ASM073 Ask Science Mike LIVE at Wild Goose 2016

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coming to you from the wild goose festival it's ask sciencemike live

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life and this week it's a live episode the questions are unscreened the answers unrehearsed and the information accurate it's always a lot of fun and it's always a good time but we've got a show to do so let's get it [Music] started hey my name is kevin garcia i'm from atlanta georgia and my question kind of centers around um some stuff that uh you've discussed it on like the literature podcast before about lgbtq issues um in regards to what like science and psychology is showing us about gender identity and sexual orientation being formed a lot within uh in utero what kinds of conversation or topics can you bring up to congregations who are more likely to be conservative or even downright hurtful or judgmental or marginalizing those groups of people good question um and as you know i'm an expert in making conservative people feel comfortable oh wow uh yeah that's a that's a struggle i have so i can i certainly understand a lot about the science of the understood science the known science of gender identity and orientation formation uh like many things in the human experience it's an oversimplification to say that we are born with a gender or an orientation and it's also no simplification to say that it's learned behavior it's an intersection of nature and nurture i tend to think humans make more sense if you de-anthropomorphize them and you think of us more like animals and when you look at similar species of animal that aren't as culturalized you find that really and truly orientation and gender are both kind of constructed ideas that what the evolution and the biology of human beings leaves us with primarily uh is criteria by which we choose people we would like to stimulate our genitals with and everything else is window dressing right um and so for someone like me who feels very comfortably binary male very comfortably heterosexual i understand that that there's a huge amount of culturalization and socialization at play that is pretty unprecedented in the animal kingdom right so the more we study the more we realize like especially mammals will pretty much do anything to stimulate their genitals because it's a really powerful drive that evolution has rewarded animals that don't seek general stimulation don't pass on their genes and they fall out of the gene pool here's the problem with that argument for conservative people are you talking about evolution and epistemologically science isn't something they necessarily respect deeply and certainly hold as subordinate to scripture and their understanding of god so i understand like my wheelhouse the science of how things happen is a completely ineffective tool to convince conservative people that their attitudes about the sinfulness about gender and orientation are a harmful force in our world so what do i do instead i focus on what i know about the science of manipulating people and i understand that human brains are overwhelmingly palatable and manipulated by what story so i don't spend an ounce of effort trying to use science to convince conservative religious people to accept different ideas about gender and orientation instead i highlight the stories of people who have suffered or died as a result of the church's approach to sexuality so i completely bypassed the science argument for people it won't work for now for everybody here we talk about science that's a really like convincing thing that helps us learn about the world but that's i never make the mistake anymore of assuming other people [Music] have the same epistemology or the same respect for how knowledge is acquired that i do and the best thing i can do in every circumstance is start by listening to understand what assumptions they may hold so that i can communicate in a way that is neurocognitively palatable to them does that make sense yes right on thank you awesome that's a really good question [Music] hi my name is claire walters i'm from chattanooga tennessee um so i'm in yoga teacher training right now and um so we're really getting into like heart chakras and meditation and a lot of deeper stuff than i'd ever done in yoga just on my own so my question is a little bit two-part but both with yoga because two really kind of weird things happen to me in my practice and i have no idea why that happened so one thing that happened was in the middle of a yoga class we were doing the teacher said we were going to do a lot of heart openers which is your chest is open and your shoulders are back so um and they gave us you know some cues and told us that you might get emotional because of this pose because it's going to open up your heart well which is fine but it was kind of weird to hear that and so we did it and i was water works crying crying crying crying no idea why no idea nothing was wrong nothing bad but just because of that so i don't know why that happened and then the second thing that happened was in a different class um at the very end of the class we were meditating and laying in shavasana and um i we laid there long enough that i no longer felt my body like my fingers were together my feet were together but it felt like they weren't so i kept touching to see if they were but and they were but i had no sensation and i almost felt like i was floating yeah so why why did all that happen to me that's a great question thank you um i'm a meditation nut uh i'm too fat and inflexible to be a yoga nut but um that's not true actually yoga is very accommodating to all people even folks like me but uh i i'm actually just very lazy so i like to primarily center my practice around my mind and stillness um we have this assumption it's remarkable remarkable the similarity between post-enlightenment religion uh and kind of a modern neurocognitive approach to humanity they both are built on this assumption of a separation between the mind and the body right it's a fundamental assumption we kind of if you really think about how you look at you most people kind of think of themselves as like you know this like brain that's got little controls and levers and it's operating a body but you may not know that for example there are more neurons in your gi tract than there are in a frog's brain right you have you literally have a gut brain and your brain many of the neurotransmitter functions um and the excitatory inhibitory functions of neurotransmitters are related to signaling that happens where in the body it's in the body and you also by the way you can have neurotransmitter elements that happen in other parts of your body other than your brain what does this mean it means that our posture affects our cognition right so we're going to try this even everybody in radio land can do this as well the first thing i want you to do is i want you to just crumple up your body as much as you can cross your arms get your legs close together i want you to kind of bend over and as much as you can just go into a ball and i want you to stay that way for 20 or 30 seconds and i want you to pay attention to how you feel how you feel about other people around you how you feel emotionally and what you may find most people do is the longer they hold this pose kind of the more defensive and closed off they feel okay now try to do the opposite now lean back put your arms out put your legs out really relax get loose right hold your head up high maybe even look up instead of looking down and see how your feelings start to change your conscious experience and your emotional experience and you'll find that it affects your temperament how you hold your body so when you go into yoga and they you have this heart opening exercise you go into these very receptive postures and you've been primed by someone telling you something's going to happen so the beginning of this program i did a neuroscience trick i told you when you cheered you would get excited even though i told you you're going to get excited and for most people that actually plants the suggestion in their mind and they go for it right it actually works more than if i hadn't said that so it's the combination of those two things setting expectations and utilizing mind-body linkage creates those really powerful experiences your posture so when i when i meditate posture is a huge part of how i prepare and training the reason practice is so important meditation the the repetition of getting into your your meditative posture creates a conditioning that trains your brain to respond right so the reason i always sit in the same pose and ideally when i'm at home in the same place is i'm conditioning myself like pavlov's dog heard the bell and drooled i sit in my meditation chair and put my palms up instead of drooling i start to enter a meditative state it's training and conditioning now you mentioned that you got so deep into a meditative experience you kind of lost your sense of physical sensation that is totally normal when i get into a deep enough meditative state i actually lose my sense of having an observer at all it's total presence and it is one of the most neurologically beneficial things you can do is meditate enough to get into that state what science is telling us is not only does that encourage the formation of healthy brain tissue it allows you while you're awake to start start to tap into some of the restorative processes in your brain that happen when you're asleep in fact one study recently came out that showed the incredible incredible neurological benefit of a daily silence regimen of literally just sitting in silence escaping noise was restorative to brain function so what science is telling us as we look deeply is that the desert fathers and mothers were on to something that the idea that we are separate a separate spirit from a body or in modern science a separate brain from a body doesn't illustrate the human experience at all [Applause] [Music] so my name is caleb i'm from joplin missouri uh and my question is how do you ask good questions what does science have to say about that and like all the people that that i like really look up to and respect they just ask the best questions all the time and i always wonder how in the world do you do that that's my question man that's a good question i gotta be honest i do question and answer a lot and i've sort of developed a mental discipline wherein i i really rarely really feel like like usually about the third word i kind of know where i'm going with the answer and i still don't know where i'm going with this answer i'm real stumped how do i ask good questions uh i think it is nurturing an insatiable curiosity and um being multi-disciplinary um so i i try to read six to eight books a month lately with all the travel i've been real slacking off it's been three to four um but i i make sure they're from a variety of disciplines and perspectives i always try to read at least one book a month that i fundamentally disagree with um by someone i respect some the most valuable voices in my life are people i respect who disagree with me not on 30 of the things but 98 and a half there's a i have a friend who's a conservative evangelical pastor and he and i like we probably maybe agree on the color of the sky most days and that's it but i keep him in my life and i like to have lunch with him a lot because he challenges all my assumptions all of them and he agrees things that i literally think are harmful to the world and i believe things that he believes are harmful to the world but in that intersection that challenging it raises new questions so the greatest gift he can give me is to challenge an assumption i have with a premise i've never heard and i think that's what it comes down to because i'm thinking about the people i know who are asking the most interesting questions which by the way those are the people i try to spend the most time with and what they all share is an insatiable curiosity and they apply in a way that transcends discipline our society really encourages specialization but i think the renaissance was the thing for a reason that based on the way creativity happens in the brain it happens in something called your association cortices and those are subway stops between different neighborhoods of the brain and they take unrelated ideas and make connections uh and if there's nothing new under the sun right which is kind of this idea maybe there are at least unexpected connections that drive new insights so i think that's probably it's probably diversity and frequency of information intake i don't know i just made that up [Music] uh i'm mike i'm mike potter from millsboro delaware i want to thank you for all you do i've been following your work since the first episode of the liturgists in the newest dan brown book and soon to be released movie inferno the story revolves around overpopulation of the earth can you tell us what science says about overpopulation and what the response of religious people should be wow man yeah that's clap right after the question say hey you gotta clap when they ask the questions you clap later you're applauding for my answer and frankly i get too much ego validation already um overpopulation is a pickle because we have a really hard time figuring out what the earth's carrying capacity is because we make these assumptions about how many fossil fuels there are how much renewable energy how much water and then some engineer figures out how to triple the efficiency and the numbers all get lost right so like depending on your assumptions we're already way past the earth's carrying capacity uh or we're at less than half right um an interesting thing about overpopulation is the degree to which we're starting to think it is somewhat a self-limiting phenomena growth rates are declining in china and india right uh the developed nations are having this real pro you know it's so funny to me that like wealthy developed nations panic about immigration but we already know what happens with a wealthy nation that doesn't have immigration it's japan and it has a declining population at resulting economic calamity immigrants are actually the engine of new economic activity in developed nations so it's a really weird like self-defeating idea we got to keep these people out because we really need our economy to crash like what um let's read some economics man so partially uh hopefully as we're getting better it's really easy to be cynical about humanity's prospects especially this week i got to be honest i'm in a real dark place black men being shot hanging from trees in parks and now police officers mowed down i haven't been this cynical about our species in years as i am like lamenting this week but at the same time i do that and my emotions and my kind of limbic system are in the dumps i'm trying to remember what i've learned neocortically the data points and the data points tell me global violence is declining population growth is slowing famine and poverty are going down especially the most severe kinds uh and in some ways we're stumbling into solutions for some of our problems now that doesn't mean we like need to let off the gas i think we're moving far too slow on the most important issues that face the species but if we can create education and economic empowerment opportunities for women worldwide you just fix population growth you just fixed it because what do we know educated affluent women they have less babies too busy living their life right it's only uh in low education no income opportunity situations where women become so reduced in society that all they do is rear babies now of course that's the most important thing anyone can do but i am not nearly as concerned with overpopulation as climate change clean water and global poverty because those three things can shift our assumptions and shift the underlying levers and make the population we have now too much so i think the way you address overpopulation is the fundamental economic and environmental challenges um and not in something like mandated child birth rates because they don't work anyway and they tend to create all kinds of issues for female infants that's a really good question though [Music] hey science mike i'm zach from atlanta georgia hey sorry i'm shaking your hand over the radio i love it or the podcast it's not a radio but it feels like i like to say radio people listen on their car radios we call it a radio even when you're not using it to tune into radio waves all right but i mean if you're using electromagnetic energy traveling across a sync cable it's it's a similar energy so why not radio it's different frequency whatever that works so my question is um you've been very open about your journey from a faith community out and then back in we're a wild goose where a lot of people seek to connect they're on their own journeys a lot of people are on a spiritual journey in isolation so my question is as we build and develop more ways for people to step back in to a community that is spiritually centered uh what is from your scientific perspective uh the the benefits for people to to practice spirituality in community as opposed to in isolation oh yeah man that's a good question uh book plug time uh my two favorite chapters in the book finding god in the waves uh one is called the good book and it's about like why i like the bible again and the other is called take me to church and it's about that question uh and it's lifted from the shenandoah connor song take me to church so the the great thing about church is it is a community centered around spirituality which is also the worst thing about church here's why what you believe your spiritual beliefs uh neurologically are closely associated with your sense of identity which means for most people when someone threatens your religious assumptions they threaten your sense of self which spoiler alert human brains don't like right we like to be really certain about how we see the world because that means our observations line up with our predictions which means we're most likely to survive thanks to something called your orbito frontal cortex the other thing we know is evolution has primed us to be fearful of being ostracized from social situations and happy when we're immersed in community so we know for example when someone goes from not being in a faith community to in a faith community that is healthy for them they experience a shift in personal happiness similar to someone who moves from the bottom quartile to the top quartile of income that's phenomenal they tend to live longer they tend to get sick less they have these genuine physiological benefits why because their monkey brain their mammoth brain says i'm part of the herd i'm part of a troop i'm okay and that's an incredible benefit until your faith community becomes authoritarian abusive or exploitive and now the same things that made it so good for you make it terrible for you and that's why we have a thing now called spiritual ptsd because the same hooks in your brain that make church so good for you means when it goes bad it can be one of the most scarring things that can happen in my experience leaving my southern baptist church in a what ended up being a very messy mutual divorce was more traumatic than my parents actual divorce i spent more time in therapy dealing with that pain than i did the dissolving of my parents actual union and it's because we're a social species that's wired for spiritual experiences as to fundamental human experiences and church rests on both of those cognitive pillars so how do you know if a church works for you or not that's the important thing to me the church that's right for you will do two things it must do both of them in my opinion one a healthy church will affirm you exactly as you are so even if they love you and they say you're great but the only way you can be right with god is if you change your orientation head for the back door don't try to reform that place they will chew you up and spit you out with the best of intentions right your church has to accept you exactly as you are but your church also has to challenge you to become who you can be and i would even say a little bit theistically for me who god is helping you become right so your church must both comfort you and challenge you to be a safe effective place like if you just go and it's like self-help sunday and you walk you're like man i feel great every sunday i mean like it feels great to eat pound cake but it's not healthy you know what i mean like i pound cake every sunday and i do uh it's not good for your body right and the same way a church that's just nothing but like filling you up is isn't healthy for your soul you can't see the air quotes in radio land soul from the materialists so um yeah i think that's it it's your church has to be accept who you are affirm who you are and challenge you to become who you could be okay [Applause] [Music] hey man how's it going zach emery from zach's place is that two zacks in a row yeah man right off so what do you think jesus would think about psychedelic substances and can [Music] can psychedelics have a legitimate place in the christian church as a spiritual discipline full disclosure full disclosure that is the most commonly asked question every week on ask science mike and i have instructed andrew to not select that question and let the patrons vote for it so you just blew my cover in a huge way i would stop here we go science mike weighs in on drugs okay [Music] um i grew up in the 80s under the reagan drug war and i was science oriented already it's really weird a little southern baptist scientist and um so when they came and they told us about the medical effects of drugs what did i do man i just absorbed it like a sponge and as i got older with those sets of assumptions about what drugs did to human brains that affected how what i selected further research i had a bias and if you would have asked me that question a year ago i would have been like i don't know what jesus would say i would know science as you're burning holes in your brain that's a terrible idea in private conversations people i trust have been challenging my assumptions and encouraging me to read more data as you know i'm not a fan of pseudoscience or conspiracy theories so i tend to write that stuff off but i'm starting to see actual clinical information historical information that makes me think the government's relationship with illegal substances is not necessarily motivated out of a desire to protect the public you know the war on drugs and i hear some snap and it's a wild goose thing that the war on drugs whether intentional or not is a systemic war on poor people and especially people of color that substances especially like marijuana were literally put on the controlled substance list because someone needed funding so i'm in a state right now where i'm fundamentally reevaluating and trying to find research good research on these experiences and here's a problem because they are controlled substances there's not a ton of research which as an empiricist that's a huge problem because i don't just like make assumptions and if i figure out i'm making assumptions i usually like hit myself with a wooden spoon so what i do know is that there is a significant neurological similarity between some controlled substances and what naturally happens in the brain and spiritual experiences and i don't know what i think about that on the one hand is there something to the potency of our spiritual experiences the amount of work some of them are required the amount of meditation you might need to get to that zone or the amount of time investment you have to put in you never want like a spirituality tourism industry centered around substances but at the same time i don't know this for a fact but i suspect there's a gene called the god gene which is a really ridiculous like it's a great brand but it's inaccurate what the god gene is is based on its expression which is variable if you have a high expression of the god gene your brain naturally produces a neurotransmitter that acts like a low-grade psychedelic and based on the fact that my whole life there's been sort of this magical sheen to reality and i've like even as a kid experience god and as an adult like heard jesus talk to me and then seen this incredible light on a beach i suspect i'm a little bit high all the time neurologically and is it fair for me to go well if you're not having that you should just work harder to someone who doesn't have that same gene expression so i'm fundamentally like reevaluating how i look at those things here's what i'll say uh be careful so even if the science comes out and says that lsd or mushrooms or whatever are completely safe they're still illegal which means what there's no regulation or control in how these things are produced they're not made by qualified professionals in labs and chemists they're made by people googling things and when you're talking about substances are active at a neurological level that can be an issue and also remember all drugs all drugs what's a drug a drug is something other than food that affects the function of the body tylenol advil marijuana heroin all share something in common they change the balance between excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters in your brain and in any of them overusage can for a time or even permanently affect the balance and ratio of those neurotransmitters which affects the way you experience the world so you can substance spirituality your way to clinical depression for example so i guess my answer would be i'm more open than i've ever been still deeply skeptical and always advise caution that is the most legal fine print answer i've ever given in the history of ass science but [Music] jonathan garner from burlington north carolina good to see you hi so i'm a outpatient therapist a clinical social worker and often doing cognitive behavioral therapy yeah identify cognitive distortions and get past some of their stuff my question is is on a daily basis as enthused as i am about helping people do that as i've seen it help a lot in my own life um at what point do we start shortchanging people because the modern science everything's showing hey how much responsibility we truly do have over our own actions and the outcome of our own life and circumstances hence all the a lot of the stuff on the law of attraction and these things but at what point you know i'm assisting clients sometimes and i wonder like so in emphasizing this i see the results i know there's benefits but do i go too far and leaving out the spiritual and suggesting that hey this responsibility totally is on you right on good question um i love this snapping that's cool oh wow so cognitive behavior therapy cbt is by jam it's my favorite thing it's the way i regularly and consistently reprogram the flash ram of my own brain to make my life be how i want i discovered cognitive behavior therapy in high school i tried to kill myself and my mom found me and they took me to therapy and i thought the guy was an idiot so they took me to another guy and that guy introduced me to cognitive behavior therapy and explained the theory and the neuroscience and i got super into it so i use cbt to like get out of depression here's how cognitive paper therapy works uh first step become aware of your thoughts you think all the time but you just kind of unconsciously consciously think so there's a little mindfulness step where you step back and just become aware of your thinking and then as you learn to pay attention to your thoughts you like interrupt your stream of consciousness so uh if we tend to be really gracious with others and really hard on ourselves so if you're like oh man i'm really stupid in your head cogging baby there says you stop that you interrupt the thought and you say no you're not congratulations that's like the shortest version of cognitive behavior therapy that exists but that's that's that's the theory uh clinical trials have shown it to be remarkably effective for people that can pull it off and i might be the wrong person to ask like where do we draw the line because i don't like using cbt suggestions i mean i literally keep an evernote with the ones i review in the morning of the current cbd therapies i'm applying to myself there's this book called the happiness hypothesis that i love and it talks about human consciousness as being an elephant and a rider and your riders your conscious mind and the elephants the unconscious and what cognitive behavior therapy does is help you train the elephant like so no matter how strong even if my conscious mind is you know uh chris hemsworth really big beefy strong guy like the amount of influence through brute strength chris hemsworth can have over an elephant is insignificant it's really no different than my daughter they both ride an elephant they pull ours they want the elephant's like okay i'm gonna go this way but if you train the elephant instead of trying to force the elephant it's easier to modify its behavior and that's what cbt does so like what's the interplay between that and spirituality i don't know i mean sometimes i'm not sure what spirituality even is but i think if there's a methodology that helps people affect positive change in their life and feel better that sounds a lot to me like renewing your mind daily and having a life more abundantly which i think is is one of the most spiritual things you do because there's there's this very legitimate critique of self-help and therapy and and that there's we build this idol of self but if the reason we're becoming healthy is because once we're more healthy we're able to actually help other people more like that's the gospel that's that's uh that's the sick getting more well and helping others to get well so i i don't know i totally look at cognitive behavior therapy as a spiritual discipline it's a form of my prayer my meditation my interceding because it allows us to influence those parts of our minds that we can't directly influence our control really good question thank you yeah [Applause] [Music] hi mike my name is general schack from cookeville tennessee and i had a question for you about well i guess it starts with a very short story my husband is an elementary school teacher and we just moved on to a new big farm and on that farm there are a whole lot of geods and he was very excited to see all these geodes and brought them to show them to his students and was in the copy room with a couple of their teachers and showed the geodes to these two other teachers and he just sort of in conversation said to them god isn't this amazing i mean like just a thing like this may have been on our land for like a million years and this is awesome and so then the two teachers kind of looked at each other and kind of rolled their eyes and looked at my husband like in all seriousness and said you know please nothing is more than 2000 years old come on and so my husband was so hurt by this because he was so excited about the science of it and the excitement of sharing this with anyway he so i guess god where do you go from there i mean he because he went home and was just like what the hell like he was just so upset about it and so i just wanted you just to speak on that some about [Music] about anything about that you would you would want to say thank you well if you'd like resources on understanding why those geos are only 10 000 years i'd like to recommend ken ham and answers in genesis great resource for people uh that was that was snarky i shouldn't have done that um leave it in greg okay so i love modern art like modern art's my favorite like the more abstract weird everybody goes wait what is that that's the stuff i find the most evocative so if i go to a modern art museum with certain friends they go what is that you know what i mean just like yeah and [Music] i've tried to explain it but like if you don't see it you don't see it and if i uh wait for them to appreciate it to allow me to appreciate it then i'll never get to so i have this gift in that i was horribly bullied as a kid and i had to learn how to just like things on my own and not care if other people approved or not and that's led to some pretty strange destructive behaviors like wearing crocs in public and science t-shirts and stuff like that but on the other hand it actually uh is a pretty satisfying life because i'm always happy to share my insights and what i've learned and what i'm learning and what i'm unsure about but if somebody else is not in whatever i know the party's with me like if they're not coming to the party they just don't get a hat and that's their problem so if i'm going to spend energy trying to convince people of something the age of the earth is on my list of 1500 is like you know 1498. i would rather talk about income inequality climate change things that like materially affect the survival prospects of the species and climate change is related the geode is just as beautiful even if they don't get it you know what i mean so i think i think the biggest thing i've learned is happiness and fulfillment are on the other side of giving up the desire to control others and we don't think like none of us think like we're manipulative we want to control people but as soon as you like really care what somebody thinks you have a desire to control them you want to control what they think and i just don't care anymore like if you're like the earth is 10 000 years old i'm like okay cool i mean i don't i guess i understand that you could believe that don't hurt yourself you know what i mean like but uh especially in the south i i think the other part is curating clearing your closest relationships with people that get you you know what i mean so i live in tallahassee florida which uh is like like southern blue like it's this little blue county in a sea of red and you know everybody in the surrounding counties thinks we're like california liberal but tallahassee liberal is like california republican and i've just learned that i have a half dozen really close friendships there and that's just that's just the thing and the last thing i'll say this is really discouraging and people hate to hear it but geography matters one of my friends says geography matters who anyway i think sometimes you if it if it's dragging you down you can't get over it you have to go to a land where people get you you know what i mean like how long do you just now that's also a really privileged perspective because i'm making the assumption you can up and move and not everyone can so there's there's certainly a critique to even that idea but there's a reason i think i'm going to pack a semi this december and roll west you know what i mean like it's just there's a place where people don't think what i think is weird and maybe i don't want to swim against all the other fish all the time [Music] hi hi i'm anna register i'm a children's pastor in um franklin tennessee yeah um so my question is and my premise may be completely false so correct me but my understanding is that as we repeat behaviors and actions and thoughts we develop literally neural pathways like little paths in our brain right and it's why learning new things is really frustrating and difficult because myelination is literally creating the new pathways yeah reinforcing sure right okay so um i wonder how that process of myelination and creating sort of novelty in your own life which can be really frustrating how that translates to social memory and social cognition especially in light of the clear rampant racism in our country that's that goes so far back in our history what does it look like to change the social cognition of a society and it can that even be linked i don't know man you really should have just pulled the mic out of the stand and dropped it as you walked off the stage that oh i'm really comfortable with both parts of the question i'm not comfortable linking them so let's talk about brain science for a second it's one of my favorites brains like neurology and cosmology are kind of like like my peanut butter and jelly like they're just they're good they're delicious they work well together um but i also have to be honest that in neuroscience we're where cosmology was when galileo made the telescope you know like we're just like whoa it's not transparent spheres like so primitive so a huge percentage of what we understand about brain function today i feel like in 30 years you remember when we thought that um but kind of what you're talking about the detention and learning it's not just about how neural pathways get reinforced it's really that you have two opposing strategies in your brain for dealing with information limbic system and below tends to be very fast acting neurological circuits neocortex tends to be slow oxygen expensive expensive and when you your brain interprets a set of signals and sensory input is something familiar it passes it to the fast brain the you might have heard it called the wolf brain and then when it's like really puzzled and doesn't know how to proceed it's like oh well turn on the super computer you know what i mean but oh there's going to be such a drain on resources and it's that tension so as you face something novel repeatedly what you find is the brain's activity moves from the neocortex inward into the brain and that's when you have muscle memory uh those kinds of things so that's issue one about learning so there's this other thing about social learning and why we're so stuck in our ways uh you almost never hold individual beliefs almost never the primary function in the formation of human belief is social identity so what we found in studies is the labels you apply to yourself affect the way you absorb new information and you unconsciously reject information that subverts the labels you've chosen this is equally true if the label is republican democrat feeling the burn you know atheist agnostic baptist whatever you're going to automatically start to filter out information that goes against those ideas you will also in social identity formation often misattribute your motivations show me a conservative white person who believes they are racist show me bring them i would love to meet them i would love to meet them so when you call some of that who disproportionately may engage in racist behaviors if you actually call them a racist they shut down because guess what you just did you just present them with information that goes against their self-assigned labels and completely unconsciously it rolls off like water off a duck's feathers gone don't stick don't stick so um that's why uh like on the allergies podcast for example we're obsessed with storytelling storytelling storytelling storytelling storytelling so we did this episode 20 lgbtq and we had like 10 minutes of scientific argument and the rest of it was what stories right uh we did uh our first episode on racism in america and we brought on two people and we got them to there was information but they also told about their stories and experiences and people don't fight story and experience the same way that they fight other phenomena so if you want to change people's minds use stories arguments as soon as you engage in an argument or debate people's amygdalas activate and you're neurologically incapable of significantly engaging the neocortex while the amygdala is active so everyone's obsessed with what defending themselves are winning uh but if you keep the conversation calm and tell stories you bypass people's cognitive defenses and reprogram their brains right so uh like i i don't i don't do the all eyes versus black lives matter debate i don't do it as soon as almost does always matter i'm like okay i can't even talk to you right now because you just want to win but maybe i'll remember that person if i'm close to them and later one-on-one in a safe context tell them about my observations of things i've seen happen to my to actual people i know in my life with law enforcement with mall security with the billion indignities a day people of color face in america and that creates a completely different context now the reason i can do that why because i'm privileged i'm not directly affected so i also be very careful and say i'm not advocating that people who are under societal oppression or marginalization they need to watch how they communicate no right anger is the reasonable response but for me one step removed i'm an accomplice i'm not an ally allies can shred the treaty at any time an accomplice commits the crime and may go to jail too right but as that one step removed it's my job to create the safe space for someone who engages in a racial behavior to process and i can do that because of my privilege that's how you that's how we cash in our privilege to destroy the system that creates it i'm just staller from berkeley california my question is what advice or thoughts could you offer to people who are especially peachable of faith but people who are attracted to the tools of science but don't always register the difference between science and pseudoscience oh yeah um there's a book called the information diet it's phenomenal it's about in an age when there's more information there's ever been how do you tell good information from bad information in pseudoscience versus science specifically show me the data show me the methodology show me the peer review if you go to a site that makes lots of claims and it says studies have shown but there's no link to a study that's a red flag if they use scientific language in a way that doesn't me meet the definition of the terms so these these oils contain photonic energy no the no they no no that's not what a photon is you know what i mean this is this is a red flag so you you you go with trusted sources to build some foundational scientific knowledge and then you check references and you'll find overwhelmingly pseudoscience if they reference something it's like a geocities website um like the all capitals and like a diamond uh with an eyeball in it or whatever like it's just it's like really obvious tells um but we we're convinced by scientific language if we're not scientifically literate which is why i care so much about creating scientific literacy so that people can't be manipulated by suicides which by the way the greatest source for pseudoscience in our society is advertising right like what what's the thing that's in scope it's right on the label it's like looks like a chemical thing but like there's a there's like a lowercase p that subset which is not how chemical notation works but you go oh wow they've done their chemistry because that looks like chemistry class and so science literacy even helps us combat manipulation through advertising so check references and try to get a fundamental understanding of the basic terms [Music] so everybody out there in podcast land one last announcement i'll let you know that we're getting ready to announce the tour for finding on the ways this fall but there are two stops we already know about the liturgist gathering in september in denver and october in chicago uh we'd love to see you there tickets are on sale now go to liturgist.com gathering thanks for listening everybody and i'll see you next week science bike give him some love