Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Well-Tuned Brain 20160305

American media and the welltuned brain, which is the book that dr. Peter whybrow will be talking about this evening. Welcome, dr. Whybrow. Thank you so much for coming to speak with us this evening. This is a real treat for so many of us. We even have people here from oxford, from france, and we are just delighted to welcome you this evening. Joining dr. Whybrow in discussion will be another preeminent scientist from the institute, dr. Andrew loopter who is a professor of psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and the director of the Neuromodulation Center at the Semel Institute. Hes also our faculty adviser. So we would like to thank dr. Luketer also for being here this evening and for sharing his knowledge and 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 question on the index card, and someone will come by to pick it up. We will not be taking any questions directly from the floor. So if youd like to ask a question, please be sure to use the index card. Then after the q and a, well have the opportunity if youve not already done so to purchase a copy of dr. Whybrows book and have it personally signed by him. And now before i introduce dr. Whybrow, i just would like to say a few words about the friends and our open mind program. As most of you know, the friends sponsor the open mind as a Public Service to the community at no charge. What you may not know is that there is a cost to putting on these programs. We are a ucla support group, or but we still have to pay for the rentals of auditoriums, honor area yums for our distinguished speakers, many who come from out of town, and we have to pay airfare and lodging. So if you have not already done so, in the spurt of the holidays in the spirit of the holidays, in the spirit of giving, we hope that you will support our organization. We really need your help so that 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 1st. Its a perfect opportunity to join the entire nation and support an organization that has given you really excellent programming this year that i know that youve all been coming. And if you feel that it has been beneficial, please support us. And now id like to introduce dr. Peter whybrow. In addition to being the direct every of the Semel Institute for euro science and Human Behavior at ucla, dr. Whybrow is also the judson braun executive chair of the department of psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of medicine and also the ceo of the rest nick neuropsychiatric hospital. He is an International Authority on emotion and its disorders, particularly depression and bipolar illness, and the effects of thyroid hormone on brain and Human Behavior. In the welltuned brain, dr. Whybrow offers us a prescription for genuine Human Progress and takes us on a fascinating tour of selfdiscovery, drawing extensively upon his decades of experience as a psychiatrist and his broad with knowledge of neuroscience and Human Behavior. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in giving a warm welcome to dr. Peter whybrow. [applause] thank you, vicki. Good evening, everybody. Its good to see you here. This is quite an evening for me as i dont one doesnt usually get celebrated by ones own institute [laughter] so i feel very grateful. A little, a little, actually, a little humbled at all these bits and pieces here. We had to move my desk out of my office because we couldnt quite figure out how to do all this. But we have a carpet, i dont know where that came from. [laughter] one doesnt know about ones own place, does one . So this new book is one that began, at least i started thinking about it, after the episode of the financial meltdown in 2008. Because it intrigued me. When we think of our great country and we wonder how could we possibly ever have imagined that we could exist primarily on debt and speculation . Its intriguing because one can see it as a moral issue but one might also want to look at it more precisely as perhaps a neuropsychiatric behavioral issue. So i began to wonder whether you could dissect out from that particular debacle something that might make sense, that would take us out of the moral realm and put us in a more constructive realm about how we might see this into the future and avoid it. Of course, it doesnt look as if we have as we run up to another bubble, it seems to me, with the quantitative easing. But it was a worthy cause, and it allowed many me to bring all my interests of history and economics and a few other bits and pieces together to find out in my own mind why it is that we dont do better. I mean, we have such material success, but somehow it doesnt quite work in terms of Human Progress. One of the things that strikes me is that in my lifetime the population of the world has increased, its doubled, actually. But the economic output has increased by eightfold in the same 50 years, 50, 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 the traded resources Something Like 25 , one wonders why it is that were not doing better than we are. Because, yes, of course, were rich. But if you look at the statistics, were in terms of our social parameters and other things were sort of in the middle of the pack. One wonders, how could that be . Is there some strange correlation here between what we do and the fact that we have certain personal Health Problems and we worry about the environment objectively, i think, etc. , etc. . So in that 50 years, if you look at the world at large, theres no doubt that health and our wealth have improved enormously. Most of the children that we bear these days in the world grow to maturity. We are literate, in general. We are very successful. And yet when you look at the u. S. , we have many scourges which plague us. One of which is, for example, that we have a great deal of obesity. We actually are one of the fattest countries in the world. Over 50 of people are now obese, especially males, white males. So i think that we have to ask ourselves questions about how did this come about. I dont think it need be. And so in this analysis which ill talk a little bit about tonight, what id like to present to you is the idea that it doesnt need to be, that 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 weve found. There are now seven 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 it. So in some senses, you have to think of the age that weve now entered as the age of man. Weve had 10,000 years of reasonably stable environment, and its now shifting. You dont have to worry so much about whether weve caused that shift or whether, in fact, it is just shifting. But shifting, it is. And, therefore, we have to think about how do we 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. You know, as og den nash said, the american humorist and poet just before he died in 1971, he said progress might have been all right once, but it has develop on too long it has gone on too long. [laughter] so thats really the, in practical term, what the new book is about. I think that if we wish to reshape the future, we need first to understand ourselves and reshape our own behave. Thats the fundamental thrust of the welltuned brain. If we could accomplish that in this great country, we would give Great Service to everybody. Because theres 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 ill ask them to you tonight. Why is it that human beings tend to consume excessively when living in a resourcerich environment . Think about that. The more affluent we get, the worse our health gets in many ways. Why, despite our growing consciousness and awareness of these things, of ec long call ecological problems, obesity, stress, lack of trust, increasing debt, we know about all these things, but we dont 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 neurobehavioral questions which, i think, are open to reason and open to an analysis that we can bear upon them from what we know about advancing neuroscience. And im not just talking here about molecular biology, im talking about what we know about the way in which human beings behave towards each other and how the brain works. You know, one of the things that i, as i began to think about these things, that became apparent to me is that one way or thinking about it is that we are caught in a mismatch, that theres evolution, the biological evolution proceeds slowly, of course. And so does cultural evolution. But they do so at different speeds. Cultural revolution is much more rapid than biological evolution, and its probable that if you analyze that, that, in fact, we have found ourselves now in a cleft stick because some of the things that weve been so creative in inventing have created for us, for ourselves a biological problem which we cant fix 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 inadvertently. And there are three elements which i will talk about. Ancient insing chul strivings instink chul strivings that seek shortterm reward, ill tell you a little about that; the continual affluence of our contemporary society, and the third thing which is an efficient, habitdriven brain. All these things of themselves are somewhat positive, but put them together, its a perfect storm. What has happened is that we find ourselves in the middle of this perfect storm without really understanding it, and its the washing away much of our better selves. So thats the fundamental thesis of the book. Im only going to talk about the first half. I will then touch upon the second half. The first half is called who do you think you are . The second part is how to live, both of them are questions. Succinctly, 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. You know, if you think of biological evolution as darwin conceived of it and weve now validated it in many ways, its just a gradual process of variation, selection, variation of the pee cease species, selection of the biology that is presented to the environment and then replication of that variation. Its something that we have very little control over. We might think we can reengineer the human frame, but actually were passive in that regard. So we no longer, we no more 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 be purpose no grand purpose at all. Human culture, on the other hand, does have grand purpose. At least we infuse it with grand purpose. We think of it as progress, as a Movement Towards some better place. But what i would suggest to you is that is not messily where we end necessarily where we end up. Think about just obesity, what i mentioned a little earlier. If you mix modern culture fast food, no exercise, time, stress with our ancient biology, you end up with obesity. On the one hand, you could consider the ability to move rapidly, to eat quickly, to not have to worry about opening the garage door as being progress. But it obviously has a deleterious effect on some of our physiology. So lets look at a slide here and ask a question about the way in which this could possibly have come about. This is just a i have to remember to speak carefully into the microphone because of the cspan. This is a, 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. But the apes and men and individuals we might now consider primate were about 20 million years ago. And we came along somewhere around here, and homo sapiens is only perhaps 200,000, 300,000 years old at most. And then when we get to the age of man, the 10,000 years i mentioned 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 changed. The interesting point is here. This is the inflection point. You see, suddenly we moved rapidly in terms of our numbers. We moved from scarcity into abundance both in terms of numbers and in terms of our culture. So this is interesting part of the story. So what actually happened then . Actually, i think what happened was we discovered liberty, of which i will talk about in a moment, but we also discovered science and fossil fuels. That is the secret to what has happened in the last two or three hundred years, the change in the energy support. Lets look a little bit at the biology. Now, 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, its about the same size. In the middle of it, theres all those seeds and pithy stuff. Well, that is the ancient brain. That is, essentially, the little brain. The brain that taught us how to be competitive, to survive, the shortterm brain. Around that and its called the limbic brain. If you think of the first wave of the flesh of the cantaloupe melon, thats the first limbic structure. That came about approximately when the mammals began to be found on earth, and the mammals, of course, brought to understanding attachment and social behavior. Lizards tend to eat their young. We dont do that, at least not anymore. And the fact is that the way in which we care for each other is a big evolutionary advantage. So that was, thats the next layer here. And in the brain, its reflected in this area that you see there. From there onwards, it is really just continued progression of growth of the brain. Which we call the cortex and the frontal, the cortex being, of course, the outer rim, and the frontal lobes are things that have delivered for us the extraordinary things that make us human; imagination, the ability to reason and especially to abstract reason. As hobbs said, who youll meet in a moment, theres no dog that does not know a horse when he see it, and theres no dog that does not know a man when he sees it, but theres no dog that hobbs knew anyway, and i dont know one either, that creates a centaur out of those two things. We are extremely clever creatures. Were also rewarddriven and competitive just as that primitive brain was all along, and the attachment and the reason that is layered upon the top of it changes that way in which we are competitive and selfinterested, but it doesnt obscure it. Is so they, the things need to move together if they are going to be compatible in terms of the behavior that we experience. When everything is working together, its an extraordinary machine. But when they dont Work Together and we see that, of course, frequently in psychiatric disorder, things fall apart. For example, you can imagine the outer cortex, the frontal cortex as the seat of reason which is what happened during the enlightenment years, but the core of it is passion. And so the relationship between reason and passion becomes something similar. In my mind i sometimes tell the students its rather like a horse and a rider. The horse is the passion, and when it starts to bolt if the rider doesnt have a good bridle, then away goes the horse and so goes reason with it. Its also a little bit like the title of my book which i take from j. S. Bach. J. S. Bach, when he went to [inaudible] in 1722, he wrote a book for his students called the welltempered yes veer. Some of you may know of it. And its a series of exercises for the students. But it also teaches you how to tune the harpsichord. Because in those days the yes veer, the harpsichord, was notoriously out of tune. Just a changing weather pattern or leaving it for a few days, the thing would go out of tune. And so bach, in his consummate skill, recognized that if youre going to have an instrument like that that you were going to play melodiously, you had to know the instrument too. Its a metaphor, of course, but, you know, human beings have always understood their world in metaphor. And so the way in which i think of this book is that its really like the welltuned brain being like the welltempered clevier. If you really want to know how to manage life, you have to not only understand the interaction and be the musician of the mind, but you also have to know about the instrument. And so today, as in the first part of the book, im talking about the instrument. When we play this instrument well, it is, as i say, extraordinary. But lets go back to that inflection. Lets go back to the point where the biology which had been there for millions of years, supercharged in the last 2 or 900,000 300,000 years, met, essentially, the discovery of fossil fuels. And until then we were completely locked into the worlds cycle of energy which is, essentially, driven by the sun. Its what were experiencing now as the Northern Hemisphere goes to sleep, were expecting cold, and there will be nothing much growing, at least not in New Hampshire which i will talk about too, but there may be something in california. But the fact is that we have a cycle which is based upon the energy of the sun. That disappeared when we discovered fossil fuel. Well, 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 to throw over the Catholic Church and basically say human beings could manage by themselves. Thomas hobbs, for example, who you will see down here in this corner, he had lived through the english civil war, watched a few one king lose their head and a few other people die, and he was convinced that there was no way in which human beings could manage by themselves. We either needed a king who was very strict, or you needed a guard. He thought life was, as he said, nasty, brutish and short. Vernon handerville, however, who was a dutchman in the early 1700s, the dutch were much more attuned to trade than were the british. And mandeville was a puckish fellow. Hed come over when he was in his 0s, and he like 20s, and he liked the english sense of humor. And he started to say that, actually, vice was a good thing. Vices were helpful because they employed a lot of people. And he had a little dogger el which i dont know whether i can find it. Yes, luxury employed a million of the poor and odious pride a million more. Envy itself and vanity a ministers of industry. Its the fundamental nature of the capitalist enterprise that he was talking about. And he was pushed aside by the english establishment. They said, you know, this is ridiculous. We cant possibly have people doing what they want to do. It just wont work. This was a time when the government essentially controlled just about all trade. David hume, the next one on our list, he was much more sanguine about these things. He believed that, yes, reason was the slave of the passions. He was much more understanding of the dynamics of mind. In fact, he was a prophetic fellow. Remember, these people knew nothing about the anatomy or function of brain, but they were extraordinarily capable of introspection and understanding the way in which the human being thought. And so david hume was very influential. In fact, he was particularly influential on this younger man here, adam smith, who as you know is the patron saint of american capitalism. Hes also, i think, somebody suggested to me i think it was meg sullivan the reason why we did not get into the euro is this thing here which is an english 20pound note in which we have a picture of adam smith. And it says the division of labor in manufacturing and the great increases in the quantity of work that resulted. We think of adam smith as an economist. In 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. Its a profound book which talks about the way in which human beings really behave. And he points out that human beings are not quite the same way as mandeville thought they were. They werent just giving advice. He was the man who actually invented what we now call empathy in terms of understanding of it. He has a beautiful passage in this particular book in which he talks about again, metaphorically his brother being on the rack. You cannot understand the pape of your brother the pain of your brother unless you place yourself in the brothers position. Being on the rack yourself. Then you can understand it, then in that understanding you have sympathy for him, youre able to create again the feelings which then enable you to be not only sympatheticking, but you will be sympathetic, but 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 or as caring individuals. We call it various names, but empathy is the core of it. Compassion is another name we use for it. Who knows, they think, everything and therefore not the order comes down from the bottom. It is the same in any institution, you allow people individually to bring their initiative. Then you have a Stronger Program than if you have something trickling down from the top. He made these points that you know you owe yourself, the butcher, the candlestickmaker, you live the good life by virtue of their selfinterest. The way in which a Market Society should work is that yes indeed few could put people have their own initiative, as they can do what they wished but it would have to the closeknit society. Father was an implicit social contract that without that social contract the thing wouldnt work. That is a very important point because what has happened to us is we have lost the concept of the social contract, especially here in the u. S. Where we are very individualistic we driven. One of the points in my last book about american mania was not the we were friends of society that we certainly are to some degree but it was about migration and the fact that migrants have an individualistic view of the world, theyre not social the independent. In england where i grew up 60 of the population still dies within five miles of where they were born. That is not true in america. In these complex biological systems, and human being being one, social organization being another, it is the interaction of things which creates the design and the stability. It is what scientists call a complex open system. So if we boiled down the proposal that smith was making, we can turn it into a narrow physiological, narrow psychological terms. This is how the neuroscience of markets really works in my mind. In the yellow box here you have selfinterest, curiosity, love of novelty and social ambition which is essentially social competition. That is the engine of the market, that is what makes things go, what makes people get up in the morning, the entrepreneurial effort. On the other side as smith rightfully said it is the sympathy, the way in which we relate to each other, the impact and distending the and the peer recognition which is important, we all want peer recognition and without it you dont get anywhere. So if you are a good groupmaker you make good boots but you also want your colleagues to know you make good do tend to buy them. That is how it works. This is the break and aphorist and hubris, the engine and this side, social sentiment, the brakes on this side and when you put these two things together it is what he called essentially an invisible hand which makes the whole thing balance. But we have to remember that it is the social contract between these two things, this zeroth year that makes it work. So now we come towards perhaps one of the second factor is of the mismatch. If you have a society which does not have a closeknit social contract you endanger of creating an opportunity so that instinct will drive to run free in and not necessarily to the advantage of the society as all hole. Let me just tell you, a very short story, keeping an eye on the time here, very short story, a restaurant some of you may know in westwood, called this l. A. I go there quite frequently because i love their french fries. One evening just after the new year, we were eating their, susan solomon, eight and enjoy it and fill up and had a glass of wine here and there, the owner, who is a french canadian came around and said you mustve had minute cheesecake, it is a wonderful cheesecake. We said we are absolutely full. He said oh, please, very crestfallen. We persuaded him, and we paid the bill and suddenly he comes running out from behind where the kitchen is and presents this plate of cheesecake to us, sticks it in the middle of a table giving us three forks and said now you will try my wonderful cheesecake and so we looked at each other and i am not overestimating, 90 seconds the thing had disappeared. What does that tell us about human beings . We are short term in our vision. I can stand here and tell you i am trying to lose weight, i am not going to eat cheesecake this coming new year, i wont eat much at thanksgiving but in the abstract i am very good at fat but put it in front of me, i eat it because this is the old is your brain waking up and saying that stuff is really good. I am not going to lose the opportunity to eat it when you place it in front of me. If you create an affluent society where your pudding metaphorically cheesecake in front of somebody all the time, what do you do . We eat it. It is a very different situation from the one where smith conceived of the modern Market Society and we still hold him up as the father of the Market Society. Look at this live here. I hope is not watch out for you in the back, but it is a picture of a house, the house i bought one i first came from england, it is in new england and it is in a tiny village, my daughter happens to be a veterinarian, one of my daughters, but it still works somewhat like it did in 1777 when the house was built. People have some sort of crisis, there barn burned down a couple years ago. Everybody was around giving would so they could survive the winter. It is what we would call a centripetal system, a system where the social networks feed upon each other. Social cohesion. It is constrained by climate, geography, and time. Lets look at this next one fest, todays society, this picture in the chicago airport a few months ago, you can see, i hope, it is unfortunately washed out, and here you have an individuals working at their laptop, somebody else playing with their cellphone and he have somebody speaking on their cellphone and the big plane taken to another distant part. This is a centrifugal system where people are moved away from each other. You can easily have the system smith was talking about when you have this type of society we now have. The internet initiates this fast new world and we are in the 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 and without that we all get worried we are in another recession. Look at the way the stock market has been bubbling up and down everyone is higher 5. 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 because we cant afford to have a recession. A 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 short term and diminishing social investment and the whole thing is moving slightly to the right. To your left. The third element which is most important battle is the intuitive aspects of things. One of the things the brain does is it is extremely efficient and that efficiency comes from had it. Cross your arms for me. Now uncross from and cross the and the other way. You got it right . I had my arm over here and now i have to put this arm under here. Difficult, isnt it . That is an example of had it. And of course we have hats, we are familiar with them in the way we played tennis with the way we walk but that have is going on inside or head, you have hundreds of social habits which you have picked up over the years. We call them in tuition. Intuitive habits which you are not conscious of. 80 of what we do is preconscious. Many of the things we do daybyday are habituated and we dont even think about them. Remember the riots in the Los Angeles School system . When we try to move them from hamburger and french fries to lunch at to jambalaya and wild rice, there was a riot. 15, 20,000 students said they were not going to eat that stuff and there was a special market that grew up outside for people to go out to buy their french fries and hamburgers. We are creatures of habit. If we fosters the habits we have, theyre very difficult to break. So the question then becomes how do we begin to think about this in a way that is constructive . Another interesting economist, right wing libertarian, i happen to be a member of his society which is a surprise to me, but i am the token biologist actually. He made this observation in the 20s infinitys, markets dont run themselves. Connects it is tradition. The way in which securities work is theres a tradition which holds, the glue that holds all together. That is essentially intuitive had it. What goes on and then in the brain is perception comes in at the back and choice and action are in the front. This is where the limbic structures, the lizard brain or the infant brain of the mammal meet the rational brain of the front will cortex. But this runs the habit system. And 10 to 20 years to develop those habits, and this initially we just combined together all the senses that we have and begin to understand how to make action. You have seen a child trying to grasp a grill, cant quite reach it. They go to it and it clears the hand fast enough. Those actions are the training of the habits of hand i coordination. The same goes on in your head in terms of social order. The first part of the book says lets try to figure out who we are . Who do we really think we are . Let me read you the beginning of the second part of the book and then i am going to close with a few more remarks. This is the prologue of the second part, how to live. The greeks called it the state of the unperturbed, tranquillity and peace of mind, to epicurus it is the foundation of the joy of human flourishing. 2,000 years on adam smith is in agreement liz smith considered happiness to the tranquility and enjoyment, the fruits bubble well tuned brain. Human beings are not given to serenity, tranquillity does not come naturally to the human mind. It is highly cultivated state achieve through hard work and self discipline we call character. Such tooting arises from awareness of the true nature of the world and understanding of the limitations, the limitations of our being. To achieve such command which is a word smith used, we must first except ourselves for who we are, instinctively driven, a curious, self interested, focused on the shortterm and ruled by habit, not a pretty picture, yes . The combined that however with extraordinary powers of reason, deception, analysis, imagination and choice but also deeply social. The challenge is to bring these thoughts together in harmony. To imagine a sustainable achievement future that promotes individual wellbeing and observes the reality of environmental circumstances. We are privileged to be living in confusing times. Nothing is more antithetical to the cultivation of anorexia data that fuelled Consumer Society which in its promotion of any quality floods selfdestruct and in the ecological sense. How do we dig out from this avalanche of modernity . Adam smith considered two cardinal values. Fairness, benevolence and prudence to underpin a stable social order. These elements of character in the bonds of infancy. The will to and brain. Crafted over a lifetime. And the promotion that social fellowship is exercised, future thriving is a matter of conscious choice and shared responsibility, healthy children flourish in healthy families, help the schools and help the communities. Collectively we drive habits designed through markets that foster opportunity and a choice, the mix is not changed by embracing the past, we can imagine the future. You might wonder who this young woman is. This is my granddaughter and she introduces the second part of the book with a story, she lives on a sheep farm with my other daughter was a sheep farmer. This is a lamb she rescued the sheep have a tendency of taking each others lambs. You may not know that. Because they get so pipe the that there hormones just before they give birth themselves that another gives birth, they often snatch the lamb and take it away and the bonding only takes a few minutes. In the cold of winter. If the lamb is not attached, literally, the milk, it dies. This is that very interesting paradigm for which we can understand because we have the same hormones, how human attachment works. What bonds a human mother to the child is the same as what bonds a you to the lamb and what bonds my granddaughter to this land that she said in the kitchen. When it was stolen by another lamb when the yous own lamb was born it was left asunder. If we think this is the second half of the book, this is the thing that really binds us together, just think in your mind love is the initial attachment but out of that comes trust. It is within trust that you begin to see your own ability to command yourself. That it sheds into education. Once we get into school, if you have that sense of self demand you begin to learn. And from there if we build cities and have attached where we can all be talking with each other, that is strengthened and when we eat around a table rather than in the back of a car is strengthened. There are so many things we know about how to build human beings, we know what imagination means, all the things that create opportunity for a stable, carrying society and yet we do not translate that into social policy. Why is that . People ask what is this book about, it is a mystery story. We know these things, but we do not implement them. We are the only country in the world that does not have the capacity to give young parents and opportunity to spend time with their children just born and go back to work without losing their job. That is fascinating, isnt it . We are stumbling towards a Health Care System if stumbling is the right word. We can do so much better in terms of thinking. Is not a moral issue. Is an issue how do you develop the best form of human being you can develop . How do you to in the brain in a way that is to the benefit of all of us . One of the wonderful things about the institute is helping us see the future. Jane and carry some years ago working with a group of us invented something called the Healthy Campus, trying to put in place at ucla this whole idea about how do you create human beings who have their own self command, and had pick and carrying the . You dont just go to university to learn physics, you learn also to understand yourself and your fellow man. In doing that, a i think we have created an opportunity for the future and just started again, extraordinary in leading the will tuned campus, held the initiative of the will to end campus but also just started a healthy mind project and that is something which i think we will be looking to over the next two or three years and it is an Exemplary Organization in that regard because it brings us together in a way that enables us to learn the best from each other and in doing that, we will be able to create a new society. There are pockets of these things going on all over the country but it has to come up from the bottom. It is the design without a designer and i think we will get there but i want to thank you for coming tonight because this is the gathering, the friends of the resnick hospitals that makes this change possible. Thank you so much. [applause] thank you. There will be questions for the audience, do you have questions . Circulating in the aisles of question cards, if you would like to ask a question please write themselves 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, to get started with a couple finis. For those that have not had an opportunity to read the welltuned brain neuroscience and the life well lived i highly recommend it. It is the wonderful work. One of the things i enjoyed the most was the panorama of history you laid out for the reader. You quoted mark twain saying history doesnt repeat itself, it certainly has a tendency to rhyme. We have been doing this to ourselves for a long time, the pattern you spoke about this evening that you write about, as you note in the book, brought down bronze age civilizations, from 1630, one thing i learned is there was a tulipomania and being inclined, the 2008 stockmarket crash. These are long in green patterns of behavior we inflict on ourselves. Is this something we are going to be able to overcome in our lifetimes . I dont know whether this is gonon. This one is. I am an optimist at heart. We have an extraordinary opportunity. We have always been somewhere ahead of the curve in the last hundred years or so in terms of developing material wealth, but we havent had a social contract. We are very much, origens come from the same enlightenment period the Founding Fathers knew much more about the enlightenment thinkers than we do today, they is essentially couch the constitution in that rhetoric. That is why we king weekend take guns are round, we believe in the eighteenth century. We ask ourselves what is it we can do now, it is to think through what you are talking about and take it out of the moral realm of. We have such a polarized political system at the moment, it is almost as if you are either for freedom or socialism. The two things dont meet each other but they are basically the same thing. We are a social element of the contract that we have to develop for the country to the entrepreneurial but each has to feed the other. Think about what we can do, if we took it out of the moral realm and put it in that neuroscience realm we can see why this has happened. Is not a mystery as to why it is, wind you produce the engine of the market place which you forget the brakes, the whole thing runs off. When you feed it with money that goes into the future you are mortgaging future so if we come to think of it in these terms, it is possible to say to ourselves this is sort of crazy, that distinguishes us from the others. If we are reasoning why cant we go back to the idea of the age of reason should be reinvented now and america could do that. I think we can. I think the mike is working too well. Pardon me for a moment while i challenge your optimism because i have had the distinction of watching president ial debates in the 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 these basic principles into our social discourse but we are in a world where nearly half the people think evolution is just another theory and the world is only about 5,000 years old, where Global Warming is a hoax, where the pyramids are billed as a grain silos and the answer to gun violence is make guns easier to get. It is almost as though, pardon the phrase, trumps reason the this belief trumps reason. How is it we are going to get past this force of reflexive, in some ways maladapted believe systems some people endorse and get to the kind of discourse you are talking about where we can reason ourselves away from this cycle of boom and bust the we are accustomed to over the centuries. You hit the right word. It is reflective. We are reflective creatures because 80 of what we do is try to have that as i said. David hewlett put it very well, reason will, is, and always will be the slave of the passions. What he was saying is what we are saying now which is you have one politician who says all you got to do is stick it to them and we will be flying, the other says no, we got to organize ourselves in a social order that is immediately taken as being essentially topdown socialism, both of them are staying the same thing, theyre saying theres something wrong here and we have got to find a solution but they havent really thought through the solution and both of them are topdown solutions, and this is why i am optimistic. I have no apologies for that because i do i think what i do in this book is talk about a lot of people, all the books i write have stories about people in them and these are real people, some of the earlier books i read where about how they got out of problems, american mania have a lot of stories about people, this has a lot of stories about people. For example what can we learn from urban Center Architect who is an expert on renaissance. Plants in italy . We can learn a lot . Renaissance villages in italy sometimes didnt work. The stories, the story of the sheep farm for example, the story of a place in culture city college the museum of jurassic technology, if you want to really do is your imagination just go down there. You will find it a fascinating afternoon. What i am saying is there are whole pockets of these things going on. In my mind i sort of thing of it rather like a series of raindrops which have fallen and eventually they coalesce a you have a lake and i think if we allow true social entrepreneurship in the sense of being willing to listen to each other we will find solutions we cannot conceive of individually and so that is why optimismamericans are very good at that, at entrepreneurial effort. It is just that we have forced it into this, what i think is a false paradigm that you are either an entrepreneur and a businessman, work you are somehow a closet academic and doing things that have no relevance to society. Thank you very much, peter. You touched in your comments about children and how we raise our children. It occur is to me that in some ways some of the drive the we see that individuals drive to success is in part, certainly in an affluent community, not necessarily manifest drive for themselves but their children, the drive to attend the best school, to have the greatest status symbols, it is not necessarily for oneself but something that one tries to do for the next generation. In a curious to me that we are not doing a favor for the next generation by setting the example. Drive to succeed and the drive to for consumption is something we tend to pass along in the way we raise our children. It is a very hard treadmill to get off of because once one is on it, one looks at ones neighbor and says they are doing this and if i dont do this my children will fall behind. Not necessarily i will fall behind but my children will. How to get off of that personal treadmill . It is a tough one. It is the natural instinct to support ones children beyond oneself. It has become increasingly difficult as society bifurcates and we have very rich people and very poor people, but i think even within the effort to make sure ones children can cope in an increasingly competitive society, it is entirely reasonable to have them participate in what they really want to do. One of the things we tend to do with children these days is we dont give them enough time to use their own imagination. Children curiously enough just as happy playing with a sauce pan and the wooden spoon as they are playing with an ipad. Will problem with the technical wizardry we have now especially when we are all using it is the child sees the parents when they are walking with their parents not talking to them but talking to something in their ear and you end up with the child wanting to be like the parent, wanting to actually have a similar machine. That tends to crowd out spaces the kids have for just thinking about nothing, is essentially. I am not quite sure how we get back to that but theres considerable evidence that childhood these days is very different from childhood that i had for example where my parents would say to me get off the doorstep and get on your bike and come back in time for supper. I live in the country and that was easier and safer in those days, but we have got to somehow im not a lot late. I dont think we should go back to the 18thcentury. I think we have got 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 a most wonderful thing and when the child begins to develop that, as they do it in a very idiosyncratic way and i think we make a mistake by giving them too many highly technical police, because it focuses them and shipped them in a direction which is somebody elses imagination, not their own. We dont have to deprive them, we just have to give some opportunity to thing for his famous which we might not think through 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 spoke quite a bit about the importance of social ties in developing the kinds of values you are talking about for society. One question here about god and religion. Where does god and religion fit into the development of the well tuned brain . And empathy and compassion . Can you speak to those kinds of constructs and how you see those things . That is a very fascinating subtopic. 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, and it is the connection we see with other generations that begin the concept of religion. As one of my anthropologist franz says it is not important but it is central, religion is in its best form something that binds society together and it is the imaginative structure. One 9 not believe in virgin birth, but nonetheless the ethos of the organization of the religion does create a social contract and a social structure which is extraordinarily important for most of us and so 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 probably 30, 40,000 years old. They have hands on the wall next to the cracks in the stone, bearing painted around hands which obviously were there at one time. There are all sorts of theory about that one of the ms. This was an effort because they thought previous generations, the ancestors were in that frame and you could get to them through these caves, these cracks in the wall so we have the imagination the week and go on for generations and we reverse that and think about the future, we can also go to heaven. If you think about the way in which the human mind works, theres nothing antithetical about religion, is completely i dont believe in people who think if you are religious you are not reasoning. You are reasoning, just using your imagination which is different from the reasoning you might be using if you were trying to develop some sort of scientific answer to an objective question. I think cumin being this need mystery, they need ways in which they can see themselves with a larger context and that is what religion does. We have an interesting psychoanalytic question here, talking about different layers of the brain, different parts of the brain, lundquist and here it is how does this relate to sit when freuds. About the it, ego and superego . Do you tie some of this into Sigmund Freuds psychoanalytic theory . I talk a little bit about Sigmund Freud in the book, not a great deal. I think dont forget he was living 100 or more years ago. He was really thinking about the way in which society at that time in vienna was a very repressive society and if he lived today i think his furies of sexual interest would probably not fly quite as well because we seem to see that in every hotel room. What he was doing was resonating with the same idea that had been airing in laymans thinkers. Core of the brain which is primitive, which in his mind would have been the id, and beyond that you have an ego which is essentially the way in which the id and the brain itself meld together because that is much more related to the conscious, day to day functioning. In his mind the id was preconscious, or unconscious costs. I dont think it is quite the same way we think of preconscious activity today but if you put those two things together then the superego is self command, something which again smith wrote a lot about in his theory of moral sentiment. He recognized the child learns self command through basically growing up to the point where he realizes he is not the center of the university she read Sigmund Freuds. About infantile sexual how many etc. That is exactly what he is describing, in a slightly different language. There is compatibility with psychoanalytic theory and the way in which we now see normal development. Several of the questions have to do with the unspeakable violence over the past week, the incredible acts of cruelty, one does not even want to call them terrorism, hot right murder of innocent civilians, people who clearly were outside 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 we see so rampant in this country with guns or most recently in europe with the horrible murders in paris . I have to confess i havent fought deeply about that regarding the paris tragedy. I think you put your finger on it wind you said i suspect individuals who perpetrate such things are on the fringe of their own religion, in this case, and that becomes a justification for their acts. It is 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 which is a mystery to me about america is we actually kill more people in a year, by about eight, ten times, and then died in the afghan and iraq wars in total, every year. With handguns. So you have to occasional outburstss, the issue of individuals who frequently, said the deal reporter killing the other this in a squanderin a squandes. We were literal about the constitution and the ability to carry arms it would be the we all would be carrying muzzleloaders which might be usually quite good because it takes quite a long time to reload a muzzleloader. When you bring something into modern times you run into trouble. We have created a Market Society for example where we dont think there should be any breaks. We think a freemarket is where you can do what you please. We have lots of regulations in this country. But regulation is absolutely essential. One of the interesting things which i havent really thought through but i think is something we need to think for is self command and trust of each other diminishes which is definitely doing, you can see that, regulation increases. It is create that is happening. We have more and more regulations because we are not regulating ourselves. When you have allowed the thing to run amok, we have so many guns in this country, more guns than people, we are in fact in a set of circumstances where we need individual trust and caring. There is the fascinating thing to me that apparently canada has almost as many guns percapita as we do but apparently they have some social fabric which enables them not to shoot each other quite so frequently. I dont know what that all means but we need to start thinking about its standing back from the moral issue, i deserve to have a gun because it is in the constitution, as opposed to the idea that these things are extremely dangerous. I dont know that we can do very much about the situation in paris except to recognize that it is going to be a season of things like that, that we have to cope with because it is a different vision of what society is and we dont share that society so we have to oppose it. I am not sure how that will play itself out but it is one of the extraordinary challenges of our time, that we need to think about that as a free society and how we can possibly contain something that is so easily perpetrated upon us now. Thank you. Great answer to a difficult question. One fin you spoke about if you want to understand your brothers suffering, you need to envision yourself on the rack, put yourself in his place. One of the questions here i am not sure i fully understand, what do we do about the deficit of empathy in this country . That relates to the mission of friends in terms of the stigmatizing mental illness, it seems people have a remarkable legacy for those suffering from depression, psychosis, major mental disorders. It is hard for people to put themselves in position of those who are mentally ill despite the fact that everybody has been touched by a mental disorder. Thoughts on about how to increase empathy for in society in general particularly those suffering from mental illness. You are asking me some tough questions here. I never said this was going to be easy. I think empathy i will come back to the point of stigma. I think empathy is actually something which begins very early in life wikipedia if you look at that picture of my granddaughter, not to be too chauvinistic, she was extraordinarily attached to that creature she helped to bring up and when the sheep had a wham of it so she was terribly unhappy because she felt she had lost her little sister. She is only 6 years old or 5 when it happened. You see there the early phases of the childs integration with social order and wanting to be part of it and i think that is what we must foster. In a society where we are so busy is very difficult to engage at the end patrick level with children. I say sometimes to my people who i try to help and care for it doesnt really matter whether you are chastising a child or complimenting a child, you have to be present with the child. Because they learn, think about for example your teachers in high school. I talked about this also in the book. All of you can remember a teacher you had in high school but you probably cant remember a word of what they taught you. The reason why you remember that person is they are in your mind probably attached to either a very positive fought, usually the case, or a negative thought that something to do with that social link which makes you remember them. That is what a child does. Went looking for social winks in their world, they first of all draw upon those, they have from their parents and siblings and they imagine them. That is why they play in these games, teddy coming to t and teddy spills his teacup, big problem with teddy. That imagination is the beginning of and hetrick understanding that teddy is a klutz or we need to nurture that and we can do that by being engage with children. When you then get to situation, i have forgotten the second part of your question. The way in which as they grow up empathy for those with mental disorder. With those who are sick. If engage by the idea of trying to understand why and mabel who comes every thanksgiving and gives them something very nice but compared with uncle charlie who come this and is always a grouch, that sort of understanding which enables them to say why is that persons range . Why is it that person seems to be distant from me . Then if their parents are thoughtful they can begin to understand and practically what happens. We dont do nearly enough of that. I joke with my friends we walk past people in the street who are obviously seriously mentally ill, you see them in local restaurants. I had peopley 1 bourthem to do with her fifth what would you really like to see come out of the information you presented in this book . There are 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, what would that lesson or those lessons look like . In some ways, this book is a template for what we are trying to do with Healthy Campus initiative and the mind body program in the sense that we are flexible throughout life. When i use the matter for metaphor of the will to in the brain is a lifelong effort, the most fascinating thing you can do, to know yourself better and to be able to care for others in a balanced way, this doesnt mean everything is calm buyout but you can be objective about some people in the world are evil. All of that is true but if you could learn that about yourself, to relate to you in an objective way without disturbing, we need to teach at a university. I think it is something that can be taught and it should start early on in childhood, it should start in the parental family, it should start in the local community etc. Etc. Things are flexible until ucla, and one of the things jane has tried to do is foster that idea. We do good science, we know we are pursuing the vulnerabilities people have to create mental illness, and how developmental disorders begin. And once we know those people we find ways to improve them but in general we also need to maintain a sense of what it is that each human person can do, human beings are extraordinary creatures, we have extraordinary gifts and we have lost the best attributes in the last few years as we have been washed over by increasing frenzy and technologies. If we could change that here in america, we would actually be providing something which was written in the early declaration, we didnt like king george because he was from the top down. We like the bottom up. We have to be careful we dont sweat into just being a top down society again. I think we can do that at the university. We can save people remember what they learned here when they become ceos or whatever is they are, leaders, they will be tearing of the individuals to they worked with. Thank you, wonderful answer. [applause] in just a moment we are going to close the program and invite you to join Peter Whybrow in the full a where you can get him to sign your book but i want to thank you very much for the wonderful presentation and lively discussion of challenging questions that you raise in your book and thank you very much for participating. Thank you. [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 third Peter Whybrow. I know many of you come to a number of our programs throughout the course of the year. As Vicky Goodman pointed out in her comments in the beginning we did not receive support from the university, the state, to put on these programs, we rely on your generosity to put these programs on and continue to provide to the public so please, the holiday season, if you take a moment to pick up an envelope and give as generously as you can to help us continue our educational mission, we would very much appreciate it. When itune into it on the weekends, usually its authors sharing their new releases. Watching the nonfiction authors on booktv is the best television for serious readers. On cspan they can have a longer conversation and delve into their subjects. Booktv weekends, they bring you author after author after author that spotlight the work of fascinating people. I love booktv, and im a cspan fan. And this weekend were live with author and new yorker staff