ASM143 LIVE in Orange, CA

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coming to you from chapman university in orange california it's ask science mike [Applause] even lives he may not understand he'll talk anyway he got problems he won't stop there but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in the face science stays there alive welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith in life of course this week we're doing a live episode so the questions are unfiltered and the answers unrehearsed so anything i say could be absolutely wrong please use google to verify any questions i also want to mention that my wonderful hosts here at chapman university are just hosting so any random thing that comes out of my mouth does not represent their opinion first faculty staff students or literally any person who's heard of chapman university i'm here tonight as part of an amazing series which is a an interstities a word i'd never heard before today and so if you want to come back on february 13th they're going to have a talk about emotion and artificial intelligence that features none other than lisa joy the co-creator of west world like i can't even believe that man is gonna be a big upgrade for me february 23rd i'll be in san diego for revive 2018 with a bunch of people i personally can't wait to hear including melissa green brandon robertson and my bro jonathan martin and finally if you're interested in meditation or the enneagram the liturgists are launching courses on both you can learn more by going to shop.thelitus.com but that's enough announcements we've got a show to do so let's get it started [Applause] [Music] hello hi welcome um so seems like a lot of people are arguing these days and a lot of it has to do with what you believe what you think what you don't believe and what you don't think seems to be a big part of that argument is is there a chance that what we believe and what we think is not a choice that's not something we actually get to decide um or is it just something is this something that just happens to us also is it is a choice in what you think and how you feel is it binary is it like either you believe or you don't or you think or you don't or is it one big sliding scale and we should all just chill okay i love it when the first question is an unanswered philosophical and epistemological dilemma that tells me a lot about the audience where we will go together and uh the amount of imposter syndrome i'll experience on stage um so i'll give you my best take on what smarter people say wrestling with that issue it is extremely unlikely that we select our beliefs through some act of cognition or volition a thought experiment can anyone with true sincerity look at me and believe that i am a hot dog stand i i get it the joe strike themselves internet i rub my belly they can't see um but anybody here seriously if you do raise your hand i'll i won't quiz you nobody not a hot dog stand what if i hold my hand like an umbrella and my hand like a little liver where the hot dogs come from not a lever with a lid it's a lid that's a word no still no hot dogs fans okay so clearly uh we bring things in through our senses they get processed through a linguistic map of reality and they can assign labels now we love categorizing things right so sometimes our beliefs are relatively binary is this bottle is the label is it blue or is it orange if we pulled the room probably get a very comfortable consensus around blue maybe we wouldn't identify this as a spectrum of blue orangeness we would just call it blue i start with the simple stuff because it gives me time to vamp and think about the harder stuff what i've been reading and researching says that beliefs are survival mechanisms we westernize them we tend to think of them as some like various fidelity description of reality but what i'm seeing in cognitive sciences and neuroscience is beliefs are just survival mechanisms that are largely formed in conjunction with social identity people's beliefs don't tend to vary that much from the labels they assign themselves so as soon as you call yourself something human man woman non-binary republican atheist whatever labels you assign to yourself your brain starts to unconsciously filter new information against what you assume those labels believe what those tribes believe and you start to unconsciously filter out things that are separate from your label unless you're non-conformist and then non-conformists find social labels and they're free thinkers right no they just find whatever the the social consensus is and then they think the opposite like when we research non-conformists they're they're literally just like they take the and they turn into an or they just they just flip the bit they like love they feel self-styled they're like i'm the only person who dresses in all black right like just me everybody's wearing all this color then they go to manhattan and then they have to wear pink i guess i don't know but so like we have these different survival strategies that make us look like we might be having higher degrees of interval choice in belief selection but i'm pretty i've heard the competing camps and i'm just not not a big believer in human i don't believe in free will i think we might have constrained will with some agency or we're just autonomatons i'm not entirely sure and that applies also to our belief selection we believe things that increase our chances of survival it's very rare that homo sapiens draw a line in the sand about a belief and make it life or death unless they imagine some narrative in which rebelling against the common belief creates a better outcome for them or people they care about in the future right so through that lens the kind of incredible risks people take in justice work and converting social convention makes sense because they're imagining a better future but then like why would copernicus risks so much just based on where the sun is so it's not a perfect theory but even then i think someone like people who have visions of of truth based on fact claims all they're doing is saying i gotta go with what my senses are telling me there's too much dissonance compared to the the tribal thinking and then even that makes sense because if we only believe things tribally and the tribal beliefs get too far from reality and the whole tribe decides you know what no matter what happens as long as we stay right here we'll always have food and the valley will never flood you got to have at least a dissenting voice every now and then because eventually everywhere is going to flood at least from tectonic action right but everest has sea life on it right it used to be a little land so i fall very much on the position that our beliefs are things our brains form in accordance with the principles of natural selection which might be a little strange for someone who gets really obsessed with the jesus stuff and then i just say that's also evolution at work because this the type of thinking that leads me to realize humans are so constrained in their beliefs and their actions um it's not terribly animating and uses a very particular and limited network in my brain and sometimes it's nice to switch hemisphere hemispheres in the brain and look at things more holistically and so i just kind of let myself do both of those but i only like make fact claims this way that was probably a bottom 20 in satisfaction for the first show first question on our show i would have liked that as the fourth question that does for you the question was perfect my answer sub sub bar all right can you expand on i don't believe in free will don't mind if i do um what would free will even be if you thought about that free will sounds like omnipotence i will myself to float off of this stage i'm making a sincere effort it's not just a joke nothing okay i will myself because i can't control the external world that makes sense that's ridiculous mike you're oversimplifying free will fine i will myself to be terrified right now nothing i almost said elated but i'm an easy laugh i might laugh at my own joke and then mess up my example when we look at human behavior we find that there's a there's a patch of tissue about the size of a quarter about the thickness of a tortilla behind your forehead on both sides called the prefrontal cortex that's where neuroscientists believe that will and agency and executive function live in the brain and we experience life as a series of choices that we make right so if one of you uh threw a wrench at me please don't if you have a wrench if one of you threw a wrench at me hypothetically and i ducked i would say i chose to duck so i didn't get hit by the wrench that was my choice what we understand by looking at brain imaging is that the part of our brain that makes choice is way way way way way too slow to dodge a wrench if we had to wait on our conscious will and agency to dodge wrenches or wolverines or falling rocks there'd be no people so lower structures and i mean physically lower not like amygdala's dumb no it's ancient but it's it's lower in the brain just because those things execute action for us creates an unsettling picture of the self right but this happens all the time your life is full of not just objective information coming into your senses but conflicting structures in the brain that want to do different things in relationship to the information so your visual cortex looks at a screen and on that screen there are dots that get formed through a pretty abstract process into numbers in your cognition that let you know it's pay day right money is in the account yes and part of your brain says you know what we should do just hear me out we should rent a bouncy house we should rent a bouncy house to celebrate the new car we're gonna go buy because the new car would be awesome we'd enjoy it people would think we're cool it would signal economic stability we should increase our chances of finding a mate let's do this new car then another part of your brain goes you know it would be amazing with that money compound interest and not starving when we're 82. right so these two parts of the brain kind of square off and they fight after a while they kind of call for a vote where the rest of the brain structure is weigh in right and parts of the brain go uh what's what's numbers i'm non-linguistic i just make the heart beat right but you you get this very strange activity across your entire neurological lattice that then sums to a decision so sometimes you decide i'm not going to get a bouncy house and buy a car and to do that that uses willpower and that literally burns a chemical your brain produces so you decided i'm not going to get a bouncy house and buy a car even though i want to and that's fine but it means later when you walk past a donut shop and you're out of willpower chemical you go get a donut and we found in research that if you hadn't struggled with decision earlier you'd have more ability to resist the doughnut later because your will comes from your brain so when i say i don't believe in free will i mean that the decisions we make are constrained by the behavior of the system that produces our perceived will one last thing i said this the prefrontal cortex the quarter to tortilla thick behind your forehead that makes all your decisions executive function we're finding out that's kind of wrong sometimes it makes decisions but most of the time it just narrates what happens and in its narration it says i did that so when you dodge a wrench your narrator who wants to be the hero of your story went i did that that was my choice yeah you interviewed somebody who did something heroic because of adrenaline and their animal brain and they go you know in that moment i just knew if i didn't jump in the icy lake bobby sue was going to drop drown bobby sue where did i get that but they didn't like taking objective pros and cons they acted on animal instinct and later the narrator went i did that i got you right we do this also when we do things we don't approve of the narrator starts to rationalize why it went against its own set of moral codes if we had free will by the way would we ever go against our own moral codes like i believe this is wrong i did it narrator goes because these reasons in fact evolutionary biologists believe that our ability to reason was not born out of a need to find fact but to convince other human brains to go along with whatever we're talking about that's where that's where the great rational capacity of homo sapiens came from not to rationally discern what is true but to convince other people our idea is the good one so i'm not saying we're completely predetermined automatons but i'm saying there's a lot of constraints that face us which each and every decision that we make and that we should be considering the constraints on human decision-making and how we structure society with government governance with how we structure advertising you know what happens when you use algorithms to use machine learning to find out really accurate probabilistic data fields on how human decisions are made you can swing elections for a couple thousand dollars right what if there's worse things we can do with that kind of insight into human behavior than just swing elections towards an orangutan so um sorry now this is the non-judgmental space so you're free to think he shouldn't have said that your opinion is just as valid as mine here okay i was never political until november 8th of last year so um we should consider that in the criminal justice system we act like people made this decision and now because of their volition they should be punished i mean i don't know by the data that doesn't really alter human behavior or create a deterrent but when we look at the constraints of human cognition and create rehabilitative strategies and create different incentive structures around behavior what do you find then you can't even find enough people to commit crimes to put in prison that does happen in cultures in the world that use a more pragmatic approach to human will than our beloved enlightenment era take on crime and punishment hello mike hi hi um i had a non-sciency question for you but um i was curious just within the you know today's like conservative fundamentalist um church i was curious what your thought might be on the future what it'll look like when you start seeing a lot of the baby boomer generation kind of transitioning out from senior leadership and what it'll look like maybe when millennials kind of start to move upwards towards those positions maybe what even your hope is for what that will look like i know you're i think you're part of a methodist congregation i am a methodist yes yes which is like not saying a lot because i think like h.w bush and hillary clinton were both methodists so it's a pretty it's a pretty big tent awesome yeah i just want to get your thoughts on that okay i got lots of thoughts on that um here's the thing this surprises people i don't hate conservative churches or denominations or politically conservative people before the rampant populism and nationalism that's facing our country right now there was actually a pretty vital dialogue between two ideological positions and governance that's important if you can have a two-party system you really need two functioning parties and in terms of christianity having an impact on the world the incredible selective pressures of a non-state mandated relatively open democracy of the united states created an era of theological innovation like we've never seen in human history and definitely not in church history it is the very environment with separation of church and state that produced american evangelicalism it was not possible without a place where you if you got mad at your church you could just start another one and nobody would cut parts of your body off so i'm really grateful for things that i learned as a southern baptist really deeply grateful that they taught me if i was going to get married i better make sure my wife was like the most important thing to me if i was gonna have kids i should like devote my time and energy to being a good father i really like that the baptist told me that god would listen to me when i prayed and that jesus loved me for a kid that got beat up a lot that's how i made it i don't love that my baptist friends told me that all people are equal in the eyes of god right after members of my churches and my families opposed school desegregation based on biblical grounds so our relationship with conservative protestantism and evangelism specifically is complex but last night i sat in a room even bigger than this cavernous room full of the evangelical people and they talked about jesus they talked about the blood of jesus which is a thing i don't really talk about a lot anymore and they sang worship songs and i kind of felt like i was at youth camp but they all meant it and a musician came up and sang beautiful songs about their faith journey and then one of the most talented preachers i've ever heard god on the platform and shared from their heart about suffering and pain and recovery and learning to protect others after we've been hurt and the only thing you may have noticed if you're perceptive is i never used a gender specific pronoun in that little monologue because everyone in the room and everyone on stage was a woman except for me and like two other token husbands now i love going to all women spiritual events because of a thing that i think is a very accurate descriptor of how our society functions that scholars would call patriarchy which is a very strong male preference in our society and a tendency to defer to men and to elevate men to positions of power that's very much in the room in spiritual gatherings and you get a room full of women and any patriarchy in the room uh gets kicked out with vehemence right so as i watch nicole norton and jyn hat maker talk about evangelical things the theological ends i don't particularly identify with something toxic was removed from evangelicalism by focusing on a woman's perspective here's another thing that i've noticed the so-called death of the church in america is a white phenomenon who's leaving churches white people why are white people leaving churches because what do white people need god for we've got escalades we've got great school zones we've got high speed internet and almost all the money in the country so why in the world do white people need jesus jesus is fine for white people as long as he protects our property and our unique social standing but when jesus is revealed as a dark-skinned middle eastern man who stood in opposition to powerful empires suddenly white people go pass now you might be listening to me right now and you might feel a funny feeling of discomfort in your stomach you might feel a little sick you might feel a little angry because you'd be like why is he attacking white people more specifically why is he attacking me and listen i am not attacking you i think you are a beautiful reflection of the spirit of a living god whatever that means what i mean is the social circumstances of our american country as filtered through a particular type of theological lens has created an unfair playing field that's gotten to the point that white people are abandoning religion for loneliness isolation and suicide that's not my like bible thumping perspective i'm not a biblical literalist that's what happens when i look at sociological data what are millennials doing that don't go to church instead they're getting on instagram and thinking everybody else is having fun but me everyone else has friends but me and they're getting very very lonely and post millennials are the most depressed and anxious generation in american history so do i celebrate the fall of american christianity no my friends i mourn it except in the case where the death of religion means the death of empire and the possibility to promote universal equality among all people so it's next so what do i see about the future of american christianity specifically the conservative ilk black evangelicals aren't saying declines declines in their church attendance hispanic and latino churches don't have a missing generation that's a uniquely white phenomenon and so if evangelicalism wishes to continue to be a force in society and a force for good in the world and some alternative to loneliness depression and suicide evangelicalism and conservative faith in america must learn to lift up women and people of color and women of color and it must learn to do it now otherwise time will do it for it because the meek are about to inherit the earth [Applause] so i pray for that you know i love the methodists they're so open-minded that they let me join but they're still super white they're just so white and they like don't want to be white and they're like what could we do to be less white we should have a potluck that'll reach millennials for sure right potluck my gosh uh there's a reason i'm i still go to church there's a reason despite like probably epistemologically what am i a materialist like atheist probably but i pray every morning if somebody tells a real compelling jesus story i'll just cry and cry and cry and cry because i believe i believe in the power of that story of an empty tomb to transform lives and bring people together who otherwise could never be brought together i went to a church in tallahassee florida we're a lesbian couple and an nra member sat next to each other every sunday and i just think we need more of that not less [Music] hi hi so oh you got notes i do have notes oh here we go okay so my view of the world is often very bleak and sometimes i'm tempted to subscribe to the idea that everything is absurd and chaotic particularly morality uh so i was wondering are you persuaded by the idea that people are bound by categorical imperatives whether they're from god or whether they're not and in other words is there a way to prove that people ought to act a certain way or that we have a particular responsibility to one another okay everybody hear that was that cleared the question for everybody can i rephrase objective morality a thing or nah categorical imperatives what's quite beautifully stated uh no i don't think that there is some unquestionable morality i think we assign moral values to things let me ask an expert on nature's morality uh do her do volcanoes think about the foliage living on their slopes as they erupt they do not because they don't think um is it unethical when a lion eats a gazelle of course not lions starved at that they don't have gazelles is it unethical when tribes of lions befriend baby gazelles and their cubs play with them for a few hours and then they kill and eat them because that that's a thing felines they've got really big brains right so they can be like this is a pretty cute little antelope they can't get away i i mean i i saw footage once of a big lion cuddle literally cutting cuddling and licking this gazelle like it was its cub and the little gazelle just like nestled up and it was just like oh finally i'm safe yeah that's the right reaction because you know what's happening this isn't a story where like years later you see a pride of lines in a full-grown gazelle and they just no is in the big lie and bit the little gazelle's head off is that like immoral it's not immoral when a lion does it if you have your neighbor's child over and you befriend and then eat it look at that hold on i did it on purpose that was not an accident did you feel that moral revulsion oh do you know what we're finding in research a lot of this stuff is just like innate to the organ our dna produces right cultures are pretty much universally against incest just everybody just goes biologically speaking the risks of a single generation of very close relatives reproducing not really a thing if a brother and sister have a child they don't like have a third eye that blinks they don't they're not missing a limb it's very low risk over time yeah there's a huge risk the taboo makes sense but the amount of we make doesn't make sense and i feel gross saying that because i have moral revulsion to my own words remember earlier we talked about different structures in the brain doing different things i've learned just let them all run and play how they wish so just because i don't think there's objective morality doesn't mean i don't think there's morality or a framework for making good moral decisions this is what drives me crazy about theologians when you say i don't think there's some unquestionable absolute moral authority they go well then why don't you just kill everybody i don't want to kill anybody and let's let's be real okay you can't see under these fancy blazer sleeves i'm not packing any heat in the bicep department where i had to successfully attempt to initiate a physical altercation in which my goal was to kill someone else unless the other person is like six i'm probably going down i also i don't have a lot of stamina so if we're tussling i'm gonna get tired and then i'm gonna i'm gonna die so there's like some incentive that's not objective for me to not going around killing people why don't i go around killing people other than empathy and being a decent freaking person because i don't want anybody to kill me so we negotiate this societal thing that you know what's not cool murdering people it's not controversial mostly mostly i mean if the state doesn't do capital punishment you know maybe that's fine but generally we agree murdering people no so what does that mean what we come down to with moral decisions it's actually pretty simple reciprocity just i want to be able to go through life if i have some stuff i don't want people taking it i don't want to get killed i don't want people killing my children i don't want someone walking into my life and forcing me to have sexual intercourse with them like there's all these things that are like my preference and we all agree that's a pretty good preference let's just all do that i think that's where morality comes from and i think if we would stop trying to fight about what objective morality is or is not because by the way if there is moral if there is absolute moral objective values who knows what they are and how do they know right so even if they exist if we can't with a hundred percent certainly all agree on what they are then that's the same as moral relativism anyway or if if we're going for this we create these situations where no because this is true i refuse to compromise on what is moral in society and if we can't agree on what's moral in society we get what we have right now and it's not exactly amazing you guys and girls and gender non-conforming people so i just wish we'd admit all we all we're trying to do is set up moral boundaries so that people have a shot at a good life that has some bigger implications by the way is like my desire to prime now a 65-inch television worth my great grandchildren possibly unable to farm food near the equator is it worth people living in conditions i would never live in to produce the television so contrary from being some moral collapse i think admitting to moral relativism actually elevates people to higher moral standards because you have to take a more holistic view of your actions and how they impact other people hi um since we're in california i just have a question about plate plate tectonics and then um earthquake predictions because they always say earthquakes are coming and i'm like it's been eight years man where are the earthquakes come on news get it together thank you like this is the most amazing place to live if you've lived here a long time you've forgotten i just moved here from florida do you know what's in florida humidity mosquitoes and alligators that's basically it just imagine this take away all the dramatic mountains and make them flat imagine being surrounded by four obese people of the gender of your choosing who have just run five miles and are all panting in your direction that's just the air in florida okay and now imagine amidst that are mosquitoes plinking off your skin like rain another thing you're unfamiliar with in socal so you're just constantly itching or feeling little pinches which may carry disease and then you're out for a jog and all of that and you go oh shoot alligator that's where i live but whenever i start bagging on my home state floridians go hey you know what florida's not going to do fall into the ocean no it's going to sink beneath it but either way [Laughter] we have a little thing on our planet that we don't like the ground shakes sometimes by the way this is the reason we're here plague tectonics is amazing you know what planet nearby doesn't have plate tectonic action mars you know why it's core froze solid which killed its magnetosphere which means the solar wind took all the atmosphere away over time so if we stop having plate tectonics no more earthquakes hey fawns um that's great less great would be the loss of our atmosphere also continuous solar radiation and everything dying of cancer pretty fast so i'm a huge fan of plate tectonics uh now what you're getting at though long-term probabilities are tough for homo sapiens right the question is not will there be a major earthquake in los angeles that's not up for just debate that's not there's no question that at some point there's going to be such a major earthquake in los angeles that's going to destroy most of the buildings that have incredible cost in human life the question is is that going to happen while i'm still in this apartment that's how our brains work right so ah man actually now i hate this question because i have to be i have to be honest and vulnerable to answer your question so what did i do to mitigate my monkey brain tendency to delay important decisions when i moved to los angeles i prepared for a major earthquake i have not one but two 55 gallon barrels full of water which i treated with a diluted bleach solution and put in the dark so they'll be safe for drinking 10 years from now that's a lot of water that's not that much water when you realize how much water people need to drink prepare food and have basic sanitation by the way all that waters i'm assuming it'll take at least three weeks for the city services or government services to provide me some form of water and that's assuming i poop in trash bags in the toilet why did i say that so dramatically because you all got quiet you just contemplated something terrible which is not being able to flush the toilet that's the first thing that goes and even a minor quake if you're gonna do anything get a stash of drinking water and just keep you'll you'll thank me i promise a package of big black trash cans what do you do you put the trash can in the bowl you do what you have to do until it really won't hold anymore then you close the trash can and you take it outside and you dig a little trench that you just line your trash bags up in all right you also want some food the right way to have some food again you want to plant at a big quake you're just trying to plan three weeks until the national guard can get to you that's all you're doing so you want to have extra food on hand the best way to do that is to just always have more groceries than you need and to live out of that stash now here's the problem you've got an undisciplined monkey brain so you'll hear this podcast and you'll go to the grocery store and you'll overstock on food and then some thursday night go you know what i don't actually have to go to the grocery store tonight and you'll eat through your food stores and then revert to your old behavior which is why i have barrels of freeze-dried food there's little old boxes they're pretty cheap on amazon and by pretty cheap i mean compared to starving to death all right so we've got some water we've got some freeze-dried food here's the other thing you're going to want work gloves because your house is going to be messed up right so you want to cut yourself trying to navigate to the front door you want a good pair of shoes and socks by your bed every night baby wipes you want baby wipes why do you want baby wipes because you might not get a shower for six weeks and you don't want to use your precious drinking water bathing if it's good enough for a baby's butt it'll work on your face and your pets okay so we got some baby wipes we got some shoes we got oh and then the other thing i like to have uh you will not be tweeting if we have a big one your cell phone is gonna be a very fascinating piece of glass i have a weather radio because we can slap together a radio station with technology that's been around a long time and it has a crank on it and a solar panel so i can charge it by putting in the sun or cranking the crank and then i can hear updates last thing i also have uh face masks that are disposable in case pollutants are released in the air or there's so much particular matter now what am i describing a hellscape absolutely but believe me if we have a big quake and you have food water trash bags baby wipes a radio a flashlight some work gloves and a pair of shoes by your bed i will probably get a letter from you one day because you'd be like well you know what i did have to like save for two months to make sure i had the money to buy that stuff but i'm also alive to write this letter thanks science mike oh man now that here's the problem what i just said if a big one hits los angeles thousands of people are going to try to find my house [Music] so i'm not sure if this is really a clear question but so i have an active dream life and recently this past year i've had a couple dreams where it's been kind of dream within a dream and a dream within a dream within a dream um so one have you ever really heard of that outside of obviously the movie the research i've done a little bit has been what's kind of like a false awakening which is where you wake up in your own bed kind of doing your daily activities and that's not the case for me when i wake up i'm actually in that first stream um and the other part is the deepest part of the dream always tend to be kind of demonic okay i can best describe that so i don't really know the question to the latter half but what do you know of that is it really anything or have you heard of it before oh yeah yeah uh heard about it lived it i have um what in my dreamscape appears to be a regular visitor in the form of a demon who assumes corpses in various states of decomposition exclusively of people i love who tells me how about people are going to die and suffer and there's nothing i can do about it true story and every time this demon shows up i go yeah how's your family i'm not kidding i'll be like do you watch sportscenter never answers me cracks me the hell up though uh so we're gonna go two places in the answer one is narcolepsy and sleep paralysis and the other is how dreams happen in the brain start with narcolepsy and sleep paralysis you have systems in your brain whose job is to paralyze you while you are dreaming why because you do dramatic things in dreams and if you do that while asleep and without conscious awareness of what's happening you'll do weird stuff like walk off a cliff or start a fight with someone who can absolutely kick your ass you know i mean like just bad decisions are made when you're literally not conscious so your brain goes i've got an idea let's just cut it all off at the brain stem yeah that's what happens unless you sleepwalk right have you ever known a sleepwalker my wife and my children all sleepwalk so jenny will sit up in the middle of the night and be like the sky and fire fumble where's the cat and i go we don't have a cat but it's okay i'll find it i'll find the cat just lay back down i'll find the cat she lays back down she's gone again kids will come walking in my older star's my favorite because she walks in every time like this doesn't say a word just and now let's go i know sweetheart come on i'll show you i take her put her back down she's gonna sleep so the flip side of that is sleep paralysis sleep paralysis where you start to wake back up but your body goes so it's just a dream and it's really freaky because you can't move and you're in this twilight state of awareness and so what since happens people as you've researched wake up and they see their surroundings and they feel like they're awake but they can't move and sometimes at the furthest physical point from them is a dark figure but because they can't move and they still feel sleepy they fall asleep or they close their eyes and they open their eyes again only now the dark figure is closer and closer and sometimes a dark figure sits on your chest why because we have sleep paralysis you can feel a weird sense of heaviness and that's how dreams work dreams take random firings of neurons they filter them through the meaning making hardware of the brain and they form images and narratives out of them that's why a heaviness of sleep paralysis becomes a demonic figure dark figure sitting in your chest why your brain is trying to scare you out of sleep paralysis because you're super vulnerable right now the problem is feelings of anxiety and fear tend to deepen sleep paralysis this can be a debilitating thing for people i get sleep paralysis if i go to bed at the wrong time or get too tired or take a nap during the day probably two out of three i get sleep paralysis and the dark figure shows up and tries to scare me and because i'm super analytical like i'm in sleep paralysis and so i've learned to scream as loud as i can the top of my lungs which makes me do this in the real world [Music] and then my my sweet sweet beloved wife will take my hand and just shake a little bit and then i'm out i can send this signal now thank goodness my wife is such a light sleeper if she's deeply asleep and i go she wakes up and frees me from my sleep present before that gift i had to learn to calm myself and go into a deeper state of sleep to kind of reset this whatever stuck and get out of it so when you have recurring dreams that are frightening flight or fight is a survival reaction so usually when you have scary things in your dreams your brain is trying to wake you up you might have to pee there might have been a noise outside brain's trying to get you aware or you become afraid of the dream imagery itself so the brain tries to wake you up if you're deep enough asleep it just makes a really terrifying dream which is something you remember and because dreams are basically associated with random firings of neurons and neural networks in your brain what's in your dreams tend to be the things with the largest neural networks associated with them which are things you're very afraid of things you have anxiety about things that you love dearly and think about a lot and weirdly stuff that just happened now take that understanding and now filter your recent dreams why did a demon chase you into the office where you were naked in a meeting in front of your boss because you have a lot of neurons associated with all those things and as they randomly fired your brain's meaning making machinery had to tell some story in the same way it told you a story when you ducked that wrench so that's what happens with occurring dreams the memory of a dream creates a suggestion or an increased neural significance that the next night when the custodians start coming through your brain to clean up unnecessary dendrites and synaptic connections they fire again neurons that fire together wire together you've just deepened the likelihood of the stream what can you do good sleep hygiene helps our dreams tend to be frightening and more vivid when we're sleep deprived guess whose sleep survived almost all of you i'm watching you yawn as soon as i say the word sleep 60 of this room just went because you're sleep deprived because facebook's so amazing and netflix just won what are you missing what what is worth costing your health and your effectiveness your mental well-being and your emotional balance just to see if there's another like the crown will be there tomorrow it will i promise whatever you're doing oh here's another thing your mattress in your room your bed two things happen on that mattress only two things you can sleep you do something else that starts with s snore yes sleeping and snoring actually two of my favorite disciplines um and when you do that so what another thing we tend to do that causes sleep paralysis causes vivid dreams is we tend to sit in bed and give ourselves weird stimulus that evolution didn't prepare us for like a bright light held right in front of our face that gives us a weird alienating feeling like we feel known but also unknown my best friend likes this but does she like me then that gets too much so then we like turn on a giant glowing rectangle right by where we sleep and we watch amazing and fantastic things happen people way better than looking at us have have conflict on screen they have romantic encounters on screen dinosaurs chase people spaceships make pew pew noises in a vacuum like all this incredible stuff that does not happen in the real world we beam it into our retina and then we go i think i'm tired enough now no still not what's on instagram right so you're going to sleep better you have less likelihood to have nightmares less likelihood sleep paralysis except good sleep hygiene by sleeping seven to nine hours every night and not doing things other than sleeping or snoring in your bed [Music] hi science mike hello um i just want to start by saying that your work along with the liturgist work has done more than i can explain so i'm really grateful thank you for taking the time to be here um i actually have a question about that other s word the non-snoring one okay um we'll just go we'll just go and i mainly was a joke there's a shame free space we can say sex it's okay awesome um i'm trying to decide how much personal information i want to divulge with this question um just ask for a friend that's what everybody else says no that's okay [Laughter] good call though um i saw my first sexual image when i was three years old i think maybe four um and since that time i've had a really big um issue with just um sex addiction as well as pornography um and i've read plenty of of and i was a well i don't know if i don't know what i am currently but i was a very conservative bible believe in christian for a long time um and so i read a lot of stuff that proclaimed it'd be science that said a lot you know a lot of anti-porn advocacy that said you know it rearranges your uh pleasure centers or whatever in the brain i don't know a lot about science but um and also wanting to i'm a very left-leaning person consider myself a feminist by whatever degree a you know middle class white person can do so i just want to know especially in regards to things like pornography what is is there a consensus on the science um how does how does all that factor in um and i know plenty about like trauma and triggers and stuff you know but but outside of that is there just any science that says for sure what happens to the brain when pornography and sexual imagery is constant okay first science doesn't say anything for sure about anything if there's one mistake i see branded about who tend to use the hashtag science it's that science proves things or that science says you know what simon says why because simon's a person with feelings and opinions and a mouth you know what isn't the discipline of science so we have discovering information about the material world science ascribes confidence to beliefs using evidence that's what science does what evidence observation that observation can include observing experiments but then people go within science can't look at things it's not repeatable nope science can look for physical evidence of something that happened long ago which is why science can talk about the big bang without us having to destroy the universe so let's start there science proves nothing so let's let's dig through some current consensus around pornography how it affects people and its role in our culture let's do that without shame let me start here you know who loves porn everybody by the numbers people who have never seen a pornographic image are incredibly rare and the people that don't look at porno pornographic images regularly be they male or female make up significantly less than half the population people look at porn so what's that doing to us i'm not like actually a huge fan of the whole purity culture thing um because i think we when we assign sexual behavior primarily through the limbs of shame and virginity especially female virginity we create strange dysfunction and obsession around sexual behavior and actually think that feeds pornography culture and why do i think that because per capita rates for porn consumption are highest in religious areas the more religious estate the more religious the city zip code and neighborhood the more likely people are to look at porn the more frequently they look at porn and the more likely they are to look at extreme pornography the more likely they have to have some deep kink that has to be scratched we're out here in godless california in the shadow of the deed and haven los angeles and people's consumption of porn in los angeles is less frequent and less extreme than people in houston texas or atlanta georgia or even birmingham alabama i'm still using major metros the smaller the community the more religious the deeper the porn itch and the more frequently it is scratched shame feeds sexual dysfunction and pornographic consumption period so ironically if we actually think people shouldn't watch porn we'd have better results by not shaming people about porn instead let's talk about supernormal stimuli this is a pretty amazing thing scientists have discovered that well gosh it's not just men that are visual creatures here's how you can tell if a creature is visual does it have eyes that's the big clue in biology to when animals have some visual orientation now check this out i want you to look around see if you can find a man in the room does he have eyes yes so it's fair to say men have some visual component to their sexual activation but watch this see if you can see a woman in the room and if you're on the subway you know right now internet look on the subway does she have eyes then there is a visual component to how she views the world and to sexual activation remarkable does your dog have eyes yes but your dog is much more oriented with the activity of its nose which is why dogs are so into butts but they don't like they don't like big butts like because they look great they're like incredible this is just biology do you know that if you take a robin and you and it's nest you put a larger bluer wooden egg that will spend most of its energy trying to keep the fake egg warm than its real chicks because in its neurological makeup blueness and egg size are associated with healthy chicks did you know that after the chicks hatch if you literally put a fake wooden bird in the nest a baby bird whose mouth is always open and who the inside of its mouth is redder than the real chicks in the nest the mother will try to feed the fake chick head while the real chicks are more likely to starve it's called a super normal stimulus something natural you figure out what works and you make it even bigger and even brighter obviously humans don't do that wait that's just an animal thing we're not dumb enough to be more attracted to someone if their lips are redder because they smeared wax and pigment on them to simulate sexual arousal that does not work on people obviously men aren't more attracted to women if they try to make their complexions more smooth by putting on foundation and powders and blush to simulate again sexual arousal obviously human men aren't more attracted to women if we use photoshop to increase their hips in relationship to their waist we don't fall for that we're thinkers do you know if we take pictures of men and we do a series of photographs and we subtly include signals in the photograph of higher or lower socioeconomic station that the picture of if you put make make women look through 50 pictures and the same guy's in there three times only we've changed his apparent socioeconomic station they'll change their attractive rating of this person the higher they look socioeconomically it doesn't work on people supernormal stimulus so what about porn what about porn where everybody's having the time of their life big huge cartoon eyes on people giant eyebrows i can't go further in a family environment other accentuated body features on both men and women doing things that non-olympians aren't capable of in the bedroom you know what i mean so what happens when you expose a generation to that is their sexual education well i know exactly what happens anxiety an attempt to try things that they think each other will find attractive but neither enjoys oh also superfund erectile dysfunction higher rates of consumption of pornography are associated with higher risks of erectile dysfunction in men that's from the anti-born community but that research holds up what well it does turn out supernormal stimulus is not great for us it doesn't matter that it scratches some unimaginable itch in our brain that nature never could you know what else does cheeseburgers cheeseburgers are super normal stimulus what happens if you eat cheeseburgers for every meal is this the healthiest way to approach nutrition possible probably not my organs are packed in fat that doesn't increase longevity or quality of life cheeseburgers are amazing but maybe not every day for lunch visual stimulation from things like pornography on in moderation is probably not terrible for people but our tendency is to create a compulsion around pornography that is fueled by shame when i was younger well i didn't get to porn at first because i'm old and when i was young if you want to look at porn it went like this [Applause] you had to dial a modem and then you had to like there was no google so you had to like find a directory on by like asking people a month when they used that like anybody got some naked girls and then people like oh yeah i've got these amazing images 2534x.jpg 397821.jpg they just had to like scroll through numbers and just guess what might be in the picture and there's a calculated risk because once you click that picture it's going to do like this just scan back and forth a line at a time it's like okay those are nice bangs this could be going somewhere good mom's home or god forbid your sister picked up the phone you couldn't resume a download now you just had this much of a lady when i was young the option that 4k hd streaming vr whatever not a thing but when i got into college i got like the first high speed internet connection in my town and then you would click the image it's like basically load now video forget it but i remember like that was amazing like whenever i want i can see women without clothes on funny how quick my basic perception of women went from relational to woe their clothes off so ethically i question the way that pornography is produced and distributed what it does to our basic reference frame toward each other as people and the basic neurological health but i say all that i don't want to shame you what about someone with a severe physical disability who because of the judgment standards of society finds it very difficult to find the company of other people i uh on this very podcast interviewed a foreign performer once because someone asked me is it ever ethical to produce pornography i didn't know so i asked an expert and she told me that no one starts working in the porn business on the best day of their life and that for a long time she was exploited and she was forced to do things that she didn't want to do with her body and that it she resorted to drugs which created an addiction that producers could exploit then she got clean and today she mainly works on webcams and that a lot of her clients who turn the camera on are physically disabled homebound and just want to be seen by another person i frustrate the heck out of people because i can be more i can be morally ambiguous but i have very little interest in shaming a woman who spends or demonizing a woman who spends many of her waking hours delivering companionship and comfort to people the rest of us suddenly shift our weight sideways as we walk past so i don't believe in moral absolutes i do believe that when considering the issue of pornography we must contemplate supernormal stimuli and economic exploitation it is usually people who are economically or educationally disadvantaged who become porn performers or people with addiction issues and every time we go to famous websites and don't pay a nickel but ads are served we are creating an economic incentive structure that preys on the bodies and dignity of human beings so where a case can be made that people are not coerced and economically empowered as they produce porn i'm not going to judge people who watch it but i would encourage everyone to take a careful and introspective posture when you cut when you consider how pornography causes you to view other people how it causes you to view yourself and how in control of your pornography consumption you are or are not and finally for anyone listening in their 20s who says but science mike you don't understand i'm horny all the time there's just not that many people who want to have sex with me all the time i have fantastic news one day you two will be almost 40 and you'll barely even remember what that was like it does get better [Laughter] but you still may want a cheeseburger [Music] hello so it's my it's my understanding that science treats our universe as a closed system um that being said is the speed of light constant and if it's not what sort of repercussions would that imply on our material reality or the implications of empirical data okay great good question everybody catch it you with me is the universal closed system or not is the speed of light constant what implications would it have for science if the speed of light was not constant what's the universe this is a big place to start because this is a word that gets beat up and abused in the media the universe in terms of science is very simple it's absolutely everything what about the multiverse the multiverse is not about multiple universes it's about multiple observable universes each of which are a fragment of the entire universe if i unpack that we're here till 2 am but i did a podcast on it called the multiverse so is the universe a closed system can you add more to everything we surmise no so we call it a closed system if we added something to it it would have come from somewhere else and guess what that's also part of the universe so it's just a it's a tricky definition thing however in most of what we do in science it involves the observable universe why because we can observe it and that's the foundation of scientific inquiry so to our knowledge is the speed of light 186 000 miles per second and change constant throughout the observable universe totes the math checks out with every observation we've ever done speed of light is the speed of light is the speed of light the speed of light is not just constant as inconsistent it's constant as in it's a foundational property of the entire universe could i have a volunteer come on could i have another volunteer come on everybody just buck your seatbelt real quick this is going to be a party by the way internet i apologize you can't see these visual references i'll try to narrate okay you stand right here and you and i will go here toward these balloons okay like this just stay right here we're gonna stay on the same line so here's what i want you to do want you to everyone to imagine that when i say go a photon is on the starting line too photons a little piece of light okay and then we're gonna run and i'm gonna imagine that i'm gonna run at uh two miles an hour that's probably realistic for me you're gonna run at four miles an hour for the sake of the metaphor you just run faster than me it won't be hard okay you stay still all right you're the observer we're objects in motion all right remember the photons in this race it's going to go from here to there to 186 000 miles an hour on your mark get set to go all right so you won your rate the rate wasn't let's do it again you you you like just do a proper run i'll handle the difference sorry on your mark get set go okay so he got ahead of me and then he got further ahead of me right so from your perspective who won the race him he beat the photon the one going 186 000 miles an hour next to me that was invisible oh oh no yeah it won just stick with me the photon won second third right so here's a weird thing let's suppose instead of two miles an hour and four miles an hour i was going a thousand miles an hour and you were going 2 000 miles an hour right that would mean from your perspective i'm going how fast a thousand miles an hour and you're going from his perspective from my perspective how fast is he going a thousand miles an hour what we disagree on his speed how weird how's that possible relative motion here's the weird thing about our universe if you're seeing this is 186 000 miles per hour right and i'm going a thousand miles per hour how fast am i seeing this 185 i'm seeing it at 186 000 miles per hour how fast is he seeing it running 2000 miles per hour it's 186 000 miles per hour we all see the photon going the same speed even though our velocities are different how is that possible how could that ever ever work nothing else works that way because in order to make light do what light does time warps so the trick is the three of us get to experience the passage of time at different rates and the math will always check out so that a photon is going 186 000 miles per hour that's einsteinian relativity congratulations you understand it now you didn't even have to do math thank you that's great let's give a round of applause so [Applause] what would happen if that were not true when we looked at things through telescopes the predictions we make based on the relativistic behavior of space-time wouldn't be there but every time we look light's going 100 if you were going 185 000 miles per hour compared to me you would still see light as going as 186 000 miles per hour no matter how fast you go now here's the trick unlike light the closer you get the light speed the more energy it takes for you to accelerate so as you approach light speed guess how much energy it takes for you to go light speed infinite energy takes infinite energy there isn't infinite energy to put into you to accelerate you to light speed that's why nothing other than light and massless particles can go the speed of light if that were not the case all of physics since einstein would collapse it would mean gps's don't work that would suck it would mean mercury's orbit around the sun would change mercury is the one planet going fast enough to have a relativistic orbit instead of a newtonian orbit so this isn't hypothetical even though we don't tend to go as fast as light speed we do experience the effects of light speed as a constant in the observable universe but what if at the big bang pockets of inflationary universes formed separately and you have multiple spatially infinite universes could you have a universe where the speed of light is 100 miles an hour totally it'd be amazing nothing could really exist there but if you visited it you would be able to slow down your perception of time by jogging because you'd be able to go a significant fraction of light speed that'd be pretty cool planets couldn't form because gravity would also go 100 miles an hour that'd be a problem but if you could visit oh also yeah jogging would also require incredible amounts of energy so you'd basically just be motionless so not as cool as i thought okay [Music] hi hi so uh i'm a nine year and i all right somebody else tonight over here let's harmonize let's all just hang out right so in terms of everything we're talking about morality faith all that how much of it really comes down to let's say your personality your number the enneagram you mean my beliefs about them i just yeah i'd love to hear your thoughts about it in terms of like does all this stuff really matter are you really just going to go back to your number whether it's in health or on health yeah i think the enneagram is a map and maps can be very useful but they're not reality itself so if i use a road map to try to figure out the temperature it's not going to help me very much right because the map is just a way of navigating reality if i get a temperature map from the weather channel it's not going to help me to figure out how to get out to san diego very well right so the maps have specific tools so i think the enneagram is a very useful map for interrogating personality but i don't put the same confidence or rigor in it that i put in physics what i like about the enneagram is it helps me understand what i'm stuck ways to get unstuck helps me understand maybe why i care about certain things and maybe why i should try intentionally to pay attention to some things i don't pay attention to my tendency as a peacemaker a nine on the enneagram is to always push aside my anger and to be uncomfortable with the anger of other people but the anger and the voices of women as they say times up is actually just valid the anger when people say hashtag black lives matter when another teen is legally killed in the united states it's valid so my enneagram work has taught me to pay more attention to their anger to not be so uncomfortable to not immediately go it's okay i'll help i'll help we don't have to be angry just because i had authority figures that scared me as a kid and it also means i can pay attention to my anger that doesn't mean it's like super great if i backhand people but it means i should my body my brain yes my personality are telling me something when i get angry and that's not something i should reflexively avoid so the fact that i'm a nine on the enneagram is why 48 of the listeners of ass science mike are registered republicans you heard the orangutan joke right why are 48 of the hundreds of thousands of people who listen to this podcast republicans because i'm an enneagram 9 and i don't judge them and i i actually kind of harmonize with and understand their motivations and i understand how in their life experience and perspective their actions and their thoughts and their beliefs make sense but then i also understand why someone else feels threatened and indeed marginalized by those same beliefs and the fact that i can pretty effortlessly walk a mile in anybody's shoes i mean i'm a really excellent translator because i'm a knight so the enneagram shows me how to lean into some strengths and find areas of growth as well if that's important but i don't know how fixed this stuff is you know i've always identified as an extrovert i fell off a motorcycle and i scrambled my eggs my brain not those eggs um they were fine and now like groups of people stress me out and i like to be quiet more than i used to i feel shy sometimes i never felt shy before so i don't let my myers-briggs map invalidate the very real experience of being someone who's living with a traumatic brain injury and no matter how successful the ideogram map has been at explaining my life i don't stress too much when that map loses detail or wears thin or even tears as i find myself in a new place i found that a meaningful life is found as we learn to hold our metaphors more loosely so we can grab new ones as needed in order to love others more completely [Music] this is kind of a short question but um is mental illness really incurable and if it is why so why did i do one more question we just had this beautiful moment together there's no such thing as mental illness as a monolith mental illness is a incredibly varied set of difficulties and disorders associated with cognitive and emotional processing some mental illnesses are more treatable than others some mental illnesses are i guess quote curable or at least very successfully treatable um our approach to mental health in america is pretty terrible in latin american cultures people uh who are schizophrenic and hear voices hear voices that most often speak to them in affirmation and so people aren't typically institutionalized for schizophrenia because they're pretty cheerful because they start cooking something and they drop an egg and a voice says it's okay you're doing your best well great i don't need to treat that in fact i'd be pretty mad if you took away the cheerful voices who tell me like it's going pretty well their voices tend not to tell them that they are jesus christ here to save the world as so often happens to people in our culture my thoroughly unqualified email me if you want opinion is that um the twin engines in american thought of the capitalistic drive to be exceptional and the fuel in that engine which is a deep seat of shame and unworthiness is what so often turns our disorders darker why do we keep walking into schools and shooting children that doesn't happen anywhere else not at the numbers that happens here why are so many of us killing ourselves we've created a culture where we're ashamed of who we are if we don't fit some pre-pre prescriptive notion i cry all the time when i was a kid that wasn't manly i didn't like football so people thought i was gay and by the way that was an insult so at the same time by calling me gay i felt horrible but so did the young person right next to me figuring out their sexuality who actually fit in with everybody what we both hear you're not good and then our religious narrative here you're horrible and you deserve hell unless you say the right prayer god only loves you if he can kill his son what what so we never touch people unless we want to have sex with him which means so often our touch is predatory and yet we're social primates who experience crippling anxiety if we are not frequently touched that's a good situation to put people in i need touch the best way to touch that's socially acceptable is to have sex so i'll have my touch be a conquest of other people i'm at a point in my life i love a good snuggle with a friend it's okay if a friend's a guy it doesn't mean i want to copulate with him i really only like to copulate with my wife and then if i haven't had too much to eat i don't think is mental illness curable is the right question and i don't say that to stigmatize your question i think how we relate to each other is the important question i think we should ask what is it about our culture that makes us so afraid to be honest and vulnerable and intimate with one another what is it about our culture that encourages us to be sharks instead of sheep to win at all costs to never display weakness and by the way before you tell me that women are traditionally more emotionally open and vulnerable that's true but they're also trained from a very young age to view each other as competitors in a race to be a prize i'm not a mental health professional i can't counsel people have mental illness i'm unqualified to do research so what do i do i travel the country and i tell you all that i love you i'm so glad you are here and afterwards i'm going to be in the lobby and i'll say hey to everyone who wants to say hello and if someone has touched you in a way that has traumatized you guess what i will not under any circumstances try to touch you but if you're lonely and you need a hug it would be my sincere pleasure to give you the most non-predatory hug you've ever gotten in your life it takes our individual action to fight a system that says we're all just cogs in a machine we're just points of economic value to extract because i believe that this all started in chaos and chance from cosmic singularity that exploded into a big bang and then if you look deep enough philosophically life is utterly devoid of meaning and i believe one day i heard god talk to me and i made god a promise that said if you'll stay with me i'll spend the rest of my life being broken and poured out for the healing of others my friends i am here to fully embrace the beauty of life as revealed by science and the mystery of the idea that god loves us and god wants us to love each other and my approach to people with mental illness is to say i don't care about cultural conventions i don't care that we label who you are as ill i love you and i'm so glad you're here and sometimes i freak people out too so my friends wherever you are tonight why ever you came into this room i hope that you leave knowing two things one science is awesome and two you are special in love exactly [Music] thanks for coming [Applause] [Music]