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Engineering Body and Mind with Michael Levin
125 Plays30 days ago
On today's episode of Doorknob Comments Fara and Grant are joined by Dr. Michael Levin, the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology and the Director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University. Dr. Levin publishes across developmental biology, computer science, bioengineering, and philosophy of mind, with work spanning from fundamental conceptual frameworks, to applications in birth defects, regeneration, and cancer. Fara and Grant discuss Dr. Levin's groundbreaking research, how he came to his research interests, and the potential linkages or applications his research might have for the future of therapeutic care.
We hope you enjoy.
Resources and Links
Doorknob Comments
https://www.doorknobcomments.com/
Dr. Michael Levin
https://drmichaellevin.org/
Dr. Fara White
Dr. Grant Brenner
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Developmental Concepts
00:00:00
Speaker
I think what you can say is there's like a set of developmentally preferred trajectories and there's a lot of different factors, right? And is there some kind of morphology that you're shooting for which is equivalent to, you know, a five-fingered hand?
00:00:14
Speaker
And can we control that more effectively?
Meet the Hosts: Dr. Farrah White & Dr. Grant Brenner
00:00:18
Speaker
Hello, I'm Dr. Farrah White. And I'm Dr. Grant Brenner. We're psychiatrists and therapists in private practice
The Art of 'Doorknob Comments'
00:00:24
Speaker
in New York. We started this podcast in 2019 to draw attention to a phenomenon called the doorknob comment.
00:00:30
Speaker
Doorknob comments are important things we all say from time to time, just as we're leaving the office, sometimes literally hand on the doorknob. Doorknob comments happen not only during therapy, but also in everyday life.
00:00:42
Speaker
The point is that sometimes we aren't sure how to express the deeply meaningful things we're feeling, thinking, and experiencing. Maybe we're afraid to bring certain things out into the open or are on the fence about wanting to discuss them.
00:00:54
Speaker
Sometimes we know we've got something we're unsure about sharing and are keeping it to ourselves. And sometimes we surprise ourselves by what comes out. Welcome to the Doorknob Comments Podcast.
Meet the Expert: Michael Levin
00:01:06
Speaker
It's my distinct pleasure to have Professor Michael Levin here.
00:01:09
Speaker
Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, an associate faculty at Harvard's Weiss Institute, and the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts.
00:01:21
Speaker
He earned dual undergraduate degrees in computer science and biology, and then PhD in genetics. Michael publishes across developmental biology, computer science, bioengineering, and philosophy of mind.
00:01:34
Speaker
His group works to understand the origin and scaling of embodied minds in a range of naturally evolved, synthetically engineered, and hybrid systems.
Cancer and Cellular Identity
00:01:44
Speaker
Dr. Levin's work spans from fundamental conceptual frameworks to applications in birth defects, regeneration, and cancer.
00:01:53
Speaker
And I want to say you're on my short list for a Nobel Prize just from intensively reviewing your work recently. And I was really glad to come across your work through learning about Carl Fristen's work as well.
00:02:07
Speaker
and So welcome. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's nice to meet you. Yeah. And and and he he, I think, would be closer to the ah to the to the prize. Well, they give one a year, I heard. um And he might get it in a different area, i'm not really sure. But your work, um to unpack the joke, is just mind-bogglingly groundbreaking. I think one of the reasons that we wanted to invite you is to introduce your work to a larger population.
00:02:33
Speaker
And I think it's hard to communicate how groundbreaking it is, and probably harder still to explain it without too much technological language.
00:02:44
Speaker
Farah, you want to say anything? um So our audience is generally pretty literary um and mostly lay people who are not in the field of mental health, but are very interested in it.
Mental Health in Humans and AI
00:03:00
Speaker
um And so I'm excited to hear more about what you're doing and what it might mean for what mental health looks like in 10, 15, 20 years.
00:03:10
Speaker
Cool. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I'm very happy to meet you. and And I actually spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like that, although I have no background in mental health. I do think that our mental health and also the mental health of the unconventional beings that are going to be increasingly populating our world is something that we need to pay a lot of attention to.
00:03:27
Speaker
yeah Yeah, I posted something on the platform formerly known as Twitter the other day, which is, I'm specializing in providing human therapy to artificial and machine intelligence.
00:03:38
Speaker
I don't know if I'm the first person, but I'm taking referrals if your AI has any foibles. You will you won be kept busy in the in the coming years, not not just with standard AI, but everything in between, ah you know, biological and and and a pure AI, there will be well a full spectrum.
00:03:56
Speaker
I'm a therapist for Cyborgs. You can find me on my website. It would be great if you could start with the experiments that you've done, that you've actually shown things in the lab and give ah kind of a thumbnail of why it's important and what it can mean.
00:04:12
Speaker
Does that make sense? Sure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a million things, so I'll just i'll just pick and choose a few things that might be might be interesting ah to you.
Cancer as Dissociative Identity Disorder?
00:04:20
Speaker
um i think I think one thing that might be relevant to to this audience um is the story of cancer as a dissociative identity disorder.
00:04:28
Speaker
And in order to understand this, you have to first ask yourself, well, a lot of people ask, why do why do we have cancer? Okay. And the better question is, why isn't it all cancer all the time? Why do we have anything but cancer? Because what happens in cancer is that cells break free from a remarkable it's ah It's a failure mode of a remarkable process that we normally don't think about.
00:04:51
Speaker
So you start off with what what what you might call an embryo. So you look, there's 100,000 cells at some point, and we say there's one embryo. why is there what What are we counting when we say there's one? I mean, it's 100,000 cells. What is there one of?
00:05:03
Speaker
Well, what there's one of actually is a a story that that all of the cells have bought into. they've all convinced but They've all been convinced of the same model of where in anatomical space. And anatomical space just means the range of all the possible um shape configurations that you might have, a tree, a snake, a you know a camel, whatever.
00:05:22
Speaker
and um And and they're all going to take the same journey. And that journey leads from being an egg to being a proper whatever it is that that they're trying to build. and and And we can also talk about some interesting detours that they can take that yeah away from that.
00:05:35
Speaker
but But what's interesting is that they create the body. If you interfere with it, they will do all kinds of things to still get their job done. So for example, you can take an early embryo and cut it into half or quarters and you don't get half bodies. You get perfectly normal monozygotic twins and triplets and so on. And so and so so this system is going to work really hard to get to the goal.
00:05:57
Speaker
And when it gets to its anatomical goal, it will try to maintain for some amount of time. And then we could talk about what happens in aging, but but but it will try to maintain. So so this is a goal-driven system. And what you have to ask yourself is, what are what what are the policies and the mechanisms that allow individual cells to work together towards ah towards this very large goal?
00:06:17
Speaker
Right. Because single cells, you know, when so, for example, a salamander, if if they get if if if they one of them bites off the limb, ah it will regrow exactly what's needed, make a perfect, ah perfect limb. And then it stops. It stops when a correct salamander limb has been completed. Right, and I would just chime in and and say there's billions of organisms on the planet, and if you're a human, if you're, don't know about salamanders, if you're a chimp, if you're ah dog, the mammals, even if they have like a hoof, they generally have five digits.
00:06:48
Speaker
And somehow all these different organisms like grow and arm with five digits. Yeah, I mean, so so that gets into would that. That's that's ah another issue that we should talk about is is is where
Cellular Identity Loss in Cancer
00:06:59
Speaker
the goals of these systems come from.
00:07:01
Speaker
and and And we can do that. but But the thing that's critical to the cancer story is simply this. There needs to be something that i that I call a cognitive glue, which is just a set of policies that we investigate, which by which while individual cells have no idea what a finger is or how many you're supposed to have or how long they're they're supposed to be, the collective absolutely knows. And you know they know because if you try to deviate them, they'll they'll do it.
00:07:22
Speaker
So so in in a certain sense, what what happens during cancer is a breakdown of this cognitive. glu what what What happens and and if you want, I'll go into more details. but But basically what happens is that cells disconnect from the electrical network that allows the collective to have very large scale, grandiose goals like building a limb. Individual cells have tiny little goals like having enough nutrients and and and some other things.
00:07:45
Speaker
And that that cognitive glue allows the scaling of goals. And during cancer, it shrinks back down. So these individual cells are not more selfish. They just have smaller cells. so And they go back to these ancient, tiny little little goals. And when they do, as far as they're concerned, the rest of the body is just outside in environment. but the The boundary between self and world shrinks. So whereas before, the whole... the whole you know, the whole um limb field or or the whole embryo, with whatever, depending what you're talking about, is is their self and they will do certain things. But now, now and you know, during during um carcinogenic transformation, that that boundary shrinks and now ah now the cell is just the rest of the body is just the outside world. So the cell has kind of ah an amnesia.
00:08:22
Speaker
um it it it it has a It has a shrinking of... ah Well, to some extent it's an amnesia, but but it's interesting. What you cannot say is that the cell had memories and now it lost them because it wasn't the cell that had those memories. it was the collective.
00:08:35
Speaker
so So this is this is different. this is we I mean, amnesia is also an interesting thing in this system that we can talk about, but but it's it's more it's more um deep than that. It's it's really the the scale of the self has has shrunk and you are now something that something different from from what you were before um And you can now have thoughts you couldn't have had before because the collective actually, it's kind of a mind meld, it prevents you from having certain kinds of thoughts.
00:08:59
Speaker
And it's the the stress or the oncogene or various other things that enables you to have these thoughts about because you start to disconnect and you said, well, what if I did leave it, you know, and then you can sort of Right. And so so that's the dissociative and then aspect of it. And then that leads to therapeutics, which we have developed, that actually is a kind of integration therapy that doesn't kill the cells. It doesn't fix the genetic damage. What it does is integrates the cells back into the collective.
00:09:24
Speaker
And then despite the damage, they continue to do things like build nice skin, nice muscle and so on. the The direct electrical connection we know between cells is is like a gap junction, which is kind of like a a window and cells can share molecules and that allows them to share a collective identity, right? That's the basic idea.
00:09:43
Speaker
How do you plug them back into the network in the lab? Yeah, um and so what you can do is there's a couple of ways you can do it. You can force the connection. So so you can you can basically force the gap junctions open. That's one thing you can do.
00:09:57
Speaker
Another thing you can do is change the voltage state of the cells, which in turn will reconnect them. Because one of the first things that happens is when you um when either oncogenes or some certain other phenomena um cause cells to transform, they depolarize strongly. Their voltage gradient drops.
00:10:12
Speaker
And as a result of that, they disconnect, and then all kinds of other things happen. they become much more plastic. They divide. There's metastasis,
Reintegrative Cancer Therapies
00:10:19
Speaker
basically. so so So we have tools by which, even pharmacological tools, optogenetics, and so on, by which you can actually force force them back into the electrical network.
00:10:29
Speaker
So there's a very loose metaphor to mental health where... you know, parts of the self and lose connection with the whole and go off and do things that aren't good for the person's self-destructive behaviors or get into drugs and alcohol or have difficulty in relationships or work.
00:10:48
Speaker
I'm trying to think of which direction to go because you there's so many other things you've done in your lab that are just... Well, could I ask a question about what you just said um with with these ah these fragments, right, the the personality fragments?
00:11:01
Speaker
what What would you say, and and I don't know if this is if there's an average to it or if it's a very wide spectrum, what would you say is the agentic level of these things? are they you know how how much How much intelligence of their own do they actually have? Are they sort of fixed they fixed patterns? Are they you know fleeting or repetitive thoughts? or are these things that are actually making plans? you know like how How far along the the intelligence spectrum are these of these fragments?
00:11:29
Speaker
Yeah. So really quite sophisticated. So at the same way, and I don't know, you know, everything that I've learned about cancer and cancer cells was at least 10 years ago in med school, but and we learned how they would recruit, you know, um sort of blood or lymph pathways to sort of get what they wanted.
00:11:51
Speaker
um And that is really how i sort of look at when i'm I'm treating someone and we see that There's something that's not completely integrated. There are defenses that can be quite sophisticated, right? And they can recruit people, make life decisions, and people can end up either through trauma or through genetics, you know, other stressors, we don't know exactly why, can end up dysfunctionally functional.
00:12:25
Speaker
Yeah, so so the different parts of the self can be very agentic. it It varies a great deal depending on the severity of the dissociation. We were talking right right before hopping on, there's something called the structural theory of dissociation of the personality.
00:12:39
Speaker
And there's three levels of severity, primary, secondary, and tertiary. And they talk about having an apparently normal part of the personality, ANP or world-facing, an emotional part or parts of the personality.
00:12:52
Speaker
And in the most basic form, the emotions are mainly dissociated and there's one coherent world facing part of the personality. So agency is more coherent and there tends to be more goal directedness.
00:13:05
Speaker
and people are more functional, you start to see breakdown in secondary. There's one apparently normal part of the personality. And so there's still more coherence. There's more cognitive glue. But the emotional parts of the personality exert causal impact on the organism and ah on the person and often lead to conflict. Right?
00:13:24
Speaker
Like, I didn't want to do that. Why did I do that? Or I want to do this. Why can't I do that? and When you get to tertiary, there's multiple world-facing parts of the personality, and so there's much more tension it behaviorally, though the emotional parts of the personality continue to exert this kind of in-the-background influence that the person isn't typically conscious of or they're partially conscious of.
00:13:49
Speaker
So in the treatment of dissociative disorders, They talk about either looking for integration or also co-consciousness. So a lot of times those parts of the self are afraid of being lost and they kind of don't want to become integrated is how it feels.
00:14:04
Speaker
um And so I would say, though, there's also a division along what are usually talked about as psychobiological lines. So. it can get very granular. So fight-flight might be like a big way it's organized, because these are mainly for survival.
00:14:19
Speaker
And so the emotional parts get locked into these survival things. And when you break down into into the more granular dissociation of the world-facing parts, they tend to pair off. And so it's it can be very circumscribed what the agency is for a particular part.
00:14:35
Speaker
And they also tend to be correlated with developmental traumatic experiences. And so they get stuck at different ages. So if you talk to someone, they'll have a part of the self that's a kid that is protecting things or keeping secrets, or they'll have a part that's very critical and trying to keep people in line.
00:14:54
Speaker
And what happens is the person's conscious self has less and less agency, the more severe it gets. And part of the treatment is to restore agency through a variety of means, as well as cohesion, whether through integration or you know better teamwork or both.
00:15:11
Speaker
Very interesting. um you know i mean, the part about the part about not wanting to be integrated makes perfect sense. There are traditions that will say, well, don't worry, when you die, you'll be you know sort of integrated into the universal consciousness. i It may be, but you know well how how do we feel about that? but But another question I have to follow up is, is there is there a um and an issue here or not with respect to the math. And what I mean is this, ah under normal circumstances, the the integrated human is exerting some amount, whatever that is, however however we measure, of computational ah power, right? it's It's supported by the brain and the rest of the body. And and there's some some amount of computation that a single human is doing, and they can't really, you know, do but under normal circumstances. that There's some limit to what they can do.
00:16:00
Speaker
yeah If somebody presents with n fragments, the sum total of what what all the different fragments are doing, is it still equal to a single human? Or is there actually more going on?
00:16:14
Speaker
Do you see what I'm saying? because Because you might think that if I only have a total pool to play with, then
Agency in Dissociative Disorders
00:16:18
Speaker
each one of these personalities is only going to get some some amount of that. Or do you say, wow, you know they're all with like if you we were to total up everything that they were doing, that's actually more than a single human can do. What's your what's your feeling about that?
00:16:31
Speaker
I think on average, you lose computational power. The ability to work with reality is impaired. You know, especially for us, we see people who have problems. There are people who are multiple, who are highly functional.
00:16:42
Speaker
So you might imagine an actor who's really good at switching self-states, but they do it in an adaptive way. And the thing I would say is that those different self-states, they also, as Farah was implying, they create a different ecosystem around them because of the way they carve through the world.
00:16:57
Speaker
But on average, I think it reduces efficiency. But sometimes there are parts of the self that have savant-like abilities. So if you look at something like the dissociative experiences scale, it will say how often do you find that you have an amazing ability to do something without any effort at all.
00:17:14
Speaker
So it's really, i think, a comp it's complicated and it varies a great deal. But it says something about the potential for the human mind, if you're able to you know break into pieces and come back together ah in a dynamically adaptive way, i think you get more done than someone who is kind of singular but rigid.
00:17:35
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah, I agree with you there. And I think one other important piece of this, and you know, the sort of psychiatric language can can be really pathologizing.
00:17:47
Speaker
So one thing that I try to look at is, yes, there are self-states that are healthier or make, you know, probably safer decisions for the overall, for the collective and self-states that don't.
00:18:03
Speaker
But to really say, well, what purpose is each is each state serving? And until we really see that, like with any behavior, um with addiction, sort of dopamine seeking behaviors, like they they serve a purpose. And until we have an awareness of that, it's really, really hard to work with them.
00:18:25
Speaker
Right. Awareness is part of the cognitive glue. So I'm curious what this is.
AI, Cognitive Prosthetics, and Mental Health
00:18:31
Speaker
percolating in you. Well, and and do you think that um ah the the mechanisms that enable these things to be integrated under, you know, sort of optimum circumstances would extend to agential prosthetics and things, you know, once once you've got an AI whispering in your ear and things like this, and you've got different different ah appliances and things that are sort of augmenting, Are are these things going to be, do do you think they can get comfortably folded in or do you think they're always going to be, ah you know, kind of disso dissociated?
00:19:04
Speaker
i i think I think those things will help a great deal, but there's a basic problem, which is, until the person is actually working therapeutically, then there's going to be parts of the self that sabotage anything that will help.
00:19:19
Speaker
So it's hard to have positivistic fixes until there's enough of a motivational state. um yeah So I think the first thing that gets folded in is really their healthiest, most protective version of themselves, right? Or sort of, we say that people should be internalizing the therapist or a loved one who was supportive and kind and gentle.
00:19:44
Speaker
So i don't know what it's going to mean when we have other devices and other modalities, but right now it's sort of people learning how to function, to think, to see themselves.
00:19:58
Speaker
Really, that's what therapy does through the eyes of someone who's caring and kind and gentle. well Well, in DID therapy, there internal protectors and the internal protectors maintain the status quo um and they reduce certain types of risk that are organized around safety, but they also prevent the person from taking chances that would allow them to change.
00:20:20
Speaker
And so, you know, you can look at phase steps and usually the therapist has to form an alliance with those internal protectors and gain their trust. And that's kind of part of the beginning.
00:20:31
Speaker
um There's a popular model called internal family systems theory, um and they talk about the different parts as the manager, the firefighter, the exiled child. and And then they posit that there's like a true self of some sort, which is like the repository of healthy impulses.
00:20:50
Speaker
I don't necessarily see it that way, but but regardless, any kind of cognitive prosthesis would have to be synchronized to match with whatever the developmental step is required at that stage of the process, right?
00:21:04
Speaker
And I think that could really be helpful. If you look at treatment approaches, there's one called Finding Solid Ground that came out of Bethany Brand and Ruth Lanias' group. for working with people with trauma-related dissociation.
00:21:17
Speaker
um And they really spell out a sequence from working with patients. There's some clinical studies and establishing basic safety and a therapeutic alliance are usually the first order of business.
00:21:30
Speaker
And overcoming what they call phobias of one's own mental contents, right? There's an avoidance of what you need to know by virtue of the trauma. That's very interesting. I mean, yeah that's that's super interesting. I wasn't even thinking about um yet in the therapeutic context. I just meant like widely for for everybody who otherwise has no you don know no complaints or whatever. um But you now have these various additional ah but perhaps, um but you know, what so significantly agentic inputs into your cognition. And and I'm wondering whether our, but when they are working well, the mechanisms that integrate all this stuff will just say, all right, come on, you' you know you're're you're part of this too now. and and And it will just, it will stop seeming like another voice in your head. It will just be more thoughts you have, you know? Right.
00:22:15
Speaker
There's treatments like virtual reality therapy for psychotic illnesses that kind of match speeds and then can change those processes. I think the problem we would run into in traditional terms is conflict.
00:22:27
Speaker
So, you know, a good idea is not always readily accepted. So there could be a kind of a power struggle. Like I know that's what I should do, right? I'm supposed to finish writing my notes, but I'd rather listen to Mike talk on on a webinar. Yeah.
00:22:44
Speaker
So, so, so all of this is very, very very interesting. And it connects to some other stuff that that I've been thinking about. and And I can give another example of ah you said now other examples of things that that we do in a lab, I'll give you another example, um which which and you'll see it yeah how how it comes around to all of this. So So one of the things that we that we have been studying is if if groups of cells in a body are, in effect, a collective intelligence that is solving specific problems, such as how do I get from being an egg to being a whatever, then one thing we would want to do is be able to read the mind of this collective intelligence, just like neuroscientists try to um do neural decoding and and read the physiology of the brain and try to infer what are the thoughts and memories and all of that.
Rewriting Cellular Memories
00:23:27
Speaker
we we should be able to do that to the rest of the body we should be able to say here's a group of cells what what what are what are they thinking what's their plan of what they're working on so we've basically extended um some tools of neuroscience to to be able to do that and so we've developed molecular tools to read and write these electrical patterns in the network that actually serve to represent the goals of the system so in some cases but very few still but you know this is
00:23:50
Speaker
this is ah an emerging field, ah to actually read out the memories that that the collective has because those memories guide what it is that they're building. And so, for example, we can see the electric face, which is the electrical pattern that says, what should your face look like long before the genes that are important for making the face turn on? Like a frog embryo, right?
00:24:08
Speaker
For example, yeah, we've done a number of things. We've done for you know frogs and worms and and human cells and culture and things like that. So, and So there these electrical pattern memories. And then the next thing you can do is you can start to rewrite them.
00:24:20
Speaker
So in effect, incept false memories. And the reason you want to do that is for regenerative medical medicine the purposes. So if there's a birth defect or if there's a failure to re regenerate after some kind of traumatic injury, you want to go ahead and put in some new memories so that the cells now are building whatever you want them to build.
00:24:36
Speaker
So one thing you can do is, so so here's an experiment, um you got you get your frog embryo and you take some RNA encoding a particular ion channel and this is a thing that's going to set up the voltage that is necessary to form a voltage pattern that says build an eye here.
00:24:52
Speaker
Okay, and we know we know what that is because we can see it in the native face. so So we inject this RNA into a part of the embryo that's going to be let's say the gut. And or the flank or the tail or something like that. And it establishes a little voltage pattern.
00:25:05
Speaker
And the surrounding cells read and interpret that pattern because that is their memory of what they should be building. And when they see that pattern, they go ahead and they build an eye. So that's how you end up with frogs with eyes on their tails or or whatever. that's so okay so And they can detect light. Yeah, that's actually true. they They can see that's a whole other thing. But yes, they can see out of these eyes.
00:25:20
Speaker
Yeah. And just just for listeners, you're using RNA, which is like a messenger and not DNA, and you're using the ah RNA just to control the bioelectric field.
00:25:31
Speaker
Correct. This is not about genomic editing. This isn't about changing the genome at all. And there's um there's a million other ways to do it. You can do it with drugs. You can do it with light. There's a lot of different ways you can do it. It's not about the genetics at all. So so you so you set up this pattern. And and now so now here's an interesting thing. Imagine that we've only injected a small number of cells.
00:25:50
Speaker
In that case, you you when you get an eye, you you you take a section through that eye, and what you see is that only a few of those cells were actually injected by us. And we know because there's a layer there's a lineage labeled a tag that we put in.
00:26:03
Speaker
The rest of the cells, why are they making an
Collective Cellular Tasks
00:26:05
Speaker
eye? Well, they're making an eye because the cells we did inject, they they can tell that there's not enough of them to make an eye, and they recruit their neighbors to go ahead and they build this eye, kind of like another collective intelligence ants. If they find something heavy, they'll recruit other other ants, right? So if people are like raising a barn and there's a few carpenters, they can still direct the other people to help.
00:26:24
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's it's it's ah yeah it's ah it's ah it's a recruit it's a resource, ah you know, scaling the resources to the task that that you have, right? so now So now here's an interesting thing. ah Sometimes you get an eye, as exactly as I just said, with with a few cells that we injected and then all these other stuff. But sometimes you get no eye and what at all. And what happens there is this.
00:26:44
Speaker
There are a bunch of cells that are saying to their neighbors, we should make an eye here. So go ahead and help like help you, you know you need to make an eye. But the other cells, because this is a cancer suppression mechanism, are saying your voltage is weird. You should be like us and be skin or gut or whatever. And so they kind of they kind of fight back and forth. And there's two ways to look at this. One way to look at this is from the perspective of the cells and what kind of pattern they're going to you know land on.
00:27:14
Speaker
But the other way to look at it is from the perspective of the patterns themselves. So what you really have here is a kind of a battle of worldview, so to speak. There's there's a pattern that's that's that says, ah you we should you you should all work towards this particular outcome. There's another pattern that says you should work towards a very different outcome.
00:27:31
Speaker
And um everything that you said about these these these personalities or or these fragments um being self-protective and and and sometimes being in conflict with each other, that's that's exactly yeah that's exactly what we see.
00:27:43
Speaker
He's got this pattern. Yeah, and they have their own agendas. And so the conventional story of all this stuff is from the perspective of the machine of the matter, and saying that, well, it's the cells doing things, and then there's these passive data patterns that they may or may not take up. But but there's ah there's another there's a flip perspective, which says the cells and everything they're doing is just a scratch pad.
00:28:02
Speaker
ah the The real action is in the and the and the competition is actually between the patterns. And absolutely, they might they might have ideas about um not wanting to be wiped out and and you know and went You could scale it up to politics very easily.
00:28:14
Speaker
um It reminds me of how zebra stripes form, that there's like inhibition and and potentiation, and there's a balance. And the way it's tuned lands on whether it's stripes for zebra or spots for a leopard.
00:28:28
Speaker
And it's like very mathy. It also reminds me of catastrophe theory and complexity where you can have these bifurcations. It's either going to be skin or eye. um under those circumstances it's yeah it's a good point i mean some of these patterns are only compelling a in in a certain in a in a sort in their totality so so half eye half gut is not compelling to anybody and it never happens and the cells will never choose that but the eye is is a is a is a powerful stable story about what we should be doing and and so is gut and so are these other things
00:29:03
Speaker
When we think about how that might apply to um you know how that might apply to to working with patients, I think a lot of times in life, right we're faced with these types of conditions, and and Mike, where you know you can go one way or the other way, and with sensitive dependence on initial conditions, kind of small steps lead to these cascades. and then so Maybe you end up in a relationship that you didn't really shouldn't have ended up in if you'd been slower or something, or you end up in a profession, um of some sort.
00:29:35
Speaker
So, so how do you work with that? Right. Yeah, I think, or just like Mike was saying, you know, it's not really that compelling to be sort of conflicted. Right.
00:29:45
Speaker
Um, and a lot of our work is around sort of ambivalence decision-making. Of course, people don't want to make the wrong decision, but, um,
00:29:56
Speaker
sometimes they can't make any decision for fear that you know it's not the outcome is not going to be what they hope. yeah Well, if you think about it, like, okay, so if those eye cells recruit other ones and you get an eye, or if the skin cells or the gut cells prevail, you know, obviously that might have implications for cancer. If the eye is analogous to cancer, how does the skin, you know, win in that circumstance?
00:30:20
Speaker
ah But in life, like, conflict can be stable, even if it's very unpleasant. And then I think The question is like, what well, what are the environmental factors and the developmental factors that lead conflict to destabilize?
00:30:34
Speaker
And that's usually what we're trying to help people is to resolve quote unquote, resolve conflict. But until they come to treatment, at least in states of psychopathology, they live with stable conflict for many, many, many years.
00:30:48
Speaker
And that must be reflected in electrical patterns in the brain. So, you know, I've treated people with TMS and we directly stimulate the left dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. And you can see on network, functional network neuroimaging studies, that their central executive networks, like the CEO of the brain, gets stronger.
00:31:06
Speaker
And this starts to lead to to integration or at least internal communication. And it suggests that there are certain areas of the brain that, that may be more agential when it comes to generating this cognitive glue and essentially, you know, getting the the different areas of the brain on the level of, you know, nodes in a network, you know, like airports in ah hub of flight patterns to kind of work together smoothly. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
00:31:35
Speaker
And, you know, this this this thing about conflict. So so we we have an example of that, too, which is we got these we've got these flatworms. these planaria, and they've got a head and a tail, and you can cut them into pieces, and every piece regrows ah perfect worm.
00:31:51
Speaker
So you can ask, how does a piece know how how many heads it's supposed to have and which one is supposed to be a head? So it turns out that if you look, um each each of these worms has a little ah voltage pattern across it that says how many heads.
00:32:05
Speaker
And what you can do is you can you can do one of two things. You can rewrite that pattern to say two heads and from then on when you cut it the pieces will continue to make two heads so it's a very it's a very long-term memory you can you can reset it but until you reset it it will stay two-headed forever so again no changes to the genome so that's not where this information it is is is is it is not a genetically ah determined ah hardware state it is it is the physiology actually determines that and um But there's another there's another version of this which which took us much longer to to realize that's what that's what we had, which is this. You can make a kind of worm, we call it or we call like a cryptic worm. And it's cryptic because when you look at the anatomy, it's normal, one head, one tail. but What you don't know is that that worm is deeply confused.
00:32:50
Speaker
And it doesn't matter until it gets injured. It'll sit there being normal one headed until it gets injured. When you cut it, you find out that every fragment is actually not sure at all whether it should be one head or two head and they flip a coin.
00:33:01
Speaker
And so pieces from the same worm, some of them will make one head, some mo will make two head because it's ah we we've analyzed that as a kind of a perceptual by stability illusion, like a Necker cube, right? You look at it this way, that way. it's It's kind of both. Both patterns are sort of equally compelling, actually not equal because there's there's a ratio. There's a 70 30 ratio. but but but But they're both they're both sort of sort of compelling patterns.
00:33:21
Speaker
and um ah You know, what what's what's interesting is that while the chunks of an individual worm are are randomized, they'll either be one head or two.
00:33:33
Speaker
All of the cells within any fragment are 100 percent on the same page. So they flip a coin, but all the cells within a chunk are flipping the same coin. So what you don't get are speckled worms where one cell is trying to be an eye and the neighbor is trying to be a tail cell. You you never
Planaria and Perceptual Stability
00:33:48
Speaker
get that. Everybody within the fragment is completely in agreement about what we're doing, but across fragments, they're they've got this conflict of which way which way they should go.
00:33:59
Speaker
but How did the two-headed worms get get ah get around? ah they I have videos on my in my various talks of two-headed worms moving around. So sometimes the two heads cooperate, sometimes they don't.
00:34:13
Speaker
So if they cooperate, you can imagine that, so so you've got this two-headed worm and it bends into a U and then it just sort of ah you know rolls around that way. Sometimes the two heads they sort don't cooperate. It depends.
00:34:26
Speaker
you know don't ah don't cooperate it it it depends So I wanted to ask you sort of how you got into all this stuff, getting a little bit into the personal and then maybe coming back around to some more of the science and speculation.
00:34:40
Speaker
I'm getting a Star Trek vibe, but I'm not sure. Mind meld and stuff, but is that from Spock or no? Which is what? The mind meld, you know, in Star Trek. No doubt, the original the original though, right? The the original, ah the 80s. TOS, yes.
00:34:57
Speaker
um Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, for for for sure. i read a massive amount of science fiction when I was when i was younger. ah i mean, where it all came from for me was as as a very young kid, i was interested in engineering, in particular electrical things, building you know building things.
00:35:14
Speaker
and And then and seeing that happen on its own in the in the living world, going outside and seeing an egg self-assemble into a caterpillar, which then rips up its brain and self-assembles into a butterfly.
00:35:25
Speaker
and, and asking what, what is the, what is the difference here? Why does the one, ah have, uh, preferences about what happens next and the other one either doesn't, or we can't tell and which is it and, and how would we, and then, and then the sci-fi and the saying, okay, so, so if we do meet unconventional beings that are not, are not on the tree of life with us so that we don't actually know what's, uh, you know, what's going on, then, then being, it being very clear then that we actually don't understand, don't know what the right criteria is of behavioral, is it materials? Is it Like, what is it? How do you know what what what you're really dealing with?
00:35:57
Speaker
And, um, and and then And then later on, of well first first first really wanting to work in in AI on the theory that to really understand something, you have to be able to you know you have to be able to make one.
00:36:08
Speaker
And then seeing that we're we don't they have anything like that, that we that we understand how to build. And then um going back to embryonic development as this this incredible ah example where right in front of your eyes, you go from a little blob of chemistry to something with a mind.
00:36:23
Speaker
And you can see it slowly and gradually. There's no magic lightning flash. that kind of converts physics into psychology and it just it just sort of slowly and gradually scales up its competencies. And so so that's how so that that's that's how I got into this. And my goal in our group is to transition whatever progress we can make on these very deep issues into therapeutics.
00:36:44
Speaker
because that that I think is how you know whether you're actually onto to something. So meaning that meaning that i firmly believe that good um ideas on the philosophical end should translate into practical, and I don't mean widgets you know for your for your house or anything, else that too, but they but they should translate into advances that make a positive difference to people that were not possible before you made that that conceptual leap.
00:37:10
Speaker
So that's what we try very hard to do is to is to is to fill out that that middle step from like philosophical insights that other people may have said you know maybe thousands of years ago and say, yeah but how how is that actually true in a way that we can we can make progress with it?
00:37:24
Speaker
you see you see You seem to have a really interesting contrast between being very, very, very imaginative, obviously very smart, and very, very, very goal-directed at the same time.
00:37:36
Speaker
um I remember you had told a story with Mark Solms, I think, about your TV wasn't working, and so you were trying to understand the inside of the TV. Yeah. It's what was. Yeah, that story. So when I was a little kid, I was probably five or six at the the time that that happened. um I had asthma.
00:37:52
Speaker
I had really bad asthma. And ah where we where we lived, there was we we didn't have access to any kind of medication. And so what my dad would do, the TV worked fine. But what he would do is. he would it it was one of these ancient things with vacuum tubes the screen was like was like this and then the the whole thing was like this and that's the vacuum these vacuum tubes in the back and so what he would do is take the back off the tv and he would turn it around and he said look at all this stuff and i would sit there and and the but the the point of it was that if you kind of get your attention off of it your your breathing kind of calms down and this you know the stress of it of not being able to breathe this makes it worse right so it's a distraction he's trying to distract me
00:38:26
Speaker
and And it worked. And I was looking, I was i remember we would we would we would do this a lot. And I remember looking at this stuff, just going, this is this is this is a clearly um um a miracle because because all of these things somehow work together to make the you know the the collective farming channel or whatever was coming out the other end.
00:38:43
Speaker
ah you know This is 1976 USSR, right? so So it's pretty much just collective farming all all day, every day. but but But whatever's coming out the front of it um this so is but but magic, but also also not magic because somebody knew how to put all those things together. It didn't just show up. This wasn't a secret. you could i asked In fact, I asked my dad, I said, so so so can anybody learn this? He said, yeah, it's engineering. You can go study this. and Well, that that's incredible. That means that that but anybody can learn to do this.
00:39:12
Speaker
And so there must be some rhyme or reason to to how this is you know this is happening. And so that that was completely transformative for me. um you know He would bring home all these these parts, of the electrical parts and things from the place he worked in. I would build stuff. And and so so, yeah, that's that's that's the the point of the TV is that there's ah there's a rational order to something really profound, that there's information and things coming out the other end that wasn't generated by these pieces, but it was somehow...
00:39:41
Speaker
transduced from information that is you know bathing us at all time. and And we're completely unaware of it, except with this amazing interface through which through which this stuff comes, which is which is how i see you know life and mind as well Kind of like the force. Well, you know, when I heard that story, i thought, well, I had ah childhood illness, but more to the point, my mother had cancer and was dying for most of my upbringing.
00:40:05
Speaker
And our TV worked and the original Star Trek was coming out of the front of it. yeah um But I think when people are exposed to adversity um or mortality at an early age, what I find is they also often become very goal-directed.
00:40:23
Speaker
there's something about it that kind of lights a fire under you or under one. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the sort of ah mix and the tension that, that you know, that you were talking about is, yeah, I mean, I try very hard to preserve the creativity, but I also think that the point is not just to sit there and have creative thoughts. I mean, that's great. And it's very enjoyable.
00:40:46
Speaker
but But if you want to make an impact and you want other people to join you in that creativity, you need to offer something that that that is obviously improving life. so So it's not enough to be, you know, we have another book on the on the New Age shelf to talk about these, you know, grandiose cosmic things, which have been said by much smarter people many thousands of years ago. All of all of that is true.
00:41:07
Speaker
but but But now in order to move this forward, you have to actually, you have to make it practical. It is not enough to, you know, to say, well, it could be this and it could be that. mean, Could be, but which which is it? And and so and so that's that's why I try, you know, there's there's parts of the lab that are extremely focused. And I say, look, this this is what we're going to do. We're going to make this thing do this. and and but But what what people may or may not realize is the reason we got there and the reason we do these things is because of the some of the conceptual advances that were made on the, you know, sort of the philosophy side or the computational side.
00:41:41
Speaker
um and it And it comes up, people people will sometimes, I'll give a talk sometimes about some of the some of the, you know, the let's say birth defects or regeneration or aging or whatever. And people will say, um well, but well these are these are these are great data, but but but I wish you'd stop talking about all this philosophical stuff. You don't you don't need it. just just just you know Just do the experiments.
00:41:59
Speaker
and like Well, you don't understand. well Why is it that these experiments hadn't been done before we did them? Specifically because the theory wasn't there to allow you to do it. you You can't, right? I feel strongly about that. you You can't just get rid of the the conceptual stuff and still do the same experiments.
00:42:16
Speaker
Well, it's a paradigm shift. I think Rene Tom talked about that. Like physicists you know many, many years ago, mathematicians didn't have any way to model the foam on a wave. So they just crossed it off the equation and now we have complexity theory.
00:42:28
Speaker
And once you have complexity theory, you can like understand and you can make things happen. Um, it brings me back around, I think first to therapy, I want to ask Farah to kind of reconnect it.
00:42:40
Speaker
And, and then I'd also like to talk to us to talk a little bit about the future and especially this kind of ethical piece with AI and all this technology could obviously sort of like the Manhattan project and the development of nuclear energy could be used for great good or great, great evil.
00:42:58
Speaker
You know, I do think that there's something, ah about developmental in this, right? That our early childhood experiences inform, you know, we know that and treat the sort of parts that don't get developed, right? But that there's this other idea that things develop in a certain way or they get certain, our our identity, our psyches get certain messages about how to be in the world.
00:43:28
Speaker
And I think that that those early connections sometimes because we grew up in a society, at Grant and I both treat people in New York very, very high achieving and goal oriented, which can be a great thing.
00:43:44
Speaker
But if we lose sight of the conceptual or of what sort of drew us to these things in the first place, it can it can kind of be become demoralizing.
00:43:57
Speaker
it's just what What can be? ah Just continuously trying to achieve and moving forward if we're not in touch with a part of the self or that piece in our development that either motivated us, excited us, whatever it was.
00:44:14
Speaker
So I think it is important to hold on to. So some kind of more basic need gets sort of cut off from the whole and then it may not develop as fully and then people put all their energies into something.
00:44:26
Speaker
Yeah, we we always do a sort of trauma like inventory and we have scales, ACEs scale. But if I tell people what was the first time, you know, that you felt excited um or when was the last time you felt really happy?
00:44:41
Speaker
a lot of people do sort of lose that thread in their life. What do you think about, um like, ah pretty much, yeah did this is totally totally amateur, but but from what what I see, fairly normal commonplace. I don't just mean horrific childhoods with trauma and all that, but like like fairly normal, at least at least um you ubiquitous, if not, I don't know what normal. is but but like at least ubiquitous ah childhood experiences then end up with things that people need to work through and all this. time
00:45:12
Speaker
What is the best case scenario? Like, is it possible? So so let's say future you know future science, we understand the the you know the mind, we understand the you know trauma, we understand all that stuff. Is it even possible to have a a growing up experience that does not end up in with things that you need to then somehow fix later?
00:45:30
Speaker
Like, is it even possible to to to have, you know, to to just like, you know, get there fully healthy or or is it always some yeah there's always going to be some kind of issue? Well, I would say for sure it's possible to not have a bad outcome.
00:45:45
Speaker
I think a lot of it is not in exactly what happens. So let's use childhood bullying as an example, um because that's a big one. It happens all the time, right? Kids bully each other.
00:45:56
Speaker
And we think, well, you know, they'll just have to get over it. Why is it so damaging? Well, we know now that it is really, really damaging. One of the most damaging things that can happen.
00:46:08
Speaker
And it doesn't mean that... that the bullying is going to necessarily stop, but how we respond to it and what that child, you know, who feels picked on is told about himself or what it means about himself, whether it's like, well, what are you doing to sort of invite this kind of,
00:46:26
Speaker
You know, ridiculing versus an adult saying, hey, that's really not acceptable. And I'm sorry that happened to you. And I'm going to do something to like make it right. So all of those things actually we know because there's a lot of research that says that it profoundly impacts how they see themselves in the world.
00:46:43
Speaker
Well, there's a handful of different inputs. There's adverse childhood experiences and there's positive childhood experiences. And then there's intrinsic resilience, which some of that is biological, kind of levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor.
00:46:56
Speaker
um And then, you know, resilient kids will seek out a mentor who gives them that better input. And then there's also like, do you fight back or not? So certainly not all childhood adversity leads to post-traumatic clinical outcomes or dissociation.
00:47:11
Speaker
In fact, it's really a small percentage of people, even with trauma, who develop PTSD. So, you know, it's really important um not to presume anything about developmental trajectory.
00:47:23
Speaker
By the same token, you know, culture and environment play a ah lot of factors as do an intrinsic things. You know, like I was bullied and it wasn't great for me, but I also fought back. I didn't particularly have a mentor to tell me it wasn't acceptable, but I kind of knew.
00:47:37
Speaker
I also discovered psychoanalysis at a young age. it was probably... the equivalent of the back of the TV. I found books on psychoanalysis in the mall. My family saw psychoanalysts.
00:47:48
Speaker
So I kind of latched onto that. I think what you can say is there's like a set of developmentally preferred trajectories and there's a lot of different factors, right? And is there some kind of morphology that you're shooting for, which is equivalent to, you know, a five fingered hand?
00:48:05
Speaker
And can we control that more effectively? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about this in the context of there are there are certain ideas in the you know scope of of philosophy and and whatever that are um pretty disturbing.
00:48:20
Speaker
And and so so I had thought about this a lot because i was so so i was we we we we we homeschooled a part of their childhood. We homeschooled our two kids. And so I was in charge of some of the science and the philosophy stuff as you know, part of a kind of a la carte education.
Teaching Philosophy to Children
00:48:35
Speaker
and and And I spent a lot of time like thinking about this because some of the ideas, you know, are are pretty disturbing, they're pretty to disruptive. And it's not like you can go your whole life without hearing these ideas because at some point you need to, you know, you need to you need to be aware.
00:48:52
Speaker
But, but, but then, yeah, you know, the, the, I, it's not good, at least as I took it didn't look look to me like it was positive for your, for your, you know, mental wellbeing. And so is it even, so that that's what we brought on the question is like yeah normal experiences. Like the first time you find out that not everybody likes you or loves you, you know, the first time you run into that person, that's just mean. Right. And I mean, that, know, that, that is going to happen.
00:49:15
Speaker
um And the first time you find out this idea, somebody says, oh yeah, you know, the universe is this like cold, meaningless void and that nothing you do matters. Like, right Those ideas can kind of they can settle in or they can kind of slide off.
00:49:26
Speaker
um And there's kind of maybe a developmental window in in Herman Hesse's story of of the Buddha Siddharth. The idea is that you protect kids from all these death, disease, poverty until they're old enough to make sense of it.
00:49:40
Speaker
So in in traumatology and we would talk about precocious experience can be potentially negative. um For me, like I went to Hebrew school as a kid, and I was exposed to horrific imagery at a very young age while my mother was dying of cancer.
00:49:56
Speaker
And it was hard to make sense of. um And so it took it took work later on, probably more work, and certainly changed the way I see things. um and And this is a huge problem just culturally, right? Especially with the internet and with AI, right? Kids can get on AI, and who the heck knows what is going to come up. So That's our like last question, I guess, for today is, where do you see this? I know it's inevitable that all these things are going to happen.
00:50:25
Speaker
do you have any thoughts about how we can prep for it as a culture? I know that's not your wheelhouse, but... Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, a lot of the... thing at the in them so I apologize. I have about the two two minutes before I get to go.
00:50:37
Speaker
um a A lot of what's actually going to happen and what should we do, like that that stuff is above my pay grade. I can't even pretend I know the answers to it. You're a parent though, so you're an expert. This is true. ah you You pretend, right? and so so but But
Ethics and Diverse Intelligences
00:50:51
Speaker
this is what I think. um the only the the the way the The only way forward that I see, and and and it's necessary for our survival as a mature species, I don't know if it's sufficient, but it's certainly necessary, is ah um a full development of of an emerging field called diverse intelligence.
00:51:07
Speaker
but Basically, to to really understand ah beyond the ancient binary categories of humans and machines and this other stuff that basically was was never really good, but now is completely useless, um that we need to go beyond this and we need to understand how we are going to ethically relate to minds that are not like ours humans have a big problem with this ah but maybe because of our evolution and the importance of in-group out-group dynamics but but to learn to to have an ethical um i we have the synth biosis so to speak with with beings that are really not like like really not like you at all And and and and to understand, to be able to detect other minds that are in unfamiliar embodiments, to go beyond what do you look like and how did you get here ah and and and work up of but what once Once we can do, if if we if we get better at that, then I think a lot of other things, we you know we can we can maybe avoid some horrific ethical lapses and things like that.
00:52:02
Speaker
good advice. Thanks so much for talking with us today. can people find you?
Further Resources on Dr. Levin's Work
00:52:08
Speaker
um Well, drmike11.org, one word. That's my official lab website.
00:52:13
Speaker
And thoughtforms.life is my blog where I put my personal opinions on what this stuff means. And you're an amazing photographer too. fer You want to finish your sign off, Farah? right. Thanks so much for i'm joining us today on Doorknob Comments. And please let us know if you have any questions. yeah Thanks very much. I appreciate it a lot. It was good to meet you. Yeah, likewise for your time. Take care.
00:52:37
Speaker
Remember, the Doorknob Comments podcast is not medical advice. If you may be in need of professional assistance, please seek consultation without delay.