  Depends, you're a human, so you can keep zooming out.

• 1:19:03Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yes.

• 1:19:04Lex Fridman?

  Living organism on earth.

• 1:19:05Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yes, exactly. That's exactly, that's exactly right. And so there are, there are some people who, there is research which suggests that there are some people who will tell you, I think it's appropriate and better to help, I should help my family more than I should help my neighbors, and I should help my neighbors more than I should help the average stranger, and I should help, you know, the average stranger in my country more than I should help somebody outside my country, and I should help humans more than I should help, you know, other animals, and I should, right? So there's a clear hierarchy of helping.

• 1:19:45Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And there are other people who, you know, they are, their niche is much more inclusive, right? And that they're humans first, right? Or creatures of the earth first, let's say.

• 1:20:01Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And I, I don't think we know how flexible those attitudes are, because I don't think the research really tells us that. But in any case, there are, you know, and there are beliefs, people also have beliefs about, there's this really interesting research in, really in anthropology, that looks at

• 1:20:24Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  what are cultures particularly afraid of? Like what the people in a particular culture are organizing their social systems to prevent certain types of problems? So what are the problems that they're worried about? And, and so there are some cultures that are much more hierarchical. And some cultures that are, you know, much more egalitarian. There are some cultures that, you know, in the debate of like getting along versus getting ahead, there are some cultures that really prioritize the individual over the group. And there are other cultures that really prioritize the group over the individual. You know, it's not like one of these is right and one of these is wrong. It's that, you know, different combinations of these features are different solutions

• 1:21:07Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  that humans have come up with for, for living in groups, which is a major adaptive advantage of our species. And it's not the case that one of these is better and one of these is worse, although as a person, of course, I have opinions about that. And as a person, I, I can say, I would very much prefer certain, I have certain beliefs and I really want everyone in the world to live by those beliefs, you know? But as a scientist, I know that it's not really the case that for the species, any one of these is better than any other. There are different solutions that work differentially well in particular, you know, ecological parts of the world.

• 1:21:52Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But for individual humans, there are definitely some systems that are better and some systems that are worse. Right? But when, when anthropologists or when neuroscientists or biologists are talking, they're not usually talking about the lives of individual people, they're talking about, you know, the species, what's better for the species, the survivability of the species. And what's better for the survivability of the species is variation, that we have lots of cultures with lots of different solutions. Because if the environment were to change drastically, some, some of those solutions will work better than others. And you can see that happening with COVID.

• 1:22:37Lex Fridman?

  Right, so some people might be more susceptible to this this virus than others. And so variation is very useful. Say COVID was much, much more destructive than it is. And like, I don't know, 20% of the population was died. You know, that's it's good to have variability because then at least some percent will survive.

• 1:22:59Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, I mean, the the, you know, the way that I used to describe it was, you know, using, you know, those movies like The War of the Worlds or Pacific Rim, you know, where like aliens come down from outer space and they, you know, want to kill humans. And so all the humans band together as a species like and they all like all the, you know, little squabbling from countries and whatever all, you know, goes away. And everyone is just one big, you know, well, that, you know, that doesn't happen. I mean, because COVID is, you know, the vi- a virus

• 1:23:40Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  like Co- like COVID 19 is like a creature from outer space. And that's not what you see happening. What you do see happening, it is true that some people, I mean, we could use this as an example of essentialism also. So just to say like exposure to the virus does not mean that you will become infected with a disease. So, I mean, in controlled studies, one of which was actually a coronavirus, not COVID, but in this was, these are studies from 10, so years ago, you know, only somewhere between 20 and 40% of people were developed respiratory illness when a virus was placed in their nose.

• 1:24:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And so

• 1:24:23Lex Fridman?

  Then there's a dose question, all those

• 1:24:25Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Well, not in these studies, actually. So in these studies, the dose was consistent across all people. And everything, you know, they were sequestered in hotel rooms and what they ate was, you know, measured out by scientists and so on. And so when you hold dose, I mean, the dose issue is a real issue in the real world, but in these studies, that was controlled. And only somewhere between 20, depending on the study, between 20 and 40% of people became infected with a disease. So exposure to a virus doesn't mean de facto that you will develop an illness. You will be a carrier and you will spread the virus to other people,

• 1:25:06Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  but you yourself may not, your immune system may be in a state that you can make enough antibodies to not, not show symptoms, not develop symptoms. And so, of course, what this means is, again, is that, you know, like if I asked you, do you think, you know, a virus is the cause of a common cold, or, you know, most people, if I asked this question, I can tell you, because I asked this question. So, do you think a virus is the cause of a cold? Most people would say, yes, I think it is. And then I say, yeah, well, only 20 to 40% of people develop respiratory illness in exposure

• 1:25:49Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  to a virus. So clearly, it is a necessary cause, but it's not a sufficient cause. And there are other causes. Again, so not simple, single causes for things, right? Multiple, interacting influences. So it is true that individuals vary in their susceptibility to illness upon exposure, but different cultures have different sets of norms and practices that allow, that will slow or, or speed the spread. And that's the, that's the point that I was actually trying to make here, that, that.

• 1:26:28Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You know, when the environment changes, that is, there's a mutation of a virus that is incredibly infectious, some cultures will succumb, people in some cultures will succumb faster because of the particular norms and practices that that they've developed in their culture versus other cultures. Now, there could be some other, you know, thing that changes that where those other other cultures are, you know, would do better. So very individualistic cultures like ours may do much better under other types of selection

• 1:27:09Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  pressures. But for COVID, for things like COVID, you know, my colleague Michelle Galfont, her research shows that she she looks at like loose cultures and tight cultures, so cultures that have very, very strict rules versus cultures that are much more individualistic and where personal freedoms are more valued. And she, you know, her research suggests that for pandemic circumstances, tight cultures, actually, the people survive better.

• 1:27:39Lex Fridman?

  Just to linger a little bit longer, we started this part of the conversation talking about, you know, did humans evolve to think, did the human brain evolve to think implying is there like a progress to the thing that's always improving?

• 1:27:57Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  That's right. We never, yeah. And so the answer is no.

• 1:28:02Lex Fridman?

  But let me sort of push back. But so your intuition is very strong here, not your intuition, the way you described this. But is it possible there's a direction to this evolution? Like, do you think of this evolution as having a direction? Like, it's like walking along a certain path towards something? Is it, you know, what is it? Is it Elon Musk said, like, the Earth got bombarded with photons? And then all of a sudden, like, a Tesla was launched into space or whatever, rockets started coming? Like, is there a sense in which? Even though in the like, within the system,

• 1:28:47Lex Fridman?

  the evolution seems to be this mess of variation. We're kind of trying to find our niches and so on. But do you think there ultimately, when you zoom out, there is a direction that's strong that does tend towards greater complexity and intelligence?

• 1:29:05Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  No. So, I mean, and I, and again, what I would say is I'm really, I'm really just echoing people who are much smarter than I am about this.

• 1:29:16Lex Fridman?

  But see, you're saying smarter. I thought it doesn't, there's no, I thought there's no smarter.

• 1:29:21Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  No, I didn't say there's no smarter. I said, there's no direction.

• 1:29:23Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:29:24Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So I think the thing to say, or what I understand to be the case, is that there's variation. It's not unbounded variation. And there are selectors. There are, there are, there are pressures that will select. And so not anything is possible because we live on a planet that has certain physical realities to it. Right? And, but those physical realities are what constrain the possibilities.

• 1:29:54Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  The physical realities of our genes and the physical realities of our corporeal bodies and the physical realities of,

• 1:30:04Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  you know, the, of life on, on this planet. So what I would say is that there's no direction. But

• 1:30:16Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  there is, it's not infinite possibility because we live on a particular planet that has particular statistical regularities in it. And some things will never happen. And so all of those things are, are interacting with,

• 1:30:35Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  with our genes and so on, and our, you know, the physical nature of our bodies to make some things more possible and some things less possible. Look, I mean, humans have very complex brains, but birds have complex brains. And so do, you know, so do octopuses have very complex brains. And all three sets of, all three of those brains are, are somewhat different from one another. You know, a bird, birds, some birds have very complex brains. Some even have rudimentary language. They have no cerebral cortex. I mean, they admittedly, they have, this is now lesson two, right? They have, is it lesson two or lesson one? Let me think. No, this is lesson one.

• 1:31:15Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  They have, um, uh, they have the same neurons, the same neurons that, that in a human become the cerebral cortex. Birds have those neurons. They just don't form themselves into a cerebral cortex. But I mean, crows, for example, are very sophisticated animals. They can do a lot of the things that humans can do. In fact, all of the things that humans do that are very special, that seem very special, there's at least one other animal on the planet that can do those things too. What's special about the human brain is that we put them all together. So we learn from one another. We don't have to experience everything ourselves. We can watch another animal or another human experience something and we can learn from that.

• 1:31:58Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Well, there are many other animals who can learn by copying.

• 1:32:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  That we communicate with each other very, very efficiently. We have language, but we're not the only animals who are efficiently, efficient communicators. There are lots of other animals who can efficiently communicate, like bees, for example. You know, we cooperate really well with one another to do grand things, but there are other animals that cooperate too. And so every innovation that we have, other animals have too. What we have is we have all of those together, interwoven in this very complex dance, in a brain that is not unique, exactly, but that is, you know, it does have some features

• 1:32:41Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  that make it use, that make it particularly useful for us to do all of these things, uh, you know, to have all of these things intertwined. So, you know, our brains are, actually, the last time we talked, I, I, I made a mistake because I said, um, in my enthusiasm, I said, you know, our brains are, are not larger.

• 1:33:06Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Are relative to our bodies, our brains are not larger than than other primates. And that's actually not true, actually. Our our brains relative to our body size is somewhat larger. So an ape who's not a human, that's not a human. Their brains are larger than their body sizes than, say, relative to like a smaller monkey. And a human's brain is larger relative to its body size than a than a gorilla.

• 1:33:34Lex Fridman?

  That's a good approximation of your of whatever, of of the bunch of stuff that you can shove in there.

• 1:33:41Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But, well, what I was gonna say is, but our cerebral cortex is not larger than what you would expect for a brain of our of of of its size. So so relative to, say, an ape, like a like a gorilla or a chimp, or even a mammal like a dolphin or an elephant.

• 1:34:00Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You know, our brains, our our cerebral cortex is as large as you would expect it to be for a brain of our size. So there's nothing special about our cerebral cortex. And this is something I explain in the book where I I say, OK, you know, like by analogy. If you walk into somebody's house and you see that they have a huge kitchen. You know, you might think, well, maybe, you know, maybe this is a place I really definitely want to eat dinner at because, you know, these people must be gourmet cooks. But you don't know anything about what the size of their kitchen means unless you consider it in relation to the size of the rest of the house. If it's if it's a big kitchen in a really big house, it's not telling you anything special, right?

• 1:34:45Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  If it's a big kitchen in a small house, then that might be a place that you want to eat for you want to stay for dinner. Because it's more likely that that kitchen is large for a special reason. And so the cerebral cortex of a human brain isn't in and of itself special because of its size. However, there are some genetic changes that have happened in the human brain as it's grown.

• 1:35:15Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  With to whatever size is, you know, typical for for the whole brain size. Right. There are some changes that do give the human brain slightly more of some capacities. They're not special, but there's just they just, you know, we can do some things much better than other animals. And, you know, correspondingly, other animals can do some things much better than we can. We can't grow back limbs. We can't lift 50 times our own body weight. Well, I mean, maybe you can, but I can't lift 50 times my own body.

• 1:35:48Lex Fridman?

  Ants with that regard are very impressive. And then you're saying with the with the frontal cortex, like that's the size is not always the right measure of capability, I guess. So size isn't everything.

• 1:36:02Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Size isn't everything.

• 1:36:04Lex Fridman?

  That's a quote about, you know, people like it when I disagree. So let me disagree with you on something or just like play devil's advocate a little bit. So you've painted a really nice picture that evolution doesn't have a direction.

• 1:36:18Lex Fridman?

  But is it possible if we just ran Earth over and over again, like this video game, that the final result will be the same? So in the sense that we're eventually there'll be an AGI type HAL 9000 type system that just like flies and colonizes nearby Earth like planets. It's always will be the same. And and the different organisms and the different evolution of the brain, like it doesn't feel like it has like a direction. But given the constraints of Earth, and whatever this imperative, whatever the hell is running

• 1:36:58Lex Fridman?

  this universe, like it seems like it's running towards something. Is it possible that will always be the same? Thereby, it will be a direction?

• 1:37:09Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, I think, you know, as you know better than anyone else, that that answer to that question is, of course, there's some probability that that could happen, right? It's not a yes or no answer. It's what's the probability that that would happen? And there's a whole distribution of possibilities. So maybe we end up, what's the probability we end up with exactly the same complement of creatures, including us? What's the likelihood that we end up with, you know, creatures that are similar to humans that are, but, you know, similar in certain ways, let's say, but not exactly humans, or, you know, all

• 1:37:51Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  the way to a completely different distribution of creatures?

• 1:37:57Lex Fridman?

  What's your intuition? Like, if you were to bet money, what does that distribution look like if we ran Earth over and over and over again?

• 1:38:03Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, so I would say, given the, you're now asking me questions that...

• 1:38:07Lex Fridman?

  This is not science.

• 1:38:08Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  This is not science. So, but I would say, okay, well, what's the probability that it's going to be a carbon life form? Probably high?

• 1:38:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:16Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But that's because I don't know anything about, really...

• 1:38:19Lex Fridman?

  Alternatives?

• 1:38:20Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, you know, I don't, I'm not, I'm not really well versed that. What's the probability that, you know, so what's the probability that the animals will begin in the ocean and crawl out onto land?

• 1:38:30Lex Fridman?

  Versus the other way?

• 1:38:31Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Versus the, I would say, probably high. I don't know, but, you know, but do I think, what's the likelihood that we would end up with exactly the same or very similar? I think it's low, actually. I wouldn't say it's low, but I would say it's not, it's not 100%, and I'm not even sure it's 50%. You know, I would say, I don't think that we're here by accident, because I think, like I said, there are constraints, like there are some physical constraints about Earth. Now, of course, if you were a cosmologist, you could say, well, the fact that the Earth is, if you were to do the Big Bang over again and keep doing it over and over and over again, would you still get the same solar systems? Would you still get the same planets? Would, you know, would you still get the same

• 1:39:16Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  galaxies, the same solar systems, the same planets? You know, I don't know, but my guess is probably not, because there are random things that happen that can, again, send things in one, you know, make one set of trajectories possible and another set impossible. So, but I guess my, my...

• 1:39:36Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  My, if I were gonna bet, bet something, money or something valuable, I would probably say it's not zero and it's not 100% and it's probably not even 50%. So there's some probability, but I don't.

• 1:39:50Lex Fridman?

  That it will be similar.

• 1:39:51Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  That it would be similar, but I don't think, I just think there are too many degrees of freedom. There are too many degrees of freedom. I, I mean, one of the real tensions in writing this book is to, on the one hand, there's some truth in saying that humans are not special. We are just, you know, we're not special in the animal kingdom. All animals are well adapted, if they're survived, they're well adapted to their niche. It does happen to be the case that our niche is large. For any individual human, your niche is whatever it is.

• 1:40:34Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But for the species, right, we live almost everywhere, not everywhere, but almost everywhere on the planet. But not in the ocean. And actually, other animals like bacteria, for example, have, have us beat miles, you know, hands down, right? So we're, by any, by any definition, we're not special.

• 1:40:59Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  We're just, you know, adapted to our environment.

• 1:41:02Lex Fridman?

  But bacteria don't have a podcast.

• 1:41:04Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:41:06Lex Fridman?

  They're not able to.

• 1:41:07Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So that's the tension, right? So on the one hand, you know, we're not special animals. We're just, you know, you know, particularly well adapted to our niche. On the other hand, our niche is huge and we, you know, we don't just adapt to our environment. We add to our environment. We make stuff up, give it a name and then it becomes real. And so no other animal can do that. And so I think the, the thing, the way to think about it from my perspective, or the way I made sense of it is to say, you can look at any individual, single characteristic that a human has.

• 1:41:40Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  That seems remarkable. And you can find that in some other animal.

• 1:41:44Lex Fridman?

  Hmm.

• 1:41:46Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  What you can't find in any other animal is all of those characteristics together in a brain that is souped up in particular ways, like ours is. And if you combine these things, multiple interacting causes, right? Not one, not one essence, like your cortex, your big neocortex, but, um, which isn't really that big. I mean, it's just big for it, this, for your big brain, uh, for the size of your big brain. It's that, it's the size it should be. Um, if you add all those things together and they interact with each other, that produces some pretty remarkable results.

• 1:42:26Lex Fridman?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:27Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And if you're aware of that, then you can start asking different kinds of questions about what it means to be human and what kind of a human you want to be. And what kind of a, a world do you want to curate for the next generation of humans? So you, I think that's the goal anyways, right? It's just to, just to have a glimpse of, instead of thinking about things in, in a simple linear way, just have a glimpse of the, some of the things that matter, that seem, that evidence suggests matters, um, to, um, the kind of brain in the kind of bodies that we have.

• 1:43:12Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And once you know that, you can, you can work with it a little bit.

• 1:43:15Lex Fridman?

  You write, "Words have power over your biology. Right now, I can text the words, 'I love you' from the United States to my close friend in Belgium. And even though she cannot hear my voice or see my face, I will change her heart rate, her breathing and her metabolism." By the way, beautifully written. Or someone could text something ambiguous to you, like, "Is your door locked? And odds are that it would affect your nervous system in an unpleasant way." So, I mean, there's a lot of stuff to talk about here, but just one way to ask is, um, Why do you think words have so much power over our brain?

• 1:43:59Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Well, I think we just have to look at the anatomy of the brain to answer that question. So if you look at the parts of the brain, the whole, the, the, the systems that are important for processing language, you can see that some of these regions are also important for controlling your major organ systems and your, like, your autonomic nervous system that controls your cardiovascular system, your respiratory system, and so on, that, you know, these regions control your endocrine system, your immune system, and so on. So, and you can actually see this in other animals, too. So in birds, for example, the neurons

• 1:44:43Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  that are responsible for bird song also control the systems of a bird's body. And the reason why I bring that up is that the, there's, some scientists think that the anatomy of a, of a bird's brain that control bird song are homologous or structurally have a similar origin to the human system for language. So the parts of the brain that are important for processing language are not unique and specialized for language. They do many things. And one of the things they do is control your major organ systems.

• 1:45:19Lex Fridman?

  Do you think we can fall in love, have arguments about this all the time? Do you think we can fall in love based on words alone?

• 1:45:26Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Well, I think people have been doing it for centuries. I mean, they, maybe it used to be the case that people wrote letters to each other.

• 1:45:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:34Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You know, and then that was how they communicated and-

• 1:45:38Lex Fridman?

  I guess that's how you and Dan got-

• 1:45:39Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Exact- exactly, exactly, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:45:44Lex Fridman?

  So is the answer a clear yes there? Because I get a lot of pushback from people often that you need, you need the touch and the smell and, you know, the bodily stuff.

• 1:45:58Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I think the touch and the smell and the bodily stuff helps.

• 1:46:01Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:46:02Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But I don't think it's necessary.

• 1:46:04Lex Fridman?

  Do you think you can have a lifelong, monogamous relationship with an AI system that only communicates with you on text, romantic relationship?

• 1:46:14Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Well, I suppose that's an empirical question that hasn't been answered yet, but-

• 1:46:18Lex Fridman?

  So, yeah.

• 1:46:19Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I, I guess what I would say is-

• 1:46:24Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I don't think I could. Could any human? Could the average human? Could, you know, so, so, um, if I, if I, um, I even, I want to even, I want to even modify that and say, I'm thinking now of, um, Tom Hanks and the movie.

• 1:46:47Lex Fridman?

  Castaway?

• 1:46:47Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, you know, with Wilson.

• 1:46:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:50Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I think if, if that was, if you had to make that work, if you had to make that work.

• 1:46:55Lex Fridman?

  With a volleyball, yeah?

• 1:46:56Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  If you had to make it work, could you, you, could you? Prediction and simulation, right? So if you had to make it work, could you make it work? Using simulation and, you know, your past experience, could you make it work?

• 1:47:12Lex Fridman?

  Could you make it work? You as a human, could you, could you?

• 1:47:15Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Could you have a, could you have a relationship literally with an inanimate object? And have it sustain you in the way that another human could?

• 1:47:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:25Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Your life would probably be shorter because you wouldn't actually derive the body budgeting benefits from, right? So we've talked about, uh, you know, how, um, your brain, its most important job is to control your body and you can describe that as your brain running a budget for your body.

• 1:47:44Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:47:44Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And, um, there are metaphorical, you know, deposits and withdrawals into your body budget and you also make deposits and withdrawals in other people's body budgets, figuratively speaking. So you wouldn't have that particular benefit.

• 1:48:02Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So your life would probably be shorter, but I think it would be harder for some people than for other people.

• 1:48:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I tend to, my intuition is that you can have a deep fulfilling relationship with a volleyball.

• 1:48:15Lex Fridman?

  I think, I think a lot of the, the environments that set up, I think that's a really good example, like the constraints.

• 1:48:24Lex Fridman?

  Of your particular environment define the like I believe like scarcity is a good catalyst for deep, meaningful connection with other humans and with inanimate objects. So the less you have, the more fulfilling those relationships are. And I would say a relationship with a volleyball, the sex is not great, but everything else, I feel like it could be a very fulfilling relationship, which I don't know from an engineering perspective, what to do with that. And just like you said, it is an empirical question, but.

• 1:48:57Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But there are places to learn about that, right? So for example, think about children and their blankets. Right? So there, there's something tactile and there's something olfactory. And it's very comforting. I mean, even for, even for non-human little animals, right? Like puppies and so I don't know about cats, but, um, but.

• 1:49:20Lex Fridman?

  Cats are cold-hearted, there, there's, there's no, there's nothing going on there.

• 1:49:25Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I don't know, there are some cats that are very dog-like. I mean, really, so.

• 1:49:30Lex Fridman?

  Some cats identify as dogs, yes.

• 1:49:32Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I think that's true. Yeah, they're, they're species fluid.

• 1:49:37Lex Fridman?

  So you also write, when it comes to human minds, variation is the norm. And what we call, quote, "human nature" is really many human natures. Again, many questions I can ask here, but maybe an interesting one to ask is, um, I often hear, you know, we often hear this idea of be yourself. Is this possible to be yourself? Is it a good idea to strive to be yourself? Is it, does that even have any meaning?

• 1:50:10Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  It's a very Western question, first of all, because which self are you talking about?

• 1:50:17Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You don't have one self. There is no self that's an essence of you. You have multiple selves. Actually, there is research on this. You know, to quote the great social psychologist Hazel Marcus, you're never, you cannot be a self by yourself. You, you know, you, and so different contexts pull for or draw on different features of your, of who you are, or what you're, what you believe, what you feel, what your actions are. Different contexts, you know, will put certain things or make more, some features be more in the foreground and some in the background. It takes us back right to our discussion earlier about Stalin and Hitler and so on.

• 1:51:02Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  The thing that I would caution, in addition to the fact that there is no single self, you know, that you have multiple selves who you can be. And you can certainly choose the situations that you put yourself in to some extent. Not everybody has complete choice, but everybody has a little bit of choice. And I think I said this to you before, that one of the pieces of advice that we gave Sophia, you know, when she went, our daughter, when she was going off to college was, try to spend time around people, choose relationships that allow you to be your best self. We should have said your best selves, but.

• 1:51:43Lex Fridman?

  The, this. The pool of selves given the environment.

• 1:51:47Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, but I, the one thing I do want to say is that the risk of saying be yourself, just be yourself, is that that can be used as an excuse. Well, this is just the way that I am. I'm just like this. And that I, I think should be tremendously resisted.

• 1:52:08Lex Fridman?

  So that's one, that's, that's for the excuse side, but, you know, I'm really self-critical often, I'm full of doubt. And people often tell me, just don't worry about it, just be yourself, man. And it's, the thing is, it almost, it's not, from an engineering perspective, does not seem like actionable advice. Because I guess constantly worrying about who.

• 1:52:35Lex Fridman?

  What are the right

• 1:52:38Lex Fridman?

  words to say to express how I'm feeling is, I guess, myself. There's, there's a kind of line, I guess, that this might be a Western idea, but something that feels genuine and something that feels non genuine. And I'm not sure what that means because I would like to be fully genuine and fully open, but I'm also aware, like this morning, I was like very like silly and giddy, I like I was

• 1:53:10Lex Fridman?

  just being funny and relaxed and light, like there's nothing that could bother me in the world. I was just smiling and happy. And then I remember last night was just feeling like very grumpy, like, uh, like stuff was bothering me, like certain things were bothering me. And like, what are those? Are those are different selves? Like what? Who am I in that? And what do I do? Because if, you know, if we take Twitter as an example, if I actually send a tweet last night and a tweet this morning, it's gonna be very two different people

• 1:53:44Lex Fridman?

  tweeting that. And I don't know what to do with that because one does seem to be more me than the other. But that's maybe because there's a narrative, a story that I'm trying, there's something I'm striving to be, like the ultimate human that I might become. I have maybe a vision of that and I'm trying to become that. But it, it does seem like there's a lot of different minds in there. And they're all like, like having a discussion and a battle for who's gonna win.

• 1:54:12Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I suppose you could think of it that way, but there's another way to think of it, I think. And that is that, um, maybe the more Buddhist way to think of it, right? Or a more contemplative way to think about it, which is not that you have multiple personalities inside your head, but you have, your brain has this.

• 1:54:32Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Amazing capacity. It it has a population of experiences that you've had that it can regenerate, reconstitute. And it can even take bits and pieces of those experiences and combine them into something new. And it's often doing this to predict what's going to happen next and to plan your actions. But it's also happening, this also happens just, that's what mind wandering is, or just internal thought and so on. That's, it's the same mechanism, really. And so, a lot of times, we hear the saying, you know, just think, if you think differently, you'll feel differently.

• 1:55:17Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But your brain is having a conversation continually with your body. And your body, your brain's, you know, trying to control your body, well, trying. Your brain is controlling your body, your body is sending information back to the brain. And in part, the information that your body sends back to your brain, just like the information coming from the world, initiates the next volley of predictions or simulations. So in some ways, you could also say, the way that you feel, you're, I think we talked before about affective feeling or mood coming from the sensations of body budgeting, you

• 1:55:59Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  know, influences what you think. And as much as, so feelings influence thought as much as thought influence feeling, and maybe more.

• 1:56:14Lex Fridman?

  But just, the whole thing doesn't seem stable.

• 1:56:17Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Well, it's a dynamic system, Mr. Engineer.

• 1:56:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:21Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Right? It's a dynamics, it's a dynamical system, right? Nonlinear dynamical system. And I think that's, I'm actually writing a paper with a bunch of engineers about this, actually. But, I mean, other people have talked about the brain as a dynamical system before, but, you know, the real tricky bit is trying to figure out, how do you get mental features out of that system? I guess. One thing to figure out how you get a motor movement out of that system. It's another thing to figure out how you get a mental feature, like a feeling of being loved or a feeling of being worthwhile or a feeling of, you know, just basically feeling like shit. How do you get a feeling, a mental features out of that system?

• 1:57:00Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So what I would say is that you aren't, the Buddhist thing to say is that you're not one person and you're not many people. You are,

• 1:57:12Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  you are the sum of your experiences. And who you are in any given moment, meaning what your actions will be, is influenced by the state of your body and the state of the world that you've put yourself in. And you can change either of those things. One is a little easier to change than the other, right? You can change your environment by literally getting up and moving. Or you can change it by paying attention to some things differently and letting other, some features come to the fore and other features be backgrounded. Like I'm looking around your place.

• 1:57:46Lex Fridman?

  Oh, no.

• 1:57:46Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And I see.

• 1:57:47Lex Fridman?

  This is not something you should do.

• 1:57:48Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  No, I'm not, but I'm going to say one thing.

• 1:57:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:51Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  No green plants.

• 1:57:54Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  No green plants.

• 1:57:55Lex Fridman?

  Does green plants mean a home? And I want this to be temporary.

• 1:57:59Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Fair, fair, but.

• 1:58:02Lex Fridman?

  What's, what goes through your mind when you see no green plants?

• 1:58:04Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  No, I'm just making the point that,

• 1:58:08Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  what if you, again, you know, not everybody has control over their environment. Some people don't have control over the noise or the temperature or, you know, any of those things. But everybody has a little bit of control. And you can place things in your environment, photographs,

• 1:58:28Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:58:28Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  plants, anything that's meaningful to you and use it as a shift of environment when you need it.

• 1:58:35Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:58:36Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You can also do things to change the conditions of your body. When you exercise every day, you're making an investment in your body. Actually, you're making an investment in your brain, too. It makes you, even though it's unpleasant and, you know, there's a cost to it. If you replenish, if you invest and you make up that. You make a deposit and you make up that what you've spent. You're basically making an investment in making it easier for your brain to control your body in the future. So you can make sure you're hydrated. Drink water. You don't have to drink bottled water. You can drink water from the tap. This is in most places, maybe not, you know, maybe not everywhere, but, but most places

• 1:59:21Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  in the developed world. You can try to get enough sleep. Not everybody has that luxury, but everybody can do something to make their, you know, body budgets a little more solvent. And that will also make it more likely that certain thoughts will emerge from that prediction machine.

• 1:59:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's the control you do have. It's, uh, yeah, being able to control the environment. That's really well put. Uh, on the, I don't think we've talked about this. So let's go to the biggest unanswerable questions of consciousness. What is, you just rolled your eyes.

• 2:00:00Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I did. That was my, yeah.

• 2:00:02Lex Fridman?

  So what is consciousness from a neuroscience perspective? I know you, I mean.

• 2:00:07Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I made notes, you know, cause you gave me some questions in advance and I made notes for every single.

• 2:00:14Lex Fridman?

  Except that one?

• 2:00:15Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, well, that one I had, what the fuck? And then I took it out.

• 2:00:19Lex Fridman?

  So is there something interesting? Because you're so pragmatic. Is there something interesting to say about intuition building about consciousness? Or is this something that we're just totally clueless about that this is, uh, let's focus on the, the body, the brain listens to the body, the body speaks to the brain and let's just figure this piece out and then consciousness will probably emerge somehow after that?

• 2:00:46Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  No, I think, you know, well, first of all, I, it'll just say upfront, um, I am not a philosopher of consciousness and I'm not a neuroscientist who focuses on consciousness. I mean, in some sense I do study it because I study affect and mood. And that's, that is the, um, uh, you know, to use the phrase, that is the, the hard question of consciousness. How is it that your brain is modeling your body? Brain is modeling the sensory conditions of your body. It's, um, and it's being updated. That model is being updated by the sense data that's coming from your body and it's happening continuously your whole life. And you don't feel those sensations directly.

• 2:01:31Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  You, what you feel is a general sense of pleasantness or unpleasantness, comfort, discomfort, feeling worked up, feeling calm. So we call that affect. You know, most people call it mood. So how is it that your brain gives you this very low dimensional feeling of mood or affect when it's presumably receiving a very high dimensional array of sense data? And the model that the brain is running of the body has to be high dimensional because there's a lot going on in there, right? You're not aware, but as you're sitting there quietly, as your listeners or our, as our viewers are sitting.

• 2:02:10Lex Fridman?

  They might be working out, running now, or as many of them write to me.

• 2:02:14Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  That's fair.

• 2:02:15Lex Fridman?

  They're laying in bed, smoking weed with their eyes closed.

• 2:02:17Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  That's fair. So maybe we should say that bit again then. So if, so some people may be working out, some people may be, you know, relaxing. But, you know, even if you're sitting very still while you're watching this or listening to this, there's a whole drama going on inside your body that you're largely unaware of. Yet, your brain makes you aware or gives you a status report, in a sense, by virtue of these mental features of feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling comfortable, feeling uncomfortable, feeling energetic, feeling tired and so on. And so how the hell is it doing that? That is the basic question of, of consciousness.

• 2:03:02Lex Fridman?

  And like the status reports seem to be, in the way we experience them, seem to be quite simple. Like, it doesn't feel like there's a lot of data.

• 2:03:12Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, no, there isn't. So when you feel, when you feel discomfort, when you're feeling basically like shit, you feel like shit, what does that tell you? Like, what are you supposed to do next? What caused it? I mean, the thing is, not one thing caused it, right? It's multiple factors probably influencing your physical state.

• 2:03:33Lex Fridman?

  I think it's very high dimensional, yeah.

• 2:03:35Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Very high dimensional. And. That and the there are different temporal scales of influence, right? So it, you know, the state of your gut is not just influenced by what you ate five minutes ago. It's also what you ate a day ago and two days ago and and so on. So, um, so I think the, you know, when I'm, I'm not trying to weasel out of the question. I just think it's a, it's the hardest question, actually.

• 2:04:11Lex Fridman?

  Do you think we'll ever understand it?

• 2:04:13Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Um.

• 2:04:15Lex Fridman?

  As scientists?

• 2:04:18Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I think that we will understand it as well as we understand other things like the birth of the universe or the, you know, the nature of the, of the universe, I guess I would say. So I, do I think we can get to that level of an explanation? I do, actually, but I think that we have to start asking somewhat different questions and approaching the science somewhat differently than we have in the past.

• 2:04:46Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's also possible that consciousness is much more difficult to understand than the nature of the universe.

• 2:04:51Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  It is, but I wasn't necessarily saying that it was a question that was of equivalent complexity. I was saying that I do think that we could get to some, I, I am optimistic that I, I would not, I would be very willing to invest my, the time, my time on this earth as a scientist in trying to answer that question if I could do it the way that I want to do it, not the way that it's currently being done.

• 2:05:20Lex Fridman?

  So like rigorously?

• 2:05:21Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I don't want to say unrigorously. I just want to say that there are certain set of assumptions that, you know, scientists have what I would call ontological commitments. There are commitments about the way the world is or the way that nature is. And they, these commitments lead scientists, sometimes blindly without, they don't, scientists sometimes, sometimes scientists are aware of these commitments, but sometimes they're not. And these commitments on the list influence how scientists ask questions, how, what they measure, how they measure. And I, I just have very different views than a lot of my colleagues about the ways to approach this. Not everybody, but, um, but the way that I would approach it would be different and it would cost.

• 2:06:05Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  More and it would take longer. It doesn't fit very well into the current incentive structure of science. And so do I think that doing science, the way science is currently done with the budget that it currently has and the incentive structure that it currently has? Will we have an answer? No, I think absolutely not. Good luck is what I would say.

• 2:06:26Lex Fridman?

  People love book recommendations. Let me ask what three books?

• 2:06:31Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Oh, you can't just like, you can't just give me three. I mean, like, really, three?

• 2:06:35Lex Fridman?

  What seven and a half books you can recommend? So you're also the author of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. You're author of How Emotions Are Made. Okay. So definitely those are the top two recommendations of all the two greatest books of all time. Other than that, are there books that technical fiction philosophical that you've enjoyed? Or you might recommend to others?

• 2:06:58Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yes. Actually, you know, every PhD student, when they, when they graduate with their PhD, I give them a set of like a little library, like a set of books, you know, some of which they've already read, some of which I want them to read or. But I think nonfiction books I would read. The things I would recommend are The Triple Helix by Richard Lewontin. It's a little book published in 2000, which is, I think, a really good introduction to complexity and population thinking as opposed to essentialism.

• 2:07:41Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So this idea, essentialism is this idea that, you know, there's an essence to each person, whether it's a soul or your genes or what have you, as opposed to this idea that you, we have the kind of nature that requires nurture. We are, we are, you are the product of a complex dance between an environment, between a set of genes and an environment that turns those genes on and off to produce your brain and your body and really who you are at any given moment.

• 2:08:13Lex Fridman?

  Good title for that triple helix. So playing on the double helix where it's just the biology, it's bigger than the biology.

• 2:08:20Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Exactly. It's a wonderful book. I've read it probably six or seven times throughout the year. He has another book too, which is. It's more, I think scientists would find it, I don't know, I've loved it. It's called Biology as Ideology. And it really is all about, I wouldn't call it one of the best books of all time, but I love the book because it really does point out, you know, that science as it's currently practiced, I mean, the book was written in 1991, but it actually, I think, still holds, that science as it's currently practiced has a set of ontological commitments which are somewhat problematic.

• 2:08:57Lex Fridman?

  So the assumptions are limiting.

• 2:08:59Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, in ways that you, it's, you know, it's like you're a fish in water and you don't like, okay.

• 2:09:04Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:09:04Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So, yeah, so here's.

• 2:09:05Lex Fridman?

  David Foster Wallace.

• 2:09:06Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, but, you know, but here's, here's a really cool thing I just learned recently. Is it okay to go off on this tangent for a minute?

• 2:09:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, there's good tangency, great.

• 2:09:16Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Okay, I was just gonna say that I just learned recently that we don't have water receptors on our skin. So how do you know when you're sweating? How do you know when, when a raindrop, when, you know, when it's gonna rain and, you know, like a raindrop hits your skin and you can feel that little drop of wetness? How is it that you feel that drop of wetness when we don't have water receptors in our skin? And I was, when I.

• 2:09:39Lex Fridman?

  My mind's blown already.

• 2:09:41Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, that was, that was my reaction too, right? I was like, of course we don't because we evolved in the water. Like, why would we need, you know, it just, it was just this like, you know, you have these moments where you're like, oh, of course, there's like a, yeah, so.

• 2:09:54Lex Fridman?

  You'll never see rain the same way again.

• 2:09:56Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So the answer is it's a, it's a, it's a combination of temperature and touch. But it's a complex sense that's only computed in your brain. There's no receptor for it, anyways.

• 2:10:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's why like snow versus cold rain versus warm rain all feel different because you're, you're trying to infer stuff from the temperature and the size of the droplets is fascinating.

• 2:10:22Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, your brain is a prediction machine. It's using lots and lots of information, combining it, you know, anyway, so, but, um, so.

• 2:10:31Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Biology is ideology is, I wouldn't say it's one of the greatest books of all time, but it is a, it is a really useful book. There's a book by, if you're interested in psychology or the mind at all, there's a wonderful book, a little, it's a fairly, fairly small book called Naming the Mind by Kurt Danziger, who's a historian of psychology. Everybody in my lab reads both of these books.

• 2:10:58Lex Fridman?

  So what was the book?

• 2:10:59Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  It's about the origin of the, where do, where did we get the theory of mind that we have, that the human mind is populated by thoughts and feelings and perceptions? And where did those categories come from? Because they don't exist in all cultures.

• 2:11:16Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so this isn't, that's a cultural construct?

• 2:11:21Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  The idea that you have thoughts and feelings and they're very distinct is definitely a cultural construct.

• 2:11:27Lex Fridman?

  It's another mind blowing thing, just like the rain?

• 2:11:31Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  So Kurt Danziger is a, the opening chapter in that book is absolutely mind blowing. I love it. I love it. I just think it's fantastic. And I would say that there are many, many popular science books that I could recommend that I think are extremely well written in their own way. You know, before I, maybe I said this to you, but before I undertook writing How Emotions Are Made, I read, I don't know, somewhere on the order of 50 or 60 popular science books to try to figure out how to write a popular science book.

• 2:12:16Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Because while there are many books about writing, Stephen King has a great book about on writing and, you know, where he gives tips interlaced with his own personal history. That was where I learned you write for a specific person. You have a specific person in mind. And that's, for me, that person is my, is Dan.

• 2:12:38Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating. I mean, that's a whole nother conversation to have, like, which popular science books, like, what you learned from that search? Because there's a, I have some, for me, some popular science books, like, I just roll my eyes, like, this is too.

• 2:12:56Lex Fridman?

  It's the same with TED Talks. Like, some of them go too much into the flowery and don't, I don't, I would say, don't give enough respect to the intelligence of the reader. And, but that's, this is my own bias.

• 2:13:10Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  I, I, I completely agree with you. And in fact, I have a colleague, his name is Van Yang, who, you know, he produced cinematic lecture of how motions are made that we wrote together with Joseph Friedman. No relation.

• 2:13:30Lex Fridman?

  Yes. Well, we're all related.

• 2:13:32Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Well, I mean, you and I are probably, you know, have some, yeah.

• 2:13:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:35Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But.

• 2:13:36Lex Fridman?

  I remember, it's, the memories are in there somewhere.

• 2:13:39Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, it's from many, many, many generations ago. Well, half my family is Russian, so from.

• 2:13:44Lex Fridman?

  The good half.

• 2:13:45Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  The good half, right. But, you know, he, one, his goal actually is to produce, you know, videos and lectures that are beautiful and educational and that don't, don't dumb the material down. And he's really remarkable at it, actually. I mean, just, but again, you know, that's good, that, that requires a bit of a paradigm shift. We could have a whole conversation about the split between entertainment and education in this country and why it is the way it is. But that's a, that's another conversation.

• 2:14:29Lex Fridman?

  To be continued.

• 2:14:30Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  But I would say, if I were to pick one book that I think is a really good example of good science writing, it would be The Beak of the Finch. Which won a, it won a Pulitzer Prize a number of years ago. And I'm not, I'm, I'm not remembering the author's name. I'm blanking.

• 2:14:52Lex Fridman?

  But the, I'm guessing, is it, is it focusing on birds and the evolution of birds?

• 2:14:58Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Actually, there's also the evolution of beauty.

• 2:15:01Lex Fridman?

  That's, yeah.

• 2:15:02Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, which is also a great book. But the, no, The Beak of the Finch is, it's a.

• 2:15:10Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  It has two storylines that are interwoven. One is about Darwin and Darwin's explorations in the Galapagos Island. And then, modern day researchers from Princeton, who have a research program in the Galapagos, looking at Darwin's finches. And it's just a really, first of all, there's top notch science in there. And really, like, you know, evolutionary biology that a lot of people don't know. And it's told really, really well.

• 2:15:47Lex Fridman?

  It sounds like there also, there's a narrative in there. There's, it's like storytelling, too.

• 2:15:52Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, I think all good popular science books are storytelling. You know, but storytelling grounded, constrained by, you know, the evidence. And then I just want to say that there are, for fiction, I'm a really big fan of love stories, just to return us to the, the topic that we began with. And so my, some of my favorite love stories are Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson. It's a, it's a love story about people who you wouldn't expect to fall in love and all the people around them who have to overcome their prejudices. And, and I love this book.

• 2:16:35Lex Fridman?

  What do you like, like, what makes a good love story?

• 2:16:39Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  There isn't one thing, you know, there are many different things that make a good love story. But I think in this case, you can feel, you, you can feel the journey. You can feel the journey that these characters are on. And all the people around them are on this journey, too. Basically, to come to grips with this really unexpected love, really profound love that develops between these two characters, who are very unlikely to have fallen in love, but they do. And It's just, it's very gentle. Another book like that is The Storied Life of A.J. Fierke,

• 2:17:24Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  which is also a love story. But in this case, it's a love story between a little girl and her adopted dad. And the dad is this like real curmudgeonly, you know, guy. But of course, there's a story there. And it's just a beautiful love story. And but it also, it's like everybody in this community falls in love with him because he falls in love with her. And he, you know, she just gets left at his store, his bookstore. He has this failing bookstore.

• 2:18:03Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  And he discovers that, you know, he feels like inexplicably this need to take care of this little baby. And this whole life emerges out of that one decision, which is really beautiful, actually. Very poignant.

• 2:18:22Lex Fridman?

  Do you think the greatest stories have a happy ending? Or a heartbreak at the end?

• 2:18:30Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  That's such a Russian question. It's like Russian tragedies, you know?

• 2:18:34Lex Fridman?

  So I would say the answer to that, for me, there has to be heartbreak.

• 2:18:38Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Yeah, I really don't like heartbreak. I don't like heartbreak. I want there to be a happy ending or at least a hopeful ending. But the, but you know, like Dr. Schivago, like, or the English patient? Oh, my goodness, like, why? Oh, it's just, yeah, no.

• 2:19:01Lex Fridman?

  Well, I don't think there's a better way to end it on a happy note like this. Lisa, like I said, I'm a huge fan of yours. Thank you for wasting yet more time with me talking again. People should definitely get your book. And maybe one day, I can't wait to talk to your husband as well.

• 2:19:19Lisa Feldman Barrett?

  Well, right back at you, Lexi.

• 2:19:24Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett, and thank you to our sponsors. Athletic Greens, the all-in-one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases. Eight Sleep, a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep. MasterClass, online courses that I enjoy from some of the most amazing humans in history. And BetterHelp, online therapy with a licensed professional. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman.

• 2:20:08Lex Fridman?

  And now, let me leave you with some words from Sun Tzu and the Art of War. "There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combination of these five give rise to more melodies that can ever be heard. There are not more than five primary colors, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever be seen. There are not more than five cardinal tastes, and yet, combinations of them yield more flavors than can ever be tasted." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.