(ethereal music) - We'll talk about the
genesis of the book, and we'll talk about your other
writing experience in time. But I'm sure for our audience
it would be most interesting if we could dive straight
into the subject matter, if that's okay with you? It's something which
you've immersed yourself in for quite a considerable time, and spoken to some really
fabulous experts around the world. And I guess, the first
question, just to check in, can you give us after your inquiry, what your definition of an emotion is? - That's a great question and I'd love to give you a great answer. Let me start though by saying that even in the field
of emotion research, that's still one of the
questions that's being debated. And people use different
definitions of emotion. The one that's pretty widely used that I like the best is, "the definition of an emotion as a functional state of the brain." And I think that takes a little
unpacking, so I'll do that. - So, say that again. So it's a functional state of the brain? - Functional state of the brain. Each emotion is a different
functional state of the brain, and each emotion is a
different functional state that is appropriate to a
certain type of situation. That is what stimulates the emotion. So your brain is a information processor. It's not like the computers that we use, it's a lot different, it's a little more like the
newer types of computers or computer programming
that people are doing with the so-called neural
nets and deep learning. But it's even much more
complicated than that. But doesn't really matter if it's like the electronic computers, it is a computer, it
processes information. And so what your brain has built in are certain rules of logic,
such as, if A implies B, and B implies C, then A implies C. And so we're blessed to have certain rules like that in our brains, and we have a rational, logical capacity. But what our brains do for
us is that they take in data, sensory data from your eyes, your ears, and your other senses, and they understand the
circumstances that you're in. And their brain is
there to make decisions. The decisions could be
either literally a decision, or it could be a thought. Your brain generates a thought, or it could generate a behavior, or it could make your heart race faster, or it could make you run away,
it could make you say hello. Whatever it is, your brain takes in the
data that's coming in and the knowledge of the situation, and it generates an output. And in doing that, it doesn't
do that in the vacuum. It does that in the context
of your knowledge base, your memories, your past experiences, your beliefs, your goals. There's a lot more that feeds into all that calculation
than just the sensory data. And that's where the emotions come in. So the emotions tune your brain in a way that when it's looking at, and taking into account these
memories and other things, each bit of information that
it's taking into account from your past, from your
beliefs, your experience, your goals and so forth,
has to be evaluated. Is it relevant? How important is it? How trustworthy is it? Should I be skeptical of it? And so all those different
pieces of information that are available to you as
you're starting your processing and doing your mental
processing, have to be evaluated. And the way they're evaluated and valued is very strongly dependent
on your emotion state. So when we say that an emotion is a functional state of the brain, it means that those elements
that are going to be fed into this processing that's going on, are dependent on your emotion state. And let me just say that
this description I just gave illustrates why I say in the
book that it's very important that there is no rational mind that's separate from a emotional mind. There's no rational thought that happens without the emotion because these beliefs, knowledge and so forth that affect your mental calculations are always there. And so there's some emotion state that's determining how they're used. And that always works together
with your rational mind to give you your final output. - It's interesting,
your very first remark, that it's the question
of what an emotion is, is not well understood, or at least not well agreed within the field is very interesting. And we can contrast that, can't we, with other bits, let's say
of biology where, you know, if you think about respiration, right? So respiration, the bit where we take air
in and out of our lungs, and there are these gases
and they get transferred across the membrane into our blood, and the concentrations of them change, and there are various disorders. That's a biological system,
which is well understood. You wouldn't say, if you were writing a book
about respiration, I'd say, "What's breathing?" You'd say, "Well, Dan, you know, it's a great question a lot
of people have debated." And so the first point
to make here, I guess, is that with neuroscience, we are as a biological field of study in a very different place than we are with most kinds of biology. And indeed, perhaps this, one might say in terms
of the study of gravity, there are some abstract
or finer points of gravity which are disputed, but basically
it makes things, you know, fall its attraction, this kind of thing. Were you disappointed to
find that the scientists, the neuroscientists you
were speaking to hadn't got further ahead with the problem? - (chuckles) Well, no, not at all. One of the exciting
aspects of writing a book was that it is a field that's
undergoing a revolution, and new information and
discoveries are made every day. So that was part of the excitement and also part of the reason I thought there was room for such a book. On the other hand, the
flip side of that is, yes, it made it a bit hard at times that people aren't using the same definitions,
and not just for emotion. I got terribly confused at some point because I thought I knew a fair
amount about brain anatomy. And I'm reading all these research papers and I'm finding what seemed
to be contradictions. And I realized then that even the parts of the brain sometimes
are not agreed upon, the anatomy or the names. Some people include
this part and that part, or have a separate name
for this and others don't, they included in that, and so forth. And that's all still being worked out. The brain is very complicated.
- So let's get back to the central question then, as you said. And I do think this
kind of dichotomy piece is really interesting. You talk about Plato's view of
the mind early in your book. And I just wonder for those of us that are maybe a bit rusty on our Plato, can you give us the description, the chariot description that he brings? 'Cause I think it's gonna be interesting to understand your central point, and also to answer the
question, what's new? So what was Plato's sense of how the mind was?
- Well, Plato, likened the system of our brain, our mind as a charioteer
that's rational thought, that has two horses that it has to control or actually not so much control as I think work with harmoniously. And one is what we would today call your emotions or your feelings. And the other are our
drives, lust and so forth. So one would be maybe the emotions were you have love and satisfaction by accomplishing something, and the other are more primal drives. And this all works together to create the products of your mind. And that was very
influential and got used, but adapted and changed through the ages by different philosophers. Each of whom seems to
have his own or her own different theory of what emotions or the passions they used to
call them, or what they are. And it really didn't become
object of scientific study in a major way until Charles
Darwin attacked the problem. - What was Darwin's take on it? Because I mean, obviously we
would say he was a naturalist, although of course he
wrote about humans as well. But what was the order that
he brought to the problem as contrasting with what came before? - Well, Darwin, who obviously brilliant, was interested later in his life, in how the idea of emotions fits into his theory of evolution. So the questions that concern him were, why did we develop and
what's the relationship between emotions in animals and in humans? And why do we even have them? How did they evolve? What purpose do they serve? And if you ever studied Darwin's life, he was a very meticulous man. And when he went into something, he left no detail uncharted. And he examined all sorts of animals that he could find in the different zoos, and even other cultures around the world. And he sent away things
for people to study, and sent back to him about other cultures. And he'd made quite an analysis. And his conclusion was that in animals, emotions have really two roles. One is to enable a quick response to a dangerous or threatening, or important situation
that they encounter. And the other was to communicate
to other of the species, something that's important to communicate. For example, if you're having a conflict, and you show fierce
anger that may be enough to preclude a fight because
the other animal realizes that you're really more determined than it is, or so forth. So it's to communicate that, hey, there's a predator in the environment. And so the animals would have certain vocal and facial expressions that would communicate in that way, and they'd have certain
preordained behavior that would come as a result of a trigger of seeing a predator
or falling off a rock, or whatever it was that
triggered the emotion. Now, in people, Darwin said, "interesting, we have language, so we don't need to communicate by making faces or showing our emotions, because we can tell each
other about our emotions." And secondly, we have rational thinking. And so we don't need the emotions to make our decisions for us. And so Darwin thought that emotions in humans were more of a
vestige, like the appendix, and they weren't really necessary. And Darwin felt that rational behavior.
- Possibly a Victorian male perspective perhaps. - Yeah. And a very male perspective. And Darwin felt, and I think most scholars since Newton felt that the rational reasoning and rational mind is the ultimate, and is the superior way
of making all decisions. And this theory of Darwin's, it got elaborate upon
over the next decades as people started to study the brain. And so added to that theory was the idea that there are certain
centers of the brain for this and for that. So you may have a love center
or a fear center, et cetera. - Just before we get to the
neuroanatomy piece though, just, back with Darwin. Was it right that he identified or claimed that there was a limited, quite a small number of emotions
which were characteristic of humans and also other animals? Is that right? - Right. So he named six basic
emotions, fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust and surprise. And to Darwin, they were
all distinct emotions. They were not categories of
related sub emotions, let's say. They were all distinct singular emotions and there was no overlap. So today we know that, that's wrong. And everything else I just said
before that was also wrong. - It was history, it's fine. - Darwin's entire theory, we've discovered over the
last 20 years, was wrong. Seems intuitive and it's not that it has no kernel of truth in
it, in some vague way, in some fuzzy way it has some truth in it, but it's not really right. For example, I'll just give you an example
what I mean by fuzzy truth. Take his pronouncement that
there's six basic emotions, today we look at many, many more than six. And those may be very important
emotions for survival, but there's awe, there's embarrassment. We consider homeostatic emotions like hunger for example as an emotion. There's jealousy, there's shame, guilt. We look at many, many more than that. Also, take fear. That's one of the emotions that he defined as a basic emotion, but today we know that fear
is not just one emotion. If we each introspect a little bit, you might imagine that your fear as you stand on perhaps the
edge of a cliff looking down, is maybe different from the fear that you'd have if a
bear is coming at you, or you look to the right and a truck is barreling down on you, or there's a scorpion
on your arm or whatever. But we can actually go
further in science and say, not only does that feel different, we can look in your brain now and we can see that it
really is different, those kinds of fears. There are different types of fear. There's one interesting experiment that showed that the fear, they put a tarantula while a person was having her brain imaged they put a tarantula on her arm, and they studied the fear. And then they also
basically water boarded her in the scientist's own way. But they made her feel
that she was suffocating by adjusting the carbon dioxide in the air she was breathing, and the fear of suffocation was different. And they could see in the
brain, one for example, involved the amygdala
and the other didn't. So in fact, this person that they
were experimenting on didn't have an amygdala, so that she didn't feel
the fear from the scorpion, but she felt the fear from the suffocation 'cause it doesn't involve the amygdala. So we know that there's
different kinds of fear. And if you look at fear
as compared to anxiety, it's not so easy to draw the line. There's a kind of a
fuzzy line between them. So this whole idea that
the emotions Darwin named are unitary and separate is also not true. It's not true that they have
a certain specific place in the brain that's more distributed. And it's not true that the rational mind is separate and superior to
emotion, they work together. - So, I'm a former neuroscientist myself, nothing would given me more pleasure than to dig inside the brain. But before we go there, I just wonder, do we think that the way that
Darwin conceived of emotions was a product of his
gender and of his class, and of his culture and of his time, and that we've kind of
managed to dissociate the study of emotion from that now? I don't quite mean, you know,
multiple words for snow, but do we think of emotion and
the categorization of emotion as being universal across all cultures, languages, classes, races,
genders, and so on now? Or would you say that it's still something where to understand it fully
requires an understanding of specific culture and
cultural difference? - I think most neuro
scientists would agree that we all have the same
apparatus for emotion, and have the same emotional
experiences to a certain extent. But there are certainly differences in how we, in our cultures and languages, view emotions and categorize emotions. So there are some languages
where there's no word for sad, or I think where sad and
anger or the same word. There's only one word for those two. And there's other emotions, other languages that
have words for emotions that we don't have words for. My favorite example was the one emotion that was described as the exhilaration of participating in a
head hunting expedition. - You don't mean recruitment, you mean spears?
- (laughs) Yeah, I mean in the wild, right. - Right. - The way to look at it is that your brain has all these functional
states and experiences, and it really has what William James said, "an infinite number of emotions." But if you really look at
each one so specifically, that really each experience
could be considered distinct. But in describing it, it's useful to have
categories to talk about. And it's natural because
there are certain ones that are very similar to other ones, and I view it as the way we
name colors in the rainbow. The rainbow is a spectrum
from certain frequency up to a certain higher frequency, from red to violet, or blue, violet. And we pick out some spaces
in there and call them color, red, red orange, or turquoise or whatever. And other countries or cultures, that if they're isolated from
us, might pick out other ones. And the names we give
them don't really matter. It's just helps us talk about them. - Now, you mentioned Darwin's interest in emotion based in his interest of evolution. And clearly we don't wanna get
into the mistake of thinking that we are the most devolved creature. But you might think if
that was your interest, that as mammals evolved,
and primates and so on, emotions would arise quite
late in that process. But I know in your book,
to me, quite surprisingly, you're describing some really
unsophisticated organisms and even bacteria as having behaviors which can be understood as emotional. Can you explain what you mean really about a bacterial emotion? Is that in any way the same as ours or is it just a metaphorical link? Where do you think our
emotional world really starts, or is it truly shared
with all living things? - Well, evolution tends to reuse things. So if you see a hummingbird
flying around, it has wings, so do fruit flies, which are a
much more primitive creature. And if you look even on the biochemical
level, there are reward, there are chemicals that work in your brain for reward system, then you can find them in flatworms too. So what evolution does is
it takes whatever it has, and rather than starting over and say let's build something more sophisticated, it tweaks things, and a lot
of the things are carried on. So we find in animals, that animals all the way
down that we can see, well, all the way down that we've studied, all the way down to fruit
flies, have emotions. And there's some very
interesting experiments on fruit fly emotions. That doesn't mean they have the same conscious experience of
emotion, I doubt that they do. And it doesn't even mean that
they have the same emotions. I don't know if they feel awe or jealousy, but we can find that
there are certain emotions such as fear that we can study, and that emotion in fruit flies has some of the same properties
that it has in humans, and the same biochemical
or neural transmitters being involved. Now when you go down to
non-animals such as bacteria, I talked about not really
emotion in bacteria, but something called, core affect. And core affect is another phenomenon or quality of experience that we have that's a step more primitive than emotion. And it probably it evolves
before emotion for sure, and emotion evolved from that. But we still experienced that. Let me tell you what that is, a core affect.
- It's a core affect just for those of us that. So affect is sort of feeling in a sense, and core in a sense? What do you mean by core really? - Well, core means, the term in this case would mean basic. What it is, is the human has a
tremendously close connection between mind and body. This is something that people have been saying for a long time in certain circles, but scientists have now been studying that and finding more and more that, that's a very amazing connection between the mind and the body. And one of the things that
the mind is always doing is so-called taking the
temperature of the body, but by temperature, I mean more
general metaphorical sense, the condition, measuring
the condition of the body. So, are you in a good
home wholemeal stasis, that you're just chugging
along and everything's fine, or is there a problem? Are you hot or cold, hungry? Are you thirsty, tired, sick? So your body is constantly
checking in with itself, and it creates this
concept or this measurement we call core affect,
which has two dimensions. It's either positive or negative, and it can be strong or weak. So, when you just think
about, what's my core affect? Just think about, how do I feel in a very
basic way right now? Do I feel relaxed or energetic? Do I feel negative or positive? And that's your core affect. And so in the book I talked about the roots of that which
is even in bacteria, we can find that bacteria respond in a similar way depending on what their current environment is. So we find the roots of a lot of the feelings that we experience go back very far in evolution. - And I think you argue, and I suppose this begins to become interesting throughout the book, about the purpose of emotion. Now you can think about, evolutionarily, what's the
fitness that it confers? But in a sense, you seem to suggest that
the benefits that emotion, even if it's realized in different biological ways by different creatures, the purpose of it is
connected for the two. So why don't we have a shot at that? What do you think emotions are for? - So most of the animal world or even the living thing world, or at least if you look at
beings, organisms that move, they work on a trigger response method. We might call that in higher animals, fixed action pattern or autopilot, or a stimulus response. So that happens where a moth, if you turn on a light,
the moth flies toward it, it's always gonna do the same thing. It was programmed to do that by evolution for whatever reason. And most animals behave that way. If you light a fire,
you withdraw your hand. Or animals tend to have a
huge encyclopedia of triggers that cause certain responses. And they can get through
life that way pretty well. Sometimes it looks like they're exhibiting a more sophisticated behavior, and actually they're really not. Let me just give one example of a goose sitting in the nest and an egg falls out. She'll take the egg and
she'll bring it back into the nest with her neck. It looks like behavior of a loving mother, "oh, there's an egg on
the side of my nest. I am gonna save this baby
and bring it back in." But researchers have found they can put a softball there, baseball
there, and it'll do that. They can put a crinkled
up coffee can there, it'll do the same thing. It's not really a motherly love, it's an automated behavior, that she'll bring anything
that's right there that's somewhat similar into the nest. And that kind of behavior
works great for animals. And what I just said illustrates
where it doesn't work, which is if you're in a novel, or an altered situation that evolution hasn't prepared you for, like a pesky scientist
putting a coffee can next to your nest. So then things don't work. So humans have more sophisticated possibilities for reacting. We all do that actually too, as you know, let's say, if you drive to work, and you have a certain
path you drive every day, you pretty much do it mindlessly. And sometimes I would find that.
- There's good studies to show that, yeah, that you actually lose all sense of time and can't recall any
details of the journey, assuming nothing exceptional
or indeed emotional happens in a driving sense. - Yeah. And I would sometimes, when
I had my office at Caltech, and I'm going to some
place that's not Caltech, but the first few turns
are the same route, I would end up at Caltech 'cause I just got it on my autopilot. So we have a lot, and there's interesting studies of how that works in social realm to
people reacting, for example, to people asking for money on
the street, is very automated. So people who are asking for money, if they ask for like
37 cents, if they say, "hey man, can you spare 37 cents?" They get more money than
people who just say, can you spare some money generically. Because the 37 cents kind of throws you out of your autopilot, and makes you really consider whether you want to give
this person some money. And then the answer is more
often yes than otherwise. But we all have other ways.
- I think there's a guy around corner from the Royal Institution who's actually read your book, Leonard, I think
- (chuckles) - he's encountered it. - So we have also though our rational mind that can help us make decisions, and it does that with emotions. And here's what emotions do
to that trigger response, then makes it more sophisticated. There's a trigger. So let's say you see a bear, that's the trigger that
would trigger another animal, either to freeze or to run automatically without any possibility
of thinking it over. But to a human, it
triggers an emotion, fear. Fear puts your mind in
a certain mental state, in this case the mental state
is to pay very much attention to certain sensory input. Your vision and your
hearing become better. You'll be more conscious of
things in your environment that would've gone over your head and not registered otherwise. Your feelings of let's say,
hunger, disappear like that. You focus on, can I
run, and where can I go? And automatically it puts your, that logical processor I talked about, it puts it in a fear
state where it's gonna pay certain higher attention to certain things and less attention to other things. Then that processor, your rational mind works
within that context and decides on the action. And then you run, or you don't run, or maybe you climb a tree, I
don't know, whatever you do. Maybe you pull out your gun and hopefully just fire it in the air
and the bear runs away. But you do something like that. But putting this extra layer in, which has to do with
emotion and rationality gives you that possibility
of a more nuanced response, a more adaptive response, so that if the trigger
happens and it's not the one that evolution has
programmed you precisely for, you can still find an optimal solution. - That can buy you outta that. Now look, when I started doing neuroscience at the beginning of the 1990s, the world of the study of the brain was divided into two camps. There were what you might
call the brains in thats guys. I was a brain in that guy, I sort of studied brains in a
not quite disembodied state, but in the context of a creature that wasn't doing very much. And then there were the behaviorists, and they looked at behavior, and they regarded the head
as a kind of black box. The classic joke, Leonard, and block your children's ears
folks if you are listening. But two behaviorists are in bed and one says to the other,
"that was great for you, how was it for me?" Right?
- (chuckles) - They didn't care what was
going on inside the head, indeed in their own heads they were only interested in behavior. And this meant that many things which we now think of as being at the core of the most interesting
parts of neuroscience, the new science that you describe, like emotions for example, were outside the realm of neuroscience. And gradual over the last couple of decades, two to three decades, the behaviorists and the neuroscientists have brought themselves together. We've started to think
about embodied minds, so minds that are in bodies, whether bodies and the
feelings of that are important. And we've had this extraordinary wealth of neuro-scientific imaging techniques, particularly you referred
earlier to being able to see which bit of the
brain is doing what. And you weren't just
about dissection there, you're talking about living, breathing people, and seeing the areas. So can you give us a couple of insights into what being able
to look inside the head has done for the study of emotion? - Well, so as you described it, psychology or that aspect
of early neuroscience really studied behavior, which made the experiments
that you could do were experiments in the lab, and
watching how people behave. Or if you were lucky
or if you were clever, you would maybe find some
real life experiments that you could do. But it was hard to be
sure of what's going on, or to even define the
terms or the phenomenon that were happening. When you can see inside the head and see what processes are
happening in the brain, it really allows you to have
a much deeper understanding of the behavior that's
happening because you can see, is there a commonality between
behavior X and behavior Y, or are they totally different
processes in the brain? If they're the same processes or similar amongst different people,
they must be related. And it kind of helps
you to form the concepts and the roadmap of the behavior by kind of looking under the hood. And for example, I wrote about wanting versus liking. And people didn't think
there was a difference between wanting and liking,
and we like what we want, and we want what we like. And that kind of makes.
- What water I like. I like water.
- But then Ken (indistinct) noticed that you can separate them. So you can create
circumstances where a rat will want something that it doesn't like. In other words, it will go and eat it even though it makes a face like it doesn't like it, or it can make a face
like it loves something but it won't move to eat it. And so he saw that you could differentiate wanting and liking, that
they're two separate things, which was a brilliant observation to make, but it was by going into
the brain and seeing that there's actually
different pathways for these, and what are the neural
transmitters involved that you could really nail down, yeah, there's something real there. It's not just, let's say, some weirdness in this particular
experiments in the rat, or you you really know, oh,
there's something concrete here, now let's study how that works in humans. And they connected that to people 'cause it's always a problem to say, "I observe this in rats,
does it work in people?" And you have to study that, and they found a person who was having electrodes stuck into
his brain for epilepsy. And it was in that area, and they could see that
same phenomenon happening when that was stimulated. So to me, what I say is it turns
psychology into a hard science, that's what neuroscience did. - Okay. But, so hard and soft. And again, you know, we're
talking to a former physicist, so you're always gonna have prejudices about what's hard and what isn't. And the neuroscientists
think that their stuff is harder than the psychologists. But I do want to return to the
comment that you made earlier about agreed terms between researchers. And to contrast again
with respiration, right? So respiration, we know how to label the
parts, we know what they do, we know their functional relationships. We needed to kind of dig in a little bit into the biology to get that. But my question or my concern, I wonder what your observation
has been from the outside? We're gathering tons and tons of data. I mean, there are thousands
of groups studying, and tons of thousands of brain scanners in operation around the world, data being accumulated at massive rates. And we can find more and
more facts about emotion. We can label and understand
more and more emotions. But are we reaching
anything like a theory, a unified account of
the function of emotions based on the neuro
scientific observations? Or are we just labeling
more and more areas, and more and more
phenomenon and differences as you went through the field? - I think this idea of
emotions as a functional state of a information processor is really moving in that direction. And the studies that they do, especially on animals and on fruit flies, and primitive animals where in a sense the apparatus is much simpler, are really revealing about the function and nature of emotion. So I think we are making progress, but it's a field that's, well, I shouldn't say infancy
if it's 20 years old, but it's a relatively new field. And actually, the whole field of brain science is in, I could say in its infancy. My friend who got me interested
in neuroscience at first, Christof Koch, who's a
eminent neuroscientist, he used to be at Caltech. He likened the state of brain science to Faraday in the early 1800s, and his understanding of electricity, which was just the rudiments, you know? And it took from there about 60, 50 years to really come up
with a good theory of it. And the brain is much more complicated than a few wires with currents going through 'em, you know? - Faraday as you know, dear friend and former director
of the Royal Institution, and certainly a great experimentalist, not as particularly thought
of as a theoretician. Let me ask, we'll come
to the book in a moment, but the book does contain
many personal stories of your own life, and your own family. Do you think that the
new science of feelings can help individuals? Do you think that
understanding the insights which scientists have gained can help us to manage our own emotions, to understand our own
emotional profile better, and to make us, as it
were, happier humans? Do you think that this
theoretical knowledge can help us? - Yeah, that was one of my
motivations for writing the book. And well, first there there is a whole chapter on emotion regulation which I found very useful when I was learning
it to apply in my own life. - Do you still apply it?
- Oh, yeah. It's not necessarily something that I didn't occasionally apply, but learning about it
specifically and reading about it, and reading how it works
really made me go, yeah, now it's very much in the top of my consciousness,
the different methods. And not only that, but it's been shown that
emotional intelligence is very useful for someone to thrive. That the people who have higher emotional intelligence
as opposed to say IQ, do better at work in industry as leaders, and they're happier in
their relationships. So I'm hoping that the book
provides that for people, a higher degree of emotional
intelligence by knowing what's behind your thinking,
what's influencing you, where your emotions are coming from, and how to control them. And I have a chapter on
profiling your emotions where you can take what the
psychologists call inventories, and just see about your tendencies, let's say toward anger
or toward aggression, or toward happiness. And you can understand a
little more where you stand. Because although we all have the same emotional apparatus, we
were raised differently, and there's individual variations. So some of us have tendencies towards some emotions more than towards others. So by learning all this about yourself, and just as important, about other people, how to understand and read other people, that increases your
emotional intelligence. And I think that's very
important in today's world. - I mean, do you want
to give us an example? I mean, again, people should buy the book if
they want to do it in detail, but of a kind of drill or of a practice which you yourself have
done more of as a result of the study that you've done. Because it's not always the case, is it, that scientists who
study things are happier as a result of that, in science at least. We'll come to you as a writer in a minute. But you know, there is often you'd say, well that works fine in
theory, but how in practice? Can you give us an example of something which you've actually put into practice in detail?
- Oh yeah. Well, okay, I mentioned
that I live in Los Angeles, that probably tells most
people that I drive a lot. And the driving here is
pretty aggressive compared to, I mean, maybe every city they say, "oh, they're too aggressive." It's pretty aggressive here, and you'll find that you're on the freeway and you get cut off a lot. In some towns, people stay in their lanes and they leave a certain distance between cars. And here that doesn't seem
to be a concept (chuckles). So you're driving, and
somebody will just cut you off. And what really annoys
me is they cut me off and they're going slower than me. So they manage to get in front of me, but now I gotta slow down. But you know, that tends
to make people angry, and there have been conflicts
over such things, right, here. And it's a natural tendency,
'cause your brain goes, the guy's ass, he's disrespecting me, he's, I dunno, taking something. I don't know what he's taking, but he's not really doing anything bad. You have to understand that, you just moving back 30
feet, it's no tragedy, but it angers you 'cause you feel like it's someone butt in line, and that's just something
you naturally rebel against. Well, what I find, I use something called, a reappraisal. So reappraisal is a method
of emotion regulation whereby you look at a
situation that you appraise, that you looked at in a certain way that led to a certain emotion and you take a different spin on it. Now it's important that
the spin be realistic. You can't just make up
something you don't believe, but find something that
you do find plausible and look at it that way. So I tend to think that
person's in a huge hurry. That person's going home to pee, they can't hold it anymore. By the way, both of which
have happened to me. Or that person's oblivious,
that happens to me a lot. I tend to be oblivious, didn't even know I was there perhaps. And when I think of that person that way instead of being the ass
who's elbowing his way in, suddenly I'm not really angry anymore. I might even be sympathetic and go, "oh, I hope he makes it
before he has an accident," (laughs) or whatever it is. - So you're a better driver as a result? - I'm a better driver as
a result of that, yeah. And I'm not just a better driver, I'm in a better state of mind because I take away, I defuse that
negative, unpleasant anger, and I turn it into bemusement or just indifference (chuckles). - There are gonna be some questions, already we're seeing them on the chat and we'll come to them in a moment. But I do want to zoom out a little bit just because I find the process for which you've reached the stage of enlightenment and knowledge so interesting. I mean, you were originally a physicist. Talk to me about the
writing about science piece. You've done it both on
your own and with others, notably with Steven Hawking, you've collaborated with Deepak
Chopra, Steven Spielberg. What's the process of
collaborative writing with people who aren't scientists? 'Cause you come from a
scientific discipline, you have a scientific cast of mind. Do you find it frustrating
writing with people who don't? Talk to us about the different approaches. - Well, first I'll say, I'm a theoretical physicist, so even though I'm not
at university anymore, I continue to publish
papers and do my research. And I find that, that's a passion of mine, and it's part of me that will never go. And I think that's very
important when you're writing, 'cause that's the other
part of me is writing. And I've done both of those
since my grammar school, third grade, fourth grade, I could look back and
see both of those paths. - You do the writing in the morning and the physics in the afternoons? Or how rapidly do you
switch between the domains? Do you wear a different jacket
or sit in a different chair? How do you separate? - Sometimes it's writing
in the morning and physics, 'cause I find that, and I
wrote a book called "Elastic," about where ideas and
creativity comes from, and there's different times that your optimal for different
parts of your brain. And for me, I can do physics. If I can't sleep, I can get up at 12 at night and I'll work for three hours on a physics
problem or something. Or you know, late afternoon, somehow I'm calm enough
to dive into the physics. The morning I feel more
creative and more open. So the writing goes better in the morning. So sometimes it's that, or sometimes it's one
day versus another day. But I talked to Richard Feynman, I don't know if your listeners know him, but my first stint at Caltech, I had an office a couple
doors down from him. - He died young, but most
extraordinary physicist, and popularizer of physics as well. Must have been. - Yeah, and we talked about this issue, 'cause I was right then in the beginning of my writing career, and in
my middle of my physics career, but I was in my twenties,
I was very young. And he said, which is what I would say too is the answer to your question, is that there's a lot of commonality between physics and writing. You need for both to come up
with creative and new ideas, and then you need to apply a certain craft to carrying them through. And one, it's mathematics, and the other one it's using language. But in some sense they're
not that different. Now that said, there are other senses in
which they are different, which is the human aspect that
you have to put into writing, the understanding of people's feelings and also their reactions to your work. Whereas in physics, what people's feelings and reactions in essence, don't matter. Nature is gonna tell you whether your physics is right or wrong, do you get the right answer? Does it describe the world? Whereas in writing, it's gonna be whatever the jury
of your peers, your readers, the critics or the marketplace, or whoever you pick to follow. But that aside, there are
similarities and differences. And I found that writing with
people who are not scientists, the difference is that they tend to have a more intuitive and less analytic approach than me. And in my writing, I try to be creative and
don't just write things that are textbook, like in
mathematical, far from it. I try to be the opposite of that. And yet my approach to learning, to looking at what's the
structure of my book, you know, what's the pacing of my book? I get very analytical, whereas everyone else is
just intuitive and I'm going, yeah, it feels right, but let me see, how long are the stories, you know? - The statistics.
- And how long were the stories in my last book? Am I right, am I getting verbose? So I actually look at my
books and other people's books in a very analytical way. But also as well as the, I hope is the non-analytical
intuitive way, but I have that other layer where I tend to quantify and analyze things just to see if I can
learn anything that way. - You paraphrased Feynman as
saying that it's your idea, your job to come up with the theories and then wait for the universe
to prove them right or wrong. There is a big part of your writing life where that isn't the case because you've written obviously for Star Trek, and perhaps in the video game context where you're in a science fiction realm where anything as they say, is possible. How have you found that process? Is it different to writing, you know, about things that we believe to be true or that we think are true, writing things that we know are not? - Well, science fiction is very, very liberating because it's fun. For a physicist it's a special fun because when I'm writing science fiction I don't just make up stuff, And I make up stuff that's plausible. So I get the excitement by going, wow, this would be really cool, and it's not forbidden by the
laws of physics (chuckles). - Only the other physicists would care about that, right, Leonard? I guess a lot of physicists
do like Star Trek, but I mean, why would you care in reality? Just break some law, come up with a storyline
that's impossible. - Well, I think for drama,
for literature or film, you set up the world at the beginning and if you're consistent
with that, it's fine. If you're constantly making up new rules, then that's bad storytelling because then it's not interesting
'cause anything can happen, so why worry about the main character? Anything can happen, but it
should be self consistent. But for me, I go beyond self-consistent. I want it to be consistent with the world. And I think that there are
people who read books like that, certainly I think on Star Trek, who felt a satisfaction knowing
that the stuff that we did wasn't absurd, wasn't out
of the range of possible. I think there are people who like that. Just like when they make
movies, sometimes they say, "well, this is a movie from World War II, and it's completely historically accurate. The uniforms are just right. - Yeah. Yeah.
- The sounds of the bullet, This is really how a bullet
sounded when it penetrates you, or you're under water and
you hear this and that. Who cares? Well, people did care, because it gives it a certain panache to know that it's realistic. - So look, my final question before
we come the audience is of a much more personal nature. And I feel that it's legitimate to ask because the book, when people read it, you'll find that there are
very, I would say moving, very touching and very personal descriptions of your family members, of the personal history of your family, your mother and and so on. And I wonder, you know, also you describe in it
some horrifying examples from the Holocaust and
of refugees and escape. And we're in a time now of world history where scenes which we hoped would not be repeated in Europe
are happening around us. Can you talk a little bit briefly about how you've come to understand yourself and your family better
through this process, and whether you think that
this theoretical understanding of emotion and of your
own life can give us some sort of compass to
understand the more horrifying aspects of human behavior that
we're witnessing right now. - Well, I think that my experiences with my parents do help me understand, and the unfortunate existence
of that sort of behavior which has persisted, really. I mean this is now happening in Europe, but it's happens in different parts of the world all the time. I should say for people who don't know, my parents went through the Holocaust, my mother lost her dear sister whom she was very close to, and her father. And my father had lost his whole family's siblings and parents, and
also his wife and child. And my mother ended up in a labor camp like in "Schindler's List." And my father was in the
underground for a while, and then ended up in
the concentration camp. So I grew up with all that
as being very real to me, and not just the incidents and the history that happened and the fact that, gee, other people had things
called cousins, you know, uncles and I didn't, what are those? But also the baggage that my parents had that came from that. my mother was 16 or 18
when the war started, and my father was 10 years older. And so my upbringing was quite
different from most people's, and I've drawn on that in all my books. When I write a book and I'm trying to illustrate a scientific point, I often start in with a story. I think stories are great, and either the story should be
moving, compelling or funny, or just interesting or something. And of course it should
make the point I wanna make. And I find that each book
finds several stories from my upbringing or from my
parents' lives that fit that. So in this case, to answer your question, also I should say that I lived in Germany as well for several
years, and speak German. And so my understanding from my parents, from living in Germany, from going through our politics in the US for the last five or six years, I think I see fairly
clearly what's happening. First of all, leaders, the wrong leader can do such amazing harm, can take the whole country
and turn it upside down. And then it can happen in a country as powerful as Russia with nuclear weapons is just super scary, right? The people in a country can easily become diluted or follow a very sad path that's not as hard as it seems either, especially if they're not
happy, and not thriving. And all the work that
I've done in neuroscience and in psychology, and including
studying animal behavior, you really see that this is very unfortunate and sad for humans. And guess what? It's kind of not uncommon
in other species, and in our relatives and our primates. A primatologist, I remember
reading once, he said, "you put a hundred chimpanzees
on a Boeing 747 in New York, and you fly it and land it in Los Angeles, when you open the doors,
there'll only be one left alive." (chuckles) So the behavior we're seeing is somewhat natural and unfortunate. And to me the history is about overcoming some of those more base individualistic aggression instincts, and really emphasizing
our social instincts, which is also there very strong in humans, cooperation, social, and kindness. And I think we're moving in that way as Michael Shermer wrote the book about, I think it was called, "The Moral Arc," about humanity progressing. I think we are progressing, but there's also backslides that seem to be going through for
instance, right now. (audience clapping)
