How to Make Better Decisions | Dr. Michael Platt
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Michael Platt.

Dr. Michael Platt is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His laboratory focuses on decision making, more specifically how we make decisions and the impact of power dynamics such as hierarchies in a given organization or group, as well as hormones on decision making.

We also discuss valuation, that is how we place value on things, on people. And what you'll find is that there are many factors that impact whether or not we think something is good, very good, bad, or very bad that operate below our conscious awareness. In fact, today's discussion will teach you how you make decisions, how to make better decisions in the context of everything from picking out a watch or a pair of shoes, all the way up to something as important as picking a life mate.

Indeed, hormones, hierarchies, and specific things that are operating within you and adjacent to nearby the things that you're evaluating, whether or not those things are people or objects, are powerfully shaping the neural circuits that lead you to make specific decisions. So today you're going to learn how all of that works and how to do it.

as I mentioned, how to make better decisions. Dr. Platt also explains how we are evaluating the hormone levels of other people, both same sex and opposite sex, and the implications that has for relationships of all kinds. It's an incredibly interesting and unique conversation, certainly unique among the conversations I've had with any of my neuroscience colleagues over the decades. And I know that the information you're going to learn today is going to be both fascinating to you, it certainly was to me,

and that it will impact the way that you think about all decisions at every level in everyday life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Michael Platt. Dr. Michael Platt, welcome.

Thanks. It's awesome to be here. I've been following your work since I was a graduate student, and it's really interesting. You're an anthropologist by training, turned neuroscientist, turned practical applications of neuroscience and related fields to everybody as it relates to business, decision-making, social interactions, hormones. You've worked on a lot of different things. The first question I have is,

Let's all agree we're old world primates. Yes. Right? Most people don't even think of us as old world primates, but we are all old world primates. And we share many similarities in terms of the neural circuits that we have in our skulls with some of the other old world primates, like macaque monkeys, for instance. Right.

When you step back and look at a process like decision-making or marketing out in the world or how people interact with one another and gauge value of objects, relationships, or even their own value, if I may, how much of what you see in human old world primates do you think is reflected by

the interactions of old world primates like rhesus macaque monkeys and vice versa. I mean in other words, how primitive are we and/or how sophisticated are the other old world primates? That's a great way of putting it because I think it's both. I always like to say there's a little monkey in all of us, right?

I believe that going in, you know, having spent actually my formative years, you know, studying, just watching monkeys. And I worked at the Cleveland Zoo, you know, when I was in college. And I took every opportunity I could get to go, you know, I went to the field, you know, I watched monkeys in South America and in Mexico. And I think we all get that. But

Over the course of my career, I'm astonished at how deep that goes. And basically, for every behavioral, cognitive, emotional phenomenon that we've trained our lens on, it looks almost exactly the same in people and monkeys. Now, obviously, we're not just monkeys, and we can talk, and we're doing this, and that's a big, big difference. But all the things that you talked about, decision-making, social interaction, social

our-- the way that we explore the world, the fountain of creativity, not only the neural circuits but the actual expression is so similar. We have monkeys and people do the exact same things in the lab. And if I didn't label the videos, the outputs of like the avatars and whatnot in games, you couldn't tell the difference.

What's striking about what you just said is that I recall, I guess at that time it was called a tweet, and I think it was from Elon, that said that we're basically a species that got a supercomputer placed on top of a monkey brain. So in thinking about it the other way, what aspects of being human, this old world primate that we are,

think is distinctly different than, say, a macaque monkey, aside from language? I don't know that anything really is. I mean, so actually, it's an interesting time to have you ask me that question because this spring semester, I teach a seminar for the psychology department at Penn called Being Human.

And the whole idea of that, each week we tackle an aspect of who we are that has at one point or another been considered to be uniquely human or close to, right? And that could be something like art and creativity or theory of mind, right? Or, you know, economics and markets and things like that.

And when you take a look at these things through the lenses of neuroscience and anthropology, this is how we do it, economics, psychology, neurology, and on and on and on, you start to really see that there's a lot more continuity than discontinuity.

And that's kind of pretty shocking. And I want to go back to that Elon tweet, if I may, because I think that's where we go a little bit astray too and thinking about the brain as a computer, right? So it's obviously not built on silicon, right? It's made of meat and fat and it's subject to all of the constraints that go along with that.

What I think instead is a better metaphor is that we've got a 30 million year old Swiss Army knife in our heads, right? So yes, you can learn how to do all kinds of different things, but you've got a brain that's got essentially specific tools

You know, it's like having a knife and a corkscrew, which is the most important one, you know, nail file, saw, etc. And monkeys got those too. Now, ours might be a little bigger, you know, and sharper, but they look pretty similar and they do the job in a very similar way. And I think once we appreciate that,

then that opens up a lot of territory for applications, not just trying to understand how some of those tools might get broken or dull as a result of illness or injury or disorders, et cetera, but also how we can measure them and how we can develop them better because some of those we use all the time, say in business. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Our Place. Our Place makes my favorite pots, pans, and other cookware.

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For more information, see the episode description. So if we were to start at what us neuroscientists would call kind of more low-level functioning, even though it's pretty high level, with something like attention. Mm-hmm.

You know, we are very visual creatures for those of us that are sighted. Most humans are sighted. We rely on vision to assess the world around us, to assess emotions of others, et cetera. And so are the other old world primates. Yeah, right.

How do we allocate attention? Like what grabs our attention? And maybe in this discussion, we could also touch on, because I know you've worked on this, what underlies some deficits in attention? So yeah, if we could just explore this from the perspective of, okay, you go into an environment, let's say it's a familiar environment. You wake up in the room, you wake up in each day. What grabs your attention? What keeps your attention? And if...

We do in fact have control over our attention, which we do to some extent. Why is it so difficult for many of us to decide, you know what, I'm just going to put everything away and I'm just going to focus on this task for the next hour? Why is that so challenging for so many people?

regardless of whether they have a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Okay, there's a lot in that question, many questions in there. And let's talk about what attention is, right? It is a prioritization or an amplification of what you're focusing on, right? And we do that by where we point our eyes, right? And then that gets turned up in the brain with a lot of consequences. And really why do we have attention?

because you can't do everything at once, right? So it's in the name of efficiency. What we attend to is a product of two things. It's what we're looking for and what the world looks like, right? And that kind of what the world looks like part is interesting

importantly shaped by what our ancestors experienced and also what we experienced when we were developing, when we were growing up. So things that are bright or shiny or moving fast, right, or loud or whatever, that grabs our attention, things that stand out, that are different.

And for us as primates, one thing that's super important and kind of really deeply baked in is other people. So if there are faces, if there are people in the environment doing something, then that naturally just grabs our attention unless we happen to be an individual who's sort of wired a little bit differently, like folks on the autism spectrum disorder or schizophrenia, things like that.

where that prioritization is not quite the same. So that's kind of how our experience as primates, you know, and just the design principles of the way our brains work to overcome some of these limitations in the name of efficiency come about. And then as you mentioned, what we can control our attention to a certain degree and that's super important for a lot

of overcoming a lot of the challenges that we have, and we can talk about that in decision-making, for example, or learning, because you can't control what you're attending to. That gets turned up in the brain, and that affects what we choose, and it affects what we learn, it affects what we remember as well. So now I'm trying to go back to then...

the end part of your question. Oh, so that had to do with multitasking or just things in the environment.

And that gets at this question or topic of, in my view, of foraging, right? And so I think that attention, this is the argument we've made, operates according to essentially the same rules and principles that our bodies do when we are searching the environment for resources. So all mobile animals

search for food, search for water, you know, for the resources that they need to survive and to reproduce. And as it turns out, that kind of decision, that the clash made very memorable, should I stay or should I go? That's the key thing. So when you encounter something, like the question is like, do I take it, do I stick with it, even though it might be depleting, getting worse, or should I take a risk and invest time and energy and go look for something else?

All animals have to do that. It turns out there's an optimal solution to that which was written out by the one of the great mathematical ecologists, Eric Chernoff, in a paper in 1976. And so he wrote this out and what's cool about it is it's very simple. It's basically you leave, you abandon the thing that you're harvesting

when what you're getting from it falls below the average for the environment. That just makes sense, the marginal returns, right? This could be a social interaction. It could be a social interaction, it could be food, it could be water, it could be the money that you're making in the moment, could be the information that you're getting from a book or from a website or whatnot. So, and we from studies done over the last whatever that is now 50 years have shown that every animal that's ever been observed

behaves as if they're performing that computation. Could you give an example in the context of, let's say, social media? And as we were walking into record today, we were comparing and contrasting X as a platform versus Instagram. And it occurred to me now, based on what you said a few moments ago, that Instagram is very visual. So you see faces. Many accounts on X, either the icon is so small or

or people even just have cartoons or whatever avatars there that aren't really faces in many cases. And it does seem that on X, there's a kind of a elevated level of emotionality to what people write. That's what tends to grab attention. And I wonder whether or not that's because of the absence of faces. I mean, when somebody is on an Instagram post and they're kind of ranting a bit, in fact, I saw this yesterday, um,

Tim Ferriss, another podcaster, had the investor Chris Sacca on. And Chris was talking about

environmentalism and the fires and he had opinions about AI. He's very, very smart, very opinionated guy, but people were commenting. I don't know how he felt. How could I? But people were commenting, he's so angry. He's so angry. And he was just being passionate and emphatic. Maybe he was angry. I don't know, but he was clearly very, very alert, leaning forward into the camera. And people were paying, most of their comments were paying attention to the emotion behind what he was saying.

And whereas on X, I feel like if you just took the text of what he was saying and you put it there, it would be kind of below the average emotionality on X. And so when you say that we are drawn to faces or that faces are – we naturally forge towards faces versus other things, that feels very true. And do you feel like elevated levels of emotion in faces are what harness the most attention? Yeah.

And by parallel, if you get a bunch of monkeys together and one of them is really upset, do they all look at that monkey?

I'm speculating a little bit here, it's not thought about in the context of say, you know, X versus Instagram. But I think you're right on. I mean, I think that's spot on. You're just combining, like you're turning, the volume gets turned up because there are faces there and if they're more emotional, they're just gonna be much more salient. You grab your attention and that's something that's really important to pay attention to because somebody who's very aroused, right?

that's activation, that's sort of pre-activation before they do something. Like they might attack you or they might take something from you, who knows, right? Something could happen there.

I want to take this back a little bit. I'm older than you. And I want to take this idea of different sources, like where you could place your attention, take it back a little bit more in time. Because what's been shown, and it's interesting, computer science picked up on this marginal value theorem from mathematical ecology around 2000 or so, and began to investigate how people search the web.

And it turned out people would leave a website the moment their information intake rate fell below the average

for sort of all the websites that they were encountering. The average is determined by your behavior in what, the preceding bin of time, like 10 minutes, until you arrive at a site or within site. So that's less well known, but we're now learning that it is pretty short term, right? So it seems to be driven by reinforcement learning processes that kind of are telling you how rich that environment is. And so

One of the things about the marginal value theorem I think is really, really profound for understanding our current predicament is that it says that if you're in a really poor environment, like you, let's say you forage for apples, right? And there's one apple tree for the next 10 miles. You stay in that apple tree until you picked every apple that

rotten or not rotten, not ripe, right, before you move on. If you were in an orchard with apple trees everywhere, you just pick the ones that are easiest to get and then you move on. So now think about it in the context of web surfing, the web. Like when you were, you know, if you're coming up when I did, you know, I was in graduate school or, you know, I was an undergraduate, the way I accessed the internet was through a dial-up modem.

So it was very slow. It was a very poor environment. You're sitting there waiting for the information to load up, right? And it might take 30 seconds or longer. You don't abandon that. You read the whole thing. You might print it out, put it in your file cabinet, right? Now you get like

super high speed internet. Yeah, you can have 12 tabs open, 50 tabs open. And you're like, you just, so you spend like, you know, half a second or a couple of seconds on any one. You don't, you certainly don't scroll down beneath the fold, right? So it totally makes sense. Now think about all the devices you might have in order. It could be tabs, it could be, most people are sitting around with a TV on,

you know, their phone, a tablet, a laptop, whatnot. Yeah, I'm guilty of having... And so what do you do? I have three phones and a laptop. Yeah, so you're just cycling. You are doing exactly what you're designed to do, right? Which is to move between these resources quickly and easily because it's so easy. So sometimes going back to your question about like, why is it so hard? It's going to be really, really deliberate. You have to either reduce...

Make it a harder environment, I guess, is the idea. You would have to actually put things away or make the return rate that you're getting from any of them much worse. Like, for example, if you turn your phone monochrome, which we know works, right? It helps you to stop checking your phone and spend less time on it.

Because it's just not as good of a source. Yeah, the information feels really depleted. You reposted a paper result recently, and I did as well after I saw it on your ex-account, that if you look at working memory, the ability to keep information online in real time and work with it,

It seems that working memory is worst when your phone is right next to you. If it's somewhere else in the room that you're working, then we're trying to do real work of some sort. Your performance is slightly better than if it's right next to you. But if the phone is completely outside of the room,

improvements in working memory are statistically significant. In other words, get the phone completely out of the room. It's not sufficient to have it next to you turned face down or even in your backpack behind you. It needs to be in a completely separate environment in order to maximize this effect. Yeah, I mean, it's completely consistent with what we're saying here with regard to foraging. But if I take my phone and I put it... I don't have my phone here under the chair, but let's say I did. This result suggests that some component of our neural circuitry is operating in the background thinking...

well, I guess something could be on there. Maybe I got a text or maybe there's a tweet I should look at or an Instagram post. It suggests that we are multitasking even when we think we are not multitasking. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It's beneath our awareness, right? So that's where I think the kind of comparative psychology, comparative neurobiology is really important here because I don't necessarily –

impute

conscious awareness to all these critters that are out there doing these things, behaving exactly the same way we are. And so to me that just indicates that, you know, all that hardware, those same routines are just running under the hood, running under the surface and we're not aware of it. So when your phone is somewhere within the sphere that could be accessed, the brain's aware of that and it's including that in the calculations about what to do next.

It actually reminds me now of a couple of papers that we published some time ago on foraging. And one of the things that's really interesting about it is that as you are considering your options and you're experiencing sort of these depleting rewards or whatnot, you see this urgency signal kind of building up.

in a part of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex that we know is important for moving on, for switching, for searching for something new. And it does, you know, I don't know what the emotional component of that is, we never explored that, but it seems reasonable to imagine that that's tied to, you know, the sense of like, I really want to turn my phone over and check what's going on there. Are there any data that suggest that

Just being able to maintain a thought train independent of visual input can help us get better at maintaining attention. So for instance, this morning I woke up very early, unusually early for me because I went to bed unusually early for me. And I decided to try something, which is something that actually a colleague in neuroscience, Carl Deisseroth, had mentioned he does. And

previous guest on this podcast, Josh Waitzkin, who is a former chess grandmaster champion, has described something like this. I decided to try it, which was to keep my eyes closed and just try and think in complete sentences, not let my mind drift off topic for a while, have a conversation with myself in my head. But

with the constant redirect of trying to stay in a thought train. And it's actually much more difficult than I thought it would be, right? There's no other input. My eyes are closed. I was comfortable at the temperature of the room was, et cetera. I was well rested, no phone, no input.

And, you know, you get one sentence of thought out, then the next. It's a bit like writing, except here no visual input. So I would have thought it's a lot easier because you don't have, you know, a set of tabs across the top or even a Word doc with a, like, do you want to change it to bold, et cetera. Like no other input competing for one's attention. And I found that after about 10 minutes, it became pretty easy.

But it took me about 10 minutes to get into this redirective focus. And then at one point I thought, I better stop this because it's seemingly kind of weird. But that was very different, I would say, than sitting down to say, meditate and think about my breath, which is a physical phenomenon that's tangible at the level of feeling one's breath. So how do you feel about practices that teach us to maintain attention and redirect our attention that are very deprived of visual input?

as a kind of training ground for being able to harness and maintain visual input when we need to get work done, work on problem sets, write, do like what I call real work or Cal Newport would call deep work. So I've never tried that. And it sounds fascinating. And I'm going to try to give it a shot, you know, tomorrow morning. At first, I was thinking, this sounds a lot like meditations.

But there are a whole variety. I'm no expert on meditation, but there are a whole variety of different kinds of meditation. Some, as you mentioned, you're focusing on breathwork, physical stimulus. But there are others that are not and that are much more kind of cognitively focused. So, for example, like

Loving kindness meditation is one where you're kind of thinking about a particular person, you're imagining them, and you're imagining something really good happening to them. So it's sort of one of these self-transcendent types of meditation, which are not, I don't think, really tied to any...

external input coming out, although it's an internal input, right? That's based on your memory or awe-based meditation. So maybe it's more similar to those, but I... But it's like thematically anchored. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. As opposed to visually anchored, like staring at a flame or concentrating on one's breath. Yeah. I didn't have a... It was like free in terms of putting in language of foraging.

It was like I didn't have a plan. I wasn't writing a paragraph. It was just can I stay in a conversation with myself that's where there's no moment that some external voice or input or thought about something else in the room, you know, just can I just kind of stay in there? Can I just stay in there? That was really the question.

Yeah, I think that that makes complete sense because it's kind of like you're forging for apples in that tree that's, you know, in the middle of the Serengeti somewhere, right? And there's nothing anywhere around you. And so you're going to stick with that and just keep mining it until there's nothing left. One of the reasons that I brought up this example was I noticed that anything that has to do with attention, whether or not it's visual attention or, you know, you need to write or

or cognitive attention and redirecting attention, unless there's some high level of, as you call it, arousal or emotionality, I find there's always a kind of warm-up period required. And that this isn't taught to us in school. And that so many people who think that they have a hard time maintaining attention, I have this hypothesis that they are training non-attention or brief attention by, you know, scrolling through movies on a social media platform is basically training students

redirecting your attention every couple seconds or maybe every few minutes. So you get good at that. You get good at scrolling. You get good at what you do. But also I think it was always the case that sitting down to do something difficult or learn or write or pay careful auditory attention, maybe even to a podcast, that there's a kind of a warming up period. What is the evidence that neural circuits in the brain are kind of –

here I'm using very top contour language in front of another card-carrying neuroscientist, but that neural circuits are kind of more dispersed in their activation patterns, but that over time we kind of drop into a trench, not just of attention, but that

then the signal to noise of that circuit required for attention and the other components of the task gets much greater compared to the background noise. Is there evidence for that? In the same way that warming up to work out, no one expects to walk in and train with their work weight or to run at the speed that they would in mile three, right? You know, that you warm up. But this notion of warming up the brain for specific cognitive activities doesn't seem...

as abundant out there. And I think part of the reason might be, and I'd like your thoughts on this, that we are all familiar with something super exciting or scary grabbing our attention in this. But then I would say, well, you can sprint into the street to save your kid from getting hit by a car. You didn't warm up for that, but that's not how you exercise because there isn't the same level of urgency. That's a deep question. I think, and I, you know, it's funny to me too, because it, it,

I don't warm up often before I work out. And that's like, so you seem to be in great shape. No, but it's like, it's funny. You know, I've been in CrossFit for like 17 years. Oh, wow. And you're still uninjured. You're one of the, I've got plenty of injuries. I, you know, I've had, uh, you know, a couple of hernia surgeries and, um,

Maybe just like five or six minutes of mobility work. We have a lot of episodes on this. No, the mobility is really good. And I actually, what I have, you know, periodically it's like take like many months off to do just purely mobility PT because, and like I did Pilates intensively for a year and a half after one injury and I loved it. And it's cool to see what it does to your body because it totally refashioned it. I was, because I've always been like,

big guy up here and then you do Pilates for or yoga for a long time, went through a yoga period too and suddenly it's all core, you know, you become like a very different human. Yeah, so this issue of warming up, you don't like warming up, which explains your injuries. No, no, I like warming up, it's more a question of time. The reason why and that's why I went to CrossFit in the first place was because I could do a workout in 10 minutes or under that left me, you know, dead on the floor. I'm telling you. It was super awesome. I'm telling you, fantastic.

100 jumping jacks, just like in PE class is still the best warmup I'm aware of. It's amazing. People laugh at me, it's like so old school, but you do 100 jumping jacks before you do any kind of cardiovascular resistance training. And I haven't run a study on this, but you greatly diminish your chance of injury, probably because of just raising core body temperature. So the question is, okay, well then let's pose it in this parallel fashion.

what is the equivalent of the 100 jumping jacks for cognitive work, right? For me, it's like internally going like, what's wrong with you, Andrew? Why is it so hard for you to like punch out these 10 paragraphs? But if someone on my team says, hey, we need this in eight minutes, I could do that anywhere. Unless I'm actually driving a vehicle, I can work anywhere, anytime. But I would say,

We don't have the equivalent of 100 jumping jacks for cognitive work, but we need it. We need that. I think people need that and they need the understanding that it can help them get into that trench of attention. I have a bunch of disconnected thoughts on this. Please. So one would be the converse of that, which you kind of alluded to earlier, which is the not warming up, but the opposite of warming up, like the distraction. So there have been some really interesting studies done recently

in sort of more business-y settings, management settings, that looked at foraging. And think of it this way, it's more like a measure of creativity, your proclivity to explore, to try new things, to be the opposite of focused. And you can measure that, for example, like an anagram task. So you get a bunch of letters, make as much money

words as you can, at some point you decide to dump them and get new letters. And so that's sort of... you're taking a risk and you're exploring and you're getting a new set, you don't know what's going to happen. And really cool studies showed that if you precede that task with a task where people are foraging for points on a screen, there's hidden... it's like a visual kind of thing and you're just looking for stuff. If the points are really dispersed and spread out,

then people, we don't know how long that kind of after effect lasts, but then people are way more kind of hyper explorers. With the words. With the word thing later. And if they're doing, if they have to like decide, if they're playing virtual fishing and the number of, you know, the rate at which you catch fish in a pond is declining and you can press a button and take a timeout to travel to another pond,

people are much more willing to move on, okay, when they do that. Whereas if you put all the points kind of together, which is essentially related to what you're saying, cognitively warming up by focusing, literally instead of having your filter, you know, your aperture, your lens like this, it's now like this, even though it's a different task that you're going to do. Oh, I love this. Then you're much more focused on that. Okay, I...

I've sat here and done many, many podcasts, and I have to say it's rare that I say I love this. It's probably the first time. I absolutely love this because as a person who's worked on a variety of topics in neuroscience, but visual neuroscience has really been my first home and continues to be the way that I think about a lot of this. There are a couple of really interesting papers that have led to some practices, mainly in China, where students focus on a fixation point before they sit down to do cognitive work.

And it improves their attention and performance on cognitive work. And it sounds so silly to people. People think, oh, okay, I'm going to stare at a dot. And then you're going to like stare at a dot at the given distance that I'm going to do my work. How lame is that? Well, I think it's incredible because what you just said fully supports this idea that we're – well, we all agree here, there's two of us, that we're mainly visual people.

Even those of us that like to listen to music and things like that, we're very somatic or, you know, very visual creatures. And that where we place our visual attention and the size of the aperture of that attention, whether or not we're looking at a small box or a big box, not metaphorically, but literally.

determines the aperture of our attention going forward. In other words, I think this is such an important thing because when we look at a horizon or we walk through a city, you know, there's information flowing past us, you know, and all kinds of, you know, without us placing our eyes on any one particular point. And that people don't,

until they do this and they hear this, but that's very relaxing. We look at a horizon, it relaxes us. And that's because panoramic vision, non-phobiated vision is, um, it, it's associated with a decrease in autonomic arousal. So has this been leveraged toward teaching kids and adults how to attend better? Um, because I think this is immensely valuable. I mean, this is, uh,

behaviorally driven pharmacology, as I like to call it, because clearly there's a change in our chemistry when we do this sort of thing. I mean, other than what you just said about the work that's done and what they're doing in China, which is entirely consistent with what I just said, I'm unaware of any utilization. And I think it could be. I mean, I love that phrase that you just used, right? Which is, when we understand the underlying neurochemistry, let's say,

That's great, but you're not going to go in and directly manipulate people's neurochemistry. But if you can change the environment they're in or you can change the state that they're in, behavioral state, cognitive state, emotional state, then that's an effective, potentially effective, practical, ethical way of having this kind of same or similar impact.

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I had this gallery of caffeine, actually the middle one's water. For those that are just listening, I've got a mate gourd here, plenty of caffeine in there. I had a cold brew mate, plenty of caffeine in there. I had several actually, and then water in the center. But caffeine raises our level of alertness and thereby attentional capabilities. But I think that most people are not familiar with using behavior as a way to increase their endogenous release of the neurochemicals that increase arousal and attention. And

We just tend to over rely on pharmacology and I'm not against that. I use it obviously. But what do you think it is? I mean, now I'm asking you to be a bit of a, of a cultural anthropologist. What do you think it is that has led people in the United States and, and, you know, Europe to mainly focus on this idea that if you can't attend easily, that,

it's a pharmacologic issue that behavioral tools are not as useful. Because the experiment you described is so cool, right? Look at dots that are close together, then cognitive space becomes kind of more bundled into a tighter bundle. Look at dots that are more dispersed and you tend to kind of disperse your cognition. It becomes almost like more of a creative exploration.

Maybe this is why my friend Rick Rubin, whose name is sort of synonymous with creativity because he wrote that amazing book, The Creative Act, is so into sky and clouds and sunsets and space.

open space. Rarely have I ever heard Rick say, Hey, you know, you should stare into a little, you know, soda straw. Um, I'd love to, for you to just kind of riff on, on what you think some of the better tools are for, um, improving attention and focus. Um, and whether or not you think we're really as challenged in that as many people assume. Well, I, I,

I don't think we're that challenged. I think, as I mentioned earlier, our brains are just performing the computations that they have been endowed with by millions of years of evolution, which is to allocate attention, to allocate behavior, to allocate focus according to how rich, I'll call it rich, you know, or poor the environment is, how many different sources are there. And so

Those are the rules your brain lives by and you're not really going to change those. I mean, you could kind of modulate up and down a little bit, whether that's through neurochemistry or other kinds of things, but ultimately it's, in this case, the brain in the environment that it's in. So from my perspective, the best thing you can do is just change the environment, put those devices away, you know, to enable you to focus, right? And so...

If I had that much more to say on that topic. No, I think what's great about this is you're essentially pointing to the fact that we have control. We're not somehow...

deficient or messed up if we find ourselves having a hard time directing our attention because we've been training ourselves to scroll. We've been training ourselves to redirect our attention constantly to new things. I mean, as you can probably tell, I'm a big fan of intervening in that process so that one has the ability to drop into focused work. I do feel as if

progress in life, you know, scales fairly directly with the ability to focus on one thing for some period of time for sake of, you know, learning in school, for sake of sport, for sake of relationships, the ability to have like a real connection to somebody, you know, and we're going to get into a discussion about social interactions in a bit. But when it comes to foraging,

Do you find that people fall out into different kind of clusters of how they forage for information? And what are some of the themes of that or kind of signatures of the different groups? Yeah, that's a great question. We haven't really approached it with the idea that there are clusters, but rather that there's, let's say, a continuum and of being either, you know, most people are somewhere in the middle, of course.

But some folks hyper focused, right? And you might just metaphorically imagine them at the extreme like obsessive compulsive almost, right? You can't get unstuck from a routine. And at the other end would be folks who

explore too readily, right? So folks who we would say have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And so folks fall somewhere along that distribution. Now we've seen that there are differences between species in terms of where they are on that. Differences is a function of age in humans, so you kind of move from being more hyper exploratory toward

more focused as you get older. Oh, good. And that also one of the things that we've talked about a lot is that that variation where you are on that continuum might make you

more or less suited to different types of careers, different types of jobs. It's not to say that people can't change, but think of it this way. For... you've got a dial that goes from super focused to a major explorer and creativity goes along with that. One person might come with their dial set at 3, another person at 7.

And you could help that person at a three, maybe turn theirs to five, but probably not to 10, right? The person who's a seven, you could turn them up to nine, right? So through various kinds of practices. And I think it's really important to just recognize that people do vary. And that variation we pick up on in the sort of neurological context of like issues, problems that people, you know, experience like with focus in school, et cetera, like that.

People are no doubt wondering, well, if I am good at dropping into a trench and focusing my attention for long periods of time, maybe it's more obvious what types of careers that person would be better at. Maybe it's programming or writing or who knows, painting. But when you have somebody whose attention tends to flip between different things, what sorts of professions do they align well with?

yeah that aligns with creative professions so and also being entrepreneurs actually if you look at the data on um entrepreneurs uh the rate of attention problems is two three four x

the general population. You also see that it's often comorbid with other issues related to anxiety, bipolar, etc. So they kind of like all cluster there with a real issue on that sort of focus. And we work with a team out in Berkeley actually that provides support to entrepreneurs so that they can

do their best, do their thing, which is to be like wildly creative, right? And to be innovative, I should say. But when they need that focus so they can have it. And we have a big research project going on right now looking at entrepreneurs in California and also MBA students at Wharton to just kind of try to identify, you know, the prevalence of these issues and then to potentially provide support

for them and that support could take any number of different forms. It could be true psychiatric support in the sense of like maybe attention focusing pharmaceuticals, drugs like Ritalin, Adderall, which can be used appropriately but that doesn't rob those individuals of their mojo. But in other cases it's going to be more like changing their... providing an ecosystem, right? So where they can learn focusing practices as we've already talked about,

uh where when they build their teams they can um build complementary strengths in the people that uh surround them so that they're much more likely to be successful and our economy depends on those people being successful right so that's where the vast majority of economic activity is coming from is people who start small businesses who are entrepreneurs and who are who are innovators so it makes all the sense in the world um to do that

I think we've been neglecting all this now. Actually, the thing I wanted to say earlier about this and that where I think neuroscience gives us a new tool to approach a lot of these business questions is that let's imagine you're hiring, right? And you're hiring, you know, we need a creative type, okay? So you put an ad out,

and you get resumes and responses and people come in for interviews, how do you measure that creativity typically? When you say, "How creative are you?" And you're like, "You really want the job." So you're like, "Yeah, I'm super creative." Or you give them a personality test, for example, or like Myers-Briggs or something like that. And we know those are not particularly accurate and self-report

can be not only inaccurate but biased and biased by the context. Why am I here? Who's asking me a question? How is that question asked?

Whereas the neuroscience gives us tools to kind of measure those things directly. And in some cases you could measure it directly from the brain and we do that, but that's not going to be practical, not going to be scalable, not going to be something a lot of people want to embrace, let's say, as applicants. But find ways to interrogate the brain that are not...

asking people to assess themselves. For instance, what would a small number of questions be that... Not even questions. One of the things that we've done is develop games, like brief, little, very engaging games...

that are based on specific tasks that we know interrogate specific circuits in the brain, like foraging, for example, where people are literally harvesting berries, let's say, and they're going along and the goal is to kind of get as many as you can.

And from their behavior we can figure out exactly where they are on that continuum, mathematically, and say, "Okay, well in the dashboard that we create, you are pitched a bit more toward being an innovator and creative type explorer and less... So less likely to be, say, a good manager who would need to be, you know, sort of have a higher degree of focus.

And we do that for a number of different aspects of, you know, of cognitive emotional performance. So things like, like for in terms of social competence, for example. And so we have a little, actually a little game, it's mimic soccer. And we've had monkeys play it, humans play it. We know exactly what it kind of elicits from the brain and what circuits it relies on. And that allows us to

numerically, you know, identify like your strategic planning abilities or your something like theory of mind, getting in the head of an opponent. And those games we found it's really been very gratifying to

demonstrate that those predict performance in a number of different jobs, in high performance jobs like soccer players, actual soccer players, but also in the military, in cyber operations. And so we're now exploring and we've helped to stand up a startup company in Philadelphia that is actually, you know, that's their mission is to go out and try to use those tools to see if they can do better

than basically a whole bunch of questions. Yeah, it certainly goes way beyond kind of typical Myers-Briggs or Enneagram type personality tests, which I think has certain value. If nothing else, people like to know about themselves. And I do think categorizing oneself a little bit, according to like, are you a three on the Enneagram or a four or an eight? You know what? Certainly gives you a...

frame of reference but yeah it doesn't seem very useful for the kinds of work environments that you're describing whereas what you're describing sounds much more sophisticated you mentioned theory of mind we should talk about theory of mind because here we are back to visual neuroscience but I think

have the understanding, you can tell me if I'm right or wrong, that as old world primates, one of the more impressive features that we've developed is the ability to attend to a location with our eyes, but pay attention to something else in the periphery. People used to refer to this as the

The other cocktail party effect. The cocktail party effect is the ability to pay attention to a conversation while there's stuff in the background. But this is the other cocktail party effect that sort of with sometimes chuckles gets described as, you know, you're out to dinner with friends.

somebody and you're listening to them and you're paying attention to them, but you're also paying attention to the conversation next to you or maybe someone else at the bar. You know, you can fill in the blanks there. This is an amazing ability, regardless of what it's used for, that a lot of other primate species don't have.

I mean, as far as I know, no other species have. So this seems to be... we know macaques can do this, for example, and humans do this routinely, we assume all apes do this. And the adaptive explanation is, I think, exactly what you're alluding to, which is the fact that like when you live in a complex multi-level society with differentiated relationships, where the things that matter to you are like your family,

your rank, your status, right? Your friends, your enemies, all those kinds of things. That then creates a really...

complex environment for, as you said, devoting your attention because where we look is the focus of our... typically that's the focus of your attention and what's turned up and other brains know that. And so now let's imagine you're a baboon and you're not the highest ranking baboon and the high ranking, the alpha is over there and so you train your gaze on that

alpha baboon, but there's a really attractive female over here that you want to know where she's heading because that's a good mating opportunity later. So it's that ability to kind of split attention from your overt attention, what your gaze is pointing at, and covertly what you're amplifying and tracking in the environment. And there's this, you know, to tie this back to theory of mind, there's, I think, it's reasonable and consistent with some of the data that

theory of mind which is a sense of being able to infer what somebody else knows, what they can see, what they want, their state of mind, which might be different from yours, that it develops through the way that as infants and young children our experience of first gazing at a caregiver, maintaining attention with them and then learning to follow their gaze

when they look somewhere and they say, hey, that's an apple or whatever, that you do the same thing, and that gaze following then is a precursor to joint attention, and joint attention being really important for the development of this theory of mind, which is our sense of being able to understand, make predictions, make inferences about what's going on in somebody else's head. I feel like the...

overlap of covert attention and theory of mind as you described comes from this assumption that I have which is that we have effectively two spotlights of attention and that we can merge them so I can place all my attention on you and what we're talking about in your face etc I can split my attention between you and you know something over there in the corner and

Or I can take that second spotlight of attention and place it on myself like, "Oh, you know, like I need to move to the side because I've got a little, you know, maybe an itch on my thigh or something like that." But I don't think we have three spotlights that we can work with very easily anyway. Maybe we could train that up, but that we don't naturally have more than two spotlights of attention.

we can merge these two spotlights of attention and i feel like and i've done some practice at this just because i'm a neuroscientist and i like to try things of ramping up my level of focus just trying to really like like i'm doing it right now i'm looking at you and like the contour of

of your shape against the background, like I can really decide to emphasize those borders. I'm not really doing anything behaviorally that's different than I was a few moments ago. But then I could also bring that spotlight of attention kind of down a little bit in an intensity. So I feel like we have two spotlights of attention that we can ramp up in intensity. And we don't normally do this so consciously. Normally we're more in stimulus response.

And I think about this a lot nowadays because, and forgive me for referencing previous podcasts, but we had this brilliant, absolutely brilliant 84-year-old psychoanalyst, Jungian analyst named James Hollis on the podcast. And he talked about

you know, what it is to be human and to create a life. And it boiled down basically to two things, which was to acknowledge that we're in stimulus response a lot of the day and how to be functional in that domain was a lot of that conversation. But that there's this essential aspect to life, which is to get out of stimulus response and bring those spotlights of attention inward and to think and to reflect and then go back into stimulus response.

And when we just sleep, wake up and go into stimulus response all day, or if we go meditate all day and are not in stimulus response, neither is good. So it's that balance. And so this notion of two spotlights of attention, I'd love for you to tell me this is like complete BS or that it works. I don't need to be validated here. I was more putting it out there as a hypothesis because it feels true to me, but that's obviously just a feeling.

Well, I think that feeling, as far as I know, is consistent with what we understand about how attention can, you know, how it amplifies the visual signals or other signals that are coming into our brains and the ways in which we can kind of

I don't know if it's divided purely or if it sort of bleeds over, you know, what that really exactly looks like. But the landscape, let's imagine it's a landscape of neural activity and you can kind of raise up two humps or just one hump

and it doesn't feel like you can go beyond that, that's really, really hard to measure. And I think our best data on that comes from recording the activity of neurons in macaques and monkeys while they are doing attention, these sort of visual discrimination tasks. And I think that would be really, really hard to actually

elicit that kind of behavior from them. Well, we both agree, I know because we were talking before we started recording, that certain types of stimuli really grab our attention and influence our decisions and our valuation of things out there in the world.

So talk to me about monkey porn. Okay, we never called it monkey porn, but a lot of people have said that, you know, essentially, you know, no matter what else I do in my career, that's going to be on my tombstone. This man worked on monkey... This man unpacked the neurobiology of monkey porn. Okay, so let's go back in the way back machine, you know, and so back when I was an anthropologist and I'm going out, I'm watching monkeys and...

It's very clear that there are certain things in the world that are important

important to them, that they prioritize. And those are very similar, the same things that we do. So they pay attention to each other, to their faces, but also to other cues. And these cues seem to make adaptive significance, right? That they're relevant for your ability to survive and reproduce, which is the name of the game for evolution. That's all that really counts. Okay. And what are those things? Well, they're cues to status,

Like, so who's dominant, who's subordinate, who can take my stuff, who do I got to watch out for, who can I, you know, dominate and take stuff from. And cues to how, you know, to sort of mate quality, mating opportunities. And if you look at non-human primates, they display those things very conspicuously, right? So, you know, males have these big canines and they have sort of, you know, physical dominant features, very square jaw, all that kind of stuff.

And females, for example, in macaques display their hormonal state, how receptive they are to mating and likelihood of ovulating at that time through the swelling and coloration on their perineum. Here's a good word for your listeners, perineum, which we introduced into the neuroscience literature.

And that's just the sort of anogenital region. So that's where they're putting a lot of... Someone else on here. Signaling taint. Listen, another card-carrying researcher, Dr. Shana Swan, excuse me, came on here to talk about phthalates and microplastics and endocrine disruptors. She spent a career working on this. She's a serious scientist. And she talked about how taint sizes are...

diminishing in males by virtue of endocrine disruptors accessing the fetus during pregnancy. This is a statistically very robust effect. I know we're going to get into a discussion about fertility later because you've worked on this issue as well. So we can say the perineum taint, and now everyone knows what we're talking about. So the females display their perineum region

when they're ovulating? Yeah, so it becomes redder, fuller, etc. So if you go to the zoo and you see the monkeys with the big red butts, they're the ones who are the females who are... It turns out the males do that too. So males signal kind of their circulating testosterone levels by how red they're...

taint is and actually even you can just see the physical size of their testes is a pretty good proxy in a cue. And then in rhesus macaques there's also kind of these signals around the eyes that get a little bit darker. The theory is that humans... so for a long time people said, "Oh, humans don't display anything about their hormonal biological state."

you know, to promote monogamy and all kinds of stuff like that. Even though it seems that monogamy is not the... Monogamy in terms of mating does not seem to be the dominant

strategy in humans. Let's call it that. Yeah. But just to make sure that I'm clear on this, it used to be said, you are saying that it used to be said that humans don't signal their hormonal status. And the reason people were saying that is because it was a promotion of monogamous behavior, which is actually not true in humans. Well, so this goes back to Darwin, really, who sort of theorized that humans

humans during human evolution that as monogamy became more adaptive for whatever reason, you know, it's all speculation, right? That these sort of cues were hidden so that, you know, males couldn't, you know, you wouldn't be encouraged to find other mating opportunities outside your monogamous relationship.

And so it would kind of keep the focus to get back to that, you know, on your partner. But you know, all the data that's out there both from, you know, like when societies were encountered by Western scientists, like whether polygyny was practiced or not, to just what we understand about extra

you know, extra pair matings like an offspring, etc. that, you know, strict monogamy does not seem to be the dominant... to have been the dominant strategy. Now that's also consistent with the observation that, you know, we are a sexually dimorphic species. So if, you know, when you look at the animal kingdom, primates in particular, those that are

obligate pair bonded monogamous primates. Males and females don't really differ much. Like we look at marmosets or tamarins... In terms of body size? Body size, coloration, you know, conspicuous sexual characteristics. Brain structure as well? That's another interesting point which we can circle back to. But even if you just look at brain size relative to body size, that is smallest in...

pair-bonded monogamous species. The difference in brain size... Not between males and females but just overall and it sort of scales up with group size and group complexity. It's slightly different but there's a point there which is that, well,

pair-bonded monogamous species look very, very different, right? It's very unusual, let's just say this. So it's very unusual, right? In mammals overall it's very unusual, in primates there's only a few, you know... - Monogamous primates. - Monogamous obligate pair-bonded primates. And in general their behavior is not as complicated or complex as individuals that live in societies where there's a lot more

going on in terms of strategizing to attain mating opportunities through, you know, either through sort of physical challenge or through, you know, being sneaky or, you know, or making friends, et cetera, et cetera. There's a sort of proliferation of different strategies that requires a lot more mental calculation, apparently, that goes hand in hand with an increase in

brain size, cortex size, et cetera. Which makes sense from the standpoint of like more prefrontal cortex, more context dependent strategy setting and decision making. And it could be based on, it seems that with more prefrontal cortex, one can, a species can incorporate different valuations of mates. It can be about hormonal status. And I want to make sure we get back to that, how humans signal hormonal status. Yeah.

But it could also be about reproductive potential as it relates to resource allocation or whether or not there'll be a good caretaker. I mean, a lot of additional factors can be incorporated in. And working with more variables flexibly requires more neural real estate, mostly in prefrontal cortex, right? Absolutely. Although I will, based on a paper we published last year in Nature, I would say that

notions of sort of the breakdowns of like where stuff is in the brain and how it's encoded I think is going to change a lot and there are a number of other studies that have come out in the last year or so that echo this. And so this was a paper in which we did something unthinkable I think, you know, in the history of neuroscience which is all about reduction, let's make the experiment as simple as possible.

only very one thing, right? And we're going to find where that one thing is in the brain. And that's the tradition going back to Hubel and Wiesel, right? Hubel and Wiesel folks are my scientific great grandparents. No, we were bound to do it sooner or later. They won the Nobel Prize for their understanding, for their, their parsing of the, of the neural basis of vision, neuroplasticity, et cetera. Torsten's still alive. I think he's like a hundred now.

Last time I saw him, he was 96 and he was still jogging and doing art. David passed away. Amazing. You can look it up. H and W we call him. He will result there. They're among our, uh, they're on the Mount Rushmore of neuroscience and we'll get back to this. So, um,

Please, yeah, explain to us what this paper showed, and then we will then talk about how humans signal their hormonal status. And we'll go all the way back to monkey porn, I hope, because it's really near and dear to my heart. We won't leave monkey porn in the past. So near and dear to my heart. Okay, so human weasel, you know, let's...

We're going to really simplify because that's how we figure out exactly how it works. But it's not what our brains do. That's not the environment our brains are in. When you're out there in the world,

You've got this incredibly complex visual environment, social environment. And what you do in any moment depends on what you experienced recently, what you think might happen next, what might have happened last week in a similar circumstance. It's super complicated. And it reflects all these different competing interests and values. And that's true for monkeys, too.

Okay, and so we did the dream, my dream experiment from back when I was an anthropologist, which was to get rid of the lab, okay, and instead we recorded wirelessly from thousands of neurons in the brain in prefrontal cortex, which you mentioned, and we tend to think of as being important for decision making and kind of setting goals and context and also the sort of

high-level visual area in the temporal lobe that's important for sensing objects and maybe faces and things like that. So seemingly one had like an input level and one had like a higher order level. We did this mostly because of some of technological limitations but it turned out to be really like a good thing in the end because it told us something really unusual.

So what we did then is we let monkeys just be monkeys with each other. Okay, so we'd have a male with his female friend or alone with a female friend on the other side of a sort of plexiglass divider. And then there could be other monkeys present like as observers, like who are like watching what they're doing or not.

And then we also introduced challenges to them, like so basically my graduate student would come in and like, you know, threaten one of the monkeys and this elicits a lot of agitation and arousal. -We're gonna have to say how you threaten a monkey. -Monkeys, you know, look, we're just like big kind of not as hairy monkeys to them and that makes... -To threaten them you look at them directly. -You look at them and you open your mouth. -So if you go to the zoo folks and you look directly at a monkey and you smile, that's a threat.

If you want to be friendly with the monkeys, lip smack. It's an affiliation thing. It almost looked like we were blowing kisses at one another. You know, so we both looked away. It's probably where it comes from. That's right. So you got a naturalistic experiment. So you got a natural experiment. And so rather than having one, you know, varying one thing, these monkeys engaged in like 27, 28 different kinds of behaviors.

Okay, they would forage, they would scratch, they groom each other, they threatened, they mount, they do everything that monkeys do. And then we also, you know, we were varying the context as well. And so that's like blows the lid off of the complexity in a typical experiment. And what do we find? We found that neurons in both these areas, they were indistinguishable.

were modulated, they were affected, their firing rates, their activity was affected by the behaviors that the animals engaged in and what the other animals engage in too. Also, who's around, who's watching me? Is it like male X or female Y? And what was really surprising... So first of all you see these signals, they're basically the same, these two parts of the brain are supposed to be very very different and the average neuron

cared about something like seven things rather than one or two.

Okay, like a grandmother cell, you know, which was kind of one idea for how the brain encoded things, like there's one neuron and it only responds to your grandmother, right? Something like that. Jennifer Aniston cells. Jennifer Aniston cells, very famous... Barack Obama cells. Barack Obama cells. And now there's this question about whether or not they're in a relationship, so that's why I brought it. But that was actually in the paper. There were neurons in the cortex that responded to Jennifer Aniston specifically.

Jennifer Aniston cells, Barack Obama specifically, I'm guessing there are Donald Trump neurons. There's probably quite a few. Right. And I'm guessing there were Biden neurons. Maybe. Maybe. So you're saying that

two very distinct brain areas can respond very similarly to the same things. And that, so that's one interesting finding. And the second interesting finding, as I understand, is that neurons are paying attention not just to what

you're looking at or the monkey is looking at, but also who's looking at them, who else is around, what the goal is. So individual neurons are multitasking. They're multitasking. Got it. And or as we say multiplexing, but it's really the same thing as multitasking. And that raises a lot of really interesting questions. Why? Why are these signals all over the place? Which it seems to be the case, right? Yeah.

And one idea that's out there is that because the, you know, if you let's say it's a visual area, those visual neurons might need to know the context in which something is happening in order to appropriately like encode that stimulus, right? Because it matters, the meaning of that stimulus is another monkey, like when I'm looking at you, it matters that we're in this setting here in California and I flew out here yesterday and all that stuff might be really, really important for

what my brain does with that information, like how I encode it, what I put into memory, etc. So that's sort of one hypothesis that I think that we're all entertaining, because it would be...

be heresy to say that like, actually it's a more like another name drop, Carl Lashley kind of view of the brain that it's just one big mush. Yeah. So in 30 seconds, Carl Lashley ran a really critical experiment where it was the equal potentiality of cortex experiment, where basically there'd been a decades of experiments with people lesioning a given area of the brain and seeing some deficit in behavior. Lashley decided to do

the same experiment and found that regardless of which area of the cortex, this is important that it was the cortex specifically that he scooped out lesion, got rid of, set it in addition next to the, in his case, I think it was rats. He didn't observe deficits in that behavior, at least that persisted. But you see this in the monkey and human data. You can lesion a brain area, see a huge deficit. I know I'm telling you what you already know, Michael, but I think most people don't realize this. A brain lesion can lead to a huge deficit in behavior

that is recovered later over time through plasticity, unless you start digging into the deeper stuff of the brain where lesions lead to permanent deficits, unless some intervention is provided. Yeah, the cortex seems to be maybe a little bit, I don't want to say equipotential, but it's very plastic. It's very flexible and very adaptive. So this was a really

cool finding, I thought, and we could decode from the population of neurons exactly what each of the animals was doing and who was around and who's watching, right? I mean, to me it was very gratifying. But the thing that was most exciting to me, the most exciting... I think that finding is really cool for neuroscientists, but for the primatologist, anthropologist in me, the finding that was most exciting

was that we discovered the account, the mental account for our social relationships. Okay, so for monkeys, a large fraction of the way that they build and maintain relationships is through grooming each other. So when they go and they pick through each other's fur, and that's how you make friends, okay, that's how you make allies.

And what has been observed going back to when monkeys were first being watched is that they tend to be really equitable, right? They're like, "If I invest two minutes in you, you will eventually invest two minutes back in me. It might not happen right away, but we're going to balance out. It's going to come even." And that raised the idea, which most people thought was ridiculous, that, well, they're actually tracking and keeping notes on all this. They've got a ledger.

for their investments and withdrawals in this social relationship. So to make it more, more, uh,

is salient for the listeners. Like think of it as like when you're texting and you text a friend and they text you back and then you text them and you text them again and you text them again and you're like, am I getting ghosted? What the heck's going on here? Why are you not, you start to feel that sense of like urgency, betrayal, like, oh, I'm not going to text you now. I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait until you text me back. It's the same kind of thing. We have this sense of, and in fact, when we think about now all the stuff that's going on sociopolitically, you know, in terms of

equitable relationships, I think that this bears on that. So we did something that never been done before, which is we tracked every single grooming interaction that ever happened between these monkeys over months, because we could. We had cameras on them and we used computer vision to do all that tracking. And yeah, they were perfectly equitable. But sometimes it, you know, sometimes it would take minutes to balance it, sometimes it took weeks. Like you owe me, you owe me.

and then it would come back. What we found is that in the brain, in both of these brain areas, we're carrying that mental account that precisely tracked who owed whom what. Amazing. How much grooming they, you know, that blew my mind. It's like, because we all feel that, right? It's like one of the most salient things there is in our lives.

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from a friend that says nice conversation which means they texted me a bunch before and I didn't respond yeah and part of that has to do with I for me the way that texts are archived they can kind of drift down and then they're hard to find and you know and and I'm a known long latency response person but then I barrage not unintentionally I'll be like get on a plane and be like oh

that's right i'm going to get these texts from a couple weeks ago and respond to them or a couple days ago and um i find voice memos to be a good solution to this i have a couple of people in my life with whom i mainly communicate through voice memo but it is very interesting that you know my my team here we we have a what feels like a very consistent cadence and um balance of accounts like that like even the text duration like you know like i'm fine with a one word

or even one letter text and I'm fine with an essay. Like, but certain relationships, you just don't do that. So what is this, just because I can't help myself, what is the brain area that's tracking this account or is it a network? - It's a network. - Okay, great. Then we don't have to lock people down with people's, with brain areas.

Well, this is amazing. I mean, I think that rather than, you know, people talk about love languages, right? Like, are you people, is it physical touch? Is it acts of service? I think, you know, there are some of your words of affirmation. I'm guessing that some people are tracking these very carefully too.

in humans and balancing the account. And that kind of love language idea seems like our five acts of support or five physical contact events, whatever you want to call it. I know I'm really sounding like a scientist, a nerd. Are those equivalent to five sentences of affirmation? What I'm gathering is that the brain is probably calculating these things on an individual basis.

And so it's not like five sentences equals five acts of service. But that – maybe it is. There's some like internal valuation that is like very mathematical. You're trying to balance the checkbook. I think it is very mathematical. But I want to point out that in the pairs of monkeys – we've now expanded this to multiple monkeys in a big open field –

but they're equal kind of partners, right? So it made sense that that balance was sort of one for one. And we know that studies of wild monkeys, wild primates, that the sort of conversion, you know, like dollars to pesos or whatever, is not one to one if there's something else in that relationship. So if there's a power differential, it's like if you're beta,

male and you're grooming alpha male, right? It might be a hundred minutes of grooming that alpha male that you get like one groom back. Or more importantly, you groom that alpha male for months and years on end and then he comes and saves your life.

when you are in an aggressive encounter with another individual. So you see how that there is this, I think that's what you're getting at with the love languages, which is that there is this underlying currency, but the value of that currency for each individual varies depending on what they, I don't know where that variation comes from, but depending on what's most important, what's most salient for them, and then also probably what that relationship is

is like and if there's a power differential if there's any other kind of differential as well

The math of power dynamics online is really interesting to observe on X, where people tend to be a bit more combative at times, not everybody. But I've noticed this notion of like, don't feed the trolls, right? Like someone says something that's insulting and you don't honor them with a response. You just let it go by. That would be somehow completing some sort of reward circuitry because what they really want is not to harm your reputation, but to be acknowledged that their opinion matters. And social media,

long as people have access to an account, effectively levels the field. Although then there's this prioritization of like high follower accounts and what used to be – when blue checks became purchasable, right? A lot of people were upset because it was essentially like equaling the status playing field somewhat, right?

It's very interesting to see how this stuff plays out. You know, like, do you honor somebody with a response or like ignoring somebody's insult that the classic, uh, madman Don Draper response, you know, in the elevator that has turned into a meme that, well, I don't think of you. I don't think about you at all being the ultimate sort of display of his power that, um, in, in terms of a, you know, not even allowing his neural circuits to, to keep track of an account. It's like zero for me.

Zero for you, you know, is essentially what he was saying. So is it the case that power dynamics are tracked across for conflict, for collaboration? We talked about love languages, which is a collaboration. You know, some people do...

seem in life to be very transactional is the word we assigned to it. They're tracking like what you did this and I did this. No, you know, you paid last time I paid this, this kind of thing. Or they're elevated by the idea that, oh yeah, you know, they did this and this, therefore the relationship must be much tighter than perhaps the other person in the relationship thinks it is. These are complex features, but the idea that we are old world primates and that there's a brain network tracking this stuff to me makes me

really good sense. And I think it's wonderful that you've identified a physiological anatomical substrate for it. I think it's, it's lends a lot of support to like thousands of years of observations. Well, thanks. No, I, I, I think you're, you're spot on there in the, in the sense that, and at some point it's, it's all really transactional in the calculus of evolution, right? So in it, ultimately it's,

if your calculations do the right thing so that you get resources and mating opportunities and translate that into offspring and that they do that into offspring as well, then those, whatever the biological substrate was that did that is going to proliferate and potentially become honed and really specialized for doing that job. And that's actually the argument, one other argument for why, you know, we study...

primates because we're so closely related to them, we share all these features of our biology and our behavior, but also because and this is where I think for example personally I find it much more compelling to study animals like rhesus macaques as opposed to say marmosets which we've talked about a little bit in the sense that

If we're thinking about the forces that have made us who we are, right? Which as we just talked about, you see it displayed on X every day. Like attending to all these things, tracking all these different relationships, deciding whether or not to give somebody your attention, you know, the purest form of generosity as it was said.

That's what monkeys have to do too. And so this argument from what we call neuroethology, and ethology being the science of basically trying to understand behavior as a product of evolution, right? That it's designed just like physical features, just like the wing of a bird, right? That our mental processes

And the underlying mechanisms are designed to serve very specific functions. And so if we want to understand how we got to be the way that we are, we should look toward animals that had, you know, seem to be doing the same kind of things, facing the same kinds of pressures in the environment, in particular the social environment, which seems to be the one that's most important for us.

How do humans signal their hormone status? It's on a very different end of the spectrum. Yeah. But, you know, everything we're talking about, which is fairly high level and in the brain exists, as I like to think about it on a, on a, on a kind of a,

water level or a tide that's set by our levels of autonomic arousal, like thinking, feeling, action changes when levels of autonomic arousal are very high, aka stress, alertness versus when we're sleepy. And hormones certainly influence autonomic arousal and a bunch of other things too. Hormones is a broad category, but let's just stay with the ones that most people are familiar with. So what are the data on how female signal

let's just say, you know, testosterone, estrogen and other, you know, relevant hormones.

And for males as well, what are the external signals or behavioral signals? Yeah, so that's a really important point that you made because both of those things go together. So it's been most controversial for females, but in my view, the data is pretty clear and it aligns, I think, with our own intuitions just from daily life, which is, well, some things are apparently not –

consciously perceptible, it's like hard to report, but through studies where you just ask males for like, okay, how attractive is this woman, etc. That there are changes in the face, for example, and that's been one argument is that, this is going to sound funny, but

that the signals that in non-human primates are in the rear, because we're walking upright, you can't see that really, so now it's kind of in the face and so these changes that happen, that the ovulatory cycle is reflected in the turgidity, how tight the skin is in the face because it gets a little plumper and a little bit redder and we may not be consciously aware of that,

that it's there, right? And it shows up in sort of preference data when you ask heterosexual males, you know, how attractive is this woman, etc. So that seems to be the case. And also behavioral, you know, so sort of flirtatious behavior... Increases around the time of ovulation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a classic study that...

that exotic dancers, strippers would actually get bigger tips, more tips when they were ovulating than when they're not ovulating. -Interesting. -So maybe... And it could be by virtue of their behavior, but it could be the way they dance proximity to the... I guess the observers, clients, whatever you call them. I don't recall that being quantified, but it suggests that there's a latent signal

And that men are unconsciously processing this. They're not saying, oh, her cheeks are particularly plump and red right now. They're that...

But that if you measure their ratings or scores of attractiveness, when she's ovulating, it's these features that might be drawing out that response. Correct. We can take this back to the monkey porn studies, which was our first real foray into trying to quantify the...

the value of various kinds of social information for guiding decisions. And we already came into this with a sense that like, yeah, things like status, physical prowess, mating status, you know, are you, you look like a good mate, bad mate, are you in mating condition, you know, etc. And so when, you know, you think about that, like how do you ask a monkey that question? You could ask them, they're not going to tell you because they can't talk.

but you have to develop a behavioral way to elicit that and so what we did i think it was pretty clever was to riff on the studies that you know i had already done looking at varying the expected value of two options so this was the work i did as a postdoc with paul glimcher

where we revealed economic signals in the brain, in the parietal cortex, an area between where visual signals come in and where you make a choice to make a behavioral response. And we varied, like in this case, monkeys don't work for money, though they work for juice. Okay, it's been actually it's really fun, you spend a lot of time figuring out what juice they really love best.

And then economically, you would vary like the size of the juice reward that each of the two offered or its probability while maintaining size constant. When you combine those, you multiply those together, you get expected value. That's the first model of economic decision-making that was really ever developed, right? You compute the expected value, different options, you choose the one that has the highest value.

It doesn't work all the time but it's sort of a rough proxy and we showed that neurons in the parietal cortex signal that. Monkeys are good economists, they choose the one that has a higher expected value. Okay, so now take that experiment, I'm going to have monkeys choosing between

two options that vary in how much juice they pay out, but I'm also going to pop up a picture when they choose one of them, okay? And they don't know what picture is coming up, but the picture is going to be... it could be a nothing burger just like some gray square, it doesn't mean anything. Or it could be the perineum of a female, if it were males that we were studying, we did this with females making choices eventually as well.

Could be face of a dominant male, face of a subordinate male, face of female, etc. What's the equivalent of the swollen taint of a female monkey?

For if you reverse the experiment and it's the female monkey who's making a choice about male monkeys, what do they find really attractive in a male monkey? Yeah, so it's the taint of the male monkey because it's providing a signal about how much... Monkeys looking at taints of other monkeys. Yeah, how much testosterone is circulating, you know, that they've got on board basically, which is a good predictor of their...

status, it's a good predictor of their fighting ability, all that kind of stuff. And if you're female, that's a reasonable kind of choice to make, because if you have male offspring and females are predisposed to choose that, then your male offspring are going to do pretty well. So that's what we did, and we varied how much juice. So sometimes monkeys would get paid, they'd have to give up juice to see the pictures, sometimes they get paid more to see the pictures.

And what we did then is we construct a choice curve and we use the differential. If it's not 50-50, if it slides one way or the other, it tells us that monkeys are paying X amount to see certain kinds of pictures or you have to overpay them, right? And so what did we find? It was really, I think, scientifically revealing but it's pretty fun. People got it immediately.

They will pay... Juice. Juice. They will give up juice. They will pay it to see pictures of the perineum, the hindquarters of females. This was an original study, it was in male monkeys. They will pay to see the faces of dominant males and you had to pay them to see the faces of subordinate males.

Okay, so females will give up juice to see the taints of testosterone rich male monkeys and male monkeys will pay juice to see the swollen taints of female monkeys that are because of the swelling indicates a better reproductive competence. Yes, better, you know, dows the time, the time is ripe.

okay to to mate but it's just in general it's a signal that is like what we would say is it's important it has value monkey something you should try and in fact yeah they're paying for it so you know it just blew up on the internet even back then it was like suddenly million every website it was like oh you proved monkey porn blah blah blah um it was kind of a fun ride it did it was a new york times uh idea of the year uh in 2005 which was um

Again, kind of shocking, you know, there's like a little word on that. But people, it makes sense. And the thing I want to point out is that we ran this same experiment in people, not with unclothed humans. So we used, and we used only, well, no, it was, and we had to create our own stimulus set because all the stimulus sets that were out there for visual studies of humans were like

a bunch of German people looking very dour. They were very well controlled and we wanted something that was more natural. So we downloaded thousands of photos from this website, hot or not.com. I don't know if you recall that, but it was a website where you could upload pictures and people would rate you. I mean, now this,

- Probably wouldn't be allowed now. I remember Rate My Pet. - Rate My Pet, Rate My Professor, I think, which is still around. - And we were saying rate. - Rate. - Rate. - Rate. - With a T, my pet. - Yeah. - But this was hot or not.com. So you get all these really natural looking. And then we had, this was really funny though too. So we had a group of separate groups of raters from the people who we actually tested in the experiment.

So we had a group of males, heterosexual males rating the female photos and vice versa. And that was interesting in its own right. So we were just trying to establish like... we're not saying why they're attractive or anything like that, just like let's measure it, okay? And it was really fun because you know by that... it took... it was hard work. You have to do one every three seconds and it took like an hour.

When the women were done raiding, they were like, okay, I'm glad that's over. The hour's over and our male raiders were like, did you have any more? I'd be happy to sit here and rate more photographs for you. Interesting. So women got sort of like they got tired of raiding males for attractiveness. Yes. Males did not tire of raiding females for attractiveness. They did not at all, which that's anecdotal, but it's still –

I think it's revealing. Then we ran the pay-per-view experiment, just like in monkeys on humans. Pay-per-view. And we also...

ran a couple of other economic, standard economic tasks. One would be how long are you willing to wait? So that's the delayed discounting. And generally you will wait longer for a bigger reward, a smaller reward. And also how hard would you work? And the work was like you had to alternate pressing two keys on a keyboard. It was really just menial, laborious, et cetera. So the two interesting, just sociologically it's interesting what comes out of this.

Our female subjects basically wouldn't give up money. They were working for money. They were hearing the sound of coins coming out of a slot machine, which was proportional to how much money they actually got. Real money. Real money. If you ignored the pictures, you'd go home with like $17 extra compared to if you were influenced by them. And the females did really well economically. So they pretty much kind of ignored the pictures of the males, even though they were rated, even the ones that were super hot.

They were not very concerned with that. For the males it was the exact opposite. So the males are giving up essentially... they're paying... and they had thousands of trials... they're paying somewhere between a half and three quarters of a cent to see images of women who were rated in the top like third of attractiveness. They also would wait significantly longer and they would work really hard, it's like rats pressing for cocaine, quite literally, to keep those pictures

up on the screen. Okay, so that's the setting we've established in monkeys and in people, similar economic principles that are guiding social, you call it attention, social evaluation, whatever. So we're like, okay, let's go look in the brain. So we did an MRI experiment, fMRI experiment, measure, measured blood flow to, you know, different parts of the brain. And we only tested

males, because they were the ones who displayed, you know, differential preferences there. And what we found is that kind of parts of the visual system that are involved in encoding faces, but then the reward system

was activated and tracked linearly how much money these guys were paying to see images. There's basically the trade-off value, the currency, the translation of pictures into money. Then in monkeys we studied all the same areas but now we could record from individual neurons in those areas rather than looking at blood flow which is a crude proxy.

And we found exactly the same thing, which is that neurons in the reward system were spontaneously and strongly activated by those pictures, you know, that made sense, right? So the pictures of the perineum of females by dominant male faces and that correspondence I thought was pretty compelling.

So these are brain areas that are involved in value-based decision-making. Not unlike the value-based decision-making of tracking how many grooming events one received versus needs to give or texts one has received or gives or acts of service one trades for some other love language. I mean, here I'm extrapolating to a lot of different themes, but...

I mean, talk about transactional. I mean, this implies that our neural circuitry, while flexible, we can trade two of those for one of those, or we can decide, you know, I'm just going to be a selfless giver, that that's a decision. And that altruism, well, it certainly exists. I mean, we fortunately see acts of altruism a lot, probably not as much as humanity would be served by, but it exists. Altruism exists.

But nonetheless, there's a formula that's maintained in the brain. Like, I'm going to do all this for nothing. And the circuit kind of understands that versus I'm going to do this, but there's an expectation, maybe with a long latency, that at some point it's going to be paid back. I expect to be paid back. The idea of altruism has been very controversial within kind of evolutionary biology for a long time because it's kind of hard to imagine a...

a scenario in which being purely selfless could persist if there was a genetic part of that, right? If it were heritable. So that's why we have ideas like kin selection. Like I will give up my life for eight of my cousins, for example. - Well, right. And I was saying in parenting and taking care of young, like we give selflessly, but there's this like unconscious or semi-conscious backdrop, which is you want your own offspring to proliferate, to survive and flourish.

And so it's not, quote unquote, really selfless, although in the short term it can appear selfless. That's, I guess, I suppose the real evolutionary biology argument. I would say that in terms of just pure acts of giving where we don't expect anything in return, I think most people that do that say,

certainly I've had this experience, right? It feels good. So there is a return on investment. It's just that the return doesn't come from somebody else doing something to reciprocate in the same domain, but it feels good. You know, there's nothing more impressive than an anonymous donor, right? You know, actually, I don't want to take us too far off track, but there's this idea in a lot of Europe that if somebody donates a lot of money to a cause that, you know, they're doing philanthropy, that they're like trying to hide something. Whereas in this country, that tends to be

Although it's sort of growing this idea that, oh, if somebody is giving a lot of money to a university, they want their name on the side of a building. They're really looking to kind of either hide other features of their life and or they want respect, right? They want fame. So it's kind of interesting. I like to believe in pure altruism. It feels good to me to believe in true altruism. So I don't think this is settled. And I think this is where...

there's another feature of human and maybe human evolution that humans and human evolution that's relevant here, which is that we may be one of the only organisms in which something called group selection might happen, right? And that's this idea that like groups are competing with each other in addition to individuals competing and collaborating and competing. And so that evolution might favor groups

groups in which there are certain individuals who are, in a sense, wired to be selfless. And there's one of my colleagues at Penn, a guy named Duncan Watts, has done these really interesting experiments where he ran these massive online, like, prisoner's dilemma games where, you know, people are having to decide whether to, you know, to either support, you know, their partner or defect, essentially.

But what was unusual about these games is he let people play them over and over again, hundreds and hundreds of times. What typically happens is once you've experienced the fact that like if you cooperate you're gonna get screwed eventually, then everybody just says, "I'm just gonna... I'm just screwing the other guy from here on out." But he identified that there's a population, like 20% of people, I think, something like that, who are persistent cooperators, who cooperate no matter what.

their experience. And that is resonant with this idea kind of from group selection that groups that had individuals who were cooperators, who were selfless no matter what, might out-compete other groups, right? And I think that's a really interesting idea. I want to circle back to what you were saying about the feel good, like when you give. There's a real substrate to that. If we can engage in a little reverse inference here,

Which is that, and this was shown actually a couple decades ago by a neuroeconomist named Bill Harbaugh for the first time, which is that when you give to like a charity that you love, you see activation of reward circuitry that looks just like if you got the reward yourself.

So it's like if I give to whatever March of Dimes or something and that's what I love, then it in essence feels good to me. And that reward system activation is the thing that through dopamine reinforces behavior. So when you have that warm glow, it makes you more likely to do that again in the future. It's a self-reinforcing signal. I love that those sorts of circuits exist because they seem to serve the greater good and I'm not...

trying to, you know, rub away our more, I don't know, harsher features of primate brain wiring, but they're all in there. So speaking of which, are there external signals besides muscularity, jaw shape, et cetera, that relate to levels of testosterone in male humans that are transient? You know, the male hormones don't cycle as robustly

as female hormones because of the lack of a menstrual cycle. They might change with age, et cetera. But is there anything that signals testosterone or free testosterone level? Certainly stress hormone level is signaled, quaking of hands, that kind of thing. But what about testosterone signaling that is independent of the kind of like vigor display stuff that we normally hear about?

It's a good question. I think it's important, as you pointed out, that it doesn't vary too much over weeks or months or anything like that. It's pretty stable. But one thing we can think about is work done by my colleague Giddy Nave, who's in the marketing department at Wharton and working with Colin Kammerer actually out here at Caltech. They did a number of studies, not where they are measuring testosterone, but doing...

very well controlled placebo trials of applying testosterone gel versus something that people... you didn't know which arm you were getting. So testosterone versus placebo? Versus placebo, yeah. And measuring things like desire for conspicuous consumption, so buying luxury cars or things like that, or other things are...

their cognitive reflection, like they're really bad at-- they start to fail on things that require not just giving the simple answer. They become more risk-taking. So there's a number of features that we kind of I think collectively anecdotally think of as being like hyper masculine associated with testosterone, like you want to signal, you're a big guy, you take more risks.

And you're less reflective?

which seems obvious, but it's wrong. So higher testosterone, more impulsive with responses, less reflective, tend to be wrong more often. Yes, but more confident. But more confident, more risk-taking, that kind of thing. That's kind of a, okay, fully expected one.

And I guess the purchasing, you know, items that signal wealth or status. It's a display. So, you know, think of it as like the chimpanzee. So when researchers first went out to study chimpanzees, you know, in Africa, and then they had like generators or whatnot around, and they had these big gasoline cans or whatever. And the male chimps, one of the male chimps, you know,

you know, discovered that he could take these cans and run around the group banging them together and getting a lot of attention. You know, which is similar, you see them up in a tree. Vigor display. Vigor display, displaying, yeah, just grabbing, I think, so much of its attention. Just look at me, look at me, look at me. And I think that's what you've got going on with this sort of, you know, buying a Jaguar or whatever, you know, it's like...

- Or people are trying to signal what they don't have, actually have, right? I mean, it's tricky because we, now you can buy things on credit. Like, you know, there are a bunch of jokes about Los Angeles that can be made here. You know, I grew up in the Bay area and there are areas of the Bay area where there's a tremendous amount of wealth. And my dad used to always say, you know, up here like wealth is really kind of hidden back in the trees, literally. You know, you go to LA and there's all this display through stuff.

It depends on where you are in LA, but it's largely true. Let me put it this way. You see a lot more yellow Lamborghinis here than you do in Portola Valley, but I'll be willing to bet that there's far more money in Portola Valley than there is in all of Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles if you really just

looked at actual net worth, not an experiment I want to run, but I'd be willing to bet one entire limb of somebody's choice to run that experiment. And so there is this kind of strange thing where the display of vigor is so flexible in humans, right? Like, it's like a

Nowadays, there's a lot of discussion about billionaires signaling more traditional or primitive forms of vigor, like fighting ability or muscle versus – it's almost like – and I think part of the reason for that is that

The concept of a billion dollars is very hard for most people to conceptualize as like a, like an operational thing, like what they would do with it and how it would impact their level of happiness, which is probably actually very little, et cetera. But we, we can assess physical qualities so readily like, and so, um,

Anyway, I guess that this is really just my way of taking us back to this idea of valuation, like how we place value on a potential mate or a friend or a coworker. It sounds so transactional, but clearly the brain is performing these operations all the time and it's highly valuable.

variable depending on who you are, the social context you live in, and yet these hormones, especially testosterone and estrogen, seem to really be playing with the volume or the gain on all of this stuff. Yep, that's exactly how... And in fact, that's how I think about all... We can think about oxytocin the same way as like a volume knob for prosocial interactions in general and testosterone. So I think that works.

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We hear about it as the love hormone, the affiliative hormone, folks it's a neurohormone, so it's somewhere in between a neuromodulator and a hormone. Let's set all that aside, all the mechanistic stuff, and I'd love to know your knowledge about what changing levels of oxytocin does

to perception, to behavior, humans... Yeah, oxytocin, we've been interested in it for a long time because as you said it seems to be a dial that can turn up or turn down certain aspects of social life and other aspects of mental and emotional function. It's important to point out that oxytocin and its sister neurohormone vasopressin, arginine vasopressin,

which is sort of maybe a little more important in males than in females and females oxytocin is a little more important, but they're in both and they've been around a long time. They've actually, you know, there's a very early invertebrate evolution. In mammals oxytocin has the primary role, right, of helping to build bonds between mom and baby. So oxytocin is released during childbirth, it's released when mom is nursing and it seems that in humans and some other animals

social, you know, really, really social creatures. It's now been co-opted to kind of have a similar kind of role in the relationships you have with other people who are not your offspring or your

your pairmate, right? So because oxytocin for example is released, you know, when you orgasm and so then that's, you know, thought to be why that sort of pillow talk afterward is, you know, like it's more engaging and, you know, people feel things at that time that they might not, that they're different from what they would have felt. It fosters attachment. It fosters attachment. That's a good way of putting it. So...

Oxytocin levels are hard to measure, right? You can measure at a distance in the periphery in the blood but it's not exactly like one-to-one correlated with what's going on in the brain and in general we don't want to put like a pump or a little thing in your brain that we could measure how much is in there. So we can look at instead what is often done is to look at what happens if you introduce oxytocin

more oxytocin than you normally have like into the brain. You can't inject it or anything like that and the way that it's typically applied is to squirt it up your nose and or inhale it intranasally so it then is taken up by the nerves that are in your sinuses and whatnot and then goes into the brain. That was what it was thought to. I think that we were the first to show that that's actually how it works. We did all the work in monkeys where

It's-- all these things are just sort of easier to do and the behavior is a little bit less complex, so our readouts are I think a bit more straightforward. In the human studies there's a lot of variation, you know, it's controversial because there's a lot of like-- there's some crap studies and there's just a lot of variability in the effects across studies. I think some of that's just because you ask people to squirt it up their own noses and so there's a lot of-- that introduces variation in just how good they were at getting it in the right place.

With the monkeys what we did instead is we used what's called a nebulizer or aerosolizer. I noticed when my kid had pneumonia and I took him to the ER, they put this mask on him and they missed this albuterol which opened up his airways. "Oh, we could do that with oxytocin too." So that's what we do with the monkeys, make sure they get like a really good dose and then we show that that gets right into the brain. Okay, now that puts us in a position to ask questions of what does it do. One of the first things that oxytocin does is it relaxes you.

So just overall, you know, you were talking about autonomic function, it's a relaxer, it's an anxiolytic. And in monkeys what that does is it reduces their vigilance to sort of any threats. So they're just a lot more chill. So that's sort of a primary thing. And then we've looked at how it affects their behavior in males and females separately.

because as I said before they sort of... first of all males and females have different strategies and behaviors and the expression of where oxytocin receptors are in the brain, etc. and vasopressin receptors are a little bit different. And in male monkeys it's super interesting because you know we've been talking about how you know dominance and they're really like recent mechanics, this really steep hierarchy and one of the things we found right away is that you give oxytocin and it just flattens the hierarchy.

So the dominant male monkeys become super chill and friendly and the subordinate ones become a bit bolder, perhaps because, you know, if I dose my own or I've dosed you with oxytocin or change your behavior, which would change my behavior, so it reverberates across individuals. So it flattens the hierarchy. They spend more time making eye contact. They pay more attention to the others.

individual and we've shown that um it's burning man yeah it's true i've never been to burning i've never either but this is what i hear no i think it's that that's the right point and i'll circle back to that because we also showed that um uh in a task-based situation where a monkey can choose we gave monkeys choices whether they could give a reward to themselves to another monkey to a bottle that could collect reward you know in case they just like to see juice dripping out

And they would become more pro-social. So they're much more likely to give a reward to another monkey. They're more altruistic, as we talked about earlier. So that's like, it looks like a real pro-social behavior.

kind of thing, right, which I think is super interesting. In females it's a little bit different. Females become kind of nicer to each other and we see that greater eye contact, etc. But they come more aggressive toward males and we speculate, I think it's the hypothesis that because oxytocin is released when you've got an infant basically for females, males are a bigger threat then.

because in many primate societies and other mammals, males sometimes can be infanticidal because if they kill off a female's infant, then that will bring that female into receptivity for mating much more quickly. And so that's sort of the evolutionary rationale behind that. So that's kind of our supposition.

The other thing that I thought was really interesting as well is we find a greater or an increase in the synchronization of behavior. So when I do something, you know, this idea of mirroring, which has been talked about in business context for a long time, you know.

It's a real thing. And it's a marker of a good relationship, a strong relationship. If you have good rapport with somebody, you tend to adopt similar movements and postures. And if you do those things... Shirts. Shirts, exactly. We didn't coordinate here. Similar clothes, yeah. You just happen to be a great dresser. Oh, well, you know, same here.

So when you have that, you know, actually if you do those things, if I subtly mirror you and I'm in a job interview, I'm more likely to get the job, going to get a higher salary, et cetera, all those sort of good things. So oxytocin turns up behavioral synchrony. And one of the things, this is like something I've been fascinated in for the last decade and we and a lot of other people have been working on is that this synchrony, the behavioral and neural level, physiological synchrony,

is kind of... it's this black magic of social behavior. It's the glue that allows us to live and work together. So the observation is that

if you and I, we have a good rapport here let's say, if we were measuring activity in our brains right now, we'd see that they were coming into alignment. So they might have been very disparate when I arrived here and you arrived here today and as we've grown closer and we discovered things that are similar about us that the

you know, our mindsets and our emotional sets are more overlapping. So we see this world more similarly, we feel more similarly about it, we're more likely to take similar decisions and then that reverberates... the coolest thing is this reverberates down to your body. So if our brains begin to align, our hearts actually begin to beat together, you know, if we have different resting heart rates,

you're getting to breathe together and you start to move together, you start to look at the same things in the environment, we've talked about attention, when you look at something, the same thing, you're getting the same data and that feedback loop, which I think now you can see that that is a way to coordinate

behavior and that is the essence of sort of... that's our secret sauce as a species, which is that we can collaborate and do things together and it seems to like oxytocin, vasopressin are involved in this as a way of kind of turning up the dial on synchrony. It seemed to turn up the so-called social brain network and then that synchrony is the glue and it's a biomarker, a biological marker of a close relationship that predicts

Better communication, increased trust, better teamwork, whether your marriage is going to last. I mean, the things that it predicts, group decision making, so we showed that in a business context. Committees that are more in sync with each other, their hearts are beating together, are more likely to reach the right decision in a really difficult problem than committees that are not. The cool thing is that now that you have a biomarker, you can hack that.

right, in the sense that now we can start looking at all those trust building exercises or anything else that you know is supposed to turn things up, turn up the dial on teamwork or communication and we have a readout and we could say yeah that's working, that's actually doing the thing, it's not BS, right, you should invest your time and energy in that rather than something else. And there's like now we've been working through this list as well as others, there's a whole host of things

that seem to actually turn up synchrony. And that's a shortcut to team chemistry. So interesting. I'm sure you're familiar with the molecule MDMA, aka ecstasy. Never taken it. I have. High on my list. Yeah, I have. It's an illegal drug, but if you are part of a clinical trial exploring MDMA, then you can do it legally. If you're not, you're breaking the law. Right. So...

Methylene Dioxymethamphetamine, it's very interesting because it dramatically increases dopamine, but not nearly as much as it increases serotonin. And it also leads to enormous increases in oxytocin. And it's not really a classic psychedelic. It's

an empathogen. It has unique properties in that it raises dopamine and serotonin simultaneously. That's unusual among compounds like amphetamine, dopamine, epinephrine, psilocybin, serotonin, broadly speaking. There's a really nice experiment that was done trying to isolate the effects of dopamine versus serotonin versus oxytocin on the empathogenic effect. And

By administering different drugs and in the case of oxytocin, oxytocin directly, what they basically concluded was that oxytocin has very little if anything to do with the pathogenic aspects of MDMA. But if I recall correctly, and I have to go back and look at this, but if I recall correctly, it had a profound impact on, as you pointed out, the reducing anxiety.

And that reduction in anxiety brings us back to this idea that, you know, as we change the tide of autonomic arousal, things become more or less available to us in terms of emotions and behavior. So I find oxytocin to just be like spectacularly interesting compound for so many reasons. But perhaps for that reason more than all the others, that it's like it's our own affiliative compound.

as you said, anxiolytic. Did I pronounce that correctly? Yeah. I never actually said that word out loud. I've written it many, many times. When I said it, I was worried that maybe I'm saying the opposite. Or anxiolytic. Anyway, it reduces anxiety, folks. It chills you out. Chills you out. And I think that's so interesting that oxytocin can be evoked by all these different types of stimuli. So as you mentioned, it's like

post-coital or post-orgasmic. But it can be elicited by non-sexual affiliative touch. There's actually really interesting evidence that, and this led to this question about whether or not cesarean sections versus, you know, vaginal births are, you know, are they truly equal in terms of their effect on the fetus? And it does seem to be, at least in rodent models, that the passage through the vaginal canal during birth

help stimulate oxytocin, that it has a bi-directional effect on the mother-infant relationship. Is there any evidence of that in primates as well? I know the evidence that you're talking about, I don't know of evidence in primates for that. But I think

I'd like to circle back to what you talked about in terms of social touch, which I think is a really, especially right now today, I think is a very important topic to consider. So we, like other primates, we have these, they're actually unspecialized sensors in our skin,

the hairy parts of our skin like your arm, whatever. And they provide input essentially to a system that releases oxytocin directly and that's basically all they do. They're really bad at telling you exactly where or how you know what's being done or how much pressure but they operate best at body temperature. So you're being touched with a body temperature stimulus

and in a way that's very what we would consider to be very pleasant like getting tickies, you know, it's like grooming. Like this is the same thing as grooming in monkeys. And so it tells us that this is an ancient part of our heritage to building relationships which is actually through social touch, right? And it's been said and I think reasonably that we're living through an epidemic of the loss of social touch

for a lot of good reasons, right? Because of raising awareness of inappropriate touch, etc. But now it's almost as if we've swung the pendulum too hard in one direction which is that we're being robbed of this very natural intrinsic signaling mechanism for building bonds that humans would normally, you know, normally, would, you know, in the past

have benefited greatly from and it's not clear how we move forward in terms of like replacing that but I do think it's possibly part of the constellation of forces, of losses that is making us very sick as a species and as a society, namely the loneliness epidemic, the sort of anti-social century

um which with concomitant you know with basically all these follow-ons in terms of anxiety and depression and despair despair exactly what a despair it's such a heavy word yeah it captures so much um a couple of reflections about this because i think about this a lot i never forget when i was um traveling overseas in 2019 so this is like pre-lockdowns and all that um

You would see in certain areas of the world men walking holding hands. Right. And, you know, I didn't know their sexual orientation, but my assumption was that they were heterosexual men holding hands because it was like just very much part of the culture over there. The other thing was if you –

And I have gone to South America. You'll see school kids walking home, all holding hands, boys and girls just walking, holding hands. It's very casual, non-romantic hand-holding. A lot more hugging, a lot of like...

I wouldn't say long, firm embrace, but I'd say like, like, like vigorous embrace upon meeting kind of thing. And, um, and I grew up in the era of, you know, like fist bumps and, and side hugs, you know, it was like a thing over, over here. And, um, as you pointed out, I think that, uh, the lack of physical touch of that sort, meaning just whatever is culturally acceptable, um, consensual, casual, physical touch, um,

Definitely, according to the literature that I'm aware of, signals to the rest of the nervous system and body that

even if we're surrounded by people. And I watched that Chimp Empire series on Netflix where they talk about this allopathic grooming, this collaborative grooming, like I'll trade five. Pick your back for a while, you pick mine. And when they decide that they're going to ostracize a given member of their troop for whatever reason, sometimes it's because the chimp misbehaved, other times it's...

more diabolical than that. They're trying to really get rid of, they're trying to adjust the power balance in the troop for other reasons. They basically just leave that chimp to try and groom itself and then the parasites start to eat away at it. It develops these immune issues and then they often just go off on their own and die. It's an incredibly hard thing to watch. And what the underlying reasons are in each case are not made completely clear. But

I think about this whole thing of like deaths of despair and not long ago you were talking about group selection. I feel like these two themes might be related. I feel like right now

politically and culturally in this country and now starting in Europe as well. It really is, it has become an us versus them kind of scenario. There doesn't seem to be a middle at all. It's like a big trough. And even the suggestion that somebody could kind of switch between groups is kind of like a no. Because they believe and have said and done this, no, because they believe and have said and done this. And very strong opinions from both sides. So

i don't think we're in a just hug it out kind of uh landscape right now and um so i'm curious what forms of non-physical affiliative behavior exist out there there are social media accounts out there like upworthy which you know just consistently puts out positive content there's there are people who are very positive in their you know in their online behavior but and there's encouragement is

exists online, but it seems to be swamped by these like high salience like attacks. Like what's the deal? What can we do? Yeah, I mean this is a fundamental question for our age I think and we're on a trajectory toward, I mean I don't want to give the impression that I'm a complete pessimist, but I could, I was about to say toward oblivion between like the despair that has been driving

people to either commit suicide or to develop severe mental illness or physical health issues, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, etc. that are, I think,

a consequence of being, in some cases, a consequence of being isolated because you are not interact... that's part of who we are as a species and we don't thrive. I mean, the work is very clear that like being isolated, being alone is worse for your health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I mean, it's just really, really bad and it scales, it's almost linear to how many contacts you have, you know, per week or per month.

So that's all really bad and I do believe that's also driving, that's a big driver for not just the deaths of despair but like the lack of coupling and the lack, you know, and crashing rates of fertility which is also a real thing and it is happening and if we don't counter it, it's gonna be bad. Getting back to synchrony, one of the most effective ways to get in sync with somebody that you're out of sync with or that you don't know, right, who's different from you,

is through conversation, but deep conversation. Okay, and there's a couple parts to this. You have to make the time and the space to do this, you have to have an intentional mindset. And we and other scientists have worked with... There are these structured sets of questions that have been developed. There's one called Fast Friends developed by the Ahrens in the late 1990s. There's commercially available decks online that you can get. And they're cool because they...

Each question, you know, you can kind of take it a superficial level or a deep level, but they're designed to kind of like break the ice and then get you really fast into like really deep questions. Is this like a hundred questions to fall in love type thing that was published in the New York Times? Yeah, it's very similar to that. But in this case, it's about connecting, like deep connection. I think it's more about deep connection than sort of romance part of this.

And what happens during that, and my good friend and colleague Emily Falk at the Annenberg School

had a really nice paper recently that showed that by measuring brain activity itself in people who don't know each other as they work through these questions and their brain you know one brain is in this space another brain is this space and they over time come into really close uh alignment and that's associated with all this good stuff like i like you more i feel closer to you i value you more etc etc and once you're in that kind of alignment now you're set

to sort of do things together. And now I think that gets back to your question, like we can't hug it out, but we have to somehow create space. And when I say space, like give people the space to do that. Like I'm going to talk to, you know, somebody from the other political party or from the whatever. That's not a bad thing, right? And in fact, that's what we need to do. But instead we're, especially online, reinforcing and making the barriers harder to

to have those conversations, which are the necessary thing, I think, to establish the glue that keeps us together. Yeah, I feel like unless there's an organized effort to try and create a bridge, it ain't going to happen. I just feel like there's, I don't want to take us too far off course, but maybe this is a good segue into the neuroscience of decision-making.

And value-based decision-making, which is so much of the work that you've done. But I feel like there's this property of the human brain that there's evidence for. I've seen a beautiful neuron paper showing that confirmation of our beliefs leads to a reward-based decision.

activation of a reward-based mechanism. Basically, we're getting a little bit of dopamine for confirming our biases, essentially, about others. And then, of course, if we then experience more affiliative behavior from our group, we feel more protected. And then there's a tendency to do more of that. And I feel like with the knowledge that we have about dopamine incentive schemes, group selection behavior,

there ought to be a program that could be established that isn't hug it out, but that is designed to, again, that word exploit is so loaded, to leverage the same neural circuits that led to the divide to try and bridge this divide. And, you know, what it has to do though is it has to break with the value system of

of both groups. I mean, let's just be frank. We're talking about the left and the right here. I don't want to like, I don't want to dance around the margins, you know, and, and somehow, uh,

Acknowledge that there's good and bad within both of those groups, which itself, as I say, is like a heretical statement. There's just so many assumptions made just on the basis of that. But create a new value-based system that is self-rewarding and allows for group selection to fill in the gap or at least come up with a third option, if not politically, then in terms of sociology.

Yeah, so the solution is Independence Day, you know, that movie. So we need an alien invasion so there's an out group that we can all, you know, identify with each other as, okay, we have to come together to fight, you know. Because I think that's really at the root of this, which is that because of group selection, humans are sort of very tribal by nature. We are wired to connect, to glue together people

with the people who are in our tribe, but that means almost by definition there's another tribe, right? So that we're over here and we're defending ourselves against them. Now, it's not like complete, right? People have been engaging in long distance trade for, you know, 100,000 years plus.

You know, there was interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and Denisovans. So there's, you know, some flexibility in those rules. But in general, yeah, I mean, to have an in-group, that means you have to have an out-group. And if we want to take the left and right and put them together, in some ways, it's like the easiest way to do that is if we had a third group.

outgroup that we needed to unite against, such as drones from over New Jersey or, you know, aliens or, you know, who knows what. But these go back to classic psychology experiments, right? As I recall, where, you know, the best way to build affiliations have a common goal and or enemy.

Yeah, unfortunately being under attack when two opposing groups are both under attack they form alliances. So it's the classic minimal group experiments of science in the 60s which I love and I teach on this all the time because it's relevant for all these tribal biases. And so what he did was like you take the random people off the street and you go like, "You're on the red team, you're on the blue team, you're on the red team, you're on the blue team."

Okay, in five minutes you're going to have to compete against the other team. And immediately the people on the red team are like, I don't like the people on the blue team, they're stupid and they're ugly and you don't know anything about them, right? But you end up immediately forming a tribe, even though you might not have had anything in common. And what I think is really interesting and relevant here is that any number of different biases that are sort of superficial based on...

race or ethnic group or whatnot, which have been, you know, shown to-- you know, even though people say like, "Oh, I feel, you know, if I see you in pain, like you're getting stuck with a needle." "Oh, I feel the same for anyone, doesn't matter." But it tends to be selective for your own tribe when you measure the brain activity.

But if you now put the emphasis on team, like literally you do that science experiment, that minimal group experiment, and I put you in a red... Or like we're both wearing black T-shirts. So you're going to work with the other people in black T-shirts. It doesn't matter who you are. That, and I think the way it does this is through attention, is put my attention on what's shared rather than what's different. So now we're on the same team. And now that kind of recovers, restores...

that the empathy that I didn't feel toward you before. And that's interesting when you think about, say, in the US, the first places, the first groups that became integrated were like military and sports.

And what's common amongst those? They wear uniforms. So the uniforms say we're on a team that takes your attention away from the things that are different. And the Stanford prisoner famous Zimbardo experiment where assigning people to prisoner versus guard and that led where it led. Exactly. That occurred not but a short distance from where my lab was. So we have this anxiety-lowering pro-affiliative...

oxytocin thing, activated by touch affiliation. And it's bi-directional, like it promotes more touch, which promotes more feelings of safety, which lowers anxiety further. And then we have testosterone, which signals certain things about others and seems to play a role in the hierarchy. And you mentioned that when oxytocin is given, that it kind of flattens the hierarchy.

And my understanding of testosterone from Robert Sapolsky and others is that testosterone tends to exacerbate existing traits in people. It doesn't turn nice people into jerks or jerks into nice people, but rather it turns jerks into super jerks and nice people into super nice people, which fits well with my idea that testosterone makes effort feel good. And what type of effort feels good?

depends on a lot of complex features within us as humans, like too many things to explain by molecules. So I feel like the primate literature and the human literature map so well to one another. And I think this is a good segue to take us into value-based decision making because I do recall a paper published, I think it was in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. I should point that out. There are other proceedings in other countries.

that showed that if day traders or people on the stock market floor took testosterone or they tended to be more aggressive and impulsive in their decision-making, or if you just looked at performance,

and then you measure testosterone that it tended to fall out on a pretty nice correlation between higher testosterone and basically more aggressive decision-making, more risk-taking. So is that all still true? I mean, that's my read of literature, that is still true. And it does raise, I think, a worrying specter

I don't know how much of a phenomenon it is now, but it was the case maybe a decade ago or so that a lot of guys who were traders who were feeling like they were losing their mojo after 40 or whatnot, declining testosterone, so they decide they're going to start juicing, put some androgel on. And if that's taking you above...

typical, you know, levels, then what might that do in terms of markets if like enough people are actually, or even if they're juicing just for physical performance, right? And they're engaged in, you know, in trading, that could have a lot of

a lot of bad effects, right, as it cascaded through the market. Yeah, I would say that probably the dominant effect of exogenous androgens and all this TRT nowadays is it's very clear that it allows people to maintain moderate to high testosterone levels, even if they're not sleeping as much, it enhances recovery. So if people have their behaviors right, their nutrition, their sleep, etc., it really does give them a, you know, significant advantage. If they don't,

have their behaviors right. It gives them the significant advantage of not having to deal with the normal fluctuations caused by minimal sleep, etc. But the decision making process, like to say yes, no, maybe or maybe later,

is reliant on things like good sleep, being rested, things other than testosterone. Like this is the idea of a committee as opposed to one individual, you know, recklessly driving decision based on state of mind or androgens. So if we could zoom out and in for a moment on some of the work that you did with Paul Glimcher when you were a postdoc in his lab, but also in your own laboratory. When I sit down and make a decision, should I do something? Should I not do something? And

Let's say I have some general sense of what the potential payoff is within a range, the potential payoff of not doing it within a range. And I always think of like some like kind of tension or pressure as it relates to time. Like for instance, I've been considering buying a house. I really like the house. It's a bit of a reach for me for a number of reasons. And I'm trying to make this decision, right? And I'm trying to gauge whether or not other people are looking at this house also.

What do we know about how we start to establish an internal representation of that? And I give that example as just one example. This could really translate to any number of different scenarios about whether or not to get married or not, whether or not to stay in a relationship or not, whether or not to move, whether or not to have another kid and on and on and on. What are the core mechanics of value-based decision-making as it relates to outcomes and time? Yeah. So,

I think we understand this system pretty well at this point. So the last 25, 30 years have been enormously productive. So we have a good sketch of the circuitry that does this. And essentially what happens is you're confronting a situation. And it doesn't really matter whether... It seems to be the same process, no matter whether you're trying to decide between eating a donut...

or an apple, or buying this house versus renting an apartment, or marrying this person, you know, proposing or not. It's sort of all the same system. And what happens is you come to the situation and your brain takes in evidence about the alternatives. What are the options that are available to me?

What do I know about them from their stimulus properties and from, you know, maybe prior encounters or just other information? And it takes that evidence and it weighs it against stored information about things you've done in the past, other decisions you've made, and then begins to assign value, computes the expected value of those different options in terms of what it will return to you, and then calculates

essentially that is the basis along which that decision gets made. So it's a soft max function as we say, so it's not like a hard deterministic one, so there's some statistical noise in there for some... you know, we could talk about what that reason might be. You make a choice and whenever you make a choice in any behavior that you're engaging in, your brain is making a forecast

of what's going to happen next as a result of that. And your brain then determines, computes, that things go exactly as predicted, right? Is it better than predicted or is it worse than predicted? And then that signal gets fed back into the system to update it so that it hopefully performs that job better in the future, right? So like, oh, actually, that was a... It went way better than expected. You should assign that a higher value and do that thing again.

This process of weighing up the evidence takes time. And that's why we have this speed accuracy trade-off in decision making, where we observe that the faster you go, the more mistakes you tend to make. Been there. Exactly. We've all made split-second decisions that we regretted later. Oh, yeah. Or slightly sleep-deprived. Sleep-deprived. Exactly. The more time you take, the more evidence you can accumulate. And when you

You have to recognize that the data your brain is taking in from the environment is noisy, right? It's not perfect. It's noisy because of the environment. It's noisy because the wetware of the brain is statistical and biological. So you can make the wrong choice by virtue of the noise dominating the signal. And that happens when you go too quickly, right? And one of the things that's... So there's a good mantra from that.

you know, which is if you want to make really good decisions or if it's really important, you kind of have to decide ahead of time like do I need to be accurate or do I need to be fast? And if accuracy is important you need to slow down, take your time, take as much time as needed to get it, you know, the most information that you can.

And even in the moment that doing like simple strategies like breathing or having a mantra that says like, you know, it's not what matters, you know, every little decision is not what counts, but it's the long run. That helps to turn, we talked about arousal a lot here, and that turns down arousal. One of the things you think of arousal is doing, we keep talking about volume knobs, it's like a volume, volume knob for the stuff that's coming into your brain that could be signal or noise.

So it can turn up noise too. So you could count as evidence toward the value of an option something that is not actually, you know, evidence and then you make the wrong decision. So by turning down arousal, slowing down,

You're relying more on evidence than on noise. Does increasing arousal increase the likelihood of false positives, that is thinking something's there that's not, generally speaking, as well as false negatives, you know, thinking that something's absent when actually it's present? I haven't thought about it that way before, but it seems to me like that's a, yeah, that seems consistent with my understanding. Just by way of example, one of the things that's been really interesting

different for me in the last few years is how quickly you move to publication when you podcast or when you're, when you're doing social media, you just click say it's out in the world versus, you know, the way I was weaned was, you know, spend two, three, four years on a project. Maybe it doesn't go anywhere. Maybe it does goes to multiple papers, gets reviewed. So by time it comes out, you know, it's been proofread and you've read the proof. So it's been vetted by a number of

hopefully expert sources, usually really good sources of feedback as opposed to nowadays where you can just kind of move immediately to publication. And I,

I used to have this saying, which was in the lab, because sometimes, you know, you have two months to do a revision or something. It's never really two months. It always takes five times as long. I used to say, I go as fast as I carefully can. And I used to tell my students in postdocs that we go as fast as we carefully can, because the moment you start going fast, you start making mistakes. You start making mistakes. You definitely pay for it later. And the mistakes that I've made podcasting were a product of going fast and or fatigue. And the two things kind of relate to one another. Yeah.

Or occasionally somebody will highlight conflicting evidence. And then nowadays you can go back and repair things with AI. You can, you know, you put things in. But I feel like so much of life in terms of decision making is trying to make decisions when most of the time we think we don't have more time. But most of the time we do have more time. Unless somebody's hemorrhaging, we usually have more time. But then there are some...

real things where we don't always have more time. I mean, we are biological aging machines and there is such a thing as too late. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you think these systems change as a function of, you know, playing a game for some money in the lab? We can or we can get caught up in it. But there's this like tremendous backdrop of context. You know, $100 might be fun for one person, might be the difference between making rent and not making rent for another person.

You know, the decision to stay in a relationship or leave a relationship when you're in your teens or 20s is fundamentally different than when somebody's, for instance, at the near the transition zone of having versus losing their fertility. I mean, these are like, yeah, and those change all sorts of these pressures are so real. And yet, if we only have one system in the brain that handles this similarly to the reward system,

It seems like we ought to learn in school how to work with and update our decision-making process based on immediate term, short term, like all the different time scales. To be able to do that seems really important.

Are there any ways to train that up? Yeah, I think it's a, so there's a few things in here that I think are worth unpacking. I mean, one is what you brought up about fatigue, which I think is really critical. We did some work with the wrestling team at Penn. Coach came to us and I had had a few of the wrestlers working in my lab and he said, you

which is that, I don't know if you've ever wrestled. I wrestled my middle son. One match. It's the worst six minutes of your life. Well, I didn't quit because I lost that match and I did lose that match. It was seventh grade. I quit because my dad gave me a choice. I could either continue to wrestle or I could play this other sport that I really wanted to play. He said, you can't do both because it was going to impact my grades negatively. And so I opted for the other sport.

What was the other sport? Soccer. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I love soccer. Yeah. But losing that one wrestling match was informative. The guy just dead fished on me the whole time and he deserved to win. It was a really good strategy. He just like dead fished on me. Plopped on top of you. Yeah. And I couldn't gumby out of there. But it is the worst six minutes of your life. You're exhausted within like 30 seconds. It's incredibly grueling.

And what the coach observed was that their guys, it was a men's wrestling team, was they were performing very well in the first two periods. And they got to the third period and they started making really dumb mistakes, bad decisions. And so he said, what's going on? I said, well, it's about the speed accuracy trade-off, but we have to investigate how it's related to fatigue.

So what we did, this was a really fun experiment. So we go to the wrestling room and we wire these guys up. They got wearable EEG, heart rate monitors, the whole nine yards. And what we do, we gave them like this simple little decision making slash impulse control task. It's just like a controlled response task. There's a, you know, a trade off. If you go too fast and you make mistakes. Okay. So it's like, there's, it's like a go, no go.

And so they do it, then we run them through two minutes of CrossFit exercises, really brutal. Then they come back off and they have to do the same thing again. And we do that three times and then they have to wrestle each other. So it's cognitive and physical. Yeah, cognitive and physical. Not unlike chess boxing, which is not a sport I recommend. Have you seen this? I have. Where they play around, they play some chess and then they literally fight. And then they, it's crazy. It's like switching between these two very different states of mind. It's insane, but also somehow really appealing, you know?

Well, I think for the neuroscientists in you and me, and I think we're all neuroscientists to some extent, we want to understand the brain and ourselves. This notion of very disparate behaviors, boxing and playing chess, being associated with very disparate types of arousal and how those map onto one another I think is interesting. I think the confluence of chess boxing is fencing.

which is very much like chess. My youngest son fenced for a number of years. And so mentally it's like that, but it has the physicality. Or jiu-jitsu, my friend. Brazilian jiu-jitsu tell me that it's like there's an infinite number of options that become constrained in certain dynamics. Yeah, very similar. So this was really cool because what we found was that speed accuracy trade-off, the more fatigue they got, the more calories they spent.

the faster they would slide down to emphasizing speed over accuracy. They just started like, just got to get done, just got to get... I don't know what they're feeling, but that they are just not deliberating, not really being focused. They just lost the capability of doing that. And aside from, you know, you can say, well, we could help you guys, you could become more physically fit. Maybe you wouldn't fatigue as fast, but they're about as fit as they could be.

They said, well, why don't we do this? Why don't we offload the decision in the third period to the coach? As soon as you, in the third period, you're going to just look at the coach at, you know, some cadence or whenever he's going to yell at you to look and you do it what the coach tells you. So, and I think this is really interesting because you think about it in like other contexts, like in a business context or something, when if somebody is really fatigued or your unit's fatigued, maybe you have an external person then who takes over the

uh, making the decision that you are just, um, you just execute in a sense. Right. Um, the other thing I wanted to say about this all too, which I, it gets to your point about, well, in the lab, it's like, you know, it's one thing you're, you're, you're, you got an undergraduate gambling for 10 bucks over an hour. And that's how does, how well does that map onto the real world where there are all these other things going on? And I think that, um,

That's the challenge. All the, you know, when I teach business school and, you know, in classes, MBA students or executives and through exec ed, they all want to know, like, give me the five-step formula. And it's like, that's supposed to apply. How do I take into all? And it's like, well, we mostly know about one, this dimension or that dimension or that dimension and not how in the real world, you know, in a real complex environment to put that all together.

So that is a... I think that's a gap. That's a... and one that we're trying to fill, which is to study decision making, whether it's individual or collective decision making in real world environments, right? To where all of these factors, you know, context and the various priorities that are coming in are more, you know, more natural. They're not controlled. And how then... I mean, we think we know how that works, but we haven't really proven it yet.

So often we think that we know how we feel about something, but some of the work that you've done in monkeys and in humans

has really highlighted the extent to which we base our evaluation of other things and people based on things that are in proximity to those things and people. Could you tell us about this experiment? And I swore I wasn't going to say the words highly processed foods during this episode, but I think we got to talk about monkeys and Doritos.

All right. I thought this could have gone, there's a number of different, and I will, I do want to bring up one study that I think people find interesting that gets at this difference between what we think we know and feel and what our brains are actually telling us. So we talked about monkeys and people, their brains are, I don't want to say hardwired, but they're tuned, tuned to something.

value social information, in particular kinds of social information, like information about high status individuals, right? And information about sexy individuals, attractive individuals, right? And it's baked into the same circuitry, or attention circuitry, or reward circuitry. And that, once we observe that, of course, it led me to wonder, well, okay, there's this really weird phenomenon in humans, that in marketing, right, that we...

Use celebrity, you know, status, celebrity and sex to sell to people like why should they ever care about, you know, Brad Pitt likes this thing or Jennifer Aniston likes Smart Water. What in the world? You're never going to meet them. Do they really know a lot about, you know, water or whatever? Yeah.

What's the point of all that? George Clooney selling Nespresso. Yeah, who cares, right? But now when you think about it in the context of like, oh, our brains are wired, tuned to attend to and process more deeply and value information about others that are essentially high status, celebrity, sexy, whereas like George Clooney's all of those things put together. Now that starts to make some sense. And so we thought, well...

Given that monkeys are humans, monkeys and humans are so alike in this regard, I bet we could run an advertising campaign on monkeys that's based on sex and celebrity.

So that's what we did. We just basically had monkeys, you know, they're just sitting there in their home colony. And we had a, you know, television monitor, computer monitor in there that would display like, you know, the Doritos logo next to, you know, high status monkey A and maybe the Cheetos logo next to low status monkey B or, you know, Coke.

next to like sexy monkey butt and you know Pepsi next to the front end of you know or backside of monkey that's not so sexy. Okay, so you just do that, just do it, just pairing. And so it's just association, simple association. And then what we did is we then gave the monkeys choices between brand logos that had either been endorsed by you know essentially celebrity monkeys, sexy monkeys or peon monkeys, right?

And they got the same reward no matter what. No matter what they chose, they always got the same banana pellet. But the monkeys favored the brands that had been paired with celebrity and sexy monkeys, just like you see in people. You know, I just keep saying this. There's a little monkey in all of us. I'm shaking my head because it says a couple of things to me. But one of the things that it says to me as a neuroscientist is that it's almost like the bins –

like the map of valuation in the brain, there's overlap of, I'm going to get into lingo here for a second and then I'll explain of the receptive fields. So like you mentioned, Hubel and Wiesel, H&W, and I mean, they basically won the Nobel Prize for a couple of things, but not the least of which was the identification of like, what are the specific qualities and positions of light and shapes of light that activate a given neuron? Right.

which eventually led to the Jennifer Aniston, Barack Obama cells. And by the way, their coexistence in the same sentence does not mean that I have knowledge of their dating. I have no knowledge. And that paper was – that study was done a long time ago. Right, right. But it speaks to the same principle, which is that when we see two things next to one another, sometimes there's a merging of those in our cognitive space or our memory when in fact there's no overlap conceptually.

Right. You know where you see this very dramatically is that if there's a podcast with a male and a female guest host pairing, I guarantee that 25% of the comments are theories about their dating and or sleeping together. It's just, it's incredible. It's like people see male and female together. Right. And they just like start doing this thing of like, oh, they're dating or they're, you know, they see flirtation where it may or may not have existed.

You know, it's just wild. And so that when I hear about this experiment that you did of pairing products with sexy monkey or non-sexy monkey or high status or low status monkey, I can't help but feel that the area of the brain that's involved in valuation is just taking visual images, conceptual images, because it'd be visual, it could be any number of things. And that there's just overlap in the maps of these in the brain. And then that the effect is born out of that overlap. Right.

That's one interpretation. The other interpretation, I suppose, and they're not mutually exclusive, is that we want to go up the hierarchy. And that's kind of an assumption that maybe we could just like poke at like a couple of nerd academics for a second. Because like I like my life very, very much.

There are people that live near me that have far more resources than I do. And I never for a nanosecond wish for their home or my home. I've tried to make it a point in life to either have the life I want or be aspiring to the life I want. You know, have the things I want or aspire to the things I want. But I've never found myself in a mode of like, oh, I want this.

to be working on that experiment or I want to be living in that house. If I see a beautiful house or a beautiful thing or some feature of someone's life, it inspires me to want to go try and create something similar.

And so I'm not, it's not that I'm without competitive spirit in me. I am like anyone else, but I feel like that's so far and away different than the notion of a hierarchy where for me to move up, someone else has to move down. And for somebody to be above me in any domain, that means that, you know,

I'm quote unquote below. So can we talk about hierarchies as they exist in old world primates like the tax versus us? Because I don't want to map this on anything political, but oftentimes this will get mapped onto the political. Some people live through the lens of abundance. There's plenty to go around. Some people live through the lens of scarcity. Their win is my loss. Their loss is my win, that kind of thing. Do you see this in monkeys too?

Again, it's really hard, you know, you can ask the monkey, but he won't necessarily tell you because he doesn't know what you're asking them. But I, you know, I think it is, well, first of all, across primate species, there's different degrees of the steepness of hierarchy. So in rhesus macaques, they're really despotic. They have a very steep hierarchy.

in like Barbary macaques, which live in North Africa and in Gibraltar. Very relaxed society, even though they're macaques, they're all the same genus. So why that's so, we don't really know. The general idea is it has something to do with how rich the environment is, the resources that are available and how monopolizable it is.

um they are so if if you can monopolize resources then that can help to create a um a steeper hierarchy if they're not monop like let's imagine you you eat grass for a living um you know you're like a cow or whatever and there there are some monkeys that do that eat grass uh

Like I can't hoard all the grass to myself, it's just everywhere and so everybody can just spread out and kind of eat grass. It's a very boring life and you spend all your time digesting and fermenting in your, you know, in this extended gut which is kind of a gross thing to do. But I think you can see that like that spans a continuum from what you're saying from abundance to scarcity and has a lot more to do with whether it's sort of monopolizable.

And does that make sense? So if you can monopolize something, then you have something that other monkeys need, right? And you're creating that scarcity. Yeah. So let's drill into this because I think this is – everybody is operating from a certain frame in this context. And so for instance –

There are billionaires, hundreds of some people like Elon has hundreds of billions of dollars. Doesn't seem to care much about money for money's sake or I think he's sold all his homes or whatever. You know, he's motivated by clearly other things as well, if money at all. And then there are people who are destitute property. I think many people will say, why does anyone need that much money? Kind of, they'll say this about billionaires. Yeah.

What's been interesting is one of the more prominent themes in pop psychology that is supported by research is this idea that past a certain level of income, your happiness doesn't scale upwards linearly with the increase in income or maybe at all.

And the number that's thrown around is like past $75,000 a year, you know, your happiness doesn't grow. I would argue that indeed money can't buy happiness, but it absolutely can buffer stress or certain kinds of stress. Let's just give an example of a single mother with three, raising three kids on her own versus a single mother raising three kids with three night nurses.

when they're infants and nannies. Different level of output required. Like you just can't argue between those two. Now, whether or not one is happier than the other is a discussion, different discussion altogether, excuse me. But I think, you know, the cow example makes a lot of sense. The hierarchies within primate troops make sense. But as humans, I think that I observe tremendous variation as to whether or not people say, oh, wow, this person is a millionaire or billionaire, but I'm good with what I've got. Or

This person has so much more and I resent them for it. And I guess we don't really think about there being a limited amount of money in the same way that we think of as like grass or resources. Now, if we were to talk about mates and that, that's a whole other thing. But you just have to go to a bar with a particular bias towards having more money.

men or women. And then, you know, like that starts to play out immediately. Right. But let's keep it simpler. Do you think that this whole stance about abundance versus scarcity is dynamic?

Like if you're surrounded by people that make more or less the same amount of money as you, do you feel better than if you're surrounded by billionaires that have yachts? I think the fundamental drive is to climb the hierarchy is more or less kind of baked in. Again, with a lot of variation across individuals and probably across cultures, which –

I'll get to in a moment. Going back to that 75,000 being kind of like where, you know, it's just the asymptotes, there's a number of papers that came out from colleagues at Penn and Wharton. So a guy named Matt Killingsworth showed in a famous paper five or six years ago, that in fact it actually continues, like happiness just keeps going up with income. And then there was a back and forth with Danny Kahneman about that. And then they worked on a paper together and what it looks like is this, it kind of goes up, flattens out for a while,

And then like above another level, wow, happiness really goes up when you got a lot, a lot of money. Ah, so that study isn't discussed as much. So that's new. Well, it's new. It's like in the last year or two. So being very, very wealthy does increase your level of happiness. I think it, yeah. I mean, for a variety of reasons, right? So, you know, sure, it's a buffer of stress, but it also allows you access to lots and lots of

different things that can make your life just easier, right? So that's, I think, part of it. But the other part, and I think this gets back to that question of what makes us human, is that we can intentionally, just like you said about yourself, it's like, well, I'm just going to chill. I'm happy with what I've got. And there's lots of ascetic traditions and

in a variety of cultures, especially Eastern cultures that have taken that approach or even in the West like early Christianity, et cetera. And I'm trying to remember the name of the book that was recommended to me. I haven't read it yet. But that in – for example, in India, in amongst some of the most extreme poverty –

in the world you have people who are kind of ecstatically happy and they're very very happy with being alive and being alive where they are when they are and with the people that they're happy with. How does that happen? I don't know but here's my guess or part of my guess I guess which is gets back to what we talked about in terms of attention

So what you attend to is being turned up in the brain and what you're not attending to is being turned down. It's kind of like glass half full, glass half empty. And if you're paying attention to the sort of good things...

then those are getting kind of priority of access to your brain. So you're kind of getting like, "Oh, it's magnifying every little small positive surprise is amplified in your brain." You get a bigger dopamine hit for that rather than the sort of small negative surprises. Now I'll put that into another context which is we've done a number of studies on loss aversion. And loss aversion is this observation that if I give you a 50/50 gamble like win some money, lose some money,

In general, for most people, I have to offer them a lot more to win than to lose for them to take the gamble, which doesn't make any sense rationally and economically. It's even chances. So people are loss averse. There's been a lot of theories about why. Danny Kahneman famously thought that people feel the pain of loss more than the pleasure of winning. And I think that's true. We investigated that using a combination of

modeling, computational modeling, and we looked at people's behavior, we did eye tracking, because we're measuring where people attend. Your average person, most people attend to what they might lose rather than what they might win. And the longer they focus on what they might lose, the more loss averse they are and that tends to be associated with people who have like negative affect. So if you're anxious or you're depressed, you're in a negative state, then you're looking more for what you could lose than what you could win.

So that sets up a really interesting test, causal test, which we were like, well, you know, where you look is a function of what you're looking for. They're looking for what might hurt them and also what the world looks like. So let's just manipulate the visual display. We made the winds bigger font or brighter than the losses. Okay. When you do that, that attracts people's attention. They look better.

at the wins, what they could, the good things they could get rather than the bad things. Just by changing the font. Just by changing the font size or the brightness. They look at it more. This gets turned up in the brain and now they're not loss averse anymore. Now they're willing to take the gamble. So that's what I'm talking about in terms of like what you focus on. So if, and that's a way to do it. I mean, obviously that you could take advantage of people by doing that, but

With their consent, so for example, we started that work on behalf of a financial services company who was saying, we're having trouble with our customers, older customers, to get them to take good risks, like that could really pay off for them because they're too afraid. And so we did some basic work and then we tested that we could actually causally change that. We could shift that. So with their consent, yeah, if we amplify, we just make, just put the

Put what you could win instead of what you could lose in a, make it more obvious. People pay more attention to that and then that will subtly shift the decisions that they make. We are so malleable when it comes to changing the context and thereby the variables that shape our decision making. But I'm always struck by the way that it comes in below our conscious detection. This might be, this is,

the appropriate time to ask about meme coins. Right, because, you know, we all grow up learning about, you know, the US dollar or Euro or whatever backed by something, right? Backed by the Fed, but also, you know, backed by real world physical objects of gold. That's what we're told anyway, right? You know, and this is, you know, why just printing more money is never the solution, right? Because...

Meme coins born out of the kind of larger theme of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin are an interesting kind of derivative of cryptocurrency whereby you're pairing reputation of a person or in some cases a Shibu Uno dog, right? With a currency that has no intrinsic value except for the person's reputation plus the

whatever backing, whatever value backing it's obtained when people decide to purchase that coin. So I don't know how many listeners, you know, track cryptocurrency and I am by no means an expert on this, but you know, one thing that people get excited about is how much money is flowing into a coin, not just the value of the coin, you know, on a given day. So, you know, essentially how much has been invested in that coin as something of potential value. So when we hear about, um,

the Hak'tuwa girl coin, the Hak'tuwa coin, or there's a Trump coin now, I think. There's a Melania coin. There's a Doge coin that was developed long before the idea of a department of government Doge, the Shibu Unu coin. Is this all just

Again, there comes that word, leveraging this proximity between reputation and value. So I think that's partially it, but it may be even simpler than that, which is it's leveraging, it's harnessing our wiring skills.

to attend to what other people are doing and what they're getting or losing. So we care a lot about... When we're in a group, the behaviors of other people... So let's think about how we learn something, the value of something. If you're a simple animal you learn from direct experience and that's reinforcement living, reinforcement learning driven, dopamine system, etc.

You can also learn from what you didn't choose, counterfactual, fictive learning. And then in groups you have this rich source of information what other people are doing. Like I could watch you try that food and if you die from eating it then I won't eat it, right?

So that's, we're deeply wired to pay attention to the decisions that other people are making. And if they look good or if they, you know, then we start to copy what they're doing. And you see this in, it's not just these meme coins, but like meme stocks, you know, like GameStop. This is very similar to the FTX phenomenon slash debacle. Yeah.

where celebrities joined in and people had trust in these celebrities, admiration of these celebrities and invested a lot of money in what turned out to be, you know, in the end, a failure. So how often is this happening in advertising? Like if we really step back and we go like, is the BMW really the better choice compared to the, you know, compared to the Range Rover? Like are we really basing our decisions on the thing that we're purchasing as much as we think?

No, I don't think so at all. And there's a few things we could kind of unpack there. I think in terms of meme coins, meme stocks, there's probably two things, a confluence of two things going on. So one is this sort of celebrity endorser. And we have studied that also as well. We talked about the monkey stuff, but we looked at, we did eye tracking studies of people making choices amongst products and brands that had been endorsed either by celebrities or not, just paired with them, right?

And one of the things we found is that when people chose a product or brand that was sort of unfamiliar to them, if it had been endorsed by a celebrity, that pupils, their pupils didn't dilate. Normally they would dilate because that's like a

overcoming your default and mental effort and arousal goes up because it's sort of surprising. And so the pupil staying silent is an indicator of kind of enhanced confidence and trust, if you will, that I'm not making a mistake. I'm putting a lot of words here, but like, you know, you're that, that, that, that was the impact in a very subliminal way of that celebrity endorser. So I think that could be going on as well as the, the, um, the,

this other process I was talking about in terms of what we pay attention what other people are doing, which seems to be a major driver of bubbles in stock markets. Like that goes all the way back to like Isaac Newton losing his fortune in you know, the South Seas trading market. You know, he famously said like, you know, I can divine the mechanics of the planets and the heavens but I can't understand the minds of men or something like that.

He just couldn't help himself. He got out first and then he got back in when he saw his friends were continuing to make money and then he got wiped out. So we were like super interested in this and we ran an experiment with MBA students at Wharton

and they were playing a stock market game. Actually, it turns out it's a stock market we developed for monkeys. We had monkeys play the exact same stock market. They're buying, selling. They've got a portfolio that they can trade in for juice. Humans get money for this. This was based on some studies that Colin Kammerer and his colleagues and Benedetto DiMartino did a while ago. In the MBA students, we used a standard psychometric approach

scalar, you know, a questionnaire that's used to test people for sort of social impairments, okay. And then what we did is we looked at how their likelihood of getting caught in a bubble market related to social sensitivity, how attuned they were to other people. And basically the more dialed in you were to other people, the higher your likelihood of losing everything in a bubble and it was those people who were like

socially impaired, who did the best. They never got sucked into bubbles. Now what was cool is we found the same thing in monkeys. Okay, so monkeys in the same stock market, okay, if they're playing alone, they're making pretty good decisions. Okay, as soon as you put another monkey in the market that they can see, they see, they watch what that monkey did, that monkey buys GameStop or whatever, then I buy GameStop. And he sees me do that,

And then he does the same thing and it just goes back and forth, back and forth. They create this bubble and then you get this crash. It was like really phenomenal. And we found that...

the brain circuit that is essentially involved in theory of mind that but is about controlling your attention to others and registering what they're doing is driving that, okay? And it was really funny. It was like the bigger the portfolio imbalance between what I've got and what you got, the higher the signal in this area. The monkeys are like,

I don't know if I can say that. You can say whatever you want on here. Okay, well, fuck. I'm losing relative to you, so I'm paying even more attention to what you're doing and what you've got in your portfolio, and I'm going to be much more likely to copy you and do what you're doing. So again, like there's a little monkey in all of us.

I see very little difference between what people are doing with GameStop and what monkeys are doing in that market. So when we hear about these, for lack of a better phrase, pump and dump type things where – like I'll never forget in 2017 a friend who's a spectacularly successful investor.

said, you should put 2% of your investable earnings into Bitcoin. And I was like, well, you know, I don't know about that. And then not long after that, there was some press releases about who was buying Bitcoin and the price shot up. And then I said, went back to them and said, I have to be really careful here and said, you were right. They said, yeah, you know, but you know,

Whenever you read about who's buying Bitcoin, it's not clear when they bought that. You know, a lot of those purchases were likely made a long time ago. So there are ways that people, you know, kind of like...

build some hydraulic pressure through social interaction on these things, right? Yeah. He's not a, you know, it's very different than like someone picking up the phone and, you know, the whole like notion of like insider trading, right? Yeah. Very different. Yeah. You know, if people kind of create a swell around something, this is great or that...

let's make it real estate. It's a little more tangible for people. Like that neighborhood is really terrific. We're all going to move there. And then, you know, people like, you know, start moving there. And then you realize that they've actually owned that very inexpensive property for a long time. Right. And they're actually the seller. Right. You get a very different impression of the advice that you got. So, and I'm not a finance guy, but, you know, I think about these things in terms of the neuroscience and the human psychology. I mean, it just, again, I'm just struck by

how our notion of valuation is adjusted in the short term by virtue of proximity, probably also in the long term, but that how we kind of lose ourselves in these things, that we just become less than rational.

Based on things like arousal, the relationship between hormones and arousal. What I love about what we're doing today is, in case people haven't caught on already, is that we've got multiple mechanisms and themes here that are starting to converge. As arousal goes too high, it's mostly what we're exploring, you start speeding up, you start misjudging information, you think noise is signal, and you start...

correlating things that are like not correlated in reality. And then you can quickly find yourself down the path of bad decisions. I think one of the best advice I ever got was if somebody ever wants you to make a decision very, very quickly, and it's not clearly an emergency, like you don't see them hemorrhaging, chances are it's a scam. Like if anyone, you know, this is the best thing to tell anyone that's older, let's say, because they'll get these calls from people and it's like, this is urgent, this is, the urgency

usually is suggestive of it being false. Like using time pressure on people. Like, "I need this money now. I'm going to miss my bus and my kid's going to be waiting for me." This kind of thing. I mean, and it like pulls on you, right? You don't want some kid waiting out in the middle of nowhere. But if this is somebody you don't know, then you could say, "Well, maybe five bucks, I'm willing to lose it." Maybe that's probably the calculation I would do. I'm willing to lose it. If they're lying, okay. If they're telling the truth, great. But when it starts getting higher stakes,

gets kind of scary. I think we should address the word rational, rationality that you used, which is like, "Oh, we're being irrational, it seems like we lose our rationality." That's a word that's bandied about a lot, right? And especially in economics and that kind of makes the assumption that we are essentially a computer and we just kind of weigh things up dispassionately.

and we have complete access to all information here and now and into the future. There are other concepts here. One is called bounded rationality, which this guy Gerd Gigerenzer kind of came up with.

which is the idea that there are constraints, there are brain constraints that are built in, we've got energetic constraints, which actually limit how much information we can process, which is why we fall prey to choice fatigue and decoy effects and things like that, why we see visual illusions in some ways.

And then there's another concept of ecological rationality, which takes that bounded rationality and it puts it into what you might call the environment of evolutionary adaptation, which kind of we've talked about before. Like what's the environment our brains are designed for? And it's not the one we're in right now. So our brains are designed for, I mean, probably 130 million years ago, but let's say 200,000 years ago, our species, right? Homo sapiens. And what was that environment like?

Well, we lived in small groups with face-to-face contact of somewhere between probably 20 and no more than 100 people. You knew all of them. You know, you talk to them every day. Things didn't really move faster as an antelope or change faster than the seasons. Okay. There was very little wealth inequality. Okay. People are physically active all day long. And they ate...

natural food. And so what are we like now? We're in these so-called weird environments, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, but you were in these industrialized societies, we have money, we're in markets, we're interacting with thousands of people, perhaps millions of people, their behaviors, their thoughts, everything are impinging on us, stuff is changing super, super fast.

Right? We sit on our butts all day long. We're not active, right? It's like you have to be intentional, have enough resources to be active and we eat garbage.

And for those reasons, I think that's the source of like a lot of the misery that we have is that now I'm not saying we should go back to being subsistence, you know, hunter gatherers or horticulturalists. Maybe we should. It'll be a painful process to get there and we may end up getting there given some of the trajectories that are, you know, we're on. But people who live in those environments seem to generally be, you know, healthier and happier. For example, you know, like

studies of brain and body in subsistence, hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists. People who are in their 70s look like people, you know, Westerners in their 30s or younger, they're incredibly fit, lean, no evidence of cardiovascular disease, no evidence of anything like dementia's major cognitive decline,

And we're always trying to hack that. We're trying to hack it. Blue zones and then people say, well, it's the diet. No, it's the wine. By the way, it's not the wine. It's not the wine. Now...

finally after years, I'm not going to say I told you so, but alcohol is not good a little bit, maybe every once in a while, but well, not more than a little bit. I'll respond to that. Yeah. The, uh, but the social component seems critical. Yeah. Um, what are your thoughts on the longevity movement, if you will? Like I always assumed if I do well, yeah, that I'll probably live to be somewhere between 85 and 102. And my hope is that, uh,

My last five years, I like the Peter Attia thing. Like what is the quality of your final decade? Will be at least as vigorous as my dad's. My dad's 80, gosh, he's 81 and he's doing great mentally, physically. He was a guest on this podcast actually. He's a scientist. Yeah, it was. And so, but he's always been very,

very moderate about his drinking. He'll have like a half glass of wine now and again. He just never ate too much. He never exercised too much. He worked nine to five, nine to six, just consistently, but he's never was a, you know, like burn them in oil type, but he's just, his consistency is what's so impressive. So I think that might have something to do with it. But what are your thoughts on the economics of,

of decision-making as it relates to live fast, die young versus be more monastic and try and live a very long time. Well, that's a personal preference, isn't it? So I, you know, and that kind of is, that's interesting because it maps on to concepts in ecology that typically we use to describe different species.

which are like R-selected and K-selected. I don't know if you've heard of this before, but R-selected are species that are limited just by their pure reproductive rate. Think about weeds or rabbits, something like that. And K-selected are like oak trees and, you know, I don't know, whales. And humans are sort of like this mix, right? And so that's where we are very...

plastic and flexible. So in some environments you can be more R selected, like especially if conditions are really not very favorable toward investing in the long term, then it's kind of like kicking up your reproductive output. But if conditions can be favorable, right, that investment is worthwhile, then you can do that and be more like the whale or the oak tree or something like that. Now,

Yeah, you're right. I think that does map onto economics in a certain way because certain people by virtue of what they know and what they have can invest in trying to live the longest, healthiest life. And other people who may not either have the wherewithal or the knowledge are going to be invested in surviving until the next day, right? And so humans are sort of

you know, exist in that whole space in between. My dad died at 55, so I lived him by two years, you know. So for me, every day is like gravy. But I also don't have this sense of a long time horizon.

which is, you know, just being a little weirdly self, you know, just introspective, may be, you know, part of my drive to like work a lot. And it might have served you well. I mean, I've read and listened to Steve Jobs's biographies by Walter Isaacson several times, in part because I grew up

seeing that stuff happening because I was born and raised in the South Bay. And then Steve used to come into the toy store slash skateboard shop that I worked at to get new roller blade wheels. And so like, I would like see him around and see him at this little shop called Shady Lane, which is like little trinkets. Like he was around town a lot. And so then of course he became Steve Jobs, right? And, or he was Steve Jobs and he stayed Steve Jobs. But in that book, he talked about where it was talked about him that he,

And humans' knowledge that we are going to die someday can be the ultimate motivator. I mean, I think I look at some of the mistakes I made with, you know, bringing myself to places of physical risk in my life. And it's not like I thought I was immortal, but I didn't really have a good sense of time.

And I think as I get older, I'm 49 now, so I can finally say that. I think my sense of the passage of time and mortality is much more visible to me in my psychology. So yeah, this is the ultimate time scale over which one has to make decisions. So actually, let's talk about this. So if your dad died two years younger than you are now,

Do you have the assumption that you'll make it to a given age or are you just trying to maximize on the day, the week, the month? What's your unit of time scale? So I think I did not anticipate – like 55 was a magic number for me. The double nickel, you know, like Michael Jordan. I didn't know what I would do or think about when I – if I got past that. And I got past it and I was like, okay, I got past it. But now kind of I'm confused, I guess. I mean –

Physically, I showed no evidence of rapid decline. You appear very healthy, not just for your age, but you're very physically fit, you're cognitively fit, clearly. So that started to... I think that I'm opening up and I'm trying to look at some wisdom that's out there about like, hey, yeah, you probably got a lot of life ahead of me, and if I keep doing what I'm doing...

what do I want to do? That's another part of it because probably because of the focusing on that 55 and I'm like, oh God, everything that's come my way

every opportunity that's come my way, I've taken it and I just keep adding. I don't subtract. We could talk about this. I keep adding more and more things. You could look at the diversity of papers that I've published or the other things that I'm doing and it's just getting wider and wider and I keep taking more things on and reluctant to give anything up. But at some point, I think that's not the recipe for success. Like there's going to have to be some

And I, you know, okay, 57. So when's that going to happen? I don't know, 62, 65. I mean, I, you know, I don't plan on retiring. Although, you know, also that was like, wow, people in my family never got the chance to retire because they didn't live long enough.

But that's the short way to death though, I think too, and decline is like retiring if you don't do something else. Yeah. So I might have a solution for you. Okay, good. Give it up. I've thought about this a ton. Give it up. And I think about time perception constantly and people can laugh because I'm always late, but that's because I'm really enveloped in whatever I was doing previously. Like I'll be thinking about this conversation tonight and tomorrow morning when I wake up, for sure. Right. Okay. A couple of reflections and then ideas about this. So previous guest on this podcast,

Josh Waitzkin, Grandmaster Chess Champion at a very young age, then realized at some point, started asking the question of whether or not his love for the game was gone or whether or not it was taken away from him. Was it the fame? Was it the... Because a lot of things came to him young around chess and he spent two years asking himself that question and then cut ties with chess forever, never picked up a chess piece again. But pivoted into...

martial arts, investing, now foiling, you know, this like, yeah. But then had a near death experience. He had a drowning event, survived fine, decided then to move his family down to Costa Rica where he now spends four and a half hours a day or more foiling, raising his sons. And

I, you know, that struck such a chord with me. I've been involved in a number of things. I don't want to make this about me, but like, you know, early on it was like fish. I was obsessed with fish and birds and skateboarding and firefighting. Then eventually it was like neuroscience. And then now I do this. And so I would say I've read a lot about people who need something to bite down into. They can't retire. And it seems to me my informal read of this is that the ones that are happiest, who don't die young,

or in their 50s like Steve Jobs did, tend to be, for lack of a better way to describe it, kind of serial monogamous as it relates to their pursuits, which is the way I would describe myself. Like I'm, you know, like super into whatever it is professionally. And then after about anywhere from five to 15 years, it's like done and kind of

move forward some of the elements and the learnings from that into the next thing. But Josh Waitzkin is the ultimate example of this, of achieved like world champion status in multiple things. And then now seems very much to achieve world champion status at like family life. And he's got his economic and professional life intact from the previous stuff, but also he's still involved. He coaches for the Celtics and he's not the head coach, but he coached. And

and so on. So I feel like the serial monogamy version of this is the ultimate. And then the question is when to cut and pivot into the next thing. But I'm not telling you not to go with Brent. But I was looking over your CV and your papers and I was like, this is going to be a really interesting conversation because you have worked on a tremendous number of different things. Adding in more isn't the thing. But then again, maybe some of us are just designed to be involved in a ton of different stuff and your vigor is undeniable.

Right. Like, like you're super fit mentally and physically. So I don't know, I'm not going to tell you what to do. I just, I get, I offer Josh as an example of one extreme. You're sort of at the other extreme, I suppose. And then, and I suppose I'm kind of in the middle. So I think, well, I've done a bit of that over my career. And the way that has happened is through external leadership,

opportunities, not really opportunities. I was like, you need to do this. Like, you know, so, uh, is you kind of, uh, you know, broad portfolio is getting bigger. And then somebody says, I want you to direct this thing. And then I would say, well, then I have to, I have to cut some of this out and then go back and narrow again. And then the problem is then I start to do this again and then, okay, then I moved to, you know, Penn and Wharton and I got to narrow again, but now it's

bigger than it ever has been. So the question is like at some point, does that just fall apart? Or can I, I think intentionally, you know, at some point, and maybe some of those decisions, you know, the other thing, the other thing one can do is just allow the universe to

to make some of those decisions for you, right? It might be the case that some of the research I do will not be fundable at some point, right? And then that decision is made for me. I know I have lots of other things I can do. You know, we have, you know, for example, if like outside of the pure neuroscience, basic and clinical and technology development, you know, we've got all this corporate facing work, funded work,

through Wharton, which is a totally new space and new opportunity. So if, you know, if one, you know, I don't want it to be taken away, but if it is, then, you know, there's, there's plenty left to do. Well, you're clearly one of the few people that I'm aware of that is, you know, a true card carrying research neuroscientist, highly respected in the domain of real neuroscience, who's also involved in like business school type stuff and, you know,

People on both sides of that take you really seriously because there's real rigor there and the vigor perhaps goes along with it. It's hard to know what's causal there. Which comes first. Yeah, which comes first. But in any event, maybe we parse this over a coffee sometime. Yeah.

Apple and Samsung. Apple and Samsung. I'm an Apple guy. Me too. But I heard that the camera's on the Samsung phone. How much do you love your iPhone? What's your loyalty? What's your brand loyalty for Apple? I grew up near the original Apple store. It was in a different location. Right.

I love Apple products. Um, I don't like that they keep changing the ports. I know that's annoying. That's super annoying. Um, but they seem to be like hovering on USB-C, you know? Um,

I love the ease and simplicity. And yeah, I have a bit of a kind of like a historical South Bay relationship to it. So yeah, I would say, could you get me to use a Samsung phone? Nah. Yeah. So, I mean, this is the interesting observation, like loyalty for, let's just talk about smartphones and Apple and Samsung are the dominant players in the US market. They're basically the same device. You know, I mean, they're both little handheld computers that can do a million things and

Amazing stuff. And yet the loyalty amongst the Apple users is through the roof. It's near 100% year in, year out. And that's not true for Samsung. Despite Steve Jobs passing away. Yeah, despite. I mean, it's just a legacy, right? But I think that reflects a lot of the design and the emphasis, I think, that he put into Samsung.

The product, but also like trying to understand it through the lens of the customer, right? So that's like an empathy. I mean, there really is empathy. This was one of the first questions I got when I, you know, when I came to business school. I was like, what the hell accounts for empathy for a brand? It's not a person or this connection. Like, why do I have loyalty to a thing that's not a human being? You know, a product and a brand, a company, right? What in the world is that all about? It doesn't make sense. And there's this idea in marketing that actually, and it makes sense, is that we're

What's happening is we're applying or we're getting leveraged the hardware in our brains that's used to connect to people and now it's connecting to brands and to the brand community.

And you could see that kind of in like the words we use to talk about brands, for example. That's a rugged brand, the creative brand. You know, we use personality words to talk about them. Say, I love my brand. I hate that brand. Whatever. And Steve understood this. He talked about the Apple icon needing to look a certain way that it was like friendly, but technically right. But, you know, balance. And this is the idea that objects or images could look friendly when they weren't.

or images of faces or bodies is a very interesting concept. Yeah, so we decided to test this idea. So we brought people in lab, we've done now like 10 studies on this, we brought people in who are Apple or Samsung users and the first experiment we did was a brain imaging experiment

And first we just asked all the standard marketing questions. How long have you had the product? How much do you love it? What's your loyalty? What's your identification with it? You know, et cetera. And it was equivalent, Apple and Samsung. They said the same things about their brands. Okay, so now we bring them into the lab, put them in the MRI machine, and we're going to expose them to news bits about each of the two brands, like something good happened to Apple, something bad happened to Apple or Samsung, et cetera.

And we asked them to rate it, how do you feel, good, neutral, bad about that. And then we go through the whole thing, we scan their brains, take pictures of what's going on in their brains. And it was really interesting because what we found is that behaviorally, in terms of their responses, they both expressed empathy for their brands, which hadn't been really measured before. I feel good for good news about my brand, bad for bad news about my brand.

And for Apple customers, they said, yeah, that's really true for Apple, but I don't feel so much about Samsung. Samsung customers said, yeah, I feel really strongly about my brand. Oh, and they had reverse empathy or schadenfreude for Apple, which was part of the story. So they felt really good when something bad happened to Apple, and they felt really bad when something good happened to Apple. Talk about tribalism. That's tribalism right there. When you look at their brains, it's totally different.

So in Apple, Apple customers show empathy in their brains for Apple. You get activation of areas that are active for reward for myself, reward for my kid winning spelling bee for good news and the extended pain network, pain for me, pain for my loved one.

For things that happen to Apple, if I'm an Apple customer, it's silent for Samsung. You look at Samsung user, you know, customers, and if you're the CMO of Samsung, you should be worried because they show absolutely nothing, no feelings towards anything that happened to Samsung.

The only thing you see is this schadenfreude, this reverse empathy. So you see like pain for good news about Apple and joy for bad news about Apple. So the first take-home message is it's all about Apple. Like Apple customers choose Apple because they love Apple and they want to be part of something bigger. And I'll get to that in a second. And Samsung users choose Samsung because they don't. They hate Apple, right? So that's...

that's sort of that. Or they hate winners. They hate winners, whatever. There's a whole thing. They don't want to be part of the community. They don't want something bigger than themselves. There is something to, in our data that essentially Apple is like kind of like a cult. You could say it's a family. I would say it's the dominant culture now though. Yeah. They're not the niche like thing. Samsung's the niche thing. Yeah. Right there. Yeah. Well, what's happening, what's really fascinating now is that, and this is by virtue of things that Apple has,

smart things Apple has done to reinforce this sense of in-group, be part of that community, like the, you know, the green text bubble thing. So now it's like 91% of teenagers are choosing Apple over Samsung because they don't want to be left out. They don't want to be ostracized.

Now we talked about synchrony before and synchrony is this marker of community and closeness and we're all on the same team. So we use the EEG to measure brainwaves in people while they're in number conditions, while they're

getting news about Apple and Samsung, also while they're watching the commercials. You remember that spectacular Apple commercial where they crushed all those beautiful instruments and whatnot and turned into an iPad or whatever and then there was the Samsung response to that. So we measure EEG activity and what we found is that Apple people are all in sync with each other. Their brains are humming along at the exact same rhythm.

Two news of the world, two ads about Apple and Samsung. Each Samsung person is like an island unto themselves. They're just not in sync at all. These are like the incels of technology. You said it. I didn't say it. Probably going to catch a lot of flack for this. But look, the data is the data. And so Apple's this sort of extended family and they're all in sync with each other, right? They're like a real team.

And you don't see that in Samsung. So Apple people are seeing the world through similar eyes, right? And feeling similar things. And beyond that, I said, well, if this is all true, maybe it's a question of now, like, are Apple people wired that way, you know, at birth, in essence, you know? Or how much, what's the balance of like who they are versus what Apple has done?

you know, through their marketing and design activities. We can't do that experiment, it's really hard. But when we looked at the structural MRI data, we found something really interesting, which is the parts of the brain that are really intimately involved in managing our social relationships. So the parts that are like involved in theory of mind and empathy. So those are physically larger in Apple people than in Samsung people.

They're physically larger. In monkeys, monkeys who have more friends, those same brain areas are bigger than monkeys who have fewer friends. Please tell me you've run this on politically leaning left versus politically leaning right. So we started to do that experiment and then the pandemic hit. So we haven't gotten that back off. Nice excuse, Clatt. It is, I know. It's an excuse. We haven't gotten that back off. I'm just kidding. No, it's true. I would be too afraid to run that experiment. Not because I'd be concerned about the result or what people would say if I shared the result, but here's why. I feel like...

When I was growing up, it was like if you were a rebel, you were associated with anything like indie music, punk rock, like you were associated with like hip hop, anything that was kind of outside the mainstream, which at the time, this was like the 80s and 90s, we had a mix of Republican and Democrat governments at that time, depending on which four-year segment we're talking about. But there was this idea that like if you...

liked anything about the government, you know, you're... This is kind of the carryover, I think, from the post... from the Vietnam era and the post-Vietnam era, that if you liked anything associated with government, that you were a conformist. Yeah. And if you didn't, you were an iconoclast. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Now I feel like it's become...

very issue specific, right? Like who's in power, basically that the party, like politics has, it was always split into two. It used to be you agree with the establishment or you don't agree with the establishment. Now it's like, depending on who's in power, people say, well, they're the establishment. So the, the, it's like the game has changed. It's sort of subdivided itself and changed. And so if one were to run the experiment of, um,

kind of like affiliation, I would assume, my prediction would be that within the right, there's a lot of affiliation. Within the left, there's a lot of affiliation. But that you wouldn't necessarily see a difference in terms of activation of affiliative neural circuitry. It depends on with whom they're sitting. Absolutely. Which is very different than the phone situation that the Samsung versus Apple thing is a lot more like when I was growing up. Yeah.

And it's complicated because what used to be niche and rebellious inevitably becomes mainstream. Like I remember the movie Revenge of the Nerds. Of course. Which of course was about like the nerds being marginalized and then, you know, and then being like the popular ones and on and on. Everything was like a John Hughes film. Jocks versus, you know, rockers versus, you know, nerds versus things really blended together for, you know, 20 years or so.

And then now it's very divided along the lines of politics. Whereas before it was politics versus nonconformists. Now it's like, depends on which color you're wearing. It's like gang warfare. It is. Yeah. It's like blues versus reds. Jets and sharks. Jets and sharks. So it feels very like the experiment. That's why I'd be afraid to run the experiment. I wouldn't know how to design the experiment.

Yeah, I mean, I think, well, it would be interesting just at the outset to demonstrate that, like, a very easy way to elicit these sort of empathy signals is like just create a video that's fake is what something a former postdoc of mine did in some studies. You just like a fake needle stick to the cheek.

and you get generally this sort of activation of empathy signals in the brain, but it tends to be tribal specific or ethnic group specific, which is like even though people say I feel just as much pain

for these two different people, the brain signals, which we know are what actually predicts what you'll do next. You know, it predicts your behavior, the brain signals are specific to within your group. So I think that was in fact the experiment we're going to do, which is like people are going to be... We'll have these videos of like proud Republican or proud Democrat or whatever you want to say on the hat and then they're getting stuck with a needle and then we ask you what you feel and then we measure your brain activity

And, you know, I think it would be obviously very highly specific. You might say you feel pain for that person who's from the other political party. Maybe you wouldn't now anymore. Maybe you'd be like, yay. You see a lot of, gosh, you see a lot of people take enjoyment in other people's suffering when the person's suffering more.

is uh sort of perceived by a lot of others as a winner yeah we saw the wires with with rich people's houses burning down and a lot of people piling on oh yeah you know right well the media was very skewed there like we're like we were hearing about people's you know first of three homes burning and that's hard for people that have very little right at the same time

you know, for anyone experiencing loss, it's loss. Yeah. It's a, it's a tough one. It's tough. It's a tough one. Yeah. This conversation has given me a ton more to think about, which means it's a great conversation. I have to say, you know, in our business of research science, um, there's that term, you know, um,

he or she is a serious scientist. I feel like there are very, very few serious scientists doing experiments in the real world or trying to map to the real world. I probably just offended about 300 scientists, but hey, listen, we only have a limited number of guests we can bring on here anyway. So no, I'm just kidding. There are others certainly, but I have to just applaud you for the range of things that you've embraced and taken on at the level of neural,

anthropologic, sociologic, psychology, like, you know, endocrinology. This is a big field that you're trying to get your arms around, a big set of questions. And yet it's clear you are a serious scientist. You do like real experiments with

isolating variables and all the necessary controls that are required to really tease out mechanism and larger themes. So whereas a few minutes ago we were talking about maybe you taking it on less, I would say, first of all, who am I to tell you what to do? Second of all, and I'm not, I hope I didn't give that impression. And second of all, what a service to the world you're doing because certainly in researching for this podcast and

even with guests, you know, oftentimes it's really a struggle to try and figure out how to talk to someone who's really down at the level of mechanism, who's not working on small animal models, or even if they are, how to map that to everyday experience. And today, you know, we've been talking about potential mate valuation, meme coins, politics, hierarchies, decision-making, timescales, I mean, all through the lens of real serious science. So first of all,

Thank you so much for coming here and spending these hours with us, educating us. And right alongside that, thank you for doing the work that you're doing. It's really spectacular. I knew we were going to get into a number of these things, but I didn't really anticipate just how much it was going to geyser out of this in terms of changing my way of thinking. And I'm certain that's changing the way that other people are thinking now and are going to think about their decisions and just kind of themselves and the world.

I'd be very grateful if you'd come back again and talk to us about the next round of amazing experiments before too long. Well, I would love that. And thanks for having me. And this has been a really stimulating conversation. I've enjoyed it. There is a lot more that we could cover, which would be super fun. Surely. And your endurance is something to behold.

Thank you. Please do come back again. Thank you for the work that you're doing. We will provide links to all the resources and places to find out more about your book, the work that you're doing, and some of these tests that you were talking about earlier where they go beyond like standard personality tests so that people can answer those critical questions about where they are, you know, perhaps best placed in the landscape between creativity and, you know, strategy implementation in a different way. So thanks so much. This was a real thrill for me. Thank you.

Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Michael Platt. To learn more about Dr. Platt's work and to find links to his books,

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