Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1344 - Joseph LeDoux
Uploaded: 2019-09-05T05:09:23.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1344 - Joseph LeDoux' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-09-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1344 - Joseph LeDoux' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-09-05. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1344 - Joseph LeDoux

here we go Joe thank you thank you for being here really appreciate it now it's
pleasure to be here it's a fascinating subject I've been really looking forward
to talking to you because the conscious mind and how we how we evolved our
conscious mind how we have our conscious mind I mean that is one of the more
unique things about being a person it is how did it happen oh well it's only a
four-billion-year story is so shall I tell you how I got sure into it and where
how I ended up thinking about that problem so I've been working on how the
brain detects and responds to danger for most of my scientific career a little
bit before that I'd actually studied consciousness and these people who have
their brains split apart to control epilepsy called split brain patients so I
got
interested in consciousness and also in how behaviors that might be produced
non-consciously affect what we know about ourselves so we see ourselves doing
something and then we kind of consciously build that into our narrative of what
we
are but a lot of what we do we do non-consciously and when we interpret it
that kind of solidifies the fact that you have a non-conscious system that's
controlling your behavior when in fact you you didn't do it but that system did
so
you got to make sense of it and generate an explanation a narrative so that
that
was where I got started and I tried to figure out well what would be some kinds
of non-conscious systems and said well maybe emotion systems are producing
behaviors that we don't fully understand and I started studying that and ended
up
figuring out how this part of the brain called the amygdala receives
information about the environment and then controls orchestrates all the
responses fight flight kinds of responses to help you protect yourself and the
you
know after many years of doing that I started asking well how far back does
this
ability to detect and respond to danger go we know that bugs and flies can do
that
and research had been done showing that bugs and flies have certain molecules
in
their brain that are important in these kinds of protective defensive behaviors
and
including the ability to learn about them and store those as memories so it's
easier to work on those little tiny invertebrates than it is to do studies in a
complex brain even like a rat brain which is pretty complex so given that what
these people had discovered about invertebrates I and others who were
studying mammals decided to see if the same molecules might be involved in
mammalian learning and in fact it was so now that raises the question you've
got
the same molecules doing the same thing same molecules same genes doing the
same
thing in ancient invertebrates and in animals like us so you ask where back in
time
is the ancestor that made that possible you know if we've got the same genes
either
it kind of happens spontaneously separately or there's a common ancestor and
indeed there's a common ancestor and that goes back to the first organism first
animal that had a bilateral body which means had left right front and the back
and the top and the bottom so it has kind of three-dimensional sides before
that
there were animals like jellyfish that were radial but no front and back they
just have
a top and a bottom and before that there are sponges which have no front back
top bottom
they're just kind of randomly organized so that's kind of the that's the story
of
animals sponges to jellyfish to these bilateral animals so the ancestor the
bilateral animal that we're
talking about gave rise to those two lines one that became all these invertebrates
like flies and bugs
and snails and octopus and all those things and another to animals like us
vertebrates all the
fish reptiles mammals birds and so forth so those are two separate lines that
inherited these genes that
make the memory and defensive behavior possible so you say well how far back
it does it stop there and no it doesn't because you can find those genes
on through jellyfish and then keep going into single cell organisms now these
are like protozoa
things that give you intestinal they're intestinal parasites so they can you
know give you upset
stomach and things like amoeba paramecia that you might have heard of and you
know biology class in
high school or something these have no nervous system and yet they detect and
respond to danger they
learn about their environment they do all these sorts of things and where do
they come from well if you go all
the way back to where they came from even simpler kind of organism still single
cell of course like bacterial
cells now these guys go back to the beginning of life the first cell that ever
lived some 3.7 billion
years ago that gave rise to the entire history of life was a bacterial like
cell that started dividing
now what's interesting that cell that started dividing is the mother of every
bacterial cell
that ever lived so that cell is it's it's more like it's re you know that cell
is still alive because
it's they reproduce by cell division so that cell just keeps reproducing and
part of that first cell
ever is still with us today in all the bacterial cells that are that are around
it's kind of a mind-blowing
thing it's incredibly mind-blowing do we have any idea why the first cell
decided to divide well
this i shouldn't say it's the first cell that decided to divide this it's the
first cell bacterial
cell it's the first cell that was able to sustain life long enough to give off
offspring that could
sustain and sustain and sustain and sustain so there were probably lots of
experiments before a kind of
cell or kind of group of cells had the right stuff to be able to do that so
they those others never made
it because they didn't have quite enough of what it took to be a cell that
could do that so the first
cell i mean it's kind of a hypothetical cell it's called luca the last
universal common ancestor of life
whoa yeah and that so that's about 3.7 3.8 billion years ago um but it could
have been a bunch of cells
you know a collection of cells cell types uh that that one of which then you
know populated all of life
the weird thing about life is not just that it's different and it varies so
much but that it's it's
ever increasing in its complexity well if you go back to the single cell and
then you come all the
way to today to a person right like what a weird sort of transformation you
know it's dangerous to
talk about as if we're moving towards some kind of goal you know right is it
dangerous that we are the
goal but we're not saying i don't think we're the goal no we're not we're
definitely not i've been more
and more thinking that artificial life is the goal well i mean there's no goal
of life right of course
there's survival is the only goal of every organism and that's uh that's what
that first cell was able
to do is to generate a set of biological properties that could sustain itself
long enough to reproduce
that's all you have to do you have to live long enough to reproduce and to do
that you have to have
energy resources so you have to incorporate nutrients you've got to balance
your fluids otherwise you
know you have to keep your eye on straight or the cell will get too big and
explode or get too small
and collapse you've got to thermoregulate because all of these things depend on
the right kind of
internal temperature and you have to reproduce those are the the survival
requirements of a cell but
they're also the survival requirements of a human so the same things that a
bacterial cell has to do
to live through the day and create a species is exactly what we do every day to
reproduce ourselves
we have to eat drink defend against danger incorporate nutrients and balance
fluids and ions that way
defend you know reproduce and so that was the mind-blowing thing see i wrote
the whole three
quarters of the book as a scientific journalist because i didn't know any of
this this stuff i had to just
learn it uh and it was a lot of fun but it took a long time i imagine when when
you think about the
original luca and then human beings do you ever try to extrapolate do you ever
try to like keep the the
process rolling in your mind and see where where's this going to go oh yeah so
the end of the book i
paint a not so rosy picture of where's going well yeah so let's talk about the
end of the book so okay
i you know say okay well our we have these two kinds of of uh significant
experiences in our lives that uh
that occupy the human mind one is the kind that we can call an awareness of
facts you know i this thing
is here and the other is what we might call um a self-awareness where it's it's
me that is aware
that that is a bottle so that's a that's a higher level and that is what
appears to be unique to the
human mind the ability to represent the self as a subject in other words to
have these subjective
experiences that have a personal past it's not just the past but your past you
lived it and
a personal present and a potential future that you can imagine different
scenarios of you existing in
in the future so that requires uh i mean that's called auto-noetic
consciousness the ability to
to self-know about where you are in time and it depends this is an idea that
was proposed by a guy
named endel tolving a very distinguished psychologist who's a retired now but
his idea was that the unique
aspect of of the human mind is mental time travel the ability to project
ourselves in the past present
and future and without that kind of consciousness we're limited to kind of
factual information something
is there you know that might i might be able to say oh food is there or drink
is there or a sexual
partner is there but not necessarily that i want that food i want you know you
might have a kind of
biological urge towards it now from the outside it looks like everything we do
is
intentional and willful so i think i'm controlling my behavior you think you're
controlling yours
i see you do something that i might have done in a similar situation i think
you intentionally control
that we see a dog doing something that would be similar to what we do we think
we know why the dog is
doing that because it had some intention but the fact is if we start taking
these things apart in the brain
we see that the systems that control very simple behaviors are not the ones
that are doing all this
high-level conscious thought take the example of the area i've worked on for
all these years which is
threat detection now this part of the brain called the amygdala is key to the
detection and response to
threat in a kind of basic sense you know threat comes up you freeze if there's
a snake for example
now it's all because of that it's been assumed that the reason you freeze is
because you're afraid
and therefore that the amygdala is also making the fear because the amygdala
experiences the fear and
that's why you produce the response but i've for for the longest time and
throughout most of my career
i've said the amygdala does not consciously experience fear and yet my work has
been used to kind of sell
and uh and defend this idea of the amygdala is the brain's fear center and i
think that's completely wrong
why do you think it's been misinterpreted it's a long complicated uh story but
it you know it's
partly it's my fault because i was not uh as vigilant as i should have been
when i was describing it
see what i did was i i would talk about the amygdala as a non-conscious state
of fear non-conscious
implicit fear um and i i would say that while the neocortex is where we
consciously
experience fear and those are separate but that was too complicated the you
know the journalist kind
of ignored it and it was just it just became the amygdala is the brain's fear
center even the
scientists ignored it because you know we were studying and you know i i kind
of gave up after
one say okay we talk about it in terms of fear um because you know that there
was a lot of money to be
directed towards research if you're studying fear and ho