Most Replayed Moment: Anxiety Is Just A Prediction! Rewrite Old Stories and Build Emotional Safety

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/c772d47af66204ed

Uh
The predictive brain.
Is this idea that I only pretty much know from you, I'd never heard it before.
When we say the predictive brain.
What does that mean? And what does it not mean?
So
When you are living your everyday life. Yeah.
Like right now. Like right now. So
Right now, I'm guessing that I'm saying things to you.
And um your
perceiving what I'm saying and then you're reacting to it. That's how it feels to you, right? Yes. Okay.
And that's how it feels to me too.
So we sense
And then we react.
That's the way most people experience.
themselves in the world.
That's not actually what's happening under the hood. Really, what's happening is that
The brain your brain is
Not reacting, it's predicting.
And
What that means is
If we were to stop time right now, just freeze time.
Your brain would be in a state
And it would be
Remembering
Past experiences that are similar.
To this state?
As a way of predicting
What to do next.
Like literally in the next moment.
Should your eyes move? Should your heart rate go up?
Should your breathing change?
Should your blood vessels dilate or should they constrict?
Should you prepare to stand?
Right.
movements and these movements the preparation for movement
Literal
Copies of those
Signals
become predictions for what you will see and hear and smell and taste.
And
Think
And feel.
So under the hood
Your brain is predicting what movements
It should engage in next, and as a consequence.
What you will experience
Because of those movements.
So you act.
First and then you sense.
You don't sense and then react, you predict.
Action
And then you sense.
So give me a
Example which brings this to light.
of how my brain is predicting
And then
Taking action.
Okay. So right now you and I are having a conversation.
And I'm speaking and you're listening.
And
you're what what what's really happening in your brain is that
Based on
Many
Gazillion.
Repetitions
Of
Listening to language.
Your brain is predicting literally predicting every single word.
That will come out of my
Yeah, okay.
And
How surprising would it have been if I didn't say mouth, I said some other orifice of my body.
that words were coming out of that would have been pretty surprising.
Because your brain is predicting.
Your brain is always predicting.
And it's correcting those predictions when they're incorrect.
And you know, I I have this um video that I often show when I'm giving a talk.
To scientists or to civilians
Giving a talk.
And I sh
I it creates a situation where
they can predict something
And they can s they can feel that a prediction is not just this abstract kind of
Thought it's
Your brain is
Is literally changing the firing of its own sensory neurons.
To anticipate
Incoming sensation.
So you start to feel
These sensations before the signals actually arrive.
For you to perceive.
perceive them. You start to have the experience before the world gives you those signals.
Uh I've read.
I think it was in your book, but it might've been elsewhere about the example of being thirsty.
Yes. So
Um
When you
um drink, so say you're super thirsty and you drink a big glass of water.
When do you stop being thirsty?
Almost immediately.
But actually it takes twenty minutes.
For that water.
To be absorbed into your bloodstream and make its way to the brain to tell the brain.
That you are no longer in need of
Fluid.
Because
Across.
millions of opportunities you have learned that certain movements now and certain
Um sensory signals now.
Will result in that
Mental state.
Or here's another example.
So right now keep your eyes on me, you're looking right at me and in your mind's eye.
I want you to imagine um a Macintosh apple, like a
Not a computer, but like an actual f piece of fruit.
Okay. Can you do it?
Yeah. Can you see it? Yeah.
Um
What color is it? Green.
Okay. Does it have any red?
No.
Okay, so it's uh Granny Smith apple. Yeah. Okay.
What does it taste like?
Like imagine
Imagine grabbing it. Yeah.
biting into it, hearing the crunch of the apple.
What does it taste like?
It's like sweet.
Like a little tart, maybe? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Is it juicy? It's very juicy. Yeah. Okay. So if I were imaging your brain right now, what I would see is
I would see
Changes in
the signal that is um related to neural activity in your visual cortex, even though there is no apple in front of you. And I would see a change in activity in your
Um auditory cortex, even though
You didn't really hear the crunch.
My mouth was watering as well. And your mouth is watering, and in fact
Every time you sit down for a meal
Your um brain directs your
saliva glands to produce more saliva to prepare
you to eat.
and um digest the food.
So
That usually happens in advance of even sitting down to a meal.
That is all.
Prediction.
That's all of that is your brain preparing itself.
for what's coming.
Um because predicting and correcting
Is a much more efficient way to run a nervous system, really any system.
than reacting to the world.
Here's another example.
Do you drink coffee?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you drink coffee every day at the same time?
Usually, yeah.
And are you one of these people that if you miss having coffee
At that time you get a headache.
I mean it's happened before.
Yes.
Well, I used to be
A person who drank a lot of coffee.
And um and I love coffee, but I don't drink it anymore. But I loved it and I drank it always at the same time every day.
And
If I didn't drink it, I would get um at that time of day, I would get a massive headache.
And the reason why, and this is true really of every medicine you take, every everything which
anything which affects your physiology, if you do it on a regular basis, your brain will
come to expect it. And what that means come to expect it is that
Coffee has chemicals in it that
Well
Constrict your blood vessels.
I'm everywhere.
But in the brain.
The brain is attempting to keep its to keep the
Blood flow.
Pretty
Constant and even.
And so
If every day at eight o'clock in the morning
you're drinking something that's gonna constrict your blood vessels.
Then at seven fifty five approximately, I don't know the exact timing, but a little bit before uh
You know, eight.
your brain will dilate the blood vessels.
In preparation for that constriction, so they remain constant.
And if you don't drink that substance, then you
have this big dilation and you get a very, very bad headache.
I was just wondering then about as you were talking, I thought you were gonna talk about how sometimes when I set an alarm, I seem to wake up like five minutes before the alarm. Yeah, sure. That's an example. Here's another example. Exercise.
Okay.
If you wanna
If you wanna play tennis better, if you wanna run a a faster mile, what do you do?
Trying
Train and you do the same thing.
over and over and over and over again.
And you get better and faster and you burn fewer calories, you get more efficient. Why? Cause your brain's predicting really well.
That's what muscle memory is. It's not literally a memory in your muscles. It's a memory in your brain. Your brain is controlling your muscles.
And so if you practice
The same
set of movements over and over and over again, you just get really efficient at them because your brain is able to predict better.
Mm.
Now, if you're somebody who's exercising because you wanna become healthier or you wanna lose weight, or you w right, you don't want to practice the same exercise over and over and over again because you will be
burning fewer calories because you're being efficient. That's the goal, right?
So instead you do interval training.
Right? If somebody's calling out to you every thirty seconds a different set of movements and you can't predict what they are.
Then you're
Y your brain will make a prediction, it'll be wrong, you'll have to adjust.
And so you end up burning more calories, and you end up throwing yourself out of balance.
um which we call allostasis. So you become dysregulated and then your your brain has to work to get itself back in again.
And so that's a different kind of workout.
These two different kinds of workouts are completely predicated on the fact that sometimes you want to be able to predict better.
Sometimes you want to be able to disrupt yourself and get back into the pocket.
Quickly.
Right.
So basically you're learning how to um
Take in
prediction error things signals you didn't predict and adjust to them.
What does this say about the nature of
Trauma.
And other mental health illnesses.
Like
Depression, anxiety, et cetera. Because is this a misfiring of my
Predictions. I say this because predictions reliant on something happening in the past.
and forming a pattern, like a pattern recognition system. So if I grew up and there were certain patterns
That are now
Not the case. So if I grew up and every time a man walked into the room he hit me.
And now when a man walks into the room and I'm thirty five years old, I'm getting that same sort of
prediction in my brain, so I've got a fear of men, for example.
Is this
Does this somewhat explain
childhood trauma and why it's so
hard to shake and why as adults we can sometimes have
Dysfunctional lives.
I would say
Is a general principle, yes.
Um
There are a lot of
You know, the devil is in the details, right? But yeah, sure.
Um so
Trauma is not something that happens in the world to you.
Everything you experience is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present.
So there could be an adverse event that occurs. You're in an earthquake.
Someone dies who's close to you.
Something bad happens to you.
Someone hurts you in some way.
Um, there could be an adverse event that is not traumatic to you.
Because
You're not you're not using past experiences to make sense of it.
As a trauma.
On the other hand
Something that
Is
could be like an everyday experience to somebody else.
to you
It links to a
A a set of memories
that are very traumatic. We're very traumatic. Those events were very traumatic.
Um, and so to you it is a trauma.
So trauma is not an objective thing in the world.
It's also not all in your head.
It's a rel the trauma is a property of the relation between what has happened to you in the past.
And what is occurring in the present.
Mm-hmm. So here's an example.
There is an anthropologist who works at Emory University, and she studies.
um people um in in a lot of different cultures and she studies trauma in a lot of different cultures. And there was this one
girl that she wro she wrote about a case study of a girl named Maria.
Um
Who was a young adolescent girl
And she lived
In a culture where
It was
more normative for men to
Physically
Be very physical with women and
And girls.
So
In our culture we we we would say it's physical abuse.
But in her culture
This is just what men did.
She didn't expi so her stepfather would would slap her around.
And
She didn't like it.
But she didn't show any sign of trauma.
The way she made sense of it was that men are just assholes.
It was very much a this is not about mi.
This is about them.
It's not pleasant, but she slept okay. Her grades
We're okay in school. She had friends. She didn't have any signs of trauma.
At all.
Then she watched Oprah.
And she heard all of these women talk about.
Having
Been
The subject of
Physical
abuse from their boyfriends or their fathers or
you know, their husbands
And she
Recognized the similarity.
In
The physical
circumstances of these women's
descriptions and and her physical circumstances.
And she also observed them.
Experiencing
Trump trem like
you know, symptoms of trauma.
And all of a sudden
She started to
Um, have difficulty sleeping, and she her grades dropped, and she had trouble concentrating, and she became socially withdrawn.
Her way of making meaning
Her way of
If you think about
Physical
movements as actions.
She made different
meaning of those actions.
And she experienced trauma.
Where she didn't before.
Now it
If you're somebody who believes that there is an objective world out there
We are
You know
Cause and effect. Yeah, that that really there was some kind of latent trauma in her and she didn't experience it before, but then it was like triggered and then she be you could tell a whole story like that. And people do tell whole stories like that.
But that's not what the best scientific evidence suggests is happening.
What's happening is that the physical
movements were the same.
The psychological experience of those movements was different.
Because
Experience
is a combination
Of
The sensory present the фізика презент.
And the remembered past.
And
The you need both.
in order to have a particular kind of experience.
So the way to describe what happened to Maria's trajectory was that
She experienced something.
As
An unfortunate
Aspect of
Like physical life.
And then it became
About her.
It became something not something this person was doing something bad.
But
This person was doing something bad.
To her.
Because of who she is.
And she was also shown how she should be responding to that by watching Oprah's show and watching these other
Yeah. Right. So it became
About
her as a person not just about you know her stepfather was an asshole.
And
If you think about it, what we do in this culture when when people go into therapy for trauma, right, is we're attempting to to actually
Reverse the narrative. So we try to teach people that.
It's not
when something traumatic happens to them
It's and I wanna be really clear what I'm saying, right?
I'm not saying that
When people experience trauma, it's their fault.
Mm.
I'm not in any way saying they're culpable for what's happened to them.
But sometimes in life
You are responsible for changing something.
Not because you're to blame.
But because you're the only person
Who can?
The responsibility falls to you.
And so
In this culture.
We try to teach people who've experienced trauma.
That they can experience those physical events that happened to them in the past.
In some other way.
And when they do
They no longer feel traumatized anymore.
My mind's a little bit blown.
For a number of different reasons, because it's a real paradigm shift to think that we are giving meaning to the thing that happened in our past, and sometimes that meaning is coming from watching other people give it meaning. And we're inheriting that meaning that Oh yes, that's called cultural inheritance.
It's like a cultural it's like a contagion.
So it turns out that
You know, there's there's one kind of old evolutionary theory, right? This is called the modern synthesis, where
Inheritance is really your genes.
You inherit in you whatever you inherit, you inherit by your genes.
And then natural selection, you know.
chooses some gene patterns and uh and not others, and and that's really how inheritance works across generations.
Most evolutionary biologists don't.
Don't hold that view anymore because
For the most part.
There are many, many ways to inherit things.
And a lot of what we think of as inheritance is really
More
What's called epigenetic, meaning it doesn't really involve DNA very much.
And I would say uh the way I like to say it is that we have the kinds of
nature that requires a nurture.
We have the kind of genes that require experience.
Before anything is wired into our brains.
And
Most of our characteristics work that way.
Very few characteristics work just by genes alone.
What always happens.
In a neurotypical
uh brain is that you're born with your brain incomplete.
Right? An adult.
Brain has
has us we we say that it's wired to its world. That world includes its own your own body.
Um but a baby
Um is not a baby's brain is not a miniature adult brain.
It's a brain that's waiting for wiring instructions from the world.
And from its own body, so your brain is wired for you to see.
out of eyes that are the exact distance of your eyes.
From each other.
If somehow, you know, magically we could transplant your brain into somebody else's skull.
You would not be able to see out of that skull. You would not be able to see out of those eyes because they're not in the right place.
You hear
With ears
Your your ability to hear
comes from signals that are shaped by the s shape of your ear.
So your brain is wired to hear out of these ears.
Not any ears, these ears.
Similarly.
You
As a baby, you are taught the meanings.
of physical signals.
You're taught.
How to make sense of these things. That's called
Cultural inheritance many things are
That we think of as hardwired into the brain are actually culturally inherited across.
Generations
That's how people survive.
In a particular
environment, you know, so like in the
eighteen hundreds and nineteen hundreds when explorers would go off and they would go off to Antarctica or here or there
And they would very quickly die.
They knew it live there, they live perfectly fine. H well, because they had culturally inherited knowledge.
We're always
Transmitting.
um knowledge to each other.
And
That knowledge
becomes fodder for our own predictions. So your predictions.
Don't just come from your personal experience. They also come from you watching television, you talking to guests, you reading books, watching movies.
Um also your brain
Like most um
Human brains can do something really fantastic, which is
You can take bits and pieces of past experience.
And put them together in a brand new way.
So that you can use the past.
to experience something new that you've never experienced before.
You talked a second ago about
therapists try and make you think about the past differently. But
I do think there's an underlying belief in our culture and society and on social media.
That
If something happened to you, almost like this Freudian approach of if this happened to you.
This is who you become.
And I was reading that book, The Courage to Be Disliked Over Christmas, and it kind of
It changed my view on this quite profoundly in an important way because it helped me to understand. I think it basically says that.
What happens to us doesn't create who we are. We use what happened to us and we apply meaning to it.
Which then determines the behavior we have. And really interestingly, in that, it means that many of the beliefs I have about myself.
Who I say I am, my identity.
And therefore like the ways that I behave every day, whether they're productive or unproductive.
Are actually just
Choices I've made.
To apply meaning.
To the past.
Does that make sense? It's it completely makes sense.
And I this is really this is such like a profound I don't know if the whoever's listening now understands what I'm saying here.
But
We said at the s start of this conversation, you go through life thinking you're a puppet and you're being controlled by what happened to you, who you are, your identity, but actually your identity is just this.
This construction of
Meaning that you've given to the past.
So to serve your purpose now, as it says in the book.
Yes.
I would say it slightly differently, but the message is the same.
I think um
There are
In the sensory present.
Right. There are sights, there are sounds, there are smells, some stuff's going on inside your own body, right? And
These signals are
Are going to your brain.
They have no inherent
psychological meaning. They have no inherent emotional meaning. They have no inherent mental meaning.
What gives them meaning
Is
The m are your memories from the past.
You are creating, you are a meaning maker.
Meaning
Isn't a set of features like a dictionary definition.
So
Meaning the meaning of this cup.
isn't that it ha it's made of metal and that I mean we certainly can talk about those features, but
The meaning of this cup in this moment is what I do with it.
So it could be a vessel for drinking.
It could be a weapon. It could be, you know, a flower holder. It could be a measuring cup.
The meaning
Uh
The vessel
Is what I do with it in the moment.
That's its meaning.
And
So
The meaning of the vessel isn't in the vessel.
А нецо нали і май.
The meaning is the transaction. It's the relationship.
Between
This the features of this vessel.
This object
And
the signals in my brain which are creating my actions. In fact
Even the fact that this is
A solid object.
The property of solidity
It's not in the object.
It's because I have a body of a certain type.
With certain features.
That makes
Me experience this as solid. The solidity isn't in me and it's not in
the object, it's in the relationship between the two.
That means
Everything.
Everything you experience
Is partly of your own making.
You don't have a sense of agency about it because it happens really automatically. It's happening
automatically now as we're talking. It's happening faster than you can blink your eyes.
But it's still
happening.
А мін
If you are partly, even if you even though you don't have a sense of agency.
You

Partly
In control.
And also therefore
Responsible.
For the meaning
That is being made.
And
When I said at the outset of our conversation that my goal was to try to
you know, as a science communicator was to try to explain to people that
They have more control over their lives.
They have c more control over who they are in any given moment.
Than they think they do.
To give them more agency in their lives. This is this exactly.
What I mean.
You
You don't have an enduring identity.
You are
Who you are in the moment of your action.
And
Actions are a combination of the remembered past, so stuff your brain is using to predict.
That's how it's
that your brain's assembling super automatically.
And the sensory present.
Right.
So if you want to change who you are, you want to change what you feel.
You want to change what your impact is on someone else.
You have a couple of choices.
You can try.
To go back into the past.
And change the meaning of what's happened before.
So that you'll remember differently, you'll predict differently in the future.
That's what psychotherapy is.
That's what, you know, heartfelt conversations at two o'clock in the morning are with your friends or whatever.
That's really hard shit.
Doesn't doesn't always work so well.
The other thing that you can do though is
If you realize that whatever you experience now
becomes the seeds for predictions later.
Then you can
Invest.
In creating new experiences quite deliberately for yourself now.
You can expose yourself to new ideas. You can
Expose yourself to people who are different than you. You can practice cultivating particular experiences.
Like you would practice any skill.
And that will
Any new
concepts you learn, new experiences you have.
In the moment, if you practice them.
They become automatic predictions.
In
The future.
take that and try and apply it to this example of this silver cup in my hand.
So psychotherapy would
Try and go back into the past.
And
Explain to me why this actually isn't something I should drink out of.
And then it could be other things.
Whereas what you're saying is another approach is if I go and get some flowers right now.
I put them in there.
I'm creating a new prediction for the future because I've created a new pattern in the present of this actually being
A vase for flowers.
And I can start to create a new pattern that
Silver cups like this one.
aren't just for drinking out of, they are also vases for flowers.
Exactly.
Okay, so I can either go back in the past and try and convince myself that the cup isn't a cup, or I can
in the present moment create a new pattern.
Which will mean that in the future my brain will predict next time it sees a silver cup, it won't just think drink out of it, Steve. It'll think pop some flowers in it.
Right. And remember, it's it's actually the thinking comes after the action, right? So
What will happen is
The next time that you are approaching a table where a silver cup might be, your brain will already be starting to prepare the actions to go get the flowers. Right. And then you will think.
Oh, right. I can use this as a oh look, there's a great vase.
Right. So in your brain it's
Action you're at first your brain is controlling it's preparing
The actions of the viscera, what we call visceromotor. So does your heart rate need to change? Do your blood vessels need to dilate? Do you need to breathe differently? It's basically
Anticipating the needs of the body and attempting to meet those needs before they arise. That supports your physical movements. Right. So if you're gonna
If you're walking over somewhere to pick up some
flowers and cut the stems and whatever that those are all physical movements that require glucose and oxygen and shit like so all of that has to get prepared in advance, milliseconds before the actions start to be prepared.
So it's not what you think determines what you feel.
It's what you prepare to do.
determines your thoughts and your feelings.
And the sights and sounds and smells and sensations.
That's how it really works.
under the hood. So meaning is in terms of what you do.
And then as a consequence of that it
meaning is a a consequ it becomes what you feel and what you think and so on.
So let me give you some specific examples then. So if I'm scared of spiders.
How would I go about overcoming
that fear of spiders using
Route number two that you described there.
So one of the ways that you change to change predictions, you can't just will yourself to change a prediction. I am really afraid of bees.
Uh.
I had a traumatic experience when I was five. I'm afraid of bees.
I know a lot about bees.
I'm actually a gardener.
And I
I
And I know a lot about the evolutionary biology of bees.
But when I am outside
If a bee comes around, my first reaction is to either run or to freeze.
Right? I'm afraid of bees.
I could talk to myself until the cows come home. It won't matter. I can't right. So what I have to do is dose myself with prediction error.
Meaning
I have to
I interact with bees.
In a way that
Changes my actions.
Which will change my lived experience.
And I can't just do it all at once.
It's not like
A good idea would not be for me to say
would not have been for me to um go to like um somebody who has beehives
And you know, put on a suit and go work. I mean, that would be like overwhelming, right? So instead
Maybe I don't run.
Maybe I stand and watch.
Maybe I get closer to a bee.
Maybe I plant
Bushes and flowers that be a lot.
To bring these to me.
So that I can sit.
And just be around them while they're buzzing and doing their thing.
Maybe I deliberately let myself get stung.
At some point, which I did.
But
You know, you're dosing yourself with
Your brain is making a set of predictions.
Those predictions
There are a set of predictions. That means
Your brain isn't preparing one action, it's preparing multiple actions.
So you need to prove to your brain that those predictions are
Wrong. Yes. So exactly. You need you are setting up a circumstances so you can prove to yourself that
Your predictions are wrong.
What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.