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From the Archives: Lisa Feldman Barrett || Surprising Truths about the Human Brain
The Psychology Podcast
Does the Mind Influence the Brain?
The mind is constituted as a set of mental features. It's like the psychological features, the experiential features in a given brain state or where the brain is in its state space to be technical. What you do in the moment, so for example, if I smile at you or I scowlet you or, you know, whatever I do influences what you do next. So, and that influences me. If I make myself predictable to you, then you are more predictable to me. And you being predictable to me is metabolically beneficial to me.
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Speaker 2
It's poetic. For sure. So yeah, well, this is a major theme of your book is that there are a lot of things that we can do to influence our mind and the patterns, you know, and which does change. You know, there's a reciprocal thing there. Well, okay, I don't get too implicit dualism here, but I wrote something on Twitter like seemingly innocuous comment, like it's very interesting to me that how, you know, it's not just as though the brain produces one mind, it produces multiple minds. And it's really interesting to me how through the course of human evolution, you know, some of these minds evolve for different purposes. It's amazing how do we make any decisions, you know, like when we all these things and people wrote things like, well, how do you know it's the brain producing the mind? How do you know it's not the mind producing the brain? And I'm like, well, and I'm like, well, you know, look, as a cognitive scientist, I assume a couple of things, you know, or else I what is the purpose of my job if I don't assume them. One thing I assume is that the mind and brain are intricately connected that and that the former that the mind depends on the brain. I mean, isn't that a reasonable assumption?
Speaker 1
Well, of course it is because we're scientists. I think what I think about it is that, well, let me first just say that this idea of does the mind influence the brain in philosophy is called, you probably know this called the downward causation problem. So, so the way I think about it is that the mind is what the brain is doing in a particular moment in time and the mind is constituted as a set of mental features. It's like the psychological features, the experiential features in a given brain state or where the brain is in its state space to be technical. So it's not like you have a mind and you have a brain and you somehow have to figure out how these two realms relate to each other, you have a brain and your brain conjures, constructs, mental features and those mental features are your mind at that moment. And that's it. There's really nothing. And so, but what you do in the moment, so for example, if I smile at you or I scowlet you or, you know, whatever I do or actually it's what your brain predicts, I'll do influences what you do next. So, and that influences me. So, this is, you know, you, so your, so mental features can influence brain wiring. There is downward causation in that sense. In fact, one of the postdocs in our lab, brilliant guy named Jordan Terrio, he published a paper about a sense of should, like why do people, why do people feel moral obligation? Why do they follow social rules? Like, what's the value of that? Why do that? And the answer is, and it's all laid out with math and, you know, is that if I make myself predictable to you, then you are more predictable to me. And you being predictable to me is metabolically, you know, beneficial to me. Again, coming back to uncertainty versus predictability.
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