How Does The Human Mind Work? - Paul Bloom

Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University and an author. The human mind is a mystery. If it wasn't for the fact that we experience it, the universe would give us absolutely no indication that consciousness existed. After an entire career studying psychology, Professor Bloom has some answers to the psychology questions we've all asked ourselves. Expect to learn whether you actually remember everything that you've ever experienced, whether we know why consciousness evolved at all, why we should remember Sigmund Freud, why babies are way smarter than you think, whether attachment theory is rubbish, if psychology can tell us how to live a good life and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Psych - https://amzn.to/42JQ4PZ Follow Paul on Twitter - https://twitter.com/paulbloomatyale Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #psychology #mindset #consciousness - 00:00 Intro 00:25 What Do We Know About Human Consciousness? 07:42 The Usefulness of the Human Memory System 15:47 Does Our Tribal Nature Make Us Racist? 21:22 How to Improve Attention 25:57 Should Freud Be Taken Seriously in 2023? 35:51 How to Find a Balance Between Thoughts & Body 39:00 Why Behaviourism Theory Has Become So Unpopular 47:26 How Much Do Babies & Dogs Actually Know? 51:56 Relationship Between Language & Thought 57:10 Biggest Differences Between Male & Female Psychology 1:02:34 Is Attachment Theory Nonsense? 1:12:55 The Need to Reform Education Around Heritability 1:19:37 Can Psychology Help Us Understand How to Live a Good Life? 1:25:35 What Will Psychology Unravel Next? 1:27:42 Where to Find Paul - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Paul Bloom?

  It's not what we think it is. And sometimes when people tell me, you know, oh, psychology is just common sense. Tell me something I didn't know. Well, I got a list and memory is one thing on the list where a lot of people think what happens in memory, it's like you hold up your iPhone and it's just recording the world and also it stays in this hard drive. And then later on through hypnosis or a kind therapist, it could all come out. It's just there. And this is total nonsense.

• 0:24Chris Williamson?

  What do we actually know about human consciousness? Do we know why it evolved or what its function is?

• 0:31Paul Bloom?

  No, we don't know. We don't know why we're conscious as opposed to zombies that are fully functional. We don't know how the brain gives rise to consciousness. We know it is the brain. I mean, the best science tells us that that conscience emerges from our very physical brain. But one of the great puzzles in psychology is how this three pound piece of meat, bloody meat, gives rise to, you know, love and hate and the feeling of a first kiss and slamming your hand in the car door and being on a podcast. There's a lot we do know about consciousness. We know, we know how it, we know how it works in attention and perception. We have theories of

• 1:14Paul Bloom?

  differences in conscious experience, but the big questions at this point elude us.

• 1:20Chris Williamson?

  I've heard that one potential explanation for the reason that consciousness comes about is that it's kind of a byproduct of us being able to have quite a complex theory of mind of other people, that when you have a large social group and I need to be able to predict what Paul thinks about me thinking about that person and what they think about him thinking about me, that you end up having a lot of layers of abstraction and that basically consciousness is potentially kind of like a side effect, like how a light bulb gives off light, but it also gives off heat, that all of the fancy mental imagery that we get is just kind of dressing on the side of that.

• 1:59Paul Bloom?

  I think it's possible. One issue is there's two senses of consciousness, at least, but two things people talk about. One is sort of what sometimes called access consciousness, which is the idea of information being available to us. You can mullet or you can analyze that. And I think that's really necessary for high level reasoning, for language use, for making sense of what other people are doing. So I'm not right now directly conscious of my blood pressure and heart rate. It's unconscious, it's fine. But I'm conscious that I'm talking to you and I know you, we met before. And the fact that I'm conscious of it means I could talk about it, I could reason about it. And we have good theories of that. The more mysterious thing is what's called phenomenological consciousness, the feel. And some philosophers think you could have one without the other.

• 2:43Paul Bloom?

  Like we could have, we could be fully reasoning and maybe AIs are like this, or will be like this, where they have, where we're able to reason and make arguments and have, and, and, understand other people, other, in people. But, um, but the feel of it, the feel of being a person right now, to feel as you're sitting there, of, of the seat against your behind, the feeling of headphones in your ears. Where does that come from? And that's kind of a mystery. And it may be epiphenomenal or something else. But then you have to explain, why is it epiphenomenal of that?

• 3:17Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean? What's the word epiphenomenal mean?

• 3:20Paul Bloom?

  It means that you, you have a certain, something with a certain function. And then something else comes as an accident from it.

• 3:28Chris Williamson?

  What would be another epiphenomenon that humans have?

• 3:32Paul Bloom?

  Say, one example is, there's all sorts of things about blood, which are really essential for what blood does. But the fact that it's the color red when brought into the light is, is epiphenomenal. It didn't have to be red, it could be green, could be brown, doesn't matter. It's just, it's just, there's, there's no point to it.

• 3:48Chris Williamson?

  I, I learned the other day that there is a particular genetic mutation in some Asian people, which causes them to have both, I think it's low blood pressure and extra dry earwax.

• 4:07Paul Bloom?

  Yes.

• 4:07Chris Williamson?

  Give me, give me the adaptive reason.

• 4:10Paul Bloom?

  So that's another, that's another example. For some people, when they stare into the sun, will sneeze. Now, you know.

• 4:16Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 4:17Paul Bloom?

  Oh, yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. There's a story behind it, but the story isn't our ancestors who did this reproduce more than those who didn't.

• 4:27Paul Bloom?

  I mean, I'm, I'm as much of a fan of evolutionary explanations as anybody and, and, and my book's full of them. And, you know, reasonable stories for perception and sexuality and, and reasoning. But, but when it comes to the feel of consciousness, some people say it's as much, it's as much of an accident as, as, as the sneezing. I don't know. One thing which is kind of cool, which is something I've been getting interested in recently is how our consciousness differs. And so there's people, as you know, synesthesia, whose senses flip over from one to another. So there's a, there's a story of this Russian guy who, who, when he looks at words, tastes them. And this is so much you can't read the newspaper while he's eating breakfast because it spoils his meal, you know?

• 5:13Paul Bloom?

  Then there's other people on the other extreme who have a thing called aphantasia, no visual imagery. There's weird kids, there's a guy on Twitter who said, I don't know if I have like thirty, forty, something like that, way into his adulthood says, I always thought when people said they have images in their heads, they were just, it was just a metaphor. But, you know, he had none. You close your eyes, nothing, can't see anything, can't, can't draw up anything.

• 5:37Paul Bloom?

  Some people have voices in their heads. I'm not talking about schizophrenics. I'm talking about sort of a narrator. Like in these, you know, these comedies or these, these, these movies where there's a narrator, a little narrator. Some people don't.

• 5:49Paul Bloom?

  Maybe we experience pain differently. Maybe we see colors differently. That's kind of cool.

• 5:54Chris Williamson?

  The fact that we're able to hear a voice in our heads when we think it. When you think about a interaction that you had with someone, an embarrassing one, or an enjoyable one, or a loving one, or whatever. And that you can hear a sound, but you can't hear the sound. There's no sound being played anywhere.

• 6:12Paul Bloom?

  No.

• 6:13Chris Williamson?

  That, and I think that this may be because my, I've heard that certain people are more image oriented.

• 6:20Paul Bloom?

  Yeah.

• 6:21Chris Williamson?

  Uh, other people seem to be more whatever auditory oriented. I wonder whether there's some people that are kind of more somatic. Like they feel, I wonder, I don't know. But for me, I'm definitely lean more heavily on hearing the words, hearing them spoken. Fuck me, they're loud. They're really loud sometimes. And I think, how can I hear anything? And they compete. You could be listening to something.

• 6:45Chris Williamson?

  Actual sounds of actual words can be coming into your ears and being played to your brain, and yet you can be hearing your inner voice talk louder than real words.

• 6:56Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, there's research with mental imagery that finds that when some people, people in laboratory terms, create an image, so I ask you to sort of close your eyes and think of the inside of your house or your apartment, you know, count the windows, walk around and count how many windows there are, you could do that, navigate around and everything, that while people do this, their visual cortex is activated. The same system that actually sees is activated, so just in some sense you're seeing it. Now, I don't know if these studies have been done with with sound, but it wouldn't surprise me if the auditory cortex was activated. You know, I can sometimes call to mind, not just voices, but but music, chords, for instance, that, you know, and I hear them as if I was hearing them.

• 7:41Chris Williamson?

  You talk in your new book about the system of human memory, and I think that you've just nudged there on one of the ways in which it could be a little bit more fallible. Just how useless of a system is the human memory construct?

• 7:58Paul Bloom?

  The human memory construct is extraordinarily useful. Just just try getting amnesia and seeing how well it works for you. You know, these disorders where you you lose your memories of the past or or these cases, like these famous case where people can't form new memories is in the excellent movie Memento, Christopher Nolan's film, this guy can't form new memories. But it's not what we think it is. And sometimes when people tell me, you know, oh, psychology, just common sense, tell me something I didn't know. Well, I got a list and and memory is one thing on the list where a lot of people think what happens in memory, it's like you you hold up your iPhone and it's just, it's just, you know, recording the world. And then

• 8:38Paul Bloom?

  it also stays in this hard drive. And then later on through hypnosis or a kind therapist, it could all come out. It's just there. And this is total nonsense. Most of what we experience is lost forever. You don't intend to, it just doesn't get in. And then when we recover our memory, when you say, what happened to you? We talked a while ago. How did that conversation go? Where were you? Where was I? What was said? In some part, you know, we go back and we, there's a storage system there, but in some part it's a reconstruction. You know, if you said to me, said to me, boy, that was quite a storm the day we talked. And then a week later, you asked me to remember, tell you about the day we talked. I might say, yeah, it was a storm, wasn't it?

• 9:20Paul Bloom?

  Because what you tell me creates a story and leading questions can create false memories. You know, there's a study after nine eleven, a couple of my colleagues came in to ask people, where were you when the planes hit? And these guys, a bit older colleagues, and people gave their stories. And then they went back and asked them like five years later, 10 years later. And the stories are entirely different. We just, our memories are deeply unreliable.

• 9:51Chris Williamson?

  I'd heard a bro-science rumor that nothing is forgotten. Everything is kept and it is a case of us unlocking that.

• 9:59Paul Bloom?

  Totally wrong.

• 10:00Chris Williamson?

  You're definitively saying that that's horseshit.

• 10:03Paul Bloom?

  Horseshit.

• 10:05Chris Williamson?

  How do you know it's horseshit?

• 10:09Paul Bloom?

  It's horseshit in a couple of ways. One way is that some things that you experience, that you're sort of right in front of your eyes, you don't attend to them. Most of the world don't attend to you. You tend to like a percentage of the world. If you don't tend to it, it's not that gone six months later. It's gone five seconds later.

• 10:25Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean when you say attend to it?

• 10:28Paul Bloom?

  So there's a wonderful experiment done, it's classic experiment. People probably have heard of it before. We, you're going to watch a film and you get them, there's going to be people wearing different colored t-shirts and tossing basketballs back and forth. And you ask them, at the end of the film, how many basketballs are tossed? How many times there is a toss? And they'll say, was it 18, was it 17? That's not what the study is about. The trick is that in the film, somebody with a gorilla suit walks into the middle, pounds his chest and walks out. And people don't notice even the front of their faces. And because their attention is drawn one way, the rest of the world is invisible to them. In fact, it came to a book called Invisible Gorilla, summarized by Dan Simons and Chris

• 11:13Paul Bloom?

  Chivry. And you're not going to remember the gorilla because you didn't attend to it.

• 11:19Paul Bloom?

  If you don't focus on something, it's gone. So that's one way is worship. The second way is there's just no evidence for this sort of perfect recording. People, the reason why this, I guess, bro science thing has come up is you're gonna feel that way. You feel, oh my God, a photograph memory. I remember exactly what it is. I can recreate it exactly. And people have memories that are confident and powerful and genuine and false.

• 11:48Paul Bloom?

  So, and, and I think we, we mistake the confidence for the reality.

• 11:55Paul Bloom?

  And this, by the way, this, by the way, so much of my book is sort of theoretical stuff, which I think is really cool, but, but not a much practical value. This has practical value because of eyewitness testimony. Somebody, somebody sits on a, on a, on a witness and says, that was the man who attacked me. And they point to somebody and juries here says, wow, wow. That's, that's sincere. I can't, that can't be wrong. The person's so confident. People are confident. Then you do a DNA test or you check back and a person didn't do it. And so now we have a better understanding of the weakness of eyewitness testimony. We're particularly bad when it comes to other races, recognizing and remembering their faces. And, and you know, so there's a practical value in knowing this.

• 12:39Chris Williamson?

  I remember learning before I even started this show about a study that was done on babies. When they were young, being shown different images of sheep. And what the babies would do, because they hadn't learned to condense together all sheep faces into just a sheep. That they were paying more attention because they could see that's one sheep. That's another sheep, but a different sheep. That's a third sheep, different to the first two. Whereas, and I think it was maybe around age either six months to a year or so, that they lose that ability, presumably the same way that I always heard that we could wiggle our ears, but because the muscles don't get used, they atrophy away.

• 13:21Chris Williamson?

  I, I heard, I might be just spouting total bro science at you today.

• 13:29Chris Williamson?

  I heard that that is a similar system that's online as to the reason as to why we struggle more so with different races to be able to pick their faces apart. Do you think that that sounds accurate?

• 13:45Paul Bloom?

  It might be. You can use, in some ways, babies are the perfect amateurs. They don't have experience in anything. Well, we are amateur in some way versus other ways. So the story for adults, I'll tell you the story for adults, you can tell me if it connects to the baby story. The story for adults is, the race effect has nothing to do with your own race. It's just who you have the most experience with. So if I see 10,000 white faces and I regularly have to distinguish them more or less, maybe for like 100 of them, I get very attuned to small differences. Just like if you're really into, I don't know, classic rock, you'll distinguish this Pink Floyd song from that Pink Floyd song,

• 14:28Paul Bloom?

  this Zeppelin song, that Zeppelin song. But if you don't have much experience or interest in something, it all blurs together. Oh, that's more classical. You know, or that's another Asian face, that's another black face. I can't pull them apart. And so it's a matter of discrimination of expertise. And their faces are just like songs, they're just like foods, they're just like wines. When you zoom in on something, you get better at it. But then when you're in a sort of separate domain you're not used to, you get worse at it. Does that sound like the baby thing?

• 14:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think it is. And what it highlights is that the race of the person that is the viewer has basically no impact on their ability to see the people. It's very much kind of like training data. It's training data, right?

• 15:14Paul Bloom?

  Exactly. And in fact, for babies themselves, one of the sort of creepy findings, I don't know, is that white babies tend to prefer to look at white people. Black babies tend to prefer to look at black people. But it's not, again, it's not their own race. It's just you get a familiarity preference. You like to look at what you've seen before. And we know that there's an Israeli study that looks at kids' race in sort of a cosmopolitan environment. A lot of black people, white people, they show no preference. And again, it doesn't matter what color the baby is, it's just their training data.

• 15:47Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to our biases that are trained heavily, seems slightly less inbuilt, humans are incredibly tribal. Do you think that we have a predisposition to a small amount of racism in all of us?

• 16:02Paul Bloom?

  I think tribal is a great word here. Racism carries some extra baggage. So I want to be conscious.

• 16:08Chris Williamson?

  I've never noticed that racism carries a little bit of extra baggage.

• 16:13Paul Bloom?

  You've heard it before. Have you heard that it's a fraught issue?

• 16:18Paul Bloom?

  You're not of this country, are you? It's, no, so, yeah.

• 16:24Chris Williamson?

  Tribal. Are humans predisposed to be tribal?

• 16:27Paul Bloom?

  I've written about this and people have summarized it as a gawk headline, babies are a little racist. It's not quite true. And in fact, it's not quite true in an interesting way. We're very tribal. But here's a cool finding from the baby work and toddler work. Babies show strong preferences very early on, age one, age two, age three, into who to interact with, who to take a toy from, who to accept food from. And they've done these experiments where babies, a white baby, is given something by a white person or black person and they have to choose. And the cool finding is up to a certain point, they don't care about color. They recognize color, they notice color, they have a preference sometimes to look. They just don't care about it. They care deeply about language.

• 17:12Paul Bloom?

  So, and it's not just, you see how baby raised in the States, they have a black person speaking English, offering them a toy, and a white person speaking French, offering them a toy. They'll choose it from the black person speaking English.

• 17:26Chris Williamson?

  Fuck the French. Fuck the French. That's what they're saying.

• 17:29Paul Bloom?

  It's not specific to the French.

• 17:30Chris Williamson?

  We're not racist against anybody, except for the French.

• 17:33Paul Bloom?

  You're taking this too literally. Yes, yes. They hate the French. There we go. That's what I want people to take from my book.

• 17:43Paul Bloom?

  You know, I will say something actually pro-French, which is they did a study a while ago where um where they exposed babies born in France to um to either French or Russian. And babies preferred to listen to French. So they concluded in this in this, this is this is a story I heard from the researchers. It may or may not be true, but they concluded, well, you like to listen to the language you were exposed to early on, that the rhythms resonate through the womb and everything like that. And then some reviewers said, what if French just sounds better, period, for everybody? So they had to go do this study in Russia. And then they found Russian kids preferred Russian to French. So it's not that there's a universal preference. But the very idea somebody would would say that is just a bit of pro-French to respond to your anti-French.

• 18:28Chris Williamson?

  Right, rightly so. That's fine. We've balanced it out. The French people are still listening. Um, I also was uh looking at a study from uh, who's the guy that wrote this psychopath book, British dude that lives in Australia? No, no, no, no, no, no. Uh, fuck, his name's just gave me, anyway, him. Um, and what he what he was saying was how uh people have massive prejudice, much, much greater than between skin color for different accents. And this would be adaptive because typically ancestrally, you would not have been exposed to people of different skin colors. I mean, what the fuck's hap- where where have you ended up that you've seen someone with

• 19:11Chris Williamson?

  a different skin color in, you know, two thousand B.C. But someone from the next valley who says a couple of vowels in a slightly different way, that's somebody that you should be very, very cautious of. And uh, yeah, you know, it it makes so much sense and I really, really love that insight. Um, which was one I'd never thought of before, which is if somebody of a different race with the same accent as you walks into the room, you feel like you have so much in common with that person. If somebody of the same race with a different accent walks into the room, it is obvi- it is straight, just so in your face and obvious and you go, oh, God, you're gonna, you're gonna be a little while before we got find common ground for us to talk about.

• 19:51Paul Bloom?

  And that's the argument. The argument is like the psychopath guy. Is he a psychopath? Or does he study psychopaths?

• 19:56Chris Williamson?

  Studies psychopath. He may also be a psychopath, but he seemed quite, quite nice. So.

• 20:00Paul Bloom?

  Okay. Um, the, the, the point is that, that from a sort of an adaptive point of view, from a historical point of view, evolutionary, you would expect language to be a wonderful cue to us versus them. And babies seem to think that way. Now, later on, you pick up whatever tribal, whatever, whatever counts as us versus them in your society. So if you're in Ireland at a certain point, that's one thing. If you're in Israel, it's another thing. If you're in the United States, it's another thing. So at some point, you start to realize that, wow, us versus them in my society may well be race, may well be skin color. And that might really matter a lot. Um, and in fact, for adults, at least, there are three things we focus on, um, when

• 20:45Paul Bloom?

  we look at a new person. The things that stick in memory, things that really count. Sex, gender, like male, female, age matters. You'll remember whether you're talking to a baby or an adult or an old person or whatever. And race. But race is in some way the odd man out. Race is, unlike the other two things, race might take on significance as you're being raised in a society where race matters. If you go to a society where race matters less, maybe not because they're angels, but because they focus on linguistic differences or something else, then, then you won't be as attuned to it.

• 21:19Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. I am just rounding out that conversation about memory. What does it suggest about our, um, what we should do, how our attention system works, what people should do if they feel bad about their memory and remembering things, that stuff that isn't attended to is so easily forgotten?

• 21:43Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, yeah, um, nothing. You're kind of stuck to that. The funnel of attention is very limited. So, I mean, it would be maybe a bit of concrete device, or a couple of the concrete device, pieces of concrete device. One is you could choose what to attend to. But if you want to remember what people wear when you talk to them, focus on what they wear. But you can't expect it to get into the system without making it through the sort of bottleneck of attention. You need to, you need to attend. And people who are skilled at that sort of thing, like, um, somebody radiologists who are looking for signs of cancer, or air traffic controllers, monitoring trajectory, a lot of the training is what do you attend to?

• 22:27Paul Bloom?

  You know, if you put somebody who never played football, um, and, and, and they're all of a sudden, they're playing a football, they don't know where to look. They don't know this counts and that counts, you know, they're looking at people's hairstyles, or looking at, you know, watching the, the ice cream truck roll by, you know, there's certain, part of becoming expert is knowing what to attend to. Now, putting that aside, there are memory techniques. Um, when I taught my intro psych course, I had Joshua For come in and give a guest lecture. He's a writer, he wrote a book called Moonwalking with Einstein, where he outlines the historical, the classical memory techniques, where you basically got to make vivid associations between things. And, you know, with a couple of hours of training,

• 23:11Paul Bloom?

  you could learn to do really powerful tricks of memory. But here's the thing, and he gave me permission to tell the story, which I tell in my book. He, he gives this bang of lecture in my class about memory techniques, students love it. Um, I get an email from him, um, like a couple of hours later saying, uh, dude, I left my phone in the class. Because he doesn't have good, normal memory. That sort of stuff you can't train.

• 23:37Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Yeah, I am. I have a bunch of friends who were medical students, Anki, Ebbinghaus, forgetting curve, spaced repetition, all of that. Peter C. Brown that wrote Make It Stick was like episode 20 on the show, I think. And yet, we do things like leave our keys.

• 23:58Paul Bloom?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Chris Williamson?

  And

• 23:59Paul Bloom?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Chris Williamson?

  meet someone. And as they are telling us their name, forget the name, forget the first half of the name as they speak the second half of the name, because our mind is just somewhere else.

• 24:10Paul Bloom?

  Yes. And they're right. And that's actually a really good example, which is, which is, you want to remember people's names, you got to make a freaking effort, you know, Chris. And then I sort of, I see your, and there's all these techniques which sound ridiculous. I see your face and I imagine the C around us. I don't know, but, but which I'm horrible at that. But names you could use techniques, faces are tougher. And that's actually enormous difference. Are you good with faces?

• 24:36Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, not bad. As a club promoter for a long time, that was something that was pretty good for me. But what's worse is being good with faces and bad with names. Because what the fuck does it mean to be good with faces? Like, I've met this person before, which is even more awkward for you to say, well, I suppose it mediates you going, hi, nice to meet you. And they say, oh, we've already met. But it's only half a step away from, hi, we've, I know we've already met, and I forgot your name.

• 25:03Paul Bloom?

  I am so, so bad at both faces and names. I have said, good to see you, in the hopes that it's ambiguous between meeting them for the first time and, and meeting them and having

• 25:14Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you're hedging your bets.

• 25:15Paul Bloom?

  I'm hedging my bets.

• 25:17Chris Williamson?

  Very interesting.

• 25:18Paul Bloom?

  Well, okay, so true story. Well, I was at, yeah, we had a party for incoming graduate students, tried to lure them into, into coming into the program. We had a party at our house. And I go up to somebody and I say, you know, hi, it's really, it's, it's really nice to meet you. Welcome to, and they stare at me and says, I've been in the graduate program for three years here. And since, since, and it's not

• 25:43Paul Bloom?

  I don't know. There's this enormous variation. We have to forgive forgive each other and mostly me for for things out of our control.

• 25:51Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 25:52Paul Bloom?

  Being bad at faces is the thing.

• 25:54Chris Williamson?

  I know very little about Freud. My completely self-taught psychology experience has almost exclusively missed out everything that he did. How much of him should anybody be taking seriously now in 2023?

• 26:12Paul Bloom?

  So first, I bet you know more about Freud than than than you think you do, because Freud has sort of trickled into modern culture. So if you've ever heard somebody say to somebody else, you know, you know, look, I'm not your mother, or he has an anal personality, or, you know, something like that. These are Freudian ideas. I don't think you need to know anything specific about Freud's theory, because for the most part, it's wrong. The the details, the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage, the Oedipal complex, the primal scene, the idea that for every kid, the most pivotal moment in our life is when they see their parents having sex, or fantasize about. It's a lot is just nonsense.

• 26:52Chris Williamson?

  You think a lot of this was just projection from him?

• 26:55Paul Bloom?

  No, I think that's there's. He was actually, I think, he was not a nice man. He was vicious to his enemies and sometimes to his friends, and he was ruthless in his pursuits. He was pretty, he seems psychologically normal in many ways. I do think he was a genius, really wonderful writer, brilliant scholar. What what it was was very much of a construction of his time, which was extraordinarily repressed about sex. And and people really did come in with bizarre hysterical symptoms, for instance, that may well have been rooted to sexual repression.

• 27:37Paul Bloom?

  Um, there were issues of he struggled his whole career making sense of stories of sexual abuse that women told him at one point believing they were real and then they and then later on saying that they were they were fantasies by these women and struggling with that. But wherever his views came from, they have not stood to test the time. With the exception of the most important thing at all of all, which is Freud championed more than anybody else, the idea that we have a dynamic unconscious, that what we think and what we do, who we who we fall in love with, who we vote for, who we hate when we make mistakes, when we miss an appointment we were set up to do. Um, he would view all of this as generated by factors

• 28:22Paul Bloom?

  that are not conscious to us, that we're not aware of. And this idea, he wasn't the first, but he was the one developed the most. This idea, I think, is right. Like, sometimes I do political psychology or moral psychology. People say, no, we're really interested in why people vote voted for Trump or why other people voted for Biden. Well, you're not going to find out by just asking them. Because it's not that they lie to you, though they'll do that, too. It's that they don't know. We don't know. You, you know, we tell narratives. I can say, so you have a very popular podcast. How did you get into what made you did it? And you'll have a story. That's what we do. We have stories. Is your story true? Probably

• 29:02Paul Bloom?

  not. Probably the answer to a lot of stuff is stuff you're not aware of. And Freud was the first to sort of make such a thing about it. And there he was right. There was like a thousand, a million psychology studies that support the idea were driven by the unconscious. That's all you need to know about Freud.

• 29:20Chris Williamson?

  That suggests something that I meant to say earlier on about the eyewitness. So the eyewitness erroneously points the finger at Paul and said, it's him. It's him that forgot my name and stole my lunch. And then the DNA evidence of her lunchbox shows that it wasn't you, it was me. And everybody then points at the eyewitness and says, willful deception. She was trying to pin it on Paul because she had a thing. And you go, no, no, no, no. It is possible for you to fully believe what it is that you're saying. Like, the way that the memory system works allows you that the best way to deceive someone you're trying to deceive is to believe it yourself.

• 29:57Paul Bloom?

  Yes, I mean, that gets us into a really other, another interesting topic, which very much dovetails on Freud, which is why are some things unconscious in the first place? And the standard story as well, consciousness is limited. You know, unless something needs to be conscious, better to keep it out of the system. So this is why we're not conscious of our blood pressure. We're not conscious of our body temperature, our heart rate. We can infer them from other things, but we don't have direct access to them. And maybe this is true for all sorts of things. You're not conscious of all these systems going ahead. But the great evolutionary theorist, Robert Trivers, who's still around, suggested that there's another reason why somebody might be unconscious.

• 30:39Paul Bloom?

  And this is your reason, which is deception, which is sometimes the best way to fool somebody else is to fool yourself. So imagine, so take confrontations. You know, I'm in a physical confrontation with somebody and everything. And I want to, I all of a sudden, you know, want to act like, you know, I will not back down. I will kill you coming closer. I'm fearless. And I believe it myself, even though I'm not.

• 31:08Paul Bloom?

  But to convince the other person, which is what I'm really after, what the system works is, it's really good to believe in yourself. And the other example is falling in love, where sometimes the system, what's the best way to convince somebody? You're head over heels in love with them. You'll never leave them. You're totally into them. Well, to believe it. And having ulterior motives, like a sort of one, well, if this doesn't work out, I have plan B. Having that not available to your consciousness is a wonderful way to see a lot of people.

• 31:37Chris Williamson?

  One of the interesting things about the love example is I actually don't know what the difference is between believing that you're in love with somebody and being in love with somebody. In the eyewitness example, we have a real world and then we have an experience and we can compare those two, right? The DNA on the lunchbox. In this scenario, I don't know what it would mean for your mind to, for my mind to kid me that I'm in love with you when I'm not.

• 32:05Paul Bloom?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  I don't know how that would differ.

• 32:11Paul Bloom?

  In a lot of ways, it would overlap. And it's hard to see the believing you're in love with somebody and being in love with somebody pulling apart too much. But you could imagine that you believe it, but at another level, you're constantly hedging. And that there's a caution to it. Imagine you're about to bond with somebody, you say, "I'll never leave you," and you believe it totally. And then all of a sudden, you know, a part of your head clicks, "Let's get a prenup." Where did that come from? And the fact that that comes to mind maybe suggests that you really don't, that there's part of your head that's kind of looking towards other things. I mean, one of the findings, which I kind of like, it's just kind of sweet, is you ask

• 32:53Paul Bloom?

  people who are about to be married, "What are the odds of you getting divorced?" And they'll often say, "Zero, 1%, 2%, tiny." What are the odds of somebody else getting divorced? "Yeah, 50%, 60%, I know what the numbers are, but not me." And you see, that's kind of nice. It's kind of supporting what you're saying. That sort of over-optimism is part and parcel of what it is to be in love. You know, if you really thought it was 50%, that's not a good sign, even though that's what that sort of cold-blooded math says. But I wonder if at some level, you believe it, but you don't believe it. At some level, we hedge these things.

• 33:35Chris Williamson?

  What do you think intuition is?

• 33:37Paul Bloom?

  So, there's many answers to that. Here's an answer which I like. It's from Danny Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize, and talks about two systems of the mind. One, called System 2, is the rational deliberative system. I think this is extremely important. I think it's what separates us from other creatures, where we plan, we do cost-benefit analyses. The other one is System 1, our gut. Our gut works metaphorically, our gut, fast, intuitive, quick. Our System 2 could be egalitarian. Our System 1's almost always racist. Our System 2 can do the math. Our System 1 goes with whatever options there. I think System 1's the gut.

• 34:23Paul Bloom?

  And we have system one for a reason. It's really, sometimes we need to move quickly. Sometimes the statistics are the way to go. You don't want to work its way through. But despite what some people say, it's not always right. And sometimes you want to distrust your gut. I was once asked for a while if I would, um, would put up a billboard that could say anything. What would I say? And I, I, after a while I said, don't listen to your heart. And I think our, our heart, our gut feelings often are, have are right within a narrow range. But let us down for a lot of things.

• 35:00Chris Williamson?

  What's a better approach then?

• 35:02Paul Bloom?

  Deliberation, rational deliberation. With the help of others, because, because we're really kind of sometimes awful deliberators. When I make a decision and I start thinking about it, I'm often the, well, let's explore all the ways in which I'm right. But if you have good friends, you talk about it and you say, well, I'm thinking of, you know, of leaving this person. I'm thinking of, of getting a new job and moving here. And I'm really enthusiastic with it. And then your friends will say, well, let's, let's, let's work this out. And, and I think that that's sort of, if you, if you have the time, if you, if you have more than like 10 seconds to act, you have some time. Deliberate and it's like, it's like science. It's like, it's like politics at its best.

• 35:44Paul Bloom?

  It's like culture where smart people, different views getting together can bring you way more than you can as an individual.

• 35:51Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether I'm seeing a trend at the moment of people being too deliberate with their decision making. Uh, I think. Maybe, maybe I'm wrong, but I, I certainly a lot of my friends out here in Austin, I think, uh, could actually do with a little bit more intuition. Could actually do with letting go of some of the deliberate cerebral cognitive horsepower that they're applying to some of the decisions that they go through. And that they're, uh, moving more slowly, that they're vacillating, they're talking themselves into and out of decisions that are bad and good for them. Um, and I wonder whether, I don't know. I mean, this is me totally bro scienceing it here, but, um. A lack of embodied practice, a lack of movement, time outside,

• 36:36Chris Williamson?

  where you're not just doing the thinking thing. More people have got knowledge worker jobs than ever before. And also, for the first time in history, your opinions are more important than your deeds. Now, you know, it's not really about what you do. It's about the takes that you have. And I wonder whether that is causing people to self-identify with their thoughts more than with their feelings and body.

• 37:01Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, so I'm a pro rational guy. And I've sort of like, so I'm inclined to like disagree with you on that. But I'll give you two reasons why I think you're right. Are two cases where you're right. One is for certain things, you don't want to deliberate. You want to go for your gut and everything. An obvious example is if you're a really good tennis player, just return the backhand. Don't sit down and think about it and make a diagram. It'll mess you up. And in fact, for really good athletes, thinking about it kills them. Thinking about it has led to people's careers being destroyed, where all of a sudden they said, you know, what is it like to catch a fly ball? You know, what do you know? How does it feel to throw a punch? Is this the right way? Is it this way? Is it this?

• 37:45Paul Bloom?

  And you're gone because you have to let the body do it. Let the gut system do it. And some things are probably like that. For people, if you're good, if you're socially adept, and someone says something at a party, you know, maybe some rep RT or maybe an argument, go, your gut is better, is statistically better than the rational system. That's one case. Another case is, I think our intelligence, when employed properly, could bring us to places that our gut never can. And I think it really is how to handle good choices. I don't think you should decide to get married in a split second. I don't think you should quit your job because you're just really in the mood to do that. But sometimes, and you actually said this,

• 38:26Paul Bloom?

  a rational system, all it is, is it defends your initial gut feeling. Jonathan Haidt has this line where, I disagree with him in general on this, but I think he's quite wise to point out a possibility, which sometimes our deliberating minds are like lawyers, not like judges. So it's not like, it's a judge balance, a good judge balances things and makes a decision. A lawyer takes something and makes a case for it. And if that's what your rationality is being used for, do less of it.

• 38:56Chris Williamson?

  At the other end of the spectrum to Freud would be Skinner and his behaviorism. He also seems to have become a little bit or quite a lot less popular recently. What's why is behaviorism being sort of thrown away? I thought that was pretty locked up.

• 39:12Paul Bloom?

  It's deservedly so. So I have a lot of love for Freud. I have no love for Skinner. I met him once, though, when he was old, he gave a talk. You know, he had an enormous influence on psychology. And his insight was these, it was developing. He wasn't the first to develop, but it but building on this theory of basic learning mechanisms. Classic conditioning, sort of Pavlov thing. You know, you hear a dentist dwelling and you flinch. You know, you see a commercial for some delicious food your mouth waters. But also awkward conditioning, rewards and punishment. It's how we train animals. It's very useful. But Skinner was very Skinner was in some way, I'll put this in the most offensive way possible,

• 39:54Paul Bloom?

  led a strange cult where you could only look at what people did and their their inputs. And you can't talk about their internal states. Some behaviorists would say that's just not scientific to talk about memories or beliefs or desires, dreams, ambitions. Others would say these things don't exist at all. We're just behaviors, everything else.

• 40:18Chris Williamson?

  Input.

• 40:19Paul Bloom?

  And input and output.

• 40:20Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 40:21Paul Bloom?

  There's a joke about two behaviorists at a conference and they have sex. And one of them says to the other one, was it good for me? And the idea is to explain the joke. There's no such thing as monitoring your own states. All you got is your is your behavior. And that's so weird. Of course, whatever my complaints are with the AI movement, they get something really important, right? Which is that that you can't explain and program complex behavior without putting a lot of machinery inside. Statistical analyses, I think, also rules, memory bases and so on. And, you know, Skinner thought this was all unscientific. I think the fact the existence of computers has shown that building machines with stuff

• 41:04Paul Bloom?

  inside and trying to explain the stuff inside is how you do good science of intelligent behavior. And it's how psychologists did their stuff.

• 41:14Chris Williamson?

  Are we losing something by casting off the insights of behaviorism in the modern world?

• 41:22Paul Bloom?

  It's a good question. I think sometimes Skinner gets it right.

• 41:29Paul Bloom?

  The time I think about Skinner the most, so Skinner was a, one of his nice ideas was that of intermittent reinforcement. And the idea is, if I want to make you learn to do something quickly, I'll reinforce you every time. The you could be a you, it could also be a rat or a pigeon. I'll reinforce you every time. But suppose I want you to do something forever. I want you to stick with it. Then I randomly reinforce you, rarely. And then, and then you start getting into behavior. And because you don't expect a reward every time, it's always coming up next, you can't stomp yourself. I've never been tempted by slot machines, which was Skinner's favorite example. But like a lot of people, social media gets me.

• 42:09Paul Bloom?

  And, and you know, so three in the morning, I wake up, I decide, isn't it a great idea to check my phone? And check Twitter. This is a perfect, brilliant idea. So, so, and then I spend an hour flicking my finger up. Oh, that's nice. Huh. And then this intermittent reinforcement. And I'm like, I'm like a rat in Skinner's cage. And so much of that sort of addictive techniques that people on Facebook and Twitter use are straight up Skinner. So, you know,

• 42:42Paul Bloom?

  I'm not a fan, but we ignore them at our own peril.

• 42:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, interesting. You know Diana Fleishman, evolutionary psychology lady?

• 42:48Paul Bloom?

  I don't know her personally, but I like her work.

• 42:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, she's got a book coming out called How to Train Your Boyfriend. And she's, I think she's terming it evolutionary behaviorism, that she's trying to use EP to inform that back and forth that you, that you do have. And I, you know, Peterson's touched on this a little bit where he says, you know, if your partner does something that you want them to keep on doing, make sure that you remember to praise them about it. That's not exactly rats in a cage. That just feels a little bit more like not being a shit human, but.

• 43:17Paul Bloom?

  Yeah. And people, so, so there is an insight there, but people are complicated in a way. So, suppose you want your kid to read. Let's take it away from that more interest domain of sex, and let's get boring here. You want your kid to read. So what's going, we'll give him, every time he reads a book, give him 20 bucks. Certainly, he's given us a lot of money because, oh my God, this is great. And he'll read books. But the argument against this is his ultimate view will be, books don't have any intrinsic value.

• 43:49Paul Bloom?

  Like a rat's never gonna think this, a rat's gonna gonna gonna bang away at at whatever you you put around, go down, shoot down a maze for the reward. It will never think going down this maze is kind of futile. It's just for it's just for the reward as no one can print it back. But people will do that. People will do that. And, you know, imagine, imagine for for either of us getting some sort of monetary award for doing something. You might do it if the money's big enough, but you but the minute the money goes away, you'll stop. Sometimes for people, it's almost the opposite, where the way to get people to value something,

• 44:29Paul Bloom?

  very anti Freud, sorry, anti Skinner, is to is to get them to pay for it. So so therapists say, with some justification, if the clients don't pay, they don't take this seriously.

• 44:42Chris Williamson?

  Commitment device.

• 44:44Paul Bloom?

  Exactly, exactly. Politicians like volunteers. Now, they like volunteers that are cheaper, but they also like volunteers because after you volunteer for a politician, you you think, oh, my God, I really believe in this. While if they're doing it for $50,000 a month, they think it's different for the money. Who cares with the politician? So this is a way in which opera and conditional logic of it. I'm not sure you want to reinforce your boyfriend for something. If you want him to do that thing, when the reinforcement goes away.

• 45:16Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. That'll be very, very fascinating. I I I totally understand what you mean. There's always these stories about parents trying to use reverse psychology on kids to get them to want to eat vegetables. Like, oh, unless you're good, you won't get any vegetables. And then have you see, have you ever looked at any of this stuff? Is that legit? Does it work?

• 45:37Paul Bloom?

  Um, nothing works. But but this is one of the lessons of life that nothing works. But the logic, the logic is is is right. Look, my next project after this this book is I'm very interested in perverse desires. I'm very interested in why people do something because it's bad. I have a TED Talk coming out on this next week. And it's like, it's it's and there, the the draw is the badness.

• 46:07Chris Williamson?

  What's an example of a bad?

• 46:10Paul Bloom?

  The classic example, which is Saint Augustine in the Confessions. One day, he and his friends go into an orchard and they just start sealing the pears. They're not hungry. They throw them away. They throw them to pigs, actually. And, um, and I, um, and when Augustine's like shocked at this, this isn't a story, this is, I'm gonna tell you stories of sexual debauchery, but then he says, I understand my sexual debauchery is reinforcing, as Skinner would say. Why did I do this? He said, because it was wrong, because I shouldn't have done it. So then I started this thing called a Perversity Project, where I started this webpage and I got people to tell me semi-stories of things that they did that were perverse in that way.

• 46:50Paul Bloom?

  And my favorite story is this guy, this guy, this young guy says, I never was with my friend and we each order an ice cream, we're walking down the street and suddenly I get this urge and I jam my finger into his ice cream. And, and my friend says, dude, why'd you do that? And, and the guy's right, he said, I didn't know, but I said, I just thought for a second, it'd really be fucked up if I stuck my finger in his ice cream. And this is very non-Skinnerian thing, but, but the desire to do something just because it's really fucked up, not despite it, but just because. It's a powerful word.

• 47:26Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to development, we talked about babies and stuff earlier on. Have we got any idea how much babies actually know?

• 47:33Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, that's one of the, that's one of the great discoveries of psychology. I've been lucky enough to be acquainted with work with some people who real made these, these great discoveries, like Elizabeth Spelke at Harvard, for instance. Babies know surprisingly a lot about the world. By the time they hit about their first birthday, you could test in subtle ways and you find they understand the physical world, they know, they could reason about gravity. They understand when an object goes out of sight, it still remains. They can reason about how things move by contact. They also understand the social world. They know that if one person helps another person, the person who's helped will later go back to that person uh, who helped them.

• 48:17Paul Bloom?

  They know that if one person messes with another person, the person who got messed with will avoid that first person or sometimes attack them. And you do these incredible research programs showing that very early on, we seem to be hardwired with some rich understanding of the world. So people like Plato and Kant and Chomsky, I think, have been vindicated by the science of developmental psychology. And the idea that the mind is a blank slate has been proven to be wrong.

• 48:44Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean pre-programmed?

• 48:49Paul Bloom?

  It means that, just like every other animal starts with certain instincts about the world, some basic understanding of the world, to varying degrees, maybe they already know how to communicate, maybe they already know how to move around. We're no exception. So we come in the world, in some ways tremendously behaviorally helpless. Babies are extraordinarily vulnerable for a long period of time. Then there's again, an argument that this is because you need a long period of time for development because we're such social, cultural creatures. There's an enormous period of helplessness, and then an enormous period of waiting before sexual maturity, just to get the system all up to speed, just to do the, the, the, the

• 49:32Paul Bloom?

  learning that has to be done. But in addition to the capacity to learn, I think evolution has wired up us up with a pre-programmed understanding of the world. Some things don't have to be learned.

• 49:44Chris Williamson?

  Wow. I, so, I was thinking about this before, I was walking around the park that's next to where I live, and I saw a dog, and it does its business, and then it does that back leg flicking thing, which, I mean, it does, it, it wasn't even facing in the right direction, it was pointless. But I always wonder, who taught the dog to do that? Did the dog learn, did it watch other dogs? Is it a reflex, like putting your hand on a hot stove?

• 50:12Paul Bloom?

  For a lot of the behaviors of animals, including really complicated behaviors, more complicated than that, I think they're just born with it. Now, animals differ. Some animals pop out and are basically adults. They're basically, they know everything. Other animals, there's a long period of learning. And for other animals, it's kind of a compromise. So, bird song, for instance, is partially innate, but then depending on the community of birds you raised, and it will all do a bit of learning, like, like learning English versus French versus Korean, whatever. Um, I think for humans, there probably are not that many, um, inborn behaviors. A few, you take a baby, you take his hand, you put your hand, the baby will grip, stuff like that. Would you, we were once, we were once, you know, hairy

• 50:57Paul Bloom?

  animals that, and there's a bit of a, of a connection with that. So, we have a few behaviors like that. But I think most of the stuff is just pre-wired, understanding of world.

• 51:09Chris Williamson?

  You know, my favorite thing, uh, uh, effect that we have that's vestigially carried over from our time as primates, I learned this from Robin Dunbar, and, uh, it's the stroke response that you get, and there is a maximum and a minimum speed that your finger needs to move across someone. It's around about three centimeters per second is the optimal speed, and any quicker than about three centimeters per second, you don't get the same area of the brain lighting up, because quicker than three centimeters per second wouldn't be fast enough for you to be able to pick little bits of whatever it is out of foot. And they look, and they've done the same thing whilst doing the primatology work, and it's exactly the same. I really, really, really love that.

• 51:50Paul Bloom?

  I hadn't heard that.

• 51:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's in his new one, Friends. I did this book, Friends, really great. So, you mentioned there about language, something that you touch on in your new one. What's the relationship between language and thought? I had this, um, lesson that I learned a little while ago, I think it's Ludwig Wittgenstein, and he says, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." And I'd taken that to mean that a richer vocabulary means a richer life, that basically the more precisely that I can describe the things that have occurred, using the best kind of language, the richer I get to experience it. How much bro-science horseshit have I used there?

• 52:28Paul Bloom?

  No, um. There's some claims of relationship between language and thought, which I think are deep and important and true. Like, you know, we could use language to convey our thoughts, which is what we're doing now. We use, we could, to some extent, um, the language we have reflects our thoughts. Um, you know, one simple example is by John McWhorter, where he points out that, um, that so many of our obscenities have to do with God and damnation and sex. And universally, because these are universally taboo and serious things. A deeper connection is that language, like language like English uses the same expressions

• 53:09Paul Bloom?

  for, for space and time. You know, I put the coin in my pocket, I'll do it in an hour. You know, get a spatial thing, language is all over. Uh, work on that model suggesting that there's a deep relationship between space and time and how we think. And this gets conveyed by language. What isn't true, or what doesn't seem to be true, is the claim that the specific language you learn affects how you think. There's a very popular idea, um, that, you know, people who learn a language like Navajo, which might have a different time system, will think differently from about time. People learn English versus French versus Korean versus Urdu versus whatever, um, will think differently about the world

• 53:51Paul Bloom?

  because of the structure of their language. And it turns out that whenever people look at it, it doesn't seem to be true. It, it seems to be that language, that language, the languages all around the world, um, have the same sort of communicative power and don't seem, seem to reflect what we think, but don't seem so much to shape what we think.

• 54:11Chris Williamson?

  Given that a lot of the time, people think in words and the words that they think in are in the language that they're in, what does the fact that the language that you speak doesn't seem to impact the things that you think mean? How do we square this circle?

• 54:27Paul Bloom?

  I think what's really interesting is, and this brings us back to what we were talking about before. We have a feeling, we think in words, but we really can't in a way. So suppose you think, you know, I'm gonna go play baseball because I gotta go and buy a bat. Well, the English word bat is ambiguous between the baseball bat and the flying animal. But your thought isn't ambiguous. You know, linguists like the ambiguous sentence, visiting relatives can be boring, which is ambiguous. It could mean when they visit you, it's boring, or when you visit them, it's boring. But it's not, there's no ambiguity when you think. So the idea we think in English is, I think, to some extent, the fact that you do your thinking

• 55:10Paul Bloom?

  and you kind of have a shadow impression of English words that go with it. But, but you don't really think in English in the same sense.

• 55:24Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 55:24Paul Bloom?

  You look unconvinced.

• 55:26Chris Williamson?

  I just, I'm trying to, I'm trying to work out. I don't speak another language. I don't know whether you do, but I only speak English.

• 55:37Chris Williamson?

  And I've heard about people who speak other languages sometimes dream in different languages. And that there's, I forget, I saved a Psychology Today article the other week about this. Something to do with the people who dream in different languages. It has some, some kind of downstream psychological effect on them. And I just can't work out how, I'm so language heavy when it comes to my thought. I can't get myself outside of what to me feel like the thermodynamics of thinking, you know?

• 56:15Paul Bloom?

  Yeah. So there's this, there is a tight band between language and thought. But here's how it would go. If you were also fluent in Japanese, maybe you'd get to think in Japanese. But your thoughts wouldn't change. I mean, I don't want to overstate it. Sometimes languages have a flavor to them in a sense that if you were raised in Italy, learned English as a second language. Sometimes thinking and talking in Italian will bring back certain memories and feelings of the past. While English will get you in sort of another mode. You know, we do, we do pick up associations. But the mental life of somebody who thinks in Japanese is not different to the mental life of somebody who speaks in English.

• 56:57Chris Williamson?

  Good.

• 56:58Paul Bloom?

  If it was, the world would be a lot different than what it is.

• 57:03Chris Williamson?

  Each language would essentially be a different sort of species in a psychological sense. Right. Yes, that makes sense. Yes, I understand. You've got it. Nailed it. Right. What are the biggest differences between male and female psychology?

• 57:16Paul Bloom?

  It has a lightning round feel to it.

• 57:20Paul Bloom?

  The biggest difference between men and women is that, on average, men are sexually and romantically attracted to women, and on average, women are sexually attracted and romantically attracted to men. That's the biggest difference. You know, obviously, it's not 100%. A lot of men are attracted to men. A lot of men are attracted to both. A lot of men are attracted to neither, but the majority of men are attracted to women. That's the biggest difference. When you get out of that, the big differences have to do very roughly that men, and this is of all the sort of research I talk about in my book, surprising me, oh, my God, evolutionary stuff, you know, that's very weak. This is the sort of research that gets done in 100 countries.

• 58:03Paul Bloom?

  This is the sort of research we were talking before about the psychologist David Buss. And there's these enormous meta-studies across different, and you find big cultural differences, but you always find the same sex differences. And the sex differences typically are roughly, men are more aggressive and risk-taking, and women are kinder and more nurturing. So, and you don't have to go to a psychology lab to see this. You go anywhere in the world and you say, who does more of your killing? It's men. Women may be aggressive in other ways. They may be, I don't want to try by who's verbally aggressive

• 58:43Paul Bloom?

  or socially aggressive or whatever, but pure violence is mostly a male, a male activity. The care and nurturance of children is mostly a female activity. And this is true for humans, and this is true for primates who are sort of similar to humans. Now, you always got to have the caveat, you're ending up talking about Val Kers. So everywhere in the world is also true, men are taller than women. This does not preclude the fact that there are some women taller than average men and some men shorter than the average woman. You kind of have, whenever talking about human differences, maybe it's worth putting in this caveat. There was a study I recently read. What I loved about it says all the continents and just tons and tons of people, like some enormous amount of people.

• 59:27Paul Bloom?

  And it just asks people a simple question. Um, how many sex partners you want to have before you die? And in every, in every country you look at, men want more than women. But the cool thing was, in addition to that, is you got cultural differences. So in some countries, like in some parts of the world, Eastern Europe, everything's higher. So men want a lot and women want a lot. In other cases, let's say Africa, everything's lower. And the way it works is that women in Eastern Europe want more sex partners than men in Africa. So what you have is you have a sort of, what's it called, one effect, a main effect of gender. Wherever you go, men want more than women. But you also have an effect of culture.

• 1:00:13Paul Bloom?

  In this place, it's more than this place. And then you have cases where there's this crossover, where the effect of culture is so big, you have the cases where, where, where it kind of flips if you, if you compare it. But to answer your question, um, issues like aggression, risk-taking, um, and then other aspects of sexual preference. Typically, men want, want younger partners, women care less about age, stuff like that.

• 1:00:38Chris Williamson?

  Yes, the best example I saw about the, um, disposition, let's say, that, uh, males would do war and women would do cat, uh, was from Joyce Bennison. And she spent a ton of time with kindergarten kids. And she says, if you look at the games that three and four-year-olds play, the boys will find an enemy, even if it's an imaginary one. It's aliens, it's cowboys, it's robbers, it's whatever. And the girls will be keeping something alive. That's the way that, that's what they tend to lean toward. And, you know, for all denial of sex differences thing wants to happen, this is replicated in chimps.

• 1:01:18Chris Williamson?

  You know, you give a fluffy little sort of baby chimp toy to a even slightly smaller baby chimp, and the same thing happens there too.

• 1:01:30Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, and and I I think this stuff that the basic difference is grounded in in in our evolutionary history. People have looked at cultures where more egalitarian cultures, you look like Norway or Sweden, those those countries versus less egalitarian cultures like country in the in the Middle East, for instance, the effect is is in in in shows up everywhere. In fact, some of these sex differences are bigger in more egalitarian cultures, which might seem that seems so weird. You'd think that they would just disappear and then the reason why they're bigger is that if you're in an egalitarian society, you're free to to sort of express whatever you want to do. And again, the sort of overlapping bell curves is worth is worth

• 1:02:13Paul Bloom?

  keeping in mind, as well as the fact that just because something is sort of a natural tendency, doesn't mean it's it's morally good. You know, if some if some women want to be aggressive, if some men want to be nurturant, I think people should be free to do whatever whatever they want. But but this is the way the trend goes.

• 1:02:33Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that attachment theory is bullshit? Because I have been seeing this more and more. I have a bunch of friends that work as coaches and therapists that rely very heavily on attachment theory and whatnot. And I don't know how far it's getting out over its skis. Have you looked at attachment theory?

• 1:02:54Paul Bloom?

  It's so funny you should say this. I I got into a discussion a few days ago with somebody, a developmental scholar, and I said, attachment theory is bullshit. And we argued back and forth and and bullshit's too strong in that there are there are different attachment styles, parents and children have. There's different attachment styles we could have as adults. I think the strong claims about them are bullshit. I think in this domain, as in so many others, people tend to forget base the basics or principles of of how traits get passed on from parents to children. So so the fact that a child in a certain attachment

• 1:03:36Paul Bloom?

  style as a kid might duplicate that attachment style as an adult need not be because of experience. It could be just from the get go. It was maybe an aggressive parent or timid parent and it just got passed on to the kid.

• 1:03:50Chris Williamson?

  When you're saying that, you're not talking about a behaviorally aggressive or timid parent. You're talking about a genetically predisposed

• 1:03:56Paul Bloom?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Chris Williamson?

  aggressive or timid parent. You're talking about heritability and behavioral genetics.

• 1:04:00Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. But and even if you so I don't have any deep problem with talking about attachment styles. To say that that's one style and that's another style. I think some of the claims about them really do go go over the skis.

• 1:04:15Chris Williamson?

  What?

• 1:04:15Paul Bloom?

  And um, I think in general, one of the lessons of a lot of research, one of the more, again, I keep talking about sort of findings from psychology, I think are a little bit shocking. You would expect that the parent's relationship to the kid would have an enormous effect on how what we grow up to be. It's just it's just common sense. A loving parent makes a kid later on loving, says that a brutal parent, you know, traumatizes the kid. It is not true as much as we think it is. A lot of the traits are just passed on via the genes and environment doesn't matter very much. And to the extent environment matters, there's sometimes you know, fifty percent, sixty percent, forty percent, whatever. It doesn't seem to have so much to do with parenting, but more experiences outside the home.

• 1:05:00Paul Bloom?

  So and what this means is that you take uh, parents and they have biological kids and then they adopt kids into their family. And parenting played a huge role. You'd expect adopted kids to be very much like the biological because they're raised the same way. It doesn't seem to happen as much as it is. And the extent that attachment styles get folded into those sort of parenting arguments. Parenting matters immensely for shaping your personality and intelligence. I think there are problems with it.

• 1:05:29Chris Williamson?

  So would it be your view that attachment style is uh, less malleable? You know, for instance, personality, your ocean big five personality doesn't seem to change a massive amount throughout your life. You you you can, there are few interventions to massively change that set point, at least compared with with other other things. Um, would you see attachment style kind of folded in with with that kind of predisposition?

• 1:05:56Paul Bloom?

  I'd be tempted to think that, but I don't know. I I I would want to be careful and want to look at this at the studies. Um, you're you're right that for the most part, again, putting aside attachment, our personality is relatively constant over our lifetime. A kid who at age eight is um, is introverted. And agreeable and studious, you know, according to an adult, most likely who's introverted, agreeable and studious, we can to some extent hack our personalities. Um, people, sometimes people do with medication, if you're over anxious. Um, there are sometimes people, people claim that disciplines, everything from, you know, mindfulness meditation to stoicism to Catholicism can transform your personality in certain interesting ways.

• 1:06:41Paul Bloom?

  But for the most part, it doesn't change that much. You know, I, I sometimes think that, this is me not being a psychologist, this is just, just me thinking that the trick to life isn't so much changing yourself, but is finding, um, friends, lovers, family, unemployment fund that mesh with how you are. I'm, I'm not an extroverted guy and I could have tried to be extroverted, more extroverted, but and be, and then took it to be a salesman. But maybe I'd ideas, I'm not a salesman, I'm a, I'm a professor and I could be a bit less introverted and less extroverted and more focused on other things.

• 1:07:23Chris Williamson?

  I really like that. I really like that takeaway, especially as someone who recently moved from a country where I was, felt a little discordant, a little bit like an, an off note, and then to one now where it feels a bit more aligned and I have people around that I can understand a little bit more. And I went from a career and a job that I was incredibly successful in and took a ton of pride in what we did, running these massive events and one of the biggest events companies in the UK and all the rest of it. But again, with that, there was just something a little bit, it was, you know, half an octave off and I thought, what's going on here? Uh, and you know, I'm now doing something which again aligns with my disposition, with the way that I like to live my life, with the things that I like to think about in private, in public.

• 1:08:08Paul Bloom?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:09Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, I, I, I totally agree. If you take.

• 1:08:16Chris Williamson?

  If you take it as relative truth that the person that you are is going to remain pretty constant in terms of your disposition throughout your life, that's not to say that you can't change the kind of capacities that you have and learn things, but your propensity toward wanting to learn or wanting to be open or wanting to change or wanting to be neurotic or wanting to be extroverted are going to stay the same. You go, okay, look, these are kind of the physics of my universe. They're not absolute laws, but they, if I try and fight against them, they're going to drag me back toward whatever they are. How can I get myself, how can I marry what I am with what I want to become with what the world can deliver to me? I think that's a really nice way to fold all of that together.

• 1:09:00Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, I mean, I like your example, which is if you're in the UK and you're kind of a natural American, well, you could try to stomp that aspect of yourself out of you, or you could do what you did and move to Texas, you know, and I think there's an advantage. It might be easier to move to Texas. One thing to keep in mind as implicit in all of this is, I think there are general ways to be that are bad, that are just maladaptive, you know, that slide into mental illness, you know, nobody, nobody wants to be schizophrenic, nobody wants to be severely depressed, nobody wants to be incredibly anxious. And for that, you'd want to fix it. You're not going to find a world that's good, that, that, that,

• 1:09:41Paul Bloom?

  where you prosper in it. But within a surprising large range, there's just a lot of ways to be. I was talking about this in my intro psych class and the student raised her hand and asked me, it was a very good question, saying, well, what's the best personality for, for all these things? What's, what's the best? And it's a good question because a lot of people think there's an answer to this. Extroverted, agreeable, low neuroticism. They're wrong, actually. That, that in some worlds, being an extrovert is a real power. In other lives, being an extrovert is a recipe for misery and failure, and introverts thrive. In some worlds, it's really good to be agreeable. Everybody likes an agreeable person, but

• 1:10:23Paul Bloom?

  disagreeable person, people, you know, transform everything and so on and so forth. Where, where so it's not as if you, you, you get yourself on a personality scale, you find, oh, I want to move here, here, here, because that's the right way to be. Rather, there's a world and jobs and people for just about every space in, in the personality matrix.

• 1:10:46Chris Williamson?

  Does that explain why people differ so much in their intelligence and their personality? That there are, or there would have been a lot of different environments and ways to succeed? And if we had pigeonholed every human to be this much agreeable and this much neurotic and this much whatever, you wouldn't have had as effective of a tribe?

• 1:11:09Paul Bloom?

  That's really interesting. I don't know. I've heard that sort of, there's two ways of looking at it. One is any system's gonna have noise. Why isn't everybody exactly the same height? Because there's just random stuff with diet and genes and it pushes us around and everything. But it might well be that in some ways, some degree of human variety turns out to be adaptive. And in some way, you don't have to talk sort of for the good of the tribe or good of the group. It's only a sort of frequency dependent, where if, if everybody, if enough people in my society are As, it might pay to be a B. And then once you get enough Bs and they overwhelm, they might pay to be an A.

• 1:11:51Paul Bloom?

  If, if enough of people are agreeable, a disagreeable person could clean up. If enough people are disagreeable, an agreeable person, oh, everybody wants to be with them. And so in this way, in a sort of dynamic, one could imagine that, that bit of variety turns out to be, to be beneficial.

• 1:12:09Chris Williamson?

  It's like a personality arms race in a way.

• 1:12:12Paul Bloom?

  Yes, yes, that's right.

• 1:12:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, where everyone's finding different, different ways to come through.

• 1:12:17Paul Bloom?

  I mean, consider some other sort of, sort of market, like consider, you know, TV shows. Why doesn't everybody make the same great TV show? Because if you have 10 prestige dramas, all of a sudden, a dirty lowbrow comedy is where everybody, oh my God, let's see that. What a break from it. And then when you get enough of those, you toss in some reality shows, you get enough of, and then you get a range of things. Because in this world, sometimes you don't enter sort of negative adverse selection to being the way everyone else is.

• 1:12:55Chris Williamson?

  We've just touched on behavioural genetics there. I had Robert Plowman on the show, maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago, and the guy's phenomenal. I love his work.

• 1:13:05Chris Williamson?

  I feel like if I was to look at the field of science at the moment, not diet, but psychology and personal development style stuff, the biggest hole in terms of public education, the longest lever that we could push down on would be teaching people about how behavioural genetics works, about how heritability works. I think that

• 1:13:30Chris Williamson?

  that would help people to make better life choices, better partner choices. It would help parents to feel less culpable or less neurotic and over-concerned about the outcomes that their kids are going to have. And then when you fold in the nurture part of the nature nurture debate, isn't the nurture that you give them, it's the nurture that Jim's dad next door gives them, and it's the nurture of the boxing coach that they give them and the friends that are around them that they impart on them. I feel like that, from the outside looking in, is the biggest hole that we have in terms of public education.

• 1:14:09Paul Bloom?

  I think that's a wise point. I'll just add two things. One is, as you know, stuff gets very politicised. And talk about genes and behaviours and everything. For some people, it brings up a spectre of scientific racism and Holocaust and all of that stuff. So I think now we're starting to say, well, we could sensibly talk about these things without it being carried the ugly baggage of history, just like behaviourism, other ideas of human nature similarly have an ugly baggage of control, of totalitarian governments and everything. I think we've got to look at the facts in a way that's compassionate and reasoned.

• 1:14:50Paul Bloom?

  The other thing is, at some level, this is stuff worth getting out. But at another level, when people aren't on Twitter or Facebook or writing op-ads and everything, people kind of know. There's some really nice stuff done by Emily Willoughby, where she just asked people, from a scale of zero to 100, how heritable are these different traits? How your introversion, aggression, religiousness, sexual orientation?

• 1:15:20Paul Bloom?

  Eye color and so on, explains a little bit what this means. And then grasps it, it turns out your average person is not bad at knowing this. Your average person pretty much matches with some exceptions, the scientific literature.

• 1:15:35Paul Bloom?

  When, when you're not dealing with people who are ideologues and you ask people, say, do you think how shy somebody is, is sort of a genetic trait? People often appreciate that, yeah, it is to some extent.

• 1:15:51Chris Williamson?

  There was a chart in Plowman's book Blueprint, and I think that that's the same study you're talking about. Yeah, oh, I had a guy on talking about embryo selection and genetic enhancement. Johnny Anomali talking about this recently. And that I think will force everybody, it will be a very difficult to avoid red pill for everybody about heritability, because as soon as you can go in and say, well, look, this is, these are the raw materials that we're playing with. And this is how far we can push these different things. And downstream from that, look at the changes that children have from genetic interventions before they were born.

• 1:16:30Paul Bloom?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Chris Williamson?

  It kind of bursts this conversation open a little bit, and that technology is not slowing down. It's not stopping. It seems like it's partly already here, and in the future is only going to be more here.

• 1:16:41Paul Bloom?

  I think that's right, but I'll give you something which is here. And I haven't looked into this, but here's my intuition. Many, many people have kids through donor sperm and donor eggs. I don't think there's many people who say, I don't care. It's all, it's all however you're, send me, give me anybody's sperm, anybody's eggs I'm in. No, people really want the sperm and eggs. People they see as having, you know, not just good physical health, but they haven't had a history of severe mental illness. They want people who are Nobel Prize winners. They want, they want women who have been to the Ivy Leagues. They want people who are, and, and I think when push comes to shove, people have an understanding that, that this stuff matters.

• 1:17:26Chris Williamson?

  You know what's very interesting there? I don't know whether you've considered this, but Johnny taught me about this when it comes to sperm donor selection criteria for women. What you get to do as a woman is bypass your own mating psychology.

• 1:17:41Chris Williamson?

  With regards to what you're attracted to in terms of what seduces you, which may cause you to downstream use those genetics to form a child. And what you actually do is you optimize for the traits that you want your child to have, independent of the attraction. So a lot of the time, like a pleasant disposition or kindness is something that is really, really optimized for being like dominance and stuff, which may be something which is sexually attractive. But in a child, do I want like a super dominant child? Well, perhaps not. And that was the first time that I've ever thought, oh my God, look at what happens when you can separate out having sex from the production of the child that comes from it or attraction from procreation.

• 1:18:26Paul Bloom?

  It's really interesting. You know, there's this work, I bet you're familiar with this on what's attractive. So you take an average face. Average faces are pretty attractive because you factor out all the flaws and everything, you know, margin, maybe genetic heterogeneity, but they're pretty great. For female faces, if you dial up the femininity of the face, everybody thinks they're prettier. Make the eyes bigger, makes lips fuller and prettier. But for male faces, if you dial up the masculinity, it doesn't quite do it. You see these fake, these features, these testosterone guys, you know, this enormous jaw and like that. And, and you know, and in some cases they're considered worse. And there you're capturing what you just said, which is for women, there's sort of two things that pull apart, which is you may not want a hyper aggressive, most manly man.

• 1:19:12Paul Bloom?

  There's, there's a draw to that, but you also want a man with actually some female traits, some protipally female, who isn't as aggressive, who is more compassionate, more kind. And so, so the case for, for women selecting men isn't as simple. And you're exactly right. In a case where you could separate what you want as a kid for your kid and what you want for your partner, there is a separation women will adopt.

• 1:19:36Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that psychology can help us understand what a good life is?

• 1:19:42Paul Bloom?

  I think the question of what the good life is, is not ultimately a psychological question. It's, it is a moral and philosophical question, you know. If one psychologist said, a good life is simple, simple pleasure, hedonism, maximize, you know, the amount of, of hedons, the amount of orgasms and cookies and all that stuff, this, that's the good life. And another one said, no, no, a good life is being moral and relationships and suffering. Not gonna do an experiment to figure out which is right. There's a, a, a philosophical disagreement here. I think the second guy is right, actually, but, but it's not, it's not a psychological question. Where psychology comes in is, once you decide what a good life is, what to maximize, a psychologist can tell you a little bit about

• 1:20:27Paul Bloom?

  how to get there. Then it becomes a miracle question, you know, if, um, so, so I've been interested in the question, for instance, of do children make you happy? And I, I, the question of whether it's good to have children in some sort of abstract way, is, is not a psychological, but what's the effect of people's lives on having children? And the answer actually turns out is complicated. It depends. It's different for men than for women. It's in countries with good childcare.

• 1:20:53Chris Williamson?

  Dig into that. Explain.

• 1:20:54Paul Bloom?

  Um, so the original findings, studies were done by, by Condon in the United States. And they found that, um, they use an experience sampling thing where they took a, where it turned out that people who had kids were on a whole less happy than people without kids. And when they were with their kids, it kind of stressful. It wasn't a good time. And so the argument was being, having kids doesn't make you happy. But then there were more studies then. And the answer is always with these things is it depends. Um, in countries which have good childcare, parents tend to be happier than non-parents. The United States is in a way atypical as a very wealthy country, but doesn't have very good paid childcare. Um, younger parents are in some way less happy than older

• 1:21:39Paul Bloom?

  parents. Single parents, as you can imagine, find the, the period where their kids are young to be very difficult. Um, women sometimes find it a bit harder than men.

• 1:21:49Paul Bloom?

  To me, the most interesting findings comes when you separate the questions of how much pleasure are you getting from your kid, how happy does your kid make day to day? And how worthwhile do you think it is? How meaningful do you think it is? Because then, when you ask about meaning and worthwhileness of value, significance, you do find there's a real significance to having kids. And for me, you know, I have, I have two sons in their twenties. And, and actually, you know, I actually really liked raising them. So maybe it's not a complicated thing. But in some way, if people say, so what do you think of having kids? I wouldn't say, it really had a lot of pleasure to my life. Seems like the wrong way of doing it. It's just, it, it, it is of great significance. I love them. They're, they're, they're the most important thing I ever did.

• 1:22:33Paul Bloom?

  Separate from any happiness they gave me.

• 1:22:36Chris Williamson?

  I remember learning about Kahneman and Dan Gilbert, and they had two different conceptions of, of happiness. It may have even been from you that I actually learned.

• 1:22:48Paul Bloom?

  It was from, from the sweet spot. I, I, I had the debate, yes.

• 1:22:51Chris Williamson?

  Yes, and one was hedonism and the other is meaning. And one is you spend the entire, the remainder of your life on a, a Lilo with a cocktail in a pool, sunning yourself. And the other one, you do difficult things, but in retrospect, you're glad that you did them. It's my belief, upon reflecting on your book from two years ago, I forgot it was from your book, that your personal disposition is one of the most important determinants as to how you move up and down on that spectrum. So if you are the kind of person that ruminates, that's introspective, that will tend to reflect and, and consider your decisions perhaps a little bit more, that will seek the meaning

• 1:23:34Chris Williamson?

  in things, I don't know where on ocean hedonism lies, maybe like openness to new experiences. I don't know. But anyway, my point being, if you are the, the non-hedenistic person, you need to optimize for things that are going to give you meaning. Whereas if you're someone that does, can take more simple pleasure in the moment to moment experience of life, then perhaps you also need to factor that in too. How far off do you think I am?

• 1:24:00Paul Bloom?

  I don't think you're far off at all. I think that I'm a pluralist and I think there's a lot of things you might want to maximize in your life. You know, meaning, pleasure. We haven't talked about being a good person, being moral. We haven't talked about spirituality for some people. And everybody got to choose how you rank them, how you prioritize them. And I think you're exactly right that some people be more comfortable with one choice over another. Some people like to be challenged, some people don't. I think for everybody, though, the simple, pure hedonism plan is probably not a good idea, even on its own terms. Like suppose we both say, my gosh, all that matters is happiness. But we could agree on that, but still say, but don't try to be happy.

• 1:24:41Paul Bloom?

  So for one thing, you get bored if you're just happy all the time. Happiness, you get the so-called hedonic treadmill. You're just going to get bored of stuff. But for another, there's actually some nice studies finding that, at least for people in the West, the East is a little bit different. You ask them, how important is it for you to be happy? And then you ask them how happy they are, and there's a negative correlation. People put value and importance on happiness tend to be less happy. Now immediately, somebody like you say, yeah, it's complicated because you can imagine the criticism being if you're less happy, maybe you take happiness more seriously. So it's hard to pull them apart. But I think in general, trying to be happy, and this is ancient wisdom, is kind of a sucker's move.

• 1:25:25Paul Bloom?

  And what you should try to do is maximize other things and then happiness will come along if you're lucky or do it right for the right.

• 1:25:33Chris Williamson?

  Looking forward, given that we are now, perhaps there's more areas of research to be decapitated by the replication process, but

• 1:25:44Chris Williamson?

  looking forward, what do you think are some areas of psychology that are the unknowns or the unknown unknowns? Where are we? Why should psychologists be looking or what can people expect, do you think, from psychology over the next couple of decades?

• 1:26:00Paul Bloom?

  Wow, that's such a good question.

• 1:26:05Paul Bloom?

  I think in ways that I find it hard to anticipate. I think that the rise of AI over the last very recent past, last year or so, six months. What's happening now, ChatGPT, is going to transform psychology in certain ways. Um, I know people, and I'm actually involved in one project where we're testing people to get their intuitions. We're also testing ChatGPT. We want to know what it thinks too, with an eye towards pulling apart what a statistical learning machine would do and what a person would do. So I feel that that's a very rich area. I'll tell you something, another area, just to, just to kind of mix it up a bit.

• 1:26:48Paul Bloom?

  There's one part of psychology which is sort of punched below its weight, and it's clinical. Clinicals, I have heard experts in the field, expert clinicians say, over the last thirty years, there's been no big developments in clinical psychology. We know treatment works, but it's not like the treatment works better now than it did in nineteen ninety. Medications work, drugs work, but you know, we got Prozac, we got, we got, you know, lorazepam, we got these, these, these things. They're not very different from what was on the market twenty years ago. I wonder if that's going to change. There's a lot of interest in psychedelics, a lot of interest in like mindfulness meditation.

• 1:27:28Paul Bloom?

  There's a lot of new, a lot of interest in, um, in sort of, um, neuroscientific interventions involving sort of basically zapping the brain in different ways. And it wouldn't surprise me if, if we're on, on the cusp of the revolution of understanding mental illness.

• 1:27:44Chris Williamson?

  That would be pretty cool.

• 1:27:45Paul Bloom?

  That would be very cool.

• 1:27:46Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, I really appreciate your work. I absolutely love it. The new one, Psych, is great. Where should people go if they want to check out the stuff that you do and keep up to date with your work?

• 1:27:55Paul Bloom?

  I got a, I got a website, paulbloom.net. And I got a Twitter thing, paulbloom at you. And, um, and in both of them, I mercilessly try to, try to impose this until at one point in Twitter, they're gonna say, stop doing this, we're not gonna follow you anymore. So I gotta stop.

• 1:28:11Chris Williamson?

  You're no longer a Twitter account, you're just a salesman.

• 1:28:13Paul Bloom?

  I'm just a salesman and everything. So, so, but that's where the finding. Thank you so much. This is always, this is always a lot of fun.

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