ASM200 Episode 200 – LIVE in LA

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coming to you from amp studios in los angeles california it's ask science mike live you got questions he's got answers even though he may not understand he'll talk anyway you got problems he won't solve them but he'll talk and talk and talk until he's blue in the face science faith in life ladies gentlemen and people of all gender identities please help me welcome science mike [Applause] i am so happy right now uh man 200 episodes and it means so much to me that you're here to celebrate this with me yeah it's because of you that it's even happening so it's i don't really don't know how to explain what i'm feeling right now and i'm usually pretty good at explaining my feelings i guess like a really deep gratitude it's been a weird season for me right now i don't know if you see the the beards a little longer because i canceled all my uh my speaking events for the rest of the year and i was like what if i just don't shave anymore what would that be like and uh i've been having to take breaks for my heart health and i've stepped back from the liturgist podcast as i kind of pursue uh getting better physically and we're trying to figure out like what does what does my work look like what do my events look like and so tonight is not only a celebration of kind of where ass science might came from which was smaller rooms where i could see everybody's faces like i'm so excited when we tour there's the light's usually so bright i can't see you and i hate that i can see everybody here tonight it's wonderful it just means a lot to me that you're here this podcast for you who are listening out in radio land or i guess watching on youtube for the first time is a weird space in that i am not an actual expert in anything i am like the least credentialed human being alive uh i basically read a lot and have had a lot of pain in my life so i tend to be really empathetic and non-judgmental so what this space is about is honoring every sincere question with dignity i think every genuine question deserves a non-judgmental and sincere response so whatever is like shaking around in your life or in your heart that you want to talk about tonight that's what we're here for this show is completely and 100 percent about you and uh with that let's get it started who's got a question hi hi um i'm getting ready to get married tomorrow congratulations thank you um and since you're a therapist right definitely not a therapist but i know a good one okay um what are the questions that you would recommend i ask my spouse every day wow no pressure the fate of a marriage hangs in the balance of one podcaster's random opinion um let's start with the obvious i have an unconventional spousal style i am highly communicative to the point that i think it drives jenny insane so i'm like let's talk about this and resolve it and figure it out and also almost completely hermetically sealed and self-sufficient in terms of managing my feelings and emotionality so i'm like willing to share but i don't have to and the reason i say that is the thing that gets me about people talking about marriage advice is it's like parenting advice and we tend to homogenize people when we do that in a way that i think erases the difficulty and beauty of life in relationships so i'm always afraid to answer marriage and parenting questions because i'm really good at being married to one person and i'm an expert at that relationship and i actually think i'm pretty good at parenting two children my children but i saw how different they are and how little what worked with one daughter worked with the other they actually require radically different approaches so i think part of what you have to do is like figure out who you are and figure out who your spouse is and understand that that will change so much that you never finish that and so the best kind of advice i've seen is not actually advice it's uh it's based out of research and when sociologists and psychologists study successful marriages by the way what is a successful marriage in the context of this study a successful marriage is one in which both partners uh self-identify as feeling satisfied and fulfilled in the relationship which i think as a marker for success is a pretty good one and those relationships when you look at the ratio of positive to negative interactions there's about four positive for every one negative interaction and then when you look at less successful relationships or unsuccessful or ones where people don't feel happy and satisfied and are considering ending the relationship or the relationship has actually ended in divorce when they look at those relationships that ratio is like one to one so it's not like there's more negative than positive it's when they get about the same it just doesn't feel like the relationship works anymore so i would say if there was one thing to look out for it was to kind of track negative moments in your marriage and whenever you have one negative moment try to create four great ones that might sound like crafty or something but i think for two people to live together for a long time is difficult and it means we have to be intentional about how we do that the other thing i would say is just brush up a little bit on neuroanatomy because as good western people when we face challenges in our relationships we try to work through it cognitively we try to do problem solving and evaluating and based on the way our brains are structured when we think about things cognitively we shift the pattern of activity in our brains towards our prefrontal cortex that's a patch of tissue about as big around as a quarter and as thick as your tortilla behind your forehead and it doesn't have a lot of feelings your prefrontal cortex so if we spend too much time analyzing our relationships we actually train our brains to experience less emotion when we think about our spouse and the way that we balance that kind of cognitive effect and emotional effect is to do things that are experiential the things that make us feel and love involve cuddling and walking together and rom-com [ \_\_ ] i don't know like whatever it takes to have a moment where you feel close regardless of whatever conflict might be happening taking time to experience things together creates a feeling of connection and intimacy in your brain and so i'd say the four to one rule and the right tilt on the brain teeter-totter between your prefrontal cortex and your anterior cingulate cortex which if you're a long-time listener you know is the seat of love and compassion in the brain is the best thing science has to say about how to have a successful marriage [Music] so i've been waiting for that moment for weeks because you have you can't hear it usually in the live shows i go with my mouth and then greg turns into the actual sound effect later but now jeb's doing it live i don't know it just seems cool to me who else who has a question thanks mike um so i recently watched a ted talk called a stroke of insight given by brain scientist jill bolte taylor in which she describes her own experience of having a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain and as her perceptions of reality were processed only through her right hemisphere she experienced the world through a unified consciousness of oneness with the universe which is how she described it um so i have a few questions around that can you explain the relationship of the left and right hemispheres to religious experience what do we know about why the left hemisphere appears appears to be dominant in our consciousness do psychedelics and meditation increase access to the right hemisphere and are there healthy things we can do to connect with our right hemisphere more and have those kinds of experiences first i'm not a professional i'm a podcaster okay um april 20th of next year or 28th april something of next year 2020. i've got a book coming out called you're a miracle and a pain in the ass and i have a whole chapter on the two hemispheres of the brain and how that affects us um i'm not gonna like cheese out and not answer your question but i am gonna plug my book while i do it so it's available for pre-order now everywhere books are sold um so i've studied that a lot so everyone knows that the brain has two hemispheres and then people think about the hemispheres of the brain they think the left brain is analytical and the right brain is creative and in neuroscience that model is called horseshit that's not true at all that's based on really really dated information um you have two hemispheres of the brain they're connected by a thick band of tissue called the corpus callosum that's like the 405 of your brain but less less crowded actually just has more lanes it's equally crowded and that's how the two halves of the brain communicate with each other and in early neuroscience we understood one of the principal differences between men and women's brains being the amount of activity that happened on the corpus callosum basically the idea was that the two halves of women's brains talk to each other constantly and the two halves of men's brains were effectively anti-social and communicated to each other as little as possible which is like funny in a stand-up comedy traditional gender role way right as we've dug into that more it turns out that one those differences were overstated in early literature and two they appear to be much more socialized than a function of you know our biological identity or gene driven and genetic driven behaviors when we actually look at the left and right brains what we find is not that they're analytical and creative but that they are reductive and holistic so the left brain sees a metal rod and a clamp and a screw and all these pieces and the right brain sees a mic stand right so you can imagine a situation where you had significant tissue loss affecting the left hemisphere and then the brain doing what the brain does through neuroplasticity trying to keep the lights on and take brain circuits that were doing something else the other day and making them do something new today a larger part of her thinking became channeled and directed through the right brain which is holistic which is unitive we understand that when you have mystical experiences or when you have experience with the divine they very much are associated with the right hemisphere of the brain as is trauma right so the right brain adds the the sizzle to life it is also true that western people especially have a uniquely left oriented consciousness effectively in the enlightenment we through our philosophers gave the left brain a promotion and we elevated left brain reductionist thinking as the only good thinking right and for those of us who grew up in conservative religious traditions we certainly were taught that feelings are bad and not to be trusted but good sound theological reasoning like the bible's literally true is to be trusted um but it was all about distancing us from our feelings that's not just fundamentalist evangelicalism that's the west right that's how we've thought and it's literally shifted the way that our brains function absolutely psychedelics meditative practice can help rebalance and re-bias our thought patterns but i have a friend named hillary mcbride who is the smartest kindest person in the world and she has been teaching me a lot about embodiment and a huge thing i talk about in the book and i'll talk about a little bit right now is the way that left prefrontal thinking separates us from our lived body experiences and so things we do that get us in our bodies start to pull us out of our left brain it's not that the left brain is bad it's just the left brain is kind of an [ \_\_ ] like the left brain because it's reductive says if i take enough steps in my process if first we load people on trains and then we take them to a camp and then we put them in a chamber and then we close the door and then we press the button to gas them to death nobody ever did anything wrong something about feeling an embodiment has a wisdom that will defy the left brain when it goes off on these crazy flights of fancy or genocide and so what i've been doing is not just my meditative practice used to be very very very very um dude it's very dude what i mean very dude it was all about transcendence it was about separating from reality it was about going to a quiet place alone and sitting still for a long time and getting further and further into the esoteria of the mind and what i've been learning from people like hillary is that you can also be mindful and present in lived activities you can meditate with others or one thing i like to do a lot is meditate in my garden doing things in my gardens like my favorite meditation time is actually watering the plants in my garden uh that's like because it's i'm doing something i'm listening to the birds i'm listening to all the natural sounds here um like cars screaming down the road and l.a wilderness is a little different but it's still grounding and connecting and what we've seen in brain scans is when you do that kind of embodied work you do actually start to get more access to the resources of the right hemisphere so [Music] yeah it works hey mike hey ally i would love to hear your current thoughts on artificial intelligence and how do you think that's going to impact society throughout the we'll just say the 21st century so over the next 80 years um what are you excited about and what scares the bejesus out of you yeah thank you future questions are my least favorite questions not only no gosh this is me giving a disclaimer that's part of my sincere response to your excellent question i like am a natural encourager so what i want people is like let's come in here and like the world is kind of shitty a lot so let's make a space that's like like encouraging i want you to leave feeling better than when you arrived and when you asked me about the future i go so hard into bummersville every time because i have like very little hope for the future of human civilization um no pressure um so the weird thing is like ai and machine learning is one of the few things i'm like actually an expert in i used i used to build thinking machines for a living before i decided to instead pursue the glamour of podcasting and um the biggest thing i understand about thinking machines now is how very little we understand about how they work and by we i mean the people that make them um the way very intelligent machines work today is you set up a criteria for computers to teach themselves things in basically a mathematical black box that you make the rules for but in order for a learning machine to do a good job you kind of have to let it loose and run wild and then judge it based on its outcomes so one of my favorite pieces of machine learning in the last few years is a product called alphago zero that's an iteration of a program called alphago and that's a software that learned to play a game called a board game called go is go a board game yeah technically i don't want to make sure that it's a bit pedantic but i just realized i was fuzzy on what abort was wasn't was not a board game but not on what a deep learning algorithm was such a strange knowledge stack i have go is notable here's why there's so many possible moves on a go board there's actually more moves than there are atoms in the universe and that means you can't brute force compute solutions to a go game it's a game that's considered to be very intuitive in play style it's less cerebral than chess it's a game you play with the gut and because of that we thought no computer would ever be good at it but turns out if you let a computer using machine learning system watch people play go and you actually let them walk you let them watch more games than a person could watch in their lifetime you can create a piece of software that's better than any person it was called alphago well once those researchers did that it was huge news in the nerd world like it wasn't as like five o'clock news as like watson winning jeopardy was but for nerds go was actually a much bigger deal in jeopardy or chess so that team then turned around and made another version called alphago zero that never watched anyone play a game but only learned to play by playing itself and after four days of playing itself alphago zero became the best go player in human history and beat alphago it in those four days it played lifetime's worth of games like thousands of lifetimes worth of go games and completely changed how the game is played so now human players study tapes of alpha go playing itself or human players to try to make their game better with the understanding no one will ever beat this machine at go but if you ask mathematically what's happening in that system the people who made it aren't entirely sure right now i'm not going all terminator on you right by the way if you saw that new terminator movie really good but um i don't think i don't have a fear that computers are gonna like take over the world i don't think a thinking machine would care what concerns me about ai is its absolute alien indifference to us but i'm not actually that worried about ai these days because i'm not sure our economy is going to be stable long enough for ai research to pay off because of this destabilizing effects of climate change so what happens to me is anytime you ask me a future question i can't stay just on that one theoretical rail because thinking machines require a really really really advanced economy and supply chain to be created and continue to operate i don't know if this is true and i don't usually say things i don't know are true but this is an amazing stat if true apparently a study just came out that says streaming porn consumes more electricity than the netherlands which i don't know if it's true or not but it passes my first fermi estimate as plausible the point being thinking machines need a lot of energy to operate and energy needs a functioning ecology right like a good track i think would be machine learning systems that help us problem solve strategies to combat climate change that don't get mired in our global geopolitical divisions so if if thinking machines can help us think of things that kind of everybody wins solutions iowa not a blue state but one of the highest producers of renewable energy per capita because they figured out farmers like wind farms because they can lease it and still put cattle out to pasture and so everybody wins in that situation so if machine learning can help us advance our response to climate change in things like energy production the reduction of fossil fuels in ways that don't trigger market-centered personalities then that could be a really good development or we accidentally make ai that destroys human civilization as it goes on some mundane tasks you know it's like dear computer please create as much fuel as possible computer goes i think people are made of fuel right like that's the that's the dark side hey science mike hey william um by the way it's william matthews here with us in other truly serious news uh i know you're a big sci-fi fan and uh i was wondering if you can talk about the impact that star trek has on our culture yes and uh since the you know the revival of all the new star trek series discovery and now the new picard one that's coming out uh you know there's a big billboard on franklin and highland uh about that i was wondering um what do you think is gene roddenberry's unique vision and is it able to speak to our current socio-political climate at the moment okay i don't usually say controversial things but i gotta be real i was a grown-ass man before i could even tolerate star wars i'm just being honest star trek all the way because i'd watch star wars and be like look how big that star destroyer is it's like number one does it actually destroy a star why is it called a star destroyer number two is there a technical manual that describes how hyperdrive works because i've got a technical main right here that describes how warp drive works and i in order to appreciate star wars i had to learn that star wars isn't science fiction it's lord of the rings in space it's just in science in star trek is just magic how does it work how we need it to work to tell the story right whereas star trek is like the biggest actual sci-fi universe in the world right so yeah i told you it's controversial because some people are like screw you science mike i love star wars about equally to the pro star trek room and then 80 percent of the room is like what are they talking about i mean i think that i like to eat popcorn and watch the movies right um but here's why i'm all in on star trek still star trek does what science fiction is supposed to do and that's inspire a collective imagination about what is possible they showed us on screen what it looks like to move past a market-based economy into an intergalactic civilization that's focused on non-exploitive exploration there's a prime directive in the star trek universe that says if you come across an indigenous culture leave them alone fellow europeans that would have been a great message to come out and say the 1400s so we also know that the actual space program is influenced by children watching star trek and then imagining what could be possible and that's a that's a well understood thing of course by the way everybody knows sci-fi creates science in a very real very charitable very thesis-able way but what i love the most about star trek is this was like a program that was on broadcast television in the 60s that had an on-screen interracial kiss at a time when that was like nope right now don't i understand like in its own way every old media is problematic but star trek has had a legacy in every iteration of every program of looking past the current taboos in our social existence and in our society and imagining something different and the way they do it is not to sensationalize it but to make it normal and mundane and every day so in a country like the united states where you cannot say the word socialism without boomers being triggered star trek showed us a currency-less society right after mccarthyism witch hunts were happening in this country so gene roddenberry's approach of de-escalating what could be by making it look normal tomorrow in a place where we want to be is the power of storytelling is what art is so well suited to do in our lives it's take us from where we are to what could be without having to imagine every step today right and we are storytelling animals and um statistically the the primary form of storytelling for most of human history has been religious traditions they are somewhat falling out of favor among modern white people um and that's leaving in my opinion a big gap like i think we're we're moving away from a lot of religion for a good reason because it was exploitive and oppressive and gross but we need stories to rally around and we need stories that can help us imagine what could be and i actually think star trek is one of the best examples of that ever also just for the record my personal favorite star trek is star trek the next generation and if that's not yours you're just [Music] wrong hi hi thanks for being here love your work the uh the church uh put the idea of an afterlife in my head when i was very young and uh for a long time uh i've been probably like the last 10 years or so i've been afraid of dying because i'm not sure that it's there i'm wondering if you can help me resolve this existential crisis i've been having for a while now yeah first of all like i don't this helps you this helps me when i was going through the what if i'm wrong and i haven't figured out a more true version of reality i'm just going to hell because of where i lived in the context where i live i thought no one had ever thought that before and the most exciting thing about my work the last few years is to know how common this experience is like it's not weird it's not abnormal it is an experience millions of people around the world are having right now so as i've kind of interrogated that it's just brain stuff which everything is brain stuff so it's not that comforting but it helps me understand the way we experience our lives and the way our brains work are very different so right now north of 90 of the people are really focused on what i'm saying right now that's amazing because we are not natural focusers as a species um our consciousness bounces around between different brain structures and different uh sensory patterns moment by moment based on what the low level parts of our brain think best helps us survive in this moment and it basically means that if you look at the structure of our brains uh as you go towards the outside surface you have the more recent stuff and evolutionarily speaking and you go deeper into the brain you have more ancient stuff and the more ancient stuff is more active when you are younger so when you're a very small person you learn about how to relate to other people i mean less than a year old and that wiring kind of gets set and is almost but not quite permanent and so you learn what allows you to exist in community and then just after that then you start layering on a set of social assumptions for lack of a better word that define your reality through your community so if you grew up in the church you didn't go through a period of cerebral cognitive processing to arrive at a set of beliefs right was anybody else like crushed when they found out santa was not real was that just me i was like depressed i was also like 13. um like my parents kept trying to tell me i'd be like wait that's not true i just realized people listen to this show with their children and on some freeway some child just went mom might have to put a trigger warning on this one right up top warning this episode contains discussions of saint nicholas okay so when we're taught as children that there is an afterlife that rug doesn't get pulled it doesn't matter what we intellectually assent to later just because our cognitive faculties can move to a new belief system those more ancient social structures in our brain don't just follow along the reason life is so frustrating as humans is because of our giant brains that don't agree with each other all the time right like most of the time your prefrontal cortex is running the show unless it's bored right so when you like daydream and drive which you shouldn't do but everyone does your brain hands over the control of your vehicle to your basal ganglia which sounds dirty but just means deep structures in your brain and it's like pretty good at like not running into things laterally but brake lights that's not a thing to the reptile brain right so you're daydreaming brain you run into people right so that tension by the way for basal ganglia is driving and someone cuts you off instead of your prefrontal cortex jumping in to take hold of the situation it's too slow your amygdala jumps in and does this right that wasn't your thinking brain that was your crocodile brain going right this tension between these brain structures is what defines our existence my wife is smiling because her amygdala is very active behind the wheel um see that it's true she's not ashamed you can't think your way out of the existential crisis of the afterlife so the bad news is there's literally no information i can offer you right now that fixes that existential set of angst what in my experience actually does it is deep intensive therapy and establishment of new communities so the other thing that happens to us post-post-post whatever religious people is we had some ready-built community that was shitty in really serious ways but it also meant there was always a casserole somewhere it will help your brain transition if you enmesh yourself in some new form of community which is almost like worse to say to people in 2019 because we're so mobile and we're so digital and we're so disconnected but i i didn't get over what happens when i die by thinking through it or reading through it it was therapy and a lot of red wine with friends [Music] the tough thing is like with serious real questions like that the jingle is like so i was glad for once i didn't have to do it thank you hi mike hey joyce so that question and a prior question have led me to a question that i have not formulated well but what is the sort of the emotional the psychological the neurological thing within us that causes community or or vulnerable interaction with other people to either help us thrive more or not based on humanity people who are more isolated and don't want that connection and then what happens to them psychologically emotionally versus and i don't want to make this a gender thing there seems to be sort of a you know a bias but i don't think it is gender i think there is a vulnerability that some people are more drawn to community and emotional connection than others aren't and what does that do to us psychologically and emotionally and healthy wise um this one's hard this one's really hard there's too many different kinds of people really simple spectrum introversion extroversion and um ambiversion neurologically if you're an extrovert your brain is not very sensitive to stimulus so if you're by yourself your brain is so bored because there's nothing to entertain it if you're an introvert your brain is really sensitive to stimulus so if you're not alone your brain is like this is a lot and then if you're like most people you're not on peg to one side of that spectrum you're somewhere in the middle you're an ambivert it means like sometimes hangs are good and sometimes i'm tired i'd rather be by myself and that's just being a normal human being some people regardless of where they're extroverted or introverted have social anxiety so you might be extroverted and have social anxiety and that would be really difficult because it means when you're by yourself you're like bored and crave people but when you're around people it's confusing and overwhelming some people have um anti-social attributes in their personality where they don't merely find people stimulating they actively prefer their own company to the company of other people so when we talk about how to form community the problem is there's so many different intersections of brain structures and life experiences and disorders i read a paper we have all this no let me i'll get to that in a second i told you this one's hard i know it's hard if i can't build an outline in my head in four seconds while i drink water um the pattern of protestant no the pattern of christian people is indoctrinated codependents that's the biggest insight i've seen in the last few years is the way in which most people are socialized into codependent patterns of being with others which means we enter into relationships with a stunted set of tools for problem solving we tend to move often too rapidly into intimacy but then have no skills at coping with conflict and so in response to those patterns what we're seeing is people being more ready and more willing to set boundaries that are healthy or to go beyond that and just ghost people at the first sign of any distress i'm not judging that by the way i'm naming a thing that i see happening in sociological data here's the problem i read a bit of brain research that says when you cut difficult people out of your life too often you lose brain tissue and increase your risks of dementia later in life so there's like some level hold on stick with me because i can already hear the tweets don't take this out of context some people are toxic and dangerous and need to be removed from your life some people are like peas and carrots with you and just easy to be around so obviously these people stay in your life unless you're both co-dependent don't realize it then you've got some work to do these people get out of your life but what do we do with all these people in the middle what we're finding this is the research i'm telling you is it if you're not careful about where you put this line and you cut too many people out of your life it appears in the research that that's bad for your brain that some degree of challenge in relationship is actually good for you i can't tell you where to draw that line i actually think that would be problematic what i'm saying is have some awareness of that difficulty and that framing because once you do i've reached a point in my life where i will be in relationship with anyone who's mutually supportive and who is doing their work to grow that's my criteria they're mutually supportive and they're doing their work to grow and people can be in really rough stages of process and still fill those criteria but when i learn that someone is exploitive or manipulative or gaslighting these are people that i'll give a chance and i'll give a second chance but then at some point i say not only do i think you're causing me harm in the relationship i actually think i'm enabling you by my continued presence and not addressing this problem so to get all that framing to the question of vulnerability what i have found since 2012 when i had a crazy mystical experience on the beach and started telling friends is i lost a lot of friends so many friends but then i made new friends and what was amazing with my new friends was that i could talk about whatever i was experiencing and they liked me that there was not some premeditated filter by which i couldn't discuss my own lived experiences and so what i've been doing since then is just continuing to do the work of being honest and genuine about my experiences and the people that don't judge me are the ones that i really become close friends with and then i do that with them they tell me about their experiences you know i'm science mike so people all the time want to talk to me about like their crystals or past lives or whatever and uh and then they're like and now tell me is that real and i'm like no i won't tell you if that's real because being your friend is more important to me than trying to get you to subscribe to my epistemology and at least in my experience this era of honesty of admitting when i'm happy and when i'm sad i don't know how many episodes ago it was but i said on our podcast that i'd been struggling with suicidal thoughts again for the first time in a long time and that was a scary thing for even me to share and william was there and hillary was there and michael was there and they all held that with such grace and dignity and non-judgment and then all your letters started to arrive and i read letter after letter after letter of a person no one lecturing me no one telling me what i should do just people saying that they've been there and that they care for me and you know how i'm taking like a medical break right now like i stopped all podcasting for a while and now i'm easing back in the reason i can do that is because way back then all of you wrote me letters and said if you need to ever take a break take a break as long as you need we'll wait so you gave me the confidence to do something that was good for me and i think in this framing of there are toxic people and there are easy people and there's difficult calls in between that ultimately vulnerability and honesty inspire lasting genuine relationships if we're mindful of codependence [Music] which hold on we're going to wait on questions because ask science mike is brought to you by a couple of wonderful sponsors so if you don't know this is real kiwiko i'm actually doing ads live for the first time ever are you so excited for the first live ads these are kiwi crates these are boxes this is a tinker crate this is a doodle crate and what you do is if you sign up for kiwi code they send these in the mail every month to your kids or now to you they have adult versions now not like adult adult but like stuff for grownups and so kiwi helps you and your family learn about science technology engineering arts and math and you can go to kiwico.com what slash science science mike something we'll we'll fix that in post but here's what i want to do uh i brought these crates these were mailed to my kids but they're not getting this month because i'm going to give them away tonight to anybody who wants a kiwi crate so you get a kiwi crate and you get a kiwi crate so just go to kiwi just go to the show notes at sciencemike.com to find the link to take you to kiwico and they will give you your first month absolutely free with no pressure or obligation also our last question we talked about codependence and difficulty with psychological things this is hard to do live uh but this is actually serious there's a company called better help which i've been using for my therapy here's why i live in los angeles most of you live in los angeles when i drive to my therapist's office this is real i have panic attacks trying to park so i would spin in my 50-minute session 35 minutes de-escalating from parking and getting lost in traffic i actually one week got so upset that i got out of my car on wilshire boulevard and just left it because i was trying to make a left turn and i couldn't and someone honked at me and i felt i'm the kind of person if yell at me in traffic i believe you so i got out of my car and it was amazing the guy stopped his car and was like are you okay and he like helped me back in my car but um so i figured out like therapy is great but sometimes even trying to get therapy when we're in really difficult states is more work than we can do and so better help you do therapy on your phone on your computer through an app it's an absolutely amazing service they have over 7 000 licensed counselors in the united states available worldwide who are real counselors and their services are also available on a sliding scale which is the main reason i accepted them as a sponsor because mental health services should be available to everyone who needs them it's secure it's safe it's affordable and uh you want to learn more about kiwi co or better help just go to asksciencemike.com episode 200 and click on the show notes so i when i lost my faith went into um what i call my angry atheist phase where 30 years i kind of spiraled um until my mom pointed out that i was basically an atheist fundamentalist and i was like oh okay um and that knocked me out of it but since then i've found like that i've avoided anything that is makes me angry like that just out of fear of that happening again with something else do you have any advice for how to tell what to legitimately get angry about and what is not that important or what is just drama every feeling every time is important every feeling every time is important what i've been learning about myself last few years is that there's some feelings that i think are good feelings and there's some feelings that i think are bad feelings so growing up as an evangelical i was taught that happiness was a good feeling and sadness was a bad feeling so i would try to be happy and not sad so i started to feel sad i would do something to not feel sad in my case typically barbecue which like uh i went through a period of morbid obesity using barbecue to not feel sad right grief was a no-no i was never allowed grief anger never i was able to put on sort of a a saccharine version of my personality for years where i presented as a mostly positive person who just occasionally had explosive anger outbursts but i'm learning every feeling matters every time but the fact that feelings matter doesn't mean my anger is important but i'm still responsible for what i do when i'm angry back to atheism some people become atheists because they move to a new understanding of reality and it's a cognitive exercise and those people tend to go huh yeah there's no god if someone else believes in god they tend to go hey you do you right there's no like stakes here if you believe in god so what other times there's an emotional component to deconversion and when there's an emotional component deconversion there absolutely is still a rigorous cognitive process that takes people from theist to atheists but if there was that and some deep hurt in a religious context that deeper brain structure we talked about earlier it's still angry and then it starts venting through our new cerebral belief system the answer is never to say like when is this feeling okay the answer is to learn to live with and accept and appreciate our feelings and what they're telling us i'm still not good at anger i am working on it i've gotten okay and if i'm angry for someone else i've always understood anger to be somebody throwing things or shouting or making physical threats and the first time i saw hillary mcbride get angry i was like what the [ \_\_ ] was that because hillary sat still and quietly and her eyes got kind of steely and she waited while other people were talking and then she said may i speak yes and then hillary check this out she told people that she was angry and why she was angry and then said thank you for letting me express my anger and it blew my mind because like not only did it correct something important in the space nobody was torn down by hillary's anger and we moved towards a better pattern behavior after it was shared i can't do that that is like some kind of black belt feeling stuff that i'm just not there yet um but i'm there with sadness i get sad all the time i love it so much i love it so much i was driving to a friend's office the other day and i looked over and i saw a potted plant had fallen over and it had dried out and died and i just thought about the impermanence of living things and i felt so blue that i pulled the car over i just had a nice little cry it was wonderful does that sound wonderful to you i see some people like are you kidding me what are you talking about i pulled my car over i was safe and i had a little cry here's what happens when we let our feelings happen instead of attacking them they teach us things our feelings aren't there to like wrestle away control our feelings are there to teach us our feelings have been around so much longer than intellect they've been solving problems for billions of years as i watched that plant and cried i realized i wasn't crying about the plant at all that i was really sad that i had stepped down from the liturgist podcast and if i would have just taken that and pressed it down because i had a meeting to be at instead of giving my feelings and space to tell me something your feelings are going to come up sooner or later the more you push them down they'll finally say okay if that's how you want to do it then your feelings will come storming through your mind and take over so it's better i'm learning to stop and give them the space so in like your situation like when is the anger okay always but what we do with our feelings according to hillary is we sit with them first and our feelings scare us because they come up so intensely don't they they really a feeling can feel like it's going to just knock you over i never grieved because if i would stop and think about the person i lost i wondered if i would just start screaming if i would lose my mind the feelings were so strong i felt like there was no choice but to put them away but what what is amazing about our brains is our feelings they start taking off like this and it's so fast it seems like they're just gonna launch us out of our minds and out of our sanity and what actually happens is it's just the beginning of this gentle wave if you learn to just trust your feelings they kind of resolve back out and on the other side of that wave that might be 30 seconds it might be 10 minutes it depends on what your feelings have to tell you that day is this amazing peace and clarity i like to cry more than i like to laugh now and friends i love to laugh and i'm just starting to be able to do that with anger and what i've found every time i'm angry my anger is telling me either you've been hurt in the past and i'm afraid you're going to be hurt again or what is happening is unjust and it cannot stand and i actually think that anger is really good one other thought about feelings that's really important our feelings don't happen in a vacuum everybody's feelings matter every time if i walk into a restaurant and i get really angry and i yell at a server a manager will come out and say i'm so sorry your meal is on us because i'm a white man but if a woman gets angry in a business meeting she's just a [ \_\_ ] right and if a black man gets angry in a restaurant police might come and end his life so the reason i care so much about her feelings is not only our personal experiences but when we all start to learn that every person's feelings matter every time then we can also become aware that we don't respond to every person's feelings the same way and that's actually one of the primary pillars of injustice and oppression in our society so i know it sounds like to some people like why are you talking so much about feelings i'm actually learning this is one of the skeleton keys to a more just and equitable world because if i'm not comfortable with my own anger how can i learn the myriad ways in which a woman's of color's anger is just and right and worthy it means i have to learn to accept my feelings so i can also hold other people's feelings in the right context that was such a great question thank you [Music] [Applause] i'm uh currently enrolled in a classical pentecostal university it's accredited i assure you and i am studying the bible um i i've managed to stay out of getting in arguments with my professors they're cooler than i thought they would be um but i'm getting into confrontations with my classmates um and sometimes they're public and sometimes they're difficult um i'm i'm a nine wing eight so i am mortified and um i was wondering what you know about the science of conflict what happens in me uh what happens in them why do my hands shake when i argue those kind of things and knowing what you know about that is there an effective way to have discourse around these difficult topics wow that is almost the perfect question at this very moment um so our brains do something really amazing um your eyes have a nerve called the optic nerve very clever name uh the optic nerve runs back from your eye into the base of your brain and then through pretty dense wiring gets back here to the back of your brain where vision happens but the optic nerve also has little tracers that enter the brain sooner than that and so um people who are neurologically blind meaning their eyes mechanically function but their visual cortex doesn't process information uh don't experience sight but we found in experiments that if you put them in front of a monitor a computer screen and you put a smiley face on it and you ask them how they feel they'll say happy if you put a frowny face on they'll say sad you put angry face on it they say angry these people are neurologically blind and don't have sight but something as simple as a cartoon expression of emotionality evokes an emotional response in them so what our brains are doing all the time is not only trying to understand and navigate reality in some really freaky ways if we had more time have some fun stage experiments but we don't have enough time but the world as we're seeing it is fabricated our brain is pulling in all these different pieces of information and painting a scene for us as it does that it is also building a reality of what you think is happening in other brains near you that's what's cool about being social animals so what we find in conversation and when people are near each other through body language people can basically teleport brain states so if you're talking to someone and you go i think i acted that well did that look like i was getting angry my face software is weird my amygdala starts to activate when i go the other person's amygdala starts to activate too and because we are without question the most dangerous and violent animal on the planet when another human is angry it does you well to pay attention because before we had hashtags and before we had language we tended to just attack and kill one another which is why we get cold hands and shaky hands it's not only an adrenal response that can create the shakes our capillaries start to restrict to reduce the amount of blood towards the outer part of our bodies in case we are injured or lacerated in combat we bleed less but your ancient brain doesn't know the difference between a discussion with colleagues that's getting a little heated and another pre-agreed hominid about to strike you with a club to the low level of the brain the same thing is happening this led me to believe for years that clearly the answer was always avoid anger at all costs and that is wrong it turns out that displays of anger can actually correct abusive behaviors more quickly than anything else when someone's really acting in exploitive or oppressive ways an anger display can make their brain do the math of is this work worth continuing in a way that rational conversation won't displays of anger have a role to play in conflict resolution the difficulty comes into play is if we get in a mutually escalating cycle of anger because the amygdala is expensive it takes so much blood flow to get that part of your brain doing what it does to produce anger it starts to lessen blood flow to other regions of the brain especially the temporal lobes where language happens it's very difficult to be angry and communicate clearly with language at the same time you can with practice but it's neurologically taxing and if you're doing both of those things you don't have the neurological energy left to also learn so if you can get angry and speak persuasively you can do that but you cannot get in a posture where you can learn from what the other person is doing over time you actually reduce the number of chunks or working memory fragments you have as a person when trauma is deep the first working conflict resolution is to start to address our own trauma not that your trauma's wrong not that an anger response in reaction to past trauma is wrong it is not but to be able to enter in a state where if the goal is actually to learn from the other person and they from you you can get you can have displays of anger but you can't get into an escalating mutual anger spiral because the brain only takes that one place just because it's ancient software so for me what i'm learning is when i'm getting angry to listen to take a moment i might even say to someone i'm starting to feel angry can i have a moment to process that and that person goes okay sure okay and then i think what what is coming up right now what is hitting me and then i do the exercise we just all did together i take breaths with a a four count exhale as long as i need to de-escalate myself to be able to engage and listen again that's one pattern that's available in like a workplace in those kind of discussions but the reason your hands are shaking and the reason they're cold and the reason we got butterflies in our stomachs is because your body is getting ready to fight even though your brain at least your thinking brain hasn't even entertained the possibility [Applause] okay so that was our last question say it with me oh here's what i'm going to say this was amazing thank you for being here with me tonight thanks for not bailing out when it gets hard this room is about every question that's raised getting a non-judgmental sincere response which means we can't solve the world's problems but i think modeling that is really important and so even though like i literally my belly is burning right now because i was so anxious these are the skills we're going to need as a culture in the coming years to try to pick apart and tear down millennia of oppressive social structures so my friends may you realize that every feeling of every person matters every time may you face the challenges in your life and the truth that others tell you about theirs with boldness and non-judgment and uh well i can't wait to talk to you next week thanks for being here everybody [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]