I've talked about NSDR or non-sleep depressed.

NSDRs come in in a variety of different forms,

there's self-hypnosis. There's yoga nidra. NSDR is really about achieving calm quickly, and
doing that in a self-directed way, for many reasons, in order to access sleep more readily, in
order to de-stress very deeply, in order to replace sleep that you've lost.
It also seems to aid neuroplasticity. It can enhance the rearrangements of connections in the brain
that occur during learning, there's scientific support for that.
This is a YouTube video that was brought free of cost by the folks over at Madefor. So this is an
NSDR script that doesn't contain any of the intentions or some of the more typical language of
yoga nidra, instead it's focused purely on the breathing protocols, as well as includes a sort of
body scan where you direct your attention to different locations around your body.
It has all the core elements of non-sleep deep rest, but is distinct from yoga nidra.

Meaning, your idea of happy is very likely different than my idea of what a state of happiness is.
If we want to understand emotions, we have to look at where emotions first develop. There's a
rule in neuroanatomy. Because if you look at 50 different brains of humans or you compare the
brains of dogs and humans, there are a lot of differences. And the rule that every good
neuroanatomist knows is that if you want to understand what a part of the brain does, you have to
address two questions. First, you have to know what connections does that brain area make?
What is it connected to? Where does it get inputs from and where does it send inputs?
So for instance, if there's an area of the brain that gets direct input from the neurons in the nose,
you can be pretty certain that it has some role in analyzing smell in measuring something about
odors or analyzing something about odors. Now if it also gets input from the eye, you can also
conclude that it gets input from the visual system that it cares about light and photons. And yet
you need to know that connectivity, and you need to know what's called the developmental
origin of that structure. You need to know where it was early in development, because things
move around a lot as the brain develops.
The brain, of course is this more or less squishy thing floating around in some liquid that stuffed
inside your skull. And as a consequence, things move around a lot. They are not always in the
same place in two different species or two individuals of the same species.
And when we're talking about emotions, we cannot point to one area of the brain. We can't say
that's the area of the brain that's responsible for emotions. There is this so-called limbic system
that has been linked to emotions. But the limbic system is just one component of the inputs to
create emotions. It's not the place for emotions. You can't go in and lesion one location in the
brain and eliminate emotions entirely, just doesn't work that way.
So, first of all, we have to ask, what are the circuits for emotion? What are the brain areas for
emotion? For years, it was thought that there might be circuits, meaning connections in the brain
that generate the feeling of being happy. That's been challenged. In fact, Lisa Feldman Barrett
has been the person who's really challenged this head-on, and has very good evidence for the fact
that such circuits probably don't exist. And yet I think there's good evidence for circuits in the
brain, such as limbic circuits and other circuits that shift our overall states or our overall level of
alertness or calmness, or whether they're not, they bias us toward viewing the outside world or
paying more attention to what's going on inside our bodies.
But the important thing to understand is that emotions do arise in the brain and body.
Emotions are built during infancy, adolescence, and puberty, and then it continues into
adulthood. But the groundwork is laid down early in development when we are small children.
So let's think about what happens to a baby that comes into the world. You were born into this
world without really any understanding of the things around you.
Now, there are two ways that you can interact with the world and you're always doing them more
or less to some degree at the same time.
Those are interoception, paying attention what's going on inside you, and exteroception, paying
attention to what's going on outside you.
Because the fact that you're both interocepting and exterocepting is true for your entire life, and
it sets the foundation for understanding emotions. As an infant, you didn't have any knowledge
of what you needed. You didn't understand hunger, cold or heat or any of that. When you needed
something, you experienced that as anxiety.bYou would feel an increase in alertness if you had
to use the bathroom. if you were hungry, and you would vocalize, you would cry out, you would
act agitated, but all you knew was what you were feeling internally.
And then your caregiver, whoever that might've been would respond to that. Oh, you need food,
and give you milk, or change your diaper or wrap you in a blanket if you were cold, but they
didn't know if you were cold, they could just assume that you were cold. So this is actually really
important to understand that a baby didn't have any sense of the outside world except that it
responded to our acts of anxiety essentially.
all developmental psychologists agree that babies lack the ability to make cognitive sense of the
outside world, but in this feeling of anxiety and registering one's own internal state, and then
crying out to the outside world or even just cuing, making some noise, we start to develop a
relationship with the outside world in which our internal states, our shifts and anxiety start to
drive requests, and people come and respond to those requests, hopefully.
And the reason I say hopefully is that we've all heard presumably about these cases of neglect.
There are a lot of cases where if you neglect a baby, you neglect an adolescent or a teenager,
development doesn't go well.
But those are really extreme cases.
What we want to center on today instead is what happens when things go well, and why things
might not go well in certain circumstances is interesting. But to me, not as interesting as what
healthy emotional development looks like.
And if you haven't achieved healthy emotional development, what can be done as an intervention
at later times in order to rescue that?
emotions are really about forming bonds and being able to predict things in the world. That's
really what emotions are about. Whether or not the baby feels angry or happy or sad, we don't
know, we can guess, but we don't know. In fact, most of the time we don't even know how we
feel, let alone how other people feel, and that's true for adults.
And at this point I actually just want to pause and mention a really interesting tool that is trying
to address this question of what are emotions and what do they consist of, that you can use if you
like.
This is an app, was developed by people at Yale, by groups at Yale who do research, and it's
called Mood Meter. And it's actually quite interesting. I think it's either free or it's 0.99. But what
they're trying to do is put more nuance, more subtlety on our words, and our language for
emotions, and be able to allow you to predict how you're going to feel in the future. And it's
actually quite interesting.
but it's called Mood Meter..
what's your level of autonomic arousal? Autonomic arousal is just the continuum, the range of
alert to calm. So if you're in a panic right now, you are like 10 out of 10 on the arousal scale. If
you're asleep, - you might be at a one or a two. So you always have to ask, where are you on the
arousal scale? And then there's this other axis, which is what we call valence. Now valence is a
value. Do you feel good or bad?
So I'm alert and I feel pretty good. And then there's a third thing, which is how much we are
interocepting and how much we are exterocepting. So how much our attention is focused
internally on what we're feeling and how much it's focused externally.
So for instance, if you're really, really stressed, oftentimes that puts you in a position to be really
in touch with what's going on in your body. If you start having a lot of somatic, a lot of bodily
sensations, like your heart is beating so fast that you can't ignore it, then you're really strongly
interoceptive.
But also sometimes you're really stressed because someone's stressing you - then you're
exterocepting.
So these 3 things, how alert or sleepy you are, that's one, how good or bad you feel, that's two,
and then whether or not most of your attention is directed outward, or whether or not it's directed
inward.
And much of what we call emotions are made up by those 3 things.
So let's return to the infant. It's mostly interocepting. As caregivers bring it what it needs, you
hope, milk, diaper changes, a warm blanket if it's cold, pull off the blanket when the baby's
fussing and it's too warm, it starts to exterocept. The baby starts to look into the outside world
and start making predictions. It starts wondering how much it needs to cry or predicting, "Well,
if I cry like a little bit, then mom comes over and I get my milk. Or if I cry a lot, mom doesn't
come over and give me milk, so I need to really scream at the top of my head."
So babies are starting to evaluate and do all this, but they're not doing it consciously. They're
doing this strategically in order to relieve anxiety.
But a lot of what we do in adulthood is when we feel something, we start exterocepting. Some
people are much better at just sitting as a container and just interocepting and paying attention to
what they're feeling internally. But most people do a little bit of a balance of both.
We don't feel good, so we look for an item or food that might make us feel better. We're feeling
anxious heading into the dentist or something like that, so we text somebody. We do this almost
reflexively, it's not always conscious. We start to now balance our interoceptive and
exteroceptive focus. And as we do that, we're starting to figure out what gets our needs met.
Remember, emotions are really there to form bonds and to make predictions. And so our needs
are going to be met to some degree or not. Sometimes sadly there is neglect.
When we expect something and it doesn't happen,It's a big let down. So the many theories of
emotion, the triune brain theory, that you have a primitive and involved brain, something that's a
little bit on shaky ground these days. The idea that Darwin proposed, that there are these
universal expressions of emotions. The work of Helen Fisher on love, that you have circuits in
the brain for lost circuits in the brain, for love and circuits in the brain for long-term bonds, as
well as the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, saying that emotions are contextual, that they have a
social component.
. All of them have strong elements of this idea of paying attention to what's going on inward and
outward.
but there were two tools in there that I just want to highlight, one is the Mood Meter app.
The other one is this idea that there are three axes two emotion, three continuum that interact, the
level of alertness and calmness, how good or bad you feel, and whether or not you're mainly
focused inward or outward, because those are going to form a useful tool kit for the information
going forward.
what kind of baby you were, because that actually informs your emotionality now. These are
classic. They're actually famous experiments done by Bowlby and Ainsworth.
This is this classic experiment of what was called the strange situation task in which, a mother
and child come into the laboratory. The baby and the mother or father play together for a bit, and
then the mother leaves. and then comes back. And the research is devoted to understanding the
response of the child when the caretaker returns, most all children, but most children will cry
when their primary caretaker leaves.
They formed a bond and an attachment. :4 patterns that babies display when their caretaker
returns, and they group these into group a, b, c, d,
a) a babies. So these were kids that would get upset when their caretaker would leave. But
when their caretaker would return, the infant would respond with happiness. They would
go to the caretaker. They seemed happy. If they had been fussy before or sad, they felt
relieved. These are referred to as secure attached kids. So they have a healthy response to
separation, and they have a healthy response to re-engaging with the caretaker.
b) The b babies - less likely to seek comfort from their caregiver when the caregiver would
return. So they would sometimes continue to play with their toys or if they had an adult in
the room while the parent was gone, they would stay with them. It was sometimes
complicated and nuanced, but these were referred to as avoidant babies. It's not clear
that avoidant babies become avoidant adults.
c) The c babies would respond with acts of annoyance. They seemed kind of angry. So it
wasn't that they ignored them, they seem kind of angry. And those were referred to as
ambivalent babies. So the infant's reaction to the returning caregiver were inconsistent. It
seemed like they wanted to bond with them again but that they seem kind of annoyed.
d) the d babies, were the disorganized babies. They weren't disorganized and that they were
messy, the child avoided interactions with everyone and acted fearful when the caregiver
returned, and their behavior didn't really change whether or not the caregiver was there or
not.
over time, it made it clear that certain babies are able to feel secure upon re-engaging with their
caregiver and others don't, or they're confused about it.
But this work, this classic work opened up a huge set of important questions that relate to what is
the reestablishment of the bond really about. I mean, what's actually being figured out here is not
whether or not there are four categories of babies, that's interesting, but it presumably is more
interesting to focus on what is it that defines a really good bond, a secure attachment, or an
insecure attachment or an avoidant attachment. And the four things are gaze. literally eye
contact. Vocalizations, so what we say and how we say it. Affect or emotion, so the way that we
express it, crying, smiling et cetera, and touch, those four things.
And you probably could add a fifth dimension once language and written language develops,
which is written word, exchange of letters, exchange of texts, are another way in which people
can bond. But gaze, vocalization, affect and touch are really the core of this thing that we call
social bonds and emotionality.
We know for instance that there are brain areas like the fusiform face area which is deep in the
brain that is responsible for the processing of faces. Children's recognition of their parents' faces
and voices is extremely accurate and strong. Likewise, parents recognition of their child's
vocalizations not just voices, but cries are remarkable.
This perception of voices. There's very good evidence to support the fact that we are tuned to the
frequencies of voices and vocalizations of people that we care about. And babies are very tuned
in to the sound of their mother's voice, even, yes, while they're in the womb. There's this whole
world of what's called mother-ease, which is the particular style of speech that mothers and other
caretakers now we know use with children. So those are the core elements.
what is it when we feel something? Is it because of something that happened spontaneously in
us, it's a memory, or it's something that we realize, we saw on the internet or we got news about
somebody?
And it's clear from most all of the theories of emotional health, that an ability to recognize when
your own internal state is being driven primarily by external events, as important for being able
to emotionally regulate.
People who are constantly being yanked around by the external happenings in the world, you
would say are emotionally labile, even if they're calm all the time, if that calmness only arrives
because they're in a placid environment and then you put a cracker in that environment and they
freak out, well, then they're not really calm. So how much the outside environment disrupts your
internal environment has everything to do with this balance of interoception and an
exteroception. And it very likely has roots in whether or not you were secure attached or insecure
attached, disorganized or ambivalent as a baby.
It's not just about learning to clamp your level of stress, it's also about how much you're
exterocepting, how much you're out of your head, they call it. But how much you're focused on
the events around you versus the events inside you. Actually, it's interesting when you talk to
people who are very effective athletes or they have very high stress high consequence jobs, they
talk about this notion of getting out of your head.
You only have so much attentional resource, and it can be split between two things, They can be
anchored to one thing. It can be fully focused on what's going on internally or it can be fully
focused on what's going on externally. And if you want to be effective in the world, it is useful
when in very dynamic environments,especially social environments, to have a lot of your
attention focused outward
Ex: If you close your eyes right now and concentrate on the contact of any portion of your body
even if you're just standing up or you're in the kitchen, you're laying on the couch, and trying to
bring as much of your attention to that point of contact as possible. And then from there, you're
going to move your attention even more deeply into say the sensation of what's going on in your
gut. Are you full? Are you empty? Are you hungry? Are you not? Is your heart beating, at what
rate? What's the cadence of your breathing? Basically bringing your focus and attention to
everything at the surface of your skin and inward.
But now try to purely exterocept, put your eyes or your ears, or both on anything in your
immediate space, one thing. And I would restrict that thing to something small enough that at
least in your field of view it would occupy 20% of your field of view. So it doesn't have to be a
pinpoint unless the pin is right in front of you and you're holding it real close. I would say, look
across the room, pick a panel on the wall or a leg of a table or something, and try and bring as
much of your attention to that as possible. It's hard to place 100% of your attention on something
externally, unless it's really exciting, really novel.
If you've ever watched a really great movie, presumably you're exterocepting more than you're
interoceptive until something exciting happens and then you feel something. You're actually
tethering your emotional experience to something external.
And now you can also do this dynamically. You can decide to focus internally and externally.
You can decide to split it 50%, 50% or 70/30. You can develop a heightened ability to do this.
And the power of doing that is actually that when you are in environments where you feel like
you're focused too much internally and you'd like to be focused more externally, you can actually
do that deliberately. But as you notice, it takes work, it involves taking your attentional spotlight,
and what we call the aperture of your attention, and narrowing that aperture to either the self or
something externally or splitting the two.
And the circuits in the brain that underlie intero and exteroception aren't exactly known, but they
are anchored in the areas of the brain that are involved in attention, like the frontal eye fields and
areas that when you third-person yourself, when you can see yourself doing something, like if
you put your hand out in your environment and you focus on your hand, you know that that's
your hand as opposed to some random object. There are areas of the brain that are involved in
that, in recognizing location of self relative to the rest of your body.
These exercises are really what are at the core of these development of emotional bonds. Because
as we mentioned before, these 4 things, the gaze, vocalization, touch and affect, those are
happening very dynamically. So if somebody winks at you, you're paying attention to their wink,
but then you also notice how you feel.
So if it seems overwhelming to try and interocept an exterocept and then shift the balance, you
do that all the time. Your brain and nervous system are fantastic at doing this.
It's very interesting note the extent to which we have biases in how interoceptive or exteroceptive
we are. Remember those three axes that we talked about earlier, you have valence, good or bad,
you have alertness, alert or calm, and you have interoceptive or exteroceptive bias.
It's certainly going to differ according to whatever it is that you're engaged in. But early in
development, you start off with this interoceptive bias. You are starting to develop expectations,
predictions about how the outside world is going to work. And you are trying to figure out the
reliability of outside events in people. And where things are reliable, when people are reliable,
we are able to give up more of our interoception. There's literally trust that our interoceptive
needs our internal needs will be met through bonds and actions of others. This starts to veer
toward the discussion about neglect and trauma.
I just invite you to pay attention from time to time how much you happen to be interocepting or
exterocepting, because emotions and the intensity of those emotions will grow or shrink
depending on how much we're interocepting. If we are feeling extremely sad, and there is an
outside event that made us sad, chances are there's going to be a balance, but that the extreme
grief, the extreme sadness is going to lead us to mostly interoceptive. Whereas when we're
feeling extremely happy, the same is true. Most of our perception, most of our awareness is
going to be on our internal state.
And I want to talk about what is arguably the second most, if not, equally important aspect of
your development as it relates to emotionality and as it relates to this, what I call trust, but this
ability to predict whether or not things in the outside world are reliable or not reliable in terms of
their ability to help you meet your interoceptive needs.
And that period is puberty. And now we're going to transition into talking about mechanism,
hormones, receptors, et cetera. Puberty is a absolute biological event. It has a beginning, and it
has a specific definition, which is the transition into reproductive maturity.
So there are a lot of hormonal changes. Yes, there are also a lot of brain changes. And most
people don't realize it, but the brain changes occur first. The brain turns on the hormone systems
that allow puberty to occur. Puberty is occurring earlier nowadays than it did in the past. The
current numbers that I was able to find is that in females and girls, the transition is starting
around age 10, whereas in boys, - age 12,
One of the primary triggers for puberty is actually body fat. The peptide hormone, leptin, some
people call it a peptide, is made by fat. So leptin had a lot of popularity in the '90s, because it was
discovered as being produced by fat, and it was seen in animal studies that it could promote
leanness. It actually communicates to the brain that there's enough body fat in order to allow the
metabolic factors and processes to occur to liberate more fat.
This is why people have trouble losing that last five pounds. It's because leptin levels are very
low. But in any case, leptin is made by body fat. And when there's enough leptin, it signals the
brain to trigger puberty.
leptin could be injected into younger females that would not have yet gone into puberty. And you
could accelerate the onset of puberty with leptin. So more body fat, the earlier puberty, that's
true. Leptin is also involved in various growth effects in the body generally. And it's interesting,
very obese children don't necessarily undergo puberty earlier. Sometimes they do, but they do
tend to be larger boned. Their bones actually grow more quickly, and they tend to have higher
bone density because leptin is also involved in bone density.
And I want to really highlight that most of these effects, also called pheromone effects. A
pheromone is a chemical that's released by one member of a species that goes and acts on and
impacts other members of that species or even other species.
So for instance, rodents are very good at detecting the urine and the scent markings of large
carnivores that want to eat them. So that's a pheromone interaction.
Whether or not they're pheromonal effects in humans is very debated. So one of the more
interesting pheromone effects that impacts puberty, at least in animal models is the so-called
Vandenbergh effect, which is, if you take a pre-pubertal female, so a female that has not
undergone sexual maturation, and you introduce a novel male that is not the father or a brother,
not a sibling, she will undergo puberty almost immediately.
So this is really striking. For years, this was thought not to occur in primate species, but there
was a paper published last year - showing that mandrills, a particular type of primate, they
exhibit this Vandenbergh effect. There are also all sorts of other pheromone effects.
There's the most infamous one is called the Bruce effect, where the introduction of a novel male
to a pregnant female animal causes spontaneous miscarriage. And that effect seems to be
protected against by the presence of the father. This interpretation of this, but the way this works
is that if a pregnant female is in the company of the male that impregnated her, then her young
are protected by his scent presence or his pheromone presence. But if he's gone and a novel male
shows up, there's a tendency for her to spontaneously miscarry, and essentially for the fetus to be
lost.
The one that's relevant to the puberty discussion is the Vandenbergh effect, which is a novel
male showing up, has to be a sexually competent male, so he has to have already passed through
puberty, and his presence triggers activation of puberty in a female that otherwise would have
remained pre-pubertal for longer. Again, whether or not this happens in humans is unclear.
Well, what can we be sure about when we think about puberty? There are changes in GABA
expression in the brain, an inhibitory transmitter. One of the more interesting molecules that
triggers puberty in all individuals is something called kisspeptin, - is made by the brain. And it
stimulates large amounts of all different hormone called GnRH, gonadotrophin-releasing
hormone to be released. Gonadotropin-releasing hormone then causes the release of another
hormone called luteinizing hormone or LH, which travels in the bloodstream and stimulates the
ovaries of females to produce estrogen and the testes of males to produce testosterone.
But those are some of the main ones as they relate to puberty. the testes in males start churning
out tons of testosterone in order to trigger the development of secondary sexual characteristics,
And in females, estrogen is doing various other things, breast development, et cetera.
Normally, in an adult, somebody who has passed puberty, a big increase in gonadotropin
releasing hormone and luteinizing hormone would eventually be shut down, because the way that
the brain works, the hypothalamus and the pituitary are actually measuring how much hormone
is in the blood. And if testosterone or estrogen or any other hormone goes too high, they shut
down the release of things like luteinizing hormone.
It's called a negative feedback loop. but once levels get too high in the blood stream, it shuts
down. But kisspeptin is able to drive very high levels of these hormones in an ongoing way so
that puberty can commence and can continue. And incidentally, kisspeptin has now become yet
another of the panoply of hormones and peptides and cocktails that athletes take in order to try
and stimulate natural hormone production, essentially to create their own performance-enhancing
drugs endogenously.
Has a number of psychological effects too, seems to have big effects on libido, et cetera. All
these things of course are subject to feedback loops, so they don't work indefinitely.
So that's how puberty happens at the biological level, gets triggered by leptin and kisspeptin.
And then this young child is now a different creature to to some extent, not just because
they're reproductively competent, but because there's a shift in a number of the things that
underlie these social bonds, there's a market shift in a number of the things that allow children
and adults to engage in predictive behavior about each other.
But it's in adolescents in puberty that we go from essentially being somewhat good at a bunch of
things or somewhat poor at a bunch of things, to be coming very good at a few things and very
poor at a lot of other things. And that's because of the relationship to puberty and neuroplasticity,
this ability to change the brain in response to experience is starting to taper off such that by our
early 20s, it's harder to achieve.
Now, the transition from generalist to specialist is one aspect of adolescence and puberty, but the
other is the formation of social and emotional bonds. And most of what consumes the minds and
waking hours of adolescents and children who have gone through puberty and going through
puberty is questions about how they relate to social structures, who they can rely on, and how
they can make reliable predictions in the world, now that they have more urgency that they are
physically changed. In fact, you could argue that puberty is the fastest rate of maturation that
you'll go through at any point in your life.
people can reflect on which of the sort of boxes were checked off for them as they approached
emotional maturity. So there's a terrific review article that was published in the journal Nature,
which is,+ as well as some of the core needs and demands
that have to be met for successful emotional maturation during that time. there's a connection
between the dopamine centers in the brain and an area of the brain that's involved in emotion and
dispersal. What you observe in animals and humans is that around the end of adolescence and
during the transition to puberty, both because of changes in the brain and changes in hormones
there's an intense desire on the part of the child to get further and further away from primary
caregivers, not permanently, they always return.
During adolescence and puberty, both in animals and in kids, it almost seems like there's a bias
for action, and the action is always in a direction away from the primary caregiver. Now, as soon
as I say that, I can just imagine in my mind that somebody out there saying, "Well, no, my kid as
soon as they hit puberty, they just want to stay home with us all the time." That's not typical. It
happens, but it's not typical.
Mostly there's a desire to start spending more time with friends, more time with peers and less
time with adults. And I find it extremely interesting to note that that's not just true in humans,
that's true in other primate species.
So parents of teenagers or future teenagers, it is not just normal, it is baked in to the biology of
humans to disperse around adolescents and in the teen years.
And what's interesting is during puberty, there's increased connection, connectivity as we call it
between the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in motivation and decision-making, being able
to suppress action for making long-term goals possible, as well as dopamine centers and the
amygdala. So there's this really broad integration and testing.
I think this is the key element here, testing of circuits for emotions and reward as they relate to
decisions.
And I think that's useful because when you look at the behavior of adolescents and teens, they
are testing social interactions, they are testing physical interactions with the world. Oftentimes
they're engaging in unsafe behavior.
I would never try and justify that with the underlying neurology, but the neuroscience points to
increased connectivity between areas of the brain that are related to emotionality and to threat
detection like the amygdala, but also reward.
So it's a time of testing behaviorally how different behaviors lead to success or not. It's how
different behaviors lead to fear states or not. Now, of course you could say that of any stage of
development, but it seems like puberty is a very, very heightened stage in which testing of
contingencies, good or bad is taking place.
So an infant can damage themselves through error, but it's harder for them to damage themselves
through deliberate planning. but it's not likely that the infant is going to devise an extremely
diabolical plan to get into the cabinet to get a certain substance. Whereas a teenager might. So
you can start to map the neurology onto some of this emotional exploration. Puberty is a time in
which the internal state of the person or the animal is being sampled and tested against different
exteroceptive events, only now they are able to guide those events with more urgency.
It's no longer just about whether or not the caregiver is bringing you milk or bringing you food.
Now, of course, the parents will all say, "Yeah, but I'm paying for everything that they're doing.
Ah, true. But the biology doesn't care about the source, the child or the adolescent is now able, is
able to now sample many, many more exteroceptive events through behavior.
The theory is that one of the motivations is to learn to mitigate the risk of famine and
malnutrition. As teenagers get older, they start questioning whether or not their parents are
everything they thought they were, whether or not they're the greatest thing that ever was or the
worst thing that ever was. Including whether or not they will be able to provide them resources.
So they test whether or not they can actually feed themselves, whether or not they can support
themselves.
Almost every mental health issue is supported by getting regular quality sleep of sufficient
duration. Leveraging different kinds of social relationships that reinforce positive behavior. And
yet, really the goal is during puberty to encourage as many safe forms of interaction that allow
children, teens, I mean are children going through puberty, that allow them to test this thing of
autonomy so that they can start to make good assessments about their exteroceptive events that
they are selecting and how those make them feel internally.
And so adolescence and puberty is really seen as the period of development in which one self-
samples for these 2 elements :how do I form bonds and how do I make predictions about what
will make me feel good at a level of interoception.
But in terms of the biology, it's clear that there's this stage of development where more
autonomy, more physical capability is triggered by these hormone changes in the brain, and these
peptide changes in the brain and body. And that nonetheless brings us back to the exact same
model that we started with in infancy, of alert or calm, feel good or feel bad, primarily
exterocepting, primarily interocepting.
There's a theory of emotional development that talks about how most of our testing of bonds and
relationships is this seesawing back and forth between very dopaminergic, or serotonergic,
driven by serotonin states. And this starts with infant and mother or infant and father. that during
development, healthy emotional development clearly begins with an ability for the caretaker and
child to be in calm, peaceful, soothing, touch-oriented, eye gazing type of behaviors.
Those really drive serotonin, the endogenous opioid system, oxytocin, things are very calming
and are centered around pleasure with the here and now, as well as excited states of what we're
going to do next. There's actually a characteristic sign of the dopaminergic interaction, where
both caretaker and child are wide-eyed, the pupils dilate. That's a signature of arousal. They get
really excited. Oftentimes the baby will look away if it gets really excited those are signatures of
dopamine release in the body, and in adolescents, these same things carry forward, where their
good bonds are achieved through hanging around, watching TV, playing video games or texting
together or talking, as well as adventure and things that are exciting, so it could be sports, it
could be shopping, it could be a summer adventure. And so this kind of seesawing back and forth
between the different reward systems seems to be the basis from which healthy emotional bonds
are created
There are some right brain, left brain differences. But the idea that the right brain is synthetic,
holistic and emotive, and that the left brain is logical, sequential and analytic is false. There is
zero neuroscience evidence for that whatsoever.
but let's talk about some truths, some differences between the left brain and right brain, The left
brain, at least for people who are right-handed is linguistically dominant. Meaning, most of
language is centered in the left side of the brain for right-handed people. For left-handers, people
that naturally write with their left hand and always did, language is still mostly in the left side of
the brain, but it's also found more often in the right side of the brain. So it's not as lateralized as
we say, it's kind of distributed between both.
So right-handers, most of your language is coming from the left side of your brain. Left-handers,
it's probably a little bit more evenly distributed.
So language tends to be centered in the left side of the brain. And that includes lexicon,
grammar, syntax, all of it, except for one. There does seem to be some arithmetic advantage. So
ability in math in the left side of the brain.
And the right brain, however, is linguistically primitive. Most people don't realize this because
the right brain is always described as the emotive side, it's super emotional and holistic, but it's
actually linguistically primitive. It's very good at manipulating spatial things and visual spatial
tasks. It's primarily handling that stuff, but it sort of non-language except one aspect. And there
isn't a ton of evidence for this, which is prosody. Prosody is the LILting and falling of language.
So a good example would be Italian. Italian that other people speak so beautiful to listen to that
that prosody and the shifts in intonation are really quite remarkable. It's almost like a singing
song listening to them speak.
So in any event, the right brain is doing things that are more about manipulating spatial
information. This was discovered in split-brain patients, the people that lack connection between
the two sides of the brain, this had to be teased out through very complicated experiments.
We can't have a complete conversation about emotions and bonds and social connection without
talking about oxytocin. -is released in response to lactation in females, it is released in response
to sexual interactions. It is released in response to non-sexual touch. It's released in males and
females, and indeed it's involved in pair bonding and the establishment of social bonds in
general.
How it does that seems to be by matching internal state. It seems to both increase synchrony of
internal state somehow, maybe it sets a level of calmness or alertness. as well as raising people's
awareness for the emotional state of their partner. And again, this brings us back to this alertness
calmness axis and this interoceptive, exteroceptive axis.
In order to form good bonds, we can't just be thinking about how we feel, we also need to be
paying attention to how others feel, and we're evaluating a match. We're trying to see whether or
not there seems to be some sort of synchrony between states. And oxytocin, both seems to
increase that synchrony and increase awareness for the emotional state of others.
Mirror, neurons, are neurons that were discovered in animals and humans for their ability to
respond when people engage in certain physical actions like lifting of a pen, but the same
neurons would respond when somebody watched someone else lift a pen. So they were really
mirrors of, were representing mirrors of behavior, both in self and in others. Mirror neurons are
very controversial.
There are however neurons in the brain that clearly point to the fact that primate species are
making assumptions and are trying to predict the behavior of other members of their species. For
those of you that are familiar with the prisoner's dilemma, which is really a model of
cooperation, you can either cooperate or one member of a given interaction can cooperate and
the other one won't, where you can both not cooperate. There are ways in which you can solve
this, so-called prisoner's dilemma, by looking at previous behavior and making predictions about
the likely next behavior that the other individual will engage in. And there do seem to be neurons
that are doing these sorts of predictions or computations.
So rather than thinking about mirror neurons, like neurons for empathy, I think it's more correct
to think about neurons that are trying to predict the behavior of others. And that's, as we said, one
of the core features of emotions, which are to establish bonds, and through those bonds, to be
able to predict behavior.
So oxytocin is one component of this ability to predict others' behavior and to guide our own
behavior. So here's some experiments that involve the administration of intranasal oxytocin.
in order to try and increase the depth of bonding. But what's been reported is increased positive
communication among couples.
There's other evidence, for instance, that men report a greater sense of connection and intimacy
with their partners during sex after taking intranasal oxytocin. There are studies in autistic
children. Giving them intranasal oxytocin as a way to try and help them establish better social
connection and "empathy" or theory of mind. were understanding of what other children and
adults are experiencing.
that oxytocin modulates social distance between males and females. What they did is they gave
oxytocin to people that were in monogamous relationships, and then they evaluated the extent to
which the males in those relationships would pay attention to visual attention to attractive other
potential partners. And it seemed like that the general takeaway from this study is that oxytocin
administration seemed to promote monogamous behavior.
So behavior that wasn't in line with monogamy of the relationship that they were in as opposed
to a foraging for potentially new mates.
But the general theme is that oxytocin is promoting monogamy, it's promoting pair bonding, it's
promoting a understanding of the internal state of others, which requires enhanced exteroception
for those particular others.
that vitamin D is required for proper production, and in some cases can increase levels of
oxytocin when supplemented. And that believe it or not, melatonin, can prime the system for
slightly increased oxytocin release.
The other molecule that we make that's extremely important for social bonds and emotionality is
vasopressin. Vasopressin suppresses urination. Alcohol consumption inhibits vasopressin. So
large amounts of alcohol, many people excrete, a lot of fluid and so forth. Vasopressin has
effects on the brain directly. It actually creates feelings of giddy love. It also increases memory
in very potent ways. It is a pretty serious compound to start messing with, because it has so many
different effects in the body. It's also used somewhat as an aphrodisiac, so it's similar to oxytocin.
It also has very interesting effects on monogamous or non-monogamous behavior.
If we're talking about the neuroscience of emotions, we have to talk about the vagus nerve. -it's
these connections between the body and the viscera, including the gut, the heart, the lungs and
the immune system and the brain, and that the brain is also controlling these organs. So it's a
two-way street.
There's this big myth out there that I mentioned before, that stimulating the vagus in various
ways leads to calmness. That it's always going to calm you down. And that is false. I just want to
repeat that is completely false.
It illustrates yet again, stimulation of the vagus increases dopamine release, increases activation
of the brain alertness. It is a stimulant of alertness, it is not calming people down.
Now this is interesting in light of emotionality - He's talking to an extremely suicidal depressed
patient who has a small device implanted that allows her to adjust her vagus nerve activity. Now
vagus stimulation was originally developed for the treatment of epilepsy. It's now being used for
various other purposes. Vagus stimulation can even increase plasticity. So again, increasing
activity of the vagus increases alertness, and it's just incredible to see what happens in real time
to emotionality when the vagus is stimulated, again, not calming, but activating alertness.
They start the stimulation and, "In the course of the next few minutes," her name was Sally,
"underwent a remarkable change, her frown disappeared. She became cheerful, describing the
pleasure she'd had during the Christmas holiday and recounting how she'd recently watched
some YouTube videos of Deisseroth. She was still smiling and talking when the session ended,
and they walked out to the reception area." So this is just by stimulating and activating the vagus.
And once again, level of alertness or level of calmness is impacting emotion, that this axis of
alertness and calmness is one primary axis in emotion. It's not the only one, because there's also
this valence component of good or bad. Those two aren't the only ones, because there's also this
component of interoceptive, exteroceptive that we talked about earlier.
But I find it fascinating, and it really brings us back to where we started, which is what are the
core elements of emotion, and what can you do about them?
And starting to really think about emotions in a structured way cannot only allow you to
understand some of the pathology of when you might feel depressed or anxious or others are
depressed and anxious, but also to develop a richer emotional experience to anything. Now of
course, I don't expect that as you're out there interacting with friends and you're watching TV and
experiencing life, that you should be parsing every bit of your experience in some sort of
reductionist and mechanistic way.
That's not the goal here. But for those of you that are practitioners, teachers of any kind, for those
of you that are kids, for those of you that are trying to understand what your emotional life and
your consciousness, dare I say the word, really consists of, I do believe that these are
fundamental elements that are well-supported by the science across a variety of researchers
doing things from a variety of different perspectives and some of whom agree with one another
and some of whom don't.
One last point as it relates to that, many of you have asked me about psychedelic therapies that
are now emerging, things like psilocybin and MDMA, I think it's more important to embed that
framework in our thinking so that when we address psychedelics and we address other sorts of
therapies, cognitive behavioral therapy, different types of emotive therapies that relate to
individuals and couples et cetera, that we are able to think about them with some sort of structure
and rigor rather than just talk about them as a bunch of chemicals that produce these amazing
experiences that people need to tell you about. Because if there's one truth, it seems that
psychedelic seem to promote activity of storytelling about psychedelic experience.
But that itself is not really what the therapeutic community and the academic communities are
interested in, they're interested in trying to understand the universal truths, the universal
biological shifts and psychological shifts that occur in the clinical use of those compounds.