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Why You Can’t “Just Do It”: The Intention-Action Gap with Dr. Tom Froese #90
1 Plays1 day ago
Have you ever wondered about the relationship between your brain and your mind? How does that wrinkled, gel-like matter in our head dictate our understanding of ourselves and the world?
On today’s episode of Doorknob Comments, Grant and Fara are joined by Dr. Tom Froese, a cognitive scientist at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) who researches the origin and nature of the human mind by integrating philosophy of mind, computational modeling, and human subjects research.
The conversation centers on what Froese calls the intention-action gap: the stubborn fact that knowing what we want to do and actually doing it are never the same thing. Why can't we simply force our bodies to comply with our intentions? And what does this mean for how long real change actually takes?
Together, they explore frustration tolerance, boredom, and the role of friction in psychological development, landing on a key therapeutic insight: sitting with uncertainty rather than demanding immediate resolution.
We hope you enjoy!
Resources and Links
Doorknob Comments
https://www.doorknobcomments.com/
Dr. Tom Froese
Consciousness may be more than the brain’s output — it may be an input, too
https://loc.closertotruth.com/theory/froese-s-irruption-theory
https://www.oist.jp/research/research-units/ecsu/tom-froese
Dr. Fara White
Dr. Grant Brenner
Recommended
Transcript
Foundations of Mental and Physical Preparation
00:00:00
Speaker
because it does mean that ultimately we cannot force our body. We can create the conditions and stack the text such that the action that we want is more likely to come about than not, but we can never force it.
00:00:13
Speaker
It's more process of cultivating the right habits, cultivating the right environments, cultivating the right relationships. So it's a historical process of, you know, Asian environment interaction or mind-body interaction such that when you're faced with a new situation,
00:00:29
Speaker
Your body is already primed to do the right thing.
Introduction to Hosts and Podcast Purpose
00:00:33
Speaker
Hello, I'm Dr. Farrah White. And I'm Dr. Grant Brenner. We're psychiatrists and therapists in private practice in New York.
00:00:41
Speaker
We started this podcast in 2019 to draw attention to a phenomenon called the doorknob comment. 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.
00:00:53
Speaker
Doorknob comments happen not only during therapy, but also in everyday life. The point is that sometimes we aren't sure how to express the deeply meaningful things we're feeling, thinking, and experiencing.
00:01:04
Speaker
Maybe we're afraid to bring certain things out into the open or are on the fence about wanting to discuss them. Sometimes we know we've got something we're unsure about sharing and are keeping it to ourselves.
00:01:15
Speaker
And sometimes we surprise ourselves by what comes out.
Tom Froese's Interdisciplinary Approach to Mind Study
00:01:22
Speaker
Hi, welcome to the Doorknob Comments Podcast. We are here with Tom Froese. Tom Froese is a cognitive scientist at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, or OIST, where he leads the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit.
00:01:37
Speaker
His background is in artificial life and complex systems theory, and he researches the origin and nature of the human mind by integrating philosophy of mind, computational modeling, and human subjects research.
00:01:52
Speaker
Freud has contributed to the embodied and inactive approach to cognitive science, which conceives of the mind as an emergent natural phenomenon that is brain, body, and world involving.
00:02:06
Speaker
Welcome, Tom. Thank you so much, Grant. I'm happy to be
Consciousness Theories and Self-Help Book Insights
00:02:10
Speaker
here. We're really delighted to have you. um and We can start really wherever you want. But what I'm curious about is how the two of you sort of came into contact and your sort of connection.
00:02:25
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. um Well, Grant, you reached out to me. I'm curious. How did you hear about me and what made you reach out? You know, i i'm I'm trying to remember. i thought we were going to ask you how you got into the field and to tell us a little bit about yourself. We can come to that. um need Yeah, I mean, i yeah i came across your work because I'm very interested, you know, and I've i've spoken with people who who are in your kind of network. um I might have seen a piece that was posted by Sheila Macron on X. I think there's about a 70% probability.
00:03:00
Speaker
um i might have seen your work cited somewhere else. I think the words that you use, ah particularly eruption, caught my eye. um i have a concept in self-help books I've co-authored called Irrelationship.
00:03:12
Speaker
So the IRR prefix, you know, is really interesting to me. i think I think linguistically it's kind of an important prefix and one that doesn't come up that often. That's true. Let
From AI to Cognitive Science: Tom's Journey
00:03:24
Speaker
me just pause there. You know, we've we've moved on from the E's.
00:03:27
Speaker
it used to be the 4E, 5E, you know, always adding an extra E. Now we've moved on to the Yeah. no Right. And I have a lot of associations to that. Like the letter i you know, is the square root of negative one, which is an imaginary number, which somewhat remarkably crops up in all of the equations that describe all the brain rhythms and natural systems. And, you know, I reached out and you were very gracious um and replied to me. And we worked out the time differences because you're in Okinawa. And um i think it's morning there and it's evening here. So right we're um we're on opposite sides of the world.
00:04:02
Speaker
um And I think in particular, you know, I'll say there's something about your theory. i don't have like a lot of um strong feelings about consciousness theories that I think a lot of people do, but I consider myself a materialist.
00:04:16
Speaker
And whenever I see theories that say that there's something that we'll never be able to know about consciousness or subjectivity, i always want to argue a little bit about it um in a very gentle and collegial way.
00:04:29
Speaker
And I think it's really in an unknown, really. But... Sure. Yeah. I mean, you I so shared with you the entry in the landscape of consciousness um website, and um I didn't choose the categorization of eruption theory, but it it was categorized as a form of materialism. You'll be happy to know. So So we we can talk about that more
Eruption Theory and Consciousness
00:04:50
Speaker
as well. But I think Farah, so I think where you wanted to go next was to, you know, like the the background story of how we got to this place and in the first place. So maybe it'll be good for me to say a few more words to to to to to unpack the journey, at least in a nutshell.
00:05:04
Speaker
And then we can dive deeper into these things. And we already mentioned ease and eyes and the embodied and active approach. But let me just take one step even before that work to show you where I was coming from.
00:05:17
Speaker
And originally, um I was very interested in artificial intelligence. that was That was my dream job when I was a high school student. And I entered a university studying AI.
00:05:29
Speaker
This was in the early 2000s, it was still the AI winter, as it was called, um where basically people were hugely disillusioned about the prospects of artificial intelligence. And so...
00:05:41
Speaker
my my lecturers basically were holding courses why AI would never work. um And my experiences at the time of working with the systems that were available, um you know, just confirmed this impression that, you know, there's something categorically different from these artificial systems compared to humans. And so um I decided to switch careers and to study instead what were the differences between natural and artificial systems and how come even very seemingly simple natural systems, I say like a cockroach, could just do so much more than our most sophisticated technological systems.
00:06:19
Speaker
And so i started studying artificial life, which is the study of ah life using technology and synthetic approaches. um I went into cognitive science, this was for my PhD.
00:06:31
Speaker
And I really fell in love with the the different E's, the embodied, embedded, extended and active approaches to cognition, precisely because they gave us answers for um What makes living systems special compared to other kinds of systems? And how could those unique properties tell us something interesting about why we have minds in the first place? Why are we conscious in the first place?
00:06:57
Speaker
And in that context, that of course, the question becomes, what's special about human minds? um you know What's special about our particular form of being aware of the world and shaping the world? um And so that was ah the the yeah know the starting point of for my career to really unpack these questions, trying to push this embodied approach, which had spent a lot of time looking at simple living creatures to the human mind and bringing in the social cultural complexity and technology and looking at the origins of social complexity and an evolutionary point of view, prehistoric ah things and so on. but while I was doing that, um I had the growing...
00:07:35
Speaker
and unease that we couldn't really get to grips with the empirical data that were being produced by the neurosciences and by behavioral sciences and by physiology. And so I decided to switch gears a little bit and become more interested in the interface between these theories and empirical work. And that made me realize that we still had a lot of work to do to actually work out what were the specific predictions that we could draw from these kinds of approaches that then can be tested in in the lab. And that's kind of like then the origin of what I call the Russian theory, that um thinking about that interface meant that I had to revisit and revise some of our cherished assumptions about how the mind works.
Influence of Early Life and Parental Careers
00:08:18
Speaker
And so I leave it there, but that's the kind of journey. And now, of course, AI is back. So, ah you know, which is very fascinating um and, you know, makes me super excited because, um yeah, that's that's where i originally started and it took a huge detour. And by the in the meantime, the rest of the field caught up and actually does give us interesting AI systems. So, you know, it's very exciting times to see all these things coming together.
00:08:41
Speaker
yeah Do you mind if I ask, like growing up, what interested you and what were you like as a kid? And you don't have to go into too much detail, but, sure you know, it's always interesting to talk to people about their earlier life who end up in in fields like this.
00:08:58
Speaker
Yeah. um ah ah but you I was born in Germany, but um growing up, it was a bit unusual. um My family left Germany when I was eight years old. um The whole family moved to the Philippines, not too far from Okinawa. It feels a little bit like home here. i grew up in the Philippines, actually.
00:09:17
Speaker
um because my my dad is a scientist, a marine biologist, and in Manila, capital of the Philippines, there was an institute which was one of the leading institutes looking at biodiversity. And at that time, they were just creating a huge database of all the known information about fish because they're the largest vertebrate group. And so for biology, that's a very fascinating group to study. And so they're just collecting all this information to one source. this was the, guess, the early 90s. So early days where information technology just started,
00:09:47
Speaker
becoming available in this way and databases were a big thing and so on. And so So I had a connection with, on the one hand, biology, but also really with computer science through the to were the work of my my father. um And my mother was ah ah working as a developmental psychologist um in Germany and also a little bit helping children with learning ah challenges and in the in the Philippines.
00:10:10
Speaker
and And she was reading constructivist ah theory like Vygotsky and things like that. So so I had... On my father, the kind of natural sciences. And then with my mother, i had the kind of pedagogy and and constructivist philosophy.
00:10:26
Speaker
um Yeah. so So these, you know, and these kind of influences kind of, you can see them in my my own work as well.
Philosophical Debates on Free Will and Behavior
00:10:33
Speaker
It's funny. It reminds me, I was having um dinner last week with a good friend of mine who's also a psychiatrist, but he studied computers and math at MIT. And we were talking about the question of whether people are truly conscious because there are these experiments by LeBay where he shows that, you know, before you think about doing something, you can see the neural signature. And what does that mean philosophically if part of your brain knows what you're going to do before you're conscious of it? It's used...
00:11:03
Speaker
It's used as an argument against free will. And he was like, yeah, you and I in like third and fourth grade would would debate this. And I was like, yeah, just like the other kids. Right. um But I had this thought experiment and i don't want to go too far off, but it'll bring us into the subject. Maybe i was thinking about this last week. I was thinking, what if you made a machine? And I was thinking about talking today with you. that could reliably predict what was going to happen in the next couple of seconds in in the user. And it was hooked up to their brain with EEG and advanced techniques we don't have yet, using AI that we haven't developed yet. And essentially, you could look at the screen or you could wear the headset or whatever it is, and you would know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was anticipating what you were about to do just in the same way an MRI would predict what you were about to do.
00:11:55
Speaker
Well, number one, I thought, what would that be like, right? And how far out could it predict and blah, blah, blah, blah. blah But I thought as as a thought experiment, does that negate libe? Because if you were if you were using this consciousness mirror device, then you could think something ahead of time and then you would know that you were ahead of the computer and therefore it would prove that you did have free will.
00:12:19
Speaker
i said There's a lot to unpack there. So let me just one step back. So i I always enjoyed philosophy too. So let me just, you know, add this into the mix. um One of my favorite subjects in high school was a theory of knowledge. um And, you know, and and and basically, although I never formally trained in philosophy, I mean, my degrees are in computer science, cybernetics, cognitive science, and so on. I always was reading philosophy on the side. So basically, their self-taught.
00:12:44
Speaker
And um so the questions about free will and autonomy were were things that were driving me crazy as an undergraduate. I would just, you know, like spin out and just think, you know what does quantum physics have to do with free will and these kinds of things? Penrose was a big, you know, book at the time and so on.
00:12:58
Speaker
Yeah, Heisenberg and nothing is real. and Yeah, exactly. Right. So so so bringing this the sciences and the philosophy together and asking these really big questions about, you know, that that really touched existential matters was was a fun thing to do as ah as a student. And it's still fun to do. Yeah.
00:13:13
Speaker
So about the Libet experiments, I think one one um one kind of qualification here that is that that that the way in which they predict what's going to happen next relies on ah the knowing already when the click has happened.
00:13:30
Speaker
um And this is a little bit of a cheat in the sense that you record it, you know where the button press was, and then you align all the trials to the button press, and then you average going backwards in time. If you were to try to predict in real time, which is the kind of thought experiment that you're unpacking right now, it would be a very different matter. And it actually it would be very hard to do that.
00:13:49
Speaker
um you know Maybe there's still some possibility of doing it, but it would be a much shorter time window and probably like the the error rate would be very high. um there's There's a lot of work now showing that if you just flip the script and basically say, let's predict from start zero of the trial rather than going backwards from the click, um what looks what happens in your brain looks very much sort like a random walk.
00:14:12
Speaker
It's just fluctuations going up and down. And at some point there's a big fluctuation and you click the button. For eruption theory, this is actually one of the pieces of evidence that we use to say, ah is there something about this noisy fluctuation that we can say that would make it actually coming from you as the agent?
00:14:29
Speaker
um and And I think we have good reasons for saying that. We can unpack that little bit more. But in a sense, we can take the exact same data, a little bit more careful about exactly how to interpret it, and then it actually becomes a piece of evidence in favor of free will rather than against it.
00:14:45
Speaker
Yeah, i i never I never thought Libet's experiment said anything about free will. But, you know, i'm thinking about like the the listener and like, you know, these questions in everyday life.
00:14:56
Speaker
Some people think about them and it can really drive people into a bad state sometimes if they start to feel like they don't have free will.
Mind-Body Connection and Treatment Approaches
00:15:04
Speaker
And this comment, and Farah, I see you're ready to say something about what makes the human mind special You know, like that's an an interesting question because on one hand, we're not so different. We are mammals and we've got, you know, the same basic architecture. But on the other hand, all you have to do is look at the world and you can see how much the human mind has changed the world.
00:15:26
Speaker
There's no other animal that has changed the world in quite the same way that we have. Right. Faria, did you want to jump in? Yeah, I think um the way that I imagine it coming up for most people in everyday life is this feeling that they want to do something or an intent to be a certain way, show up in the world, and that they can't really make that happen. ah for themselves and and this frustration. Like I, I know the patterns, I see the patterns that are harmful to me.
00:15:59
Speaker
And I'm not feeling like they can really do anything to stop it. Right. Yeah. and we we We are very interested also in that phenomenon from the point of view that we're developing. And ah we're calling it the intention action gap, which which which is interesting because in in a way, um you know, Grant, I know you want, you know, we're we're in favor of materialism in a certain way, but if it's a too simplistic one, if the mind and brain are just the same, then why is there an intention action gap at all?
00:16:29
Speaker
You could argue that, you know, You should just be able to change your behavior because your behavior is generated by your brain. If your mind is just your brain, well, then just change the behavior, right? I mean, but what's the issue? I definitely don't think the mind and the brain are the same. Good. You know, i think I think the brain sort of produces the mind. But I think you're, you know, I think you're talking and Farrah, I think you're talking in in a some somewhat important way clinically, but also just in everyone's lives is,
00:16:54
Speaker
about causality and why, why isn't, why isn't it the case that that's, that you, you can't just do what you want when you want to do it. And people struggle with this all the time. And I'm sure that has something to do with what's happening in the brain and in the mind. um So, you know, for example, I know we talked about a little bit beforehand, and at some point we should take a step back and have you explain what your theory is. I see patients who have problems with volition, with doing what they want to do, and sometimes it's labeled as major depressive disorder, um for example, and we'll treat this with transcranial magnetic stimulation, which appears to restore connectivity between certain executive areas and motivational areas of the brain in a way which...
00:17:42
Speaker
simplistically is very much like reconnecting a wire that wasn't connected, say, between the frontal cortex and the cingulate cortex. And I've seen people almost overnight restore their ability to bridge the intention-action gap.
00:17:58
Speaker
And it's correlated with you know treatment of depression. But of course, there are other things that interfere with intention-action loops. So let's come back to that. Could you try to explain in as simple terms as possible, what your theory postulates and what is important about the black box?
00:18:18
Speaker
and The black box. Sure. Yeah. Let me, um let me start with a phrase that you just said, which which I also believe is true, which is that, um, mind and brain are not the same thing. so You say something like that. right So um what we are trying to take as our starting point is to just stay with and recognize that the way in which the world shows up to us shows that there are different kinds, different natural kinds.
00:18:45
Speaker
um So there can be men there can be minds and with mental features and there can be bodies with bodily features. um And some of these cannot be translated from one to the other. So very famously in cognitive science, um the mind-body problem says, how do we go from intentions that have goals and conditions of success and failure and so on, there's also this whole normativity associated with them, to something which is just, you know, changes in space-time. Your body moves at a certain in a certain way, right? The way in which a physicist could measure it.
00:19:21
Speaker
But when we measure those changes in the world, we cannot directly measure the normative aspects. um You know, what is the content? What what what was the action about? what What was the motivation for it? Those things, we can't just put a label on it and say, you know, your action intention, the intention behind your action, you know, we measure it as three volts or something like that. You know, it it doesn't come in standard physics units.
00:19:45
Speaker
And so we have a translation problem. And the other way around is also true. so you said that the brain maybe gives rise to the mind or to conscious experience, you might say. And again, we can go into our brain and we look at how the brain activity changes with respect to what's in front of our eyes, for example.
00:20:03
Speaker
At some point, you will try that activity and the person will say, oh, now I see the stimulus. But that subjective experience, that conscious awareness of now I see something that we can't directly measure in the brain.
00:20:14
Speaker
We have to ask the person saying, do you see it now? you know Are you you know conscious of this? There's no no way around that. So whether we're going from the mind to the brain or from the brain to the mind, there's always something that clock gets lost in translation.
00:20:26
Speaker
And people have been banging your head against this for a long time, trying to find a way to make this fully transparent. And our approach is to say, for the moment, let's just treat this as a black box. There's something that gets lost in translation. We don't know exactly why.
00:20:41
Speaker
Maybe it's there for a reason. Maybe it's a principle difference, like a categorical difference. um But that doesn't mean that these two sides don't make a difference to each other. We can still say the mind makes a difference to your behavior and your brain makes a difference to your experience, um but they're not the same.
00:20:57
Speaker
And this is another way of saying we assume non-reductionism. You cannot just reduce one side into the other. So we cannot collapse all the world into your consciousness and we cannot collapse your consciousness into the world. Neither of that would give us a satisfactory answer.
00:21:12
Speaker
But if we take this approach and say both of these make a difference, your intentions, your volition makes a difference, your desire for change makes a difference, but also your embodied being, and that also makes a difference.
00:21:23
Speaker
So the situation is complex and we have to learn to work on on both sides of this gap. And that's what the theory really tries to do.
Cultivating Long-Term Changes
00:21:31
Speaker
It's try to capture systematically the uncertainties that get introduced because of the non-reductionism.
00:21:37
Speaker
So if I work on the side of the brain, for example, there might be spontaneous changes in brain activity that I cannot trace the cause of because the cause is actually something I cannot directly measure. For example, your volitional states.
00:21:51
Speaker
and And that's what we call eruption. And that's what I said in the case of the LIVID experiments. The fact that um spontaneous stochastic fluctuations seem to be associated with your freely-willed decision to click the button um might actually be exactly the kind of signature that we would expect if we adopt this kind of non-reductionist black box framework. So by stochastic, there's kind of like a noisy spike when people make a choice?
00:22:18
Speaker
Right. So and ah maybe a more technically accurate term would be say it's indeterminate. So you can't see a cause for why the change is happening. You can't measure the underlying causes.
00:22:29
Speaker
That's what I mean by spontaneous. And stochastic, you know, it's it's it's people more conventionally would say random, but the thing about random is that it carries a lot of other kinds of connotations. So here we really mean that there's a change, but we cannot determine why the change happened as long as we restrict our scope or our scale to that particular level of analysis. Of course, I could zoom out and then say, did you just have the urge to click the button? And the person will say yes.
00:22:56
Speaker
And then you'll be like, oh, okay, right. and now Now I understand why there was more spontaneous activity at this moment rather than another moment. So ah let me just say one more thing there. So this then explains why there is an intention action gap.
00:23:07
Speaker
And also explains that when things go wrong, because for example, in depression, or or also when the body does things that we don't want it to do, which is the other way around, right? ah Maybe in addiction or or you know if you have certain tics or something like that, the way to think about that is that in most cases, there's not gonna be two possible answers for why things don't work the way they should.
00:23:31
Speaker
We can look for the cause on the side of the mind and say, perhaps there was an absence of motivation. That's why the behavior didn't happen. Or we can say there was actually a lot of motivation, but it didn't connect properly with what was going on in the in the body.
00:23:45
Speaker
And that's why the the behavior didn't come out. um And that's actually reflecting quite well our our current distinctions in the sense that we have psychiatry and we have clinical psychology or therapy, which can work on both sides of this gap. But so far, it's been quite hard to integrate them and in a way such they can talk productively with each other and say, okay, you know let's diagnose this in such a way where each of us makes an equal partner contribution to the change that we want to create.
00:24:14
Speaker
usually it's still have done it in a very reductive way, that in a way that's really the most important part is the brain and the mind is sometimes thought of as less important. um But in a way, you know the brain in some cases might be perfectly primed to enact whatever action, but if the person doesn't have the motivation or relation to actually do anything, the behavior is not gonna happen. So so we we basically need to bring in both sides of the table.
00:24:41
Speaker
I think that's where I have trouble because sort of if you say you can't measure sort of subjective experience, well, I know that if someone looks at ah ah words, you know, you can you can figure out what they're looking at from decoding their visual cortex.
00:24:56
Speaker
And it's crude, but you can do it. And if someone has a ah motivation, you know, I also understand that the midbrain has motivational systems and we can we can we can measure that in animals and and with imaging. And we can see in addiction that there's abnormalities in motivational reward systems. And we can see that drugs like Ozempic and ZepBound change those reward circuits. And then like people talk about the food noise is gone. It's just gone. And you can see a very one-to-one correlation between the mind and the brain.
00:25:30
Speaker
Once you get that level of ah kind of mechanistic precision, Though I also think there's a way where it seems like the mind, my mind is in your mind and is in Farah's mind. At least the the the activity from my brain is is is influencing activity in each of your minds.
00:25:49
Speaker
So there's a way where you might make the case that mind is distributed in some way. Though you could also say that it's all in the brain and like a tick is like a motor activity in the brain that wires to your arm. But...
00:26:03
Speaker
you know These are things that, like Farah said, it almost won't matter to a lot of listeners because they're just like, how come I can't behave the way I want at work? I keep getting fired because I keep being irritable at work.
00:26:17
Speaker
But it has practical implications. let me farris So let me just quickly say how I think about it. And and I'm curious about whether you think that that this is the right way or not. um Once we recognize this intention-action gap, um and um you know basically it creates an indirection. It doesn't mean that there's no brain activity happening. And the brain activity could even be quite structured. It has to be because it's involved in behavior generation. So you know we do expect that there's going to be a lot of correspondence. um It's just not identity. And and so there's a slight indirection. But the indirection is important because it does mean that ultimately we cannot force our body.
00:26:54
Speaker
That's what it means. We cannot force. We can create the conditions and stack the text such that the action that we want is more likely to come about than not. But we can never force it. And so step number one is not to beat ourselves up if something goes wrong.
00:27:09
Speaker
Because actually we can't force. We're not ultimately 100% responsible for what our bodies do. That's number one. Second point is then how do we increase the percentage that our bodies do the things that align with our intentions most of the time?
00:27:23
Speaker
And that's something that can't be done in the moment, according to this view. It's something where it's more process of cultivating the right habits, cultivating the right environments, cultivating the right relationships.
00:27:35
Speaker
So it's a historical process of Asian environment interaction or mind-body interaction, such that when you're faced with a new situation, your body is already primed to do the right thing.
00:27:46
Speaker
Even if you personally haven't really yet decided yet, or even if you have decided, if there's resistance in the body, it will not happen, right? So in a sense, it's your, the freedom that we have is one of choosing the long-term trajectories. In which area do we want to live? With whom, with what kind of people do we want to surround ourselves?
00:28:06
Speaker
um you know Do I want to you know do exercise to to train my body? These kinds of investments will then mean that in the moment-to-moment intentions, our bodies are more likely to respond in the appropriate ways.
00:28:19
Speaker
um but it's it' like crazy Sorry, just one last thing. so It shifts the the locus of control away from the moment and into this longer-term interaction. Yeah, it's like you're trying to set the stage for your future self. Exactly. Exactly.
00:28:32
Speaker
And I think there are a lot of people where um if, especially today, if something, if they don't see an immediate benefit, right, something like sleep, I would say is a big one where people can sometimes set the stage for sleep and have really good sleep hygiene, but then there might be some disconnect and it might take a lot of practice and it's a little bit of a process. Yeah.
00:28:59
Speaker
But that sometimes if the result takes too long to be produced, then it's demoralizing to people.
Sleep and Social Dynamics
00:29:07
Speaker
And I think it is helpful with everything that we do to say, hey here is how long these treatments might take. um This medication will take four to six weeks to work or this psychoanalysis will take, you know, 12 years or, you know, whatever it is.
00:29:25
Speaker
So. Yeah, that's interesting. I think ah waiting is an important skill in general. um We have a whole line of research on optimal waiting time and things that So this is so very close to my heart at the moment.
00:29:37
Speaker
And even sleep, ah you know, you have to think of this as an investment. You know, not not as downtime, but as an investment. And, you know, sleep is is like one of those mysteries in the sense that um why does it exist at all? You know, like ah we've we've had billions of years of evolution and and and pretty much all animals with a nervous system have to have some downtime.
00:29:59
Speaker
And you can be pretty sure that the death rate of all of those organisms is much higher during that downtime than when they're awake and alert. So if evolution had a chance to just you know minimize sleep or get rid of it, then it would have done so because the fitness benefits would have been huge. Imagine an animal that never you know sleeps as always alert, but it can't.
00:30:21
Speaker
you know And that means there must be fundamental reasons, absolutely fundamental reasons for us to be in this downtime phase where we're totally vulnerable to or to our environments. It seems to be important for the brain to kind of clean out waste, consolidate memory. Is it true that dolphins like are always awake because part of their brain can sleep while part of their brain is awake?
00:30:43
Speaker
is that Or is that a myth? Do you the answer to that? yeah. I'm not a sleep expert, but I have heard that, you know, for animals who need to be constantly active and who can't rest, you know, lying down or or you know, just using gravity to hold them for a moment, they do need to be partially active and maybe some part of their brain, you know, switches off while the other one continues like maintaining the the behavioral pattern. so So even those animals where you would think that here's a real reason for not falling asleep because you'll drown, they still have to somehow, you know, have compromises.
00:31:15
Speaker
keep moving. I also think socially, just to digress slightly, you know for human beings, we can take turns sleeping in shifts. And you know this goes back to the invention of time, because that's why it's called a watch, because people would have a watch.
00:31:31
Speaker
And so you sleep and I'll stay awake. So as a group, you know part of the human group is sleeping and part of the human group is awake, right? Yeah. I didn't know that about the watch. Okay. Very interesting. Yeah. um The social, right. um I mean, you you talked a little bit about, you know, are the the base of her mind, maybe even extending and so on, right? That's another whole line of research that we could just maybe briefly touch on, because I think it's it's quite relevant also for the discussion of the intention action gap.
00:32:01
Speaker
Yeah. Just to say that we're not really ever alone. um And who we are with changes fundamentally the organization of our internal dynamics. And we've got lots of work showing that from simple simulation models so we can actually do the mathematics of, you know, how does the state space of neural activity change to doing the hyper scanning and then just showing that your brain will be differently activated when you're interacting with a real another person than if you're just being active, but it's not a social situation This is really important, right? So it it means that joking when you're in front of an audience is not just you, it's also the fact that there is an audience there and, you know, and and you there's this interaction.
Social Influences on Development
00:32:43
Speaker
or the fact that maybe you feel more, the children may feel more empowered with their caretakers and then have to learn how to reenact those skills even in the absence of their caretakers. That's a real process, you know, because um there's gonna be some, you know reorganization necessary in order to become independent in this way. And probably it's not by chance that there's a lot of, you know, pathologies start in adolescence when all these reorganizations start to take place.
00:33:12
Speaker
a lot of interesting research. I'm just reading a book by Lucy Jones called Butrescence that I don't know if either of you have have heard of it. But anyway, she talks about the sort of postpartum changes in the brain, gray matter changes and, um you know, how it's thought to be a process of pruning that allows women to, i guess, be more attuned and attentive to the needs of an infant. um
00:33:44
Speaker
Yeah, there's there's research that both men and women's brains, but women's brains more dramatically, almost like go back to an earlier developmental state and then are like reborn when they have children.
00:33:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think everything changes, right? It changes. it is a change in body, mind and and brain. And I think that is felt um quite strongly by most people who are either delivering a baby, caring for a newborn. And it is, yes, sort of hard then to connect back with the former self. I think that first year is really should be and could be about integration.
00:34:26
Speaker
Yeah. So I think, you know, the traditional developmental psychology view um has a very different view of this. um You know, there were some psychologists even arguing that children are not really even aware of the existence of other minds until they're like four years old.
00:34:42
Speaker
which sounds ridiculous, right? and And so they had good reasons, right? They were like saying, this is what the evidence tells us. There's only evidence of false belief understanding when they're four years old. and But you know this was like you know artificial scenarios with like based on image understanding and and you know they were not real ecological, real life situations. And anyway, so I think the inverse is much more appropriate, which is to say that every human being starts inside another human being Okay, so actually being almost the same organism. And then the whole all of the rest is a process of separation.
00:35:18
Speaker
You start as a unified biological system. Then you start you continue as a unified, interactive, dyadic social system. And eventually, many years later, you know you become two independent individuals.
00:35:31
Speaker
And and and that those transitions of separation are the ones that are the the critical ones and where a lot of problems can happen. um But the idea that they're basically mind blind and then later have to learn to be social um and realize that there is another, that there are other people around them.
00:35:47
Speaker
um Yeah, I think ah that that view has been overhauled. Right. Well, yeah, Mahler talked about separation and individuation, but I'm thinking of the psychoanalyst Wilford Bion, and he had a theory of the psychoanalytic theory of thinking where he really talks about that the child's mind needs to be in partnership with the mind of the the caregiver, typically the mother, who would take experiences and maybe they're eruptive experiences in some ways that just don't make sense and then the mother would take them in and partially metabolize them and then symbolize them in an appropriate way for where the child's mind was.
00:36:26
Speaker
And that would allow the child to grow little by little by giving them like what they can take at that moment. Kind of like someone lifting weights would start with a low weight and then a good a good personal trainer would give them more weight and more exercise until they develop what Bion called an apparatus for thinking.
00:36:45
Speaker
Meaning they would have the full agency that they could have, and there would be the minimum gap between intention and action. And Beyoncé said, if that process gets messed up, then instead of developing what he called an apparatus for thinking, and he tried to make this a mathematical theory, they would develop what he called an apparatus for projecting.
00:37:04
Speaker
And then the world would be black and white, and people would not actually see themselves as properly individuated. they would They would be living inside at least partially a fantasy world that they would project their inner reality onto the outer reality, and therefore the outer reality would not match their predictions of their inner reality.
00:37:23
Speaker
And this would lead to problems, of course, like getting fired from jobs over and over again. Right, interesting. Yeah, let me think about that. um Some colleagues of mine, DiPaolo and DeAger, have done a lot of work on participatory sense-making, making sense together. And they also look at these the developmental trajectories.
00:37:41
Speaker
um And this is what you call metabolizing the nonsensical eruptive experience. I like that a lot. um One example they have is that um ah an infant might be playing with different objects and might just, you know almost like motor babbling, you know enact different ways of relating to the objects.
00:37:58
Speaker
And at some point, the caretaker or mother takes one of the objects from their hands and says, oh, thank you. And then suddenly what was mainly an instrumental or exploratory action has become a social action of giving and receiving. And that was not the original intention, but the mother has turned it into that intention through her complimentary actions. So she basically, you know bootstrapped the, you know, the intentional capacities of the infant one level up by showing the infant, Hey, you know, there's also this thing that you can do with your actions. Um,
00:38:31
Speaker
And so that's a nice example where, you know, ah basically giving them the infrastructure through these interactions is what the caretaker can do. It increases the entropy of the infant system by showing that there's possibilities that they hadn't known before, right?
Embracing Life Transitions for Growth
00:38:45
Speaker
Right. So it's say increasinging increasing the state space of possibilities, yeah. Yeah. So Farrah, what do you think? Can you bring this back down to earth again with, you know, you're really good at thinking about what that's like? and you I do think that the sort of, and and I have a lot of respect for developmental psychology. I think the one thing that you know, maybe we we didn't always get right is this idea that, you know, things are exclusive to mother infant or that um there is some sort of a progression. Okay, now they know object permanence. You know, in my mind, with my children, with my patients, it's much more nebulous um and that we can recreate bits of that. And there are people who are highly functional, over-functioning, in fact, that, let's say have missed one critical part of development. It might be setting a boundary with someone, saying no to plans that they don't want, or, so you know, and that,
00:39:56
Speaker
just because they didn't get that, because maybe they had a ah mother who was too perfect and too giving and never said no. So now they think like, oh, well, can I really say no? I didn't have that model.
00:40:07
Speaker
In my mind, it can be learned at any time. There's motivation too. True. So I do agree that, you know, we're we're always adaptable and it's also another skill, you know, yeah you can be learn to be adaptable to be adaptable. um So you can basically bootstrap that yeah across the lifespan.
00:40:25
Speaker
And I really like what you said about boundaries and saying no. um Another colleague, Dan Hutto, has a book on folk psychology. And and one passage that i really stayed with me from his book is that frictions are natural and and you know and actually to be welcomed sometimes and not just to be brushed away.
00:40:46
Speaker
And such that, you know, when there is tension, let's say, in the caretaker-infant relationship, that is okay. And that is that, you know, the thing to do in those situations is to work through that, not to try to brush it away or pretend it's not there.
00:40:59
Speaker
Because those experiences is absolutely crucial for the infant, for the children, um in order to go through this process of separation and becoming independent. um You know, it hurts for the moment.
00:41:12
Speaker
um But then that's just like giving birth in general, i guess, although I've never had that experience. Right. So so to going through different stages of life will bring with it a certain discomfort and a certain struggle.
00:41:24
Speaker
um But it's absolutely essential to let that process flow, because otherwise you'll never get to the other side of that process.
Eruption and Absorption in Personal Development
00:41:30
Speaker
It's like what you're saying about. about waiting. And we talk about frustration tolerance in psychoanalysis.
00:41:38
Speaker
And nowadays, like kids and adults can't stand being bored. And being bored is so important for development. um I do in the last couple of minutes, I want to come back to kind of the most seemingly mystical aspects of your theory.
00:41:54
Speaker
We haven't really dug into it And again, beyond has an idea of the O, with the thing that can't be symbolized. But so you have eruption, which is stands against or in contrast to absorption. Can you kind of briefly talk about what those two things are and kind of what happens in the the sort of space between them?
00:42:18
Speaker
Because the feeling I had from talking with you and reading your work is that this is where things kind of come from in a way. It's like this, what, it's it's where things are generated in some way, where choices come or reality is made or something, where the world comes into being. Right, right. um Wow, yeah, so so I usually try to, do you know, stick with what what we should try to test in the labs. And now you're asking me to kind like zoom out into the into the big picture.
00:42:48
Speaker
Well, you can talk about the lab, but I mean, for for people who don't you know run experiments on brains, you know who they run the experiment of going through their daily life. you know Right, right. So for that, yeah, I think I have something um that people can relate to. um And that is that these notions of eruption and absorption, we can think of them as transactional operators that sit at the boundaries between different scales or sit at the boundaries between different qualitative domains.
00:43:16
Speaker
So it could be between the social and the individual. It could be between you as a person and your body. It could be your body as a multicellular organism versus one cell somewhere or one organ inside your body.
00:43:29
Speaker
um It could be the conscious mind versus the unconscious brain. So there's lots of um natural kinds that somehow must interact with each other. And yet they all have unique specific properties that can't be easily reduced to each other.
00:43:43
Speaker
And so these... boundaries must be efficacious in the sense that they affect each other and yet they can't be reduced. So how do we think about the transactions that go across these boundaries?
00:43:55
Speaker
And so eruption and absorption is just to say there are two directions. If you have a smaller scale, um let's say ah things are happening in your personal mind,
00:44:07
Speaker
that coming from a larger scale, let's say your family, your caretaker relationship, your work situation, your society, if the society has consequences for your individual experience that you cannot relate to because you're at a different scale, you're an individual, this is coming from the whole population around you, that will show up to you as something that you cannot make sense of.
00:44:28
Speaker
That's what we call an eruption. It's basically outside of your frame of reference. And the other way goes out too. So there are things that you are contributing to the larger whole through your behavior. For example, maybe you are aligning with the kind of beliefs and actions of your people around you, even though you don't even really aware of that you're doing it.
00:44:46
Speaker
You're following the conventions of your society, and you know, unconsciously. That's absorption. You're basically reducing the amount of variability that you could enact in the service of emerging this larger coherent whole.
00:44:59
Speaker
And so one kind of takeaway insight from this is that sometimes when we feel like things are a bit strange or we don't fully understand our situation,
00:45:10
Speaker
Again, we shouldn't simply try to avoid it or medicate it or, you know, pretend it's not there. um In a way, we have to be patient for a moment and listen in and say, what is this, you know, thing that I cannot make sense of right now?
00:45:24
Speaker
Because what it could be, is that some of the other scales, such as the social scale, or maybe your physiological scale, are in a process of reorganization. They're adapting to changing circumstances.
00:45:37
Speaker
And when they do that, basically, you're also going to be affected at your scale, but it's happening outside your frame of reference, so you can't make sense of why it's happening to you. But the worst you could do in those moments is try to block it and say, I'm going to resist this um and basically become rigid um because then you're not allowing the other processes to flow and readjust themselves and adapt.
00:45:58
Speaker
And also it just you know prolongs the struggle and the suffering on your scale. And so the key question for medical practitioners though is to help patients to think about which which situation are they in? Is this a real serious, yeah specific thing that we need to cure and get rid of?
00:46:14
Speaker
You know, because it could just be that, yeah, you you have a tumor in your brain and we need to remove it. There's not, you know, and that's also possible. Or is the discomfort and and the deviations that the person has experienced part of this larger multi-scale alignment process, which just is a natural consequences that we're not limited to our individual person on level scale.
00:46:33
Speaker
So that's a kind of, you know, the enlargement of eruption theory beyond the the the mind brain boundary. Very cool. Thank you so much for coming on today and talking with us about this grant. Do you have any questions as we wrap up? Well, yeah, just to, you know, it seems to me on in one sense, you know, these moments that we want to make sense of things, but but maybe it's advisable not to do so are moments when some kind of coupling is taking place across scales, right? And if we try to if we try to just take a sleeping pill or we try to just do it and force ourselves, we interfere with a more complex process that is developing. And I know when we were emailing, it reminded me very much of something that psychoanalysts
00:47:20
Speaker
have latched onto, especially relational analysts, the concept of negative capability from the poet John Keats. And he used it to describe um Shakespeare.
00:47:31
Speaker
And he he was writing a letter to a brother of his, and he said, it struck me with it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously.
00:47:45
Speaker
And then he defines it. He says, I mean, negative capability. That is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
00:47:59
Speaker
And there's that IRR again with you irritable. And, you know, so eruption requires us to... feel irritated and not scratch it, maybe.
00:48:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's great. to go away yeah Negative capability. i'm I'm going to stick with the number of that. I think that's a nice way of phrasing um one of the capacities that we should cultivate that that this framework framework suggests. So, yeah, eruption is irritation and ah in a way, but it's one that is unavoidable if we want to have multi-scale alignment. That's another way of putting it. And so Keats is very right to say that You know, if you want to think big and if you want to do big things, you need to think multi-scale. But multi-scale means that you have to have this capacity to let the other scales do their work, even if it's, you know, irritating you for the moment. um And yeah, so that's a really nice way of putting things.
00:48:50
Speaker
And if it's irreducible, you know, it is what it is. Irreducible, not non-reducible, irreducible. point. We nailed it. Well, thank you very much, Tom. Thank you, Farah.
00:49:02
Speaker
We will um sit with a lot of uncertainty as we wrap this one up. and And it was a pleasure speaking with you. Yeah, Tom, where can our listeners find you if they want to learn more about your work or... No, don't tell them.
00:49:18
Speaker
there's ah There's a big thing piece that just came out by science writer Connor Feely. um So if you look for Connor Feely, big thing, it's a popular science introduction to the ideas that we talked about. So I think that's a good starting point. And then then people can take it from there.
00:49:36
Speaker
We'll share that link. Thank you very much. Thank you Thank you for having me. Remember, the Doorknob Comments podcast is not medical advice. If you may be in need of professional assistance, please seek consultation without delay.