Welcome

Welcome to the btrmt Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns. Patterns of thought, patterns of feeling, patterns of action— because that’s what brains do. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.

The last few episodes have been a kind of pop-neuroscience debunking run. I covered the amygdala, I covered cognitive bias, I covered how people use neuroscience to over-engineer calming down. So I wanted to do something a little different from the brain science today. I wanted to talk about something more social, more structural—something I think a lot of people are getting wrong in a way that’s starting to have real consequences and no good solutions.

Before I was at Sandhurst, before I was a brain scientist even, I was a clinician. A crisis counsellor. And one of the things I dealt with a lot was people’s digital hygiene—technostress, as it seems to be getting called these days. The idea that people are struggling with their digital habits, their screen time management, doomscrolling, whatever you want to call it.

I think we all have this distinct sense that the digital world is a perilous place. This economy of shame, outrage, yearning, and terror that floods our media streams. Algorithms designed to suck us in and drain us dry. Algorithms that, famously, the creators won’t use themselves or let their kids use. And I want to talk about it, because I think the social media problem is actually a bit of a distraction.

So let’s get into it.

The story everyone’s heard

Here’s the story you’ve probably heard. Mental health problems are on the rise, particularly in young people. Social media use is also on the rise. So, probably, social media is causing the mental health crisis.

There are some fun graphs around this. Social media use starts ticking upward around 2010, and around the same time you have this spike in mental health concerns. Ipso facto, et cetera.

It’s hard not to draw that conclusion, because it feels right. You’ve probably felt it yourself. Doomscrolling at midnight, closing the app feeling worse than when you opened it. I remember distinctly, in the final weeks of my PhD, finishing a day of writing at four in the morning and being perversely addicted to watching car crash reels on Instagram until the sun rose. Try getting a good night’s sleep for the next day of writing after that.

Or watching your kids—or someone else’s kids—glued to their phones or their iPads in a way that just seems unhealthy. There was this Tumblr post that said if aliens came to Earth, they’d think we were the slaves of the little black boxes we carried around in our hands while sitting, or walking, or even driving our cars.

And there’s a figurehead for this concern now. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, who pivoted through some excellent work on moral psychology in the early 2000s— stuff I actually teach in my classes today—into some slightly more questionable complaints about how emotionally fragile our society is becoming, and most recently into a book called The Anxious Generation. It sold over two million copies. Spent a year on the bestseller list. The argument: smartphones have rewired children’s brains. We evolved for a play-based childhood and we’ve replaced it with screens. We can’t handle this new world of social media.

Off the back of this book—and the broader anxiety it represents—thirty-five US states have passed phone restriction legislation. Australia, dearer to my heart, has banned social media for under-16s. Other countries are now considering the same thing. This very mainstream craze around forcing people to do less social media.

And I should say, the concern is very understandable. Social media companies aren’t really benevolent creatures. Algorithms are explicitly designed to hold your attention. It’s very easy to look at TikTok or Instagram and think, yeah, that can’t be good for a fourteen-year-old.

But understandable isn’t the same as correct. I’ve been writing about this for a while, pointing out that the research doesn’t really support the story. And more pressingly, everyone has been writing and podcasting about how Haidt seems to have got himself caught up in increasingly shrill moral panicking. What’s good is that since I wrote my article, the research has moved on quite a bit. So today, let me do a little update.

What the research actually says

Let’s start with what the research actually says, because the gap between the public narrative and the scientific evidence is kind of troubling.

In 2024, Christopher Ferguson published a meta-analysis of 46 studies looking at youth social media use and mental health. A meta-analysis is an analysis that collects studies examining a phenomenon and then looks at trends across those studies. He took 46 of them, looked across them, and what he found was that the effect of social media use on mental health was “not statistically different from zero.” That’s not the same thing as “small.” That’s academic speak for nothing. And there are two forms of nothing academics can talk about: no evidence because we haven’t looked yet, and no evidence because we’ve looked and couldn’t find any. Here, Ferguson is saying the latter. He looked across 46 studies and didn’t find any evidence.

He then explicitly warned that policymakers and professional guilds—psychology bodies, medical associations—are misleading parents with unsupportable claims about the harms of social media.

That same year, Amy Orben’s group— she runs a lab at my old department at the University of Cambridge that basically does nothing but study this exact question—published the biggest meta-analysis yet. 143 studies. Over a million adolescents. The correlation between social media use and mental health problems? 0.08. For context, a correlation of 0.08 is almost indistinguishable from zero. If you put it in percentage points, where a correlation coefficient of one is 100%, it means social media use explains less than 1%—0.8%—of the variation in mental health outcomes. Less than a per cent.

So all of that happened in 2024, when I first wrote the article on this subject. Now, more recently, an umbrella review came out covering 72 reviews, including 20 meta-analyses. An umbrella review looks at the trends across studies and the meta-analyses of studies. What they found: general social media use showed “weak and inconsistent associations” with mental health. The only thing that was consistently associated with worse outcomes was what they called “problematic” use—essentially addiction-pattern behaviour. Not using social media, but being addicted to social media. Which is a very different claim. We’ll talk more about that in a moment, but I want to tease out what’s happening here first.

Stuart Ritchie, who wrote a fantastic book called Science Fictions, makes an excellent point about why the research looks like this. Basically, people claiming that social media is causing problems are cherry-picking. They’re counting studies that favour their hypothesis. And the problem is that in science, you can’t just count studies. Twenty tiny, low-quality studies saying X is true can’t outweigh one large, well-designed study saying it isn’t. Science isn’t a democracy where one study gets one vote. It’s the methodology that matters.

And that seems to be what’s happened here. A lot of low-quality correlational work that seems to point in one direction, drowned out by the careful studies that don’t find much of anything. Yet thirty-five US states legislated on this evidence base. And Australia banned under-16s.

If you listened to my lecture on atavism, you’ll recognise the pattern. People got scared of technology. They noticed something is going wrong. The obvious solution is to go back to the old ways—ban the modern problem, eliminate it. Panic led to policy. And the problem is left unresolved, because atavism is almost never the answer. People aren’t defenceless against the modern world. What it requires is a little bit of thought.

Life is actually getting worse

So the question becomes: if it’s not social media causing the problem—because mental health problems are going up—then what is going on?

There’s an important answer I’m not going to speak to in detail here, which is the quality of our testing for mental wellbeing. I’ll link to something on this in the show notes. But one of the things that’s definitely happening is we’re spending more time diagnosing people with mental illness and spending more effort as a society treating them with care. That accounts for part of it, but sadly not everything.

So I did an exercise for the article version of this. I walked through the top-level headings on “contributing factors to mental illness” in my first-year psychopathology textbook from about a decade ago and checked which ones have gone up. Nearly every single one has. Let me give you a few.

Income inequality and the cost of living. This one’s hard to miss. Widening income inequality is well documented across most developed countries, and there’s a clear empirical correlation between more inequality and more mental health problems—depression and anxiety, mostly. A paper in the Lancet in 2023 modelled the health effects of the cost-of-living crisis and found it threatens both physical and mental health, disproportionately for vulnerable households.

Housing specifically has got much worse. A Dutch longitudinal study found that housing unaffordability increased sharply, almost entirely within the rental sector, and that it’s clearly linked to poorer mental health—particularly in younger adults. If you’re under 35 and renting, you’re the demographic being squeezed hardest. And the mental health data shows it.

Job insecurity. The gig economy, zero-hour contracts, short-term work. It’s pretty clear that work is changing and turning ever more towards instability. A charitable interpretation is that we’re moving towards flexibility, and that’s also true—but flexibility is definitely a trade-off with stability. Just looking at the rate of striking in the UK over wages and working conditions over the last few years, you’ve got pretty good anecdotal evidence that something’s off. And the correlation between job insecurity and psychological distress is one of the most robust in the occupational health literature.

Urbanisation. More people live in cities than ever before. Several studies highlight the correlation between urban living and higher stress, social isolation, and mental health disorders. City living is just hard on people, even with all the advantages it confers over living more rurally.

Information overload. Now, this one does involve social media, but not in the way Jonathan Haidt would have you believe. It’s not that Instagram is rewiring your brain. It’s that the sheer volume of information we’re all processing is completely unprecedented—and it’s still increasing.

There’s this book by Neil Postman from the 1980s called Amusing Ourselves to Death. I think it’s still well worth a read. What he said, in short, is that in a technologically connected world, rather than getting information about your local area—people and places and events you can engage with and do something about—more and more, we’re getting information “from nowhere” and “to no one.” You can’t do anything about the war in Ukraine, but you’re fed information about it. You can’t do anything about the situation in Iran, but you’re fed information about it. Postman was talking about television, but the internet made that problem much, much worse.

Sedentary lifestyles. We’ve been agonising over this since the 70s, and it’s only getting worse.

And I could keep going. Substance misuse, climate anxiety, family dynamics—I just wrote an article on how much cultural turmoil is happening around family dynamics. Almost all of the headings from this textbook seem to be problems that have been increasing in recent years. When you lay all of this out, social media becomes this tiny thread in a much bigger tapestry.

A really comprehensive review came out just last year arguing exactly this. They call it “a paradigm shift in the global political economy which has largely passed under the radar.” Neoliberal policies producing fragmentation and inequality, and that’s what’s driving the youth mental health crisis. Social media is just one item in a long list of contributing factors—nowhere near the headline.

And the most authoritative review I’ve found on the subject, published in World Psychiatry in 2024, is a comprehensive treatment of the social determinants of mental health. Income, housing, neighbourhood, education, employment, discrimination. All structural. All far out-shadowing the effect of social media. The stuff that’s hard to legislate against in an afternoon.

The directionality problem

Here’s the bit I think is the most interesting, and it’s something I speculated about in the original article. But there’s now actual data behind it.

The question is this: is social media making people sad, or are sad people using more social media?

We should ask this, because all of the research is trying to associate increased social media use with mental health concerns. A correlation describes a relationship: as one goes up, what does the other one do? And with any study that’s just correlational, the relationship could go both ways. Social media could be doing what Jonathan Haidt thinks it’s doing—making people worse, rewiring their brains. But since the literature doesn’t really pan out on that, maybe it’s going the other way. Maybe people with mental health concerns are doing something different with social media.

Amy Orben’s group—again, my old department at Cambridge—published a paper in Nature Human Behaviour last year. This was a registered report, which means they described the methodology and had it peer reviewed before they collected the data.

The reason that matters is because recently—well, over the last fifteen years—we’ve run into what’s called the replication crisis. A lot of famous psychology studies can’t be replicated. They were done once, and when people try to do the exact same study again, they don’t find the same result. One reason for this is that researchers have an idea, collect data, run their analysis, don’t find what they hoped, and then mess about with the data until they find something that supports the conclusion they wanted. Obviously that’s difficult to replicate. It’s fraud, right?

So one of the solutions now is registering your methodology, having it peer reviewed, and then collecting the data and running the analysis exactly as planned. Much less room for messing around.

That’s what Orben’s group did. They looked at a nationally representative UK sample of over 3,000 adolescents with proper clinical assessments. And what they found is that adolescents who already have mental health conditions spend more time on social media, do more social comparison, and are more affected by feedback on their posts. The kids who are already struggling are the heaviest users.

A Spanish study found the same pattern from the other direction. Escapism as a motivation for using social media predicted more internalising symptoms—that’s what we call it when you direct your psychological distress inwards: anxiety, depression, withdrawal, somatic complaints like headaches or stomach aches with no medical cause. Contrast that with externalising, where you turn your distress outwards—aggression, rule-breaking, substance use. So, escapism predicted more internalising symptoms, which in turn predicted more social media use. A reinforcement loop, a vicious cycle. But the starting point was the distress itself, that motivation to escape—not the social media platforms.

And remember: with correlational studies, you can’t tell which is influencing the other. Does social media cause people to feel bad? Does feeling bad cause people to use more social media? Or is some third thing causing both?

The solution is a causal study, and I won’t get into the detail for time. But there’s one big UK longitudinal study I think is interesting. It found very little evidence for a causal relationship between social media use and mental health problems over two years. Most of the apparent effect was mediated by self-esteem—and when you controlled for that, the relationship washed out. Self-esteem was the thing driving both: increasing mental health concerns and increasing social media use.

So here’s how I’d put it. Social media seems to be acting as something closer to a thermometer—a measure of the problem. And smashing the thermometer isn’t really likely to do anything about the weather.

When we find sad kids on TikTok, maybe they’re on TikTok because they’re sad. Maybe social media is the most visible manifestation of people trying to cope with a world that is, in all these structural ways, getting harder to live in.

What does this mean for you

So what does all of this mean for you?

I think three things.

First, we should probably be more honest about why we feel this impulse to scapegoat screen time. The structural factors I’ve been describing—inequality, housing, job insecurity, urbanisation, information overload—these are enormous, slow-moving, politically inconvenient problems. You can’t fix income inequality in a legislative session. You can’t reverse urbanisation with a policy paper. Not least because it doesn’t really serve politicians to do so.

But you can ban phones in schools. You can pass an age restriction on social media. These things are visible, they have an impact on individuals, and it feels like we’re doing something. It’s the same pattern I talked about in the atavism lecture. Legitimate concerns about the modern world, real yearnings for an idyllic past—but because we don’t work like that, and because the past was never as uncomplicated as we like to make out, we end up with the wrong diagnosis and the wrong prescription.

Second, this isn’t a lecture about social media being harmless. It’s certainly not nothing. But the research is increasingly clear that what you do on social media matters much more than how long you spend. Passive consumption of weight-loss content is associated with body image problems. Active social use—talking to friends, maintaining relationships—can actually be protective. A really nice review in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry put it well: “social media use is not a monolith.” It’s more like a diet. The question isn’t whether you eat. It’s what you eat.

And third—and this is the bit that matters most—it’s up to you to shape your relationship with social media. Not the other way around. As far as anyone can tell from the evidence we have, social media isn’t doing something to you. You’re doing something with social media. And the thing you’re doing with it is shaped by everything else going on in your life.

If your life is good—if you’ve got stable housing, decent work, and people around you who actually care about you—social media is probably going to be just fine. But if your life is hard, social media might be where you go to cope. And it might not always be the healthiest coping strategy. But the answer to that isn’t taking away the coping strategy. The answer is to fix the thing that’s making life hard.

And that honestly seems like a pretty good place to leave it.

Welcome to the btrmt Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there is one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns—patterns of thinking, patterns of feeling, patterns of action—because that’s what brains do. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.

I’ve done a couple of lectures now with this thread running through them: the way that pop psychology uses, or rather misuses, brain science. I’ve spoken about how people malign one of the most valuable biological technologies we have available to us—the human stress response—confusing it with trauma responses mostly, and how we should actually think about stress to make it useful. I’ve talked about where that bit of misinformation came from—how the amygdala isn’t the fear centre of the brain, but people use it as a shorthand for stress, hiding what’s actually interesting about it. And I’ve talked about how people are now really getting into the idea of cognitive bias, construing it in a similar way—how these biases mess up your thinking, when really they’re a pretty useful tool, so long as you understand what they’re trying to do.

I thought what I’d do today is pull on that thread more explicitly. I’m often struck by just how much of the pop-psych advice you see for the average working person boils down to little more than something like “just cool the fuck out and you’ll be better at stuff.” And more to the point, I’m left wondering why we feel the need to overengineer this stuff so egregiously, using brain science to justify our emotions. Because these theories produce as much bad advice as good advice. So in this lecture, I want to show you three different flavours of this and see if we can work out what’s so attractive about dressing up simple advice about how to be less stressed and anxious in these complicated brain-sciencey clothes.

It’s good timing too, because I’m planning an overhaul of the ancient positive psychology module that we teach at Sandhurst, and I think this is going to be the basis of it. So if positive psychology—getting your stress and anxiety under control, these sort of things—speaks to you, then maybe this is a good place to get started in updating your understanding.

Though, of course, since I’ve mentioned Sandhurst, I should say that my opinions here are my own, as an academic, as a clinician. Not Sandhurst’s, not the military’s. It’s just Dorian doing his little podcast.

Overengineered theories everywhere

If you’re someone who pays any attention to wellness content, or to self-help, or business leadership material, you’ll have encountered a bunch of different theories about how your brain and body sort of conspire to mess up your day. I’m going to rattle off a few of them to try and capture you as a listener. I’ve already mentioned amygdala hijack. There’s also polyvagal theory. You might have heard of the lizard brain, or the monkey brain, or the reptilian brain. Some people talk about alpha and beta brain waves. You might have heard of positive intelligence with its saboteurs and sages. And finally, I guess, the chimp paradox, or its predecessor, Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2.

All of these things are examples of what I would call overengineering advice around how to calm down. They all superficially look like different theories about different things. Amygdala hijack is about your emotions taking over. Polyvagal theory is about your nervous system shutting you down. The lizard brain or the chimp paradox is about evolution leaving you with outdated hardware. They look like different and sophisticated toolkits for understanding human behaviour from different angles.

And they’re everywhere. I’ve seen them in consulting firms, at military conferences. I’ve had them raised in therapy rooms, obviously on infographics on Instagram and TikTok, TED Talks, and even Psych 101 classes. They’re very popular and they’re very sciencey-sounding. And they’re all the same theory. They’re just wildly overengineered versions of the same advice, which is that if you’re too stressed, you’re not going to perform well.

The fight-or-flight trend

Let’s start with the old favourite, amygdala hijack. This is this idea from psychologist-cum-journo Daniel Goleman’s pop-science book in the 90s on emotional intelligence. He basically says that when something stresses you out, your amygdala—this little almond-shaped bit of the brain—hijacks your more rational brain bits, the frontal lobes or whatever. And as a consequence, it makes you behave in silly ways. I went through why that’s not how the amygdala works in a previous lecture, so I’m not going to rehash it much here. But suffice to say, with a bit of poetic licence, it goes something like: once we were running from tigers on the savannah and we needed to escape, so we had this fight-or-flight response to help us. But now we use the same brain to deal with being late to work. The amygdala takes over, makes us freak out, and we’re in the same sort of fight-or-flight state.

A similarly overengineered theory is polyvagal theory, which is this idea that we can break the autonomic nervous system—that’s all the nerves in the body that aren’t the brain and the spinal cord—into three groups. One mobilises you in response to stressors: fight-or-flight. Another immobilises you when you’re too threatened: you freeze up, you shut down. And then there’s this third sort of Goldilocks branch of the nervous system that lets you function normally. Just like in amygdala hijack, you want to do less of the other two branches and more of this Goldilocks branch.

Now, I’m not going to get into this in more detail, for a different reason than amygdala hijack. The Wikipedia page itself is pretty clear about how unfavourably it’s been received as an academic theory. I don’t want to accidentally spread it by giving it more airtime. It’s already popular enough. What puzzles me about this theory and about amygdala hijack is that they’re both really complicated. Polyvagal theory, even more complicated than amygdala hijack. And they both say the same thing: too much stress puts you into a super-stressed fight-or-flight mode. I never really understood why people would want a theory that gets into the nitty-gritty details of neuroanatomy, of dorsal and ventral distinctions in the vagus nerve and endless detail on nucleus bundles—all this terminology—just to tell them that if they’re too stressed it’ll be unpleasant, but if they’re normally stressed they’ll be fine.

Speaking of the vagus nerve—you have people now online doing breathwork and ear massage and cold plunges, all in the name of “toning their vagus nerve.” The vagus nerve, from a brain scientist’s perspective, is just the biggest nerve in the body. It is, you’d hope, related to the nervous system as a result. And the stuff people do to stimulate it—the breathing, the groundwork, the cold exposure—all of this is just stress reduction that shows up in the vagus nerve because it’s the biggest nerve, it’s easiest to measure. It works, but it works because stress reduction works, not because you’re doing something magical to a particular nerve.

So we have to ask ourselves: what’s going on? Why overcomplicate the stress response? Why don’t we just do what I like to do and use the stress curve, which says the same thing in simpler language: too much stress makes your body respond like you’re being too stressed, and less stress makes you respond more normally.

As I’ve been lecturing and consulting on this for a while, I’ve come to a conclusion. These theories all make it clear that the negative outcomes of being too stressed aren’t because we’re doing something wrong, but because our bodies are doing something we can’t control. And that, I guess, is a pretty interesting insight. It’s not your fault, per se. It’s your amygdala, your vagal tone. It’s this mechanism inside you. You can name it, you can fight it. It’s not you—it’s some sort of enemy. The part of you that shuts down or gets too angry when you’re super stressed doesn’t represent you. I think hearing this is a pretty liberating sort of thing.

But another aspect is this sociology of the interesting that I like to talk about a lot. It’s the idea that a theory doesn’t get popular because it’s true, but because it violates your weakly held beliefs. “Stress isn’t characteristic of me—it’s because of a misfiring dorsal-vagal complex” is exactly the kind of thing you’d want to tell people down the pub. It would surprise them.

And all of that seems fine, I guess. But I think it has an important cost. Fight-or-flight, freeze, fawn—all these Fs—originally described something quite specific. It’s called hypervigilance. A severe physiological response to genuine threats, to life-or-death kinds of threats. And when we steal that term for everyday stress, we run the risk of alienating or marginalising people who actually experience hypervigilance. People with trauma, people with PTSD, people with acute stress. And it might not surprise you to learn that these theories are very popular in, and often originating in, exactly these communities—trauma circles, self-help circles—where the incidence of actual hypervigilance is higher. It doesn’t really seem ideal to me to be encouraging people who are having life-or-death physical reactions to trivial daily stressors to just sort of push through and carry on. These people should be encouraged to seek support.

And more importantly, stress isn’t really an enemy. The sympathetico-adrenal response recruits resources to tackle the task at hand. As stress goes up, your performance goes up. It’s only when stress becomes too great or lasts too long that it starts to produce really negative outcomes. Emotions are motivators. We don’t act unless there’s an emotive reason to act, at least not as far as anybody can tell. So when we demonise our more stressful emotions, it doesn’t exactly seem like it’s going to get us very far.

The old-brain trend

We talked about polyvagal theory before, and it actually bridges us nicely to the second flavour embedded within this class of theories, because it claims that its three nervous-system branches have an evolutionary order. According to polyvagal theory, the immobilising one is oldest, followed by the mobilising one. The Goldilocks branch of the nervous system is the newest feature of the mammalian nervous system. And obviously the older branches are a bit shit, the logic goes. So we should try and tap into that human new one.

This “old equals bad” trope is embedded in a lot of these. The main offender is the lizard brain, which comes from the now-discredited 1960s triune brain model. It fundamentally views the brain as an onion. Very old “reptilian brain” at the core, a newer “early mammalian brain” around it, and then the shiny new “neomammalian complex” on top. The original author, MacLean, was a bit more thoughtful about this than modern takes. He just suggested that older structures handled instinct, middle ones handled emotion, and the newer ones handled higher-order thought that we associate with humans. He wasn’t really interested in making one seem worse than the others. I suspect he thought that all were necessary. But psychology in the popular sense ran with it: set aside your lizard impulses, get out of your monkey brain, evolve past your outdated wetware.

The lizard brain is going out of fashion a bit, and we’ve moved on to the monkey brain more recently. The chimp paradox is one theory that talks about this explicitly. Although, as far as I can tell, Peters is pretty careful not to touch the discredited theories that claim the same thing—I don’t think that would be very good for his sales. But the chimp brain in his formulation is posed against the human brain. The emotional chimp brain versus the logical human brain. And the emotional chimp brain, he says, is more evolutionarily ancient. So we should try and override this stupid chimp brain with our sensible human brain. A bit of poetic licence there, but I think you get it.

This overlaps anywhere people are comparing our behaviour to chimps or bonobos or whatever close evolutionary relative, with the same message: evolution gave us a load of useless and maladaptive behaviours, and you’d be better off setting these ape-like impulses aside in favour of the newer stuff built into your superior human brain.

But of course, phylogeny isn’t really this tidy. There’s no evidence that polyvagal’s branches correspond to evolutionary phases. And in fact, the earliest animals from which we descended had neocortices—these so-called “new brain structures.” One of the most remarkable things about studying the brain is discovering just how capable even very small neural circuits are at producing extremely complicated behaviour. I have an article on my site about how honeybees—just little tiny honeybees—do abstract concept learning. Stuff we thought only humans could do for a really long time. All of that with a brain smaller than a grain of rice.

So again we should ask, what’s going on here? And I think it’s essentially the same thing as with fight-or-flight. Distance from responsibility—it’s not you who are close-minded or oversensitive, it’s your lizard brain or your inner chimp. You’re liberated from this aspect of yourself. There’s the “interesting” quality—an inventive evolutionary narrative that makes for a cool story you can tell people, including yourself. And then there’s a secret bonus: these theories make us feel special. Having studied cognitive ethology for a bit—the study of how non-human animals think—you see this theme crop up a lot. We like to think that humans are special, that we can do things other animals can’t. And every time we discover an animal can do what we do, can think how we think, just not as well or at the same scale, there’s always about 20 years of flustered argument. There’s a great journal called the Journal of Animal Sentience that demonstrates this pretty regularly. I’ll link to a very funny thread—well, I think it’s funny—with academics arguing over whether fish can feel pain. It’s the closest you’ll ever get to academics writing in caps lock.

And the cost is similar. Equating old with bad ignores all the times these systems have gracefully navigated the world for us. So much of what we do occurs under the surface of our awareness. The assumption that the newest and least developed aspects of our nervous system are somehow better adapted to the world is pretty optimistic—that something battle-hardened over evolutionary time is going to be as helpful as something that cropped up in just the last little while.

And you’ve probably seen examples of how silly this is, even if it feels right when you’re hearing these evolutionary theories. Because the same books and blogs and podcasts that demonise our evolutionary brain bits will also pretty regularly rail against this unfulfilling modern life, tell us how the modern world is making us sick, and wax all nostalgic about our healthier palaeolithic tendencies. Can we have it both ways? We’re either well adapted to the modern world or we’re not. Our past ways are helpful or they’re not. Your evolutionary brain is probably doing just fine, on average. Somewhere between the healthy past and the problematic present.

Brain bits as enemy agents

When you step back, all these anti-old-brain-bits and anti-fight-or-flight tropes point at something more general: using neuroscience to identify psychic enemies. This liberating idea that we can separate ourselves from these mental bad guys.

Quick tangent. There’s a class of psychological models we could call “parts work.” Internal family systems, schema therapy, gestalt therapy. All of these share the idea that within us, there are many different forces. Sometimes they’re helpful, sometimes they get in the way. You work with these internal parts—these mental parts—to achieve your goals. You tame the troublemakers.

Modern pop-science usage of brain bits is indistinguishable from this therapeutic kind of parts work. The amygdala is a bad guy for hijacking your frontal lobes. Doesn’t really matter that this isn’t how the brain works. The role these brain bits play is psychic enemy. Same with brain waves. I’ve been asked to review professional development work for companies a few times now that speaks about beta brainwaves as bad stressed states and alpha waves as the relaxed state we should aim for. Brainwaves don’t really function like this, but it puts a name to the psychic enemy.

Rather than talk about that in more detail, I want to talk about a fairly popular consumer version of this parts-work style called positive intelligence. What they do is explicitly pair your psychological parts with brain bits—brain bits, actually, that I’ve studied myself, so I find it particularly offensive. Their white paper singles out two well-studied neural networks: the default mode network, associated with more reflective thought, and a fronto-parietal network associated with more task-oriented thought. They recast these as “saboteurs” and “sages.” You can probably work out which ones are the bad guys. That these networks bear very little relationship to the simplification in their white paper is clearly not relevant to the task at hand, which is naming the enemy.

And there are other examples. The complete domination of the business world by Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, where he talks about System 1—the fast, naughty, emotional system of thinking—and System 2, the logical, slow, and sensible one. And then more recently, the chimp paradox, which is essentially the same thing but with mascots. All of these things put names to brain bits. Naming the bad guys: the saboteurs, System 1, the chimp brain.

So again, what’s going on? Hopefully it’s obvious by now. This is the most explicit form of the self-liberation I’ve been talking about—distinguishing us from the mechanisms that cause us problems in how we think and behave. Most parts work spends time naming the parts. Call it a saboteur, or call it the amygdala, call it System 1, call it the chimp. The result is the same. You’ve isolated an aspect of yourself and you can now have a dialogue with it. You’ve created something you can point at, something with a name and a shape. And frankly, that’s what we do with a lot of complex features of the world to make them more sensible or more legible to us.

I suspect this is the least troubling of the three trends. Making abstractions into entities seems pretty helpful to me. It is the most irritating for me personally, because one thing brain scientists love to do is talk about the brain, which is made very difficult when people think random psychological concepts are literal brain bits. Am I supposed to just nod politely and wince through this kind of brain-word salad? Because then we can have fun engaging with the often pretty interesting psychological stuff underneath. Or I could try and steer them into actual brain stuff, with the risk that they’re the ones nodding and wincing, or worse, glazing over. Tough questions. But the thing itself seems largely harmless, or maybe even beneficial.

The only risk is overemphasising these enemies. Spending a great deal of time calling out parts of your mind for messing up your day seems a bit rash. These parts are usually doing some pretty important stuff for you that you’re not really giving them credit for if you name them something like a “saboteur.” You wouldn’t spend much time trying to restructure how your lungs work, because typically they’re doing the job just fine on their own. Same is probably true of whatever you’re calling a saboteur. But by and large, this third flavour—naming the bad bits—seems pretty good to me. Something worth encouraging, as long as it’s done right.

Work with yourself, not against

All right, so we’ve got three flavours of the same thing. Fight-or-flight theories, evolutionary brain-bit theories, and brain-bits-as-enemy-agents theories. They all dress up pretty straightforward psychological phenomena in complicated neuroscience clothes.

And I think they do it for three pretty predictable reasons. They create distance from responsibility—it’s not you, it’s your amygdala or whatever, and now you can work on it. They tap into the “interesting” quality—brain bits are sexier to talk about than just calming down. And they make us feel more scientific and more special. They sort of emphasise our humanity, which I think is important to us.

And the alternative—simply telling somebody to cool out—gets the same message across, but it doesn’t isolate the problem. It doesn’t tell them how. It doesn’t make us feel rational and special. And it makes us the problem rather than creating the distance we need to work on it. Not to mention that it’s not particularly sexy.

So I get all of that. I think the point of this lecture is just to express that I wish we didn’t keep picking shit ones. Messages that confuse us or make things worse.

Because here’s the thing. These convoluted narratives don’t just describe our troubling behaviours. They shape how we think about ourselves. And when the narrative says that your emotions are enemies, that your stress response is an enemy, that your evolutionary inheritance is baggage, that parts of your brain are saboteurs—then you’re going to start treating yourself accordingly.

Emotions aren’t the bad guy. Stress is a useful biological tool. Your unconscious processes are doing an enormous amount of graceful work underneath your awareness, all the time. The parts of you that these theories demonise are the parts that got you to where you are. They might not always be convenient, but they’re not malfunctioning. They’re doing exactly what they were built to do.

So rather than fight with these features of your system, concentrate on how you can work with them. Celebrate them, even. At least as often as you correct them. Don’t just surrender to the comforting story of saboteurs in your brain. Do the work to make them work for you. It doesn’t require that much of you. Just a little thoughtfulness.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr. Dorian Minors, and if there is one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it is that there is no instruction manual for this device in our heads. But there are patterns—patterns of thought, patterns of feeling, and patterns of action—because that’s what brains do. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.

Now, if you’ve been following along in this little lecture series of mine so far, you’ll know that one of my favourite things to do is to strip away the pop psychology nonsense around neuroscience and try and show you a better way of thinking about how the brain influences behaviour. I’ve done one on stress before and how, properly conceived, stress is actually a pretty good thing. And I’ll talk more about that in this lecture, too. And I’ve done another one about how anyone who talks about the amygdala as the fear centre of the brain is distracting you from what’s really going on.

This lecture is in a similar vein, but I think it’s a little bit bigger than these more focused examples, because I’m not just talking here about one brain structure or one biological mechanism. I want to talk about how we think about thinking itself.

And you’ve probably heard something along the lines of what I want to speak about today. The idea that bias—cognitive bias—is a problem and we should avoid it at all costs in the way that we think. It’s an idea that I’ve had to wade through in my clinical work, something that dominates the business world, the world of management consulting, and it’s even something that we teach here at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. And the way that it is usually taught is a real problem for anyone trying to make fewer errors in their thinking.

Now, normally when I mention Sandhurst in these lectures, I like to do a little disclaimer that this is my own perspective, my own little podcast, nothing to do with Sandhurst. But in actual fact, fortunately, this is something that I can and have been changing as Associate Professor here. So let me tell you how bias should be taught, how it is taught now at a premier leadership institution like Sandhurst, and frankly, how I think it should be taught everywhere.

So. Bias. Let’s get into it.

The pop psychology version

If you’ve ever done some kind of psychology course—online, EdX or YouTube, or a first-year university class—or if you’ve ever done any kind of professional development in the last twenty years or so, leadership training, a management course, anything with a corporate facilitator, then you’ve probably been told that bias is a bad thing. You’ve got these cognitive biases, these flaws in your thinking, and if you could just be a little bit more rational, you would make better decisions.

Now, when I write articles at btrmt., I like to use Wikipedia a lot because it’s normally pretty good for this sort of thing. But in this case, Wikipedia is also a victim of the pop psychologists I’m about to complain about. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, you can go there and you’ll find a catalogue of something like 200 or so cognitive biases, complete with this beautiful image, the Cognitive Bias Codex, this wheel of all the ways your brain is supposedly failing you.

And a lot of this largely comes from a behavioural economist named Daniel Kahneman, who wrote a book in 2011 called Thinking Fast and Slow. It’s probably one of the most popular psychology books ever written, if not the most popular. And in this book, he talks about System One and System Two. A fast, automatic way of processing information—System One—and this slower, more deliberate way of thinking—System Two.

If you haven’t heard of System One and System Two, you’ve probably heard the analogues. People say things like hot and cold thinking, or Kahneman calls it fast and slow thinking, Type One and Type Two thinking. People also describe it as “get out of the amygdala and into the frontal lobes,” or “get out of the sympathetic and into the parasympathetic nervous system,” or something something vagus nerve. All of this stuff is the same thing dressed up in different words.

And if you haven’t heard of these analogues, you’ll probably have an intuitive sense of the idea, and I’ll try and illustrate it for you. Let’s say I asked you: what is two plus two? You’d come up with the answer—four, I hope. You probably didn’t have to think about it. It’s automatic. But if I asked you what’s 136 by 365, you’d have to stop, right? You’d have to think about it for a little bit and slow down as you work through the process. One form of thinking is automatic, fast, and intuitive. The other is slow, deliberate, and more effortful.

And it’s this fast thinking that Kahneman and other dual process theorists would tell us produces cognitive shortcuts—ways of working out the world quickly and automatically according to rules of thumb. So, for example, telling where a noise came from quickly so that we can respond without thinking, or allowing us to read the text on a billboard while we’re driving past. These kinds of quick rules of thumb that we’d be useless without, because the slow thinking is super costly. Multiplying 136 by 365 costs effort in a way that two plus two doesn’t. Slow thinking engages a whole bunch of cognitive infrastructure that’s difficult to run. And probably more importantly, you wouldn’t want to have to work out everything from first principles all the time. You’d never get anything done.

So the idea is that we offload all this more difficult stuff to the fast thinking, the cheap thinking, where we can—where it’s predictable, where we can make a rule of thumb about it. And the reason that Kahneman is the most popular dual process theorist is because he was interested in a very specific thing: where these shortcuts go wrong. He called these moments biases—when the cognitive shortcuts, or as he called them, heuristics, are off target.

So, for example, you’ve got something called the availability heuristic. This is a type of fast thinking that you do when you make decisions based on the data available to you. What kills more people—shark attacks or taking selfies? Your fast thinking would have you answer: of course it’s shark attacks, right? But you’ve probably guessed, because I’m using it as an example, that it’s taking selfies. Deaths related to selfies outnumber shark attacks by, I think, an order of magnitude. You probably want to check me on that. But certainly deaths related to shark attacks are vanishingly small. The reason we get it wrong is because we don’t get nearly as much media around selfie-related deaths as we do about shark attacks. Shark attacks are more available—hence the availability heuristic.

Now, this is the kind of thing behavioural economists like Daniel Kahneman are interested in. But because they’re interested in them, behavioural economists have gone on to document this enormous quantity of biases. You have biases related to attitudes—your standards, equity and diversity concerns, prejudices based on stereotypes about cultures and social groups. But you also have biases related to your emotional attachments, or the limitations of your cognitive capacity and working memory. And like I said, we’re inching into this territory where we’re drowning in almost 300 biases that we have on hand to explain the halt, the lame, half-made creatures that we are.

And in the context of a system like this—fast thinking that leads to all these errors, these biases—then of course the assumption is always going to be something like, well, why don’t we hand things over to slow thinking? System Two. If our fast thinking is error-prone, then the more deliberate, effortful processes of logically working through the information are surely going to save us from these kinds of pitfalls.

In my lectures that talk about this concept, I like to use this excerpt from a Harvard Business Review article called something like “Outsmart Your Own Biases.” The quote goes: “It can be dangerous to rely too heavily on what experts call System One thinking—the automatic judgments that stem from associations stored in memory—instead of logically working through the information that’s available.”

And this is the idea. System One, fast thinking, is bad. Use System Two instead. And as I’m about to tell you, this is a complete misunderstanding.

If you can explain everything, you explain nothing

And it’s not just a pop psychology misunderstanding, either. Now it’s going out of fashion, but historically the entire field of behavioural economics has been built on this foundational idea that humans are rational actors who sometimes deviate from rational action. This is, you’ll be surprised to learn, called the rational actor model—the idea that when you make a decision, you’re optimising for your preferences, weighing up the costs and the benefits, coming up with the optimal decision. And the biases are the times that you deviate from this model, that you act irrationally, that you make choices that aren’t optimised even if you have the right information.

So the behavioural economists have come up with this enormous list of deviations from rationality—these biases. And I guess the idea is that if we can catalogue all of them, we can sort of sticky-tape them onto our model of human behaviour and predict behaviour better. But the question is: if you have 200 deviations from your model, at what point do you start wondering whether the model itself is the wrong model?

And there’s this great quote from an economist, Jason Collins, who says something like: suppose you’re trying to help granny save for her retirement and you want to help her make a better decision about this. Which of these 200 or so biases are going to lead her to make a mistake? How can you help her avoid the biases? Is she going to be loss-averse, present-biased, regret-averse, ambiguity-averse, overconfident? Is she going to neglect the base rate? Is she hungry? Which of these biases are actually going to help you help her to make a better decision? It’s impossible. Nobody’s going to pan through this endless list to figure out what’s going to go wrong and disentangle one from the other. It’s just not a very useful concept.

And people are discovering this. There’s this enormous study— the technical term is a mega study—that looked at almost 700,000 people and the kinds of behavioural interventions that would make them more likely to get vaccinated. I’m not going to get into the results because the results aren’t what matters. What’s more interesting about the study is that they asked behavioural economists to predict which interventions would work best, right? The people that came up with biases as a way of predicting human behaviour. And they couldn’t. They couldn’t predict which interventions would work best. And more to the point, random laypeople could. Slightly, but they could. Your average person off the street was better than the expert at predicting these things. So it almost feels like a knowledge of biases is a barrier to prediction, not an aid.

And again, you think back to granny saving for her retirement, you can kind of see why. As that economist Jason Collins said later in his article: if you can explain everything, you explain nothing. If somebody’s making a conservative choice, it’s loss aversion. If they make a risky choice, it’s overconfidence. If they chose fast, it’s anchoring. If they choose slow, it’s analysis paralysis. You’ve got a bias no matter what they do. That’s not a theory—that’s basically a horoscope.

Bias as a trade-off

So if a bias isn’t a deviation from rationality, the question becomes: what is it? And that’s where I think the interesting part is.

Maybe annoyingly, I want to take a little detour into statistics. Behavioural economists characterise biases as errors—deviations from the rational actor model where people make irrational decisions. But statisticians don’t see bias in the same way. They see bias as a trade-off. Essentially a trade-off in which you ignore noise in order to get better precision on the thing that you care about.

Let me try and put it into context for you. Say I’m trying to figure out who’s sleeping in one of my lecture theatres. I could do this in a couple of ways.

One thing I could do is pick people at random to figure out whether they’re asleep. I look at someone—are they sleeping, are they not? I look at another person—are they sleeping, are they not? And doing this, I’m probably going to catch one or two people sleeping. I’m doing a lecture about statistics, after all. But in a big lecture theatre, what are the chances that I’m going to catch somebody sleeping at the actual time that they’re sleeping? This is an example of me trying to figure out who’s sleepy in an unbiased way. I’m picking people at random, but it’s going to be pretty inaccurate because I’m not going to catch many of the people sleeping when they’re sleeping. This is a noisy way to figure out whether people are sleeping in my lecture theatre.

So maybe instead what I might try is to look at bunches of people all at the same time. I try and take in a cluster of the classroom with my eyes. This is probably going to be a little bit more accurate because I’m more likely to catch sleeping people than when I was looking at them one by one. I can see more of them at once. I can cover more of the classroom more quickly. But it’s still going to be pretty noisy. I can’t see everybody in the classroom at once in a 300-person room. And the closer people are to my peripheral vision, the less likely I’m able to make out the detail of their eyes. Still a pretty noisy way of figuring out who’s sleepy. Not really that biased—I’m still picking clusters at random—and it is a little bit more accurate.

But if I wanted to improve on this, what I’d probably do is bias my search. I might say something like: sleeping people are more likely to be at the back and the sides of the classroom, because people who come into the class planning to sleep aren’t going to sit right in front of me. And the people at the back are facing much less pressure from me screaming at them, trying to get my voice up the back of the room, right? So there’s less pressure on them to stay awake.

Here I’m biasing my search to look around the back and the sides of the room, ignoring the people in the centre. And now I’m much more likely to catch my sleeping pupils. Not all of them, of course, but many more of them than with the two more noisy ways of doing it. What I’m doing is optimising for precision, for accuracy. I’m ignoring the noise. I’m biasing what I’m doing in order to get a better result.

Of course, this could lead me to make certain kinds of errors. If I see somebody with their eyes closed up the back, and I think they’re sleeping—but maybe they’ve just got their eyes closed. They’re thinking about all the wisdom I’m sharing with them, or the sun is hitting them in the eyes. And it’s this latter case that behavioural economists are interested in when they talk about bias—this case where bias has led me to make a mistake.

But the thing that most people take away is that all kinds of bias are wrong, even the ones that work, even the ones that help us get more precision, more accuracy. And I should be clear: this isn’t what behavioural economists believe. They call biases that work heuristics. But this nuance isn’t really the kind of thing that tends to come away with people when they learn about bias. Instead, they come away with the idea that bias is uniformly an error. It’s a problem.

So I think this statistical way of thinking about bias is actually a much better way of doing it, because it’s closer to what the brain actually does. Just like I used my assumption about where sleepy people would go in my classroom to bias my search and catch more sleepers, the brain uses its assumptions, its expectations and its history of being in the world, to bias the way that you behave in order to produce more accurate behaviour. And it’s only when these expectations fail that it stops and recalculates and does something different. In the words of the behavioural economist, that’s when it switches on System Two, the slow thinking.

Bias and the stress curve

I’ll try and give you an example in real terms that follows on from my stress is good lecture. To remind you, the basic premise there is that where most people characterise stress as a bad thing, stress is actually just a motivating force. As stress goes up, your performance goes up. And that’s because stress is recruiting all the cognitive and attentional resources you need to complete the task at hand. If you have a project to complete next year that’s only going to take a week to complete, there’s no stress in the system. You’re not going to be motivated to do it. But if that project is due next week and you have a week to do it, then you’re probably going to have appropriate stress in the body to complete the task—you’re going to start performing. It’s only when stress goes up too much that your performance starts to decline. You start to get brain fog or the jitters. You start to get distractible and anxious. If your week-long project is due tomorrow, then you’re probably going to be less useful at performing the task. Too much stress.

Now that was the stress lecture. But we can think about this same thing in terms of bias. One of the reasons that you perform better at a task when the amount of stress in your body increases is because what the brain starts doing is limiting your attention to the task at hand. It’s biasing you to engage. You’re going to be much less likely to be concentrating on all the other things you could be doing, and instead you’re going to be focusing on the things you should be doing now.

In contrast, as there’s less stress in the body, you’re going to be paying more attention to the noise. You’re going to be exploring. You’re going to be tinkering with other projects. You’re going to be thinking about putting together a new theme for your slide deck. You’re going to be creative. Bias is the brain’s tool for ignoring noise in order to get more precision on the task at hand.

Fundamental beliefs, not 200 biases

All right, so all of that is hopefully at least a little bit interesting, but it still leaves us with a bit of a problem. The behavioural economists are still out there cataloguing their 200 or so biases, all these errors in behaviour, and we probably shouldn’t just ignore them. Most people aren’t really that enthusiastic about making errors. Luckily, I wouldn’t be doing this podcast if I didn’t have an answer for you. So let’s get into it.

Biases—both the behavioural economist term of art, but also the statistical term—depend on our expectations. They depend on our history of being in the world and what we expect to happen based on what’s going on now. Our assumptions, more or less. Which makes me think that rather than try and get distracted by some enormous number of biases, what might be a better thing to do is try and figure out what our assumptions are.

You might think that this is the same kind of mammoth task as cataloguing biases—cataloguing human assumptions—but it doesn’t need to be. And there’s this very interesting recent review that illustrates why this might be a better way of going about things. What they argue is that a huge number of the biases that behavioural economists catalogue boil down to basically just two things. Some fundamental belief, followed up by confirmation bias, or more precisely, belief-consistent information processing.

So the idea is that we don’t have 200 separate flaws. We have this handful of deep beliefs about how the world works, and then we process information consistently with those beliefs. Which, if I’ve been explaining myself right, is exactly what bias is. Consistency. Accuracy. Ignoring the noise for precision.

I’ll give you a couple of the clusters they describe. They say the first fundamental belief might be something like: my experience is a reasonable reference for the experience of everyone else. This one explains a bias known as the spotlight effect, where we overestimate how much others notice us. It explains the illusion of transparency, where we think our inner states are more visible than they are. It explains the false consensus effect, where we assume other people share our same perspective. And it explains the curse of knowledge—we can’t imagine not knowing what we know. All of these things are basically the same thing: starting from your own experience and projecting it onto others.

The second fundamental belief they use to illustrate is the idea that I make correct assessments. This belief gives us the bias blind spot—we see biases in other people but not in ourselves—or the hostile media bias, where partisans on both sides think the media is biased against them. If you believe that your assessments are correct, anybody who disagrees with you must be wrong or biased or both.

Now, they go on in quite some technical detail, but you can extend this idea yourself. One that sprang to mind for me is a belief that something like things are caused by people. The teleological bias. Children think that rocks are pointy so that animals can scratch themselves. Adults think that toast falls butter side down because the universe hates them. We see agency and intention everywhere. And this kind of thing explains biases like the fundamental attribution bias, where we assume people do things on purpose, not by accident, or the just world bias, where bad things happen to people who deserve them. We’re wired to see agents behind events. That much is well documented. So this belief, with belief-consistent processing, could explain a huge number of biases.

Just there, with three beliefs, we get three clusters that are starting to account for a big chunk of this endless list. Instead of memorising 200 deviations from a model that even economists are moving away from, you can ask: what’s the fundamental belief here? And is that belief serving me right now?

The simplest strategy wins

I could go on, but I’ll close it up for time’s sake. And I’ll close with an example that I think makes this really concrete.

In the late ’70s, there was this political scientist called Robert Axelrod, and he ran this tournament for robots. It’s based on a thought experiment and a common behavioural experiment called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where basically you and another player have to either choose to cooperate and get a reward, or defect and you get a slightly bigger reward but your partner gets nothing.

The dynamics of this are well studied. What Robert Axelrod did is get everybody to create bots to compete in tournaments to find out who could win the most and what strategies would be the best to win these Prisoner’s Dilemma games. And the bots could be as complicated as their creators liked. They could have the most sophisticated strategies, complex decision trees, the works.

And the bot that won every single tournament was the simplest one there. It was called the Tit for Tat bot. What it does is it cooperates on the first turn and then after that it just does whatever you did last. That’s it. It didn’t think. It didn’t calculate. It didn’t follow a decision tree. Pure bias. Whatever happened last determines what it does now. Ignore all the rest of the information.

This bot didn’t win every round. Other bots could beat it in a match. But it won the most rounds across every tournament. The very simple biased strategy beat every sophisticated deliberative one.

And that’s the point. In a nutshell, the world is super noisy and bias makes the noise less distracting. Errors are bad, obviously, but errors come from both biased and unbiased thinking equally. And on balance, bias is a good thing. System One is a good thing. It’s just trying its best.

So don’t try and eliminate bias. You can’t, and you shouldn’t want to. But what you can do is notice when a bias isn’t serving you. And that means asking what the fundamental belief underneath the assumption is. Is “my experience is a reasonable reference” actually reasonable here? Is the idea that “I make correct assessments” actually true in this case? Triaging our beliefs like this seems like much more of a sensible strategy than trying to figure out which of your 200 biases might be leading you astray right now.

I’ll leave it there until next time.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there is one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it is that there is no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns. Patterns of thought, patterns of feeling, patterns of action, because that’s what brains do. So let me teach you. One pattern, one podcast. You see if it works for you.

Now, some of you are going to remember the first lecture I did—almost ten lectures ago now—on stress. In that one, I made a promise. I said, if you’re talking about stress, we don’t need to talk about amygdalas or fight-or-flight responses to understand stress. All we need is a hill. As stress goes up, performance goes up. You’re climbing the hill. But if stress goes up too much, then we start to fall down the other side—performance starts to get worse. Simple as that.

But a few of you came back and you said, well, what about the amygdala then? Because everybody’s heard of the amygdala. It is the fear centre of the brain, after all. It hijacks you. It takes you over. You need to calm it down. You need to get out of the amygdala and into the frontal lobe, as my consultant peers sometimes like to say.

And I thought, yeah, all right, fair enough. Because this is maybe the most egregious piece of pop neuroscience out there. And since this is essentially what I do for a living now—correcting the record on how brains actually work—this one is actually a little bit personal. Not just because it annoyed me when my colleagues would use it in the management consulting world, but also because it has slipped into the educational programme here at Sandhurst. Though I say that, and as always, this is my own perspective, not Sandhurst’s. It’s just Dorian doing his little podcast.

With that said—the amygdala. Let’s get into it.

The Fear Centre Myth

The amygdala is a brain structure. Two little almond-shaped clusters, one on either side of your head. And according to pretty much everyone who isn’t a neuroscientist, it’s the fear centre of the brain.

I love this Atlantic article that I linked in my other lecture on stress. I use it all the time when I’m lecturing. It’s a management professor, actually, and he writes: “Negative emotions such as anger and fear activate the amygdala, which increases vigilance towards threats and improves your ability to detect and avoid danger. It makes you fight, flee or freeze. Not think, ‘What would a prudent reaction be at this moment?’ But the odds are you no longer need your amygdala to help you outrun the tiger without asking your conscious brain’s permission. Instead, you use it to handle the non-lethal problems that pester you all day long.”

That is a fairly classic example of the kind of thing I’m talking about, this binding up of amygdala and fear and vigilance and ancient tigers. Essentially, the idea is that the amygdala evolved millions of years ago to detect danger. And when it spots a threat, it hijacks the brain—takes over the rational parts before they can do anything. You end up in this fight, flight, or freeze state, this ancient mechanism that’s just poorly calibrated to the modern world. And now we get this same response—once for tigers—now triggered by email notifications and difficult colleagues.

This idea was popularised in the 90s by a science journalist called Daniel Goleman. He wrote this book that has absolutely dominated business psychology ever since. It’s something we teach here at Sandhurst. It’s something that is taught everywhere. It’s universal. At this stage, the book is bigger than this. But within it, he describes what he calls the “amygdala hijack.” The idea that the amygdala detects something threatening and takes over milliseconds before the neocortex can get in the way. The neocortex being a brain structure that is more evolutionarily recent, and it’s where all the rational bits are supposed to be stored. And then because the amygdala has done this, I guess you become a sort of idiot. I suppose that’s sort of the implication.

And as I’ve made clear, management schools ate this up. Every McKinsey consultant will tell you to get out of the amygdala and into the frontal lobe. Every pop psychology blog trots it out to this day. Thirty years later, this story of the amygdala is the dominant story—the amygdala is the enemy. It’s an ancient tiger detector. It’s a panic button that gets hit even for trivial stresses like email notifications.

Fight-or-Flight Was Never About Email

I want you to really pay attention to how we go from the amygdala being a fear detector to bolting on the concept of fight-or-flight. The amygdala hijacks you into fight-or-flight or something like this. But I should make clear—and this is one of my problems with pop psychology more generally, but with this theory in particular—fight-or-flight was never about everyday stress. Fight-or-flight is a concept that comes out of the trauma literature. Hypervigilance, extreme stress responses, threats to survival. These sort of animal models of fear—fight-or-flight has always been in this literature.

And what really bothers me about this theory is: when did email notifications become a threat to survival? Let me tell you something. If email notifications are genuinely inducing a fight-or-flight reaction in you, then you should be getting offered help from people around you, not pithy blog articles. This is not normal and you shouldn’t have to put up with that. Email notifications should be email-notification stressful. It shouldn’t be tiger stressful. And we should be triaging that better as a society, as a community.

I also want to point out something else that should make you suspicious about this common narrative. When I wrote the article that this lecture is based on, I went to check Wikipedia. This was a year or two ago, and there wasn’t a single reference to an academic article on the subject of amygdala hijack. Not one, just some peripheral articles. When I check now, there are a couple more. I’m wondering if this is from people upset at my article. And even if so, they haven’t done a very good job of linking academic articles in support of the amygdala hijack thesis. Both articles are from the 90s. There’s a LeDoux paper—a researcher who was very interested in affective tagging, early emotional signals. And the other is an ancient paper on amygdala response habituation—the amygdala sort of relaxing over time in response to the same facial expressions. Neither of these have anything but the most peripheral relationship to the idea of amygdala hijack.

That should be very telling. This heuristic is not useful to people who actually care how people and brains and behaviour work. It is only for entertaining the people who read the kinds of psychology blogs that populate the Wikipedia reference list.

But I reckon you do care. So let me tell you what the go is with our mate, Miggy.

What the Amygdala Actually Does

So here’s what’s actually going on. The amygdala is heavily involved in fear learning. That much is absolutely true. If you damage the amygdala, you might lose your fear response. There’s a lot of interesting stuff about psychopaths and thrill seekers and amygdala abnormalities. Also, if you stimulate part of the amygdala in an animal, you can see fear responses. The fear literature around the amygdala is pretty robust.

The problem is that that’s not the only literature. It’s just the most dominant literature. And it’s the most dominant literature for the most boring reason possible. Basically, it’s easy to scare things in a lab. It’s very hard to produce other emotions like joy or surprise. So fear gets studied more and more, and the amygdala got branded as the fear brain structure.

But the amygdala isn’t the centre of fear processing. It has this sort of complex hand in all emotional learning, from good to bad. Essentially, this is a problem I’ve written about before—the problem of easy measurement.

And I should point out that Goleman himself knew this, because buried in his book is this quote: “Not all limbic hijackings are distressing. When a joke strikes someone as so uproarious that their laughter is almost explosive, that too is a limbic response. It is at work also in moments of intense joy.”

So even the guy who’s popularising this is admitting that it’s not just fear. But fear centre is the thing that makes for the best slides and anecdotes. “Amygdala hijack” is a more snappy name than “emotional processing.”

So what the amygdala really seems to be doing is helping us understand what kinds of things in the world are important. It helps us focus our attention on those important things and helps us remember how important those things are when we see them again. You see something, you feel an emotion, and the amygdala is doing something about tagging the intensity of that emotion—whether it’s good or bad, it’s helping you remember the importance, the intensity of that event.

So if we want a better heuristic than “tiger detector,” we might say that the amygdala is an emotional intensity detector. It’s that thing that charges our perceptions with emotions. High intensity, more amygdala. Low intensity, less amygdala. Fear, joy, whatever.

And critically—and this is maybe more important than the semantics around what we’re going to call the job of the amygdala—we don’t see times where the amygdala is “taking over” from other brain regions. Basically, we see that the amygdala is always involved. It’s just more visible when emotional intensity is higher. Because of course it is. That’s its job—to deal with emotional intensity.

There’s this really nice study that illustrates this. It’s a reappraisal study. You show somebody a distressing image—a person crying outside a church, for example—and the amygdala activation begins to rise. The idea being that you see a person crying outside of a church, it might have something to do with a funeral. But if you tell them that this person is crying at a wedding, the amygdala activation automatically reduces. Same image. Different interpretation. The amygdala is tracking the emotional charge of the situation. What it’s not doing is hijacking the brain in response to a situation. The amygdala isn’t taking over. It’s just mapping its activation to how emotionally charged the situation is.

So it’s not clear to me that it generates anything at all, let alone this sort of outsized stress response, this sort of hijacking. It’s not that sexy, but it’s just detecting emotional intensity.

Responding Differently

Now, I know that people like this story about the amygdala—that it’s the fear centre of the brain—because it helps them have a dialogue with that process that feels like a takeover, where a stressful situation occurs and you feel like you’re launched into some more primitive atavistic state. But I don’t think that sharpening our impression of what the amygdala does takes away its power to have a dialogue with those moments. I think it actually makes it a little bit better. So let me tell you how, and then I’ll let you go.

So what are we left with, now that I’ve defanged Miggy? Like I said before, the idea that we’re sometimes emotionally distressed by things that we shouldn’t be, in a way that makes us respond in a way we shouldn’t, is a pretty helpful idea. And that’s why I think we get so excited about this amygdala story in the first place. It’s this convenient villain—the emotionally distressed thing that we could blame for that problematic behaviour. And it’s pretty nice, I think, to be able to distance ourselves from the parts of us that are inconvenient or confusing. I have another article on this that talks about all the different ways that we do this, and all the ways that it’s helpful—not just problematic from a scientific point of view.

But what I want to focus on here is that focusing on the amygdala as the culprit misses the point of the story. Because it’s not your brain that’s the enemy. The amygdala is a distraction from what’s important. Because the amygdala isn’t the problem. It’s the way that you’re responding to the world that’s causing the problem. And the trick isn’t to calm the amygdala. The trick is to learn how to respond differently.

And actually, once you drop this sort of fake neuroscience jargon, you might notice that far from hijacking and taking over the rational parts of the brain, your stress responses are already doing the right thing—the rational thing. I wrote this article on fight-or-flight that makes this point, and I’ll drop it in the show notes. But when you get defensive in an argument, that is assertiveness. And it’s not always a bad thing. In fact, often it’s a good thing—it’s the point of argumentation. Or when you avoid the uncomfortable phone call until you’re ready to take it—that’s strategic withdrawal. There’s no reason to put yourself in these situations unduly. Sometimes that stress response is the right response. When you freeze up, similarly, that’s poise. You’re holding the balance. You’re ready to act. You’re collecting your thoughts. These things aren’t amygdala hijacks. They’re preparatory steps. They’re stress doing its job.

Stress makes us do things. And sometimes that ends up being the wrong thing. But very often it tends to be the right thing. So the question shouldn’t be “how do I stop the stress response?” It should be “is this stress response serving me right now?” And that question isn’t about your amygdala. That question is about you.

And this lesson should sound familiar from the stress lecture because it’s the same principle. We don’t need fancy neuroscience jargon to understand what’s going on. Amygdala hijack, fight-or-flight, getting out of the amygdala and into the frontal lobe—this is all just complicated language for something that’s very simple. And I’ll tell you what—when you take these things out of jargon and put them into what’s actually going on, it’s not the amygdala, it’s your way of responding. Is the way of responding serving you? That’s when you start to see results. That’s when, working in the clinical space, I would start to see people developing. That’s when, working with executives, you start to see them getting it right. Because it’s not jargon anymore—it’s actionable.

So if you’re emotionally overwhelmed, the question isn’t “how do you calm the amygdala?” The question is “how do you respond differently?” And the answer is much more accessible than the jargon suggests.

The amygdala isn’t the fear centre of the brain. It is your emotional intensity detector. And the sooner we stop blaming it for our problems, the sooner we can start working on the things that actually matter—which is how we choose to respond.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there is one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it’s that there is no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns. Patterns of thought, patterns of feeling, patterns of action. That’s what brains do. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.

So today I want to talk about something a little bit different from the usual brain science fare or the other stuff that I teach here at the academy. I want to talk about infrastructure, and specifically, I want to talk about a dead theory from political science that I think describes modern life a little bit better than any of the live ones.

Now, I should say, as I always do, that this is my own perspective. Nothing to do with my day job at Sandhurst, just Dorian doing his little podcast. But today I want to talk about a theory called hydraulic despotism, proposed by a guy called Karl Wittfogel in the 1950s. And I’ll be up front — it was absolutely savaged by his peers, and rightly so, because it has some real problems. But not only does it have an excellent name, there’s a pattern inside it that I think is worth extracting, because once you see this, I think you’ll start seeing it everywhere. And it has some interesting implications for all of us.

So let’s get into it.

Control the Water, Control the People

Here’s the basic idea. People need water. Not just as a basic need, but also because it allows us to lean into agriculture. With a rich flow of water, you can irrigate your crops. And so where water flows, you’re going to find more people congregating around that water. And as populations grow, you’re going to find that infrastructure grows to support those populations. And where infrastructure grows, mobility is going to drop because people become more reliant on these conveniences — the local goods and services to support the size of that community.

And so at some point — and this is the key move that Wittfogel makes — the organisation, the government that controls the water at the point that mobility starts dropping, has the capacity to become a despot. Because if they were to take the water away, people wouldn’t just be able to move. They would face death. So whoever controls the water has total control of the people.

This is a thesis that he wrote about in his book Oriental Despotism. And he argued that this explained the historical empires of China, of Egypt, of Mesopotamia and pre-Columbian Peru. All these ancient empires arose because somebody figured out irrigation and then used it as a lever to become despots, to become a tyrannical force. In contrast, he liked to point out, you had these enlightened Europeans elsewhere who had this beautiful system of feudalism where people were free. Incidentally they were starving, but at least they were free.

And here come the problems with Wittfogel’s thesis. Not just that the comparison to European feudalism doesn’t seem like quite the comparison he thought it was, but also that the examples he picked weren’t really demonstrating what he thought they were demonstrating. The causality often ran backwards — a lot of successful states built irrigation, it wasn’t that irrigation led them to take control of a group of people. And plenty of actually despotic states didn’t bother with irrigation at all. If you look at the history of the man, the whole thing was fairly transparently motivated by a shift from being a committed communist to a committed anti-communist. He was really trying to explain why the Soviet Union and China were the way they were, and he worked backwards from the conclusion.

So his theory of hydraulic despotism died in the water. Nobody serious is citing Wittfogel approvingly. It’s a dead theory and that’s where most people leave it.

Modern Hydraulic Resources

But if you’re a cynic like me, you hear something like this — controlling the water means controlling the people — and you start looking around at the way that we live our lives with a bit of a raised eyebrow.

So let’s do an autopsy on Wittfogel’s theory. Put aside the specifics about ancient irrigation. The insight that I think is interesting is that any resource that flows through increasingly centralised infrastructure, when it becomes essential and non-substitutable — you can’t just go and get it somewhere else — then whoever controls it controls you. And once you frame Wittfogel’s theory like that, you start seeing hydraulic resources everywhere.

Start with the obvious one. Actual water. Here in the UK, Thames Water has something like a 20 billion pound debt pile. They can’t even manage the literal water resource. So that’s a bit embarrassing for the metaphor, but it does rather prove the point.

Or you could think about energy. Hydrocarbon fuels, electricity, gas — these things are controlled by relatively small and relatively centralised forces. And it’s really evident in the resistance we face trying to move from these products for energy to more modern products for energy. The infrastructure makes it very, very difficult to change. Or Russia’s activity in Ukraine demonstrated this almost overnight — you had global food insecurity because grain, another flowing resource through centralised infrastructure, was suddenly being controlled by a conflict.

You can also think about communities. I’ve written about this a couple of times — about rising rates of loneliness, about the whittling away of familial connections. But the short version is that we increasingly outsource all the things we used to do for each other to organisations, both governmental and non-governmental. And a lot of the problems we have in terms of mental health and well-being are because the infrastructure we outsourced it to is becoming increasingly fragile, particularly in a changing political environment.

Or you could think of social media. Your links to your friends and your family flow through just a handful of companies. You have Meta, you have Google, you have ByteDance. And so this aspect of your relationships is subject to what I’d call hydraulic conditions. If Meta decides to change how its algorithm works tomorrow, your ability to maintain your connections to your friends changes. And I think that’s one of the things that’s so problematic about social media — not just the content it feeds us, but how little control we have over how that content is fed to us.

And you can keep going. Payment processing — there are just a handful of processors that control almost all of the flow of money, and you can’t really run a business without them. Visa, Mastercard, Stripe. AI compute — the absurd Nvidia valuation tells you everything you need to know about who controls access to the resources that are going to shape whatever comes next. Medicine and medical aid, data storage, cloud infrastructure. All of these things are flowing resources that have become centralised and increasingly non-substitutable.

Convenience as Control

It’s certainly not what Karl Wittfogel had in mind. And to just call it despotism off the bat is certainly unfair. But I think it’s an interesting pattern, because one of the things that I’m very interested in is mental well-being. And there is an enormous correlation between mental well-being and a sense of controllability. This is an old theory now — Selye was an endocrinologist, but he had this idea of the difference between distress, bad stress, and eustress, good stress. I have an article that talks about this in more detail. But fundamentally the difference is partly biological, partly psychological — and it comes down to perceived controllability. If you don’t feel in control, you’re going to interpret the same stress that could be excitement as something threatening.

And I don’t think that in the main it’s truly despotism. People aren’t doing this on purpose. In the main, it’s just industrial society doing what it does — centralising life in urban areas, delegating our responsibilities to institutions, making things more convenient, making things more productive, and doing so at the cost of our communal ties. I don’t think many people would be keen to go back to a time where hospitals weren’t a thing because people weren’t centralised enough for that to make sense.

But I think there is something we can do about it from a mental health perspective, because we often actively participate in relinquishing this control. The delegation is convenient. When it comes to technology, because it’s so difficult to understand, we happily hand it over. We don’t have to use Meta for our social connections, but it’s easier than the alternatives. There’s a reason not many people ended up migrating to Mastodon when Twitter started getting wild. And we don’t have to use a particular cloud provider, but migrating once you’re in the Google or the Apple ecosystem is very difficult.

And it’s not just convenience. There is also an element of coercion here. And it’s not the coercion that Wittfogel’s ancient subjects suffered from — coercion by threat of death. It’s coercion by marginalisation. Try and migrate your friends from WhatsApp to Signal and see how many people join you there. If you don’t buy into the infrastructure, you’re going to miss out. It’s a softer coercion, but the endpoint looks awfully similar.

By this point, you can’t leave. Your relationships are there on whatever service you’re on. Your data’s there, your workflows are built around it. Your flowing resource has been captured and now the terms can change.

And I think that’s why I like hydraulic despotism for this. There are other theories that point directly at what I’m talking about — Michael Mann has something called infrastructural power; there’s platform capitalism; Callon has something on obligatory passage points from actor-network theory; even the essential facilities doctrine from antitrust law. All of these things describe what I’m talking about. But none of those things have that same kind of motivating force as hydraulic despotism. Hydraulic despotism sounds worrying. Good. I think we should be worried.

What Can Be Done

But I don’t just want to leave you with the worry, because unlike Wittfogel’s ancient imagined subjects who really couldn’t leave, we do have alternatives now.

Cory Doctorow works at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and gave a talk at the 39th Chaos Communication Congress in early 2026, where he describes what I’m about to talk about in great detail. I think that article is well worth reading, and I’ll leave it in the show notes. But essentially you have a lot of forces aligning against this kind of hydraulic control now in a way that hasn’t really been the case in previous years. You have people in the digital rights space who’ve been harping on about this for long enough that governments are starting to do something about it. You have tech entrepreneurs who are trying to raid big tech’s margins, particularly with AI. And then you’ve got national security hawks increasingly worried about dependency on concentrated infrastructure because of the way the global stage is changing. So this concern isn’t fringe anymore. It’s starting to become mainstream.

And Doctorow is also excited about some of the changes in the legal landscape. Anti-circumvention laws exist in almost all jurisdictions that criminalise modifying devices without the approval of the manufacturer. The US often makes these a condition of a trade agreement. These are the reason why it’s so hard to jailbreak an iPhone — you own the technology, but you’re not allowed to jailbreak it because it’s illegal. Doctorow thinks that now with trade agreements being weaponised, these kinds of pressures might go away and people might start building software that allows you to have more independence.

But I don’t think we have to wait for these changes. All the alternatives already exist. Federated social media, self-hosting your own services, community-owned infrastructure, open-source software — probably the single most successful anti-hydraulic movement in history. All of these things have been possible for a long time and none of them have been as convenient as the alternatives. And in fact, that’s the point. The convenience is the mechanism of control. Every time you choose the convenient option, you are strengthening the hydraulic infrastructure.

But now is the time of AI. And I think the landscape looks very different, because where once you had to figure out these complicated things yourself, now you have the opportunity to have AI walk you through this alternative landscape — to help you take back control of these hydraulic resources and move you away from the infrastructure that controls them. And in doing so, I think we have a chance of gaining back a sense of control and hopefully alleviating some of the pressure that is contributing to the lack of mental well-being that’s increasingly prevalent in our society.

So I’ll leave you with this. The defining feature of human beings, I reckon, is our capacity for nurture — to share ideas and bring them into the world. To live in a modern society is to relinquish control of our water. That’s unavoidable at this point. But we don’t need to lean so hard into that fact and hand over everything else as well. I write more about this — about recreating systems from zero, about digital literacy as a civic responsibility, and about what happens to our relationships when they’re mediated by hydraulic infrastructure. Now I think that we have the ability to do something a little bit different.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it’s that there is no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns. Patterns of thought, of feeling, of action — because that’s what brains do. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.

In the last lecture I talked about values. I got a couple of complaints for that — it felt a little too organisational, I think. And that might be true. I am interested in the subject of values at work because of organisations like the army, and it did come out of a conversation about organisational values with one of my old management consulting colleagues. But values aren’t just organisational. You can only have organisational values because you aggregate values across individuals. And the values that we have as individuals shape us — how you raise your kids, what you think a good life looks like, what you put on your plate. It shapes everything.

And I actually have a really good example of this that falls out of my lecture on how nature versus nurture just isn’t that interesting. A little more topical, maybe.

I want to talk about atavism. And since I’ve mentioned the relationship between my work and the Army, I should say that this is my own perspective, not the perspective of the military academy at Sandhurst. It’s just Dorian doing his little podcast.

So. There’s a bunch of stuff around at the moment telling people that the answer to modern problems is to go back to some ancient time. Back to raw milk, back to ancestral diets like the Paleo diet, back to traditional roles, phone-free childhoods. A lot of this sounds pretty reasonable — and in fact so reasonable, I suppose, to some people that it’s now federal policy in the United States. The problem is, I think all of this stuff is built on two assumptions that don’t really hold up.

Let’s get into it.

The Template

The most interesting face of this right now is probably the MAHA situation in the US — Make America Healthy Again. Robert F. Kennedy Jr is the institutional face of this particular thread, and it’s interesting that he has Calley Means, a wellness entrepreneur, as his senior advisor. What we’ve seen coming out of this movement is pushes for things like raw milk and against things like seed oils. Anti-sunscreen messaging, food dye bans. Supplements are never far from this sort of thing either. Something like 75 bills across 37 states last year alone.

If you’re like me — a bit paranoid with a low sense of institutional trust — this doesn’t come as much of a surprise, because you’re already seeing this kind of thing in your socials. Microplastic fears, additive fears, hormonal disruption from wearing the wrong kinds of pants. But if you’re not immersed in that world, the fact that it’s now institutional should tell you this kind of thinking has become pretty mainstream. Pay attention and you’ll start to see it in lower-level conversations happening around you.

The reason it’s mainstream is because it bundles together a whole cluster of things people are already doing. All of them share this basic shape: modern life is making you sick, and the answer is to go back to how things were.

Seed oils: one in five Americans is now actively avoiding canola oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil. The claim is that our ancestors never ate industrially processed oils, so these must be what’s causing modern inflammation, heart disease, obesity. You’ll hear people in restaurants asking if the kitchen uses seed oils. It’s an identity at this point.

Raw milk: unpasteurised, straight from the cow. Multiple US states passing bills to legalise sales. The claim being humans drank raw milk for thousands of years before pasteurisation, so pasteurisation — ostensibly designed to kill off bad bacteria — actually just destroys the good stuff.

And then there’s The Anxious Generation. Jonathan Haidt’s book sold over two million copies, spent a year on the bestseller list. It hits on something that feels very truthy: the claim is that smartphones have rewired children’s brains, that kids evolved for a play-based childhood and we’ve replaced it with screens. Off the back of this book, 35 US states have already passed phone restriction legislation.

Now I want to slow down here, because there’s a pattern underneath all of these examples that’s worth making explicit. And I think the tradwife movement is probably the best way to illustrate it.

Tradwife was added to the Cambridge Dictionary in 2025 — women performing homemaker roles, huge on social media. The example that springs to mind is Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm fame: nine million Instagram followers watching her bake bread, raising kids on a ranch, looking immaculate. The claim, whether explicit or implied, is that traditional gender roles reflect something biological. And modern feminism is making women unhappy.

This is where you can see the machinery. Because whatever tradition is being invoked here isn’t precisely ancestral. It’s harkening to a specific time period: roughly 1945 to 1965 American suburbia. If you go back to Pleistocene women, you see a very different kind of traditional wifehood — heavy agricultural labour, hunting, gathering, tool-making, trade. The tradwife aesthetic as it’s portrayed on social media now is cosplaying a very specific, very recent historical moment, and we call it nature. Research from King’s College London basically summarises the point: it reflects exhaustion with today’s work-life pressures, not nostalgia for a bygone era. And Ballerina Farm, this “self-sufficient homestead,” employs something like 30 warehouse workers and 10 office staff. The farm clothes are costumes.

So what’s happening here? It’s a template, and once you see it you’ll recognise it in every one of these trends — from the food trends to the microplastic trends to the traditional wife and traditional masculine role trends. I’ve written about this in the context of what makes theories interesting. It builds on Murray Davis’s work, who noticed that the most successful ideas follow a specific shape: they’re hot takes on stuff you don’t care that much about. They subvert weakly held beliefs. You can’t violate somebody’s strongly held beliefs and have them pay attention — they’re going to resist. And interesting ideas can’t be something you don’t care about, because then you just shrug it off. The sweet spot is beliefs you hold casually.

Evolutionary narratives are perfect for this, because they’re Just So Stories — after Kipling. Narratives that construct an evolutionary origin to explain why something is the way it is. They’re seductive because you can make anything feel true by making up some evolutionary story about it. Nobody can go back to the Pleistocene and prove it, right? Find the tradwife working at the kitchen sink in the archaeological record. That kind of evidence doesn’t exist. You can make up whatever evolutionary story you like to explain anything, without addressing any of the real reasons it might have come about.

And so you get this template. Every single time:

1. Identify a modern health problem — real or perceived, physical or mental.

2. Construct a narrative about ancestral conditions.

3. Claim the gap between ancestral and modern is the cause.

4. Sell the “return” as the cure.

Like any evolutionary story, it’s unfalsifiable by design. Any improvement gets credited to the ancestral practice. Any failure gets attributed to insufficient commitment. If you’ve listened to my podcast on mundane cults, this should sound familiar. It’s the same structural logic.

Some of the underlying concerns are eminently reasonable. Reducing ultra-processed food is almost certainly a good thing. Questioning sedentary lifestyles is absolutely imperative. Spending time outside is wonderful. That’s what makes this interesting — there’s something real underneath all of it. My problem isn’t that people want to be healthier. My problem is these two assumptions underneath the claims.

We Don’t Actually Know What’s Optimal

The first problem is pretty intuitive: we really don’t know what satisfies human needs. Every one of these trends follows the same template — find a modern health problem, construct a narrative about some idyllic ancestral time point, say the distance from here to there is why we’re sick. That assumes the previous state was better. But the evidence doesn’t support it.

Take seed oils. The science directly contradicts the narrative. Plant-based oil intake is associated with lower mortality. Butter intake is associated with higher mortality. The specific molecule people worry about — linoleic acid — doesn’t increase chronic disease risk and is in fact linked to lower inflammation, lower type 2 diabetes risk.

Raw milk. I’ve written before about how nobody really knows what’s good for you when it comes to nutrition, and raw milk is a good case in point. Before pasteurisation was widely adopted, milk caused something like 25 per cent of all foodborne illness outbreaks. In 2024 they were finding bird flu in raw milk — a disease that survives refrigeration for five or more weeks. 70 cases in the US by March 2025, where pasteurisation would completely inactivate the virus. There is an ancestral condition where you drank unpasteurised raw milk, but you’d have found a lot more people dying from completely avoidable diseases. That’s not quite as romantic as the picture that’s painted.

Jonathan Haidt’s smartphones argument is similar. Social media feels malicious — all these algorithms trying to steal our attention. I complain about it a lot on my website. But when you try to figure out exactly what the relationship is, you find it very difficult to identify anything. There are two ways scientists can talk about there being no evidence for something: there can be no evidence because we looked and didn’t find any, or no evidence because we haven’t yet looked. People slip between the two. In this case, we have looked hard for the evidence that social media causes negative mental health outcomes in teenagers, and we find it very difficult to tell a strong story. A meta-analysis by Ferguson found that the causal effect of social media on mental health was statistically no different from zero. And yet 35 states have passed legislation.

What I find particularly revealing is what happens when people try to actually live by these ancestral principles. The Carnivore diet is my favourite example. Paul Saladino wrote The Carnivore Code — the argument being that plants are poison. He quit his own diet: testosterone crashed, sleep problems, joint pain. He eats plants now. Or the Liver King, the Netflix sensation, who also denounced the carnivore diet in 2025. Or Andrew Huberman, who promotes ancestral protocols — cold plunges, morning sunlight, grounding, delayed caffeine — but admitted he’s been on testosterone replacement therapy since 45 while selling supplements.

All of these people promote the atavistic return to nature while relying on cutting-edge pharmaceuticals. The ancestral lifestyle cannot produce the results its advocates advertise.

The Robust-Fragile Paradox

The second problem is subtler. The atavism argument contains a paradox. On the one hand, humans have extraordinary flexibility — Siberia to the Sahara, we dominate almost any biosphere. Robust, adaptable, resilient. That’s the argument for why we should be out there using our bodies: we evolved these incredible capacities and now we’re wasting them behind desks.

But on the other hand, the same people tell you modern life is destroying us. Smartphones rewiring our brains. Seed oils inflaming our bodies. Office work atrophying our muscles. We’re fragile, brittle, prone to shattering.

You can’t have both. Either we’re robust, and we can handle modernity, or we’re fragile, and the ancient world would have been equally punishing.

Haidt’s smartphones claim is probably the clearest case. If the brain, shaped by millions of years of evolution, can be fundamentally broken by a decade and a half of smartphones, it must be the least robust organ imaginable.

Or the anti-sunscreen claims. If humans are so well adapted to sunlight that sunscreen is unnecessary, then why did ancestral humans in high-UV environments evolve dark skin pigmentation? Melanin is the body’s sunscreen. The evolution of melanin is itself evidence that unprotected sun exposure was a selective pressure.

Raw milk again. If we were robust enough to survive millennia of raw dairy, then pasteurisation should be a trivial modern convenience our bodies can handle. If our gut flora is so fragile that pasteurisation destroys something essential, then the ancestral world of contaminated milk and parasites would have been devastating.

The paradox tells you something: the reasoning isn’t about evidence. It’s about a feeling.

The Yearnings Are Real

I’m not saying the yearnings are wrong. Wanting to be healthier, wanting community, wanting less screen time — all completely reasonable and almost certainly associated with better health. The King’s College London tradwife research tells this story nicely: people are drawn to that aesthetic because they’re exhausted with today’s work-life pressures. It’s a rational response to late capitalism dressed up as evolutionary truth.

The problem is the reasoning. The Just So Story template — identify a problem, construct an ancestral narrative, sell the return — is completely unfalsifiable. Any improvement gets credited to doing it properly. Any failure gets attributed to not being ancestral enough. It’s the same structure as any number of belief systems I’ve talked about before.

And this kind of reasoning, if you don’t spend time thinking about it, ends up producing policy decisions that are really problematic. We’re heating milk to 40 or 60 degrees and somehow this is rocking our ancestral connection to the world. People are legislating off the back of that idea and it’s causing real problems.

Different environments pose different challenges and require different skill sets. The modern world is just a new kind of biosphere we’re adapting to, as we’ve adapted to many others. Rather than imagining some continuum from ancient wellbeing to modern suffering, it’s more like a landscape with many peaks and many valleys.

So we should listen to those yearnings for a better way of living. But just a little bit more carefully. I’ll leave some links in the show notes. The original article is called Atavism Isn’t the Answer. There’s also Evolution is Overrated for more on the Just So Story problem, and Hydraulic Despotism if you’re interested in the infrastructure side of modern dependency. Thanks for listening.

Welcome to the btrmt Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there is one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it’s that there is no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns—patterns of thought, patterns of feeling, patterns of action—because that’s what brains do. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.

Now, I want to play a little bit today. I teach ethics—or at least the behavioural science of ethics—here at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. And it can get a little bit tricky because a study of ethics should tell you how to be, what you should do, what you ought to do, what’s good. But often it seems like it raises more questions than it answers, particularly at work. If you consider that the people I teach, their job involves going out and trying to work out who is a lawful target—from shooters to women and children—you have an ethical framework that helps. They have the Law of Armed Conflict, which helps define what a lawful target is. But it’s not going to be particularly encouraging when you get the go-ahead to engage a child soldier. This is precisely how moral injuries happen, because this kind of ethical dilemma raises more questions than it answers.

Now, that is more of a work conversation, and we consider things very seriously there. But this isn’t Sandhurst—this is just Dorian’s little podcast. And like I said, I want to play a little bit today. So let’s move away from that heavy talk and concentrate on something that I’ve noticed in my time teaching the behavioural science of ethics here.

Everyone Loves Values

There is this one ethical framework I’ve noticed that everyone loves, either implicitly or explicitly. And once I tell you about it, I think you’re going to see it everywhere. And the thing that I like the most about it is it’s almost as useless as it is ubiquitous as it’s ordinarily deployed. What I’m talking about is the concept of values.

I noticed this when an old colleague of mine called me up for help. His startup was big enough now to start thinking about what their company values were. And as I thought about it, I realised that company values are actually something that all places where people collect seriously to do things have—from institutions and organisations to sporting clubs, or even the house rules in a D&D game. Anytime people come together to set out what kind of person people should be trying to be in a group, they’re establishing values. That’s the project they’re engaged in.

I’m going to give you a few examples of what that looks like. But the point is, across the board it seems like people really love values and they instinctively try to inculcate them in their groups. But repeatedly, it seems like people really struggle to implement them. They want them to work, but values don’t seem to work. And there aren’t a lot of easy answers as to why. Most people don’t have the kind of cash my colleague does to get someone like me to help them fix the problem. But interestingly, teaching ethics, I found out that ethics does have something to say—and it’s pretty low-hanging fruit.

So let me give you a few examples of values to really ground it, show you how they sort of fail, show you what ethics says, and then show you how, if you care how people coming together in a group behave, you can address that problem.

The British Army has a very good set of values, as you might imagine from an organisation like that. The British Army claims courage, discipline, respect for others, integrity, loyalty, and selfless commitment as their values. The Australian Army has an almost identical set, except that we add in excellence—you can take that as you will.

This is sort of a standard case. You won’t find that organisations stray too far from a set of values like this. My colleague will end up doing something like this, probably. If it’s a particularly snappy new kind of organisation who notices that organisational values end up mostly just being decoration, they might make them into verbs. So instead of courage and discipline, you’d end up with “be courageous” and “be disciplined.” The hope, if you’re the kind of leader who reads the Harvard Business Review or whatever, is that by making them doing words, you’re upgrading this historical project of value-making by making them easier for your people to do.

An interesting counterpoint is Tesco. I like Tesco because it was once owned by Bermudians, and as a Bermudian myself, I have some sort of loyalty there. It’s a grocery store here in the UK and it uses values that sound more like this: “No one tries harder for customers.” “We treat people how they want to be treated.” “Every little help makes a big difference.” This is sort of starting to evidence what I mean about how everybody wants values, but everybody also worries that nobody’s going to actually do them. Tesco’s basically gone for SMART goals here—look how specific these things are.

When you’re doing values in your non-organisational groups—your rowing club, your chess group—you’re going to go more for the Tesco kind of thing. You’re probably going to go for something that’s closer to rules than values, if we’re being honest. But the intent is the same. The house rules in a D&D group are going to include stuff like “don’t be a rules lawyer” or “be a turn-taker.” You’re talking about how people should be. You’re talking about values.

People love values. They put them everywhere they collect in groups. So the question becomes: if we have this instinct towards values, why don’t they work? And that is what I want to talk about today.

Values Are Just Virtue Ethics

Values are really just virtue ethics in disguise. Let me tell you what that means.

Ethics is one of the main branches of philosophy. I have sort of an ethics primer that explains things a bit more substantively, but essentially it’s the philosophy of how to be good. We all want to be good, but what even is good? What does good mean? And as such, how should we go about things to achieve that goodness?

Virtue ethics is a particular approach to these questions. And I think that virtue ethics actually make the most sense, at least to me, when I explain the other kinds first, to help you understand what kind of problem they’re trying to solve.

I think what you’d find is most people intuitively are consequentialists. We like to judge whether we’re being good or not by the consequences of our actions. You go about the place and you make decisions by deciding: is this going to hurt somebody? Is this going to help them? How do I do the least harm and the most good? Focus on the consequences. I think very close to our hearts, we hold this sort of consequential calculus.

But the problem with consequentialism is that consequences aren’t all commensurate. They don’t all have the same sort of cash value, so to speak. We’ll take one of the examples that you use in the lecture room—you’ll get this in an Ethics 101 course. Let’s say you’ve got a surgeon, and this surgeon just straight up murdered somebody, harvested their organs, and used those organs to save five other people. Numerically, this is a pretty good deal, right? One dead person, five people who would have died who are now alive. But we’re not really interested in the consequential calculus here. There’s something a little off about comparing the one to the five in that circumstance.

For a more realistic example, I like to think about the kind of ethical altruism groups that pop up all over university campuses. There’s this sort of way of thinking called longtermism that says if we just increase overall economic wealth, everybody’s going to be better off. Sort of like if you bring the average up, then you’re going to bring everybody up. You just concentrate on raising GDP, then just like the standards of living are better now than they were in the Middle Ages, in the future everybody’s going to be much better off. And the problem with this is there seems something very weird about preferring future hypothetical people with a really good economic profile over the suffering of real current people that we have to make policy decisions that hurt now to achieve that future state.

So this is consequentialism. I think it’s intuitive right up until it’s not. And then it’s really hard to figure out what consequences actually matter.

So you might not just rely on consequences—and you almost certainly don’t. The next one that people will bring up in an Ethics 101 class is something that we could call principle-based ethics or rules-based ethics. Take our surgeon before. Killing people might save lives, one for five. But on the principle of things, it’s not really that sweet to kill people, so maybe we should just not kill people as a rule. And even in cases where killing somebody could save five people, we just treat it as a blanket rule that killing is not appropriate. This is a principle-based ethical approach to behaviour.

Another example of this is laws. We don’t follow laws because they’re always perfect. We don’t follow laws because they’re always right. We follow them because on principle we believe in lawful societies. You don’t speed not because you think speeding on this highway surrounded by nobody is going to harm anybody, but because you believe in the principle of the law. You believe in the rules. This is called deontology, and it’s another approach to ethics—one of the main three, along with virtue ethics, that people will teach you in a basic Ethics 101 course.

There are actually a lot of others and they all try to fill the gaps where the others fail. We’ve already talked about how consequences fail—not all consequences have the same value, so it’s hard to measure them against one another, particularly in edge cases. And littered throughout my example of principle-based ethics, we had how laws may or may not be right, but we follow them on principle, so we know that these things fall down.

People have come up with other approaches to try and fill the gaps. The one that I like to use here at Sandhurst is called care ethics. I like to use care ethics because it’s a feminist ethics, and I get a sort of satisfaction teaching feminist ethics at an institution like Sandhurst. But I think it’s very poignant because care ethics talks about the ethics of care. If your grandma’s sick, you’re not going to be focused on speeding laws. You’re not going to be focused on the consequences of ditching your dinner date to go and be with your grandma. You’re going to drive as fast as you can to help her. And that’s a care ethic—because here you are prioritising your loved ones over everything else. That is a type of ethic. It’s a value that you hold close.

Virtue ethics, back to our main topic, are an attempt to shift the question from what these other frameworks are trying to answer. Virtue ethics aren’t asking “what should I do?” What are the consequences of this? What do the laws say about what I should be doing? Do I love this person enough to take these actions? It’s shifting the question from focusing on the moment-to-moment decisions to the kind of person you should be trying to be.

The idea here is that understanding what the right principles might be or the extent of the consequences of our actions might be—that’s hard and we’re not likely to get it right all the time. So maybe we should try and focus on being good people instead. We like good people. We don’t mind when good people make mistakes because we know that their hearts are in the right place and we think they’re much more likely to do good than bad. So maybe it’s better to try and be one of these good people rather than try and figure out what each of our actions should be, because we’re much more likely to do good than bad.

So we’re not asking what we should do, like principle-based ethics or consequentialist ethics or even care ethics do. We’re asking: what kind of person should I be? And then hopefully you, as a logical consequence, are just going to do more good things. More or less. That’s virtue ethics. I think you get it.

And hopefully, if you get it, you’ve made the leap now from virtues towards values. Because like virtues, organisational values are often the desirable qualities of people. They’re aspirational about character development, just like virtues are. They assume that these things can be cultivated in the organisational culture and they’re explicitly about what good means. They’re presented in this manner because they’re difficult to codify. You can have codes of conduct that tell people what they should be doing—rules. You can have rewards and punishments that help people pay attention to the consequences. But it’s very difficult to account for every situation that’s going to make you act in the best interests of the customer. So maybe instead you should concentrate on trying to inculcate that as a value. The kind of people our employees should be, the kind of people our D&D players around the table should be trying to be.

Values are virtues, at least in this specific form. So there’s a little primer on ethics—virtue ethics trying to fill gaps, in fact trying to approach the whole problem of ethics from another angle. And this is the thing that we are so intuitively drawn to when we try and collect people together to do things. We want to put values in that help people understand what kind of people they should be in groups.

And this is a huge problem because there are two massive issues with virtue ethics.

The Indeterminacy Problem

The first problem with virtue ethics is what’s known as the indeterminacy problem. Even back when Aristotle was formulating virtue ethics as we know them today, he pointed out that virtues sit between two extremes.

What is courage? It’s kind of difficult to say what courage is, but we certainly recognise cowardice and we also recognise recklessness. So it’s not either of those. It’s somewhere in between the two things. Similarly with discipline—well, discipline isn’t just chaos, and it’s also not brittle rigidity. That’s not what we mean by discipline. It’s somewhere in the middle of these two things.

You get it, and if you get it, you might have already gotten the problem, which is: what is the point at which cowardice gets an upgrade into courage? What’s the line over which some act of bravery stops being brave and courageous and starts becoming negligent? It’s not very clear.

There was this recent—I mean, recent, the last 50 years or so—very influential virtue ethicist, Alasdair MacIntyre, who talks about this specifically in organisations. I’ll link to the book in the show notes because I think it’s interesting. For MacIntyre, virtues aren’t just different in degree, they’re also different in kind. So the problem I just identified is this sort of continuum—courage is somewhere between cowardice and recklessness. MacIntyre is saying that’s even worse because that differs depending on what it is that you’re doing. They have to be embedded in practices to make sense.

What courage means for a doctor, versus recklessness and cowardice, has almost nothing to do with what courage means for a soldier or for a teacher. When the British Army says it wants officers to be courageous—when I’m trying to teach them what that means—do we mean the courage of a frontline soldier, or do we mean the courage of a logistics officer? Or do we mean the courage of the officers that populate the recruitment team? Courage in these circumstances isn’t the same thing. And all of that is within even the same organisation. You have different ideas and different standards of excellence. You have these different standards of virtue based on the practices you’re engaged in.

So indeterminacy: a virtue is something that sits between two extremes, but those extremes and that middle differ depending on what it is that you’re doing. That’s the first problem, and it’s not the worst problem.

The Situationist Critique

I think the next problem is the worst problem, which is called the situationist critique of virtue ethics. This comes out of a broader area of behavioural science called the person-situation debate. I’ll put links to the Wikipedia in the show notes—I think this is one of the great Wikipedia reads.

Essentially, there are these people who pay particular attention to the fact that virtue ethics are all about character. What we want to do is embody virtues or values as traits of ourselves. And then they also notice that there’s this sort of troubling lack of evidence that traits are a thing. The vast majority of empirical evidence points to the fact that there’s very little, if anything, that is stable in the human. And rather, what seems to overwhelmingly drive human behaviour is the situation.

Now, that’s not to say that there are no traits. This could be something that’s an artefact of experimental design—how do you design a test to demonstrate how people behave under different circumstances without changing the circumstance? It’s very similar to the nature versus nurture question. The argument’s basically the same. These things are so tightly intertwined that it’s very hard to tease them apart.

And we also know that there is some stability. Personality is kind of a stable thing. And IQ is a pretty stable thing—not entirely stable, they can change, but they are stable enough that we like to measure them. They wouldn’t be interesting if they weren’t at least a little bit stable. So we’re not out of options for stable human behavioural attributes, but outside of these few things, there isn’t much else. And as a consequence, it’s kind of hard to imagine how something like moral character might be found nested within these stable kinds of traits, like personality or like IQ.

And then contrasted against that, there’s this handful of experiments started in the 60s and 70s—but they extend until now—that demonstrate that the situation can be made to annihilate the individual capacity for virtue. I’m thinking of Milgram’s electroshock experiments or the Stanford Prison Experiment. These are examples of catastrophic ethical leadership failings in which the situation led average people to—for example, in the Milgram electroshock experiments—shock somebody ostensibly to death in the name of science, or in the Stanford Prison Experiment, led undergraduate students to brutalise each other while simulating a prison.

And while most people—and I complain about this elsewhere—get the basic facts of these experiments wrong, it’s actually because they’re simplifying details that makes very clear just how influential the situation can be if we try really hard.

So a lack of stable traits in humans, measured against evidence that the situation really overwhelmingly drives human behaviour. While everybody is asking “what virtues comprise the best moral character?” or “what values should we be inculcating in our rowing club?”, the situationists are asking: is there even such a thing as character?

It’s not very heartening, and it should make you very worried if you’re the kind of person who’s trying to think about what values you want in your organisation. Thankfully, I wouldn’t be doing this little lecture if I didn’t have answers for you.

Design the Context

We haven’t painted a very flattering picture of the project of values or virtues or virtue ethics. I’ll summarise. We’ve known from the start that virtues themselves are a little vague—they sit somewhere between two extremes. But it’s not just that. They’re also located differently on that spectrum depending on what practice you’re engaging in. So it’s not this continuum from cowardice to recklessness. It’s this sort of moral landscape with many peaks and valleys where courage means different things depending on what you’re doing. And it’s very easy to get lost in this hilly terrain.

And it’s worse than that, because even if you manage to locate the peaks that you care about, people aren’t going to do anything about it. They’re not reliably going to display those peaks. The situation overwhelmingly drives their behaviour, no matter how committed they are to embodying the virtues you want them to embody. That’s what all the empirical evidence seems to suggest.

Now, like I said, this entire lecture was essentially prompted by an old colleague who called me asking how he could help his executive team with their new values initiative. And I spent about seven minutes describing what is looking like it’s going to be maybe 15 or 20 minutes for you before realising that he—possibly like you—probably didn’t really care about the background. Nobody ever does. It’s leadership consulting after all, not brain science. And you are probably listening to this on a drive to work. Instead you want sexy-sounding solutions that can help you in your group enterprises.

So I’ll give you the sexy-sounding solution, which is: if the situation is all that matters, if the environmental context is all there is, then just design that. The situation. The context.

This isn’t a new idea. MacIntyre, who I was telling you about before, makes it clear that institutions need to create structural opportunities for action. We have other ethicists too. John Doris talks about empirically informed, context-sensitive approaches to ethical behaviour. Maria Merritt talks to something similar, but she speaks more to how having an attitude of humility can help you identify that context dependency.

I don’t actually think that you need to be so highfalutin as all that. You could read those people—you’ll get a lot of good ideas—but you could also just be very straightforward about it.

Come up with values. But if you want people to do them, first of all, you have to solve the indeterminacy problem. You have to come up with values that you can then articulate to show people what it means. It’s not enough to tell people to be courageous. It needs to be clear to them what that means.

Google, for example, famously dropped “don’t be evil” from their manifesto. That seemed like a real problem, but actually having it wasn’t useful at all. If you’re a software engineer working at Google, you know that everybody’s sort of upset about all this attention-stealing algorithmic behaviour that’s going on, but it’s not really clear why it’s bad other than people don’t like it. It’s not corresponding to any particularly obvious trends and negative outcomes for people. So it seems like stealing your attention is evil. But equally, nobody likes the non-algorithmic alternatives. Nobody liked RSS, and that was around for as long as Google has been around. I bet most of you listening right now don’t even know what RSS is. So what does it mean for a software engineer working for Google to not be evil? It doesn’t make any sense to include it if it’s not clear what that means.

In contrast, surgical teams have this very clear. They call them “speak up” protocols. Anybody in the surgical theatre can call a halt, often with an exact phrase. And it’s often operationalised at certain points—you’re supposed to call it at a certain point in the operation if you notice something’s wrong. So here courage is actually operationalised in practice. You have to show people what it means.

You can also do that by hijacking the human tendency for conformity. This is something that I teach at Sandhurst. People don’t like the idea of conformity, but it’s actually very useful because when we don’t know how to behave in groups, we conform to solve that problem. So just have influential people model those virtues.

There’s this sort of quote from an Aussie general that you hear around the halls of the military academy here at Sandhurst and also back home at Duntroon: “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.” It sounds kind of trite, but it’s true. Because if senior people cut corners—if the leaders of a group cut corners—everybody else is going to as well. So figure out how you want people to behave and show people how to do it. They’ll conform to you if they don’t know how they’re supposed to behave.

That’s one thing you can do, but the other thing you can do is identify what situational factors need to be present to motivate people and design the environment to encourage this. Now this is classically called choice architecture, and I’m kind of critical about this elsewhere. But it does work in certain circumstances.

For example, if you put a cheap bottle of wine and an expensive bottle of wine on your wine menu next to the bottle of wine that you want people to buy, then they’re going to buy that—because most people don’t take any pride in being needlessly cheap and they don’t take any pride in being stupidly reckless with their money. So they’re motivated to buy the medium-priced bottle.

There are heaps of examples of this and heaps of examples of models of motivation that you can use to help you work out what will motivate people to behave a certain way in your group. Open-plan offices is a good example—it’s a good example executed poorly, because I think there is evidence to suggest that it’s not really very good for productivity or people’s wellbeing, but they certainly force a certain kind of behaviour. They force something other than private conversation. Or maybe a better example is putting hand sanitiser at eye level. It makes people use it heaps more. So you’ve got to put the structure in for people to behave how you want them to behave.

And then the last thing you can do is just skip all of that and concentrate on what people believe. Because people really only pay attention to what they believe is important. This comes out of work that I used to do before coming to Sandhurst as a brain scientist. Attention is fundamentally belief-shaped. There’s a lot of evidence that we just don’t even notice things—and it’s not that we’re ignoring them, it’s that we don’t even perceive them if we don’t believe they’re important, if we’re not expecting them to be important.

There’s a fantastic example I’ll link in the show notes. It’s a game where you have to watch basketball players play basketball and count the number of times they pass the ball. I don’t want to spoil it, but go watch it and you’ll see what I mean. So you can concentrate on their beliefs and help them pay attention to the things that you care about.

A good example of this is checklist culture in aviation, because pilots really believe that checklists save lives. So they use them even when they’re feeling particularly cocky or even when they’re tired, because they believe in it as an enterprise. Alternatively, it’s not going to have any effect having “customer first” values if the only messaging your salespeople get is that numbers are the priority. So you’ve got to help people understand and believe that the virtues on the table actually matter.

Design not so much the virtues but the context in which those virtues sit. Choose them. Choose your values. But don’t spend too long waiting for people to adopt them. You have to design the context to help people along. Otherwise your virtues, your values, they’re hardly going to matter.

I’ll leave it at that.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns to the thing—patterns of thought, patterns of feeling, patterns of action. Because that’s what brains do. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast. You see if it works for you.

Now, this is another one in my series of bits that I have on questions that people ask me which seem important but actually don’t really end up mattering for most people, certainly not in the way that they’re typically deployed. When people are asking me questions about this, it’s because they’ve heard about an interesting problem in science. But often when I see it out in the wild, they’re deployed like stupid questions that make you seem smart.

So let me tell you about these irrelevant questions so you can avoid wasting mental energy on them.

The Redness of Red

What is consciousness? Everybody wants to know lately, largely because we wonder if AI is conscious. But understanding whether something is conscious means that we first have to understand what consciousness is. And this is where you start running into problems. And these are problems that I actually don’t really think matter.

Now, the typical way that people teach consciousness is to talk about the colour red—the redness of red. And I have no idea why this is true. Maybe it’s because it’s a good illustration of the thing, because there aren’t actually many good illustrations of the thing.

So let me give you an example of this. And for me, the cleanest example is Frank Jackson’s thought experiment that he called Mary’s Room.

So you imagine this woman, Mary. She’s a brilliant scientist, just like me, and for whatever reason, she was forced to investigate the world from some kind of black-and-white room. And she’s looking into a computer screen that is also completely black-and-white. And what she specialises in is the neurophysiology of vision. And in the process of her studying the world from a black-and-white room through a black-and-white computer screen, she obtains everything there is to know—every physical fact there is to obtain about colour, about red, about ripe tomatoes or how we see the sky. She knows the terms red and blue. She can describe everything about how colour is processed in the brain.

But the question that we want to know is: what happens when Mary is released from a black-and-white room or her computer screen is transformed into a colour monitor? Does she learn something new?

Mary has never seen the colour red before, but she knows everything there is to know about it. And then one day she sees it. Has she learned something new about the colour red?

I think you’ll agree that she has. Certainly Frank Jackson thought so. Lots of people think so. There is some kind of knowledge beyond the physical properties that we understand about them. For red, it’s its redness. And that knowing about red isn’t the same as experiencing it.

Now, this—whatever this is, the redness of the colour red, the feeling of pain that we experience when we’re slapped across the face, the feeling of beauty that we experience when we’re looking out over a vista—whatever this is, is an example of what’s known as qualia.

And Thomas Nagel is another famous philosopher, famous for consciousness, who puts it in an interesting way. And I’ll link the paper, although honestly, it’s a bit impenetrable. But what he says is that although we can in theory understand everything there is to know about how bats echolocate—how they make their clicking sounds that allow them to see through their ears—we can understand the physics of sound waves, we can understand the physiology, we can understand the behavioural responses, the information processing that happens in the brain. We can understand all of this stuff, but we will never know what it’s like to experience the world through echolocation.

There is something that it is like to be a bat, and it doesn’t really seem like you can pass along that subjective phenomenal character of batness with a description. That is consciousness.

Chalmers and the Hard Problem

So now to the problem. And the problem is: why does red have redness? Why is there something it is like to be at all, never mind something it is like to be a bat? And it’s a difficult question to answer.

Chalmers famously called this the hard problem of consciousness. And he called it the hard problem of consciousness because he poses it against what he calls easy problems. There are phenomena that are related to qualia, to experience, that we can in theory explain. I’ll quote his book: “the performance of all the cognitive and behavioural functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorisation, internal access, verbal report.” That’s the quote.

You know, all of these are processes that lend themselves to examination. They can be explained functionally and mechanistically. To Chalmers, they are easy problems. The hard problem is explaining why these things are accompanied by a sense of experience, by qualia. Why does Mary learn something new when she sees red beyond knowing all its physical properties? And why can’t we know what it’s like to be a bat? That’s the question.

And Chalmers uses the example of a sort of automaton to drive this home. So you could imagine a person who goes about behaving in all the ways that you or I do, but they have absolutely no experience attached to that behaviour. They’re some kind of zombie or a robot, just mechanically acting and reacting to the world around them.

There doesn’t seem on the surface of it any reason to build that robot so that it also has to experience the stuff. If you were going to save money, you would save money on the experience. It doesn’t need it—at least in theory, conceivably. That is the hard problem of consciousness.

The Non-Solutions

And there are a lot of solutions to it. And I’m going to detail them briefly in a second. But what I really want to point out is that none of them seem to really matter very much. So let’s get into that.

So lots of people try and solve the hard problem of consciousness in lots of ways. And I have an entire article that details this. So I’ll link that in the show notes. But I will talk about them here kind of briefly—maybe even a little more than briefly, to be honest, because I think it is kind of interesting.

So the first solution to the hard problem of consciousness is the non-materialist view. Non-materialists say that there’s both material stuff, physical stuff, and there’s this separate kind of experience stuff. A classic example of this is dualism. So this is the idea that there is a distinction between the mind and the body or the body and the soul. And this is kind of sliding out of fashion in an increasingly secular world, but it can be a secular position.

Then there are the emergentists and the functionalists. And these people say that consciousness is just some kind of special property of the material world that emerges from specific configurations of material stuff. So in the same way that you get water when you put together two oxygen molecules and a hydrogen molecule, you get this sort of property of liquidity. If you arrange neurones in a certain way, you get consciousness. That’s the sort of basic idea.

And then there’s people who treat it as a mistake. There are illusionists and eliminativists. And these people say that thinking of consciousness at all is a mistake.

Illusionists, the easier position to describe, they basically say that consciousness is an illusion. In the same way, I guess, that movies are a sort of illusion. Movies produce the illusion of motion by flashing still images so fast that we process them as moving. And in the same way, maybe consciousness, this experience, is produced by a bunch of snapshots of what the brain is doing at any given point in time. I think it was Daniel Dennett who called it an edited digest of all the events going on in the brain, like a general sense of the shape of things.

And then there’s the sort of last group, and these guys are called panpsychists. And what they say is that maybe consciousness sits in the space that physics doesn’t explain. So maybe it’s like the intrinsic nature of stuff—and I’m going to have to explain that a little bit, aren’t I?

So physics tells us what things do. It doesn’t tell us what things are. Physics can tell us that atoms have a certain mass, for example, but mass is characterised by behavioural properties. So you’ve got gravitational attraction or resistance to acceleration. I don’t know, I’m not a physicist. But these physical properties don’t actually have anything to say about their underlying nature. So maybe physics describes what things do, and consciousness is what things are.

Why None of It Matters

And at this point, I think we can stop, because if you’re getting tired, I’ve sort of made my point. Because what’s super annoying about all of this is that it’s impossible to have a conversation with all these different perspectives in the room, because you basically have to take whichever one you prefer on faith. All of them—and I’ll link to an article that describes this in more detail—all of them suffer from the same explanatory gap.

Whether you think that consciousness arises from the configurations of neurones, or it comes from a soul, or it comes from this sort of space that physics leaves unexplained, you still have to explain how it actually interacts with the stuff that we do know about—Chalmers’ easy problems. And nobody’s managed this. Nobody’s even close.

Now, the modal position in academia is the emergentist one—that consciousness sort of comes about with the right configuration of neurones or whatever. Back at my old lab, you ask any given brain scientist there, and this is basically what they would say. And in fact, they would probably be confused that there were other perspectives on this. I would have said this a while ago, even having studied consciousness as part of my academic trajectory.

And I think that this view is so popular because it feels like science, even though the explanatory gap is actually identical. It feels more scientistic, and that’s what we sort of value now. And maybe it also feels reasonable because consciousness certainly seems like it’s dependent on our perceptions. The hard problem seems related to the easy problem because you can’t really experience something without perceiving it first.

So I think there’s this sort of optimism that if we just study the brain hard enough, eventually consciousness will turn from a hard problem into an easy one. And so what you see is all these debates about whether AI systems have genuine experiences or whether honeybees are conscious. Or there’s one of my favourite articles out there by a guy called Brian Key, and he’s writing in the equivalent of academic caps lock, some of the most vehement academic writing I’ve ever seen, that fish cannot feel pain, followed by tens of people responding with articles talking about how fish do have pain, that they do have the neurobiology, that they can suffer, that they are conscious.

People love to talk about this stuff, even though none of them have actually got any closer to solving the hard problem of consciousness.

So What?

And more to the point, you don’t need to pay attention to any of this because none of it matters. Let me wrap up and show you why.

You know, these kinds of academic debates are precisely when I start to lose interest in the project, because so what? Under precisely what circumstances does any of this stuff matter? When would it actually matter whether something was truly conscious or illusorily conscious? Because if things seem conscious, we already know what to do about it.

And Sam Harris is a philosopher who has a nice bit on this, and I’ll link to it in the show notes. He’s got both an essay and a TED Talk. And what he says—and I’ll quote him—“Why is it that we don’t have ethical obligations towards rocks? Why don’t we feel compassion for rocks? It’s because we don’t think rocks can suffer. And if we’re more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it’s because we think they’re exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering.” That’s the quote.

So I think Sam’s pointing at this sort of secret hope that we have that by working out what consciousness is, we can reduce suffering. But we can do that now. We can do it by caring about things that seem to suffer in a way that makes them seem to suffer less. And we can do all of that without proving that they have qualia, because we’re just not close to understanding this distinction.

And some people reckon that we’ll never crack it. There’s a group that I didn’t talk about called mysterians, and they reckon that like an ant would never crack calculus, we’re never going to crack consciousness.

But I think, again, that’s sort of a distraction, because even if we could, I can’t actually tell what would change. Would we stop caring about animal welfare if we proved that they weren’t strictly conscious? Would we treat rocks differently if we found out that they were?

Of course not. Because it’s not an interesting question. Whatever consciousness rocks might have isn’t likely to change how we treat them, because what matters is the behaviour and how the behaviour expresses suffering. Whether there’s some ineffable “what it’s like” behind the curtain is practically irrelevant.

So why bother asking?

I’ll leave you with that.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns to the thing—patterns of thought, of feeling, of action. That’s what brains are for. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast. You see if it works for you.

We’ve finally passed the introductory lectures and into the real thing. Shorter introductions now. The last one went pretty well, turned out pretty short. I’ll be curious to see what you think of shorter lectures, whether we prefer them one way or the other.

But I’m going to continue now on my series of bits that I have on questions that seem important but don’t really actually end up mattering for most people. Certainly not in the way that they’re typically deployed, because usually you’ll find that people deploy these like stupid questions that make them seem smart.

And I’m going to tell you about one.

The Ancient Question

There’s always been a question about whether free will exists. It’s probably a question that goes back as far as people have been thinking about dual-process models of mind. And this is more modern terminology for a very old idea—that there are obviously some actions that are under our control because there are just as obviously actions that are not under our control. If I ask you what’s two plus two, you’re going to say four. But if I ask you what’s 36 times 74, you’ve got to stop and work that out. One of them is automatic, happens, not really under your control. And the other is more deliberate, more effortful.

And this has been called a lot of stuff: hot and cold thinking, fast and slow thinking, passion and logic, emotion and reason, conscious versus unconscious processes, rational versus irrational processes. I’ve called them before thinky versus non-thinky motivations. I’ll put a link to an article that talks about that in more detail.

But there is this question that comes out of it about how much control we have over our behaviour. And indeed, more specifically, the question is: do we actually have any control at all? Is there even such a thing as free will? Or is our behaviour completely deterministic? Is it entirely determined by aspects of our environment?

And it’s a debate with a great deal of history. You just have to consider the concept of fate to really get a flavour for it. If you believe in fate, then you believe that there’s no such thing as free will in an important way. You’re a fatalist. The world unfolds as it will. Or if you’re the kind of person who believes in an omniscient God, then the logical consequence of that is to grapple with this question of whether you have free will. If God or gods know what you’re going to do at any given moment in time, then are you in control of that process?

Libet’s Legacy

And in the modern science of mind, things started to heat up with a guy called Benjamin Libet. He has this famous experiment. He had people make a voluntary action and then report when they became aware of the urge to make that action. And when he got people to report when they were aware that they were going to make an action, he reliably detected this brain activity—brainwaves specifically—that predicted their conscious awareness by something like 350 milliseconds.

And that doesn’t sound like a lot, but in brain science it’s quite a substantial prediction. And more to the point, if brain activity predicts voluntary decisions even before we’re aware of their voluntary nature, then how exactly could they be voluntary? That’s the question that Benjamin raised.

Now his study is old as hell and it’s been picked over hundreds of times, but we actually regularly find stuff like this in brain science. I’ll link you to an article that we were particularly interested in in my old lab at Cambridge, where you could predict people’s brain activity something like five seconds into the future. So now we’re not even predicting behaviour any more, we’re actually predicting how the brain activity is going to unfold.

And indeed, more generally, there is an entire field now called the neuroscience of free will, because we find brain stuff that predicts voluntary action in all sorts of places, all over the brain, which again raises these questions about just how voluntary it is.

And what I want to do now is get into how I’m just not really sure that any of this matters.

The Infinite Regress

As I said—and maybe this is surprising at the outset—this isn’t actually really the interesting thing, even in the free will debate. Now I’ll link to a place that talks about this more, but unless you’re a really strict non-materialist, unless you really think that there is some kind of soul or psyche that’s distinct from all this stuff sloshing around in your body and your glands, then it’s probably obvious to you that if you’ve had a thought, something in your body needed to precede the thought. It doesn’t just arise from nowhere.

And some people interpret this as necessarily deterministic. So I’ll give you a case. I’m quoting this from somewhere—I wouldn’t be able to tell you where—but it goes something like this:

Is mental activity determined or not? This is the question you need to ask yourself. Is it determined by something else, or is it undetermined by anything? Because if it’s undetermined by anything, that mental activity is random. And you can’t be in control of something that’s random.

And if it’s determined by something, then is that thing further inside the mind, or is it external to the mind? If it’s external, then you’re not in control of it. And if it’s internal, then you’re simply deferring the problem. What you need to do is go back to the start again and answer the question of whether it’s determined or undetermined.

And you get this sort of infinite regress. It’s either determined or undetermined. And if it’s undetermined, it’s random. And if it’s determined—if it’s determined externally, it’s not you. And if it’s determined internally, then you return to the question. And on this model, there can’t be free will.

There’s another cut on this that I actually like—I think it’s a bit more poetic and a bit less ruthless. Again, I’m quoting somebody. It’s probably Instagram. I’d be happy to add it in the show notes if somebody sends me an email about who this is from. But it goes something like this:

Ask yourself who you are. You might give your name to answer that question, but you’ll notice that your name isn’t you. That’s just a word. So you might point to your body, but of course, you’re not your body. You don’t say “am hand” or “am head.” We say “my hand” and “my head.” So then you say, okay, well, I’m going to point to my spirit or my mind. But again, this is your spirit, your thoughts—they aren’t you. And so on and so forth.

And put in either of these kinds of ways—the cuter one or the more clinical one—determinism feels kind of inescapable.

Agent Causation

But this is actually a bit of a mislead, because what it’s doing is treating the brain like some kind of passive transformer of events into action. And what it’s ignoring is the possibility that any of this could actually be determined by the agent itself.

If it’s determined externally, it’s something else. If it’s determined internally, you ask again. Maybe that is actually not the right question to ask, because internally generated mental activity could well be determined by the agent in some complicated manner.

So let’s again assume that you’re not getting around all this messiness with a soul or a psyche or some kind of non-materialist answer. It’s not actually that hard even to imagine some kind of foundational mental state or states—some sort of resting state of the brain, of mental activity. And you can also imagine a web of interconnected mental states. Marvin Minsky has this beautiful idea called a society of mind that I’ll link to in the show notes.

And the idea is, if you have this web of interconnected mental states, none of them necessarily need to be privileged over any of the others. There’s no one mental state in control determining the others. They all sort of determine and are determined by the others.

It sounds kind of messy, but essentially what I’m saying is the very same infinite regression that our clinical example before used to deliver this sort of punchy account of determinism can be used to illustrate the exact opposite—that personhood could rely on this regressive structure. Acting in accordance with our desires, even if those desires are determined, but in a structure where everything is determined by everything else—why is this inadequate to explain free will?

Mental states can be both caused by prior mental states but also constitute genuine mental agency because they form this sort of integrated system. The person is the system.

And honestly, that is why most contemporary free will defenders are what are called compatibilists—people that accept determinism but argue that free will is in some way compatible with it. So for them, determination doesn’t undermine control.

Why It Doesn’t Matter Anyway

Now, that’s all very complicated and messy, but I want to get into one final point before I wrap up, and that’s about how none of this matters anyway.

So this all brings me to my final point. If we have to get this far into the weeds to even debate this, then what’s the point? As I talk about elsewhere—and many people agree with me on this point, I’ll link to those in the show notes—this world is so intractably complex that for all practical purposes it doesn’t matter whether we have free will or determinism.

And it’s not even clear to me that if we could prove it, then it would matter. Neuroethicists obviously think so. If our behaviour is determined, for example, then how can we justify punishing people for their crimes? If they have no control over their behaviour, then it’s not up to them to behave differently. It’s up to us or the environment or the structures that we build.

But to me, that’s the wrong way to think about things. Like I often point out—and the previous podcast in this series on nature versus nurture is on the same point—all it does is highlight the critical importance of the environment and of our socialisation. And if we act on those, then we change our behaviour, even and in fact especially because our behaviour is determined.

And if it’s not something that we can change, then we’re stuck at what’s called the Fatalist’s Idle Argument. I think it was Cicero who talked about this. But it says, for example, if it’s fated for you to recover from the illness, then you’ll recover whether you go to the doctor or not. But if you’re fated not to recover from an illness, then you’re not going to recover whether you go to a doctor or not. Either you’re going to recover from the illness or you’re not, if you’re fated. So it’s futile to consult a doctor.

In the same way, if you’re fated to behave in a certain way, then it doesn’t matter what you think or do. It’s fated. So why even bother asking the question?

I’ll leave you with that.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr. Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns to the thing—patterns of thought, of feeling, of action. That’s what brains do. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.

So we’re officially past the introductory lectures and into the full swing of things. This is my shorter introduction—I’ll be curious what you think.

And now, to get things on the straight and narrow, I want to do a series of bits that I have on questions that seem important but don’t actually really end up mattering for most people. Certainly not in the way that they’re typically deployed. Typically, they’re deployed like stupid questions that make you seem smart.

And I’m going to tell you about one.

The Gender Essentialist Fantasy

I have an article called Genetics is Nurture. I say there:

There’s a constant tension in any animal science between the impact of nature and the impact of nurture. How much of who we are and what we do is the result of our genetic predispositions, and how much is because of our environment?

But this isn’t just a delicate sparring match between academics. Instagram and TikTok are chock-a-block with people claiming evolutionary motivations for stuff that have been corrupted by or are at odds with our socialisation. And the most common one, at least currently, is gender. People love Buss’ sexual selection stuff, even if they always get it wrong. The idea—to be a bit glib—is that men evolved to be powerful resource hunters and leaders of the household, and women evolved to be homemakers ready to breed at a moment’s notice. And the modern world has us all messed up because we’re trying to go against our evolutionary natures in this regard.

Even if you find this fantasy sexy—and I must admit that I do find this fantasy a bit sexy—you should still at least admit that it’s stupid. And I’ll give you three reasons why.

Evolutionary Stories Are Just Stories

Firstly, evolution, as an explanation, is completely overrated. This is something I write about again and again, and I’ll put some links to that in the show notes. But essentially, you can tell any story you like by appealing to evolution. They have this “it could be anything” quality about them. You know, like you might ask, why do giraffes have long necks? It could be because their ancestors had to find food higher on trees—the bed of food was just higher, so their necks grew longer. But equally, it could be that longer necks made them more deadly in the odd combat that giraffes get stuck into when they smash their necks against each other. And so on and so forth. You can come up with any kind of evolutionary story to explain any kind of thing.

And that’s not to say that evolutionary narratives don’t have a place. We should at least test our theories against an evolutionary perspective so that we don’t come up with a bunch of fantastic dead-end notions like Freud’s Oedipal desires and death instincts. These are things that just aren’t contiguous with what we know about evolutionary theory. But trying to do more than just test our theories against them is just story time. You have infinite explanations and nobody can go back in time to prove the counterfactual.

So that’s one reason: evolutionary stories are just stories.

Genetics Is Nurture

The second reason is that genetics just is nurture. They’re very difficult to distinguish.

Genetic evolution is the product of the environment at different time points. And this is actually true in two ways.

The first way is the most obvious one. Obviously genetic evolution is evolving in response to the environment, and it can happen surprisingly fast. We have evidence for it happening in thousands of years, if not hundreds of years. A community of people who spend so much of their time diving in the ocean that their lung capacity has changed within a thousand years.

And more surprisingly, although I must admit I’m pretty sceptical of epigenetics and post-genomics—it really does seem like it’s starting to become the new evolutionary theory with regard to explaining everything, and it’s also very notable that we saw a lot about epigenetics and then all of a sudden it went very quiet. That’s a red flag to me as well. But regardless, there is some tantalising evidence, and indeed the entire body of literature points to genetic changes that happen within one generation or even within our lifetime.

And for anybody who doesn’t know what epigenetics is, I’ll put a link in the show notes, but this is the idea that genetic changes can be passed down from parent to child. And there are some fantastic studies on anxiety in rats where genes related or associated with anxiety—when a rat is anxious and gives birth, that child has those same genes expressed. This is the kind of thing that epigenetics looks at. Within one generation.

And in my article, which I’m speaking to here, I also talk about the phenomenon of jumping genes. Now, jumping genes are these DNA sequences that can move their position, changing the form and the function of other genes. And we don’t really know exactly what they do, what their role in the body is, but there’s heaps of them. There’s this one particular sequence that might make up almost a sixth of the entire human genome. And what we think they probably do is relate to regulation of gene expression. So we know that bacteria use them to develop antibiotic resistance, which is not good for us, but it gives us a clue as to why they’re useful for us.

So epigenetics, post-genomics literature that’s pointing to genetic changes that happen within our lifetime—maybe, maybe not. But certainly in a generation, and if not hundreds or thousands of years, much faster than the millennia that people usually point at.

And if anything, it’s probably speeding up. There’s this concept called neutral evolution or genetic drift. And what it suggests is that most genetic developments really just aren’t substantial enough to be weeded out by natural selection. They’re these sort of random stochastic mutations that aren’t really that helpful. They’re not really that harmful. They don’t do anything for us, but they don’t hold us back.

And what’s really interesting is as we get better at keeping ourselves alive, essentially more of these mutations fall into this category of neutrality. All our health innovations mean that harms that once would have been quite harmful aren’t really that important any more. And this effect is biased in an interesting way. The bigger the mutation, the more likely it is to be weeded out by natural selection. But health innovation is targeted solely at mitigating the costs of these harmful mutations. We do a lot to keep people from getting sick—certainly more so in fact than keeping them from flourishing. And this is for obvious reasons. So reducing these sort of evolutionary penalties is going to increase the amount of genetic drift that evolution allows to propagate in the environment.

So genetic evolution happens pretty fast. And it is a product of the environment that we’re in. That’s what genetics does. It encodes the history of our being in the world.

The second way that genetics is a product of the environment is actually built into the way that scientists and geneticists talk about it. You’ll never hear a scientist talk about the “genetic-ness” of something when they’re trying to describe its genetic influences. What you’ll hear them talk about is this word called heritability.

Heritability is a statistic that tells us how much of the variation in some trait that we have at some time point, within some population, and under certain environmental conditions can be attributed to genetic differences. And all that qualification—I mean, it sounds complicated, but it’s necessary because you can’t study genetics in a vacuum. Genetics necessarily relies on the environment. Because if the environment changes, then the relative contribution of genetic variance can change, even if your biology is exactly the same.

I’ll give you an example. A good example of this is that the heritability of height increased all over the place in the 20th century. And this is probably—at least, people seem to think—not just because our nutritional environments became better, but actually because our nutritional environments became more uniform. So people are eating the same from culture to culture, and as a result you can see more differences in genetic expression. More genetic differences showed up.

And the point of this is to say that genes just don’t have intrinsic effects independent of the environment. Under these circumstances—people eating the same—these genetic differences are showing up. But under previous circumstances when people were eating differently, the genetic differences didn’t show. There’s no reason to privilege some historical genetic story because whatever genetic story you’re trying to tell might not apply now, or might not have applied then under these conditions or those, because the same genes can produce entirely different outcomes.

All of this to say: between just the fact of heritability and the fact that genetic evolution itself is encoding the environment into our bodies and the possible speeding up in the form of genetic drift—genetics is the same thing as nurture in important ways.

Why It Doesn’t Matter Anyway

And that leads us to my conclusion. And my conclusion is easy. It’s my third reason that nature versus nurture as a concept is a stupid question, which I think applies even if you don’t accept the other two.

And that’s that evolutionary stories are just boring. They’re true Malcolm Gladwell shit. And when I say that, I’m referring to this other article of mine where I talk about what Murray Davis called the sociology of the interesting. What Murray Davis noticed is that what makes an academic theory interesting is the ones that subvert our weakly held beliefs. They’re hot takes on things that we don’t care very much about. So if our strong beliefs are attacked, then we’re likely to resist the attack. But if our existing beliefs are confirmed, we’re likely to do very little but nod and forget. What we find really interesting is if the stuff we don’t care about very much is revised.

That’s what Malcolm Gladwell does in his books. The same, in fact, that I’m using for this podcast right now. And that’s what nature and nurture is often speaking to. They’re superficially sexy because they can revise any belief that you have. There are infinite evolutionary stories, but practically they’re completely useless.

No one has ever come to me with a convincing reason to believe that understanding something as being the product of nature rather than nurture meaningfully helps me. Not just because there could be any number of competing explanations, nor because I can’t disentangle them from the environment. If only it’s because it’s so obvious that the environment matters way more. And if things truly are immutable, then frankly, I’m not enough of a fatalist to want to believe it.

So, all that to say: nature and nurture. Why bother even asking?

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr. Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns—patterns of thought, of feeling, of action. That’s the brain’s job: creating the patterns that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life.

We call these things ideologies, rituals, biases. But there’s something else I’ve learnt teaching this stuff: we’re animals first. You can’t escape these patterns, but you can choose which ones to emphasise.

So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast. And you choose if it works for you. That’s the idea, so let’s get into it.

Now, this is the third in this initial attempt of mine to turn my lectures into podcasts, and probably the last one I’m going to really polish. Last long intro, for example. Be happy to do away with that. Last long session of editing too. You’ll just have to put up with my coughs and mumbles.

But so far, it seems like it’s going down pretty well. I’m still spending more time getting them done than I’ve been hoping to, but I can still pump one out after a day of lecturing.

But once again, the feedback coming in suggests that, as a baseline for new people coming in, I should make sure to go beyond the stuff I’m teaching here as associate professor at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and beyond the stuff I studied as a brain scientist at Cambridge and as a clinician. And in the feedback, one bit that I do kept coming up as one people wanted to hear about.

My bit about mundane cults.

And since I’ve mentioned Sandhurst, I should, as always, be clear that this is my own perspective—not Sandhurst’s. Just Dorian doing his little podcast.

So, since it’s honestly one of my favourites too, I thought I’d give it a go. The background here comes from a project I’ve been doing for a while now on human systems. The best article for this is called True Family Ties. It’s probably worth its own podcast, but essentially it talks about how it’s no secret that we are lonelier than ever. We have many complaints of modern society, but our growing isolation is a common one. There are two reasons for this unhappy accident—the difficulty of finding people in ever more crowded cities, and the fact that we have lost sight of what a community is really made of.

And I think that the way we talk about cults is one of the more entertaining examples of this.

So let’s get into it.

The Dark Image of Cults

The word cult is an undeniably dirty word. It conjures images of hooded people in circles around fires. It conjures images of mass suicide and self-harm. It conjures images of tragic figures, brainwashed to abandon their families. And it conjures images of the infamous ‘narcissistic leader’.

You think of the Jonestown Massacres in the 1970s: 900 dead—either by murder or suicide. All members of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple.

You think of Heaven’s Gate, twenty years later. 39 suicides by poison, all to chase the ‘Next Level’ and marry up with the UFO that was Halley’s Comet.

Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult, carried out a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing 13 people and injuring thousands.

And if we’re not describing something this dramatic, we do use it to talk about groups we’re wary of.

We talk about vegans as cult-members, or fitness communities as if they are training grounds for zealots.

Crypto is cult-like.

Political factions are cults! It’s increasingly trendy to make the link between political ideology and religious ideology!

If it’s not describing actual destructive cults, it’s a rhetorical bludgeon, a way to dismiss without engaging, to pathologise people.

In my mind, this image of cults is a problem. The kind of problem that actually makes us more likely to fall victim to the destructive groups that gifted the word cult these connotations.

Cults are better seen as, if not a basic, then at least a pervasive building block of modern day life. There’s every chance you’re in one now. And there’s every chance you’re better off for it. Which makes the likelihood that you might fall victim to a destructive version even more likely.

A Brief History of the Word ‘Cult’

The word ‘cult’ started as a sociological classification. A slow growing attempt of theologians to distinguish between different kinds of religious behaviour. In particular, the word cult was used to carve out the kind of groups that emphasised the personal and private nature of religious beliefs, particularly those which embraced the more mystical or ecstatic aspects of a connection to the divine.

So the people who wanted that more personal, almost gnostic connection to god—in Christianity, these are the Pentecostal/Charismatic; Kabbalah in Judaism; Sufism in Islam is interested in this, and so on—as opposed to a connection to the community, or the church, or the priest, and accessing god that way.

As time went on, this classification began to emphasise a feature that was often common among these more personally oriented and mystically inspired groups—their deviancy from the mainstream. The pursuit of the personal in the context of the religious often results in a break from the predominant religious culture. Institutions have little room for individuals. This, indeed, was a core thread of the Protestant Reformation.

So cult was a way of distinguishing these people—mystically oriented, and thus increasingly deviant from the mainstream.

One final transformation completes the history of the term cult for us—the rise of the non-religious or ‘new religious’ movement.

So, spiritualism in the 1850s, New Thought in the late 1800s, the occult in the turn of the century, then the human potential movement, neo-paganism, and transhumanism.

In an attempt to characterise the increasingly secular nature of the cults academics were seeing, the emphasis began to zoom out from the religious nature of the groups. Rather than consider how cults were defined by their adherence to or deviancy from some established religion, instead academics began to concentrate on the beliefs of the individuals.

In this new foray, we see something of a return to our first use of the term. The personal nature of cultic beliefs became central again. Cults were seen to be ephemeral groups, arising in response to the needs of some transient collection of individuals, with loose boundaries and no clear centres of authority. Sociologist Roy Wallis called this ‘epistemic individualism’ the characteristic trait of cults.

So let me illustrate what I mean and I’ll use neo-paganism because I’m pretty fond of it.

Modern Neo-Paganism, including Wicca (Gardner, 1950s) and broader Pagan-inspired movements (1970s onward) like neo-druidry, popular here, emerged as a revival or reconstruction of pre-Christian European religions—though the accuracy here is as loose as the boundaries. Good fella to read on this is Ronald Hutton.

Unlike older religious “cults,” these groups often don’t have a formal hierarchy—covens/gatherings form and dissolve flexibly, or central texts—non-rigid orthodoxy. It’s focused more on personal belief. You pick and choose and blend practices, deities, rituals, and cosmologies according to personal preference rather than conforming to a central dogma. I remember a druidry course that skipped from Chakras to Jung to Irish poetry. I doubt they found that in Caesar’s accounts back when he was purging them from Gaul.

Everyone is negotiating their own spiritual truth.

And that’s, more or less, it. Cults are, and always have been groups that centre on the needs of a loose collective of individuals, that engage in religious behaviour, and that by the nature of their personalisation often deviate from the mainstream.

You might ask when cult became such a dirty word, then.

Deviation has its own connotations.

I talk about this more elsewhere, but largely, it’s because of marketing.

Most people will trace the modern idea of cults back to Robert Jay Lifton and Margaret Thaler Singer.

During the Korean War, the Chinese were so effective at indoctrinating their prisoners of war—this is where brainwashing comes from, a Chinese term for this practice that we adopted as a domain of research. Lifton, writing on the topic, spoke to the idea of totalism: organisations and ideological movements that explicitly seek total control over human thought and behaviour.

We then saw a rise in visibility—though not in number—of high-control and destructive groups from the 1960s through the 1990s, culminating in cases like Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, and the Manson Family.

Singer, a ‘brainwashing’ academic in her own right, spent a great deal of time during this period in courts and on TV speaking about the phenomenon. By the 90’s two popular books were circulating. Singer’s own book, co-written by Janja Lalich and foreworded by Lifton, and another by Steven Hassan which was a (bestselling!) practical guide to extracting people from these groups. Both have the word ‘Cult’ in the title, which indicates that, despite Singer’s book explicitly noting:

the term cult is not in itself pejorative but simply descriptive

…it had become the word de jour for destructive cults. That early association with deviancy had become the association that stuck.

But, by pushing back before the media panic of the late 20th Century, we can see that this isn’t the critical feature of all cults, just destructive ones. The critical feature of all cults is religious behaviour.

The Ubiquity of Religious Behaviour

It’s important that we don’t confuse religious behaviour with religion. Indeed, this was the very aim of the cultic classification in the first place—to mark out those which had replaced the religion with new beliefs.

Religious behaviour is, at its core ritualistic behaviour around some kind of article of faith. You have religious behaviours around doing. Things like prayer, or the kinds of sacrifices that have you perform a service—a pilgrimage for example, or the sacrifice of an animal. Rituals where you do things.

And you have religious behaviours around not doing. These are often sacrifices too, but ones in which you give up something—a fast perhaps, or a set of purity rules. And also, in these not doings, there is the rich domain of taboos—actions that are forbidden for whatever reason the faith would have it so.

So ritual behaviours around faith where you either do or don’t do something as a consequence of that faith.

Importantly, religious or not, everyone engages in religious behaviour. Humans take many more things on faith than we might care to admit.

And I write about this a lot. I’ll drop some links in the show notes, but essentially the world is super complicated—we can’t know everything.

Perhaps the best example is our faith in the consciousness of others. There is, under our current model of scientific enterprise, no possible way of assessing whether something is conscious or not. We each have some experience of consciousness, but we will never know if others share that experience with us. You’ll never know if you are the only conscious being in a sea of automatons. But no one behaves like this. Take politeness—socially derived rituals of behaviour that necessarily assume others are conscious. It’s a technically perfect example of religious behaviour!

And where religious behaviours collect, cults are likely to emerge. If you haven’t heard people describe veganism as cult-like, you haven’t been in a western city. This is because it is cult-like. Veganism, when done for humane reasons, are religious behaviours around the consciousness of animals at their most prominent. An almost punitive collection of not doings. And in support of these faithful efforts, a transient, leaderless collective sprung up to meet the needs of vegans—to help insulate them as they deviated from the mainstream views on animal consciousness in the process.

I’m not saying any of this to be pejorative—it seems like we’re really moving in that direction for all sorts of reasons. What is true is that being a vegan would be hard without the cult of veganism. My mum had to give up because she was doing this in the 90s, before it was so established.

Cults are defined by religious behaviour.

There’s another example, worth mentioning, to drive the point home. The world of health and nutrition is extraordinarily fertile soil for the development of cults. Absolutely no one seems to have a good idea about how nutrition works, outside of the basic average macronutrient profile. And health is almost as much of a crapshoot. I’ve talked before about how much of a failure modern therapy is. And our weirdly quixotic relationship with the world of medicine is almost entirely faith-based. So it’s no surprise that the realm of health and wellbeing is a treasure trove of cultic movements. Everything from neo-pagan religions, to loose-knit groups of crystal healers, to the communities that populate websites like Goop or any number of topical substacks, to franchises like F45 and Crossfit. All of these loose collectives of people are creating their personal relationship with health and supporting each other through religious behaviour oriented around a health-related faith that deviates from the mainstream.

They’re cults! Technically!

And importantly none of that is pejorative! I mean that it describes healthy groups AND problematic ones.

I hope I’ve convinced you, but I assume you’re wondering at this point, so what. Why bother trying to reclaim the word? We don’t care about all cults, we care about destructive ones.

And that’s where I disagree with you. I think it isn’t the right cut. Let me wrap up with a little explanation.

Community in a Lonely World

I’ve talked before about how our attraction to destructive and spectacular cults distract us from the real and important dynamics of these things.

And I hope I’ve just illustrated some of that.

But there’s one idea I haven’t really talked about here, which is the notion that a charismatic leader is required to make a cult whole. It’s actually part of the literature—I mentioned Singer and Lalich’s book earlier and they explicitly define a cult as:

a group that forms around a person who claims to have a special mission or knowledge, which they will share with those who turn over most of their decision making to that self-appointed leader.

Because there is clearly a role of charisma in a cult. Obviously, the charisma of some new article of faith—the core of the religious behaviours that engender the cult. And charismatic leaders will arise to embody that charisma—leaders in the Weberian sense. Leaders who through their religious behaviour appear exceptional, or through their aggression become prominent, or through their being in the right place at the right time attract a following. These kinds of leaders are a feature of any kind of novel environment—points of light in the dark. And this is what Weber says. This is where charisma shines as a guiding force, before structure begins to emerge. But these charismatic leaders rarely rise to the top of these loose collectives.

This is true of spectacular cults we’ve talked about, but this doesn’t normally happen.

Rather they serve as eddies and currents in the transient cultic milieu.

Like who is the leader of vegans?

And, as Weber noted, charismatic leadership will eventually give way to traditional or rational leadership as the cult begins to require structure, and as its growth creates its own mainstream presence.

Now, that’s not to say that these structures can’t become problematic. There’s a reason Lifton was worried about ‘totalising’ organisations and Singer about their leadership. Authoritarian structure in high-control groups is something we should be worried about. But we shouldn’t be worried about cults. Cults are simply communities organised around shared values that engage in religious behaviour around those values. We need to strip cult of its dark mystique, and point our concern at the things that matter or risk people mis-identifying a good cult as a bad one, or worse, failing to recognise a bad one because it seems good.

So, with that out of the way I want to bring it back to my interest on human systems. The problem of rising loneliness and isolation in modern cities is a common one. I spend a lot of time noting that one reason for this is because we really seem to have missed what binds a community.

Cults—mundane cults—some of the most obvious examples of community left in a modern world.

Mundane cults describe many loose collectives where people come together, in person or online, to share their values and their beliefs. To share their faith in things that an increasingly specialised world makes difficult to understand. To share their rituals around their faith. And in doing so, to find their people. And this is why, in the academic world, cults which are not destructive or totalistic are seen as a place of value. A place where one can find affiliation and spiritual fulfillment. A place where we find community and purpose in a world that sidelines those things in favour of individual productivity.

So that’s my challenge.

So stop using cult as a dirty word. If you’re not in one, or two, or even a handful, then you’re probably doing something a little weird.

The REAL question is, are the cults you’re in cults you’re choosing to be in? Because if you’re not asking that question, you’re exactly the kind of person who’s likely to end up in a circle of hooded figures.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns. Patterns of thought, of feeling, and of action. That’s the brain’s job: creating the patterns that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life.

We call these things ideologies, rituals, biases. But there’s something else I’ve learnt teaching this stuff: we’re animals first. You can’t escape these patterns, but you can choose which ones to emphasise.

So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast. And you choose if it works for you. That’s the idea, so let’s get into it.

Now, I’ve done a longer intro than I plan to do in the future because, as I said in the last podcast, I’m recording the first few and I want to set a sort of baseline for people coming for the first time. I’m also thinking about how to hook people in with the first series. The first podcast went down pretty well, so this “one pattern, one podcast” thing is definitely staying. I also managed to deliver the podcast after a day of teaching before going home, so the timeframe seems like it’s going to work—although it took more like four hours than two or three. Let’s see if we can get it lower this time, make sure that this length of podcast is going to be feasible for me.

But some feedback on the first podcast with regard to hooking you in is that maybe the lectures shouldn’t all be brain science. As a brain scientist, that’s what I love, obviously. But teaching here as associate professor at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, we cover way more stuff. And in my career as an academic and a clinician, I’ve also covered more stuff. So I’m going to try and demonstrate a bit more range and see if I can make it a bit more exciting. Let’s see. I’ll be interested to hear what you think.

Now, this one is more topical than anything else. I’m wondering if you’ve seen that Vogue article entitled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” I’ll drop a link in the show notes, but they covered a few reasons why it’s starting to be less trendy to show your partner on social media and that sort of thing.

And I want to zoom in on one particular reason. I’ll quote them: “Boyfriends are out of style. They won’t come back until they start acting right,” read another respondent to their survey with 10,000 likes.

Now, I have my own perspective on this. And whilst I say the words “perspective,” I should make very clear that this is not the perspective of my workplace, Sandhurst. This is just little old Dorian doing his podcast.

But I have this idea for an article I want to write that I think will cover this in more detail. The Vogue article talks to it—which is, I think there’s something very interesting about how we talk about what men and what women are supposed to be and supposed to do and how they’re supposed to act, I guess. And I think that in particular, these framings that we put together have this interesting side effect that can hide incompetence. In men certainly, probably in women too, but I’m more familiar with men obviously.

And in an increasingly feminised world, I think that this is confusing men and women—the former who want to do more but don’t know how, and the women who are now expecting more because the world is more accessible to them and they’re finding, as Vogue said, boyfriends embarrassing.

And to illustrate this, I want to use this book from the 90s that is also coming back into vogue—excuse the pun. My most popular article is on the book Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus. Now this article is a bit more irreverent than some of the others on my website, but it comes directly out of observations I had whilst working in more clinical environments. And it seems like it might make a pretty fun podcast. So let’s see.

Gender Essentialism’s Moment

All right, we’re going to start with some background. The article and the request to review the book, in fact, come at a time where there’s this huge spike in gender essentialism, exploring what it means to be a true man or a true woman. And the reasons for that are probably a little bigger than this little lecture.

But you do see a lot of it in the popularity of Joe Rogan or the spike in content about what being a man is supposed to be by people like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Huberman or, you know, even Andrew Tate.

And obviously as a man, this isn’t that surprising to me. Lots of people around me complain about the feminisation of the world and how it has made being a man seem more difficult.

And I think Sebastian Junger put this really nicely in his book Tribe. So Junger is the journo who did the doco Restrepo about a unit deployed on operations and the feelings of brotherhood and camaraderie and the struggle they had re-assimilating to the world. And he wrote this book Tribe as a result of that. And he mentions in this book that it’s one of the reasons young men join the military still. A lot of kids trying to find manhood in one of its last traditional bastions in a world where, you know, maybe a lot of aspects of manhood appear more toxic.

So that’s not surprising for me. I mean, that book is maybe like 10 years old now, but what’s more surprising is a similar spike in content around modern takes on traditional female roles. Like there’s a fantastic show, Mormon Wives, or where it came from, MomTok, which is a TikTok thing around this kind of trad wife aesthetic. Or, you know, any of the trad wife and stay-at-home mum communities online. And I don’t know if this is new or if I’ve only just started noticing it, but it does seem to be everywhere these days.

And the sad fact is that although there are trivially obvious differences in anatomy between males and females, there is a huge amount of disagreement about how that plays out in behaviour. I mean, sexual dimorphism is something that is well studied, and it’s a pretty confused literature. There’s not a lot of clear findings. And it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish this from the influence of social norms, right, the environment.

So it’s, you know, it’s like very cheap and easy to make up an evolutionary story about how men should be this way and women should be that way. But it’s not very easy to go back seven million years ago when we diverge from chimpanzees and run this experiment again, you know. So it’s just a very hard debate to resolve, this nature versus nurture thing.

And so there’s this growing appetite for gender essentialism, but there’s very little to ground it properly. And so there’s this resultant sort of glut of content that tells aspiring men and women what it is that they’re supposed to be.

And where better to turn than this book from the 90s, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus by John Gray, PhD. And I’ll tell you something, I was a big fan of this book when I was 21, 22, something like this. My mum told me to read it because it influenced her and it certainly influenced me. It talks about how men and women have different needs and communication styles and how those can come into conflict. Seems transparently true.

So when people asked me to review the book, I was keen to get back into it. And in doing that, I realised that if you were the kind of person who wants to re-examine what it means to be a man or a woman, you’re excited by this new trend in gender essentialism, you know, it like speaks to you—my advice is to pick any book but this book because this one is just an embarrassment. It’s like 300 pages of some rando’s blinding insecurities.

But what it is a good example of is how the way we frame things can obscure incompetence. How really, men and women aren’t so different, but the way we talk about them makes it seem like they are. And that gives us little pockets to hide in, especially men. John Gray’s men are embarrassing. Check it out.

What Gray’s Actually Describing

First thing we should talk about is Gray himself. What’s notable is that his Wikipedia page has him coming off like a charlatan. And if Wikipedia—a site that anyone can edit—lists a bunch of shady stuff about you, you should be pretty sceptical of the fella.

I’m not that keen for a defamation lawsuit, so I’ll put links in to help you do your own research. But since I think the PhD part is a particular draw card, I will point out that he has a history of flirting with unaccredited institutions. As far as I can tell, his bachelor’s and master’s degrees aren’t clearly from an accredited institution. There’s some confusion about whether his degree in, to quote Wikipedia, “the Science of Creative Intelligence” is from the non-accredited Maharishi European Research University in Switzerland or the accredited Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa.

Not a great start. We could put that aside though—it’s not always about where you came from, it’s where you went. And in this case, Gray went to an unaccredited PhD in 1982 with the now defunct correspondence institution that was lazily fraudulent, Columbia Pacific University.

The council’s review of CPU listed numerous violations of academic standards, including one master’s degree student being given credit for “a learning contract describing how he would continue taking dance lessons,” a PhD dissertation written in Spanish that was approved by four faculty who couldn’t speak the language, and one dissertation that had “no hypothesis, no data collection, and no statistical analysis.”

So not a super auspicious start. We’re also frankly concerned about his FDA cease-and-desist order for violating their laws about marketing drugs as supplements on his marsvenus.com website. Honestly, supplements are a huge red flag for me.

Also, he wrote a book about how warm baths will cure autism. So not, like, a traditionally academic guy.

But again, no ad hominem—let’s look at the content. I want to start with his Chapter 2 because it really demonstrates my point—how framing things can hide real issues.

In chapter 2, he says, “we will explore how men’s and women’s values are inherently different and try to understand the two biggest mistakes we make in relating to the opposite sex: men mistakenly offer solutions and invalidate feelings whilst women offer unsolicited advice and direction.”

So far, perhaps not that controversial. If we’re gender essentialists, maybe we suspect that men and women do have inherently different values for whatever reason—biological, social, whatever. It’s not a leap to assume this would lead to some miscommunications, and indeed, it’s the reason I read this book in a positive light a decade or so ago.

John would have me believe that this is because men “value power, competency, efficiency, and achievement. They are always doing things to prove themselves and develop their power and skills. Their sense of self is defined through their ability to achieve results. They experience fulfilment primarily through success and accomplishment.”

So, they don’t read silly magazines like Psychology Today. They like “outdoor activities like hunting, fishing, and racing cars.” They care more about “objects and things” rather than “people and feelings.”

You see, unlike women, men don’t talk about things unless they want a solution. The man “rarely talks about his problems unless he needs expert advice. He reasons: ‘Why involve someone else when I can do it by myself?’ He keeps his problems to himself unless he requires help from another to find a solution. Asking for help when you can do it yourself is perceived as a sign of weakness.”

So, when women are talking to him about some kind of problem, he’ll offer solutions. That’s the only reason talking should happen, right? And when those pesky women reject his finely honed solution, yet remain unaccountably upset, “it becomes increasingly difficult for him to listen because his solution is being rejected and he feels increasingly useless.”

Honestly, this sounds totally believable. John Gray was singing to my heart. All these idiots, if they just listened to me, their problems would vanish, and I wouldn’t have to stomach their complaining any more.

And of course this is absurd. I would tell young Dorian “hey, look, sometimes people want to complain about shit, and sometimes they want your help. Sometimes you want to complain about shit, and sometimes you want help. Usually, when people want your help, they’ll ask for it. If they’re not asking for it, they probably don’t want your help.”

Absolutely none of this is contingent upon my gender. But Gray hides it. I don’t think intentionally—I think we all do this. He hides it in this kind of intuitive idea about how men care more about “objects and things” rather than “people and feelings.”

The cracks start to show, and they usually always start to show, when he talks about women, who “instead of being goal-oriented, are relationship-oriented; they are more concerned with expressing their goodness, love, and caring.” And so, women often provide suggestions for improvement. And here we take a turn towards the darker motifs in this book with:

“When a woman tries to improve a man, he feels she is trying to fix him. He receives the message that he is broken. She doesn’t realise her caring attempts to help him may humiliate him. She mistakenly thinks she is just helping him to grow.”

And all of a sudden, we are made blindingly aware of John Gray’s crippling insecurities. This isn’t a guy being a guy! This is a guy who is showing really clear signals of what I’d call rejection sensitivity.

“He is broken”… “may humiliate him.” Either this woman is a banshee, or this guy is very delicate.

Do you think I’m overstating the case for comedic effect? John presents for us Tom and Mary:

“Tom was driving. After about twenty minutes and going around the same block a few times, it was clear to Mary that Tom was lost. She finally suggested that he call for help. Tom became very silent. They eventually arrived at the party, but the tension from that moment persisted the whole evening. Mary had no idea of why he was so upset… From her side she was saying ‘I love and care about you, so I am offering you this help’… From his side, he was offended. What he heard was ‘I don’t trust you to get us there. You are incompetent!’”

Tom, mate, you are incompetent. Mary obviously likes you enough to tolerate your nonsense, but she doesn’t want to fuck about in the car with you all night whilst you pretend to know what you’re doing. Mary wants to go to the party, Tom.

If someone is criticising your behaviour, then it may be because your behaviour is something worth criticising. It’s true that substantial criticism is one of the classic hallmarks of a failing relationship. But it’s also true that most people can recognise this as either constructive or destructive and respond accordingly. If you can’t, then maybe the problem is you, and there are models of behaviour that will help you develop this skill. Don’t be like Tom.

And in case you think I’m still being unfair, I want to show you what John thinks are a man “mistakenly invalidating feelings” by offering solutions: “It’s not such a big deal.” “OK, I’m sorry. Now can we just forget it.” “All right, I’ll clean up the backyard. Does that make you happy?” “If you’re not happy then we should just get a divorce.” “All right, then you can do it from now on.”

Yeah, right, John. What a helpful solution, John. I wonder why the delicate female sensibility would find that invalidating. I, on the other hand, would be very pleased with these suggestions.

And again, on the other side, we get a weird reaction from really quite normal stuff. Look at what he calls “some brief examples of ways a woman might unknowingly annoy a man by offering advice or seemingly harmless criticism”: “Those dishes are still wet. They’ll dry with spots.” “Don’t put that there. It will get lost.” “You should call a plumber. He’ll know what to do.” “You should spend more time with the kids. They miss you.” “You forgot to bring it home again. Maybe you could put it in a special place where you can remember it.”

Look, if you are getting criticisms like that, I see absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be getting these criticisms delivered in exactly this manner. This person is gently trying to help you to not be an idiot. Clean the dishes properly and don’t lose shit. Don’t toy around with the sewage, play with your kids, and bring the stuff you’re supposed to bring home. Don’t be like Tom, you know.

I can’t emphasise how disturbing the place from which this book is written seems to come from. And again, I’m obviously cherry-picking, but this isn’t unreasonable. I assure you, you can read the book to check. This stuff is littered throughout it. It starts off truthy and then rapidly devolves into this kind of off-the-wall stuff.

And let me tell you something, nothing in this chapter has anything to do with men or women. John’s men are not reasonable men struggling to understand overly demanding, more people-oriented women. John’s men are troubled men reacting absurdly, sensitively to their partner’s attempts to help them to not be foolish.

But by framing it like Mr Fix-It versus the Home Improvement Committee kind of hides that fact. And it’s the reason why I was able to just skim through it 10, 15 years ago now.

Now, honestly, I’ve basically made the only point I’m going to, and I have three articles on this particular book online, so I don’t want to elaborate too much. But the book is darkly hilarious once you notice this pattern. So let me cherry-pick a couple more illustrative threads to wrap up.

From his introduction, he describes his chapters, and he goes like this. In chapter three, “we’ll discover the different ways men and women cope with stress. Men pull away. Women feel an instinctive need to talk.”

I like this one because it starts to show us a theme. So Gray thinks that women, seems to think that women are this kind of overfull cup spilling their feelings into the lives of their stoic male counterparts. So women talk about stress. They offer unsolicited advice. That’s chapter two because they value love and communication and relationships. You know, that’s a quote. Specifically, again I quote, “to share their personal feelings is more important than achieving goals and success.” Because remember, in contrast, and I quote again from chapter 2, men “value power, competency, efficiency and achievement.”

And in his description of chapter 4, he actually points out explicitly how easy this kind of framing can be used to hide masculine incompetence. So, to quote, “Men are motivated when they feel needed, whilst women are motivated when they feel cherished. When a man doesn’t feel needed in a relationship, he gradually becomes passive and less energised. When a woman does not feel cherished in a relationship, she gradually becomes compulsively responsible and exhausted from giving too much.”

So you see, all this busy feeling work women are doing is unwelcome because it makes men feel like they’re not useful, right? And as a result, they just quit, I suppose. Meanwhile, women, just because they’re women, right, no other reason, feel compulsively responsible and exhausted. Probably has nothing to do with all the men pulling away and becoming passive.

Now, look, John reckons this is—and he says about chapter five—men and women speak and even stop speaking for entirely different reasons. Women express feelings. Men express information.

And I want to pull out the truthiness here, right? Because there is probably something to this, you know. Gray, if we were being charitable, could be talking about the idea that women, you know, on average are socially trained to be more fluent in the language of interpersonal relationships. There’s literature that points in this direction and I’ll put a link in the show notes.

So maybe Gray’s pointing out that men aren’t as good at this and need support to do this? And you might think that because that feels true, but then you look at his examples and you realise it’s really not.

So, you know, he has this translation guide between men and women. So when women say “we never go out,” and men reply “that’s not true, we went out last week.” Or women say “everyone ignores me,” men reply “I’m sure some people notice you.” Or when women say “the house is always a mess,” and men reply “it’s not always a mess.”

You know, it seems plausible that Gray is talking about someone who’s interpersonally challenged. Because to Gray, it’s obvious to him that in these kinds of interactions, and I quote, “You can see how a literal translation of a woman’s words could easily mislead a man who is used to using speech as a means of conveying only facts and information.”

So, maybe that’s what Gray is talking to, but we should be a little bit suspicious because Gray goes on and it starts to seem a little less literal. So when women say “nothing is working,” his men will reply “are you saying it’s my fault?” Or “I want more romance,” he’ll respond with “are you saying I’m not romantic?”

You’ve got like pages and pages of this. And some of them are wild. So again, I quote, “Without this translation, when a woman says ‘everyone ignores me,’ the man may hear, ‘I am so unhappy. I just can’t get the attention I need. Everything is hopeless. Even you don’t notice me and you are the person who’s supposed to love me. You should be ashamed. You were so unloving. I would never ignore you this way.’”

Gray’s men are not missing the point because they’re hung up on some literal meaning, right? This guy isn’t interpreting anything literally. This guy’s linguistic analysis is even more complicated than the hypothetical women that Gray is trying to describe in this book.

Again—an initially sensible framing—men are, on average, less socially fluent, so maybe we’re not as good at dealing in the language of feelings. And then it’s used to hide some truly bizarre self-worth issues.

And here’s the last thread I wanted to do. So in chapter eight, he quotes, “Men primarily need a kind of love that is trusting, accepting and appreciative. Women primarily need a kind of love that is caring, understanding and respectful.”

And he goes on to describe what seems reasonable on the surface, but his advice to women is off the wall. So here’s the art of empowering a man. I quote: “The secret of empowering a man is never try to change him or improve him. Certainly you may want him to change. Just don’t act on that desire. Only if he directly and specifically asks for advice is he open to assistance in changing.”

Never. You might want to change this guy, but never do that. That’s the advice. And you think I’m taking this out of context. He goes on: “This doesn’t mean a woman has to squash her feelings. It’s okay for her to feel frustrated or even angry as long as she doesn’t try to change him. Any attempt to change him is unsupportive and counterproductive.”

Any attempt. I don’t think he could be clearer. He goes on, you know, if you’re not convinced with three pages of helpful list items like “Remember, don’t ask him too many questions when he’s upset or he’ll feel you’re trying to change him. Show some initial concern, but not too much.” Or “Remember, give up trying to improve him in any way. He needs your love, not rejection to grow. Trust him to grow on his own.” “Remember, if you make sacrifices hoping he’ll do the same for you, then he will feel pressured. Practise doing things for yourself and not depending on him to make you happy.” “Remember, if you give him directions and make decisions for him, he’ll feel corrected and controlled. Relax and surrender.”

Surrender to Tom in his car, who’s never going to make it to the party.

Look, I have to be the first to admit that I get defensive when people are telling me what to do. I have a really hard time accepting that this is a man thing, though. Right, I suspect no one likes being told they need to change, but I’m just gobsmacked that the advice here is for women to just give it up, especially with Gray’s men who obviously need to change.

There’s no healthy relationship in which one person must just unconditionally accept the other as they are. I mean, we get this impression from the media, and I will get into why this feels kind of truthy in a little bit, but it’s just not true. We compromise for each other in relationships. That’s a big part of relationships. You know it. Any serious self-help book will talk about it. But for Gray, no. It’s not men who have to change. It’s women who need to accept Gray’s men. Gray’s women need to just sort their shit out.

And look, I’m going to wrap this up with maybe my favourite part of the book. In chapter 12, he’s talking about the difference between “could you” and “would you.” And for him—to quote—“to women, there’s not much of a difference. In fact, ‘could you’ may even seem more polite than ‘would you,’ but to many men, it’s a big difference because this distinction is important. I’m including comments by 17 different men who attended my seminars.”

Let’s have a look at some of these comments. Here’s one of them: “When I’m asked, ‘could you clean up the backyard?’ I really take it literally. I say I could do it. I’m sure it’s possible. But I’m not saying I will do it. And I certainly don’t feel like I’m making a promise to do it. On the other hand, when I’m asked ‘would you clean up the backyard?’ I begin to make a decision and I’m willing to be supportive. If I say yes, the chances of me remembering to do it are much greater because I have made a promise.”

That’s one. Here’s another one: “When I’m asked ‘would you help me please?’ it gives me an opportunity to help and I’m more than willing to support her. But when I hear ‘could you help me please?’ I feel backed up against the wall as if I have no choice. If I have the ability to help, then I’m expected to help. I don’t feel appreciated.”

Here’s the last one that I’m going to pull out of this: “When I hear a ‘could you,’ I’ll immediately say yes. And then over the next 10 minutes, I will realise why I’m not going to do it and then ignore the question. But when I hear a ‘will you,’ a part of me comes up saying ‘yes, I want to be of service.’ And then even if objections come up later in my mind, I will still fulfil her request because I have given my word.”

John has gotten 17 of his mates to help him make a case for how even the most reasonable request that she makes will be agreed to and then consciously ignored over the next 10 minutes simply because she used “can you” instead of “will you”—like that annoying high school teacher who would always reply to you “can I go to the bathroom” with “I don’t know, can you?”

And to add insult to injury, this is the chapter that’s probably the most detailed of the book, describing how a woman should go about getting what she needs out of the relationship without stepping on any of the intricate interpersonal landmines John and the boys have laid out.

What This Means For You

All right. I think that’s enough from the book. I think I’ve made my point. I’ll leave you with a little bit of a wrap-up, some high-level thoughts on this framing, and then I’ll let you go.

I think, I hope I’ve illustrated it well enough. The framing is the thing here. It starts off and it sounds good. It sounds truthy, right? It’s picking up on real threads that exist in our social environment. The main one, you know, women do spend a lot more time interacting with feelings on average and men are often less fluent at expressing them and validating them. And for the same reason, men are resistant to interpersonal feedback, maybe more so than women, because again, on average, women probably do this thing more frequently. So they have the social infrastructure to handle it, right? We train women through their socialisation to do this stuff, regardless of what you think of their biology. It could be, you know, it could just be purely explained by social phenomena.

So some of this stuff does ring true because if we’re not thinking very hard, it’s easy to recognise this in the pages and move on. And then it quickly degenerates into something crazy. It’s just not good relationship advice. The framing is hiding really problematic behaviour.

You know, Vogue asked if having a boyfriend is embarrassing and Tom is embarrassing. John Gray’s men are embarrassing.

And more generally, what Gray is pushing here is a narrative that leans less into the ways that women and men are, but more into the way a lazy man might want his woman to be. A book that sort of takes all the social expectations we have about men and women and lays out a case for the worst men to improve a bit, with the implication that women should expect far less from the rest of men.

And I don’t think that this is Gray’s intent. You know, it could be an editor thing. There seems like there’s something biographical in there. There’s some oddly specific examples that, you know, it makes me wonder how much of this is sort of Gray’s travails with his long-suffering wife. So I don’t think that it’s malicious.

But what I think you should do is ignore whatever intent Gray has and view it as a piece of propaganda. Because if you view it as a piece of propaganda, you’d recognise more easily that John isn’t describing normal men and normal women. If you imagine that this was written by a lazy, emotionally incompetent man to justify his atrocious behaviour to a watching world, you would see that this isn’t a reflection of a relationship that anyone would want to be in.

So to close, you know, my advice is to people who might be into gender essentialism, if you find yourself connecting with this material, I think you need to ask some delicate questions of yourself. What is it in you that reminds you of the emotionally troubled men that Gray is describing? I connect a great deal, for example, to the defensiveness that he describes. What is it about your partner that makes you think that their reasonable requests are unreasonable?

And I think the answers to those questions are really the only valuable advice that this book could hold because it really is a very shit book.

That is my review of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. You asked for it, three articles on it and a podcast. Please, please stop asking me about this book.

Thanks, guys. I’m going to run and I’ll let you go too.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr. Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our heads. But there are patterns. Patterns of thought, patterns of feeling, patterns of action. That’s the brain’s job—creating the patterns that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life.

We call these things ideologies, rituals, biases. And there’s something else I’ve learnt teaching this stuff: we’re animals first. You can’t escape these patterns, but you can choose which ones to emphasise. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast. You choose if it works for you.

Now, I’ve already done a longer intro than I plan to ordinarily do because I hate long podcast intros. But since this is the first podcast, I may as well talk about the vision I have for this thing.

I write a lot at my website, btrmt., but people don’t always have the time to read the articles. Frankly, they complain about it. Plus, since I started as an Associate Professor in the behavioural science department here at RMA Sandhurst, I find that I’m essentially lecturing on the very same stuff. So I thought, why not take all the good stuff I’m already teaching in verbal format and share it here?

But since I don’t have a lot of time, I’ve got to be pretty strategic about this. I’m going to take one idea that I teach, see if I can turn it into a podcast in two or three hours after class is done, and we’ll see how things develop.

Because this is the first podcast, I’ve got to choose something that really bites, that hooks you. I started talking about this idea when I started doing leadership consultancy—there were some executives that had a problem with it. But it was so useful, it’s become a mainstay in my arsenal. In consulting, in keynotes, in the one-on-one stuff I do. The students here really like it when I slip it in. In fact, come to think of it, it might actually be one of the bits I used in the taster lecture I delivered to get this job in the first place.

Since I’ve mentioned my workplace, I should say the opinions expressed here are obviously my own. They don’t reflect Sandhurst or the British military or the United Kingdom more broadly. It’s just Dorian doing his little podcast.

But the idea—the idea is that stress is a good thing. So let’s get into it.

Why We Think Stress is Bad

I want to start off with this article from the Atlantic that I love. It’s the quintessential example of the kind of thing I have in mind. The author, a management professor, says: “In other words, stress makes you fight, flee or freeze, not think. What would a prudent reaction be at this moment? This makes great evolutionary sense. Half a million years ago, taking the time to manage your emotions would have made you a tiger’s lunch. But in the modern world, even if you don’t have tigers to outrun, you can’t relax in your cave because the emails are piling up.”

This is it. This is the expression of what stress is that I’m specifically targeting today. This idea that it evolved thousands, millions of years ago to outrun lions on the savannah or whatever the case may be. But now it’s just triggered by all these non-lethal mundane problems that we face in day-to-day life. Stress is poorly calibrated to the modern world. It gets in the way. It hinders our performance. It stops us behaving how we want to behave. It gets in the way in our relationships. It’s a bad thing, fundamentally.

And I want to counter that. Because I think that not only is stress typically calibrated perfectly for the modern world, it’s also the only thing that gets us to perform at all. At work, in relationships, whatever—stress is the thing that gets the job done. And in that sense, I think it’s actually the most valuable biological technology that we have.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law

I think what’s happening here is some kind of misunderstanding of Robert Sapolsky’s work, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. It’s the core premise, although it’s a misunderstanding that’s sort of wrapped up with work that’s been done in the trauma community. These two ideas have gone smooshed together.

This idea of fight, flight or freeze really originated to describe hypervigilance—a life or death response to a threat. The kind of thing that kicks in when you almost get hit by a car, a near miss of that kind. And most people are not responding to email notifications with fight or flight. People with a lot of trauma—people with PTSD, for example—often respond to mundane stuff with fight or flight. But people who don’t suffer that kind of thing typically respond to these things absolutely normally. So if you’re responding to email notifications with fight, flight or freeze responses, then there’s something wrong and you shouldn’t just be putting up with it.

Rather than adopt this model, I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about the Yerkes-Dodson Law.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law is a really old model of stress—maybe 1915, 1917, over 100 years old. A lot of people will be introduced to this through a first-year or high school psychology course. But it’s really simple. Even though it’s old, even though it’s simple, it’s still contiguous with what we know today about the human stress response.

Picture a graph—an x-axis, a righty-lefty bit, and a y-axis, an upy-downy bit. Plot on it a bell curve, like a little mountain or a hill, an inverted U if you like. Put yourself down the bottom left corner of your little hill.

What we’re looking at is that as stress is low, performance is low. As arousal in the body is low, performance is low. You’re not going to do anything when you’re not stressed, when you’re not aroused. As stress goes up, performance increases. You’re moving up the hill now because stress is recruiting interest and attention and all the cognitive and physical resources that you need to get the task at hand done.

As you keep going up your hill, as stress keeps going up, performance keeps going up until you reach the peak. At this point, you’re talking about optimal stress and optimal performance. If you’ve heard of a flow state, this is the kind of thing we’re talking about here. It’s where you’re completely absorbed by the task at hand, where your capacity to do something is completely met by the challenge you’re facing. This is the kind of time where you would find yourself sitting down, doing the thing, and three hours fly by, and you look up and you’ve missed lunch. The same exact thing happened as I was trying to set up for this first podcast. You just lose track of time. You’re completely occupied by what you’re doing. The peak of the stress curve—optimal stress, optimal performance.

Now, if you continue to get stressed, you’re going to start falling down the other side of our little hill. You’re going to become more stressed, but your performance is going to decline. You know this. You’ve experienced this much stress before. You get the jitters when you’re this stressed. You get some brain fog. You start to stammer, stutter your words. You’re just not thinking as clearly when you have too much stress in the system.

Most people, when they’re talking about stress, they’re talking about the right-hand side of our stress curve. When people are falling down the wrong side of our hill. But there’s so much to be gained by understanding the left side of the curve—that gentle uphill to optimal stress, optimal performance, the peak of stress and performance.

Let me put this into perspective for you. Imagine you have a project due. An assignment if you’re in school, a presentation at work, something for your kids, maybe something for the PTA meeting. You know that if you devote your spare time to it, it’s going to take you about a week to get this project done.

Now, let’s say that the due date for this thing is next year, 12 months from now. Where are you on our little stress curve? I would suggest that you’re down the bottom. Low stress, low performance. You are just not motivated to do this project unless you are a particularly disciplined kind of person, or you’re super bored. There’s just not any motivation to do it. It’s due in 12 months. Why would you use what spare time you have getting it done? No stress whatsoever, no performance.

But if we move that due date up—let’s say it’s due next month—then you are all of a sudden going to be much more motivated to get that task done. If that due date is closer, there’s a little bit more stress in the system and you are much more likely to be paying attention to that task, to thinking about what needs to be done, to collecting the resources that are going to get it done.

Now, let’s imagine that the due date is next week and it’s going to take you a week. Now we’ve moved all the way up to the top of the hill. We are going to spend all our spare time doing this project. We know that we just don’t have enough time to do anything else. Optimal stress, optimal performance. We could not be spending more time on this project than we can right now.

And then, of course, you can start to slide down the hill. The due date is in three days or it’s due tomorrow and it’s going to take you a week. Now there’s too much stress. You’re starting to panic. You’ve got all this sick feeling in your stomach. You’re getting the jitters. You’ve got brain fog. You’re just not doing as good a job as you would if you hadn’t left it until it was too late. And I’m pretty sure you’re all familiar with that feeling.

This is the stress curve. It’s a straightforward way to describe stress.

But look, there are a couple of things that are interesting beyond just the basic curve. Beyond low stress, low performance; optimal stress, optimal performance; high stress, poor performance.

One quirk is that for simple tasks, this doesn’t really obtain. If the task is super simple—say, somebody is holding a gun to your head and saying, “look at this red button, don’t look anywhere else”—you’re not going to have much trouble looking at the button. It’s a simple task. Even if you have maximum stress in your body, you’re not going to have difficulty. So if the task is super simple, you see low stress, higher stress, high performance, optimal stress, optimal performance—and then it plateaus at that point. This is more for complex tasks.

And maybe performance is a bit of a misnomer because there’s certain kinds of things that this is less good for. Down the bottom of our hill, low stress, low performance—this is the area where we’re optimising for something else. Cognitive flexibility. Reward-seeking behaviour. Exploration behaviour. Creativity, essentially.

If what you’re seeking is creativity, then you want low stress. And you know this. If your project’s due in a month or two months and it’s going to take you a week, you’re thinking not really about getting the project done as fast as possible. You’re thinking of all the ways it could be done. Maybe you can pick a different theme, different colour scheme, different fonts. Maybe you can incorporate this avant-garde thing into it that you wouldn’t otherwise consider because you have the time for that. Low stress—it’s not precisely performance but it’s creativity, it’s a different kind of thing.

As you go up the hill, as stress increases, one of the reasons that you get better performance is because it promotes cognitive rigidity. You’re engaging in more stereotypical thinking and behaviour. You’re doing things how things should be done, not thinking about how they could be done. If it’s due in a week, your project, then you’re not thinking of changing the fonts. You’re just doing the project as you know it needs to be done to get it over the line.

So that’s one of the benefits and the drawbacks. This cognitive rigidity is the thing that helps you achieve performance. But if you want creativity, you don’t really want to be injecting too much stress into the system.

So far, we’ve been talking about this biological mechanism—mapping the biological response to stress. But there’s also a psychological dimension to it. I’m going to talk about a particular cut on this by an endocrinologist by the name of Hans Seyle. He’s writing about this in the 1970s. It’s an old model, and there are newer models that can give you better fidelity, but for the purpose of this little lecture, I’m going to talk about Hans Seyle’s model of Eustress.

Eustress is good stress. It’s the left side of the stress curve. Low stress, low performance; a little bit more stress, high performance; all the way up to optimal stress, optimal performance—that side of our hill. Eustress, good stress, is posed in contrast to distress. This is the right-hand side of our curve. Once you go over the peak, over the hill, down the other side, now you’re in distress.

He said that the fundamental difference here seemed to be something about how controllable the stressor felt to us. It’s the difference between a threat and a challenge.

Eustress, good stress, challenges—these are things that are controllable. It’s something that we have enough resources for. We have the capacity to do it. We have the time. We have the people to be able to accomplish whatever it is we’re trying to accomplish. We have the resources for it. And as a consequence, we’re much more oriented towards the possibility of success or reward as a consequence of what we’re doing.

In contrast, threats—bad stress, distress, the other side of the hill—this is characterised by uncontrollability. You’re badly resourced. You don’t have the capacity to do the task or you don’t have the time. You don’t have the people. You don’t have the material. And as a consequence, you focus much more on the possibility of failure or damage as a result of what it is that you’re doing.

This is a psychological dimension. I can give you an example. Let’s say your project is public speaking. You’ve gotten to the day and you’re standing up in front of everybody presenting—to the PTA meeting or at work—and you have a mental blank. You completely forget what you’ve meant to say. This is often a physiological thing. There’s so much adrenaline in your body that it’s just blotted out your cognitive thoughts and now you’re in distress. “I’m embarrassing myself, I’m not doing a good job, I’m gonna show myself up, I’m not gonna be picked to do this again.” You’re on the wrong side of the curve. You’re falling down that hill.

But then you remember: “Hey, I have notes for this. Why don’t I just pull them out?” So you pull out your little palm cards from your pocket and you look and you remember where you’re up to. It all comes back to you and you’re lurching straight back into your performance, right back where you left off. You might still be a little jittery because there’s that physiological effect, but even though there’s all this stress in the body from that experience, you’re still performing now. You’ve moved much closer to eustress, to good stress rather than distress.

So it’s not just a biological thing. We’re not just talking about the sympathetic response and the parasympathetic response. We’re talking also about this psychological dimension, this difference between something that is controllable versus uncontrollable.

Using Stress Wisely

Now, the last couple of points I want to make are some caveats. People always want to take away a message from this that since I say stress is good, we should just stress people all the time. That is also not true.

Stress is itself a costly resource. To use stress is to use up something in our bodies. The best model for this is something called allostatic load—basically wear and tear on the body. It’s the wear on the cognitive and biological systems that comes with stress. If you’re going to use stress all the time, if you’re stressed all the time at a high level, you’re actually damaging your body and your mind. It’s going to lead to increasingly poor cognitive and biological outcomes. You know this—the stuff that it does to you is terrible. You should just look at the Wikipedia page on chronic stress—it’ll give you a litany of all the terrible things this can do to you.

We don’t want to be using stress all the time. If you imagine our hill, what being stressed all the time does is it squishes it. You put your hand on the top of the hill and you push it over towards the left, towards the good side of stress. You’re not gonna perform as well if you’re stressed to that optimal level—the more stressed you are over time, your capacity for performance reduces. The opportunity for good stress reduces. That side of the hill becomes steeper and shorter, harder to climb. You’re going to spend much less time good stressed, and you’re going to spend much more time possibly in this bad stress. There’s much more space for being overstressed if you’re engaging in stress all the time.

And then the very final thing is that one stress curve doesn’t characterise all things for all people. Things that you’re good at have a different stress curve than things that you’re bad at. Resurrect our hill, bring it back up to its former glory. Things you’re good at—if you swoosh it down and to the right—it makes good stress last longer. Your opportunity for good stress increases and the likelihood that you fall over that peak and fall into bad stress decreases. Equally, for stuff that you’re bad at, it’s the inverse. The chances that you’re going to be good stressed, eustressed about it, is not as high as the chances that you’re going to be distressed, badly stressed in response to whatever it is.

Different tasks for the same person have different stress curves, but also different people have different stress curves. What stresses me might not produce the same stress curve for you and what stresses you might not produce the same stress curve for me.

And that’s it. That’s the Yerkes-Dodson law. Look, it’s a simple model. You’re just picturing a hill or a bell shape or something like this. But look how much we drew out of it. We didn’t have to recourse to sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous systems. We didn’t have to talk about amygdalas, fight, flight or freeze (read more about why the amygdala doesn’t work that way here). It’s just a simple model. It gives you simple answers to simple questions. And I think it’s a good one.

Let me wrap this up.

First thing: good stress and bad stress, eustress and distress, performing and being too stressed to perform—this is a continuum. It’s the same physical mechanisms driving both of those things. You can’t talk about stress as a negative thing without also realising that that is the same mechanism involved in your doing anything at all. Stress is, in many ways, the same thing as motivation, or it’s an important ingredient in motivation.

But of course, that’s not always true. Low stress is better for creativity. You want to be down the bottom of that stress curve if you are looking to be cognitively flexible, if you want to engage in exploration behaviours, if you want to be engaging in reward-seeking behaviours. Low stress is much better for that.

More stress—one of the reasons that it produces performance is because of cognitive rigidity. It imbues you with this stereotypical thinking. You’re going to do things the way they should be done. That implies you can only really utilise that properly if you’ve been trained to do the thing. You need cognitive rigidity in the right direction. Stress goes hand in hand with training and learning.

The last point: it’s not just biological, it’s also psychological. There’s a difference between a challenge and a threat, and that’s the controllability of the thing. How much physical stress you have in your body will influence whether you perceive something as controllable or uncontrollable. But you have a little bit of wiggle room in that psychological aspect—trying to change a threat into a challenge by thinking differently about the resources you have and making it controllable.

And the caveat: you don’t want to just stress people all the time. You’re going to wear them out, burn them out. What you want is tactical deployment of stress. Stress injected at the times where you want to perform a little better, knowing that the trade-off is that allostatic load. We’ve got to be thoughtful about it. We should be a little bit concerned about stress—not fight, flight or freeze stress for the average person—but we don’t want to be stressing ourselves all the time because that leads to chronic stress.

And the last thing: individual curves are super important. Different tasks, different challenges are going to have different curves for you, and different people are going to have different curves.

That’s it. That’s the Yerkes-Dodson Law. That’s the first btrmt. Lecture. I’d be very keen to hear any feedback as to how this went, how the format was, how you found the amount of content, the length, that sort of stuff. Until next time.