2017
University of Toronto

Lecture series of 22 videos.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQApSdW8X71Ihe34eKN6XhCi

01: Introduction
02/03: Historical & Mythological Context
04/05: Heroic and Shamanic Initiations
06: Jean Piaget & Constructivism
07: Carl Jung and the Lion King (Part 1)
08: Carl Jung and the Lion King (Part 2)
09: Freud and the Dynamic Unconscious
10: Humanism & Phenomenology: Carl Rogers
11: Existentialism: Nietzsche Dostoevsky & Kierkegaard
12: Phenomenology: Heidegger, Binswanger, Boss
13: Existentialism via Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag

14: Introduction to Traits/Psychometrics/The Big 5
15: Biology/Traits: The Limbic System
16: Biology/Traits: Incentive Reward/Neuroticism
17: Biology and Traits: Agreeableness
18: Biology & Traits: Openness/Intelligence/Creativity I
19: Biology & Traits: Openness/Intelligence/Creativity II
20: Biology & Traits: Orderliness/Disgust/Conscientiousness
21: Biology & Traits: Performance Prediction
22: Conclusion: Psychology and Belief

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYYJlNbV1OM&t=5s&index=2&list=PL22J3VaeABQApSdW8X71Ihe34eKN6XhCi

Definition of personality

Personality is unfathomable. there are more connections among neurons in the human brain then there are subatomic particles in the universe. The study of personality is daring and hopeless.

Approach this course as if you are an engineer of the human spirit.

As humans interact we tell each other what we want and what we do not want. We are co-creating personalities, our own and others.

How the Big Five was created. Lists of adjectives. Factor analysis.

https://youtu.be/HbAZ6cFxCeY

Jonah and the Whale.

Some of Grimm's fairy tales are 15,000 years old.

Camille Paglia: ignorant professors.

What the world is made of.
How we should act.

Natural rights.

In tribal groups, death by violence is very high. As tribal groups unite into civilization, new rules are necessary.

Soul, psyche, unconscious

Admiration, contempt = an implicit morality.

You cannot act without a morality. Because the only reason to act is to make things better. And the word “better” implies good vs bad.

Story of Lion King. Paradise Lost. Paradise regained.

Story of Jonah. God tells Jonah to fix the evil city. Jonah refuses. Storm comes. They blame Jonah and throw him into the sea. Swallowed by whale and lives there three days.

You cannot run from your destiny. You need meaning. The whale is the dragon. Chaos. The brain circuits used to fight predators are reused to fight the unknown.

Key to understand ancient stories.

We are nested inside a dream. Inside stories. Outside the stories is the unknown.

To be punished for your virtues. Jesus. Harry Potter.

The Divine hero has two sets of parents, earthly and heavenly.

You have an ethical duty to straighten things out. And if you don't do it, life will be hell.

St George and the dragon.

You can't understand yourself until you see that you are a monster.

We learn the hard way. The importance of a lesson is proportional to the pain of the learning.

Face the things you are afraid of. Let the thing occur and wait for the rebirth.

All the world is a stage, and … Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

• Go out where no one has gone before.
• Face the terrors of the unknown.
• Gather something of value.
• Return.

The central story, or in the top three stories.

1:18:30

Universal in human being:

• Self conscious. We know of our own existence and limitations. Innate terror and fragility.
• Seeks the good. Seeks revenge.
• We live in a society. For a long time. Serotonin system is found in lobsters. Reputation is important.
• Society also has two elements: repressive and cooperative.
• Outside is the unknown.

Voyage to the underworld. #story

Voyage into the unconscious (Jung). The parts of you are personalities, not mathematical components. Many cases of PTSD are about things we've done, not seen.

Society regulates our emotions. Match between what you do and what society expects.

The societal structure is a elaborated dominance hierarchy. Rising high in the dominance hierarchy increases serotonin levels. This means happy things make you happier, and sad things make you less sad. At the bottom of the hierarchy, nothing makes you happy and everything makes you nervous.

The Psychoanalysts.

Chaos represented in stories.

Meaning. Pre-verbal thought.

Females are choosey and devious.

Bower bird. An appreciation of beauty. The male's nest.

Social-cognitive architecture. We look at the world as if it's personified. Like children's cartoons.

Woman's face, red sports car, cocaine produce an activation in the reward system in the brain. Dopamine. It's an approach symbol, not satiation. Happiness is moving toward a reward. Not the reward itself.

Nature tries to kill you. Culture keeps you alive. Stories tell you which things are good and bad.

https://youtu.be/wLc_MC7NQek

Our world is other people. Arranged in a dominance hierarchy.

Psychoanalysts: Freud, Jung.

Jung would create creatures and have conversations with them.

Initiation, transformation.

Jung. Hero's journey is into the unconscious. The pathway to wisdom is through hell.

There is something you must say or do. Refuse, oppressed. Resentment. Insane.

Sacrifice. Pay now for a better future. Delayed gratification. #pattern

Money is a promise that the sacrifice you make now will pay off in the future.

Shamans in Amazonia. Ayahuasca. Two plants. How did they learn the formula. The plants told us.

Shamanic experience.

Ayahuasca. Openness increases. Metrics. John Hopkins LSD experiments. Participants say it's the most important experience in life. DMT. Everyone reports they see beings who tell them things.

2:35:40 Scandinavian drawing. Amazonia drawing. Tree that unites earth with heaven. Tree surrounded by snakes: a very real reality for our ancestors.

https://youtu.be/BQ4VSRg4e8w

Most famous developmental psychologist.

But he considered himself a genetic epistemologist.

Epistemology: how knowledge structures work. Genetic: formulation of. How children formulate their knowledge structures in the world.

Constructivist. The belief that humans construct the world.

Thomas Kune, philosophy of science.

Piaget: As a child grows: 1. He acquires a set of facts and theories.

2. He is confronted with anomalies in his set of facts and theories.

3. He acquires a new, larger, more complete set of facts and theories with the anomalies resolved, through assimilation and accommodation.

Assimilation = fill in the details.

Accommodation = transformation of the whole structure.

Peterson says this structure is a repeat of the hero myth. 1. order. 2. Chaos. 3. Return.

Peterson likens states 1 and 3 to Newtonian vs. Einsteinian physics. The first state is a nested subset within the larger state.

Bridge the gap between science and values (religion).

Procedural memory vs. representational memory.

Infant starts life by building procedural memory of how to use his body. No representational memory yet. Perhaps that's why we cannot remember our infancy.

20:00 breast feeding. In-built behavior, modified by the need to get along with mother.

22:30 an emergent morality. Social interactions emerge within a bounded space, the space of the game.

Introduction to Big Five.

Analytics company has you in their database and has tagged you by personality by looking at your Facebook activity. Advertisements are targeted specifically at you individually. News articles also.

Colombine shooters

A really bad guy who raped 1200 men, burned buildings, tried to start a war between UK and Canada.

18:45 Back to Lion King, Simba and Nala in hell. Malevalence.

https://youtu.be/YFWLwYyrMRE

Personality non grata

Everything he discovered is now considered self-evident.

Eidepal complex. Trapped in a state of childhood dependence.

Moved to England to escape the Nazis shortly before he died.

the idea that you have one mind and you are in control of it is misleading.

The unconscious contains multiple personalities and these are living things. Your aggression or your sexual desire for example can rise up and take over.

Three memory systems.

• Procedural memory
• Imagery
• Semantic memory

Focused on aggressive and sexual impulses.

The psychoanalysts Freud, Jung and Adler. Book: the discovery of the unconscious, by Henri Ellenberger. Victorian Europe.

The pill. A profound biological Revolution. Changing the nature of what it is to be female.

During ovulation the female prefers more masculine men. At other times the female prefers less masculine men. Post-pill women never reach ovulation.

Dangers of sexuality. Emotional social pregnancy disease

By 1904 functions of the unconscious had been described.

• Conservative. We do not always have access to all of our memories. Memories are subject to change.
• Dissolutive. Habits. Once voluntary, now automatic and dissociated and parasitic. Related to procedural memory.
• Creative. New ideas.
• Mythopoetic

Meaning. Meaningfulness. something that impacts the way you will act in the world, because the way that you look at the world has changed.

Ego. The you that you think of as you.

Id. The biological subsystems, instincts, which can derail you at times.

Superego. The thing that's on top saying you better behave yourself.

As opposed to Piaget, who saw a healthy person is having all of these instinctual drives integrated into a healthy personality governed and shaped by Society.

Freud: there is something about communication that can be Curative.

How to handle negative experiences.

• Repression
• Denial.
• Reaction formulation. Over-compensation.
• Displacement.
• identification.
• Rationalization.
• Intellectualization
• Sublimation
• Projection

Unconscious ideas are at the core of psychological conflicts

• Incomprehensible distress
• Psychosomatic symptoms
• Behavioral anomalies
• Hallucinations and delusions

Interpretation of dreams. The dream worker disguises the repressed content to smuggle it past the sensor and deliver it to the conscious mind.

As opposed to Just, Who wished to express the repressed content as clearly as possible by using symbols and archetypes.

https://youtu.be/68tFnjkIZ1Q

Leaving psychoanalysis. New topic.

Phenomenology. Heidegger leading the group. Trying to come up with a new philosophy. In the same way that a new system of Non-euclidian geometry that arose about that time.

13:50 aside. I like the psychoanalysts. But there is a problem with that way of thinking.

28:05 Jung said 1. Unite your mind with your emotions. A male - female pairing. Thinking feeling. Masculine feminine.

2. Unite mind-emotions with the body. Act it out.

3. Erase the distinction between yourself and the world.

Rogers. Phenomenologist. Does not start his philosophy from the perspective of subject versus object, or from the idea of psyche, mind with layers inside you.

Exchange of Truth between two people is Curative. For Rogers this is the principal of the psychoanalytic therapeutic relationship.

https://youtu.be/4qZ3EsrKPsc

Continuing with Rogers and phenomenology.

Phenomenologists felt that experience is the Ultimate Reality.

Existentialists agreed with this to some extent.

is intrinsic to human existence. Psychopathology is built-in. No need to look for causes, like childhood trauma. Similar to the Fall of man, From a paradise.

Pascal: when I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up buy The Eternity before and behind it, the small space that I fill, or even see, engulfed in the infinitt immensity of spaces which I know not and which know not me, I am afraid, and wonder to see myself here rather than there; for there is no reason why I should be here rather there, now rather than then.

This is “thrownness”, heidegger.

The safe World surrounded by predators. The known World surrounded by the unknown. Humans use the same circuitry to apprehend both Concepts. Humans are both predator and prey. Therefore we have a paradoxical approach to the unknown.

the negative emotions are stronger than the positive emotions dose for dose. this makes sense because you can always be a little bit happier but once you're dead you're dead. It's better to be anxious than to be dead even though anxiety is not pleasant.

The existentialist view is of life's limitations in the face of infinite unknowableness.

there was a time when traditional religious systems were comprehensive and explained everything. These crumbled in the late 1800s in the West and then spread everywhere. That's one way of looking at the world, traditional religious systems have been replaced with a Western Scientific approach which has existential angst built into it.

Young people in the University are torn between nihilism and a radical totalitarian ideology, neither of which are any good.

Nietzsche, Dostievsky and Kierkegaard did the best job of explaining the problem.

21:45

If a rat appears unexpectedly you go into fear. If you deliberately and voluntarily approach a rat you are using a different set of circuits.

Freud said you must dig into your messy past and sort out the skeletons.

Jung said what you most want is found where you least want to look.

Rodgers said people must communicate honestly about difficult things.

A child is naturally calm. WRONG. A Child near his parent is calm. Left alone he will begin to cry.

A human is naturally calm. WRONG. A human in a safe place is calm. A safe place is not normal.

Rats, Skinner…

33:31

Paradoxical the existentialist philosophy is an optimistic one. If the human is week and faces the ultimate opponent. And yet by facing that opponent he discovers Limitless strength Within.

Clinical Psychology, fear of elevator…

49:00 additional existentialists.

Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre.
Pascal, Keirkegaard.
Ripke, Kafka, Ortega, Camus.

You are fated to suffer and be vulnerable as an individual and therefore your unit of analysis must be the individual.

Example. Self authoring Suite. Personality analysis. Tested with 4000 students in the business school at Rotterdam.

Performance measurement before.

• Dutch women
• Dutch men
• non-western women
• non-western men

After this psychological intervention, non-western men moved to the top. Evidently without a plan, men refuse to perform.

53:14

A good psychotherapist takes an existentialist approach to clients.

Rationality requires Emotions, motivations, embodiment.

Emotions give you guides in situations you cannot compute your way through.

1:00:00

Slide

• The inevitability of nihilism
• The insufficiency of reason
• The necessity of difficulty
• The crowd as the LIE
• The individual as truth
• Influence on Freud

Kierkegaard was the first person to write about anxiety, dread.

Nietzsche, the death of God, the prognosticator of the psychological consequence of the demise of this ancient classical structure of meaning.

Dostoyevsky, explores nihilism in Crime and Punishment, Notes From The Underground, the Devils. In The Devil's he predicts that the sudden death of Christianity will precipitate the totalitarian horrors of the Soviet Union.

1:02:54 Nietzsche A full professor at age 24. Sickly, died young. Could only write a few paragraphs at a time. Lived alone and wrote in Switzerland. Wrote for himself. Never imagined he would be published.

“I'm telling the history of the next 200 years.”

“Totalitarian certainty is preferable to nihilistic chaos.”

1:13:50 Dostoevsky

Dramatist.

Big influence on Nietsche.

Notes from Underground. Criticism of Utopianism. Men require some insanity. Give man everything he wants, he won't be satisfied it happy. 40 years before the revolution.

1:22:50 Kierkegaard.

https://youtu.be/11oBFCNeTAs

We talk about philosophers in this course because psychology is concerned with values. A patient lives in a framework of ethics which the psychologists must take into account.

Phenomenologists: People live within a self-defined perceptual world.

…

19:54

Wrong

• There are objects in the world
• You see the objects
• You think about the objects
• You evaluate the objects
• You decide how to act on the objects
• You act

Repeat. Still Wrong Object, sense, perception, emotion, cognition, action.

Meaning is implicit in the object.

Science strips away the meaning from the object.

https://youtu.be/pCceO_D4AlY

Extroversion
Neuroticism
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Openness to experience

Clinical psychology is Engineering

Measurement is key

Social psychology is rife with scandal because their measurements are not instantiated properly.

Why are there five traits? Factor analysis. Other traits are correlated with one of these five.

Ask questions. Surveys. Tests.

IQ is not a personality trait, but is tested similarly.

Traits manifest in:

• World view
• goals
• behaviors
• motivations
• values

World view examples

Openness: the world is a place of opportunities to talk about ideas, aestuitics

Neuroticism: the world is a place of threats

Agreeable: biography characterized by relationships

A person is a Melody of traits.

How to choose a relationship. Better not be too far off in traits.

5% of the vocabulary accounts for 95% of usage. Paretto distribution.

Make a list of 1000 adjectives

Linguistic hypothesis: variation in personality among human beings is of sufficient import that it has become accurately coded on the lexicon.

Construct validation. Does fear exist in the objective world? (Fear is a psychological construct)

Temperament

Political proclivity.

Liberal: high in openness, low in conscientiousness

Conservative: low in openness, high in conscientiousness

Entrepreneurs are low in conscientiousness, high in openness.

Conscientiousness is a predictor of good performance in graduate School, law, administration, any place where there are rules.

46:10

This is why bureaucracies stultify. All conscientious. No creatives.

https://youtu.be/AqkFg1pvNDw This is the 2014 lecture, copied into this 2017 series.

(See also the 2015 lecture notes)

Personality neuroscience.

Gray, Jeffrey, 1995: A model of the limbic system and basal ganglia: applications to anxiety and schizophrenia. A summary of His influential 1982 book. Gray is expert in Behavior, Anatomy, neuropharmacology.

Norbert wiener, MIT: cybernetic Theory

Animal research

LeDoux, Joseph E., 1998: the emotional brain. Hippocampus compares current situation with desired situation and if they're the same you are calm.

Swanson, L.W., 2000, cerebral hemisphere regulation of motivational Behavior.

Motivation vs emotion

Motivations set goals.

Emotions orient you in relationship to those goals.

Hypothalamus keeps you alive. you can live without your cortex but not without your hypothalamus.

The newly-evolved cortex is in charge only when you're not bothered by anything.

The invisible guerilla video.

The center of the retina is the fovea. Each nerve ending in the retina is connected to 20 cells in the first layer of the cortex.

The nerve cells in the periphery are good at detecting motion. When you detect motion your eyes swivel to point the fovea at the motion to look at it more clearly.

Only pay attention to things that make you fail.

Our world is bounded by our expectations and desires. We keep complexity away from us so we don't have to deal with it.

One picture, five ways to see it. Which is correct?

Compression. Thumbnails. Adjust perception to get the level of detail needed to reach our goals.

So where do I goals come from?

Hypothesis: you have to frame the world to interact with it.

ouroboros. Dragon eating its own tail. symbol of Chaos. Chaos is everything outside your safe little world that might intrude and mess things up for you.

We have to frame the world within the chaos. We have to simplify. We have to oversimplify. Frame each problem with only enough complexity needed to complete the task.

Where am i? Head. Heart. stomach.

The nervous system is throughout the body, not just the head.

Blind sight. Some neurons go from the retina direct to the amygdala. Just as some neurons go from the skin to the spine back to the muscles.

Solar plexus.

Some scientists are building robots from the bottom up. You can't have intelligence until you have a body.

1:09:00

Brain.

Left vs right. Stability vs learning.

Cerebellum. More neurons than the rest if the brain. We don't know what it's for. You get wobbly if it's damaged. Affected by alcohol.

Occipital lobe. Vision.

Parietal lobe. Body within in space. Damage the left side and the right side of the body goes paralyzed and the right side of everything disappears.

Temporal lobe. Hearing. Memory.

Frontal lobe. Voluntary movements.

Pre frontal. Potential voluntary movements.

1:15:28

Brain inside.

Primitive versus old. the old parts of the brain are smart because they've been there a long time. the new parts of the brain are primitive; they don't know what they're doing yet.

Cortex. Some people say it's responsible for conscientiousness.

Thalamus. Collects all sense input, combines, passes back and forth with cortex. (Maybe this back and forth is what consciousness Is. Looping.)

Hippocampus storage of short-term to long-term memory.

Amygdala. Emotional.

Hypothalamus. Primordial motivational states.

https://youtu.be/ewU7Vb9ToXg

Motivation.

The forefront of: Brain function. Emotion. Personality. Learning theory. (Aka Behaviorism.) Behavioral theory.

Motivational system. Usually hypothalamic.

Motivational state. Sets a goal, and the framework within which goals are pursued. Tunes perception to see only what is relevant. Activates or inhibits Behaviors to pursue the goal. Preps the body to receive the goal. Like a sub-personality.

“It's useful to think about … a motivated state as a micro personality.”

…as we've already talked about with regards to psycho-dynamic theory

Emotions track progress toward goals.

Some basic motivations: [circuits?]

• hunger
• thirst
• pain (and mental equivalents: grief, disappointment, frustration, lonliness)
• Anger / aggression
• thermoregulation
• Panic / Escape
• Affiliation / care
• Sexual desire
• Exploration
• Play
• self maintenance: ingestive, defensive
• Self propagation: reproductive

(Freud would associate these with the ID and consider them primordial.)

pain comes when a signal exceeds a threshold where a component may be damaged.

Psychological pain comes from the cortex. Physical pain comes from the body.

Predatory aggression versus neurotic aggression

Male predatory aggression versus maternal solicitude, opposite ends of the agreeableness distribution

Panic/Escape versus fear, panic is a separate circuit

Play circuits. Rats laugh. Rough tumble play. (Paanksepp: affective neuroscience)

Swanson: half of the hypothalamus is devoted to exploration.

If all your other needs are met, then you will engage in exploration by default. Extroverts explore in the social space. High in openness explorers in the cognitive space.

Disgust circuit. Separate system. Associated with conscientiousness. Not clear whether this is an emotion or a motivation.

16:14 Hypothalamus. Very complex thing with many sub-components. Half goal framing, half exploration.

22:20 Swanson: motor system has three sets of inputs.

1. Cognitive. Voluntary. Top-down.

2. State monitoring system. Autonomic.

3. Sensory system. [Reflexes?]

Luria: behavior pattern is a kinetic Melody.

Hierarchical from spine upwards, with different levels of processing.

Body control is part of our intelligence. Olympic feats. [Extreme sports.]

26:00 locomotor pattern generator. In the spine.

Paraplegic can walk on a treadmill.

Hypothalamic animal acts like an animal, hyperexploratory, sex, defensive aggression. No memory.

Why hyperexploratory? Brain is not there to dampen the exploration. Also it can't remember what's new or known.

Dual projection system. Eyes connect both to the visual cortex and directly to the motor system. When you see a snake you do not take time to think before you jump.

Historically snakes gave us vision.

40:30 the whole sensory-motor perception action hierarchy, has to be constructed so that your motivational States stay satiated.

Time frames, social constraints.

43:44

Emotions

Positive: extraversion

Negative: neuroticism

Satiation = consumatory reward = unconditioned response

Approaching the satiation = incentive reward = dopaminergic systems

Approach (behavioral activation)

• Curiosity
• Joy
• hope
• interest

Defense and avoidance (Fight and behavioral inhibition)

• Pain
• anxiety
• disgust

53:05

Units of Positive emotion per promise

Units of negative emotion per threat

Satiation, innate, consumatory rewards serotonin

Incentive rewards, indicate progress towards a consumatory reward, learned or innate, dopamine, exploration circuit or the hypothalamus (excitement, happiness, play, Novelty, enthusiasm)

Extraversion and neuroticism are separate circuits, not mutually exclusive, both can be high

Can be happy and sad simultaneously. Mixed states of positive and negative emotion.

Unconditioned punishments, pain frustration disappointment grief

1:06:20

Hippocampus, amygdala, per sokolov via Norbert wiener

The hippocampus is looking outside at your perception of the world and inside at your memory and expectation. If they match then the hippocampus inhibits the amygdala and the hypothalamus.

Reticular activating circuit, in the brain stem. Turns your brain on to wake you from sleep when you hear a noise that doesn't belong.

When the hippocampus detects an anomaly it disinhibits the reticular activating circuit and the hypothalamus.

https://youtu.be/G1eHJ9DdoEA

Traits vs emotion.

Agreeable vs disagreeable.

Agreeable: compassion, politeness.

Women more than men.

Woman's nervous system is wired for mother-child dyad.

Disagreeable: tough-minded, blunt, competitive, won't do anything they don't want to do.

Not defensive aggression, predatory aggression, dominance behavior.

In judging a person, an agreeable person will be compassionate and generous, whereas a Conscientious person will base her judgement solely on performance.

Agreeable person can be exploited. As she is wired to be exploited by an infant.

Do not like conflict.

Sometimes don't know what they want.

Really disagreeable and really low in conscientiousness is bordering on psychopath. Add high IQ and high emotional stability and extraversion and he may be charismatic. Will let you do the work and take credit for it. Will have the confidence that is confused with competence.

24:50

Development of aggression in children, criminality in adults.

Group children by age 2 through 18. Code Behavior by kicking, biting, fighting and property theft. The group of two-year-olds will contain a subset of aggressive kids, mostly boys. Most of them are socialized by Age 4. Rough and tumble play. Competition. (Ritalin is God awful.)

If not socialized by age four, their peers reject them. The job of a parent is to make your kid socially acceptable by the age of 4.

Criminality in boys occurs between 16 and 24. Same curve for creativity. Testosterone has increased with puberty.

Extreme disagreeableness is predation. Extreme agreeableness is maternal caring. These compete. Opposite ends of the scale.

36:15

Traits and Political persuasion.

Conservative. High in orderliness, low in openness. Puts things in boxes. Borders determinant and inviolable.

Liberal vs conservative. Borders open or closed.

Orderliness is associated with disgust. Conservative. Europeans brought smallpox to Americans.

39:20

Political correctness.

Does it exist?

Methodology.

Collect press quoted. 400

Ask 1000 people to characterize.

Factor analysis. How do they clump? Two groups.

PC liberals were high in openness, high in verbal intelligence, and high in agreeableness.

PC authoritarians were also high in agreeableness. High-end orderliness. Negative correlation with verbal intelligence. Obsessed with language control.

43:25

Temperament allows simplification of the world.

Conscientious: work

Open: discover and do new things

Agreeable: establish intimate relationships

https://youtu.be/D7Kn5p7TP_Y

Where does intelligence fit into traits?

Big Two: Plasticity vs stability

stability
  Conscientiousness
    Industrious
    Orderly
  Emotional stability
    Volatility
    Withdrawal
  Agreeableness
    Politeness
    Compassion
  
Plasticity
  Extroversion
    Assertive
    Enthusiasm
  Openness
    Openness
    Intelligence

Why do they clump? Stability is serotonin. Plasticity is dopamine.

Big 5 testing is all self-reporting except for intelligence and creativity.

We perceive low resolution representations of the world. And we confuse those with the world. Like South Park.

When unemployment goes up 1%, psychiatric hospitalization goes up 5%.

First problem solved by intelligence. How to perceive the world. Or how to choose a level of abstraction to perceive the world. We abstract the world to an icon and then attach a word to the icon.

Second problem solved by intelligence. How to move from one state to another. How to force the world to manifest in accordance with our wishes.

We also use abstraction to generalize a problem-solving technique and apply it in other situations.

24:35

The traits motivate the perceptual frame.

Extroverts are after social success.

Neurotics are oriented to security and safety.

Agreeable people are oriented to cooperation. Disagreeable people are oriented to competition.

Conscientious people are oriented to order, Duty, obligation, implementation.

Open people are oriented to abstraction.

These are values.

Values are not only what you pursue, but indeed what you perceive.

The traits seem to be higher order agglomerations of the biological motivations.

The hypothalamus regulates the biological motivations including exploration.

Openness and extraversion seem to be manifestations of exploration.

Hippocampus, amygdala, periaqueductal gray related to pain, fear, anxiety which seem to have lower thresholds in neuroticism.

Pain: grief, depression, social isolation, disappointment.

When something threatening occurs how upset should you get? Unknown. That's why there is variability in human responses. Your response is a guess at how bad is the threat. Your guess positions you in the normal distribution curve of neuroticism.

Conscientiousness. How hard should you work? Dependent upon your assumptions about the stability of the future. Conscientiousness only works in a stable Society.

The utility of a trait depends on the surrounding societal environment. That's why there is variability in traits. For the traits no value on the normal distribution curve is any better than any other value.

One exception might be IQ (hi is always better). Except that high IQ is only valuable in a highly complex society. Also high IQ women are more likely to remain single, and therefore perhaps unlikely to reproduce.

33:30

Cognitive ability allows you to do modeling.

the motor cortex models the body and is used to move the body voluntarily.

the premotor cortex evolved out of the motor cortex and is used to Envision potential future actions.

The frontal lobe is used to think about envisioning potential future actions.

Hopper. we developed the ability to abstract so that are stupid ideas can die instead of myself actually dying.

Abstract thinking is creating models of potential future actions in time and space.

And that's also what storytelling is.

A preference for fiction indicates openness. Experiencing simulated worlds. Reading fiction improves your interpersonal intelligence - the ability to understand the position of the other person.

40:10

What it means to abstract.

• Motor. How you act voluntarily.
• Pre-motor. How you represent how you act voluntarily.
• Frontal. How you think about acting voluntarily.

Think of intelligence as abstract action. Neurologically, the part of the brain that does the highest order of abstract thinking is something that emerged from the motor cortex.

An image manifests on the retina, then in the visual cortex and then in the motor cortex Where It prepares the body for action. Movement can take place without conscious awareness of the image. Your eyes can activate your body without you being aware of the image.

Understanding a cup of water means pattern-mapping it on to the action of drinking it. If I do that successfully I get a reward, a kick of dopamine, which makes me feel better, but which also bathes [nourishes] the neural tissue that I used to structure that perception and undertake that act, making it more likely I will act this way in its presence again.

That's learning.

You lay out a perceptual scheme. It has a goal. If you manifest the goal you get a reward of positive emotion. The nerves that instantiated that goal thrive and get a little bit more predominant.

Psychomotor stimulants produce hyperlearning.

When I glance at a cup of water thirst is triggered. When an addict sees cocaine he moves towards the cocaine to the exclusion of all else.

When one of these perceptual systems comes up its suppresses all the other potential perceptual systems. [Perceptual system refers to hunger, thirst, or cocaine craving].

Same things happen when you're angry. when you get angry at your partner all you can think about are the irritating things she's done for the last 10 years.

A micro personality can Dominate and suppress the other micro personalities. Because if it didn't it would never run to conclusion and you would never get what you want.

47:55 cognitive ability.

How can you conceptualize intelligence?

People have been studying IQ since the 1920s. It is a very established branch of science. Of all the concepts in Psychology, IQ is the most well-defined.

If we Define intelligence as that which moves you forward successfully in the world.

People have posited a number of different intelligences.

• Practical vs. Analytical.
• Social, emotional, moral
• Multiple: linguistic, Musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, body-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal.

in trying to predict a person's success in life, IQ does a good job. The trait of conscientiousness is number two.

Conscientiousness cannot be measured easily. Only through self-reporting, or the reports of peers, parents, teachers.

The correlation of IQ to job success is .5 to .6. that of conscientiousness is .4.

Point Five is 25% of the variance. (You've got to square it.) Point six is 36% of the variance. Point four is 16% of the variance.

The use of IQ is contentious, because people are uncomfortable with the idea of individual differences in IQ.

None of these multiple intelligences exist. Because through factor analysis they are all correlated with IQ.

Compare IQ to physiological features. Reaction time is correlated to IQ at .25. how big your brain is. How big your brain is relative to your body size. Peripheral nerve conduction velocity.

A correlation of .25 is pretty good. .5 is really good. Of the psychology papers published 90% of them show a correlation coefficient of point five or less. (A study by Hemphill)

Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality in a distribution.

1:10:00

Income inequality predicts homicide.

Income falls in pareto distribution, not normal.

[Income inequality predicts homicide. Martin Daly https://youtu.be/-asltUUvcGU

56:30 pareto vs normal distribution. Like Monopoly board game. One winner has everything. Everyone else has nothing.

1:03 Canada gives grants, small amounts to many researchers. US gives large amounts to a few researchers.

1:09 the Matthews principle. Compare economics to physics. Money or wealth flows according to physical laws. Redistribution schemes fail because money dumped in at the bottom goes right back up to the top.]

1:18:00

Nourishment raises IQ. Breastfeeding raises IQ.

High IQ is 130 to 160. 130 is 1 out of 8 people. 160 is 1 out of 20 people.

15% of people have an IQ below 85. There are no jobs these people can do.

10% of people are at IQ below 83. It is illegal to induct such a person into the army.

https://youtu.be/fjtBDa4aSGM

Fractionation of openness to experience.

Example of significance of fractionation. Conscientiousness: orderliness, industriousness. Disgust sensitivity, part of the behavioral immune system, related to orderliness but not to industriousness. Political Iconservatives more into orderliness than industriousness.

5 traits, 10 aspects. Level of resolution

Openness: Openness and Intellect. Intellect == IQ.

Openness: Creativity and IQ.

Proclivity to engage in creative thought. vs Creating artistic artifacts.

Proclivity to engage in creative thought.

A thought:

1. shared by everyone.
2. idiosyncratic so I'm the only one who thinks it and noone else can understand it.
3. creative, unique but practical and doable

The more creative, the less common.

Fluency, how many ideas can you generate around a topic.

Many unlikely useful responses.

Creative thinking vs creative achievement.

high-risk, high-reward. Very difficult to launch a creative product.

The creative achievement questionnaire. Median score 0.

Price's law. The square root of the number of people in a domain do half of the work. With 10 employees three people do half the work. With a hundred employees 10 people do half the work. With 10,000 employees 100 of them do half to work.

As your company grows, incompetence griws exponentially, competence grows linearly.

the 1% rule applies not only to wealth but in every realm where there is difference in creative production.

Five composers account for half of the classical repretoire. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky. End of their music only 5% of it ever gets played.

Basketball hoops, hockey scores, size of cities

Derek John de Solla Price (1922–1983). Originally applied to authorship of scientific papers.

The average lifespan of a Fortune 500 Corporation is 30 years. These behemoths cannot survive. They go into a death spiral. Weighted down by incompetence.

40:56

Can you predict creativity.

Give random students a collage kit, let them each create a collage, and have a panel of artists rate the creativity of the collages.

Correlation between creative collages and CAQ was .59. creative achievement questionnaire.

Divergent thinking: Originality fluency flexibility

Nietzsche: creativity can fight death anxiety. Existential anxiety.

Plasticity: openness Plus extraversion

https://youtu.be/MBWyBdUYPgk

1920s Germany hyperinflation unstable

Hyperinflation wipes out the people who had worked hardest to build the society. Conscientious, industrious, orderly traits are only helpful during a period Of stability.

We have no model for understanding conscientiousness. No

Conscientiousness and neuroticism are negatively correlated. Conscientiousness is related to guilt. Judgemental.

Aversion to inactivity.

20:04

Orderliness

• Predicts conservatism.
• Disgust sensitivity.
• Harsh judgment of moral transgression
• Behavioral immune system

Predicts conservatism along with low openness.

Disgust sensitivity. Preference for order and tradition. Not egalitarianism.

Harsh judgment of moral transgression

Behavioral immune system

Why people are prejudiced. It's a necessity.

Parasite stress hypothesis. Parasitic infection in a region may drive variability add both individual and societal levels. Avoidance of death or disability through avoidance of infection is a major evolutionary driving force. Until recently up to 50% of children die of infection.

Aside. if we did the statistics properly we would probably find that hospitals kill more people than they save. They bring people together to breed antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Aside. Corn is a subsidized crop. That's why cattle are fattened up on corn and that's why everything is sweetened with corn syrup.

Black plague. Avoid strangers. Careful food preparation. Such systems are likely to be hypersensitive. May lead to etnocentrism, xenophobia, distrust of different others, conformity.

Strict sexual morality because sex is a prime vector for disease transmission.

Disgust is

• one of the basic human emotions
• defined by a strong revulsion and desire to withdraw from elicitous stimulus.
• accompanied by a facial expression involving constriction of the oral and nasal cavities
• Evolved to help us avoid contaminated or harmful foods and potential sources of disease such as sexual contact.

Psychological models of sexual shame are complicated and speculative.

More straightforward is to look at it as a biological battle. Approach systems and sexual arousal systems vs. disgust systems. Mutually regulatory.

humans are highly selective of sexual partners, partly for biological protection.

Disgust mechanism extends into psychological phenomena like moral decision making.

Distinguish between self and non-self.

OCD is a disgust disorder. Likewise anorexia.

42:10 Harshness of moral judgments increases when in a state of disgust.

Facial expressions of disgust are observed when presented with unpleasant taste, disturbing photos, and when receiving unfair treatment in an economic game.

Rolling the eyes is a disgust response.

43:47 politics

Nazism was not a descent into barbarity, but The disease of civilization. Conscientiousness predicts success in complex industrial societies. Nazism was conscientiousness (orderliness) gone out of control.

Jews as virus.

Disease metaphor.

Chaos vs order

Disgust vs orderliness

Disease vs health

Nazism propaganda movie. Archetypes used in stories. Underlying biology of the brain. Hijacked for use in propaganda.

https://youtu.be/Q7GKmznaqsQ

Individual differences.

Creative achievement. Entrepreneurial achievement. Academic achievement. Success in the workplace. Simple jobs, complex jobs.

Understand, predict, measure.

Predict job success. Unstructured Interview, Correlation .12 (lousy) Conscientiousness, .25

Binomial effect size

Example. r =.20, 60/40, 60 - 40 = 20 r = 0, 50/50

Most popular test is Myers Briggs. It had zero predictive value. Because it does not offend anyone. Everyone wins.

Impossible to sell to corporate execs.

30:30 Zebra story. Zebras have stripes. For camouflage. Bullshit. lions have camouflage; they are gold and like the grass. Zebras run in herds. (there is no such thing as a zebra. there is only a herd of zebra.) The camouflage is against the herd. Scientists mark a zebra so they can follow it. Lions eat that zebra because they can now identify it. (The first step in a hunt is to identify a Target.)

Human motivation: camouflage yourself against the herd. Wear your stripes. Do not stand out. People are always trying to stay in the middle of the herd.

Trait neuroticism. Let's not be threatened or hurt. Strong motivational system. The negative emotional system. You don't want to be happy; you want to avoid suffering.

35:50 to what degree do people vary in terms of their performance capacity? An absurd amount.

IQ is normally distributed. So is conscientiousness. Productivity follows the Pareto distribution. Price's law. Derek desola Price, studying productivity in the 1960s. It's a tiny number of people who produce almost all of everything.

for a scientist to get published many factors have to come together. The probability of each factor is very small. When these probabilities are multiplied together you get a very tiny probability. So only a very small number of scientists get published. But if you are one of those, you publish everything.

The square root of the number of people in a domain produce half the output.

Chance produces the normal distribution.

The web has equalized access to education. Nutrition is largely available to everyone in North America. Therefore we have wiped out the socio-economic influence upon individual variability leaving only the genetic variability.

Largest differences between men and women in productivity and personality occur in Scandinavia, because there the socio-economic factors have been leveled and the only remaining differences between genders are the genetic biological differences.

45:25 animation of the distribution of money. Game. 1000 people playing. Everyone starts with $10. Everyone trades with everyone else based on coin flipping. At first a normal distribution is formed. As the game continues it gradually moves into a Pareto distribution. if allowed to continue eventually one person has all the money.

The Matthew principle. The law of economic productivity. To those who have everything more will be given; from those who have nothing everything will be taken.

Zero is a significant barrier.

Feedback loops. Negative or positive. Negative feedback loop causes a person to spiral downward to zero.

When people come to see a clinical psychologist, it's not because of a psychological problem, but because the person is really in trouble.

1:04:52 determinants of lifetime success.

• IQ (there is no way to improve IQ. However there is a way to prevent or slow the deterioration of IQ during aging. Physical exercise.)
• big five
  • Conscientiousness. Industriousness. (Set up goals tailored to your personality. Create micro habits that stimulate your dopaminergic reward system. Sources of motivation defined by Big Five. If you are extroverted you want friends. If you are agreeable you want an intimate relationship. If you are disagreeable you want to win competitions. If you are open you want to engage in Creative activity. If you are high in neuroticism you want security.)
• Social network
• specific skills
• Interest

https://youtu.be/J9j-bVDrGdI

Personality and its transformations.

Being and becoming.

You are an entity that both is and is transforming.

Don't sacrifice who you could be for who you are.

If you have to choose between transforming in a positive direction and maintaining your current course, choose the former.

Piaget and Jung. Who are you? you are the thing that transforms Who You Are.

You are also Who You Are. but on top of that you are the thing that transforms Who You Are.

Many universities Now teach that value structures are relative. That is wrong. There are many things wrong with that idea.

Some things are better than others. the thing you can become is better than the thing you are. You allow some things to burn away from you. That is the Phoenix. Burning away the negative to transform into something better.

Science: the world is a collection of objective phenomena.

Morality: how should I conduct myself in the world?

The scientific method removes value from its descriptions.

The Narrative cognitive framework. The world as it is and the world as it perhaps should be.

You need direction because it is direction that produces primary positive emotion.

You need positive emotion because without it you cannot even move. Therefore you need direction, which means you need a goal, which means you need a value structure.

Your value structure must work for all of the individuals around you.

The Piagetti game proposition. if you want to be a popular kid on the playground you must play the games that the others want to play.

8:06

Where do moral judgments come from? Partially from consensus. we need an iterative game that doesn't spiral downwards, that neither of us object to. Massive social constraint on what constitutes an appropriate frame of reference. So much for the relativist argument.

Pragmatists, William James, only American psychology.

Each person is a plurality of sub components.

If you provide children with food and shelter but not with social interaction or touch, they will almost all die within the first year. Proved by experiments with Romanian orphans in the 1990s.

Attention, touch, play are not optional.