Dr. Kay Tye: The Biology of Social Interactions and Emotions
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and i'm a professor neurobiology and opened moloch at stanford school of medicine. My guess today is doctor k tie. Doctor k. Tie is a professor of neusatz at the sock institute for biological studies.

SHE did her training MIT and at stanford and is currently in investigator with the Howard huge medical institute, which is a highly curated group of individuals who are incentivize to do high risk, high reward work and pioneer new areas of biological study. Throughout her career, doctor kiti has made fundamental breakthrough into our understanding of the brain, including demonstrating that a brain area called the amiga la, which most people associate with fear and threat detection, is actually involved in reinforcement of behavioral and experiences that are positive and involve reward. Her current work focuses on various aspects of social interaction, including what happens when we feel lonely or isolated.

Indeed, today, K, I will tell us about her discovery. IT also called loneliness neurons, neurons that give us that sense that we are not being fulfilled from our social interactions. SHE also describes a phenomenon SHE discovered called social homeostasis, which is our sense that we are experiencing enough, not enough or just enough social interaction, irrespective of whether or not we are an introvert or an extrovert.

We also talk about social higher keys and social rank, how people and animals tear out into so called alpha and beta, subordinate and dominance eeta in all sorts of social interactions. I think everyone will find that discussion especially interesting. And we talk about the role of social media and online interactions, and why, despite extensive interaction with many, many individuals, those social media and online interactions can often leave us feeling pride in specific ways.

We talk about the neurochemical, the neural circuit and some of the hormonal aspects of social interactions. It's a discussion that, by the end, will have you thinking far more deeply about what is a social interaction and why certain social interactions leave us feeling so good, others feeling sort of me, and why other social interactions are lack of social interactions can often leave us feeling quite depleted, even depressed. It's a conversation central to mental illness and the understanding of things like depression and anxious, P, T, S, D.

And isolation. And it's a conversation central to mental health and in order to build healthy social interactions. Before we begin, i'd like emphasize to this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford.

IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is eight sleep sleep max smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity.

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Select countries in the E. U. In australia. Again, that eight sleep dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by levels. Levels is a program that let you see how different foods and different activities and your sleep patterns impact your health by giving you real time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor.

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If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element spell elemental 点 com ash huberman to try a free sample back again。 That's drink element dot com slash huberman. And now for my conversation with doctor k tie.

Doctor K, I welcome andy huberman. What is three folks are gona hear? You call me andy and wonder if my name is andy.

I always know who i'm speaking to according to whether not they call me Andrew, which is my family and people that I know after a certain period of my life, drew, which are people that know me through my very brief and non lustre ous career in boxing, and andy, which you are people that met me as I was coming up through science. Let's just put this way. There was another Andrew.

We did a coin flip and I lost. So andy is fine. Andreas, fine. Whatever makes you comfortable, what's important today is not how anyone refers to me, but rather the discussion about your work, which is spectacular.

I've known you a long time and i've been following your career and IT just been amazing and wonderful to see the contributions you've made to science and also to the culture of science. So we're going to talk about both of those things. To kick things off, let's talk about a brain structure that most people, I think i've heard of, but that is badly misunderstood.

And that's the amida. Most people hear a migdalia and they think, oh, fear, that's what the omega is all about. But you know, and i'm hoping you'll educate us on the fact that that the amiga is actually far more complex than that and far more interesting than that. So when you hear the word of mick della, where does your mind go?

I agree that a lot of the the band went on the amidas occupied by fear studies. But we've known actually, for a really long time that the egg is important for all sorts of emotional processing, since clever and busy performed lesions on on monkeys and found that monkeys would then have flat effective responses to all sorts of different stimulus, poop, food and animal object, whatever. IT was just nothing.

No, no, no emotional response, no motivational significance. However, you want to phrase IT two things that usually would make you either you know disgusted or excited or neutral. And so um I think that that knowledge about the amiga was there from the beginning.

It's not something I came up with, but then it's interesting. It's almost it's a meda statement or mea observation about how scientific research progresses. Sometimes you make a lot of progress in one particular vein because it's easy to press forward there, but it's important to also think about all the other parts and filling in the space in between to make sure you haven't missed anything.

So the narrative about the immigrant be came about fear. And I think also just when we think about survival, when you are an animal in the natural world, especially if you're a prey animal, which is the majority let's a lot of animals um then you need to prioritize escaping a predator, its immediate threat on your survival verses rewards set, meeting, drinking water, getting food, these things can be done later. Escaping this predator is paramo. And there should be some natural a symmetry in how we process a motion at baseline. And so that something that we have looked into a lot as well.

But I think that the big picture discovery that my team has contributed to our understanding of the middle is that IT represents a fork in the road, uh, for processing emotional violence and thinking about all these old psychological theory about how do you emotionally evaluate the world around you, what's the chain of events? Is there a chain of events, what's in a certain order versus what's happening in parallel? For example, one model is if there's all the information that comes in and then we have to filter out what's important um what's gonna something that need to pay attention to veris? What do I need to ignore if i'm driving? I need to pay attention.

The road, this light, this pedestrian, just start verses, you know what IT feels like for my sock to be touching my foot? Not super relevant right now, or my, but against the seat, nothing I need to pay at anti I need to focus on you know, the dynamic information. Then you have to select you know, the second set would be selecting whether it's good or bad and what you want to do with that.

And so that. process. I think the selection of whether you're um assigning IT a positive or negative valence happens in the amedure.

So god, you brought up this word violence. I think it's a word that some scientists, but most of the general public are probably not familiar with silos talk about violence um and then I want to go back to the imagine and um kind of explore some of its diversity of function a little bit more. So when I hear the word violence I think goodness versus badness yeah of something is that basically .

basically it's been using a lot of different fields. I think of that you know negative and positive numbers or or um but it's an analogy that we take to just minia pot, positive negative and it's it's a intentional departure from the word value. Value becomes very scale.

Everything on you know, I could be in the same direction with different magnitudes is often how we think about value IT. IT could be representing families and often a small reward in the bigger reward or small punishment and big punishment is how experimentally we pass um value. And so veillette just asking about um how your brain response to things that are good or bad, what are neurons that might respond similarly to things that are good and bad? You know those might be important neons rather than positive and negative violence neons. So yeah I I think it's a it's just a term that that signalizes that next step.

So when we walk to say, a novel environment, do you think that our amigas are active and really trying to figure out whether not an environment, a set of people or a person is safe and really just check that box first in order to be able to do other things, as you know, is this business of um determining violence and the role of the omega. That kind of the first gate that we have to walk through anytime we're a new environment for insinuation showed up here today and you mention, I think I locked my car and and I said, you'll be finding this neighbor d either way, and then you walked in. And presently you are taking in the new environment, meaning some new people.

We have a discuss about caffeine, alcohol and presumably because you and I know one another you felt say, if I would hope so but presumed ly, the amiga is always performing this role even if we have some prior knowledge about something just figuring out, am I safe here? Where are the exists? Where are the entrance? Um who's here? What's their story? Um do you think all of that is is Operating? And do you think it's always conscious or is IT largely unconscious to us?

okay. So a few different questions there. Um first I want to address the the question about novelty, and then I want to come back to this the other issue of conscious but um the way that a mg dollar works is its job is is to assign meaning to anything that could have motivation, significance.

And so it's a brand new thing. We're paying attention. We're seeing if if IT mattered did IT matter.

And so I think anything that's novel, even if we don't know what that means aloud sound you have never heard before um even if IT signifies nothing of motivational significance the first few times that you are presented with IT, you'll get a immel response. So you see this in the lab, play the tone for the first time. And then there's a response that rapidly, decades when the tone doesn't end up predicting anything that .

the the animal can .

can detect or human. And if you're the type of person that puts your phone and do not forces has IT on vibrate. And you know sometimes it's always vibrating and it's just it's vibrates all the time whether I put my phone on the so when someone else this phone rings, it's very startling to me.

But there they don't even notice because that's just the sound the phone makes. IT makes IT all the time. So I think IT has to do with how many times are presented with that.

And it's as a start response. So the first few times that you are presented with the stimulus a, the amygdala will respond. And then he took case very quickly and then only if that stimulus predict something important or something rewarding or or punishing, then um will will IT begin to respond again.

So it's it's like you're giving everything novel a chance to to tell you in one trial and single trial learning um if something's GTA happen and so um I think of firearm is a great example. You know firearm goes off your your instantly, you know you're looking round is there anything happening even even just people rushing out the alien thing that you're going to respond to, you know if you have a lot of fire drills, then you might respond differently after while. So I think that's the evaluation component.

You mention that the immigrants a will respond to a novels stimulus um and if he predicts something interesting, then other things happen. When will talk about those um if not the mingle le stops responding and you said something really important which is that the amiga will respond to something that is predicting reward or punishment and I think most people don't realize that.

In fact, do I think a lot of early career news bio gist don't realize that that the amiga is not just involved in fear and punishment? Um so when we talk about the amigo personally, we're trying about the amiga complex a bunch of other things. So is IT true that there are neurons in the immigrant complex that predict reward and others that predict fear and punishment? yeah.

So as a graduate student, I worked on a part of the meeting called the base a atta. The is still a complex within the broader and middle. This brain region is cortical like, and that is mostly glued materia c neurons with some gaba erga non the extent, but without the same structure that the cortex has.

Um and I studied the the midnight in the context of reward. I found essentially that when you induce politically, you get a synaptic strengthening. When you, when animals learn things I make go in on fire and response to accuse that predict rewards.

And this was in coming into the context of a field that had shown that this happens with fear. And so this became, I remember me the very first time I give presentation at a scientific conference. I was a junior graduate student.

I was given a ten minute talk at the, you know, an arguable and magical gordon research conference. Many famous professors were speaking, and there were two talks about the emigre le and reward. And I was one of them.

And the response of the talk was just, how is as possible? How can, how can the amiga la? how? How can you get the same read out for reward and fear? And really IT came to be, there's two two possibilities.

And me, there's more possible. But the main two possibility are never one that the amiga wasn't specific for fear at all. IT just responds to anything important. If it's important, IT responds, period.

The other possibility is that the amiga a is sending has different neurons that respond to positive and negative predicting stimuli, sends this information to different downstream targets to respond differently, obviously respond differently to a reward. I walked towards IT. I I consume IT.

I, A punishment. I am avoiding IT. And so clearly, the behaviors are diametrically opposed. And so to me, that seem very possible, at least that that there was a divergence point, and maybe this could be at.

And so we just did some very simple experiments when I first started my lab to trace the projection targets of a middle and irons and record. And so everything i'll mix up together. So it's not obvious that they would this would be A A fork in the road. But when you look at them, you do see that there are projections that come from the immigrant that are predominantly encoding either reward or fear and there's many different projections.

And um you know this is just the beginning, but this was a time when I was a novel concept to even think that neurons from one region could have completely different functions going into different downs am targets which now seems totally obvious um and there's hundreds and hundreds of paper are showing in now. But at the time that was difficult to get this work publish because that's just not how people thought about information moving through the brain. I guess .

what I think um first of all, such important work and so wonderful to be a early in the the phase of recasting how the brain works, which is what you did. I think most people in the general public still think a mig d love fear. And clearly it's able to signal reward and punishment, as you discovered. And now pointing out of curious, does the amiga have a direct line to some of the organs of the body that can change our bodily activation state, heart rate, breathing rate, muscle tension? Because I think most of us experience fear and reward as both in our head, in our brains, but also of the body.

Great question. Great question. So um i'll tell you the clues that lead me to my current working model, which may you know is not necessarily the final word but I would say that I think the amida complex is were discussing IT these thirteen seven nuclear I that resided you know in the temporal lobe.

They are important for assigning importance but they're not important for producing the actual autonomic arouse that we associate with panic or fear. The reason I say this is there's a famous key study patient S M, who have has bilateral damage to her family and you know no responses to emotional faces, no responses to fearful stimuli. Um but if you capable of having the panic response due to low to suffocation associated with with suffocation.

And so there's still the ability to produce that panic and arousal response. Um it's just not the cognitive evaluation of IT. I think that's what we think the amida is doing is a signing that IT IT does receive information from the rest of the body. Um there are, for example, glin receptors in the amiga, things that can sense hunger.

And we've done some some work looking at this kind of inspired by I am am not sure this for your familiar with this study is a controversial study dance ago twenty eleven but where the supreme court judges they looked at supreme court judge rulings on on Pearl decisions um across the day relative to meal breaks and you can see right after like breakfast, you know ninety percent every is getting pulled, everything is getting out yeah and then then just drop till ten percent. Then there's lunch. We were back to eighty percent and then just precipitately drops .

to single digits again. So the judges are changing the linen cy of their rules depending on how .

welfare they are, are counter arguments to this. But that is strongly what the data suggest. No, IT is not a controlled study, is just a striking correlation.

But it's the it's not a completely novel concept. The hungry phenomenon, i'm sure I don't know everybody y's difference. I certainly experienced. Um but we we think that when you are getting strong signals from the body, for example, you know I think I think the m also going to be able to detect a lot of different homestake puts, even that we haven't we don't have evidence for that yet. But for specifically energy baLance, when you're hungry um you're a magician detected perhaps through glin receptors or other other you know mechanisms.

Um and then what we see is that in that food deprived after one day of food depression for a mice, um you can see this shift in the baLance between the positive violence um encoding projection neurons and the negative baLance encoding production neons in a at baseline fear trumps all the negative projection neurons, you know can silence the reward projection ones which makes sense if I need to run away from this pedal. You know I can't I can't worry about eating this food right now but if i'm in a near starvation like state which for my they are very hymettus. Sm, so one day without this is a really big deal. Um the only last a few days so at this point they are kicking into survival mode where actually getting food becomes the the get your need and you'll see animals you know hunting in ways they not only won't hunt when when they're really desperate. And so this mode of of food deprivation shifts things so that the reward 嗯 pathway actually has stronger power to to influence and silence the fear pathway than before。

Well, the brain is so smart. IT really is. He can take what we Normally think of as a priority list. Fear and staying safe is more important than food reward. And then if food and acquiring food is critical to survival, IT can invert all that is what you're .

so exactly is that happens you know in a day IT seems reversible. So that's something that we're looking at right now and thinking about um how specific is this this to food? Is this true for lots of different things? What about exercise? Other other stressors that are you know potentially more positive? The amiga la is able to detect a lot of different signals from the environment, and we're not sure how all of that gets in there.

So I think one of the the detection of the environment has been, you know, really well worked out in terms of our basic sensory modalities. But think about the things that really affect your emotions day to day, at least for me as a human in this society, the things that affect my emotions most of today are almost entirely social interactions, very subtle ones, ones that don't seem to threaten my life for a safety. You know very small, subtle um social interactions are are what you know have the greatest bearing, I think um um my emotional evaluation and my emotional band with and what is that? How do we detect that? How do we assemble this information? Apply all the new ones know, put on the onion layers of social programing to come out with whatever you know. I interpret this gesture to mean it's pretty incredible. And so that's kind of where my research program has has been sliding.

Such an interesting area, let's drill into IT a bit. Um and to put in context, maybe um talk about social media um so on social media um where not instagram or x as that seem to be the two major platforms. I'm not on tiktok.

People say stuff. Sometimes they say positive things. Sometimes they say saying negative things. Sometimes they say things. They are a small neutral. So IT seems to me that nowaday if one is on the social media platforms that we are um we sort of crowd source this phenomenon of social interaction in a way that we hadn't before because I grep prior to the advances social media and that I could bring my physical body into certain environments and not others. Even at high school I could hang out.

We had an area called the bad cave where scape orders and some other at that time, miss IT hung out with where the cool out. Um eeta you you could pick your niche. Social media is not like that.

You can pick followers. They can pick you at sea. But I think since most people have social media nowadays, seems are on there in some ways, that we've placed ourselves in the center of an arena which we have a ton of incoming input.

We all, most of us, have a mick dollars, two of them a mic delays. He pointed out one on each side, the brain, and presumed ly, we're on these platforms to receive positive feedback and avoiding negative feedback. However, there does seem to be a coward of people who seem to like the friction of combat or kind of this just call that py friction interactions or moderate friction interactions.

They like to argue. They like to part ideas. It's not all bad necessarily.

So have you ever looked at social media in your own mind? Looked at social media through the lens of of a middle a filtering, or through the lens of a neural circuit filtering and I wondered, um what's going on there that someone with without your in depth knowledge of these brain circuitry ies would not think to look at that landscape? Or may we could .

just do that? Now kind of a lot of people asked me about social media from the context of is this of is this social context meaningful as this positive this is count does this help you not feel lonely? Um and of course, I don't know the answer.

I haven't done that particular study and I don't know I don't know of that specific study having been performed, but my prediction is that it's not going to do much because I I believe that a key component of what I would consider social contact heavily depends on having some international in synch, ony some interaction and in that is synchronous. And I think with social media, sometimes there can be an engaging dialogue that plays out in near real time. But generally speaking, it's a synchronous. You're looking at things that are happen that you're not a part of. You're .

excluded for all these things that happened in australia. Oh.

like that we're not experiencing at the same time. It's not a shared experience. You know that in terms of that having that bond necessarily. And so i've ever actually been asked about how the immigrant of process is social media.

Um I guess I think what happens is you know the amiga is just responding to situate sending up bottom up signals, you know as a career latter of of um bottom up in top down processing. Let's give example that i'm walking on the street and all of a sudden here look a really ferocious dog barking all going crazy. And then I get super scared, and then I realized, okay, there's a fence.

So detect, heard the dog barking and the dog barking and breaking out. Then my preference cortex realized, is there the first? And IT looks very dirty, the fence looks stable. And then i'm relaxing and i'm resuming my walking Normally. You know, I think that sort of the dance that our brain is doing when we have top down and bottom uh information that would trying to stay focus.

So for me, I think when i'm on social media, there are so many stimuli that that are evoking responses and um to be completely transparent and I know this is not something that everybody else does or can do or is clearly what's best for them. But I work very hard to control input from the top down um in terms of I really, really limit the amount. I basically don't check email or go on social media. I would say i'm on social media or email less than one hour per week, about a week per week.

I I have to say is that is a congratulations to talk about social media again in second. But as a the professor email once a week, i've heard of people scheduling their times for email responses. But once a week that is awesome.

I had to won I people who help me get through that and then and it's important but otherwise I just when I I do my own email, I say yes to all these things. Then I make all these plans and then and then have too many trips. And responding fragmented, fragmented and it's just overcommitting and I think um I know my limits.

Sometimes it's difficult for me to be in my amiga a mode, responding simple and yet letting my proper cortical do its thing. So I i've set some very heavy prefrontal cortical selected limits of the input I put in so that my brain can function and be clear. I can't be creative.

I can't have epiphany. If there's all this quarter of like writing this first and back and lab bb ba, it's just crash out, wipe e squee the brain down so that we can actually grow something beautiful. And no.

well, and I want to reemphasize what I said in my introduction, which is that I mean, you are oh so productive. And when I say productive, I don't just mean productive, like plugging hug you. The work you've done is incredibly creative.

You transformed our understanding of what this famous structure the amiga actually does. I mean, ve made so many important discoveries as a consequence of, personally, other things, but including wiping away of this incoming and clutter, as you said, controlling the top down inputs. I have to ask, just from a practical standpoint, during that one hour a week, are you reading every email that came in? Are you just being very .

selective about you? I ils, no, I just, I searched for the ones that my assistant identifies as the one I need to open. There's A A list of things that I would be interested in, and then we will go through the list. And then, you know, sometimes that requires me go and find the email, respond myself because that, and then I would do that for ten, you know, ten minutes a day or something.

Do you recommend out .

there that did?

Do you pass on this advice to the people that you train?

I think IT depends on what resources and what's your what's your job right now, right? So I think as a training, I definitely did this professor. I did my own emails, but at a certain point, I was just never getting to the bottom.

And then I would just stress me out, make me feel overwhelmed. And what is my job? My job is to number one, be a stable core of a sustainable research program.

And um that just requires me having a lot of mental health and well being and and and clear minded ness and I need to be able to come up with creative ideas. I need to be able to sprint when there is a deadline. And I just can't exhaust my system with unnecessary. I would call them quade for in the time management. Quade, if you're familiar.

this is important. gent. Certain things are gent, important.

Are the things ither important or urgent that most emails, and if you we time management literature and you have a luxury to have someone else help you, or something that's like so well trained to be really good to have you chapt doing things that important. And you know sometimes I this emails but emails are not the way my training is would to reach me. They would reach me in a different way um and then emails for everyone else that I didn't give my number two.

you know I feel so honored to your contact. I'd like to take a brief moment and think one of our sponsors and that ag one ag one is a vitamin, mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptations. I started taking A G one way back in two thousand and twelve.

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Um we have a future guest on this podcasts. E and called newport he wrote the the deep work and he has another book called the world without email. He is a computer science professor, George dawson ry.

He talks about about the tremendous career but also relationship and life value of doing essentially what you're describing. Although I do think kay, that you represent have the extreme of what i've become aware of terms of people that can limit the amount of time on uh, social media platforms and email. Anyway, I just wanted say, um congratulations. I just want to say that again.

And I think even if people don't reduce to one hour per week, I think that making some effort toward reducing the amount of incoming, as you said, controlling the top down inputs to the amiga a but also to the rest of the brain involved in creative processing at a is so keen we actually do have agency is just as it's it's tough sometimes to build up that discipline. So you're doing a tremendous service by sharing that somebody as successful as you does this reasonably is successful in part because you do this. Could we buy extension, say that many people, sint billions of people are on social media are likely triggering the activation of their a mega clouding out other more potentially productive activation of the neural circuits by so are just making themselves freely available to the to the thoughts and words and impulses of others. I mean, to me that seems the answer would be yes.

But i'd like to know what you I mean, I think and there's something to be said, there's death living moments where I i've never gone a deep into social media and spend more time in a certain birth, right? That is isolated. And I think that there's a lot to be learned from social media.

So to actually to bring back to want to point you mentioned earlier on social media, sometimes of people prove just want accolades and sometimes there's a lot of of friction. One of the reasons I stay on social media, even though i'm making this big effort to sort of decoder my conscious ness, is because of that feedback, especially when you know, for someone like you, I imagine it's gotta be super true. And even for me, at a certain point of my career, I just felt like people don't want to tell me bad news to my face as much anymore. I've be so positive all the time.

And you know what they what are they really thinking? And social media allows you the protection of anonymity to say what you really think without consequence essentially。 And so on the one hand, the consequence free um nature of being able to just say things can be very dangerous.

But at the same time, for me, I really value just being able to receive IT. I am you know, i'm a big girl. I can filter out what I want when I get all the inputs. But if I don't receive the inputs, sometimes it's hard to learn from the feedback i'm not getting, so even sometimes feel like given and not very nice way.

I can still create a model for someone else that has this perspective that I can take with me, and that can be another perspective I can honor easily in the future because I have this theory of mind for someone. Could someone would get upset about that? You know, that something that could be harmful to people who are they know, have the theory of mind. So I think it's super valuable from that perspective. And that's why I continue to use IT.

great. Yeah I I really applaud that as well. I I always read by teaching evils because they're anonymous. And yes, I do wonder, you know what grade the different people who gave different? You know, god, I don't know that information. I sometimes wonder, do they attend the class or they just angry they'd do well in the exam. But that really represents the small fraction of feedback that um that I wonder about most of IT.

Um that's valuable to me is the hey you know like to the course but these parts really sucked for rester human or this part was completely unclear or completely hated the way you blank black and black because that feedback is something I can really work with to improve. So I think courtly balls are similar to what you're describing. I think there's a value there.

If I were to just look at the the positive feedback and then ignore the negative feedback and write those people off, then I don't think I could improve as a teacher. Actually, I always encourage comments and feedback and suggestions in the youtube comments for this podcast for that reason. And I do read the comments I go through and I read and um a few of things yeah but you know the positive feeding is great too.

Sometimes it's more of this, please, yes, or less of that. I think there there's information in that. yeah. So I think that sounds like you've been doing all of these things naturally.

So so actually, since I ve had my research to my lab, we do an anonymous lab survey every it's supposed to be about every eighty months. And then it's a whole long process of going through IT, and it's just evolved. I think it's the fourth of time we've done IT.

And so it's now I think it's like seventy questions. It's because we got mabe. We should term IT down but ends up being hundreds of pages of of text, you know short answer lots sometimes long answer feedback from anonymous ly from people.

My life, my love is pretty big. So it's you know i'm not even trying to really guess who is saying it's just feedback. And IT takes me months to go through with that and and get all the feedback. And IT is so useful.

I mean, in a class, the amount of content that you have is is restricted to this very specific time and space, whether when you're Mandarin, someone over the course course of years, there's a lot of different there's a lot of different points of of content and interaction. And you know you're in the lab or body hours a week or whatever. And you know going trip, meeting here, there's just a lot of different ways to improve in ways that we've never you know, I haven't had any training in how to be a really great mentor.

And so i'm getting that training now i'm making my own course and my mentions are my teachers and um I really am grateful for the the two edge that they provide for free in this anonymous must lab survey. Sometimes IT makes me cry, but sometimes IT makes me feel really good about something that i'm doing that's working. And in any case, that makes me feel that I have ground truth, I guess I still don't know.

But when people say things that staying um IT makes me feel like they're saying what they really think and they're not holding back IT doesn't you know and um bad news feels like reality and so that is very something about that is rewarding just to feel like I have reality rather than i'm getting something else. You know that the model doesn't quite fit, very, very sad. Fine with the model doesn't play fit.

I love the words ground truth. There's something so beautiful to that and I I resonate with what you're saying. Let's go back to social interaction, something that your love is doing lots of work on nowadays.

And maybe we could shift to the sort of social interaction that most of us are familiar with, the sitting across the table, I have a coffee with somebody that taking a walk with somebody, your phone call yeah maybe a tough conversation um maybe a playful um no unscripted conversation um maybe a meal at a holiday dinner. You know there's a huge range. What what do we know about value of social interaction at the level of core biological needs? I get the level of neural circuits and maybe even hormones. You know most people part of oxy toes and I think the love hormones, but it's there's so much more there for people to understand and know about know how important is this thing that we call social interaction and how bad do things get when we're not getting the right kinds of social interaction.

You know, I think this is this is a great question, and i'm glad that it's become something that has been recognized at a more global and national scale. Just the importance of of having social support in our lives for help for our well being um but social isolation or even just perceived loney ss has immense health consequences for all social species.

So short lifespan, increased mood disorders, um increased actually mobility and mortality for diseases like cancer or heart disease that you know might not be what we would Normally think. And so I think understanding how each of those processes is happening, those mechanisms are far from being worked out. But the the correlational evidence is underived.

We're now taking this into the lab bra for the first time. And so something so simple as social isolation, how can we don't know way more about IT? and. I am someone who stumbled into the field of social isolation by accident prior to the pandemic.

And so i'll to say, you know, the whole story on why there's such a gaping hole in our knowledge as a neuroscience community about social isolation really comes from Harry harlow s work. This original work of maternal separation that was under ably cruel IT IT caused irreparable damage to these baby monkeys, and they never recovered. And sorry.

interrupt, I apologize. I'm describing to not interrupt in my life. But but so that people are on on board. Could you just briefly describe the harlow experiments?

Yes, so the very frames experiments where they separated a baby monkeys from their moms and then had either a wire sort of thing holding a bottle. So, okay, what what do you miss most about the mom? Is IT the wire? Is that the food or the the the comfort? And then they had they so they had a wire thing with with a milk bottle versus blank.

It's and cutter soft things and and the the baby monkeys would go to the cuti soft thing. But you know, a blanket is not a replacement for her mother. Nobody's saying that IT is and through these experiments there is extended maternal separation and it's IT was deemed cruel um there was permanent, irreparable damage. When you when you rehouse these monkeys never socialized Normally, they had lots of different mental and physical health problems um and I think in humans we know that solitary confinement is considered torture you know socialism tions are difficult thing to study in in a lot of conditions.

And we stumbled onto IT by complete accident through working with a postdoc, a former postdoc of my lab, Julian Matthews, who was a graduate student um doing an experiment IT was just trying to figure out if these dope neurons would also respond cocaine the way vt these sorry, these ventures tech mental area document for known respond cocaine want to see these other doing respond cocaine so sort of incremental study. So when you do this cocaine studies you you inject the animal with cocaine or saying, when you leave the nave animal in the cage and then you take print sliced record from the neurons and look at the synaptic strength and so you know, the expected outcome sort of was that these documents would be similar to other documentation that showed long lasting potential after a single dose of cocaine. But what happened instead was that, yes, there was potential of the coke there also potentially in the salian animals relative to the naive group.

And this was a huge puzzle. What was this? And IT turned out through many, many different experiments, that it's actually because when you inject animals with cocaine, you're separating them from the weeks ago.

And I adult crazy. And then is just what the way people do the experiment. So you inject the mossad, separate them, the native animals just stay there.

So with their other, other litter, I see, saw the control group. The sAiling control group is actually a social isolation condition.

So by accident, this control group that didn't make sense was how we stumbled onto. So so then we tried as a novel cage. It's not the novel cage, it's the it's the social isolation. And so um that is how we became a lab that studied social isolation that was complete accident. We weren't sure what what we were looking at. And then we we found these neurons and we manipulated these neurons and they produced um something very different than other dobin irons, which Normally if you stimulate dobin irons this venture al tegmental area mid brain dominance, like ninety percent of the time when people you hear people talk about dominances, I mean these ones and they are the ones where you press the very timely, the not well press the level of thousands of times, you know and .

they love to be stimulated.

yes. And if if you're a human and you do cocaine, you you most people love cocaine. They want they're very poor social and their on cocaine. And so that's what job in yarns were thought to be doing.

But these other dop mines in the dorso raffer that I will also say in the brain stem to an aquatic or you could detect signals from the body um but these other doctors in the raf, they when you simulate them, animals don't like IT. They will not work for reward. They actually will move away from a space where they are being stimulated you know, condition place and real time place aversion.

I don't like the feeling of these neurons being activated. Please stop IT. And yet they would be pro social. And so for a long time, this was super confusing. We couldn't understand IT.

And then just because at the same time we had A A hunger study going on the lab, we just thought about IT like, I can eat food because it's delicious and I I want to eat to see my treat, or I can eat because i'm super hungry, I feel shaky. I'm just IT as nasty if I affect, i'm so desperate and I need, like, I need my blood gar is dangerously low, you know. And so there's two reasons that you can eat.

And one of them is uncomfortable. Hunger is not comfortable, you know, is not a good feeling to be hungry. And so we thought about this, and that's kind of how we circularly came around to thinking.

I think we've discovered the loneliness. Ss neons, essentially. And so what is lonely? Ess, and loneliness is this unpleasant needs state of wanting social contact that would have this pro social effect as well. And so that's basically the very serendipitous loop lute way that I came to be studying how loneliness is represented in the brain。

amazing. Before we talk a bit more about these loneliness neons and some of their input and outputs in the brain, um how has the discovery of these neons perhaps change the way that you organize your day and week and life right um if at all um for instance are you more aware of how much time you spend alone versus with others? Are you um more careful or designing about who you spend your time with? Um you know I asked this um because you there are so many examples for me in the neuroscience literature where you I learned something new about how the brain works and I think oh yeah you know IT makes a lot of sense why my sleepers in great you know IT turns out that light exposure to the eyes at particular times a day really sets the whole body and brain into particular rythm that explain why I was a little depressed when I was in graduate school stay up all night doing experiments and i'd sleep much of the day and feel like I was getting eight nine hours I don't eight to nine hours now but um you know and when I wake up early, for me personally there is a bit of an antidepressant fect .

as long as I slept I before .

right so you know I think as new information comes online, at least for me, it's it's changed the way that I organized my life to in subtle or or not so subtleties.

So the idea that there are neurons in the brain that encode lonely ess, the absence of social contact, does that have you thinking, you know, after a few days of managing the lab, with which, as you point out, you have a very large lab, lots of social interaction, but its work contact, social interaction, does that um has that LED you to think, hey, you know, we should go out to dinner as a lab or I should spend time with somebody who's not in science or I should spend time by myself because I ve had too much social interaction. I'm not asking for strict protocols here. I'm just wondering if you're willing to get um like playing the same box of this with me a bit. Yeah how this information perhaps is shaped some of your choices you personally and be very clear, I am not asking .

you to what other .

people do has IT changed your social life. So it's .

really interesting that you ask this question and now that you know now that you're asking in this way, I I mean, of course, when I learn new things, I I, I take them and implement them into my life.

But to be honest, in in the cycle of of learning and studying and being increased, I actually think where I resigned more is when somebody is going on with me, my research program, research is research IT becomes what the addicted, what the research program evolves into. And so for for example, so just get started studying loneliness a few years before the pandemic hit. And then the pandemic hit and IT was just a step function like change I went from.

I'm never alone unless you call being an uber alone or being on a plane just, you know, constantly people in my office, even when i'm going in the bathroom, I was waiting for me outside like, you know, i'm not like i'm hurrying in the bathroom and ever longer four people in my bed kicking me in the face, i'm just, you know, there is so much social and then, boom, you know, there will be a day I wouldn't see another, let you know, just the not zero but just extremely sudden drop of social contact when there's no more work. And you know, it's just that period of time. And IT was, IT was very depressing.

IT was just this huge. I felt like I was in free fall. And IT made me, you know, at first I was really disruptive, and I was worried about myself, you know. And then at some point I just get to IT. And then I got used to working home.

I started a garden like, I got, I got, I just started a different life pattern that involved a lot of a long time, and, you know, something, and a long time personal life agreed, whether isn't any space for anything to grow before. And then I became comfortable with that. And so then I started thinking about that.

That's really where the idea of social homeostasis was born. This idea that, okay, why is IT with acute social isolation? Humans, monkeys, mice, you know, you acutely isolated the individual in the social group.

You reintroduce them to the social group. Rebound of pro social interaction. Oh, so happy to see you. There's like all these films of interactions of hute, a burst of a fili ative interactions, wherewith chronic social isolation in humans, monkeys might even flies. You reintroduced the social group and you get territorial behavior, aggression, avoidance, anti social behavior um or just you know sort of a very different negative violence response to the exposure to the group.

And so this maybe people brushed IT off a long time is just, uh, it's confusing this literature and consistent or maybe there's one model that makes IT all make sense that is social M E S cases where you know you're used to getting this at a certain point. And so my effector system gets activated. I I detected that i'm alone.

It's I want more the deficits detected than my effector systems gets activated. this. And then I.

Spinning all the systems that try to get me back into contact. I'm calling my friends. I'm texting my friend if i'm a mouse, i'm making ultra sonic vocalizations. I'm expLoring outside of the burrow.

And then you know, if my friends don't call me back like, sorry, we don't want to see anyone till end of cove IT bi, whatever IT is, you know, it's it's not working. My correction efforts are fAiling, or maybe a certain amount of time, we don't know. Then I give up, I stop, I stop calling, I stop going now I just make a different life, you know you that you don't leave the borrow whatever IT is.

And there's in in animals and humans, at least behaviorally. There's a near step function like drop off of attempts to, you know, you can see sort of date all then they just give up on dating after this one. Whatever that happens, there is some some straw that breaks the camels back and then this person doesn't to date anymore or doesn't want to go out anymore, whatever.

And and what is that? So that adaptation, then you're at a new baseline. You you're expecting now you're new Normal. I'm expecting to have a gardening day home alone, not seeing anyone and then and then but people come over if he s like a surplus. So my previous optimum and reintroduction to the social group is now feeling like a surplus and overload overstimulated. And that I think something that a lot of people experience the swift lash of going into the the pandemic in coming out of IT different people to different levels IT depends on how much you, you know isolated while you were are in the pandemic.

But I think thinking about um your social set point as being flexible and dynamic was a new concept to me and then in my mind the question is what is the part of this process that is causing all these harmful health consequences like short and lifespan mood disorders? Is that is that the initial detection that I missing something in a factor system activation? Because if that was the case, maybe I want to bandit that, you know, maybe I want to to get a pet, get a zoom body.

I don't know what know you would have different prescriptions and advice to give people if that were the case first, as you would give almost opposite advice, if the thing that causing IT is the the step point adaptation, then you want you want to stay IT off versus if you wanted to accelerate getting into the set point, which is Better, you know, is that the adaptation? Or is that, you know, kind of trying to fix IT? And so in one case you would, anna, ease off the the having the set point happen, the set point transition happen.

And the other case ripped off like a bandit called turkey. Just adjust and then you'll be fine, you know then you won't worry about IT then you won be lonely ly more because you'll just be comfortable being alone. You know people talk about cognitive flexibility um and I think it's it's sort of like that, but it's social flexibility.

I want to be able to be alone. I also want to to be able to be in a large group and be comfortable. And so I think what i've done, if anything, to change my lifestyle um to accommodate these new insights i've had is is to consciously create dynamic social experiences, lots of social experiences, yes, but also protecting a long time, which I never did before.

I just just gave IT all the way. And you know I realized that having that just made my social homeostatic system feel more elastic and flexible and resilient and less like a crisis. If something i'm very comfortable being alone, i'm super comfortable and own skin now. And IT requires investing in that relationship.

I like how you framed earlier, and I think we were not not recording yet, but the relationship with yourself as being a very important relationship and um when I think about brain states you know we don't know this yet but my working model would be that different individuals we have represent their identities and whenever they are present, IT creates a unique ensemble of that combination of people being present. And being alone is also a unique state that cannot be achieved. I have the brain state of being alone.

I cannot achieve IT if anyone else is around. And that's just what you know. That's kind of the working model I have.

I think what you're saying is essential for people to hear because um IT makes sense that loneliness would hurt um IT makes sense that some people are more extroverted, which I think is defined as are getting energy from social interactions and resetting energy through social interactions as I was introverted which by the way, folks introverts like myself do enjoy social interaction is just that we reset through more um so low or one on one time than we do in larger groups that's my understanding of the introversion extroversion literature we can revisit.

But this notion of social homeostasis is I think so key, important enough that I think we probably want to redefine IT um as many times or restate IT rather as many times as is necessary because I believe what you are describing as the same thing that one would experience with food if we eat a lot, we are consuming three, five hundred calories a day and then um suddenly we only have access to eighteen hundred calories a day. There's IT feels like a deficit because indeed IT is where as after some period of time at eight hundred colors a day, twenty two hundred colors a day feels like relative abundance relative abundance. Um when the pandemic at I certainly um was unhappy about the state of affairs in the world, of course but I recall feeling like, oh my god as I finally don't have to commute ninety minutes in each direction to stanford because I lived in the ebay at that time, I felt I had time to do things I hadn't done in a long time and thanks to zoom, I was able to get certain things done, not others.

Then after about six, eight, eight months when I realized that this is gonna Carry on for a while, I remember feeling quite lonely and making some efforts to repair that. I think social media not to harp on social media um could do either one of two things and I don't know which in the context of uh social homeostasis either going on instagram and seeing a lot of familiar faces and comments and accounts could make me feel like i'm getting some social interaction such that then when I closed that APP and move to my work at my desk or something which these days is mostly done um solo um that I would feel like I had social interaction or perhaps it's the equivalent of um calories that that makes me feel more isolated when i'm not in the APP. Perhaps I find IT to be distinctly different then like the experience at last night of going to dinner with someone I know quite well, sitting down and having an open ended conversation and deciding to close out the night only when we realized we got to get up tomorrow for work. So when our separate wise, there's something that felt very sad about IT. So I wondered, in this context of social homeostasis with them, not the analogy of social interaction to chloric intake, if we could, is there another dimension to IT where it's not just the total number of calories of the total amount of social interaction, but the quality of social interaction, the type of social interaction that actually feels like nourishment as opposed to just calories?

I love what you're going with this. And so um when we wrote this review, the first time of concept, this idea of of how your social set point can change based done if if you are acutely isolated or or cloning isolated and the y access is the quality slash quantity of detecting social contact, which is so fuzzy and you know there's it's it's again one of the most chAllenging frontiers of this field because how even if we measured every single component that the brain can detect of the social the social context, so much of IT is about expectation.

You know, like if I think I got a gesture, if if I get a nod from the president, i'm like, oh god, did the president just not at me? That's so exciting. Verses, if I get a nod from my partner, i'm like, oh god, are they mad at meet? What's going on? why? Why did I just get in on right? IT totally matters suggested you will need the identity.

There's many different cognitive systems that need all plug in to this wheel um to make IT spin. So I think that that is one of the the I I think that's going to keep us busy for a while. But in terms of your question about social media and when you switch from you know getting social media feedback and then doing work, um I think I think IT really depends.

I mean, social media is such a large category, you can have many different types of responses. generally. I think the bounds you say also media verses of real life interaction where you're with someone, maybe you're touching may be you're not touching, but even if just having conversation, um you have international in symphony, you are um having a lot of interpretation to get to you are in the same place.

But you can have international in security even on the phone right just a voice call is actually a lot more interpret synergy y than then messages. I think I think text messages can bring a lot of anxiety, and there's been a lot of commentary about that. Um and same thing with with social media. I think the the thing about social media that is perhaps the most harmful or negative, I think it's in terms of I when i'm thinking about social nourishment, I making that term on the fly here. But um it's it's almost withdraw when social media is posted.

It's not to you, to everyone and you could be one of the people that receives this message but is not even to and might not i've been talking to you and i'm doing something that without you otherwise you've been this picture and not reading on social media, listening to whatever you know it's like. But almost exclusively you are posting about activities that you're being excluded from and sometimes not even really talking to you unless A D direct messaging you. But then I kind of consider different category if it's like a one to one communication social media, me is is a blast, right? It's not it's just you know catching up with someone on social media.

I I don't really see the merit of IT because i'll just catch up with them. When I catch up with them and their kids, i'll be like older but you know actually really catch up with them then just see pictures of I know I I feel mixed about IT because it's not a real connection and IT doesn't for me state my social appetite to catch up with to look at someone else's profile on social media. Um that doesn't actually do anything for the the connection I I don't know but I seriously doubt tons of oxytocin is released when I you know follow someone's feed about their vacation. So I don't know I would I think that IT definitely matters. The quality and social media is is different than real life interactions for many reasons.

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Again, that inside tracker dot com slash huberman really appreciate your willingness to uh explore in this a in this context, I think you are mentioned the fact that real life interaction involves international in synchy could be by text scaling up from that by phone face time or something akin to that video video chat um on social media there is comments back and forth um although that's time consuming and it's difficult because there's anonymity. People are in different places, different times zones if you don't know someone, it's different context. Um so i'm really thanks to what you're describing.

I'm really starting to think about social media as so different than in person. Social interactions were by phone or video chat, social interactions in how those would difference rentin impact social homeostasis. And it's leading me at least to conclude that at least for me that most social media interactions would create more hunger as opposed to a um seeding of of the need for social interaction to be careful with the analysis here. But since I can do almost going to make an analogy between pornography .

in persons .

sexual intimacy as well, there's something in between where people could talk my phone but we don't want to explore this in any casual and then sexy intimacy with with a with emotion, with positive emotion, right? There's a scaling factor that and I am not putting judgment veillette. I'm certainly not that's not my place. As a good friend of man says, i'm not a cop, you know, i'm not telling people what to do they can do.

But it's so interesting to think about these um the circuits within us that create these what you and I and our field called competitive, the desire for or aversive the desire to move away from type responses and how so much of our life IDE from you because you're regulating your social media and you're a and your email and take but so much of life now is offering us the opportunity to article le these circuits or even hit them hard with a sledge hammer. But we're not thinking about these homeostatic mechanisms of whether not they're creating more hunger for or more satisfaction from. Yeah and I I cannot emphasize enough how critical this is and I think that because know i'm somebody who does spend a fair amount of time on social media, lot of my my work exists on social media, youtube, IT said.

And I would hope that the work that were pretty into the world with this podcast is creating a association of the desire for information, rather than a hunger for more. I do hope that, but I recognize that educational material on social media represents the the tiny, tiny fraction of what's there. So social homeostasis, I think, is a term that if people haven't already stamped into their mind, they should be stamped into their mind.

And and doctor kiti deserves credit for that. I don't I will say that. So you don't have to i've heard you say before you wrote in a review something again to social contact is either positive or negative when it's deficient or in access, which is I think what you are describing social homestay.

When we talk about the quality and quantity, um there's just in terms of contact, just amount of contact. There's such a thing as just the right amount. There's a thing as too little.

There's such a thing as too much. There's overcrowding, right? IT doesn't matter who IT IT could be your family, you could just sometimes it's like a lot your family.

you know you know the famous ROM dos quote, think you're enlightened. Go spend a weekend with your parents. No, no, just respect, mom.

Did I right? But I think with quality, IT matters so much like I was sort of thing before, you know, the same gear from the president or my partner. It's gonna feel very different to me whether that was a slight or um you know it's just it's relative to what is appropriate for our ring for our prior history relationships for you know the the environment context.

And so I think with social media in general and agree social media is great for a lot of things. I mean, I and I think that having a podcast like this accessible to the public makes research more sustainable. So I have a lot of things to say about science, communication and very, you know, grateful for.

But in terms of social media, think about the mutual investment. When you are interacting with someone on the social media, what are they investing in this connection? So if I put out a post about my vacation that is public, i'm investing point zero zero zero zero zero zero, zero zero zero one percent of my bean with to make contact with you.

You really mean and so it's scales up from them. If if you're making a voice call with someone, you're giving them at least most of your attention for the time that you're on the call. That a lot right, whether you know so so just thinking about the investment is another component is the real time component and then there's the the investment component.

Who who is IT coming from IT matters. If you're anonymous, I really I cannot tell what this means. You know, a compliment from or hate comment or a love comment from anonymous son, I don't do with this.

Know like I just literally don't know how to know he does that really doesn't really do anything for me because I don't know how to interpret IT. It's almost, you know, until without this other dimension that my brain is has evolved to look for, I think so that you know speculation. But I think social media is is Operating in a way that that is not ethology ical and not designed to make us feel Better.

It's just designed to make us want to use IT. And I think have a lot of this comes down to things that are relative. You know there's the famous um there's the famous observations of a monkey sees monkey get a cucumber is happy with a cucumber, but if a monkey sees the other, monkey get grape. Monkey wants grape, you know, you want, you want to keep up with the Jones you want.

What if you see someone else having something you suddenly IT feels like a loss that you don't have IT, that you didn't even think that of the thing that you need IT right? And so I think social media exposing you do a lot of things you don't you know that it's like this this premier space you didn't have. There's all these things you didn't know you are missing that you didn't needed this out on.

And so we have this whole project now we have two projects, one that's looking at social isolation and following what happens with social isolation across the time course to try to understand, is IT the amount of time? Or is that the amount of effort that you put into correcting that deficit that that makes you leads you to the giving up, you know kind of state change and another project that um is about the quality of social contact, specifically social exclusion. So a different kind of deficit.

You're with your other animals, but there's this this you know four animals have um um our cage mates and um three animals are on one side able to drink a chocolate k shake and the other animals is excluded and this one excluded animal will go up beginning the the divider you know look look frantic and you know exhibit lots of behaviors that we would associate in humans with fear of missing out, trying to reunite with the group, try to get the attention of the group, trying to get over there. A lot of attending looks frantic and studying what we think is actually going on. And so I think I think coming up with paradigms to try to probe social isolation and we don't even know what behaviors animals exhibit when they're longer, this is is a chAllenging field because there's no number of ever present.

There's no there's no script to follow and there's no trial structure. And so for a neuroscientist, neuroscience were trained to be rigorous about our statistics because of the dash nature of neural neutral activity. You know, how do we process things without a trial structure? How do we be statistically rigorous when the animal is just free floating, deciding whatever he wants to do? And so that is kind of the crucible that my lab is is working through right now to establish pipelines and techniques and ways to quantify social behaviors and peel off layers.

I love where your lab is headed, which just means we going to have to have you back on here again at some point in the future to get the answers to those questions that you're now addressing. I've long thought that we really know how we feel about somebody when something good happens to them there for them. And I never quite understood this at the level of mechanisms.

How could I? It's not more my life studies, but you know, I think that there's a natural sort of empathy, if one is a healthy, a MPA thic person, to seeing a member of our own species, and hopefully also to observing the members of other species experiencing some of discomfort. What we don't like that nor should we so another human is in emotional pain right um you know the whale or the cry of loss is like one that just I think for any person who is impatient tune is just like or an animal you hear an animal in pain like goodness.

I mean, i'm not here to diagnose opaque but if that doesn't evoke a at least some sort of response like he like what I wouldn't do to remove that. Pain that their pain is your pain empathy that seems like a very reflexive circuit, at least I would hope so. Um but when somebody experiences something positive, I think it's Normal and healthy to have A A graded set of responses. If it's somebody that we really love, we may not even know them.

We think yeah like you're you're just reflexively happy for them um somebody that we dislike, I think there's a more natural tenny like oh you know right as as suppose if that person were in pain, I would like to think that even if you wouldn't like them that you would think like that that socks i'm really sorry to hear that um so I feel like there's some cyma try in these ethic interactions that both empathy one has negative violence pain the other one as positive violence another member of our species or other species receiving reward and we can delight in that. I mean, I am almost embarrassed, admit how many fairy and order and raccoon account I follow, because I love seeing them eat. I love seeing a little hands of the record.

Is some great recon account, by the way. And I delighted IT like delighted that I want to see the races win. I don't know why. I just I love animals and so I suppose that's why.

Um so do you think that there that we are asiedu ally wired for this empathic attachment? Can we observe that in other animals? I realized this might not be squarely in the White house of what your lab is focusing on, but I think IT IT relates enough to the topics that we're recovering today that or just you know you'd like to speculate on what might be going on there.

Yeah I I can definitely speculate something that we think about a lot. But again, you know there some there are some level of this which is semantics um I think of empathy is being defined as being able to understand another animals emotion and also taking IT on. So I think something that's a little bit different than emotional contagion, right? I see a panic.

I'm in google pan. It's not the same thing as as as empathy. Um empathy often used in in sort of certain contacts like feeling sorry for someone and it's may be different if for feeling happy for someone.

And this is something I was just talking about with one of my graduate students the other day. Why is there is is there an a in in empathy for positive negative? Or is that just what we've studied is easier to studied this. So there's a number of you know we don't know the answer, but I guess another concept framework to put out there and not saying it's correct, it's I think just a good tool for debate. But um it's not so much that there's good people and bad people and that good people are empathy and bad people aren't uh so you quite so simple.

I I guess the way I think about IT is whether you view this other social agent is having aligned goals are agendas as you or are they adversarial? So if there, if they're in in your alliance, whatever that means, broadly defined versus adversarial, you would have a different feeling. And you know, you see this, I guess I was just, I was watching this.

Okay, this is just sort of over sharing. But this is a podcast, not a primary research journal. So I can just say things right? So I watched some flash TV. Sometimes these reality competition shows works like then you wrote the two best friends into elimination, and then they have, they have to eliminate each other. But you know, then the best friends and they you know and then it's basically mutually exclusive.

Either you can care about your friend and feel bad, not wanting to send them home, or you you kick in, you just you know you it's game time and you you, you compete. And so you can see different individuals wrestle ling with these two brain states and and how to like what to do. But they are essentially, my speculation is that viewing someone as a competitor and they're an adversary, they are standing the way of me getting what I want.

Empathy goes down. It's like inversely correlated to empathy if you are viewed as a competitor. So things that would contribute to you creating a model where in in a social agent, IT is an adversary as opposed to an a potential is really what it's going to come down to.

To the degree that you feel empathy, you know, like you, the second someone you realize someone's ought to get you, no empathy, no, no more empathy for this person who I just realized is out to get me or something like that or you know a in the case of being isolated for a long period time, you've learned to exist on your own now maybe everyone is your competitor adversary you know I none of you I really helping me do my day. I don't really need you. I really so so I mean this food or what you know, I think it's just becomes different um when you're part of an ecosystem and you realized that you know there's consequences and there's there's every action that you take, you know every active altruism would be recognized.

And you know there there's a there's some score being kept in your when you're part of a society and um and then when you're when you're not, there's known there's there's none of that. And so I think the degree of what you're integrated in society, um it's almost like the extra cellular matrix. You know this is really this is out there analogy.

But you know, when you think about synapse is being made connections between people, there's also all the support material that facilitate certain patterns and certain connections from happening or not happening. And and I think that's it's it's stuff that we haven't quantified yet, but IT doesn't. I think those things should be studied.

Years ago I worked with at rise kids and in a fair number of them had just arrived from a region of the world that had undergone dramatic sociopolitical um evolution um and change and IT was remarkable because we would put out a tray d of food to eat and in the the format was everyone would serve themselves and then you could go get more food if if everyone finished and a couple of these kids that have come from these very deprived environments would just take more than their their share IT was clear that by taking that other kids we're gonna get any and and I remember telling them, listen, we all have to eat more less equal parts and then can there is more, we can get more and um i'll never forget this kid's response.

He just turned me. He said, you can't hit us and I said, that's true. I can't hit unis and he said, so i'm just gonna take as much as I want. And this took several weeks actually to work out, right? Because, of course, I would never hit him.

And everyone's is adversary.

Everyone's is adversary and IT was remarkable to see the evolution of these kids across that he was about three and a half weeks at which point they actually became incredibly um good at sharing um but IT IT took a lot of work IT was almost as if even though they knew more trace of food could arrive yeah i'm not limitless but there was there was an abundance of food yeah in the moment they they were solving for that short in moment and and he will tell you about human beings capable of speech and expression of emotion that at a and he understood the fundamental rule, which was, I couldn't hit him. Therefore he could basically do what he wanted without that consequence. The main .

consequence, huge space.

right? right? exactly. And and I remember, you know, I was I was so striking and i'll never forget that and the evolution to a different, more um altruistic state was wonderful, especially because of what I think what I did for him.

But but i'll never forget thinking this is a human being who is essentially functioning like an animal, like an animal. And I A bulldog, massive, and he was kind of other dogs, but if there were unattended to toys at the dog park, he was gna pick him up and he put him right in front of himself. And is this was downstair egg. And to sit with the rain front of and i'm like cost still, you're not going to play with all those toys, but if another dog came and to anyone who you're sit in front of them, but another dog would come and trying and take one of those toys and he would hear these giant t and he would just down and dry back.

And so IT seems that there are these very primitive circuits about resource allocation and protection of resources, that in the absence of understanding that there's a much bigger landscape, like cosell eventually figured out like tags of phone game, although most dogs can play dog with, there are a few that could is in any bound ball dog, just the neck like this. But know, to see this in a human being was just so striking. I just as you're describing, this is like this adversary versus a neutral versus a friend is is just so striking and it's gotto be know that that the brain as complex as IT is i've often wondered, and our colleague martis master once said, that circuits in the brain um can broadly be divided into these sorts of circuits into yum yum and mh right, which is far too simply list c right but who might argue with the great mark boyster um and i'm not going to but it's sort of interesting we sort of been our responses into yes, okay, let's CoOperate or yes.

let's CoOperate zing .

baLance yeah or or no way no chance like mine versus like and you know as complex as i'd like to think the brain is and we are I mean, maybe when IT comes down to behaviors and how we interpret input in our decision making. Um maybe it's really all about feelings of safety and feelings of related this yeah I .

think it's also about the area experiential statistics that you have been exposed to. So this this boy who says you haven't take all this book because you can hit me, I mean, we don't know, but the the picture that grows out of my imagination is the boys had a lot of experiences of people hitting them, a lot of experiences of not enough food and not a lot of experiences of strangers being nice to them.

You know, like not a lot of people that you could trust. That's that's experimental statistics that would fit this model. Someone like like you who's in in being like, oh, no, there's more for i'm going to give you guys more food for free, you know, i'm going to give you even more food for, you know, the experience of statistics are you've come from a world of abundance with people are general, you know, generosity being, you've learn, being generous can make you have a life long friend.

And all these amazing opportunities that make your life that food is never. Again, it's about the relationships because that's your experiences, statistics. And so I think this is such a profound concept about about news, science and the brain, about our social structures and how they form what makes a structure a galitch an or dsp tic.

We're right like how how can we as individuals take a structure that is is one format, let's says the spot hierarchy and evolve IT to something that's more egalitarian? And um what what are the the the levers and what are the premier spaces that we can pull on? And I think these are questions that, I mean, it's hard to think of what could be more important.

But that perspective of thinking about from experiences, statistics, I think, really supports, you know, the need of of of diversity. You haven't bringing in people to academy who had very different experiences, experiences, statistics, different biases of what they gone to think is interesting to work on and study, and obviously in every every sector of our society. So I think how can we get more diverse sets of experiences represented at each decision making body that really matters.

Yeah, i'm into that. And also to be able to understand that differences in background experience require that we we the earlier you mentioned theory of mind, this ability to get into the mind set of others and in sort of assume more presume certain mindsets in order to hopefully create a more benevolent environment for everybody.

You know IT requires you know realizing that some people's social interactions are you know have been terrible or traumatic or IT requires a departure himself. Essentially IT requires this empathy or something like empathy um in all directions, right? I mean all directions that requires that everyone at least make some effort to try and to understand that. I do wonder and maybe someone would put on the comments on youtube and maybe you're aware k of whether not kids are being trained in that beautiful period of time of life where a neuroplasticity is so robust although does continue to the authorized life span, IT is especially robust early in life um to be in a healthy way impac ally attuned to be able to have theory of mind, more robust theory of mind .

yeah so I think it's it's really I mean, i'm i'm so i'm a parent I have two kids that are in public school and think their public schools raided. You know it's fine but we and but but at the school they definitely do get education about more holistic health and emotional mal regulation I think and and considering others, um that's been that is a big focus of the school and I think that's actually really important.

I mean, you know again, i'm i'm super biased from from my upbringing, but my kids are going to learn math whenever it's time to learn the that they will learn IT whenever they needed and whenever they need IT. They'll n IT a couple of a couple weeks and figure out to do the thing. And most of the things that yarn, you're going to forget them and then have to relearn them.

So what are the things that you're gonna need to know no matter what you choose to do? And I think regulating your own emotions in and and engaging other individuals in a healthy, sustainable way that you know. And I mean sustainable in terms of the longevity of the relationships.

And I think those are the things that end up really mattering. So I think um also this question about exposure to abundance in scarcity is really interesting to I mean, I don't know that the direction we want to go into. So please yeah well.

I think you know this you know sort sounds sort of new age when I say you know the abundance mindset, right um I mean you see this in people who are like a recently divorced or newly single for whatever reason.

Is the world a place where like finding partnership is is relatively straight forward with some work involved? Where is IT like there's only one person on the planet for you and they might be dead already, right? Like is there if someone else's business takes off, maybe someone you to college or high school with where their lab is doing really well, you're seeing them tremendously successful that maybe they made a hundred million dollars in in a in a company acquisition. Do you immediately feel like, oh, those are resources that I don't have even though i'm not in that business? Or do you see that as well that there must be a lot of money out there that that people could earn and potentially make?

I really prescribe and believe in this abundance versus scarcity mindset framework. Um I think there's absolutes like the example we just talk about the kid you there's just not food. There's scarcity of food.

Fact you know of course, there are individuals that experience scarcity of various different needs, but many of us, we reach a threal of abundance, and then IT becomes relative. We have everything we absolutely physiologically need if we're not comparing ourselves to anyone else. But then once we will enter the social arena, comparison is essential.

Why do we compare ourselves to others? It's it's in rain. Because social status is something that we need to attend to.

A large part of our our brain is devoted to representing our relative social rank, what's our places, social network, what's the dynamic? How do we fit in to the social landscape? And comparison, I think, is just a way to do that.

That's that's been evolutionary conserved, perhaps for less of a good purpose at this point, because so many of our basic survival needs are met for the large majority of of humans on the planet today, not for everybody, of course, but so yet, what is the percentage of humans who feel they have everything that they desire? How many people feel like they don't want for anything? And you know, it's interesting because having things doesn't make you have an abundance mindset. Having abundance does not is not sufficient to give you the mindset of abundance.

That's such an important statement. I mean, just IT, I don't think they could be retained enough. Um you've studied social rank. Uh people hear social rank and hierarchy and I have to guess that at least some neurons in there are miglia and other areas of the brain get buzzing. Because as soon as people hear social rank, they, I think naturally start well.

Where am I in the social rank and how do I feel about how that rank is, you know, established and and all sorts of interesting and important questions. Um some people get very angry that there are billionaire on this planet, especially given that in most major cities you don't have to go very far to see people who have very limited resources. So social rank is something that um I think exists in every little nish you know at work and maybe even in the family the social rank.

I have a sibling I remember um who got more of a of a piece of cake like even a slight difference in that you know was something that my older sibling would point out because he was more effective at getting in the slightly larger PC cake because I was until I was big enough to defend. For myself and my friends with larger sibling pools in their family, IT was especially competitive. And if you ve ever gone to a meal with somebody had a lot of siblings, different resource allocation methods, then if they were an only child versus one sibling there there is a variation here.

I'm generalizing but um but yeah let's talk about social rank. What do we know about how social rank is organized in the brain, how we perceive our own social ranking? And um yeah the what's the modern science on this stuff? I find IT fascinating. Um i'm not scared of any topic, almost any topic. And I think this is one that that affects us all.

Yeah I mean, i'll first say that social rank is something very specific to a certain type of that assumes all in the your hierarchy which sometimes forms but often times there are different type of hierarchy that are flatter or more and more face. It's not really clear who's who's the alpha on the playground, I don't know there there's this click here, they be yama. It's dynamic.

It's not always organized such. But um if you get animals into a sort of small space, you will see in many species, especially with in the males forming a linear herky. And um we wanted to explore this.

And so I think one of the biggest chAllenges were study social rank, and this is something we've struggled with as well, is how do you control for the individual identity verses the um the actual rank? So what I mean by this is let's say there's a study that says um that you neons in a turn brain region fire to animals of different ranks according to the right fire. Most of the alpha less, less, less, less down to the rank of does that does that tells that this brain region in code, social rank, maybe in a loose sense.

And i'm sure that when rank issues come up, a lot of the brain lights up for different, different reasons. But for example, let's say, the amygdala would respond more to the alpha, maybe because IT encode social rank, but maybe also because whoever is the dominant is the one whose most likely to have consequences. And so all of my interactions with the alpha are relatively high consequence.

And so i'm sort of stress out whatever i'm talking the help of the attention. And you know, you remember all the interactions you have with your boss more so than you know someone else. There is an attention hierarchy supporting its attend border dominance.

And so there's it's almost hard to make this comparison because it's not all that like the the queen experiment, which we are still trying to do. It's it's difficult to do. The perfect experiment would be if you take an individual and change their rank.

So for example, i'd like to use this example with bar obama. So just indulge me. I know that this is from a well go, but once upon a time I met barack obama for a very brief moment when he was president.

And and maybe there is some reasons that light up, oh, wow, you know, there's the book, obama, lush, president now. But if they are identity neons once he was no longer president, if I was to be presented with brock obama, then they would still fire. If they were ranked neons, then maybe after he was no longer president, adjust these neon fire to whoever is president now.

And so I think that experiment is very difficult to do and has not been done, but we're working on that right now. Um in uh uh another experiment where we take animals and their living in groups a and we rank them all and then we rehouse them, so everybody has a rank that they start with. Then we put all the office together, put all the bees together, it's seta so that everybody forms a new rank. Then you have animals that went up rank, went down data rank or state the same for every group. And so that's something that we're looking at right now.

So initially you take a pool of animals. And then let's say you get your number one, two, three, four just for sake of simplicity. Let's say I take the number four lowest in that ah but now I make them the top of a new .

highlight that's right. Got IT. And so it's really preliminary and we'll see what happens, but we're investigating IT. IT seems that when you take alfas intermediates or supporting ate and put them together to new harkers, IT takes them different amounts of time and the dynamic are very different, informing the new hierarchy. And so in any kind of predictable .

way that are willing to share is too early.

I think it's too early, but i'll just I guess, IT seems like the the intermediate might be taking the longest amount of time to form the they don't know where .

they sit and they .

were flexible or something. Where's the dominant? They are going to do IT out.

And then we're we're the deficit's quick. The fight doesn't laugh at long. So borders, you know, know, we have to still observe.

This is all still, you know, being will see if everything replicate, but certainly the dynamics are different, what the exact read outs know. We're working on what the features are, what key features to to see. But it's kind of uncanny because these are genetically and brand animals that are all housing.

This should be all everyone should be the same theoretically. But this makes me think that during certain developmental periods, rank is shaping your long lasting development. I think it's a similar phenomenon perhaps to the older child, Younger child phenomenon where you know, if you're the all this, you go into the world that you have lots of different rules, you might be the bottom, you know you're going to plan sports teams and being different classes.

And I always but the the the leadership desires lash potential scale seems to be correlated in a very non significant know that the number of presidents that off and oldest or only just the type of thing. It's a loose correlation and there's a lot of other reasons why might not be behavioral, but there's sort of you know fluffy, fluffy relations about that. I think there's something to IT though um when lustily happening your this this becomes your most familiar state of assuming a certain role and that attracts take deepens with more time spent there.

I find that fascinating. I've also observed, and I think i've seen a few papers on, I don't know how rigorous these papers are the Youngest, or let you say not oldest siblings. Here we're setting a side single children, they don't have any siblings but the Youngest siblings do tend to quote break the mold more in terms of social and cultural norms of the family.

They they venture further in terms of um experiences and value systems they've often seen as having had fewer constraint than the older sibling, which may may not be true um but that the Youngest siblings often will take on risk. Yeah that older siblings won't yeah yeah and that certain ly been my option. I mean Younger Younger brother of a older sister but and but then there was times in our childhood where he was out of the house, and I was at home just with my mom.

So, so that changes things. But, and this is very dynamic. I realized we are playing here and in a space. But I find social rank stuff to be resting. I grew up in a big pack of mostly boys um that's just kind of have worked out in my nephew d um at the time um and IT was very interesting because IT was very clear I was a dynamic hierarch where if we were skateboarding, certain kids were alf if we were playing soccer, other kids were alf if we were doing anything artistic um if there was a going to geeky knowledge and and nerdy stuff um you then might have been somebody else who had the knowledge and had the information that people wanted so I think dynamic hiero's are really interesting and I think get us out of that sort of more standard alpha like kind of chest beating, telling your own what to do dictor al model.

I mean, and this is now fully out of any science landed into speculation, opinion land. But I think that type of structure, structure where when you're doing different tasks, different individuals become the alpha of the leader because it's based on competence is very healthy.

I think structures where you have locked down, this is this is a herky where someone's the boss of you because of this one skills, but there's all these other skills that they're not as they're not the period, you know, they don't don't out rank you at. And and so how do you work all of that out? And so I think it's also something about keeping score like what is what is the rank, right? And so we did this experiment when we designed a task.

Um animals are trained that A Q predicts reward delivery. Only one animal can get at a time. It's just a very narrow place. So if one animal is getting you can get IT, then um we would have four animals that are cage mates for my site are cage mates, and we would have two of them do get out at each point and that we know the ranks. The ranks are stable.

They have a rank one, two, three, four in the cage, and everybody does a around Robin ones versus choose ones versus three to do around Robin this reward competition task, their food deprived, you know. And we we present rewards what the what happens. And so the born to win some of the times, even their dominance win more.

Or you know, they they consistently win more. And we found that prefrontal cortical neons, you could represent very stability and decode which animal was dominant flat a regardless of the trial. And then when you looked at whether we could decode competitive success, meaning who is gonna in that next trial, so there's a new trial every thirty or forty seconds. And so but thirty seconds before, which is as far we can measure because they then were like kind of the previous trial as soon as the last trial and even before the next trial. And you can predict, above chance so significantly, which animals going to win the next trial.

just based on the firing pattern, a prefrontal courter. So you can predict winners and losers. You can predict and understand where they are in the higher chy as well, based on the activation of neurons prior to the battle. That's like recording from the byo logic， like the frontal cortex of two let's take business competitor martial arts competitors. And you can predict who who's going to win based on the pattern of firing in the brain to prior to the competition.

That's right. And so um that suggests all sorts of things. Number one, IT doesn't mean these competitions are independent.

There's something about the state of the animal. And when we looked at is IT just whoever won the previous trial that did not account for. And so um I thought this was really interesting. But when you look at the decoding accuracy for dominance version supports about who will win the next trial for dominant IT stays pretty flat IT just has to do with I think this is my speculation of our data um that you know they they either are engaged or not engaged the ordinate the decoding accuracy is that is above is above chance. But then IT shoots up somewhere around closer to the key presentation.

And so my speculation about that is that the sub borne are looking at the dominance they are the dominant doesn't look like there IT doesn't like they going go for IT oks like me away. It's not like they're both calling out for every time. It's it's a calculation which trials oh, he's not being intention.

You know it's like when you're driving in traffic and you're trying to find the moment to cut over and you're waiting for the person who was like testing and there's there a big space and everybody just getting in here, you know you can just see you're like looking for clues about the state of love, you know of competition and and then the dominance. They are not looking at this point. They're just doing whatever they feel like doing.

It's like there's I think there's that one scene in mad men where something happened in the work environment and and IT was clear, someone's account didn't sell or something didn't work out for one person verse to the other and I think one of the character says to don rapper, who's clearly one of the alpha and network environment by virtue of role and position, says, no, I sometimes think about the way that you blank, blank, blank bank and he goes on this brief tie rate about how upset he was in.

And draper says, I don't think about you at all. And then the elevator, I believe, closes and IT really cemented his status in the office as somebody who is really not paying much attention to what other people are doing. He's just making decisions according to what's gonna best for the fermin in some cases for himself, in some cases both. So I think that essentially what you're talking about yeah.

I think it's um it's kind of the nature of the structure. That's what makes you the alpha is you you have you have other things that are occupying your attention and your visionary status. Hopefully, if you are a productive, successful of the and for a sustainable you know group and then everyone else is they don't they don't need to have the big picture.

You know, it's becomes the reinforcement schedules different. I'm just looking for a validation and playing my role. Okay, it's A A very different mindset. I think you know as a scientist, when you're a training, sometimes you're A A supporting member on a team where you're getting instruction, something telling you what to do. This is the moment when you get your own project and maybe you're working myself may be there's no one to command, but no one's telling you what to do.

That is to me, one of the biggest the rush holds to step over when you're becoming a scientist is our investigator is the first time where you just do something and like try and experiment, no one told you to do and IT feels super weird that feels like they're sneaking around. There's something. And and then you know, I think I think in today's medders ship chain, sometimes that that happens too late. I think if we could have that experience happened earlier, um I think that would only be good for for the future of research.

I agree. I was very fortunate that my graduate advisor told me, look, i've onna help you but i'm going to have two kids while you're in the lab and not to me around a lot you you have to figure out don't burn the lab down.

Don't kill yourself with any of the poisonous in the lab and the my postdoc advisor um the late and great benevolence as um largely treated the post oxes as junior professors from in the release stage and I remember thinking he can control the experiments i'm gonna this is up to me and he a great number of us. Who are training with him at that time, went on to have our own lab. So I think um there's really something important to that model. And of course, we're discussing the research field, but this could be exported any number of different fields because he went those mentors were essentially training us to do was to um to assume the role that we would eventually have as supposed to be subordinate. Um do you watch chip empire?

So actually um just this week yes yesterday and the day before or before this uh and post to interview who worked with the chance on china empire, visited an interviewing in my lab and talked about this work so I have not seen him embed is the very top of my to do so good and .

I want to spend the next twenty years talking about IT but you see all sorts of interesting behavior.

Very resent than human behavior or higher keys E S but also um altruistic behavior um alope thic grooming ing I mean in in chip culture um as i've learned from the show and assuming to accurate that who groom who is very important um and there's all sorts of interesting um manuvers that sub borden tes make and there's all sorts of interesting displays of vigor that the alpha makes to remind people that they are the alpha. And then as they age or make mistakes of judgment, the subordinate also will fain difference. They're be like, oh yeah, you're the alpha.

You're really tough and secretly they're plotted to replace the alpha. So whether I were talking about a scene from mad men or were talking about tim campfire, we're talking about researcher laboratories um or any other landscape kindergarten. I think these circuits are active in all of us. And the sooner that we um acknowledge those in trying find ones that generalized to the the goodness of as many members as possible, we're not doing our task. But clearly you're doing the task.

So okay, social rank is something that we need to acknowledge, no doubt um which actually leads me to what might seem like a desperate topic but um one that I know we're both very interested in and that you're focusing on now, which is psychiatric because one of the interesting things about psychiatrically is their capacity to increase neal plasticity um but also some of the psychedelics and I realize m dma is not a classic psychodeviant, but they are classified as in atheists. They increase empathy for self and others so um what are you looking into a psychodeviant s which psychodeviant and um yeah what brought you to the study of psychodeviant? And by the way, i've done participated in clinical because people will wonder I have participated in clinical trials for Sullivan and md ma.

I don't recommend people do psychiatric reap ally. I do think they hold great promise for the treatment of depression and trauma, but people need to be careful. They're certain people who could not and should not take psychiatrically, because that would be genuinely unsafe for them psychologically, especially Young people. So there is my discount imer. And but they are .

fascinating compounds. So I guess i've always been interested in psychodeviant. S, I think I wrote my undergraduate thesis about, it's just about hallucinations produced by psychodeviant psychotic. C breaks and rem sleep and schizophrenia. Y, I just comparing what is the common thread when our brain creates a reality that is not objectively there.

And psychology, of course, is a way that we can experience that and remember IT and recall in a way it's very difficult with and sleep and and sometimes with psychotic c breaks. Um obviously schizo any is not something that you can transiently give yourself and have that experience. So I think having the ability to move into other brain states is what makes IT so attractive.

I think the other component is the the plasticity. You can you can have an experience. And perhaps the first hand experience is you have an epiphany.

Y that you take with you its life changing, and you know, your life habits are completely different for a long lasting way after the singular experience is is kind of one of the things that makes IT so different from all of the other. They are petite treatments that we've got or most of the other ones, I say. Um and so for me right now, there's a lot of work going on.

The expLoring psychology is a therapy for various different conditions, disease states. I think that's great. I think it's really important work. I'm glad a lot is being done on that.

I think my focus is, is to turn over some rocks that might not have been turned over yet and just to get really down at a quantitative, rigorous mathematical level of what is a holus. For example, when I ask this question, what is a holus nation? I'm interested in the actual cellular mechanisms.

Are we just you know, we think about neurons having signal to noise and new modulation as changing that? Are we just changing the signal to noise ratio and then pattern, completing all the noise and that's what a pollution ation is. We just, you know take that we're just reinterpreting noise and and putting sort of existing maps, everything's fitting to an existing moder map that we've already got that appears as some hallucination or is you know maybe just you have to be helluland ation.

This also obviously sub vous different thresholds of the psychedelic experience um but all these clinical statement is human self reported um qualitative descriptions of the psychedelic experience. Things like be having just more positive outlook, being uniting one itself and other like a sort of you know clarity of the world, more lybia and thoughts, more flexible thoughts. We are trying to just create actual ways to test them.

So for example, this idea about what is what is going on in your mind when you when you're having a psychotic experience, all of these different states might feel more label um IT maybe the transition probabilities between different brain states of happy, sad, your nostalgia, know may just all loser. And so you can access everything because the transition probabilities are just high. Another possibility is that, and maybe it's those dependent at a certain dose, you go into another brain state.

And so previously we've done in the same project that was just telling about rank we were recording for prefer cortical neurons and looking at all the behaviors. And so the behaviors for representing social rank, we don't know what they are. So we use computer vision to extract a bunch of behavior of motives, and then try to understand what's the best model that would predict, you know, what the animal is going to do next, not just wins and losses, but all the subtle gestures.

Are we going to fight? Are we going to give IT up? Are we going to back off and predict the behaviors from profound to cortical activity? And the best model that we found was something called ahead and markova model, which essentially just means that there are hidden states.

You might think of them as moods. You might give them some other name, but all all use moods loosely. It's not perfect but um that's kind of one way that helps me think about hidden states where you have certain statistics of behaviors that you would produce IT.

If i'm sad, there's certain things i'm going to do. It's a different statistics and when i'm happy, different probability of going surfing. If i'm sad or happy here, you know things like that.

So we basically found that there are a certain number of hidden states. And so if you are on psychiatry with that change, the number of states or just the transitions between them. We also found in our profit cortical representation that there's a certain distance of the representation of self and other in this you know dimensionality reduced activity space.

So for mumbo jumbo, that just means there's a representation of self in other. There are some quantifiable distance in in abstract you know terms in the brain, and we can quantify if those representations get closer together and emerge self first is others. So that's something that we would want we would be looking for if you are putting psychology on.

These are questions that i'm interested in that are under construction. So right now, we're recording from animals while we're giving them so lyde in using neural pixel recordings. So we're according thousands of neurons um in part of the cortex and other parts of cortex because the shake is for lots of places and looking at how a animals respond in a conflict task.

So there's there's trials where there's A Q that pretis reward, A Q that pretis shock. Then there's some trials where both queues are presented and both outcomes are presented. And the reason for this conflict trial is that actually if you give you know moderate to low doses of Sullivan or most drugs, onest ly animals can do this.

You know, even on lots of different drugs, most people can still eat food and avoid getting hit by this truck. I mean, their exceptions, of course. But generally speaking, you know, there's a lot of different brain stats where you can still do these essential functions pretty robustly.

But it's about what happens in the more ambiguous zone, what happens when there is a conflict and what do you do? How do you when it's a little gray? I think that when you can see a shift in violence assignment, so that's something that we've been looking for and trying to see if um you know in clinical studies, they're expLoring set and setting um as maybe the factors that have in the past historically given very unpredictable outcomes for psychodeviant therapies.

Um it's possible that is set in settle is also possible that there is individual variability. It's possible that there are biomarkers that can predict which individuals would be well suit for this type of therapy. And so those are also things that were interested in.

I find this so fascinating and I I just want to apple laud you again for taking on these hard questions. These are fairly high level questions. Certainly there's a lot of uh clinical trials expLoring psychedelics like suicide and in the rule and treating mental health.

And there's at the same time um a real dearth of studies expLoring mechanistically how these compounds are working. I mean, I do wana tip my hatch. All the folks that have explored dendritic changes and seller changes in the level of neurons and on and on.

But in terms of these and like higher level states of self force versus other recognition in psychiatrically, you that those are tough questions that need to be addressed mechanistically and it's clear you're doing that. Um I I think this um this notion that you're testing of whether not psychiatric reveal more accessibility or liability as you described IT between different states like, oh wow, I can actually move from sad to happy. There's there's a lot for that and you can experience that.

I supposed to just being told that when you're feeling sad, feel your the field of psychology of especially pop psychology is in a real crisis right now, in my opinion, because we're told to feel our feelings, but they were also told to not react our feelings, which sounds great. But if those feelings get intense enough, that's very hard for most people to do. So it's feel your feelings but don't stay with that.

You know what? There's a cathartic model like feel your feelings and and get them out screaming and it's Better. And then there's the the no no, the more you engage in neural pathway, the stronger that moral pathway gets.

And there four years, just going to feel more anger. There's a lot of conflict right now in terms of the popular psychology version of this as where as the clinical fields, I think of an understanding that hasn't been translated. I think one other thing about psychology x that is interesting is that the transitions into states is also more label.

I give you start feeling a little sad, know there's the potential to feel very, very sad and to go to a state of sadness of of an intensity of ve never experienced which by the way, could be theraputics beneficial. Uh, I think there's some evidence for that provided there's adequate support before, during and after those sessions. Um but I think most people feel when they're not on psychiatry, ics will feel emotions that are uncomfortable and will do all sorts of things to try and avoid those emotions.

So I am not speaking as the clinic here, but I just again, I think the the range and specificity of questions that you are asking about psychodeviant, I find so exciting. Another reason I say that we want to have you back to to discuss those findings when when they come out. Let's talk a little bit about you.

Okay.

i've known you for a while, but to be honey, I think this is the the longest conversation we've ever had, which is one of the reasons I love doing this podcast. I get to sit down with colleagues and have intellectual slash other conversations of of substantial debt that I wouldn't have the opportunity to have elsewhere. I know enough about you, however, to know that um you've been involved in various things.

Um I can say preferable the science but you have other interest as well as I recall um you have been a yoga instructor or or you've been involved in the uh kind of wellness fitness uh community industry, tell us about that. And then I also curious about um how you structure your day, your routines given that you're apparently to Young children. You run a very large laboratory Operating at the very highest level and of course you value important things like relationships and relationships to self and health and all these sorts of things. So not to make IT too open ended, but and like tell us tell us of your interest in and of your relationship to wellness and fitness .

and well being. Yeah, I guess I think you know everybody comes to their they're calling in in some what feels like a path that you couldn't predict. But when you look at IT outside, I guess both of my parents are professor or doesn't look super surprising that i'm a professor, but that's not how I felt to me when I was in high school.

I was a total rebel. I just drew parties and my house when my parents were there. Sorry, everybody, listen. It's not I don't recommend that.

But I just cared about I just cared about having fun and sports and um I think school wasn't maybe chAllenging enough for me at that time. I didn't necessarily recognize that that was what I was. But i've always enjoyed being really active and that's what makes me feel good.

As I definitely agree with stuff you've set on your podcast about having exercise routine in the morning that really influences the rest of your day. I didn't always exercise in the morning of different phases. But yeah after I was an undergrad I took some time to travel around australia, backpack around australia, live in some very remote places, spend some time living in a tent, then I was a yoga structure.

Um then I I went to grad school in the area. I had a very active uh hobby of I was the semi professional breakdancer is a very break dancing. Ah yes, we did um you know half time shows or I get typically third quarter time out shows at oracle stadium for the golden state warriors. I was the one girl who could do in male so they would .

use me footage .

and there's some know very mediocre footage of me break dancing and I was just really into IT but I think that's where my worklife baLance passion comes from. I talk about IT a lot. I think about you a lot.

And people say to me all the time, well, you, is this really true? Why do you, why do you preach all this worklife about stuff when you know, you must have been a alcohol at some point in your life? And I think, you know, when I was Younger, I definitely didn't like the idea that you had to only be one thing.

I wanted to be so many things I couldn't decide. IT was a huge chance. I was going to be a writer.

I was gonna a yoga ductor. I was gonna. I never really thought I was going to a professior answer.

I just wasn't good enough. And there's not career to be made from dancing really. It's very difficult. But you know had a lot of other interests. And I wanted to prove I don't know who I wanted to prove IT to, I think myself at first.

And then eventually IT made me maybe feel like I should, may be proved to everyone that you can have a very whole life and not sacrifice everything you don't have to choose between family and career or personal life. You can have them all. You just have to decide that is a priority and own that and make those choices on a daily basis and comes under time management.

And so it's been a very even though that looks like, oh, OK likes to have fun and how well as other holidays, it's it's important because I think that we need more role models in, especially in academic science, where people bring their whole selves to their job. And even though your job is a very specific thing um because you have a role and enter and you know I suppose that mental a printed ship relationship as evolves, then there's a lots of comes about that too in academia. I still think ultimately when when I was working in someone else lab and I definitely looked up to them, they were the role model.

Obviously, i'm looking at, yes, they are science. I'm looking at how they make this all work. How are you doing this? How how do they live their lives and how do they approach balancing at all? And so I guess I just wanted to put some more data points on on the score board where people having lots of hobby and other non work activities while still making meaningful contributions and IT doesn't make you less of a few less of a scientist or less of a person because you're a whole human.

If anything, perhaps that makes people Better. Scientists, yeah, did your exploration of of yoga and we're break dancing in form? Anything about your your researcher was IT really about resetting, uh, your mind and body in healthy ways so that you could return to the law, feeling excited about returning to the law. I think .

i've always of the minds where sometimes go well in a certain arena and it's IT doesn't feel good to have all your eggs in that basket. Stuff goes wrong. Sometimes experiment, doing work.

Sometimes you find something that you lose the whole day. So you know, bad news happens in the lab. And um I think just want to diversify your portfolios so that your happiness portfolios is not entirely based on your accomplishments at work.

Um I think we just want to have more elements. And the same thing goes for, you know, at one point when I was really into dancing, I got a very serious injury, and IT took this huge part of my life away from me, and so glad had work. They gotta have something I can do else.

And I just think having a lot of different parts of your life make you more flexible, more creative, more awake, more engaged. And you know, when I don't I definitely have been a work cohosh when I was a post talk in a system professor period, definitely did not make enough time for myself to have A A richer, a rich personal life at certain points. And very quickly I just wither away into a shell of a human, a shell empty shell of a the person I used to be.

And it's notice everybody can feel that you can't pretend you know, everyone that works with you fears IT eventually. And so I think that's a big thing. And so as i've taken feedback from my anonymous lab surveys and other other forms of feedback and just reflecting, it's clear, you know, taking your lifestyle and having agency over designing your lifestyle to be ideal for you is super important.

So a typical day for me might look like, um okay, the last work day and say I will go up actually so there was early high tides. I've got to wake up in the dark pack of my boss goes surfing and then get home before serf see my friends in the water. And I think surfing is a lot of things.

It's exercise, it's a cold plunge, it's photons. Some of your favorite things, maybe a little bit, meditate, maybe some social community then, and you know, go every time at the same day. So there's the same, prepare people.

Then I go home, make the kids or snacks before drop him off at school. Then I got a lab and then run lab meeting and have meetings. Most of my day when i'm at work is spent meeting with people drawing on a White power, mostly meeting with my chinese um is what i'd like to spend most of my time on. Of course, there's other stuff that gets in the next like administrative, whatever, and then come home at a pretty early hour, pick up my kids, make dinner and then GTA sleep of early, kind of boring these days that spent a good day.

Sounds exciting to me. Sounds exciting to me. I think if one more to stay up late, then one feel, feel sleep deprived.

If they wake up early. If you wake up late, you're missing out on the early morning sunrise, the serve, all of that i've never served. I actually once I padded out once when I was in college and there was no surf.

So I pedal back in, but keep hearing about this surfing thing. And people seem to love IT. As one of my concerns is that if you fall in love with that, you're going to spend a lot of time out in the ocean.

Clearly it's all serving you well and um must be wonderful to be a child in your home. I can imagine how much fun IT is and how interesting IT is. Um you mention several times a mentorship and trainees and it's clear that reshaping the landscape of science for the next generation coming up with something that's a real passion to you.

Um I take great. Uh pleasure in asking this because um you know IT wasn't long ago that you and I were graduate students and post dogs are more or less the same vintage, right? And as is the case, people retire, people die.

This is the reality of life and people move up up the ranks uh as you have. Um so what are some of the things that you're most passion about in terms of shaping the future of science um in particular research science but maybe more broadly? And um what are you doing .

about IT? I think that so the academic culture has evolved and and I guess I should start by just saying first, I as I was driving over here is just beautiful drive. And i'm just thinking, IT is so cool that we get to do this for a living.

Isn't IT amazing that studying, whatever I find interesting to me, is something that I can, you know, have a secure job for, and then just thinking about cool ideas and directions and talking about IT stuff that I would do for free is is really my job. And I I just am so grateful to have that. And um I think there are a lot of beautiful size of academia that sometimes don't get the air time that they deserve.

And of course, as a lot of dooming gloom, there always has been when I was a grade student, there's lots of dooming gloom and the either there's plenty now um I think perhaps IT is become a little bit more dire um the plight of academia right now, uh, there's been a nationwide drop of postdocs in general. There's just a mx accident away from academia to industry. And I think that reflects the changing environment then.

So um I guess when I was a graduate student, I had this book in my destroyer called advice for investigate and my remona hall, which is a great book. It's then it's a quick read. It's got to win sc anees some important insights, I think um also a lot of method.

I very much glaze zing work code lic tendencies. And there was definitely a picture of a scientist. This was the way to succeed.

Other options not really offered and and I really struggled that I had a lot of impostor syndrome coming up through. I an could someone asked me, when did I I stop having a positive room? I think maybe twenty, twenty one.

You know, very recently, I think I spent twenty years of my career having a posture. Stm, wondering that was good enough if I was to make IT I can do I have what IT takes and constantly doubting and questioning IT. And I think that IT would have been nice to to to not feel so alone at that period of of my career.

Um so I think some of the things that were described in this original book, um we're really important for academic research to be born as a thing like how do we make this be a thing that you can get paid for? You know, how do we make this be a job that people get to have? And then at this point, I think most people would agree we need science.

Science is important. We want to, we want to. We benefit from science. Um and I think at this point, it's not so clear that we need to lead them as much as we did before.

It's not um we're we're looking at a crumbling academic culture where where we're struggling to retain people. And you know that it's it's not a great sustainable dama. I think trainees are not getting compensated well enough or treated treated well enough that it's an attractive choice. And so I think we need to sort of make a change and nothing wrong necessarily about about the intentions that were set hundreds of years ago, but things change in where where we are now and things are changing very quickly. So um I I guess I get to make one of my child hod dreams, which is to write a book come true um in um I get in in one of the benefits of social media.

I did have a tweet kind of you know just sort of spontaneously ranting about about how this book is problematic and very much genomatica and maybe we need another book for other types of people um and that makes people feel more included um and so and this tweet went around and I thought I didn't expect I didn't expect anything to come of this just you know living my daily life and then my D M. Something had literary agents and a book deal and then okay, i'm now i'm reading this book and so am I made me about halfway through, but I think the the goal of the book, I I don't really have time for this project, to be honest but it's such an important project to me. Um I think that I I anna, see academia be a one of the healthiest places.

Why is the second only to the military in the pervasive veness of sexual misconduct? And you know things like, yeah yeah I did you know that so actually know factor IT is academia is the military is worse in terms of sexual misconduct, retaliation, ation issues that occur. But I could be a second. And I and makes you wonder, what are the parminters that make this type of abuse so rampant? I think one of the obvious ones is the clear ranks.

How stable the ranks are, how the power structure um of academia and the military, very fixed, not super debatable, not difficult to move these the ranks are you know they're there and the power structure is very skilled and those are the ingredients that facilties abuse and so I think in the military I could see a very good argument for why that hiera that strict rigid hiero structures necessary. There's not time for making mistakes get IT. But with academia there's there's time.

There's what we we're not you know it's not a war. We're just studying stuff that we think is cool. Why is a such a rigid herky with such devastating and consequences is necessary, I would argue maybe it's not. And um I think i've been spending a lot of time thinking about this for myself.

I've been I found this professional leadership coach I I love and just thinking about sustainability, how do we make in A A sustainable ecosystem? And it's not something you ve find in a lot of leaders, management uh, literature that I that i've been exposed. So i'll i'll take a note from from the the power test and say if anyone knows of literature that talks about developing sustainable ecosystems within leadership and management, I would love to hear about that in the comments but um I think that's a big hole. Um people think about making things stable. The power structure should be stable but actually being flexible and dynamic is what gives systems resilience and flexibility um to to survive and right now you all the cracks in in the towers of academia are showing and it's time to to see if this is are we gonna adapt and survive or are we gonna crumbs .

a lot pack there. I'm grateful that you drilling in all of that with, i'm sure, the same rigor and um attention to asking the really critical questions that you have in your lab. Certainly, I observe the landscape changing very rapidly. I think there's also a lot to be learned and to explore that exports to other professions.

I certainly um believe that the more um first time opportunities to experience the beauty of doing research and biology in particular because that we're unfamiliar with, the more likely that we are as a field of research and science to make more fundamental discoveries. In other words, the more people that get the experience of trying science, doing exploratory research science, the more likely we are to pull from that pool. And within that pool there will be people of competence, talent and also gifted like we're just you know so like increase the the size of the net yeah and the net of course is netty something very specific which is you and I both know that um well training certainly matters.

Knowledge is important that that ultimately you love of craft and passion. Um and just being stickle by that research bug, once that neuron that you know gets tikka that lets us see something for the first time or know something um on the microscope or in a in a data plod or something is really no going back. So you know, I want to be very clear that i'd loudly applied your efforts to extend the experience of research to people in earlier. You are telling me that you're doing this, that many of the people in your lab, our first time researchers that didn't come through the pedigree of .

research yeah now we do a lot of outrage. About twenty five percent of my lab this summer was the first time research experiences. And so um we've been really privileged to have the band with to support that.

Um I will say though, I mean on the same tip, I think what you've done with this podcast is incredible. You've made millions of people who didn't have access to science or neuroscience be fascinated with neuroscience. And now imagine what if every person that listen this podcast and thought this is a great podcast, I wish I could do some newer science, could do IT with some, you know, not full time.

What if they could contribute in any just whatever level that they wanted to, that so much more contribution that were currently missing out on because there's so many barriers to be able to contribute to science. And I think um removing the ones that are really there as well as the ones that are just perceived to be there is so powerful. But I mean, the podcast is, you know, proof. The proof is in the putting the problem in this podcast. How many people could fall love with science if they were given a chance to well.

thank you for that. IT is indeed a labor of love for me. And and there are opportunities maybe provide a link to a couple of them um where a certain projects and neal science are crowd source and l is actually quite there's the connect home project where you can trace in irons is actually very, very pleasing, can do IT while listening to podcast a book, kids can do IT.

You're tracing these in irons busy filling in lies like a coLoring book and you're contributing to the party lation of understanding the structure of of the brain and clean the human brain. And without that crowd sourcing, um it's just not going to happen. I mean, there are efforts to make machine learning do IT and to do IT through AI, but that there's a lot to be gain from having actual humans do this, that those technologies don't quite yet approximate.

So we will provide a link to to some of those projects. But this in k doctor tie, of course. Um I want to thank you so much, first of all, for coming here today and sharing so much and knowledge and also been willing to going to some places that were um by virtue mie questions are always speculative and and really think about those and. And and addressed s through the lens of of deep mechanistic understanding of how these circuits work and to make IT clear to people um your enthusiasm for science is infectious in the most positive sense of the world and I know that so many people are going to benefit from from your knowledge and also from the work that you've been doing in your laboratory you know i've seen your star rise and it's still going going, going and it's just remarkable and extraordinary but I must say not at all surprising. So um that and your advocacy work and for all you do and that you're doing um I just behalf of myself and everyone listening, I just want to extend IT a genuine and really heart felt thanks.

Thank you. Thank you so much and it's been such an honor to be on the human poddar. ast. It's legends. So thank you .

so much for having again, thank you for joining me for today's discussion all about the biology of social interactions with dr. k. Tie to learn more about her work and to follow her on social media.

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