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The Michael Shermer Show, 308. The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature (7)

308. The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature (7)

2 (1h 9m 38s):

You don't want your sister to marry them. So you have some apprehension. You feel that their, their essence is somehow tainted. And again, it's these two crayons that explain it, right? Because A, why do you think that the results of the brain are different than the results of, of the behavior that are completely logically identical? But if you believe that your innate essence lies in the body, and the brain reflects the body, then you think that the brain more likely to reflect on your hidden essence of who you really are and therefore speaks to your innate properties. And that's completely belonging, right? This is wrong.

2 (1h 10m 18s):

AEO neuroscience can tell you about acquired traits and about innate traits. There is nothing in seeing in the brain that distinguishes whether the trait is innate or not. But lay people assume that if it's in the brain, then therefore it must be innate. And if your essence is different and it speaks to your essence, and if your essence is different from mine, then you know, I don't want to associate with you and and so forth. So all these misconceptions are coming from assumptions about dualism, right? Mind is separate from the body and essentialism. This notion that the essence, the real essence is only in the body that explains why people have these misconceptions, which are pretty tragic.

2 (1h 10m 60s):

So in fact, this speaks to, you know, that there has been this attempt to try to make psychiatric disorders of disorder like all the others. So the idea was let's tell people it just in the brain. Now the surgeon general tried to do so, and the hope was we will combat misconceptions, we will combat stigma. But it turned to have mis to have fired, act backwards. And in fact, in some ways, stigma increases. And I think that this results explained why is it, why is it the case that stigma increases? Because you think that if you look at the brain, then you somehow magically look into the person's essence.

2 (1h 11m 40s):

And in fact they think that the brain is more likely to do so than other methods because they think they're also dualist. So again, there's two cranes. Explain this really unfortunate misconceptions that people have about psychiatric disorders. In the case of dyslexia, it's the opposite problem. So we know what dyslexia is, dyslexia can actually arise from multiple causes, but in the majority of people, what's wrong actually has to do with the processing of speech sounds and linking letters to sounds. So it's a lot about speech and a lot about sounds, it's a lot about knowledge of how to link them together.

2 (1h 12m 20s):

But when you look at lay people and ask them, what do you think causes dyslexia? They're telling you it's a visual problem, it's letter reversal that is really the real cause of dyslexia for which there is actually very little evidence. There might be some people for which that's the case, but that's certainly not the majority. So the question is why people assume that visual problems are more likely to be the true explanation for dyslexia. And the answer is you think that if the person really has such a serious disorder that, and they correctly assume that the disorder is innate, which indeed it is. So for it to be innate, it must be in the body and vision can be in the body, you can see to your eyes.

2 (1h 13m 1s):

But how can something like linking letters to sound, how can this abstract process could possibly have some innate basis? So how anything that has to do with knowledge and its manipulation has an innate basis. People think that is not possible. So they jump to the conclusion that, you know, it's that the problem is really visual and if in fact you know that the problem is what it is, which is processing speech sound and linking letters to sounds and you think can be real, it must be in the person's head. It's all an invented problem, which some people unfortunately still think. So you have these two competing misconceptions that are both wrong. On the one hand people think, oh, if it's visual, then it's really innate.

2 (1h 13m 42s):

Well, it's innate, but it's not visual. Or they think if it has to do with letters to sound correspondences making those links, which in fact that's mostly part of the problem, people don't think this could possibly have an innate basis. So it's kind of in the way that neurologists call these things, it's a double dissociation. You see how the same principles lead to opposite conclusions depending on whether people think a problem lies in the body or they lies in the mind, but critically that they make this distinction, I think is remarkable.

1 (1h 14m 16s):

Yeah, I thought of a good example of that from Adrian Raines spoke the anatomy of violence, and he makes the argument that it's all, it's all brain violence, brain driven, but how we interpret what is going on in the brain very much affects how we treat these people. So two examples I've used before, he starts off with Mr o Ft, Mr t who's this anonymous and middle-aged school teacher who suddenly, his wife, he's, he's married to a woman, already had a daughter, finds that he, he's being inappropriate with the stepdaughter. So he gets in big trouble for this and she, I think he, she turned him into protective services, child services, and he's evaluated by a psychiatrist and so on.

1 (1h 15m 4s):

And just as he is about to halt, be hauled off to jail for, you know, pedophilia, he, he pee's in his pants standing there like in the corridor with the psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist is like, what's wrong with this guy? This is bizarre. Let's get a brain scan. Sure enough, he's got a tumor in his orbital frontal cortex. So that's where the oft comes from. Oh, he's got a tumor. Oh, that's different. He's not really a pedophile, he's got a tumor, right? It's a, it's a medical condition. And then the, the tumor's retracted and he's fine back, back to life normal. And then six months later, wife finds kid porn on his computer, scan the brain again, the tumor's grown back and so on.

1 (1h 15m 45s):

Then Adrian Rain says, okay, so first of all there's, you know, okay, we don't think of him as like this evil pedophile, he's just a victim of a medical condition. And the second case is this young African-American male named Dante page who was convict, tried and convicted for rape and murder of a college-aged kid, woman in Colorado. And so he's on in the penalty phase of the trial. Adrian Rain is on the defense, ter defense to try to get him life imprison rather than executed. And his argument, which goes on for like three pages of this guy's background, young African American male was, you know, born of a single mom who was herself drug addicted and her mom was a drug addicted and involved in gangs, men coming in and outta the house who would beat up on little Dante page when he was a child, head injuries, you know, multiple ER visits because of injuries to the head and so on.

1 (1h 16m 38s):

And basically this guy's got no prefrontal cortex, you know, he's just bubbling up urges and violence and sex and he's totally outta control. But the way it's described for page after page, it's like it's, he's just a victim of a horrible environment, just terrible. I mean, you can't see it on a brain scan like you can a tumor. So rain's point is that it's all tumors, but you can't see the upbringing. Right. And that, you know, that we treat these people differently based on where we think the, the problem is located.

2 (1h 17m 9s):

Yeah, no, no, I, i I mean you can, I, I don't know if that would, that almost feels like the kind of experiment that one needs to do to have a vignette in which people are presented with two people that have some criminal behavior. In one case, the problem is localized in the brain and the other is distributed in the brain. And if you think about one's essence as this little piece of matter, you would actually make the prediction that even though both are in the brain, and if even though both have a physical cause, people would think that the localized one is more likely to be considered innate and therefore uncontrollable. So that actually is completely in line with what we know from intuitive psychology.

1 (1h 17m 52s):

Mm, interesting. Well, Adrian rain's long-term goal with this whole project is in a century or two from now, we will have the equivalent of the brain tumor causing the pedophilia behavior for everything people do. Yeah. You know, it's just this series of neural networks that's complicated and we'll have brain scans that can see these networks lighting up for everything. And that therefore it's almost a sci-fi, you know, Stephen k dick type novel where, you know, we can predict the violence before it happens, right? And, and nav 'em off the street before they commit the crime because of brain skins. Obviously there's ethical issues there, but that's the idea.

2 (1h 18m 30s):

Yeah. It, it raises again the question of free will, which is a is yeah,

1 (1h 18m 36s):

Well, right, because if, if you really think everybody's determined it's tumors all the way down, or it's background all the way down, whatever, then you really can't hold people accountable. Or maybe you can in a kind of pragmatic way, but really she just feel sorry for them if they're criminals, you know, they just had bad luck of having been born in this horrible environment or a bad, you know, tumor in their brain, whatever, just some genetic work that you and I didn't have. And that would kind of change the way you think about it. But as you point out in the book, research shows that people that think that like that tend to be less moral or they're more likely to say, well, it's okay to to cheat cuz you know, I have no control over my behavior.

1 (1h 19m 22s):

Right.

2 (1h 19m 23s):

No, but I, I think there's a, the deeper question is whether a punitive, you know, criminal justice system is indeed just one. And and that's a big question,

1 (1h 19m 35s):

Right? For criminal justice reform. Yeah. You know how we, you know, what's the point?

2 (1h 19m 42s):

That's where, where we are right now in the states. I mean, this is unconscionable.

1 (1h 19m 47s):

Yeah. Right, right. Okay. I was also, what else was I thinking about here? Oh, Thomas saws, you know, that that was, that phase that psychiatry went through or some, some sort of fringe psychiatrist like Thomas saw that it's, it's none of it's physiology or it's none of it's brain. It's all how culture defines deviant behavior or it down or defines it as deviant when it isn't really deviant, you know, so therefore it's the context in which the behaviors happen.

2 (1h 20m 15s):

I, I don't understand the argument, sorry.

1 (1h 20m 17s):

Oh, his argument is that what you and I might call a brain disorder, in fact is, is just defined by culture that way. You know, maybe 500 years ago, you know, the people, somebody schizophrenic, they were just kind of weird Uncle Joe and we just put him on the farm and he does his thing and he's okay. Yeah,


308. The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature (7)

2 (1h 9m 38s):

You don't want your sister to marry them. So you have some apprehension. You feel that their, their essence is somehow tainted. And again, it's these two crayons that explain it, right? Because A, why do you think that the results of the brain are different than the results of, of the behavior that are completely logically identical? But if you believe that your innate essence lies in the body, and the brain reflects the body, then you think that the brain more likely to reflect on your hidden essence of who you really are and therefore speaks to your innate properties. And that's completely belonging, right? This is wrong.

2 (1h 10m 18s):

AEO neuroscience can tell you about acquired traits and about innate traits. There is nothing in seeing in the brain that distinguishes whether the trait is innate or not. But lay people assume that if it's in the brain, then therefore it must be innate. And if your essence is different and it speaks to your essence, and if your essence is different from mine, then you know, I don't want to associate with you and and so forth. So all these misconceptions are coming from assumptions about dualism, right? Mind is separate from the body and essentialism. This notion that the essence, the real essence is only in the body that explains why people have these misconceptions, which are pretty tragic.

2 (1h 10m 60s):

So in fact, this speaks to, you know, that there has been this attempt to try to make psychiatric disorders of disorder like all the others. So the idea was let's tell people it just in the brain. Now the surgeon general tried to do so, and the hope was we will combat misconceptions, we will combat stigma. But it turned to have mis to have fired, act backwards. And in fact, in some ways, stigma increases. And I think that this results explained why is it, why is it the case that stigma increases? Because you think that if you look at the brain, then you somehow magically look into the person's essence.

2 (1h 11m 40s):

And in fact they think that the brain is more likely to do so than other methods because they think they're also dualist. So again, there's two cranes. Explain this really unfortunate misconceptions that people have about psychiatric disorders. In the case of dyslexia, it's the opposite problem. So we know what dyslexia is, dyslexia can actually arise from multiple causes, but in the majority of people, what's wrong actually has to do with the processing of speech sounds and linking letters to sounds. So it's a lot about speech and a lot about sounds, it's a lot about knowledge of how to link them together.

2 (1h 12m 20s):

But when you look at lay people and ask them, what do you think causes dyslexia? They're telling you it's a visual problem, it's letter reversal that is really the real cause of dyslexia for which there is actually very little evidence. There might be some people for which that's the case, but that's certainly not the majority. So the question is why people assume that visual problems are more likely to be the true explanation for dyslexia. And the answer is you think that if the person really has such a serious disorder that, and they correctly assume that the disorder is innate, which indeed it is. So for it to be innate, it must be in the body and vision can be in the body, you can see to your eyes.

2 (1h 13m 1s):

But how can something like linking letters to sound, how can this abstract process could possibly have some innate basis? So how anything that has to do with knowledge and its manipulation has an innate basis. People think that is not possible. So they jump to the conclusion that, you know, it's that the problem is really visual and if in fact you know that the problem is what it is, which is processing speech sound and linking letters to sounds and you think can be real, it must be in the person's head. It's all an invented problem, which some people unfortunately still think. So you have these two competing misconceptions that are both wrong. On the one hand people think, oh, if it's visual, then it's really innate.

2 (1h 13m 42s):

Well, it's innate, but it's not visual. Or they think if it has to do with letters to sound correspondences making those links, which in fact that's mostly part of the problem, people don't think this could possibly have an innate basis. So it's kind of in the way that neurologists call these things, it's a double dissociation. You see how the same principles lead to opposite conclusions depending on whether people think a problem lies in the body or they lies in the mind, but critically that they make this distinction, I think is remarkable.

1 (1h 14m 16s):

Yeah, I thought of a good example of that from Adrian Raines spoke the anatomy of violence, and he makes the argument that it's all, it's all brain violence, brain driven, but how we interpret what is going on in the brain very much affects how we treat these people. So two examples I've used before, he starts off with Mr o Ft, Mr t who's this anonymous and middle-aged school teacher who suddenly, his wife, he's, he's married to a woman, already had a daughter, finds that he, he's being inappropriate with the stepdaughter. So he gets in big trouble for this and she, I think he, she turned him into protective services, child services, and he's evaluated by a psychiatrist and so on.

1 (1h 15m 4s):

And just as he is about to halt, be hauled off to jail for, you know, pedophilia, he, he pee's in his pants standing there like in the corridor with the psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist is like, what's wrong with this guy? This is bizarre. Let's get a brain scan. Sure enough, he's got a tumor in his orbital frontal cortex. So that's where the oft comes from. Oh, he's got a tumor. Oh, that's different. He's not really a pedophile, he's got a tumor, right? It's a, it's a medical condition. And then the, the tumor's retracted and he's fine back, back to life normal. And then six months later, wife finds kid porn on his computer, scan the brain again, the tumor's grown back and so on.

1 (1h 15m 45s):

Then Adrian Rain says, okay, so first of all there's, you know, okay, we don't think of him as like this evil pedophile, he's just a victim of a medical condition. And the second case is this young African-American male named Dante page who was convict, tried and convicted for rape and murder of a college-aged kid, woman in Colorado. And so he's on in the penalty phase of the trial. Adrian Rain is on the defense, ter defense to try to get him life imprison rather than executed. And his argument, which goes on for like three pages of this guy's background, young African American male was, you know, born of a single mom who was herself drug addicted and her mom was a drug addicted and involved in gangs, men coming in and outta the house who would beat up on little Dante page when he was a child, head injuries, you know, multiple ER visits because of injuries to the head and so on.

1 (1h 16m 38s):

And basically this guy's got no prefrontal cortex, you know, he's just bubbling up urges and violence and sex and he's totally outta control. But the way it's described for page after page, it's like it's, he's just a victim of a horrible environment, just terrible. I mean, you can't see it on a brain scan like you can a tumor. So rain's point is that it's all tumors, but you can't see the upbringing. Right. And that, you know, that we treat these people differently based on where we think the, the problem is located.

2 (1h 17m 9s):

Yeah, no, no, I, i I mean you can, I, I don't know if that would, that almost feels like the kind of experiment that one needs to do to have a vignette in which people are presented with two people that have some criminal behavior. In one case, the problem is localized in the brain and the other is distributed in the brain. And if you think about one's essence as this little piece of matter, you would actually make the prediction that even though both are in the brain, and if even though both have a physical cause, people would think that the localized one is more likely to be considered innate and therefore uncontrollable. So that actually is completely in line with what we know from intuitive psychology.

1 (1h 17m 52s):

Mm, interesting. Well, Adrian rain's long-term goal with this whole project is in a century or two from now, we will have the equivalent of the brain tumor causing the pedophilia behavior for everything people do. Yeah. You know, it's just this series of neural networks that's complicated and we'll have brain scans that can see these networks lighting up for everything. And that therefore it's almost a sci-fi, you know, Stephen k dick type novel where, you know, we can predict the violence before it happens, right? And, and nav 'em off the street before they commit the crime because of brain skins. Obviously there's ethical issues there, but that's the idea.

2 (1h 18m 30s):

Yeah. It, it raises again the question of free will, which is a is yeah,

1 (1h 18m 36s):

Well, right, because if, if you really think everybody's determined it's tumors all the way down, or it's background all the way down, whatever, then you really can't hold people accountable. Or maybe you can in a kind of pragmatic way, but really she just feel sorry for them if they're criminals, you know, they just had bad luck of having been born in this horrible environment or a bad, you know, tumor in their brain, whatever, just some genetic work that you and I didn't have. And that would kind of change the way you think about it. But as you point out in the book, research shows that people that think that like that tend to be less moral or they're more likely to say, well, it's okay to to cheat cuz you know, I have no control over my behavior.

1 (1h 19m 22s):

Right.

2 (1h 19m 23s):

No, but I, I think there's a, the deeper question is whether a punitive, you know, criminal justice system is indeed just one. And and that's a big question,

1 (1h 19m 35s):

Right? For criminal justice reform. Yeah. You know how we, you know, what's the point?

2 (1h 19m 42s):

That's where, where we are right now in the states. I mean, this is unconscionable.

1 (1h 19m 47s):

Yeah. Right, right. Okay. I was also, what else was I thinking about here? Oh, Thomas saws, you know, that that was, that phase that psychiatry went through or some, some sort of fringe psychiatrist like Thomas saw that it's, it's none of it's physiology or it's none of it's brain. It's all how culture defines deviant behavior or it down or defines it as deviant when it isn't really deviant, you know, so therefore it's the context in which the behaviors happen.

2 (1h 20m 15s):

I, I don't understand the argument, sorry.

1 (1h 20m 17s):

Oh, his argument is that what you and I might call a brain disorder, in fact is, is just defined by culture that way. You know, maybe 500 years ago, you know, the people, somebody schizophrenic, they were just kind of weird Uncle Joe and we just put him on the farm and he does his thing and he's okay. Yeah,