And that's a strange jump in some sense, because the two levels of analysis are relatively disconnected.

But what's happening right now at the sort of outer echelons of personality research is that the workers at the forefront of the field are trying to integrate what's being established at the statistical level of analysis with what's known at the cycle biological level.

And so this emerging science is known as personality neuroscience, and it's developed in a rather strange way because the trades that were identified that I discussed with you on Tuesday the Big Five traits all emerged as a consequence of the statistical analysis of of descriptors, characteristic mostly of the English language, although it's been duplicated in other languages.

So in some sense it was in a theoretical model, right?

It just came out of the linguistic data, so there was no riel initial inferences about brain, area or neurological activity or anything like that to drive the formulation of the Big Five model, and instead the Big Five model came first, and then people started thinking, okay, can this be put into alignment with what we know about the brain?

And so people have been hitting that pretty hard.

I would say over about the last.

It's probably 30 years something like that, because Hands I Zinc and his student, Jeffrey Gray.

We're pretty far along on this kind of thinking by saying 1982 when Gray published his book The Neuro Psychology of Anxiety, which the paper you're reading now a model of the limbic system in basal ganglia, basal ganglia, applications to anxiety and schizophrenia.

That's a very short summary of the book that Great published in 1982 which is being incredibly influential if you're interested in going on in psychology, especially on the scientific end.

But I would say pretty much regardless, if you're interested in going on in psychology, that's Ah, that's a very useful book to tackle.

There's a newer version was published by Grey and McNaughton, and I think 2000 something like that.

It's hard going like, and you may have found the paper that we two Gray was very, very unfortunately, died a few years ago.

He was a very, very smart person, and he knew the animal literature on behavior in your Adam neuro anatomy and narrow psychopharmacology inside out and backwards.

And so whenever he defined the term, he always made sure that the term was intelligible at a behavioral level and at of anatomical level and at a pharmacological level.

It had to, you know, that the ideas that he were developing had to make sense at the's multiple levels of analysis before he would accept them as as genuine.

And Gray did a remarkable job of extending our knowledge of the biological and evolutionary basis of at least the 1st 2 personality traits, say, extra version and eroticism roughly corresponding to positive and negative emotion.

So, um, so that's partly why you're reading gray and grace theories.

Also, cybernetic theory.

Cybernetic theory is it is a variation of a theory developed by an M.

I T.

Cognitive scientist named Norbert Whiner, who who was an early a I artificial intelligence researcher.

And he proposed that that that intelligent entities were goal directed and that they organized their behavior around reducing deviations from a goal.

Well, they were approaching it once they had decided what it would be now.

That's also proved to be incredibly influential.

We'll talk a fair bit about cybernetic models as we progress.

So Gray is sort of a combination of artificial intelligence, cybernetic theorizing and then on incredible amount of data that's coming in from animal behavioral research.

And as far as I'm concerned, most of the things that we know about the brain have been derived from animal research.

The animal researchers tended to be extraordinarily careful scientists.

They were influenced by B.

F.

Skinner, who established the sort of initial theoretical basis for understanding how animals learn.

We'll talk about that a little bit next class.

So anyways, that's the That's the context within which Gray is working.

LeDoux, These air old papers you're going to read except the 3rd 1 which is optional.

LeDoux is also an emotional.

He's an effective neuroscientist, so he's just someone who studies emotions mostly again animals.

And LeDoux has done a lot too sort of add.

Some of the pieces that were missing in gray gray probably concentrated a little bit too much on a brain area called the hippocampus, which is the brain area that sort of, let's you know if it's reasonable to be calm where you're currently situated, And so what the hippocampus does in some senses, compare what it is that you want to have happened with what is happening, and if the two things are the same, then you're calm.

So it's a match mismatched detector.

And it has access not only to memory but also to formulations of, say, the desired future.

Um, Swanson.

I had people read this Swanson paper last year.

I put it in Your reading list is optional.

It's worth hacking through if you could manage it.

It's very hard paper, though, which is why I took it out of the required reading list.

The reason I like Swanson we're gonna talk a fair bit about him today is Swanson is not a psychologist.

He's actually ah, developmental neural.

I can ever say this properly.

Anna.

He studies developmental and out of me.

Well, we'll do that.

And so he's very interested in how the brain unfolds across time during embryonic development and then up into maturity.

And so he understands the brain differently than a psychologist would, because the psychologist tends to analyze the brain, you know, as a sort of mature thing, usually in adulthood.

But but for Swanson, it's a much more living and transforming system, and he's trying to set forth a schema for understanding brain anatomy and also associating that with function, you know, And you might think that that's a well advanced science already, that we know how to segment up the brain, and we know you know roughly what the pieces do, but we haven't even really managed to establish the terminology problem property yet.

It's very narrow.

Neuroscience is a very new field, and and this is there's no limit to the number of things that we don't know about it, including even the basic classifications structure.

Now Swanson has put forth a very intelligent basic classifications structure and part of the reason that I think it's so relevant to a personality classes because it maps in a beautiful way onto some of the things that we've already talked about, especially PJ.

So there's a nice direct mapping of PJ's developmental theory onto Swanson's theory of neuro development and then of neural function.

And that's completely accidental because Swanson never sites PJ so they're non overlapping literature.

I kind of like that because, you know, if if something pops up in one place with one method and pops up another place with a completely different method, especially if those two places are distinct in terms of their historical development, you might start thinking there's actually something there, you know.

It's sort of like seeing something in hearing it.

At the same time, you got two independent sources of data.

It's like triangulation in a sense.

And so it was very exciting to me to come across this paper by Swanson.

Um, I think he's one of only two scientists I ever wrote a fan letter to, and really, it's a brilliant paper.

And then, uh, there's there's other reasons why it maps onto what we're going to talk about.

Two.

Because Swanson also points out quite clearly the function of that.

He kind of roughly separates the hypothalamus into two halves, and he points out that they have quite distinct functions, and the functions also map onto some of the things that we'd be talking about in a very lovely wait.

And so there's a lot of reasons to to go through Swanson's paper carefully.

You know, it's like 50 pages long, but the guy put it in some sense.

His whole life's work is in those 50 pages.

So you know, even if it takes you 12 hours or 20 hours to read it, it's like that's not too bad if you're gonna extract out.

Like 30 years of solid research.

Gray's book is the same, like, Do you read that book you've got?

If you read it and understand it, you've basically got a fair chunk of neuro anatomy, a lot of animal behavior analysis.

So behaviorism in general, a lot of psychopharmacology and a lot of understanding of the functional significance of the brain's major neurotransmitter systems.

You can get all that from Greece Book, that's that's a killer book, you know if you can extract all that out.

So anyways, Carver and Shire also take a cybernetic perspective.

Fundamentally, they're more cognitive scientists.

You're gonna find their paper a little bit farther down the road.

But they're also very interested in how creatures human beings in particular select goals and then align themselves with those schools and for our purposes.

We're gonna talk a fair bit about motivation today, and the distinction between motivation and emotion is not clear.

They're both words, that sort of function within in linguistic context.

But for the sake of argument.

And, of course, all the emotions aren't the same stunt like there's one circuit that subsumes emotion.

There's multiple circuits that subsume emotion, and they're not identical circuits, you know, So it isn't like every emotion is a variant of the same thing.

It's not, and it's the same with the motivation.

So they're very loose groupings, motivation and emotion.

But for the purposes of our argument, we're going to make this case roughly.

Motivations, set goals and roughly emotions orient you in relationship to those schools now.

Like I said, those categories overlapped.

Anger is usually considered an emotion, and it often has a goal, right?

The gold lister hit something or heard something.

That's that's one possible goal.

So emotions can Segway quite easily into motivational states.

But whatever you got to use a category system of some sort to clear clarified things, and so that's what we're going to.

We're going to, uh, pursuit motivations, set goals.

It's actually more complicated than that.

You know, I showed you that little oval diagram with the, you know, desired future and unbearable present, so to speak.

Motivations actually, don't just set goals.

They also prime behavior, and they also set up the perceptual frame within which you interpret the world.

So, for example, if you're hungry, it isn't just that you're driven to eat.

First of all, eating is a very complex behavior, especially if it's associated with food preparations.

Say you're the systems that you've used in the past to procure food and then to ingest it are sort of disinhibited by the motivational states.

So they're at the ready, and then your sensory system is tuned so that it's going to focus on those things that are relevant to eating and tune out everything else.

So the motivational state also does perceptual tuning, and then there's a felt component of it as well.

So it's not.

It's It's not reasonable to only say that motivation sets goals or that it drives behavior.

It does three things.

Goal setting, behavioral driving.

Plus it provides a perceptual schema within which those other two things make sense.

And so a motivated state, in some sense, is like a little micro personality.

It's going to go out one aim.

It's sort of a one eyed micro personality, you know.

So it's only aiming at one thing, but it still has all the other aspects of personality, so sort of, you know, for me that that lines nicely with the psychoanalytic idea that you know, you're you're a loose aggregation of multiple fragmented personalities.

You know, they're sort of coherently tied together at the highest level of analysis, but they can go off and do their own thing.

You see that in situations, for example, like eating disorders where the hunger system itself starts to become almost a spun off part of the personality and the rest of the personality, then wars with that.

And that's sort of in some sense that's like cortex first disciple thalamus and you never win.

Cortex does not win over hypothalamus.

The hypothalamus is what keeps you alive, so it's one of the things that keeps you alive.

You could do without your cortex, but you cannot do without.

Your hypothalamus and the connection's stretching upwards from the hypothalamus, which is a very old brain area, are much more powerful than the connections coming down from the cortex to modulate the hypothalamus.

And that's another indication of just exactly who is in charge when the chips are down, you know, and that's why it's so hard for you to override your basic emotions or motivational states.

It's like the system evolved to keep you alive, and it's not particularly willing to give up control in a sense, given that your survival is staked on its function.

So it's useful to know that because, you know, if you if you if you if you pursue psychology and you stay within the human side of psychology, say, instead of wandering off into the animal behavioral research, you'll see that most human psychologists and neuroscience ologists are very cortical centric.

They really like to think that it's the newly evolved parts of the brain that are in charge, and that's just not right.

The newly evolved parts of the brain are in charge on Lee when nothing is bothering you.

Like if you're not hungry, you're not thirsty.

You're not too excited.

You're not too curious.

You're not too terrified.

You know you're not too cold.

You're not too warm any of those.

Then the cortex is in charge.

But if you deviate substantially across any of those dimensions, the probability that control over your behavior low put in your perceptions is gonna devolve down the evolutionary hierarchy to more primordial brain areas is extremely likely.

You know, when you see the same thing happens, you know, maybe you're having a discussion with someone, right?

And they exhaust the limits of your rational knowledge, which means basically they out argue you Well, what happens?

Well, usually what happens is that people cry or they get angry.

It's like they're out of cortex.

It's bang right down to the more the lower and more primary evolutionarily determined systems.

So okay, now we're gonna take a look at how the brain functions in general.

And so we're gonna start pretty general, and then we're gonna go narrow.

And the first thing that you might want to think about is what problem exactly is the brain wrestling with?

And the major problem is that reality is so complicated.

It has so many layers and so money, interconnected causal links that it's complex beyond comprehension.

And that's a big problem.

I mean, you think about all the subatomic complexity that's that's horrible thing.

Then there's the complexity at the atomic level, and that's, you know, pretty overwhelming.

And then there's the molecular level, which makes the atomic level looks simple.

And then there's all the exceedingly complex structures that emerge out of the molecular level, especially in living organisms.

So that would be roughly at the organ level of existence, you know.

And then there's you as a totality with your brain, which is, and the brain is so much more complex than everything else in the universe that it's not even in the same category.

So there are estimates, for example, by Gerard Edelman that there are more connections in your brain, more patterns of connections in your brain.

Then there are subatomic particles in the universe.

So you know, that's one major league complex thing, and there's lots of them around and, you know, they're all integrated into families and then, you know, roughly tribal groupings, some of which get large enough to be nations.

And then that's all embedded inside of some biological system.

So on and so forth, all the way out to the limits of the cosmos.

I mean, this is one complicated place, and you know, your job, in large part, is to understand it, but also not to become overwhelmed by it, because you have to simplify it down to the point where you can sort of think about one thing and do one thing, and so you have to screen all of that out so that the complexly complexity doesn't overwhelm you when you're attempting to do anything, anything simple, even to look at yourself in the mirror, which is also a very complicated thing to do.

Part of the problem your brain is is always facing his What can I ignore?

And the answer to that is, well, you need to ignore almost everything, and that's that's a problem.