What Everyone Gets Wrong About Anxiety

The J. Rogan experience. I would imagine. When you think about the original Luca and then human beings, do you ever try to extrapolate? Do you ever try to keep the process rolling in your mind and see where's this going to go? Oh yeah. So at the end of the book, I paint a not so rosy picture of where I was going. Oh yeah. So let's talk about the end of the book. So I say, okay, well, we have these two kinds of significant experiences in our lives that occupy the human mind. One is the kind that we can call an awareness of facts. This thing is here. And the other is what we might call a self-awareness. It's me that is aware that that is a bottle. So that's a higher level. And that is what appears to be unique to the human mind, the ability to represent the self as a subject. In other words, to have these subjective experiences that have a personal past. It's not just the past, but your past. You lived it. And a personal present and a potential future that you can imagine different scenarios of you existing in the future. So that requires – I mean that's called auto-nuretic consciousness, the ability to self-know about where you are in time. And it depends – this is an idea that was proposed by a guy named Endel Tolving, a very distinguished psychologist who's retired now. But his idea was that the unique aspect of the human mind is mental time travel, the ability to project ourselves in the past, present and future. And without that kind of consciousness, we're limited to kind of factual information. Something is there. You know, that might – I might be able to say, oh, food is there or drink is there or a sexual partner is there, but not necessarily that I want that food. I want – you know, you might have a kind of biological urge towards it. Now, from the outside, it looks like everything we do is intentional and willful. So I think I'm controlling my behavior. You think you're controlling yours. I see you do something that I might have done in a similar situation. I think you intentionally control that. We see a dog doing something that would be similar to what we do. We think we know why the dog is doing that because it had some intention. But the fact is, if we start taking these things apart in the brain, we see that the systems that control very simple behaviors are not the ones that are doing all this high-level conscious thought. Take the example of the area I've worked on for all these years, which is threat detection. Now, this part of the brain called the amygdala is key to the detection and response to threat in a kind of basic sense. You know, a threat comes up, you freeze if there's a snake, for example. Now, it's – because of that, it's been assumed that the reason you freeze is because you're afraid, and therefore that the amygdala is also making the fear because the amygdala experiences the fear and that's why you produce the response. But I've – for the longest time and throughout most of my career, I've said the amygdala does not consciously experience fear. And yet, my work has been used to kind of sell and defend this idea of the amygdala is the brain's fear center. And I think that's completely wrong. Why do you think it's been misinterpreted? It's a long, complicated story, but, you know, it's – partly it's my fault because I was not as vigilant as I should have been when I was describing it. See, what I did was I would talk about the amygdala as a non-conscious state of fear, non-conscious, implicit fear. And I would say that while the neocortex is where we consciously experience fear and those are separate, but that was too complicated. You know, the journalist kind of ignored it and it was just – it just became the amygdala is the brain's fear center. Even the scientists ignored it because, you know, we were studying and, you know, I kind of gave up after one and said, okay, we talk about it in terms of fear because, you know, that there was a lot of money to be directed towards research if you're studying fear and how you could treat that. But I think it's, you know, it's been kind of a wrong path because it's led to the development of medications that don't really work. So all the big companies are getting out of the anti-anxiety business, anti-fear business, because people still feel fearful or anxious when they take them. You mean like Xanax, things along those lines? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Companies are getting out of the Xanax business? Benzos, Xanax, yeah. I mean, they're not – either that or they're repurposing them for other purposes, you know. But so what happens is you – the way these things – you know, these things, the basic drugs were discovered in the 60s almost accidentally in some cases, you know, not rather than by some hypothesis. So the only thing that's been discovered since then is more versions of the same thing with, you know, slightly fewer side effects. But there's been no new discovery of a new kind of drug that's going to help people. And why is that? Well, the way the drugs are discovered is they take a rat or a mouse, put it in a challenging situation, give it some different medications, and the ones that make the animal less timid in those situations is assumed to make the animal less fearful. And that's why it's less timid. So when you give it to a person, they should be less fearful. But what you find is a person with social anxiety might find it easier to go to the party. They're less timid, but still anxious while they're there. And the reason is that we now know is that damage to the amygdala in a person doesn't necessarily also eliminate the feeling of fear. It gets rid of the body responses, but not the feeling. So it was a misunderstanding of what behavior can tell us. We treat behavior as if it's an ambassador of the mind. But behavior is really a tool of survival. It goes back to those first cells that ever lived who had to defend against danger. Bacterial cells move in the water, and then they come across like a gradient of some chemical that's a toxin. As soon as they detect that, they bounce away and go in a different direction. If they find a gradient of something that is a nutrient, they keep going and absorb it. So they have the ability to detect what's useful and harmful in their lives. These are not there for psychology. They're simply there to keep the organism alive. And many of the behaviors that persist throughout the whole history of life are like that. They're there because each of the cells in the body has to do all these things to stay alive. And so the organism as a whole has to do it as well. Defend against danger, incorporate nutrients, balance fluids, thermoregulate, reproduce. So these are survival tools, not mind tools. Now we can use our mind in conjunction with these things. And because we can, we conflate every time we're freezing in the front of the snake to the fact that the fear is what's causing it. But the fear is a separate process. It's the awareness that that stuff is happening to you. The awareness of that stuff is happening to you. So no self, no fear. Oh, that's my t-shirt.