Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Well-Tuned Brain 20160216

[inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] good evening. On behalf of the institute of neuroscience and Human Behavior. It i welcome you to this open my presentation. We are honored and proud to have with us this evening a scientist who needs no introduction to this audience. Our director of the seminole institute and author, american mania and the well tuned brained, neuroscience and that life well lived which is the book that peter will be talking about this evening. Welcome, thank you so much for coming to speak with us this evening. It is is a treat for so many of us. We even have people here from oxford, and we are just delighted to welcome you this evening. In discussion will be another scientist who is the professor of psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and the director of the neuromodulation center. He is also off faculty advisor. So we would like to thank you all for being here and sharing your expertise with us. A few housekeeping items, after the presentation we will have a discussion, you will receive if you would like to ask a question, please pick up an index card that will be passed around by some of our board members. Write your your question on the index card and we will come by to pick it up. We will not be taking any questions directly from the floor. So if you would like to ask a question please be sure to use the index card. After the q and a, you have the opportunity to purchase a copy of the book and have it personally signed. Before i introduce doctor y brow, i would like to say a few words about the friends in our open mind program. As most of you know the friend sponsor the open mind as a Public Service to the community at no charge. What you may not know is there is a cost to putting on these programs. We are a ucla support group but we still have to pay for the rental of the auditorium, honorarium for our distinguished speakers, many who come from out of town and we pay airfare, and lodging. If you have not already done so in the spirit of the holidays and the spirit of giving, we hope that you will support our organization. We really need your help so we can continue to bring these programs to the ucla community and the Los Angeles Community as a Public Service and not charge for them. Giving tuesday which is the national day of giving is on december first, it is is the perfect opportunity to join the entire nation and support an organization that has given you excellent programming this year that i know you have all been coming, if you feel it has been beneficial then please support us. Now i would like to introduce the doctor, in addition to being the director of the Semel Institute for neuroscience and Human Behavior at ucla, his also a distinguished professor and executive chair of the department of psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the david school of medicine. Also the ceo of the psychiatric hospital. He is an International Authority on emotion and its disorders, particularly depression and bipolar illness and the effects of thyroid home hormone on brain and behavior. Doctor offers a prescription for genuine Human Progress and takes us on a fascinating tour of selfdiscovery join extensively upon his decades of experience as a psychiatrist and has a Broad Knowledge of newer neuroscience and Human Behavior. [applause]. Thank you vicki and good evening everybody. It is good to see you here. This is quite an evening for me. One does not usually get celebrated by ones own institute, i feel very grateful, a little humbled with all these bits and pieces here. They had to move my desk out of my office because we cannot quite figure out one doesnt know about ones own place. So this new book is one that began, at least i started thinking about it after the episode of the financial meltdown in 2008. It intrigued me, when we think about our great country and we wonder how could we possibly ever imagined that we could exist primarily on debt and speculation. It is intriguing because it you may want to look at it more precisely perhaps as a neural psychiatric behavior issue. So i began to wonder whether we could dissect outs from that particular debacle something that might make sense and would take us out of the moral realm and put us in a constructive realm of how we might see this into the future and avoid it. It doesnt look as we have as we run into another bubble it seems to me but it was a worthy cause and it allowed me to bring my interest together. To find out in our own mind why it is that we do not do better. We have such material success but somehow it does not quite work in terms of Human Progress. One of the things that strikes me is in my lifetime the population of the world has increased, it has doubled actually. But the economic output has increased by eight fold in the same 50 or 60 years. That is extraordinarily striking. So one wonders given that we as a nation are only 4 of the population of the world but we consume in Something Like 25 . One wonders why it is that we are not doing better than we are. Because yes of course we are rich, but if you look at the statistics in terms of our social parameters and other things, we are sort of in the middle of the pack. One wonders how could that be. Is there strange correlation here between what we do and the fact that we have certain personal Health Problems and we worried about being violent, and objected lee, et cetera. So in that 50 years if you look at the world at large there is no doubt that health and our wealth have improved enormously. Most of the children that we bear these days in the world to maturity, we are literate in general, we are very successful, yet when you look at the u. S. We have many things that plague us. One one of which is for example that we have a great deal of obesity. We actually actually are one of the fattest countries in the world, over 50 of people are now obese, especially males, white males. So i think we have to ask ourselves questions about how did this come about. I think it may be so in this analysis that i will talk about tonight what i would like to present to you is the idea that it does not need to be, we can actually do things differently and have something which if we look forward into the future we would be able to avoid many of the pitfalls that we have found. There are now 7 billion of us living on this planet which is a larger burden to the planet than any other large animal species that has ever existed on its. In some senses you have to think of the age that we have now entered as the age of man, we have had 10000 years of reasonably stable environment and it is now shifting. You do not have to worry so much about whether we caused that shift or whether in fact that it is just shifting, but shifting it is. Therefore we have to think about how we can do something about it. It becomes in the age of man our responsibility to think forward and to ask ourselves why is it that certain things have gone off the boat. As ogden nash said, the american humorist import before he died in 1971, he said progress might have been all right once but it has gone on too long. [laughter] so that is really the impractical terms what the book is about. I think if we wish to reshape the future we need to first understand ourselves and reshape our own behavior. That is the fundamental thrust. If we could accomplish that in this great country, we would give Great Service to everybody. Because there is no doubt that people look to the u. S. For the future and yet we ourselves are not very good at looking at the future. I asked two questions to myself when i started this book and i left them to you tonight. Why is it that human beings tend to consume excessively when living in a resource rich environment . Think about that. The more we get the worse our health gets in many ways. Why, despite our growing consciousness and awareness of these things of ecological problems, obesity, stress, lack of trust including debt, we know about all of these things but we do not change them. We worry about them but it seems as if we are powerless to change our behavior. Why is that . These are two interesting behavioral questions which are open to reason and open to analysis that we can bear upon what we know about advancing neuroscience. Im not just talking about molecular biology, i am talking about what we know about the way in which human beings behave towards each other and how the brain works. One of the things as i began to think about these things that became apparent is that one way of thinking about it is we are caught in a mismatch, there is a biological evolution proceed slowly of course, and so does cultural evolution but they do so at different speeds. Cultural evolution is much more rapid than biological evolution and it is probable that if you analyze that, in fact we have found ourselves now and a stick because some of the things that we have been so creative in inventing had created for yourselves a biological problem which we cannot fixed just by pretending that new technology will bring us to a better place. So what im going to propose to you tonight is that in evolutionary terms we have promoted a mismatch. There are three elements i will talk about. Ancient is the actual that seek shortterm reward, i will tell you about that. Material affluence of our society and the third thing which is an efficient habit driven brain. All of these things of themselves are somewhat positive but put them together it is a perfect storm. What has happened is that we find ourselves in the middle of this perfect storm without really understanding it and it is washing away much of our better selves. So that is the fundamental thesis of the book. Im only going to talk about the first half, i will then touch on the second half. The first half is called who do you think you are . The second part is, how to live. Simply i think what we run into and this is where the title comes in, the human brain is not well tuned for our modern culture. If you think about biological evolution as a darwin conceived it and we have now validated it in several ways it is a gradual process in variation, selection, variation of a species, selection of, selection of the biology that is presented to the environment and then replication of that variation. It is something we have very little control over. We might think we can reengineer the human frame but actually we are passive in that regard. So we no longer control our biology than does the darwin finch that he wrote so eloquently about in his writings of the late 1800s. It has no grand purpose at all. Human culture on the other hand it does have grand purpose, at least least weve use it with grand purpose. We think of it as progress. As a Movement Toward some better place. What i would suggest to you is that is not necessarily where we end up. Think about the obesity i mentioned earlier, if you mix modern culture, fast food, no exercise, time, stress, with ancient biology you end up with obesity. On the one hand you could consider the ability to move up rapidly, to eat quickly, to not have to worry about opening the garage door as being progress. But it obviously has an effect on our physiology. So lets look at a slide and ask the question about the way in which this could possibly have come about. This is just eight i have to remember to speak carefully into the microphone and because a cspan. This is an interesting slide because it shows the geological record, mammals first began to appear somewhere towards the end of the dinosaur era, some 60 million years ago. The apes of men and individuals we might now consider primate were about 20 million years ago. Then we came a long, somewhere around around here and homo sapiens are only perhaps 200,000 or 300,000 years old at the most. Then we reach the age of man, i was the 10,000 years years earlier, the age of man really began when we moved from hunting and gathering to living together in various cultures, mainly through agriculture but nothing very much change. The interesting point is here, this is the inflection point. You see we moved rapidly in terms of our numbers. We move from scarcity into abundance both in terms of numbers and in terms of our culture. So this is the interesting part of the story. So what actually happened then, actually what i think happened was we discovered liberty of which i will talk about in a moment. We also discovered science and fossil fuels. That is the secret to what has happened in the last two or 300 years, years, the change in the energy supports. Lets look at the biology. You can only really understand the human brain if you think about it in terms of evolution. What i just spoke about, if you think of it as a cantaloupe melon, it melon, it is about the same size, in the middle of it is all the seeds and that is the ancient brain. That is essentially the lizard brain. The brain that taught us how to be competitive, to survive, the shortterm brain. Around that and it is called the limbic brain, in fact it doesnt mean border, so if if you think of the first part of the flesh of the cantaloupe melon that is the first structure and that came about approximately when the mammals began to be found on earth. The mammals of course brought to our understanding attachment and social behavior. Lizards tend to eat their young, we do not do that, at least not anymore. The fact is that the way in which we care for each other is a big evolutionary advantage. So that is the next layer here. In the brain it is reflected in this area that you see there. From there on the words it is really just continued and of growth of the brain. That is what we call the cortex and the frontal the cortex be in the outer rim of the frontal lobes being things that delivered for us, the extraordinary things that make us human. Imagination, the ability to reason and especially to abstract reason. At hobbs said as youll need in a moment, there is no dog that does not know horse that it when he sees it and there is no dog that does not know a man when he sees it. We are extremely creatures. Also we are driven and competitive just as that primitive brain was all along and the attachment of the layer on top of it changes that way in which we are competitive and selfinterested, but it doesnt obscure it. So that things need to move together if theyre going to be compatible in terms of the behavior that we experience. When everything is working together it is a nextdoor to machine, but when they do not Work Together and we see that frequently a psychiatric disorder, things fall apart. For example, you can imagine the outer cortex, the frontal cortex is the seeds of reason which is what happened during the enlightenment years, but the core of it is passion. So that relation ship between reason and passion become something similar in my mind and i tell my students its like a horse and a writer. The horses the passion and when it starts to bolt up the writer does not have a good bridal and away goes the horse and so does reason with it. Its also a little bit like the title of my book which i take from when he went in 1722 he wrote a book for his students called the at the series of exercises for the students. But it also on the frontal piece teaches you how to choose because in those days the obstacle wasnt notoriously out of tune, just a changing weather pattern or moving it for a few days the thing would go out of tune. So bock and his constant recognize that if youre going to have an instrument like that that you are going to play melodious late you needed to know the instrument too. So we really understand the world and metaphor. So the way in which i think think of this book is that it is really like a well tuned to brain being, if you really want to know how to manage life you have to not only understand the interaction of the musician of the mind to but you also have to know about the instrument. So today as in the first part of the book i am talking about the instruments. When we play this instrument well it is extraordinary. Lets go back to that inflection, lets go lets go back to the point where the biology which is been there for millions of years, supercharged in in the last two or 300,000 years met essentially the discovery of fossil fuels. Until then we were completely locked into the worlds cycles cycle of energy which is essentially driven by the sun. It is what we are discovering now is that mr. Goes to sleep. We are thinking nothing much will be growing, maybe something in california but the fact is we have a cycle which is based upon the energy of the sun, that disappeared when we discovered fossil fuel. The people of that era we call the enlightenment thinkers. The enlightenment thinkers were individuals who were just like we are but they were fascinated by the country around them and they were somewhat reticent of the Catholic Church and basically say human beings could manage by themselves. Thomas hobbes for example who we see down here in this corner, he had lifted the english civil war, watched a few other people die and he was convinced that there is no way in which human beings could manage by themselves. We either needed a king who is very strict or we needed a guard. He thought life as he said was nasty, buddhist, and shorts. Another man, a dutchman in the early 17 hundreds, the dutch were much more attuned to trade than the british. Mandeville would come over when he was in his 20s and he liked the english sense of humor. He started to say that actually vice was a good thing. They were helpful because they employed a lot of people. He had luxury and into itself and vanity them industry. Its the fundamental nature of the capital of enterprise he was talking about. He was pushed aside by the english establishment and said this is ridiculous, we cant possibly have people doing what they want to do, just will not work. This was a time of the government essentially control just about all trade. David hume, the next one on our list he was, he believed that it was a slave of the passions. He was much more understanding of the dynamics of mind, in fact to the prophetic fellow. These people knew nothing about anatomy of function of the brain but they were extraordinarily capable of introspective and understand it the way in which human being thoughts. So david hume was very influential. In fact he was particularly intellectual on this younger man here, adam smith. He was the patron saint of american capitalism. It was also someone suggested to me i think it was meg, but the reason why we did not get into the euro is because of this thing here which is in english 20pound moat in which we have a picture of adam smith. It says the division of labor and manufacturing and the great increase in the quantity of work that resulted, we will think of adam smith as an economist, inc. Fact he was a psychologist. He was a person who knew a great deal about Human Behavior and in 1759 he wrote a book called the moral sentiments. It is a profound book which talks about the way in which human beings really behaved. He points out that human beings are not quite the same as mandeville thought they were. They were not just a device, he was the man that actually invented what we now call empathy in terms of understanding of it. He has a passage in this particular book in which he talks about, metaphorically, his brother being on the black. You cannot understand the pain of your brother unless you place yourself in the brothers position. Being on the rack yourself. Then you you can understand it, then, and that understanding you have sympathy for him, you are able to create again the feelings which then enable you to be not only sympathetic you will be able to work with this individual to create a new vision of their problem and help them with that problem. This of course is what we talk about today in terms of the engagement we must have as physicians, as caring individuals, we call the various names but empathy is the core of it. Compassion is another name we use for it. He also wrote this book called the wealth of nations in which basically he said human beings are so organizing, you do not have to have someone from the top telling everyone what to do. What you can do is you can just lose the fact that theyre intimate with each other as i was just describing and you will find a natural order of things. In other words, you, you can design something without the aid of a designer. This of course is the great nature of the democracy and it is very different from the way in which fascists or topdown communists type societies work. Where you have an individual who knows, they think, everything and therefore the order comes down from the bottom. It it is the same way in any institution. If you allow people individually to bring their own initiative then you have a Stronger Program than if you have something just trickling down from the top. He made these points, you will yourself, the prichard, the candlestick maker, youll live a good life by virtue of this. So he then argued the way in which a society should work is that yes indeed with mandible you could let people have their own initiative, they could do with a wish, but it had to be a closely not society. There was an implicit social contract with out that social contract it would not work. That is a very important point because i think what has happened to us is that we have lost the concept of the social contract especially here in the u. S. Where we are very individualistic driven. One of the points in my last book about the american mania is not so much that we were a frenzied society although we surely are to some degree, it was was about migration and the fact that migrants have an individualistic view of the world. They are not socially interdependent. In england where i grew up 6060 of the population still dies within 5 miles of where they were born. That that is not true in america. So in these complex biological systems a human being, being one, social interaction be in another it is the interaction of things that create the design and creates the stability. It is what what site is called a complex open system. So if we go around the proposal that smith was making we can turn it into neurophysiological, neuropsychological terms. This is how the neuroscience markets work in my mind. On the yellow box here we have selfinterest, curiosity, love of novelty and social ambition which is essentially social competition. That is the envy of the market, that is what makes things go, thats what makes people get up in the morning, that the entrepreneurial effort. But on the other side of smith rightfully side a smith rightly said, it is the sympathy, the way in which we relate to each other, the empathetic understanding and that recognition which is important. We all want. Recognition and. Recognition and without it you do not get anywhere. So if you are good maker, you you make good boots but you also want your colleagues to note that you make good boots and to buy them. That is how it works. So this is you have the engine on this side, selflove which he called it social sentiment and the brakes on the side. When you. When you put these two things together it is what he called in sensually an invisible hand which makes the whole thing balance. But we have to remember that is is the social contract between these two things, this arrow here which make it work. So now we come towards perhaps one of the second factors of the mismatch. If you have a society which does not have a closely knit social contract, we are in danger of creating an opportunity for that instinctual drive to run free. Not necessarily to the advantage to the society as a whole. Let me just tell you, we are very shortterm discount is is a very short story, keeping an eye on the time here. This is a very short story. Theres a restaurant theres a restaurant some of you may know in westwood which is called the soleil, i go there quite frequently because i love their french fries. [laughter] anyway one evening just after the new year we were eating there, i think actually Susan Sullivan was among the arctic, three of us and we ate and we enjoyed it and we had a glass of wine here and there. The owner who is a frenchcanadian came around and he said you must try my new cheesecake it came straight from montreal. We said no thank you we are absolutely full. He said oh, please anyway he went away and we paid the bill. Suddenly he he comes running out from behind where the kitchen is and he presents this plate of cheesecake to us, he puts it in the middle of the table he gives us three forks and says now youll try my wonderful cheesecake. We looked at each other and at about 90 seconds i think that disappeared. What does that tell us it tells us that we are shortterm in our vision. I can stand here and tell you that i am trying to lose weight, that im not going to eat cheesecake this coming new year, im not going to eat much at thanksgiving, et cetera. But when in the abstract im very good at that, but when you put it in front of me, i eat it. Because this is the old lizard brain waking up in same boy that stuff is really good and im not going to lose the opportunity to eat it when it its in front of me. So if you create an affluent society where you are putting metaphorically cheesecake in front of someone all of the time, what do we do . We eat it. Its a very different situation for where smith can see the Market Society we still believe as the farther of the Market Society and of what he talked about. Look at the slide here, i hope it is not washed out for you in the back. That is a picture of a house, it is actually a house i bought when i first came from england. Its in new england, its in the tiny village, might daughter happens to be there but it still works somewhat like it did in 1777 when the house was built. When people have a crisis, the barn burned down a few years ago and lost all of the wood supply for the winter. Everyone was raw giving would so they could survive the winter. It is what we would call a center petal system. A system where the social networks here feed upon each other. Social cohesion, it it is constrained by climate, geography, and time. Lets look at this next one. This is todays society. I took this picture and the chicago airport a few months ago. You can see, i hope were were unfortunately it is washed out that here you have an individual who is working on their laptop, someone else playing with their cell phone, and here you have someone speaking on their cell phone. Then you have the big play that takes them to another distant part, this is a central system where people move away from each other. You can easily have a system when you have this type of society that we now have. The trade and the internet initiates this vast new world and we now have gotten ourselves an interesting position where we are dependent upon growth for the economy. So in fact we have to have shortterm reward and we have to feed it in order to make the economy grow. Without that, we will get worried that we are now in another recession. Look at the way the stock market has been going up and down recently, everyone is terrified. Are is terrified. Are we going back into another recession . When we had the disaster of the twin towers one of the things our president said within a few days was go out and shop, we cannot afford to have a recession. We are very Interesting Society which in fact is the second part of my three elements. This is what is happening to us, we are actually fostering the shortterm and we are diminishing the social investment. The whole thing is moving slightly to the right, to your left. But the third element which is most important of all is the habit of things. One of the things the brain does is it is extremely efficient and that efficiency comes from habits. Cross your arms for me lets do an experiment. Okay, now on cross the and cross them the other way. [laughter] you got it right . You see i had my arm over here and now ive got to put this arm under here and ive got to its difficulties in it thats an example of habit and of course we have habits and we are familiar with them but that habit is also one inside your head you have hundreds of social habits which you picked up over the years, we call them intuition, intuitive habits which are not conscious of. 80 of what we are due is unconscious. So one of the things we do day by day are habituated and we do not even think about them. Remember the riot in the Los Angeles School system . When we try to move them from french fries from lunch to jambalaya and wild rice . There was literally a riot. Something like 15, 20,000 students thousand students said they were not going to eat that stuff and there is a special market that grew up outside for people to go out and buy their french fries and their hamburgers. We are creatures of habit. So so if we foster the habits that we have their very difficult to break. So the question then becomes how do we begin to think about this in a way that is constructive . There is another interesting economist, a rightwing libertarian, peter i happen to be a member of the society which is always a surprise to me. I think i am the token biologist actually. Hayek made this observation in the 20s and 30s. He said markets dont run themselves, they are not free in the sense that we sometimes talk about in the country. What connects the issue together is tradition. What he called tradition. So it is is the way in which societies work is a tradition which holds the glue that holds us all together. Now that is essentially intuitive habits. What goes on then in the brain is that perception comes in the back and choice and action are in the front. This is where the limbic structures, the infant brain of the mammal meet the rational brain of the frontal cortex. But this is where it runs the habit system. It takes us as human beings somewhere around ten or 20 years to develop those habits. This is a slide and in fact initially we just combined together all of the senses that we have and we begin to understand how to make action. You have have seen a child tried to grasp and they cant quite reach it and they dont close their hand fast enough or they close it before they get to it. These actions are the training of the habits of hand eye coordination. The same goes on in your head in terms of social order. So the first part of the book says, lets try to figure out who we are, who do we really think we are. Let me reach you at the beginning of the second part of the book. Then i will close with a few more remarks. This is the prologue of the second part. Hard to live. The greeks call it the state of the arm protrude, the tranquility and peace of mind. The epicurus is the foundation of you dime ona but the joy of human flourishing. 2000 years on adam smith was in agreement, smith considered happiness to be born of tranquility and enjoyment, the fruit to fruit of a well tuned to brain. Human beings are not given to serenity, tranquility does not come naturally to the human mind. Atarax yet is a highly cultivated state achieved through hard work and selfdiscipline we call character. It comes from an understanding of the limitations of our being and an understanding of the world. To achieve that self command, which by the way is a word that smith used we must first accept ourselves for who we are, instinctively driven, joys, joyous, selfinterested, focused on the short term, and ruled by habit, not a pretty picture. We combine that however with external powers of reason of deception, analysis, imagination and choice. We are also deeply social and we need fellowship. The challenge is to bring these together in harmony, rooted in passion to imagine a sustainable human future that promotes individual wellbeing and observes the reality of our environmental circumstance. We are privileged to be living in confusing times. Nothing is more at which in its promotional material gruffly and creeping inequality floods with selfdestruction and the ecological sense. But how do we get out from under this avalanche of . Adam smith considered three values, fairness, benevolence and prudence. These elements of character are ground in the infancy and crafted over a lifetime, thats the well tuned brain. Crafted over a lifetime. It is it is crew the promotion of social fellowship exercise that it is a matter of conscious choice when shared responsibility, healthy children portion healthy families. Healthy schools and healthy communities. Collectively we are in habits designed as humans in mind and through markets with opportunity and choice. It is not changed by embracing the past, we can imagine the future. Now you might wonder who this young woman is, this is is my granddaughter. She introduces the second part of the book with the story, she was on a sheep farm with my other daughter. This is a lamp she rescue. Sheep have a tendency of taking each others lamps, you might not know that but they get so hyped up with their hormones before they give birth that if a mother gives birth they will snatch the lamb and take it away. It takes only a few minutes for the bonding in the cold of winter. If the lamb is not attached to the you literally for milk at dice. So this is a very interesting paradigm for which we can understand because we have all the same hormones, how human attachment works. What bonds a human mother to a child is the same that bonds a you to a lamb and what bonds lynn to this you that she fed in the picture when it was stolen by another lamb. Then when the land was born it was left. This is the second half of the book, this is what binds us together. Just think in your mind, love was the initial attachment but out of that comes trust. It is within trust that you begin to see her own ability to command yourself. That sheds into education. Once we get into school if we have that sense of self command to begin to learn. From there if we built cities and habitat where we can all be talking with each other that is strengthened. When we eat around a table rather than the back of a car it is strengthened. There are so many things we know about how to build human beings. We know what imagination means, we know all of the things that create an opportunity for a stable, caring society. Yet we do do not translate that into social policy. Now why is that . Ask yourself. The book is a mystery story, we know these things but we do not implement them. Where the only country in the world but does not have the capacity to give your parents an opportunity to spend time with their children just born and go back to work without losing their job. Thats fascinating isnt it. We are stumbling toward the healthcare system. We can do so much better. In terms of thinking, its not a moral moral issue its an issue of how do you develop the best form of human being that you can develop. How do you to the brain and the way that is benefit to all of us. One of the wonderful things about being at the seminal institute is that we have the seminoles helping us see the future. Jane and terry promote some years ago working with a group of us invented something called the Healthy Campus initiative. We are trying to put in place at ucla this whole idea about how do you create human beings who have their own self command, are empathetic and caring. You dont just go to a university to learn physics. You learned also to understand yourself and your fellow man. In doing that i think we have created an opportunity for the future. We just started again, wendy wendy has been extraordinary and moving the well to campus, the healthy initiative, but we also have just started a healthy mind project. That is something i think will be looking for over the next few years. It is just an Exemplary Organization in that regard. It brings us together in a way that enables us to learn the best from each other. I think in doing that we will be able to create a new society. There are pockets of these things going on all over the country. It has to come up from the bottom. It is a design without a designer. I think we will get there but i want to thank you for coming to him mine but i think this is the sort of gathering. Theyre friends of the seminal institute that makes this change possible. So thank you so much. [applause]. [inaudible] [inaudible] thank you peter for a wonderful presentation. Now well take questions from the audience. If you have a question with a question card please write on your question, if you would like to be able to ask them please write them so i can read them. And i will do my best to work those into our interview session here. Before we get to questions from the audience peter, just started with a few things. First for those of you who have can we do, if we take it out of the realm and put it in a neuroscience realm, we can see why this has happened to us. Its not a mystery. When you goose the engine of the marketplace and forget the brakes, the whole thing runs off. When you feed it with money that goes into the future, you are essentially mortgaging the future. I think if we come to thing about it in these terms, its possible that we will be able to say to ourselves, this is sort of crazy. We are reasoning creatures. This is what distinguishes us from the other creatures. If we are reasoning, why cant we go back to the idea that the age of reason should be reinvented now and america can do that. I think we can. I think this microphone is working. Thank you. So pardon me for a moment while i challenge your optimism because i have had the pleasure of watching president ial debates last week. We seem to live in a fact free world. You were marveling at the end of the talk about how we are not able to adopt some of these basic principles into our social discourse. We are in a world where nearly half the people think evolution is just another theory and the world is only about 5000 years old. They think noble warming is a hoax and the pyramids were built as grain silos and the answer to gun violence is just to make guns get easier to get. It is almost as though, and pardon the phrase, belief trumps reason. [laughter] how is it that were going to get past this sort of reflexive and adaptive belief system that some people endure and get to the kind of discourse that youre talking about where we can begin to reason ourselves away from the cycle of boom and bust that weve become so accustomed to . Youre right, you hit the right word, its reflexive. We are reflexive creatures because 80 of what we do is because of habit. He put it very well, he said reason will, is and always will be the slave of the passions. In fact what he was saying is what we are saying now which is that you have one politician who says all you have to do is stick it to them and well be fine. The other says no, we have to organize ourselves in a social order that is immediately taken as being essentially topdown socialism. Both are saying the same thing, i think. What theyre saying is something is wrong here and we have to find a solution but they havent really talked through the solution. Both of them are topdown solutions, if you follow me. What i think is, and this is why am optimistic, i have no apology for that because i do think what i do in this book as i talk about a lot of people. All the books that i write have stories about people in them. These are real people. Some of the earlier books were about patients and their experience and how they manage to get out of those problems. American mania had a lot of stories about people and this has a lot of stories about people. For example, what can we learned from a urban Center Architect who is an expert on things in italy. We can learn a lot because renaissance in italy sometimes didnt work. He knows why it didnt work. The stories, theres a place in culver city called the museum of jurassic technology. If you want to really use your imagination, just go down there. You will find it a fascinating afternoon, because what im saying is there are whole pockets of these things going on, and i sort of think in my mind rather like a series of raindrops which have fallen and eventually they coalesce and you have a leak. I think if we allow true social entrepreneurship in the sense of being willing to listen to each other, then we will find solutions that we cannot conceive of individually. So that is my optimism. America is very good at that, america is very good at entrepreneurial effort. Its just that we have bolstered into what it is this false paradigm that youre either an entrepreneur and a businessman or you are somehow a closet academic and doing things that have no relevance to society. Thank you, thank you very much, peter. You touched in your comments a bit about children and how we raise our children, and it occurs to me that in some ways, some of the drive that we see, individuals drive to success, is in part drive for their children. A drive to attend the best school, to have the greatest status symbols. Its not necessarily competitive for oneself but something they try to do for the next generation. It occurs to me that were not doing a favor for the next generation by setting that example. That the drive to succeed in the drive for consumption is something we tend to pass along in the way that we raise our children. Its a very hard treadmill to get off of. Once one is on it and once one looks at ones neighbor and says if theyre doing this and i dont do this my children will fall behind. Not necessarily that i will fall behind, but my children will. Howd you get off of that personal treadmill . Its a tough 1i think it is the natural instinct to try to support ones children beyond oneself, but its becoming extremely difficult as our society by the kates and we have very rich people and very poor people. I think even within that effort to make sure that our children can cope in what is an increasingly competitive society, its entirely reasonable to have them also participate in what they really want to do. One of the things we tend to do with children these days, i believe, is we dont give them enough time to use their own imagination. Children are just as happy when tiny, playing with a sauce pan and a wooden spoon as they are playing with an ipad. The problem with the technical wizardry that we have now, especially when were all using it, is that the child sees their parents walking with their parents and not talking to them but talking to something in their ear and you end up with the child wanting to be with like the parent and wanting to have a similar machine. That tends to crowd out the spaces that the kids have for just thinking about nothing essentially. Im not quite sure how we get back to that but there is considerable evidence that childhood these days is very different from the childhood that i had, for example when my parents would say to me get off the doorstep and get on your bike and come back in time for supper. That was life in the country and that was perhaps easier and safer in those days, but we have got to somehow, i dont think we should go back to the 18th century but i think we have to ask ourselves how do we give space for children to think for themselves. How do we create an opportunity for them to use their imagination. Human imagination is the most wonderful thing and when a child begins to develop that, they do it in a very idiosyncratic way and i think we make a mistake by giving them too many highly technical toys because it focuses them and ships them in a direction which is someone elses imagination, not their own. I think we dont have to deprive them, we just just have to give them opportunity to think through things which we might not be thinking through with them at the moment. Having a music lesson five times a week is not a way of developing your imagination even though you might be a good pianist at the end of it. Thank you very much. You talked a lot about the importance of social ties in developing the kind of vile values you were talking about. You talked about god and development. Where does data and development fit in the well tuned brain with empathy and compassion . Can you speak to those kinds of construct and how you see those fitting . I think thats also a very fascinating topic and i touch upon it some in the chapter on imagination. One of the interesting things about human beings is we are able to imagine ourselves in other places, even other worlds. I think thats the connection that we see with other generations that actually begins the whole concept of religion. It is one of my anthropologist friends who says, its not important, but its central. Religion is, in its best form, something that binds society together and its the imaginative instructor. One might not believe in virgin birth or such things, but nonetheless the ethos of the imagination and the organization does in fact create a social contract and a social structure which is extraordinarily important for most of us. I think if you stand back far enough and say this is another facet of the extraordinary ability to have imagination. Look at the cave paintings in southern france, which are probably 30 or 40000 years old. They have hands on the wall next to the crack in the stone, burnt paint around hands that were obviously there are one time. There are all sorts of theories about that but one is that this was an effort because they thought previous generations, the ancestors were in that frame and you could get to them through these cracks in the wall. We have the imagination that we can go on for generations and you just reverse that and you think about the future that you can also go to heaven. I think if you think about the way the human mind works, theres nothing hypothetical about religion. Its, i dont believe in people who say if youre religious youre not reasoning. You are reasoning. Youre just using reasoning with your imagination which is different than if your reasoning to develop a scientific answer to a scientific question. I think human beings need mystery and they need ways in which they can see themselves in a larger context and i think thats what religion does. Thank you. We have an interesting psychoanalytic question. You are talking about the different layers of the brain and parts of the brain. One question here is how does this relate to freuds theory about the id, ego and superego . Do tie in some of this into freuds psychoanalytic theories . I talk a little bit about freud in the book, not a great deal in this book, but dont forget, he was living 100 more years ago. He was really thinking of the way in which society, at that time indiana was a very repressive society, and i think his theories of sexual interest would not fly quite as well if you live today because we seem to see that in every hotel room. I think what he was doing is he was resonating with this same idea that had been there in the enlightenment thinkers that you have a core of the brain which is primitive, which in his mind wouldve been the id. Beyond that you have an ego which is essentially the way in which the id and the brain itself melds together because its much more related to the conscious state of day functioning. Of course in his mind the it was preconscious or the unconscious. I dont think its quite the same way as we think of preconscious activity today. If you put those two things together then the superego is self command. That is something which smith wrote a lot about in his theory of moral sentiments. He recognized that the child learns self command through basically growing up to the point where he realizes that hes not the center of the universe. If you read freuds theories about infantile sexuality, et cetera, that is exactly what hes describing only in slightly different language. I think theres compatibility with psychoanalytic theory and the way in which we now see normal development. Thank you. Several of the questions this evening have to do with the violence, the unspeakable violence over the past week. The incredible acts of cruelty, one does not even want to call them terrorism, its just outright murder of civilians. People who clearly were outside of the main social fabric of their community who really committed these horrific acts. How do the theories of your book and the concept of social fabric, or lack thereof, relate to some of the violence that we see so rampant in this country with guns or most recently in europe with the horrible murders in paris . Im i have to confess, i havent thought deeply about that regarding the paris tragedy. That becomes a justification for their acts in some way. Its easier to think about what happens here in this country because if you think about most of the mass shootings, one of the fascinating things that is a mystery to me about america is that we actually kill more people in a year by eight to ten times then have died in the afghan and iraq wars, in total, every year with handguns. Then you have occasional outbursts of the issue of individuals who have frequently, sadly deranged, killing others in a squandered way very similar to what went on in paris. You no, if you think about it, this is an example of a habit which goes back to the 18th century 18th century. I was not joking when i said that if we were literal about interpreting the constitution and the ability to carry arms, it would we would be carrying muzzle loaders which is good because it takes a long time to reload a muzzleloader. Its when you take something that is habitual and you turn it into something that is, without thinking, brought up to modern times that you get into trouble. I think we created a Market Society, for example, where we dont think there should be any breaks. We think oh, a free market is when they can do what they please. We dont of course, we have lots of regulations in this country. I think thats absolutely essential. One of the other things i havent thought through but i think we need to think through is as self command and trust of each other diminishes, which it definitely is doing, then regulation increases. Thats clear that thats what is happening to us. We have more and more regulations because we are not regulating ourselves. When you allow the thing to run amok because we have so many guns in this people, we have more guns and we have people, then we are in fact in a set of circumstances where we need individual trusting caring. Theres the fascinating thing to me that canada has almost as much guns per capita as we do but they have some social fabric that allows them not to shoot each others feet frequently. I dont know what that all means but we need to think about it standing back from the moral issue. I deserve to have a gun because its in the constitution as opposed to the idea that these things are extremely dangerous. I dont know that we can do much about the situation in paris but recognize that is going to be a series of things like that because its a totally different vision of what society is. We dont share that and so we have to oppose it. I think its one of the extraordinary challenges of our time and we need to think about that as a free society and how we could possibly contain something that is so easily perpetrated upon us now. Thank you. That was a good answer to a difficult question. One thing you spoke about was, if you really want to understand your brothers suffering on iraq, you have to put yourself in his place. One of the questions here and im not sure i fully understand it but ill put it out there, what do we do about the deficit of empathy in this country. I think some of that relates to the mission of the friend in terms of the stigmatizing mental illness. It seems that people have a remarkable lack of empathy for those who are suffering from depression, psychosis and other mental disorders. I think it is hard for people to put themselves in the position of those who are mentally ill despite the fact that everyone has been touched by mental disorders. Talk about how to increase empathy in sick society in general in particular those suffering from mental disorders. Boy you are asking me some tough questions here. I didnt say this would be easy. I think that empathy, ill come come back to the point of stigma, but i think empathy is actually something which begins very early in life. I think if you look at the picture of my granddaughter, not to be too chauvinistic about it, but the fact is she was extraordinarily attached to that creature she helped to bring up. When the sheep have a lamb of its own she was terribly unhappy because she thought she lost her little sister. Shes only six years old at that time, or five when i happened, but you see their the early phases of a childs integration with the social order and wanting to be part of it. I think that is what we must foster. In a society where we are so busy, it is very difficult to engage at the empathic level with children. I say sometimes to people when i try to help and care for, it doesnt really matter if you are chastising a child or complementing a child, you have have to be present with the child. They learn, think about for example, your teachers in high school. I talk about this also in the book. You probably, all of you can remember a teacher you had in high school, yes, but you probably cant remember a word of what they taught you. The reason why you remember that person is because they are in your mind, probably attached to either a very positive thought which is usually the case, or a very negative thought. Its something to do with that social link which makes you remember them. That is what a child does when they are looking for the social links and their world they first of all draw upon those they have from their parents and their siblings. Then they imagine them. Thats why they play these little games with teddy coming to t and teddy spilt his teacup. That imagination that they have is the beginning of empathic understanding that teddy is a klutz. I think that we need again to nurture that. We can do that by just being engaged with children. When you get to a situation, and ive forgotten the second part of your question, the way in which as they grow up those with mental disorders. Those who are sick, if they engage the idea of trying to understand why cant mabel who comes every thanksgiving and gives them something very nice compared to uncle charlie who comes and is always a grouch, its that sort of understanding which enables them to say why is that person strange . Why is that person distant from me. Then they begin to, if their parents are thoughtful, they can begin to understand empathically what happens. I joke with my friends, we walk past people on the streets who are obviously very mentally ill. You see them in restaurants. Ive had people come up to me in local restaurants who have serious illness. We dont engage them as if they are real people. I had a patient who came in tied to a chair. She had mania. She was tied to a chair by her family because they didnt know what to do with her. She was completely crazed. They were dumbstruck when i said untie her please. So we untied her and i went over to her and said, and i knew her name because they told me, and i said mrs. Jones, im doctor Peter Whybrow. She looked at me and she said oh, am i in a hospital . Suddenly they engagement of a person at a human level can have an extraordinarily influence. Were either frightened or we havent had enough practice. We have lots more questions but i just want to pick one more and that is, what would you really like to see out of the information that you present in this book . There are many, many messages here. If you had to distill out which message you would like to see come from this that would be absorbed by society and lead to some changes, what with that lesson or lessons look like . In some ways this book is a template for what we are trying to do with the Healthy Campus initiatives and with the mindbody program in the sense that i think we are flexible throughout life when i use the metaphor the wilting brain, its a lifelong effort. I think it is the most fascinating thing you can do because to know yourself better, and to be able to care for others in a balanced way, this doesnt mean that everything is all whom by our, but you can be objective about some people in the world are evil and some people you dont like, but i think if you can learn that about yourself, you can provide an opportunity for others to relate to you in an objective way without disturbance. I think we need to try to teach that at the university. I think it is something that can be taught. I think it should start early on in childhood. It should start in the parental family. It should start in the local community, et cetera, but even if it hasnt, i think things are still flexible enough by the time you get to ucla you could still learn some things. I think one of the things that jane has tried to do is to try to foster that idea. Of course we do good science and we know we are pursuing the vulnerabilities that people have that create mental illness. Youre not going to solve problems by this alone. You need to know how developmental disorders begin and affect the Central Nervous system p we know all those things. Once we know those things we can find ways to improve them. In general, we also need to maintain the sense of what it is that the human person can do. I think human beings are extraordinary creatures and i think we have extraordinary gifts and as i said at the beginning of the talk, we have lost some of our best attributes in the last few years as weve been washed over by increasing frenzies in technologies. If we could change that here in america, we would be actually providing something which was written in the early declaration he didnt like king george because he was from the top down. We like from the bottom up and we have to be careful we dont slip into just being a top down society again. I think we can do that at the university. We can say, if people remember what we learn here here when they become ceos or whatever they are, leaders, they will be also caring of the individuals who they work with. Great, thank you. Wonderful answer [applause]. Thank you be met in just a minute we will close the program and we invite you to join doctor Peter Whybrow in the foyer where he can sign your book. First i want to thank you for a wonderful presentation and great discussion of challenging questions that you raise in your book. Thank you very much for participating this evening. Thank you, sir. [applause]. I very much want to thank the friends for putting on the program this evening and to all of you who have come out to hear doctor why brow. I know you come to many of our programs throughout the course of the year. As she pointed out in the beginning, we really do not receive support from the university or the state put on these programs. We rely upon your generosity in order to continue to provide them free to the public. During the holiday season, if