Colin DeYoung || Cybernetics and the Science of Personality

Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. I'm Dr. Scott Berry-Coffman, and in each episode I have a conversation with a guest who will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world we live in. Thanks for listening, and enjoy the podcast. Today I'm really excited to have Colin D. Young on the podcast. Dr. D. Young is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He specializes in Personality Psychology, but is especially interested in Personality Neuroscience. Besides being a prolific academic and researcher, I'm also honored to count him as a dear friend and collaborator. Hey, thanks so much for appearing on the Psychology Podcast, Colin. Thanks for having me, Scott. I'm excited to be here. Wow. Yeah, I'm excited to chat with you, and your body of work is truly impressive, and you've covered so many different aspects of the Personality structure, the Personality hierarchy. In fact, I thought we could just start there, because I don't think a lot of people are really aware of modern-day personality research. They certainly don't view it as a hierarchy. But maybe you could discuss a little bit about how Personality is a hierarchy. Sure. Yeah. So, when I talk about what I study, I usually say that I study the structure and sources of Personality, and so what you were asking about is on the structure side, and that's sort of about what are the important components of people's personality and how are they related to each other? And one of the big questions there is what are the important Personality traits? And we know a lot about that, and interestingly, Personality psychologists spent several decades basically trying to figure out what are the most important Personality traits that we should be studying. And they actually came to a reasonably good consensus. And to say that these traits are arranged in a hierarchy means that we can think about Personality traits at a really broad level, like we could talk about, for example, somebody's tendency to experience negative emotions, let's say. And it turns out that if you are prone to experiencing one kind of negative emotion like anxiety, then unfortunately you are also more likely to experience other kinds of negative emotion like anger, depression, or vulnerability. And so we can take these more specific Personality traits and say that they are grouped together at a higher level of the hierarchy into some general tendency to experience negative emotion. And so the result of all this research has been something that's known as the five factor model, or the big five, which basically indicates that there are five very broad dimensions of Personality. In other words, all these more specific traits tend to go together in various ways that indicate that there are sort of five broad dimensions of Personality, and so people talk a lot about the big five. And those are probably the most common Personality traits that are measured and studied. But that doesn't mean that those are the only five Personality traits, right? I think some people get confused sometimes because of the five. Okay, so the big five are there is extraversion, and we can come back later to what some of these mean. There's extraversion. There is neuroticism, that's basically what I was talking about as negative emotion. There is conscientiousness, agreeableness, and the last one is called openness to experience or intellect. That's my favorite story. That's your favorite one. Oh, I know. I think it's both of our favorite ones. We've written papers about it together. For sure. And so people sometimes think, oh, well, Personality, Psychologists have found these five Personality traits. I guess that's all there is to Personality. But that's not really true at all because each one of those traits, you can break it down into a narrower set of traits. And then often you can even break those down further into more specific traits. And so when we talk about Personality, we're not just talking about the big five, we're talking about all of these different traits. And it just happens that most of them we can categorize into the big five, but sometimes it's useful to go down to lower levels of the hierarchy and study these more specific traits. And let's go above, you know, to the top level because I think that's in our recent discovery. That's true, right? And that's interesting because the original idea behind the big five was that they were supposed to be the broadest level of Personality traits and they weren't supposed to be related to each other. They were supposed to be totally independent. But that turned out not to be true, and after people worked with them and did research with them for, well, I guess a couple of decades almost, basically it was discovered that they have a regular pattern of association. So extroversion and openness tend to go together and then low neuroticism or emotional stability and high agreeableness and conscientiousness tend to go together. So you end up with these two higher order factors, even above the big five. And a lot of my own research, since I was in graduate school actually has been studying the nature of those two higher order factors that are even bigger than the big five. And we developed a theory to try to understand what they mean and to explain what they're about. We refer to them as stability and plasticity. So stability is the combination of being emotionally stable, high in agreeableness, that's sort of like being socially stable, and then high in conscientiousness, which is like being, let's say, motivationally stable, and then plasticity is the combination of extroversion and openness. And we think about as basically being a tendency to be flexible and exploratory, right? So if you're plastic, that means you can be flexible and adapt and like yoga poses as in yoga poses. Well, so it is true that people who are higher in extroversion tend to be more physically active. So we think of extroversion as being like the tendency to explore in the behavioral domain, right, by talking to people or engaging in more activities, and then openness and intellect, that's more like the tendency to be exploratory in the cognitive domain to think about things and come up with new ways of seeing things. Now you use the phrase socially stable. Could an introvert consider those fighting words? Are you saying that introverts are socially unstable? They would just say that they don't know, I was, yeah, no, no, certainly not. No, I was associating social stability with agreeableness. Oh, oh, yeah. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. I'm sorry. I heard extroversion. Yes. No, sorry. Maybe I misspoke. But that's a agreeableness is a totally separate dimension from the extroversion, introversion dimension. And it's really more about whether people are altruistic and cooperative. And so those people who are highly agreeable, who are altruistic and cooperative, they tend to put effort into maintaining social harmony, social stability, right? They not only care about pursuing their own goals, but they want to make sure that other people have our can pursue their goals and have their needs met. And I apologize if I misheard you. I think I was thinking in my head that I wanted to discuss introversion, extroversion, that was my segue. Oh, yeah. Can you do that? Yeah. So, I mean, I find all of those dimensions fascinating and my brain is kind of, because I'm loaded with dopamine in this conversation right now, my brain is like, okay, which one of the big five do I want to explore right now? But let's pick the extroversion domain right now. Now, some people have suggested that the opposite of extroversion in the big five poll, that introversion is kind of a mislabeling or not the most descriptive, it should be just detached or something like that. Detachment is the word that people have suggested. Yeah, this is a really interesting issue and it sort of, it goes back to the origin of the idea of extroversion and introversion with Carl Jung's theories. And so, for Jung, extroversion meant people who had their energy and attention focused outward, whereas introversion was people who had their energy and attention focused inward. Right? That's the prefixes, extra and intro, they mean outward and inward. But so part of what the problem was is that, you know, Jung's theory, although, you know, is very insightful and very influential, it was based on his own personal intuitions and his clinical experience. And it turns out that what he describes as introversion is actually more like what today we think of as openness. Right? But Jung talked about introversion as people who were interested in imagination and fantasy and the world of ideas. And he thought that that was essentially the opposite of being, you know, outgoing and talkative and sociable and degraded. But it turns out that that's not actually true. So when personality psychologists today talk about introversion as the opposite of extroversion, that word is sort of left over from Jung's terminology, but we're not talking about the same thing as the opposite of extroversion that he was. And that's just because empirically it's not, right? So it turns out that what's at the other end of the trait dimension from extroversion is basically the tendency to be quiet and reserved, having, you know, less energy, less enthusiasm. But that doesn't necessarily go along with being intellectual and imaginative. So it turns out that that's a separate dimension, that's the openness dimension. And so you can have extroverts who are high in openness and imaginative and thoughtful and, you know, even introspective. And you can have introverts who are imaginative and open and introspective. But that's a, you know, it's a different trait. Well, but this is where the things get a little controversial, because not only you didn't go far enough, actually the research suggests that introversion is statistically negatively correlated with what Jung actually referred to as introversion. Well, okay. So yes, this is true But the problem is that you don't want to mislead people because I think there's often a tendency when you say something It's correlated with something else Then they think oh that means that if I have one of those things I have to have you know, no And that's really unfortunate that interpretation of what it probably is But it's very common right and I think that's because people in general are bad at statistics Hey, there's all this there's a lot of research showing that even Scientists often have bad statistical intuition. It's just not something that's easy for the Human mind to graph. So yes, there is a weak Positive correlation between extroversion and openness, which means that on average the average extrovert would tend to be a little bit higher in Openness and intellect than the average introvert But it's like a such a small effect that it's easy to find Introverts who are also high in openness and intellect, right? So it's certainly not really not the existence of those people I think there's a real issue here, and that's the split between how the big five Personality researchers label or conceptualized introversion and how the most people in the general public when introversion is part of their identity So as soon as is that's part of their identity? It's something that's much more than just the opposite pole of extroversion If you actually read like, you know, my friend Susan Cain, she's done some great work Well, you know, she has a whole movement, right as you know, and if you read the Followers of her movement people who identify themselves introverts and are proud of it and they write blog posts and things that the quiet revolution about it What they say are things like I'm an introvert. I care deeply about others I am deeply attentive and in tune with the real needs of others. I am artsy. I'm creative So they're kind of in a way in a lot of ways they're blending the positive poles of all the big five things When that's interesting. Yes. I mean, so definitely the idea of being like artsy and imaginative that ties into Jung's idea The idea of being attuned to others and more sensitive and, you know, more empathetic. That's now getting into agreeableness Creableness. Yes. Yeah, so you know, I think what happens is that there's a particular type of people who are Really interested in personality, right, and they tend to be people who are high in openness You know, because they're they're interested in ideas and understanding things including themselves and They tend to be people also who are interested in people in general, right? Because that's also obviously a part of what personality is about So I think that it probably that world of people who are really devoted to studying personality You know in the not in the scientific world, but in just the general population and on the internet It's going to be populated with a particular type of people So the introverts that you get there are not going to be necessarily the same as just your average introvert in the general population Oh, well, she's like that's not a representative sample of introverts. Yeah, the representative sample. Right? So and you know, the funny thing is I think exactly the same thing happened to Jung So I think that the reason that Jung got the wrong idea that the opposite extroversion was, you know, basically high openness and imaginativeness was that you know, he was somebody who was really imaginative and creative himself and his whole set of psychological ideas and his school of thought really attracted people with those kind of qualities So basically all the people that he was surrounded by almost all of the patients that he saw You know, if you go back and study this historically, which I did my undergraduate degree was in the history of history of science Focusing on psychology and psychiatry and I actually wrote my I honors thesis on Jung from a historical perspective I'd love to lead that actually I'd be happy to send it to you. I mean, you know, probably not quite as well written as it would be now But you know, I was just an undergrad so But we know a lot of things that's clear is that he was just surrounded by all of these people who are super high and openness very creative Very imaginative and interested in fantasy and inner life And so you know, those were the people that he knew so well and he used to develop his theories So for him the kind of Introvert that he knew like the people who were quiet and reserved were also people who were intensely imaginative and thoughtful and interested in ideas So that was how he ended up characterizing introverts as the opposite of extroverts And I think, you know, maybe if you'd sampled in his experience a bit more widely in the population He would have realized that there are plenty of people who are low in extroversion They're not outgoing. They're not sociable. They're not gregarious At the same time they're not particularly interested in the inner world either See because it turns out that there's just sort of this general dimension of interest and there's being interested in the outer world That's extroversion and there's being interested in the inner world and that's openness and those things actually tend to go together Because some people just have more interest in everything than other people And that's where this idea of plasticity comes in right that when you if you look at what extroversion and openness share It's this general tendency to be Engaged with the world and interested in different things and exploring it, you know Opened changing your views changing your mind changing your behaviors changing your activities. Oh, yes And you wrote this paper on dopamine as the quote neuro modulator of exploration very sexy call it very sexy Yeah, how science is it's all about the sexness. Yes, that's what that's why we do what we do really This relates to what you were just talking about. Could you talk a little bit about What is dopamine? There are a lot of misconceptions about what the role dopamine actually plays in human behavior and cognition Yeah, let's just start there because I think there are a lot of misconceptions. Sure. Yeah. No, that's great And you know, that's that's a nice switch from talking about the structure of personality to the other half My anger switches the sources of person. I know. Did you see what I did there? I did. I liked it. Yeah, smooth So, you know, I'm really interested in the mechanisms that underlie different personality traits and especially in trying to figure out what's going on in the brain and So they get the hand. Yes, like what's going on in the earlobe when you're trying to yeah the earlobe probably doesn't have much to do with personality at all It's true. So that's a good like you pick the right organ. Okay, go on dude. Okay careful. You're getting out of control with the open screen Have you never listened to the psychology podcast before calling? I hate to admit that I haven't because I don't listen to the talk radio or podcast Are you going to listen to this episode? Probably not actually why I'm listening to it right now Why do I need to listen to it again? Okay, fair enough. Anyway, we like to be open We like to be open. Okay, cool. We can mix it up. We can get a little funky Come on, go on Anyway, yeah, it's not too funky So dopamine so yeah, there's this idea that the general public often seems to have that dopamine is a pleasure chemical Right, dopamine is what makes you feel good But that's not quite right It turns out that dopamine is what makes you want things and sometimes wanting things feel good Like especially when you think you're going to get things that you want or when you're moving toward things that are You know exciting or pleasurable then dopamine goes along with feeling good But that's actually due to a whole different set of neuro transmitters different chemicals in your ran that are known as endogenous opiates And so there it's the opiates that are actually responsible for making you feel pleasure and making that You know sense of excitement be a good thing You can have dopamine without pleasure though, and that's like you really want something but you're not getting it And so you're feeling frustrated that is also dopamine right that sense that I really need to do this I want this that's not always a good thing right it really depends on how well things are going and pursuing that goal So it turns out that there's a lot of evidence from personality neuroscience That dopamine is one of the major drivers of extroversion right so it turns out that what a lot of what extroversion is about is Being more motivated by the possibility of rewards So the reason that extroverts are more talkative and sociable, you know We think of extroversion often as like a purely social thing, but it's not a purely social thing It's just that most human rewards are social like most of the things we care about are things like social affiliation or social status and so With the more active and sensitive dopamine system you have people who are more motivated to pursue those potential rewards So you know an extrovert goes into a party and all those people that they don't know are a source of potentially rewarding interaction Wow, who am I going to talk to next that guy likes interesting. I'll talk to him right so an introvert goes into the same party they don't have Their dopamine system is not particularly upregulated by this event and so to them they just look around and they think god look at all these people I don't know this is going to be exhausting Right, so one of the ways that I like to think about dopamine. It's been described as essentially regulating the cost of effort. So I like doing stuff doing stuff has a cost right like at it's almost basic a cost just in terms of energy We have to use energy to survive. That's why we have to eat. We need all this energy in our good To not squander it right to not use it when we don't have to Except it turns out to be a real challenge to figure out when you shoot or shouldn't be expanding energy And extroverts just happen to be tuned in such a way that they often think it's a good idea to expand energy Right, so dopamine basically gives you the signal like something good could happen if you put some effort out right now And so they're like yes, I definitely want to go and talk to five new people that I've never talked to before So introverts are tuned in a way that's more likely to conserve energy And so they just don't have that same sense of excitement and possibility when they go into that situation Now in a situation where there are more you know comfortable and familiar and it's more like what they like. Of course, they're gonna enjoy that. Of course, they're gonna put the effort in. But it's all about where that threshold is, right? And so extroverts just have kind of a low threshold for overcoming the cost of effort. And so that makes the more sociable, it makes them more talkative. It's like, you know, what's the cost of running your mouth off? Well, for an extrovert, it's quite low. Until, you know, maybe the consequences kick in once in a while. But it's not just socializing, it's also talking, it's also engaging in physical activity. So, you know, the cost of this is that extroverts take more risks and they get themselves into more trouble. I've always loved this one study where they went to emergency rooms and got people who were sitting around with, you know, too much time on their hands, waiting to fill out personality questionnaires. Yeah, it's a great time. Have you heard this before? No, I'm like, that's a great time to fill out a personality questioner. My arm is like hanging off. Yeah, right. Like, I'll fill out your darn questionnaire. But yeah, what they found was that people in emergency rooms on average are more extroverted than the average people in the population, right? And average person. So, you know, and there's also studies that are probably a little bit more rigorous than that that have shown things like extroverts have more traffic accidents and more speeding tickets. And, you know, so extroverts engage in more risky behavior, but at the same time, it also opens up various possibilities for them. So, you know, as with most personality traits, it's really their trade-offs to being higher low. Daniel Nettle has done some beautiful work on from an evolutionary perspective showing that's probably why, you know, both sides of the bell curve evolved, you know? Yeah, right. That's one evolutionary theory about why there's such a range of personality across these traits. It's because there's not one optimal level, right? In different niches in the environment or in just different environments, entirely different levels are going to be advantageous. Anyway, so where I started with this before I went off on three tangents was that there's all this evidence that people who are higher in extroversion have higher levels of dopamine function, right? They're more sensitive to the reward properties of dopamine. And so, there is a lot less evidence, but we've been developing a theory to suggest that dopamine is also one of the drivers of the openness and intellect domain, the thing that makes people more cognitively exploratory. So, it turns out that there are two kinds of dopaminergic neuron in the brain. There's one kind that basically responds when something better than anticipated happens with a spike of dopamine. And then if something worse than anticipated happens, dopamine drops off. So, one group of dopamine neurons is basically keeping track of the value of things. And that seems to be the kind that's related to extroversion, right? So, you go to the party, you see some new people, you get the spike of dopamine, that motivates you to go and talk to them, that gets you excited about the whole thing. Now, let's say you walk into the party, and there's only like, I don't know, like five old people there that you don't know, and you're like some young guy, and then suddenly this is worse than you had hoped it would be. And then what's gonna happen is your dopamine's gonna drop off, and you're gonna feel like kind of bored and disappointed, and you're gonna wanna go somewhere else. Now, that's just one kind of dopamine neuron. And the other one basically responds to unexpected events regardless of whether they're good or bad. And what it seems to be doing is essentially tracking something like salience, or like whether things are a source of potentially interesting information. So, it's not just about whether they're valuable or not in terms of like the things that you want, the rewards that you can get out of them. It's more like, could you get information out of this situation, right? So, whenever anything unexpected happens, there's something you could learn about that. Like, well, I didn't predict that. Why did it happen? So, then you could possibly learn about it. And so, dopamine kicks in in that situation basically to drive you to explore that situation cognitively, to start gathering information and thinking about like what's going on here? How do I model it? There's some pattern here that I haven't encountered before. And that's what openness and intellect is about, right? It's about this tendency to be sensitive to the reward value of information. And so, you know, extroversions about all those kinds of concrete rewards, like, you know, social interactions, food, sex, money, those are the kinds of things that extroverts are motivated by. But introverts are not, sorry, if I must did the Jungian thing there. (laughing) Are motivated by, oh, can I learn something here? What can I do? That was a close call. Just undermine all that work really. You almost took us back a hundred years in progress. - Thanks. (laughing) - No, now you're making fun of me, I'm done. (laughing) - Yeah, you're being Madonna. (laughing) - You figured me out. No, I just, you know, my dopamine dropped off 'cause things didn't go the way that I wanted them to itself. (laughing) - No, you were on a roll call and you were on a roll. I'm sorry to break that up. We keep going. - Oh, that's okay. But really, I mean, I was at the end of that segment, right? So what we've got now is the idea that dopamine drives this tendency to explore and to find things rewarding. But there's this fundamental difference between the dopamine processes that are involved in extraversion and drive behavioral exploration and the dopamine processes that are involved with opens and intellect and drive cognitive exploration. - Yeah, I just love that. And, well, you know, I love that. Now, but the thing is like, has anyone made a direct link between what you're proposing there as the dopamine neurons that code for the reward value of information and the salience brain network? - I would love to see a paper that makes a direct link between those two things. - Oh, man, well, that's complicated. I don't know if we even want to go there. - Okay. - We just, you see what I'm saying, though. You see what I'm saying? - We have a paper, we actually have a paper coming out where we show that this network that people often refer to as the salience network is actually mostly related to conscientiousness. - What? - I don't know if we even want to go there. Are you kidding me? - Okay, so here's the problem, right? This is just like different meanings of the word introversion. There's different meanings of the word salience, right? Because, and that's because in some ways, everything that we care about is about salience because what is salience is just what matters to us, right? And so, yeah, the salience network seems to be, here's the way, I guess, the way to think about it. The salience network that neuroscientists talk about, most often, is really about emotional salience in terms of like, you have internal visceral and emotional states that are like, this is painful. This might be rewarding. It's about the brain systems that alert you to the presence of some kind of emotionally relevant stimulus. So, see, that's a little bit different from just realizing that there's something that you could learn, right? That there's something that you don't know. - That's not what it's all about about that. - And salience, and this other salience network is more about the thing that generates impulses, right? It's like, you might not want to do that 'cause it could hurt or, hey, you might want to go over there 'cause, you know, maybe there's something exciting or good to eat over there. So, it's more about the generation of impulses, and then we think it's related to conscientiousness because part of that network is actually involved in regulating those impulses, right? So, being conscientious and being able to pursue goals effectively, like that's what conscientiousness is all about, right? It's about being able to avoid distractions, not be lazy, put in effort to go after those long term goals. Organize your goals properly, right? Prioritize them correctly to your out, like, what makes sense to do now? You know, it's about being organized, being hardworking. So, anyway, in order to do that, what you need to do is basically effectively prioritize your goals, and that means that you need to be able to control those impulses so that, like, when the little alarm goes off, it says, hey, there's something relevant over there, you need to basically assess it and say, well, is paying attention to that going to be useful for my long-term goals, or is that just some kind of short-term thing that I should ignore, is that just a distraction, right? And so, we think that conscientiousness basically has to do with how well people are able to prioritize their goals, and then that, in turn, essentially helps them to regulate which impulses they pay attention to and which they inhibit. - See, that is a fundamentally different conceptualization of major function of the status network that I had. So, I always like talking to you, because, you know, it opens my mind. I mean, I had thought more generally, not just emotions, but information flow more generally, that it kind of was like the baton bet passer to either the executive or the default mode network. Like, it was like essential at a lower subcortical level in terms of where to direct the attention either to the outside world, or either to really focus, or either to more just free form, sort of just, like, associative kind of processing of the information. But you're saying-- - Yeah, well, you know, these things are complicated, and, you know, neuroscience is really just at the point where we've started to understand these major networks and brain function, so functional networks. You know, there used to be this sort of neuroscience approach that was very module for it. It's like you take one region of the brain and you say, okay, what does this region of the brain do? And we don't really think that way anymore. We think more in terms of whole connected regions of the brain and the kinds of processes that they carry out in coordination with each other. Right, so we're at the point where we're starting to understand that these are these major networks, but there's still a lot of work to be done to figure out, A, exactly what each network is doing on its own, and then B, even more complicatedly, how it interacts with all the other networks. So I am familiar with the work that you're talking about, in which you can see this kind of informational flow between where the sailing its network essentially helps to regulate the switching between what's called the-- - That's right. from a prior control network and the default imagination or simulation network, I don't think that that's actually inconsistent with what I was just saying about the link with conscientiousness because I think one of the things that being conscientious is about is knowing when you need to engage with a task that's presented to you in the external world versus knowing when you can switch over to thinking about things more internally and like planning for example, right? So I think it would be misleading to think of the default network as just something that's involved in imagination or mind wandering or association. It's also what is in what you're doing when you're engaging in planning, right? So if I sit here and think about what I have to do tomorrow in a very organized and efficient boring way, that's my default network in operation, right? Because I'm imagining like, how am I going to structure my day? What needs to be in it? I'm projecting myself into the future. It is an act of imagination. It's just in the service of getting work done in my longer term goals. So I like that. I like to reconcile those two things. It does, but then I'm trying to reconcile all that that you just said with the notion of my attempt to link this salience coding dopamine with the salience network. I think that could still work. That could still work within that framework. Of course, they interact with you better because everything in the brain interacts. The thing is, that's interesting is like, you know, with the salience coding dopamine north, like you could see how it gets really excited. Oh, well, here's like the possibility for me to like reduce the discrepancy between what I know and don't know. And then kind of like make a decision, which is going to be more efficient in reaching that goal. Is it going to be the executive network or the default mode network for this context that I'm in? Yeah. I do think that that's quite likely. You know, and the other thing is in that paper of mine that you mentioned about dopamine and trying to understand the role of dopamine and personality. One of the things that we point out is that it's not just a simple one to one mapping. Like back in the 80s, people started developing these theories of personality where it was, they were trying to take one neurotransmitter like dopamine and map it onto one personality trait, you know, like there was this theory that dopamine equals novelty seeking. And the problem with those is that they were just a little bit overly simplistic, right? So it turns out that dopamine has these wide effects, right? So it's involved in both extroversion and openness, you know, cognitive function. And one of the things we do in that paper is to try to actually say what is the whole range of things that it's related to. And actually industriousness, so the tendency to work hard and persevere on things, is one of the personality traits that's probably influenced by dopamine. Right. It's not quite as sensual as extroversion and openness, but there is this link between, there's a correlation between being high and intellect, being intellectually engaged and confident, being assertive. That's part of extroversion, you know, being driven to get what you want, and then also being industrious, being hardworking, being achievement oriented. And so I think all of those things are probably influenced by dopamine. And that's probably where this connection comes in that you're thinking about, right? So, yeah, you know, and that's why dopaminergic medications work for ADHD, right, which is in large part a problem of low conscientiousness, right? So you've got people who are wired in such a way that they just have a really hard time maintaining their focus on things, maintaining their attention, not getting distracted by things, right? And so that's partly about not having your dopamine system operating in the right way. So interesting. Well, you know, you give people a low dose of the dopaminergic drug, and it kicks that into gear just enough so that now they can focus and stay on track, right? Look, I find this conversation extremely fascinating, but we probably lost 90% of our audience at this point. So I think it was super, super interesting topic. We can continue that back channel. I wanted to ask you a question that I think will be very interesting to a lot of the audience. And that's the Myers-Briggs personality inventory or whatever it's called, the MBTI, the Myers-Briggs. Yeah. People love the Myers-Briggs. Yeah, I would say the Myers-Briggs is more well-known than the Big Five. Yeah, well Scott, you know, there's a funny way in which now we're just circling back to the earlier part of our conversation because now we're back, now we're back to Jung again, right? I know, I know. So the Myers-Briggs was created by a woman with some help with her mother, and that's Myers-Briggs. What they were doing is that they were attempting to create an assessment based on Jung's theory of psychological types, which are, you know, which is essentially the first theory of personality types. Well, it's not really the first theory, right? Because the first theory goes all the way back to ancient Rome and Galen, in a Greek position. But yeah, so people have been thinking about personality types for a long time. Problem is one of the things we know from modern personality science is that personality doesn't really come in types. It comes in these dimensional traits that where people can fall anywhere along the spectrum, right? So personality is a bunch of different spectra. In order to understand someone, you need to know where they fall on these different spectra. Now, the interesting thing about the Myers-Briggs, there are basically two problems with the Myers-Briggs. The first one is that it categorizes everybody into these binary categories, right? So you're either an extrovert or an introvert, you're either sensing or you're intuiting, you're either judging or perceiving. And the problem with that is that that's just not how personality works, right? Personality doesn't come in categories. It comes in spectra. So they could actually make the Myers-Briggs a lot better if they stopped telling people, you know, that they were an I or an E and started just giving them like a score along the range. Yeah, exactly. Well, and here's why this is a problem, right? Because if what you have is a binary category, like if that was how personality really worked, then what you would expect to see with the scores from those questionnaires is that they would be my modally distributed. And that means that you would have like a bunch of people who scored high and a bunch of people who scored low and very few people who scored right in the middle. But in fact, what you find is the opposite. Because what you really see is that there's a normal distribution, right? Like the typical bell curve. And so a lot of people, the majority of people, are fairly near the average. And then, of course, you have some people who are very extroverted and some people are very introverted. So in other words, most people are what are called ambivotes. You know, when they try to deal with this, they come up with like, oh, let's add a third category. But really, it's not a category at all. It's just the middle of that dimension. And the problem with treating it that way is that it makes your results unstable if you're one of the people who scores near the average, which is many people. So, you know, people often complain that the first time they took the MBTI, they were an extrovert. And the next time they took it, they were an introvert. You know, and that's, that doesn't mean that their personality was changing. Possibly, it could have changed just like a couple of points, which is just within the error of the test, right? They could have answered one question differently, perhaps, and gotten an eye instead of an E. And that's because they were someone who fell right near the average of the distribution, right near the cutoff, and the test just can't adequately deal with that. So, the way that we do personality questionnaires from a scientific perspective is that, you know, if we're measuring extroversion versus introversion, we just give you a percentile score, like you're at the 50th percentile. That means you're near the average, like half of people are below you and half of people are above you in that in extroversion, or you're at the 75th percentile, or you're at the 90th percentile. You're really high in extroversion, but you know, you just get a lot more information that way and it creates a lot more accurate assessment of people's personalities. Okay, the second problem. The second problem is that it just doesn't divide up the personality space in quite the right way. An interesting thing is that the extroversion introversion scale in the MBTI is fine. It's basically just a modern extroversion scale. So if you think you're an introvert because of the MBTI, that actually doesn't say anything about your imaginativeness or your intellect or whatever else. That's just saying that you are relatively reserved and quiet and not, you know, socially outgoing. So, you know, somehow that Jungian interpretation about the inner life got welded onto this thing that's actually assessing something more like modern extroversion, but that's a little weird. But, you know, so okay, so there's nothing wrong with the extroversion introversion scale in the MBTI. The one that is the most problematic is the thinking feeling dimension. And actually, I bet this one will really interest you because I think you're somebody who's high in both thinking and feeling. I was totally going to bring up that point about that in my breaks, yeah. Well, so the problem with it is that it sets up these two things in opposition that aren't really opposed. False dichotomy. Basically has all these questions that forces you to choose whether you're more of a compassion and feeling oriented person versus are you more of an analytical, intellectually oriented person. And it turns out those things just are not negatively correlated, right? They're lots of, they're not positively correlated either. They're essentially, you know, they're large. My dissertation showed the effect of openness was part of that sayingness. Yes, but openness is not part of thinking feeling, right? So, okay, here we need to go to a different level of the personality hierarchy, right? Like if you think anybody is still listening to this, who listens to the beginning, now we can get back to this idea of the hierarchy, right? So, I keep referring to this openness dimension. And sometimes I say openness and intellect, it gets very confusing. And that's because there's sort of an old debate about what's the right way to characterize that one of the big five dimensions. And it turns out that it's not really openness to experience, and it's not really intellect, it's both. And each of those things describes a different major subfactor within that dimension, right? So, you have to go down to the next lower level of the hierarchy, and then you've got openness actually as a different thing from intellect. And so intellect is about being interested in intellectual matters and let's say, you know, philosophical ideas. And openness is about being interested in art and patterns and aesthetics and fantasy. So they end up being kind of different. In the Myers-Briggs, the sensation intuition scale is actually a good measure of openness specifically, that sense of intuition and imagination. That's what sensation intuition is about. But it's not intellect. Intellect is not really related to sensation intuition very much. Intellect is the thinking part of thinking and feeling. And so what they did is they basically took that thinking and contrasted it with what turns out to be basically compassion, which is one of the two major subfactors of agreeable. So you basically are forcing people to choose whether they're intellectual or whether they're compassionate. And that's not a good choice to make people commit to because there are lots of people who are both compassionate and intellectual. And vice versa, of course, there are people who are callous and unintellectual. Yes, I suppose what I was saying, isn't there a still statistically positive association between the two, even if it's not large? Well, the two things tend to go together. Compassion is positively correlated with openness, or so what about it? But what's the question? I have to look it up. I actually suspect it's statistically significantly positive. What I do know that's interesting, though, is that compassion does have a positive correlation with intelligence, right, with IQ. And that seems to be mostly driven by its association with openness. So there is something about this ability to understand and reason about other people's mental states that's associated with IQ, but it's not just IQ. It's tied into what people refer to as emotional intelligence, which has this additional association with agreeableness. Yeah, I say this because, you know, Seymour Epstein's research as well. A big part of my dissertation was trying to integrate Seymour Epstein's experiential, rational thinking styles into the openness domain. So this is very relevant to what we're talking about. Yeah, well, it turns out that his rational style maps on pretty clearly to intellect. Thinking. Yeah, no, definitely. But the experiential style is a lot more complicated. And I think that's because our unconscious processes are so much more extensive than our conscious ones, right? So people think you are your consciousness. Well, no, your consciousness is like this sort of small layer on top of what's really going on in your mind. And it turns out that the experiential skill turns out to be related to openness, to compassion. Right. That's great, really good description. Yeah, as you've actually used the phrase, it's a compound trait. Yes, right. But I think that's interesting still because it is linked to compassion as well as intellect. But I think that there's this real connection to imagination, right? We were talking about the default network earlier. We have a paper that just came out earlier that shows that compassion is related not only to the ability to understand other people's mental states, so these kinds of theory of mind or emotional intelligence tests, but also both of those things are linked to specific patterns of connections in that brain network. Yeah, right. And we also know that brain network is related to the whole openness and intellect in which essentially related to imagination. And I think that's because in order to really be compassionate and sympathize and empathize with somebody else, you have to be able to imagine what their experience it's like. Yeah, that makes perfect sense, Colin. And I keep thinking about the default mode network. And it sort of seems like there's such a strong tie between the self self-concept, self-representation, self-generated cognition, and the default mode network. So, you know, the ability to have that strong self seems to be part of that story as well, that jigsaw puzzle. It's interesting to think about. Yes. Well, and here's another interesting thing. So there's a front region of the default network, the same imagination network that is in the middle of the brain that is actually related to neuroticism, right? The potential to experience negative emotion. So that's that region that's been implicated in self-awareness and self-consciousness because a lot of what you're doing there is basically evaluating yourself. Rubination. Right. And so people who are high in neuroticism seem to have less of a connection between that part of the default network and the amygdala. And so it's like they can't use their broader value of networks to try to rein in their own negative emotions, right? So they have potentially a deficit in how they integrate their sense of themselves and how they evaluate themselves. And as you know, we're critical of that small wooded owl paper that kind of equated default mode network functioning with neuroticism. You know, it's much more complex than that. Yeah. Well, you know, what I didn't object to they're saying that there was a link between neuroticism and some aspects of the default network. It was that they were trying to say that neuroticism is what drives creativity. Right. We know that's not true. So okay, I wanted to say I wanted to move into your work on the cybernetic big five. It's a really interesting integration of a lot of what we talked about. I'm trying to build little by little in this podcast. And I think we're now ready for that. You know what I mean? So we talked about the big five. We talked about the hierarchy. We talked about potential neuro correlates of the big five. Now you put a lot of this within the framework of cybernetic functioning and thought you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, sure. So cybernetics dates back to the 40s and 50s. It's a whole area of study and theory that was founded by a guy named Norbert Wiener. And it basically came about when you start to have the precursors to computers and then as computers are developed, you've got these artificial control systems. And what happens is basically that he realizes that if you have a machine that is basically monitoring its progress and trying to adjust itself so that it reaches some goal, you're basically doing what an organism does. So you know, if you're like a guided missile, right, that thing has to be able to adjust to receive feedback and adjust its own course to try to hit a target. If you have a chest computer, it has to take the, you know, the pattern of pieces on the board and try to figure out what's the right move to make to win the game. And so there was this realization that there's this commonality between what all organisms do, which is that they try to pursue their goals to allow them to survive and reproduce. And these systems that we started to be able to build with technology. And so cybernetics, the original book is called cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine. And so it's this attempt to distill a set of principles to explain how these goal-directed systems that regulate themselves by feedback from their environment, what are the principles by which those operate. And it's sort of, it's also now currently also known as control theory. It's basically at the heart of a lot of computing, robotics, you know, artificial intelligence. So my idea was that we know that human beings are goal-directed systems, right? We know that they're cybernetic systems. What are you doing right now? I'm drinking, I just had a drink of glass of water. Right. And why are you doing that, right? Because you're thirsty. And are you thirsty because you have a feedback system in your body that monitors how much liquid you have in you and that basically sends a signal when it needs to control your behavior to make sure that you have enough liquid that you don't die. And that is a cybernetic mechanism. That's just the same way that a thermostat, you know, measures the temperature with a thermometer and then compares it to the goal temperature that's been set by the user. And then when they don't match it either your fire is up the furnace or it turns on the AC, right? So we function in exactly the same way. The thing that makes us different from a thermostat or a chest computer is that we are so staggeringly complex in the array of different goals that we can pursue, right? So we have so many goals, you know, all the way down to these very concrete things like just, you know, needing to get enough liquid, needing to get enough food for energy to drive the whole system. But we have whole arrays of goals, and we are remarkably free compared to other species to take on all kinds of sort of seemingly unusual goals. But nonetheless, I would argue that virtually all of our behavior is driven by one goal or another. The one category that you might actually describe as a sort of exception for this is exploration, right? Because sometimes, you know, we don't know, we don't have anything we need to be doing right now. We're just going to sort of poke around and see what we find. But even there, you could say something like the goal is to acquire information, right? That gets back to this idea of curiosity and openness and the rewarding properties of information. Anyway, so we're cybernetic systems, and we have a certain biological similarity, right? Like all human beings, we've evolved to have a lot of species typical properties. But we also vary from each other, and we vary from each other in some of these very fundamental ways, like how motivated we are to seek rewards or how sensitive we are to the possibilities of threats or punishments, how capable we are of ignoring distraction. And so all of those properties represent underlying cybernetic mechanisms that are operating to allow us to pursue any particular goal, right? So we can come up with all kinds of different weird goals, but as long as we, once we have a goal, then we have to be able to pursue it, which means we have to be motivated by cues that indicate that we're moving toward that goal, those are rewards. We have to be afraid of things that are going to block us from a goal. Those are threats. We have to be able to ignore distractions. We have to be able to assess what's going on in the world in such a way that we can figure out whether we're making progress through our world or to our goal or not. And so the idea behind my cybernetic theory, and it's called cybernetic big five theory, because each one of the big five personality traits basically represents variation in a fundamental mechanism or set of mechanisms that allow us to carry out these different cybernetic processes that allow us to do our goals effectively. Now how did you arrive at that insight? Well, it probably goes back to some of my early introduction to psychology, and I studied with Jordan Peterson. Of course, at this particular moment in history, everybody knows who Jordan is. And he was very interested in the idea that people's minds are organized by their goals. So he kind of introduced me to some of these cybernetic ideas, and he also introduced me to the work of Jeffrey Gray. And Jeffrey Gray was a brilliant neuroscientist, and in some ways, one of the early personality neuroscientists, although he didn't really do research with humans. He did research in animals, but he finally thought about how personality came out of variation in the brain. And that was partly because he worked with Hans Eisenk, and Eisenk was really, I would say, the father of personality neuroscience. He was the first developed theories about what patterns of brain function were related to extroversion and neuroticism. He wasn't necessarily right. I mean, some of his ideas have proved to be at least suggestive in the right direction, but the technology had available for neuroscientists quite limited at that time. So it wasn't really until neuroimaging FMRI developed in the 90s and started to be used widely that we started to make better progress. Yeah, I want to say something about that for a second, just real quick. My reading of Eisenk was more a biological model, not neuroscience model. Maybe I haven't read all of his work. He's not actually positing precise neurological mechanisms, but more like neurotransmitters. I guess that is really-- Yeah, I don't think that you can really make that distinction. I mean, his theories were pretty low resolution, but that's because the capacity for measuring and understanding that brain was pretty low resolution at that time. And we're talking back in the '40s and '50s, then he published a book length treatment of it, I think, in the '60s at some point. But they were neurobiological. They were neuroscience, right, because what he thought was that is this arousal system in the brain called the ascending, reticular, activating system, which is really mostly involved in whether you are like how sleepy versus awake you are. It's sort of this very broad system for arousal. And he thought that extroversion had to do with people's levels of arousal, or later, he changed it more to arousability, how easily arous you were sort of across the whole cortex based on this ascending, reticular, activating system. And that's not quite right as far as we can tell now, but it was still using the tools that he had. It was definitely-- it was generated, right? It led to a bunch of research, for sure, anyway. Jeffrey Gray, well, basically a postdoc with Isaac, and got interested in personality and was also already a neuroscientist. And he's just brilliant. I think he's one of the most brilliant psychologists who's ever lived. He has an amazing book called The Neuropsychology of Anxiety. The second edition of that was published with Neil McNaughton, who had been one of his collaborators. I think it also was a postdoc, maybe, who I know, and I've worked with, he's also brilliant. So they published this book, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety in 2000. And then a little later, I can't remember, maybe it was 2004, Gray published his last book, which is trying to understand consciousness. Yeah. So really-- You actually suggested that book. I love the book. I love the prize. That's an amazing book. Yes. You perspective on cybernetics that Gray lays out in that book really gave me insight, right? It really kind of allowed me to put all these things together. And so it just kind of fit with my whole-- with the whole perspective that I had been thinking about with, you know, for a number of years. And I had this interest in personality, I had interest in neuroscience and neurobiological basis. And then with the way in which goals are crucial for organizing human behavior. And then cybernetics essentially just allows all these things to be put together into coherent framework. Yeah. I'm a fan of your theories. I know, and I've been trying to build on it and linking it to self-actualization. So really like that. And you've extended it in some really interesting ways. Most recently, you've made some linkages to the mental illness, right? And kind of-- Yes, that's all right. Actually, this is what I'm really excited about right now is that we've taken the theory and basically extended it to be a formal theory of psychopathology. So more and more, what's being recognized in the world of clinical psychology and mental health is that mental illnesses are not these categorical entities. You know, it's not like getting some disease where you're infected by a microorganism. And then like, you know, as long as that's in your body, you're in trouble. And then once your immune system gets rid of it, you no longer have the disease. Mental illness doesn't work like that. Instead, what you have is a whole bunch of different risk factors like in people's personalities and then in various traumatic things that they experience difficulties in their lives that lead them to cease functioning properly, right? And what's happening there is its cybernetic function that is being disrupted is when people are no longer able to effectively pursue their goals or to get the basic needs fulfilled that they have. You know, and basic needs are basically just the kind of goals that are actually evolved into us, right? That we essentially can't escape. You know, you can make up some crazy goal like, you know, I want to be like capable of it. Yes, the world's keyball champion. We've talked about that before. How does it come about that anyone has the goal of being the world's keyball champion? So there are those kinds of goals, but then there are much more basic goals like, you know, the need for affiliation, for example, now that varies from person to person, but almost everyone has some degree of need for affiliation and contact with other human beings. It's very rare that you have someone who has so little of that goal, which is, you know, essentially an evolved mechanism that they can be happy just being a hermit living in the woods and not talking to anyone for years, right? Most people have that basic need for affiliation. And so those are goals too, and all these things are governed by these cybernetic processes. So the way that we're approaching psychopathology is basically to say, okay, we need a way to define what psychopathology is and what it seems to be is essentially cybernetic dysfunction. So that's when your current set of goals and understanding of how the world is and strategies for turning the current state of the world into the desire to the world. When those aren't working for you, and not only that, but you are incapable of generating new ones, right? Because there's a way in which, of course, just having things go wrong and having some of your goals failed, that's not mental illness, right? That happens to everyone. That's just the vicissitudes of life. But it's when people get into a situation where they're in that kind of a state where they don't know what to do, things aren't working right, and then they can't get out of it. That's when you get mental illness. And that can happen for a variety of reasons in a variety of ways. If you can't get out of it, it might not be objectively the case. You haven't gotten out of it. Let's put it that way. Yeah, no, I'm not saying that some people are hopeless far from it. Right. Right. The resources that they have, they have not been able to develop new ways of thinking about the world, changing their goals potentially, or even just developing new strategies to pursue their goals. So they haven't been able to do that. And so they're essentially stuck in this space of dysfunction, right? They're stuck in this kind of chaotic and tropic state where they do not know how to proceed. They don't know what to do. And so they're often miserable. And so if you think about that as the core of dysfunction, right, it's not like, oh, you have schizophrenia or you have bipolar disorder or you have borderline personality disorder. No, the reason that you have psychopathology is that you are not functioning cybernetically. And then the question is, well, why do we have these different, you know, people have tried to come up with these categories for different types of mental illness? What's that about? And so it turns out that the way in which mental illness manifests, the array of different symptoms that people have, those have patterns of association and tend to appear together with each other in very much the same way that personality traits do. And it turns out, and I think this will eventually be recognized as one of the major discoveries of the last, you know, let's say, 30 or 40 years. And it's certainly not my discovery that the structure of psychopathology and symptoms of mental illness is essentially the same structure as the structure of personality. Nice. Yeah. That's huge. That's huge. Yeah. And so what that means is that mental disorder is in terms of the ways in which they are different from each other. Yeah. basically extreme and dysfunctional manifestations of normal personality traits. - Wow. - Yeah, and so what we're doing is we're essentially trying to combine, we think that the right way to proceed is essentially to combine what we know about personality and personality neuroscience with what we know about mental disorder and the neurobiological basis of mental disorders in order to get a better new system for understanding and treating mental illness. - Where does environment play a role in this? You've talked a lot about biology. And obviously there's a lot. - You know, I'm glad you asked that because I find that this is a misconception that people often have. When we talk about something being biologically based, that does not mean that it is genetic, right? Because we are biological creatures, right? We're biological systems, the cybernetic system that we are is the biological system. And so everything about your behavior and your experience is generated by biology. And so that's totally separate from nurture question from the question of genetics. And what we know from behavioral genetics is essentially that everything is heritable, which means that everything, all of our patterns of behavior are influenced by our genetics, but equally everything is influenced by the environment as well. So it's not nature or nurture, that debate is over. So at this point, basically anyone who works with this scientifically thinks about it in terms of nature and nature. And what we know is that, you know, if something that happens to you in your environment is going to affect your personality, it has to affect your brain, right? Because your brain is what is controlling your behavior in your experience. And if there's gonna be a lasting change to your personality, there has to be some kind of lasting change to your brain. So it's all biological. And you know, when I say we're looking at the biology, that should in no way imply that it's purely genetic or that it can't be changed. Oh, in fact, I mean, obviously biology can be changed. That's part of why pharmaceuticals are used to try to treat mental illness, because we think that if we change people's brains, we'll be able to help them and, you know, change the way that they're, change their dysfunction into healthy function. Now, personally, I don't think that pharmaceuticals are necessarily always or even often the best route to treating mental illness. I think that our research into the treatment of mental illness is shockingly lagging behind what it should be. And that's partly because of all the money that can be made from pharmaceuticals. But, you know, I think the thing is that what we need to do is help people, and this is what things like cognitive behavioral therapy do, right? We need to help people figure out what are different ways of thinking about the world, different goals that they might have, different strategies that they might use to pursue their goals. That is ultimately what is going to allow them to be healthy. - Interpretation, yeah, I like that interpretation. - Yeah, exactly. How they think about and interpret the world, how they evaluate it. And, you know, I'm not saying that pharmaceuticals can't sometimes help people with that, right? Because so, the way that I think about this is, when you give people pharmaceuticals, you are essentially directly adjusting those cybernetic mechanisms that I was talking about that underlie personality traits. And so that can be useful, right? It's like if you are depressed, part of what's going on is probably that you have too much negative emotion, too much sensitivity to punishment, and not enough approach motivation, not enough motivation to actually pursue rewards effectively. So, you know, potentially doing something like increasing levels of dopamine, or, well, we can say our tone is too complicated to talk about in this conversation. But anyway, you know, you can imagine you could make certain adjustments that would help people. But even if it does help, they still have to then figure out how to pursue their goals in life, right? What the right goals should be and how they're going to pursue them. And that is, you know, ultimately, what is going to enable them to be well. Jung used to talk about this, you know, like people always think about Jung and like, oh, he was a mystic and he had such crazy ideas about what people needed to do. But he had this idea about the stages of therapy that I really like. And the third one is, what do you call it, education? I think it's like confession, elucidation, education, and then transformation. I should probably check to see if I'm getting that right or not. But basically, I was just thinking about this because Jung was at some level a very sort of intensely practical person. And he recognized that, you know, after you'd done the kind of psychodynamic depth work, you know, the kind of Freudian thing and gotten deep into people's unconscious and figured out all of their unconscious, you know, fears and impulses and wishes and these kinds of things, that you really needed just to educate people. You needed to get them so that they could function adequately in the day-to-day practical world. And it was only after that that he thought, then you might want to actually, you know, meet the collective unconscious and go for the far out stuff. - Right. - And go for transformation. But like, he really had this sense that first you want people just to be able to handle day-to-day life and, you know, hold down a job and make your bed. - We're not even sure. Whatever you need to do and, you know, sort of out your just everyday familial relationships and whatnot. So, you know, a lot of it is about that and pharmaceuticals sometimes can be really helpful to people in allowing them to do that. But it's certainly, you know, okay, so there was a meta-analysis that just came out in the past year that Brent Roberts did with some other people. And they looked at the effects of different kinds of therapy on personality change. And you might think, well, aren't we using therapy to get people over mental illness? Well, yes, often we are, but nonetheless, people often assess personality when they are studying the effects of different treatment programs. And it turns out that, you know, if you treat somebody for depression and they get better and that improvement persists, one of the things that you're doing is you're lowering their neuroticism, you're lowering their general tendency to experience negative emotion. And so it turns out that all different types of therapy have the effect, you know, of lowering people's neuroticism. But it turns out that things like cognitive behavioral therapy and, you know, vegetarian or humanistic therapy, those things actually lower in neuroticism more than pharmaceutical treatments. More than drug treatments. - Great, yeah. - What about the ACT approach? Acceptance and commitment therapy that Stephen Hays has pioneered? Are you familiar with that? - No, I'm not. I'm happy to explain it a little bit. And you can see it might really, kind of the core aspect of psychological flexibility where you just really kind of accept all of your thoughts that arise with full acceptance and mindfulness. And it actually quakes, you know, the emerging mindful CBT, you know, field that is coming up. So can you see how that would be related to the cybernetic dysfunction? - Yes, definitely. And it has to do with one of the really important stages of the cybernetic process, which is when, you know, which all of these things are running constantly in parallel in our brains. So we're always monitoring whether we are where we want to be. There's essentially three things that has to happen in the cybernetic process. Or well, actually we can expand it and say there are five things that have to happen. So one of our goals has to be come activated enough that it motivates us to pursue it. And so we've got an operative goal at any given time. Then we have to select some action or strategy that we think is going to work to pursue that goal. You know, and that's a decision-making process. Then we have to actually carry it out that action. Then we have to understand like what the state of the world is after we've carried out that action. And then we have to compare that state of the world to our goal, to where we want to be, right? And that last step of the process is really crucial. And it's basically where, at any moment, we detect whether we are where we want to be or whether we're not where we want to be. You know, if we are where we want to be, then we can go on to the next goal. If we're not, we have to either try again or give up. And one of the problems for people who are high in neuroticism, the sensitivity to negative emotion, is that they have a really sensitive mismatch detector, right? So people who are really neurotic are basically just like, you know, they're often unsatisfied with where they are. Most people would be in that situation and think, yeah, this is fine. And the neurotic is sitting there being like, this is terrible, this is not going the way it's supposed to go. And that's partly just because they have this very sensitive mismatch detector. And that means that they are prone to a lot of anxiety, a lot of inhibition, prone to giving up on things earlier than they should. And one of the things that they need to do is to basically learn that just because that mismatch detector goes off, doesn't mean that you're doing everything wrong, that you have to abandon your goals, that everything's hopeless, right? And so basically what you're doing, it sounds to me in that act therapy. And I mean, I know a lot more about mindfulness approaches than I know about acts specifically, is that you are essentially training people to interrupt that process whereby when you detect a mismatch, it leads to a big disruption in the whole system. And essentially ends up preventing you from pursuing your goals successfully. - Yeah, that sounds about right. - Right, 'cause you've got to learn, like, you know, different people have different sensitivities. If you're the kind of person who's highly neurotic, well, you know, we may not be able to turn you into, I have to go lucky person, but hopefully what we can do is get you a bit of perspective on the fact that, yeah, these alarm bells are gonna be going off for you as you go through your daily life more often than for other people. And you need to know how to cope with that properly. And the proper way is not just to give up, or to assume that, you know, you're doing something wrong or that everybody hates you or whatever it is, you know, whatever worry it is that pops up at any given time. So you basically have to teach people how to. to be more careful and less evaluative in interpreting the reactions that they have to the world. - Become less judgmental. - Yeah, yeah, I guess that's what you mean by evaluative, but just with your own thoughts, not evaluating, kind of the eye-me distinction, kind of separating them a little bit. - Yeah, absolutely, right? So that's what a lot of what mindfulness trends you to do, it trends you to inhabit that sense of awareness and paying careful attention to what is going on in the world around you and in your head, but without immediately categorizing and labeling it, it's like, oh, that was bad, that was a failure, that went wrong, allowing you basically just to observe what's going on as sensations or thoughts without triggering that, you know, eject from that cycle. - Yeah, that's what I found, you know, MBSR mindfulness stress-based reduction, MBSR really, really helpful in doing that at a mindfulness course. - Cool, well, this has been just such a stimulating excellent conversation. So, hey, Colin, I just want to thank you so much for coming and being on the psychology podcast and truly, truly for influencing my own thinking and research helping me and my work, but also just being such a great collaborator and friend. - God, it's been great. I mean, what we've been doing this now for-- - Over a decade. - Yeah, yeah, like 12 or 13 years. And you've been one of my most enjoyable collaborators, you know, and also just friends, of course. So it's, yeah, it's great. And this was a lot of fun. - Thanks, Colin. - But I see people don't realize, people don't realize we have conversations like this all the time. - A whole the time. And it's just a nice moment. - Yeah, yeah. - You have to be on a podcast. - And that's why I do this podcast as well is I'm not like different when I'm not doing this podcast. Do you know what I mean? I just, it dawned to me. Wow, people might get value from all of the really nerdy conversations I like to have with people. And it's very edifying when, it's very confirming when people do seem to enjoy it and get value from it. But I'm sure people will, a lot of people will get value from this conversation. So thanks again. - Yeah, you're welcome. - Thanks for having me. - Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thepsychologypodcast.com. That's thepsychologypodcast.com. Also, please add a rating and review of the Psychology Podcast on iTunes. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the podcast and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. - Thanks for listening to the podcast. - Thanks for listening to the podcast.