WEBVTT 00:00:00.474 --> 00:00:03.283 Other people. Everyone is interested in other people. 00:00:03.283 --> 00:00:05.406 Everyone has relationships with other people, 00:00:05.406 --> 00:00:06.998 and they're interested in these relationships 00:00:06.998 --> 00:00:08.853 for a variety of reasons. 00:00:08.853 --> 00:00:10.865 Good relationships, bad relationships, 00:00:10.865 --> 00:00:14.011 annoying relationships, agnostic relationships, 00:00:14.011 --> 00:00:17.435 and what I'm going to do is focus on the central piece 00:00:17.435 --> 00:00:20.738 of an interaction that goes on in a relationship. 00:00:20.738 --> 00:00:23.074 So I'm going to take as inspiration the fact that we're all 00:00:23.074 --> 00:00:25.499 interested in interacting with other people, 00:00:25.499 --> 00:00:29.331 I'm going to completely strip it of all its complicating features, 00:00:29.331 --> 00:00:33.225 and I'm going to turn that object, that simplified object, 00:00:33.225 --> 00:00:37.375 into a scientific probe, and provide the early stages, 00:00:37.375 --> 00:00:39.824 embryonic stages of new insights into what happens 00:00:39.824 --> 00:00:43.474 in two brains while they simultaneously interact. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:43.474 --> 00:00:45.767 But before I do that, let me tell you a couple of things 00:00:45.767 --> 00:00:47.466 that made this possible. 00:00:47.466 --> 00:00:50.247 The first is we can now eavesdrop safely 00:00:50.247 --> 00:00:52.958 on healthy brain activity. 00:00:52.958 --> 00:00:55.535 Without needles and radioactivity, 00:00:55.535 --> 00:00:58.398 without any kind of clinical reason, we can go down the street 00:00:58.398 --> 00:01:01.525 and record from your friends' and neighbors' brains 00:01:01.525 --> 00:01:04.063 while they do a variety of cognitive tasks, and we use 00:01:04.063 --> 00:01:07.797 a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging. 00:01:07.797 --> 00:01:10.122 You've probably all read about it or heard about in some 00:01:10.122 --> 00:01:14.500 incarnation. Let me give you a two-sentence version of it. 00:01:14.500 --> 00:01:17.984 So we've all heard of MRIs. MRIs use magnetic fields 00:01:17.984 --> 00:01:20.013 and radio waves and they take snapshots of your brain 00:01:20.013 --> 00:01:22.374 or your knee or your stomach, 00:01:22.374 --> 00:01:24.419 grayscale images that are frozen in time. 00:01:24.419 --> 00:01:26.740 In the 1990s, it was discovered you could use 00:01:26.740 --> 00:01:29.399 the same machines in a different mode, 00:01:29.399 --> 00:01:31.745 and in that mode, you could make microscopic blood flow 00:01:31.745 --> 00:01:35.045 movies from hundreds of thousands of sites independently in the brain. 00:01:35.045 --> 00:01:38.245 Okay, so what? In fact, the so what is, in the brain, 00:01:38.245 --> 00:01:42.077 changes in neural activity, the things that make your brain work, 00:01:42.077 --> 00:01:44.087 the things that make your software work in your brain, 00:01:44.087 --> 00:01:46.576 are tightly correlated with changes in blood flow. 00:01:46.576 --> 00:01:48.549 You make a blood flow movie, you have an independent 00:01:48.549 --> 00:01:50.888 proxy of brain activity. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:50.888 --> 00:01:53.922 This has literally revolutionized cognitive science. 00:01:53.922 --> 00:01:55.913 Take any cognitive domain you want, memory, 00:01:55.913 --> 00:01:58.054 motor planning, thinking about your mother-in-law, 00:01:58.054 --> 00:02:01.769 getting angry at people, emotional response, it goes on and on, 00:02:01.769 --> 00:02:04.858 put people into functional MRI devices, and 00:02:04.858 --> 00:02:08.241 image how these kinds of variables map onto brain activity. 00:02:08.241 --> 00:02:11.090 It's in its early stages, and it's crude by some measures, 00:02:11.090 --> 00:02:13.658 but in fact, 20 years ago, we were at nothing. 00:02:13.658 --> 00:02:16.017 You couldn't do people like this. You couldn't do healthy people. 00:02:16.017 --> 00:02:18.505 That's caused a literal revolution, and it's opened us up 00:02:18.505 --> 00:02:21.323 to a new experimental preparation. Neurobiologists, 00:02:21.323 --> 00:02:25.083 as you well know, have lots of experimental preps, 00:02:25.083 --> 00:02:28.224 worms and rodents and fruit flies and things like this. 00:02:28.224 --> 00:02:31.621 And now, we have a new experimental prep: human beings. 00:02:31.621 --> 00:02:35.382 We can now use human beings to study and model 00:02:35.382 --> 00:02:38.332 the software in human beings, and we have a few 00:02:38.332 --> 00:02:41.167 burgeoning biological measures. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:41.167 --> 00:02:45.054 Okay, let me give you one example of the kinds of experiments that people do, 00:02:45.054 --> 00:02:47.731 and it's in the area of what you'd call valuation. 00:02:47.731 --> 00:02:49.866 Valuation is just what you think it is, you know? 00:02:49.866 --> 00:02:52.670 If you went and you were valuing two companies against 00:02:52.670 --> 00:02:55.406 one another, you'd want to know which was more valuable. 00:02:55.406 --> 00:02:59.285 Cultures discovered the key feature of valuation thousands of years ago. 00:02:59.285 --> 00:03:01.975 If you want to compare oranges to windshields, what do you do? 00:03:01.975 --> 00:03:04.331 Well, you can't compare oranges to windshields. 00:03:04.331 --> 00:03:06.586 They're immiscible. They don't mix with one another. 00:03:06.586 --> 00:03:08.937 So instead, you convert them to a common currency scale, 00:03:08.937 --> 00:03:11.643 put them on that scale, and value them accordingly. 00:03:11.643 --> 00:03:15.079 Well, your brain has to do something just like that as well, 00:03:15.079 --> 00:03:17.567 and we're now beginning to understand and identify 00:03:17.567 --> 00:03:19.704 brain systems involved in valuation, 00:03:19.704 --> 00:03:22.336 and one of them includes a neurotransmitter system 00:03:22.336 --> 00:03:24.968 whose cells are located in your brainstem 00:03:24.968 --> 00:03:28.143 and deliver the chemical dopamine to the rest of your brain. 00:03:28.143 --> 00:03:30.585 I won't go through the details of it, but that's an important 00:03:30.585 --> 00:03:32.742 discovery, and we know a good bit about that now, 00:03:32.742 --> 00:03:34.972 and it's just a small piece of it, but it's important because 00:03:34.972 --> 00:03:38.247 those are the neurons that you would lose if you had Parkinson's disease, 00:03:38.247 --> 00:03:40.263 and they're also the neurons that are hijacked by literally 00:03:40.263 --> 00:03:42.495 every drug of abuse, and that makes sense. 00:03:42.495 --> 00:03:44.831 Drugs of abuse would come in, and they would change 00:03:44.831 --> 00:03:46.620 the way you value the world. They change the way 00:03:46.620 --> 00:03:49.819 you value the symbols associated with your drug of choice, 00:03:49.819 --> 00:03:52.333 and they make you value that over everything else. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:52.333 --> 00:03:55.354 Here's the key feature though. These neurons are also 00:03:55.354 --> 00:03:58.855 involved in the way you can assign value to literally abstract ideas, 00:03:58.855 --> 00:04:00.896 and I put some symbols up here that we assign value to 00:04:00.896 --> 00:04:03.616 for various reasons. 00:04:03.616 --> 00:04:06.305 We have a behavioral superpower in our brain, 00:04:06.305 --> 00:04:08.058 and it at least in part involves dopamine. 00:04:08.058 --> 00:04:12.247 We can deny every instinct we have for survival for an idea, 00:04:12.247 --> 00:04:16.252 for a mere idea. No other species can do that. 00:04:16.252 --> 00:04:19.858 In 1997, the cult Heaven's Gate committed mass suicide 00:04:19.858 --> 00:04:22.073 predicated on the idea that there was a spaceship 00:04:22.073 --> 00:04:25.858 hiding in the tail of the then-visible comet Hale-Bopp 00:04:25.858 --> 00:04:30.130 waiting to take them to the next level. It was an incredibly tragic event. 00:04:30.130 --> 00:04:33.615 More than two thirds of them had college degrees. 00:04:33.615 --> 00:04:37.338 But the point here is they were able to deny their instincts for survival 00:04:37.338 --> 00:04:40.204 using exactly the same systems that were put there 00:04:40.204 --> 00:04:44.246 to make them survive. That's a lot of control, okay? NOTE Paragraph 00:04:44.246 --> 00:04:46.335 One thing that I've left out of this narrative 00:04:46.335 --> 00:04:48.569 is the obvious thing, which is the focus of the rest of my 00:04:48.569 --> 00:04:50.728 little talk, and that is other people. 00:04:50.728 --> 00:04:53.724 These same valuation systems are redeployed 00:04:53.724 --> 00:04:56.216 when we're valuing interactions with other people. 00:04:56.216 --> 00:04:59.487 So this same dopamine system that gets addicted to drugs, 00:04:59.487 --> 00:05:02.011 that makes you freeze when you get Parkinson's disease, 00:05:02.011 --> 00:05:05.088 that contributes to various forms of psychosis, 00:05:05.088 --> 00:05:09.008 is also redeployed to value interactions with other people 00:05:09.008 --> 00:05:11.904 and to assign value to gestures that you do 00:05:11.904 --> 00:05:14.478 when you're interacting with somebody else. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:14.478 --> 00:05:17.055 Let me give you an example of this. 00:05:17.055 --> 00:05:20.022 You bring to the table such enormous processing power 00:05:20.022 --> 00:05:22.646 in this domain that you hardly even notice it. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:22.646 --> 00:05:24.113 Let me just give you a few examples. So here's a baby. 00:05:24.113 --> 00:05:27.843 She's three months old. She still poops in her diapers and she can't do calculus. 00:05:27.843 --> 00:05:31.196 She's related to me. Somebody will be very glad that she's up here on the screen. 00:05:31.196 --> 00:05:33.572 You can cover up one of her eyes, and you can still read 00:05:33.572 --> 00:05:36.327 something in the other eye, and I see sort of curiosity 00:05:36.327 --> 00:05:39.924 in one eye, I see maybe a little bit of surprise in the other. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:39.924 --> 00:05:43.103 Here's a couple. They're sharing a moment together, 00:05:43.103 --> 00:05:44.421 and we've even done an experiment where you can cut out 00:05:44.421 --> 00:05:47.428 different pieces of this frame and you can still see 00:05:47.428 --> 00:05:49.932 that they're sharing it. They're sharing it sort of in parallel. 00:05:49.932 --> 00:05:52.395 Now, the elements of the scene also communicate this 00:05:52.395 --> 00:05:54.630 to us, but you can read it straight off their faces, 00:05:54.630 --> 00:05:58.133 and if you compare their faces to normal faces, it would be a very subtle cue. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:58.133 --> 00:06:01.480 Here's another couple. He's projecting out at us, 00:06:01.480 --> 00:06:04.368 and she's clearly projecting, you know, 00:06:04.368 --> 00:06:06.631 love and admiration at him. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:06.631 --> 00:06:10.266 Here's another couple. (Laughter) 00:06:10.266 --> 00:06:15.416 And I'm thinking I'm not seeing love and admiration on the left. (Laughter) 00:06:15.416 --> 00:06:17.976 In fact, I know this is his sister, and you can just see 00:06:17.976 --> 00:06:20.489 him saying, "Okay, we're doing this for the camera, 00:06:20.489 --> 00:06:26.191 and then afterwards you steal my candy and you punch me in the face." (Laughter) 00:06:26.191 --> 00:06:28.297 He'll kill me for showing that. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:28.297 --> 00:06:31.094 All right, so what does this mean? 00:06:31.094 --> 00:06:34.444 It means we bring an enormous amount of processing power to the problem. 00:06:34.444 --> 00:06:38.092 It engages deep systems in our brain, in dopaminergic 00:06:38.092 --> 00:06:40.910 systems that are there to make you chase sex, food and salt. 00:06:40.910 --> 00:06:43.804 They keep you alive. It gives them the pie, it gives 00:06:43.804 --> 00:06:46.708 that kind of a behavioral punch which we've called a superpower. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:46.708 --> 00:06:50.362 So how can we take that and arrange a kind of staged 00:06:50.362 --> 00:06:53.060 social interaction and turn that into a scientific probe? 00:06:53.060 --> 00:06:55.751 And the short answer is games. 00:06:55.751 --> 00:07:00.155 Economic games. So what we do is we go into two areas. 00:07:00.155 --> 00:07:03.491 One area is called experimental economics. The other area is called behavioral economics. 00:07:03.491 --> 00:07:07.569 And we steal their games. And we contrive them to our own purposes. 00:07:07.569 --> 00:07:10.536 So this shows you one particular game called an ultimatum game. 00:07:10.536 --> 00:07:12.381 Red person is given a hundred dollars and can offer 00:07:12.381 --> 00:07:16.104 a split to blue. Let's say red wants to keep 70, 00:07:16.104 --> 00:07:20.190 and offers blue 30. So he offers a 70-30 split with blue. 00:07:20.190 --> 00:07:23.041 Control passes to blue, and blue says, "I accept it," 00:07:23.041 --> 00:07:24.997 in which case he'd get the money, or blue says, 00:07:24.997 --> 00:07:29.304 "I reject it," in which case no one gets anything. Okay? 00:07:29.304 --> 00:07:32.696 So a rational choice economist would say, well, 00:07:32.696 --> 00:07:34.752 you should take all non-zero offers. 00:07:34.752 --> 00:07:38.514 What do people do? People are indifferent at an 80-20 split. 00:07:38.514 --> 00:07:42.038 At 80-20, it's a coin flip whether you accept that or not. 00:07:42.038 --> 00:07:44.929 Why is that? You know, because you're pissed off. 00:07:44.929 --> 00:07:48.538 You're mad. That's an unfair offer, and you know what an unfair offer is. 00:07:48.538 --> 00:07:51.242 This is the kind of game done by my lab and many around the world. 00:07:51.242 --> 00:07:53.786 That just gives you an example of the kind of thing that 00:07:53.786 --> 00:07:57.524 these games probe. The interesting thing is, these games 00:07:57.524 --> 00:08:01.231 require that you have a lot of cognitive apparatus on line. 00:08:01.231 --> 00:08:04.159 You have to be able to come to the table with a proper model of another person. 00:08:04.159 --> 00:08:07.372 You have to be able to remember what you've done. 00:08:07.372 --> 00:08:08.792 You have to stand up in the moment to do that. 00:08:08.792 --> 00:08:12.142 Then you have to update your model based on the signals coming back, 00:08:12.142 --> 00:08:15.114 and you have to do something that is interesting, 00:08:15.114 --> 00:08:17.711 which is you have to do a kind of depth of thought assay. 00:08:17.711 --> 00:08:21.044 That is, you have to decide what that other person expects of you. 00:08:21.044 --> 00:08:23.998 You have to send signals to manage your image in their mind. 00:08:23.998 --> 00:08:26.851 Like a job interview. You sit across the desk from somebody, 00:08:26.851 --> 00:08:28.220 they have some prior image of you, 00:08:28.220 --> 00:08:30.971 you send signals across the desk to move their image 00:08:30.971 --> 00:08:34.891 of you from one place to a place where you want it to be. 00:08:34.891 --> 00:08:38.276 We're so good at this we don't really even notice it. 00:08:38.276 --> 00:08:42.043 These kinds of probes exploit it. Okay? NOTE Paragraph 00:08:42.043 --> 00:08:43.850 In doing this, what we've discovered is that humans 00:08:43.850 --> 00:08:46.181 are literal canaries in social exchanges. 00:08:46.181 --> 00:08:49.578 Canaries used to be used as kind of biosensors in mines. 00:08:49.578 --> 00:08:53.138 When methane built up, or carbon dioxide built up, 00:08:53.138 --> 00:08:57.324 or oxygen was diminished, the birds would swoon 00:08:57.324 --> 00:08:59.650 before people would -- so it acted as an early warning system: 00:08:59.650 --> 00:09:02.630 Hey, get out of the mine. Things aren't going so well. 00:09:02.630 --> 00:09:05.584 People come to the table, and even these very blunt, 00:09:05.584 --> 00:09:08.574 staged social interactions, and they, and there's just 00:09:08.574 --> 00:09:11.590 numbers going back and forth between the people, 00:09:11.590 --> 00:09:13.789 and they bring enormous sensitivities to it. 00:09:13.789 --> 00:09:16.478 So we realized we could exploit this, and in fact, 00:09:16.478 --> 00:09:19.034 as we've done that, and we've done this now in 00:09:19.034 --> 00:09:21.728 many thousands of people, I think on the order of 00:09:21.728 --> 00:09:23.893 five or six thousand. We actually, to make this 00:09:23.893 --> 00:09:26.117 a biological probe, need bigger numbers than that, 00:09:26.117 --> 00:09:29.791 remarkably so. But anyway, 00:09:29.791 --> 00:09:31.795 patterns have emerged, and we've been able to take 00:09:31.795 --> 00:09:35.631 those patterns, convert them into mathematical models, 00:09:35.631 --> 00:09:38.320 and use those mathematical models to gain new insights 00:09:38.320 --> 00:09:40.451 into these exchanges. Okay, so what? 00:09:40.451 --> 00:09:43.764 Well, the so what is, that's a really nice behavioral measure, 00:09:43.764 --> 00:09:47.083 the economic games bring to us notions of optimal play. 00:09:47.083 --> 00:09:49.567 We can compute that during the game. 00:09:49.567 --> 00:09:52.520 And we can use that to sort of carve up the behavior. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:52.520 --> 00:09:56.850 Here's the cool thing. Six or seven years ago, 00:09:56.850 --> 00:09:59.400 we developed a team. It was at the time in Houston, Texas. 00:09:59.400 --> 00:10:02.794 It's now in Virginia and London. And we built software 00:10:02.794 --> 00:10:06.001 that'll link functional magnetic resonance imaging devices 00:10:06.001 --> 00:10:10.036 up over the Internet. I guess we've done up to six machines 00:10:10.036 --> 00:10:12.017 at a time, but let's just focus on two. 00:10:12.017 --> 00:10:15.075 So it synchronizes machines anywhere in the world. 00:10:15.075 --> 00:10:18.244 We synchronize the machines, set them into these 00:10:18.244 --> 00:10:20.227 staged social interactions, and we eavesdrop on both 00:10:20.227 --> 00:10:21.893 of the interacting brains. So for the first time, 00:10:21.893 --> 00:10:25.500 we don't have to look at just averages over single individuals, 00:10:25.500 --> 00:10:28.397 or have individuals playing computers, or try to make 00:10:28.397 --> 00:10:31.160 inferences that way. We can study individual dyads. 00:10:31.160 --> 00:10:33.945 We can study the way that one person interacts with another person, 00:10:33.945 --> 00:10:36.509 turn the numbers up, and start to gain new insights 00:10:36.509 --> 00:10:39.024 into the boundaries of normal cognition, 00:10:39.024 --> 00:10:41.756 but more importantly, we can put people with 00:10:41.756 --> 00:10:45.093 classically defined mental illnesses, or brain damage, 00:10:45.093 --> 00:10:48.644 into these social interactions, and use these as probes of that. 00:10:48.644 --> 00:10:50.994 So we've started this effort. We've made a few hits, 00:10:50.994 --> 00:10:53.443 a few, I think, embryonic discoveries. 00:10:53.443 --> 00:10:56.255 We think there's a future to this. But it's our way 00:10:56.255 --> 00:10:58.815 of going in and redefining, with a new lexicon, 00:10:58.815 --> 00:11:02.837 a mathematical one actually, as opposed to the standard 00:11:02.837 --> 00:11:05.415 ways that we think about mental illness, 00:11:05.415 --> 00:11:07.482 characterizing these diseases, by using the people 00:11:07.482 --> 00:11:10.489 as birds in the exchanges. That is, we exploit the fact 00:11:10.489 --> 00:11:14.733 that the healthy partner, playing somebody with major depression, 00:11:14.733 --> 00:11:17.643 or playing somebody with autism spectrum disorder, 00:11:17.643 --> 00:11:21.493 or playing somebody with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, 00:11:21.493 --> 00:11:24.712 we use that as a kind of biosensor, and then we use 00:11:24.712 --> 00:11:27.356 computer programs to model that person, and it gives us 00:11:27.356 --> 00:11:29.826 a kind of assay of this. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:29.826 --> 00:11:31.957 Early days, and we're just beginning, we're setting up sites 00:11:31.957 --> 00:11:35.367 around the world. Here are a few of our collaborating sites. 00:11:35.367 --> 00:11:37.676 The hub, ironically enough, 00:11:37.676 --> 00:11:40.565 is centered in little Roanoke, Virginia. 00:11:40.565 --> 00:11:42.834 There's another hub in London, now, and the rest 00:11:42.834 --> 00:11:46.843 are getting set up. We hope to give the data away 00:11:46.843 --> 00:11:50.516 at some stage. That's a complicated issue 00:11:50.516 --> 00:11:53.510 about making it available to the rest of the world. 00:11:53.510 --> 00:11:55.357 But we're also studying just a small part 00:11:55.357 --> 00:11:57.624 of what makes us interesting as human beings, and so 00:11:57.624 --> 00:11:59.665 I would invite other people who are interested in this 00:11:59.665 --> 00:12:02.234 to ask us for the software, or even for guidance 00:12:02.234 --> 00:12:04.453 on how to move forward with that. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:04.453 --> 00:12:06.794 Let me leave you with one thought in closing. 00:12:06.794 --> 00:12:08.736 The interesting thing about studying cognition 00:12:08.736 --> 00:12:12.468 has been that we've been limited, in a way. 00:12:12.468 --> 00:12:15.411 We just haven't had the tools to look at interacting brains 00:12:15.411 --> 00:12:16.611 simultaneously. 00:12:16.611 --> 00:12:19.081 The fact is, though, that even when we're alone, 00:12:19.081 --> 00:12:23.192 we're a profoundly social creature. We're not a solitary mind 00:12:23.192 --> 00:12:27.565 built out of properties that kept it alive in the world 00:12:27.565 --> 00:12:31.513 independent of other people. In fact, our minds 00:12:31.513 --> 00:12:34.383 depend on other people. They depend on other people, 00:12:34.383 --> 00:12:35.924 and they're expressed in other people, 00:12:35.924 --> 00:12:39.576 so the notion of who you are, you often don't know 00:12:39.576 --> 00:12:42.264 who you are until you see yourself in interaction with people 00:12:42.264 --> 00:12:44.670 that are close to you, people that are enemies of you, 00:12:44.670 --> 00:12:47.215 people that are agnostic to you. 00:12:47.215 --> 00:12:50.991 So this is the first sort of step into using that insight 00:12:50.991 --> 00:12:54.286 into what makes us human beings, turning it into a tool, 00:12:54.286 --> 00:12:56.264 and trying to gain new insights into mental illness. 00:12:56.264 --> 00:12:59.385 Thanks for having me. (Applause) 00:12:59.385 --> 00:13:02.474 (Applause)